Lady of the Butterflies (53 page)

“How can we help you, Mr. Piggott?” I had not quite stilled the tremor in my voice.

“Routine inspection,” he said self-righteously, stepping past me, out of the steadily falling rain and into the hall, his hands clasped behind his back. He pulled himself up straight and glanced around as if to show he meant business. “We’re on the hunt for that scoundrel Thomas Knight. He’s not shown up as yet in the prisons or on the death roll.” He pushed his face up closer to mine. “Not seen him by any chance, have you, Ma’am?”

I shook my head, my mouth dry as ash. A cold bead of sweat trickled down my back. I glanced at Richard. His jaw was clenched and a muscle in his cheek began to twitch. He had not taken his eyes off me, was watching me even more closely than was the constable.

“This would be the last place Thomas Knight would come,” I managed. “As you know, it was not so long ago that he led a mob up here and threatened to set fire to the house, while my children were asleep in their beds.”

“His sister’s still your maid though, isn’t she? Wouldn’t mind having a word with her, if she’s about?”

“She’s in the dairy. But she’ll not be able to tell you any more than I have. Her brother is not here, nor has he ever been.”

“Forgive me if I don’t take your word for it, Madam. I’ll have a look around the place, if I may.”

I stood back as they swarmed all over the house, searching every room. They threw open the doors of the court cupboard and turned over tables, pulled the tapestries off the walls and dragged drapes down from the windows. I heard their boots stamping about upstairs and sounds that indicated they were throwing up the lid of every chest, opening every garderobe, jabbing their muskets under every bed. Next they turned their attention to the new stables and the hayloft and the pigsty and the chicken shed, kicking at hay bales, upending feeding troughs.

All the time Richard watched not the constable and his men but me, as if the wanton destruction of our property was nothing compared with what I had so wantonly destroyed.

Little Mary ran to me and tried to hide herself in my skirts. “Why is the constable here, Mama?”

I stroked her hair and did not let myself think of what would happen to her if they found something now, or later, that gave me away. I did not let myself think what would happen to my children if their mother and stepfather died as traitors.

John Piggott came back to the hall, breathless and frustrated. “Your maid broke down at mention of her brother’s name. Either she is grief-stricken or guilt-stricken, but I can get no sense out of her at all. Maybe we’ll pay a call on the old Knight woman and her husband again.”

“Leave them be,” I said. “They know nothing. Have given their son up for dead.”

“Right they are.” Mr. Piggott snorted. “He won’t be able to hide forever. If he’s not dead already, he’ll be swinging by his neck soon enough.”

They left us amidst the upheaval. I stroked Mary’s head and told her it was all over now, even though I knew it was not.

“I never knew you had such a talent for lying,” Richard said darkly. “You were very convincing. Except that I can read your face like a page in a book. You did not convince me at all.”

Mary clung so close to me that she trod on the hem of my skirt and I could not move. Richard thrust his hand roughly down the front of my bodice, his nails scratching me, and retrieved my half-written letter to James. I tried to grab it off him but he turned his back on me, fluttered it high out of my reach as he read. When he had done, he screwed the letter into a tight ball, opened his fist and dropped it to the floor. “Show me where you keep him.”

Holding Mary gently away from me, I turned and walked very calmly to the fireplace. I was almost relieved to have it done with now, for the secret to be out, but my heart was hammering so hard I was sure it would burst through my rib cage. I glanced at Richard as I dug my fingers into the wainscoting and pulled back the entrance to the priest hole, standing aside to let him enter, just as Bess came running into the great hall.

Richard made no sound at all, stared down at Thomas, who lay on the soiled pallet, shielding his eyes from the sudden burst of light. As if he had seen more than enough and was suffocating, Richard staggered back out of the enclosure.

He went to the window, raised his arm and leaned against the lintel to steady himself. He balled his hand into a fist and smashed it into the rough stone above his head with a ferocity that made me flinch. “I always knew there was something between you and that sprat,” he growled, turning to me. “I’ll bet he’s enjoyed having you sneaking down to his grubby little lair to minister to him in the middle of the night. I’ll bet you’ve both enjoyed it. Well, I shall see to it that you enjoy it no more. Or rather, John Piggott will see to it. By making sure Knight swings. If you do not want to join him, I suggest you turn him out now, so that he is far enough away from here by the time he is caught.”

I did not dare to dismiss it as an idle threat. I had never seen Richard so angry. I knew that he was hurt, desperately hurt, and was not a person to manage such emotions easily. He was liable to lash out, to do something rash that he might later regret.

He was already at the door, had banged it closed behind him.

I came to my senses, leapt to my feet, hurled the door open again. “You are right,” I called after him. “There
is
something between me and Thomas.”

He halted, spun round to face me.

It was still raining, a cold, gray rain that was fast turning the ground outside the house into a sea of mud. His hair was already wet and he did not have coat or cloak. I walked toward him, oblivious of the deepening puddles, soaking the hem of my silk gown.

“There always has been something between me and Thomas,” I said, having to raise my voice above the hammering of the rain. “Only I never knew it until a few nights ago, when his father told me, in order to persuade me to give him shelter rather than turn him out as I had fully intended to do. Richard, Thomas is my half brother. My mother’s illegitimate son.”

He looked at me as if he didn’t believe me.

“It is perfectly true, sir,” Bess said from behind me.

“I beg you, Richard, let him go. You have no cause to be jealous of Thomas. He was born first, and born a boy, but I have Tickenham Court while he has nothing. Because of that he hates me, has always hated me.”

“But still you would beg me to spare his life?”

“He is my brother,” I said, giving weight to the word. “He is Bess’s brother.”

The rain fell like a shroud between us. The anger had gone from Richard’s face, and had been replaced by . . . nothing. There was an emptiness in his eyes, a deadness, as if my deception had killed something in him.

