The Lady of the Butterflies

by Fiona Mountain

  The plain little altar had at least been adorned with bays, but I yearned again for Tickenham. I thought of the golden morning on which we had left it and I wished with all my heart that we were marrying in the familiar surroundings of the church of St. Quiricus and St. Juliet, sharing this day with our neighbors and household family, with Mistress Keene from the kitchen, with Bess’s parents. I even found myself thinking quite fondly of Thomas Knight and Susan Hort. I should like to have had Reverend Burges officiating, or even the new young curate, John Foskett, and blessings and psalms of rejoicing and a procession of pipers to lead the way and make the occasion feel festive and joyous, instead of rather furtive and solemn, as it did now.

  The minister was waiting with his service book already open, two worn hassocks placed at his feet in readiness for us. He looked extraordinarily old and as worn as his church, his hair wispy and white and his eyes almost lost in the deep wrinkles and furrows of his face. He spoke in a hushed voice more suited to a funeral than a wedding.

  But the marriage service is a grave and somber affair, though beautiful and dignified nonetheless, for all that it comes from the notorious Book of Common Prayer.

  “Not to be entered into unadvisedly, lightly or wantonly . . . those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder.”

  With a monumental effort I pushed away the thought that it should be someone else standing by my side at this altar.

  The minister read the part about “accustomed duty” and Edmund dutifully fished in his pocket for a five-shilling piece, which he placed on the minister’s service book to pay him for marrying us. Then came the ring, and Edmund found it in another pocket and placed that, too, upon the pages of the open book, a band of gold, set with many jewels. Considerate of my background, he’d asked me if I would find the ritual of the ring offensive, as did scores of Puritans who saw its part in the marriage ceremony as a relic of Papistry.

  He could not have been more wrong. I had secretly dreamed of the day when the man I loved would place the ring upon my finger, from which it was said a certain vessel ran directly to the heart.

  I looked at it, gleaming with jewels in the dim light. The symbol of my transformation, its placing upon my hand as powerful as the placing of a crown upon the head of a new queen. The ring. Token and symbol of constancy, of a love that has no end but death, a heart that is sealed from even the thought of another man.

  But as I held out my hand for Edmund to slip the ring onto my finger, I suddenly remembered how it felt when Richard Glanville encircled my thumb with his lips. I remembered the caress of his tongue upon my skin as he tasted my blood. How ever was I to vanquish such thoughts?

  As I made my vows, I turned my head from the ominous tablet of stone upon which were engraved God’s Ten Commandments. I did not want to see how the sacred edict had been broken, split asunder as if by a wrathful bolt of lightning.

  WE WENT DIRECTLY from the church to the Rose of Normandy public house on Marylebone Lane, the oldest building in the parish, or so we were told by the landlord, set inside a brick-walled garden with fruit trees and broad walks and a square center bowling green, edged with quickset hedges.

  Our small wedding party was served a good dinner of rabbit fricassee, and we started to work our way merrily through several flagons of claret and ale.

  I sat on the bench beside my new husband in the pale, smoky rushlight and we held hands beneath the table. Though I convinced myself I had to be happy, I seemed bent on self-destruction, oblivion, on blotting out all thought. I must have drunk more wine in that night than I usually drank in a month. As the evening wore on, I felt my cheeks grow very pink, and when the room started to spin around me, I tilted my head against Edmund’s broad shoulder.

  “You make a pretty sight.” Mary smiled. “It puts me in mind of my own wedding night.”

  “Oh, do tell.” I giggled and then hiccupped behind my hand. Which made me giggle all the more.

  “Perhaps it is time to show a little restraint, Eleanor,” Mr. Merrick suggested reproachfully.

  I giggled again. Hiccupped again more loudly and didn’t even try to be polite and conceal it. “I’m afraid I don’t know the meaning of the word, sir.”

  “Neither do I,” Bess said, taking it literally. “You should though, miss. You read enough books.” Her hand flew to her mouth. “Beg pardon. Is that supposed to be a secret now?”

  “Restraint means moderation and self-control, my dear,” Mr. Merrick answered patronizingly.

