Lady of the Butterflies (29 page)

The sickness worsened around the forty-fifth day, the time when it is said that a baby’s soul is born. I felt nauseous as soon as I sat upright and I could barely keep down a morsel of food. The constant retching left me limp as a wet leaf, but I believed I deserved no less, welcomed it, bore it like a penance.

Edmund was as thoughtful as he had sworn always to be. He touched me cautiously as if I was made of porcelain and refused to lie with me at all for risk of dislodging the baby. He took over the household management, so I wouldn’t tire too much, and he took me on outings to Bath, where the waters were said to be beneficial for women who were with child. His concern and his love for me and for our baby were almost unbearable. The kinder he was to me, the more wretched I felt.

When he came to find me one morning, I was sitting on the chamber floor in my cambric chemise, my hair lank and loose, my back against the wall and my legs outspread before me like a rag doll as I cradled a basin in my lap.

“What is it about being with child that causes a woman to vomit?” I wondered apathetically, trying to be objective in the hope it might help a little. “Maybe it’s the growing womb pressing on my insides, but surely that would be worse at the end of term rather than at the start?”

Edmund, not at all interested, took the basin off me and helped me to my feet. “Darling, this cannot go on.”

“I’m sure it will ease soon.”

“You’ve been saying that for weeks.”

I grabbed the basin off him again, tossed my hair over my shoulder, doubled over and heaved, until it felt like my guts were being torn from within me. The retching was dry. There was nothing left inside my belly but a baby, and I was increasingly afraid that if this went on much longer, the baby must be ripped from me too.

And if it was not . . . It is well known that the womb is absorbent, that womb children are in danger from corruption, and I had exposed this little soul to so much wickedness. Richard had caressed my body wherein, unbeknownst to me, there had been planted my husband’s seed. My body had been shaken to its core with a sinful passion for a man who was not the father of the child it carried. I was sure there could be no greater carnal sin. If my baby was not shaken from me, I feared it would be marked with the most baleful influences for the rest of its life.

Edmund must have seen fear in my face. “That’s it,” he decided. “I’m sending for Dr. Duckett.”

“No.”

“Eleanor, be sensible. We must.”

“I will not see that charlatan, no matter how ill I am.”

“He could bring you some physic,” Edmund reasoned. “He could make you well.”

“I have never seen Dr. Duckett make anyone well. All he has ever brought to this house is suffering and death.”

Edmund looked at me, uncomprehending. “You are being absurd,” he said helplessly.

I saw myself for a moment as he must see me, long fair hair in tangles, eyes enormous in a face that was drawn and pale with sickness, and I almost agreed to do as he wanted, just to make him happy, even if it did me no good at all. But I could not. “I have so longed for this baby,” I said as I rested my hand on my still-flat belly. “Already I love him so much.”

“Him?” Edmund smiled questioningly.

“I am sure we shall have a boy,” I said. “I feel it. I cannot bear to think that anything will go wrong.”

I let Edmund take me into his arms. “Eleanor, it is so unlike you to be so gloomy,” he said, stroking my back. “Be of good cheer. Have faith.”

I could not tell him that it was faith that made me gloomy. I had thought I had thrown off much of the indoctrination of my Puritan upbringing, but in the empty void of guilt it had rushed back with a vengeance. How could I forget the Puritan God who was always watching, waiting to reward good deeds and punish the bad? How could I ever forget the Puritan code which deemed that ill fortune followed wrongdoing just as night followed day? How could I ever forget years of teaching about how carnal lust was the way only to madness and ruin? Puritan law had once made adultery a capital crime, but it made no difference that it was no longer enforced, made no difference that Richard and I had not actually lain together. By God’s law, I had committed adultery almost nightly ever since the day I learned to skate. I had no need of Dr. Duckett and his purges. It felt as if my body was trying to purge itself of my longed-for little child. The worst punishment I could imagine.

“Lie still and rest, at least,” Edmund said.

But I knew that what I needed was not rest but reparation.

