Lady of the Butterflies (62 page)

I felt a little pang of shameful envy that I tried very hard to quash, but could not quite. All I could think was that I should like very much to be bound as James Petiver’s apprentice. I should like nothing better than to know that I would be learning from him, working side by side with him, every day for the next seven years.

ENVY MADE ME a little impatient with Dickon as I helped him sort his own possessions from the trunk and put them into a small portmanteau we had borrowed from John Burges. Dickon was as dejected as Cadbury, who trailed at his heels with her tail between her legs.

“I’ll take care of her for you, I promise,” I tried to assure him.

He turned to me then, his bottom lip trembling. “I want to stay with you,” he said, plaintively. “Mama, why do I have to go?”

Faced with his doleful eyes, I felt my heart completely melt. I went to him and wrapped him in my arms, a knot in my own throat. I clasped his head to my chest and pressed my lips into his hair. “This is a great opportunity, Dickon,” I told him gently. “You could not have a better master than James Petiver. He is a good man, a clever man, my dearest friend. You will learn so much from him. Will you try to be brave, Dickon, for me?”

He nodded.

James welcomed him with an arm about his shoulders and took him off on a tour of the premises. The back of the shop was even more bizarre and amazing than the front, like a sorcerer’s laboratory, with cauldrons bubbling and steaming and liquids distilling in bottles and tubes. Outside was something equally amazing and sublime. James had established his own idyllic little physic garden.

I felt like Cadbury as I trailed behind them, up the straight grassed avenues and neat rows of herbs and medicinal plants, trying to quell the pangs of regret that only magnified with each friendly, enthusiastic word James spoke to my young son and made me wish, now more than ever, that I had been born a boy.

“You will accompany me on my rounds and become familiar with patients and diseases in a way that medical students in Oxford and Cambridge, who are restricted to academic learning, never have the chance to do,” James said. “There will be a few menial tasks, I’m afraid, but not too many. Most of the time you’ll be learning about the mystery and craft of compounding drugs and simples, and how to recognize medicinal plants and where they grow in woods and meadows. Several times each year we shall take the Apothecary Society’s state barge up the river with the other masters and apprentices and roam around the meadows of Gravesend and Tickenham, collecting plants to bring back here or take to the Company Hall for discussion.” James flicked a humorous sideways glance at me. “Your mother was always very interested to hear about those days and the riotous suppers which usually end them.”

I glanced away, in case the envy had so magnified it had turned my blue eyes to green.

When we had completed a full circuit and were back in the shop, I knew I could delay no longer. “I will be on my way, then,” I said, going to Dickon to kiss him good-bye. His lip was trembling again. “Don’t,” I commanded softly. “Or I will start too.”

“Mama, I will miss you.”

I stroked his cheek. “I will miss you too, my little love.”

“Ach, stop it, the pair of you,” James said. “You will neither of you have the chance to miss each other. Dickon, your mother is welcome here anytime, she should know that. She can come to the shop every day to see you, if she wants to.” He was addressing my son, but his words were very definitely directed at me. Then he turned to me and I knew that it was a waste of time trying to conceal anything from him. My face was an open book to him. James, like Richard, read it as easily as my father used to read the Bible. He smiled, as if at some private joke shared between us. “She can be as an apprentice herself, if that is what she would like to be.”

I MADE MYSELF GIVE Dickon a day or two to settle in on his own. When I went back to the shop, I was impressed anew by its extraordinary atmosphere, part scientific, part magical. For many, the study of herbs was still allied to magic, for all that apothecaries worked side by side with physicians. Camphor vied for shelf space with brimstone, artists’ dyes with substances used in alchemy. And in the midst of it all was James, standing betwixt the old world and the new.

He looked up from grinding some dried leaves and salt in the mortar and smiled to see me. “He’s in the laboratory,” he said. “Go and see.”

Dickon was seated at a bench, wearing an apron and measuring out ajar of juice into a bowl of oil. “It is self-heal and oil of roses,” he said. “If you anoint the temples and forehead, it is very effectual in removing headache.”

“Always good to know.”

“And if you mix it with honey of roses, it heals ulcers in the mouth.”

“I’ll try to remember,” I said.

“I cannot stop, or it will spoil,” he told me.

“I’ll not interrupt you, then.” I wandered back out to the shop, feeling superfluous. “You keep my son too busy to talk to me,” I complained teasingly to James.

