Lady of the Butterflies (32 page)

“My wife, what has come over you?” he whispered thickly. “You are so thankful for being a mother that you want me to make another child on you tonight?”

I stood up on my tiptoes as I always had to do if I wanted to kiss him, and he bent his head so that we met halfway. I slid my hand up under his shirt and walked my fingers up his smooth chest, let my palm rest flat against his hot, damp skin. For once his heart was racing much faster than mine. “If you do,” I said, “I promise that this time I will still be close beside you when you wake.”

Summer

1678

T
he sunlight was sweet and golden as the best cider, and it was the time of year when every lovely day was a bonus that could not be wasted. The air already smelled of wood fires and of distant rain. Humming a happy tune to myself and to Forest, I carried him down onto the moor straddled across my hip, butterfly net over my shoulder. My black lead pen and notebook were tucked inside my corset, along with a little book of psalms. I didn’t have enough hands to bring a cushion of pins and a pine collecting box, so I had reverted to my original method of pressing specimens between the pages of a book. Since my Bible was also too big and too heavy, the psalms would have to do.

At nine months, Forest was growing heavier by the day, but I’d always had strong arms and legs and lungs from rowing and walking and riding, and it was no great effort to carry him, even on such a warm day. Edmund had gone on a visit to his father and brother in Suffolk and I had stayed behind, hoping to have some time to please myself. I hadn’t quite accepted that now I had a baby there was no such thing unless I entrusted him to someone else’s care, which I could not bear to do, not even for a little while.

On the far side of the moor was a little group of roe deer, half concealed in the long grass, and I stood and watched them grazing, glad to be given a glimpse into their private and secret lives.

Forest wriggled and I set him down amidst the buttercups and sat beside him. There was no point going all the way to the river. All summer I had been trying to show him the otters, but he was never quiet or still for two seconds and they understandably kept well out of our way.

I laid him on his back so he could look up at the kestrels and sparrow hawks soaring above him, but he was instantly squirming to roll over onto his belly, and before I knew it, he’d be trying to chew the grass, no matter how much I told him babies weren’t supposed to eat grass. Though maybe it would be a good thing if this one did. Maybe it would help to satisfy him, since nothing else seemed to.

I sat cross-legged and scooped him up onto my lap, dandled him up and down, making him gurgle with delight. I dropped a kiss on his fat little cheek, rubbed our noses together and he suddenly grabbed at my hair and pulled very hard.

“Ouch, little whelp. That hurts.”

He blew bubbles at me with his mouth and pulled all the harder, so that I had to prize open his grasping fist and unwind my hair from it.

“I’ll always love you, no matter how you hurt me,” I said.

With eyes that were turning from blue now to a brown so dark it was almost black, he regarded me as if he understood every word I spoke. Then his whole body suddenly went rigid and he arched his back to free himself and be off again, so I put him back down on the grass.

I slid my arms out behind me and turned my face up to the sun. The movement of grass snakes sounded like the rustle of dead leaves and already there was the scent of autumn in the air. Where had the summer gone? I hadn’t caught a single butterfly since Forest was born. I’d not even made one entry in my observation book. Though James still wrote to me it was with less regularity, his letters growing shorter. I’d only managed a few brief replies.

Now Forest was tearing at a buttercup. Pity any butterfly that came near while I had this tiny destroyer with me. Why had I even bothered to bring my net along?

“We might as well pay a visit to Mistress Knight,” I sighed. “She’d love to see how you’ve grown into such a pudding.”

We were nearly at the Knights’ cottage when I saw it, not too far away, in an open area of sedge and reeds where the milk parsley grew. It was flying, slowly and powerfully, a spectacular sweep of yellow and red and blue. I gently deposited Forest in a soft patch of grass. “I’ll be right back, poppet,” I whispered.

I bunched up my petticoats, kicked off my slippers and ran, slowing as the butterfly came drifting down toward me. It hovered, not quite settling, its wings aflutter, as it sucked the juice from the milk parsley. It was a fine example, the colors still luminously vivid in the bright sunshine, wings perfectly unragged. Almost before I knew what had happened it was there, unbelievably, imprisoned like a rare jewel beneath the veil of my muslin trap.

