I slipped backward away from him, like a boat casting off from the shore. “That is for my husband to find out.”
He held on to my extended arms until only our fingertips were touching.
As Edmund had once been a beacon of light in the dark hall, so now was this boy, in rich green velvet, a single point of color in a white wilderness, as glamorous and gleaming and as rare and precious as an emerald.
He must not be. Could never be. I loved Edmund. I had always loved Edmund. I must not let myself be attracted to this man. He was no more than a boy in any case, a dangerous, raffish boy, and I was promised to another. I was promised to his friend.
I twirled round as if I was in the tailor’s shop once more, trying on my first gown. With a swirl of my crimson cloak I skated off in a wide sweep, into the sparkling white world.
“You learn very quickly,” Richard called.
I shouted back to him over my shoulder, “You’ll never keep up with me now.”
His voice came to me on an icy wind. “I shall enjoy trying.”
THE NEXT DAY WAS one of unremittingly bright sunshine of surprising warmth and strength for the time of year, and it raised the temperature well above freezing. By mid-morning it was slowly but surely thawing the ice, laying upon it a shimmering sheen of treacherous water, ruining any hopes I’d had of being able to go skating again and practically confining all three of us to the house, since the conditions were not fit for riding either.
“How about a game of dicing,” Edmund suggested when he had finished his small beer and cheese. “Or cards perhaps?”
“I’d rather chess,” Richard said amiably.
“I’m sure you would.” Edmund grinned. “But at least I have half a chance of beating you if some luck is involved.” He glanced at me considerately. “Besides, only two can play chess.”
“Oh, please don’t worry on my account,” I said, reaching for Edmund’s hand and giving it a quick pat. “I’ll read.”
“Maybe Eleanor should play against you, Richard,” Edmund suggested. “She beats me more often than not.”
“No,” I said quickly, picking up a travel journal that had just arrived from the bookseller’s. “You two play.”
Bess brought a tray of hot, spiced cider, and I made myself comfortable in the chair by the fireside as Richard and Edmund drew up chairs to the little table by the window and perused the chessboard.
I read a little, sipped the cider, watched as Richard reached across to pick up a black marble knight, the trailing lace at his cuff almost upending Edmund’s castle. I went back to the story of a sailing ship battling the storms of Cape Horn and had read a dozen or so pages, become quite lost in the adventure, when, with that strange sixth sense that tells us we are being observed, I looked up to find Richard’s eyes resting on me. Edmund was deciding on his next move, totally absorbed in his pawns and knights, and I wondered how long his friend had been studying me. As our eyes met he gave me a lovely, enigmatic smile. There was a fragility about it, as if despite the physical strength that made him such a good rider, swimmer and skater, there was within him a part that was not strong, could easily be damaged, had perhaps been damaged already, and it stirred in me an unexpected protectiveness. He seemed so different today from the boy I had skated with, not nearly so self-assured, and I was intrigued by the change in him. Had something shaken his confidence, or was that confidence just a disguise, a mask that easily slipped?
I smiled back at him and his blue eyes seemed to light up, illuminating his whole face. I was struck afresh by his beauty, the almost feminine prettiness which contrasted so starkly with his long, lean legs, stretched out in front of him, booted ankles crossed, in a way that was utterly, powerfully male.
Edmund made his move and Richard languidly picked up his cider, drank, turned back to the chess pieces. He moved his black queen without appearing to give it any thought at all.
“Hah.” Edmund gave his castle a triumphant nudge. “Checkmate.”
Richard lounged back in the chair. “So it is,” he said with an air of indifference.
“Well, well,” Edmund chortled. “When was the last time I won against you at chess?”
“I can’t remember, it was so long ago.” Richard smiled very charmingly.
“You’ve not been concentrating, lad,” Edmund replied. “You’ve not had your mind on the game at all.”
THE EVENING WAS MARKED by the most magnificent winter sunset. Badly needing to escape the house, I walked down to the bridge the better to enjoy it. The vast sky was streaked with crimson and bright orange, soft pink and mauve, and it was reflected in the wide sheets of icy water. It was as though I hung suspended in a shimmering world of radiant color.
As if from nowhere the sky was filled with swarms of chattering starlings, a black mass against the inflamed sky, swirling and spilling down in unbroken ribbons to fill the branches of the bare trees, then swirling up again as if blown by unseen winds, the whole throng plunging, turning in on itself, sucked upward in a spiraling current and then sweeping out again horizontally. How did they do it? How did they all know which way to go? It was an awesome sight, and I was struck with an almost desperate desire to preserve the magic and the wildness of this place for my children, and for theirs. It suddenly seemed the greatest tragedy and folly that it would be lost.
Or maybe it would not be, I thought, ever hopeful.
What made William Merrick and his partners so sure they would succeed where more grandiose schemes had failed, where even the agents of the crown had failed? King James himself had been thwarted in his repeated efforts to drain the peat lands of King’s Sedgemoor. Cornelius Vermuyden, the greatest drainage engineer there was, under a commission from Cromwell, as Lord Protector, had his bill rejected because the tenants and freeholders did not consent. His skill as a drainage engineer, his ownership of a third of the land and his position of influence could not prevail against the opposition of the commoners.
