Lady of the Butterflies (13 page)

“What do you mean?”

She allowed a silence. “I hope Edmund Ashfield is the great love of your life, child. Not everyone has a great love, but you, I think, must have one, or it will be the most dreadful waste.”

I THOUGHT ABOUT WHAT my great-aunt had said about my mother as I accompanied Mary on her rounds of the poor thatched cottages straggling along the line of the road that ran parallel to the track of the River Yeo. They were not high enough to escape the winter floods, which forced their inhabitants to cook and sleep in a single room upstairs for months, and I began to think that surely anything was better than that. Even when the floodwaters finally diminished, leaving the rivers gurgling and hidden pools of bright water in the ditches all across the moor, they left the lower earthen floors of the cottages thick with viscous mud, which no amount of rushes could properly soak up.

When Bess told me her father had a persistent and hacking cough, I helped mix up salad oil and aqua vitae and took it to the Knights’ little hovel myself. Bess’s mother was crippled with rheumatism, hobbling about around the table where they’d just finished eating their pottage. Bess’s little boy, Sam, toddled after her with mud smeared up to his knobbly knees. There was a smoky fire burning in the grate but it had made little impression on the damp wattle walls, and yet the dark little room felt surprisingly warm and homely, a well-loved and cared-for place. There was a bunch of marsh marigolds in a jug in the middle of the scrubbed table, and a battered but polished copper pot still simmering over the fire.

“If you’re stopping you’d better sit down,” Mistress Knight said in a friendly way when I made no move to leave. She had a deeply wrinkled face, a gruff almost manly voice, but her eyes were kind. She plonked a wooden spoon and a bowl of curds and whey on the table together with a pot of small beer. “There. You eat up now.”

“Thank you.” I smiled, taking a rickety stool beside Mr. Knight and only cursorily tucking up my skirts to stop them trailing in the sludge, not really caring if they did. Mr. Knight looked at me with genuine pleasure and surprise, as if he had not expected me to want to sit and stay, but was glad I did. He had spent so many years on the moor cutting sedges that he was almost as much a feature of the landscape as the birches and willows. He seemed at one with the sky and the water, and yet he did not look out of place in this small, smoky room, but quite comfortable and content. He was tall and lean as a withy, with short and thinning brown hair and eyes as dark brown as coffee beans. I wondered how the two of them had fathered a son as disagreeable as Thomas, who was thankfully nowhere to be seen.

I handed over the cough mixture. “I hope it helps, Mr. Knight.”

He was a typical marsh man. To foreigners we are strange people living in a strange land. Isolation and dependence on soggy marshes, which only those born here know how to survive, breed a spirit that is taciturn, obstinate and determined. Yet as Mr. Knight took the remedy he seemed to wish he could shrug off his habitual uncommunicativeness and say much more to me than thank you. “You could have sent it with Bess, you know,” he said. “You needn’t have come all this way.”

“It is no trouble. I wanted to come.”

“You’re a good girl, miss, despite what some folk say about you.”

I laughed. “Thank you, I think. My aunt Elizabeth told me how well my mother cared for the people of Tickenham,” I added.

“Oh, aye, she cared for us all right.” Mistress Knight gave an ironic laugh, shuffled over to give the fire a sharp, stabbing poke. “Some of us at least.” Her husband cast her an equally sharp glance as if to silence her. I was left feeling that I had inadvertently made a terrible blunder, but since I did not know how, or why, I was at a loss as to how to even begin to make amends.

Sam presented me with a crudely carved little horse. “Thank you, Sam.” I smiled, gratefully, lifting him into my lap, heedless of his little muddy feet.

Mr. Knight sipped his pot of ale awkwardly. I noticed that his nails were broken and dirty, the skin around them cracked and sore from constant exposure to cold and wet. They were outdoor hands, but the fingers were as long and slender as the fronds of sedges he spent his life cutting, though the knuckles on his right hand looked so stiff and sore it was a wonder he could do his job at all. “I’ll bring a rub for your joints next time,” I told him.

“We’ll have no need of rubs soon,” Mistress Knight retorted. “His joints won’t trouble him, nor mine me, soon as we get some warm, dry days.”

It was not the best moment to ask, but ask I did. “Mr. Knight, don’t you sometimes wish you could live somewhere that was dry all year round?”

The affection was suddenly gone from his eyes, to be replaced by an expression of extreme truculence. “I’m a sedge-cutter,” he said almost aggressively. “I’ve cut sedges all my life. I’ve reared my son to be a sedge-cutter. As you know full well, Mistress Goodricke, sedges don’t grow where it’s dry. They only grow in marshland.”

I STOOD BEFORE my guardian’s desk, my feet together and my hands lightly laced in front of me as he pored over his great ledger, his fleshy features pursed in concentration. I drew a deep steadying breath. “Please invite Edmund Ashfield to come and visit again,” I told him.

Mr. Merrick set aside his quill pen and looked up with a victorious smile that did not quite reach his small eyes. “I am glad to hear that you’ve come to your senses. By God, it has taken long enough.”