I pinched its black and yellow abdomen carefully and swiftly between my finger and thumb, just below its head. Wings and antennae quivered a moment, then were still, outspread and undamaged, not a single pearly scale missing. A yellow stain appeared on my palm. I suffered an instant of remorse at the loss of its little life, that it would no longer flutter innocently in the sunshine. But it was outweighed by the satisfaction of having a pristine Swallowtail specimen to add to my collection, at last. I stared in wonder at the glorious Gothic, sculptured wings, the magnificent markings, and I thought only of how I would describe in a letter the thick dusting of lemon meal that gave it its predominant color. I thought only of how I couldn’t wait to tell James about my find.

I laid it carefully inside the psalms and closed the little book, reverential as a Puritan girl should be, tying a ribbon round it to keep it shut tight.

“What kind of unnatural, unfeeling mother are you?” Mistress Knight, Bess’s mother, was standing right behind me, clutching Forest to her in her gnarled old hands as if she had snatched him out of the jaws of death itself. “Tom heard your child wailing from yards away, even if you did not. You are not fit to care for a babe if you leave it crying in a marsh, amidst a herd of cattle, to go gadding after butterflies.”

It made no difference to Mistress Knight that I was lady of the manor now. She had known me as a little girl, a little girl she had felt quite entitled to chastise if need be. That Forest had been wailing I doubted very much. He looked perfectly content. And since I heard his every snuffle from the depth of sleep, I would not have failed to hear him crying. There were indeed a great number of cattle on the moor, not just those of the commoners, but the beasts of others they grazed for a fee, but they were all so far off as to be almost invisible. Not so Thomas Knight. He was loitering by the bend in the river, hands stuffed in his pockets and a pile of cut sedges at his feet.

Annoyed, but doing my utmost not to show it, I quickly pushed the psalms back inside my gown, took Forest into my arms, cradled his head in the crook of my neck. “I was only gone a moment, Mistress Knight.”

“A moment is all it takes for a cow to trample him, or for him to roll into the bog or ditch, or eat a poison plant that will make him vomit for a week, or worse,” she said gruffly. “The wild swans and geese tend their chicks better than you tend yours.”

I knew Mistress Knight cared very much for my little son, whose birth she had witnessed. She had supported me as he was being born, and walked behind me and laughed with me at my churching. “I thank you for your concern,” I said evenly. “But Forest was perfectly safe, I assure you. I know very well which are the poison plants and there were none near him. He was nowhere near any bogs or ditches either.”

“This is no place for a child.”

“I came down here every day when I was one.”

“Aye, and look how you’ve turned out.”

“I will ignore that comment. We were on our way to see you,” I said shortly. “But I think we had better go back to the house instead.”

“And I think you had better stay there, out of harm’s way, until your husband is returned.” She cast a strange, longing glance at Forest, as if she wanted to run off with him and rear him herself. “Your father should have shown you a stiffer hand. He should have known you’d grow to be as wild and wayward as your mother.”

I was astounded. “What do you mean?”

“I mean nothing,” she said, flustered. “Now be off with you, before I say more than is wise.”

“I think you had better say it, Mistress Knight.”

“I think I had better not.” She flicked her rheumy eyes toward Thomas.

He was still standing there, watching us. For some reason that I was no closer to understanding, he hated me still. He was my enemy, and an increasingly dangerous, insidious and underhanded one, who would use whatever weapons he could muster against me. He would make sure that this was round the village like wildfire, spread by scandalmongers and gossips, exaggerated and distorted. Everyone would hear of it. Edmund would hear of it.

“I once clouted my boy for calling you whimsy-headed, for putting it about that you must be cracked to go chasing after fairies,” Mistress Knight went on. “But now I think he was maybe not so wrong.”

“You’ve been a good friend to me and to my family, Mistress Knight,” I said carefully. “But I’ll ask you to mind your tongue. I would never put my baby in any danger.”

“So you say.” She turned and hobbled off on arthritic legs toward her son.

I held my own son very close, in the middle of the milk parsley, and stroked his broad little back. “You weren’t upset at all, were you, my little cherub? You know I’ll always look after you.”

I couldn’t face going inside yet, so I took him into the orchard and sat with him under an apple tree. “If she could see us, she’d likely criticize me for endangering your life from falling apples,” I jested.

Forest was sleepy after so much sun and fresh air, so I rested him against my shoulder and rocked him gently. Instead of singing to him, I told him about a letter I had written to him before he was born.

“I wrote it in case I died giving birth to you,” I whispered into his pink shell of an ear. “I wrote down all my hopes for you, in case I wasn’t there to bring you up and tell you them myself. It’s very important, even though I am still here, so please listen very carefully.

