Virgin Earth Read online

  ‘I had to go barefoot. I was in Virginia,’ John said shortly.

  ‘No wonder all your boots pinch,’ the cobbler said. ‘You have no need of boots at all.’

  ‘Yes he does,’ Hester remarked. ‘He’s a gentleman in England and he’ll have a pair of boots of best leather, a pair of working boots and a pair of shoes. And they’d better not pinch.’

  ‘I haven’t the leather,’ the man said. ‘They don’t drive the cattle to Smithfield, the tanners can’t get the hides, I can’t get the leather. You’ve been in Virginia too long if you think you can order shoes like the old days.’

  Hester took the cobbler by the elbow and there was a brief exchange of words and the clink of a coin.

  ‘What did you offer him?’ John asked as they emerged from the dark shop into the bright March sunlight.

  Hester grimaced and prepared for a quarrel. ‘You won’t like it, John, but I promised to supply the leather from your father’s rarities. It was only some leather painted with a scene of the Madonna and Child. Not very well done, and completely heretical. We would invite the troops upon us if we ever showed it. And the man is right, he can’t get leather for your shoes otherwise.’

  For a moment she thought he was going to flare up at her again.

  ‘So am I to strut around London with Papistical images painted on my boots?’ he asked. ‘Won’t they hang me for a Jesuit in hiding?’

  ‘Not much of a disguise if you’re going around with the Virgin Mary on your feet,’ Hester pointed out cheerfully. ‘No, the painting is almost worn off, and he’ll use it on the inside.’

  ‘We are using rare treasures as household goods? What kind of stewardship is this?’

  ‘We are surviving,’ Hester said grimly. ‘Do you want boots that you can walk in or no?’

  He paused. ‘Do you swear that nothing else of any merit is missing from the collection?’ he demanded. ‘That it is safe in hiding as you say?’

  ‘On my honour, and you can see it all for yourself if you cut down the tree and open the door. But John, you had best wait. It’s not safe yet. They all say the king is defeated but they have said that before. He has his wife working against us in France, and the Irish to call on, and who knows what the Pope might order if the queen promises to hand over the country to Popery? The king cannot be defeated in battle, for all that they fight and fight. Even when he is down to his last man he is not defeated. He is still the king. They cannot defeat him. He has to decide to surrender.’

  John nodded and they fell into stride together for the short walk home. ‘I keep thinking. I keep wondering – perhaps I should go to him,’ he said.

  She stumbled at the thought of him returning to the court and to danger. ‘Why? Why on earth would you go?’

  ‘I feel almost that I owe him some service,’ he said.

  ‘You left the country to escape serving,’ she reminded him.

  He grimaced at her bluntness. ‘It wasn’t that simple,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to die for a cause I can’t believe in. I didn’t want to kill a man because like me he had half-heartedly joined, but on the other side. But if the king is ready for peace then I could serve him with a clear conscience. And I don’t like to think of him alone at Oxford, without the queen and with the prince fled to Jersey, and no-one with him.’

  ‘There’s a whole crowd with him,’ Hester said. ‘Drinking themselves senseless every night and shaming Oxford with their behaviour. He is in the thick of company. And if he sees you he will only remember you and ask where you have been. If he wanted you he would have sent for you by now.’

  ‘And has there been no word?’

  She shook her head. ‘Since they wanted us to serve under the Commission of Array there has been nothing,’ she said. ‘And they risked our lives for a lost cause then. There is nothing you can do for the king unless you can persuade him to come to terms with his people. Can you do that?’

  ‘No.’

  As soon as John’s new boots were ready he put them on, dressed in his best suit and announced his intention of formally visiting his daughter in her new home. Hester and Johnnie, also dressed in their best, went with him in the boat downriver.

  ‘Will he be angry?’ Johnnie asked under the noise of the oars in the water.

  ‘No,’ Hester said. ‘The moment he sees her she’ll have him wrapped around her finger like always.’

  Johnnie chuckled. ‘Can we shoot the bridge?’ he asked.

  Hester hesitated. Timorous passengers would make the ferrymen leave them on the west side of Tower Bridge and walk round to rejoin their boat at the other side. The currents around the pillars of the bridge were terrifyingly swift and when the tide was on the ebb and the river was full, boats could overturn and people could drown. It was Johnnie’s great passion to shoot the rapids and generally Hester would stay in the boat with him, her hands gripping the side, her knuckles white, and a smile firmly fixed on her face.

  ‘Do what?’ John asked and turned around.

  ‘Shoot the bridge,’ Johnnie replied. ‘Mother lets me.’

  John looked in surprise at his wife. ‘You can’t enjoy it?’ he asked.

  One glance at her face told him that she was terrified. ‘Oh, I don’t mind,’ she said. ‘Johnnie loves it.’

  John gave a short bark of laughter. ‘Then Johnnie can do it,’ he said firmly. ‘You and I will land at the Swan Stairs like Christians and Johnnie can meet us on the other side.’

  ‘But I like Mother coming too!’ Johnnie protested.

  ‘That’s as maybe,’ John said firmly. ‘But I’m home now, and you’re not going to drown my wife to keep you company. You can shoot the bridge on your own, my boy.’

  The ferryman set them ashore at the steps. John put his hand under Hester’s elbow as they climbed to the top and turned to wave to Johnnie as he sat in the prow of the boat to gain full pleasure from the terrifying ride.

  ‘Look at his face!’ Hester exclaimed lovingly.

  ‘You are too indulgent to him,’ John said.

  She hesitated. John was his father and the head of the household. Restoring the power to him was hard for her, just as regaining his position was for him. ‘He’s still only a boy,’ she remarked. ‘Not yet thirteen.’

  ‘If he was in Virginia –’ John started and then bit back the rest.

  ‘Yes,’ she said softly. ‘But he isn’t. He’s a good boy and he has been courageous and faithful through these difficult years. If he was a planter’s son, living in the wilds, then I dare say he would be a quite different boy. But he is not. He is a boy who has had to have his childhood in the middle of a war and he has seen all of the adults around him most terribly afraid. You are right to restore the rules, John, but I won’t have him blamed for not being something he has no business to be.’

  He turned and faced her but she did not drop her gaze. She stared at him fiercely as if she did not care whether he beat her or sent her home in disgrace. Not for the first time John was reminded that he had married a redoubtable woman and, despite his temper, he remembered also that she was fiercely defending his son, just as she had fiercely defended the garden and the rarities.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said, with the smile she loved. ‘And I will be restored to my place at the head of the household. But I won’t be a tyrant.’

  She nodded at that, and when they strolled together to the other side of the bridge where the boat was waiting she slid her hand in the crook of his arm and John kept it there.

  They paid the boatman and retraced their steps to the Tower. Alexander Norman’s timber yard was beside the walls of the Tower on the grounds of a former convent. His house was built alongside, one of the long, thin townhouses pressed against the narrow street. Hester had feared that Frances would be unhappy without a garden, with little more than a dozen pots in the cobbled yard at the back which was overshadowed half the day from the stacks of wood in the timber yard next door. But already the house was draped in climbing roses and honeysuckle was