He took my hand in his, leading his horse by the reins, and we started to walk back to where I had left the food beneath a willow. He shouted a cheery good day to the fishermen nearby. “Fortunate fellows,” he commented to me. “Having such a delightful place as this to wait for their catch.”
“Will it be as delightful after drainage?”
“Ah, William warned me that you had questions to ask me.” He grinned. “It wasn’t just a ruse to bring me here?”
“Partly. Edmund, the tenants and commoners, everyone who lives here . . . they all seem totally opposed to the very idea of draining the land.”
“Of course they are,” he said mildly.
“They seem entirely content with the state of the moors, are willing to tolerate them being inundated for half the year and waterlogged for a good time longer. They would rather that than have their way of life changed.”
“Of course they would. Life on the wetlands is all they have ever known.”
“It is all I have ever known.”
“But they do not have your intelligence and imagination. They are simple people and lack the foresight to appreciate the benefits that drainage will bring. But benefits aplenty there are. Fertile pastures all year round to grow crops and graze livestock. Dry cottages to live in.”
“But what about the people whose livelihoods depend on eeling and fishing and fowling? It would seem like robbery to them. I am not so sure it is not.”
“They will still have the rivers after drainage,” he said kindly. “Wider ones, deeper ones, and a whole network of drainage ditches too. There will still be fish and eels to catch. I grant the sedges will be lost with the loss of the marsh, but fertile agricultural land yields other crops. There’ll be hemp, flax, woad and mustard, and opportunities for new, more wholesome labor than wading up to your knees in a bog all day.”
“But they will lose the common for grazing their cattle, won’t they?”
“The majority will be apportioned other land. An acre-per-beast lease, which should satisfy.”
“You make it all sound so straightforward.”
“Then I mislead you, which I hope you know I would never wish to do. Make no mistake, what we are contemplating here is a process fraught with difficulty and opposition, not straightforward at all, but when it is all complete the problems will be quickly forgotten and few would want to go back to the way it was before.”
“You have absolutely no doubts that it is for the best?”
“No, I have no doubts whatsoever.”
“My father was wrong, then?” I asked thoughtfully.
“No,” Edmund said. “He was a man of a different time, that is all. In recent years practically every lowland area has seen some attempt at reclamation now.” He halted while his horse bent its head to a pool of water to drink. He squeezed my hand, lifted it to his mouth in a very courtly gesture, kissed it. “Dear Eleanor, let us talk no more of it now. Drainage or no, Tickenham is the most delightful place to me because you are here. There is nowhere I’d rather be, and no one I’d rather be with.”
I leaned in closer to him and laid my cheek against his arm. “That is the loveliest thing anyone has ever said to me.”
“Is it? Well, it’s fortunate for me that you’ve seen so little of the world, or you would realize that I am really very poor at this kind of thing.”
“I have seen enough of the world to know that, for me, you are the center of it,” I said with girlish impetuosity.
He looked touched if a little overwhelmed by my declaration. “I could not hope for more than that.”
Just then a large copper-gold butterfly came flying swiftly at us, the sunlight glinting on its magnificent shiny wings. It swooped and glided right in front of my eyes, as if it was taunting me. I itched to catch it to stow in my Bible along with the other one, as if I really had fallen under an enchantment. When it danced away I held on to Edmund’s hand just a little tighter, to stop myself from hitching my skirts up to my knees there and then and chasing after it.
Edmund looped his horse’s reins round a branch and spread out his riding cloak for us to sit on while we ate the food that I had brought. But I did not sit. I waited and watched to see what plant the butterfly chose to land on. A water dock, I noted with interest.
When I did sit down and broke off a piece of the crusty bread, my mind was still elsewhere.
Edmund tickled me under my chin with a grass stalk. “What are you thinking about now?”
I smiled at him. “Oh, nothing really.” Determined as I was that he should love me for myself, I feared he might think me completely crack-brained if I said I was wondering what it was about water docks that made them appealing to copper-colored butterflies.
