Lady of the Butterflies (48 page)

“It is not all about what you need, my love,” he said to me, softly suggestive. “It is about what you want.”

“You know very well what it is that I want.”

“Besides that,” he said, his eyes crinkling. “Besides what you already have on order for your wedding night.”

I giggled. “You are scandalous, sir, to talk so in a public place.” But we were not alone in our flirting. It seemed the desires of shopping were linked very closely to the desires of the flesh. Perhaps the sermon writers had a point when they associated shopping with encouraging illicit sex, even going so far as to accuse the women in this place of being little better than harlots.

The mercer’s servant certainly had a tongue far freer than any I had ever heard. “Oh, there’s nothing like the feel of fine linen on your skin,” she said in seductive tones, as she caressed a bale of sheets and fluttered her eyelashes at Richard. “Do have a feel, sir. Go on, do. ’Tis not often you get offered such a pleasure for no charge.”

“Nor from the lips of such a pretty face.” Richard returned her smile, as he walked his elegant fingers over the sheet she offered him.

“Have you touched anything finer or smoother?” she cooed.

“Only a young girl’s skin.” He flirted back, clearly enjoying the repartee and obviously not unpracticed in it.

“Can you imagine having anything better close to your naked skin?” she went on. “Can you imagine anything better to lie upon or beneath?”

“Only a young girl’s skin,” Richard repeated, with a chuckle.

I twined my arm very firmly around his and dragged him off up the broad avenue.

“But we need new sheets,” he protested laughingly.

“Not from the likes of her, we don’t. One more second and she’d have been over the counter and ripping off your shirt, fine linen or no.”

He laughed. “Now who is jealous?” But as if it pleased him.

I slid my hand around his waist, let it rest lightly on his hip, just above the hilt of his sword. He shepherded me past a booth named Pomegranate and another shop called The Flying Horse. We bought luxurious gold silk from Naples for my gown, a bolt of burgundy wrought velvet for Richard’s suit, gold lace to trim cloaks. We bought coffee, chocolate, tea, sugar and spices, and then went to a stall selling gems. “Show me the biggest Oriental pearls you have,” Richard said. “The brightest and the roundest.”

He bargained with assurance and skill, drove down the price by a half and then bought them, with a small lacquered cabinet for keeping them in.

I had never seen him so at ease. “I’d never have guessed you’d be so interested in browsing the wares of drapers and haberdashers and perfumers and silk mercers,” I said, tucking my hand back inside his belt. “You like it here as much as I do.”

He kissed my hair. “I like buying things for you.”

“You must have something too. What will it be?”

He chose a jewel-encrusted scabbard and silver dagger and I was sure that must be the last purchase, but he had moved on to another silver merchant. We had already bought trenchers and a sugar box, new mustard pots and saltcellars and wine pots, but he picked up an escalloped fruit dish, the kind that would be displayed on the buffet, and I felt a shadow pass over me, transitory as the shadow of the wings of a swan in flight but enough to ruin my enjoyment, because I knew, as everyone did, that plate was displayed as a symbol of status and of wealth. I understood how much it must matter to Richard, because he had seen what it did to his father to have it all plundered and stripped away. I understood it, but it troubled me.

He saw that I was troubled, mistook the reason. “Regard it as an investment,” he said. “If we are ever in need of ready money, we can have it melted down.”

“We will have to do it immediately, if we spend any more.”

“No we won’t,” he said easily. “The world runs on credit now. Dealers in luxuries are particularly glad to extend credit to landed gentlemen and ladies. Enjoy it now, pay for it later.”

“Why does that sound more like a warning than an opportunity?” I tried to put George Digby’s comment about profligacy from my head. Failed.

Richard was looking at me strangely and I slid my eyes away from him to the floor. “What is it?” he said very low.

I raised my face to his. “I think a beggar girl might not do for you after all,” I tried to tease, but his eyes flared, the blue of them suddenly glacial.

I thought how I would have to grow accustomed to this unnerving changeability of his. I would learn to notice the warning signs and triggers and find ways to avoid them and divert him, I told myself, as I had learned to divert Forest from the tantrums that erupted whenever he did not get what he wanted. Sometimes.

