“Even so, I for one will be forever grateful to him,” Edmund said quietly.
“Why is that?”
His cheeks had turned a soft pink beneath the pale freckles. “For introducing me to you.” His smile was bashful, as if he was not accustomed to having such conversations, and it made me like him even more than I already did, if that was possible.
“I am thankful for that too,” I said quietly. And then: “Why are you blushing?”
He smiled with mild surprise, as if nobody had ever asked him such a personal question before, then raised his hand and touched his head. “It is the hair,” he said diffidently. “All redheads blush annoyingly easily.”
“Oh.” I grinned. “I can see that must be a great nuisance.”
“It is.” He drew in the oars and took hold of my hands, held them inside both of his as we drifted. His hands were very warm from all the rowing and his eyes were just as warm as he gazed into mine, making my heart race. “May I come and see you again, Eleanor?”
“Isn’t it my guardian’s permission you should be seeking?”
“I am conscious that your guardian would arrange a match between us, but I shall not court you unless you are happy for me to do so.”
“I am happy.” I smiled.
He smiled with relief. “May I come again soon, then?”
“Soon.”
“And may I kiss you?” he asked with aching politeness.
I did not think gentlemen asked ladies if they could kiss them. I thought they just did it. “You may,” I said, my heart pounding.
He leaned forward in the boat and made it rock. I closed my eyes and waited. I felt his lips lightly brush my own.
“I should like to help you carry the burden of running this estate, and all others you may have,” he said soberly. “If you would let me.”
I STOOD at the great oriel window and watched Edmund ride away along the causeway, the surface of the water that lay all around him ruffled in a brisk breeze. I did not know how to feel, was caught halfway between misery and joy. He was leaving, but he had kissed me and told me he wanted to come back.
In such a flat land, when the mist had lifted, it took a long time for people to disappear completely from view. They just grew smaller and smaller until they were no more than a speck on the wide horizon. But I stayed at the window until Edmund and his horse had vanished beyond it. I did not know what else to do with myself. I would find no solace on the moor as I usually did, for I was sure the little boat would seem utterly desolate now without him in it.
“Why look so melancholy?” Mr. Merrick said, with an unusually genial tone that would have made me very wary had I not been so preoccupied. He had come to stand by my side but I did not even acknowledge him. “Extraordinary as it may seem, Edmund Ashfield appears to be bewitched enough by your pretty little face and blue eyes to overlook completely the initial peculiarities he cannot have failed to notice in your character. I expect he is charmed by your quaintness, views you as something of a curiosity.” He paused. “He wishes to enter into a courtship with you. He knows of course that his own family would approve fully of such an advantageous match. As the second son it is most desirable for him to form an alliance with an heiress of some means.”
Something in his self-satisfied gloating alerted me, and my mouth dried. “An advantageous match?” I repeated slowly, turning to him. “Advantageous to whom, sir?”
“To all concerned.”
“The alliance would benefit you too, wouldn’t it? My father’s will forbade you to use your custodianship of me and this estate to advance a drainage scheme, but if I marry Edmund, you are counting on him doing it for you, aren’t you?”
Smugly, he dusted an invisible fleck of dust off the shiny brass buttons of his embroidered saffron silk waistcoat, neither agreed nor disagreed.
“I know all about coverture,” I said.
“I do not doubt it.”
“I know that a husband and wife become one person when they marry, and that legally that one person is the husband. I know that as a wife I must relinquish all my rights, my identity, my belongings. Upon our marriage Tickenham Court would belong solely to Edmund, every acre of it, his to do with as he saw fit. And if he, like you, saw fit to drain it, there is nothing I could do to stop it.”
The prospect of marriage had seemed so distant that I had not fully considered what it would mean until now. And it dragged at my heart to realize that in order for Edmund Ashfield to be mine, Tickenham Court would no longer be. And yet at that precise moment I’d have given anything just to see him again.
