Lady of the Butterflies (37 page)

With both hands clawed, I gripped the tapestry and tore it from its hangings, let it crumple in a great plume of dust on the stone floor. I hauled it over to the great fireplace and rolled it and kicked it onto the flames. But rather than catch light, the heavy wool snuffed out the fire in an instant. The room turned colder and darker. If He did exist, then God had forsaken me.

I raised my face to the vaulted roof and cried out into the emptiness: “Where are you?”

“I am right here, Nell.” It was a softly spoken and achingly familiar voice that had answered me.

I spun round to the door. “What are you doing?”

“I have come to pay my respects to Edmund,” Richard said with a small, stiff bow.

He was dressed in a velvet suit as black as his hair, with high boots and a black feather on his hat. There were dark shadows beneath his eyes. Even lightly tanned as he always was, he looked very pale.

I had ripped holes in my black Puritan dresses after my father’s funeral. Now I felt as if it was my heart that had been ripped to shreds. But I hardened it. “Have you no shame?” I asked him.

He hesitated. “I can never be ashamed of loving you.”

“You have no right to love me,” I said, my voice very cold. “You had no right to love another man’s wife.”

“Nell, please listen to me.” He took a few echoing steps and they brought him closer to me, too close. “Edmund asked me to take care of you and Forest for him.”

“Oh, God! Don’t tell me that. Don’t say that to me.”

“He asked me. That is all he asked of me.”

“And all I ask is that I never see you again. Not ever. Do you understand?”

His eyes raked my face. “You do not mean that?”

“I do.”

“I came to see if there was anything I could do for you,” he said. “Is there?”

“The only thing you can do for me is to stay away from me.”

“Edmund Ashfield was my friend,” he said slowly. “I grieve for him just as you do, Nell. I would like very much to be a friend to you.” He glanced at the tapestry smoldering on the fire. “You look to be in dire need of one.”

As did he. But how could I be a friend to him, when I had once wanted to be so much more? “Do you not hear me? The last person in the world that I need is you.”

He was before me in a stride, had gripped my shoulders very tight as if he would shake me, but instead pulled me roughly toward him. He held me against him for a moment and then abruptly released me.

I did not want him to. I wanted him to take me in his arms again. I wanted to beat at his chest with my balled fists and for him to hold me tighter still. I wanted to bury my face in his neck, to lay my head against the soft velvet of his coat and sob out my grief. I wanted him to kiss my tears away and later, much later, I wanted to know that he would stroke me with warm, soft, healing hands and love me with such passion that I forgot all else.

“Stay away from me,” I rasped. “Do not ever touch me again.”

“Sacrificing our own happiness will not bring Edmund back,” he said, bereft. “He would not want this.”

“How can you speak of what he wanted?” I hissed, clenching my hands and digging the nails into my flesh until I drew blood. “Don’t you see? You were a false friend to him and I a faithless wife. We are to blame. We ill-wished him. Something catastrophic is conjured between us when we are together. When I said I could never be your bride, you knew there was one way. You asked me once if I wished I was married to you instead, and I said that I did wish it. We as good as welcomed the possibility of Edmund’s death. You must see that we can never, ever take advantage of his death or allow ourselves one moment of pleasure because of it. We can never be together now.”

There were tears in his eyes and in mine. I let them stream unchecked down my cheeks, hot against my ice-cold face. I made myself say it. “I will never see you again.”

Summer

1680

M
ary Burges stayed in Tickenham with me awhile, and then she insisted Forest and I go back with her to Hackney, with Bess in attendance, so that I could have my baby there. She had made all the necessary arrangements, secured a written certificate of my widowhood so no suspicion would befall me when I was brought to bed in childbirth away from home. I hadn’t had time to ponder my new circumstances for it even to occur to me that, without this paperwork, I was likely to be treated as barely better than a harlot, my little children as bastards.

“Bring your butterflies,” Mary suggested gently, as she and Bess helped me pack a small trunk of my own and Forest’s clothes.

She might have spoken to me in an unknown language. “Butterflies?”

“There’s plenty of room for them. We can invite your friend James to visit. He still writes to you, doesn’t he?”

“Yes, he still writes.” I’d not replied to his last two letters.

“I’m sure he’d like to see your collection.”

I had let Mary wrap my gowns and petticoats around the leather-bound book and pine boxes in which I’d pasted the butterflies. Not that I could ever imagine showing them to James, nor ever myself looking at them or finding joy in them again. The only reason I carried on breathing was for Edmund’s children, for little Forest and the baby inside me who would never meet its father, whom Edmund would never see. I tortured myself that I was to blame. I should never have given him the Jesuits’ Powder. His death felt like the greatest cross that I could ever bear. I was sure that I would weep myself as blind as he had been at the end.

