Lady of the Butterflies (70 page)

I had not even known that Richard’s father was still living.

The blacksmith said that Elmsett Manor lay not a quarter of a mile away, at the edge of the forest, and I continued on with a heavy heart, but with a little flicker of curiosity to meet this man about whom I had heard so much, and none of it very favorable.

I passed through fields and meadows left uncultivated and badly run to seed. Withered leaves drifted down from the eponymous elms as I rode through them, ducking to avoid low branches, the horse’s hooves muffled by the dead foliage on the ground. I thought how this would be a strange and melancholy place, even in summer, when these most funereal of trees were in full leaf.

I came upon Elmsett Manor unexpectedly, a small gabled manor built of silver-gray flint, set amidst meadows left uncultivated and run badly to seed. The house was set well back in the trees, half hidden by them and encircled by a little moat, silvery also under the white sky. One wing of the house was crumbled away, roofless, entirely derelict, and the rest looked to be in very poor repair, but that only added to the romantic air, made it even more like a place in a story, a place where a fairy princess, rather than a young apprentice boy, might have been held captive, a place for a sleeping beauty to wait for her one true love to find her and wake her with a kiss.

An elderly man was sitting on a stone bench beside the moat, a worn blanket over his knees. He was holding a fishing net. The drawbridge was down and I crossed over it, the horse’s hooves making a hollow clop on the damp and rotten planks that sagged alarmingly as we passed over.

The man looked up. He did not acknowledge me, but lifted the blanket, folded it, rose and came toward me. He had thick hair which would once have been very dark, but was now as silvery as the water in the moat. His eyes had the shape of Richard’s, but were brown, not blue. He must have been in his early sixties, but was tall and still slender, very striking.

I slid down from the saddle and hooked the bridle over a gatepost. “Mr. Glanville?”

“That is me,” the man replied.

“I am Eleanor Glanville, Richard’s wife.”

“I have been expecting you.”

“Where is my son Dickon, sir? Have you seen him?”

“Yes, I have seen him.”

“Is he well? Is he safe?”

“I believe so. Please.” He held out his hand to me. “You look very tired. Won’t you come inside and share some supper with me?”

There was a time when it would have delighted me to be in a place so connected with Richard’s past, and to meet his father. I could not equate him at all with the embittered, uncaring man who had so mercilessly pushed his son to succeed, had thrown him in the lake, to drown or swim. Either Richard had lied to me, as seemed entirely likely, or else time had mellowed him.

I was shown through to a dilapidated parlor. Despite the dark and heavy decayed furnishings, the faded tapestries that failed to cover the evidence of peeling, badly damp-stained walls, Elmsett Manor was not quite how I had imagined it either, not totally ruined. Only two or three rooms seemed to be habitable, but with sufficient funds to lavish on its restoration, it could be beautiful again.

We sat at a small worn table and were served with baked trout that Richard’s father ate in the old way, with a spoon, a knife and his fingers.

“Do you know where they have gone?” I asked him.

“They headed up the coast. A place called Whitby, in the North Riding of Yorkshire.”

“Yorkshire? So far away? Why?”

Richard’s father rested his spoon on the edge of the plate. “None of this is Richard’s doing,” he said. “You must believe that.”

“I am afraid I find that rather hard.”

“It was jealousy that drove him to take the boy.”

“Jealousy?”

There was a stiffening of the lines of his face, a flicker of anger in his eyes that was strangely familiar to me. “You bound your boy, my son’s boy, as apprentice to your lover.”

I lowered my eyes, suffered a stab of remorse. It seemed pointless to argue that James and I had become lovers only after Dickon’s apprenticeship had begun.

“They knew this was the first place you’d come looking for them,” Richard’s father said. “Your boy is refusing to cooperate. They took him to Yorkshire to give them more time to convince him.”

“Convince him of what? What do they want from him?”