  “How dull,” I replied. Hooking my foot around Edmund’s ankle, I let my satin brocade slipper slide off and wiggled my toes against his silk stockings. He gave a little jerk of surprise and then smiled at me, rather drowsy-eyed. “I do not believe in moderation,” I whispered to him. “Or self-control. Especially not on my wedding night.” I clapped the palm of my hand against the table. “Now, all of you be quiet and let Mary tell us about hers.”

  The look Mary gave John was so loving and devoted that it pierced through my fuzzy brain. “I was very gauche and green,” she remembered softly, her eyes lowered. “I was marrying a man of the cloth, so I assumed we’d be very chaste and only be able to kiss and touch in the dark. You can imagine my surprise when I went to sit beside my husband in an inn much like this and he pulled me down into his lap and fondled me all evening.”

  “Dearest John,” I said gushingly. “God bless you. I do believe you are blushing as pink as does Edmund.”

  I was overcome with a rush of affection and wanted to fling my arms around both John and Mary and hug them. But I saw that they only had eyes for each other. So I sprang onto my rather wobbly feet and promptly flopped in a puff of petticoats into Edmund’s lap, much to his surprise and everyone’s amusement.

  “That’s it, Eleanor.” Bess clapped. “You lead the way. I was starting to worry the pair of you were just going to hold hands all night long.”

  “That’s all you and Ned did after your nuptials, I’m sure?”

  “He wanted me to hold a lot more of him than just his hand, I can tell you.” She winked at me and burped very loudly. “I was more than happy to oblige.”

  Uninhibited with wine, I lunged across the bench, nearly upsetting a glass, and smacked a kiss on her cheek. “Bess, you are so perfectly coarse and shocking.” I gave another loud hiccup. “Have I ever told you how much I love you for it?”

  “You love everyone tonight, I think, Ma’am. But you best save some of it for your new husband.” She smiled at me warmly as I twined my arms around Edmund’s neck. “Mind, you do have more of it to give out than most people I know. I hope Mr. Ashfield appreciates that.”

  Drunk as I was, I was concerned for a moment that he would disapprove of a maid speaking so out of turn, but I should not have worried at all. As I felt his arms go around my waist he looked at Bess and a playful look came into his clear gray eyes. “Tell me, Bess. Is my wife wearing a garter?”

  “Certainly, sir. I helped her put it on myself.” She grinned at me, then at him. “Now I’d say it’s high time it came off, wouldn’t you agree?” She made a grab at my skirts. “Come on, Mistress Burges, lend me a hand. It’s about time we brought these two to bed, don’t you think?”

  I giggled and squirmed and kicked on Edmund’s lap and he did not help me at all, but only laughed delightedly as they started pulling at my laces and ribbons and the silk sashes tied below my knees.

  Bess started singing a bawdy song and Edmund’s brother joined in. Then they all grabbed my hands and Edmund’s hands and dragged us both, still giggling and protesting, to our small sloping room at the top of the inn.

  Mary and Bess had conspired to make our own Hymen’s revels to compensate for my wedding being so quiet. They had bedecked our half-tester bed with ribbons, scented it with essence of jasmine and strewn it with violets. Mary had even gone so far as to ask the landlady to make up a sack posset for us to drink and I swigged it down, barely savoring the delicious combination of wine and cinnamon and egg.
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br />   Bess took charge of flinging the garter and John helped Edmund undo his buttons and stumble out of his breeches.

  “Time to leave you in peace now,” Mary said, kissing my forehead.

  “I hope neither of you have any peace at all.” Bess tittered, with another wink. “Go to it, the pair of you. Heaven knows, you’ve waited long enough.”

  Edmund’s brother slapped him between the shoulder blades. “Time to let your little wife see your goods.” He guffawed.

  Then they were gone. And there we were, with a single candle and clothes scattered around the floor and the smell of jasmine entirely vanished, replaced by the acrid stink from the tallow candle. Edmund was still in his knee-length drawers and I in my voluminous shift.

  We lay on our backs, side by side, like the marble statues of a knight and his lady upon their tomb. The room seemed to be rocking slightly, as if we were in a boat. But apart from that I felt exactly the same, as if being married made no difference at all. I flicked my eyes sideways to see what Edmund was doing. I wished he would make some move, make of our two bodies one flesh, make us truly man and wife.

