Lady of the Butterflies (73 page)

I was sorely tempted to tell her how Richard had already murdered his own friend, but I did not want to drag poor Edmund into this, did not want to involve him in any way in the sordid mess that my life had become. Besides, there seemed a strong chance she would commend such behavior in any case.

“You were always so set on having my husband, weren’t you? Why? Why him? Why would you go to all this trouble?”

In the moment’s pause before she answered, as my eyes met hers, I knew that it was not that she loved him, or that even if she thought she did, then it was a self-seeking kind of love, that looked only for what was to be gained, and I told myself that they were indeed well suited, were well deserving of one another, for Richard had loved me no better, had he?

Considering the way she had systematically set about turning my friends and neighbors against me and destroying my life, I’d assumed she must hate me. But I realized also that just as she was incapable of real love, so she must be incapable of hate. She did not hate me, but was altogether indifferent to my feelings, as I imagined she was indifferent to the feelings of everyone but herself. Which made her the most dangerous kind of person. She was driven not by love or by hatred, but by self-interest, and maybe Richard was just the same. Maybe they had been planning this for years.

“Why do I want him?” she repeated with a snigger. “Are you blind? He is a beautiful man. A gentleman.” She fingered one of her jeweled rings. “He and I share an appreciation of beautiful things.”

“Then it is a wonder what he sees in you.”

Behind me, I heard James give a quietly congratulatory chuckle.

She narrowed her eyes. “He said you had a sharp tongue at times.’Tis a pity your mind’s not so sharp.”

I did not want to hear what Richard had said to her about me.

“I expect it must be difficult for you,” she went on, “seeing me here, in your house. Knowing it is I now who share your handsome husband’s bed at night.” She stroked her stomach. “Knowing I am to bear his child.”

I stared at her.

“That’s right,” she said. “I am carrying Richard Glanville’s baby.”

“That is a lie,” I said, very quietly, but how could I be certain?

How could Richard? If it was true that she was with child, it might not be his. Even if it was, why did it matter to me now? I had said it myself: Richard Glanville was a drunkard and a debtor, a bigamist and a murderer. I did not want him anymore. I never wanted to see him again, in fact. The pair of them were in this together, were equally to blame. My husband had colluded and conspired with this woman to abduct his own son, to blackmail him, to accuse me of unspeakable things.

“May you rot in Hell,” I said.

“Oh, I don’t doubt that I shall. But I think Hell would be a much more interesting place to spend eternity than Heaven, don’t you?”

Her total remorselessness was utterly chilling. And it served somehow to confirm my worst suspicions of Richard, to suddenly take away all the pain of losing him. The man I had thought him would find no comfort in this woman’s arms, would want nothing to do with her kind. A man who had murdered his friend and sought to swindle his wife and child out of their inheritance, however . . .

“You could not win him back, you know,” she said, “no matter how hard you tried. You never did know how to satisfy him, did you, how to give him what he needed? I pity him, wedded to a lunatic for so long, shackled to such an unsuitable wife. If he is a drunk and a debtor and a bigamist, then have you ever considered that it is you who have made him so?”

I didn’t understand what she meant, nor why that stung me, but it did. James saw that it did and he grabbed hold of my arm. “She is not worth it, Eleanor.”

There was a noise, footsteps in the cross passage, voices. It was Will Jennings together with John Hort, both carrying muskets taken from my father’s armory. “Everything all right, Ma’am?” Will asked.

I experienced a moment’s relief at seeing them, was about to reassure him that all was under control, until I realized he was not addressing me, but her.

“I suggest you leave now,” she said icily, “while you still can.”

James gave an insistent tug on my arm, but I stood rooted. I stared her down, was glad to see that for the first time she looked almost afraid, despite the armed men waiting to do her bidding. I hoped in that moment that I looked truly and totally insane. I hoped that I looked like a madwoman, like a witch, a sorceress, like a necromancer. I hoped my eyes blazed with a wild and terrifying vengeful light that would haunt her for the rest of her days.

