Lady of the Butterflies (57 page)

“Oh, I expect I shall find something.”

When he had kissed me good-bye, I realized that what I wanted to do was some hunting of my own. Butterfly hunting.

With mounting excitement, I went to the oak chest in the corner of our bedchamber and dug deep down, through layers of silk gowns and velvet capes, to the very bottom, to my books and boxes of specimens. I carefully took them out and laid them on the bed, going back for my observation book and all the letters from James I had kept.

I looked back over my notes and studied each butterfly, reacquainting myself with long-lost and dearly beloved friends. I reread the book James had made for me and every one of his letters, the ink faded now to a pale ocher. I devoured it all, the way I used to devour my first meal after a long fast. Then I dusted down my butterfly equipment, picked up my silk skirts and ran down onto the moor.

Dickon had carried his swan to the river and was standing at a bend, upstream from John Hort and the other fishermen and eelers, trying without success to encourage the great white bird to go for a swim. He had his stockings off and was ankle deep in the sparkling water, but the bird was paddling about in the reedy shallows, its webbed feet firmly rooted to the muddy riverbed.

“Pitiful.” I grinned. “Even I could do better.”

“You can swim, Mama?” Dickon exclaimed with surprise.

“Your father showed me how to do it a long time ago. I think, by now, that I am probably an even better swimmer than he is, but for Heaven’s sake, don’t ever tell him I said that.”

Dickon regarded the clap net and pins and pine collecting box with cautious interest. “You don’t swim with those?”

“No.” I laughed, holding out my hand to him. “Come with me and you’ll see what these are for.”

He left his swan to splash about and scrambled out of the river, under the scornful stare of one of the fishermen. I realized with a shock that it was Thomas Knight. So he had turned to fishing now. My half brother. The years had not been kind to him at all and his bitterness showed in a harshening of the lines of his long face, which looked wolfish. It was almost as if his lips and his eyes had narrowed permanently for lack of joy in his life. His hair was cropped, thinning and receding. He was leaner than ever, as if resentment was eating away at his insides. He carried his damaged arm crookedly, dragging on his shoulder so that he stood slightly stooped and twisted, like a hunchback.

“Good day to you, Thomas,” I called across to him. “Welcome back.”

He stared at me as if I was not even worthy of acknowledgment. I walked away and Dickon ambled after me. We had gone less than a yard when a little Blue Wing obligingly fluttered past our noses, and with a leap and a reflex swipe of the net, I had it instantly pinioned, my fingers pressing on its thorax.

Dickon was aghast. “Why do you have to kill them?”

“To catalogue them and map the different variations and species.”

“But it is God’s commandment that we must not kill.”

“We kill cattle and geese, Dickon. God would not want us to starve.”

“We do not eat butterflies,” he pointed out.

“But we do need to learn about them.”

He did not argue, and I could see him mulling on that as we carried on.

I threw my arm to stop him in his tracks when I sighted an unusually wide-banded Marsh Fritillary, feeding on the pale domed flower of a devil’s-bit scabious. I put my fingers to my lips to signal that he keep quiet and stealthily started to creep toward it. I was about to whip out my net again, but this time it was Dickon who held me back, with a restraining hand on my arm. “Don’t, Mama, please.”

He sat on his heels and watched as the little butterfly eagerly unwound its proboscis into the flower and waved its distinctive orange-tipped antennae as it outspread its red-brown and yellow wings.

“See?” he whispered. “It is far more interesting alive than dead.”

I let it go on feeding then flit away, just for the pleasure of seeing my son’s sweet, victorious smile.

I stroked his gold hair. “I’ve never shown you my collection, have I? Butterflies that are set well are just as beautiful as those basking in the sunshine. With their wings outspread, they look as if they could fly away at any moment. You’ll see what I mean. And you’ll see that there is a purpose to killing them, I promise.”

But Dickon was not interested in the dead butterflies, was in fact quite perturbed by them. What interested him instead was why there was one book amongst the butterfly paraphernalia which seemed to have no connection with it whatsoever, though it had perhaps more importance to it than any other. The King James Bible. I told Dickon what his grandfather had told me, so long ago now, about butterflies being a token, a promise, and in the telling of that story I felt the stirring of excitement that I had experienced when first I heard it. A wellspring of hope.

When Dickon had gone to bed, I sat down beside the Bible, wary almost to touch it, to open its pages after so many years. Eventually I put the candle on the stand and reached out my hand, lifted the great book into my lap. I felt the weight of it, ran my fingers over the worn leather and tooled gold lettering. I turned it on its side and let it fall open where it would. The Gospel of John, chapter eight, verse twelve. The page where I had pressed the first golden butterfly. The light of the candle caught a very faint indentation in the page, the finest sparkling of bright dust.

I let my eyes rest on the words, words that had once been as familiar to me as my own name but which I had let fall silent.

I read them now out loud.

“Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, ‘I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness but have the light of life.’”

I felt a strange peace descend on me, such as I had not felt for a very long time. I heard my father’s voice, so clear he could almost have been sitting right beside me.
The only light you need is the light of the Lord.

I went to Dickon’s chamber. Cadbury, the blind hound which he had found wandering, abandoned on Cadbury Camp, was curled up at the foot of the bed and she gave a low growl as she heard me enter. I crouched down next to her, let her sniff my hand and fondled her ears until her tail started to thump against the floor. “Well done, girl. You guard him well.”

I lowered myself onto the edge of the bed, reached over and stroked Dickon’s golden cheek. “You shall be my example,” I whispered to him. “I shall study living butterflies from now on, do you hear me, my little darling? I am going to rear them, instead of killing them.”

I was going to witness the transformation, from worm, to coffin, to butterfly. From birth, to death, to resurrection.

