TWO YEARS LATER
Thomas Knight’s sister, Bess, was my new maid, and despite her brother’s dislike of me, Bess and I had become fast friends.
“Hold still now,” she commanded, giving me an apple-cheeked smile that revealed the wide gap between her two top front teeth. “Or the gentleman visitors will take you for a little vagabond.”
I was so excited by the prospect of visitors that I didn’t mind having to stand still for an age while Bess brushed and brushed at the hem of my plain dark dress to rid it of the worst of the ever-present rim of mud stains. Made of wool, it could never be washed or it would shrink. I didn’t mind either that Bess combed and combed at my long fair hair until it crackled with life and sparkled like spun gold, only for the great mass of it to be pinned and braided and tightly fastened away beneath a lace cap that was starched as crisp and white as my square collar.
I went to kneel upon the seat in the oriel window, my nose practically pressed against the uneven panes of leaded glass, keeping a lookout over the ghostly waterland patterned with droves and causeways that rose above the submerged world. I was determined to be the first to see our guests, though the drifting mist had rendered even the nearby stables indistinct. It had been raining all night, was raining still, and the floodwaters were lapping at the Barton wall now. We were half marooned, accessible from the south only by the main causeway or by boat.
As my father chose to shield me from the world and all that was worldly, he allowed me to mix with only the most restricted society. I seldom saw a new face, seldom saw anyone but the servants who made up our wider family. I had hardly ever traveled beyond the confines of the estate, beyond the isolated village of Tickenham, had never even been to Bristol.
I didn’t mind much, because I didn’t know any different, but also because I loved Tickenham, so that I could not in all honesty imagine myself away from it. Tickenham was a part of me, was who I was. I was Eleanor Goodricke of Tickenham Court. Since the day I was born I had imbibed the water from the springs and the cider from the apples in the orchard along with my mother’s milk. What little flesh there was on my small limbs was nourished by the fish from the rivers and the wildfowl from the wetlands. And Tickenham’s moods, its spirit, reflected my own. The isolation and secrecy caused by the winter floods and mist echoed my own unusual need for seclusion, for time to myself, whilst the profusion and lushness of summer on the moor satisfied my deep and unquenchable yearning for color and sunshine. Tickenham for me was the world and I did not want to be anywhere else. Though that did not mean I did not relish the chance to meet outsiders.
William Merrick, a Bristol merchant, had visited several times recently to talk to my father, about financial matters mostly, but never before had he brought anyone else with him. Eventually I saw them riding along the causeway. Mr. Merrick was a barrel-chested and bulbous-nosed man who took great pains to hide his lack of refinement beneath immaculate clothes. He was a Puritan, supposedly, yet he could not help displaying his considerable wealth in a flash of silk brocade waistcoat, in subtle but obviously expensive rings, in the finest silk stockings. He sat, square-shouldered and square-jawed, on his dun mare as it trotted up the miry path past the rectory. Even the way he rode was brash. But it was the other rider on the roan gelding who interested me, the tall, straight-backed gentleman from Suffolk.
I ran round to the cobbled stable yard, then held back, suddenly struck by shyness as I watched them dismount amidst a scattering of chickens. They were both wearing long black cloaks and tall hats which shadowed their faces. I could see rain dripping from the brims by the time they’d walked the short distance to the door beneath the oriel.
With a look of distaste on his florid features, Mr. Merrick wiped his highly polished beribboned shoes with a clump of straw. He lived in a smart new street in Bristol, by the docks, where the marshland had been nicely tamed, so he had little patience with mud and damp, or with anything with even the slightest tendency to disorderliness, such as me.
He wasted no time in introducing Edmund Ashfield, who shook my father’s hand. It was an odd greeting, only used by true Parliamentarians. Then he turned to me and bowed, removing his hat. As he came up again, he smiled at me and my eyes widened in wonder. It was as if the mist had cleared to reveal a burst of sun, or else his entrance had been announced with a fanfare of trumpets. His short-cut hair was thick and wavy, and of the brightest copper I’d ever seen. When he straightened, I took in just how very tall and how broad-shouldered he was. He had clear gray eyes, an open, ready smile, and his nose and cheeks were sprinkled with pale gold freckles. He was as different from the rustic Tickenham boys as it was possible to be. He shone. He lit up the austere gray stone-walled hall like a sunbeam, and seemed to me like a knight in gleaming armor who had stepped straight from the pages of a romance.