Alone in my chamber, I went down on my knees, clasped my hands and begged God for forgiveness, for allowing myself to be led into sin and temptation. I read the Bible and I murmured the catechism I had learned as a child. “My duty toward my neighbor is to do to all men as I would they should do unto me . . . to bear no malice nor hatred in my heart . . . to do my duty unto God, to keep my body in soberness and chastity.”

I had learned to repeat those words before I even knew their meaning. I could say them backward, in my sleep. I did want to live by and be all those things. I did want to be sober and chaste. But oh, it was so much easier to say than to do.

Autumn

1677

T
he nausea did abate, to be replaced by ravenous hunger. My stomach gnawed as if there was a hole growing there, not an infant, but I delighted in piling my plate with odd combinations of cheese and fruit, pastries and meats, thinking how my baby had a fine appetite, must be growing strong and healthy after all. I had been forgiven, even if I could not forgive myself.

When I wrote to tell James I was expecting a child and that Edmund would not risk having me go chasing after butterflies, James sent me one small wing, iridescent purple-blue, from a butterfly he’d caught on an expedition to the fields that lay around King Henry VIII’s great Hampton Court Palace. I wondered what had happened to the other half of the butterfly. It was an odd thing to send me, when we were usually so concerned with pristine specimens, but it was very pretty nonetheless, like a little petal or a fragment of sky, and I stored it away in the back of my Bible.

The bigger and less mobile I grew, the more I looked forward to receiving James’s letters and the more I enjoyed replying to them. He said he and his friends had been butterfly hunting in Greenwich too, beside the new observatory, and on Primrose Hill, in the Mitcham lavender fields and in Fulham Palace Gardens. I would have been envious of this like-minded group of men, for whom a passion for butterflies was a social pursuit, who could visit such romantic-sounding places and share their discoveries, but for once I was glad to be a woman, for only a woman could know the joy of feeling a child move inside her own body.

James told me to drink sage ale to strengthen my womb, said that lilies and roses, cyclamen, or sowbread and columbine would nourish my unborn child and procure an easy and speedy delivery for me. I was very touched by his concern and told him what a skilled apothecary he was going to become.

He wrote, too, of the debate raging amongst his naturalist friends, one faction questioning spontaneous generation as a relic of ancient times, while another arguing that if a caterpillar could become a butterfly inside a pupa, why could a leaf not transmute into a caterpillar? All sides were calling for more investigation.

Preoccupied as I was by the changes in my own body, I tried to describe to him how the subject of metamorphosis had a strange resonance for me at this time. My swelling womb was just like a tightly wrapped pupa, ripening with the promise of new life. A new life that kicked and squirmed inside me, with tiny limbs forming and fluttering beneath my taut skin, just like wings. As I wrote the words, it occurred to me that I had never tried to describe the experience to Edmund, because he had never shown any real interest, considered it women’s work. It was to James that I told of my eagerness to meet my baby. To James I explained how the promise of holding the little thing in my arms even helped ease my utter dread of banishment to a darkened lying-in chamber for weeks on end.

“Is that really all you are afraid of?” Bess said in disbelief, as I sat on a stool and let her rub my aching back. “Do you really fear the banishment more than the pain and peril of childbirth itself?”

“I was doing my best not to think of that.” I grinned. “Until you kindly brought it up.”

“Ned lived for the whole nine months in terror of my being taken from him for good, and I was petrified myself, I won’t pretend otherwise. Any more than I can pretend that your danger is not great and the pains will not be grievous.”

I laughed. “I thank you for your honesty, Bess. I can always rely on you to tell it to me as it is.”

I wondered. Was Edmund afraid like Ned had been? If he was, he had not shared it with me at all. But then, when he came into the chamber as I lay half asleep, I felt the mattress dip to his weight as he sat down beside me. He laid his hand very gently upon my head, and I heard his whispered private prayer. “Lord, look upon my dear wife as she is great with child, give her strength and a gracious delivery from these perils.”