Huddled inside a cloak, despite the warm weather, I took in nothing of the journey, or of Hackney itself, beyond that it was a rural, grassy little place, more like a village than an outlying parish of a great city, for all it was becoming a center of genteel education.

I knew it no better when I’d been there several weeks.

I sat shelling peas on a stool by the open door in Mary’s little white-walled kitchen, with its shining brass pans and pots of aromatic flowers, now and again pausing to throw a wooden ball at the skittles for Forest, before he exploded in one of the increasingly regular and incandescent tantrums that only his father’s calm firmness had been able to control. After dinner I fetched sand from the barrel that stood in the corner of the kitchen and started to help Mary to clean. But she insisted I rest and drink up my fortified wine and cordial.

“Why don’t you write to James Petiver and tell him you are in Hackney?” she suggested, but I shook my head. I didn’t want to see him. I didn’t want to see anyone.

Before I knew it, it was time for my confinement, and I retreated to the small, dark birthing room beneath the eaves almost with relief. Mary and Bess were the only companions I wanted. One day Mary brought me a gift, a curious little stone within a stone on a neck chain.

“It’s an eaglestone,” she told me as I took it from her. “From Africa.”

“How did you get it?”

“They’re readily enough to be had in London. Here, let me put it on for you.” She leaned toward me and slipped it over my head, kissing my forehead as she did it. “You’re supposed to wear it touching your skin when you’re with child, to keep you both safe. I thought it was a pretty notion. See.” She held the little pendant in the palm of her hand. “The two stones, one nested within the other, are like a child in the womb.”

I took it into my own hand and I wanted to weep. “Thank you, Mary. Thank you for wanting to keep me safe.”

I hated the thought that I was a burden to her, when she had enough worries of her own. She was in far more danger than was I. The Popish Plot and the subsequent wild allegations against Catholics had seen thirty-five put to death and the Catholic Duke of York exiled abroad for the alleged plot to murder the King. Anti-Papist feeling still ran dangerously high. Which is why I had not told her the precise nature of Edmund’s death, could never tell her, did not even want to explore my confused, suppressed fear that it was Catholic poison which had killed him.

“I know you don’t believe in amulets,” Mary said.

“I believe in them as much as I can believe in anything now.” I wrapped my fingers around the little charm and slipped it inside my cambric chemise. “I might as well put my faith in this as in anything else. Maybe good luck or bad luck is all there is. Maybe a talisman is all I need.”

I WAS IN BED, with barely the strength to lift my head, when Mary brought a tiny baby girl to me, all clean and pink and wrapped up in soft swaddling cloths.

“There, little one,” Mary crooned, as she placed this tranquil little stranger carefully in my arms. “She’s been waiting so very patiently to meet her mother.” Mary sat down on the edge of the bed. “We thought you’d taken leave of us, Eleanor. Do you have any recollection at all?”

I tried, shook my head. “I remember the pains starting. Then nothing.”

“It is probably just as well,” she said. “The birth wasn’t an easy one. You’ve been grievously sick.”

I gazed down into my baby’s sweet face, as she made a little O with her mouth. All rosy and content, she was so utterly different from my first sight of Forest, bloody and naked and blue, still attached to me by the slippery, pulsating cord.

“What happened?”

Mary hesitated.

“I want to know, Mary. Everything.”

“The baby came wrong,” Mary began, gently. “She was stuck so long the midwife had to drag her out of you by her legs.” Her kind, calm voice removed only some of the horror of her words. “You fainted from an overflow of blood just after it was over. You regained some sensible pulse and color, but after a few days fell faint again from noxious impurities that nature should have cleaned out of you. It is a miracle you’re still with us. That both of you are still with us.” She paused, looked down at the baby with adoration. “She’s the most docile, easy little thing. Hardly ever cries or complains. It’s almost as if, after the violence of her delivery and the fight she had to come into the world, she wants only calmness and peace.”

“Her father wanted that too.”

“Pray he has peace now.”

“I cannot pray for anything anymore. I wish I could.”

I stroked my baby’s silken little cheek, shifted her slightly and felt my own flattened belly. “She is a new life,” I whispered. “Just like a little butterfly bursting forth from a pupa. If I could only believe in that. I owe it to her grandfather’s memory to believe it.”

If I had taken more heed of his warnings, perhaps this little girl would have known a father’s love as I had known it, even though I had rejected all that my father stood for. Had he been right all along? Had I been so very wrong to doubt him?

“If only I could be sure that Edmund is not merely rotting in the ground but that his soul has been reborn,” I said quietly. “If only I could be sure that he will meet his little daughter one day.”

