Lady of the Butterflies (52 page)

He released me, sat with me as I gulped deep breaths, waiting until I looked to be recovered before he pressed me again. “What is it that you need to tell me, Nell?”

I rested my hand on my belly. “Nothing,” I said. “It was nothing.” I could not even tell him that I thought I might be carrying his child.

“I heard at the inn last night that Monmouth has been executed at Tower Hill,” he said quietly. “It is over now. Thank God, it is all over.”

But I knew, by the way he hurled back the covers, that he had seen, rightly, that I could not share his relief, not at all, and that he believed, wrongly, that it was because I wished the outcome had been different.

I ASSUMED THAT Richard had gone for a swim. It was not the first time that he had been driven out of the warmth of our bed to the coldness of the sea, as if by unnamed demons he could only seem to banish with an early morning dunking in the waves. I had tried not to dwell on what it was that he seemed to need to wash away after he had lain with me, what he needed to cool, to exorcise, but this time I knew all too well, and this time it did not seem to have worked. Previously he had always returned before I was even dressed, but now it was mid-morning and still he was not back.

I took Mary to fly her kite on the moor, anything to be out of that house, where my eyes constantly drifted to the panel by the fireplace in the great hall.

“Higher,” Mary kept begging. “Higher.” And I reeled the kite out further, shielding my eyes to watch it soar into the infinite blue as still it tugged and tugged against its tether to be free. Then the wind suddenly dropped and it plummeted to the ground, landed with a crash that I felt in my very bones.

Mary ran with it and threw it into the sky, but it was not quite windy enough to get it properly airborne again. I suggested to the children that we ride out to Ladye Bay, but I did not find Richard there as once I had done. I sat on the cliff top and watched Mary and Forest down on the beach, skimming flat pebbles across the waves. Gulls screamed, the sound harsh and desolate, and I felt a first prickle of fear. What if, in his anger, Richard had swum out too far, had not been as alert as he should have been to the currents and the undertow? I tried not to think of how he could have been dragged out to sea, his body hurled against the rocks.

I tried not to think of the treason trials that were already under way, but now that I myself was amongst the guilty, all that I had read in the gazettes over the past weeks seemed suddenly very vivid.

The trials had begun in earnest at Dorchester, where three hundred and forty were brought to court accused of rebellion. They were pipe makers and yeomen, tailors and butchers and merchants, ordinary men who’d had no real craving for another revolution. To serve as the most awful warning to all would-be rebels, many of the condemned were to be taken down from the gallows before they were quite dead, to have their entrails drawn out of them and their bodies butchered. And so that none would miss out on the spectacle, these most gruesome of executions were taking place at crossroads and marketplaces and village greens all across the West Country. Heads and limbs were being boiled in salt and tarred for preservation and public display. The streets of Somersetshire were running with blood again, and it seemed to me that even here the very air reeked of decomposing corpses.

The danger of discovery seemed greater now that the Assizes had come closer, to Wells. Of the five hundred and forty arraigned, five hundred and eighteen were accused of levying war against the King. The fortunate ones were sentenced to transportation to the plantations of Barbados and Jamaica. A hundred were to be hanged, as widely as possible, in Wells and in Bath. And at Bristol.

My eye was caught by a tawny and black butterfly, and my mind latched on to it, my time-honored salvation from sorrow and distress. The wing patterns were subtly but crucially different from those on the Marsh Fritillaries that frequented the moor and a Straw May Fritillary that James had once drawn for me. They were redder. This one was more orange and had unusual white-and-black-spotted tips to the forewings. There was another, just the same, just as different from all the Fritillaries I had seen before, on the wing or even on paper. I swiped at it almost angrily and felled it, stowed it away in the pocket I wore fastened round my waist, called down to the children that we were going home.

I was sitting on the window seat, watching the mist curling off the river, when Richard finally stumbled in, none too steady on his feet.

“Where have you been?” I asked him.

“Bristol,” he offered too readily, his voice slightly slurred. He unbuckled his sword, threw it down with a clatter on the table. “The talk there is all of the treason trials. People are calling them the Bloody Assizes.”

“Please, Richard. Not now.”

He came to stand over me. “Where are they, Nell?” he said very low.

“Who?”

“You know damn well who. Ned Tucker and Thomas Knight. Do you take me for a fool? That is what you almost told me this morning, isn’t it? You know where they are, don’t you?”

“No.” The lie had come to my lips of its own volition.

He said no more, nor did he move. He seemed to be waiting for me to reconsider, for me to say something else. When I did not, he flung the latest copy of the gazette at me, called for Bess to bring him a bath in front of the chamber fire.

My eyes strayed to the print. Tentatively, I reached out my hand and picked up the newssheet. What I read made me tremble so much I had to rest it out on my lap to finish it.