It sounded very much like the prayers Puritans still said on Gunpowder Treason Night, to thank God for delivering us from the deadly plot of the Papists.

I AWOKE to a dull pain in my lower back, which sent out aching tentacles all the way round to my belly. It eased. I listened to the rain pit-pattering on the window. Then came another twinge, which also passed. The next one was more severe but it, too, subsided. So it went on for hours, with the spasms growing sharper as the downpour became more and more torrential, windswept and battering the glass, so that when I finally cried out for Edmund, for Bess, sleeping nearby, I was not sure they would hear me above the clatter.

For weeks I had been confined to this room. The bed had been draped with hangings and drawn close to the fire, the windows and doors kept closed and covered, and I had a sudden need just to open the curtains and see daybreak, even if it was only a dank and murky one. I rolled clumsily to the edge of the mattress, pushed open the bed curtains. Bess woke and ran to the bed just as I stood up, and a huge gush of water poured out of me, dousing my feet and the floor, as if I had lived on the wetlands so long even my body had been flooded.

“Get back in bed,” Bess ordered, almost pushing me back under the blankets as Edmund rushed in, still in his nightshirt, tousle-haired and blurry-eyed and carrying a candle.

I drew up my knees against another wave of pain. “It’s started, Edmund,” I grunted. “The baby is coming.”

He was by my side in an instant. “Are you sure?” he asked, his voice ringing with panic.

“Don’t sound so shocked. It is not as if we have not been expecting it to happen these past nine months.”

“I’ll send for the midwife, and the gossips.”

“The midwife first,” I urged.

“Yes, yes. Of course. The midwife.” He was rushing to the door fast as a scalded cat but I called him back.

“Would you open the curtains for me before you go, Edmund?”

He hesitated. “But the manuals are very strict.”

“I do not want this baby to be born into darkness,” I said firmly. “Please, do as I ask.”

Reluctantly, he went to the window while I screwed a ball of blanket in my hand as another wave of pain reached its peak.

Edmund came back to my side and watched my face twist with pain. “I would be so much happier if you were attended by a surgeon.”

“If the parish midwife is good enough for the yeomen’s wives, she is good enough for me,” I said when the spasm abated. “Mother Wall may not even be able to write her own name, but her knowledge is the best there can be. It comes from the experience of her own eyes and ears and hands, and from the scores of babies she has safely delivered before.”

He nodded. “I will fetch her for you.” He left the room, hurtled back to give me a kiss, rushed off again. As Bess went to fetch the linen and I listened to a horse galloping off from the stables, I looked over at the canopied oak rocking cradle that had been moved over from the corner of the room to the side of my bed. “Please, God,” I whispered, “let me rock my baby in his crib. Have compassion for me through the torture that’s coming. Preserve my life and the life of my little child.”

I felt much safer when Mother Wall arrived, with her stool and her knife, followed by more than a dozen gossips: Ann Smythe from Ashton Court; Bess and her mother; Mistress Keene, the cook; Jane Jennings, the former kitchenmaid, with her baby daughter in her arms; Mistress Bennett, wife of a wildfowler; Mistress Walker from the mill; and lastly Mistress Hort.

Between eating pasties and caraway comfits from the kitchen, they drew up stools around the bed and kept up a constant flow of chatter about their own labors and childbeds, their numerous children and their households. I was not expected to join in and it was comforting to listen to them, enjoying being all together, and to have their support, companionship and recollected experience as the crushing pains grew stronger and closer together, until I gripped Bess’s fingers hard enough to break them and screamed that I couldn’t bear it any longer. “Something must be wrong!” I yelled through gritted teeth. My shift clung to my body, soaked in perspiration, and my hair hung below my waist in sweaty rats’ tails. “This cannot . . . cannot be normal.”

“It is normal, child,” Mistress Bennett soothed. “More’s the pity. Now you stop worrying about it and let nature do its work.”

“Why is it never like this for cows in calf?”

“We have grandmother Eve to thank for that,” Mistress Keene said.

