Lady of the Butterflies (38 page)

“It is good of you to come, James.”

“I’d have come much sooner if I’d been invited.” He studied me as a botanist might study a flower, to appreciate its complexities but also to comprehend what it needed in order to blossom. “I can’t believe you’ve been but a few hours’ walk away all these weeks.”

“I’ve lost all grasp of time. So much has happened to me. I’ve become a wife and widow and a mother, twice over, all in the space of four years.” Silently, I added adulteress to that list. “James, have you . . . have you ever used Jesuits’ Powder?”

“I have too much regard for my career even to stock it at present. Why do you ask?”

I shook my head, found I did not want to speak of Edmund’s death. Having it confirmed that Jesuits’ Powder was a deadly poison could change nothing. For once in my life, it seemed better not to ask, better not to know the answer.

“I should love to meet your little son and daughter,” James said. “They must be a great comfort to you.”

There seemed no point at all in pretending, or even trying to make idle chat with him. “They are my joy and my torment,” I said. “I see Edmund in them, but the very thought of them makes my heart shrink because I remember his great pleasure in them. And I am so terrified of some illness or accident befalling them, of losing them too, that I am never at peace.”

James considered me. “You are grieving,” he said gently. “But you are also suffering from fits of the mother, I think. It’s very common after giving birth to succumb to a kind of melancholy, especially when you’ve experienced trauma in your life. It passes, after a while. There’s a physic I can give you to help.” He was still holding my hands, chafing them gently as we talked, and I felt the blood flowing in my veins again, like the sap rising in spring. “You’re in very good company as well, you know. All the great intellectuals of our time are tormented by morbid dispositions . . . Hooke, Locke, Newton.” He kept the warmth of his eyes focused on me so that I felt as if I really was a flower, opening to the warmth of the sun. “Mistress Burges told me you’d brought your collection with you. I’d like to see it, if you would show it to me.”

I went to fetch an armful of books and cases, handed them to him with some reluctance, sat back in my seat and watched in an agony of suspense as he turned over a page, paused to examine a specimen, then turned another, on and on, in complete silence.

He spent the longest time looking at his beloved copper-colored butterflies, and then, mercifully, he reached the end. At last he looked up. “The quality and variety of your collection puts the rest of us to shame.”

It was so simply said, and yet it meant so very much to me.

“Thank you, James.”

“No need to thank me when I speak only the truth.”

I hadn’t realized how much I had wanted his approval—almost more than I used to want my father’s. And I smiled. For the first time since Edmund died, I felt a flush of joy. And with it came hope, without which I think life is unbearable. I had collected my butterflies devotedly but I hadn’t thought they amounted to much. Now I wondered if I might find some meaning to life after all, might even make some lasting contribution.

James had turned back to the middle of the book. “This insect here,” he said, pointing to a checkered red and black. “I’ve only ever seen one before, or one very like it. Captured in Cambridgeshire.”

“Conditions in the Fens were once very similar to those where I live. I see those butterflies almost every day.” I told him then about the Swallowtails and Large Coppers and how they seemed to have deserted the Fens when they were drained.

“That’s a remarkable discovery.” James looked back at the red and black specimen. “It would be interesting to know if it’s the same with these. They’re the ones you once described to me as having markings like a chessboard?”

“That’s right.”

“I’ve a checkered dice box that looks just the same. Fritillary.”

“It should be called a Marsh Fritillary, then.”

“A good name. I’ll propose it at our next coffeehouse meeting.”

“You can give names to butterflies, just like that?”

“A proper system of nomenclature is vital to bring order out of the chaos of the natural world. If a butterfly doesn’t already have a Latin name or a common name, we should give it one. You already speak of Swallowtails and Large Coppers. Let’s do some more, shall we?” He spun the book back toward me, as if we were to play a board game, pointed to a butterfly with bands of bright red across its brown velvety wings.

“It reminds me of one of the flags you see on naval ships.”

“The Red Admiral?” he said.

“Red Admiral. I like it. We should call it that.”

“And this?” He pointed to one with jagged orange-brown wings, marked with black and blue. “What would be a good name for this one, do you suppose?”

Puzzled, I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees, chin resting in my hands to think. “Hmmm. Not so easy.”

James reached out toward me and produced a little comb, like a conjuror at a fair might produce a coin from the sleeve of his coat. It took me a moment to realize he’d taken it from my hair. “It looks rather like this pattern, don’t you think?”

A curl flopped across my eyes. I pushed it away with my hand. “Tortoiseshell.”

“Tortoiseshell it shall be.”

“How do you know for sure you’ve found a different species, that it’s not just a variation?”

“There’s always much debate about species divisions. That’s why we all need to keep collecting and share our findings.”

“Will other people use those names we’ve chosen?”

“They could still be in use hundreds of years from now.”

The notion of that amazed and cheered me, the idea that there might just be butterflies called Red Admirals and Tortoiseshells flying around when we were long gone.