WHEN JOHN SMYTHE RODE over from Ashton Court to see him, Richard was with Forest in the great hall, where they had both been for most of the morning. Richard had removed his small ornamental sword from his hip and was demonstrating with great patience just how to hold the hilt and draw it from the jeweled scabbard to make a lunge.

Our neighbor was a trim-bearded and very aristocratic young man who behaved as if he was twice as old as his years. He had already adopted the irascibility and pomposity of his father, Sir Hugh, who had died several years ago. In his role as deputy lord lieutenant, John Smythe had come to tell us that the militia was being put on readiness for an invasion by the Duke of Monmouth.

It should not have come as any great surprise. Talk of rebellion had been brewing since before the second King Charles died and the new King James took the throne. But why did it have to happen now, just days before my wedding?

“You will join us, of course, sir?” John Smythe said to Richard. “Colonel Portman has sent out a call for young and able gentleman to lead our troops.”

My eyes flew to him as my heart turned over. With a hiss of metal that reminded me poignantly of skates on ice, Richard dropped the sword into its sheath, handed the encrusted hilt back to Forest.

The boy took it in a trance, watching him as intently as was I. “Will you go and fight, Mr. Glanville?” my son asked eagerly.

The civil war was not even a distant memory for him, no more than a thrilling adventure from the ballads that made no mention of Somersetshire being turned into a blood-soaked battlefield, of people being starved out of their houses and those houses pillaged and burned, of children being raped and murdered before their mothers’ eyes, of the inhabitants of this country being reduced to a state close to destitution from which many were only just recovering. I had been born into that aftermath and it was still very real and raw for me. My blood felt chilled to think such hardship might return. Richard showed no outward fear, except that his lovely face had gone ashen and the tension was evident in every line of his body. I sank down into a chair, suddenly lacking the energy or the will to stand.

“Will you go, sir?” I had not noticed Bess come into the room, carrying an armful of my new gowns.

I glanced at her and her eyes told me everything. Ned and Thomas would be going to join the rebels. Their fathers were club men in the civil war. They would see it as their duty to defend the grand old cause, the Protestant cause, just as my father would have defended it to his dying breath. He would turn in his grave to see John Smythe in his house, asking my intended husband to help lead the militia in support of a Catholic king against a Protestant pretender.

The differences between us had seemed of no account before, but never had I felt them so keenly as now, when Ned and Thomas and the other Tickenham men were probably already collecting pitchforks and scythes and rounding up their friends to rally to the cause of the Duke. The war had never been over for my father, and it seemed it was never really over for England, least of all the West Country. If Richard joined the militia, our family would be split in two. Bess and I would be on opposing sides, our men at war with one another. We would be enemies under the same roof.

Richard came over to me and sat himself down quietly on the arm of my chair. I slid my hand over to rest on his thigh, not sure if it was to comfort him or myself.

“I am to be married in a few days,” he said, finally answering the question only I had not dared to ask. “Nothing will disrupt that, not war, nor flood nor famine. After it is done, if the militia still needs me, I will decide what to do.”

“Very well, sir. Thank you.” With an abrupt click of his heels, John Smythe bowed and left.

Forest whipped out the little sword, sliced the air with it. “How old d’you have to be to fight?”

“Old enough to know what you are fighting for,” Richard said.

“What are the rebels fighting for?” my son asked.

“To rid the country of kings and Papists,” Richard said sardonically. “Same as it ever was.”

I had never quite shaken off my conviction that Edmund had died of Papist poison. I could not help fearing what it would mean to have a Catholic on the throne, could not help thinking it might be better if the rebels won—except that Richard would be fighting against them. If they won, he would have lost, just like his father, and I did not know how he would cope with that.

Forest came over to Richard and handed back the little sword with obvious reluctance.

“Keep it,” Richard said.

Forest’s eyes were wide as trenchers. “Really, sir? Can I?”

“It is too dangerous, Richard,” I said, ignoring my son’s scowl. “He is too young.”

