Lady of the Butterflies (74 page)

I curled my fingers round the cold, dead weight of the gun and I felt a knot in my throat. “I can’t say good-bye to you.”

He kissed me, a warm, open, loving kiss. “Does that feel like good-bye?”

It did not.

“Will you think about what I have said?”

“I will.” But I could not watch him ride away.

IF JAMES HAD LOOKED back as he left me, he would have seen me standing alone on the edge of the cliff, staring out to sea with the wind blowing my skirts back against my legs, whipping my tangled mane of pale hair back from my face.

I closed my eyes and prayed for deliverance.

The faces of all my four children came in turn into my mind. Mary, kissing a pink rose. Ellen with her rosary. Dickon trying to teach his pet swan to swim. Forest rowing a boat out on the floodwater. I lingered on each one and practiced saying farewell. Then I saw my first family, my father and mother and my little sister, their faces so clear again they could have been standing right there before me, beckoning me to join them.

I thought then of Edmund, of Richard and of James. My father told me that the three stages of the life cycle of a butterfly symbolized the three states of being. Life and death and resurrection. And yet I felt I had gone through three stages already. Three men I had loved, three so very different men. My life with Edmund an uncomplicated and pleasant routine of day-to-day living, of eating, sleeping, raising a family, which for the most part had made me content, might have continued to content me, had not Richard stirred up in me a maelstrom of wild emotion and dark intensity, like the miraculous transforming soup inside a pupa, potent and intoxicating and giving of life. And then James had loved me. His love had given me wings at last and would set me truly free, if I could only let it.

A pair of gulls glided beneath me. If I held out my arms and jumped, I was sure I would not fall but fly.

When Richard found me, I had been standing on the cliff-top so long I felt as if I was a statue, a carved masthead on a galleon, proud and strong and forward-facing. I sensed his presence behind me and slowly turned to him. I still did not know if I was going to leave this life behind, leave Tickenham forever, but just the possibility made me feel unfettered, strangely powerful.

In the gathering twilight, I saw that the past weeks had taken a far worse toll on him even than they had on me. He looked ill, was unkempt, unshaven. He wore no cloak, no coat even, just a shirt that was badly crumpled, the lace coming unstitched. His eyes looked bruised. And yet those beautiful eyes, like his whole being, still blazed with raw emotion. They never left my face.

“How could you, Richard?”

He seemed unable to answer, to utter a single word. He just went on staring fixedly at me, as if he would climb inside my skull. He wore both dagger and sword at his hip and I held the pistol down at my side, but my fingers instinctively tightened around the trigger. He saw me do it. He saw everything.

“How could you?” I repeated.

At last he found his voice, but only to echo what I had asked. “How could you?”

“What did I do?”

There was the longest silence. “You did not . . . trust me.”

This answer was so utterly unexpected, that for a moment it stunned me, so that I did not move when he stepped up to me, did not register what was happening until I saw that he had raised his hand, as if he would strike me again or push me over the cliff. But he did not hit me, he did not push me, he touched my cheek, as if he needed confirmation that I was actually there. “You did not trust me,” he whispered again. “Why did you not trust me, Nell? ‘Love always trusts.’ Is that not what Paul said to the Corinthians? But you did not trust. You have always been so ready to think the very worst of me.”

I wanted to deny it. Could not.

“You never could hide your thoughts from me and it was always there, on your face and in your eyes. Mistrust. I pretended not to see it, learned to ignore it, hoping it would go away. But every time I saw it, every time you turned away from me, it was like a dagger piercing my side, twisting. When I saw the horror and fear in your face after I carried you in from the rain, and when I read that book Petiver had sent to you about Jesuits’ Powder, I knew that you believed I had willingly brought about Edmund’s death, that I was capable of murder. You believed me wicked enough to have killed my friend. They said you were mad and I wanted to believe them. I
had
to believe them, do you see? I accused you of madness, I wanted to hear everyone accuse you of madness in the most powerful terms. I wanted them all to sign their name to declarations against you. I needed to convince myself that you knew not what you did, that you had lost your wits. How else could I bear it?”

He spoke very quietly, very calmly. His words carried neither reproach nor recrimination, but were all the harder to hear for that and there was in his voice and his eyes a mesmerizing quality which meant I could not look away, could barely blink. Could only stare at him with mounting horror.

“From what James Petiver has told me, I take it you now know that it
was
Jesuits’ Powder I brought back from London. But you still suspected me, didn’t you? You thought I purposefully gave you the wrong information about how to administer it? I did not. Nor was I negligent or careless with the instructions, Nell. I never had any. You forget that there was so much fear surrounding the powder then. I was served by an apprentice who wanted to rush me out of the shop faster than you could say Hail Mary. He did not trouble to mention dosage, and when you asked me, I did not have the heart to tell you that I had no idea. I could not bear to disappoint you. I so wanted to prove myself worthy of the trust you had placed in me, that I had seen blazing in your eyes when I left for London, that I had seen so very seldom. And never saw again.”

Tears stung my eyes. I could not shape a single thought, nor shape my mouth to speak. I was aware only of sensations of the most agonizing pain.

