Summer 1638, London

J’s ship arrived at London docks at dawn in early April and he came blearily out of his cabin into the cold English air, wrapped in his traveling cloak with his hat pulled down on his head. A wagoner was idling on the dockside, fiddling with the feed-bag at the head of a dozing horse.

“Are you for hire?” J shouted down.

The man looked up. “Aye!”

“Come and fetch my goods,” J called. The man started up the gangplank and then recoiled at the waving fronds of saplings and small trees.

“Goods?” he asked. “This is a forest!”

J grinned. “There’s more than this,” he said.

Together they humped the barrels filled with damp earth down the gangplank and into the wagon, the whippy branches of trees stirring above their heads. Then J brought another barrel of seeds and nuts, and finally his own small bundle of clothes and a chest of rarities.

“I know where we’re headed,” the man said, climbing onto the box and waking the horse with a slap of the reins on its back.

“You do?”

“Tradescant’s Ark,” the man said certainly. “It’s the only place in the world that you’d go to with half a forest on board.”

“Quite right,” J said, and put his feet up on the board. “What’s the news?” he asked.

The carter spat accurately over the side of the wagon and hit the dirt road. “Nothing new,” he said. “A lot worse.”

J waited.

“Everything you can eat or drink is taxed,” the carter said. “But that was true before you went away, I dare say. Now they’ve got a new tax, a rotting crime of a tax: ship money levied on everyone, however far they are from the sea. It’s the ports that should pay ship money, they’re the ones that need the navy to keep them free of pirates. But the king is making all the towns pay, even inland towns. My sister lives in Cheltenham. Why should she pay ship money? What are the seas to her? But she has to.”

J nodded. “The king won’t call a parliament, then?”

“They say he won’t even hear the word mentioned.”

J allowed himself a pleasurable “tut tut” of disapproval.

“If he called a parliament and asked them to set a tax they would tell him what they think of him as king,” the carter said baldly. “They would tell him what they think about a Privy Council which is advised by a Papist French queen, and a court which is run by Frenchmen and Jesuits.”

“That can’t be so,” J said firmly. “I’ve only been gone a few months.”

“It’s well known the Tradescants are the king’s servants,” the man said unpleasantly.

“It is indeed,” J agreed, remembering his father’s regular warnings against gossip that could be overheard as treason.

“Then I’ll say no more,” the carter remarked. “And see how you like it when they knock on your door and tell you that now there is a monopoly declared on the dirt in your garden and you have to pay a fine of ten percent to some courtier if you want to plant in it. Because that’s what’s happened to every other trade in the kingdom while the king taxes the traders but won’t call a parliament which could tax the gentry for their rents.”

The man paused, waiting for a shocked response. J discreetly kept silent.

“You’ll have heard that the Scots have sworn they won’t read their prayers from the new book?”

“No?”

The man nodded. “All of ’em. Taken against Archbishop Laud’s prayer book. Say they won’t read a word of it. Archbishop is put out. King is put out. Some say he’ll make ’em, some say he can’t make ’em. Why should a king order what you say to God?”

“I don’t know,” J said tactfully. “I’ve no opinion on the matter.” And he tipped his hat over his eyes and dozed as the wagon jolted down the familiar road to his home.

He did not lift his hat as they went down the South Lambeth road toward the common; but he looked sharply all around him from under the brim. It was all well. His father’s house still stood proudly, set back from the road, the little bridge spanning the stream that ran alongside the road. It was a handsome farmhouse in the old timbered style, but on the side of the house was the ambitious new wing, commissioned by his father for the housing of the rarities, their great collection of oddities from the monstrous to the miniature. At the back of the house was the garden which made their name and their livelihood, and the rarities room overlooked the garden through its great windows of Venetian glass. J, taught by a long-standing habit, looked at the ground as the cart drove around the south side of the building so that he did not see his father’s vainglorious stone crest, affixed to the new wing in defiance both of the college of heralds and of the simple truth. They were not Tradescant esquires and never had been, but John Tradescant, his father, had drawn up and then commissioned a stonemason to carve his own crest; and nothing J could say could persuade him to take it down.

J directed the carter past the rarities room, where the terrace overlooked the orderly gardens, on to the stable yard so that the plants could be unloaded directly beside the pump for watering. The stable lad, looking out over the half door, saw the waving tops of small trees in the cart and shouted, “The master’s home!” and came tumbling out into the yard.

They heard him in the kitchen and the maid came running up the hall and flung open the back door as J mounted the steps to the terrace and stepped into his house.

At once he recoiled in surprise. A woman he did not know, dark haired, sober faced, with a pleasant, confident smile, came down the stairs, hesitated when she saw him looking up at her, and then came steadily on.

“How d’you do,” she said formally, and gave him a small nod of her head, as if she were a man and an equal.

“Who the devil are you?” J asked abruptly.

She looked a little awkward. “Will you come in here?” she said, and showed him into his own parlor. The maid was on her hands and knees lighting the fire. The woman waited until the flame had caught and then dismissed the girl with a quick gesture of her hand.

“I am Hester Pooks,” she said. “Your father invited me to stay here.”

“Why?” J demanded.

Hester hesitated. “I imagine you don’t know-” She broke off. “I am very sorry to have to tell you that your father is dead.”

He gasped and swayed. “My father?”

She nodded, saying nothing.

J dropped into a chair and was silent for a long moment. “I shouldn’t be surprised… but it is a dreadful shock… I know he was a great age, but he was always…”

She took a chair opposite him without invitation, and sat quietly, folding her hands in her lap. When J turned to her she was waiting, judging her time to tell him more.

“He didn’t suffer at all,” she said. “He grew very tired, over the winter, and he went to bed to rest. He died very peacefully, just as if he fell asleep. We had brought many of his flowers into his room. He died surrounded by them.”

J shook his head, still incredulous. “I wish I had been here,” he said. “I wish to God I had been here.”

Hester paused. “God is very merciful,” she said gently. “At the moment of his death he thought that he saw you. He was waiting and waiting for you to return, and he woke as his bedroom door opened, and he thought that he saw you. He died thinking that you had come safe home. I know that he died happy, thinking that he had seen you.”

“He said my name?” J asked.

She nodded. “He said: ‘Oh! You at last!’”

J frowned. The old fear that he was not first in his father’s heart returned to him. “But did he say my name? Was it clear that he meant me?”

Hester paused for a moment and then looked into the gentle, vulnerable face of the man that she meant to marry. She lied easily. “Oh yes,” she said firmly. “He said: ‘Oh! You at last!’, and then as he lay back on the pillow he said ‘J.’”

J paused, and took it all in. Hester watched him in silence.