They gathered in the stable yard to see him off. He kissed his sister, he kissed his stepmother and she clung to him for a moment as if she would beg him to stay. She inhaled the scent of him, the newly washed linen which had been stored with lavender bags, the warm straw smell of his hair, the warmth of his skin, the tender stubble of his cheek, the soft apprentice mustache on his upper lip. She held him and thought of the child he had been when she had taken him into her care, and she thought of the terrible gulf in her life that would be carved out if he were lost.
“Let him go,” John said quietly from behind her.
Johnnie briskly embraced Alexander and then he turned to his father. He dropped his head and was about to kneel for his blessing. “Don’t kneel,” John said quickly, as if a patch of damp on his son’s knee mattered one way or another when the boy was going out to fight a doomed battle. He wrapped him in his arms and held him furiously tight.
“God bless you and keep you,” he whispered passionately. “And come home as soon as you feel you can. Don’t linger, Johnnie. Once the battle is done there’s no shame in riding away.”
The youth was ablaze with joy, he could not hear words of caution. He turned to his horse and he sprang up, swung his leg over and gathered in the reins. The old knowledgeable war horse, Caesar, knew the signs, he pawed the ground, arched his neck and sidled a little, eager to be off.
Hester felt her knees giving way, she put her hand into John’s arm and leaned against him.
“I’m away!” Johnnie sang out. “I’ll write! Good-bye!”
Hester folded her upper lip in a tight, admonitory grip between her teeth and raised her hand to wave.
“Good luck!” Frances called. “God bless you, Johnnie!”
They crowded to the stable-yard entrance to watch him ride out, and then followed him, under the wall with the stone-carved crest, over the little bridge, and then eastward along the road to the Lambeth horse ferry and the northern roads.
“God bless you,” John called.
The horse’s polished haunches moved powerfully. As he reached the firm going of the road, Johnnie let the animal extend into a trot and then into a broad-paced canter. He went too fast for Hester, the big horse’s pace took him too swiftly away.
“Johnnie!” she called.
But he did not hear her, and in a moment he was gone.
Autumn 1651
Then there was nothing to do but to wait. The City was alive with rumors and counterclaims of battles and routs and attacks, victory to the Prince or victory to the Model Army. John kept as much of the news from Hester as he could, and asked her to do a dozen tasks in the rarities room, in the garden, to keep her hands busy and to keep her away from the constant litany of bad news in the kitchen between the cook and Joseph. But nothing could stop her longing for her son.
Frances and Hester lit a candle in the window the evening that Johnnie went away, and Hester would not have the shutter closed on it, to hide it from the road, nor ever let it burn out. Every morning she renewed it herself, a great wax candle, more suited for a church than for a home, every night she checked that it was burning safely and its light was showing out toward the Lambeth road where Johnnie had ridden away.
John remarked only that there was a danger of fire if the candle should fall over in a gust of wind, and after that she placed the holder in a dish of water. But nothing would persuade her not to show a light, as if the one candle could guide her boy homeward along the dark, unsafe roads.
In the first week in September Alexander Norman came upriver and marched briskly from the landing stage to the Ark. He found John alone in the physic garden.
“News,” he said shortly.
John scrambled up from the herb bed and waited.
“There was a battle on the third, the anniversary of the Dunbar defeat. Cromwell is a great one for anniversaries.”
“And?”
“Defeat. The Scots were routed and Charles Stuart has gone.”
“Dead?” John asked. “Dead at last?”
“Disappeared. There’s a price on his head and the whole country looking for him. He must be taken any day. The Scots are fled back to Scotland and the English volunteers heading for their homes. Cromwell writes that he is bringing the army home and disbanding the militia. He must think he is completely safe. We must think so.”
“A defeat,” John said.
“It means nothing for a single soldier,” Alexander said swiftly. “He could be riding home now.”
John nodded. “I’d better tell Hester before some fool blurts it out to her.”
“Where is Frances?”
“They’ll be together,” John predicted. “This summer has been a long vigil for them both.”
John gathered up his tools and the two men crossed the road. Instinctively they looked east toward Lambeth, as if they might see the big horse and the joyous young man riding back to them.
“I keep looking,” John said gruffly. “We all of us keep looking for him.”
They had no word, they could get no news. Cromwell came home but Lambert stayed in Scotland, ruling from Edinburgh, bringing the Scots gradually into line with a republican England. He sent an order for some tulips to grow in pots in his rooms and Hester, knowing herself to be taking a risk with their whole livelihood and lives, wrote him a note, slipped it in with the bulbs and handed them to his messenger.
Forgive me asking for your assistance, but one very dear to me may have been captured at Worcester. Can you tell me how I might discover what has happened to him, or where he is now?
“Shall I order more candles?” the cook asked, preparing the list for market. “Or-”
“Or what?” Hester snapped.
The suggestion that there was little point setting out the candle every night for Johnnie was too grave to be named.
“Nothing,” the cook replied.
John Lambert replied by the next courier traveling to London in a note which showed that he understood exactly who might be very dear to Hester and who might have been at Worcester.
Dear Mrs. Tradescant,
I am sorry to hear of your anxiety. The Scots cavalry were not intensely engaged in the battle and retreated in good order to Scotland. There they dispersed. He might well have gone with them till the order came to scatter and thus there is good reason to hope that he may return within the next few months. There were very few captured and he is not among them. I specifically asked for him by name. We are not holding him prisoner. There were very few killed.
I thank you for your tulips. You seem to have put in half a dozen more bulbs than I paid for. I wish I could render you greater service in return, but I will be alert for any familiar name and I will write again if I have any news.
Hester took the letter into the rarities room where the fire was kept burning against the wintry weather and plunged it deep into the heart of the red-hot logs. She very much wanted to keep the note for the little comfort she could draw from it; but she knew that she should not.
Winter 1651
In a dark afternoon of December as Hester was closing the shutters in the rarities room and the parlor she heard a horse walking steadily up the road. She went to the window and looked out, as she always did whenever she heard a single horseman riding by the house. She looked without expectation of seeing her son, but she looked, just as she burned the candle: because he should always be looked for, because a vigil should always be kept for him.
When she saw the size and solidity of the horse, she blinked and rubbed her eyes because for a moment she thought it must be Caesar. But she had thought that she had seen Caesar so many times before that she did not start forward and cry out.