Lady of the Butterflies (58 page)

“Something that I love,” I said. “I had forgotten how much. Please do not try to stop me.”

“Could I stop you?” he challenged. “If I asked you to give it up, would you do it?”

I reached back and put my hands over each of his, slowly but deliberately pushing them down and away from me. “Would you be asking, or would you be ordering?”

“Would it make a difference?”

I shook my head. “In this instance, I think not.”

“I am your husband. You vowed to obey me. You are commanded by God to obey my orders.”

I stiffened. “So, are you ordering me, Richard?”

“God knows I should do,” he said. “For the sake of local harmony, if nothing else. You need to know that Jack and Margaret Sherburne are none too comfortable about their Annie spending so much time with you, even if you do pay her for it. Her father is swayed by the wages and your rash offer of reduced rent, but Annie’s mother does not want her here, not even with those extraordinary carrots dangled before her. I take it you have a plan as to how we meet our debts, by the way, if you reduce rents to a peppercorn on a whim? Perhaps in future you’d at least do me the courtesy of informing me of your decisions, even if you see no need to discuss them.”

“I’m sorry. I should have talked to you.”

“Why should you?” he said acerbically. “It is your right to do as you wish. After all, it is your estate.”

“God in Heaven, Richard, just for once can we not come back to that? I wonder that you ever agreed to marry me, when you knew you could not have Tickenham Court as well, or were you counting on the fact that I loved you enough for the settlement to make little difference? I have never denied you money, never denied you anything, have I? So why can you never let it rest?”

He was staring at me very oddly and I feared I had gone too far, but I could not seem to stop. “Is that why you favor Forest over your own son? Because he is my heir?”

I saw the warning flash in his blue eyes, like lightning in a summer sky, swift and searing, a charge of angry power that suddenly made me almost afraid of him.

“Forgive me. I should not have said that.”

“By all means.” His tone was very cold. “It makes no difference whether you say it or not. If it is what you think.”

“I don’t think. I wasn’t thinking. I am just angry. Why do the Sherburnes not want Annie to work with me, for God’s sake?”

“They are not the only ones who think the girl should not be doing what you’ve had her doing,” he said flatly.

“Collecting caterpillars and assisting with their care? What the devil is so wrong with that?”

“Have you even paused to wonder why Mistress Keene has lost her help in the kitchen and since yesterday there is no longer anyone to work in the brew house?”

Admittedly I had been rather preoccupied of late, but the issue with the kitchenmaid I did know about. “Alice Walker was needed at the mill, wasn’t she?”

“Only because her brothers didn’t want her near this house. They have heard tales,” Richard said. “They have all heard tales.”

“What kind of tales?”

“That you seek out caterpillars and keep their coffins, waiting for the worms to grow wings. They say only a witch would be concerned with such things. They say it is evil.”

I felt my spine tingle at the use of those words. “I had hoped it was godly.”

“Shape-shifting, Nell? Use the brain God gave you! They see it as unholy, akin to attempting to breed a werewolf.”

That was not quite so preposterous as it might sound, since metamorphosis had been put forward as proof that werewolves could exist, just as it had been used to argue that alchemy was a possibility. “This is tavern talk,” I said angrily. “Vicious tattle. Malicious gossip. It is Thomas Knight’s doing. He’s not been back a month and already he’s causing trouble for me. It is he who has been stirring them all up, isn’t it?”

“Whipping them up, more like, but then you have made it so damnably easy for him.”

“Why can’t he leave me alone?” I exploded. “Why can’t they all leave me alone? I harm no one.”

“Except for yourself. Except for your reputation. And mine.”

“You did tell them it is all nonsense?” I studied his face. “You didn’t, did you? You did not speak up in defense of me at all. For pity’s sake, Richard. Why not?”

“I saw nothing to be gained from having them think that both of us are cracked.”

Tears pricked my eyes. I could bear being talked about, gossiped about, so long as I had his support. If he even half believed them, sided with them against me, I did not know what I would do. “I am cracked?” I raged. “Is that really what you think of me?”

“What I think,” he stormed. “What I think is that you have been writing to him again, haven’t you? That is what has got you started on all this again, isn’t it? You have been writing to that damned quack apothecary.”

“His name is James. And he is no quack. I have not written to him for years, but rest assured, I shall,” I shouted vengefully. “Oh, I shall. Just as soon as I have something to tell him.”

Richard snatched the glass jar out of my hand and hurled it against the wall, where it shattered into shards like splinters of ice.

We stood, eyes flashing, chests heaving. Out of habit, I smoothed the loose tendrils of hair off my face, and at that familiar gesture of mine I saw the anger in his eyes change into passion of a different kind. I knew that this argument would end the way most arguments between us usually did, with lovemaking, and I wanted that as much as I knew Richard did. Having him inside me was the only way I ever felt close to him anymore, though even then it never seemed close enough.

He stepped nearer to me, pushed me back against the wall, his body pressing against mine. I matched his hard, angry kisses with hard and angry kisses of my own, kisses that had in them more despair than desire. I hooked one leg up around his thigh, my arm around his shoulder and my hand in his hair, to bring him nearer. His fingers were working at the fastenings of my gown, but it was taking too long, for both of us.