“I was only four when my father gave me my first sword,” Richard said easily, reminding me, as if I needed reminding, of that pressure his father had put on him from such an early age, to win, always to win.

I could not be so cruel as to remind him that his father had also thrown him into a lake, to drown or swim. I could not be so cruel as to remind him that he was not the father of my son. Though looking at them both, with their two heads of black hair, Forest looked to be more Richard’s child than mine.

I glanced from my husband, the son of a Cavalier, to my son, the grandson of a Roundhead major, and felt truly thankful that my father was no longer here to see them together.

“Who will win?” Forest asked, practicing a parry with the sheathed sword. “The rebels or the King?”

“Ah, now, that is always the question,” Richard said. “Tell me, who would you stake your money on? A king with trained infantry and mighty guns, or a disorderly rabble with scythes and pitchforks? Whose side would you rather be on?”

The words came to my tongue of their own volition, were out of my mouth before I could bite them back. “You should not be so confident,” I said. “You, of all people, should not need reminding that the first King Charles did not win. For all his battalions.”

His expression changed, darkened. “You speak as if you would see our King and all his armies defeated too.”

“I no longer care,” I said slowly, “whether a person be Puritan, Protestant or Papist. Just as I do not care if they be kin to Roundhead or to Cavalier.”

“Are you quite sure of that, Nell?”

Summer

1685

M
y second wedding day could not have been more different from the first.

The predicted invasion had not happened, and I refused to let the threat of it spoil the day.

It began with much eating and drinking, so even before we made it to church half our party, Bess and Ned, John Hort and the Walkers and Mother Wall, were all headed for mild intoxication, everyone very loud and merry.

Richard and I traveled to Bristol in a coach with glass windows and liveried pages, the sun shining brightly all the way. I had a golden dress to match my golden curls, and a necklace of sapphires and diamonds that Richard had given to me as a wedding gift.

The soaring church of St. Mary Redcliffe was festooned inside with violets and roses. Precious little of the medieval stained glass had survived destruction during the Reformation and by Cromwell’s army, but the very highest windows were still intact and were enough to illuminate the spacious interior with a myriad of colors. The sunlight filtered through them and made colored patterns on the floor. It gleamed on the golden basin in which the guests were to cast their brightly wrapped gifts.

“Look,” I said to Richard, as we walked to the aisle over a pool of red and yellow and purple light. “We have found the foot of a rainbow.”

He stroked back a wisp of hair that had drifted over my cheek. “And see, here is the gold.”

But for all the radiance around us, he appeared today as if haunted by his own private shadow. He seemed more than usually preoccupied and troubled, and I imagined it must be the promise he had made to John Smythe that was distressing him. He’d said he would join the militia, if need be, as soon as our wedding was over. I took his hand in mine, leaned into him and kissed him, to be rewarded with a gentle, transforming smile. There was a mischievous sparkle in his eyes again as he whispered to me of the wedding vow that Protestants had foresworn as pagan idolatry. “I shall worship you with my body, Nell, forever, so long as you will always worship me with yours.”

“Oh, I will. I will.”

It was enough to irk even the mild Puritan in William Merrick, who muttered that the whole event was a shameful display of pomp. And that was before he found out what was planned for later.

The bridesmaids showered us with flowers and sprinkled us with wheat as we proceeded from the church, and my smiles turned to an amazed stare when I saw what was waiting to greet us for our return to Tickenham. A hundred riders on horseback had come to escort us back to the house, and all the grand families—the Smythes from Ashton Court, the Digbys from Clevedon Court and the Gorgeses of Wraxall—had turned out in their finest coaches.

“It is only fitting,” Richard said. “How else should a lady and new lord be welcomed back after their wedding?”

I turned to him. “You knew they were planning this?”

I saw by his quiet smile that he had had more than a hand in that planning, had obviously taken it upon himself to visit all the local gentry whom my father, and even Edmund, had failed to count as friends. But clearly they were all Richard’s friends now, had all succumbed to his gentle, winning charm. How could they not?

The commoners and tenants were no different, seemingly. The Bennett boys came up alongside the carriage and threw flowers in at the windows, and Alice Walker rode up with her father and handed me a bouquet of marigolds. Everyone was carrying flowers and wearing flowers and throwing garlands and posies at us all along the way.

