Earthly Joys
A Novel
Chapter 1: April 1603
The daffodils would be fit for a king. The delicate wild daffodils, their thousand heads bobbing and swaying with the wind, light-petaled, light-stemmed, moving like a field of unripe barley before a summer breeze, scattered across the grass, thicker around the trunks of trees as if they were dewponds of gold. They looked like wildflowers; but they were not. Tradescant had planned them, planted them, nourished them. He looked at them and smiled -- as if he were greeting friends.
Sir Robert Cecil strolled up, his uneven tread instantly recognizable in the crunch of the gravel. John turned and pulled off his hat.
"They look well," his lordship observed. "Yellow as Spanish gold."
John bowed. The two men were near each other in age -- both in their thirties -- but the courtier was bent under a humped back and his face was lined by a lifetime of caution at court, and with pain from his twisted body. He was a small man, little more than five feet tall -- his enemies called him a dwarf behind his hunched back. In a beauty-conscious, fashion-mad court where app ... read full excerpt from: Earthly Joys: A Novel ebook
