The Lady of the Butterflies

by Fiona Mountain

  Edmund had walked away, not at all curious to see what was inside the parcel.

  I slipped my finger beneath the brown paper wrapping. It was not a book at all, but a sheaf of papers bound in vellum. I caught my breath as I carefully turned over the leaves. It was a collection of original colored drawings of butterflies, rich with yellows, oranges, reds, blues. Beside each illustration were notes on the location of sightings, on flight patterns and preferred food plants. It was like looking through a rich illuminated manuscript, like the one John Burges had shown me once.

  There was an inscription on the covering page, in the same untidy, almost childish hand as had penned the address.

  There are no books in existence that are solely devoted to butterflies, so I have made one for you. Your friend, James Petiver.

  There were tears in my eyes again but for a totally different reason. I dashed them away before they had time to fall and spoil the lovely paintings. I was stunned by such thoughtfulness and generosity. It must have taken him hours, days, to copy out all his drawings and notes for me. I might know nothing of the cost of a bottle of claret, or of running a household, but I knew that what I had here was worth more than money could buy. This gift was more precious than any silk or silverware, more precious than any trinkets or lace. I knew, somehow, that this gift, this friendship, would be my salvation.

  Summer

  1676

  I held my breath. Some distance away but unmistakable, flying powerfully over the sedges, was the magnificent lemon and black butterfly with scalloped, sickle-shaped wings, like the Gothic arches in a church or a swallow’s tail. It was larger than any other butterfly and so stunning it seemed almost unreal. It was my most burning ambition to see one up close. I’d learned their favorite haunts, knew they seemed to like milk parsley, but they were proving extraordinarily elusive.

  I walked forward slowly, at the ready, remembering how kittens learned to wait for the right moment to pounce. I whispered a quick prayer that this specimen would drift within my reach. Miraculously, it alighted on a thistle and I crept as close as I dared, then sprang forward, my hands cupped. I tripped and landed flat on my face, while the butterfly danced off, gaily evading capture, much to Edmund’s amusement and the other fishermen’s undisguised and total mystification.

  “It seems rather cruel, anyway,” Edmund said, having set down his fishing rod on the riverbank to watch me. “How can you like butterflies and also quite happily kill them?”

  “This from the person who likes nothing better than a plate of eels fried alive for his dinner? James says it is the only way to study them properly.”

  Edmund was no more jealous of my correspondence with James Petiver than he had been of Richard’s attentions to me. “I can’t see any point whatsoever in catching what you cannot eat,” he added indulgently. “But if it makes you happy, then so be it.”

  It did make me happy, and I was sure that I could remain so, could be quite content with this life, if only Richard did not come to visit, as he soon must, to upset my equilibrium again.

  I turned my mind determinedly to the problem of the elusive specimen. I needed a net like James Petiver’s.

  I had written to James to thank him for the drawings and enclosed one of the copper-colored butterflies he so valued. In little more than a week, in almost no time at all, I had had a reply to my letter.

  I did not open it at once, did not want household distractions to ruin my concentration or enjoyment, so I waited until I could take it down to the moor. Then, leaning against a willow trunk by the Yeo’s curved bank, I broke the seal.

  It was a long letter, scrawled in his untidy, hurried, boyish writing that was rather a struggle to read, but which pleased me because it suggested that the author had far more important matters with which to concern himself than the forming of neat curves and hooks. Just the sight of his handwriting made me feel unaccountably, uncomplicatedly happy and I smiled to myself as I read, imagining him bent over a little desk, scribbling away with ink-stained fingers, all the things he wanted to tell me coming into his head faster than he could write them down.

  Besides asking me how I did, the letter contained directions on how to study, preserve and log butterflies. He emphasized the importance of keeping an observation book, to note down exactly where and when I had found each specimen, to record colors in case they faded. He had drawn a little diagram of a clap net, in case I’d forgotten how it looked, and explained how I might make one for myself.

