Earthly Joys Read online

  John bowed slightly. ‘Any preference as to colours?’ he asked. ‘I can get some very handsome red and white roses, Rosamund roses. I have them growing at my garden in Lambeth.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she said, falling over the words in her haste. Even after five years in the country she still spoke English as if it was a strange and ugly foreign language. ‘And in the centre bed I want a knot with our initials entwined. C and H M. Can you do that?’

  John nodded. ‘Of course …’

  She suddenly stiffened. ‘Of course, Your Highness,’ she corrected him abruptly.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ John said smoothly. ‘I was so interested in what Your Highness was saying that I forgot my manners. Of course, Your Highness.’

  At once she smiled at him and gave him her hand to kiss. John bowed low and pressed his lips gently to the little fingers. His sense that he had served steadier, more intelligent and more noble masters did not show on his face.

  ‘It is to be a garden which expresses Love,’ she said. ‘The highest love there can be below the heavens. The love that there is between a man and his wife, and higher than that: between a king and a queen.’

  ‘Of course, Your Majesty,’ John said. ‘I could plant you some symbolic flowers around the roses. White violets for innocence, and periwinkle for constancy, and daisies.’

  She nodded enthusiastically. ‘And one corner in blue as a tribute to Our Lady.’ She turned her dark eyes on him. ‘Are you of the true faith, Tradescant?’

  John thought briefly of Elizabeth in her modest grey gown, the staunch Baptist faith of his daughter-in-law, and his promise to J that his conscience would not be offended by this work. He kept his face perfectly steady. ‘I attend the church of my fathers, Your Majesty,’ he said. ‘I’m a simple gardener, I don’t think much of things other than plants and rarities.’

  ‘You should think of your immortal soul,’ she commanded. ‘And the church of your fathers is the church of Rome. I am always telling the king this!’

  Tradescant bowed, thinking that she had just said enough to get both of them hanged if the king applied the laws of the land – which he manifestly only did when it suited him.

  ‘And I shall want flowers for my chapel, for my private chapel,’ she said. ‘Blue and white for Our Lady.’

  ‘Of course, Your Majesty.’

  ‘And for my private rooms, and strewing herbs, and the king wishes you to maintain and replant the physic garden and look at the herb garden.’

  Tradescant bowed again.

  ‘I want the house to be like a palace in a fairytale,’ she said, changing at once from the evangelical Roman Catholic into the flirtatious queen. ‘Like a bower for a fairytale Princess. I want people all over the country, all over Europe, to hear of it as a fairytale garden, a perfect garden. Have you heard of the Platonic ideal?’

  John felt a sense of weariness he had never before known while talking about a garden. He had a sudden sympathy for the king who had lost the easy male companionship of Buckingham and had no-one to turn to but this vain woman.

  The queen was laughing. ‘I suppose not!’ she cried. ‘It does not matter, Gardener Tradescant. It is an idea which we make much of at court, in our masques and poetry and plays. I will just tell you that it is an idea that there is a perfect form of everything – of a woman, of a man, of a marriage, of a garden, of a rose, and the king and I want to attain that ideal.’

  John glanced at her to see if she was speaking seriously. He thought of how the duke would have roared with laughter at the pedantry, at the pretentiousness. He would have slapped John on the back and called him Gardener Tradescant for ever after.

  ‘Think of it,’ she said, her voice as sweet as syrup. ‘A perfect garden as a shell for a perfect palace for a perfect king and queen.’

  ‘In a perfect country?’ John asked incautiously.

  She smiled. She had no sense that there might be anything behind his question but spellbound admiration. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘How could it be otherwise when it is ruled by my husband, and by me?’

  Summer 1631

  John had thought he would enjoy some time away from his home – never in his life before had he been so settled and he feared that the domestic life of Lambeth would be too narrow for him. But he found that he missed the daily changing business of the Ark, the midsummer flowering of the garden, and, more than anything else, the rapid changing of Frances who grew, in the summer of 1631, from a rosebud-mouthed, lisping toddler, to a little girl of rare determination.

  He went home to Lambeth at every opportunity he could, to choose his stock from his own garden, and so that he could see his granddaughter. Each time he set off back to the palace, J would loiter in the stable yard, helping to pack the wagon with the heavy earthenware pots of plants.

  ‘D’you need me at the palace?’ he would ask, and John would drop his hand on his son’s shoulder.

  ‘I can manage without you another week,’ he would say. ‘I’ll tell you when I need you there.’

  ‘I’ll come then,’ J would promise. ‘As I agreed to.’

  He would watch his father swing into the seat and go, and John would chuckle to himself at the seriousness of his beloved son who had bound himself in so many contradictory ways: to his conscience, to his promise, to his father, to his wife.

  By the end of the summer John had completed the designs for the work in the king’s court, had shown them to the queen, and was ready to start the labour of digging over the garden and replanting it. He had a team of men ready to start but he needed J to supervise the work while he went on to the queen’s court, so that it should be designed in time for autumn planting.

  ‘Will you come back to the palace with me this time, J?’ he asked as the family were seated on the terrace one evening. J was drinking a glass of small ale, John had a small tot of rum. ‘There’s the physic garden which needs replanting, and now the queen has asked for a flowery mead.’

  Jane looked up from her sewing, affronted. ‘A what?’

  John smiled. ‘A flowery mead,’ he said. ‘Modelled on an old tapestry, those you see with the unicorn surrounded by hunters. It’s supposed to be like a meadow, a perfect meadow, with all the flowers of the field but no stinging nettles. You plant it with wild and garden flowers and then you cut a little path around it for the pleasure of walking with wild flowers.’

  ‘Why not walk by a meadow, then?’ Jane asked.

  John took another sip of rum. ‘This is not a woman of sense, this is the queen. She would rather that everything was fashioned to perfection. Even a wildflower meadow. It’s an old fashion in gardening, I did not think to plant one again. And although it is supposed to look wild and untouched, it takes unending work to keep it in flower and keep the weeds checked.’

  ‘I can do it,’ J said. ‘I’ve never worked on one before. I’d like to do it.’

  John raised his glass to his son. ‘And you’ll have little or nothing to do with Her Majesty,’ he said. ‘Since she first showed me the garden and told me what she wanted I have hardly seen her. She is with the king most of the day or with the courtiers. She wants the garden as the backcloth to her theatre of being queen. She has no interest in planting.’

  ‘Well enough,’ J said. ‘For I have no interest in her.’

  John had intended that J would miss the king and queen altogether, and timed the arrival of his son to the date when the court was due to have moved on. But there was the usual delay and confusion, and they were a week late in going. J, cutting the full-blown roses in the rose court and carefully shaking the petals into a broad flat basket for drying, looked up and saw that a short dark-haired woman was watching him.

  He took in the wealth of jewels, the rich silk and lace of her gown, and the straggle of courtiers behind her, and pulled off his hat and bowed, as low as he should go for courtesy, but no lower.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked abruptly.

  ‘I am John Tradescant, the younger John Tradescant, Your