Lady of the Butterflies (42 page)

“Have you ever wondered where the swans go in summer?” I asked both children.

Disappointingly, my question was met with the shaking of two heads, one dark, one copper. Mary was too young, I consoled myself, and Forest too obstinate. If he did wonder, he would never admit it to me. Yet I so wanted him to love this land that would one day be his, wanted it to mean as much to him as it did to me.

“When I was a little girl, I used to wonder,” I told them. “I used to imagine that perhaps they came with the winter and flew away again in spring, because they were white and were snow birds who took the cold away with them. It is the same ones who come back every year, though I have no idea how they find their way. I did sometimes wish I could fly away with them, wherever it was that they went, or rather that I could do the opposite of what they do, and leave Tickenham in winter and return in spring when the floods have gone. But soon the floods will be gone for good, Forest,” I said to him, wondering where the swans would go then. “The drainage work will begin. By the time you are a grown man, it will be complete.”

This at least appeared to have spiked his interest, though for entirely the wrong reasons. “And I shall be as rich as William Merrick?” he asked with a keenness that made me uneasy, young as he was.

As he had grown, the greedy side of Forest’s nature had increasingly tended toward an unpleasant avariciousness that I did not like at all, did my utmost to discourage. “You will only be as rich as Mr. Merrick if you are as devious and ruthless as he is,” I said severely. “Which I sincerely hope you will not be.”

“What are we to have for dinner?” he asked then. “I’m hungry.”

“So am I,” Mary agreed.

“I hope it is not pike again,” Forest grumbled.

“I hope it’s not, either,” Mary echoed supportively.

Forest stuck out his tongue, pretending to gag. “If we eat any more pike, we’ll look like one.” He sucked in his cheeks and pouted his mouth, fishlike, making Mary giggle behind her hand.

“What would you like to eat, then?” I asked.

“Venison,” he said. “Like Mr. Merrick always has.”

“Hmmm. Well, when you are squire you can eat venison every day if you like, but for now I suggest we send to the inn for a barrel of oysters. As a treat, we shall all three of us eat them by the fire.”

Forest scowled at me until I screwed up my face and scowled back comically, managing at last to make him grin.

Spring

1685

T
here were several occurrences in the course of the spring that proved the people of Tickenham were as resistant to drainage as ever.

First the ale barrels in the buttery were prized apart, allowing the contents to swill all over the floor. Days later, the chickens were all found dead in their coop, their necks wrung, and the fresh eggs broken in a mess of yolk and white and shell. Then two of the pigs were butchered in the sty, their throats slit wide, splattering so much bright red blood that it resembled a slaughterhouse.

I was more angered by the needless waste than by the destruction of my property, but at least anger served to hold fear at bay, for a time. Unsurprisingly, all around me had suddenly been struck mute, deaf and blind. Nobody had seen or heard anything, it seemed. When the constable questioned them, tenants and commoners and servants all denied having even the glimmer of a suspicion about who might have committed these vengeful crimes. Even Bess remained guiltily tight-lipped, her loyalties clearly torn in a way that disturbed me more than anything, made me more certain than ever that her brother was behind it all. She refused to meet my eye, even when Forest told me, in her hearing, that Thomas had asked him, some while ago, if he knew what a Fen tiger was.

“And do you?” I asked Forest cautiously, wondering if that was why he had taken to following me around and standing quietly at my side.

“Thomas told me they are not really tigers at all,” he said. “But angry men.”

We were in the great hall. I sat down on the settle, and for the first time in I don’t know how long, Forest let me take him onto my lap. I wrapped my arms around his strong little body and held him tight. “Did Thomas say anything else, Forest?”

“He said the tigers were being bred in Somersetshire now. Right here, in Tickenham, and that Somersetshire tigers are angrier even than their Fen cousins. He said they would take revenge on us for robbing the commoners of their way of life.” He twisted round to look at me. “It’s them who killed the pigs and the hens, isn’t it?”

He did not deserve a lie. I stroked his hair. “I think it must be.”

“They are not done yet, are they?” he said with a heartrending perception way beyond his years.

