Lady of the Butterflies (44 page)

He lifted my shift off over my head and I helped him with his shirt. I undid the laces of his breeches and slid my hand inside, and as I caressed him there, his whole body gave a spasm that filled me with a sense of power, of fulfillment. It was as if my body had been made for this and only this, had been shaped and created for the giving and receiving of this pleasure, had been made to love him and for him to love.

He unfastened my plait so that my hair spilled all over him like a golden waterfall, and he let it run through his fingers. The only light in the chamber came from the hearth, and our bodies were bathed in a dim, red-gold glow. I sat back for a moment to look at him, naked on the high-canopied bed. I ran my fingers over the taut muscles of his belly and his erect penis, made him moan soft and low in the back of his throat. He reached out with both of his hands to stroke my hips, my buttocks, the insides of my thighs, the triangle of pale hair.

I slid out from his grasp, bent to scatter hungry kisses across his chest, biting, licking, brushing my lips against the soft little hairs that formed a denser line that led down from his navel to his groin. I kissed and licked and sucked at his nipples as if I was a kitten. I moved down that line of dark hair and kissed his hard, flat belly, and the hardness of his sex. He grasped my head in both of his hands and gave an agonized groan, pulled me closer. I could feel his heart beating so fast against mine. Then he rolled me over as a wave will roll a pebble on the shore, so he was above me once more, lying between my legs, straining against me but holding back, so that I almost cried out for him to come inside me.

But all at once he froze. He hurled himself away from me and off the bed, dragging a rug around him to cover himself. He clutched the carved bedpost and stared down at me, lying on my back, panting for breath, naked save for a pale, gossamer veil of hair. But I knew it was not me he saw anymore. There was a haunted expression in his eyes, a look almost of horror, and I remembered how he had clutched that same bedpost for support as he had stared down at Edmund’s lifeless body.

It was so very long ago. I had spent a thousand lonely nights in this bed since then. But for the first time it occurred to me that it could be a curse rather than a blessing to be so tied to a place, to be expected to live out an entire life in one house, to be born, to be bedded and to die in the same damned great ancestral bed. It shocked me to see him seemingly so troubled now, for having loved his friend’s wife, when it did not seem to have affected him so much when Edmund was still living. I was a wife no longer but a widow now. I had spent too many nights alone.

I scrambled from the bed, quickly gathered up a pile of pillows and rugs, took them over to the fireplace. I felt him watching me as I deposited the bedding by the hearth, quickly arranged it into a little nest. I stood beside it in the warm orange glow of the flickering flames and I held out my hand to him, but still he did not move. The shadows had gone from his eyes, were replaced by something else entirely.

“God, Nell, you are so beautiful.”

“Come to me, then,” I said softly.

He shook his head, almost imperceptibly. “I cannot,” he said. “I need . . . I need . . .”

“What do you need, love?”

“More than this. Don’t you understand? I need more than a romp with you every five years. I need to know that you are mine forever. All mine. Only mine.”

I waited for him to say it, to ask me. He did not. But he did come to me. “Hold me,” he said. “I need you to hold me.”

I lay down on the rugs and he lay beside me and I held him and stroked his hair until he went to sleep, his arms wound tight around me and his beloved dark, curly head resting between my breasts.

IN THE MORNING I awoke stiff and cold and alone on the floor by a fire that was no more than a few embers.

I dressed myself and, not even pausing to fasten back my tumbled hair or put on stockings, ran downstairs. Bess was going about her daily duties as if nothing had happened. I had no time for her, for any of them. All I cared about was one person. His was the only face I wanted to see. But he was not there.

I ran out into the yard to see if his horse was in the barn, but it too had gone.

“He left about twenty minutes ago, Ma’am. You’ll probably catch him if you ride hard.” Ned carried on forking fresh straw in the stable, ashamed to look me in the face, looking instead at my bare ankles poking out from beneath my long skirts, which I was still holding up from running.

Ned was a good man. I couldn’t believe he’d really meant any harm last night. He was just concerned for the future, like the rest of them. All he wanted to do was care for Bess and raise their son and have enough food to feed them all. He’d been saving for years for enough to pay for a tenancy and thought I was threatening that future. He was doing his best to make amends.

“Which way did he go, Ned, do you know?”

“Clevedon. Ladye Bay.”

Without waiting to be asked, he led my mare from the stable, but before he’d exchanged the halter for a bridle and saddled her, I led her to the mounting block, hitched up my skirts and grabbed a handful of her mane, mounted her bareback and astride like a boy. I touched my heels to her flanks and urged her into a gallop, my hair flying out behind me. I let the mare have her head, as she charged full pelt toward the rutted trackway over the ridge that led all the way from Tickenham to the coast, a distance of some four miles or so. It was a mild morning that carried a promise of summer on the faint sea breeze. It was a lovely walk on a fine day, and a short ride, but it wasn’t short enough for me then, when all that mattered to me was getting there fast enough to find Richard.

Ladye Bay was a rocky cove, very secluded and cut deep into craggy cliffs, with a shingle beach that was scattered with boulders. I’d spent hours there, with my father, alone, and then with my own children, scrambling over the rocks and upturning stones, hunting for sea anemones and ferns. I didn’t take Richard for a geologist or a botanist, I just hoped little Ladye Bay had enough to occupy him for as long as it took for me to get there.

I smelled the sea, and then my heart danced when I saw his horse at the top of the cliffs, tethered to a rock and contentedly nibbling grass. I left my mare there too and clambered down the steep winding path that led to the shore, slipping and sliding on the stones, sending them tumbling before me in my haste.