“They were all very happy when I said that, instead of draining the land, we were planning a great feast and dole for them all,” Richard explained.

“I am sure they were.”

I insisted we stop the coach so we could get out and ride on top with the coachman for the rest of the journey, so as to have the best view of the cavalcade of drums and bagpipes and fiddlers and dancers that accompanied us, and I smiled at all the well-wishers, reached down to touch their hands.

A girl threw a rosebud and Richard reached out and snatched it from the air. He held it to his lips and looked at me over it with the most roguish, twinkling smile. “Soon your rose will be all mine,” he whispered. “The secret rose you keep between your legs, with petals as pink as these. I shall be like a bee, or one of your butterflies, and put my tongue into those petals.”

“Hush,” I said, flushing as hotly as a greensick girl. Just imagining him doing what he described made me almost delirious. I was glad we were in the open air, that there was a breeze to cool my skin. I was glad I had the procession to watch to distract me. It danced us back to the house and through the flower-filled rooms to the great hall and the wedding table decorated with floral rose cake.

More than a hundred guests sat down for the first sitting, to scoff breads and meats and puddings and cheeses. Fulfilling his duty as groom, Richard served me with beef and mustard, and John Foskett raised a glass and joined in, offering blessings and drinking healths. The merriment was naturally restrained while the clergyman was present and I was impatient for him to go. I was not interested in edification. I wanted mirth and fun, bawdy jests and devilish ditties. I wanted to make a May game of this wedding. I delighted in seeing cakes and ale relished, and every lusty lad with a wench at his side, all pulling at laces and loosening each other’s clothes.

“There is so much kissing and flirting, I doubt many will still be maids by evening,” Richard whispered into my ear.

“It’s like a wedding from the old days,” Mistress Knight came up especially to say to him, her wrinkled old face alight as if she was just a girl again. “I never thought we’d see the likes of it again, now that the gentry folk are so anxious to save their shillings.”

Richard handed her a posy from the table decoration, gave her his most adorable smile. “What is the good of having shillings if they are not spent and scattered amongst friends?”

She beamed back at him and almost danced away with the little bouquet, as if her gnarled old legs pained her no more.

“Damn me,” I said, slipping my hand into his. “But is there nobody my husband has not utterly charmed?”

There was one person, I realized, but I imagined that was because Richard had not even tried. Mistress Knight was seated at a bench with her husband, Arthur, and Bess and Ned, but I noted that Thomas was not with them. How he must hate me, to deny himself a feast rather than be here celebrating my wedding day, and for a moment I felt a little chill. What had I done to make him hate me so much? I shrugged. Well, it was his loss that he was missing out on today.

We had been showered with presents from everyone else. To the ones we had received in church were added more money and silverware and all manner of food or drink: swans, capons, a brace of duck, hares and fish and puddings and spices.

I took a moment to take note of every detail, so I should remember it always. This great hall that had seen such austerity was utterly transformed with sprigs and bouquets on every table, the feasting guests decked out in their silver buttons and scarlet stockings and with scarlet and blue bridal ribbons round their wrists and hands and hats. My children, giddy from too much sun and cider, were hiding under tables with Bess’s Sam and scores of other village children. I did not want the day ever to end. But when it did, I consoled myself that there would be eleven more to follow just like it.

Richard had been softly caressing the inside of my wrist with little circular movements of his thumb, and now his tongue was in my ear. It tickled deliciously and I wriggled away. His arm tightened around my waist, but I came back willingly for more. He kissed me and his mouth tasted of wine. His hand strayed now under the table, found its way up under my skirts, his fingers moving up slowly between my legs, stroking me, touching the secret parts of me.

“I want you, Nell,” he whispered urgently. “I cannot wait any longer.”

The guests must have worried that if we were not soon sent to our bed we would take our marriage joys right there on the wedding table, unable to hold back from doing the act before them all. The bride cake and the posset were speedily brought forth, and then everyone followed us upstairs for the public disrobing, crowding round to catch the ribbons and laces that held our clothes together. I did not even see who caught the most admired trophy, my garter. I had eyes only for Richard, for my husband. And he was looking only at me, smiling at me, that beautiful angel’s smile, and there was nothing else in the world for me but him.

