Lady of the Butterflies (5 page)

“Surely you knew it was dead, miss?” Mistress Keene asked me patronizingly, as if I was two years old or a simpleton. “Surely you’ve lived on this moor long enough to know a dead duck when you see one and to not let it upset you?”

“Of course I knew it was dead,” I said quietly. “I wasn’t upset. I wasn’t trying to keep it warm.”

“Then what were you doing, wrapping it up and keeping it in your chamber, child?”

“Seeing if maggots would grow in it.”

My father made a noise in his throat, a mixture of a suppressed laugh and a groan. Mistress Keene gave a sharp intake of breath and her hand flew to her throat. Jack Jennings flinched away. The two of them looked at me as if, instead of a slight young girl with fair hair and blue eyes, wearing a long, plain black wool gown, they saw a freak, a grotesque hunchback, or a child with two heads. They looked at me as if the Devil himself had come to sit upon my shoulder. Tears pricked my eyes, and my belly fluttered with fear. Why did they look at me like that? I remembered what Mary Burges said about people being afraid and aggressive toward what they did not understand, and I had a sense then that I might make life very difficult for myself if I did not curb this passion I had for discovery and observation. And yet I did not want to curb it, did not think it was even possible. Nor, in truth, did I see why I should.

“I thank you, Mistress Keene. Jack,” my father said quickly, “that will be all. You may go back to your work.”

Mistress Keene gathered herself as if she was about to faint away with terror and revulsion. “What would you have me do with the bird, sir?”

My father waved his hand impatiently, then went to take it from her. “Best to leave it with me.” I was alarmed to see that his hand was shaking again, more noticeably than it had done on the moor.

He turned to me with the duck aloft as the servants scurried out of the room, casting furtive backward glances at me. By the look on my father’s face I guessed that whatever amusement he had felt when I first mentioned maggots was long gone. It was at such times that I understood how, with a powerful combination of praise and chastisement, he had won the fierce loyalty of all the soldiers who served under him in the Roundhead army. Why every man there had willingly followed him into the most bloody of battles, would have laid down their lives for him, why every man loved him and feared him in equal measure.

Above all else I wanted him to love me, to be proud of me and pleased with me.

He tossed the stinking bird on the floor and pinched the bridge of his nose. “In pity’s name, Eleanor, but what were you thinking of?”

“Spontaneous generation, sir.”

His eyes softened. He coughed into his hand, rubbed his chin. “And what do you suppose the servants will make of that?”

A tendril of my hair had come free from the braids and pins again, had drifted down over my cheek. I smoothed it away, gave a small shrug, shifted my feet. “Probably that I am a little odder than they already thought?”

“It would have been a good deal better if you had let them go on thinking that you had grown overly sentimental, had formed an attachment to a dead duck and wanted to coddle it like a poppet.”

“That’s macabre!”

“Indeed it is.” His mouth was twitching with a smile, which made mine do the same. “But not quite so macabre as keeping dead meat in your room just to see if you can breed maggots from its rotting flesh. It is all well and good to be curious,” he said. “You are a persistent little thing, and also, it appears, somewhat ingenious and I would not have you any other way. Nor would I have you conform simply in order to placate narrow minds. I blame myself for encouraging your curiosity.” He sighed. “But have a care. Folk are used to seeing you with jars of water beetles and shrimps. They doubtless think it odd but let it pass as a harmless enough activity for a child, but this tale of maggots and rotting flesh will inspire nothing but fear. Jack and Cook will add the grisly story to the pot, and who knows what will come out of it? What they will all think of you? They are still burning witches in Somersetshire,” he said, deadly serious now. “Have a care, Eleanor.”

“I will, Papa.” I took a breath. “May I have my duck back, please?”

He looked at me as if he couldn’t believe he had heard me correctly. “No, child. You may not have your duck back. Have you listened to one single word I have said?”

“I just want to see if there are any maggots yet.”

“Fortunately, there are not. Otherwise the poor little kitchen boy might never recover from the shock.”

“I’m sorry, Papa. I didn’t mean any harm.”

“I know that, little one.”

“Please don’t send me to my chamber.”

“Now, why ever would I do that? Surely you know I’d never punish you for this kind of inquisitiveness, it is different altogether from running off to the church on Christmas morning.” He held out his hand to me and I tried so hard to ignore how terribly cold it was, and how pale was his face, but my skill for forcing out unwanted thoughts completely failed me for a moment. His hand felt just as my mother’s had done a few days before she died. It felt just like my little sister’s before she started to shiver uncontrollably.

My father said I was to come with him over to the far corner of the parlor, where he kept his ever-expanding case of books behind a dusty brocade curtain. “I’ll show you something very special, arrived not more than a week ago from London,” he said. “I think you’ll find it of great interest.”

I HADN’T NOTICED the book box on top of the settle. As my father moved it in order to sit, I came to sit next to him. He lifted out a large folio and rested it on his lap, running his fingers over the embossed lettering on the glossy tooled calf binding, which read:
Robert Hooke, Micrographia.

I nestled closer to him, inhaling the comforting leathery, smoky scent of my father as he moved the book so it lay companionably between us. I rested my hand on his arm as he lifted the front cover and turned a few of the thick creamy leaves, past pages of lavish illustrations, then folded out one of the plates. It was breathtakingly strange and beautiful, even more astounding when I realized what I was looking at.

“A louse!” I exclaimed. “But Papa, it can’t be.”

We both had a sudden urge to scratch our heads, which made me giggle. Lice had always seemed mightily troublesome for something no larger than the head of a pin, but this one was bigger than my foot, and it had eyes not unlike my own, and hairs on its legs. He turned another page and there was part of the leaf of a stinging nettle, such as I had never seen a stinging nettle before, with barbs as big as claws.

