The Lady of the Butterflies

by Fiona Mountain

  “Edmund did say you are dependably undependable.”

  He did not return my brief smile. “You know the reason I did not come.”

  “It was very quiet anyway. We had only a few guests.”

  “If you were my bride I should want to celebrate it before everyone, with a feast that went on for twelve days.”

  “I never can be your bride, Richard.”

  He did not answer. There was for an instant an awareness for both of us that what I had said was not wholly true, but that there was only one eventuality that would leave me free to marry again. For one wild beat of my heart I was afraid of what he was capable of and of what he might do. I looked into those capricious, quicksilver eyes of his and for one chilling, insane half-beat of time, it wasn’t so very hard to see him as amoral and corrupt, like the worst picture my father had ever painted of Cavaliers, a murderous dueler, the kind of man who’d stop at nothing to have what he wanted.

  “I love my husband,” I said firmly. “I love Edmund.”

  “I love Edmund too,” he echoed savagely. “I’ve known him all my life. His father and my father knew each other all their lives. Do not think I am not tortured by guilt for this, for how I feel about you. But I cannot help myself. I cannot help it that for these past months I have tossed and turned in my bed every night for longing for Edmund’s little wife. Nell, I have never wanted a woman as I want you.”

  When I said nothing he slid his hand around my waist, drew me closer to him. Then his hand moved around my back as he held me. “You know what it is like to be driven by an obsession, I think,” he whispered. “You know what it is to want something and to strive after it, and to desire it all the more the harder it is to catch, the more unattainable it is.” He fixed me with a melting blue gaze. “I saw Edmund when he was last in Suffolk. He told me how you have a favorite butterfly that is yellow and black but you can never catch one of them. He made me look for them with him, but he wouldn’t look as you look, as if your life itself depended on finding one, as if your whole being was caught up in pursuit of it, in possessing it and having it to keep with you forever. Edmund doesn’t know the power of such an obsession. He is not passionate. He does not know the force of a desire that overrules all reason, a hunger that can never be satisfied yet demands to be satisfied.”

  I had forgotten how to breathe. “That sounds like madness.” Except that I understood exactly what he was talking about, saw that he understood me, as if he had seen into my soul.

  “If it is madness, little Nell, then it is you who have driven me mad,” he said. “And I must have my kiss, or I cannot account for what I might do.”

  “Very well,” I said quietly, feeling my lips already softening to receive him. “A Valentine kiss. That is all it is.”

  Almost before I knew what was happening he bent his head and pressed his mouth against mine, so softly at first, slow and tender, and then harder, deeper, more insistent. Sensation rippled down through my body, through every limb, to the ends of my fingers and the tips of my toes, to an agonizingly sweet peak of sensation between my legs. I felt the firm, warm moistness of his tongue as it slipped inside my mouth and sought my own, tasting and exploring. I raised my hand in a halfhearted attempt to push him off, but he caught my wrist and held it, poised in midair, as if time itself had stopped, as if the night would never end and the sun would never rise. For once I didn’t mind, didn’t long for morning, for light, only for this, only for him.

  He clasped me to him, his fingers splayed against the small of my back, pressing me urgently against his groin. I could feel the shaft of his arousal through my shift, against my belly. I did not move away but found myself pressing back. With his other hand he was caressing my breast, stroking and kneading. Entirely of their own accord, as if driven by instinct alone, my own hands had slipped up inside his shirt, were traveling up the warm nakedness of his back to his smooth shoulders, round again onto his taut belly, brushing against the fastenings of his breeches. He trembled at my touch, his eyes closed, long lashes shadowing his cheek. He moaned softly. I tipped my head back as his tongue traveled from my lips and down my throat. He held me tighter, pushed his leg between mine.

  “No!” I broke free and shoved at him with both palms against his chest. “No. I cannot.”

  His eyes opened and they were full of hurt, of rejection, shadowed now by the agony of frustrated desire that matched my own.

  “Go!” I said hoarsely, feeling faint, wanting to weep with desire for him. “You’ve had your kiss. You’ve got what you came for. Please, just go!”

