John was at the window again, looking at the apple trees. When she came in he turned. For a moment he saw not the grave Elizabeth in her sober Puritan dress, but little Cathy the serving maid in her mob cap with her gown cut low over her plump breasts, and her inviting smile. Then he put his hands out to Elizabeth, drew her to him and kissed her gently on the forehead.
I can marry you, he said, as if it were the conclusion to a business arrangement which had been tediously delayed.
Thank you, she said coolly. She wanted to tell him that she had been waiting for this moment ever since her father had come to her and folded her in his arms and said quietly: I have got you the gardener, my dear. You will be John Tradescants wife as soon as he has saved enough to marry. She wanted to tell him that in the nightmare summer when her little sister and then her father sickened of plague and then died, she had prayed every night for John Tradescant to come for her, like a hero in a romance, to take her away from the fear of sickness and from the depths of mourning. She wanted to tell him that she had waited and waited, while her mother put off her grief and gleefully remarried. That she waited while the newlyweds kissed before their fireside. That she waited though she thought he might never come, and that, with her father dead and a hard-hearted mother who used her labor and never paid her, there would be no one to hold John Tradescant to his binding promise to marry.
She waited, in the end, because she was in the habit of waiting, because there was no escape from waiting, because there was nothing else she could do. Elizabeth was twenty-seven years old, no longer a girl in her first looks. She had been waiting for John for six long years.
I hope you are glad? John retreated to his place at the window.
Yes, she said carefully from her place at the door.
Three weeks later they were married at the parish church. They walked up the narrow path to the church door hand in hand; John could not stop himself noticing the yew trees, which were extraordinarily fine. One was growing like a castle with pretty pinnacle towers; the branches of the other fell like layers of cloth in a deep green dress. Elizabeth saw the direction of his gaze and smiled and patted his arm.
Her stepfather George Lance and Gertrude her mother were witnesses. Elizabeth wore a new gown of white, instead of her usual gray, and John wore a new suit of brown with white and crimson slashings in the sleeve. The sunlight through the stained-glass windows dappled the tiles on the floor with splashes of additional color. John stood tall and made his responses in a firm voice, and felt with pleasure Elizabeths little hand resting lightly on his arm.
There were those waiting outside the flint-walled church to see the couple who complained that the bridegroom was dressed too fine for a workingman. They murmured that he was getting above his station and that the slashings in his sleeve were made of silk as if he thought himself to be a gentleman. But then the wedding ale at the back door of the farmhouse was strong and sweet, and the grumblings gave way to a roar of ribald jokes by mid-afternoon.
Gertrude had laid on a grand wedding dinner with three different sorts of cooked meats and half a dozen puddings. John found himself beside the vicar, the Reverend John Hoare, at the dinner table and took his compliments and accepted a toast and then tried to make stilted conversation.
You serve a great lord, the vicar commented.
John warmed at once. None greater.
The Reverend Hoare smiled at his loyalty. And he has put you in charge of the gardens of his new palace?
John nodded. He has done me that honor.
Will you have to live at Hatfield? Or shall you keep a house at Meopham?
I shall keep the house here, John said. But I shall be much with my lord. My wife knows that his service must come first. Anyone who has the honor to serve a great man knows that his lord comes before everything.
The vicar assented. The master comes before the man.
I wonder if you can tell me one thing though, vicar? John asked.
The vicar at once looked cautious. These were not the times for theological enquiry. Sensible men confined themselves to the catechism and the commandments and left questions to heretics and papists who would have to pay with their lives if they got their answer wrong. What thing? he asked.
It puzzles me that God should have made so many things the same, and yet just a little different, Tradescant confided. So many things He has made which are the same, but differ only in shape or in color. And I cannot understand why He should make the difference. Nor how Eden can have looked, crammed with such- he sought the word for a moment such diversity.
Surely every rose is the same, the vicar replied. It differs only in color. And a daisy is a daisy wherever it grows.
John shook his head. You wouldnt say that if you had looked as closely as I. To be sure they have their families, a rose is still a rose, but there are hundreds of different kinds of roses, he explained. Every county has a different sport. They have different shapes of petals, they have different numbers of petals, they have different preferences as to light and shade. Some are scented, they tell me, and some are not. And sometimes I think I see them being made. Making themselves while I watch, almost.
