‘What is it?’ he asked quietly.
‘I was just thinking how proud Johnnie would have been,’ she said simply. ‘To see our name on the same page as the king’s. To have the collection dedicated to the king.’
John nodded. ‘Yes, he would have been,’ he said. ‘His cause won the war in the end.’ He turned to Elias Ashmole. ‘I thank you for your help, Elias. Let’s get it printed at once.’
Elias nodded. ‘I’ll deliver it to the printers on my way home,’ he said cheerfully. ‘It’s no trouble. I’m glad you approve.’
Hester took her glass of wine and sat with the men. ‘Do we have guests for dinner tonight?’ she asked. ‘Is Dr Wharton and the rest coming for dinner?’
‘Yes, and there’s news about that too!’ Elias said gleefully. ‘We are to have royal patronage. The king is very interested in our thoughts and discoveries. We are to be called the Royal Society! Imagine that! We are to be fellows of the Royal Society! What d’you think?’
‘That is an honour,’ John said. ‘Though we’d never have gathered together if it hadn’t been for the republic. Under the bishops half what we discussed would have been called heresy.’
Elias flapped his hand dismissively. ‘Old days,’ he said. ‘Old history. What matters now is that we have a king who loves to talk and speculate and who is prepared to advance men of science and learning.’
‘Then why does he touch for the king’s evil?’ Frances asked innocently, bringing a plate of biscuits which she put at John’s elbow. ‘Is that not the superstition of ignorant people? Would he welcome an inquiry into such nonsense?’
Elias was briefly put out. ‘He does his duty, he does everything that is right and courteous and pleasing,’ he said with emphasis. ‘Nothing more than good manners. Good manners, Mrs Norman, are the very backbone of civilised society.’
‘If you are a Royal Society I had best order a royal dinner,’ Hester said tactfully. ‘Come and help me, Frances.’
Frances shot a grin at her father and followed her stepmother into the house.
It was a good summer for the Ark. The sense of safety and prosperity meant that more and more visitors came to the doors. The spirit of inquiry which the Royal Society represented spread throughout London, and men and women came to see the marvels of the Tradescant collection and then walk in the rich gardens and the orchards.
The horse chestnut avenue which ran from the terrace before the rarities room to the end of the orchard was now thirty-one years old, with broad trunks and wide, swaying branches. No-one who saw the trees in flower could resist purchasing a sapling.
‘There will be a chestnut tree in every park in the land,’ John predicted. ‘My father always swore that they were the most beautiful trees he had ever grown.’
But the chestnuts had their rivals in the garden. John’s own tulip tree from Virginia flowered for the first time in the hot summer of 1660, and botanists and painters made special trips up the river to see the huge cupped flowers against the dark, glossy foliage. John had some new roses, Warner’s rose and a beautiful new specimen from France that they called the velvet rose for the deep, soft colour of the petals. The fruit trees in the garden had shed their blossoms and were heavy-laden with growing fruits. The early cherries were picked at dawn by Frances to save them from the songbirds, and sold at the garden gate by the lad. One part of the fruit garden was set aside for vines now; John had row upon row of well-pruned bushes, grown low on wires, just as his father had seen them grown in France, with fourteen varieties of grape, including the fox grape from Virginia and the Virginian wild vine.
In the melon beds John grew half a dozen varieties of melon. He always kept one fruit to the side, he called it the royal melon, descendant of the seeds which Johnnie had planted at Wimbledon House. When it fruited in midsummer John sent a great sweet-smelling globe to the king, who was hunting at Richmond, with compliments of John Tradescant. He wondered if this was the second melon that Charles Stuart had received, and if he would ever understand the devotion which had been poured into growing the first fruit.
Autumn 1660
Castle Cornet, Guernsey.
Dear Mr Tradescant,
Please would you send me, as soon as you lift them, six Iris Daley tulip, six Tricolor Crownes tulip, and two or three tulip which you think I might like that are new to your collection.