“Thank her!” I grunted. “I’d like to strangle her.”

Bess chuckled.

The pain subsided once more and I took consolation from watching Mother Wall issuing confident instructions for the fire to be got ready, the candles kept lit. She could have been forty or she could have been a hundred. Her hair was silvery, her back stooped, but her fingers, with their neatly trimmed nails, were soft and remarkably supple for a marsh dweller. She anointed my womb and her own hands with oil of lilies, rubbed soothing salves and liniments into my skin, and gave me cups of caudles and herbal infusions. I did not ask her what was in them; for once I was content just to obey without question.

She probed me gently to see how the birth progressed and how the baby lay, and all the while she talked to me in her soothing country burr, telling me to move about and not lie still on the bed, to stand and lean against the bedposts, as the great waves of pain rose ever higher, so that I was sure they would rip me apart.

She patted my hand as I bore down and pushed with all my might. “You are doing very well, Ma’am,” she said. “You screech all you want. We are nearly there now.”

“You’ll meet your little one soon enough,” Mistress Knight soothed, and the thought of that made it more bearable, reminded me what lay at the end of my labor.

“How much longer?” I gasped.

“The babe will come in its own good time,” Mother Wall said.

That turned out to be just before midnight. I squatted over a pile of rushes, with Bess supporting me under my arm on one side and her mother on the other, while Mother Wall knelt below me and peered up between my legs. “Its head is crowned,” she said, as if he were a little prince.

And then, in one fiery eruption of ripping, gushing, hot, wet agony, my baby boy came slithering out like a fish between my knees, into the waiting arms of Mother Wall, who caught him like a boy catches a football. She flipped him over and slapped him on the back and he howled in protest, his little balled fists punching the air, his face red and contorted with anger.

I sat where I was on the floor, and tears of joy and relief spilled down my hot cheeks. I had a child. A healthy, living child, and I had survived to see him born. He was so perfect. I held out my arms. “Let me hold him,” I said. “I want to hold my baby.”

I did not need anyone to tell me to use my hand to support his fragile little skull. Holding him was for me as natural and instinctive as his first breath. I held him in my left arm, close to my heart, and with my right hand I carefully wiped the blood and stickiness off his tiny head with the edge of my shift. I noted that he had the blackest hair. Where Edmund was redheaded and I was fair, our son had hair as black as peat, and for a while, at least, he also had soft blue eyes. I kissed him and rocked him, stroked him and crooned over him, could not take my eyes off him. I was filled with love, a protective and pure love that was so powerful it was overwhelming.

“Thanks be to God,” Bess’s mother said. “You are delivered of your firstborn son.”

Everyone crowded round with blessings for us both, examined him and pronounced him very well made. I was struck by an enormous sense of affection and kinship with these women who had been with me through my travail. They were my sisters now and it was a joy to be a woman, to be in the exclusive company of women. I felt exalted. With God’s help, and with some help from my husband, admittedly, I had created life inside me. I had brought life forth. And I had survived to see a miracle. If death had seemed an everyday tragedy, so birth was an everyday wonder.

The midwife took my son back into her expert hands and I watched as she took her knife to cut the navel string. She dressed it with frankincense; then, as I was put to bed, she took the baby to the basin of warm water and sweet butter to bathe him.

“So, I have a son.”

I tore my eyes away from the perfect little bundle and saw that Edmund had come into the birthing room. Poor Edmund. He looked so exhausted and so happy and so alarmed amidst the carnage, that all at once my heart went out to him.

I held out my hand and he came and took it and bent down to kiss my damp forehead. “Eleanor darling, I heard your screams and I was sure you were dying.”

“You were not the only one.” I smiled across at our baby as he was being swaddled by the midwife. “But it was worth the pain. I’ve almost forgotten it already.”

He kissed me again. “I’m so proud of you. You were so brave.”

The midwife handed our son to Edmund, who took him tenderly but awkwardly. “Father, see, there is your child. God give you much joy with him.”