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,’ Gertrude went on. ‘Though it will do him little good, I suppose. We could call him Henry Charles for the two princes. But they say Prince Charles is a sickly boy. D’you ever see him at Theobalds, John?’
She glanced up to John, who had leaned out of the window and was thoughtfully weighing a flowerpot in his hand. Poking from the moist earth was a whippy slim stem crowned with a little hand of green leaves.
‘Oh! that eternal pot! Every day Elizabeth sighs over it as if it were worth its weight in gold! I told her! No twig in the world is worth that sort of attention! But I was asking you – John – d’you ever see Prince Charles at Theobalds? I heard he was sickly?’
‘He’s not strong,’ John replied, putting the chestnut tree gently on the windowsill. ‘They say he is much better since he came from Scotland. But I rarely see him. The king does not keep his family by him. When he comes hunting, he comes with only his most intimate circle.’
Gertrude leaned forward, avid for gossip. ‘And are they as bad as everyone says? I’ve heard that the king adores the Duke of Rochester, that he loads him with pearls, that the duke rules the king and the king rules the kingdom!’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ John said unhelpfully. ‘I’m just the gardener.’
‘But you must see them!’
John thought of the last visit of the king. He had come without his wife Anne, who now never travelled with him. She was completely replaced by his young men. John had seen him walking in the garden with his arm around the Duke of Rochester’s waist. They had sat together in the arbour and the king had rested his head on the duke’s shoulder, like a country girl mooning over a blacksmith. When they kissed, the court turned aside and pretended to be busy about its own concerns. No-one pried, no-one condemned. The young Duke of Rochester was the favourite of everyone who wanted to be the favourite of the king. A whole court was formed around his handsome lithe figure. A whole morality was lightly constructed around the king’s love for him that permitted any sort of display, any sort of drunkenness.
At night the duke went openly to his bed in the king’s room. The king was said to be afraid of assassination and it soothed him to sleep with a companion, but there were loud groans of pleasure from the inner chamber and the repetitive squeaking of the royal bed.
‘They go out hunting, I weed the paths,’ John said unhelpfully.
‘I hear the queen misses him and pines for him, and has become a Papist for consolation …’
John shrugged.
‘And what of the children, the royal princes and princesses?’
John looked deliberately vague. He was disinclined to gossip and in any case he had seen more than enough of the royal princes and princess. Princess Mary was only a baby and not yet at court but Prince Henry, the heir and the darling of the whole court, was an arrogant boy whose charm could be blown away in a moment’s rage. His sister, Elizabeth, had all the Tudor temper and all the Tudor hastiness, and poor little Prince Charles, the second surplus heir, the rickety-legged runt of the litter, ran behind his stronger, older, more attractive siblings all the day, breathless with his weak chest, stammering with his tied tongue, longing for them to turn and pay him attention.
They
