Virgin Earth Read online

  She was good with the visitors. She asked them for their money at the door without embarrassment, and then showed them into the room. She did not force herself on them as a guide; she always waited until they explained if they had a special interest. If they wanted to draw or paint an exhibit she was quick to provide a table close to the grand Venetian windows in the best light, and then she had the tact to leave them alone. If they were merely the very many curious visitors who wanted to spend the morning at the museum and afterwards boast to their friends that they had seen everything there was to see in London – the lions at the Tower, the king’s own rooms at Whitehall, the exhibits at Tradescant’s Ark – she made a point of showing them the extraordinary things, the mermaid, the flightless bird, the whale’s mouth, the unicorn’s skeleton, which they would describe all the way home – and everyone who heard them talk became a potential customer.

  She guided them smoothly to the gardens when they had finished in the rarities room, and took care that she knew the names of the plants. She always started at the avenue of chestnut trees, and there she always said the same thing:

  ‘And these trees, every single one of them, come from cuttings and nuts taken from Mr Tradescant’s first ever six trees. He had them first in 1607, thirty-one years ago, and he lived long enough to see them flourish in this beautiful avenue.’ The visitors would stand back and look at the slim, strong trees, now green and rich with the summer growth of their spread palmate leaves.

  ‘They are beautiful in leaf with those deep arching branches, but the flowers are as beautiful as a bouquet of apple blossom. I saw them forced to flower in early spring and they scented the room like a light daffodil scent, a delicious scent as sweet as lilies.’

  ‘Who forced the chestnuts for you? My father?’ J asked her when some visitors had spent a small fortune on seedlings and departed, their wagon loaded with little pots.

  She turned to him, slipping the coins into the pockets of her apron. ‘I had the gardener bring them into flower for your father as he lay sick,’ she said simply.

  ‘He saw them in bloom?’

  She nodded. ‘He said he was lying in a flowery mead. It was something we once talked about. He lay among a rich bed of scents and colours, tulips all around him, and over his bed were great boughs of flowering horse chestnut. It was a wonderful sight. He liked it.’

  J thought for a moment of the other deaths in the house: his mother’s in the room ablaze with daffodils, and the boat laden with Rosamund roses going slowly downriver to the City for Jane’s funeral. ‘Did he ask you to do it?’

  Hester shook her head.

  ‘I am glad you thought of it,’ he said. ‘I am glad there was someone here to do that for him.’ He paused and cleared his throat. ‘About his plan that we should marry …’

  She flushed a little but the face she turned towards him was serene. ‘Have you come to a decision?’

  He nodded.

  ‘I’m glad. I cannot in all conscience stay here much longer. Your mother-in-law Mrs Hurte is bound to wonder what I am doing here, and the servants will talk.’

  ‘I have thought about it,’ he said, sounding as detached as she. ‘And I have thought that we might suit very well.’

  She stole a quick look at his face. ‘You want to marry me?’

  ‘If you desire it,’ J said coldly. ‘As my father wrote to me in his letter, I have two children and work to do. I must have someone reliable at my home. I have observed you these last months and you are clearly fond of the children and you do the work well. I cannot think of a better wife for me, especially since I have no preference in women.’

  She bowed her head. For a moment she had an odd sentimental thought that by accepting Tradescant’s loveless proposal she was cutting herself off from all the other possibilities which might have unfurled before her. Surely there would have been men, or even just one man, who might have loved her for herself, and not because she was good with his children and reliable with his business? Surely there might have been just one man who might have proposed and waited for her answer with his heart pounding? Surely there might have been just one man who might have put her hand to his lips so that she felt not a polite kiss but the sudden warm intake of breath which reveals desire?

  She gave a small unnoticed shrug. No such man had yet appeared and she was nearing thirty. The agreement with John Tradescant was the best she had ever been offered in a country where success was measured in terms of intimacy with the court. The king’s gardener and a favourite of the queen was a good catch, even for a spinster with a dowry of two hundred pounds.

  ‘I have no preference in men,’ she said, as coolly as he. ‘I will marry you, John.’

  He hesitated. ‘No-one ever calls me John,’ he said. ‘I’ve always been J. It was my father who was John.’

  Hester nodded. ‘I know that. But your father is dead now, and you are the head of the household and a son no longer. I shall call you John. You are the head of the household, you are John Tradescant.’

  ‘I suppose I am …’

  ‘Sometimes it is hard when your father or mother dies,’ she said. ‘It’s not just their death which causes you grief, but the fact that you are no longer someone’s little child. It’s the final stage of growing up, of becoming a man or a woman. My mother used to call me a pet-name, and I have never heard that name since she died. I never will hear it again. I am a grown woman now and no-one calls me anything but Hester Pooks.’

  ‘You are saying that I must take my manhood.’

  ‘You are the head of the household now. And I will be your wife.’

  ‘We will have the banns called at once then,’ he said. ‘At St Mary’s.’

  She shook her head at the thought of him walking to his wedding past the headstone of his only beloved wife. ‘I am a resident of St Bride’s in the City,’ she said. ‘I will go home and get the banns called there. Shall we marry at once?’

  He looked indifferent. ‘It would be more convenient for me,’ he said politely. ‘But you perhaps have clothes to order? Or things you want to do?’

  ‘A few things. We can be married in October.’

  He nodded as if it were the completion date of some routine gardening work. ‘In October then.’

  October 1638

  John wondered if he should feel himself faithless to his promise to Suckahanna, but he did not. He could not remember her well enough, only foolish details like the pride of her smile or the cool clasp of her hand when he had pledged himself to her. He dreamed one night that he was in the woods with her and she was setting a fish trap. When he woke he wondered at the power of the image of her bending over the little stream and setting her trap of woven withy. But then Baby John marched determinedly into the room and the dream was gone.

  He wondered occasionally what was happening to her, whether she and her mother were safe in the woods as they had planned to be. But Virginia was so far away, a two-months’ voyage, and such a leap of the imagination that he could not keep her in his mind. Surrounded by the business worries and demands of his home J could not retain the picture of Suckahanna. Every day she seemed more exotic, more like a traveller’s tale. She was a mermaid, a barnacle goose that swam underwater and then flew from the barnacle shells, a being with its head beneath its shoulders, a flying carpet. One night when he was drunk he tried to tell a fellow gardener that he had collected his Virginia plants with an Indian maid who was covered in blue tattoos and wore nothing but a buckskin pinny; and the man roared with laughter and paid for another round of ales to praise John’s bawdy invention.

  Every day she receded further from him. Whether he tried to speak of her or kept silent, whether he dreamed of her or let her image go, every day she seemed less likely, every day she floated down the river of his memory in her little canoe, and never looked back at him.

  On the first of October Hester went to stay in her City lodgings to prepare for her wedding: buying a few pieces of lace to stitch on her petticoats and he