Lady of the Butterflies (24 page)

“I hope neither of you have any peace at all.” Bess tittered, with another wink. “Go to it, the pair of you. Heaven knows, you’ve waited long enough.”

Edmund’s brother slapped him between the shoulder blades. “Time to let your little wife see your goods.” He guffawed.

Then they were gone. And there we were, with a single candle and clothes scattered around the floor and the smell of jasmine entirely vanished, replaced by the acrid stink from the tallow candle. Edmund was still in his knee-length drawers and I in my voluminous shift.

We lay on our backs, side by side, like the marble statues of a knight and his lady upon their tomb. The room seemed to be rocking slightly, as if we were in a boat. But apart from that I felt exactly the same, as if being married made no difference at all. I flicked my eyes sideways to see what Edmund was doing. I wished he would make some move, make of our two bodies one flesh, make us truly man and wife.

The sheets smelt faintly of damp and tobacco and of unwashed bodies. There was a draft coming from a gap in the ill-fitting window. I missed my own bed, my home, and I wished Edmund would at least hold me. He had his eyes closed and I feared he’d drunk so much he might soon fall asleep. It was my wedding night and I totally refused to feel miserable and homesick. I reached out and touched Edmund’s freckled cheek, which was prickly with a fresh crop of coppery whiskers. He gave a mock drowsy smile, so I knew he’d been teasing me by pretending to have dozed off.

I bounced up onto my knees, gold curls tumbling down around my face. “Don’t you dare, Edmund.”

He reached out his arms and pulled me into them, then rolled me onto my back and heaved himself on top of me, smiling down into my face. “How do you do, Mistress Ashfield?”

I giggled. “How do you do, Mr. Ashfield?”

“Very well indeed. Pistol’s loaded and ready for its first husbandly foray.”

“Oh! Ouch!”

He was a big man, in every way, I was alarmed to discover. He was squashing me and I could feel his cock, hard and hot, pressing into my pubic bone. I’d hardly taken a proper breath before he was fumbling with my shift, dragging it up. I closed my eyes as he rubbed himself up and down against me and poked and prodded about as if he was tending a fire, rather than inflamed with passion.

Then suddenly he stopped.

I opened my eyes.

“I’m afraid of hurting you. You will say if I am?”

I wrapped my arms around his broad back and pulled him closer. “Oh, Edmund, I think you must hurt me. Bess said it would hurt the first time. I shan’t mind.”

He looked at me doubtfully and I wriggled underneath him.

Alarmingly, he reared up as if he had been stabbed in the back, let out a groan and impaled me with one single thrust. The hot, piercing pain made me think how very aptly pricks are named, for my insides were most definitely being jabbed, his cock indeed a burning poker. He thrust again and I banged my head on the bedpost. He flopped down on me, heavy and leaden as a bag of grain.

“Sorry,” he mumbled against my shoulder.

“It’s all right.”

We lay there for a minute or two.

“Edmund?”

He moaned contentedly and didn’t reply, so I knew, this time, he really was asleep.

I put my hands against his shoulders and, with some effort, managed to push him off.

He lay stretched out beside me, his red-gold head on my shoulder.

I lifted up the sheets. There was a spot of blood, token of my lost maidenhead. I tried so hard not to think of what else I had lost. Most of all I tried not to think how it had felt when Richard Glanville’s tongue had licked away a drop of my blood. But vexingly, the very act of trying not to think brought him more swiftly and powerfully to my mind.

An hour later Edmund stirred, stroked me a little and entered me again, very gently this time. It did not hurt so much, and it might have been all I could ever have imagined wanting, if only I did not have something else with which to compare it. I might have been quite happy and satisfied, had I not been secretly hoping to experience again what I had felt when Richard had touched the tips of my fingers as we danced. Edmund gazed down at my face lovingly, but not even on our wedding night did he look at me as intensely as Richard did every time he saw me.

I lay on my back and hot tears slid out of the corners of my eyes and trickled into my hair.

I glanced across at my now softly snoring husband and stroked his head, thought sadly of how all was not gold that glistened. I was terribly, bleakly afraid that I had married the wrong man, and I knew also, bewilderingly, that I did love Edmund and that he deserved much, much better. I vowed there and then that I would never hurt him. I could not control how I felt, but I could control what I did about it. I would make the very best of my marriage, would honor my wedding vows. Somehow I would find a way to banish Richard Glanville forever from my head and from my heart.

BANISHING HIM from my head was going to be much the easier of the two, I decided. I should start with that. And I thought I knew just the way to do it. Fill it up with something else.

I waited for dawn to lighten the sky before I crept out of bed. My head throbbed, my mouth was dry, and there was a hollow, nauseated feeling in my belly, but I draped a green morning gown and cloak over my arm, found a lead pencil and scribbled a brief note, telling Edmund that I had woken early and didn’t want to disturb him, so had gone for a drive into London.

I dropped a kiss on his brow, tucked the sheet back around him and left the letter beside him on the pillow. I softly opened the door and tiptoed down the dark corridor to the first door on the right.

Bess was snoring soundly, huddled down beneath the sheets on her little truckle bed. I gave her a firm shake, putting my hand over her mouth to stop her squealing. “Help me get dressed, Bess, quick as you can.”

She sat bolt upright. “You’re not running away, are you? It wasn’t that bad, surely?”

“Of course I am not running away, silly.”

She put her hand to her head. “Ugh, I don’t feel very well.”

“Nor do I.”