Chief Justice Jeffreys and his judges are determined to show no mercy to the harborers of fugitives. Lady Alice Lisle, widow of a man who had sat on the High Court of Justice, was accused of sheltering an escaped rebel, a dissenting minister, who had not even been tried himself. At any sign of sympathy Judge Jeffreys swore and cursed in a language no well-bred man would use at a cockfight, and he decreed that Widow Lisle should receive the only sentence possible for a woman condemned for high treason, that she was to be burned alive. Ladies of high rank tried to intercede and a plea for mercy was made by no less than the Duke of Clarendon, the King’s own brother. On account of the widow’s age, the sentence was commuted from burning to beheading and Lady Lisle was put to death on the scaffold in the marketplace at Winchester. She suffered her fate with serenity and courage.

After a while, I don’t know how long, I made myself go up to Richard. He had undressed and climbed into the steaming, scented water. He was resting against the linen-draped back of the tub, arms extended along the sides, his eyes shut, dark lashes casting little shadows over his cheeks in the firelight. His black curls framed his pale face, lovely as a seraph’s. I knelt at the side of the tub, leaned over and kissed his closed lids, felt the lashes brush my lips.

He opened his eyes languorously, looked at me questioningly, sadly, and I was so near to confiding in him, so longed to confide in him. And the reason I did not quite dare was not that I did not love him enough, but that I loved him too much and the thought of losing him, of having him be angry with me and disappointed in me, was utterly intolerable.

In silence I ladled water over his head, soaped his back for him. I rubbed the tension from his shoulders with my fingers. I dried his hair with fresh linen. I acted the part of a dutiful and devoted wife, when I had so betrayed my husband that I had put both our lives in jeopardy.

LIKE THE CONSPIRATOR I was, I waited for darkness, waited until Richard was safely sleeping, and then I slid from the warmth of his arms and of our bed, creeping down the drafty stone stairwell to mix up an ointment of egg yolk, oil of roses and turpentine. I pulled back the oak panel, ducked through into the cramped little cell and tried not to gag at the smell that had tainted the confined air.

Bess was sitting on the little stool beside her brother, my brother.

“How is he?”

“Awake, at least. He has taken a little bread and some cheese.”

Thomas’s narrow eyes flared feral and dark in the gloom, like a wounded, cornered animal. My mother’s son. I did not think I should ever be able to think of him in those terms.

“Hello, Thomas.” I knelt down beside him, carefully lifted his shirt to examine him.

His skin glistened with sweat.

“He has a fever,” Bess said.

“It is poison from the wound.”

“Shouldn’t he be bled?”

I shook my head. “From the look of him, he has already lost enough blood.”

I started to remove the bandages, but he grabbed hold of my wrist with startling strength.

I looked at him. “I’m sorry if I hurt you.”

“Why are you helping me?” He looked at me with the black eyes of my son: Forest’s eyes, proud and antagonistic and hungry. I knew now it was no coincidence that they looked so alike. This man was my son’s uncle.

“I am helping you for Bess’s sake. And because of what your father told me,” I said matter-of-factly. “But don’t worry.” I smiled wryly. “I’ll not expect you to suddenly start showering me with brotherly affection.” I twisted my arm free and carried on with my task. “Now, I have to change your bandages, and I would advise you to hold still or it will hurt even more.”

FOR THE FIRST TIME in years I had an urge to write to James Petiver. Though he was the very last person to boast of his abilities, I knew he was as skilled as any surgeon and as many a physician. I craved his advice and reassurance, needed to know that I was treating Thomas’s wound properly, doing all I could possibly do to speed his recovery and hasten the day when he was fit enough to leave Tickenham for a safer refuge.

I was at my writing table, composing the letter. There was no way of knowing if it might be intercepted and I could not risk implicating James in any way, so I was searching for a way to ask him indirectly about the treatment of deep wounds when Richard surprised me. “Who is James?” he asked coldly, catching the salutation.

Guiltily, I whipped my arm across the letter to shield its contents from him, for all the world as if it had been a secret love letter.

“Who is he, Nell?”

I must have seemed to be behaving so oddly these past days that I did not blame him at all for being suspicious. “James is a butterfly collector,” I said. “I have corresponded with him for years. About butterflies,” I added unnecessarily.

“The constable is here,” he said darkly. “Along with two lackeys armed with muskets.”

I felt as if I had been wounded, so mortally that the blood was draining very quickly from my head and from my legs. At a loss as to what else to do with it, I folded the letter very small and pushed it down the tight-boned bodice of my dress. Then I walked to the door and greeted the constable, trying to appear as if I had nothing to hide, nothing at all to fear.

I knew John Piggott, a stocky, florid, self-important little man who strode about the village sticking his purple-veined nose where it was not wanted. He was clearly enjoying the even more elevated position of power he had with two armed men to accompany him.