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 never did. They were courted beloved spoiled children, the first children of four kingdoms, and they had no time for him. John would see them boating on the lake or riding across the park and never looking back as poor little Charles struggled to keep up.
‘I scarcely see Their Highnesses,’ he said.
‘Oh, well!’ Gertrude leaped to her feet in frustration. ‘Tell Elizabeth I called in to wish her well. I’m surprised she is not downstairs by now. Tell her that I said she should stir herself. And tell her that the baby should be called George David.’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ John said in the same quiet tone of voice.
‘What?’
‘I will not tell her any of that. And you shall not tell her either.’ ‘I beg your pardon?’
John smiled his easy smile. ‘Elizabeth shall stay in bed until she is well again,’ he said. ‘We were lucky not to lose her. It was a hard birth for her, and she was hurt inside. She shall rest as long as she wants. And we won’t be calling the child George or Robert or James or Charles or Henry or David. He’ll be John, after my grandfather, and after my father, and me.’
Gertrude flounced towards the door. ‘It’s very dull!’ she exclaimed. ‘You should save your name for another child. The first child should be named in such a way as to encourage a sponsor!’
John’s smile never wavered but his face was dark with regret. ‘There won’t be another child,’ he said. ‘There will only ever be this one. So we will name him as we wish, and he will be John Tradescant, and I will teach him how to garden.’
Gertrude paused. ‘Not another child?’ she asked. ‘How can you say such a thing?’
He nodded. ‘I called the apothecary from Gravesend. He said that she could not manage another birth, so we shall only ever have this, our son.’
Gertrude came back into the room and looked again into the cradle, shocked out of her normal irritability. ‘But John,’ she said softly. ‘To have to pin all your hopes on just one child! No-one to bear your name but just the one! And everything to be lost if you lose him!’
John rubbed his face as if he would rub away his scowl of pain. He leaned over the cradle. The baby’s sleeping fists were as tiny as rosebuds, his dark hair a little crown of fluff around his head. A tiny pulse like a vulnerable heart beat at the centre of his skull. John felt a deep passion of tenderness so powerful that his very bones seemed to melt inside him.
‘It’s as well I am used to growing rarities,’ he murmured. ‘I have not a dozen little seedlings to watch, I shall never have more than this one. I just have this one precious little bud. I shall nurse him up as if he was a new flower, a rarity.’
‘It is done.’ Robert Cecil found Tradescant on his knees in the Theobalds knot garden. ‘I was looking for you. The king wants to call Theobalds his own this year. We are to leave.’
John rose to his feet and rubbed the cold earth from his hands.
‘What are you doing?’ the earl asked.
‘Relaying the white stones,’ John said. ‘The frost disturbs them, throws up dirt and spoils the pattern.’
‘Leave it,’ he ordered peremptorily. ‘The king’s gardeners can worry about it now. He wants it, he has pressed me for it, he hinted a hundred thousand different ways, and Rochester pushed him on every time he might have stopped. I’ve fended him off for three years but now I’ve given it to him, God damn it. And now he’s happy, and Rochester is happy, and I have Hatfield.’
Tradescant nodded, his eyes on his master’s face. ‘You shall make me a splendid garden there,’ Robert Cecil said rapidly, as if he was almost afraid of John’s calm silence. ‘You shall go abroad and buy me all sorts of rarities. How are the chestnuts coming along? We will take them with us. You shall take anything you want from the gardens here, take them with us and we shall start again at Hatfield …’
He broke off. Still John watched him, saying nothing.
The most powerful man in England, second only to the king himself, took two hasty steps away from his gardener and then turned back to face him. ‘John, I could weep like a babe,’ he confessed.
John slowly nodded. ‘So could I.’
The earl held out his arms and John stepped into them and the two men, the one so slight and twisted, the other so broad and strong, wrapped each other in a deep firm hug. Then they broke apart, Cecil rubbing his eyes on the sleeve of his rich jacket while John cleared his throat with a harsh cough. John offered his arm and Cecil took help and leaned on his man. The two of them walked from the knot garden