Lady of the Butterflies (16 page)

“EDMUND, THERE IS SOME THING I have to ask you.”

We had gone inside for glasses of cider in the parlor, and Edmund was sitting facing me in the window embrasure.

“Ask and I shall grant it,” he said, setting his glass down on the side table.

“Will you take me to the Fens? So that I may see for myself what has been done there?”

“It would be my pleasure.” He took a deep breath and looked very somber all of a sudden. “It would be the perfect opportunity to introduce you to my father and brother. They are longing to meet you.” He paused. “Actually, there is something I have to ask you too.” He took my hands in his, looking more earnest than ever, so that I thought I knew exactly what he was about to ask me. Even though I was expecting it, my heart started fluttering frantically.

“It’s such a beautiful day,” I said impetuously, jumping to my feet without letting go of his hand. “Let us go back into the garden and you can ask me there.” I would treasure the memory of my betrothal forever, and it would be so much more memorable if it was done under a blue sky, surrounded by flowers and butterflies and serenaded by birdsong, instead of in this somber oak-paneled room. He stood too and I tried to lead him but he stayed as rooted to the spot as a tree. Apparently he needed formal surroundings for such a formal event. It was so like him to want to do everything just right.

I sat down again. He sat down. He cleared his throat. “Difficult maneuver,” he said, his face turning a little pink. “I’m not sure where to begin. I don’t suppose Mr. Merrick has said anything to you?”

“About what?” I asked, all innocence.

“About my . . . my intentions. No. Of course. Not up to him. Not the occasion to mount a joint ambush.”

I waited, smiling encouragingly, wondering how I might help him along. It was touching that he was so nervous, though I did not know why he should be.

“We’d do well against the world, you and I, if we joined forces, don’t you think?”

“I do.”

“So you’ll be my wife?”

This was it, then, the most important decision I’d ever make. I was about to enter a binding contract to change my life, that would determine my entire future, and now that it came to it, I hesitated. As Edmund himself had jested, I had seen so little of the world, so very little of men. In accordance with my father’s last and very strict wishes, I’d still been to only a few sedate local gatherings at Ashton Court. No dances or dinners. I had not mixed in society like most girls of my age. All I really had to measure Edmund against were heroes from romances and ballads. He was kind and infinitely patient and very fine-looking, and from the moment I first saw him, I’d believed we were meant to be together, but how could I be certain he was the man to whom I wanted to be yoked forever? At the very back of my mind was a very troubling doubt, a notion that somewhere out there, someone else was waiting for me.

“Do you love me, Edmund?” I asked him, very quietly, realizing he had never actually said that he did.

He blushed. “I hope to have the chance to grow to love you more each day.”

“And would you love me if I was not the heiress of Tickenham Court?”

“Dear Eleanor,” he said, looking flustered. “What questions you do ask.” I thought he was going to say that of course he would love me whatever my circumstances. But that was not what he said at all. “You look at me with those great searching eyes of yours that demand an answer, demand the truth, but how can I answer such a thing truthfully without hurting you? For you
are
the heiress of Tickenham Court. And if you were not, you would not be as you are.”

“Oh,” I said despondently, but I saw that what he said was entirely true. And I knew I should consider myself very fortunate even so, since so many courtships between gentry couples were conducted for financial reasons alone. I realized also that Edmund had answered my question bravely, for it would have been much easier for him to reassure with false platitudes.

“Be frank with
me
now,” he said gently. “Would you have allowed yourself to fall in love with me if I was a chandler or an innkeeper, for instance, if I were not the son of a landed family, born to a life of squiring an estate like Tickenham Court?” He quickly put his finger across my lip. “No need to answer,” he said with a dazzling smile. “I ask only so that you do not think less of me for the answer I gave you.”

I experienced such a rush of love for him then, coupled with a powerful sense of romantic sacrifice, that suddenly the prospect of losing my home mattered to me not at all. I would give it up, gladly. In fact, I loved Edmund so very much that I was pleased I had something so valuable to offer to him.

Perhaps out of dismay that it was taking me such a long time to answer his proposal, Edmund sank down on one knee at my feet. “Say you will marry me, Eleanor, please?”

I was presented with a view of the top of his head. The sun had appeared from behind a cloud and a long golden ray slanted in through the window, lighting the spot where he knelt, waiting for me to say yes to him. It lit up his copper hair, surrounding him in a dazzling golden corona. I couldn’t have been sent a more potent sign. It was my beacon, guiding me forward to a bright new future. I reached down to stroke the copper waves, almost expecting them to be flame hot or for something like lightning to crackle up through my fingers.

“Oh, Edmund my love, I will marry you. Gladly.”

