Elizabeth smoothed a loose strand of hair under her cap. ‘Of course not,’ she said levelly. ‘He was summoned by the earl himself, he could hardly send a message back and say he would not go!’
‘And was the bedding properly done?’ Gertrude asked in an undertone. ‘You will not hold him to the marriage if he can argue that the work was not undertaken or carried through.’
‘Of course. And he does not wish to withdraw from the marriage. He was summoned away to his lord. He sent me a message from London. I expect him back every day.’
‘The sheets were hardly marked at all,’ Gertrude pointed out.
Elizabeth flushed. She had resorted to strawberry jam on the bed linen. It was the tradition that the newlyweds’ sheets be put to air over their windowsill so that the neighbours and the community might be assured that a marriage had been made and consummated and was now indissoluble. Not even people of the class of Elizabeth and John could escape public scrutiny.
‘They were marked enough,’ Elizabeth said.
‘Oh, well!’ Gertrude sat back in the hard chair and looked around the little parlour. ‘He has left you comfortably, at least. As long as he provides for you I daresay you will not miss him, having been a spinster so long.’
‘He will provide for me, and he will return to me,’ Elizabeth replied calmly. ‘He had to go to Theobalds with some new plants for the earl. But I expect his return any day.’
‘You’d have done better to marry a farmer!’ Gertrude gave a malicious little laugh. ‘Better a little mud on your parlour floor than a husband who leaves you the very morning after you are wed.’
‘Better to be married to a man high in the favour of the Earl Cecil himself than to be a woman who knows nothing beyond the hills of her home!’ Elizabeth flared up.
‘Do you mean me, you saucy miss!’ Gertrude exclaimed, leaping to her feet. ‘For I shall not be insulted by you. Your stepfather shall hear of it! And he will make you sorry for your impertinence! I shall send him down here after he’s had his dinner and he will tell you what we think of impertinent spinsters, married a night and abandoned the next day! You’ll be lucky if your husband ever comes home at all!
I shall see you at my back door wanting your own bed back, I don’t doubt it!’
Elizabeth strode to the door and flung it open. ‘I am not a miss, saucy or otherwise,’ she declared. ‘And my stepfather has no rights over me any more and neither do you. I do not have to listen to you, and I certainly don’t have to obey him. My father would not have used me so!’
‘Easy to say!’ Gertrude retorted. ‘Since he is not here to contradict you!’
‘He would not contradict me,’ Elizabeth rejoined. ‘He was like me. The faithful kind: we love and stay loyal. We don’t flit from one to another like a drunk bee.’
The reference to her mother’s four marriages could not be borne. Gertrude flounced to the door. ‘Well, I thank you, Mrs Tradescant!’ she spat. ‘I shall go home to my husband at my fireside, and enjoy company and good cheer. We will drink and be merry. And I shall sleep in a warm bed with the man who loves me! And I daresay you wish you could say the same!’
Elizabeth waited until Gertrude was on her way and then she flung the door shut with a crack which sounded down the length of the street to mark her defiance. But when she was quite sure that Gertrude was gone, and not returning for a final retort, she dropped to her knees on the hearthrug, put her face on the empty seat of the master chair and cried for John.
He did not come until late in the summer, nor did he send for her to go to Theobalds. He did not send her so much as a note to tell her that he was delayed – absorbed in the work of replanting and maintaining the most beautiful garden in England. First it was the newly designed knot gardens which took his attention. The continuous twist of hedging was much harder to keep cut than the old straight lines, and inside the box hedges the lavender had flourished too strongly. Now it needed cutting back so that it did not thrust wands of navy blue out of their place; but at least Cecil agreed that the softness of their shape and the spiky azure flowers had added beauty to the geometric precision of the garden and that Tradescant should plant other shrubs inside the hedging.
Then the bathing pools in the marble temple turned green in the hot weather, and he had them drained and scrubbed with salt and rinsed clean and refilled. Then the kitchen gardens started fruiting, first strawberries, then raspberries, gooseberries, peaches, and apricots. It was not until the currants came into season that John took time from his work to borrow a horse and ride down the dusty lanes to his home in Kent.
He took two of the new chestnuts in his pocket, still shining from the polishing he continually gave them. Of the six in the merchant’s box he had planted two in large pots and left them in a shady place in the garden, watering them gently every day from the dish placed underneath the pot to encourage their roots to grow down. Two he had kept in a net hung high out of the way of rats in his shed, planning that they should feel the heat of the summer on their glossy backs before he planted them in autumn, when the weeds died back and before the first frosts came, hoping to mimic the trees’ natural time for growth. Two he carried in the safe darkness of his pocket, planning to plant them in spring in case they needed to be hidden from frost and to feel the warmth of a new season and the damp richness of the spring earth to make them flourish. He thought he should have left them in a stone box in the darkness and coldness of the floor of the marble bath house but he could not resist their smooth round shapes, tucked in his waistcoat. A dozen times a day his fingers found their way into the little pocket to caress them like a broody hen turning over two precious eggs.
He buttoned down the flaps with care when he mounted his horse.
‘I shall stay some weeks with my wife,’ he said to the gardener’s lad who held the horse. ‘You can send for me, if I am needed. Otherwise I shall come home at the end of September.’ He did not notice he had called Theobalds ‘home’. ‘And have a care that you keep the gates shut,’ he reminded the boy, ‘and weed the grass every day. But do not touch the roses, I shall be back in time to see to them myself. You may take the heads off when they are finished flowering, and take the petals to the still room, but that is all.’
It was a two-day journey to Meopham. John enjoyed travelling through the Surrey countryside where the hayfields were showing green again after the rain, and where the wheat stooks stood high in the field. Horsemen cantered past him, covering him in blinding clouds of dust; he sometimes rode alongside great wagons and could hitch his horse behind, taking a seat with the driver for a rest from the saddle and a sup of the driver’s ale. There were many people walking the roads: artisans on the tramp looking for work, harvesting gangs at the end of their season, apple-pickers making their way to Kent like John, gypsies, a travelling fair, a wandering preacher ready to set up at any crossroads and preach a gospel which needed neither church nor bishops, pedlars waddling beneath the weight of their packs, goose girls driving their flocks to the London markets, beggars, paupers, and sturdy vagrants forced away from parish to parish, bullocks being driven to Smithfield by swearing, anxious cattle drovers.
In the inn at night John ate at an ‘ordinary’, the daily dinner with a set price which humble travelling men preferred, but he paid extra to sleep alone. He did not want to appear before Elizabeth scratching with another man’s fleas.
At the long dining table in the inn’s front room the talk was of the new king, who could not agree with Parliament although he had been in the kingdom only four years. The men dining at table were mostly on the side of the king. He had the charm of novelty and the glamour of royalty. So what if Parliament complained of the Scots nobles who hung around the court, and so what if the king was extravagant? The king of England could afford a little luxury,