If the new tenants of the house at Wimbledon have no objection, I should like you to collect from my garden any specimens which you would like to have as your own. I think the acacia tree was promised to you – all that long time ago. I particularly would like to see my own Violetten tulip again, I had one in particular which I thought might be so dark a purple as to be almost black.
If you can be admitted to the garden I would be very pleased to have some of my lily bulbs returned to me, especially those from my orange garden. I have high hopes of breeding a new variety of lily here and I will send you some bulbs in the spring. I shall call it the Lambert lily and my claim to fame shall not be for the battle for freedom but for one sweet-smelling, exquisitely shaped blossom.
Lady Lambert has joined me here with our children and the castle has become less like a prison and more like a home. All I am in need of, is tulips!
With best wishes to Mrs Tradescant and Mrs Norman – John Lambert.
John passed the letter to Hester without comment and she read it in silence.
‘We’ll get him his Violetten back,’ she said determinedly. ‘If I have to go over the Wimbledon garden wall at midnight.’
Winter 1660
Elias Ashmole came to visit the Ark in midwinter, wearing a new furlined cape and very conscious of his new status. He came by carriage with some friends and brought a case of Canary wine to share with John. Hester lit the candles in the rarities room, and ordered dinner for them all, served it and ate her own dinner in the quieter company of Cook in the kitchen.
John put his head around the kitchen door. ‘We’re taking a stroll down to Lambeth,’ he said. ‘For a glass of ale.’
Hester nodded. ‘I shall be in bed by the time you return,’ she said. ‘If Mr Ashmole wishes to stay the bed is made up in his usual room, and there are truckle beds for his friends.’
John came into the kitchen and gave her a kiss on the forehead. ‘I shall be late home,’ he announced with satisfaction. ‘And no doubt drunk.’
‘No doubt,’ Hester said with a smile. ‘Goodnight, husband.’
They came home earlier than she expected. She was putting out the candles in the rarities room and raking out the fire when she heard the front door open and John stumble into the hall with Ashmole and his companions.
‘Ah, Hester,’ John said happily. ‘I am glad you are still awake. Elias and I have been doing some business and I need you to witness it for me.’
‘Can it not wait until the morning?’ Hester asked.
‘Oh, sign it now and then we can put it away and have a glass of port,’ John said. He spread the paper before her on the painter’s table in the window of the rarities room. ‘Sign here.’
Hester hesitated. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s a piece of business and we need a witness,’ Elias said smoothly. ‘But if you are uneasy, Mrs Tradescant, we can leave it until the morning. If you want to read every paragraph and every sentence, we can leave it. We can find someone else to serve us if you are unwilling.’
‘No, no,’ Hester said politely. ‘Of course I can sign it now.’ She took the pen and signed the paper. ‘And now I shall go to bed,’ she said. ‘I give you goodnight, gentlemen.’
John nodded, he was opening a case of coins. ‘Here you are,’ he said to Ashmole. ‘In good faith.’
Hester saw the antique milled shilling piece passed to Elias.
‘Are you giving away one of our coins?’ she queried in surprise.
Ashmole bowed and pocketed the coin. ‘I’m very grateful,’ he said. He seemed far more sober than John. ‘I shall preserve it very carefully as a pre
cious token and a pledge.’
Hester hesitated, as if she would ask him what pledge John had made to him; but one of the men opened the door for her and bowed low. Hester curtsied and went out and up the stairs to bed.
She was wakened by the bang of her bedroom door as John stumbled into the room and then by the shake of the bed as he dropped heavily on to it. She opened her eyes and saw that he had fallen asleep at once, on his back, still wearing his clothes. Hester thought for a moment that she could get up and undress him and get him comfortable in bed. But then she smiled and turned over. John’s drinking bouts were rare but she saw no reason why he should not wake up in the morning in some slight discomfort.
