Lady of the Butterflies (3 page)

“Well, it’s not a problem you’ll have with many lads in a few years’ time,” Mary said, smiling down at me. “No boy with eyes in his head will be able to do anything but fall in love with you, since you are so uncommonly pretty.” She stroked my cheek with the back of her finger. “Even with dirt on your face.”

“Thank you,” I said politely as we started walking together, but I was sure she was only trying to cheer me. My father’s wish to protect me from the depravity of the world had not stopped me glimpsing the tall and curvaceous Digby girls from Clevedon Court and the Smythe sisters from Ashton Court. I saw them riding out to suppers at their fathers’ mansions and to Bristol, in their ringlets and ribbons and gowns of satin and brocade. Though I did not possess a single looking glass, I’d seen my reflection in the water and in windowpanes plenty of times. I knew that my hair was thick and fair and my eyes were large and wide-set and blue as cornflowers, but my skin was not marble white like those other girls’, it was honey-colored from being so much outside, and rather than a long, straight nose to look down, mine was small and turned up very slightly at the end, like an infant’s nose. And there was something else. “I am so small,” I said to Mary despondently.

“You are indeed,” she agreed. “You are as delicately delightful as a pixie.”

I pulled a face, not at all sure of the appeal of that.

Mary laughed. “You are a dear child and I am glad you are so humble.” She fell silent, then went on in a less happy tone. “Your father strives after humility above all else, and so far it has served him well. He commands respect and affection, despite being such a zealot. But I do fear for him, for you, if ever he gives in to the pressure he is under to drain these wetlands. If the people are hostile to you now, a move like that will stir up no end of trouble.”

“Oh, he’ll not do it,” I said confidently. “Tickenham Court was my mother’s. He’d want it to stay just the way she left it.”

“I’d not be so sure about that.”

ONE THING I was entirely sure of was that I would not escape the severest punishment if my father found out where I’d been. I had intended to be back long before he woke for morning prayers and so drew back into Mary’s shadow when I saw him waiting for me in the gloom by the cavernous stone fireplace in the great hall, beneath the impressive display of armory. I trembled a little as he came to loom over me in the flickering torchlight, taking in my muddy cloak and state of undress in one scornful glance. His frugal suppers of a single egg and draft of small beer had always kept him lean, but now grief for my mother and my sister, coupled with long bouts of penitence and fasting for the punishment of their deaths, had made him gaunt. His craggy face, with its long, aquiline nose and strong jaw, had lost nothing of its power and authority, though. In his black coat with starched square white collar worn over it, he was as imposing as ever. He was every inch Major William Goodricke of the Parliamentarian army, Cromwell’s formidable warrior.

But he was all I had in the world now and I loved him above anything. I was truly sorry for displeasing him, knew that what I had done was wrong. It was just that it had not felt so wrong, and in my heart I could not regret it. Life could be so confusing sometimes.

“You should be ashamed of yourself, Eleanor,” he said.

I hung my head only half in repentance, but also so that he would not see the lack of contrition in my eyes.

Mary Burges tightened her arm protectively around my shoulders and drew me into her skirts. “On the contrary, you should be very proud of your little daughter, sir. She showed great courage and strength of will this day.”

I stole a glance at my father and relaxed a bit as I caught his look of faint relief and pleasure.

“I am glad to hear it,” he said, as if he would have expected no less from me.

“Some of the village children had dared each other to make her eat marchpane,” Mary explained. “But Eleanor refused to so much as touch it, even when they had her pinioned on the ground. There’s not many a child would not give in to such taunting and temptation.”

My father harrumphed as he addressed me. “Who was it?”

“Thomas and Susan, Papa. But they said they were sorry,” I added quickly. “They didn’t mean anything by it.”

I desperately didn’t want my father to cause more trouble with their families. Puritans could be as harsh and unforgiving as their God sometimes, and after what I had seen, and what Mary had told me, I wasn’t at all sure we could afford to be.

