“I don’t believe that for one instant.”
“Well, it is quite true.”
Surely there were plenty of girls, one girl at least, who’d like to see his bright, clever eyes light up even more brightly with love for her, for her alone? “You must have a sweetheart,” I questioned curiously. “Surely there is some pretty girl whom you’ve restored to health with your magic potions and who has lost her heart to you?”
“I wish that was so,” he said. “But I’m afraid it has not happened.”
For a moment I thought I could almost be that girl. For James had cured me, undoubtedly he had. But my heart? It was most certainly lost, but long before this day. When Edmund ambled into the hall of Tickenham Court out of the rain. When I first saw Richard Glanville smiling down at me from the saddle of his black Barbary stallion, like a winter prince. In such different ways, I loved them both. I mourned Edmund still, with a grief sharpened by remorse. And I missed Richard. I missed him so much. I still met him in my dreams—sweet, tortured, passionate dreams that made me wake restlessly in the morning, with the pain of parting from him as fresh as if it had been only yesterday that I had told him never to touch me or come near me again.
I was a typical lusty widow after all, wasn’t I? I saw something in James’s eyes that made me think I must tread very carefully with him. It would not be fair, even for one moment, to let him think he could love me, even if he had a mind to. He was my dearest friend and I could not imagine him as anything else. I would not risk hurting him, ruining our friendship, when I needed a good friend far more than I needed another lover. My heart had been split in two. And a thing cannot be split without being broken.
I took James’s hat off my head and put it firmly back on his, for all the world as if I was handing him back his heart. “There. You look after my butterflies for me.” I lifted the pincushion that hung round his neck, let it rest in the palm of my hand. “Why so many different-sized pins?”
“If you stick a small fly with a large pin its joints will break and it will fall to pieces.”
I looked up at him and spluttered. “Well, if I ever marry again, then, I’d best make sure my husband’s yard is not too big, since I am so very small.”
He froze, mouth agape. The years fell away and he was the unworldly boy he’d been the first time we’d met. I collapsed in laughter. He started laughing too. We both laughed until we were bent double like a pair of crones, clenching our sides with pain, tears rolling down our cheeks.
Autumn
1680
James was coming for dinner and there was something of great importance that I had to ask him.
“Mary, would you take the children for me awhile?”
“You know I’m glad to have them anytime.” She glanced at me quickly, as she carried on with her brocading. “But we shall be going to mass later. They’ll have to come with us.”
I gazed down at my little daughter, asleep in my arms, and I almost said no straightaway. “I’m not sure.”
“Since you no longer care for any religion, what does it matter if they attend an Anglican ceremony or a Papist one?”
Because Jesuit poison killed their father. “I do not know. But it does. Force of habit, I suppose.”
“A father’s influence runs so deep you can never be entirely free of it, especially when that father was as commanding and powerful as yours.” Mary stuck the needle into the brocade, set it to one side and gave me her full attention. “But you know, not all your ancestors were so set against Catholics, or Cavaliers for that matter. Your uncle, who lives in Ribston Hall in Yorkshire, is a baronet. Your mother’s father, Rice Davies, is still remembered in Tickenham for being as noble as they come. It takes ambition and desire for grandeur to build a great house such as Ribston or Tickenham Court, to be granted acres of land. It takes favors from the King. Your family has the blood of brave knights running through its veins. Who knows? Maybe even royal blood.”
Mary smiled as she saw my eyes open wide at the daring, almost traitorous thought that I, the daughter of one of Cromwell’s men, could have royal blood. I almost felt it stirring dangerously inside me, rousing me.
“And it’s not just royal blood you may have,” she said with gravity. “When you go back to Tickenham, you look very carefully at the wainscoting around the chimney breast in the great hall.”
I smiled. “Is this a riddle?”
“There’s a tiny chamber, a cell, built into the side of the chimney,” she said. “There used to be a tunnel from it that led to the church, but I understand it is now blocked. It’s a priest’s hole,” she added with great significance. “Where they hid Catholic priests during the Reformation. Your Catholic lineage, your children’s Catholic lineage, is strong.”
“Maybe that explains my hankering for satin and gold.”
“Maybe it does.” She paused. “So, the little ones can come to mass, then?”
“I suppose they can.”
JAMES ARRIVED just after Mary and John and the children had left. He brought part of his collection, in pine boxes of yellow and white and blue, because later he was going on to join his club at the Temple Bar coffeehouse. And I was determined that he was going to take me with him. They might not talk so freely in front of me and I would surely never be allowed to come back. But like Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, I was going to risk all and go just the same, just once.
“Will you show these to your friends?”
James looked at me over a little square box of blues, neatly arranged in pairs, a female beside a usually larger and more brightly colored male. Quick as a flash, I thought of Edmund’s red hair, and of Richard Glanville in green silk, and me in drab Puritan black, fluttering toward them both. Was I a butterfly or was I a moth, fluttering irresistibly toward a bright flame that would burn me alive?
I looked at James, with his hair the color of ripened corn and his extraordinary multicolored eyes. Now, why could I not have fallen in love with someone like him?