  Over the next days I set about hacking off withies and cut up two perfectly fine muslin kerchiefs. With a notebook and lead pen, I spent hours amidst the lilac haze of lady’s-smock and cuckooflowers on the moor. I wrote to tell James the net was a miraculous invention that let me swipe butterflies from the air, of how amazed I was each time I trapped one, saw its fine legs poking through the tiny holes.

  I found that cataloguing and preserving butterflies in the mica James had sent to me seemed to give me extra enthusiasm for other tasks. With Edmund’s patient help, I mastered the accounts, and though I’d never find my vocation as a bookkeeper, butterfly collecting brought out a methodical side to my nature which, when applied to the household finances, made them start to make sense. It gave me great satisfaction to see neat rows of figures in my own sloping hand and to realize that I could make a success of running this house. If I felt Edmund was shaping me slowly and very subtly into a good housewife, for all that he had said he would not want to, then, I told myself, it was not such a bad thing and I did not really mind so much after all.

  I did not even mind overseeing the beating of the bed hangings or the ordering of the linen cupboard because, surprisingly, there were other aspects of housewifery that I found interesting, and which even offered me opportunity for experiment and observation. From Bess I learned that pewter was best burnished with mare’s tail, brass cleaned with charcoal, and silver with salt and vinegar. Ned Tucker’s sister, Lizzie, who worked in the cider house and stillroom, taught me all about the process of fermentation. I pored over the book of herbal remedies, used by my mother and Mary Burges, and made up poultices and ointments, as and when they were needed.

  “You like being lady of the manor, I think?” Edmund said to me one evening, as we shared a supper of cold beef and talked about our day, in the manner that had quickly become routine for us. Usually, the conversation centered on impersonal matters: boundary disputes between the tenants, the hiring of laborers to tend the orchard for the harvest, the incompetence of the dairymaid who had let the milk sour. It was rare for him to express an interest in my likes and dislikes, in what I wanted from life, and I welcomed the opportunity to talk to him about what was close to my heart.

  I reached for the fruit bowl and took a bite from a juicy purple plum. “I like walking up to the cottages and drinking dishes of cold cream and sympathizing over toothaches and boils and fractious babies,” I said. “I like feeling needed and appreciated.”

  “I shall always need you and appreciate you.” Edmund smiled fondly at me. “But the villagers certainly seem to have taken you to their hearts.”

  It pleased me perhaps more than anything that the people of Tickenham seemed to have accepted me as mistress of the manor so readily. I had brought them a new lord who was far more lenient than their previous one, and was proving to be a good wife to him, in their eyes. And, as they saw it, I had called a halt to the drainage plans. True, Thomas Knight and Susan Hort did whisper aside together when they saw me with my strange butterfly trap, but I did not let that trouble me.

  “I like rocking the babies best of all,” I said. “I could do that for hours.”

  Edmund’s eyes softened. “You will be an expert mother.”

  “I hope I can be one very soon. If only so I don’t have to pretend not to see the women’s knowing glances at my belly and answer their constant inquiries after my own health.” I chuckled. “When I tell them I am well, they are so disappointed. They’d rejoice if I said I was nauseous and
exhausted. As would I.”

  “I too,” Edmund agreed.

  “I do pray every night and every morning that God will let me be fruitful.”

  “My dear, I am certain He will. If only you were more patient and at ease about it.”

  “That is easier said than done.”

  “Aye, for you, most certainly.”

  “It is only that I cannot think of a punishment much worse than barrenness.”

  “My wife, why ever should you be punished? What have you ever done that is so wrong?”

  There was a moment of silence which I hurried to fill. “I was raised a strict Puritan, remember? I live in constant fear of punishment.”

  “It is of course a Puritan’s duty to multiply,” he said with levity. “Your bounden duty as a wife.”

