Lady of the Butterflies (17 page)

Winter

1675

S
pears of icicles still hung outside the window, frost flowers clung to the leaded panes. The floodwaters had turned to ice that extended all the way to Yatton.

I had been sitting by the window for days, for an eternity it seemed, my face white as the snow with fear. I had watched the ice whiten and thicken, blessedly changing from the thinner, deadly kind that was strong enough to hinder the passage of boats and yet not able to bear the weight of a man. Bess had brought a brazier of hot coals from the kitchen but I felt as frozen as the earth and the water. Still I vowed to keep my vigil until Edmund appeared.

Today icicles were dripping, the frost flowers fading. The deadly ice would return. He should have been here by now; he should have been back from London days ago. He was no doubt waiting out the big freeze in some wayside inn, but I knew how perilous rutted tracks could be when they flooded and iced over. Horses frequently sank right up to their bellies in them. I was terrified in case he was lying frozen in an icy ditch somewhere, with his leg broken or his neck. I was terrified in case death should snatch him from me before my wedding day. I had worn the colors of mourning all my childhood. I did not want to feel like a widow before I had the chance to be a bride.

But now, at last, there were two dark shapes moving closer along the silver ribbon of causeway. Not one horse and rider but two. Just like the first time he had come to Tickenham.

Almost weeping with relief, I flung on my red riding cloak and raced outside as they came cantering into the yard, with their swords glinting like icicles at their sides.

Riding beside Edmund on an ebony Spanish stallion was a slim, black-haired boy, about twenty years of age. He was dressed in a long, elaborate coat and breeches of jade silk, with flounces of elegant white lace at collar and cuffs. He wore knee-high riding boots and a shallow, wide-brimmed hat that danced with exotic green ostrich plumes. In the sparkling white winter world, he looked like a prince. His hair was glossy-black as the King’s, loosely curly and worn long enough to reach his shoulders. Framed by those black curls was the most exquisitely beautiful face: the face of an angel. His mouth was soft and sensitive with the slightest pout to his upper lip and little indents at the corners, like dimples. His eyes were heavy-lidded, long-lashed, and of a sparkling blue, deeper and brighter than my own.

Seated on his impressive mount, his slender fingers lightly resting on the tooled saddle, he affected an elegant, heroic pose that distinguished the Cavaliers I’d been brought up to so scorn and to fear, but who had therefore always held for me a glamorous allure. Everything about him marked him out as just the type of boy my father had warned me against. It almost felt that simply by admitting him onto this land I was doing something dangerous and forbidden, something that could only end in trouble.

Except that he was smiling at me, a smile of gentle charm, the loveliest smile I had ever seen.

I had the strangest feeling that I was falling. I had completely forgotten my anxiety of moments before. I had completely forgotten who I was, a girl betrothed to be married. I could barely tear my eyes away from this beautiful stranger who seemed no stranger to me at all, but like someone whose image I had carried forever in my heart, held in my imagination like a promise of something more, something better, of escape, of the essence of life itself. The very idea of him spoke of color and richness, of gaiety and beauty, in a life that had felt so drained of those things. And now at last he was here, he had come, and nothing could ever be the same for me again.

Edmund dismounted, bowed courteously and kissed my cheeks.

“I’m so glad you are safe, Edmund,” I said. “I have been so worried.”

“We would not have been here now if I’d had my way,” he said. “We almost turned back. But Richard was adamant we keep going.”

“Richard?” My lips shaped his name and I turned to him again as he removed his hat and swept it low. He bowed, his horse did a little prance, and he pulled back smoothly on the reins.

“I’m pleased to meet you, sir,” I said. “Edmund did not say that you were to come with him. What brings you to Somersetshire?”

He gazed searchingly into my face for a moment, said in an unusually softly spoken voice: “You do.”

The odd thing was that I was not at all surprised to hear him say it.

“As soon as I told Richard we were to be married, he insisted on coming to see you for himself,” Edmund explained cheerily.

His friend swung down from his saddle, his silver, star-shaped spurs jangling in the crisp air. He was tall, though not as tall as Edmund, his shoulders and chest not as broad, tapering to narrow hips and long legs.

