‘Whatever you have in the larder will do for me,’ John replied. ‘I’ll fetch some wood for the fire.’
‘I’ll run up the road to my mother’s house and borrow a jug of beefstock,’ she said, pulling her grey gown on over her head. She turned her back to him and offered him the ties on her white apron. ‘I’ll only be a moment.’
‘Give them my good wishes,’ John said. ‘I’ll call up and see them tomorrow.’
‘We could go up to the house for supper,’ she suggested. ‘They would be glad to see you tonight.’
‘I have other plans for tonight,’ John said with a meaning smile. Elizabeth felt herself warm through with the intensity of her blush. ‘Oh.’ She recovered herself. ‘I’ll get the beefstock then.’
John nodded and listened to her quick step down the brick path and out into the main street. He stacked the fireplace with a liberal supply of logs and then went out through the back yard to the little field to see to his horse. When he came back Elizabeth was stirring a pot hung on a chain from the spit, and there was bread and new cheese on the table and two jugs of small ale.
‘I brought my book,’ she said carefully. ‘I thought you might like us to look at it, together.’
‘What book?’
‘My lesson book,’ she said. ‘My father taught me to read and write and I did my writing in this book. It has clean pages in it still. I thought, if you wished, I might teach you.’
For a moment John was going to rebuff her; the idea of a wife teaching her husband anything was contrary to the laws of nature and of God; but she looked very sweet and very young. Her hair was tumbled and her cap was slightly askew. Lying on his cape on the floor of the little cottage she had been tender and ready to be pleased, and at the end, openly passionate. He found he did not feel much like supporting the laws of God and nature; instead he found that he was rather disposed to oblige her. Besides, it would be good to know how to read and write.
‘D’you know how to write in French?’ he asked. ‘And Latin words?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Do you want to learn French?’
‘I can speak French, and a bit of Italian, and enough German to see that my lord is not cheated when I am buying plants for him from a sea captain. And I know some plant names in Latin. But I never learned to write any of it down.’
Her face was illuminated with her smile. ‘I can teach you.’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘But you must tell no-one.’
Her gaze was open and honest. ‘Of course not. It shall be between the two of us, as everything else will be.’
That night they made love again in the warmth and comfort of the big bed. Elizabeth, free from her fear that he did not love her, and discovering a sensuality which she had not imagined, clung to him and wrapped her arms and legs around him and sobbed for pleasure. Then they wrapped their blankets around their shoulders and sat side by side on the bed and looked out at the deep blue of the night sky and the sharp whiteness of the thousands of stars.
The village was all quiet, not one light showed. The road away from the village, north to Gravesend and London, was empty and silent, ghostly in the starlight. An owl hooted, quartering the fields on silent wings. John reached for his waistcoat folded on the chest at the foot of the bed.
‘I have something I should like to give you,’ he said quietly. ‘I think it is perhaps the most valuable thing I own. Perhaps you will think it foolish; but if you would like it, I should like to give it to you.’
His hand closed over one of the precious chestnuts. ‘If you do not like it I will keep it, by your leave,’ he said. ‘It is not really mine to give away, it is entrusted to me.’
Elizabeth lay back on the pillow, her hair spread as brown and as glossy as his chestnut. ‘What is it?’ she asked, smiling. ‘You sound like a child in the schoolyard.’
‘It is precious to me …’
‘Then it is precious to me too, whatever it may be,’ she said.
He brought his clenched fist out of his waistcoat pocket and she put her hand out flat, waiting for him to open his fingers.
‘There are only six of these in the country,’ he said. ‘Perhaps only six in the whole of Europe. I have five in my keeping and, if you like, you may have the sixth.’
He dropped the heavy nut like a round smooth marble into her hand.
‘What is it?’
‘It is a chestnut.’
‘It is too big and too round!’
‘A new chestnut. The man who sold it to me told me that it grows into a great tree, like our chestnut tree, but it flowers like a rose, the colour of apple blossom. And this great nut comes only one to a pod, not two nuts to a pod like ours, and the pod is not prickly like our chestnuts but waxy and green with a few sharp spines. He sold it to my lord for nine pounds down, and another eighteen pounds if it grows. And I shall give this one to you.’
Elizabeth turned the nut over in her hand. It nestled heavily in her palm, its brown glossy colour dark against her callused hand.
‘Shall I plant it in the garden?’
John instantly flinched, thinking of the voracious chickens. ‘Put it in a pot, somewhere that you can easily watch it,’ he said. ‘In soil with some muck well stirred in. Water it from the base of the pot with a little water every day. Perhaps it will grow for you.’
‘Shall you not regret giving me this precious nut, if it fails for me?’
John closed her fingers around the nut. ‘It is yours,’ he said gently.
‘Do with it as you will. Perhaps you will be lucky. Perhaps together, now that we are married, we shall be lucky together.’
John stayed a full month at Meopham with his wife, and when the time came for him to go back to Theobalds a number of innovations had been made. She had a pretty little miniature knot garden outside the back door, incongruously planted with leeks, beets, carrots and onions and fenced with rooted willow twigs woven into a dwarf living fence against the marauding chickens. He could both read and write a fair-enough script, the chestnut was in a pot on the windowsill showing a pale snout above the earth, and Elizabeth was expecting their child.
‘The boy should be called George, for his grandfather,’ Gertrude remarked. She was seated in the best chair in Elizabeth’s parlour. The wooden crib stood beside the open window, and John, leaning against the windowsill, was rocking it gently with his foot and looking down into the sleeping face of the baby. He was a dark-skinned child, with black hair as thick as John’s own. When he was awake his eyes were a deep periwinkle blue. John kept his foot nudging the crib, repressing the desire to lift his son to his face and smell again his haunting smell of spilled milk and sweet buttercream skin.
‘George David, for his grandfather and godfather,’ Gertrude said. She glanced sideways at John. ‘Unless you wish to call him Robert and see if the earl can be persuaded to take an interest in him?’
John gazed out into the garden. The little vegetable knot garden was doing well and this spring he had added another square beside it, planted with herbs for strewing, for medicines, and for cooking. There was now a withy hurdle penning Elizabeth’s hens into the far end of the garden with wormwood planted around it to hide the fencing, to give them shade, and to prevent fowlpest.
‘Or we might call him James in a compliment to His Majesty,’