  I licked the plum juice from my fingers. “My bounden duty and my most passionate wish,” I said seductively, but he looked almost alarmed as I took his hand and led him toward the stone stairs leading to our bedchamber.

  Autumn

  1676

  Five months later, still in my nightshift, I drew my knees up on the oriel window seat and hugged them as I waited for Bess to come and help me dress. I turned my head and rested my cheek against my folded legs and gazed out of the window. The sky was colorless, an even blanket of thick cloud, and a low ground-mist hung over the rivers and flat fields.

  “What’s the matter?” Bess asked.

  “My courses have started again,” I said to Bess, twisting my head round to her. “Bess, why aren’t I with child yet?”

  She put her arm around me and sat herself down beside me in the embrasure. “Have you been doing it with your husband regularly?” she asked, coming straight to the heart of it as usual.

  I stared at my bare toes, twiddled them. “Is every other night regular enough?”

  “Not every night? Not several times a night?”

  “He’s very considerate,” I said quickly, not wanting her to think less of Edmund.

  She gave me a look that was almost pitying. “Does he not like it if you try to lead him, lamb?”

  I tucked a loose lock of hair behind my ear, shook my head.

  Bess tutted. “Does the man not accept you have needs of your own?”

  I smiled. “Oh, I think he’d be most disconcerted by the very idea of that.”

  “Doesn’t sound very considerate to me, then.” She sniffed. “Does he at least take longer over it than he did at first?”

  “Does that make a difference?”

  “Well, it most certainly would to me.”

  I could not help but laugh. “I mean, surely it doesn’t make any difference to whether you can make a baby or not? So long as his seed is inside me, surely that’s all that counts?”

  “Pumping seed is probably all it takes to make a baby, but if you ask me, it’s most definitely not all it takes to make a husband.”

  I laughed again, even as I drew my knees tighter as if to banish and deny the dull ache in my abdomen. “Is it true that a woman has to experience real pleasure in bed for the seed to take root?”

  “Absolutely vital. I thought everyone knew that. So has he found your little mound of pleasure yet? Do you still have to pretend?”

  I didn’t answer immediately. We had always talked like this, Bess and I, and there had seemed nothing wrong in it until now. I knew Edmund would be so hurt if he knew I had discussed the most intimate details of our lovemaking and found him wanting. And yet I needed somebody to talk to, to confide in.

  “Maybe I’ll never have a baby, then,” was all I said.

  Winter

  1677

  I had woken up hungry in the middle of the night and was in the pantry helping myself, by the light of a single candle, to cheese and rye bread. My breath was misty and I shivered in my nightshift. It was not much warmer when I took my little feast through to the kitchen, where the glowing embers of yesterday’s great cooking fire had been covered over with a brass dome, waiting for the bellows to breathe life back into them come the morning.

  I set the round of crumbly cheddar on the long scrubbed table and cut off a chunk. I had just put it in my mouth when I heard a soft tap at the door in the great hall. It was still completely dark outside and I was sure I’d misheard. But there it came again. Firmer this time, more urgent, a definite rap against the thick studded oak. I hesitated, uncertain what to do. There were no servants about yet, nobody else to answer it except me, and I was hardly dressed to receive a visitor. Yet I couldn’t ignore it. Nobody would call at this hour unless it was an emergency.

  I took up my candlestick, shielded its guttering flame with my hand as I made my way through the drafty cross passage and across the great hall, bracing myself to find a distressed commoner who’d not been able to rouse the midwife, or had news, God forbid, of a breach in the seawall. I drew back the bolts and swung open the door. Froze.

  “Richard!”

  “Eleanor,” he echoed, with almost as much surprise. “Not a butler or a serving girl, but the little lady herself. How very fortunate.” He slid one leg forward, swept his feathered hat off his black hair, bowed low and came up again gracefully, the white lace ruffles of his shirt luminous in the dark.

  “Is something the matter?” I asked him. “What are you doing here at this hour?”