“I congratulate you on an excellent choice, Edmund, my friend,” he said warmly, his eyes never leaving my face. “But even your glowing description did not do her justice. She is a dainty little maid for sure. I do fear, great ginger bear of a man that you are, you will crush her.”

Edmund smiled, not seeming at all put out by such an overt reference to bedsport, and any embarrassment I might have felt at this sally was outweighed by a mild sense of indignation. “I assure you, sir,” I said. “I am much stronger than I look.”

Richard laughed, but kindly. “We shall soon see.”

He turned back to his horse and unstrapped from the saddle a small portmanteau, inside which was a wooden box elegantly wrapped in silver tissue and ribbons. He presented it to me, his blue eyes twinkling. “A Twelfth Night gift for the bride-to-be, but since I am returning to London for the festivities, you may open it early.”

“Thank you,” I said, suddenly shy. “That was very thoughtful of you.”

“Oh, you will find Richard a master of the grand gesture,” Edmund quipped.

I could not think what the box might contain. Too large and heavy by far to be the jewelry or gloves that Edmund always gave to me. Books perhaps.

Edmund came forward and pecked my cheek. “I’ll leave you in my friend’s good care. The fire beckons and my toes need to thaw.”

I was nonplussed. “We may as well all go inside.”

“You need to open your present out here,” Richard said. “Don’t worry, Edmund,” he added, turning his head slowly toward his friend but letting his eyes linger on mine. “I shall not let anything happen to her. I promise to take very good care of her.”

“That is just what gives me cause for worry,” Edmund joked in parting. “But even though I know what’s in that box, I guarantee Eleanor will not fall at your feet like the rest of them. She’s very different from other ladies.”

“I can see that,” Richard said quietly.

I untied the ribbon around the box and lifted off the lid. In the bottom lay two strips of metal attached to leather straps.

“You fasten them to your shoes,” Richard explained. “They’re for skating on the ice. They are all the fashion in the Fens since the Dutch brought the idea over. I had them forged specially,” he added quietly. “I trust they’re the right size. Edmund told me you had tiny feet.”

“They look a perfect fit. Thank you,” I said again, touched that he would have gone to so much trouble for a person he had never even met. I found that I could not look him in the face.

“Don’t be shy with me,” he said very gently. “I want to be your friend, if you will let me.”

I raised my eyes, a strange feeling in my belly that was like excitement, but much nicer.

“Shall we be friends, do you think?” he asked, as if it mattered to him very much.

“Surely,” I said briskly, trying to hide my mounting confusion.

I moved quickly over to rest against the mounting block, trying to work out how to put the skates on. It would never have occurred to me to ask for directions. But my fingers were numb with cold, which didn’t help.

“Ouch! Damn.” I dropped one of the skates onto the frozen yard and it rang out like the echo of the blacksmith’s hammer that had beat it into shape. A bead of dark red blood had sprung up on the pad of my thumb.

“Be careful, they’re very sharp.”

“You could have told me that before.”

“I didn’t know you’d be so impatient.”

I glanced up, prepared to glare at him, but he was smiling at me again, a tender smile, with neat white teeth softly biting his lower lip and his dark eyebrows drawn up together in a little quizzical peak.

“Do you think you could help me?” I asked him.

“With the greatest pleasure.”

He sauntered over and took hold of my wrist with slender fingers that were partially covered by intricately patterned lace. “You are hurt,” he said. “Let me see.”

The ruby bead of blood had grown into a large droplet that was threatening to brim over and snake down my arm. Without preamble he lifted my hand and pushed my thumb into his beautiful mouth, and almost before I knew what was happening I felt his lips close around it, felt the hard, moist heat of his tongue slide round and over. He withdrew my thumb, looking with some amusement at my stunned expression: “All better now, I think.”