  The sheets smelt faintly of damp and tobacco and of unwashed bodies. There was a draft coming from a gap in the ill-fitting window. I missed my own bed, my home, and I wished Edmund would at least hold me. He had his eyes closed and I feared he’d drunk so much he might soon fall asleep. It was my wedding night and I totally refused to feel miserable and homesick. I reached out and touched Edmund’s freckled cheek, which was prickly with a fresh crop of coppery whiskers. He gave a mock drowsy smile, so I knew he’d been teasing me by pretending to have dozed off.

  I bounced up onto my knees, gold curls tumbling down around my face. “Don’t you dare, Edmund.”

  He reached out his arms and pulled me into them, then rolled me onto my back and heaved himself on top of me, smiling down into my face. “How do you do, Mistress Ashfield?”

  I giggled. “How do you do, Mr. Ashfield?”

  “Very well indeed. Pistol’s loaded and ready for its first husbandly foray.”

  “Oh! Ouch!”

  He was a big man, in every way, I was alarmed to discover. He was squashing me and I could feel his cock, hard and hot, pressing into my pubic bone. I’d hardly taken a proper breath before he was fumbling with my shift, dragging it up. I closed my eyes as he rubbed himself up and down against me and poked and prodded about as if he was tending a fire, rather than inflamed with passion.

  Then suddenly he stopped.

  I opened my eyes.

  “I’m afraid of hurting you. You will say if I am?”

  I wrapped my arms around his broad back and pulled him closer. “Oh, Edmund, I think you must hurt me. Bess said it would hurt the first time. I shan’t mind.”

  He looked at me doubtfully and I wriggled underneath him.

  Alarmingly, he reared up as if he had been stabbed in the back, let out a groan and impaled me with one single thrust. The hot, piercing pain made me think how very aptly pricks are named, for my insides were most definitely being jabbed, his cock indeed a burning poker. He thrust again and I banged my head on the bedpost. He flopped down on me, heavy and leaden as a bag of grain.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled against my shoulder.

  “It’s all right.”

  We lay there for a minute or two.

  “Edmund?”

  He moaned contentedly and didn’t reply, so I knew, this time, he really was asleep.

  I put my hands against his shoulders and, with some effort, managed to push him off.

  He lay stretched out beside me, his red-gold head on my shoulder.

  I lifted up the sheets. There was a spot of blood, token of my lost maidenhead. I tried so hard not to think of what else I had lost. Most of all I tried not to think how it had felt when Richard Glanville’s tongue had licked away a drop of my blood. But vexingly, the very act of trying not to think brought him more swiftly and powerfully to my mind.

  An hour later Edmund stirred, stroked me a little and entered me again, very gently this time. It did not hurt so much, and it might have been all I could ever have imagined wanting, if only I did not have something else with which to compare it. I might have been quite happy and satisfied, had I not been secretly hoping to experience again what I had felt when Richard had touched the tips of my fingers as we danced. Edmund gazed down at my face lovingly, but not even on our wedding night did he look at me as intensely as Richard did every time he saw me.

  I lay on my back and hot tears slid out of the corners of my eyes and trickled into my hair.

  I glanced across at my now softly snoring husband and stroked his head, thought sadly of how all was not gold that glistened. I was terribly, bleakly afraid that I had married the wrong man, and I knew also, bewilderingly, that I did love Edmund and that he deserved much, much better. I vowed there and then that I would never hurt him. I could not control how I felt, but I could control what I did about it. I would make the very best of my marriage, would honor my wedding vows. Somehow I would find a way to banish Richard Glanville forever from my head and from my heart.

  BANISHING HIM from my head was going to be much the easier of the two, I decided. I should start with that. And I thought I knew just the way to do it. Fill it up with something else.

  I waited for dawn to lighten the sky before I crept out of bed. My head throbbed, my mouth was dry, and there was a hollow, nauseated feeling in my belly, but I draped a green morning gown and cloak over my arm, found a lead pencil and scribbled a brief note, telling Edmund that I had woken early and didn’t want to disturb him, so had gone for a drive into London.

