Lady of the Butterflies (20 page)

I was suddenly consumed with terror for her and gripped her arm. “But Mary, it’s so dangerous. If only you could hear the things Mr. Merrick and his Bristol friends discuss over their claret. The Duke of York’s declaration of his conversion to Rome, and the Test Act that has expelled Catholics from public office . . . they have made fear of Popery greater than ever. It is worse for Catholics even than it was when everyone blamed the Great Fire on the treachery and malice of a Papist plot. There have been Pope burnings all across London and here in Somersetshire, in Bridgewater.”

“It’s almost as if the civil war has never ended,” Mary agreed quietly. “There’s no safe side to be on. One moment our enemy is the Papists, the next the Dutch, then it’s the French, or even our own neighbors. Intolerance and suspicion are as rife as they ever were when the Roundheads and Cavaliers were slaughtering each other in their beds. Effigies of the Pope are burned on bonfires. I’d not even be surprised to see Thomas Knight cry witchcraft when he sees you chasing after butterflies. It’s not safe to be different, but different you are. And so am I. And what is the good of living if we must live a lie, if we cannot be true to ourselves?”

I stared at the candlelit altar, lovely and glittering and, to be quite honest, far more appealing to me now than it ever was under my father’s direction. Just as the maypole had once looked lovely to me too, even though I knew it to be evil and Popish. But was it truly? I was beside my father’s grave again, in my black taffeta funeral cape, and the ground was falling away beneath my feet. Was nothing at all I had grown up believing actually true?

I looked at Mary, the first Catholic I had ever known. There were so many questions buzzing in my head, I did not know where to begin. “I was taught to despise Catholics. I was taught that they are Hell spawn, the Antichrist.”

“Except that you do not despise me, do you?”

“Never.”

She smiled. “Do I appear any different to you now at all? Do I look evil to you?”

I looked deep into her soft brown eyes and slowly shook my head. “Of course you do not.”

I realized I was no better than the commoners who had always been prejudiced against me, for being a Puritan and a girl with an interest in science.

“You are not your father,” Mary said gently. “You do not have to hate Catholics because he did. Your mind is your own.”

“What if I do not always know my mind?”

“That means it is an open one like John’s, a good one.”

Was it? I thought of Richard, the most beautiful, intriguing boy, a boy my father would have reviled.

I realized I had not even asked Mary the reason for her conversion. “Why, Mary?”

“My namesake, for one,” she replied simply. “Far better for womanhood to have saintly, motherly Mary as their guide than to be left with only wicked Grandmother Eve. Don’t you think?”

I could not disagree with her.

“The Catholics have women for saints, too.” She let me ponder that for a moment. “I believe, in time, women will accomplish much in this world as well, by example from the next.”

THE WEEK AFTER CHRISTMAS, Edmund received a letter from his brother, telling of a severe flood in the Fens that had caused much damage: washed away whole cottages, uprooted ancient trees, torn down bridges, ripped up gravestones, made ancient droves and trackways vanish as if they had never been.

“But I thought there could be no more floods now that the land had been reclaimed?” It felt as though my heart had come up into my throat and I swallowed hard, as if to force it down.

“So did I. So did we all.” Edmund stared at the letter in disbelief, then concentrated on folding it very slowly, as if it was important to follow the original creases exactly. “It seems the dried-out peat is shrinking. And as the surface of the land dries, crumbs of soil are picked up and carried away by the fen winds. The rivers are now running higher than the fields around them.”

I was horrified by the image of such an upside-down, unnatural world. It seemed the stuff of nightmares. My father’s nightmares. “That’s why Mr. Merrick didn’t want me to go to Suffolk with you, isn’t it? He didn’t want me to see what was happening.”

“My brother says the fear is that serious floods will become commonplace.”

“So Papa was right about that after all,” I said tremulously. “We are fools to think we can tamper with God’s creation.”

“No,” Edmund said firmly. “We learn by making mistakes. What the engineers are trying to accomplish is a monumental feat. There will inevitably be setbacks.”