At high tide the waves crashed against the rocks with an explosion of white froth and foam, but the tide was low now and the sea was as calm as the water that lay over the moor in winter.

The small, secluded beach was deserted. I was about to turn back, assuming that for some strange reason he must have dismounted and carried on along the coastal path on foot. Then I saw something, far out in the middle of the bay, just above the surface of the gray ocean, sleek and secretive as an otter. But it was no otter, it was the head of a man, a swimmer, heading out toward the headland and the wide, open sea.

I stood with the waves lapping at my slippers and the hem of my gown, my hair whipped by the sea breeze, and I watched him grow smaller. I was gripped with fear, could barely blink my eyes lest I open them again and didn’t see him anymore, and yet a part of me was thrilled and awed to see a man so at one with the ocean, that wildest and most untamed aspect of the whole of creation, exerting such power over lowland dwellers like me.

He had turned round and begun swimming back toward the shore with surprising speed.

When he was about ten feet away from me, he stopped swimming and stood up, waist deep, with water streaming off his shoulders, his naked chest and his black hair. I smiled to myself with a sudden certainty that he had intended it to happen just this way. He knew I would come to look for him, and had gone swimming to impress me, to demonstrate his prowess for my appreciation. He was aware, undoubtedly, of how extraordinarily beautiful he looked, striding through the breaking waves in his wet, skintight breeches. He walked toward me out of the water, like the most vivid early dreams I’d had of him, waking dreams that I’d had before I’d ever met him. He came to stand in front of me, his bare feet shining wet in the sand, grains of it stuck to his toes. The fine covering of dark hairs on his chest glistened with droplets of seawater.

“Will you teach me how to swim?”

He ran his fingers through his hair to shake some of the moisture from it. “You’d faint from the cold.”

I turned my face up to his, which was framed by wet black curls, his long eyelashes spiked with saltwater. “Remember how quickly I learned to skate? I surprised you then, did I not?”

He smiled, touched my hair. “Skating. Dancing. Swimming. Is it my role to bring excitement and danger into your quiet little life?”

“It is certainly quieter when you are not here. Safer too. But I never did want a quiet life. Or a safe one.”

“Didn’t you?”

I gave a small shake of my head. “No. I wanted my life to be like . . .” I cast about for a way to describe what I was trying to say. “A firework. I wanted to live in an explosion of color and light.”

He smiled. “And why are you so eager to swim?”

“I want to know what it’s like. How it is done.” I had such a desire just to touch him again, to bend my head to his chest and lick the droplets of salt water from his skin, to feel the tautness of the muscles in his arms, muscles that had the strength to propel him through waves. “I’ve lived all my life in a world of sky and water. I’d like to know what it is like to fly like a bird or a butterfly, but since that’s impossible, the next best thing is to learn to swim like a fish.”

“Did no one ever tell you it was dangerous to be too inquiring, little Pandora?”

“They did, many times. But I chose not to listen.”

He smiled. “You’d make a better bird than fish, I think. You are most definitely of air and angels.”

I recognized the line from John Donne. “I did not know you were a poet.”

“There is so much you do not know about me, Nell. Though you must surely know that for just one of your impish smiles, I’d do anything you asked of me.” He made a slow scan of the sea, as if considering how it was best done. The waves made a hushing sound, sucked at my feet, impatient to drag me in.

“Is it really so cold?”

“No woman I’ve ever met would last more than one minute in it.”

“One minute, you say?”

He grinned, held up a finger. “Aye, one minute.”

It was all the encouragement I needed. In an instant I was out of my dress, laughing and running headlong into the waves in my cambric chemise. The first shock of the water snatched my breath away, made every muscle in my body go rigid, made me pull myself up straight and suck in my belly. I held my arms out of the water, bent like wings, and plunged on in until I was up to my waist, bracing myself as each wave slammed into my body, almost knocking me over. I let one pass and then carried on, waited for the next onslaught, pushed through it. Already, I felt a little less cold. The salt water was soft as silk against my legs.

“That’s far enough,” called Richard, raising his voice above the tumult of the pounding breakers, striding through them to stand in front of me. “Wherever are you going? I did not think we were walking to Wales.”

“So what do I do?”

He cleared his throat, as if he was unsure how to begin, held his arms out in front of him. “Push out, then round and back,” he said as he demonstrated. “Kick with your legs at the same time.”

“Like a frog.”

“Yes, I suppose. Like a frog.”

I tried to copy him. Obviously failed.

“No. Not like that, like this.”

He took a tight hold of both my wrists and drew my arms toward him, then pushed them out firmly to the side in an arc, more gently folded them back to the center again, in an attitude almost of prayer. I might no longer have time for God but old habits are not so easy to abandon and I whispered a silent prayer or two right then. Don’t let me make a fool of myself in front of him. Do not let me drown, or be washed out to sea either.

“Let’s try,” he said. “Shall we?”

I stretched out on the surface of the sea, my arms spread wide. I felt his hands go underneath me, palms upward, and lifted my feet off the seabed, felt the pressure and warmth of his fingers against my belly and my chest, holding me up so that I was floating.

I tried to do as he’d shown me.

“Wider and slower,” he said. “Keep your fingers together. Now, kick. Hard as you can.”

I tried to keep my body horizontal in the water and made a sudden lurch forward, carried in part by a wave. He took one hand away, so he was just supporting me under my belly. Then he let go completely and instantly my head sank beneath the water, my knees scraped the rocky seabed, and my mouth filled with salt water. The undertow of the wave was dragging at me. I breathed in and choked, scrambled for a footing, came up spluttering.

“You let go of me too soon,” I gasped, wiping the hair from my face.

“It takes practice.” He clearly found it all quite entertaining. “Are you all right?”