Lady of the Butterflies (27 page)

“I know how much you liked the trinkets I sent you before we were betrothed,” Edmund said. “I realized then you had a rather worrisome liking for material possessions. But we don’t need such folderols. We have each other. We have this lovely house and a comfortable income. We already have everything we could possibly need.” He smiled at me softly, a little shyly. “And if, with God’s grace, we were to have a child, I should have everything I could ever want.”

I slipped my arms around his back and rested my cheek against the bumpy brocade of his waistcoat. “Oh, Edmund, so would I. I want a baby too. I want your baby. Lots of your babies.”

He dropped a kiss on the top of my head. “The household accounts are in your charge now,” he encouraged me brightly, as if he was presenting me with the key to a castle. “The monthly housekeeping is yours to spend as you see fit. I daresay there’s enough to buy some spices at least.”

NEXT MORNING, I struggled with the practicalities of adjusting to my new position and duties. Mary and John were gone. Mr. Merrick had handed over all the great ledgers and account books and receipts and bills of fare, which were my responsibility now. I sat at my mother’s small writing desk, in her tiny green-paneled closet, as if I might feel her guiding presence. I felt nothing but claustrophobia, and mounting frustration and inadequacy. The ledger had been open at the same page for what seemed hours. I rubbed the tips of my fingers against the closed lids of my eyes. When I opened them again the neat rows and columns of figures swam before me worse than before.

Bess bustled past the open door with an armful of linen. “Still there, miss? I mean, Ma’am?”

“Bess, I am not a nincompoop, am I?”

“You’re the cleverest person I’ve ever met,” she said, coming to stand in the doorway.

I smiled appreciatively at her loyalty. “Bless you for that, Bess. Oh, I should be able to do this easily,” I said determinedly. “There is nothing especially difficult about it. A simple case of balancing profits from rents and the fisheries against outgoings on wages and expenses.”

“That all sounds quite difficult to me.”

I propped my chin in my hand and frowned at the ledger. I knew what to do in principle, but the practice was rather different. The real trouble was that I wasn’t overly interested, never had been, never would be, I suspected. But it was my life now. “It looks as if it does balance. We do have a small fortune, but it seems to cost as much to run this estate. And it’s up to me now to see that the larder and pantry are amply stocked with provisions, to make arrangements for meals, to make sure you and the other maids are paid.”

“Keeping house can’t be as hard as learning to read a whole book in Latin,” she said helpfully.

“It can, Bess. It is bewildering.”

“Your mother was good at it, by all accounts.”

“I know it. You don’t need to tell me again.” The servants and villagers had told me a hundred times how her gentleness had hidden formidable organizational skills. “I know she ordered the kitchen garden and the dairy and the fishery with patience and grace. I know she was always willing to roll up her sleeves and lend a skilled hand with the cookery and fruit preserving.”

“You are gentle and graceful, Ma’am, and willing and hardworking. And I am sure you can learn to be ordered.”

I laughed. “Well, right now I can’t even calculate if we can afford a new carpet.”

“Your father taught you arithmetic, didn’t he?”

“He did, but he did not rear me to be a housekeeper.”

And yet he entrusted this house into my keeping. He taught me that it was my first and foremost obligation to be a good custodian of my birthright, of my children’s inheritance, but at the same time had encouraged my interests in a world beyond mere accounts-keeping.

“You could ask Mr. Merrick to help you,” Bess suggested, tentatively.

“I could, yes. If I could put up with the I-told-you-so look on his face. I don’t need him to remind me that much good geography has done me, when what I really needed to be paying attention to was how many loaves of bread are needed to feed a houseful of servants.”

“I’d best leave you to work on it, then,” Bess quipped. “Unless I want to go hungry.”

She left me gazing longingly out of the tiny closet window, absently brushing the quill feather against my cheek. The rain of the previous night had passed, and with the typically capricious nature of spring, the sun was shining enticingly. A buzzard wheeled higher and higher in the milky blue sky. For my father this house represented my security. To me just then, much as I loved it, it felt more like a kind of imprisonment, the one thing that frightened me above all else. I groaned and laid my head down on the table, folding my arms up around me as if I feared the roof of this grand and ancient manor might fall down and crush me.

“It can’t be that bleak,” Edmund said breezily, as well he might when he’d been out riding all morning. “Mr. Merrick assured me all was in good order.”

I sat up, saw him and stared, aghast. “Good God!” Then I laughed.

“Don’t you like it?” he asked chirpily. “It’s very fashionable.”

He was wearing the most vile brown periwig.

“It just arrived with the carrier from Bristol. I ordered it last time I was there. Thought, now I am a husband, I’d better have one, so I look more distinguished.”

