You’ll come with me, won’t you, John? You’ll leave our maze and the fountain court and the great garden for me?’
‘Your Grace … of course …’
The earl heard at once the hesitation in his voice. ‘The king would keep you on here if I told him you would stay and mind the gardens,’ he said a little coldly. ‘If you don’t wish to come with me to Hatfield.’
John turned and looked down into his master’s wretched face. ‘Of course I come with you,’ he said tenderly. ‘Wherever you are sent. I would garden for you in Scotland, if I had to. I would garden for you in Virginia, if I had to. I am your man. Whether you rise or fall, I am your man.’
The earl turned and gripped John’s arms above the elbows in a brief half-embrace. ‘I know it,’ he said gruffly. ‘Forgive my ill humour. I am sick to my belly with the loss of my house.’
‘And the garden.’
‘Mmm.’
‘I have spent my life on this garden,’ John said thoughtfully. ‘I learned my trade here. There’s not a corner of it that I don’t know. There’s not a change that it makes from season to season that I cannot predict. And there are times, especially in early summer, like now, when I think it is perfect. That we have made it perfect here.’
‘An Eden,’ the earl agreed. ‘An Eden before the Fall. Is that what gardeners do all the time, John? Try to make Eden again?’
‘Gardeners and earls and kings too,’ John said astutely. ‘We all want to make paradise on earth. But a gardener can try afresh every spring.’
‘Come and try at Hatfield,’ the earl urged him. ‘You shall be head gardener in a garden which shall be all your own, you will follow in no man’s footsteps. You can make the garden at Hatfield, my John, not just maintain and amend, like here. You shall order the planting and buy the plants. You shall choose every one. And I will pay you more, and give you a cottage of your own. You need not live in hall.’ He looked at his gardener. ‘You could marry,’ he suggested. ‘Breed us little babes for Eden.’
John nodded. ‘I will.’
‘You are betrothed, aren’t you?’
‘I have been promised these past six years, but my father made me swear on his deathbed never to marry until I could support a wife and family. But if I can have a cottage at Hatfield, I will marry.’
The earl laughed shortly and slapped him on the back. ‘From great men do great favours flow like the water in my fountains,’ he said. ‘King James wants Theobalds for a royal palace and so Tradescant can marry. Go and tie the knot, Tradescant! I will pay you forty pounds a year.’
He hesitated for a moment. ‘But you should marry for love, you know,’ he said. He swallowed down his grief, his continual grief for the wife he had married for love, who had taken him despite his hunched body and loved him for himself. He had given her two healthy children and one as crooked as himself, and it was the birth of that baby which had killed her. They had been together only eight years. ‘To have a wife you can love is a precious thing, John. You’re not gentry, or noble, you don’t have to make dynasties and fortunes, you can marry where your heart takes you.’
John hesitated. ‘I’m not gentry, my lord, but my heart cannot take me to a maid without a portion.’ Irresistibly the thought of the kitchen maid from the first dinner for King James came into his head. ‘My father left me with a debt to a man which is cleared by this betrothal to his daughter, and she is a steady woman with a good dowry. I have been waiting until I could earn enough for us to marry, until I had savings which might take us through difficult years, savings to buy a house and a little garden for her to tend. I have plans, my lord — oh, never to leave your service, but I have plans to take my fortune upwards.’
The earl nodded. ‘Buy land,’ he advised.
‘To farm?’
‘To sell.’
John blinked; it was unusual advice. Most men thought of buying land and keeping it, nothing was more secure than a smallholding.
The earl shook his head. ‘The way to make money, my John, is to move fast, even recklessly. You see an opportunity, you take it quickly, you move before other men have seen it too. Then when they see it, you pass it on to them and they crow at having spotted their chance, when you have already skimmed the cream of the profit. And move fast,’ he advised. ‘When you see an opening, when a place comes open, when you see a chance, when a master dies, take what you’re owed and move on.’
He glanced up into John’s frowning face. ‘Practice,’ he reminded him. ‘Not principles. When Walsingham died, who was the best man to take his place? Who had the correspondence at his fingertips, who knew almost as much as Walsingham himself?’
‘You, my lord,’ Tradescant stammered.
‘And who had Walsingham’s papers which told everything a man who wanted to be Secretary of State would need to know?’
John shrugged. ‘I don’t know, my lord. They were stolen, and the thief never found.’
‘Me,’ Cecil admitted cheerfully. ‘The moment I knew he would not recover, I broke into his cabinet and took everything he had written and received over the previous two years. So when they were casting around for who could do the work there was no-one but me. No-one could read the papers and learn what needed doing, for the papers were missing. No-one could know Walsingham’s mind, nor what he had agreed, because the papers were missing. Only one man in England of the dozen who had worked for Walsingham was ready to take his place. And that was me.’
‘Theft?’ John asked.
‘That’s principle,’ Cecil said swiftly. ‘I’m advising you to look to practice. Think what you want, my John, and make sure that you get it, for be very certain that no-one will give it to you.’
John could not help but glance up at the great palace of Theobalds, a place so grand that a king could envy it and insist on owning it, knowing that he could never build better.
‘Aye,’ said the earl, following his gaze. ‘And if a more powerful man can do it, he will take it from you. He will be guided by practice and not principles too. Buy land and take risks is my advice. Steal if you need to and if you will not be detected. When your master dies – even if it is me – have your next place secure. And also – marry your woman with a dowry, she sounds the very one for a rising man like you. And bid her be careful with her housekeeping.’
John Tradescant rode down the Kentish lanes to his old village of Meopham, where he had been expected every day for the last six years. The hedges were white with hawthorn and may blossoms, the air warm and sweet-scented. The rich green pastureland of Kent glowed lush where cattle were knee-deep in water meadows. These were prosperous times and rich fields. John rode in a daze of pleasure, the lushness of the fields and the greening of the trees and the hedges acting on him as strong wine might turn another man’s head. In the hedgerows were the white floss of gypsy lace and the little white stars of meadowsweet. Through gaps in the hedge where trees had been coppiced was a sea of blue where bluebells had sprung up to carpet the floor of the forest. Ahead of him the road was drifted with the tiny petals of the hawthorn flower like spring snow, and at every verge the lemon-yellow flowers of primroses were stuffed into roots and nooks like nosegays in a belt. When the road wound through meadowlands, John could see the light