WHEN WILLIAM MERRICK CAME to inspect the carnage in the pigsty he told me to show forbearance, but even he seemed to have lost much of his old brash self-assurance. He appeared almost cowed.

“I had hoped it would be different this time,” I said, as we watched two silent laborers, their pails brimming with red water, scrubbing the blood off the walls. “I hoped the memory of that poor boy’s death in the last serious floods would make a difference. What, in God’s name, does it take to convince them?”

“Evidently much more than it takes to convince the investors to withdraw their funding,” William said morosely. “Unfortunately they have heard of these recent disturbances and it has undermined their confidence in the whole project.” I had never seen my former guardian so disconsolate. “They will back out if there is even a whiff of more trouble. The fear is that once the work commences, the vandals will turn their attention from destroying your property to sabotaging the new sluices and walls and rhynes. Such setbacks in the Fens cost the investors dear, almost brought about their ruin. My partners had not anticipated such disastrous disturbances here.” He looked at me scathingly. As if it was my fault that I had not carried the people with me, as if to say that all would have been very different if Edmund, or indeed any other man, were here to calm, coerce and inspire solid confidence. I did not think it would have been different at all, but I would have given much to hear Edmund’s unshakable assurances that what we were doing was right, that even the commoners would come to see that eventually. Without him, doubts assailed me again. It was my decision now, not my father’s, not my guardian’s, not my husband’s. But having no one to tell me what to do meant there was no one to share the responsibility. My decision. And by it I should stand or fall.

“William, do you honestly believe they have no justification for what they do?”

His eyes almost popped out of their sockets. “Justification?”

“I know there is no excuse for violence, but they see their rights being stripped away from them and what else can they do?”

“Are you actually questioning if certain circumstances make it acceptable to break the laws of this land?”

“It is not as simple as that.”

“No,” he said drily. “Nothing is ever simple where you are concerned. You’d find a dozen different sides to examine on a triangle.”

I laughed, glad at least that he would joke with me now. My father had liked him. I should like to find a way to like him too, and perhaps, now that we were on a more equal footing, it would be possible.

We had turned and walked back inside the house. The children had gone to their beds not ten minutes before, but I heard Mary scream with terror as she sometimes did when awoken from a bad dream in the middle of the night. The scream was followed by the pounding of her bare feet on the stairs as she came running to find me in her nightshift, her thick plait of red hair flying. I caught her up in my arms and hugged her, her little arms clinging tight around my neck and her legs wrapped round my waist like a monkey. “Whatever’s the matter, sweetheart?”

“An eel,” she sobbed. “An eel in my bed.”

“In your bed? Are you sure?”

She nodded vigorously, her tawny eyelashes wet with tears.

“Let’s go up together and see, shall we?”

In the nursery I pulled back the blankets, and there it was, its slippery, glistening body dark against the white linen bedding of my daughter’s cot, like an evil black serpent.

For Mary’s sake, I made light of it, did not let her see my anger flare almost beyond control, destroying any lingering sympathy I might have had for the commoners. Damn whoever did this, I thought. Damn them all to Hell. She’s just a little girl. “It is just an eel,” I said. “It can’t hurt you.”

She hid her face, had always been squeamish in a way I had never been. “Is it . . . dead, Mama?”

It wasn’t. Quite. I reached out and took hold of its slithery, twitching body, and with a calmness I did not feel, I took it to the window and threw it out.

For once I was grateful that Mary did not ask the questions I would have asked at her age. She did not even ask how the eel could have got into her bed. Like her father, she did not dwell on things, would not dwell on who might have crept secretly into the house and up to the nursery and pushed it between her sheets. I knew better than to even think for a moment that this might be a prank of Forest’s. He doted on Mary, would never have done anything that might frighten or upset her.

“We’ll get the chambermaid to change the sheets in the morning,” I said, hugging her close. “You shall sleep with me tonight.”

WILLIAM HAD LEFT. I did not close the curtains around the bed and I kept the candle lit. I closed my eyes, but every muscle in my body remained tense, my ears alert for any sound. All I had wanted was to make our home, our little world, a better, safer place, and it seemed I had done just the opposite. And Heaven knows, there was danger and unrest enough in this county without creating more.