He scrambled to his feet and hugged me with relief. He couldn’t really have doubted me. I couldn’t really have doubted myself.

Mr. Merrick suddenly burst through the door, so I knew he had been listening outside.

“Blessings to you both,” he said as he kissed me and shook Edmund’s hand.

Edmund dug his hand in his pocket and brought out a twenty-shilling piece, put it between his teeth and bit the thin coin in two, handed me half. “Proof of our promise.”

I reached out and closed my fingers over it, the sliver of broken metal that sealed my fate. The ceremony in church would just be a formality now that our contract was legally witnessed.

“When will we do it?” I asked. “When shall we be married?”

“Next spring, I thought,” Edmund said.

“Oh yes,” I said delightedly. A May wedding, with music and dancing and a feast in the meadow. I could hardly wait. I should be a May queen after all.

“I’ll purchase an ecclesiastical license so that we can marry quietly and privately,” Edmund said. “Without the banns being read and our affairs declared to the whole world.”

The sun seemed to disappear behind the clouds again. “But I want the whole world to know . . .”

“Surely you don’t want all the neighbors gawking and hundreds of noisy, drunken guests?”

Oh, but I do, I do.

“Practically all gentry marriages are by license now,” he asserted. “It’s quite the custom to marry without any fanfare on a weekday morning, with just two witnesses and the minister and sexton in attendance. I’d like our marriage to begin as it should go on, in quietness and tranquillity. In such troubled times as we were born into, that’s all I’ve ever hankered after.”

“But Edmund, I’ve always dreamed of a merry wedding.”

“A license means we can marry in a parish away from home,” he said with a puzzled but patient smile. “I know how much you want to see London. I thought we would marry there.”

“London?” I felt a stir of excitement, even if it was hard to adjust to the idea of not marrying in Tickenham.

“I shall have to go to London just as soon as I’ve been to Suffolk to give the news to my father and brother,” Edmund said happily. “I can’t break it to Richard in a letter that I am betrothed. Oho, he will be so vexed to learn that I have found a bride before him!”

WILLIAM MERRICK WAS so gleeful that I half expected him to break into a jig. “Come the next floods, a survey will be conducted to ascertain exactly what extra channels are required to draw off the water,” he explained with unbridled enthusiasm. “We also need to know what quantities of wood and stone will be needed.”

“Then what happens?” I asked.

“We draw up the documents to petition the court of sewers and state our case.”

“And how long does that take?”

“Impossible to say,” Edmund said.

I knew very well that at Congresbury it had taken years, with the local commissioners delaying making any decision to task the area with drainage because they were not sure of their power to order new channels. Eventually the petitioners had had to obtain an act of Parliament, which had taken another age to obtain. The process here might be equally protracted.

“You can leave it all to me and my partners,” William Merrick said to Edmund. “We will act as your agents, arrange all the financial and legal matters, instruct the surveyors and then the engineers. The court of sewers will supervise all the works and future maintenance. You yourself will have to do nothing.”

“Except grant you a significant acreage of the drained land,” I said wryly.

“A fair price for our labors,” Mr. Merrick intoned. “We will be investing considerable sums in this project ourselves and that is the only reasonable way we can be recompensed. As we discussed, to keep all the newly drained land for yourself and the commoners and reward us with payment out of the rent is too slow a process to commend itself to any prospective investor.”

“Rest assured, William,” Edmund said mildly. “You will have your land.”

Autumn

1675

I
had hoped Edmund would take me back with him to Suffolk, but though Mr. Merrick had initially been in complete agreement with my wish to see the reclaimed Fens, he inexplicably changed his mind, forcing me to remain behind.

Edmund ended up staying in Suffolk for more than three months to tend his father, who was suffering so severely from gout in both feet that he could barely walk. I missed him very much, the more so because, though I sat at my little desk and composed long, impassioned letters to him almost daily, the sporadic ones he sent in reply continued to be stilted and a little awkward. I almost began to fear he did not miss me at all, until he wrote promising to return to Tickenham before traveling on to London, said he could not go so long without seeing me.

Even so, he did not come back until the swans started flying in for the winter, until the rivers had burst, and the three men from Bristol had already been to conduct their surveys. On the day of Edmund’s return, after we had spent not an hour alone over a dinner of roast duck, Mr. Merrick arrived with the charts of the proposed drainage works.

He rolled out the parchment on the long refectory table in the parlor, and the three of us gathered round. I looked down at a carefully drawn map of the moor, the place I knew so intimately and loved best in the world. There were the existing pastures, Cut Bush and Church Moor and Court Leaze, the little humpbacked bridge where the boat was moored in winter. There were the boundary rhynes and tributaries that flowed from Cadbury Camp and on into the Yeo and Middle Yeo, toward the clay belt and out to sea.