The Somersetshire nobility, along with most of the people hereabouts, had been Royalist during the civil war and now Anglicanism was increasingly the religion of the gentry, so for one reason or another our own class had largely disowned us. And every member of our household, every one of our neighbors and servants who were made to attend the secret Puritan prayer meetings in our great hall, saw their lord’s empty pew during church services, knew that my father’s deliberate absence from church branded him a recusant, still a capital crime. It would take only one person to denounce him to the court or the bishop to render him liable for fines and penalties, to send him to gaol, or worse. So far his fairness and the esteem in which he was held locally had secured his safety, my safety, and enabled him to continue to stay true to his conscience and practice his beliefs in private. I did not want him to demand Thomas Knight be punished. We had already set ourselves far enough apart from the rest of this little community. There seemed nothing to be gained from drawing more attention to the fact that we were different.

My father reached out and took me by the arm. “I thank you for bringing her back,” he said brusquely, dismissively.

Mary gave me an encouraging smile as she turned to leave.

“I only went to watch, Papa,” I said when we were alone. “I just wanted to see what it was like.”

“And did you like what you saw?”

I hesitated, not wanting to appear defiant but feeling too passionate to lie, even if it might spare me much trouble. “I liked it very much,” I said. “Oh, Papa, it was so lovely, and so holy. Not sinful at all. If you would only go and see for yourself then I know you’d . . .”

“I am going nowhere, child,” he said stonily. “And neither are you for a good while. It is not those village children who need to be taught a lesson, I think, but you.”

He took me by the arm and led me back up the narrow stone stairs to my chamber. Fear tightened my throat when he put his hand in his pocket and produced a large key. I’d have preferred to have my hands or backside whipped, really I would. Anything was better than being locked up. I hated being inside for any length of time. I needed open air and space and the sky above me and freedom to roam. Even in the winter, when I had to go everywhere by boat and there were weeks and weeks of rain and mist and ice, I loved to be outside, lived to be outside. I had a strange terror of doors and walls and of locks and keys. Of being confined.

“You’ll stay in this room until this day is done,” my father said. “And if you have any sense you will spend much of that time on your knees praying for forgiveness for your disobedience.” He turned to go, his hand on the door latch.

“Why is it so wrong to celebrate the birth of Jesus?” I asked quickly.

My father turned back to me, as I had known he would. “You should not need me to tell you, child,” he said, exasperated but patient, always ready to answer my questions and explain. “The Bible does not tell us to observe Christ’s birthday. Christmas is just an excuse for debauchery, a commemoration of the Catholic idol of the mass.” He took a deep breath and I saw the dangerous glint of fanaticism in his eyes. “We must be on ever more constant guard now that the King has placed a Catholic queen on the throne of England. The danger from Rome is present now more than ever. The hand of the Jesuit is still too much amongst us.”

The questions were pushing against my lips and I had no choice but to ask them. “Most Puritan ministers call themselves Protestants now,” I persisted, my mouth drying at my own audacity. “Why can’t we be Protestants? Why must we always be different, always excluded?” I gulped a breath. “What’s the harm in lighting up midwinter with a church full of candles?”

I braced myself for my father’s rage, but instead he regarded me with deep sorrow, as if I was the greatest disappointment to him. More than that even, as if he feared that all the time he had spent answering my questions and explaining his doctrines had been wasted. He looked at me as if he feared for my immortal soul. I was appalled to see there were tears in his eyes. I had never seen my father cry, not even when my mother and my sister died.

I ran to him and threw my arms around his legs. “Oh, Papa, I’m sorry. Please don’t be upset. I’ll try to be good from now on, I promise.”

He uncoiled my arms and held me gently away from him. “Little one,” he said with great weariness. “Will you never learn? The only light we need is the light of the Lord.”

With that he turned away, picked up the candle and left me, closing the low, studded door behind him. I heard the key turn with a grating click in the rusty lock. My chest tightened. I felt as if I couldn’t breathe, as if all the air were being pressed out of my lungs, and I was sure that I was going to faint. I forced myself to resist the urge to rush at the door and hammer on it until my fists were bruised and bleeding. I knew it would do no good, only make matters worse. I was expected to accept my punishment meekly and with penitence, no matter how frightening it was, no matter how unjust I believed it to be. What was the use in trying to be virtuous? I might as well have eaten that marchpane, since I was being punished anyway.

I went to sit quietly on the edge of the high bed, picked up my poppet doll and hugged it. I took deep breaths, tried to think calm thoughts, to imagine myself somewhere else. It was a trick I had practiced ever since my mother’s death, to take myself back in time to another place, a happier, better place. If I concentrated hard I could see her kind and radiant smile quite clearly, as if she were still with me. Almost.