What dyou mean?
When they throw a sport, when from one main stem you can see another grow different, and if you take the different one you can breed another from it God didnt make that, surely? I made it.
The vicar shook his head but John went on. And daisies are not the same wherever they grow. I have seen a Kent daisy different from a Sussex daisy and a French daisy which was bigger and tipped with pink. I dont know how many daisies there are. A man would have to travel the whole world over with his eyes on his boots all the way to be sure. Why should such a thing be? Why should God make hundreds of the same thing?
The vicar glanced around for rescue but nobody was looking his way. God in His wisdom gave us a world filled with variety, he began.
He was relieved to see that Tradescant was not arguing. This was not a man who was quarrelsome in his cups. This was a man urgently in quest of a truth. The vicar had an odd sense of a man in search of his destiny. Tradescant was concentrating, passionately concentrating, with a deep line engraved between his brows as he listened to the vicars answer. It was Gods great wisdom to give us many things of great beauty. We cannot question His choice to give us many things which are only a little different, one from another, if you tell me that is how they are.
Slowly John shook his head. I dont mean to question my God, he said humbly. Any more than I would question my lord. It just seems odd to me. And God did not make all things at once in Eden, and give them to us. I know that cannot be, though I read it in the Bible, because I see them changing from season to season.
The vicar nodded, quick to move on. That is no more than a craftsman making a table, I suppose. It is using the skills which God has given you and the materials which He has provided to make something new.
John hesitated. But if I made a new daisy, say, or a new tulip, and a man came along and saw it growing in a garden, he would think it was the work of God and praise Him. But he would be wrong. It would have been my work.
Yours and Gods, the vicar said smoothly. For God made the parent tulip from which you made one of another color. Undoubtedly it is Gods purpose to give us many things of beauty, many things which are rare and different and strange. And it is our duty to thank Him and praise Him for them.
John nodded at the mention of duty. It would be a mans duty to gather the varieties? he asked.
The vicar drank a little wedding ale. It could be, he said judiciously. Why would a man want to collect varieties?
To the glory of God, John said simply. If it is Gods purpose that we should know His greatness by the many varieties of plants that are in the world now, and that can be made, then it is to the glory of God to make sure that men know of His abundancy.
The vicar thought for a moment, fearful of heresy. Yes, he said cautiously. It must be Gods will that we know of His abundancy, to help us to praise Him.
So a man making a garden, a fine garden, is like a man making a church, John said earnestly. Showing men the glory of God as a stonemason might carve the glory of God into his pillars and gargoyles.
The vicar smiled. Is that what you want to do, Tradescant? he asked, seeing his way at last to the heart of it. Being a gardener and digging up weeds is not enough for you it has to be something more?
For a moment John might have disclaimed the idea, but the strong wedding ale was working on him and his pride in his work was powerful. Yes, he admitted. It is what I want to do. My Lord Cecils gardens are to his glory, to be a setting to his fine house, to show the world that he is a great lord. But the gardens are also a glory to God. To show every visitor that God has made abundant life, life in such variety that a man could spend all his days finding it and collecting it and still not see it all.
You have your lifes task then! the vicar said lightly, hoping to end the conversation. But John did not smile in return.
I have indeed, he said seriously.
At the end of the dinner Gertrude rose from the table and the ladies followed her lead. The serving girls stayed behind with the poorer neighbors and drank themselves into a satisfying stupor. Elizabeth completed the last of the tasks in her old family home and waited for John in his turn to leave the dinner. At dusk he came away from the hall and the trestle tables and found her sitting at the kitchen table with the other women, waiting for him. He took his bride by the hand and they went down the hill a little way to their new cottage followed by a shouting, singing train of family and villagers.
In the cottage the women went upstairs first, and Elizabeths cousins and half sisters helped her out of her new white dress and into a nightdress of fine lawn. They brushed her dark hair and combed it into a fat plait. They pinned her cap on her head, and sprayed her with a little water of roses behind each ear. Then they waited with her in the little low-ceilinged bedroom until the shouts and snatches of song from the stair told them that the bridegroom had been made ready too and was come to his bride.