Lady of the Butterflies (64 page)

On a table just inside the door James had set up a large breeding cage, inside which was a large earthenware pot filled with soil. Beside it were a brass barometer and a thermometer. On the ground by the table was a charcoal brazier already glowing with coals.

“To regulate the temperature, now that it is autumn,” he explained. “Pretend it is summer for as long as possible.”

“It all looks very scientific.”

“So it should. We are conducting an experiment after all.”

“It will work,” I said, my confidence soaring. “I know it.”

James handed me a trowel. “I thought you’d like to help with the planting and with introducing the little creatures to their new home.”

I pushed up my sleeves and worked beside him as he took each plant and bedded the roots into the crumbly soil. I watched the firm but gentle pressure of his hands against the soft, dark earth, the hands of a gardener and of a scientist, of an artist and a doctor.

He sprinkled water from a can and then let me release the worms onto the leaves, while he checked the instruments. “Did you ever master how to use a microscope?” he asked conversationally, as he made a note of the readings.

I angled my hand to encourage the last worm to wriggle off onto the nettle and shook my head. “You were going to teach me, weren’t you? It is my fault you never had the chance. I never came back to London.”

“You are here now.”

I smiled. “And I have distracted you from your work all afternoon. Shouldn’t you get back to the shop?”

“Probably.”

“Later, then,” I said.

“Later,” he echoed, catching hold of my dirty hand as if it was the fragrant, gloved hand of a duchess.

WHEN I WENT BACK to Hackney, I generally broke in on scenes of such domestic harmony it made me feel superfluous. My daughter, Mary, was either busy with her crayons or with her needle, or reading texts that Mary Burges had set her to learn, while Ellen was regularly to be found balancing a hefty Bible on her lap in a way that would have done her grandfather proud.

This time, though, Mary was playing the flute and Ellen was dancing around the floor, in wider and wider twirls. When she saw me, she stopped dancing and rushed into my arms, hugging me and crying, “Mama, Mama,” and showering me with kisses.

I kissed her back and then turned to Mary, saw the despondent look in her eyes. “Still no word from your brother?”

Mary shook her head. “He used to write to me so regularly,” she said. “What if something has happened to him?”

“We would have heard,” I reassured her, but I utterly failed to reassure myself.

DICKON WAS in the laboratory, crushing dry leaves with a pestle and mortar. His forearms had grown sinewy and strong from this regular work and his fair curls flopped over his forehead, in just the way that his father’s dark ones did. He looked up, gave me a confident yet very gentle, very lovely, very charming smile. So help me God, his father’s smile.

I sat down on the bench beside him, tucking my skirts out of his way. “Are you enjoying your work, Dickon? Do you like it here, after all?”

He paused from his compounding and set his pestle down on the table. “I like it best when Mr. Petiver takes me with him to visit patients and I help him with letting blood and drawing teeth and administering enemas and blisters.”

I wrinkled my nose. “Strange boy.”

He grinned. “I like it when we go to the surgeons’ hall to watch a dissection too.”

“Ugh. This is the person who once flinched from a dead butterfly?”

“You told me there was nothing wrong with looking at dead things, so long as you can learn from them. I want to learn all about anatomy. I want to be more than a shopkeeper and compounder of herbs,” he said very earnestly. “I have decided that I am going to be a doctor. One who attends the needs of the sick poor, who cannot afford a physician.”

My heart swelled with pride, but at the same time I was fearful for him.

“Then you will be at the forefront of open warfare,” I said lightly. “A bitter conflict that goes back to before even the civil war, when the apothecaries declared for Parliament and the physicians were for the King.” I did not want to discourage him, but neither could I bear to think of him disillusioned, his ambitions frustrated. I knew a little of what that felt like. “You know that apothecaries who prescribe medicines independently of a physician or give separate advice or treatment still risk prosecution?”

“Of course I know that, Mama,” he said, as patient and kindly condescending as if our roles were reversed and I was the child and he the parent. “I know very well that the Society of Physicians have the right to march into this shop anytime they like and destroy any substances of which they do not approve.”

I nodded. “Fair enough. What does James say? Mr. Petiver, I mean. Have you talked to him about this?”

“He says I am like you, because I am determined to go my own way.”

I laughed. “Well, I hope you are more successful at it than I have been.”