For added effect, I gathered a gob of spit in my mouth and hurled it at her face, and as I let James lead me quietly out of the great hall, I looked back at her over my shoulder, kept on staring at her as I watched her dab it off with a lace-edged cloth.

Then the great oak door closed between us with a resounding clang. I was standing in the familiar muddy, misty yard, outside my own door, on my own land, and I felt utterly lost.

James was looking at me, with what appeared to be unequivocal approval. God bless him. What other man would approve of my behavior just now? “I told you I should have been born a boy,” I said, not sure now whether I wanted to laugh or cry. “Ladies do not curse and spit, do they? I hadn’t been planning a barroom brawl, I assure you.”

“You gave her no more than she deserved,” James said. “And you got what you came for too, didn’t you?” he added gently. “You did not see Dickon but I think that is probably just as well. It would only distress him. You know he is well, and happy enough. He is being allowed to do what he loves. And when you are no longer a threat to their plans they will no longer be a threat to his. Even if that harpy has a child, now, or at some point in the future, and is determined to have it inherit your husband’s estate instead of Dickon, as she surely will be, they will be doing Dickon a great service. He is not destined to be a squire, but a country doctor. Squiring an estate would only get in the way of doctoring, and that’s all the boy wants to do.”

I nodded. “But what do I do now, James?”

“Walk with me,” he said, as if it would solve everything, and I almost believed it could. “Show me that little cove where you saw the unusual Fritillary.”

As we rowed away, I looked back toward the house rearing starkly against the apricot and saffron sky. The last rays of the low winter sun lit the traceried windows of the hall, but instead of making it look welcoming, it looked blank, foreboding.

James handed me his flask of whiskey, and when I had thrown a warming slug of it down my throat, he produced two hard-boiled eggs from his pocket, staple diet for all expeditions.

“Whiskey and eggs,” I said, my lips cracking, as they tried to form the unfamiliar shape of a smile. “I feel better already.”

James looked appreciatively around him at the swans and wild geese and the submerged trees, the arc of the sky.

“Living beneath such a sky,” he said. “It is no wonder you have such a love for all that’s in it, for creatures with wings.”

“My father always did tell me my mind should never be on earthly things.”

“How could it be, in such a place as this? You said it was magical at this time of year, but it is more wild and beautiful even than I had imagined.”

All I wanted for now was just to walk away from it, with James, to the coast. And when we came at last to the edge of the water we mounted Kestrel and started toward the ancient ridge that led to Clevedon.

He made me talk of other things. Of the Royal Society, Hans Sloane and John Ray.

“How is John?”

“No better, sadly. David Krieg went to stay with him recently and prescribed some new physic for his legs. You do remember David Krieg, the Saxon physician?” James asked with an odd significance I did not even try to understand.

“Of course I remember him.”

“He is sailing from Bristol for Virginia in a few days,” James said, as if this news should be of the greatest importance to me.

“Is he?” I said, not much interested.

“He is in a fever of excitement to be there and take up his paintbrush. He has promised to bring back for me some more of the black and white sickle wings, and the yellow-spotted wings. You remember those, too?”

“I do.” The memory of magnificent butterflies rose and flickered in my mind, sparks of beauty and promise, where for so long there had only been despair.

“America is a new world,” James said, as a skein of wild geese called overhead and he lifted his eyes to watch them. “It is there waiting, for those who are not daunted by wide rivers and endless skies, those who are brave enough to walk their own path across wild open plains.”

I must have had an inkling then, of where he was leading me, but I was so weary I could not think, could not resist. I was flotsam, carried along on a tide. I’d have let him take me anywhere, could have ridden with him beneath Somersetshire’s vast sky forever. But too soon the track came to an end and there we were, with Ladye Bay below us, and a sea crested with white. We dismounted and James took me to him and we stood in a gentle embrace atop the rugged, windy cliff. We watched the winter sun sink lower in the sky and lay a shining path over the sea that led all the way to the far horizon.

“Remember the Red Admirals,” James said, so quiet I was not sure whether he had spoken at all and it was only a whisper on the wind. “Remember how you wanted so much to keep them. But you knew that if they were kept shut up in the dark, they might as well never have been born.”