He turned from me, toward the stables and his horse.

“IT IS NOT SAFE for Thomas to stay here,” I told Bess. “Not for any of us.”

“Mr. Glanville will not betray us?”

“No,” I said, my voice faltering. “He will not. He had a brother once. He knows what it is to lose one. He will not bring about the death of yours and mine. But the constable will not give up.”

“Tom is not strong enough to ride.”

“I know he is not. You must take the cart for him to lie in. But you must leave, Bess. As soon as it is dark.”

Like smugglers with an illegal cargo, we bundled Thomas into the cart under cover of night. We laid down straw to muffle the sound of wheels on the cobbles and wrapped rags around the horses’ hooves. We used more straw and blankets to cushion the cart and make Thomas as warm and comfortable as possible.

I packed up a basket of bread and cheese, cold meat and fruit, and gave Bess all the coins I had in my pocketbook.

“Where will you go?” I asked her, as she climbed onto the seat of the cart and took up the reins.

“The same place you run to whenever you are in trouble,” she said bravely. “To Mary and John Burges in Hackney. Nobody will ever find us there, or think to look for us, even. Mary and John will help us.”

They would, even though they were Catholic and Thomas had been wounded for his hatred of them. They would help him because they were good people, who offered love and respect to every person, no matter their creed or character. “You take care, Bess,” I said with a glance at Thomas. I hoped he survived long enough for me to have at least some time in which to adjust to our new-discovered relationship.

Once the cart had trundled out of the yard, I wasted no time in dragging the soiled pallet out of the priest hole and into the stable. I rolled up my sleeves and brought a bucket of water and a cloth. I bunched my silk skirts beneath my knees on the dirty floor and I scrubbed and scrubbed at that incommodious little hole, as if I could scrub away all that had happened. It was almost daybreak when I was satisfied that all evidence of Thomas’s presence there was obliterated. Almost daybreak, and still Richard had not come back. I was sure he must have gone to the inn at Bristol, taken a room there for the night. There was only one thing to do, I decided. If he was not coming home to me, I would go to him. I would beg his forgiveness, fetch him back. It was my fault and I would put it right.

The children ran out into the yard as I mounted my horse, and Forest asked me where I was going.

“To Bristol, darling. I will not be long.”

“Are you going to see the hangings?” he asked with a hint of glee that was, I knew, prompted by his devotion to Richard, whose enemies the hanged men had been. “I heard the servants talking,” he qualified. “It is to be today.”

“I am not going to see the hangings, Forest.” I gave a jerk on my mare’s reins, then spun back. “You didn’t happen to hear where in Bristol, exactly?”

He shook his head.

I knew well before I reached the city walls that I had come the wrong way. A pall of death hung over the wide new streets. Bristol was the richest port of trade in Britain, with the exception of London, but the usual bustle and color of it were sadly diminished. People walked by with faces downcast and gloomy. The sledges drawing the heavy goods and the merchants in their fine coaches did not seem to be going about their business with the same zest. I rode up toward the Redcliffe Gate, toward the church where Richard and I were married. I had paid no attention then to the oddly truncated tower that had famously been struck by lightning over a hundred years ago and never rebuilt, but now it seemed ill-omened. As ill-omened as the crack in the tablet of commandments in the church where I’d married Edmund, or as Monmouth’s rebellion beginning during the celebrations for my second wedding.

The ghastly structure of the gallows cast its shadow over Redcliffe Hill. Six executions had taken place, only six, a small fraction of the number being put to death all across the west. But they made a grisly display, hanging from the noose, with their tongues dark and lolling, their breeches stained with the final voiding of their bowels and bladders, their faces contorted into fixed, grotesque grimaces. A punishment as horrible as any you could find in Hell. All the more terrible because I knew it could have been me swinging from that crossbeam, could still be the punishment that awaited me for what I had done.

I rode across the bridge over the Avon, saw the docks spiked with masts of the ships that had blown into port from the Caribbean and the tropics, the scent of adventure still in their sails, and a part of me wished that I could just sail away with them. I rode on toward the elegant new houses on King Street that had been built for the merchants in the tamed marsh area by the quayside. Past the Merchant Venturers’ Hall and opposite the almshouses was a row of half-timbered buildings with overhanging eaves and projecting gables. The last building in the row was the Llandoger Trow, the inn I knew Richard had frequented on the many past occasions when he had tried to see me and I had turned him away.

With its low blackened ceiling and sawdust-strewn floor, it was a rough sort of a place behind its grand façade, a dark place where it was not difficult to imagine dark deeds being done. Mr. Merrick had told me its position so close to the docks made it the haunt of slave traders and smugglers and pirates and it was easy to believe, judging by the gang of low characters sharing tankards of ale with my husband. He did not look particularly at ease amongst them, nor did he look particularly at ease with the buxom, brassy blonde who had her arm draped provocatively around his neck, but he was letting her keep it there.

I was torn between a desire to rush at her and scratch her eyes out and the need to turn away, to pretend I had not seen them together. For a moment I just watched them, unwilling and totally unable to go any closer, my mind in an agony of paralyzed confusion. She was expensively but gaudily dressed in a low-cut crimson gown, her face painted and patched. For all that, she looked like me, I realized, albeit a bigger and brasher version of me. She was not gentry, but clearly prosperous, the widow or daughter, wife even, of a merchant or a lawyer or a goldsmith. One of the new moneyed class who were gaining dominance and power in England, who understood the getting and the making of money and whose collective wealth already surpassed that of the impoverished nobility. A natural choice for a man who liked to be on the winning side, I thought bitterly. Merchants and lawyers were not ruined by bad harvests and unpaid rents. They were building new mansions instead of borrowing to repair crumbling ones.