Lady of the Butterflies (75 page)

“And you hated me,” I said softly. “You wanted vengeance, you wanted to hurt me, as I had hurt you. You wanted to betray me, as I had betrayed you.”

He did not answer, did not need to. That is the danger of loving too deeply. The capacity to hate just as deeply is always there. The light and the dark.

“Can you ever forgive me?”

“I love you,” he said simply, starkly. “I can forgive you anything.”

“I love you too,” I sobbed, stroking his face. “I never stopped loving you. You need to know that. Even when I feared what you had done, what you would do to me, even when I saw that you hated me. I still loved you.”

He gave me a little smile and it lacerated me. “Can you forgive me, Nell? I need you to forgive me.”

“What is there to forgive?” He had taken a manipulative, scheming Jezebel into his bed, but only after I had turned him out of mine. He had taken our son, but only after I had already taken him from his father and placed him in the care of a man who was my lover. He had accused me of madness, and what was it but a kind of madness not to trust the man who had given me so much love? What was it but madness to accuse of the worst possible crime the man whose smile had always lit up my heart with its gentle charm and beauty? “There is nothing to forgive,” I said. “Nothing.”

But how could we ever even begin to find our way back from here, how ever could we find a way forward? There was too much against us. I did not see how it was possible. And yet how could I go, how could I begin anew, as James had suggested, without the person I loved most in all the world? How could I ever leave him now? How could I go on living without ever seeing that lovely smile, without ever looking into his beautiful eyes? How could I kiss him good-bye and know it was the last kiss?

How could I stay?

I let go of him. I turned my back and walked away down the narrow rocky path to the bay. I carried on down the beach, and at the water’s edge I waited for him. The tide was coming in, crashing against the headland, as low gray clouds scudded above us. The encroaching waves hissed on the shingle, like the whispers of conspirators.

He wrapped his arms around himself, his hands tucked under his armpits.

“On his deathbed my father warned me to protect Tickenham Court against unscrupulous Cavaliers,” I said. “And it was those words which stayed with me, which shaped the way I saw you, saw everything. And because of that I don’t want Tickenham Court, not any of it. The very thought of it sickens me. I cannot be Eleanor Glanville of Tickenham Court anymore. But there is only one way for me to be free, truly free.” Only now did I hold out the letter.

When he reached out and took it, I saw that his hand was trembling.

“If I had known what you have just told me, I might not have written it,” I said. “But I think, in a way, it is as well that I did. I’ve told Dickon to sign the affidavits that say I am mad. Or that he may sign the one that says I am dead. I told him he could not be accused of perjury, whatever he says about me. If he swears that I am dead he will be committing no sin. I shall be dead, dead to this world and gone to a new and better one.” I let my cloak slip to the ground and shrugged off my secondhand woolen dress. I bundled them both up and handed them to Richard. “Put them on the rocks for me. Where they will easily be found, when they come to search for me. It will be all the proof they need. They think I am mad, and this is what the mad do.”

“But Nell, you can swim,” he said desperately. “I taught you how to swim.”

“You did.” I smiled. “You taught me well. And Dickon knows it. James too. Nobody else. I am asking you to guard my secret for me, Richard. You wanted me to trust you and I am putting all of my trust in you now.” I put the clothes on the pebbles by his feet. “Will you do this for me? Will you do as I ask?”

“Do not ask it of me!” He lurched for me and grabbed my hands and somehow we both collapsed on our knees in the lapping water, were pulled down with each other. I sank beside him in the wet sand and took him in my arms, held him tight and we clutched at each other, rocking together to the rocking of the waves.

“Please, Nell, I beg you. Don’t go. Stay with me.”

He stroked my face, kissed it as I kissed his, both wet with tears.

“I have to go,” I wept. “I have to.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know yet. I shall only know it when I find it.”

“I will come to you,” he said. “Let me come. Wherever it is.”

“You need a home,” I said gently. “You cannot go back to wandering. Whereas I . . . I think I need to wander.”