“The course of the river will need to be widened and straightened, here and here.” Mr. Merrick pointed a finger with a clean, perfectly trimmed nail to the beautiful natural curve in the Middle Yeo that would be bypassed. “The end of the old course may need to be dammed with stones. The banks will need to be strengthened, a new bridge built, and droves for the cattle. The earth thrown up for the cuts will be used to make embankments. The old drainage channels will be deepened and reoriented, and new ones will be dug that will link up to the existing drains. Here, here and here.” He pointed again, at the places where the moor would be carved up by a network of new ditches. “We will need to explore the possibility of erecting a tidal sluice, strengthening the seawalls at Clevedon.”

“It’s a very ambitious plan,” I said quietly.

“Well, what did you expect? There’s no point going to all this effort just to turn common grazing pastures into meadows that produce an occasional hay crop. We might as well drain so thoroughly it can be properly cultivated. It could be worth fifteen shillings per acre, eight at least.”

I hadn’t noticed Bess come into the room with coffee. She set the tray down on the table without a word, with only a glance at the parchment. But I knew her well enough to know she would have overheard and seen everything and I felt like a conspirator, a traitor.

“Thank you, Bess.” I touched the sleeve of her dress as she busied herself by my side arranging the cups. She paused and looked at my hand on her arm as if a pigeon had dropped its excrement on her. I removed it and she didn’t so much as acknowledge me as she turned to go.

“This may be about how many shillings we can make per acre for you, sir,” I said to Mr. Merrick when I was sure Bess was safely up the stairs. “For me it is more about improving local living conditions.” I straightened to my full, if still insufficient, height. “You propose destroying the thickets that families have been using for generations, for wood to build their houses and to burn on their fires.”

He shrugged. “Unavoidable, I am afraid.”

“They have always been able to gather brushwood and firewood by the boatload. What right have we to take even that from them?”

He gave an indifferent wave of his hand. “That is for the courts to decide.”

Edmund tried to mollify. “Eleanor, it is the surveyor’s opinion that the moors of Tickenham, Nailsea and Kenn are in a lamentable condition compared with the rest of the county . . . the rest of this country, for that matter. They are the areas most badly affected by flooding but where the least has been done. Half measures are no good here. What they are proposing is no more than was begun at the monastery at Glastonbury before the Dissolution. We are only trying to ensure these moors are neglected no longer.”

“There must be some reason they’ve been neglected?” I asked pointedly. “Why have speculators avoided Tickenham until now?”

“Peat lands are the hardest to drain,” William Merrick explained nonchalantly. “Dig wet peat and it flows back to fill the pits. Build anything on it, sluices or walls, and come wet weather the foundations are rendered unstable. But with modern engineering methods these difficulties can be overcome.”

“Just like that?”

“They are not insurmountable problems,” Edmund said, placating.

I looked at him with dread weighing heavy in my chest. “Perhaps those difficulties can be solved, but they may be the least of our concerns.” I ran my fingers across the plans. “Once all this gets under way, I am not so confident that the problem of the commoners and freeholders can be so easily overcome.”

And if we could not overcome them . . . I heard an echo of my father again. I did not want to forfeit the goodwill of my neighbors. I did not want to stir up discord and live amongst people I had turned into my enemies.

I WENT TO FIND Bess in my chamber, where she was brushing the dried mud off the hems of one of my gowns, a relentless task, given that we lived in a world of mud.

“Bess, please stop what you’re doing for a moment. I need to talk to you.”

She set the brush down, obediently but not willingly, and waited with belligerent eyes for me to speak. I took a deep breath. “You know this has to happen sooner or later?” I realized I was echoing Mr. Merrick’s argument and hated myself for it.

“I never thought I’d see it. I never thought you’d do it.”

Edmund’s argument then: “Everyone stands to gain.”

“That’s a lie, and you know it! We’ll be left with a paltry share of land, and the meanest, wettest share at that. My father keeps four cows and if we no longer have the common he will not be able to keep so much as a goose, and you ask me what we
lose
by it?”

“Bess, can’t you see what Edmund is trying to do? Can’t you see how drainage will transform Tickenham, how our land will become dry and warm and solid and full of fruit, with well-fed oxen and the fattest sheep? It will be like summer all year long.” I picked up the teasel she’d been using and waved it at her temptingly. “No more mud?”

“Nothing wrong with mud.”

She held out her hand for the tool. I gave it to her with a sigh and she went back to her work. I had always told her everything, we had always shared our innermost thoughts. She was as dear to me as a sister. And yet she believed I had betrayed her.