Everyone said the Duke of Monmouth would sail from the continent and bring war again to the West Country any day now. His father, King Charles, had died in February and Charles’s brother James had been crowned in his place, an avowed Catholic, in a country that still despised Catholicism, was still utterly opposed to a Papist on the throne. The dashing duke was Protestant, and because of that at least half the country favored him as king. Monmouth would move soon to take the crown of England by force. The rivers of this land would run red with blood again, as men I had known all my life rose up to fight for the grand old cause, for the battles my father had already fought and ultimately lost. I could do nothing at all to prevent that. But I had hoped to rid Tickenham of its lethal floods.

I sat up, pushed my hand under the pillow and reached for my notebook, knowing it was the only chance I had of finding some peace. Mary sat up too and snuggled into my side as she did when we were reading a storybook together. “Is that your book about flufflies?” my enchanting daughter lisped, with her own endearing pronunciation that I could not bear to correct, dreading the day when she called butterflies by their proper name.

I put my arm around her, pulled the blankets up around her. “It is, my little love.”

“Why do you write about them?”

“Because I like to.” But it was more than that, so much more. Because I have to, I could have said. Because I believe it is what I am meant to do. Because it is the only thing I can do. Because it is the only thing that really makes me happy. Because it stops me from thinking. Because I began to study butterflies and to write about them as a cure for longing and I am still longing, and it is still the only cure for it that I have.

I had the time and freedom now to spend on my own observations and catalogues and had amassed a collection of specimens and records of which even I was proud. With Ned Tucker’s help, I was cultivating a butterfly garden near the orchard, stocked with all the plants that seemed to attract them. But I did not write to James anymore; thought it was simpler, fairer. I had sensed his deepening affection for me and knew I could never love him that way. There was only one man I loved. Since the day I had first seen Richard, he was all I had wanted. Even if I never saw him again, it seemed likely that my last thoughts this side of the grave would be of him.

I slipped a letter from inside the back cover of my observation book. Richard had kept on writing to me, just as he kept on trying to see me. I had consigned all his letters to the fire, except for this one. In a moment of weakness I had opened it, read it, and once I had, I could never have destroyed it. It was a lovely letter.

My eyes drifted to the closing paragraph.

What I once took for poverty, I now see as the greatest riches. I think I would be content now just to be able to look at you, to talk to you, to hold your hand, to be your friend, if only you would let me. But in a way it makes no difference that you refuse to see me. Know that when you are dancing, when the fields and the rivers are lit by moonlight, when the floodwaters freeze thick enough to skate upon, I am there with you, waiting for you. I shall always be there, Nell. I shall always be waiting.

A window shattered below stairs. I sat bolt upright. I did not drop the letter, but rather my fingers tightened upon it, as if I would cling to it on a journey through the jaws of Hell.

It was silent now. It had been raining, but the rain had stopped and there was only the occasional drip from the wooden guttering. Otherwise, perfect stillness and silence. Except for the violent hammering of my own heart.

Another window smashed and Mary sprang awake. “What was that, Mama? I heard a noise.”

I clutched her tight. “Shush,” I told her, as reassuringly as I could.

“We know you are there,” a voice shouted from outside. “Show yourself.”

“Who’s that?” Mary squeaked.

A different voice: “You can’t hide from us.”

There were two of them, then. “Just village lads who’ve been drinking,” I said to my daughter. “That’s all.” I put my hand over her ear and pressed her red head against me, gathered her to me more closely, as if I could shield her from all harm with my own body.

“Come out now, if you know what’s good for you.”

I recognized that voice, recognized the spite and the malice in it. Thomas Knight. Three of them, then.

“Come out now or we’ll burn down this house.”

I leapt out of bed as if it was already in flames. “Stay right there,” I said to Mary as I threw a loose gown over my shift.

“Don’t leave me,” she squealed, her face filled with terror.

“Go and get into bed with Forest. But do not come below stairs, do you understand?”