  His eyes twinkled with mischief. “I might have hoped for a warmer welcome. When I’ve ridden all through the night, and a bitterly cold night at that, just to be sure I was the first person to see you this Saint Valentine’s Day morning, just to be sure I was in time to take you as my own Valentine.”

  “In time to . . . as your . . . what?”

  “Your Valentine,” he repeated with a smile, his teeth biting softly on his bottom lip and his eyebrows slanting rakishly. “Or had you forgotten it’s February the fourteenth? The feast of Saint Valentine? The one day in the calendar when even a wedded girl is free to kiss whosoever claims her first.”

  There was not a trace now of the vulnerability he had revealed when he had lain wounded with his head in my lap. I did not know which of these different sides of his personality was the more devastating. One moment he had all the sweetness of an angel, the next all the charm of a Devil. The very way he swung between the two left me breathless and strangely exhilarated.

  “Aren’t you going to let me in?” he asked. “Before I catch my death of cold.”

  I moved aside and he stepped through the door, pushing it closed with his foot.

  I was acutely aware of the contours of my body, silhouetted inside my fine linen shift, my breasts and nipples hardened by the cold and by a desire that descended on me like the mist over the moor, occluding my senses, blocking out all else save his beautiful face, his black curls, the swirling folds of his riding cloak and the soft, velvety richness of his voice. “Since I’ve explained why I’m here,” he said, “why don’t you tell me what you’re doing, wandering around a dark house at night all alone?”

  “I was hungry.”

  “I can see hunger in those pretty eyes of yours well enough. But I doubt very much that it’s the kind of hunger that anything in your larder can satisfy.”

  “Richard, stop it. Please.”

  He removed the candleholder from my hand, set it on a little table. He moved closer to me and I took a step back. He followed, as if we were conducting some strange, silent dance. Then he reached out one finger and traced the line of my cheek, making me quiver with a pleasure so intense it was almost like pain. “Please,” I said again. “You have to leave.”

  “Not before I have claimed my Valentine’s kiss.”

  My eyes moved to his mouth, the lips slightly parted. It was the most fascinating mouth, as beautiful as the rest of him. Small and neat and with a slight pout, it had an almost childish sweetness. His upper lip curved like a bow. It was a mouth made to kiss and to be kissed.

  I swallowed. “You aren’t the first to see me this morning at all,” I argued lamely. “Edmund and I share a be
d, naturally. So he was the first person I saw when I woke. I am not for the claiming.”

  “I assume Edmund was sleeping. He didn’t see you. It does not count.”

  “I’ve never heard that before.” I half smiled. “You can’t just make up your own rules, you know.”

  “If I can’t make them, I’m quite prepared to discard them if they stand in my way.”

  “What would you have done if I had not been awake, had not heard you at the door?”

  “I’d have broken in and woken you with a kiss.”

  “And what if one of the servants had been about to open the door to you?”

  “I’d have told them I had a most urgent and private message to give to you and I’d have sent them to fetch you to me.”

  “You had an elaborate plan.”

  “But I didn’t need it. You were here yourself, waiting for me, as if you knew I was coming. As if this was meant to be.”

  “It is not meant to be, Richard,” I said slowly. “You know that.”

  He cupped my face in his hand, his expression suddenly desolate. “Little Nell, I know nothing anymore.”

  I struggled for something to say, anything that might anchor me in some normality. “Nobody has ever called me Nell.”

  He stroked his thumb firmly along my cheekbone. “D’you like it?”

  “Yes,” I said, laying my hand over the back of his, as if to remove it, though instead I just held it closer, tilted my head into his touch. “Yes.”

  “Nell,” he said again, making it sound like the sweetest endearment. “You must let nobody but me ever call you by that name.”

  “I don’t really think you can take such possession of another man’s wife.”

  He let his hand slip away, fall to his side, leaving my cheek feeling suddenly cold and exposed. “I am sorry that I missed your wedding.”