Mr. Merrick gave a swift tug on his waistcoat, his grin sly. “Hard as it is for you, you must accept that coverture is an unavoidable consequence of marriage.”
“But I do not have to accept Edmund’s hand in marriage. He only wants me if I want him. He told me so. He will not allow you to force me into marriage with him against my will.”
“Ah, but you want to be his wife, do you not?”
I was being trapped. Gain Edmund. Lose Tickenham Court to drainage. It was a trade, a bargain. Mr. Merrick bargained with everyone and everything. Why should he not bargain with my heart?
“You also have to accept that drainage will happen sooner or later,” he said. “If not in your generation, then in the next. This land is in a deplorable condition and eventually it must be reclaimed, like the rest of the wetlands in the Fens and at King’s Sedgemoor.”
I said nothing. Instinctively, with every ounce of my being, I resisted the very idea of this land that I loved being dug up and dredged and destroyed. For what? For profit primarily, as I saw it. It seemed a heresy, a sacrilege. I loved bright satin and ribbons and Christmas celebrations, but there seemed something very treacherous in rejecting this ardent belief of my father’s, one he had so cared about he had it written into his will, one not born from bigotry but surely from common sense. So steeped was I in my respect for God’s creation that to even consider tampering with it, to countenance the idea that we could attempt to control the elements, seemed an arrogant and hazardous thing to do.
“I urge you not to waste too much time deliberating,” Mr. Merrick said. “Edmund’s father is pressing him to make a match before his third of a century, which is not long off. Are you prepared to see him promised to someone else?” I failed to hide my misery at this prospect and he smirked. “No. I thought not.”
I WAS IN THE HABIT of taking a slice of apple pie and custard and a glass of Bristol milk up to my great-aunt Elizabeth in the afternoon, of sitting with her and keeping her company while she ate. She liked to hear of the servants and doings in the village, of how I was progressing with my dancing and music lessons.
I was her only real contact with the outside world. Since the mild attack of apoplexy had left her left side slightly weakened, she was permanently ensconced in the small lime-washed guest chamber, where she spent most of the day in a high-backed oak chair drawn up to the window, her violet-veined hands still stiffly busy with a needle. She seemed ancient to me, but she did not seem to feel the cold and kept the small leaded casement window open no matter how thick the fog that curled up off the river. She still had the noble bearing of the girl who had been presented at King James’s court as the daughter of a baronet, and a complexion as pale as the ornate square lace collar she always wore over her black gown. She had wispy silver hair like moonlit mist and she was most profoundly deaf. But her kindly gray-blue eyes more than compensated for it. With their aid she missed not a thing.
She set down her crewelwork as soon as she saw me. “You come and tell me what’s troubling you, my dear,” she said in her clipped, aristocratic voice. “And don’t say it’s nothing, because I won’t believe it. You’ve had such a wistful look in those lovely great eyes of yours these past days. Now I’ve had quite enough of seeing you moping about, all lost and lovelorn.”
I brought round a small tapestry-draped table, removed the covering and put down the plate and glass, finding that I w
anted nothing more than to tell my aunt exactly what had been troubling me.
I sat at her feet, took hold of her hands and looked up into her handsome, wise face so she could read the words on my lips even if she could not hear them. As soon as I started I wanted to pour it all out, but I made myself speak carefully and calmly so that she could catch every word. I told her everything, how I was in love with Edmund and was sure he had feelings for me, but that if I married him it seemed inevitable that he would push for Tickenham land to be drained. “My father did not want that to happen,” I said. “And yet he did approve of Edmund, I know it. He said he was very likable.”
“And since people always want most what they cannot easily have—you especially, I think—I am quite sure that he seems a lot more than likable to you now.”
“I love him,” I said mournfully.
“Are you quite sure about that, my dear?”
“Oh, what does it matter?” I sighed, my shoulders drooping.
My great-aunt laughed. “You have your father’s Yorkshire cussedness combined with a wetlander’s tenacity—what a combination! You’d not even consider drainage on principle, would you? Just because William Merrick wishes it. Not even if you knew it to be for the best.”