Still beaming warmly at my father and me, he clutched his hat in front of him in both hands and turned it round like a spinning top. “I beg your pardon for our late arrival. We had a slight skirmish with an uprooted tree on the high road, and we didn’t dare venture round it onto the flooded fields, lest we be washed away or sink up to our waists in the bog. It’s mightily hostile out there, I tell you. But this is a delightful place in which to wait out the siege.”
I wasn’t in the least disheartened to hear that his manner of speech was not as unusual as his appearance. Overuse of military language was common amongst my father’s few visitors, an inevitable consequence of the years when the chief topics of conversation had been civil war and armory and battle strategy. Just like me, Mr. Ashfield must have a father who had fought for Cromwell.
“Didn’t I tell you Major Goodricke had a pretty little daughter?” Mr. Merrick interposed. He had never, ever paid me even the scantest compliment before, and it did not sound very sincere now. But I barely wondered at it. I barely noticed his cold and calculating smile, and for once did not pause to consider what he, ever the merchant, might be looking to trade this time. I did not think of him at all.
“I’ve been looking forward very much to coming here,” Edmund Ashfield said with sincerity enough for both of them.
I silently cursed myself for being so tongue-tied. For what must have been the first time in my life, I could think of absolutely nothing to say.
“Are you staying in Bristol for the winter, Mr. Ashfield?” my father inquired.
“Oh, no, sir. I’m on my way home from the Twelfth Night celebrations in London.”
My eyes flew anxiously to my father and I saw his bushy gray brows knit in a tight, disapproving scowl. My need to cover his displeasure and make Mr. Ashfield feel entirely comfortable was so great that it helped me to find my voice at last. “Have you been to London before, sir?” I asked.
He turned to me and gave me his full attention. “I have, miss. Several times.”
I felt myself flush in the full warmth of his glorious smile, now miraculously directed solely at me. “And is it very foul and wicked and full of thieves and cutthroats?” I asked.
“And many more things besides. Not all bad.” His eyes shone with such amusement that I could not help but smile back. I thought how I had never seen a face so full of laughter. He looked like a person who was always happy, would never have a care in the world. A person who could never look dour or severe or puritanical. He seemed made for Twelfth Night festivities, for capering and merrymaking, and, for me, the knowledge that he had come direct from such forbidden entertainments, from the great and wicked capital city, only served to add to his appeal.
“Have you seen the lions in the Tower?” I asked. “What do they feed them?”
“Nosy little girls, I shouldn’t wonder,” Mr. Merrick sniffed.
Mr. Ashfield ignored that remark completely. “I am afraid I have not been there at feeding time,” he answered, finding my question worthy of a considered reply. “I shall make an effort to do so and report back, since it interests you.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“You a
re most welcome.”
I wondered who had been lucky enough to enjoy the Twelfth Night festivities in his company. “Do you have family in London, Mr. Ashfield?”
“Do hush, Eleanor,” my father chided. “You mustn’t interrogate our guest before he has even taken some refreshment.” He apologized on my behalf. “My daughter is renowned for her curiosity.”
“I was there with a very good friend of mine,” Mr. Ashfield said to me, and my heart melted, because again he’d taken the trouble to answer me. “Another lad from Suffolk. Name of Richard Glanville.”
I saw my father tense.
“Ah, that young blade again,” Mr. Merrick snorted obsequiously. “You mustn’t judge a man by his friends,” he added hastily, with a glance at my father that was, astonishingly, almost nervous. “Edmund’s a very respectable fellow, aren’t you? For all that you choose to mix with Cavaliers.”