“Then so do I. All the years I was in exile, I dreamed of coming home. I thought that home was a manor house, surrounded by water meadows and filled with beautiful things that I would never have to lose or leave. But Elmsett is not home. Tickenham Court is not home. You are home for me, Nell. Only you. Wherever you are is where I want to be. I told you once I’d love you if you had nothing to give me but your heart. I swear I will ask nothing from you but that. There would be no secrets between us now, nothing that we cannot share. Believe me, trust me, as you have never trusted me before. Send for me and I will come. Wherever it is that you are going.”

I did not tell him that it could not be. I gifted him hope. I gifted it to myself. For is not hope the most precious gift there is?

Virginia: Summer

1700

FIVE YEARS LATER

T
o, James, we go on with our letters, just as we began. This is a new beginning for me, in a new world. It has taken me many months and much hardship and subterfuge to reach it, but now I am here. In God’s own country.

My clothes were found on the rocks where Richard left them, and he and Dickon and you are the only ones who knew I exchanged them for the shirt and breeches you had left for me, with your uncanny foresight, even before I came back to Tickenham. With the moonlight making a silver path on the black sea just like the gold path the sun had made earlier, I walked as a lad to Bristol and found David Krieg and, with him, later boarded the ship bound for America.

It was such a typically thoughtful suggestion of yours that the little orange and black butterfly be named the Glanville Fritillary. I like to think that Richard’s name will live on too, that he and I are bound together for all time, that we shall soar forever together on those lovely bright wings.

It is only love that prevails in the end, and there are so many different kinds of love, aren’t there? And one of the most precious of all must be a mother’s love, of which Richard was deprived, a love that is unconditional and eternally forgiving.

I can forgive Forest entirely for what he has done. Of course I forgive him. There is surely nothing a child could do to a mother that she could not find it in her heart to utterly forgive.

I always knew that my will would never stand and that he would use my alleged madness to try to have it overthrown. I knew that the girls would take direction from their older brother, would be swayed by him, as they always were. I wanted them all to be free, as I am now free, but they were, of course, perfectly free to choose differently. And if Forest had accepted my last wishes, there would not have been the grand spectacle of the court case. How I should have liked to be there to see that for myself!

All those affidavits presented against me, signed by the people of Tickenham, accusing me of committing the very great sin of beating bushes with sticks for worms, wandering the moors at dawn with my clothing in disarray, and surely the greatest crime of all, having to send out to the inn for ale, because I did not brew my own as a gentlewoman should!

I am glad I was so vilified. Had I not been, then the great Hans Sloane and John Ray would not have been subpoenaed to come to the Assizes in Exeter, to defend me, to testify that entomology is a sane and sober science, and that I was a great entomologist. It does not matter that even their testimony was not enough to prove my sanity, to prove that it is a valid occupation to observe butterflies. It was enough for me. I was so astonished and so touched to know those gentlemen regarded me so highly. It is just a pity that recognition so often comes only after death.

I am glad that I saved Thomas Knight’s life, for he has given me mine.

If I had not been so maligned, I should not be here.

Awake thou that sleepest and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.

James, I have awoken and I am bathed in light. I find I am in the most wondrous place. There are bright, fragrant flowers of unspeakable beauty, and lush green grass and mighty forests and ravines and in the distance a range of mountains that look almost blue. The people of this land are adorned with beads and with the bright feathers of wild birds. The air is scented with honeysuckle and it is alive with butterflies, so many butterflies, with iridescent wings as wide as my hand.

Instead of white swans, there are pink birds living on this land’s swamps. Imagine that! There are crimson birds and birds with brilliant green wings and blue heads. And they are always singing. Here, the sun is always shining, even in the autumn, when the leaves burn with scarlet and gold of such vividness it is a sight to behold. And I hope that, through my eyes, you too can see this magnificent new world you say you are not brave enough to see for yourself.

The old one is dead to me, as I am dead to it. Eleanor Glanville is dead. Water claimed me in the end, as seems fitting. I have no burial place. My coffin was the dark and stinking hold of that ship, my shroud a pair of boy’s nankeen breeches and a shirt, the clothes of Isaac, the butterfly boy, bound for America to help the good Dr. Krieg, to devote every waking moment to collecting specimens, for you. Sleeping belowdecks every night, swaddled in a hammock, my mind turned, naturally, to caterpillars awaiting metamorphosis.