“But we must call a halt to the plans for Tickenham,” I said resolutely. “Edmund, you do see that? We cannot proceed until we know how to avoid these same problems here.”

“I doubt even William Merrick and his associates would argue with the prudence of that.”

So, a reprieve.

Spring

1676

T
he next time Richard Glanville came to Tickenham Court, he came riding up the lane past the rectory in sharp spring sunshine and apple-blossom-scented air, with an invitation from our most illustrious neighbor, George Digby no less, to attend a banquet and dancing at Clevedon Court that very same evening. I had been gathering marsh orchids to take to Bess’s mother, whose rheumatism was troubling her so much she wasn’t able to venture far to pick any for herself.

“We’re all three of us invited,” Richard said, leaning forward, his arms lightly crossed and resting on the pommel as he smiled very gallantly down at me from the elegantly tooled saddle of a powerful Barbary bay. His dark curls were tumbling to his shoulders—in a way my father would have considered a sure sign of a debauched and decadent character, I swiftly reminded myself. He was more modestly dressed than before, though the riding suit of smooth brown wool that he was wearing did not detract from the beauty of his face, but rather threw it into relief, like a lovely and perfect pearl set upon a bed of homespun. “Digby’s welcome extends to me, to you and to Edmund,” he said, then glanced toward the house. “I take it he’s here?”

“He is.” It was Edmund’s last visit to Tickenham before he became my husband and Tickenham his permanent home. Before Tickenham became his.

Richard swung down from the horse, stood before me with a cursory examination of the bouquet of purple and white flowers in my hand. “You look as delighted by my news as a little maid who’s never been dancing before,” he said, with gentle amusement. “Or is it that you are just pleased to see me?”

He had the most expressive brows, I noticed, silky, dark and high-arched. The way they had of drawing up together at a slightly oblique slant when he smiled was very endearing and highlighted the humor in his eyes.

“As a matter of fact, I haven’t ever been to a dance before,” I said, a little defensively. “But I do know all the steps.”

“Then, since it is I who brought your first invitation, I hope you will reward me by allowing me to have the first dance with you?”

There was invitation to much more than a dance in those lovely twinkling blue eyes of his, but I was wise to his flirtation now and met them boldly. “I would be honored to dance with you,” I said. “So long as Edmund does not mind.”

He looked so discouraged and unhappy that it made me feel as if I had been unnecessarily cruel, and I was struck again by a strangely compelling need to reassure him in some way.

“How ever did you manage it?” I asked brightly. “I’ve lived but four miles away from Clevedon Court all my life and not once have I been past the gatehouse.”

He gave a nonchalant shrug. “I met one of the Digby girls and her father out riding just now and I introduced myself.”

I laughed. “You just rode up and introduced yourself to the Earl of Bristol?”

His confidence was apparently entirely restored, I was glad to see, and he smiled at me as if to say, What of it?

George Digby, the Earl of Bristol, was one of the most striking figures of our time, a great orator in the House of Commons and a remarkably handsome person of irrepressible good spirits. He had assumed a great mystique for me because of the staunch disapproval he had earned from my father for his role as advisor to the first King Charles. The Digby family had suffered dispossession at the hands of Oliver Cromwell’s army, and only recently had Clevedon Court been restored to them.

Richard turned his head and flashed a smile at Edmund, who was hurrying over, face lit with pleasure at the sight of his friend. He trapped him in a rough hug that Richard returned with as much affection.

“I cannot wait for a banquet before I eat,” Edmund said, after they had discussed the invitation. “I’m ravenous.”

“When are you not?” Richard said laughingly. “Shall we go and catch something fresh for an early supper, then?”

He and Edmund rode off over the moor with their fishing rods, and I went inside to fetch a book. My father’s library had been returned to me in its entirety after my betrothal, and I chose a volume, going to sit on the sunny grass by the walnut tree to read. I found I could not settle but kept reading the same line over and over again without taking it in. All I saw before me was Richard Glanville’s face, his smile, as if it had been burned onto my brain.