“Mr. Petiver says that you are very respected. Mr. Petiver says,” he began again, “that the physicians’ monopoly on medical practice cannot last forever. He says that the physicians are only too happy for us to attend emergencies at night when they don’t want to be disturbed, just as they all fled and left the apothecaries to treat the victims of the plague. Mr. Petiver says the poor already regard us as their doctors, they respect our seven years of training. It is only right that we should be allowed to attend them.”

“I cannot argue with you.” I smiled. “Or with Mr. Petiver.”

“I met two young physicians at the coffeehouse yesterday,” Dickon went on eagerly. “John Radcliffe and Richard Mead. Dr. Mead has a plan to start a practice of coffeehouse consultations that could set us up as general medical practitioners and pave the way for us to be given a legal right to practice. It could change medical practice in this country forever.”

I looked at his soft blue eyes, so alight with hope, with ambition and plans, and I knew then that I had done right in bringing him here. James’s kindness and enthusiasm were evident in every word Dickon spoke.

I could picture Dickon returning to Somersetshire after his training, a learned professional, surrounded by dogs and cats and several swans and ducks, respected in his village as a general medical practitioner, an alternative to quacks and surgeons like Dr. Duckett, the first person to whom ordinary families turned when they were sick and in need.

“You were right, Mama. James Petiver is a good man. I can see why you care for him so much.”

I don’t know which of our faces flushed the brightest. “Listen to me, Dickon,” I said. “James and I have been friends for a very long time. I love him as I would love a brother. I may not be with your father now, but you must understand that I am still his wife. I love him more than I have ever loved any man. I have never been faithless or untrue to him.”

Dickon’s boyish jaw had stiffened. “James Petiver is more a father to me than Richard Glanville will ever be,” he said, his voice breaking with emotion. “He is kind and good and he guides and teaches like a father should. It is him I want to emulate. My father is a cruel man. I know he hit you. I despise him.” Dickon looked suddenly shy. “Mama, James Petiver is like a father to me. And anyone could see that he loves you and cares for you like a husband should love and care for you, like you deserve to be loved and cared for.”

I was taken aback. “I don’t know about that.”

“Well, I do.”

I HAD STUDIED NATURE all my life, but the sheer ingenuity of creation never failed to surprise and amaze me. I had never been more surprised or amazed than I was when I visited the nettle pot in the herbarium with James and found that the worms had turned architects and builders and constructed a neat little tent out of leaves at the base of the plant. They had bound the leaves tidily together with silk and were inside it, happily wriggling and munching away.

“Well, that certainly didn’t happen last time,” I said.

“Different species,” James concluded. “Butterflies are creatures of great diversity, as we know.”

The tent structure grew, as the worms grew and shed their skins. They cut through stems and pulled the whole shoot over to extend their home. And then half a dozen of them spun themselves little coffins, which hung suspended on small hooks and pads of silk, inside the shelter. We had to peer inside very carefully, so as not to disturb them. The coffins, too, were quite different from the ones I had seen before, grayish and shot with shimmering gold.

“I feel I’ve witnessed a small miracle already,” I said. “Even if they do not turn into butterflies.”

“They will,” James replied. “I am sure of it.”

I was convinced by his quiet assurance, wanted it to happen more for his sake now than for mine. “We should keep a vigil,” I said. “I’ll keep watch and then you take a turn, so we do not miss it.”

“That sounds a rather lonely way to go about it.” He smiled. “D’you think we could perhaps time it so that our watches overlapped now and again?”

JAMES ASKED ME if I would like to go with him to visit John Ray and I said that nothing would please me more. I helped him fill a saddlebag with as many carefully wrapped specimen trays as would safely fit. Then, wrapped in cloaks against the autumnal breeze, we set off on horseback for the hamlet of Black Notley, near Braintree in Essex, where John Ray had grown up, the son of a blacksmith, and where he still lived in a small Tudor timber-framed house called Dewlands. It stood on a knoll and had dormer windows that looked out over a stream, the smithy and a small cluster of cottages.

We were welcomed by John Ray’s wife, Margaret, twenty years his junior and a former governess to his friend’s family, who showed us into a parlor that was built around a great chimney and crowded with books, collections and four small, noisy little girls with lace caps on their heads. Margaret went to fetch her husband from his study over the brew house, and John Ray greeted James with a hug of great affection before turning to me with interest. “Ah, Isaac, my boy,” he said with a gentle humor. “I must say you are suited much better to petticoats than you are to breeches.”