“The whole purpose of studying nature is to bring us closer to God through a better understanding of His creation,” he said, with a heartrending echo of his previous fervor. “It is not to cast doubt over His works and throw His very existence into question.” He grimaced, continued, his voice weakening again. “Science must not lead us to a godless world. We may strive to learn but we must never take a bite from the tree of knowledge.” He laid his head back on the pillow, exhausted from his short speech.
I knew I should urge him to rest but did not want to, wanted to prolong this last conversation I was ever to have with him as much as I could. There was so much still to be said.
“If only you had been a boy,” he sighed.
I straightened my spine on hearing that, assuming that now the time had come for the most important conversation of any landowner’s life, he regretted not being able to have it with a son, regretted not having a boy to carry on his name and to whom he could bequeath Tickenham Court. Which hurt me sorely. “I can care for this estate as well as any man,” I said spiritedly.
“Oh, I do not doubt that for a moment.” He gasped a breath. “How I would have welcomed men with your courage and fortitude to march beside me against the Cavaliers. But you are not a man, Eleanor. One day you will marry, and the man who seeks to win your hand in marriage will first and foremost seek to gain land and a fortune—to win Tickenham Court. You have a loving nature, a trusting nature, and no guardian or trustee will watch over your interests the way a father would. To make matters worse, you are growing to be a little beauty. There is a radiance about you that will attract men like bees to nectar, the worst kind of men, the type I fear you will find all too appealing.” He was struggling now to talk and breathe at the same time, which only lent extra weight to his words, since it cost him such effort to voice each one. “On every count you will be susceptible to all manner of philanderers and ne’er-do-wells. May the Lord help you, but you will be prey to every unscrupulous Cavalier who happens by.”
“Do not worry, Papa,” I said reassuringly, adamantly. “When the time comes I will choose a husband wisely.”
“Ah, my child, the heart is seldom wise.”
“I swear to you, Papa, I will ensure the man I marry will be a good lord for Tickenham Court.” Like Edmund Ashfield, I thought. My father had liked Edmund.
“You can speak dispassionately now,” Papa said. “But you are just a child still. When you do marry you will be a woman, with a woman’s baser nature, a woman’s low passions and greater temptations.” I was shocked at his sudden severity, especially when the woman he had known most intimately had been my mother, who I considered to be as unblemished as the Virgin Mary. He took a labored breath. “Never forget, Eleanor, that you carry the stain of Eve’s sin upon your soul. Never forget that Eden was lost to her because of that sin.”
Those were the very last words he ever spoke, to me or to anyone else.
We gathered round his bed and we watched life slowly leaving him. He grew gradually whiter and colder but the end, when it came, was quiet, very gentle. A breath and then no breath. A heartbeat and then no heartbeat. A little trail of spittle had dribbled from the corner of his mouth and when I wiped it away he looked as if he was only sleeping still. His hand around mine was still warm and I did not ever want to let it go. I wanted to hear his voice again, for him to say something else to me. Anything. I laid my head on his arm, where I used to nestle when I was tired of walking and he carried me home from the moor. It felt so familiar and safe, even now. I twisted my face round to look up at his. One of his eyelids had slightly opened and I saw there was no life at all behind his eyes.
I let go of him and bolted, his last words ringing inside my head, louder and more ominous even than the death knell.
I fled down the stairs and out through the garden, running until there was a pain in my side as if I had been stabbed. Only when I reached the moor did I stop.
It was dusk and a little cooler now, the air fragrant with the heady scents of summer, but all the colors of the wildflowers in the meadows were muted, fading to gray.
Mary found me in my favorite place, down by the humpbacked bridge. She put her arm around my shoulder. “Let me tell you something,” she said, as we watched bats flit over the fields and listened to the strange triple call of the whimbrel. “When John and I first came here, what immediately impressed me was how, in a land as flat as this, the sky is such an overwhelming presence. I told John that it was a good place for us to be, a place where it’s as if the border between earth and Heaven has been blurred and weakened. Nobody who crosses it is ever very far away when you view it from here.”