“Take it off,” I pleaded. “Edmund, I mean it. Take it off right now, please.”

“Why?”

I stood up and swiped the horrid thing off his head myself. My hands flew to my mouth. “Edmund! What have you done?”

To accommodate the wig, he had shaved off every lock of his own lovely copper hair.

I sank back into the chair. Ridiculously, I looked from Edmund’s shaved head to the ledger in front of me and a tear slid down my cheek. It splashed onto the page, instantly blurring the neat inked figures. I made to wipe it away but Edmund whipped the book from under my fingers.

“You’ll only smudge it and make it worse,” he said, with no hint of reproof, handing me a neatly laundered cloth as he sat the ghastly wig back on his bald head. “I’ll grow my hair back if it really means so much to you. Please don’t cry about it. For Heaven’s sake, it is nothing to cry about.”

“I know it’s not,” I said, hurriedly wiping the tears away. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”

Edmund handed the accounts back to me.

“I don’t know what to do with them,” I admitted.

“You’ll soon learn,” he said. “You’ll be a prudent and frugal housekeeper before you know it. Here’s something to cheer you anyway.” He produced a flat, square parcel from behind his back.

“Oh, Edmund! A present!”

“It’s not from me. The carrier brought it as well. From the bookseller, I assume.”

I hadn’t ordered any books, and if it was a book, it was a decidedly thin one. But it was definitely addressed to me: Eleanor Ashfield, Tickenham Court, Somersetshire. The writing was small and crabbed. It was the first time I had seen my new name in writing and it gave me a strange feeling, made me feel like a small tributary that flows down from Cadbury Camp and loses itself in the Yeo, as it is swept onward toward the sea.

Edmund had walked away, not at all curious to see what was inside the parcel.

I slipped my finger beneath the brown paper wrapping. It was not a book at all, but a sheaf of papers bound in vellum. I caught my breath as I carefully turned over the leaves. It was a collection of original colored drawings of butterflies, rich with yellows, oranges, reds, blues. Beside each illustration were notes on the location of sightings, on flight patterns and preferred food plants. It was like looking through a rich illuminated manuscript, like the one John Burges had shown me once.

There was an inscription on the covering page, in the same untidy, almost childish hand as had penned the address.

There are no books in existence that are solely devoted to butterflies, so I have made one for you. Your friend, James Petiver.

There were tears in my eyes again but for a totally different reason. I dashed them away before they had time to fall and spoil the lovely paintings. I was stunned by such thoughtfulness and generosity. It must have taken him hours, days, to copy out all his drawings and notes for me. I might know nothing of the cost of a bottle of claret, or of running a household, but I knew that what I had here was worth more than money could buy. This gift was more precious than any silk or silverware, more precious than any trinkets or lace. I knew, somehow, that this gift, this friendship, would be my salvation.

Summer

1676

I
held my breath. Some distance away but unmistakable, flying powerfully over the sedges, was the magnificent lemon and black butterfly with scalloped, sickle-shaped wings, like the Gothic arches in a church or a swallow’s tail. It was larger than any other butterfly and so stunning it seemed almost unreal. It was my most burning ambition to see one up close. I’d learned their favorite haunts, knew they seemed to like milk parsley, but they were proving extraordinarily elusive.

I walked forward slowly, at the ready, remembering how kittens learned to wait for the right moment to pounce. I whispered a quick prayer that this specimen would drift within my reach. Miraculously, it alighted on a thistle and I crept as close as I dared, then sprang forward, my hands cupped. I tripped and landed flat on my face, while the butterfly danced off, gaily evading capture, much to Edmund’s amusement and the other fishermen’s undisguised and total mystification.

“It seems rather cruel, anyway,” Edmund said, having set down his fishing rod on the riverbank to watch me. “How can you like butterflies and also quite happily kill them?”

“This from the person who likes nothing better than a plate of eels fried alive for his dinner? James says it is the only way to study them properly.”

Edmund was no more jealous of my correspondence with James Petiver than he had been of Richard’s attentions to me. “I can’t see any point whatsoever in catching what you cannot eat,” he added indulgently. “But if it makes you happy, then so be it.”

It did make me happy, and I was sure that I could remain so, could be quite content with this life, if only Richard did not come to visit, as he soon must, to upset my equilibrium again.

I turned my mind determinedly to the problem of the elusive specimen. I needed a net like James Petiver’s.

I had written to James to thank him for the drawings and enclosed one of the copper-colored butterflies he so valued. In little more than a week, in almost no time at all, I had had a reply to my letter.

I did not open it at once, did not want household distractions to ruin my concentration or enjoyment, so I waited until I could take it down to the moor. Then, leaning against a willow trunk by the Yeo’s curved bank, I broke the seal.

