Earthly Joys Read online

  ‘God keep him safe,’ Hester said, glancing out of the window at the dark March skies.

  ‘Amen,’ John said.

  Towards the end of the month John fell ill again. He ached in every bone and complained of the cold. But he was adamant that nothing ailed him, he was well enough. ‘Just tired,’ he said, smiling at Hester. ‘Just old bones.’ She did not press him to rise from his bed, nor to eat. She thought he looked as if he had reached the end of a long and arduous road.

  ‘I think I should write a letter for J,’ he announced quietly one morning as she sat at the foot of his bed, sewing an apron for Frances.

  At once she put her sewing to one side. ‘He will not get it if he left the colony as he planned. He should be at sea now.’

  ‘Not a letter to send. A letter for him to read here. If I am not here to speak to him.’

  She nodded gravely, she did not rush to reassure him. ‘Are you feeling worse?’

  ‘I am feeling old,’ he said gently. ‘I don’t imagine that I will live forever, and I want to make sure that it is all settled here. Will you write it for me?’

  She hesitated. ‘If you wish. Or I could send for a clerk to write it. It might be better if it were not written by me.’

  He nodded. ‘You are a sensible woman, Hester. That’s sound advice. Get a clerk for me from Lambeth and I will dictate my letter to J and finish my will.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said and went quietly from the room. At the doorway she paused. ‘I hope you will make it clear to your son that he is not bound to have me. Your son will have to make his own decision when he comes home. I am not part of his inheritance.’

  There was a small gleam of mischief in John’s pale face. ‘It never occurred to me,’ he said unconvincingly. He took a difficult breath. ‘But it shall be as you wish. Send for a clerk from Lambeth, and also send for the executors of my will. I want to leave everything straight.’

  The clerk came and the executors with him – Elizabeth’s brother, Alexander Norman, and William Ward, Buckingham’s steward, who had served with John all those years ago.

  ‘I shall be your executor with the greatest of pleasure,’ Alexander assured him, taking a seat at the bedside. ‘But I expect that you shall be mine. This is just a winter rheum. We’ll see you in the garden again this spring.’

  John managed a weary smile, leaning back against his pillows. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘But I’m a good age now.’

  Alexander Norman glanced over the will and set his name to it. He reached towards John and shook his hand. ‘God keep you, John Tradescant,’ he said quietly.

  The Duke of Buckingham’s old steward, William Ward, stepped forward, and signed the will which the clerk showed him. He took John’s hand. ‘I shall pray for you,’ he said quietly. ‘You shall be in my prayers every day, along with our lord.’

  John turned his head at that. ‘D’you pray for him still?’

  The steward nodded. ‘Of course,’ he said gently. ‘They can say what they like about him but we who were in his service remember a master to worship, don’t we, John? He wasn’t a tyrant to us. He paid us freely, he gave us gifts, he laughed at mistakes and he would flare into a rage and then it was all forgotten. They spoke ill of him then and they speak worse of him now; but those of us who knew him have never served a better master.’

  John nodded. ‘I loved him,’ he whispered.

  The steward nodded. ‘When you get to heaven you will see him there,’ he said with simple faith. ‘Outshining the angels.’

  The will was signed and sealed and posted with the clerk, the executors in agreement, but Hester thought that John would not go until he could see his tulips one last time. There is no gardener in the world who does not worship spring like a pagan. Every day John would take a seat at the window of his bedroom and peer outward and down to try to see the tiny spears of green springtime bulbs piercing the cold earth.

  Every day Frances came to his room with her hands filled with new buds. ‘Look, Grandfather, the lenten lilies are out, and the little white daffodils.’

  She would spread them on the coverlet wrapped around his knees, both of them careless of the sticky juice from the cut stems. ‘A feast,’ John said, his eyes on them. ‘And they smell?’

  ‘Like heaven,’ Frances replied ecstatically. ‘Yellow, they smell like sunshine and lemons and honey.’

  John chuckled. ‘Tulips coming?’

  ‘You’ll have to wait,’ she said. ‘They’re still in bud.’

  The old man smiled at her. ‘I should have learned patience by now, my Frances,’ he said gently, his breath coming short. ‘But don’t forget to look tomorrow.’

  Hester thought that John’s stubborn will would not let him die in early spring. He wanted to see his tulips before he died, he wanted to see the blossom on his cherry trees. She thought his soul could not leave his weary body until he had some warm summer flowers in his arms once more. As the cold winds died down and the light at the window of his bedroom grew brighter and warmer, his breath slowly slipped away, but still he hung on – waiting for the summer, waiting for the return of his son.

  At the end of March he turned his head to her as she sat at his bedside. ‘Tell the gardener to send me in some flowers,’ he said softly. He was breathless. ‘Everything we have. I may not be able to wait for them to bloom. Tell him to pot me up some tulips. I want to see them. They must be nearly showing by now.’

  Hester nodded and went out to find the gardener. He was weeding in the seed beds, preparing them for the great rush of planting out which would come when the danger of night frosts was over.

  ‘He wants his tulips,’ she told him. ‘You’re to pot them up and take them in. And cut some daffodils, armfuls of them. But I want us to do more for him. What are the best plants he has made? The rarest, most special plants? Can we not put them all in a pot and take them in so that he can see them from his bed?’

  The gardener smiled at her ignorance. ‘It’d be a big pot.’

  ‘Several pots then,’ Hester persisted. ‘What are his other plants?’

  The gardener’s gesture took in the whole garden, and the orchards beyond. ‘This is not a man who gardens in pots,’ he said grandly. ‘There’s his orchard: d’you know how many cherry trees alone? Forty! And some of his fruit trees were never grown before, like the diapered plum he got from Malta.

  ‘And he found wonderful trees for the park or garden. See those beauties so fresh and green with those pale needles? He grew them from seed. They are Archangel larches, from Russia itself. He brought the pine cones back and managed to make them grow.’

  ‘They’re dead,’ Hester objected, looking at the spiky yellowing needles clinging to the brown twigs.

  The gardener smiled at her and took one of the swooping bare branches. There was a tiny rosette of green needles at the tip of the rusty brown branches.

  ‘In the autumn they turn as golden as a beech tree and shed their needles like yellow rain. Come the spring they burst out, all fresh and green like grass. He reared them from seed and now look at the height of them!

  ‘In the orchards he grows the service tree, and his favourites are the great horse chestnuts. Look at that avenue down the garden! And every one of them flowers like a rose and makes leaves like a fan. It’s the greatest tree that has ever been seen, and he grew the first from a nut. On the lawn before the house? That’s an Asian plane. And nobody can say how big it will grow because nobody has ever seen one before.’

  Hester looked down the avenue at the arching swooping branches. ‘I didn’t know,’ she said. ‘He showed me all around the garden and the orchard but he never told me they were all his own, discovered by him and grown here in Lambeth for the very first time. He only told me they were rare and beautiful.’

  ‘And there’s the herbs and vegetables,’ the gardener reminded her. ‘He’s got seven sorts of garlic alone, a red lettuce which can make seventeen ounces of good leaves, allspick lavender, Jamaican pepper. His flowers come