I left the gray English waters behind and sailed to an ocean that glowed with phosphorescence, that was alive with schools of jellyfish, where dolphins swam beside the ship and great whales broke through the waves. The water claimed me, but only so that I could be liberated, baptized, so that I could throw off suffering and pain and enter a bright new world. Like a butterfly, I once gorged on material things; I was entombed; and then I took flight and am transformed.

Now I am free to watch butterflies every day, to do what I was put upon this earth to do. My life is very simple. I live off the land and what you pay me for the specimens I send to you, which will form the bedrock of that great museum, as beautiful a shrine to our friendship as ever there could be.

I am reborn, just as my father always told me I would be. I know now that all that he taught me, on that count, was good and true. And secure in that knowledge, we have nothing at all to fear.

Because if I have learned anything at all, it is this: There is always, always hope, even when it seems that all hope is lost.

So please tell Dickon that he may let his father know that my name now is Hannah. It is a good Puritan name, but I did not choose it for that. I chose it for my own reason. It means the grace of God.

Historical Notes

Lady of the Butterflies
is based on fact. The Glanville Fritillary is named after Eleanor Glanville, who is now recognized as a distinguished pioneer entomologist. According to her biographer, she “gained happiness from natural history in the midst of great fear and sorrow.” When her relatives, led by her son Forest, brought lunacy proceedings to set aside her will on the grounds that “no one who was not deprived of their senses would go in pursuit of butterflies,” it became a cause célèbre.

Eleanor’s escape to America is my own flight of fancy, but her true final resting place remains a mystery, as does that of Richard Glanville. Among James Petiver’s many correspondents there was an unknown girl from Virginia, named Hannah.

James Petiver (1663–1718) was the first person to give butterflies English names, many of which—Brimstone, Admiral, Argus, Tortoiseshell—are still used to this day. It is with his catalogues and preserved specimens that the documented history of butterflies begins. After his death, his collections were purchased by Sir Hans Sloane and formed the foundations of the British Museum, later the Natural History Museum, where some of his correspondence with Eleanor and the folios in which he pasted specimens are preserved. It is recorded fact that Eleanor’s son Richard was James Petiver’s apprentice and that he was abducted from Aldersgate Street by his father, though I have brought the period of his apprenticeship and abduction forward a few years for the sake of narrative drive.

After overturning Eleanor’s will, Forest sold the Manor and Lordship of Tickenham. He apparently lived on at various houses in the parish. He died unmarried at the age of forty-four and left no will. None of those who left testimonies had anything good to say about him. Richard Glanville, Jr. (Dickon), married and settled near the Somerset village of Wedmore and was one of the first general practitioners. I understand that his descendants still live in Wedmore. Eleanor’s daughters seemed wary of marriage after their mother’s experience of it. Mary Ashfield died a spinster in 1730, and of Eleanor Glanville II (Ellen) it is known only that she was living unmarried in Rome in 1733. Counter to accusations presented against Eleanor at the Assizes, her son Richard went on lasting record as saying that he had “the best of mothers and the worst of fathers.”

The disease commonly known in the seventeenth century as ague, which claimed so many lives in the Fens and Somerset Levels, was eventually identified as malaria. Peruvian bark, the so-called Jesuits’ Powder, is the source of quinine.

The Tickenham, Nailsea and Kenn moors were not properly drained until the last years of the eighteenth century, but fenland was one of the earliest habitats lost to butterflies. The progressive draining that was begun in the seventeenth century left less than three percent of fenland remaining by the 1900s. This destruction resulted in the first known butterfly extinction, that of the Large Copper, which was last seen in 1851. The Swallowtail survives only in the Norfolk Broads. Seventy-one percent of Britain’s butterflies are now declining and forty-five percent of species are threatened, mainly because of loss of habitat. The Glanville Fritillary is classified as rare, but is still to be found on the Isle of Wight. I am reliably informed that English Nature has plans to reintroduce it to Sandy Bay at Weston-Super-Mare, a few miles from Eleanor’s ancestral home.

During the course of my writing this novel, Britain was hit by repeated and devastating floods, caused in part, according to leading environmentalists, by the loss of wetland floodplains. In 2007, the study of butterflies was formally accepted by the government as an important environmental barometer.