Instinctively, my arms tightened around his back. “Do not say any more.”

“I don’t need to say it. You know it yourself. You know what you have to do, what you are meant to do. A husband does not need the law of coverture to take from his wife all that she has, all that she is. He does not need to lock her in an asylum to rob her of her freedom, her very essence. We live in a society which expects a wife to be a helpmeet, prepared to suppress any interests or passions of her own, in order to devote every waking hour to tending her man’s needs and wishes, to find complete contentment in ordering his household. And that is not you.”

I drew away a little, so I could see his face. “But have you never wanted someone to do that for you, James?”

“What I want, what I have always wanted, is to see you become all that you can be. It is because I love you that I let you go. You were not made to be confined, Eleanor, not in any way. When you were sitting at the table in my parlor, which you tidied so diligently, when you were reading the travelers’ tales from sea captains and ship’s surgeons, when you listened to them talk over the shop counter of their voyages and listened to David Krieg talk of America at dinner, when you saw the wonderful creatures they brought back with them from distant lands and distant seas, can you tell me you did not wish yourself far, far away from London and from my little shop?”

“No! Yes! Sometimes.”

The golden path across the sea widened as the sun dipped lower to the rim of the world. It was so solid and so bright, it seemed you could step out onto it.

“I am no explorer, as you know,” James said. “Nonetheless, I have been doing some exploring today. There’s a little cave in this cliff, with a ledge inside it, always dry. A girl could go into that cave and it would be like a cocoon. She could shed her gown, and if she found something waiting for her on that ledge, she could come out again as a butterfly boy, as Isaac, and if her discarded gown was found by the seashore, all would believe she had gone from this world and she would be free forever.”

The golden track across the sea shimmered enticingly, as I stared. “Come with me.”

“Who would there be to receive all those specimens and letters?”

“They are only letters.”

“But I have made them my life’s task. And you should not belittle their importance. You and I have said a hundred times more words to each other in letters than we have ever spoken face-to-face. And it will be no different, wherever you are. I shall go on hearing your voice in the words that you write to me, as though you are right there beside me. Your letters sustained me through all the years I have loved you. I hear your smile, when you write something amusing. I touch the page your hand has touched as it formed those words, and I feel as if you are as close to me as you are now.”

“Your letters sustained me too,” I admitted. “They were always my escape and my sanctuary.”

He reached into his coat and took out his observation book and a pencil, handed them both to me. “Now you must write to someone else. Now you must escape for good and find a new sanctuary.”

Eventually I took the book and the pencil, found a blank page, scratched out a few shaky lines. For Dickon. But for his father’s eyes. I tore out the page and folded it, gave the book and the pencil back to James. “I don’t want her to get her hands on it.”

“I will go back to the house and send him to you.” James did not put the observation book in his pocket again immediately. “It is a pity it is not summer,” he added. “This is where you saw your mysterious little Fritillary, isn’t it? We could have looked for one.”

“I have one already,” I said. “Pressed in my Bible, in my chamber. Take it.”

“If it turns out to be a new species, it will be named for you, and you will be remembered in butterfly books for all time.”

“It is you who should be remembered.”

“I am content to catalogue the finds of others, and for them to form the bedrock of a great museum to the natural world.”

“If I am remembered, I think it is more likely to be as the lady whose relations tried to prove she was mad, on the grounds that nobody in their right mind would go in pursuit of butterflies.”

He smiled. “No matter. Nobody reading about you in years to come will think it at all strange to love butterflies and to want to learn more about them.”

“You taught me all I needed to know,” I said. “About butterflies and about so much more. Always know that those weeks with the Red Admirals were the most peaceful days and nights of my life.”

“Like the Red Admirals themselves. Beautiful and short-lived, and all the more lovely for it.” He reached inside his coat to put his book away and drew out something else, a pistol. He placed it in my hand. “I have spoken to Richard Glanville,” he said. “He is not like her at all. I do not think for one moment that he would do you harm, but just in case I am wrong . . .”