Virgin Earth

Winter 1645, England

In October Frances and Alexander Norman came upriver to Lambeth to stay for two nights. Hester urged them to stay longer but Alexander said he dared not leave his business for too long, the war must be coming to an end, every day he was sending out new consignments of gunpowder barrels and there were rumors that Basing House had fallen to Cromwell’s army at last.

It was not that it was such a strategic point, not like Bristol – the second city of the kingdom – which Prince Rupert had lost only the month before. But it was a place which had captured people’s imagination for its stubborn adherence to the king. When Johnnie knew that Rupert was dismissed from the king’s service, Basing House became his second choice. It was to Basing House where he planned to run and enlist. Even Hester, with memories of a court which were not all of playacting and folly but which also had moments of great beauty and glamour, longed to know that whatever else changed in the kingdom, Basing House still held for King Charles.

It was owned by the Marquess of Winchester, who had renamed it Loyalty House, and locked the gates when the country around him went Parliamentarian. That defiance seemed to Hester a more glorious way to spend the war than gardening at Lambeth and selling tulips to Parliamentarians. Inigo Jones, who had known Johnnie’s grandfather and worked with him for the Duke of Buckingham, was safe behind the strong defenses of his own design at Basing House, the artist Wenceslaus Hollar, a friend of the Tradescants, and dozens of others known to Hester had taken refuge there. There were rumors of twenty Jesuit priests in hiding and a giant of seven feet tall. The marchioness herself and her children were in the siege and she had refused free passage out of the besieged house but decided to stay with her lord. She had engraved every windowpane of the house with the troth “Aimez Lovauté” so that as long as the house stood and the panes were unbroken it would carry a record that one place at least was always unwaveringly for Charles.

“I am as bad as Johnnie, for I long to be there,” Hester confessed to Alexander. They were seated either side of a small fire in the parlor. In the windowseat Frances and Johnnie were playing cards for matchsticks. “These are the people I knew from girlhood. It feels wrong to be here in comfort while they are facing the guns.”

“They were freer to choose than you,” Alexander said comfortingly. “You gave your word to John to protect the Ark. And anyway, you have played your part. When the royalist uprising came to your door you lent your horse and did the best you could.”

Hester snorted. “You know how willing that was!”

“Don’t fall in love with the cause just because it is losing,” Alexander warned her. “He was a reckless and foolish king before he was doomed. John went away rather than serve him, and I’ve always admired your determination to survive this war and not to join it. Just because it is coming to an end is no reason to want to enlist. It is a foolish man who loves a lost cause only because it is lost.”

Hester nodded. “Yes,” she said. “But Basing House is like a fairy story.”

“There will be no romance ending,” Alexander said grimly. “Cromwell has brought up the heavy guns. There can be no ending but defeat. No walls could stand against them forever.”

Alexander was right, and the news came through the next day, before he and Frances left. Basing House had fallen and a hundred men and women had been killed. Even the engraved windowpanes were not allowed to survive. Cromwell ordered the house to be destroyed and nothing was left standing.

It was only one battle in the many which now seemed to go inexorably the way of Parliament. Hester’s greatest buyer of tulips, John Lambert, was praised in all the reports for being a quick and daring cavalry commander, the Parliament horse were unstoppable. The army under Cromwell had learned their business at last and combined soldierly discipline with an absolute dedication to their cause. They believed they were freeing the country of tyranny and bringing in a new rule of law and justice. They fought as men will fight when their hearts are in the fighting, and there were few underpaid, halfhearted, badly led royal armies that could stand against them.

The king retreated to the hard-drinking, rich-living city of Oxford and the comfort of court life and amused himself as well as he could. His only recognition of his continual defeats was to blame his generals. Prince Rupert had been dismissed for failing to hold Bristol and nothing he or his friends could say could gain him a fair hearing from the king he had served so faithfully.

It was a bitter winter, colder than any in living memory. Frances wrote to her stepmother that she had been skating on the Thames below the Tower and that if the freeze continued she would take a sled and travel up the frozen river to visit. Hester, wrapped in John Tradescant’s old traveling cape and with a hat made from his Russian furs, went out every morning to brush the snow from the branches of the precious trees to prevent them from breaking under the weight of snow and ice, and sat every night over a fire made of fallen wood and little twigs, dined on potato soup and wondered when spring would come and if it would bring her husband home.