“Leonard Plukenet and Adam Buddle will be there tonight,” he said. “They like to see my latest acquisitions, are as passionate about butterflies as you and I.”
“You could discuss the differences between the sexes?” I said leadingly.
“Maybe.”
“A one-sided debate, given the single sex of your club.”
He smiled, feigning innocence. “We’re a botany society. We’ll talk about male and female butterflies, or ants, or the reproduction of flowers, not about men and women. But still.”
“Still, what?”
He frowned, his finger over his lips, making a show of giving something the greatest consideration.
I giggled. “What, James?”
“There are greater differences between men and women than between male and female butterflies, for sure. But the differences are not so great if the woman is, how can I say it . . . not as voluptuous as the fashions of our age usually dictate.”
“Well, there’s no need to be rude.”
“Not at all. I have no time for fashion, as is surely evident.” He lifted one of his feet, encased in outdated flat-heeled shoes. “I think it is far more appealing for a lady to have the delicate prettiness of a butterfly.”
“Well redeemed.”
But he was still studying me, as if reflecting on a possibility. “What differences there are could perhaps be concealed, with a little ingenuity,” he said.
I had an inkling then of where this was leading, but I didn’t dare hope. Didn’t dare hope that, once again, James knew me so well that he knew what I wanted or needed, almost before I knew it myself.
“There is perhaps one insurmountable difference,” he deliberated. “The small matter of courage. It’s generally accepted that a man is far braver than a woman. A man would take risks that a woman would not. A man would keep his head where a woman would lose hers at the first sign of trouble. In which case it could never be achieved.” His playful tone had turned more earnest. “I would l
ose the trust and respect of my friends, all I’ve worked for. If they found out I’d be a laughingstock. Would never be taken seriously again. No. It’s no use. It cannot be done.”
I held my breath and leaned forward, arms pressing on my knees, and peered into his face. “What cannot be done, James?”
He expelled a long breath. “It’s no good telling you now. It’ll only spoil your evening.”
“It is already spoiled,” I admitted. “Because you are going off to your club and leaving me behind. You were thinking you could take me with you, weren’t you?”
He grinned. “Now, whatever gave you that idea?”
I grabbed his hands. “Take me with you, James. I am brave, as brave as any boy. My father told me he wished he had men of my courage marching with him for Cromwell. I will not be intimidated by anyone, I promise you. I won’t fail you.”
He wavered, or pretended to waver, then sized me up. “When we first met we were almost exactly the same size, wouldn’t you say?”
I knew what he was going to suggest before he said it.
“My scheme, extraordinary as it may seem, was to take you along in disguise, dressed as a boy.”
I clapped my hands. “James, that is the most harebrained, madcap idea!”
“One you might have thought of yourself, I think?”
“Only far better. It’s perfect. But who would I be?”
“I thought to introduce you as my assistant, my butterfly boy.”
“And what would be my name? I’d have to have a name.”
“Isaac, I thought, in homage to the great Mr. Newton himself, founder of the most exclusive scientific society in Britain and the investigator of light.”
“Isaac . . . I can be Isaac. Oh, let me be Isaac. Let me do it. I will not disappoint you, I swear it.”
HE HAD BROUGHT a parcel of clothes, and I laughed to think how our thoughts ran in such extraordinary parallel. All the time I’d been plotting how to find a way to go with him to the coffeehouse, he’d been plotting how to enable me to do it, packing up his own shirts and breeches and waistcoat and boots to disguise me in.
He handed the parcel to me, but I hesitated. I realized there was one problem and did not know how to broach it, without risking having him take it the wrong way.
“You need assistance with unfastening your gown?” he asked, very pragmatically.
I nodded. “Bess and Mary’s maid have the afternoon off. There is nobody else here, and I can’t do it on my own.”
We went up to my little sloping-roofed chamber above the schoolroom and locked the door. Discreetly, James went to look out of the little dormer window, hands lightly clasped behind him, his flaxen pigtail falling down the middle of his back.
I took the parcel then and laid all the items out on the bed, ran my fingers lightly across them. There was something rather poignant about them. They were the clothes James had worn as a boy, when he’d been about the age he was when I first met him, and been the same size as me. The shirt had been freshly laundered and carried a faint scent of lavender, but I could see where the cuffs had frayed slightly around his hands, and the cloth breeches still bore the faint creases which had formed as he had worn them, as he had walked and sat and knelt down to examine herbs and flowers and butterflies. Too small for him now. He had grown and I had not.
“I’m ready,” I said.
He made a great show of breathing deeply and gathering himself, as if he was about to do some onerous but unavoidable task. I turned my back to him so he could get at the tiny buttons and laces that held my costume together.
I expected to feel fumbling, nervous fingers, for him to take a long time over it, but instead I felt him working the tiny row of pearl buttons with the deftness with which he pinned a tiny butterfly. The realization hit me and surprised me: He knows exactly what he is doing. He had done this before. This was no gauche boy who’d never undressed a woman, never seen one naked. He had done this before, with some other girl, maybe with many more than one. There was no one special, he said, but he had taken his pleasures somewhere. And there were, after all, plenty of places for a young man to take his pleasures in London, plenty of willing orange girls and pretty whores who could be had for a few pennies. Plenty of maids who’d give themselves willingly, for free, to an ambitious and clever young apothecary with warm, bright eyes, who, it was plain to see, was on the rise.