  I dropped a kiss on his brow, tucked the sheet back around him and left the letter beside him on the pillow. I softly opened the door and tiptoed down the dark corridor to the first door on the right.

  Bess was snoring soundly, huddled down beneath the sheets on her little truckle bed. I gave her a firm shake, putting my hand over her mouth to stop her squealing. “Help me get dressed, Bess, quick as you can.”

  She sat bolt upright. “You’re not running away, are you? It wasn’t that bad, surely?”

  “Of course I am not running away, silly.”

  She put her hand to her head. “Ugh, I don’t feel very well.”

  “Nor do I.”

  “Then why are you sneaking about in my room? Why aren’t you enjoying your new husband and your marriage bed?”

  “Hurry.” I pushed her shoes at her. “I don’t want Edmund to hear us and decide to come along too.”

  “So you have had enough of him? Poor fellow.”

  “There is no need to feel sorry for him, Bess,” I said tetchily. “Really.”

  “How was it, then?” she asked, circumspect, as she slipped her shoes on, fastened my gown for me.

  “I’ll tell you later.” Impatient, I turned to go.

  She caught my arm. “I’m not going anywhere unless you tell me all, right now.”

  “It is private.”

  “That is so unfair,” she wailed. “I tell you everything. We promised to always tell each other everything.”

  It was true. But I did not want to be disloyal to Edmund. Nor could I lie to Bess. She would see straight through it anyway. “You said that I might still be left wanting more,” I said. “So I am sure it was perfectly normal.” I reached for the door latch.

  She held on tighter. “Normal? That’s hardly the word to describe your wedding night.”

  I looked at her. “We women are ruled by insatiable lust. We are driven by stronger sexual desires and much lower passions than are men, is that not so?”

  “So the preachers are always telling us, yes.”

  “Men are allegedly governed instead by reason and intellect.”

  She smirked. “Now that, I’m not so sure of.”

  I laughed. “Well, I think it must be just so. And I think I have married an extremely reasonable and intelligent man.”

  Bess gave me a skeptical frown.


  “Now, please, can we go!”

  “As you wish, miss, I mean, Ma’am.”

  DOWNSTAIRS THE MAID WAS already about, sweeping grates and fetching pails of water. The door to the yard was already unlocked.

  It was a dull, gray morning, very different from yesterday. Bess shouted up to our coachman, who was sleeping in a loft above the stable, and told him to make the coach ready.

  “Where to, Ma’am?” he asked.

  “Pall Mall.”

  Bess looked at me. “I thought you wanted to see the river and the lions?”

  “But first I want to find Dr. Sydenham, the physician who came to treat my father. There’s something very important I have to ask him.”

  As we came to the fashionable squares and myriad streets of Soho, London assailed my senses. Bess was all for putting up the canvas screens, but I didn’t want to miss a thing, not even the stench. It wasn’t the countryside stink of dung but a much less wholesome combination of what I could see all around: decaying refuse that littered dirty cobbled streets and alleys running with filthy open sewers. I clasped my scented handkerchief to my nose but almost retched at the reek of rotten eggs which came from the sulfurous smoke belching out of the mass of crooked chimneys and darkening the air into a yellow choking smog as thick as any mist that descended over the Tickenham moors. But this fog was not accompanied by an unearthly peace as it was in Somersetshire.

  On the contrary, horses neighed and the deafening clatter of ironbound carriage wheels competed with the shouts of drivers of drays and wagons and the apprentices who bellowed from open shops. I had never seen so many vehicles and animals and people all crammed together. Sailors and mountebanks rubbed shoulders with women carrying baskets of fruit on their heads; grandees rode in velvet-lined coaches and sedan chairs, escorted by liveried servants and black slave boys.

  The mess and chaos of London diverted me for a while from the mess and chaos I had seemingly already managed to make of my young life, just married to one man and already hopelessly in love with another. But Bess wasn’t enjoying the experience at all. “This question you have to ask Dr. Sydenham, it had better be important, worth going to all this trouble for,” she muttered.