“He’s a brilliant man, isn’t he?” my father commented, clearly both delighted and surprised by the intensity of my interest. “He uses a microscope, an instrument such as is used to study the heavens. But instead of looking upward it’s used to look down, at all manner of nature’s miniature marvels, and see them as if they were a hundred times their real size. It’s the latest fashionable device, so I’m told, though very expensive.”

If only I could make some such discoveries one day, see something that nobody else had ever really seen before, see it in a way it had never before been seen. Imagine seeing a dragonfly wing through a microscope, or a leaf of watercress. “Papa, could we . . . ?” I wanted a microscope so badly but I knew there was no point in asking. It was more out of reach than the stars.

“Educating a girl on books is one thing.” My father tweaked my nose. “If people found you with your big blue eyes pressed up against a microscope, dabbling in the male domain of experimentation, they’d think I’d been infecting you with the wrong ideas for sure.”

“There’s a far worse contamination to fear from that book, sir.”

Shocked, we looked up to see Mary’s husband, Reverend John Burges, framed in the doorway. A sandy-bearded, neat-featured and surprisingly hesitant and unassuming young man, given his calling. I’d never heard him speak with the gravity he had just now, even when delivering a sermon.

My father was just as bewildered. “Reverend, whatever do you mean?”

“The plague has reached the city of London. It is far worse than the usual summer outbreaks. Nearly a thousand died there last week.”

At the mention of that dreaded word, the heavy book slid from my father’s fingers and crashed to the floor. I didn’t need him or John Burges to explain the reference to contamination. The book over which we’d been poring, so newly arrived from London, could have carried the seeds of plague with it.

The reverend was wringing his hands, seemed even more anxious and uncertain than he usually did. “Poor Mary is beside herself with worry,” he said, coming toward us. I remembered then that her entire family, her mother and father and brothers and sisters, all worked in the textile trade and lived in Southwark. “I confess I don’t know what to do.”

Reverend Burges never looked sure enough of anything, not even of his own fitness to be God’s voice on earth. But that was probably at least partly because he was so awkward in my father’s presence, could never feel entirely welcome.

He and Mary had come to Tickenham four years ago, after the Act of Uniformity had come down like a brutal sword of retribution against Puritans for beheading a king, forcing my father’s closest friend, the previous Puritan minister, out of the Anglican Church and out of Tickenham. Reverend Burges’s arrival was an insult to everything my father had striven and fought for. Ordained by a bishop, rejecting the solemnly sworn covenant, Reverend Burges accepted Prayer Book rubrics, including the wearing of Popish surplices and the idolatrous kneeling to receive the sacrament. He had even brought with him a pair of silver candlesticks for the altar.

But Reverend Burges had much sympathy for my father and for all dissenters. He allied himself with the Latitudinarians, who thought the act too harsh and wanted to see it relaxed. He overlooked the heresy of our absence from his church services, was even willing to act as chaplain and lead our morning prayer meetings. Toleration was not enough for my father, though. He was convinced that Puritans belonged to the English Church, were indeed the body of it, and could not come to terms with schism. For him, being a dissenter was akin to being cast into the wilderness like the Children of Israel. It was a very uneasy situation, but one we all had no choice but to accept, since our house, our minister’s house and God’s house stood in such close proximity, in one another’s shadow, isolated together from the rest of the straggling village, on a little mound of higher ground.

I knew that my father was concerned that Reverend Burges’s willingness to quote from Puritan tracts and to stress the weekly cycle of the Lord’s day in the privacy of our parlor, whilst he could also abide by the new decrees of the Church for the benefit of his parishioners and in order to retain his living, signified a dangerous lack of conviction.

“We must trust in God to keep us all safe,” my father said now, with enough conviction for ten men.

“Amen to that,” John Burges said.

“Amen,” I whispered fervently.

“Mary’s sister says there is panic throughout the whole of London,” John Burges said. “Her letter is filled with unimaginable horror. She writes of bodies and coffins piled high in the churchyards and of death carts rumbling through the streets at night with cries to bring out the dead. They are slaughtering dogs and cats to try to stop the contagion. The whole city stinks of rotting flesh. The King has moved to Hampton Court Palace, the nobility have all fled for their country estates, followed by the merchants and lawyers and anyone else who is able. Even the physicians have abandoned the sick.” He dragged on his beard. “I don’t know what to do for the best. If they were to come here to us, do we risk the plague coming with them? I’m afraid it may already be too late. There’s talk of the Lord Mayor closing the gates to anyone who hasn’t a certificate of health.”

“Then we can be sure the forgers will be the only ones who stand to benefit,” my father said.

I waited for him to say more, since he’d long predicted a terrible calamity would befall London to punish its people for their wickedness and depravity. The plight of Mary’s relatives would not normally cause him to miss such an ideal opportunity to illustrate the mortal danger of sin. But he remained gravely silent and I knew it was because he feared the plague may already have come to our godly house in the pages of a lovely book.

He laid the book in the grate and sent for the tinder book to set it alight. A shiver ran through me too when I looked at his rugged, pale face as he suggested Reverend Burges should lead us in a short prayer to call upon God to show mercy to the people of England’s great capital.

John Burges bowed his head and as usual he talked to God not as a mighty unseen being on high, but as if he was his dearest and most trusted friend. I clasped my hands as tight as I could and squeezed my eyes shut, as if that might make my prayer stronger, all the more likely to be heard and answered. As John spoke of suffering on earth for a far greater reward in Heaven, my stomach clenched too, clenched with dread, and I prayed for those whom I loved. For Bess and for Mary and John. For myself and my father. But even as I prayed I imagined the plague wind blowing and the deadly miasma drifting inexorably westward like smoke, so noxious that no amount of sweet-scented flowers could ward it off.