And there was similar opposition in Tickenham. I sensed it now whenever I went up to the village with Mary, in my daily dealings with the servants. Talks with local families were under way, to settle and untangle the complicated claims for common rights, to establish the validity of the claims and allot land in proportion, but resentment seethed not far beneath the surface. It expressed itself in surliness, small acts of defiance that became increasingly annoying and disturbing. Ink spilled on one of my father’s books and nobody admitting fault, general refusal to pay rents on time, my little mare lamed by a rusted iron nail that had mysteriously been driven into her hoof. It could have been an accident, but I suspected it was not.
It was not just the commoners who were implicated, but uplands farmers and freeholders and tenants who had enjoyed unlimited grazing rights here and had taken cattle in for fattening from other areas for a fee.
I didn’t like to think what would happen if these near and far-flung neighbors of mine were to rise up and act together to try to put a stop to what we had determined to do. It had happened in the Fens: mobs and gangs destroying the work of the engineers, ripping out the sluices, filling in the drains as quickly as they were dug. I could imagine all too easily how such violence could rip apart this little community—after all, it had happened in the civil wars.
I felt the lightest touch on the small of my back, turned to see that it was Richard, not Edmund, who had come to find me. My heart gave an odd little flutter.
“There will still be sunsets even when the water is gone, you know,” he said, perceptively.
“But they won’t look like that.”
He raised his eyes skyward, making them seem bigger and bluer and more beautiful than ever. “No,” he admitted softly, lowering them slowly once again to look out over the lake, and then at me. “They won’t.”
The colors were changing, deepening to shades of luminous rose-pink. Like this, with the sky lit with the most wondrous shades and the swans and wild geese like dark silhouettes sailing on a bright sea, it
was impossible to see it as a dark or unwholesome place. It was surely the loveliest place on earth. Even when the color faded and the mist swirled in, it brought with it a mysterious sense of peace, a special haunting beauty that I realized now I would miss dreadfully. I listened to the wild bugle call of the swans, the sepulchral clap of their great white wings, and I felt such a sense of loss it was almost overwhelming.
“You feel bound to this place,” Richard said, not a question but a statement of fact. “And it to you. For as long as you live. You do not want it to change, to be lost. It will be like losing a part of yourself that you can never get back.”
I turned to him, startled. “Yes.” I might have said more, but he looked almost grief-stricken and I was afraid of treading too close to the source of whatever was causing him such hurt.
“Edmund is so keen for it to happen,” I said.
“But what about you? What do you want?”
“Oh, nobody really stopped to ask me.”
“I am asking you now.”
“Edmund is so certain that what we are doing is for the good of all,” I said after a moment. “I wish I shared that certainty.”
“Better that you do not.”
“Is it?”
“It means you care,” he said. “You care about what it will mean to the people who live here.”
I should have been astounded that this man who rode Spanish stallions and was dressed now in a velvet cloak and the finest lace should spare even a thought for commoners and tenants. And yet I was not at all.
“It is not only their land and their rights they are losing,” he said with fierce empathy. “It is their independence, their ability to provide the basic necessities of life for their families that is at stake. And pride. There is pride in being able to put bread into your children’s mouths, in seeing them grow strong on milk from your own cow and eggs from your own hens. Edmund has no comprehension—how could he be expected to have? How could you? And yet you do, don’t you? You think about such things.”
I smiled. “Sometimes too much, perhaps.” I paused, glanced at him. “You too, I think.”
“Since time began, men have been prepared to fight and die to defend their land,” he said. “It makes no difference if that land is a miserable strip, good for nothing but a few vegetables, or a thousand acres of fields and meadows.” It was as if he had ceased talking about the commoners now, nameless people he did not know, but was speaking from some direct personal experience, and I was sure then that his must have been one of the Royalist families who had suffered from the sequestration of their estate under Cromwell—except that he was surely too young to remember it, to feel it so deeply. So deeply that I felt entirely prevented from asking him about it.
I shivered and, seeing that I was cold, he wordlessly took off his cloak, draped it around my shoulders. Heat drawn from his body still clung to the fabric of it and I pulled it closer about me than I needed to for warmth alone. The collar felt very soft against my cheek.
He cupped his hands round his mouth, blew on his fingers.
“Now I am warm and you are cold.” I smiled. “We should go back.”
“Not yet,” he said. “It is so lovely here, and I shall be leaving for London in the morning.”
“You are very welcome to stay,” I said, the words coming unbidden. “For as long as you like.”
“That is kind of you,” he said, his tone strangely tight. “But I cannot.”
As we walked back to the house I wondered at what he had meant, wondered at the sadness behind his beautiful eyes, but as we were approaching the yard something broke through my thoughts. My nostrils twitched and I inhaled, like a wild creature alert to the first sign of danger. A smell of smoke. The air over the stables was thick with a gray pall that was not mist. I almost heard the crackle of the flames before I saw them, bright and luminous as the sunset had been. I heard the panicked whinnying and snorting of the horses, the frantic thud of their hooves against the stable door. The whole of the building was ablaze.