“At least Papa will be with my mother now,” I whispered. “He has missed her so much.” I realized with dismay that I could no longer picture her face. My father’s insistence on modesty meant that I didn’t even have so much as a rough charcoal sketch to remind me. “I can’t remember what she looked like,” I cried to Mary in distress. “I can’t even see my mama’s face anymore.”
Mary took me into her arms and rocked me like a baby against her soft breasts, stroking my hair as tears poured down my face and soaked the front of her dress. “Yes you can,” she said. “Think hard enough and you can.”
I felt her own breath turn ragged and I looked up to see that she was crying too, and I forced my own anguish aside. “Mary, you have news from London?”
“A letter, from my cousin,” she said quietly. “She went to call at my family’s house and found fires burning outside the door and a fearful red cross daubed upon it. The doors and windows were all nailed shut until the contagion passes or all inside have succumbed to it. She saw the children’s little faces at the locked window. Now I see them too. I cannot get them from my mind.”
BESS AND MARY WASHED my father’s body, wrapped him in the white linen winding-sheet and laid him on the long oak table in the great hall.
In all other aspects William Merrick assumed control the minute my father was gone and nobody questioned him. I’d been judged too young to take a turn watching over my mother’s body, but when I asked, Mr. Merrick said I might do it this time. Or rather, he said that I could do whatsoever I pleased. Nobody had ever said that to me before, but dismayingly, it gave me little pleasure. Even if I could do anything, there was nothing I particularly wanted to do. It was beyond me even to decide if I wanted a cup of small beer or not. Perversely, without my father there to rebel against, I could see little joy to be had from being free to wear ribbons or eat a whole plate full of marchpane. There was no point in anything. No pleasure in being good and clever either, if there was no one to praise and be proud of me. But that felt dangerously close to self-pity, and I would not give in to self-pity.
My situation was not uncommon, I reminded myself. Mine was by no means the only family to suffer such a loss. Almost every child my age had some close experience of death, had lost a parent, a sibling. People died all the time, every day, every hour, every minute. Remember Mary’s family. Remember them, and the thousands of others dying of plague. The graveyard across the Barton wall and the crypt beneath the church were filled with the dead. Death was perfectly normal and natural. Yet it didn’t feel normal or natural to me at all.
“Won’t you be very afraid?” Bess whispered, her almond-shaped brown eyes clouded with alarm as she glanced at my father’s shrouded corpse, her normally rosy cheeks pale and pinched. Her hands pecked worriedly at her homespun apron. “What if his soul’s not quite detached, is still hovering nearby? It can happen, you know.”
Her simple but powerful country-girl superstitions did not touch me. Despite my small stature I felt as if I looked down at her from a great height, or as if a great distance separated her from me, this girl who would soon go home to her brother and both her parents. I stared down at my father’s face, the skin already waxen and sinking against the bones to reveal the shape of his skull. I had no mother and no father anymore. The two people who’d given me life were dead. I
was no longer anybody’s little girl.
I hardly noticed Bess quietly leave the hall, eager for escape. But there were no ghosts here. It was only Mr. Merrick who hovered like a specter by the oriel. He came silently across the floor and moved a lighted taper off the table to the court cupboard in the corner of the room. “There must be no candles near the body, no question of Popish practices,” he muttered, taking up another candle and standing in the flickering light with the stick in his hand. “Your father entrusted me with his last wishes, as he entrusted me with so much else.” I felt his eyes resting on me, wished he would just go. “Now is perhaps not the time, but you may as well know. He has appointed me as your guardian.”
I stared at my father’s beloved face in consternation. Too late now to ask him why.
I knew anyway. Wardships were bought and sold just as anything else, and since part of the estate of Tickenham Court was mortgaged to Mr. Merrick, my father would have had little choice but to sell the rest of the guardianship to him. He cared for me but it was more important that the estate was left in safe hands. Tickenham Court, my family’s past and its future. I was just a passing encumbrance, part of the package.
