Lady of the Butterflies (60 page)

When he climbed into the bed he reached out to take me into his arms. I flinched from his touch and straightaway scrambled out of the other side. There was a flash in his eyes then, like the slash of a sword, and it was as if a mask had been cut away. He stared at me, angry and aggrieved. He said nothing, did not ask me now what was wrong. He looked as if he knew that I finally understood exactly what he had done. As if there was no further need for pretense. There was no mistaking it, he stared at me with guilt. And with hatred.

I TOOK A TORCH and walked down to the moor again, found myself wandering over the river and across the Tickenham Road, up the stony track to Folly Farm, an isolated low little farmhouse, nestled in trees at the foot of Cadbury Camp. It had not been tenanted for years because it had fallen into disrepair, and the funds that might have been used to repair it had been spent instead on the new coach house. The door hung on its hinges and the kitchen was empty except for a rickety table and stools. It was dirty and dark and cold. There was a hole in the crooked lath ceiling and a corresponding one in the thatched roof in the room above, so that it was possible to look up and see right through to chinks of starry sky. But at least, being built where the ground started to rise, it was quite dry. It was a sin that it had been left empty so long. I would see it put to rights and turned into a good home for someone.

There was half a bushel in the grate, enough to get a small fire going, and I curled up on the bare floor beside it with my cloak as a blanket. My face and my hands were warm enough, but the fire did not even air the room or do much to compensate for the broken roof. I slept with an icy chill at my back.

In the morning I went out to the well at the back of the farmhouse and washed in a bucket of cold water before I went back to the house to find Bess.

She waited for me to finish sneezing before she handed me the cup of hot cider. “Well, if you will stay out in a rainstorm, what do you expect, if you don’t mind me saying?”

“Where is Richard?” I asked, wrapping my fingers around the warmth of the cup to stop them trembling.

“I take it the two of you had another falling-out? Why else would you go for a midnight wander and he ride off as if the hounds of Hell were on his tail?”

They are, I wanted to tell her. Bess, they are. They have been for years.

But I could not voice my fears. If I did, it made them real.

“I need to go to bed,” I said to her. But I did not know where to go. Not to the chamber I shared with Richard, nor the one he had always used when he came here as Edmund’s guest. I wanted to sleep somewhere where he would not think to look for me. “I shall go to your room,” I said to Bess.

She looked aghast. “In the attic, Ma’am?”

“Yes.”

I lay down on the little pallet, but I could not sleep. Thoughts flew at me haphazardly, like an ambush of arrows all fired from different angles. No judge would ever find him guilty. Even if it was Richard who had come back from London with poison, it was I who had administered it, I who put it into the claret and held it to Edmund’s lips for him to drink. So easy it would have been for Richard to do it. So easy to visit an apothecary and purchase a poison instead of a cure. But why? Was it out of desperation? Out of love for me? That competitive spirit of his? Because he could not stand for Edmund to have me? Or was it the pursuit of wealth that had motivated him? Why else would he have been so against a marriage settlement? Why else . . .

What was I thinking? I loved him, had lived with him and shared his bed every night for ten years. Richard was not capable of murder . . . was he? The vulnerability and impulsiveness that had so enchanted me now seemed sure indications of a character that was dangerously unstable. I needed to see him. If I could only see him, only look into his eyes again, I’d know that I’d been mistaken, horribly mistaken. I’d know it could not be true.

I heard my father’s voice then, so loud he might have come to sit right beside me.
These are men who would break any trust or dare any act of treachery to satisfy their passions and appetites, who are uncontrolled by any fear of God or man. . . . You will be prey to every unscrupulous Cavalier.

“
You have a visitor, Ma’am,” Bess came to tell me later, much later, when the sun was sinking in the sky again. “Shall I tell him you are ill, or shall I help you to dress?”

“Who is it?”

“Gentleman by the name of Joseph Barnes. Asked to see the lady who collects butterflies.”

“I’ll see him,” I decided, thinking that anything was preferable to lying here, with suspicion battering my head until it throbbed.

Bess helped me into my gown of moss-green silk and fastened up my hair, but as soon as she was gone I shook it loose since my head was hurting so much.

Joseph Barnes was a foppish young gentleman traveler who explained effusively that he was on the way to sample the excellent waters in Bath. “I decided to stop at the inn in Tickenham for the night and couldn’t help hearing the locals talking over their ale about the lady of the manor who is paying anyone who brings her worms. I went to the trouble of finding some, just for the privilege of seeing you for myself.”

“Did you?” If I’d not had so much on my mind, it would probably have unnerved me to know I was being talked about in such a way, that I was attracting such interest, but now it only added to the strange air of unreality. “I did not realize I was a local curiosity, sir,” I said, sneezing again. “You’d find the caves of Cheddar Gorge far more interesting, or the cove at Ladye Bay. Even the rhynes and moors, I can assure you. They attract dragonflies and butterflies that even the Royal Society finds of interest. I am afraid I must be a great disappointment.”

He made a little bow. “On the contrary. You are uncommonly pretty and erudite. I had imagined an old hag.”

I laughed and it sounded very odd to my ears, as if I should never laugh again. “So where are these worms?” He did not appear to have come with any vessel at all.

He produced a highly ornamented snuffbox and opened it. Two striking little creatures wriggled most obligingly, black speckled with yellow. Despite everything, because of everything, my interest was spiked.