He put down his pestle and gave me his full attention. “He’s a capable boy. He takes notes of everything I tell him and knows the properties of the contents of a good proportion of the jars already.” I smiled with the pleasure of any mother at hearing her child praised. “If he carries on at this rate, I’ll be able to leave him in charge in a couple of months and concentrate on cataloguing my specimens.” He saw my eyes brighten for a different reason. “I have so many sent to me now, from all over the world, that I can’t keep up. I am afraid they are in the most terrible muddle. But I fear your son will be no help to me in that respect. I tried to show him some lizard specimens but he became almost distressed. Couldn’t get away from them and scuttle back to the laboratory fast enough, in fact.”

I smiled. “He does not approve of killing so much as a fly.”

“It is no matter. My collection is not to everyone’s liking.”

“You know it would be very much to mine.”

He looked almost abashed. “If I am to show it to you, it would mean going up to my rooms.”

“It may be improper, but I am a most improper person.” I smiled, linking my arm through his. “Ask anyone in Tickenham.”

James left Dickon listening out for callers and led the way up a flight of steep, narrow stairs that ran up the outside of the shop and led to a little parlor. It smelled clean and fresh, with a hint of lavender and pencil shavings, but it was an utter mess. Clothes and books were heaped on chairs and the table, as were piles and piles of papers and letters. There were bottles of frogs, lizards, grasshoppers, and all varieties of small creatures—spiders, wasps, flies, lobsters, urchins—drowned in rum. Boxes of shells and cases of beetles were stacked on the floor or against the walls. There was an anaconda and a rattlesnake that still looked capable of slithering across the floor. It was like being in a dreamland, being given a tantalizing glimpse of a new world rich in color, utterly different from any I had ever known or even dreamed of.

But I turned to James and pulled a face.

He read my dismay and shrugged. “I did warn you.”

“You did.” I laughed. “But still, I was not quite prepared. Good Lord, James, I have never seen such a jumble.”

But it was a treasure trove of a jumble, filled with promise. I raised my skirts as I would in the wet, and picked my way over to the table, where I lifted a box of beetles and was met with a glimpse of a stunning butterfly beneath. It had black-and-white-striped wings, in the sickle shape of a Swallowtail, and came from South Carolina, according to the note pinned beneath it.

“There are plenty rarer and far more beautiful even than that,” James said. He gestured helplessly around the room, scratched the back of his head. “If only one knew where to look.”

I itched to see more, but was reluctant to relegate the precious South Carolina butterfly back to its precarious pile in order to free up my hands. I might be consigning it to oblivion forever. I looked round for a more suitable place but there was none, not one clear surface.

James strode over a tower of collecting books and came to stand beside me. “I have tried to make some inroads.”

“You have?”

He removed the American butterfly from my grasp and set it down, turned to a cabinet behind him and opened a long shallow drawer like a tray, releasing a lovely scent of cedarwood. Contained within it was a box of butterflies, their silvery-white wings marked with brown and orange borders and striking black eyespots. “White Peacocks, from the West Indies,” he told me.

I ran my fingers over the glass, and it felt like trying to reach the sky or touch the stars.

“There are butterflies in this room from all over the world,” James said tantalizingly. “Antigua. Barbados. New York. St. Christopher’s Island.”

“The sea captains and ship’s surgeons send them to you, just like you said they would?”

“Aye, and in greater quantities than ever I had hoped.”

I let my eyes linger on the captivating White Peacocks for a little longer. They were not perfect, missing a leg here or an antenna there, were ragged around the edges, but it did not seem to matter. It was heartening to know James no longer sought perfection. That he would not discard a pretty creature just for a broken wing.

“I have promised my friend John Ray that I will catalogue them, so he can include them in his great history of insects. But I lack the time.”

“What you need, then”—I smiled—“is a person with some experience of cataloguing. A person who has plenty of time and is badly in need of some distracting occupation.”

“And would you happen to know of such a person, by any chance?”

“Oh, I most certainly would.”

Summer

1695

T
here was no formal arrangement as such, but I fell into a habit of going to the sign of the white cross at least every other day, and for most of those days, while James and Dickon were about their apothecary business, I climbed the narrow stairs to James’s rooms above the shop and tidied and organized and was happy as a bee in clover. I spent the mornings with beetles and lizards and shells; the afternoons were devoted to butterflies, which I ordered according to color and then subdivided by size, until they were neatly graded in their cases like jewels strung on a necklace. In this room, if in no other part of my life, I had complete control. It was cathartic, putting things to rights, restoring order, squandering hours just marveling at the glorious little beings.

