Lady of the Butterflies (6 page)

“How does slaughtering dogs and cats stop the plague spreading?” I asked when the prayer was done.

John Burges shook his head in despair. “It is believed the animals are the plague carriers.”

“How do they carry it?”

“This is no time for questions, Eleanor,” my father admonished gently.

I kept my mouth shut, but it seemed to me that it was very much the time. I thought of the giant flea in the beautiful book that must now be burned and it seemed that we knew so little still about nature and the world we lived in, so little about disease. Except, as my father constantly warned, that death has a thousand ways to guide us to the grave.

NEXT MORNING MY FATHER was late for prayers. John and Mary Burges arrived before first light as usual and I joined the rest of the household who’d fallen to their knees on the hard stone floor in the great hall in readiness for the candlelit routine with which we all began each day. It was unknown for my father not to be the first there and cold fear gripped my heart. I tried to hide it, as I knew my father would expect me to hide it, but I knew by the way that Bess looked at me that I had failed.

Please God, I prayed silently, do not let there be plague in this house, do not let my father be ill. Don’t let him have survived the Royalist muskets and cannons and bayonets to be struck down now. Don’t let him die. Oh, I know he must, one day. But do not let it be for a very long time. You already have Mama and Margaret. Please let me keep my papa for a little while longer.

I told myself how my father was robust and straight as a pikestaff from his regular exercise on horseback. He was much stronger than my mother and my sister. Wasn’t he?

There was much tittering while we all waited. Fear was in the air and would ignite like kindling at the slightest spark. Even those who couldn’t read the newssheets had heard of how disease was laying waste to London, had decimated whole streets, whole districts, claiming thousands. Everyone was afraid that it might spread west. Bess told me that her mother had made her wear three spiders in her shoes for protection. Everyone was ill at ease.

It made little difference when Papa sent the chambermaid down with word that he was suffering from a chill and had decided to remain in bed. I knew it would take more than a chill to keep him from prayers. I knew that, in any case, chills and fevers were cause for greatest concern, that the first sign of one could come in the morning and could herald death by night. “I’ll see if he needs anything,” I said, rising to my feet on legs as unsteady as my voice.

“I’ll go, Eleanor,” John Burges said, swiftly. “He’ll want a blessing.”

More waiting. People were standing now, rubbing their sore, cramped knees. I did not want them to act as if my father might not be coming to join us any minute, that the day would not go on as normal. And then at last I heard John Burges come back down the stairs from the solar. “How is he, sir?” I asked.

“I am no surgeon, Eleanor,” he said carefully. “But Ned will fetch one.”

“It’s not . . . ?”

“I doubt it very much but we will know soon enough, child. We will know soon enough.”

“Is he shivering?” I persisted quietly. “Does he have a headache? Has he vomited?”

A single nod.

Mary Burges instantly enfolded me into her arms, pressed my head against her chest. She must have seen my terror, everyone must have seen it. But they would not have known its cause. I didn’t either, not for sure. I didn’t know which I feared the most: the plague, that most dreaded disease, or ague, which had already killed the rest of my family.

Shivering, aching muscles, nausea. The same symptoms for both diseases.

Plague.

Ague.

They both sounded the same to me.

They both sounded like death.

I WASN’T ALLOWED NEAR my father until Dr. Duckett had made his diagnosis.

I should have been relieved to see the Tickenham surgeon and yet I wasn’t, not at all. He was a tall, thin man, not unlike a heron in his gaunt, gray watchfulness, and I could not help but shiver at the mere sight of him. In my mind his presence on our land, in our lives, was so closely connected to sickness and loss that I could only view him as a prophet of doom. I so wanted to put my trust in him, to believe he had the power to heal the sick, but so far, in my experience, he had always failed. Even with all the hope in Heaven, I could not summon any confidence in him at all.

We didn’t have to wait long for him to deliver his verdict. Soon, too soon, we heard his ponderous footsteps descending the stone stairs to the great hall, where Mary was waiting with me, her arm around me as I clutched the worn poppet doll I had discarded as a babyish plaything years ago but had resurrected, finding I had a sudden need of it again.

Dr. Duckett spoke. “I am pleased to be able to tell you that there are no signs of swellings under the arm or in the groin, no marks upon the skin. Which means . . .”

“He doesn’t have the plague.”

Dr. Duckett looked both very startled and intensely annoyed at my interruption. “That is my considered opinion,” he admitted tersely.

“So it is ague that sickens him.” My voice was a cracked whisper.

His look of grudging surprise widened, so I knew my deduction was correct. “I believe so,” he said through pursed lips.

I was small for my age, had a small child’s wide eyes, and I was wearing a little lace cap and clutching a poppet, so I could not blame him for taking me for several years younger than I was, but did he not remember that I had been here before? Twice? Did he think me a fool not to remember the symptoms that had preceded the deaths of Margaret and our mother as if they were yesterday?