  “I have had what I came for, but I find it wasn’t nearly enough,” he said. “It can never be enough.”

  I COULD NOT SLEEP. I felt ill. So ill that I thought love must indeed be a sickness. I was lovesick. I must have been suffering what the physicians called erotic melancholy, the dangerous, infectious malady that was caused by excessive passion and unfulfilled desire. A physical disease that inflamed the body, boiled the blood, took possession of the mind, caused the humors to combust and consumed the liver. A rage of love that could, it was said, actually burn the sufferer’s heart so that, upon examination after death, the organ resembled a charred timber.

  I did manage to doze, eventually, but when I woke later in the morning I gagged the instant I sat up. I reached for the ewer and was violently sick, sicker than I had ever been since I was a child and my mother stroked my brow and murmured to me that she was there.

  Now it was good, kind Edmund who sat with me on the edge of the bed and stroked the hair off my face and I was swamped by intolerable, crippling guilt. I thought how I had never felt so wretched, but fully deserved to feel much worse. Wanted to feel much worse. I spewed into the basin again and when I had done, Edmund handed me his own cup of warm ale, holding it for me while I sipped.

  “Eleanor, my love, can it be . . . ?”

  My lips still felt bruised by Richard’s kiss, my cheeks still scratched by his stubble. I could still taste him, could feel his body imprinted against my own. I could not bear to look at Edmund’s trusting, expectant face. I hardly dared to hope myself. It was preferable to lovesickness, at any rate. It could be true. I was hungry in the night, sick in the morning. Was I with child? “Maybe,” I said hesitantly.

  Edmund kissed my hand, in that formal, chivalrous gesture of his, but his kindly, freckled face was radiant with such pure joy that it made him look saintly, and beside him I felt like the very blackest and most wicked of sinners.

  “Oh, Eleanor, that’s wonderful news, the best news.” He kissed the side of my head. “And I almost forgot. It is Saint Valentine’s Day.”

  I HAD BEEN TAUGHT to be observant of signs and portents, but did not wholly believe in them and for that I was very glad. For if I saw this pregnancy as a sign that my marriage had been blessed, that the sin I had committed would go unpunished, there soon followed more ominous signs that the blessing might be taken away.

  The sickness worsened around the forty-fifth day, the time when it is said that a baby’s soul is born. I felt nauseous as soon as I sat upright and I could barely keep down a morsel of food. The constant retching left me limp as a wet leaf, but I believed I deserved no less, welcomed it, bore it like a penance.

  Edmund was as thoughtful as he had sworn always to be. He touched me cautiously as if I was made of porcelain and refused to lie with me at all for risk of dislodging the baby. He took over the household management, so I wouldn’t tire too much, and he took me on outings to Bath, where the waters were said to be beneficial for women who were with child. His concern and his love for me and for our baby were almost unbearable. The kinder he was to me, the more wretched I felt.

  When he came to find me one morning, I was sitting on the chamber floor in my cambric chemise, my hair lank and loose, my back against the wall and my legs outspread before me like a rag doll as I cradled a basin in my lap.

  “What is it about being with child that causes a woman to vomit?” I wondered apathetic
ally, trying to be objective in the hope it might help a little. “Maybe it’s the growing womb pressing on my insides, but surely that would be worse at the end of term rather than at the start?”

  Edmund, not at all interested, took the basin off me and helped me to my feet. “Darling, this cannot go on.”

  “I’m sure it will ease soon.”

  “You’ve been saying that for weeks.”

  I grabbed the basin off him again, tossed my hair over my shoulder, doubled over and heaved, until it felt like my guts were being torn from within me. The retching was dry. There was nothing left inside my belly but a baby, and I was increasingly afraid that if this went on much longer, the baby must be ripped from me too.

