Lady of the Butterflies (18 page)

We shot forward with dizzying speed. I was gliding beside him, not daring to take my eyes off my feet, appearing and disappearing beneath my skirt, following his lead. It was more like dancing than marching, a mysterious, forceful kind of dance, and I could feel the muscles of Richard’s strong legs working as they pressed against mine, feel his arm encircling me tight, our skates slicing parallel lines with a swishing sound, like a sword being drawn, or the noise a comet or a falling star might make if only you could hear it.

And then I looked up and realized how fast we were going, a dizzying, magnificent speed such as I had never thought possible. Faster than a galloping stallion, faster than the wind.

He glanced at me, smiling with pleasure at my obvious delight.

“Let me go,” I said. “I can do it now.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Suddenly I was on my own, racing forward. I pushed my legs into the glide, harder and harder, until I picked up even more speed. I screamed with glee but the wind snatched away my voice, my very breath. I cut an arc toward the causeway, the sunken trees whizzing past, the clouds wheeling overhead.

I lifted my arms to each side of me like wings, as I liked to do when I was running. This time I was really soaring. My cloak flew out behind me. At last I really did have wings like the swans and the butterflies. I was no longer earthbound. For the first time in my life I felt utterly free. I was flying.

I skated right into Richard Glanville’s arms. He caught me as I skidded to an abrupt halt and I was thrown against the hardness of his chest, windblown, laughing, my face aglow. “You never told me how to stop.”

“I never expected you to go so fast.”

I was motionless but the world had carried on spinning around me faster than ever, the trees and clouds whipped up like a storm. I clung to him as if he was the still center of my orbit. I couldn’t let go of him or I was sure I would fall. He had taught me how to fly. Like an eagle, he had seized me and carried me up with him into the infinite sky, and if he released me I should come crashing down again and be shattered.

“That was extraordinary.”

“It is you who are extraordinary, Eleanor Goodricke.” There was not a hint of flirtation in his voice anymore. He had slipped his hands inside my cloak again, on either side of my small corseted waist, and though I was perfectly balanced now, he had not let go of me. “You are utterly fearless,” he said. “A little force of nature.” Wisps of hair had blown free across my face. He brushed them away with the tip of his finger. “A little Viking. Golden flames without signifying golden flames within, I wonder?”

I slipped backward away from him, like a boat casting off from the shore. “That is for my husband to find out.”

He held on to my extended arms until only our fingertips were touching.

As Edmund had once been a beacon of light in the dark hall, so now was this boy, in rich green velvet, a single point of color in a white wilderness, as glamorous and gleaming and as rare and precious as an emerald.

He must not be. Could never be. I loved Edmund. I had always loved Edmund. I must not let myself be attracted to this man. He was no more than a boy in any case, a dangerous, raffish boy, and I was promised to another. I was promised to his friend.

I twirled round as if I was in the tailor’s shop once more, trying on my first gown. With a swirl of my crimson cloak I skated off in a wide sweep, into the sparkling white world.

“You learn very quickly,” Richard called.

I shouted back to him over my shoulder, “You’ll never keep up with me now.”

His voice came to me on an icy wind. “I shall enjoy trying.”

THE NEXT DAY WAS one of unremittingly bright sunshine of surprising warmth and strength for the time of year, and it raised the temperature well above freezing. By mid-morning it was slowly but surely thawing the ice, laying upon it a shimmering sheen of treacherous water, ruining any hopes I’d had of being able to go skating again and practically confining all three of us to the house, since the conditions were not fit for riding either.

“How about a game of dicing,” Edmund suggested when he had finished his small beer and cheese. “Or cards perhaps?”

“I’d rather chess,” Richard said amiably.

“I’m sure you would.” Edmund grinned. “But at least I have half a chance of beating you if some luck is involved.” He glanced at me considerately. “Besides, only two can play chess.”

“Oh, please don’t worry on my account,” I said, reaching for Edmund’s hand and giving it a quick pat. “I’ll read.”

“Maybe Eleanor should play against you, Richard,” Edmund suggested. “She beats me more often than not.”

“No,” I said quickly, picking up a travel journal that had just arrived from the bookseller’s. “You two play.”

Bess brought a tray of hot, spiced cider, and I made myself comfortable in the chair by the fireside as Richard and Edmund drew up chairs to the little table by the window and perused the chessboard.

I read a little, sipped the cider, watched as Richard reached across to pick up a black marble knight, the trailing lace at his cuff almost upending Edmund’s castle. I went back to the story of a sailing ship battling the storms of Cape Horn and had read a dozen or so pages, become quite lost in the adventure, when, with that strange sixth sense that tells us we are being observed, I looked up to find Richard’s eyes resting on me. Edmund was deciding on his next move, totally absorbed in his pawns and knights, and I wondered how long his friend had been studying me. As our eyes met he gave me a lovely, enigmatic smile. There was a fragility about it, as if despite the physical strength that made him such a good rider, swimmer and skater, there was within him a part that was not strong, could easily be damaged, had perhaps been damaged already, and it stirred in me an unexpected protectiveness. He seemed so different today from the boy I had skated with, not nearly so self-assured, and I was intrigued by the change in him. Had something shaken his confidence, or was that confidence just a disguise, a mask that easily slipped?

