Virgin Earth by Philippa Gregory Read Free Book Online Page A

made Hatfield ready for us. 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 humor. 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 favors 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 upward.”
    The earl nodded. “Buy land,” he advised.
    “To farm?”
    “To sell.”
    John blinked; it was unusual