When he woke in the darkness he thought for a moment he had been dreaming his worst dream: of failure and his own inability to inherit his father’s work and continue his father’s name. He slipped out of the narrow bed without waking Hester, who turned and stretched her hand out over his pillow.
He slipped on his shoes and went downstairs. The parlour which had seemed so bright and jolly only hours ago was now dark and unwelcoming, it smelled of stale ale and tobacco smoke, and the fire was burned down to dark embers. He blew on the coals, was rewarded by a red glow, and then threw on a handful of kindling. The dry wood caught and the shadows leaped high in the room.
On the table was the document and at the foot of the document was his own clear signature, and next to it Elias Ashmole’s educated elliptical hand. He touched the wax of his seal. It was hard and cold, there was no escape. The signature was there, the seal was there, the document was there. It stated very clearly that at John Tradescant’s death Elias Ashmole was to inherit all the rarities in the collection and all the plants in the garden. John had signed away his patrimony, he had signed away his name, he had signed away his inheritance and all his own work and his father’s work would count for nothing.
‘I didn’t mean this,’ John whispered quietly.
With the deed of gift in his hand he went out into the hall. Hester in her white nightgown was like a ghost coming down the stairs.
‘Are you ill?’ she asked.
Dumbly, he shook his head. ‘I have done a most terrible, terrible thing.’
At once her eyes went to the contract in his hand which she had signed as he had bid her. ‘The business you were doing with Mr Ashmole?’
‘He told me it was a deed of gift, to give the rarities to the University of Oxford at our deaths. He told me that they would put our name to the collection and that everyone would always know that we had the first collection open to any visitor in all the world, that we had the finest things, the rarest, the most beautiful. He told me that I was signing the goods to him as a trustee. He would ensure that the university received the rarities entire, that they would call it the Tradescantean.’
There was the creak of a door opening upstairs.
‘Come outside,’ Hester whispered as if only in the garden could they be safe. She opened the door to the terrace and slipped out into the icy night, careless of her bare feet on the chill floorboards. ‘Does it not say that? The document? Is he not pledged to do that?’
‘I just signed it,’ John said numbly. ‘I just agreed with him that it would be a fine thing to have the collection in the care of the university. So I just signed it. And I made you sign it too.’
‘And what does it say?’
‘I didn’t read it carefully enough. And he is a lawyer. He has made sure that it is unclear. It says that the collection is to go to him entire; but there is nothing about the university. He is not a trustee, he will inherit everything for himself. He will have it when we die. He can keep it as he likes. Or he can give it to his heirs. My God, Hester, he can break it up and sell it piece by piece.’
She said nothing, she was aghast. Her face was as white as her nightcap, as her gown.
‘And I signed too,’ she said, her words a tiny thread of sound.
John took his gardening cape hung on a hook near the door wrapped it around her shoulders, then turned and looked out over the garden, leaning on the rail of the terrace. He thought of the many hours his father had spent, leaning on the rail and looking out at his trees, at his beloved chestnut avenue.
The night was kind to the garden, the trees were as beautiful as black lace against the sky which was slowly growing blue. Somewhere amid the rare plum trees a robin was starting to sing, its haunting ghostly song enhancing the silence. Further down the orchard a duck, disturbed in its sleep beside the lake, quacked once briefly and then was still.
John leaned his head in his hands and blotted out the garden. ‘He will have it all when I am gone, Hester. He was witty and helpful, and I thought I was doing a clever thing. And now my head is fit to split and I know that you are married to a fool. There will be no Tradescant collection to carry my father’s name to future generations, they will call it the Ashmolean and we will all be forgotten.’
He thought for a moment that she would cry out against him and beat him, but she had turned away and was reading the document by the light of the setting moon. In the pallor of the moonlight she looked sick with the shock. ‘I have broken my promise to your father,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I told him I would guard your children and guard the rarities. I lost Johnnie and now I have lost the rarities too.’