I WOKE as I had woken as a child, eager and full of plans for the day. At sunrise I slid out of Richard’s arms and out of bed, pulled on a simple morning gown, unfastened my hair from its plait and tied it in a knot at the back of my head. I went down to the kitchen for a widemouthed glass jar and was out on the moor before even the eelers were about to check their wicker traps. Only the marsh birds were awake, twittering and singing away as if they shared my anticipation, a perfect accompaniment to a glorious morning, heralding what would be another hot day. For now, it was neither too hot nor too cool, though the ground was still damp with dew, as I discovered when I got down on my hands and knees and started crawling around in the undergrowth. I paid no heed to the dark wet patches that stained my skirt, nor to the nettles which stung and scratched my hands nor the twigs that caught in my hair. I carried on regardless, even when Thomas Knight, John Hort and the fishermen did come to take up their positions, even when I felt them watching me censoriously. What did it matter if they disapproved? What could they do?

The first worm I found had a brownish-olive body, covered with long white hairs. Hiding under the scabious, I discovered two tiny pale yellow larvae. My search of the nettles revealed a larger worm, greenish ocher in color, with a black head. Satisfied for now, I stood and smoothed my hand over my head and tucked a stray strand of hair behind my ears, smiling to see the scandalized stares of the fishermen, with their early morning catch still twitching on the riverbank beside them. “I bid you good morning, gentlemen,” I said, as if greeting the Earl of Bristol in the parlor, but bending instead to pluck another few nettle leaves to add to my supply. I giggled to myself at the picture I made. Chin held high, swishing serenely through the grass in my damp-stained gown, with my jar of wriggling worms held carefully in both hands like a goblet of finest wine.

I went directly to the dovecote, a lime-coated corner which I had decided to appropriate for my butterfly birthing room. It was sheltered and warm and, with the rows of separate openings for the birds, always well ventilated.

Over the course of the next day and night, I tended my quadruplet worms as devotedly as I had tended my four babies. It was a similar toil and done with similar willingness. I brought them fresh leaves, cleaned out their droppings, fretted over whether they were too cold or too warm, were sleeping too much or not enough, were having enough to eat. I kept a record of it all, but I had to record that, one by one, all the worms died.

I threw them out and swilled the jar clean in the horse trough. A good proportion must perish in the wild. I just needed a greater quantity to guarantee success.

Ellen and Dickon were keen to help me, and Dickon also recruited Annie Sherburne, one of the tenant farmers’ daughters, who sometimes went to feed the ducks with him. She was a tall girl with flyaway soft brown hair and the doleful eyes of a puppy. She wore a woolen dress that was thin with age and several inches too short, but which still hung off her skinny frame.

Annie proved herself a diligent little helper, young and naive enough in the ways of the world not to be too perturbed when I took her out into the fields and beat at bushes with a long stick, when I gave her a linen sheet and instructed her and Dickon to hold it spread out beneath the bushes to collect the worms dislodged from the branches by my thrashing.

“Will you sell them at market?” she asked, as I crouched down to scoop a score of them into ajar.

I managed to keep my face straight at this natural question from a farmer’s girl, for whom every crop had a market value. Why would caterpillars be any different from apples or eggs or pike, gathered in to be sold for profit? “No, Annie,” I told her kindly. “Nobody would want them.”

“Why d’you want ’em, then?”

I stood up, the jar and its squirming contents in my hand. “To me they are valuable because of what I can learn from them.”

“How valuable, exactly?” She leaned on the beating stick, her little face very serious. “I told my brother Tim what I do for you, and he has been collecting worms too,” she explained. “How much would you give him for ’em?”

“Well now, how about twopence a dozen?” I suggested. “Would he accept that as a fair price, do you think?”

She nodded vigorously.

“Good. You tell him to bring me however many he can find.”

“We need every penny we can get,” Annie said, “with the bad harvests we’ve had these past two years and bread so costly. Ma says we’ll soon have to choose whether to eat or have a roof over our heads, especially with two extra mouths to feed now.” She clamped her little hand over her own mouth as if to push back the words.

“What extra mouths, Annie?”

She shook her head, much afraid.

“You can tell me. I promise I shall not be angry.”

“My cousin and her baby,” she murmured. “She was thrown out of her parish when they found out she was with child. I know it is forbidden, but she had nowhere to go so we took her in.”

“I should hope you did. And did she have a little boy or a girl?”

“Boy.” She smiled. “He is called Harry.”

“It must be very cramped in your cottage,” I said. “With all your sisters and brothers and grandmother.”

“There’s ten of us now, Ma’am. It’ll be a squeeze come winter, when it floods downstairs and we all have to live in the one room up top.”

“Tell your mother not to worry about the rent,” I said. “She can pay half, or whatever she can afford. And tell your cousin that she can have the cottage along the lane from yours, for a penny. It has been empty for I don’t know how long.”

Annie’s eyes were round with surprise and wonder. “They’ll never believe me.” She looked like she didn’t believe her luck either.

“And how would you like to be my apprentice, Annie?”

“Oh, but my father can’t pay you for an apprenticeship.”

“Why should he pay, when it is you who is doing me the service? No, it is I who will pay you, Annie. A good wage. Here.” I put my hand in my pocket, took out a coin for her. I had spent too long squandering money on things that I was now coming to realize mattered not at all. “You tell your brother to bring those worms. I might even give him sixpence if they are good ones.”

RICHARD HAD RIDDEN OUT to the village, collecting rents with the steward, and as usual they had ended up in the inn, but when he waylaid me on my way back from the pantry, where I had gone for a fresh collecting jar, I saw that it had not put him in a very good humor. He caught me in his arms in a gentle enough embrace that nevertheless held me fast. “What are you doing, Nell?” he asked probingly.