  And if it was not . . . It is well known that the womb is absorbent, that womb children are in danger from corruption, and I had exposed this little soul to so much wickedness. Richard had caressed my body wherein, unbeknownst to me, there had been planted my husband’s seed. My body had been shaken to its core with a sinful passion for a man who was not the father of the child it carried. I was sure there could be no greater carnal sin. If my baby was not shaken from me, I feared it would be marked with the most baleful influences for the rest of its life.

  Edmund must have seen fear in my face. “That’s it,” he decided. “I’m sending for Dr. Duckett.”

  “No.”

  “Eleanor, be sensible. We must.”

  “I will not see that charlatan, no matter how ill I am.”

  “He could bring you some physic,” Edmund reasoned. “He could make you well.”

  “I have never seen Dr. Duckett make anyone well. All he has ever brought to this house is suffering and death.”

  Edmund looked at me, uncomprehending. “You are being absurd,” he said helplessly.

  I saw myself for a moment as he must see me, long fair hair in tangles, eyes enormous in a face that was drawn and pale with sickness, and I almost agreed to do as he wanted, just to make him happy, even if it did me no good at all. But I could not. “I have so longed for this baby,” I said as I rested my hand on my still-flat belly. “Already I love him so much.”

  “Him?” Edmund smiled questioningly.

  “I am sure we shall have a boy,” I said. “I feel it. I cannot bear to think that anything will go wrong.”

  I let Edmund take me into his arms. “Eleanor, it is so unlike you to be so gloomy,” he said, stroking my back. “Be of good cheer. Have faith.”

  I could not tell him that it was faith that made me gloomy. I had thought I had thrown off much of the indoctrination of my Puritan upbringing, but in the empty void of guilt it had rushed back with a vengeance. How could I forget the Puritan God who was always watching, waiting to reward good deeds and punish the bad? How could I ever forget the Puritan code which deemed that ill fortune followed wrongdoing just as night followed day? How could I ever forget years of teaching about how carnal lust was the way only to madness and ruin? Puritan law had once made adultery a capital crime, but it made no difference that it was no longer enforced, made no difference that Richard and I had not actually lain together. By God’s law, I had committed adultery almost nightly ever since the day I learned to skate. I had no need of Dr. Duckett and his purges. It felt as if my body was trying to purge itself of my longed-for little child. The worst punishment I could imagine.

  “Lie still and rest, at least,” Edmund said.

  But I knew that what I needed was not rest but reparation.

  Alone in my chamber, I went down on my knees, clasped my hands and begged God for forgiveness, for allowing myself to be led into sin and temptation. I read the Bible and I murmured the catechism I had learned as a child. “My duty toward my neighbor is to do to all men as I would they should do unto me . . . to bear no malice nor hatred in my heart . . . to do my duty unto God, to keep my body in soberness and chastity.”

  I had learned to repeat those words before I even knew their meaning. I could say them backward, in my sleep. I did want to live by and be all those things. I did want to be sober and chaste. But oh, it was so much easier to say than to do.

  Autumn

  1677

  The nausea did abate, to be replaced by ravenous hunger. My stomach gnawed as if there was a hole growing there, not an infant, but I delighted in piling my plate with odd combinations of cheese and fruit, pastries and meats, thinking how my baby had a fine appetite, must be growing strong and healthy after all. I had been forgiven, even if I could not forgive myself.

  When I wrote to tell James I was expecting a child and that Edmund would not risk having me go chasing after butterflies, James sent me one small wing, iridescent purple-blue, from a butterfly he’d caught on an expedition to the fields that lay around King Henry VIII’s great Hampton Court Palace. I wondered what had happened to the other half of the butterfly. It was an odd thing to send me, when we were usually so concerned with pristine specimens, but it was very pretty nonetheless, like a little petal or a fragment of sky, and I stored it away in the back of my Bible.

  The bigger and less mobile I grew, the more I looked forward to receiving James’s letters and the more I enjoyed replying to them. He said he and his friends had been butterfly hunting in Greenwich too, beside the new observatory, and on Primrose Hill, in the Mitcham lavender fields and in Fulham Palace Gardens. I would have been envious of this like-minded group of men, for whom a passion for butterflies was a social pursuit, who could visit such romantic-sounding places and share their discoveries, but for once I was glad to be a woman, for only a woman could know the joy of feeling a child move inside her own body.

