Free Virgin Earth by Philippa Gregory Page A

would not last long.
    Elizabeth took John’s traveling cloak from the press where she had laid it in lavender. She had thought then that it was worth protecting it against moths for months of storage.
    “When will you be back?” she asked quietly.
    “I can’t say,” John replied briskly.
    Elizabeth flinched at the coldness of his tone. “Am I to join you at Hatfield?” she asked. “Or come to Theobalds?”
    He looked at her and saw the coat she was holding for him. “I thank you,” he said courteously. “I’ll send you word. I don’t know what is happening, I don’t know what he wants me for. These are dangerous times for him. I must go at once.”
    Elizabeth felt her village-based view of the world shudder under the weight of great events which would now impinge on her life. “I didn’t think these were dangerous times. How are they dangerous?”
    He glanced at her quickly, as if her ignorance surprised him. “All times are dangerous to men with great power,” he explained. “My lord is the greatest in the land. Every day he faces one danger or another. If he sends for me I go without question and I make no plans other than his will.”
    Elizabeth nodded. There was no arguing with a man’s duty to follow his lord.
    “I’ll wait till I hear from you then,” she said.
    John kissed her forehead in that passionless meaningless gesture which seemed to have started with their betrothal and hung over them still. Elizabeth curbed her impulse to turn up her face and kiss him on the lips. If he did not want to kiss her, if he did not want to lie with her, then it was not the part of a good wife to complain. She would have to wait. She would have to do her duty by him, as he did his by his lord.
    “Thank you,” John said, as if she had obliged him in some little courtesy, and went out to saddle his horse, mounted the animal and rode him from the back of the cottage to the village street. Elizabeth was at the doorway, her head high; none of the village gossips would know that her husband was leaving her as virginal as she had been on her wedding day.
    John doffed his hat to her, conscious also of the dozens of watching windows. He did not lean down to kiss her, nor did he offer one word of assurance or comfort. Seated high on his horse he looked down on the pale face of the wife he was leaving without bedding and knew himself to be behaving badly, with his duty as an excuse as well as an obligation. “Farewell,” he said shortly, and turned his horse and rode briskly out at a trot. The knowledge of his unkindness to a woman who, wedding night or no, mother-naked or clothed, had said no more than she had every right to say, and who, before that accursed interruption, had lain warm and pleasant to his touch, galled him all the way along the lanes going north to Gravesend.
    He met his master at the quayside, at the docks of the East India Company, the air rich with the smell of cinnamon and spices and loud with the curses of the dockers.
    A merchant welcomed them on board his ship at the gangplank. “Follow me,” he said and led them between the sailmakers and the rope chandlers to the captain’s cabin. “A glass of wine?” he offered.
    The earl and his gardener nodded.
    “I have some curious roots,” he said when they had a glass each. “I bought them for their weight in gold because I knew that a man such as yourself, Your Grace, would pay much more for them.”
    “And what are they?” the earl asked.
    The merchant opened a wooden box. “I have kept them dry and sweet, and hidden from the light as Mr. Tradescant advised me.”
    He held out a handful of woody twisted roots, brown, with a dusty earth still clinging to them. The earl took them gingerly and handed them to John.
    “They are the roots of flowers of exceeding fineness,” the merchant said rapidly, his eyes on Cecil’s impartial face. “Roots of course, Your Grace, never look well. But in the hands of your gardener you could bring these