“Do you think it is for the best, Aunt Elizabeth?”
“There’s plenty that do.”
“My father was not one of them,” I said grimly. But this land had belonged to someone else before it belonged to him, hadn’t it? “You knew my mother,” I pleaded. “What would she have had me do?”
“Well now.” She sat back a little in her chair. “Your Uncle Henry, my son, the Baronet of Ribston, was very fond of both your parents and they of him. He spent a lot of time here after they were first married. Somersetshire is as different from Yorkshire as it is possible to be, as low and flat as Yorkshire is high and hilly, yet your mother taught him to love Tickenham as she did, precisely for these differences. My Henry told me how she loved this land, but most of all she loved its people. She was the first person the village women called on if they went into labor and the midwife was busy. There’s dozens of your neighbors and servants who were brought into the world by her.”
“I never knew.”
“Well, now you do. She would be very proud of you. You want to do what is right, and you are prepared to sacrifice your own happiness in order to do so. There could be nothing nobler than that. The question is, what is the right thing? Your mother’s overriding concern was the good of the people of Tickenham, so if you want to know what she would have done, what she would think was right, it would be whatever is best for them. I cannot tell you what that is. But if anyone can work it out for themselves, it is you.”
I kissed the old lady’s parchment hand. “Thank you, Aunt,” I said.
“I’ve not done anything, child.”
“Oh, you have,” I said. “You’ve given me hope.”
“Hope?” She smiled. “You usually have a way of finding a little of that for yourself, I think. May you always.” She took my face in her hands, lifted it to hers.
“Perhaps it is your hopefulness that makes your eyes and your smile so bright. You are such a pretty girl. You know, once in a while, in the middle of an ordinary life, love gives us a tale straight from the pages of a romance. And if ever there was a girl made for such a tale it is you. But I fear you want it so badly you’re at risk of running headlong in the wrong direction.”
“What do you mean?”
She allowed a silence. “I hope Edmund Ashfield is the great love of your life, child. Not everyone has a great love, but you, I think, must have one, or it will be the most dreadful waste.”
I THOUGHT ABOUT WHAT my great-aunt had said about my mother as I accompanied Mary on her rounds of the poor thatched cottages straggling along the line of the road that ran parallel to the track of the River Yeo. They were not high enough to escape the winter floods, which forced their inhabitants to cook and sleep in a single room upstairs for months, and I began to think that surely anything was better than that. Even when the floodwaters finally diminished, leaving the rivers gurgling and hidden pools of bright water in the ditches all across the moor, they left the lower earthen floors of the cottages thick with viscous mud, which no amount of rushes could properly soak up.
When Bess told me her father had a persistent and hacking cough, I helped mix up salad oil and aqua vitae and took it to the Knights’ little hovel myself. Bess’s mother was crippled with rheumatism, hobbling about around the table where they’d just finished eating their pottage. Bess’s little boy, Sam, toddled after her with mud smeared up to his knobbly knees. There was a smoky fire burning in the grate but it had made little impression on the damp wattle walls, and yet the dark little room felt surprisingly warm and homely, a well-loved and cared-for place. There was a bunch of marsh marigolds in a jug in the middle of the scrubbed table, and a battered but polished copper pot still simmering over the fire.
“If you’re stopping you’d better sit down,” Mistress Knight said in a friendly way when I made no move to leave. She had a deeply wrinkled face, a gruff almost manly voice, but her eyes were kind. She plonked a wooden spoon and a bowl of curds and whey on the table together with a pot of small beer. “There. You eat up now.”