I smiled back at him and his blue eyes seemed to light up, illuminating his whole face. I was struck afresh by his beauty, the almost feminine prettiness which contrasted so starkly with his long, lean legs, stretched out in front of him, booted ankles crossed, in a way that was utterly, powerfully male.

Edmund made his move and Richard languidly picked up his cider, drank, turned back to the chess pieces. He moved his black queen without appearing to give it any thought at all.

“Hah.” Edmund gave his castle a triumphant nudge. “Checkmate.”

Richard lounged back in the chair. “So it is,” he said with an air of indifference.

“Well, well,” Edmund chortled. “When was the last time I won against you at chess?”

“I can’t remember, it was so long ago.” Richard smiled very charmingly.

“You’ve not been concentrating, lad,” Edmund replied. “You’ve not had your mind on the game at all.”

THE EVENING WAS MARKED by the most magnificent winter sunset. Badly needing to escape the house, I walked down to the bridge the better to enjoy it. The vast sky was streaked with crimson and bright orange, soft pink and mauve, and it was reflected in the wide sheets of icy water. It was as though I hung suspended in a shimmering world of radiant color.

As if from nowhere the sky was filled with swarms of chattering starlings, a black mass against the inflamed sky, swirling and spilling down in unbroken ribbons to fill the branches of the bare trees, then swirling up again as if blown by unseen winds, the whole throng plunging, turning in on itself, sucked upward in a spiraling current and then sweeping out again horizontally. How did they do it? How did they all know which way to go? It was an awesome sight, and I was struck with an almost desperate desire to preserve the magic and the wildness of this place for my children, and for theirs. It suddenly seemed the greatest tragedy and folly that it would be lost.

Or maybe it would not be, I thought, ever hopeful.

What made William Merrick and his partners so sure they would succeed where more grandiose schemes had failed, where even the agents of the crown had failed? King James himself had been thwarted in his repeated efforts to drain the peat lands of King’s Sedgemoor. Cornelius Vermuyden, the greatest drainage engineer there was, under a commission from Cromwell, as Lord Protector, had his bill rejected because the tenants and freeholders did not consent. His skill as a drainage engineer, his ownership of a third of the land and his position of influence could not prevail against the opposition of the commoners.

And there was similar opposition in Tickenham. I sensed it now whenever I went up to the village with Mary, in my daily dealings with the servants. Talks with local families were under way, to settle and untangle the complicated claims for common rights, to establish the validity of the claims and allot land in proportion, but resentment seethed not far beneath the surface. It expressed itself in surliness, small acts of defiance that became increasingly annoying and disturbing. Ink spilled on one of my father’s books and nobody admitting fault, general refusal to pay rents on time, my little mare lamed by a rusted iron nail that had mysteriously been driven into her hoof. It could have been an accident, but I suspected it was not.

It was not just the commoners who were implicated, but uplands farmers and freeholders and tenants who had enjoyed unlimited grazing rights here and had taken cattle in for fattening from other areas for a fee.

I didn’t like to think what would happen if these near and far-flung neighbors of mine were to rise up and act together to try to put a stop to what we had determined to do. It had happened in the Fens: mobs and gangs destroying the work of the engineers, ripping out the sluices, filling in the drains as quickly as they were dug. I could imagine all too easily how such violence could rip apart this little community—after all, it had happened in the civil wars.

I felt the lightest touch on the small of my back, turned to see that it was Richard, not Edmund, who had come to find me. My heart gave an odd little flutter.

“There will still be sunsets even when the water is gone, you know,” he said, perceptively.

“But they won’t look like that.”

He raised his eyes skyward, making them seem bigger and bluer and more beautiful than ever. “No,” he admitted softly, lowering them slowly once again to look out over the lake, and then at me. “They won’t.”

The colors were changing, deepening to shades of luminous rose-pink. Like this, with the sky lit with the most wondrous shades and the swans and wild geese like dark silhouettes sailing on a bright sea, it was impossible to see it as a dark or unwholesome place. It was surely the loveliest place on earth. Even when the color faded and the mist swirled in, it brought with it a mysterious sense of peace, a special haunting beauty that I realized now I would miss dreadfully. I listened to the wild bugle call of the swans, the sepulchral clap of their great white wings, and I felt such a sense of loss it was almost overwhelming.

“You feel bound to this place,” Richard said, not a question but a statement of fact. “And it to you. For as long as you live. You do not want it to change, to be lost. It will be like losing a part of yourself that you can never get back.”

I turned to him, startled. “Yes.” I might have said more, but he looked almost grief-stricken and I was afraid of treading too close to the source of whatever was causing him such hurt.

“Edmund is so keen for it to happen,” I said.

“But what about you? What do you want?”

“Oh, nobody really stopped to ask me.”

“I am asking you now.”

“Edmund is so certain that what we are doing is for the good of all,” I said after a moment. “I wish I shared that certainty.”

“Better that you do not.”

“Is it?”

“It means you care,” he said. “You care about what it will mean to the people who live here.”

I should have been astounded that this man who rode Spanish stallions and was dressed now in a velvet cloak and the finest lace should spare even a thought for commoners and tenants. And yet I was not at all.