Dawn had only just broken but it would be a short day, would be pitch-dark again in just a few hours, and I had no candle. I had always been petrified of the dark, no matter how much I tried to rationalize the terror away. Eleanor Goodricke, I told myself very sternly now, how can you ever hope to be a natural philosopher if you are prey to such superstitious fears? But I did not dare turn my head toward the far corners of the chamber where strange-shaped shadows already lurked. If only I had a candle. But I knew there was no use calling for that either.

The only light we need is the light of the Lord.

I bit my lips against blasphemy but still my heart cried out: It is not enough for me.

January

1664

TWO YEARS LATER

T
homas Knight’s sister, Bess, was my new maid, and despite her brother’s dislike of me, Bess and I had become fast friends.

“Hold still now,” she commanded, giving me an apple-cheeked smile that revealed the wide gap between her two top front teeth. “Or the gentleman visitors will take you for a little vagabond.”

I was so excited by the prospect of visitors that I didn’t mind having to stand still for an age while Bess brushed and brushed at the hem of my plain dark dress to rid it of the worst of the ever-present rim of mud stains. Made of wool, it could never be washed or it would shrink. I didn’t mind either that Bess combed and combed at my long fair hair until it crackled with life and sparkled like spun gold, only for the great mass of it to be pinned and braided and tightly fastened away beneath a lace cap that was starched as crisp and white as my square collar.

I went to kneel upon the seat in the oriel window, my nose practically pressed against the uneven panes of leaded glass, keeping a lookout over the ghostly waterland patterned with droves and causeways that rose above the submerged world. I was determined to be the first to see our guests, though the drifting mist had rendered even the nearby stables indistinct. It had been raining all night, was raining still, and the floodwaters were lapping at the Barton wall now. We were half marooned, accessible from the south only by the main causeway or by boat.

As my father chose to shield me from the world and all that was worldly, he allowed me to mix with only the most restricted society. I seldom saw a new face, seldom saw anyone but the servants who made up our wider family. I had hardly ever traveled beyond the confines of the estate, beyond the isolated village of Tickenham, had never even been to Bristol.

I didn’t mind much, because I didn’t know any different, but also because I loved Tickenham, so that I could not in all honesty imagine myself away from it. Tickenham was a part of me, was who I was. I was Eleanor Goodricke of Tickenham Court. Since the day I was born I had imbibed the water from the springs and the cider from the apples in the orchard along with my mother’s milk. What little flesh there was on my small limbs was nourished by the fish from the rivers and the wildfowl from the wetlands. And Tickenham’s moods, its spirit, reflected my own. The isolation and secrecy caused by the winter floods and mist echoed my own unusual need for seclusion, for time to myself, whilst the profusion and lushness of summer on the moor satisfied my deep and unquenchable yearning for color and sunshine. Tickenham for me was the world and I did not want to be anywhere else. Though that did not mean I did not relish the chance to meet outsiders.

William Merrick, a Bristol merchant, had visited several times recently to talk to my father, about financial matters mostly, but never before had he brought anyone else with him. Eventually I saw them riding along the causeway. Mr. Merrick was a barrel-chested and bulbous-nosed man who took great pains to hide his lack of refinement beneath immaculate clothes. He was a Puritan, supposedly, yet he could not help displaying his considerable wealth in a flash of silk brocade waistcoat, in subtle but obviously expensive rings, in the finest silk stockings. He sat, square-shouldered and square-jawed, on his dun mare as it trotted up the miry path past the rectory. Even the way he rode was brash. But it was the other rider on the roan gelding who interested me, the tall, straight-backed gentleman from Suffolk.

I ran round to the cobbled stable yard, then held back, suddenly struck by shyness as I watched them dismount amidst a scattering of chickens. They were both wearing long black cloaks and tall hats which shadowed their faces. I could see rain dripping from the brims by the time they’d walked the short distance to the door beneath the oriel.

With a look of distaste on his florid features, Mr. Merrick wiped his highly polished beribboned shoes with a clump of straw. He lived in a smart new street in Bristol, by the docks, where the marshland had been nicely tamed, so he had little patience with mud and damp, or with anything with even the slightest tendency to disorderliness, such as me.