It was a long letter, scrawled in his untidy, hurried, boyish writing that was rather a struggle to read, but which pleased me because it suggested that the author had far more important matters with which to concern himself than the forming of neat curves and hooks. Just the sight of his handwriting made me feel unaccountably, uncomplicatedly happy and I smiled to myself as I read, imagining him bent over a little desk, scribbling away with ink-stained fingers, all the things he wanted to tell me coming into his head faster than he could write them down.

Besides asking me how I did, the letter contained directions on how to study, preserve and log butterflies. He emphasized the importance of keeping an observation book, to note down exactly where and when I had found each specimen, to record colors in case they faded. He had drawn a little diagram of a clap net, in case I’d forgotten how it looked, and explained how I might make one for myself.

Over the next days I set about hacking off withies and cut up two perfectly fine muslin kerchiefs. With a notebook and lead pen, I spent hours amidst the lilac haze of lady’s-smock and cuckooflowers on the moor. I wrote to tell James the net was a miraculous invention that let me swipe butterflies from the air, of how amazed I was each time I trapped one, saw its fine legs poking through the tiny holes.

I found that cataloguing and preserving butterflies in the mica James had sent to me seemed to give me extra enthusiasm for other tasks. With Edmund’s patient help, I mastered the accounts, and though I’d never find my vocation as a bookkeeper, butterfly collecting brought out a methodical side to my nature which, when applied to the household finances, made them start to make sense. It gave me great satisfaction to see neat rows of figures in my own sloping hand and to realize that I could make a success of running this house. If I felt Edmund was shaping me slowly and very subtly into a good housewife, for all that he had said he would not want to, then, I told myself, it was not such a bad thing and I did not really mind so much after all.

I did not even mind overseeing the beating of the bed hangings or the ordering of the linen cupboard because, surprisingly, there were other aspects of housewifery that I found interesting, and which even offered me opportunity for experiment and observation. From Bess I learned that pewter was best burnished with mare’s tail, brass cleaned with charcoal, and silver with salt and vinegar. Ned Tucker’s sister, Lizzie, who worked in the cider house and stillroom, taught me all about the process of fermentation. I pored over the book of herbal remedies, used by my mother and Mary Burges, and made up poultices and ointments, as and when they were needed.

“You like being lady of the manor, I think?” Edmund said to me one evening, as we shared a supper of cold beef and talked about our day, in the manner that had quickly become routine for us. Usually, the conversation centered on impersonal matters: boundary disputes between the tenants, the hiring of laborers to tend the orchard for the harvest, the incompetence of the dairymaid who had let the milk sour. It was rare for him to express an interest in my likes and dislikes, in what I wanted from life, and I welcomed the opportunity to talk to him about what was close to my heart.

I reached for the fruit bowl and took a bite from a juicy purple plum. “I like walking up to the cottages and drinking dishes of cold cream and sympathizing over toothaches and boils and fractious babies,” I said. “I like feeling needed and appreciated.”

“I shall always need you and appreciate you.” Edmund smiled fondly at me. “But the villagers certainly seem to have taken you to their hearts.”

It pleased me perhaps more than anything that the people of Tickenham seemed to have accepted me as mistress of the manor so readily. I had brought them a new lord who was far more lenient than their previous one, and was proving to be a good wife to him, in their eyes. And, as they saw it, I had called a halt to the drainage plans. True, Thomas Knight and Susan Hort did whisper aside together when they saw me with my strange butterfly trap, but I did not let that trouble me.

“I like rocking the babies best of all,” I said. “I could do that for hours.”

Edmund’s eyes softened. “You will be an expert mother.”

“I hope I can be one very soon. If only so I don’t have to pretend not to see the women’s knowing glances at my belly and answer their constant inquiries after my own health.” I chuckled. “When I tell them I am well, they are so disappointed. They’d rejoice if I said I was nauseous and exhausted. As would I.”

“I too,” Edmund agreed.

“I do pray every night and every morning that God will let me be fruitful.”

“My dear, I am certain He will. If only you were more patient and at ease about it.”

“That is easier said than done.”

“Aye, for you, most certainly.”

“It is only that I cannot think of a punishment much worse than barrenness.”

“My wife, why ever should you be punished? What have you ever done that is so wrong?”

There was a moment of silence which I hurried to fill. “I was raised a strict Puritan, remember? I live in constant fear of punishment.”

“It is of course a Puritan’s duty to multiply,” he said with levity. “Your bounden duty as a wife.”

I licked the plum juice from my fingers. “My bounden duty and my most passionate wish,” I said seductively, but he looked almost alarmed as I took his hand and led him toward the stone stairs leading to our bedchamber.