Did it really matter so much anyway? Perhaps, for Edmund, I would not mind so much becoming like every other good wife. Perhaps if I was his wife I would be perfectly content with embroidering my sampler with great bumbling caterpillars and brilliant giant butterflies. It would not really matter that they could never be as beautiful as the real thing, no matter how many minute seed pearls I painstakingly stitched onto their wings.
“You like butterflies,” Edmund observed idly, relaxing back on his elbow.
“What girl could not? They are very pretty.”
“Not half as pretty as you.”
I turned to look at his handsome face beneath his cap of copper hair, and all thoughts of the Large Copper butterfly flew from my head.
Edmund sucked the reed between his teeth. “D’you like them too?” he asked, with a nod toward the dragonflies and damselflies which were busy about the tall reeds, their diaphanous wings all a-whir.
I considered this for a moment. “Not so much,” I said. “They are all too frenzied, too agitated. They lack the playful joy of butterflies.”
“You have clearly given it much thought,” he said, amusedly.
I broke off a piece of bread, threw it to one of the mallards that had come waddling out of the river, and was instantly surrounded by two dozen of its greedy, quacking, flapping companions, all threatening to peck the rest of the bread from my hands and take my fingers with it. I jumped to my feet and Edmund followed suit, laughing to see me ambushed by the sudden commotion of ducks. He threw a piece of his own bread overarm so it traveled some distance, luring the whole flock away to search for it in the long grass. Then he looked at me as if he had just realized something.
I cocked my head to the side. “What?”
“I think, dear Eleanor, that you are playful and joyful as a butterfly yourself. For such a staid fellow, I do seem drawn to people who like to enjoy themselves.”
“You are not staid at all,” I said passionately.
“Richard says I am. He thinks me far too settled in my habits.”
“He is not, then?” I said, bending down to pick a little white mallow.
Edmund laughed. “Oh, no.”
I twirled the flower between my fingers. “He does not have a sweetheart?”
“He’s had a good many. But they do not tend to last very long.”
“Why not?”
“Hard to say. Except that he’s entirely driven by emotion, which makes him rather impulsive. That is part of his appeal, I suppose, but it also makes him a difficult person to be with for too long. Though most ladies like to try. When you see him you’ll understand immediately why he leaves a string of broken hearts behind him. He’s damnably attractive, curse him, if you like pretty boys.”
I added that to my list. Cavalier. Swimmer. Fine horseman and swordsman. Breaker of hearts.
“You are very fond of him, aren’t you?”
“It is impossible not to be. Richard can charm the birds right out of the sky. I am sure he will charm you too.” He took the little mallow from my hand, leaned toward me and tucked it in my hair, behind my ear. “But not too much, I trust.”
I smiled into his handsome, sunny face. “I have already been charmed,” I said.
He looked lovingly into m
y eyes. “I promise you this, dearest Eleanor. Your heart is quite safe with me. I shall never break it.”
Summer
1675
Bess poured warm water into the small bowl on the three-legged table and I washed my face with Castile soap, put salt on my fingers to scrub my teeth, stripped off my shift so that I could rub my body, under my arms and between my legs, with a linen cloth wrung in water perfumed with herbs and essences.
“I must say, I can’t see why you insist on going through all this rigmarole every time Mr. Ashfield is due a visit,” Bess grumbled. “He’s been coming to see you every fortnight for two years and the pair of you do no more than hold hands and coo at one another. What’s the point of having your privates smelling sweet as roses if he’s not going to have a sniff of’em?”
“Bess!” I exclaimed with laughter. “You are disgraceful.”
“I do know what it is to want a man and to want to make him wild for you,” she retaliated, as she started removing the curl papers from my hair. “I just can’t say I’d ever be prepared to go to half as much trouble as you gentry ladies do.”
“It’s hardly a great chore to be clean and to have to wear ringlets and ribbons and lace,” I said, smiling.
“I meant the dancing lessons and the drawing,” she sniffed.