He wasted no time in introducing Edmund Ashfield, who shook my father’s hand. It was an odd greeting, only used by true Parliamentarians. Then he turned to me and bowed, removing his hat. As he came up again, he smiled at me and my eyes widened in wonder. It was as if the mist had cleared to reveal a burst of sun, or else his entrance had been announced with a fanfare of trumpets. His short-cut hair was thick and wavy, and of the brightest copper I’d ever seen. When he straightened, I took in just how very tall and how broad-shouldered he was. He had clear gray eyes, an open, ready smile, and his nose and cheeks were sprinkled with pale gold freckles. He was as different from the rustic Tickenham boys as it was possible to be. He shone. He lit up the austere gray stone-walled hall like a sunbeam, and seemed to me like a knight in gleaming armor who had stepped straight from the pages of a romance.

Still beaming warmly at my father and me, he clutched his hat in front of him in both hands and turned it round like a spinning top. “I beg your pardon for our late arrival. We had a slight skirmish with an uprooted tree on the high road, and we didn’t dare venture round it onto the flooded fields, lest we be washed away or sink up to our waists in the bog. It’s mightily hostile out there, I tell you. But this is a delightful place in which to wait out the siege.”

I wasn’t in the least disheartened to hear that his manner of speech was not as unusual as his appearance. Overuse of military language was common amongst my father’s few visitors, an inevitable consequence of the years when the chief topics of conversation had been civil war and armory and battle strategy. Just like me, Mr. Ashfield must have a father who had fought for Cromwell.

“Didn’t I tell you Major Goodricke had a pretty little daughter?” Mr. Merrick interposed. He had never, ever paid me even the scantest compliment before, and it did not sound very sincere now. But I barely wondered at it. I barely noticed his cold and calculating smile, and for once did not pause to consider what he, ever the merchant, might be looking to trade this time. I did not think of him at all.

“I’ve been looking forward very much to coming here,” Edmund Ashfield said with sincerity enough for both of them.

I silently cursed myself for being so tongue-tied. For what must have been the first time in my life, I could think of absolutely nothing to say.

“Are you staying in Bristol for the winter, Mr. Ashfield?” my father inquired.

“Oh, no, sir. I’m on my way home from the Twelfth Night celebrations in London.”

My eyes flew anxiously to my father and I saw his bushy gray brows knit in a tight, disapproving scowl. My need to cover his displeasure and make Mr. Ashfield feel entirely comfortable was so great that it helped me to find my voice at last. “Have you been to London before, sir?” I asked.

He turned to me and gave me his full attention. “I have, miss. Several times.”

I felt myself flush in the full warmth of his glorious smile, now miraculously directed solely at me. “And is it very foul and wicked and full of thieves and cutthroats?” I asked.

“And many more things besides. Not all bad.” His eyes shone with such amusement that I could not help but smile back. I thought how I had never seen a face so full of laughter. He looked like a person who was always happy, would never have a care in the world. A person who could never look dour or severe or puritanical. He seemed made for Twelfth Night festivities, for capering and merrymaking, and, for me, the knowledge that he had come direct from such forbidden entertainments, from the great and wicked capital city, only served to add to his appeal.

“Have you seen the lions in the Tower?” I asked. “What do they feed them?”

“Nosy little girls, I shouldn’t wonder,” Mr. Merrick sniffed.

Mr. Ashfield ignored that remark completely. “I am afraid I have not been there at feeding time,” he answered, finding my question worthy of a considered reply. “I shall make an effort to do so and report back, since it interests you.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You are most welcome.”

I wondered who had been lucky enough to enjoy the Twelfth Night festivities in his company. “Do you have family in London, Mr. Ashfield?”

“Do hush, Eleanor,” my father chided. “You mustn’t interrogate our guest before he has even taken some refreshment.” He apologized on my behalf. “My daughter is renowned for her curiosity.”

“I was there with a very good friend of mine,” Mr. Ashfield said to me, and my heart melted, because again he’d taken the trouble to answer me. “Another lad from Suffolk. Name of Richard Glanville.”

I saw my father tense.

“Ah, that young blade again,” Mr. Merrick snorted obsequiously. “You mustn’t judge a man by his friends,” he added hastily, with a glance at my father that was, astonishingly, almost nervous. “Edmund’s a very respectable fellow, aren’t you? For all that you choose to mix with Cavaliers.”