“WHY MUST it be done in the dark?” I asked Mary, as the wooden bier, draped with black mortuary cloth, was brought from the church after dusk.
She stroked my hair. “It was your father’s wish that the burial be conducted at night, in the latest Puritan fashion, to help keep the vulgar at bay.”
There were to be no rings or gloves for the visitors, no feasting or distribution of alms and dole of bread. Biscuits and burned wine were to suffice. With her customary frankness, Bess had told me how peeved everyone was to be denied a spectacle, though they’d expected nothing more.
I wore a black taffeta cloak and hood and Mr. Merrick and the other men had black silk weepers falling from their hats down their backs, but true to my father’s last wishes, neither the house nor the church was hung with mourning drapery. Mr. Merrick headed the pallbearers, who carried the lead-lined oak coffin the short distance to the churchyard. The bells gave one short peal, and the procession, lit by links and flaming torches, moved with silent dignity through the dark. Reverend Burges met us at the church stile, and the coffin was taken into the church and set to rest on two trestles near the pulpit, where just a few candles burned, flickering wildly in the drafts and casting an eerie sepulchral glow.
My father had naturally wished to forgo all ceremony but at the final hour Reverend Burges lost the courage entirely to abandon standardized church practice. He began with a touching eulogy praising my father’s virtues, followed by a sermon designed to draw attention to our own mortality.
The coffin was taken to a prominent position beside my mother on the south side of the graveyard. Reverend Burges read from the Order of the Burial of the Dead. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of the resurrection.”
My father had surely been certain of it. Was I? I did not know.
I stared down into the dark pit of the grave. It was supposed to be six feet deep but was not nearly that much because of the water and the soft black peat, which flowed back to fill any hole or ditch as quickly as it was dug. Even in the worst drought the country had known, our land was still waterlogged at its very heart. Water had disappeared from the surface but was still there, had merely retreated to its subterranean depths. It was glimmering now, in the torchlight, as at the bottom of a well.
The coffin was lowered and I heard a faint plashing as the wood slapped against the water, like a little boat being put to sea.
“Ironic, isn’t it?” Mr. Merrick was standing at my shoulder and spoke in a hushed voice, for my ears alone. “Duckett and Thomas Sydenham were both of the opinion that it was living in such close proximity to marsh and floodwater that killed him, and now in death the water is receiving him into its depths.”
“He need not have died.” Tears stung my eyes, blurred my vision, so I was only vaguely aware of everyone staring at me. “He could have been cured.”
I had a sudden disturbing realization that my father was not infallible; he was not incapable of making a mistake, of being foolish and stubborn. He was just a man, a normal man, with weaknesses and failings just like everyone else.
I was standing suddenly on sand, with the waves sucking it away beneath my feet. Everything I believed in, everything my father had told and taught me, the very foundations of my life were all stripped away from beneath me, cast into doubt. I did not know if butterflies rose up from tiny coffins as he had said they did. I did not know if death was the beginning or the end. I knew only one thing for sure. It was not bad air that had taken my father from me, nor ague. It was Puritan fanaticism and prejudice that had killed him.
I turned and ran through the churchyard, crashed through the gate in the Barton wall, all the way into the darkened hall of the house. I climbed onto a bench and reached up to the sword that hung on the wall. It was heavy, nearly as tall as I, but I had good, strong muscles from climbing trees and wielded it like an avenging angel. I was already halfway up the winding stone stairs before I saw torches coming through the dark garden.
I flung the sword on the bed and ripped off my black dress. Holding it at arm’s length, standing like a ghost in the darkness in just my shift, I slashed at the black material with the sword, slashed and slashed with all my might, until my dress was torn to shreds, a mass of black ribbons. Black for mourning. Black for Puritanism. Black for despair.
I threw it on the floor and dragged my other identical dress from the chest. I hacked at that too, stuck in the sword and twisted to gouge great holes. When I was satisfied at the damage I’d caused, I cast the ruined garment onto the pile of rags and stamped on it, the tears streaming down my face now. Then I stood there in my shift in the silence, the ripped dresses an unidentifiable black mass, like a crouching shadow at my feet.