I had rehearsed what I was going to say a dozen times. Why had I not accounted for him leaping to such a conclusion? I let my hands fall to my sides, flexed my fingers, knowing that what I was about to say now would anger him beyond all reason, but there was nothing for it but to plow on. “I have not yet reached a decision on whether I will consent to having him court my hand, sir. I need to ask him some questions first, about drainage, in order that I might do so.”

Mr. Merrick slammed his fist against the desk, making the quills and the silver inkpot bounce. “You and your damned questions. Out with them. I’ll answer them myself and be done with it.”

I felt a bead of sweat trickle down my back but I was not going to be intimidated. “With respect, sir, you do not understand drainage as Mr. Ashfield understands it. As you said yourself, he has firsthand experience. I have none, and I cannot be expected to make such an important decision in ignorance. I want to ask him what it will be like, what it will entail, what it will mean for everyone living here.”

“What kind of fool do you take me for?” roared my guardian.

But I was my father’s daughter. I knew how to stand my ground. “Mr. Ashfield is in favor of drainage, is he not? So talking to him about it can only persuade me that it is a good thing, surely?”

There was no rejoinder to that. Mr. Merrick banged the ledger shut with a puff of dust and an ire that made me flinch. But inside I was smiling, for I knew that I had won. This first battle at least.

“Very well,” he growled. “I will send for Ashfield.”

I RAN AS FAST as I could through the tangle of reeds and sedges, for no other reason than the sheer joy of feeling the sun on my face. I stretched out my arms at either side like wings. If only I could run just a little faster I really might take off. On days like this we lived in a cloudland; the ground was insignificant, there was only the wide dome of the sky, and I wanted to be as much a part of it as were the birds.

The faint sound of pipes and drums reached me from across the fen meadows.

Spring had arrived early this year and already it felt like summer. The moor was teeming with life, ablaze with color. Frogs croaked and otters slipped in between the bulrushes, while above me skylarks sang as they climbed higher and higher in the heavenly blue sky. Against the emerald of the rushes blazed purple loosestrife and yellow rattle, while the ditches and riverbanks were flushed pink with orchids. In my long, plain black cloth dress I was the only point of darkness in the wide, flat wasteland. It was hardly the thing to wear to the May Day celebrations, but Mr. Merrick had been left strict instructions by my father not to condone my attendance at pagan celebrations, and had confiscated my blue silk gown. But today I did not care. Edmund Ashfield was coming to visit again. Winter was over. And at least the gold of my hair could not be dulled, Bess had said as she’d combed it earlier, braiding it tightly upon my head, whispering naughtily about how she’d be wearing hers loose with flowers in it for the festivities.

It didn’t look too far to the edge of Horse Ground Meadow, where the revels were taking place, but the moor was deceptive. It took a long time to cross the shortest distance because of the continuous obstruction of rivers that were too wide to jump, stretches of open water and ponds and bog. I crossed the Boundary Rhyne by Causeway Bridge, and beyond it was a little grove of alder, willow and birch that formed a natural screen. The silver-blue pointed leaves of the willows seemed to be swaying and quivering to the music that was much louder now. I saw flashes of color and frantic movement beyond the trees.

The May king and his queen presided over everything in their flower-decked arbor, the dancers were merry in their red and white girdles and embroidered jackets, bells jingling and handkerchiefs swinging. The Devil’s Dance, my father had called it. And maybe it was, for it took tight hold of me. There was nothing in the world I could do then to stop my hips from swaying, my cold, wet toes from tapping along to the rhythm.

“Very bawdy and lewd, is it not?” Bess’s voice in my ear made me leap an inch in the air. She gave a voluptuous trill of laughter, cupped her hand round her mouth and bent her chestnut head to whisper to me again. “Not half as bawdy and lewd as the way I’ve been dancing with my Ned, mind.”

I pulled her back into the trees. “Did you love Ned on your first sight of him, Bess?”

“What? Up to his elbows in horse dung? Can’t remember exactly when I realized I loved him, or a time when I didn’t.” There was a saucy gleam in her eyes. “But I have a mind to take him into the bushes and let him love me back right now.” She tilted her head alluringly. Her round cheeks were flushed and she had a crown of foliage askew on her head. “D’you think he’ll be able to resist?”

“Oh, definitely not.” I looked at her seriously. “Am I irresistible, do you think?”

For a moment I thought she would tease me, but instead she gave me a quick, tight hug. “Of course you are, little lamb.”

“You’re not to flatter me, Bess. I need to know. Am I pretty? Tell me, honestly?”

“You are sweet as a sugarplum.”

“I was up at dawn this morning collecting May dew,” I told her. “So my skin will be beautiful when I see Edmund again. He won’t have changed his mind, will he? He will still like me?”

“How could he not? But there’s plenty more gentlemen in the world besides Edmund Ashfield, you know.”

“But he’s the only one I want.”

“He’s the only one you’ve met, you mean.” She peered at me. “Never mind about May dew. Your skin is soft as a rose petal. A cowslip wash on your nose would not go amiss, mind. I do believe you’ve got the beginnings of sunspots already. If you’re not careful they’ll turn into freckles.”