“And where has he taken His Majesty?” John asked.
“To Maidenhead,” she said. “And they say Oliver Cromwell himself is going out to meet him.”
“Cromwell?”
She nodded. “D’you think that means peace?”
John shook his head. “I suppose it means that the game has changed again,” he said, baffled. “When the king was held by the Scots he was in the power of Parliament. But now the army has him, I don’t know what will become of him, or us for that matter.”
“We may be in danger,” Hester said. “The ferry boatman said that the soldiers of the New Model Army may march on Parliament. They’re determined to have their pay. And they recognize no loyalty to anyone but their commanders and their leveling ideas. They are saying that Parliament and the City may hold out against the army. But if the army comes to the City from the south then they will march right through here. We may have to pack up the rarities again. They are marching for their pay, they are hungry and desperate men. And they have sworn that all the land and all the property shall be held in common.”
John shook his head. “It’s like living in the middle of a thunderstorm,” he complained. “It has all changed again. If the army fights against the Parliament which brought it into being, then what becomes of the country?”
In July the news was that the king was to be taken, under guard, to Oatlands.
Hester looked at her husband across the kitchen table. Cook, Joseph, the new gardening boy, Frances and Johnnie all turned to the head of the table and waited for John to speak.
“Now, I have to go,” he said simply. “He cannot be at Oatlands and not see me working in the garden. That was my work, that was my place.”
Hester hesitated for only a moment. “I’ll pack your bag,” she said, and went out of the room.
Johnnie turned to his father, his face suddenly flushed. “May I come too?” he asked. “And see him?”
When his father hesitated he went on in a rapid torrent of speech. “I’ve never seen him, and my father and my grandfather were in his service. And I’ve never even seen him. Frances saw him and the queen. Can I come? Please?”
John gave a short laugh. “I cannot be sure that I will see him,” he said. “And if he sees me, he may not speak to me. I just feel the royal court under his window should be tidy, I don’t know what state it’s in.”
“I can tidy it,” Johnnie said desperately. “I can weed. I worked there while you were away. I can do it. I am a Tradescant, I am gardener to the king. I should be there.”
Hester came back into the kitchen and John turned to her with relief. “It depends on what your mother says.”
“Can I go with Father to Oatlands?” Johnnie scrambled over his stool to get to his stepmother. “And work for him? He’d have such a lot of work to do, I could help.”
“I don’t know if it’s safe,” Hester said hesitantly.
“It’s probably safe,” John said shortly. “Safer than it’s ever been with him under guard and forced to make peace at last.”
She nodded. “He can go if you wish it,” she said to John.
Johnnie turned his bright hazel eyes on his father.
“Oh, very well,” John said. “But not a word do you speak unless spoken to – and then you just answer “Yes, Your Majesty,” or “No, Your Majesty.” Not a word about me being in Virginia. Not a word about the cavalier who came here. Not a word about John Lambert buying our tulips. Not a word about anything.”
Johnnie was dancing on the spot with excitement. “Yes! Yes!” he shouted. “Yes! Of course. And I shall be absolutely silent. Absolutely. I shall be absolutely discreet.”
John met his wife’s eyes across the boy’s bobbing head. “I don’t know about you; but I feel very confident,” he said wryly.
They went by the river, rowed in a wherry, Johnnie seated beside his father and looking all around him. When they were past the village of Staines, John said quietly, “There it is,” and pointed to the little rose-pink palace, sitting on the terraces with the unkempt lawns running down to the river. “D’you know, I never thought I’d see it again,” John said softly. “I never thought I’d be here, working in these gardens again.”
Johnnie glanced quickly at his father’s darkened expression. “But you’re glad of it?” he asked. “Glad you came home and that the king is back in his palace, and soon everything will be as it was?”
John dropped his hand on his son’s thin shoulder. “I don’t think everything will be quite as it was,” he said. “There’s a lot of men dead and a lot of tears shed, and the king is in his palace but not on his throne. We’ll have to mind our tongues here, and beware even of our thoughts.”
The boatman shipped the oars and the wherry nudged against the landing stage. John stepped quickly ashore and caught the mooring rope, dug in his pocket for a coin and dropped it down into the boat as Johnnie tossed up their bags and then handed up, one at a time, a dozen pots with nodding blooms.
John shouldered his bag. “We’ll come back for the pots,” he said, and led the way up the slope to the palace.
Prince Rupert had allowed his cavalrymen’s horses to graze on the lawns and they were pocked with hoofprints and lumpy with droppings, but at least the animals had kept the grass down. As John approached the palace he saw that the creepers and the wall climbers which he had trained so carefully to take blossoms and scent up to the windows were doing well – overspread, sometimes pulling away from their ties, but thriving on neglect.
The beds at the feet of the rose-brick walls were overrun with weeds but some flowers were still struggling through. Pansies and gillyflowers, irises and peonies had thrust their heads above the encroaching green. “Soon hoe that out,” John remarked, nodding to his son.
The yew tree allée was overgrown but looked thick and bushy, throwing a welcome green shade against the brightness of the afternoon sunshine. The orangery that John’s father had rebuilt was dilapidated – the white paint was peeling and some of the ornamental woodwork had been wrenched off for the troopers’ campfires – but the silkworm house and the neighboring gardener’s house were as Hester had left them, swept clean and bare and empty.
John left his son collecting firewood for the empty grate and unrolling their traveling cloaks for beds as he prowled around the deserted palace.
The strangest thing was the quiet. Instead of a bustling royal court filled with folly and flirtation, shouted orders, voices calling and musicians playing, there was nothing but the occasional rattle of a shutter banging in the breeze and the insistent coo of the wood pigeons nesting in the trees. The stable yard, which had housed more than a hundred horses, was empty, straws blowing in the yard, the stalls heaped with dung, stale water in the troughs.
The great front door was shut and bolted. John tried the massive brass handle and then stepped back. The king was due in a few days, surely there should be servants inside setting the palace to rights. Not a face showed at the windows, there was not a movement in the courts.
John went around to the kitchen quarters and to the bake-house. The fires were out, the place was silent. A heap of ash and a few scattered utensils showed that the cavalrymen had dined before they left, but all the food had been eaten by rats or mice and their droppings were heaped even on the kitchen tables.
John shook his head in wonder at the desolation of the place, at its transformation from the pinnacle of the social life of the kingdom, with the queen singing about the platonic ideal and the king going hunting on his high-bred Arab horses, to this shell. He turned and trudged back across the bowling green to the silkworm house.
Johnnie had brought up the pots from the riverside.
“Good lad,” John said with pleasure, glad of the chance to set about his work and restore normality at least to the flower beds. “Let’s take these up to the royal court. At least that can be looking right in a couple of days.”