I ran, shouting for someone to come, for someone to help.
Ned was already running from the kitchen garden.
“The horses,” I yelled. “Help me get them out.”
“I’ll go,” Richard said to me. “You stay here.”
But I was already inside the burning stable. The smoke was so thick and billowing that I couldn’t see where I was going, couldn’t breathe. I choked and covered my mouth with the edge of my cloak. My eyes stung as if scorched and the heat was a solid barrier in front of me, pressing me back, tongues of fire leaping and writhing. I bent my arm up over my face, pushed forward through flames that were licking through straw and bedding, were leaping from the roof and the hayloft and from the bubbling, cracking walls. I smelt the bitter stench of singed horsehair.
The horses were bucking, their eyes rolling in terror. With my hand on the halter and using the most soothing words I could marshal, I dragged out Edmund’s hunter, let him bolt for safety in the direction of the churchyard, where Richard’s stallion was already heading. I dived back in for my little gray mare and her foal, not able to find my way to their stall. The walls of the stable were sheets of fire now, the roaring sound like an angry mob. A length of timber crashed to the ground in front of me in an eruption of crimson sparks which stung like demonic gnats from Hell. I couldn’t see where I was, which way I had come and which was the way out. Then I felt a hand grasp mine, pull me back just in time as another beam came smashing down on the place where I had been standing a second before.
“This way!” Richard shouted.
I could barely see him. He was just a hand to hold on to in the fiery darkness and I gripped it tight, let him lead me to safety.
“They’re all out, miss,” Ned shouted, leading a cob in one hand and the carthorse in the other.
I bent double and coughed, rubbed my sore, stinging eyes.
“Here, drink this.” From somewhere Richard had produced a cup of water and I tipped it gratefully down my dry throat. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“Yes. Thank you. Are you?”
He nodded, raised his arm and turned his head into it to wipe the smuts and sweat off his brow.
Bess and Mistress Keene and Jane the cookmaid were all running back and forth across the yard with water buckets, doing their best to douse the flames. I ran to Jane and took the other side of the handle, helping her carry a heavy bucket, to lift it up and throw the contents over the fire. I was about to run and fetch some more when someone stopped me.
“It’s no use, Eleanor.” It was Edmund who held me back as the flames leapt toward the sky. “It’s no use.”
I pulled away from him in a fury. The flames were licking round the whole of the building, fanned by the breeze that was blowing off the moor, toward the cow barn . . . toward the house. “We can’t just give up, damn it! We must at least try to contain it, make sure it doesn’t spread. Please, God,” I heard myself say. “Don’t let it spread to the house.”
“It won’t,” Richard said.
I stopped fighting against Edmund for a moment and looked to his friend, his face still smeared with soot just as mine must be and his eyes full of compassion, as if he felt my anxiety in his very core and wanted only to ease it. “It is raining,” he said, with an upward glance at the darkening sky. “The rain will put the fire out.”
Rain was by no means a rare occurrence in Somersetshire in September, but this felt like a miracle. It was just a fine drizzle, so fine that I had not felt it, but in minutes it turned into a typical autumn deluge of heavy, fat raindrops which poured down from the darkening sky and did for us the work of a hundred men and buckets.
I let it lash me, soak me, saw it washing the soot in black streaks from my skin. I turned my face to the rain as I usually would to the sun, letting it pour down upon me, over me, cleanse and cool me. I had never been so glad of rain in all my life. I opened my lips and drank it in, letting it rid me of the foul, choking taste of s
oot. The taste of the water on my tongue was sweet as wine.
In hardly any time the stable had been reduced to a smoking ruin, a blackened skeleton. It was hissing angrily like a snake, would smolder for a long time yet.
“What could have started it?” Edmund asked.
“I don’t know.”
There was straw and hay aplenty in the stable, and when Ned had slept there, before he married Bess, there would have been tallow candles with naked flames. But Ned had not slept above the horses for years. Nobody did now.
Richard bent down, picked up something that had been discarded or dropped in haste on the ground. He held it out in his hand and looked at me. It was an empty liquor flask, and no words were necessary. Since time began, men have been prepared to fight and die to defend their land. The fire was no accident. It was no coincidence that, as the day when the drainage project would start grew ever closer, a fire had been started. Discontent had ignited something dangerous and sinister.
I WAS KNEELING on the rush-strewn church floor by the altar, helping Mary arrange branches of greenery to decorate it for Christmas. The whole place was filled with the warm, spicy scent of the rosemary and bay that adorned the pews. We’d lit a dozen candles and the light of them gleamed on the gilded candlesticks and dark oak.
We were keeping the front of the aisle clear for the musicians and theater troupe to perform the nativity play. Afterward there would be fiddlers and drummers and a wassail procession, dancing and feasting and blindman’s buff. If I was to be denied a grand wedding celebration, I would at least enjoy the Christmas festivities to the full. I was determined to find the charm in the cake and be Queen for a Day.
The Lady of the Butterflies Page 15