Lady of the Butterflies (26 page)

“Didn’t you care for school?” I’d known him only a few minutes yet we were talking as if we’d known each other for years. I felt I could ask James anything.

“I was born in Warwickshire. My father was a haberdasher. My grandfather had high ambitions for me and wanted me to have an education. He paid for me to go to Rugby but I’ve learned a lot more since I left.”

“We’re the same, then.” I grinned. “I don’t much like being told what to do, or what to believe.”

We were alike in so many ways. For a start, it was unusual for me to be able to have a conversation with a person eye-to-eye, rather than have to look up. His eyes, I noticed, were impossible to describe. They were hazel, flecked with green and gold and blue, as if they had absorbed something of the grass and the trees and the sunshine and the sky, and there was an extraordinary warmth and intelligence in them that was reflected in his smile. The butterflies still encircled and flickered around us, as if drawing us together, and I felt a bond between us, something strong and simple, not at all like my girlish infatuation with my husband, nothing like my disturbing desire for his friend. I thought of the dangerous rush of the Thames and of how this would be better than being able to swim, would be something to hold on to if my new life turned out to have such undercurrents. I knew I had found a friend, and had a strange sense that we were meant to find each other.

James was just a boy. He was the same height as I, lean as a withy, and his shoulders beneath his white shirt were bony still. He looked as if he had plenty of growing left to do but would never be particularly sturdy.

“How old are you?” I inquired.

I smiled to see him do what I so often did and straighten to make himself appear taller. “I became bound apprentice to St. Bart’s three years ago,” he said, with all the touching pride of a boy trying to be a man. I thought how frightening it must be to leave home and come down alone from the country to live in a strange city. “I’m supposed to be here studying plants, but everyone is doing that. I want to show that insects are equally worthy of effort, for the ultimate benefit of mankind.”

“How?”

“There are two reasons to collect and cultivate plants: taxonomy and nomenclature.” When he saw that I didn’t understand he added quickly: “So we can classify and name them according to their shared characteristics, as well as keep a record of their medical and commercial uses.”

“You think butterflies could be similarly useful?”

“I’m sure of it. They can teach us much about the processes that have generated the diversity of life on earth. Their transformation seems to hold the key to the origins of life itself.”

“My father told me it held the key to life after death.”

“He is far from alone in that belief. Metamorphosis is the source of much speculation, particularly in the Netherlands. A painter there claims to have kept caterpillars in jars and observed the entire cycle. In his book he compares it to resurrection, the rebirth of the soul after death.”

I was elated. “There are others, in the Netherlands, who have seen this happen?”

“Jan Swammerdam has written a
Natural History of Insects
, which categorizes them by type of metamorphosis. He is certain worms come from eggs rather than being born from dew or cabbages, though I don’t believe he has seen an egg or even a pupa. And he also says that Adam and Eve contained all the humans that came after them, which seems a rather wild notion.”

Now I was confused.

“It’s just a matter of time,” he said brightly, as if he understood my bemusement. “There is still much to be discovered, about metamorphosis and everything else. But all is possible from the observation of nature. If we study birds and butterflies, I believe even people will be able to take to the skies one day.”

Human flight seemed an impossible but splendid fantasy. I’d thought it had been mine alone. “Do you, honestly?”

He shrugged. “Why not?”

“Your grandfather must be very proud of you.”

“He was, I think. He died in January.”

“I’m sorry for that. Both my parents are dead.”

“I’m sorry too.” He looked at me speculatively, then put his hand in his pocket and offered me a hard-boiled egg. I thanked him, peeled it, took a bite, and then he handed me a hip flask. I took a long swig and molten fire ran down my throat. My eyes watered and I screwed up my face, laughing. “What in devil’s name is that?”

“Whiskey.” Grinning, he took the flask back, swallowed a nip himself and secured the top. “I want to help to encourage a free exchange of specimens and opinions,” he said. “To build a community of scholars, with everyone contributing. If nobody communicates properly, progress will be very slow and fragmented, with nobody knowing what anyone else is doing or has discovered. To avoid duplication of effort, and in the broader interest of science, I believe very strongly that correspondence with like-minded people in other countries is as important as private study and experiment.”

“‘Many shall pass to and fro, and knowledge will increase,’” I said, quoting Francis Bacon, feeling almost as if the father of science was watching over me, guiding me.

“Exactly,” James said. “Ship’s surgeons constantly visit apothecaries to provision their chests of medicines before a voyage. It is my plan to enlist their help. If I can send them off with instructions for collecting, they will spread an interest in insects across the seas at the same time as they bring specimens back. There are butterflies in the New World that nobody here has ever seen, that we will never see in England, but this way we have access to them all.”

I could hardly believe my luck in finding this boy. He was a genius, a visionary. He made everything seem possible. My own ambitions at once seemed very limited, yet I had never felt so inspired.

“I could write to you?” he offered.

“I’d like that.”

“And will you write to me?”

“I will.” I agreed with all the wholehearted solemnity and sweet joy of a wedding vow.

WE WERE HOME. It was pitch-dark with no moon, and it was raining, a fine, windswept spring rain that brushed my face like cobwebs as Edmund handed me down from the carriage and I breathed in the familiar peaty tang of the marshes. I was tired and I was hungry and it was so good to be home.