But it wasn’t totally silent. Something was tapping lightly on the glass, like ghostly fingers. I stood perfectly still and listened, my heart pounding, a sudden flood of guilt convincing me that my father had come back from the dead to punish me for what I had just done.
I made myself creep over to the window. I lifted my hand and tentatively moved the drapes aside. I gasped at what I saw. A white butterfly, luminous in the dark, trapped behind the heavy crewelwork, was trying to escape. I remembered what my father had said about butterflies symbolizing the souls of the dead and a shiver ran down my spine. I flung open the window to set the little creature free. It fluttered out instantly and as I watched it disappear into the warm, dark sky, my heart soared with it.
My father’s hand had been so dry after the fever, but I tried to see his entry into the watery grave not as sinking but as a baptism. I tried to picture the water seeping into him, replenishing his body, making it whole so that one day it would rise again, just as he had described, as if on white shimmering wings.
Find a way to believe in that, Eleanor, find a way to believe in it.
Part Two
Spring
1673
EIGHT YEARS LATER
Crisp March sunlight streamed in at the window of the smart Bristol tailor’s shop where I stood amidst bright bolts of satin and silk. I turned around slowly, making the sky-blue silk skirt of my lovely new gown swish and sway around my ankles. The gown was full-sleeved, with a low, broad neckline and tightly boned, pointed bodice with a full overskirt drawn back to reveal a petticoat heavily decorated with silvery braid and cascades of frothy white Italian lace.
“It’s been smuggled into the country,” the fashionably dressed young tailor informed me proudly. “Much finer than regulation English lace.”
“It’s beautiful,” I murmured, rubbing it gently between my thumb and forefinger. “Like a cobweb.”
He raised a brow. “You’re the first girl I’ve ever met who’s referred to a cobweb as a thing of beauty. Most ladies find them rather ghastly.”
“Oh, but they are beautiful, si
r,” I exclaimed, looking up at him with an avid smile. “Every bit as beautiful and intricate as this lace. With the frost or the dew sparkling on them first thing in the morning, they are more lovely even than a necklace of diamonds. There is nothing in the world more lovely. Spiders are amazing creatures, don’t you think, to be able to create such things?”
“You’re a quaint one, all right.”
“You must have seen silkworms at work?” I asked. “Since you work with the material all the time.”
He laughed at that. “I’ve no interest whatsoever in the worms themselves or how they do what they do. Just so long as they keep on doing it, that’s all I ask.”
“Did you know, a single silkworm cocoon is made of one unbroken thread of raw silk over three thousand feet long?”
“Is it, now?”
“Don’t you think that’s astonishing?”
“I suppose it is.”
I stroked the material of my beautiful new gown. Well, I at least was very grateful to the little worms that had spent so much time and energy spinning it for me to wear.
“D’you like it, then, miss?”
“Oh, yes. Very much. Thank you.”
He smiled at my unrestrained gratitude. “A beautiful girl like you was born to wear a gown like this.” His words sounded genuine, for all that they were probably a practiced trick of his trade.
Under his appraising eyes I felt myself flush and glanced away, surreptitiously, to the tall mirror on the far wall. I was still so unaccustomed to seeing my own image so clearly that it utterly fascinated me, but I cast a critical glance over the stranger I saw reflected back at me, a girl in a shimmering blue silk gown, with eyes of the same color framed by long, sooty lashes. They were still as wide as a child’s, those eyes, but they were a woman’s eyes now, and they were far too direct, too animated and vivid, not at all docile and modest as all definitions of feminine beauty dictated. Even after a long winter, this girl’s skin was creamy rather than alabaster, the impression of vitality enhanced by the brightness of her curls. She was like the water meadows in springtime, bursting forth with an abundance of life, too much life to be contained in such a slight little body. Was she really me? And was she beautiful? I was not at all sure many respectable gentlemen would think so.
The Lady of the Butterflies Page 7