Lady of the Butterflies (19 page)

“It is not only their land and their rights they are losing,” he said with fierce empathy. “It is their independence, their ability to provide the basic necessities of life for their families that is at stake. And pride. There is pride in being able to put bread into your children’s mouths, in seeing them grow strong on milk from your own cow and eggs from your own hens. Edmund has no comprehension—how could he be expected to have? How could you? And yet you do, don’t you? You think about such things.”

I smiled. “Sometimes too much, perhaps.” I paused, glanced at him. “You too, I think.”

“Since time began, men have been prepared to fight and die to defend their land,” he said. “It makes no difference if that land is a miserable strip, good for nothing but a few vegetables, or a thousand acres of fields and meadows.” It was as if he had ceased talking about the commoners now, nameless people he did not know, but was speaking from some direct personal experience, and I was sure then that his must have been one of the Royalist families who had suffered from the sequestration of their estate under Cromwell—except that he was surely too young to remember it, to feel it so deeply. So deeply that I felt entirely prevented from asking him about it.

I shivered and, seeing that I was cold, he wordlessly took off his cloak, draped it around my shoulders. Heat drawn from his body still clung to the fabric of it and I pulled it closer about me than I needed to for warmth alone. The collar felt very soft against my cheek.

He cupped his hands round his mouth, blew on his fingers.

“Now I am warm and you are cold.” I smiled. “We should go back.”

“Not yet,” he said. “It is so lovely here, and I shall be leaving for London in the morning.”

“You are very welcome to stay,” I said, the words coming unbidden. “For as long as you like.”

“That is kind of you,” he said, his tone strangely tight. “But I cannot.”

As we walked back to the house I wondered at what he had meant, wondered at the sadness behind his beautiful eyes, but as we were approaching the yard something broke through my thoughts. My nostrils twitched and I inhaled, like a wild creature alert to the first sign of danger. A smell of smoke. The air over the stables was thick with a gray pall that was not mist. I almost heard the crackle of the flames before I saw them, bright and luminous as the sunset had been. I heard the panicked whinnying and snorting of the horses, the frantic thud of their hooves against the stable door. The whole of the building was ablaze.

I ran, shouting for someone to come, for someone to help.

Ned was already running from the kitchen garden.

“The horses,” I yelled. “Help me get them out.”

“I’ll go,” Richard said to me. “You stay here.”

But I was already inside the burning stable. The smoke was so thick and billowing that I couldn’t see where I was going, couldn’t breathe. I choked and covered my mouth with the edge of my cloak. My eyes stung as if scorched and the heat was a solid barrier in front of me, pressing me back, tongues of fire leaping and writhing. I bent my arm up over my face, pushed forward through flames that were licking through straw and bedding, were leaping from the roof and the hayloft and from the bubbling, cracking walls. I smelt the bitter stench of singed horsehair.

The horses were bucking, their eyes rolling in terror. With my hand on the halter and using the most soothing words I could marshal, I dragged out Edmund’s hunter, let him bolt for safety in the direction of the churchyard, where Richard’s stallion was already heading. I dived back in for my little gray mare and her foal, not able to find my way to their stall. The walls of the stable were sheets of fire now, the roaring sound like an angry mob. A length of timber crashed to the ground in front of me in an eruption of crimson sparks which stung like demonic gnats from Hell. I couldn’t see where I was, which way I had come and which was the way out. Then I felt a hand grasp mine, pull me back just in time as another beam came smashing down on the place where I had been standing a second before.

“This way!” Richard shouted.

I could barely see him. He was just a hand to hold on to in the fiery darkness and I gripped it tight, let him lead me to safety.

“They’re all out, miss,” Ned shouted, leading a cob in one hand and the carthorse in the other.

I bent double and coughed, rubbed my sore, stinging eyes.

“Here, drink this.” From somewhere Richard had produced a cup of water and I tipped it gratefully down my dry throat. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes. Thank you. Are you?”

He nodded, raised his arm and turned his head into it to wipe the smuts and sweat off his brow.

Bess and Mistress Keene and Jane the cookmaid were all running back and forth across the yard with water buckets, doing their best to douse the flames. I ran to Jane and took the other side of the handle, helping her carry a heavy bucket, to lift it up and throw the contents over the fire. I was about to run and fetch some more when someone stopped me.

“It’s no use, Eleanor.” It was Edmund who held me back as the flames leapt toward the sky. “It’s no use.”

I pulled away from him in a fury. The flames were licking round the whole of the building, fanned by the breeze that was blowing off the moor, toward the cow barn . . . toward the house. “We can’t just give up, damn it! We must at least try to contain it, make sure it doesn’t spread. Please, God,” I heard myself say. “Don’t let it spread to the house.”

“It won’t,” Richard said.

I stopped fighting against Edmund for a moment and looked to his friend, his face still smeared with soot just as mine must be and his eyes full of compassion, as if he felt my anxiety in his very core and wanted only to ease it. “It is raining,” he said, with an upward glance at the darkening sky. “The rain will put the fire out.”

Rain was by no means a rare occurrence in Somersetshire in September, but this felt like a miracle. It was just a fine drizzle, so fine that I had not felt it, but in minutes it turned into a typical autumn deluge of heavy, fat raindrops which poured down from the darkening sky and did for us the work of a hundred men and buckets.

I let it lash me, soak me, saw it washing the soot in black streaks from my skin. I turned my face to the rain as I usually would to the sun, letting it pour down upon me, over me, cleanse and cool me. I had never been so glad of rain in all my life. I opened my lips and drank it in, letting it rid me of the foul, choking taste of soot. The taste of the water on my tongue was sweet as wine.

In hardly any time the stable had been reduced to a smoking ruin, a blackened skeleton. It was hissing angrily like a snake, would smolder for a long time yet.