My mouth fell open. I gaped at Edmund Ashfield, whose allure had suddenly multiplied beyond all imagining with this new revelation. He actually knew a Cavalier! Was friends with a Cavalier! He might as well have admitted to supping with the King himself, or rather with the Devil. Which, in my father’s eyes, amounted to exactly the same thing.
“Richard has never been anywhere near Whitehall Palace and he was born during the Commonwealth,” Edmund said very amiably. “After the war was over.”
“Makes no difference,” Mr. Merrick said, with another fawning glance at my father. “He’s the son of defiantly Royalist parents who mixed with the court in exile, which makes him as Cavalier as Rupert of the Rhine.”
“I’m surprised that an upstanding gentleman such as yourself would choose to fraternize with men of pleasure,” my father said critically.
“They are not half as debauched as we’ve been led to believe, you know.” Mr. Ashfield smiled, his cordiality still totally unruffled.
“Come now,” my father said. “You’ll not tell me that the news of lewdness and perversion that reached us from Europe was all fabrication? The depravity of the public and private morals of Charles Stuart and his band was the scandal of the country—still is, now that they’ve brought their vile wickedness to Whitehall. It was well reported how they abandoned themselves to their lusts, and drank and gambled, fornicated and committed adultery. How they committed these blackest of sins and saw none of it as any sin at all. These are men in contempt of all decency and religious observation. Or would you deny that they are a crowd of short-tempered quarrelers, violent heavy drinkers and murderous ruffians who would brawl and duel to the death over so little as a game of tennis?”
Carried away by his fervor, my father seemed to have entirely forgotten that I was standing there in wide-eyed enthrallment, listening raptly to every word. Oh, I was used to hearing him rail against Cavaliers. In many ways they stirred up his moral indignation even more than did Catholics. But never before had he been so specific, and I was caught between utter fascination and an acute embarrassment that made me half wish I could fall into a hole and hide. I felt so dreadfully sorry for poor Mr. Ashfield, though he did not appear at all affronted.
“I can’t speak for all Royalists,” he said good-naturedly. “But I assure you that Richard Glanville is possessed of great wit and courage and is one of the most cultured and charming young men I have ever had the pleasure to socialize with.”
“Cultured?” my father snorted. “It is a culture of monstrous indulgence, drunken gaiety and sensual excess that our monarch and his circle cultivate and would wish to impose on this country. The sooner they all rot and decay in their own filth, the better. God forbid it bring us all to moral ruin first.”
There was an excruciating silence. “I heard young Richard swims as though he were a fish, not a boy,” Mr. Merrick interjected rather desperately. “He’ll have his pick of the new drainage channels and widened rivers next time he visits Ashfield land, eh?”
Fen drainage was Mr. Merrick’s favorite topic of conversation, one he unfailingly managed to bring up at every visit. It might have made me uneasy, after my conversation with Mary Burges, but I didn’t much mind what the three of them talked about so long as they were not insulting poor Mr. Ashfield and his friend. So long as I could listen to him and watch him and stay near him.
But it was not to be. “I suggest we move into the parlor for some coffee,” my father said brusquely, remembering his manners at last. “Eleanor,” he said to me. “Find Bess, would you, and ask her to send a pot through to us.”
I wished I knew why Mr. Merrick was honored with the great luxury of coffee every time he visited, but I was very glad Mr. Ashfield was to be given the best that we had, would not begrudge him anything at all.
He went with the others toward the oak-paneled parlor, and when I took a step to follow, my father halted me with one of his sharp looks. I actually shivered, as if, deprived of the nearness of Edmund Ashfield’s bright hair and sunny smile, I was being cast back out into shadows and darkness. I lingered like a little phantom beneath the vaulted roof in the empty hall as he took the seat of honor in a carved oak chair that was drawn up beside the fire as the wind boomed outside like distant cannon fire and the rain peppered the windowpanes like tiny arrows. The flames behind him were pale in comparison, only served to make him appear all the more burnished and gleaming. He had all the glorious grandeur of autumn, a blaze of red and gold that defied the closeness of winter.
He was talking of windmills that were used in his home county to drive back the water. “There’s clearly a great advantage to be gained from combating the floods and claiming the territory for lush meadows in their stead,” he said mildly.