I knew this house, with its long-standing absence of mirrors, far better than I knew my own face. It called to me, spoke to me in a way that nowhere else ever could. I knew the sound of the great hinges and the bolts of the studded oak door as well as I knew the sound of my own voice. The cracks in the flagstones were as familiar to me as the lines in the palms of my own hands. My feet directed me without the need to think. I knew how many worn stairs to climb up to my bedchamber, how many paces took me from the parlor to the great hall. I had been on a long journey, but here I was again, back where I belonged. Though Tickenham Court was now entirely Edmund’s, had passed from my father to him as if I did not count, I did not feel disoriented or displaced by that, as I had expected to. I had an unaccountable feeling that I had not really lost it at all.

Edmund looked very comfortable at the head of the long table, in the great carved chair with arms that had been polished by the repeated touch of my father’s hands. I was in the smaller carved chair, my mother’s chair, and had a very strong sense of the generations of ladies of the manor who had sat before me in this very hall. Edmund and I would eat our supper here, more a late dinner, really, since it was hot, and then we would go up the stone stairs to the bedchamber which generations of Tickenham Court ladies had shared with their lords. We would sleep together in the sturdy oaken matrimonial bed, the very same bed in which my mother and father had spent their first nights as newlyweds. There was a reassuring continuity in it all, though I felt and understood, as if for the first time, the weight of responsibility my father had always spoken of.

Edmund smiled benignly at me down the table, then went back to enjoying his meal, chewing with relish, as if he had not a care in the world, as if nothing troubled him or indeed ever would.

There was one small thing that marred my pleasure in being home. I set my fork down on the pewter plate, pushed it away, leaned back against the unyielding carved wood of the chair and folded my arms. “Do you know, I hate eel pie. I have always hated eel pie.”

Edmund glanced up at me, his mouth full. “Can’t think why. It’s delicious.”

I smiled. “Not when you’ve had to eat it at least three times a week for your entire life, it’s not. I hate eels in whatever way they are served. Salted, cured, smoked, stewed.”

“So tell the cook what you’d like prepared instead,” Edmund said, forking another generous helping. “You have governance of the kitchen now, of the entire household. This is like our own little commonwealth.”

“Didn’t you know? The days of commonwealths are over. Thanks be to God. Just because you are sitting in my father’s chair, there is no need to start talking like him.”

He grinned back at me. “You sit in your mother’s chair, yet I see you do not intend to emulate her at all. Pity. I have heard exceptional reports of her from William Merrick. It is my understanding that she was chaste and loyal as well as meek and modest. The best things a wife can be.”

I was sure he must be teasing, but still I stiffened.

Edmund did not appear to notice, or else chose not to. “My own father always advised of the benefits of marrying a young girl,” he added. “One not yet spotted or sullied, one I could shape and mold into the wife I wanted her to be. There’s no need to look at me like that.” He smiled. “I mention it only because I should like you to know that I am very content with your shape, just as it is.”

The tension left my shoulders.

He stood and walked the length of the long table, taking my hands in his and raising me to my feet, kissing my fingers with his soft lips. “We have never had a falling-out, have we?” he said. “And I do not ever want us to have one.”

That seemed a rather daunting aim, though maybe not for someone as mild-mannered as my husband. “We are bound to have misunderstandings I think, aren’t we? At least at first,” I ventured. “There is so much we still do not know about each other.”

“We have plenty of time to learn. We have our whole lives ahead of us. Our whole lives to spend together.”

“Dearest Edmund.” I looked at his open handsome face and much of the emotional turmoil of the past few days drained away like the winter floods in spring. I just needed a little time to adjust to my new situation, that was all.

“We shall be happy here,” he said. “This is a beautiful house.” He kissed the tip of my nose, then my forehead. “It is our house now. Our home.”

I looked around the gloomy hall and an idea glinted at the back of my mind, like a solitary jewel swept beneath the floorboards. I could make Tickenham Court truly ours. I could make it beautiful, transform its Puritan austerity with brightness and comfort.

“We can hang printed calico or striped muslin at the windows,” I whispered, tentative at first and then growing bolder as fresh plans rushed at me. “We can replace all the dark oak with rosewood and walnut. We can light the rooms with great candelabra. And we can have mirrors, and padded armchairs upholstered in striped silk, and replace the rush matting with Oriental carpets. And we can buy pepper and ginger and cinnamon too, so we can eat food that doesn’t taste of marsh and peat.” I was grinning now, thinking that I could and would do it. I would work very hard to make a success of this marriage. Edmund was good and kind and I did love him. What I felt for Richard was surely just desire and lust, not love at all. And I didn’t need desire and lust to make me happy, did I? I would make Edmund happy too. “The very first thing we shall have,” I said, “is a silk quilt for our bed, stitched with all the colors of the rainbow.”

Edmund was looking concerned. “I doubt we can afford quite all that,” he said.

“But of course we can, we’re wealthy landowners. Mr. Merrick has always said so.”

“We’ve lived through enough dire and changeable times to learn that we can never know what’s waiting round the corner,” he said judiciously. “The King might make a levy on us tomorrow, for horses or arms for another war with the Dutch.”

“Then we may as well spend it first.”

“We should invest and save. We mustn’t be reckless.”

The rain had turned heavier, beating at the windows, and it was blowing a gale. It would only take a high spring tide to pile up the waters in the estuary and block the outflow of the already swollen rivers. They would burst their banks, inundate the fields and drown all the fresh grass and the bright spring flowers in their first bloom. Suddenly, I knew just how that felt. “Surely buying a few new furnishings for our marital home is not reckless?” I rested my palms against his chest and felt how steady his heart still was. I picked at a thread in his waistcoat, tweaking the stitched cloth gently between my fingers. “Besides, I’d like to be reckless, just a little. I’d like to know what it feels like. For a short while, at least.”