“I rode without rest,” he said. “I was so tired, it was as if I was drunk, and I spoke without thinking, did not believe it mattered so much anyway. Prescriptions are usually so arbitrary, aren’t they? One physician tells you one dose and another tells you quite different. I made the most terrible, terrible mistake and it is that which has haunted me ever since, that which has given me nightmares. You did see guilt in my eyes, oh yes, every time I lay with you and felt a moment’s happiness in your arms. I suffered the most insufferable guilt, but I loved you so much I’d rather have suffered it a million times over than be without you. You chose to believe I was guilty of murder, not of a mistake. You say you loved me, but that is not love, is it? You loved only despite your better judgment. You never for a moment loved me unreservedly. And I needed that, Nell. It was all I ever wanted.”

“Richard, I . . .”

But he was not ready to let me speak. “Every time we argued about the marriage settlement, I saw doubt and mistrust in your eyes. Every time. That is why I kept raising it. I hoped your reaction would change, but even after a decade of being married to me, you still half took me for a fortune hunter. That should not have mattered to me so much, when so many marriages are founded on fortune hunting, but it did matter to me. Why did it not occur to you that I resisted that settlement from the start, that it always hurt me, only because I needed some proof, something to hold on to, something to show me that you loved me above all else. I know you did it for Edmund’s children, but I could not help but think that you loved the land and that house more than you loved me. That you loved Edmund more than you loved me. It seemed to me that you gave everything to him so readily, your estate, all of your trust. I wanted you to give to me what you had given to him. There is nothing I would not have done for you, nothing I would not have given to you. I would have died for you, Nell. That is how you know if you love a person, I think. If you would give your life for them. I would have given my life for you. But you gave me so little.

“The only time I laid a hand on you, you thought I had finally revealed myself as the ruthless villain you had always half suspected me to be. But I had read your treasured letters from James Petiver, and I saw, even if you did not, that he loved you, that for years he had loved you. He shared a passion for butterflies with you, the mainstay of your life, and it was as if you spoke to each other a different language, a language I could not understand; you entered a world with him in which I had no place. If you had trusted me and loved me as I wanted you to, that would not have mattered. But you did not trust me and so I could not trust you. I doubted your love for me and so his presence in your life, your affection for him and his for you, was a torture to me. I hated James Petiver, I hated him, because he loved you and because it was he who sent you that book, the book that damned me in your eyes.”

I watched, appalled, as a single tear slid down his face. He wiped it away impatiently with his sleeve like a child and went on. “I thought that in some way I could atone for what I had done to Edmund, by being a good father to his son. That is why I worked so hard at winning Forest’s trust. Because I wanted to be a father to him, since he had no other. But even that disturbed you, didn’t it? You distrusted my motives.”

“Why did you not say something?” I cried. “Why did you keep all this to yourself ?”

“What could I say? What would it have changed?” His face was wet with tears now and he let them fall, unchecked. “Half of the time I did not even know how I felt. It is astonishing, the capacity we have for denial, to practice deception upon ourselves, to block out a truth that is too painful to bear.”

I moved closer to him and he did not move away. He let me put my arms around him and his own arms went around my back, his fingers clutching at me. He turned his face into my neck and I felt the wetness of his tears and the scratch of stubble against my skin.

I stroked his tangled windblown curls and he made a sound, half moan, half whimper, and his shoulders shuddered.

“Hush,” I said, holding him tighter, kissing him and sobbing into his hair. “Hush.”

I did not need a court to judge me. This felt like my own day of judgment. I had thought myself so enlightened. And it was as if only now had a mirror been held up to my own face, and I saw that I had been as blind as Dickon’s hound, as blind as Edmund when he died.

It was not only Edmund who had been poisoned, it was me, and it was a far more dangerous, invidious poison I had taken than Jesuits’ Powder.

Oh, yes, I had been so bent on questioning my father’s every belief: in eternal life, in metamorphosis, resistance to land reclamation, hatred of Papists; but I had clung in the pit of my being to his most ardent contempt for the men who had been his enemies in the civil wars, the men he believed to be untrustworthy, depraved and dissolute, morally corrupt. The things he hated and feared most, because my mother had broken her most sacred vows to him and committed adultery with a sedge-cutter. So deep had mistrust been rooted within me that I never had entirely overcome it.
Reserve judgment until the truth is compelling,
wasn’t that what John Ray had once said? Yet that is not what I had done.

There was a certain justice in my current predicament, I realized. Thomas Knight had used as his weapon against me the prejudice against women who did not behave as was expected of them. But I was guilty of a far worse prejudice against my own husband. I had been reared on hatred and I had allowed the vestiges of that hatred to taint my judgment of the man I loved, who had so loved me.

He drew away. “When you left me I went to get drunk in Bristol,” he said. “I have no recollection of it. I do not know how long I was there, or how much I drank, or how I ended up in her bed.”

“You don’t need to explain any more.”

“She told me she wanted to be my wife, to have my baby. She wants our baby to inherit Elmsett, as if I had never had another wife, as if you had never been. And I wanted that too, Nell, I wanted it. I wanted to obliterate you. I did not care what she did,” he finished. “I was beyond caring, about anything.”