The first grower shook his head. ‘It may be just flowers to you, but it’s trade to us. We are traders and we have formed a college and we buy and sell in each other’s view. That way we know what prices are being charged, that way we can watch the prices rise. And not be left behind.’
‘Prices are rising so fast?’ John asked.
The grower beamed and dipped his face into his great mug of ale. ‘No-one knows how high it can go,’ he said. ‘No-one knows. If I were you I would swallow my English pride and go to the college and post my bid and buy now. It will be dearer next season, and dearer the year after that.’
John glanced around the ale house. The growers were all nodding, not with a salesman’s desire for a deal but with the quiet confidence of men who are in an irresistibly rising market.
‘I’ll take a dozen sacks of plain reds and yellows,’ John decided. ‘Where is this college?’
The grower smiled. ‘Right here,’ he said. ‘We don’t leave our dinner table for anything.’ He took a clean dinner plate, and scribbled a price on it and pushed the plate across to John. The man at John’s elbow dug him in the ribs and whispered, ‘That’s high. Knock off a dozen guilders at least.’
John amended the price and pushed it back, the man rubbed the number off and wrote his own total. John agreed and the plate was posted on a hook on the wall of the room. The grower extended a callused hand.
‘That’s all?’ John queried, shaking it.
‘That’s all,’ the man said. ‘Business done in the open where everyone can see the posted price. Fairly done and well done, and no harm to either bidder or seller.’
John nodded.
‘A pleasure to do business with you, Mr Tradescant,’ said the grower.
The tulips were delivered to John’s inn the next day and he sent them off with a courier under strict orders that they were not to be out of his sight until he had put them into the Hatfield wagon at London dock. He also sent a letter to Meopham with his love and a kiss for Baby J, and news that he was going on to Paris.
It was as he sealed the letter and put it into the hands of the courier that John knew that he was a traveller indeed. He did not fear the strangeness of Europe, he had a deep intoxicating sense that he might hire a horse here and then exchange it for another, and then another, and then another, and ride all the way across Europe, through the heart of Papist Spain and even on to Africa. He was an islander no more, he had become a traveller.
He watched the barge carrying his precious tulips slip away down the canal and turned back to the inn. The horse was waiting, saddled for him, he had paid his slate, his travelling pack was ready. John swung his thick cape around his shoulders, heaved himself into the saddle and set the horse’s head for the west gate.
‘Where are you headed?’ one of the tulip growers called to him, seeing a good customer departing.
‘To Paris,’ John called back and nearly laughed at his own sense of excitement. ‘I’m to visit the gardens of the French king. And I am buying more plants. I need even more. I think I shall buy up half of Europe.’
The man laughed and waved him on and John’s horse, its metal shoes ringing on the cobblestones, stepped delicately out on to the highway.
The roads were good to the frontier and then they deteriorated into a mud track riddled with potholes. John kept a sharp look out for great forests with a chateau set among the trees and when he saw newly planted drives he turned off the road and went to find the French gardener to discover where he got his trees from. If he found a good supplier of rare trees he placed an order with him to lift a hundred of them when the weather turned colder and they could be safely moved and sent on to Hatfield. For the great Earl Cecil himself.
As John drew nearer to Paris the woods became thinner except for the preserved forests for hunting, and then the road became lined with little farmhouses and market gardens to feed the insatiable appetite of the city. From his vantage point on horseback John overlooked garden and orchard walls and constantly surveyed what the French gardeners were growing. As a man from Kent he could afford to despise the quality of their apples but he envied the size and ripeness of their plum trees and stopped half a dozen times to buy specimens of what looked like new varieties.
He entered Paris with an entourage following him like a travelling garden, two wagons loaded with swaying leaves, and he had to find an inn that was accustomed to great baggage trains where he could pack up his new purchases and send them on to England.
As soon as they were safely despatched John called for a laundress to wash and starch his clothes, to clean the dust from his cape so that he might use his letter of introduction to the French king’s own gardener, the famous Jean Robin.
Robin had heard of Tradescant and was desperate for news of the new great palace and gardens at Hatfield. Of course it would be in the French style, it was to be designed by a Frenchman, but what of the woods, what of the walks? And what did Tradescant think of the prices of tulips, were they rising or would they hold steady for another year? How high could the price of a bulb go anyway? Surely there must be a point where a man would pay no higher?
Tradescant and Jean Robin walked around the royal garden for a couple of hours and then retired for a grand dinner enhanced by several bottles of claret from the royal cellar. Jean Robin’s son joined them for the meal, washing the mud from the garden off his hands before he sat down and bowed his head for a Papist grace. Tradescant shifted uneasily in his seat while the ritual Latin was spoken but when the young man broke bread he could not help but smile.
‘I hope that my son too will follow me into my place,’ John said. ‘He’s only a baby now, but I will bring him up to my work and – who knows?’
‘A man who holds a craft should pass it on,’ Jean Robin said, speaking slowly for John’s benefit. ‘But when it is a garden which takes so long to fruit, then you are planting for your son and his sons anyway. It is a fine thing to say to a boy, look out for this tree and when it is grown this high, I want it pruned like that. To know that the garden lives on, and your work and plans for it will live on, even after you are long dead.’
‘It is a poor man’s posterity,’ John said thoughtfully.
‘I should want no other than to leave a beautiful garden,’ Jean Robin declared. He smiled at his son. ‘And what an inheritance for a young man!’
When they parted, a week later, they had sworn eternal friendship in the brotherhood of gardeners, and Tradescant was loaded with trays of cuttings, purses of seeds, and dozens of roots and saplings.
‘And where d’you go now?’ Robin demanded at a final farewell dinner.
John knew an instant temptation to say that he was going on to Spain, that he would ride slowly down the country ways and collect a plant from every roadside verge. ‘Home,’ he said, in his halting French. ‘Home and my wife.’
Robin clapped him on the back. ‘And the new garden at Hatfield,’ he said, as if there was no doubt which was the most important.
John arrived back at Meopham in December to kiss Elizabeth and make his peace with Baby J, who was angry at being neglected. He had brought Baby J a little wooden soldier, carved by a Frenchman and dressed in the uniform of the king’s personal guard. Baby J was talking clearly now and very firm in his opinions. He particularly disapproved of John’s return to Elizabeth’s bed.
‘That’s my place,’ he stated flatly, glaring at his father in the early hours of John’s first day at home. John, who had planned to make love to Elizabeth when they woke, was rather taken aback by the unmistakable enmity in his son’s little face.
‘This is my bed,’ John said reasonably. ‘And my wife.’
‘She’s my mother!’ Baby J shouted and launched himself at his father.
John caught the little fists and tucked