“I want you to grow to be a good man, like your father and your grandfather. Above all else, I hope that you are just and wise and honest in all that you do. I pray you take an interest in the world around you and find some worthy occupation that pleases you and is of some service to God and to mankind. For then you will be sure to be happy and fulfilled.” I paused and slipped my hand between my waist and his dangling legs. “Find yourself a pretty and kind girl and be good to her, and be good to any little brothers and sisters you may have. Take care of them, protect them, and be someone they look to for counsel and guidance. I always wished I’d had an older brother. Be the brother I would have wanted. Be a son to make me proud.” I nuzzled his warm neck, kissed it. “Oh, and most important of all, always be good to your mother.”

He’d grown even heavier, so I knew that he was asleep, a puzzling phenomenon I could not even begin to comprehend, since surely a sleeping child did not in actual fact gain extra pounds, to be lost again the moment he woke. So why did it feel as if that was exactly what happened? I tilted him over to cradle him and look down into his peaceful sleeping face. He had pushed his thumb in his mouth, and now and then his little lips puckered with sucking movements that seemed to comfort him as once only my breast or finger had done. Something about this tiny show of independence tore at my heart. He was already growing away from me. Day by day, he needed me less.

I opened my book of psalms. The beautiful Swallowtail, the first I had ever caught, was broken in two. No matter. I would give one of the wings to James. He would like that. In his most recent letter to me he had enclosed another of his strange little broken gifts, the single brilliant emerald and black wing of a large tropical butterfly that had been sent back to him from a ship’s surgeon who had sailed to Brazil. James was sticking to his plan, his life’s task of building a worldwide community of natural scientists.

Maybe that was why my walk on the moor today hadn’t been the balm to me it usually was. The wide wetland horizon just drew attention to how vast the world was and how little of it I would ever see, how far I would never travel.

I had been a small part of something important which had mattered to me more than anything else. Now I had my baby, and he mattered more than life itself. So I was torn, for it felt as if all time borrowed from my child was misspent, but also that when I was not studying butterflies, I was somehow missing out on what I was supposed to do.

I closed the psalms. If I wanted to be a good mother, I could not be a good scientist. If I wanted to be a good scientist, I could not be a good mother.

I wanted so very much to be able to be both, to be good at being both.

Autumn

1678

T
he autumn rains returned before Edmund did, steady, incessant rain. Accustomed to it as I was, it was still alarming to watch a deluge of water pouring down from the sky as more water rose up the riverbanks and the rhynes, came gushing up through the very earth to meet it, quickly turning the moors into a desolate, wild morass of bog and marsh and wide lagoons.

I sat on the window seat in the parlor and traced the raindrops with my finger as they raced haphazardly down the small panes, like animated versions of the tiny air bubbles trapped within the glass. I was Persephone of the Greek myths, abducted by Hades, the King of the Underworld. I was a child of Somersetshire: land of the summer people, fated to live out half of each year in darkness.

Though it was London, now, that was gripped by a great ague epidemic. The latest gazette lay on the table, filled with news of how the King himself had contracted the disease and had demanded the services of an Essex man, Robert Talbor, a self-styled feverologist who the college of physicians had dubbed a quack. No one knew his secret and he refused to reveal it, but he had seemingly cured the King and was to be knighted for his services.

Jesuits’ Powder? I wondered. Was that his secret cure? It would certainly explain why he’d be so desperate to hide the truth now, at the very time Jesuits were being accused of plotting to assassinate the King and put his Catholic brother on the throne. The gazette reported that all of London was hysterical with terror at a clergyman’s claim that thousands of Jesuits were crouching in cellars, ready at the signal to leap out and slaughter all Protestants in England. They were, apparently, conspiring to poison the whole world by means of the so-called medicine commonly known as the Jesuits’ Powder.

I was expecting Edmund to be home today before dark, in plenty of time for supper, and I couldn’t sit here any longer. Forest was sleeping, with luck would sleep for another hour, and Bess would listen out for him. I snatched my red, hooded riding cloak and set out for the causeway.

The rain had eased, but the cobbles were slick and slippery and I walked carefully to avoid twisting my ankle. There was a stiff southwesterly wind and I clutched my cloak tight, pulling up the hood.

The heavy sky was the color of pewter and the willows were delicately penciled in the mist. The water meadows were shimmering with pools of silver, while flocks of little dunlins skimmed the air, their flight rapid and direct, all abruptly changing direction at once, like a wave breaking in the air as they flashed their dark backs and then white undersides.

