John bent his face down to his little son’s wriggling body and smacked a kiss on his bare stomach. ‘He’ll learn to love me again,’ he said. ‘I shall stay till Twelfth Night.’
Elizabeth did not protest, she was learning that the lord’s garden came before everything, but she swept out of bed in a way which made her feelings very plain. John let her go, his eyes on his son’s bright little face.
‘One time I shall take you with me,’ he promised. ‘It’s not that I’m in your place here – you should be sharing my place with me.’ He nodded to the window which overlooked the village street but he meant the wider world, beyond the lanes to London, beyond even London. He meant Europe, he meant Africa, he meant the East.
John stayed for little more than three weeks at Meopham, long enough to get under Elizabeth’s feet in the little cottage and to make his peace with his son, before hiring another cart and driver and travelling down the mud-filled, almost impassable roads to Dorset, seeking more trees for sale: apple trees for the orchard, cherry, pear, quince, plum. Trees for the park: oak, rowan, birch, beech.
‘Wherever will you get them all from?’ Elizabeth wondered, bringing him his well-darned travelling cloak and packing a basket of food under the seat of the wagon.
‘I shall buy them from the orchards,’ John said determinedly. ‘They sell apples by the dozen, why not trees?’
‘And the wild trees for the earl’s park?’
‘I shall take them,’ John said recklessly. ‘From every forest I pass on my way. I shall be going through the New Forest, every sapling I see I shall stop and dig up.’
‘You will be hanged for certain!’ Elizabeth exclaimed. ‘You will be hauled before the verderers’ courts and hanged for damaging the royal chase.’
‘How else am I to find my lord’s trees?’ John demanded. ‘How else am I to do it?’
John travelled around England and brought back his swaying whispering carts filled with the bushy heads of trees. They came to know
him on the West Road, and when children saw him coming into a town with his carts rumbling behind him they would run to the well to fetch a bucket to water Mr Tradescant’s trees.
The great house was nearly finished and the gardens were slowly shaping according to the master plan. There had only been one long delay when the workmen had run short of money, and even the great Cecil coffers had run dry. John had feared for his lord then, feared that the cost of the house and the cost of the garden had overstretched him, as everyone had warned that it would. John sensed, but did not know, that there were enemies on every side at court who might bow to and flatter the Secretary of State now, but at the least sign of weakness would pull him down like a pack of hounds upon an old stag. Just as the rumours got out that Cecil had overreached himself and would fail, there was more money delivered to the builders, and more money at the goldsmiths’ in the little provincial towns for John to draw on to buy his trees.
‘How did you manage it?’ John asked Cecil. ‘Have you sold your soul, my lord?’
Cecil’s smile was grim. ‘All but,’ he said. ‘I sold every other property I owned, and borrowed on the rest. But I had to have my house, John. And we had to have our garden.’
John first laboured on the acres which faced the house, especially the huge knot garden below the terrace where the earl had his private rooms. Each path leading from the house was precisely aligned to the windows of the private rooms so that Cecil, looking out, would always see a vista of straight lines, running outwards to the distant horizon. Tradescant, breaking with tradition, planted different edging plants at each junction of the outward path so the colour of the hedges melted and grew paler as the eye was drawn further and further from the house. At each crossroads was a little statue, an aid to meditation on the fleeting nature of life and the vanity of wishes.
‘I might as well have put up a moneylender’s sign,’ Cecil said dourly to John when they walked the new paths, and John grinned.
‘You were warned, my lord,’ he said lovingly. ‘But you would have your own way.’
‘And are you telling me I was wrong?’ Cecil asked with a dark upwards gleam at the taller man.
Tradescant shook his head. ‘Not I! It was a great venture. And grandly carried out. And still much to do.’
‘You have given me a great gift,’ the earl said thoughtfully. They climbed the steps to the stone terrace, Cecil heaving his lame leg, refusing to take help, John beside him, his hands pushed deep into his pockets to prevent him reaching out and holding his master’s arm. They gained the top of the terrace and Cecil gave John a quick glance which thanked him for his forbearance.
‘Walk with me,’ he said.
The two men strolled side by side on the new paving stone, and looked down on the patterns of the twisting beds of the knot garden. ‘You have given me a great gift because every year it will grow more lovely. Most gifts are consumed in the first weeks, like young love. But you have given me a gift which will be here long after we are both gone.’
John nodded. The sky above them was soft and grey, only in the west was there a line of rosy cloud where the sun had gone. An owl called in the wood and then they saw its pale shape drift across the new orchard in the distance where the land fell away down to the valley.
The earl smiled. ‘Sometimes I think the greatest thing that I ever did for England was to set you to work, my John. Nothing in my life gives me more joy.’
Tradescant waited. Often these days, the earl was disinclined to talk and would walk in silence with his gardener through the slowly emerging shapes of the garden and park. His work was daily growing more arduous; the power of the favourites around the king was undiminished, the problems of the court profligacy greater than ever. The fashion for masques now dominated at court and every occasion was marked with a catastrophically expensive play written, composed, designed and produced in one night, and completely forgotten the next. Every court favourite, the women as well as the men, had to have a costume blazing with jewels, every important role had to arrive in a chariot or depart with fireworks.
King James had inherited a fortune with the throne of England. The legendary meanness of the old queen had served the country extraordinarily well. Her father had left her a throne with two sources of revenue: the steady flow of money from the sale of places at court, favours, and civic jobs, and the rare bounties voted in taxes by an agreeable Parliament. The balance was a delicate one. Tax the wealth of the industries too sharply and the merchants, traders, and bankers would complain. Go cap in hand to Parliament too often and the country squires who sat there would buy control of royal policy. Only by scrimping on every expenditure, by borrowing, by insisting on constant gifts and by downright out-and-out corruption, had the Tudor King Henry and his daughter Elizabeth amassed a fortune for themselves, and a steady reliable prosperity for their kingdoms. The almighty theft of the Roman Catholic church possessions had started the process, but Tudor charm and Tudor guile had continued it.
King James was new to this process but he had Cecil and half a hundred others to advise him. The earl had thought that the new king, who had previously managed hand-to-mouth in cold castles in a poor kingdom, would show all of the family’s legendary parsimony and have no experience of their love of show.
But it was a habit quickly learned. James, new-come to one of the richest thrones in Europe, could see no reason why he should not have everything he desired. The money from the royal treasury poured out in fountains over the new favourites, over the new luxurious court, for every beautiful woman, for every pretty man. Not even Cecil’s constant struggle with the farming out of taxes, the sale of honours,