They all took their leave of us eventually and we tore off the rest of each other’s clothes, getting in a tangle in our haste and tumbling each other naked to the bed.

Richard raised himself above me and I parted my legs for him, but for a while he seemed to want to do no more than hold himself against me as I stroked him and he gazed intently into my face. The hardness of his cock was pressing into me, stirring me, and when he began to move, very slowly, my need for him became so unbearable that my body took charge and responded to him of its own accord. I pressed back, began thrusting softly against him. I did not stop, could not stop, wanted more and more of him, just to touch and be touched, to give myself to him, to give myself up to feeling. It was a letting-go. Like dancing and letting the music take hold of my body, like skating on ice and not caring if I could not stop, like the wonderful weightlessness of swimming. It was beauty and bliss unbound. The sensation of his skin against mine, such soft skin, on a body that was hard and lean, took me to a world beyond any world I had ever known, a world of fire and of ice, of the deepest darkness and the brightest light. Curls as black as night and eyes as bright as a summer sky . . .

“Love me,” I whispered. “Make me yours.” And he did love me, as I had never been loved before. It was a love to be completely lost in, consumed by. It was like being split open and it was like being made whole, like receiving a blessing, like coming home.

I wept against his shoulder and cried out and clutched his hair, and when he stroked me with his warm hands it was as if the music that had played all day played on in my head, a glorious cacophony of sound. Entangled, grappling, our limbs entwined, we were warmed as if by the hottest, brightest midsummer sun, even as dusk was falling. A bead of sweat trickled down the small cleft between my breasts, and his thighs glistened as if he had just walked out of the sea.

It was all that life could be, all that it was meant to be, a sensuous explosion of touch and taste, of sight and sound and smell. The taste of his mouth, his skin. The smell of his warm perfumed curls, his sex. The sound of his moans of ecstasy. His naked body was beautiful to behold and the hardness of his cock a delight.

His hands were all over me, caressing every part of me, making my skin tingle until it was as if it was fused with his, so I could not tell where he ended and I began.

“I can’t hold on any longer,” he whispered. “I want to be inside you.” And the feel of him penetrating me at last made me cry out with the joy of being able to give myself to him completely, to give to him finally all that I had to give.

I wrapped my limbs tight around him and arched my back to draw him deeper, wanting to be closer to him still, closer, understanding only now what it meant for two bodies to become one. When I cried out for him to finish it and he finally found his relief, it was as if the sun had burst inside me, the music rising in a great crescendo and all the church bells ringing, ringing, for Christmas.

WE WERE LYING in each other’s arms and I was drifting in the pleasant transitory state just beyond wakefulness when Richard suddenly cried out in his sleep, words that were unintelligible but full of distress. He pushed me roughly away from him, thrashed his legs, kicking out at me as if he was fighting me off, as if in his dream I was something to be feared and meant him harm. His eyes were tightly closed, his brow furrowed, as if in pain or anguish.

I reached out to him and took hold of his shoulder, gave it a gentle shake. “Richard.”

He turned his face into the pillow, twisted his head back again violently, as if he was trying to escape from something.

I shook him a little harder. “Richard. Wake up.”

His eyes flew open, stared at me, unseeing but filled with terror, so that I knew he was not properly awake but still trapped in a nightmare world.

I stroked his hair off his face and felt that it was damp with sweat. “I’m here,” I said. “It’s me.”

I slid my arm up under his and around his back and found that his body was running with sweat, and yet he was trembling. I held him tighter, felt the ferocious pounding of his heart through my bones.

“You had a dream,” I said. “Do you remember what it was?”

He shook his head, his eyes suddenly guarded, so that I wondered if he did remember quite clearly but was either too ashamed or too afraid to talk about it.

“It’s all right,” I murmured, kissing his brow, my mouth wet with his sweat. “It’s all right.”

Gradually his heart steadied, but he held on to me as if the fear had not left him.