“Sarah Gideon is the widow of an attorney,” Mr. Glanville explained. “She has a devious, grasping nature and a good knowledge of the law, a formidable mix. They are putting pressure on your son to sign affidavits against you, testifying to your unsuitable way of life, your state of mind, your unhealthy interest in butterflies.”

“Don’t they have enough against me already?”

“The boy’s testimony will count for much. He acted as your assistant, I understand.” He picked up his spoon again, put it in his mouth. “I believe they have taken a lodging near the harbor, above an inn.”

“Why would you tell me that?” I asked, instantly suspicious. “Why help me to find them, when you and I are strangers to one another?”

“I do not condone this,” he said quietly. “And your son is my grandson.”

“Then why did you let him go?” I burst out. “Why did you not find a way to help him?”

He looked at me as if to say that I knew the answer already. A man in his sixties was no match for the unstable, hostile man my husband had become. “I helped your boy every day, in the only way I could. I tried to get pen and ink to him. He wrote a letter to you but Richard discovered it and it seemed to cause him some distress. I am afraid he destroyed it.”

“Do you know what it said?”

“Your son said only that you could trust him, and that he trusted you and that he did not believe the many wounding things his father said about you.” He looked down at his plate. “I secretly took him food, even though that woman vowed to have me thrown out of my own home if she discovered one morsel of bread had passed the boy’s lips.”

I pushed my own plate away in horror. “She means to starve him?”

“Oh, she threatens much.”

“What has she threatened?”

“She has told your lad that if he does not sign the documents, he will starve to death. Or else he will be sold as a slave to plantation owners in the New World. Threats as ludicrous and empty as they are vicious.”

“But Dickon does not know that,” I shouted. “He will believe her.”

“Richard would not see harm done . . .”

“Then why does he not stop her? Why is he doing this? Does he hate me so very much?”

Mr. Glanville lowered his eyes, did not answer that. “He is not himself,” he said. “He is drinking too much, not sleeping enough.” His father ran his hand over his face. “He has always been rather highly strung. I am afraid I was a very poor father to him. He was a child who desperately needed warmth, affection, a confidant, to be hugged and held. Above all else he needed approval, but I was able to give him none. I had nothing left to give.” His eyes were full of regretful tears. “If ever there was a boy needed a mother’s love,” he said, “it was that little lad.”

I held up my hand to silence him, stood, walked quickly, distractedly, to the other side of the room. There was a mottled mirror hanging on the wall, and for a moment it was not my face I saw, but Richard’s, as he had looked when I had first fallen in love with him. Youthful, beautiful, troubled. Memories rushed at me. His angelic smile, gentle and uncertain when I held him in my arms, after he fell from his horse, the need and the loneliness I had sensed in him when he had danced with me. The passion and the intensity of that first kiss. I wanted to weep. I felt a dragging in my heart that was like compassion, like love, and a need to protect and comfort that somehow transcended all that was happening now, made it seem completely unreal, almost irrelevant. I suffered a moment of deceptive lucidity, during which I was quite certain that Richard had not murdered Edmund, that somehow I had brought all this upon myself. But the moment passed and reality came back like a blow to my heart.

I blinked, and his image in the mirror was replaced by my own and I thought how the dilapidated surroundings suited me very well. With violet smudges under my eyes, dirt on my cheeks, my dress filthy and torn and straggles of hair hanging loose and uncombed about my shoulders, I no longer looked like a lady who would live in a fine mansion. I looked like a vagabond, a gypsy who wandered from place to place, who had no belongings and no fixed abode, and I found that I would not mind that at all.

“I believe Richard has convinced himself this is all for my benefit,” his father was saying. “We were estranged, you see, for so many years. I did not even know he had married, or that I had two grandchildren. And I think he feels guilty for that now, wants to make some kind of recompense. He saw how distraught I was to see this house in ruins when we returned from exile. He knew how important it is to me, to this family, and I think he hoped to find a way to enable me to see it restored before I die.”

