J thought for a moment and then took the step, the next step, speaking without thought, speaking from his heart, his unexamined heart. ‘I shall marry her,’ he promised. ‘She will be my wife and I will keep her safe and she shall have her own house and fields here. I shall build her a house beside the river and she need fear for nothing.’
He was speaking to her mother but he was looking at the girl. A deep rosy blush was spreading from the coarse linen neck of the shift up to her forehead where the bear grease still stained her brown skin at the dark hairline. ‘Should you like that?’ J asked her gently. ‘I am old enough to be your father, I know. And I don’t understand your ways. But I could keep you safe, and I could make a house for you.’
‘I should like that,’ the girl said very quietly. ‘I should like to be your wife.’
The older woman put out her hand to J and he felt the roughened palm in his own. Then she took her daughter’s hand and joined them together in a hard grip. ‘When you come back she shall be your wife,’ she promised him.
‘I will,’ the girl said.
‘I will,’ J swore.
The woman released them and turned away as if there was nothing more to be said. J watched her go, and then turned to Suckahanna. She seemed at once very familiar, the easy companion of weeks of travelling and camping, and exquisitely strange, a girl on the edge of womanhood, a virgin who would be his wife.
Carefully, as if he were transplanting a seedling, he put his hand to her cheek, stroked the line of her jaw. She quivered as he touched her but moved neither forwards nor back. She let him caress her face for a moment, for one moment only; and then she turned on her heel and ran from him.
‘Come back soon,’ she called, and he could hardly see her in the darkness as she went swiftly after her mother, only her linen shift gleaming in the dusk. ‘Come in the good time, the fruitful time, Nepinough, and I shall make you a great feast and we will build our house before winter comes.’
‘I will!’ J said again. But she was already gone, and the next day at dawn the ship sailed and he did not see her.
J’s ship arrived at London docks at dawn in early April and he came blearily out of his cabin into the cold English air, wrapped in his travelling cloak with his hat pulled down on his head. A wagoner was idling on the dockside, fiddling with the feedbag at the head of a dozing horse.
‘Are you for hire?’ J shouted down.
The man looked up. ‘Aye!’
‘Come and fetch my goods,’ J called. The man started up the gangplank and then recoiled at the waving fronds of saplings and small trees.
‘Goods?’ he asked. ‘This is a forest!’
J grinned. ‘There’s more than this,’ he said.
Together they humped the barrels filled with damp earth down the gangplank and into the wagon, the whippy branches of trees stirring above their heads. Then J brought another barrel of seeds and nuts, and finally his own small bundle of clothes and a chest of rarities.
‘I know where we’re headed,’ the man said, climbing on to the box and waking the horse with a slap of the reins on its back.
‘You do?’
‘Tradescant’s Ark,’ the man said certainly. ‘It’s the only place in the world that you’d go to with half a forest on board.’
‘Quite right,’ J said, and put his feet up on the board. ‘What’s the news?’ he asked.
The carter spat accurately over the side of the wagon and hit the dirt road. ‘Nothing new,’ he said. ‘A lot worse.’
J waited.
‘Everything you can eat or drink is taxed,’ the carter said. ‘But that was true before you went away, I dare say. Now they’ve got a new tax, a rotting crime of a tax: ship money levied on everyone, however far they are from the sea. It’s the ports that should pay ship money, they’re the ones that need the navy to keep them free of pirates. But the king is making all the towns pay, even inland towns. My sister lives in Cheltenham. Why should she pay ship money? What are the seas to her? But she has to.’
J nodded. ‘The king won’t call a parliament, then?’
‘They say he won’t even hear the word mentioned.’
J allowed himself a pleasurable ‘tut tut’ of disapproval.
‘If he called a parliament and asked them to set a tax they would tell him what they think of him as king,’ the carter said baldly. ‘They would tell him what they think about a Privy Council which is advised by a Papist French queen, and a court which is run by Frenchmen and Jesuits.’
‘That can’t be so,’ J said firmly. ‘I’ve only been gone a few months.’
‘It’s well known the Tradescants are the king’s servants,’ the man said unpleasantly.
‘It is indeed,’ J agreed, remembering his father’s regular warnings against gossip that could be overheard as treason.
‘Then I’ll say no more,’ the carter remarked. ‘And see how you like it when they knock on your door and tell you that now there is a monopoly declared on the dirt in your garden and you have to pay a fine of ten per cent to some courtier if you want to plant in it. Because that’s what’s happened to every other trade in the kingdom while the king taxes the traders but won’t call a parliament which could tax the gentry for their rents.’
The man paused, waiting for a shocked response. J discreetly kept silent.
‘You’ll have heard that the Scots have sworn they won’t read their prayers from the new book?’
‘No?’
The man nodded. ‘All of ’em. Taken against Archbishop Laud’s prayer book. Say they won’t read a word of it. Archbishop is put out. King is put out. Some say he’ll make ’em, some say he can’t make ’em. Why should a king order what you say to God?’
‘I don’t know,’ J said tactfully. ‘I’ve no opinion on the matter.’ And he tipped his hat over his eyes and dozed as the wagon jolted down the familiar road to his home.
He did not lift his hat as they went down the South Lambeth road towards the common; but he looked sharply all around him from under the brim. It was all well. His father’s house still stood proudly, set back from the road, the little bridge spanning the stream that ran alongside the road. It was a handsome farmhouse in the old timbered style, but on the side of the house was the ambitious new wing, commissioned by his father for the housing of the rarities, their great collection of oddities from the monstrous to the miniature. At the back of the house was the garden which made their name and their livelihood, and the rarities room overlooked the garden through its great windows of Venetian glass. J, taught by a long-standing habit, looked at the ground as the cart drove around the south side of the building so that he did not see his father’s vainglorious stone crest, affixed to the new wing in defiance both of the college of heralds and of the simple truth. They were not Tradescant esquires and never had been, but John Tradescant, his father, had drawn up and then commissioned a stonemason to carve his own crest; and nothing J could say could persuade him to take it down.
J directed the carter past the rarities room, where the terrace overlooked the orderly gardens, on to the stable yard so that the plants could be unloaded directly beside the pump for watering. The stable lad, looking out over the half-door, saw the waving tops of small trees in the cart and shouted, ‘The master’s home!’ and came tumbling out into the yard.
They