“I stung myself on the nettles, getting them for you,” he complained.

“Did you bring any with you?”

“Nettles, you mean?” He frowned. “I am afraid not.”

“These are good specimens,” I said, giving one a tiny prod with my finger. “But they will need a plentiful supply of the right food plant. Can you show me exactly where you found them?”

He seemed glad of the chance to walk with me, and set off as frisky as a young pup, bounding haphazardly from one new and thrilling scent to another.

The light was failing, the dusky blue of the vast sky streaked with palest lemon. The air was busy with gnats, and in the distance, a plover was calling. We walked over Cut Bush Field toward the Yeo, and just before the mill, my fashionable companion indicated a patch of common nettles by the trackside.

“You are sure that is the plant?”

“I am quite certain.”

I thanked him, paid him sixpence and sent him on his way, then bent to pick some of the stalks. I chose the healthiest shoots and took a whole handful, tearing off the muslin trim on my gown to bind them and protect my hands from the serrated leaves. I walked back alone across the twilit moor.

Richard was standing beneath the oriel, staring not at my hair that hung down to my hips, nor at my ripped gown, but at the Gothic prickly posy I carried through the dusk. He stared as if it was of great significance, as if within its spiky leaves lay a hidden truth, an answer, as if I had come to scatter our marriage bed with stinging nettles, where once it had been scattered with bright summer flowers.

As I came closer I saw that there was something very wrong with him. He had been drinking, and his eyes were dark, so dark against the unnatural pallor of his face, as cold and as hard as winter stars. I came on, and if I had hoped to see a man incapable of murder, I saw the opposite. I saw rage and a naked, glittering, unadulterated hatred that made me falter and drop the nettles, afraid to go any closer. He was breathing deeply and there were beads of sweat on his brow.

He stepped up to me, raised his hand and slapped me across my cheek, so hard that my head whipped to the side and it felt as if my neck would snap. My skin stung; there was a sharp pain in my lip and the metallic taste of blood in my mouth. Before I had a chance to recover, he grabbed my arm with such force it felt as if it would be wrenched from its socket, and dragged me, stumbling behind him, into the hall and up the narrow stone stairs. The clothes chest was thrown open, and my boxes and observation books and an untidy pile of James’s letters were heaped beside it, opened. Richard took up one of the letters, held it in front of my face and slowly ripped it in half. With one swift fluid movement he put the two halves together and tore again, let the pieces scatter to the floorboards.

He took hold of another, and started to tear.

“No!” Fury erupted inside me—uncontrolled, desperate, searing fury. I grabbed the collecting box and hit him with it. He tore the box from me, smashed it down over my hands, cutting them and driving splinters into my skin. He snatched a specimen box and did the same with that, and with a single violent swipe of his arm he knocked the rest off the bed, sending them crashing to the floor in a flutter of broken wings and little broken furry bodies. I collapsed beside them in a flurry of silk and lace and petticoats, and he brought the spurred heel of his boot down on the little wings and crushed them as if he would crush and trample my heart.

“I should have seen it before,” he said, in a guttural voice I hardly recognized as his. “As soon as you started with this absurd fixation. Beating at trees and crawling under bushes, rambling around half dressed, like a gypsy. Talking gibberish about miracles and worms. Now you carry a gruesome bouquet of weeds, as if they were the sweetest roses. You grieve for dead maggots and pay people a small fortune to bring you live ones. You stir a pile of cow manure like a cook with the broth.”

I shook my head, shaped my mouth to deny that, but no sound came.

“Do not try to gainsay it,” he spat. “Your word stands for naught. All that they say about you is true. It has taken me long enough to see it, but I see it now. You are not in your right mind. You must be . . . completely insane.”

NEXT TO ACCUSING ME of witchcraft, lunacy was the most dangerous charge he could have made. The mad were creatures to inspire terror. They were bewitched, visited by Satan, possessed by demons, souls who were preyed upon by the armies of the night. Lunacy was a charge which carried with it the threat of chains and confinement, of asylums, of the loss of all rights and liberties.

It was the only charge he could have made that would enable him to overturn the marriage settlement and seize control of my estate. I did not know how easy it would be for him to accomplish, I could not even be sure that was what he planned to do, but I did know that there were plenty of people who would support such claims.

I would fight him, fight them all with everything that I had, but my first thought was to get the children away to safety. As soon as Richard had fallen into a rum-induced sleep in a chair in the parlor, I packed a trunk and went to wake the girls and Dickon.

“Hurry and put on your clothes,” I urged Ellen, setting a candle on the table and depositing a heap of gowns and stockings and breeches on the bed.

“Where are we going?” she mumbled, clutching the linen sheet over her body.

“To London,” I said, trying to make an adventure of it.

“But it’s dark outside,” she complained. “Can’t we wait until morning?”

“No, sweetheart.” I pulled a petticoat over Ellen’s head. “I’m afraid we cannot. Here.” I put my hand into my pocket. “I have brought you a treat.”

“Marchpane! In the middle of the night?”

“Why not?”

The bribe worked and I helped Ellen into her stockings, made sure Mary had her cloak. I saw the three of them out to the waiting coach, carrying Ellen in my arms, still wrapped tight in her rich colored blanket, with Dickon clinging anxiously to my skirts, as if he thought I might leave him behind or that someone might try to snatch him from me. The coachman folded down the iron steps and handed the girls in. The lanterns were already lit, the lights from them hazy in the mist.