My heart hardened. “He has it in mind to abandon Tickenham Court,” I said. “Doesn’t he? He plans to sell it off to the drainage speculators and use the profit to rebuild Elmsett?”

It would not matter to Richard if the commoners were bent on destruction and vandalism, would not matter if he was loathed and spurned in Tickenham, if he no longer lived there, if he had already taken the money and fled.

I was not a gypsy. There
was
somewhere that I belonged. I belonged at Tickenham Court. I was Eleanor Glanville of Tickenham Court. I had sworn to my father that I would protect it from unscrupulous Cavaliers and so far I had made a very sorry job of it, but I would do my best to put it right, just as soon as I had found my son.

WHIT BY WAS many, many miles away from Elmsett, too many miles, but the route was straightforward at least. All I had to do was go north toward the Fens and the great estuary of The Wash, and then follow the east coastline all the rest of the way.

I rode first toward Stowmarket and had to cross a tributary of the River Gipping to the south of the town. It was deep and fast-flowing, and Kestrel shied and sidled when I tried to urge her to walk into the water. She would not be persuaded and I had to dismount and lead her in. When the water was up to my waist I climbed back into the saddle and leaned forward, my arms wrapped around her neck as her hooves slipped on the smooth rounded stones on the riverbed and she bucked and stumbled.

We made it through with no mishap but my skirts were still dripping wet and I was shivering when we reached the market town of Bury St. Edmunds, a place famed for its beautiful situation and wholesome air, with a ruined abbey haunting the town center. The monks had long gone, replaced by gentry and people of fashion, who thronged the fair to buy toys and trinkets. There was a time when I would have loved nothing better than to stop and join them, to browse and to shop. But I had nothing in common with such people anymore. I felt very distant from them now, and I could not have made polite conversation if my life depended upon it.

Just as dusk was falling, I arrived in Thetford, another market town with another ruined priory and buildings of flint stone. I stopped at the Bell Inn and was served a supper of sprats and given a bed with sheets grimy and infested with lice. I spent the night itching and scratching and continued itching as I rode on again to King’s Lynn, the port on the east bank of the Great Ouse, the vast-mouthed river that carried the outfall of all the waterways which drained the Fens.

King’s Lynn had a guildhall with a medieval flint-checkered façade, fine medieval merchants’ houses on cobbled lanes, and a new customs house overlooking the medieval harbor and quay, where grain and butter, hides and wool were loaded onto ships bound for the Netherlands. But for all its ancient grandeur, it felt like a town on the margin, a final outpost of civility at the edge of the flat lowland of the Fens and the vast three-sided bay that was The Wash.

I fed Kestrel a bag of oats and rode out into the wilderness. A bleaker, more inhospitable place I had never seen or dared to imagine. The wildness and vast desolation of The Wash made the marshland of Tickenham seem tame in comparison. It was raining, a cold, windswept rain that poured down from banks of leaden clouds and was carried over the expanses of salt marshes and shifting sandbanks.

The tide was far out, exposing the ridges of sand and mud and sheets of shallow water cut with deep channels as far as the eye could see. There were dense flocks of wetland birds, oystercatchers and terns, geese and ducks and waders, and their forlorn cries added to the utter desolation and strangeness. A few souls braved the treacherous wastes, hunting for shrimps and cockles, but their presence did not make the place seem any less lonely. So caked were they in mud from head to toe that they scarcely resembled human beings at all.

The flat lowland was such a quagmire that Kestrel sank up to her shanks, so I had to dismount to urge her on, slipping and sliding from one clump of higher ground to another. Time after time, I went into bog up to my knees. I was accustomed to Somersetshire bog and marsh, but this was different, a sucking, viscous, frightening mud. I hauled myself clear with difficulty. My boots were so heavy and caked that it felt as if I had rocks tied to my feet. I had mud up to the tops of my legs, over my hands and splattered on my face. My skirt and cloak were slick with it and wet from the rain, and my hair was plastered to my head. I grunted with effort and frustration and despair. But not once did I consider turning back.