John shook his head. ‘You lost nothing,’ he said passionately. ‘Johnnie died thinking that kings were glorious heroes, not time-serving lechers. He died because he could not bear to live in the new world that the time-servers were making. And it was me that did this; not you. I did it all from my own folly. Because I thought Ashmole was cleverer than me. That’s why I was glad to be his friend. That’s why I wanted his help with the catalogue of the treasures. And now I wish to God I had inherited my father’s caution as well as his treasures. Because I could not keep the one without the other.’
‘It might fail,’ she said. ‘This – paper. We could say you were drunk when you signed …’
‘I would have to prove more than being drunk. I would have to prove that I was mad for it to fail,’ he said. ‘And being a fool is not the same as being mad.’
‘We could cut off the seal, and the signature, and deny it …’
He shook his head again, not answering for a moment. ‘We can try but he has the law on his side, and he knows the lawyers. I think there is no escape from my folly. I have failed you and I have failed my father.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I had no heir,’ he continued with deep sorrow. ‘No-one to come here after me. And now there will be nothing here, anyway.
‘I thought my father’s name, my name, my son’s name would live forever,’ he said wonderingly, looking out over the dark garden, thinking of the riches hidden safe in the frozen soil, waiting for the sun. ‘I thought everyone who ever planted a garden would know of us three, would be glad of what we had done. I thought every garden in England would grow a little brighter because of the plants we had brought home. I thought that as long as people loved their gardens and loved trees and shrubs and flowers there would be people who would remember us. But I have thrown it all away. My life’s work, my father’s life’s work: it will all mean nothing. Elias Ashmole will have it all and we will be forgotten.’
Hester stepped forward so she could lean her head on his shoulder, the warmth of her body was familiar and comforting. He put his arm around her and held her close. A little breeze went through the orchard and Tradescant’s trees; fifty-seven new plum trees, forty-nine new apple trees, forty-nine new pear trees, twenty-four new cherry trees moved their branches in a gentle dance. Before them the great branches of the chestnut avenue bobbed, their upwinging boughs carrying the hidden sweet spikes of their buds, their proud, broad trunks strong and still. In the orangery, safe in the warmth, were the rare and tender plants, the exotic, precious plants which the Tradescants, father and son, had brought from all over the world for the gardeners of England to love.
‘We will be forgotten,’ John whispered.
&
nbsp; Hester leaned back and picked a sweet-scented winter-flowering jasmine bud, one of the first ever grown in England. The unfurling petals were cream in the yellow moonlight. The tears were hot on her cheeks, but her voice was confident.
‘Oh no, they will remember you,’ she said. ‘I think the gardeners of England will remember you with gratitude one hundred, two hundred, even three hundred years from now, and every park in England will have one of our horse chestnut trees, and every garden one of our flowers.’
About the Author
Philippa Gregory is an internationally renowned author of historical novels. She holds a PhD in eighteenth-century literature from the University of Edinburgh. Works that have been adapted for television include A Respectable Trade, The Other Boleyn Girl and The Queen’s Fool. The Other Boleyn Girl is now a major film, starring Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman and Eric Bana. Philippa Gregory lives in the North of England with her family.
Also by the Author
The Tudor Court Series
THE CONSTANT PRINCESS
THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL
THE BOLEYN INHERITANCE
THE QUEEN’S FOOL
THE VIRGIN’S LOVER
THE OTHER QUEEN
The Wideacre Trilogy
WIDEACRE
THE FAVOURED CHILD
MERIDON
Earthly Joys
EARTHLY JOYS
VIRGIN EARTH
The Cousins’ War
THE LADY OF THE RIVERS
THE WHITE QUEEN
THE RED QUEEN
THE KINGMAKER’S DAUGHTER
THE WHITE PRINCESS
Standalones
PERFECTLY CORRECT
ALICE HARTLEY’S HAPPINESS
A RESPECTABLE TRADE
THE WISE WOMAN
FALLEN SKIES
THE LITTLE HOUSE
ZELDA’S CUT
Short Stories
Virgin Earth Page 66