“Then why are you sneaking about in my room? Why aren’t you enjoying your new husband and your marriage bed?”

“Hurry.” I pushed her shoes at her. “I don’t want Edmund to hear us and decide to come along too.”

“So you have had enough of him? Poor fellow.”

“There is no need to feel sorry for him, Bess,” I said tetchily. “Really.”

“How was it, then?” she asked, circumspect, as she slipped her shoes on, fastened my gown for me.

“I’ll tell you later.” Impatient, I turned to go.

She caught my arm. “I’m not going anywhere unless you tell me all, right now.”

“It is private.”

“That is so unfair,” she wailed. “I tell you everything. We promised to always tell each other everything.”

It was true. But I did not want to be disloyal to Edmund. Nor could I lie to Bess. She would see straight through it anyway. “You said that I might still be left wanting more,” I said. “So I am sure it was perfectly normal.” I reached for the door latch.

She held on tighter. “Normal? That’s hardly the word to describe your wedding night.”

I looked at her. “We women are ruled by insatiable lust. We are driven by stronger sexual desires and much lower passions than are men, is that not so?”

“So the preachers are always telling us, yes.”

“Men are allegedly governed instead by reason and intellect.”

She smirked. “Now that, I’m not so sure of.”

I laughed. “Well, I think it must be just so. And I think I have married an extremely reasonable and intelligent man.”

Bess gave me a skeptical frown.

“Now, please, can we go!”

“As you wish, miss, I mean, Ma’am.”

DOWNSTAIRS THE MAID WAS already about, sweeping grates and fetching pails of water. The door to the yard was already unlocked.

It was a dull, gray morning, very different from yesterday. Bess shouted up to our coachman, who was sleeping in a loft above the stable, and told him to make the coach ready.

“Where to, Ma’am?” he asked.

“Pall Mall.”

Bess looked at me. “I thought you wanted to see the river and the lions?”

“But first I want to find Dr. Sydenham, the physician who came to treat my father. There’s something very important I have to ask him.”

As we came to the fashionable squares and myriad streets of Soho, London assailed my senses. Bess was all for putting up the canvas screens, but I didn’t want to miss a thing, not even the stench. It wasn’t the countryside stink of dung but a much less wholesome combination of what I could see all around: decaying refuse that littered dirty cobbled streets and alleys running with filthy open sewers. I clasped my scented handkerchief to my nose but almost retched at the reek of rotten eggs which came from the sulfurous smoke belching out of the mass of crooked chimneys and darkening the air into a yellow choking smog as thick as any mist that descended over the Tickenham moors. But this fog was not accompanied by an unearthly peace as it was in Somersetshire.

On the contrary, horses neighed and the deafening clatter of ironbound carriage wheels competed with the shouts of drivers of drays and wagons and the apprentices who bellowed from open shops. I had never seen so many vehicles and animals and people all crammed together. Sailors and mountebanks rubbed shoulders with women carrying baskets of fruit on their heads; grandees rode in velvet-lined coaches and sedan chairs, escorted by liveried servants and black slave boys.

The mess and chaos of London diverted me for a while from the mess and chaos I had seemingly already managed to make of my young life, just married to one man and already hopelessly in love with another. But Bess wasn’t enjoying the experience at all. “This question you have to ask Dr. Sydenham, it had better be important, worth going to all this trouble for,” she muttered.

I let the screen drop over the window and leaned back, clasping my hands in my lap. “It’s as important as can be. It’s a matter of life and death.”

Bess stared at me white-faced.

I laughed to see her look of panic. “Oh Bess, I’m so sorry.” I grabbed her hand. “I’m not ill. Unless, of course, Galen was right to treat love as a disease. It’s just that I’m afraid I might die of longing for something I can never, ever have.”

She looked bemused. “Dr. Sydenham has a cure for longing?”

“I believe he might. I pray he might. If only we can find him.”

I knew Bess was waiting for me to tell her what it was that I longed for, but I did not want to. For once, this was something I did not want to share. I did not want to have these powerful, delicate, confusing emotions held up to her scrutiny, picked over and belittled. I wanted to keep them close and safe, a secret, even as I sought to dispel them. Whatever Bess saw in my face then, it was enough to stop her from inquiring any further.

Onto Pall Mall, a fine, paved thoroughfare, lined with a row of shady elm trees behind which were grand mansions. I leaned my head and shoulders rather precariously out of the window, and searched up and down the street. We were passing a redbrick mansion with wings, pediments and porticos, which looked far too impressive even for an eminent physician.

“Be sure you have the right place or you could find yourself calling on the King’s mistresses,” Bess said. “Mary told me Lady Castlemaine has a residence here, and Nell Gwynn.”

I remembered dimly something else Mary had told me, from the time of the plague, when London was a place of death. I had listened as always to any details about it with a morbid fascination. I shouted for the carriage to stop outside the sign of the feathers, the only place where you could buy the Countess of Kent’s Powder Virtues, allegedly believed by all the physicians of Christendom to guard against malignant distempers.

I walked into the dark little shop, where a wizened old man in a long apron was busy behind the counter, dusting bottles of potions. He told me that Dr. Sydenham lived over near the pheasantry.

I set off toward a small grove of chestnut trees and did my best not to gape at two ladies who were walking down the wide pavement carrying vizards which they held up to their faces on short sticks, beneath which it was possible to glimpse the tiny black leather patches in moon and star shapes that they wore stuck to their cheeks. Even in my fine silk morning gown I looked like a country girl who didn’t belong here, much as I might wish I did.