I’d gone about half a mile before I heard the faintest sound of a horse’s hooves above the wild and lonely call of the curlews. Like a beast from the legends of King Arthur, Edmund’s chestnut gelding came splashing across the causeway, with only the head and shoulders of his rider visible above the mists, a rider with copper hair which shone warm as the welcoming light of a distant inn to a lone traveler.

He reined in beside me. “Eleanor, what are you doing out here? What’s wrong? Little Forest . . . ?”

“Is fast asleep in his crib. Nothing’s wrong.” I held on to the horse’s bridle as the animal snorted and tossed its head, the bit jangling, and smiled up at my husband, my hood falling back from my face. “I’ve been lonely without you. That’s all.”

“Have you? Have you really?” He beamed down at me, like he did the first time I ever saw him, the first time he’d come to Tickenham, on a day not unlike today.

“You’re going to tell me I’m foolish,” I said. “That you’ve not been gone very long.”

He reached out his hand to pull me up into the saddle in front of him, settled his arms around me. I rested my hands on the reins between his as he gave them a jerk.

“As a matter of fact, I’ve been lonely without you too,” he said. “I’m very glad to be home.”

“Do you still think of your father’s house as home, too?”

“My father barely recognizes it himself. Drainage doesn’t just alter the landscape, it creates a whole new society, a whole new economy. But tell me, how does my little boy? Is he talking yet? Has he missed me too, do you think?”

“He is greedier than ever,” I said fondly. “He’s probably doubled in size since last you saw him.” I paused, and then my confession came tumbling out of my mouth, like the river over a weir.

As I told him about the Swallowtail and Mistress Knight’s accusations, Edmund’s hold on the reins remained light and his arms around me didn’t tense or recoil.

“I wanted you to hear it from me, rather than through village scandalmongers,” I finished. “I know Forest was perfectly safe and yet I am annoyed with myself. He is still waking twice in the night and I’m so tired that, it’s true, I probably wasn’t as alert as I should be. But I would never neglect him. Never.”

“I know you wouldn’t. You are a wonderful mother. And he’s thriving, as you said yourself. That’s all that matters.” Edmund kissed the top of my head and then tucked it under his chin. “What’s done is done, and there’s no use worrying about what might or might not have been.”

How much easier life would be if I was as unruffled as Edmund, if I could skim along as he did and not look too closely or delve too far beneath the surface of things, if I didn’t have to question from every angle and worry about what might never be. It was good that I had him to act as my counterbalance. And maybe, once I’d been married to him for a few more years, I’d become a little more like him.

“So, did you catch your prize?”

“I did.”

“I’m glad. I know how much you wanted one.”

That surprised me. But I remembered then how Richard had said Edmund had once made him look for one.

“Do you find them all over the country? Does your butterfly friend in London see them there?” He sounded genuinely interested.

“No. He’s seen dead ones others have collected, but he has never seen one on the wing.” I nestled up closer to Edmund’s shoulder and almost drew back a little on the reins. The steady clop and gait of the horse was as pleasant and easy as our conversation. I didn’t even feel the cold and the rain, was warm and cozy as if we were curled up together beneath the blankets in bed, with a fire glowing in the brazier. “Since when were you so interested in butterflies, anyway?”

“Since I saw that they interested you.”

“Oh.”

“Whatever matters to you matters to me too.”

I put my small hands over Edmund’s much larger ones, slipped my fingers down so they were meshed with his. I knew, clearer than I could see the summit of Cadbury Camp on a sunny day, that though he had been prompted at least in part to marry me because I was the heiress of Tickenham Court, and though he may not have loved me as I wanted to be loved, he loved me with all that he had. And I valued that love more than ever.

“William is keen to press on with the drainage again here now,” he said presently.

I felt my muscles tauten. “Must we?”

“There’s a fresh move across the whole of the country for agricultural improvement. William has watched a hundred acres being successfully recovered at Wick St. Lawrence, not so very far away, and it’s renewed his enthusiasm for land reclamation here. But we are under no obligation now, since that first scheme was abandoned. It is not William’s decision.”

I didn’t want to ruin the closeness between us with another disagreement, so I chose my words carefully. “You don’t sound as if you share his enthusiasm so much anymore.”

“It’s not that I can’t still see the benefits. But for all that, I would rather leave well alone for as long as is possible.”

“You would? Why?”

“I am growing soft and sentimental in my old age, that’s why.” I heard the humor in his voice. “I can’t say for sure. All I
can
say is this. If we drained the moor, you’d have seen the last of your Swallowtails here. When I was a boy, they were as abundant in the Fens as they are in Tickenham. But now the water has gone, the Swallowtails have gone with it.”