The shadows were lengthening when Edmund came back with a brace of gleaming pike.

“Well done,” I said as I stood and he kissed my cheek, handing over his catch with pride. “We shall have them baked with almonds. Where’s Richard?”

“Oh, he wanted to stay at the river a while longer.”

Richard rode up not long after, his own catch slung over his shoulder. He had taken off his coat and his frilled white linen shirt was undone, revealing a scattering of fine, dark chest hairs. I clasped my hands together, as if I did not trust myself not to slip my fingers inside his shirt to stroke them.

“We’d go hungry if it was left to Edmund here,” he said to me sweetly, producing not a brace but a half-dozen larger fish, their translucent tails almost as wide as the span of his hand. He stuck his tongue into the side of his cheek. “The rivers here are very bountiful, if only you know what you are about.”

Edmund was shaking his head in affectionate disbelief. “How the devil did you manage to land all those?” He chuckled softly. “I should have known you’d not be outdone, especially when there is a pretty lady to impress. Eleanor, you must look suitably amazed by this plenitude or the effort will have all been in vain.”

“It is an excellent catch,” I said offhandedly, keeping my eyes very firmly fixed on the fish rather than the person who had caught them.

I WAS THANKFUL THAT I had a new gown to wear to Clevedon Court. It was made of sea-green silk with a beaded stomacher and a long, tight, off-the-shoulder bodice. Bess arranged my hair so that long elaborate curls framed my face, and decorated it with tiny pearls. I wore an emerald necklace and eardrops that Edmund had given me.

Richard had been waiting in the great hall, and as I descended the stairs from the solar, he turned and fastened his eyes on me.

“You look beautiful,” he said, almost bleakly.

“Thank you.”

Standing alone in the gloomy, cavernous hall, he looked very young, troubled, a little lost. He wore a heavy pewter ring on the middle finger of his left hand, was twisting it back and forth in a way that must have chafed at his skin. I wanted to put my hand over his and hold his fingers still. Wanted at least to ask him if he was all right.

But Edmund came up behind me then and wrapped me in a dark green velvet cloak that had once belonged to my great-aunt Elizabeth, who had passed quietly and peacefully from this world the winter before Edmund and I were betrothed. “Time to go,” Edmund said.

It was a clear night, almost a full moon, and the wide, wild, featureless landscape was flooded with a milk-white light. Edmund wore a topaz brocade vest and coat, and Richard was very elegant in a coat of burgundy silk, so that as we rode out three abreast at dusk, I felt like a princess with her handsome young courtiers trotting on either side, swords at their hips.

As we made our way up the Tickenham Road to Clevedon, we were joined by a stream of fine coaches. More coaches were already drawn up outside the house, where flaming torches had been lit. Clevedon Court was a medieval manor on a much grander scale than Tickenham, with a massive thirteenth-century tower and a great hall twice the size and several hundred years older than Tickenham Court’s.

Tonight it was lit up even brighter than a church at Christmas-time. Candlelight gleamed on the oak-paneled walls and long polished tables laid with silver platters and engraved glasses. Musicians were playing: lute, viola, cello, oboe and bassoon.

We were introduced to George Digby, the Earl of Bristol, resplendent in crimson and gold, but I was so overawed just to be in his presence in such magnificent surroundings that I barely noticed what he said, except that it was something about how he hoped I could set aside my father’s prejudices, so that we might be strangers no longer. We ate a feast of roast gull and lark, stuffed swan and carbonado, drank claret and sack, then had sweetmeats in the parlor while we waited for the tables to be cleared away.

“Are you enjoying yourself?” Richard asked me.

“Never more.” I smiled. “I hope you are too.”

“You would not look at me when I came back from the river this afternoon,” he said quietly. “Why? What did I do?”

I was stunned. “You didn’t do anything,” I said, wondering what in the world had happened to him to make him so sensitive. “I’m so sorry if I offended you.”

Everyone was moving back into the hall.