“What could have started it?” Edmund asked.

“I don’t know.”

There was straw and hay aplenty in the stable, and when Ned had slept there, before he married Bess, there would have been tallow candles with naked flames. But Ned had not slept above the horses for years. Nobody did now.

Richard bent down, picked up something that had been discarded or dropped in haste on the ground. He held it out in his hand and looked at me. It was an empty liquor flask, and no words were necessary.
Since time began, men have been prepared to fight and die to defend their land.
The fire was no accident. It was no coincidence that, as the day when the drainage project would start grew ever closer, a fire had been started. Discontent had ignited something dangerous and sinister.

I WAS KNEELING on the rush-strewn church floor by the altar, helping Mary arrange branches of greenery to decorate it for Christmas. The whole place was filled with the warm, spicy scent of the rosemary and bay that adorned the pews. We’d lit a dozen candles and the light of them gleamed on the gilded candlesticks and dark oak.

We were keeping the front of the aisle clear for the musicians and theater troupe to perform the nativity play. Afterward there would be fiddlers and drummers and a wassail procession, dancing and feasting and blindman’s buff. If I was to be denied a grand wedding celebration, I would at least enjoy the Christmas festivities to the full. I was determined to find the charm in the cake and be Queen for a Day.

“It will be wonderful to be married in London, even quietly,” Mary said, knowing where my thoughts often strayed these days.

I handed her another bough of holly. “You must come with us. Please say you will?”

She was expertly twisting ivy around the holly and didn’t take her eyes off her task. “We shall already be there.”

I assumed she meant she’d be visiting her mother and little brother, the only members of her family who had survived the plague and who still lived in Southwark.

She stopped what she was doing and glanced at me. “I’ve been meaning to tell you, Eleanor. John and I are leaving Tickenham. We’re returning to live in London.”

I felt as if I had suddenly lost my way in a dark wood. “Leaving?”

“I promised your father that I would take care of you, but you are grown now and about to be a wife. It’s my mother and my brother Johnnie who need looking after now.”

She came to put her arms around me, as if I were still the orphaned little girl I often felt myself to be, the little girl who disguised herself in the colorful gowns of a lady and hid behind a pretense of self-possession and poise. “Come now. It’s not so bad. You can visit whenever you like.”

I thought I might cry. “But I shall miss you so much.”

“I shall miss you too.” She was past thirty but she still looked young, her waist and breasts only slightly more plump. “You have been my blessing, Eleanor. Each time another month passed and still I bled, I thanked God for the little girl he had already given to me. That though the cradle was empty, my arms were always full.”

“Oh, Mary.”

“It is you who showed me my vocation, with your love of learning and constant quest for knowledge. You were our first little pupil, always the most special. John and I are going to run a boarding school.”

I grasped both of her hands. “You will be excellent tutors, both of you. There could be none better. Oh, I wish I could come, Mary. I wish I could come with you and help you with your school.”

Her smile hid a hint of concern. “Your life now is with your new husband, with Edmund.” She peered into my face. “Eleanor, you do still want to marry him?”

I glanced away. “Of course.”

I could not tell her that my most precious possessions were now the little skates that Richard Glanville had given to me, could not tell her of the strange, secret vice I did not seem able to give up. Every night before I went to sleep I took the skates out of their box and stroked them, ran my finger along the blade, dangerously close to the sharp edge, risking a cut, almost wanting a cut, wanting to feel that sharp sting of pain so I could better remember the warmth of his mouth as he had sucked my pain away.

I was no wiser about the source of his own pain, was afraid that if I tried to talk to Edmund about him, if I so much as allowed Richard’s name to touch my lips, I would give myself away.

“You’ve been so good to me, Mary,” I said.

“It is kind of you to say so, but I’m not so sure your father would agree. I fear he’d be of the opinion I’d led you a long way off the path of righteousness.”

“No, he wouldn’t.”

She looked at me, considering her words before she spoke. “Do you remember the prayers we used to say, Eleanor? How we came when the church was empty, like it is now, and we lit candles for all those we loved who were no longer with us: your sister and mother and father, and my father and brothers and sisters, who had all perished in the plague year? Do you remember that we asked that they be safe and happy in Heaven?”

I nodded.

“Eleanor, you do know it’s only Catholics who say prayers for the souls of the dead?”

There had seemed nothing wrong in it at the time. It had seemed a fitting thing to do.

“In my heart, I converted to Catholicism a long time ago,” Mary continued, keeping her voice as quiet as if the ancient stones of the church might be listening.

I stared at her in utter disbelief. “You are Catholic.”

“I would never have practiced while I had you to mind. It would have felt like the most dreadful betrayal of your father. Now our work here is done and we are leaving, I am free to follow my conscience.”

I had been so steeped in anti-Catholicism that I couldn’t help but look at her with a mixture of dismay and horror. I turned away, toward the simple altar. Once so carefully divested of crucifixes, gilded cloths or other obvious Catholic trappings, it looked almost Papist now, festooned with greenery and ablaze with candles.

“And John is a Catholic too? But how can he be? When he delivered his sermon on Gunpowder Treason Night he thanked God for delivering England from the hellish plots of the Papists.”

Mary smiled. “John is a follower, not a leader. As you are well aware, he is easily influenced. He can see all sides and goes wherever the wind blows him, so long as he believes it to be God’s wind. He would like nothing more than for England to be a haven of religious pluralism. He was a Puritan while ever Puritans were shouting the loudest, until the new laws meant he would have lost his pulpit if he clung to such ideology. He was happy to be called a Protestant then, though your father could still bring out the Puritan in him. Now I am to become a Catholic, he’ll convert with me. I can help him see the reason in it.”