“That’s not for Edmund. Well, not just for him. I have always wanted to dance, and it would be wonderful to be a competent enough artist to be able to capture the colors of a butterfly’s wing or the clouds at sunset, not that I have any talent for drawing at all. But my dancing master says dancing comes as naturally to me as breathing,” I added proudly. “He said only yesterday that he’s never seen a girl who is so light on her feet.”
“That you are, lamb,” Bess agreed, unraveling another curl. “But you should try dancing barefoot round a bonfire. Or with a fiddler in the fields at harvesttime. I daresay you’d find it more to your liking than balancing precariously on your toes and bobbing back and forth as stiff as a bobbin on a loom.”
“Gliding to a rhythm of eight, you mean?” I looked at her out of the corners of my eyes. “D’you think Edmund would like to see me dancing round a fire?”
Bess grinned with satisfaction as she took up my new lemon-colored gown from where it was spread out on the bed. “That’s my girl.”
I giggled. “You really shouldn’t talk to me like that, you know,” I teased, my nose held in the air. “You must be more respectful or I shall have to consider hiring a French maid.”
Bess was too busy now to rise to my teasing. She had been shown how to help me dress by a very affected French maid loaned to us by one of Mr. Merrick’s Bristol neighbors, but it was a complicated business that still required her utmost concentration.
“If I was really doing all I could to convince Edmund I’d make a good wife for him, I’d make sure I was fluent in French rather than Latin,” I said thoughtfully as I leaned forward against the bedpost while Bess wrestled with the laces of my corset. “And I’d make sure I was as practiced in the art of carving at table as I am at naming all the continents and constellations.”
“I’d have thought any man might consider himself very fortunate to be loved by a lady who spoke the language of goddesses and could find her way amongst the stars.”
I could tell from the sound of her voice that Bess wasn’t fooling anymore, was entirely sincere, and I twisted round to look at her, as surprised by her vehemence as by her eloquence and very touched by both. “I thank you, Bess,” I said, heartfelt. “That was very nicely put.”
“You’re welcome. And to think, all my Ned expects of me is that I know how to please him in bed, an’ he’s happy enough to teach me that himself!”
I laughed, pressing my hand against my corseted waist.
“Stop it, or I’ll never manage it,” Bess chided, trying to straighten her own face as she pulled the laces tighter round my small ribs. “Suck your breath in harder.”
Much as I’d longed to wear fine clothes, I did not like the feeling that I might die for lack of air. With the great piece of whalebone thrust down the middle of my stomacher, I could barely breathe or eat, let alone laugh. I certainly couldn’t skip about on the moor and play leapfrog and turn cartwheels on the grass anymore. I did sometimes wonder, just for a moment, why I had been so keen to wear such silly garments. It seemed to me they must have been invented by men, to hamper women and keep us in our place.
When Bess had done trussing me she finished dressing my hair in a knot on top of my head, from which cascaded a mass of long, shiny golden ringlets fastened with gold ribbon.
Finally she stood in front of me to admire her work. “Don’t let him find you in amongst the trees or he’ll take you for a nymph.”
“I feel like one.” When I moved the lemon silk swished and sounded like a breeze rustling through leaves.
I fastened on some delicate topaz drop earrings and the matching necklace, which Edmund had given to me last Valentine’s Day.
“Pity you don’t have any rouge to put some color in your cheeks.” Bess reached out and gave both of them a pinch with her fingers. “Try that just before he sees you.” She tutted. “I do believe you have a touch of the green sickness. You are in the most dire need of bedding.”
“Oh, I am.” I giggled. “I am.”
“Bite your lips too, like this.” She demonstrated. “It’ll make them look so red with lust he’ll have to push his tongue between them, even if he can’t get his cock between your legs.”