“I have made a thorough examination of Major Goodricke’s urine,” he said. “It is of good color and taste, but his body is filled with noxious matter which must be released. I have lanced his leg and the cut must be kept open with a seton. If that doesn’t work, I will try a cantharide and pierce the blisters to let more matter out.”

I remembered the agony my mother had suffered from the cantharides and the blisters they had caused, needless agony, since they had not saved her.

“I have consulted the stars,” Dr. Duckett added. “Jupiter is in the ascendant, which is not at all good. Its qualities are hot and moist, which leads me to predict fever and sweats.”

“Forgive me, sir, but if my father has tertian ague, you don’t need the charts to predict fever and sweats,” I said evenly. “There is always a cycle of shaking and heat and sweats.”

“Eleanor,” Mary chided gently. “Dr. Duckett is only trying to help.”

I had not meant to be rude, it was just that I was not used to being treated as a child, or a fool, and I did not take very kindly to it. I was going to lose my father. My father was going to die, and there was nobody to help him.

“I wonder that you sent for me at all,” the surgeon said snidely. “When you have such a knowledgeable young physician already in situ. Perhaps the little lady would like to prescribe an appropriate treatment?”

Mary laid a restraining hand on my arm, as if she was worried I might actually put forward a suggestion. If I had done, it would only be to say that I would be sure not to give my father anything that would cause him more distress. “Please tell us what we must give Major Goodricke to help speed his recovery,” Mary said.

“The patient is to have feverfew and sage mixed with half a pennyworth of pepper, one little spoonful of chimney soot and the white of an egg, all laid together on the wrist.”

“And if that doesn’t do any good?” I whispered, trying not to despair.

“I have every confidence . . .”

“It didn’t help my mother or my sister.”

“You can also try a spider bruised in a cloth, spread upon linen and applied to the patient’s forehead. Or dead pigeons placed at his feet to draw down the fever.” He glanced round the great hall with distaste as he left us. “It’s living for so long in this place that’s the problem. It is not healthy to live in such proximity to bogs and marshes and unhealthy damp vapors. You only have to meet a few inhabitants to see how it twists the body and subdues the spirit.”

So why was it that ague struck most often in the heat of summer? The physicians said it was bad air that caused ague, and who was I, a mere child—a girl child at that—to question them? And yet question them I did. The fact remained: My sister and mother had both fallen ill and died, not in the dankness of winter, but on beautiful sunny days both. And now my father was dying in the hottest summer for decades.

MY POOR FATHER’S BODY was subjected first to convulsive shivering and then to raging fever, followed by another punishing bout of quaking and shuddering two days after the onset of the first. Propped up on pillows, he no longer looked like a man who’d commended himself at the Battle of Langport, the battle that had heralded the beginning of the end for the Royalists in this county. He had not been defeated then, but even I had to admit that he looked defeated now, or rather as if he had willingly surrendered, as if there was no fight left to be won. The seton on his leg had turned smelly and nasty and his skin had become a waxy yellow, but I recoiled at the prospect of calling Dr. Duckett back for more of his purges.

“Can we not send for the London physician?” I beseeched Mary as she met me, coming out of the chamber with an untouched dish of toast soaked in small beer.

It was Ned Tucker, when he took pike and eels to market, who’d heard that Thomas Sydenham, the West Country gentleman said to be the most eminent physician in all of England, had fled his practice in Pall Mall to escape the plague and had come with his wife and sons to stay with relations near Bristol.

“Some kind of physician he must be,” Mary said, a judgmental tone to her voice that I’d never heard from her before. “If he can abandon the dying to save his own skin, I guarantee he won’t set foot outside his front door for less than five guineas either.”

“I don’t care what it costs,” I said. “We will pay him whatever he wants.”

She cupped my face in her hands and looked down into my eyes that were shadowed with worry and the exhaustion of caring for my father. Mary and Bess had both offered to sit up with him through the night, but I had insisted upon doing the bulk of it, needed to do it.

“Send for the physician, by all means,” she said with a smile. “So long as I don’t have to be civil to him.”

I smiled back ruefully. “Shall you be as uncivil to him as I was to Dr. Duckett?”

She laughed, stroked my hair. “Maybe not quite.”

We sent to Mr. Merrick, begging him to use his connections to find the physician, and later that day he escorted him to us on horseback, and for once looked shabby and insignificant in comparison. Dr. Sydenham was dressed in a dark gray cloth riding suit with a wide collar trimmed with lace. He wore no wig and his own light brown hair, parted at the center, fell gently to his shoulders with threads of silver at his temples. He rode his enormous bay hunter as if he and the beast were one. Gait prancing, muscles rippling, his powerful steed was docile as a lamb under the reins. Dr. Sydenham was the kind of man whom even diseases would obey, I decided, still hoping.