My mouth fell open. I gaped at Edmund Ashfield, whose allure had suddenly multiplied beyond all imagining with this new revelation. He actually knew a Cavalier! Was friends with a Cavalier! He might as well have admitted to supping with the King himself, or rather with the Devil. Which, in my father’s eyes, amounted to exactly the same thing.

“Richard has never been anywhere near Whitehall Palace and he was born during the Commonwealth,” Edmund said very amiably. “After the war was over.”

“Makes no difference,” Mr. Merrick said, with another fawning glance at my father. “He’s the son of defiantly Royalist parents who mixed with the court in exile, which makes him as Cavalier as Rupert of the Rhine.”

“I’m surprised that an upstanding gentleman such as yourself would choose to fraternize with men of pleasure,” my father said critically.

“They are not half as debauched as we’ve been led to believe, you know.” Mr. Ashfield smiled, his cordiality still totally unruffled.

“Come now,” my father said. “You’ll not tell me that the news of lewdness and perversion that reached us from Europe was all fabrication? The depravity of the public and private morals of Charles Stuart and his band was the scandal of the country—still is, now that they’ve brought their vile wickedness to Whitehall. It was well reported how they abandoned themselves to their lusts, and drank and gambled, fornicated and committed adultery. How they committed these blackest of sins and saw none of it as any sin at all. These are men in contempt of all decency and religious observation. Or would you deny that they are a crowd of short-tempered quarrelers, violent heavy drinkers and murderous ruffians who would brawl and duel to the death over so little as a game of tennis?”

Carried away by his fervor, my father seemed to have entirely forgotten that I was standing there in wide-eyed enthrallment, listening raptly to every word. Oh, I was used to hearing him rail against Cavaliers. In many ways they stirred up his moral indignation even more than did Catholics. But never before had he been so specific, and I was caught between utter fascination and an acute embarrassment that made me half wish I could fall into a hole and hide. I felt so dreadfully sorry for poor Mr. Ashfield, though he did not appear at all affronted.

“I can’t speak for all Royalists,” he said good-naturedly. “But I assure you that Richard Glanville is possessed of great wit and courage and is one of the most cultured and charming young men I have ever had the pleasure to socialize with.”

“Cultured?” my father snorted. “It is a culture of monstrous indulgence, drunken gaiety and sensual excess that our monarch and his circle cultivate and would wish to impose on this country. The sooner they all rot and decay in their own filth, the better. God forbid it bring us all to moral ruin first.”

There was an excruciating silence. “I heard young Richard swims as though he were a fish, not a boy,” Mr. Merrick interjected rather desperately. “He’ll have his pick of the new drainage channels and widened rivers next time he visits Ashfield land, eh?”

Fen drainage was Mr. Merrick’s favorite topic of conversation, one he unfailingly managed to bring up at every visit. It might have made me uneasy, after my conversation with Mary Burges, but I didn’t much mind what the three of them talked about so long as they were not insulting poor Mr. Ashfield and his friend. So long as I could listen to him and watch him and stay near him.

But it was not to be. “I suggest we move into the parlor for some coffee,” my father said brusquely, remembering his manners at last. “Eleanor,” he said to me. “Find Bess, would you, and ask her to send a pot through to us.”

I wished I knew why Mr. Merrick was honored with the great luxury of coffee every time he visited, but I was very glad Mr. Ashfield was to be given the best that we had, would not begrudge him anything at all.

He went with the others toward the oak-paneled parlor, and when I took a step to follow, my father halted me with one of his sharp looks. I actually shivered, as if, deprived of the nearness of Edmund Ashfield’s bright hair and sunny smile, I was being cast back out into shadows and darkness. I lingered like a little phantom beneath the vaulted roof in the empty hall as he took the seat of honor in a carved oak chair that was drawn up beside the fire as the wind boomed outside like distant cannon fire and the rain peppered the windowpanes like tiny arrows. The flames behind him were pale in comparison, only served to make him appear all the more burnished and gleaming. He had all the glorious grandeur of autumn, a blaze of red and gold that defied the closeness of winter.

He was talking of windmills that were used in his home county to drive back the water. “There’s clearly a great advantage to be gained from combating the floods and claiming the territory for lush meadows in their stead,” he said mildly.

“You tell him, Edmund, my boy,” William Merrick said. “For he’ll not listen to me.”

“On the contrary, William,” my father replied. “I listen to you very carefully.”