“Thank you.” I smiled, taking a rickety stool beside Mr. Knight and only cursorily tucking up my skirts to stop them trailing in the sludge, not really caring if they did. Mr. Knight looked at me with genuine pleasure and surprise, as if he had not expected me to want to sit and stay, but was glad I did. He had spent so many years on the moor cutting sedges that he was almost as much a feature of the landscape as the birches and willows. He seemed at one with the sky and the water, and yet he did not look out of place in this small, smoky room, but quite comfortable and content. He was tall and lean as a withy, with short and thinning brown hair and eyes as dark brown as coffee beans. I wondered how the two of them had fathered a son as disagreeable as Thomas, who was thankfully nowhere to be seen.
I handed over the cough mixture. “I hope it helps, Mr. Knight.”
He was a typical marsh man. To foreigners we are strange people living in a strange land. Isolation and dependence on soggy marshes, which only those born here know how to survive, breed a spirit that is taciturn, obstinate and determined. Yet as Mr. Knight took the remedy he seemed to wish he could shrug off his habitual uncommunicativeness and say much more to me than thank you. “You could have sent it with Bess, you know,” he said. “You needn’t have come all this way.”
“It is no trouble. I wanted to come.”
“You’re a good girl, miss, despite what some folk say about you.”
I laughed. “Thank you, I think. My aunt Elizabeth told me how well my mother cared for the people of Tickenham,” I added.
“Oh, aye, she cared for us all right.” Mistress Knight gave an ironic laugh, shuffled over to give the fire a sharp, stabbing poke. “Some of us at least.” Her husband cast her an equally sharp glance as if to silence her. I was left feeling that I had inadvertently made a terrible blunder, but since I did not know how, or why, I was at a loss as to how to even begin to make amends.
Sam presented me with a crudely carved little horse. “Thank you, Sam.” I smiled, gratefully, lifting him into my lap, heedless of his little muddy feet.
Mr. Knight sipped his pot of ale awkwardly. I noticed that his nails were broken and dirty, the skin around them cracked and sore from constant exposure to cold and wet. They were outdoor hands, but the fingers were as long and slender as the fronds of sedges he spent his life cutting, though the knuckles on his right hand looked so stiff and sore it was a wonder he could do his job at all. “I’ll bring a rub for your joints next time,” I told him.
“We’ll have no need of rubs soon,” Mistress Knight retorted. “His joints won’t trouble him, nor mine me, soon as we get some warm, dry days.”
It was not the best moment to ask, but ask I did. “Mr. Knight, don’t you sometimes w
ish you could live somewhere that was dry all year round?”
The affection was suddenly gone from his eyes, to be replaced by an expression of extreme truculence. “I’m a sedge-cutter,” he said almost aggressively. “I’ve cut sedges all my life. I’ve reared my son to be a sedge-cutter. As you know full well, Mistress Goodricke, sedges don’t grow where it’s dry. They only grow in marshland.”
I STOOD BEFORE my guardian’s desk, my feet together and my hands lightly laced in front of me as he pored over his great ledger, his fleshy features pursed in concentration. I drew a deep steadying breath. “Please invite Edmund Ashfield to come and visit again,” I told him.
Mr. Merrick set aside his quill pen and looked up with a victorious smile that did not quite reach his small eyes. “I am glad to hear that you’ve come to your senses. By God, it has taken long enough.”
I had rehearsed what I was going to say a dozen times. Why had I not accounted for him leaping to such a conclusion? I let my hands fall to my sides, flexed my fingers, knowing that what I was about to say now would anger him beyond all reason, but there was nothing for it but to plow on. “I have not yet reached a decision on whether I will consent to having him court my hand, sir. I need to ask him some questions first, about drainage, in order that I might do so.”
Mr. Merrick slammed his fist against the desk, making the quills and the silver inkpot bounce. “You and your damned questions. Out with them. I’ll answer them myself and be done with it.”
I felt a bead of sweat trickle down my back but I was not going to be intimidated. “With respect, sir, you do not understand drainage as Mr. Ashfield understands it. As you said yourself, he has firsthand experience. I have none, and I cannot be expected to make such an important decision in ignorance. I want to ask him what it will be like, what it will entail, what it will mean for everyone living here.”
The Lady of the Butterflies Page 10