“You tell him, Edmund, my boy,” William Merrick said. “For he’ll not listen to me.”
“On the contrary, William,” my father replied. “I listen to you very carefully.”
“Yet you do not heed my advice. Even when it seems you have little choice.”
“There is always a choice,” my father added gravely. “If we trust in God to provide.”
“And what if His way of provision is by way of reclaiming land from water?”
My father hesitated, as if to consider, and I held my breath as I waited for his reply. “You know I have the gravest reservations about that, William,” he said. “Your gentlemen adventurers are playing God, tampering with His creation, and not only is that wrong, it is also highly dangerous.”
THE MIST AND RAIN had cleared when I stood with my father and watched our visitors ride on to Bristol beneath a glorious winter sunset that shimmered on the sheets of water. In the dusky light I could see, both inside and out, the translucence of my face reflected in the panes of gray-green leaded glass, and beyond, the lapwings and redshanks and curlews wading in the shallows and the great herds of swans and wild geese out on the lake, gliding between the rows of half-submerged pollarded willows that were always an eerie sight, no matter how familiar.
Had Mary Burges been telling the truth when she said I was pretty, I wondered? Never had it seemed to matter so much before. But I wanted to be pretty enough to make a man like Edmund Ashfield fall in love with me when I grew up. Bess constantly complimented my gold hair and blue eyes, but it was their liveliness and brightness she said she liked, and I was not sure that gentlemen would like that at all. Ladies were supposed to be demure and docile and saintly, and I was none of those things.
“Will Mr. Ashfield come here again?” I asked, making a great effort not to sound as forlorn as I felt.
“He’d not be unwelcome,” my father said, surprising me. “An extremely likable young fellow. I shall pray for him, that he is not ruined by his objectionable associations.”
“Do you even know Richard Glanville, Papa?” I asked, feeling a strange need to defend this man whom I had never met.
“I know of his family.” My father scowled. “I know his type.”
“Men of pleasure.” I whispered it like a creed. At the age of eleven, my naive notion of pleasure extended not much beyond music and
dancing and feasting, all that was forbidden to me and therefore infinitely fascinating and desirable. Was Edmund Ashfield a man of pleasure, despite being a Parliamentarian? He must be, a little, to have such a friend.
“Young Edmund was probably not as persuasive as William Merrick had hoped he would be,” my father added. “So maybe he’ll be brought back again for another try, since it seems Merrick will use any ploy to try to convince me that we are sitting on a fortune and that our drained fields could become the richest pastureland in all of England.”
I loved it when my father talked to me as if I was an adult rather than a child, as he had taken to doing more and more, recently. But I remembered Mr. Merrick’s opportunistic smile, predatory as a vulture, and even the small surge of joy I’d experienced at the prospect of seeing Edmund Ashfield again was marred by the notion of its being for Mr. Merrick’s benefit.
He had even turned being a Puritan dissenter to his own advantage. Barred from the professions, he’d made a great fortune as a merchant trading in tobacco and sugar. My father saw it as a sign of God’s supreme approval that Mr. Merrick’s business ventures had flourished and as a result generally relied wholeheartedly on his financial acumen and shrewdness. Seemingly not in this one instance, though.
“You disagree with him totally about drainage, then, Papa?”
“If I had a shilling for all the failed schemes to drain Somersetshire, I’d have not needed to take out a mortgage with him, or even consider letting him act as my agent to embark on some risky scheme here. But I can’t deny that it’s tempting . . . even making a small fortune would be useful to us now.” He stroked my hair. “Don’t look so alarmed, my little one. We’re not facing ruin just yet.”
I was about to ask him what a mortgage was but I didn’t get the chance.
“It’s the war, of course,” he ran on. “We’re still suffering for maintaining a troop of horse rather than our land, and we’ve still not recouped the revenue that was forfeit to the new king for his pardon. But we will, given time, and at least our house is not a burned-out shell like so many others. At least our fields do not lie abandoned and overgrown with weeds, even if they are underwater for half the year.”
The Lady of the Butterflies Page 3