  James told me to drink sage ale to strengthen my womb, said that lilies and roses, cyclamen, or sowbread and columbine would nourish my unborn child and procure an easy and speedy delivery for me. I was very touched by his concern and told him what a skilled apothecary he was going to become.

  He wrote, too, of the debate raging amongst his naturalist friends, one faction questioning spontaneous generation as a relic of ancient times, while another arguing that if a caterpillar could become a butterfly inside a pupa, why could a leaf not transmute into a caterpillar? All sides were calling for more investigation.

  Preoccupied as I was by the changes in my own body, I tried to describe to him how the subject of metamorphosis had a strange resonance for me at this time. My swelling womb was just like a tightly wrapped pupa, ripening with the promise of new life. A new life that kicked and squirmed inside me, with tiny limbs forming and fluttering beneath my taut skin, just like wings. As I wrote the words, it occurred to me that I had never tried to describe the experience to Edmund, because he had never shown any real interest, considered it women’s work. It was to James that I told of my eagerness to meet my baby. To James I explained how the promise of holding the little thing in my arms even helped ease my utter dread of banishment to a darkened lying-in chamber for weeks on end.

  “Is that really all you are afraid of?” Bess said in disbelief, as I sat on a stool and let her rub my aching back. “Do you really fear the banishment more than the pain and peril of childbirth itself?”

  “I was doing my best not to think of that.” I grinned. “Until you kindly brought it up.”

  “Ned lived for the whole nine months in terror of my being taken from him for good, and I was petrified myself, I won’t pretend otherwise. Any more than I can pretend that your danger is not great and the pains will not be grievous.”

  I laughed. “I thank you for your honesty, Bess. I can always rely on you to tell it to me as it is.”

  I wondered. Was Edmund afraid like Ned had been? If he was, he had not shared it with me at all. But then, when he came into the chamber as I lay half asleep, I felt the mattress dip to his weight as he sat down beside me. He laid his hand very gently upon my head, and I heard his whispered private prayer. “Lord, look upon my dear wife as she is great with child, give her strength and a gracious delivery from these perils.”

  It sounded very much like the
prayers Puritans still said on Gunpowder Treason Night, to thank God for delivering us from the deadly plot of the Papists.

  I AWOKE to a dull pain in my lower back, which sent out aching tentacles all the way round to my belly. It eased. I listened to the rain pit-pattering on the window. Then came another twinge, which also passed. The next one was more severe but it, too, subsided. So it went on for hours, with the spasms growing sharper as the downpour became more and more torrential, windswept and battering the glass, so that when I finally cried out for Edmund, for Bess, sleeping nearby, I was not sure they would hear me above the clatter.

  For weeks I had been confined to this room. The bed had been draped with hangings and drawn close to the fire, the windows and doors kept closed and covered, and I had a sudden need just to open the curtains and see daybreak, even if it was only a dank and murky one. I rolled clumsily to the edge of the mattress, pushed open the bed curtains. Bess woke and ran to the bed just as I stood up, and a huge gush of water poured out of me, dousing my feet and the floor, as if I had lived on the wetlands so long even my body had been flooded.

  “Get back in bed,” Bess ordered, almost pushing me back under the blankets as Edmund rushed in, still in his nightshirt, tousle-haired and blurry-eyed and carrying a candle.

  I drew up my knees against another wave of pain. “It’s started, Edmund,” I grunted. “The baby is coming.”

  He was by my side in an instant. “Are you sure?” he asked, his voice ringing with panic.

  “Don’t sound so shocked. It is not as if we have not been expecting it to happen these past nine months.”

  “I’ll send for the midwife, and the gossips.”

  “The midwife first,” I urged.

  “Yes, yes. Of course. The midwife.” He was rushing to the door fast as a scalded cat but I called him back.

  “Would you open the curtains for me before you go, Edmund?”