“Dance with me,” he urged, and before I had a chance to ask for Edmund’s blessing, he had led me away into a courante. At first I was so busy concentrating on counting the vigorous beats that I did not even notice the feel of his hand pressing warmly against my boned waist, as it had done when we skated.

Then his soft black curls tickled my face as he leaned in toward me, his cheek against mine, to whisper something in my ear. “Look at me,” he murmured. “Not at your feet.”

I turned my eyes up to his, his face still so close to mine that I could feel the warmth of his breath. The irises of his eyes were intricate and delicate as flower petals.

“I’ll not let you make a mistake,” he said, as if he referred to far more than dance steps, but I had no time to consider his meaning because I was so determined not to put a foot wrong.

One, two, three. Pause, hop, glide, turn. I quickly found, though, that I did not need him to guide me at all. As my dancing master had said, dancing came to me as easily as walking. I stopped concentrating and let my body move as it had always yearned to do. I let myself be swept up in the glorious swish and rustle of silk clothes, the tap and drag of leather-soled shoes.

“I knew you would dance as gracefully as you skate,” Richard said to me.

“So do you,” I replied, wishing to God that he would stop looking at me like that, as if he wanted to eat me.

The music changed to the saraband, a slow and halting Spanish dance. I had never been held so close by a man before. It was an extraordinary sensation to feel the heat of his body close to mine, to feel the muscles in his chest and arms and legs, the sway of his slim hips as we moved to the alien rhythm. I knew that, for the rest of my life, whenever I heard the saraband I would be back in this room, with Richard. It was like a wonderful dream, the sounds and sights so piercingly bright and colorful that I was spellbound.

“So if you have never been to a ball, Edmund has never danced with you?”

I shook my head.

Richard seemed inordinately pleased by that news. “Shame on him. He does not know what he is missing.”

Except that, seemingly, he did. On the edge of my vision I glimpsed Edmund coming toward us as the music faded and I felt a stab of shame for having abandoned him for so long. I smiled across at him and immediately went to extricate myself from Richard. But he held on to my hand as tightly as if he was trying to stop me from slipping over the side of a boat into a floodtide, or as if he himself was slipping.

I tried surreptitiously to tug myself free, but when it was clearly no use and as Edmund came closer, I pulled our still interlocked hands behind me in a vain attempt to hide them in the folds of my skirts.

“My turn now, I think,” Edmund said amiably. “You’ll have to let her go, I’m afraid, my friend. She’s to be my bride, after all.”

Richard slipped his fingers through mine, weaving us together, and he drew me imperceptibly but firmly closer to him, away from Edmund. “One more dance,” he bargained. His tone was mischievous and yet it was underlaid with a challenge that was entirely serious, so I was caught between feeling touched, amused, embarrassed and annoyed.

Edmund was merely annoyed. “Damn it, lad,” he hissed under his breath, the first time I had ever seen him riled. “You go too far. Unhand her.” The trumpets sounded for Lord Monk’s March and Edmund stepped between us. “Now.”

Richard’s eyes darkened to indigo, and anger flared in them, as sudden and as bright as quicksilver. But he had no alternative but to release me or else cause a spectacle. He relaxed his hold on my hand and I took it from his, feeling suddenly deprived. He stood for a moment where he was as we moved away; then he turned and made for the side of the dance floor.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Edmund a little breathlessly, not quite sure exactly what I was apologizing for, not really quite sure even what had just happened.

“Oh, you’re not to blame, my dear,” he said with a tone now of fond amusement. He planted a kiss on my cheek and smiled as we started marching together. “It is just that he finds it insufferable to see me with the most beautiful girl in the hall.”

I glanced back quickly to where Richard was leaning against the dark, carved wainscoting, beneath a flaming wall sconce. He was surrounded by people, yet seemed totally alone. “Were you jealous of him dancing with me?”

Edmund looked at me as if he did not know the meaning of the word. “Jealous? No. I trust him and I trust you,” he said simply. “Because you are to be my wife and he is my friend. It’s a sorry affair if we cannot trust our friends and our spouses.”