If I kept myself well occupied, I managed not to think of Richard, of what he was doing all alone at Tickenham. But at night, it was not so easy. It was so long since I had slept without him, and I missed the comforting sound of his breathing, missed lying in his arms, missed talking to him, missed making love to him, no matter how much I told myself that that was where I had gone wrong. Had my father not warned me that the heart is seldom wise and that a woman’s body is driven by base desires?

It unnerved me that Richard had made no effort to contact me in all those weeks. If I am honest, it hurt me too, and in my hurt I took his silence as proof, if ever I needed it, that all he had ever wanted was Tickenham Court and that though he might be willing to let me go, he would not relinquish my estate without a fight. I knew that I must go back and fight him for it. But I could not face it, not yet. The girls were so happy being schooled by Mary; Dickon was happy with his books of herbals and anatomy. I did not know if Forest was happy. I had written to him twice in Flanders. Mary had written to him, but there had been no reply, and I did not doubt that he had had word from his stepfather and had taken his side, as he always had.

Sometimes, when the shop was quiet, or when I was so absorbed that I worked late into the evening, James came up with two pots of warm ale to join me, or brought up a plate of cheese and bread and fruit for us to share, and I showed him particular marvels I had just unearthed.

“Look,” I said, “this has to be my absolute favorite.”

“It is very lovely.” James smiled at my delight and looked closer at the exquisite butterfly from Surinam, with iridescent wings of green and gold and a splash of deepest crimson.

I was so proud of it that it was almost as if I had discovered it in its natural habitat, rather than in the turmoil of a little London parlor. Almost, but not quite.

“Imagine how dazzling it would be on the wing,” I said. “How I would like to see such a sight.”

“You’ll have to travel to Surinam, then,” James said pragmatically.

“Wouldn’t you like to?”

By way of an answer, he opened a collecting book he had brought up with him, and I gasped at the enormous Jamaican Swallowtail within. The wingspan was awesome, nearly half a foot at least, banded with luminous yellow and black. “In his covering letter, Allen Broderick described how because of its great size, it must hover before flowers while it feeds,” James explained. “Of course I should like to see that for myself, but I am happy enough just to know it exists. I lack the funds to travel and I cannot neglect the shop and my trade for months on end. Besides, I am not nearly adventurous enough. I far prefer to let others better suited to it do the traveling for me.” He closed the book on the Swallowtail, handed me another specimen to file. “I have promised Edmund Bouhn this will be called Bouhn’s Yellow Spotted Carolina butterfly.”

I laughed. “A very accurate description, since it has yellow spots, was found in Carolina and by a man named Bouhn.”

It was a strategic description too. I had learned that James was very wily. Promising his collectors the kudos of having specimens named after them, and seeing their names in print, was one way he spurred them on to bring back more. I had found the catalogues he printed in which he listed finds and named donors.

“I would like to have a butterfly named after me,” I said wistfully. “I would like to be connected for all time with the most beautiful of all creatures. I would feel then that my life had some significance. That would be immortality, of a kind.”

“Of all the people in all the world to have a butterfly named after them, it should be you,” James said. “You love them more than anyone I have ever met. You even look like one, as graceful and pretty and joyful as a little brimstone.”

“But I have no wings.” I smiled. “I can never travel, either.” I spoke with a tug of longing that surprised me with its strength. After days spent amongst these exotic dead creatures and meeting in the shop some of the surgeons and captains bound for distant lands, I realized for the first time just how much I had always yearned to see more of the world, ever since I’d studied the names of foreign lands on my father’s globe. “I am a woman of some means, but I am just as hampered as you, since ladies do not travel alone to far-off continents. And what are the chances of me discovering a new species in England? All the butterflies I see have been seen before by one of your friends. Although I did once see a Fritillary, on the cliffs, that I could have sworn had different markings from all the others.”

“But there are dozens of undiscovered butterflies still flying in English skies,” James said, in his usual tone of optimism and subtle encouragement. “You could be the person to find one of them.” He looked around the now almost tidy parlor. “After all, it can be no more taxing than trying to find anything in this room, and yet you have found just about everything.”

“I’m not quite finished yet.” I indicated the piles of letters still stacked against the wall. “They should really be filed.”

He seemed to sense my reluctance to pry into his correspondence. “You are welcome to read them, Eleanor,” he said. “I keep no secrets from you.”