“They can’t have!”

“They have.”

“Are you certain?” Dry meadows should mean more butterflies, not less, surely?

“Believe me, Eleanor, I looked. I looked last summer and I looked again this time. Knowing how much you love them, I looked hard. But I didn’t see a single one.”

I was still coming to terms with the fact that he even knew what a Swallowtail was.

“It’s the same with the red and orange ones you once told me are so prized amongst collectors. They were plentiful too, as they are here, but now, in the Fens, they have totally vanished.”

I would have felt a jolt of dismay at this discovery, except that I was so delighted it was Edmund who had made it, that he had made it because of me. “I can’t believe you noticed.”

“You notice. So I notice.”

I twisted my head sideways against his shoulder, felt his bristly copper whiskers snag my hair. We carried on in silence but my mind was not at all quiet, was whirring busily as ideas crystallized inside me. “It must mean they can live only on marshes, that there is something about marshland necessary for their life.”

“That seems a fair conclusion.”

“So if all the wetlands in England are to be drained, will Swallowtails and Large Coppers disappear completely? The specimens in the collections of butterfly hunters might be all that is left to prove they ever existed.” There was something portentous in that. “If drainage causes a little creature at the bottom of the great chain of being to die out, then could it have some effect upon those further up—on people? Could land unable to sustain a tiny butterfly ever sustain us?”

“I am afraid you are losing me.” Edmund laughed.

It seemed too dramatic and too abstract a theory to dwell upon now. What mattered far more right at this moment was that I was having a proper conversation with my husband at last. I had thought that I might grow more like Edmund. Instead it seemed he was growing more like me. That was probably not a wholly good thing, but I liked the idea all the same. I liked being able to talk to him about things I cared about. I liked this new feeling of closeness very much.

We had reached the stable. Edmund released the reins to dismount, but something prompted me to hold on to his hands. Maybe it was because of the ominous disappearance of the butterflies, but I didn’t want him to let go of me. I had the alarming sense that, though he was here with me now, I was losing him, just as he had jokingly said I was during our conversation. But to what, I did not know.

He swung to the ground, turned around to help me down.

I slid into his arms and held him tight, standing on tiptoe to kiss him, as always.

The mist seemed to close in around us.

BESS TOLD ME THAT Forest was awake and had just that moment started to bawl for food, or attention, or both. I told her I would go to him. He was lying on his back, kicking his sturdy little legs, and I lifted him out, surprised afresh by how solid and strong he was growing. “Come here, little fellow. Your papa’s home and wants to see you.” I swung him, still kicking, onto my hip, and he quieted as we made our way down the stairs to the parlor, where I handed him over to Edmund, who promptly tossed him in the air and caught him, much to Forest’s delight.

“Do you think he’s changed while you’ve been away?” I asked.

“You make it sound like I’ve been gone months.”

Forest was playing with the brass buttons on Edmund’s waistcoat.

“He’s changing all the time, can’t you see it? His legs are a fraction longer, his eyes darker. His cheeks just a bit more plump.”

Edmund looked bemused. “All to the good, surely. Why look so sad about it?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I’m being foolish. But I do wish I were a better artist. I’d draw him every day so I could hold on to each moment. I want to see him walk and hear him speak proper words to me, yet I hate the thought of him even being old enough to be breeched. I want him to stay a baby forever.”

“Ah, but then he’d not grow to be a fine young lord for Tickenham Court. That is what I want to see, above all else. I do realize, of course, that he cannot actually take the seat until I have vacated it,” he added jocularly, “but I shall enjoy rearing him to sit in it well.”

Forest promptly stuffed the lace-trimmed edge of Edmund’s square white collar into his little gummy mouth.

“So you have a taste for finery, do you, my little lad?” Edmund said. “Just like your godfather. Richard sends you his love, by the way, Eleanor, promises to come and visit very soon.”

“You have seen him?” I asked, as casually as I could.

“Aye, rather ironically he asked if he could come to the Fens to escape the ague outbreak, not to mention the outbreak of mass hysteria at this Popish Plot.”

“They are still claiming that we are all to be poisoned?”

“Would you believe, a facsimile of Jesuits’ Powder has been paraded through the city streets, with great signs warning of exactly that.”

“But what if Jesuits’ Powder really does hold the cure for ague? Thousands who fear it might die needlessly, just like my father.” It seemed to me that the world had gone totally mad.