“Bess!” I gaped at her, then burst out laughing. “Here.” I grabbed the damp cloth and threw it at her, showering us both with droplets of water. “You are far more in need of a wash than me. I’ve never heard such filthy talk! As you well know, Mr. Ashfield’s tongue has never been near my mouth. Nor even his lips, for more than one fleeting moment, more’s the pity.” Amidst a great billow of skirts, I sighed and threw myself backward onto the high bed, where, earlier, I’d been examining my collection of love tokens for the hundredth time. “Maybe he’s read that conduct book Mr. Merrick thrust upon me. It is very clear that mutual liking and respect is all that is called for between a man and a woman who vow before God to share their lives. Amorous love is a contemptible disease. But I want to be loved,” I breathed, staring up at the faded crewelwork canopy. “I want Edmund to love me.” I snatched up a pair of salmon pink gloves he’d sent to me and clutched them to my heart. “Liking will never be enough for me.”
“I do wonder if Mr. Ashfield will ever be enough for you,” Bess said, coming to perch beside me and clucking. “Or rather that you will be altogether too much for him.” Her dancing, almond-shaped eyes grew uncommonly serious then, their expression almost protective, and as I sat up beside her on the edge of the bed she kissed my cheek. “I just hope he is capable of loving you even half as much as you love him.”
I unfolded the letter from him that had arrived days ago.
“You’ve read it so often it’s in tatters already.” Bess smiled. “Shame he hasn’t written you a few more.”
“I don’t mind,” I said, quick to defend him. “He told me not to be offended or think badly of him for not writing more often. He doesn’t have an easy way with written words.”
“Let’s see, then.” She scrambled up behind me and tucked her chin onto my shoulder. “ ‘My best beloved’ ”—she knew that bit by heart—“ ‘O-u-r-p-a-r-l-e-y-i-s-n-e-a-r-i-n-g . . .’ ” She broke off.
With the help of a little bone tablet I was trying to teach her to read, but she never concentrated for long enough and we were having great trouble progressing past isolated letter sounds.
“Oh, it’s too hard,” she huffed. “You do it.”
I shuffled back further onto the bed and read aloud: “‘Our parley is nearing an end. Now that I have stormed the cherry bulwarks of your sweet mouth, I am convinced I may gain your surrender. But if I must lay siege to your heart to secure my final victory, then I shall do so willingly.’ He goes on to describe ano
ther week he’s spent in London with Richard Glanville. They’ve visited the playhouse a dozen times and marveled at the novelty of seeing females onstage, but Edmund says none of the actresses were as enchanting as me.”
“How does he end it?”
“‘I shall be making advances in your direction again very soon. I beg of you, Eleanor, remove all fortifications against me, or I am crushed.’ ”
Bess chortled. “You have to admit he uses some very peculiar words to woo a girl. I just hope he can do better than that when he gets you between the sheets or his weaponry might prove woefully inadequate!”
“Oh, stop it.” I giggled, giving her a gentle shove that toppled her. “I think his letter is very charming. And he doesn’t talk the way he writes, or at least he only does when he is unsure of himself. Besides,” I sighed, “it’s entirely appropriate. After all, gentry love is very like the waging of war. Allies are sought to make approaches, concessions are bargained over. The reason I’m certain Edmund is about to propose now is because I know very well he’s been in negotiation with Mr. Merrick for weeks and they’ve finally reached an agreement.”
All Bess did was raise her brow. As well she might.
EDMUND TUCKED MY HAND into the crook of his arm and we went to walk in the garden, where the light was so thick and golden that it gilded everything it touched.
“I feel as if I have drunk a barrel full of this sunshine.” I smiled. “Or else I cannot imagine how it is that I feel so happy and warm inside.”
“You’re sure it’s not Somersetshire cider you’ve been drinking?” Edmund quipped. “It tends to have that effect on me.” He grinned down at me again. “As does the sweetness of your face.”
“Oh, Edmund. I do like it when you talk to me like that. Say something else.”
“I am not sure that I can pay compliments on command.” His brow creased as he tried to think of another all the same.
I did not have to try at all. “I can’t decide if it is the sunshine or having you here that has made the colors of all the flowers seem so much brighter,” I said, quite truthfully.
The Lady of the Butterflies Page 12