“I pray that you find your faith again,” Mary said. “I will always pray for you, Eleanor, and your dear girl. And for Forest.”

I had a pang of yearning to see my son. “Where is Forest?”

“Busy learning to chop wood with John. Would you have me fetch him?”

“No. Leave him be,” I said. “I’ll not drag him from a boy’s pleasure into a nursery. He will have precious little opportunity to do manly things, since he is adrift in a little family of women now.” The baby mewed like a kitten then, so I put her to my breast. Her gums didn’t hurt me as Forest’s had done, her suckling no more than a gentle tug and tickle.

“Your milk will come again soon,” Mary said, standing. “I’ll tell the wet nurse we have no more need of her.”

“Thank you for caring for her so well for me.”

“I’ve cherished her as if she was my own.”

“She shall be named after you.”

“I’d like that.”

“Hello, my Mary,” I said when we were alone. The baby blinked her mild blue eyes, then looked around as if in wonder at a world still so new to her. She wrinkled her nose and it was the most delightful thing. She yawned and it was like a miracle. She fascinated me. She was my cherub, my fairy, my little princess, my companion. I was overcome with a love as profound and consuming as the love I had felt when I first saw Forest, entirely different this time, though, because Mary was of my sex. We would understand each other, would share similar experiences, similar hopes and fears. She was like me, made anew.

I loosened the swaddling cloths and gave her freedom to wave her arms about. Her tiny fingers jumped open like a little frog, a starfish, like the leaves of a marsh pimpernel. They curled around my thumb and clung to me. Then the swaddling fell back from her head and I saw that she was not like me at all. She was like Edmund. She had a fluffy fuzz of the brightest copper hair. And it undid me.

I stared at the downy auburn tufts and tears streamed down my face. Edmund’s daughter gazed back at me with unfocused eyes and looked completely calm and accepting, just like her father. I held her to my face and kissed her, wetting her cheeks with my tears. I clutched her to me and rocked her, rocked myself, and told her how her father would have loved her so.

MARY LET ME BE until a few days after I was churched; then she laid out my blue gown on the bed and sent Bess in, armed with curling tongs for my hair.

“There’s someone coming to see you later,” she said as Bess stuck the tongs in the fire to heat them.

I was lounging back on the pillows feeding the baby, but was instantly alert. “Who?”

“James Petiver.”

“Oh.” I tried not to sound disappointed that it was not someone else, tried not even to feel it.

“I asked him to come. I hope you don’t mind.” Mary seemed well pleased with herself. “He’s just what you need. He has been such a good friend to you, keeping up his correspondence all this time. He’s also an apothecary. One of those qualifications, or the combination of them, surely mean he will be able to help you where the rest of us have failed.” She took the baby off me and pulled me out of bed and onto a stool. Then she picked up an ivory comb to start on my hair herself.

“I can’t think what I’ll find to say to him,” I said, as Bess took over and coiled a silken lock of my fresh-combed hair round the tongs. “I fear I shall be very dull company.”

Mary watched as the rich yellow curls bounced up around my shoulders. “Sweet girl, I doubt any man could ever find you dull. But we shall let James be the judge.”

John had taken Forest to market with him and Mary had the baby with her in the schoolroom, so I was sitting alone by the fire when the maid brought James in.

He had changed so much since the first and only time I’d met him face-to-face in the Apothecaries’ Garden, and yet I would have known him anywhere. After so many letters had passed between us, I felt I knew him as well as I knew myself. He could have been my brother. We even looked alike, both of us fair and slight.

He was dressed in a well-cut suit of blue serge with brass buttons and a square white collar edged with lace. He had let his corn-blond hair grow longer and had tied it back with a dark blue ribbon—a practicality, I imagined, but it suited him well. In physical stature he was still only head and shoulders above me, but I could see instantly that in other respects he had grown from a boy to a man. He had an air of assurance he’d not had before, but was still as unaffected as ever. He took both my cold hands in his warm ones, didn’t raise them to his lips and kiss them, or do anything at all gallant, but kept them pressed inside his and held them there as we sat down, me on the little settle and him on a stool beside me.

“It is so good to see you,” he said. This was no platitude, was not spoken out of politeness but as if he meant it from the bottom of his heart. “I am so very sorry for your loss.”

He moved toward me slightly and then away again, and I caught a scent of the herbs and lavender and the other aromatic plants he worked with and turned into medicines. It was the scent of the meadows and the gardens he frequented for his trade, and it reminded me of what I’d been missing: this essence of nature, of fresh air, which emanated from his hands, his clothes, from his very being. It was somehow reflected in his indefinable eyes, flecked with hazel and green and gold, which had in them all the warmth and brightness of a sunny glade. They radiated enthusiasm, intelligence and affection.