Earthly Joys. Philippa Gregory

a winding path to the top.

      ‘Will this ease your homesickness for Theobalds?’ Cecil asked jokingly.

      ‘It will ease mine,’ John replied, looking at the magnitude of the plan and thinking, his imagination whirling, of how he would ever get the thousands of fruit trees, where he would buy the millions of plants. ‘Will it ease yours, my lord?’

      The earl shrugged. ‘The service of a king is never easy, John. Don’t forget that. No true servant of a king ever sleeps well at night. I shall miss my old house.’ He turned back to the plan. ‘But this will keep us busy into our old age, don’t you think?’

      ‘This will keep us busy forever!’ John exclaimed. ‘Where am I to get a thousand golden carp from for your water parterre?’

      ‘Oh!’ Cecil said negligently. ‘Ask around, John. You can find a hundred pairs, surely! And they will breed if they are well kept, I don’t fear it!’

      John chuckled reluctantly. ‘I know you don’t fear it, my lord. That is to be my job.’

      Cecil beamed at him. ‘It is!’ he said. ‘And they are reroofing a fine cottage for you here, and I shall pay you an increase. How much did I promise you?’

      ‘Forty pounds a year, sir,’ John replied.

      ‘Call it fifty then,’ the earl said genially. ‘Why not? I’m hardly going to notice it with the rest of these bills to pay.’

       Summer 1610

      John decided that Elizabeth and Baby J should remain at Meopham while he was travelling in Europe to buy the earl’s trees. Elizabeth protested that she wanted to live in the new cottage in Hertfordshire, but John was firm.

      ‘If Baby J should be ill, or you yourself sick, then there is no-one there who would care for you,’ he said in the last days of August, while he planned and packed his clothes for the journey.

      ‘There’s no-one here in Meopham who would care for me,’ she said inaccurately.

      ‘Your whole family is here, cousins, sisters, aunts, and your mother.’

      ‘I can’t see Gertrude wasting much time on my comfort!’

      John nodded. ‘Maybe not. But she would do her duty by you. She would make sure that you had a fire and water and food. Whereas at Hatfield I know no-one but the workmen. Not even the house staff are fully at work yet. The place is still half-built.’

      ‘They must be finished soon!’

      John was incapable of explaining the scale of the project. ‘It looks as if they could build for a dozen years and never be done!’ he said. ‘They have the roof on now, at least, and the walls complete. But all the inside fittings, the floors, the windows, there is all that to do. And the panelling is yet to come, there are hundreds of carpenters and woodcarvers on site! I tell you, Elizabeth, he is building a little town there, in the middle of a hundred meadows. And I must plant the meadows and turn them into a great garden!’

      ‘Don’t sound so overawed!’ Elizabeth said affectionately. ‘You know you are as excited as a child!’

      John smiled, acknowledging the truth. ‘But I fear for him,’ he confided. ‘It is a great task he has taken on. I can’t see how he can bear the cost of it. And he is buying property in London too, and then selling it on. I fear he will overstretch himself and if he gets into debt -’ He broke off. Not even to Elizabeth would he trust the details of Cecil’s business arrangements, the bribes routinely taken, the Treasury money diverted, the men bankrupted by the king one day on charges of treason or offences against the Crown whose estates were bought up by his first minister at knockdown prices the next.

      ‘They say he is an engrosser,’ Elizabeth remarked. ‘Not a wood or a common is safe from his fences. He takes it all to himself.’

      ‘It is his own,’ John said stoutly. ‘He takes what is his by right. Only the king is above him, and God above him.’

      Elizabeth gave him a sceptical look but kept her thoughts to herself. She was too much like her father – a clergyman of stoutly independent Protestantism – to accept John’s spiritual hierarchy which led from God in heaven down to the poorest pauper with each man in his place, and the king and the earl a small step down from the angels.

      ‘I fear for myself too,’ John said. ‘He has given me a purse of gold and ordered me to buy and buy. I am afraid of being cheated, and I am afraid of shipping these plants so far. He wants a garden all at once, so I should buy plants as large and fruitful as I can get. But I am sure that little sturdy ones might travel better!’

      ‘There’s no-one in the kingdom better able than you,’ Elizabeth said encouragingly. ‘And he knows it. I just wish I might come with you. Are you not afraid to go alone?’

      John shook his head. ‘I’ve longed to travel ever since I was a boy,’ he said. ‘And my work for my lord has tempted me every time I go down to the docks and speak to the men who have sailed far overseas. The things they have seen! And they can bring back only the tiniest part of it. If I might go to India with them or even Turkey, just think what rarities I might bring home.’

      She watched him, frowning slightly. ‘You would not want to go so far, surely?’

      John put his arm around her waist to reassure her, but could not bring himself to lie. ‘We are a nation of travellers,’ he said. ‘The finest of the lords, my lord’s friends, are all men who seek their fortunes over the seas, who see the seas as their highway. My lord himself invests in every other voyage out of London. We are too great a nation with too many people to be kept to the one island.’

      Elizabeth was a woman from a village that counted the men who were lost to the sea, and tried to keep them on the land. ‘You don’t think of leaving England?’

      ‘Oh, no,’ John said. ‘But I don’t fear to travel.’

      ‘I don’t know how you can bear to leave us for so long!’ she complained. ‘And Baby J will be so changed by the time you come back.’

      John nodded. ‘You must note down every new thing he says so that you can remember to tell me when I return,’ he said. ‘And let him plant those cuttings I brought for him. They are his lordship’s favourite pinks, and they smell very sweet. They should grow well here. Let him dig the hole himself and set them in, I showed him how to do it this afternoon.’

      ‘I know.’ Elizabeth had watched from the window as her husband and her quick dark-eyed dark-haired son had kneeled side by side by the little plot of earth and dug together, John straining to understand the rapid babble of babytalk, Baby J looking up into his father’s face and repeating the sound until between guesswork and faith they could understand each other.

      ‘Dig!’ Baby J insisted, thrusting a little trowel into the earth.

      ‘Dig,’ his father agreed. ‘And now we put these little fellows into their beds.’

      ‘Dig!’ Baby J insisted again.

      ‘Not here!’ John said warningly. ‘They need to rest quiet here so that they can grow and make pretty flowers for Mama!’ ‘Dig! J want dig!’

      ‘Not dig!’ John replied, descending rapidly to equal stubbornness.

      ‘Dig!’

      ‘No!’

      ‘Dig!’

      ‘No! Elizabeth! Come and take your son out of this! He is going to destroy these before they even know they’ve been transplanted!’

      She had come from the house and swept Baby J up, and taken him down to the end of the garden to pet Daddy’s horse.

      ‘I don’t know that he will make a gardener,’