“Did I ever tell you,” I said, “a boy once accused me of being soft in the head for chasing butterflies.”

“That doesn’t surprise me in the least. You should see the strange looks I attract when folk see me out walking with a net over my shoulder, a pincushion round my neck, and butterflies fastened round the brim of my hat.”

I giggled. “You pin them round the brim of your hat? What a perfect place.”

“You see, only you’d appreciate that. To the rest of the world I look an oddity indeed.”

He stayed for hours and, when he came back the next week, he arrived with a posy of flowers he’d picked from Chelsea, and a draft of physic he’d prepared for me himself.

“What is in it?” I asked.

He smiled to see a glimmer of my natural curiosity returning. “Water pimpernel and marsh marigold, mainly.”

“Both those plants grow on Tickenham Moor,” I pondered. “I never knew they had medicinal properties. Something else that might be lost, then, if the land were converted from marsh into permanent arable land?”

“Well, for now they are plentiful enough.” He spooned out a measure of the physic for me before we had glasses of wine and slices of Mary’s almond tart. Then he talked to me about his work with the paupers at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital and about how he wanted to open his own apothecary shop. He talked animatedly about his group of friends who’d started meeting every Friday evening at the Temple Bar coffeehouse off Fleet Street, to talk about botany and insects. “It’s the only society in the country devoted to the study of the natural world,” he said, excitedly. “We’ve gathered together some of the greatest minds of our day and intend to formalize our club and make it a focus for promoting botanical knowledge.”

“James, you have such an illustrious circle of friends and such a full and interesting life, I can’t imagine why you’d choose to spend your precious days off with me, eating tarts in a little boarding school in Hackney.”

“Can’t you?” he asked, suddenly serious.

But as the time drew nearer for his third visit, I became convinced that he’d send a message to say he couldn’t come after all. I wasn’t sure how I’d manage a whole week without a few hours of his company, though. The physic he gave me helped heal my body, but his presence soothed my soul. He was like a window opening out onto the world. Through his bright hazel eyes I saw, for the first time in weeks, beyond Mary’s little kitchen and school, beyond my loss and my guilt and sorrow.

But he did come, and he suggested that next time we go on a butterfly-hunting expedition together. “We’ll take provisions. Make a day of it.”

“Wouldn’t you have a much better time with your friends?”

“I thought you were my friend.”

I couldn’t have felt happier if I’d been the staunchest Royalist given an invitation to the royal court on the King’s own birthday.

“So. Where shall it be? Where would you like to go?”

I remembered the pretty names of all the places he’d mentioned in his letters. Fulham Palace Gardens. Hampton Court. Primrose Hill. The lavender fields of Mitcham. “Oh, I don’t know. I can’t decide.”

He looked at me, considering. “Let’s go to Fulham Palace, then,” he said. “It’s like a scene from a romance. I think you’d like it the best of anywhere.”

“WHAT IS THAT you are reading so avidly?” Mary asked me, looking up from the table where she was crushing almonds for marchpane.

I showed her the cover of
Philosophical Transactions.
“It’s the journal of the Royal Society. James brought it for me. He said he thought I’d find it helpful.”

“Helpful in what way?”

“I’ll show you,” I said excitedly, feeling the familiar thrill of experiment and discovery stir in me again. I put the journal down, scooped up little Mary and carried her over to the sunny leaded window. I held up my left hand toward the light, the hand upon which I still wore the bejeweled band that Edmund had slipped onto my finger on our wedding day. I turned the back of my hand toward the glass and tilted it slowly, this way and that, keeping my eyes trained intently on the far wall. “Watch very carefully,” I whispered to Edmund’s little daughter.

“Whatever are you doing now?” Bess had been wiping the dishes. She put down the cloth.

“We are contemplating Isaac Newton’s theory of light and color,” I told her and Mary with a grin.

“You are an addlebrain for sure,” Bess muttered.

But at that moment I got the angle just right and a myriad of dancing colors, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet, were splashed across the white walls of the little lime-washed kitchen.

“Isaac Newton has proved that we are surrounded by color all the time,” I said. “Light itself is made up of a spectrum of colors.” With my thumb I stroked the band of my ring with its diamonds that were doing the job of a prism. “So you see, my little Mary, your father can still bring some brightness to our lives, even though he is gone from them.”

“It seems to me that it is James Petiver who has done that for you,” Mary said gently.

“Maybe. But do you see,” I said animatedly. “Mr. Newton has shown how rainbows are made.”

“Pity John didn’t know that when he was preaching.” Mary looked from one tiny rainbow to another. “How lovely to think God not only created light to banish the dark, but made it so beautiful, just like a true artist.”

“If experiment can reveal the components of light,” I posed tentatively, “maybe it really can illuminate the rest of God’s work. If I could only see how a butterfly is born, I could perhaps be sure that Edmund is in Heaven with my parents and my sister. I could still believe I will see them all again.”

“IT’S NOT MUCH FURTHER NOW,” James said. “Those are the gardens over there.”