I put my lips to his ear. “Rip it,” I whispered. “I want you to rip it.”

I turned round to face the wall, flattened myself against the stone and swept up my hair with my arm, so he could get more easily at the row of tiny buttons down my back. I felt him give a sharp, swift tug which sent them scattering like hailstones.

He stripped the gown off me and slammed into me, took me quickly and passionately up against the wall, but though the pleasure was intense, I could tell he was left as strangely dissatisfied as I.

It was no better when we did it again in bed, more slowly and lingeringly. There was something missing, always something in the way, standing between us and keeping us apart. What?

As I lay in his arms afterward, my thoughts returned to the local unrest, then ran off, as they were wont to do, on a tangent. The window was open and a faint breeze blew in, scented with river water and new-scythed grass. I drew little circles with my finger in the hairs on Richard’s chest.

“Do you remember when we celebrated William and Mary coming to the throne, and George Digby said the Bill of Rights would change England forever?”

“Aye, I remember,” Richard said. He turned over on his side so he could see my face. He was accustomed by now to the no doubt puzzling paths my mind sometimes chose to wander and stroked strands of sweaty hair off my face with the flat of his hand, waiting for me to go on.

I propped my head up on my elbow, looked at him. “By removing any chance of having a Papist take the throne, it has dispelled much of the hatred of Catholics, making England a safer place for them, and others too of differing faiths. In that respect England has changed indeed. Yet some things have not changed at all.”

“Where is this leading us, Nell?” Richard asked wearily.

“We may have a queen ruling jointly with her king, but nothing has changed for women like me, has it? Why should I be viewed with suspicion just because I take an interest in the world? Just because I want to do something other than household accounts?”

“I don’t know, Nell.” The light suddenly went out of his eyes. “But you are right that hatred of Catholics is not the only prejudice. There are others,” he added. “There are plenty of others, and they can be just as malign, just as dangerous.” He rolled away from me, onto his back, threw his arm up over his eyes, almost as if he needed to blot out the sight of my face. I had not the faintest idea what he was talking about, or what I had done now to upset him.

BESS USHERED my apprentice’s scrawny little brother into the parlor. He was carrying a dented but perfectly polished copper pan and he stood on the threshold, wary of coming any closer, as if he took me for a witch.

“You have some worms for me?” I said gently, aware that this was not a question to put him much at ease.

He nodded, gulping down his terror.

“May I see them, Tim?”

He shuffled two steps closer and held out the pan with dirty hands that stuck out from frayed shirtsleeves he had long outgrown.

I looked into the pan, where a few miserable-looking maggots were squirming. The wrong kind of worms entirely, but an easy enough mistake to have made.

“Where did you find them?” I asked.

He swallowed hard again, tossed his head to flick the limp brown hair out of his eyes. “In a cowpat, Ma’am.”

I smiled. Only a small boy would go digging in cowpats. “What a good idea,” I said enthusiastically. “I’d never have thought to look there.”

He thrust the pan at me. “Are you going to take ’em?”

“Thank you, Tim. They will do very well.” I emptied the unpleasant contents of the pan into a pot and handed him his sixpence.

He snatched it off me and bolted for the door, almost forgetting to reclaim the pan and hardly daring to come back for it. That was something I marked well. If a small boy was so eager to be away from me that he would forsake the only means by which his mother could cook his dinner, I must be fearsome indeed.

EACH MORNING when I went to the dovecote, there were more curled corpses to remove from the jars, until there was just a spotted one left, barely moving. When I came back next day, I expected it to have gone the way of the rest, thought at first that it had somehow just vanished. But when I looked more closely I saw something hanging from the muslin I had fastened over the top of the jar to prevent any escape.

Dickon was rubbing Cadbury’s belly when I ran to fetch him. The hound sat up and Dickon looped his arm around her neck. She turned her head and licked his face with her great pink tongue, nearly knocking him over.

“Come with me, Dickon,” I said to him. “There’s something I want to show you.”

We looked together at the small, dark, elongated shape, slightly curved, like a tiny ripening fruit, that had anchored itself to the cloth lid with a minute button of silk.

“What is it, Mama?”

“It is a little butterfly coffin. It has to be!”

I sat down at my desk and wrote to James. I asked if he had his own apothecary shop yet, and was he still corresponding with butterfly collectors across the globe. I apologized for breaking off our correspondence, telling him I had married again, had been busy with babies, but that I had collected more butterflies since last I saw him and had cultivated a butterfly garden. And now I had reared a pupa, and it was like a small kernel of hope.

Devoted as a mourner, I took to visiting the little coffin and sitting beside it for long stretches at a time, as the pigeons and doves flapped and cooed around me. I did not know how long it took for a butterfly to emerge but I would not risk missing it. I came half dressed at dusk, and at sunrise, and in the afternoon. I watched and I waited until my limbs grew stiff from sitting so still. Over a matter of days the coffin changed, almost imperceptibly, grew paler, nearly translucent, so that I almost believed I saw the ghost of wings beneath its gossamer casing.

But then, when Annie and Dickon and I went to check on it together, we saw it changed again, blackened, shriveled to an empty shell, one from which the life had not been expelled but had been entirely extinguished. There was to be no newborn butterfly.