My gaze shifted sideways in search of Edmund, not in an appeal for help, but for guidance as to how I should manage this friend of his, with whom I now felt entirely out of my depth. But Edmund had gone, which oddly helped put me at ease. He knew what his friend was like; had no doubt seen him behave this way countless times. He would have known that such flirtation meant nothing at all. I reminded myself that Richard Glanville came from another world, a morally corrupt and licentious world that my father despised, a world that was entirely different from and far more sophisticated and complex than my own. This was evidently how people behaved in that world. The very last thing I wanted was to appear gauche or prudish, so I should just have to do my best to play along.

Richard had gone on one knee at my feet to help me with the skates, but it did look for all the world as if he was going to ask me to be his wife.

“I am afraid you are too late, sir,” I said teasingly. “I am already taken.”

He carried on adjusting a strap on the skate and, without fully lifting his head, smiled again, flicked up his sapphire eyes to look at me through his lashes, lowered them again to check what he was doing, raised them once more so swiftly that they sparkled. It was an extraordinary coquettish gesture that left my bones feeling as if they had been turned to water. “Maybe Edmund and I shall fight a duel over you,” he said. “Would you like that?”

What was it my father had said about Cavaliers being murderous ruffians who would duel over a game of tennis? “I should not like either of you to be wounded, or worse, for my sake.”

He lifted my right foot and placed it on his thigh. “Already you care for me so much you don’t want me to be hurt?”

“Not before you have taught me how to skate, at least. I should like to learn to swim too. You are very good at it, I hear.”

“You’d have to undress for me to teach you that.” He half raised the hem of my skirt. “May I?”

It took me half a moment to realize he only needed to see what he was doing with the skate, was not seeking permission to strip me naked there and then. He was just a boy, but he seemed so cocksure, so well versed in the ways of men that it was I, a betrothed woman, who was made to feel young and naive. I smiled down at this angel-faced, dark-haired boy who would seduce me away from his friend and said, “Please do.”

He tucked my skirt out of the way, cupped his hand around my heel. One of his fingers slipped over the top of my shoe and caressed my silk stocking. I wanted to snatch my foot away and yet I did not, could not. I clutched at the mounting block for support, sure that my legs would give way beneath me as shivers of sensation shot all the way up the insides of my thighs and carried on deep inside me until it felt as if the ice was cracking and splintering all around me and I was melting from the inside out.

He deftly secured the straps across first one foot and then the other. “Have you never worn pattens?”

“No.”

“You don’t know what they are, do you?”

“Please don’t mock me, sir.”

“I would never mock you,” he said seriously. “Ladies in London strap pattens under their shoes,” he explained. “So that they don’t get spoiled in the filth.”

I laughed out loud at the very idea. “London filth could never be so bad as living on a marsh! Here we just grow used to having dirty, wet feet.”

He stood, dusted down his green breeches. “You deserve much better. Desire it too, I think.”

“Do you now?” I stood up and immediately wobbled over.

“Whoa! Steady.” He caught both my hands in his, held them for a moment longer than was necessary, blue eyes locked with mine, a strange expression in them now that was almost like sadness. He rested me back against the mounting block again. “Wait for me.”

There was a small voice speaking inside my head. I refused to listen to it but it whispered: I have been waiting for you all of my life.

Richard had quickly strapped skates to his own boots. “Ready?”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak, and then, gripping his arm for support, I hobbled with him across to the edge of the ice.

He let go of me and strode gracefully out onto it with complete mastery and control. “One step at a time,” he cautioned, spinning round to face me with a hiss of blades cutting ice. “I suspect it is completely against your nature, but you need to go slowly at first.”

It couldn’t be as hard as all that, could it? I stepped out determinedly and immediately felt my foot slip away alarmingly beneath me. I tightened my muscles and froze.

“Not as easy as you thought?” Richard’s eyes sparkled as bright as sunlight on water. He offered me his hand and I took it. I was glad of the tightness of his grip as he slid forward, pulling me with him. I wobbled once but didn’t fall.

He slipped his hand beneath my cloak and around my waist, and I felt the hard strength of his young body against mine as he held me steady at his side.

“Right, left, march,” he commanded. I had just enough time to think how, spoken in his softly melodious voice, military language was powerful and compelling, rather than friendly but formal as it had sounded to me on Edmund’s lips. “Hold tight on to me.”