I wanted to turn round and look at him, to see if this new realization made him appear any different to me. I didn’t feel jealous of these unknown girls at all, but the thought of James as a man, with a man’s needs and urges, did make me feel strange. In the way that noises become louder in the dark when you cannot see, I was acutely aware of every movement of his fingers at my back, every slight change in pressure. I let my dress fall to the ground and felt him loosening the laces of my corset. I peeled it off, turned round and, in just my chemise, I stepped out of the watery-blue circle of silk.
I wondered then if I’d been entirely wrong about his past experiences. For he stood transfixed, like a boy who’d never seen a woman’s body before, except in his most secret dreams, as if he couldn’t tear his eyes away from me. And I, who’d been a wife and borne two children and tasted another man’s ardent kisses and caresses, was acting as shy and chaste as a virgin on her wedding night.
There was no need. I was not wedded anymore. I was no virgin either. I was free and ready to love another man. I did love another man. And it was not this man. My chemise slid off my shoulder. Quick as lightning, James came out of his trance and reached behind me for the shirt, held it out to me. “I’ll wait outside while you put it on.”
When the door had softly closed behind him, I took off my undergarments. Alone and naked, I slid my arms into the arms of James’s shirt. The linen had worn very soft. It was so strange to think of my small shoulders and elbows where James’s elbows and shoulders had so often been, and it was almost as if the impression left by him, the ghost of him as a boy, was still there, slipping his arms along the entire length of mine, holding me, wrapping me in a gentle embrace.
Not a lover’s embrace, but the enfolding, secure and protective embrace of a brother, a twin, a part of myself. The shirt was a little too big for me, and yet it felt as if it fit as well as a hand in a glove, as well as my own skin. It still carried the faintest trace of him, the scent of herbs and fresh air that was so familiar to me. It was as if he were still in the room, standing right behind me, as if he would always be with me, no matter what.
I stepped into his breeches, smiling to myself now at the thought of which parts of his body had been in this particular garment before. I tugged the belt tight around my waist and pulled on his boots, which he’d padded with straw to make them fit. I looked down at myself and laughed out loud at the picture I made, like a she-soldier from a ballad.
“It is safe to come in now,” I called.
He grinned when he saw me. “A lad with ringlets. Well, I never.”
“Oops! I forgot.” I scooped up my hair and knotted it at the back of my head, squashed the cap on top. “I was bound to get something wrong, since I’ve never been a lad before.”
James came up to me and lifted my chin, smoothed a strand of hair away and arranged the collar of my shirt. “Hmm. You’ll just about pass as my butterfly boy. A fitting name, since you’re such an uncommonly pretty little fellow. We just have to hope they’re all too busy with botany to pay too much attention to a dainty little lad with fair skin and golden lovelocks and the widest blue eyes. But then they may guess our ruse. Cross-dressing is all the rage at court, I understand.”
“Would it really be so bad for you if we were found out?”
“As bad as can be,” he said lightly. “They’d never forgive me for deceiving them. I’d likely be barred.”
I pulled the cap lower, fiddled with my cuffs. “I can’t let you take such a risk for me. I won’t go.”
“You can and you shall.” He handed me a box of butterflies. “And sin
ce you are my assistant, you’d better make yourself useful and carry one of these.”
“I’ll take them both.”
James picked up the other one. “You may be got up like a boy, but I’ll not forget you’re a little lady underneath. I’ll not burden you with too heavy a load when we’ve such a long way to go.”
IT DID NOT SEEM a long way at all. It took us well over an hour, but it was so easy and such a novelty to walk without the encumbrance of a long skirt that I practically skipped along in James’s boots to the coffeehouse, wishing I could wear breeches and boots all the time. How lucky men were to be so unhindered. We talked as we walked. He told me how such establishments as we were about to enter were multiplying in London, how they had even attained some degree of political importance from the volume of talk which they caused. Each camp, sect or group of fashion had built a meeting place around the little bean, and he made them sound such lively, stimulating places that I couldn’t wait to get there.
But I owed it to James to be as well prepared as it was possible to be.
“Tell me what it’ll be like,” I said eagerly as we made our way past the mansions and beneath the swinging wooden signs of rose garlands and cross keys. “Tell me what to expect. How should I behave? What should I do?”
He glanced at me as I gamboled along in his breeches beside him. “No point telling you just to be yourself, now, is there? But it really doesn’t matter how or who you are. A coffeehouse is a place for levelers, a medley of society where each man ranks and files himself as he pleases. A silly fop can converse with a worshipful justice and a reverend nonconformist with a canting mountebank. A person shows himself to be witty or eloquent and, before he knows it, he has the whole assembly abandoning their tables and flocking to his.” He patted the top of my head. “Since you’re both as witty and eloquent as any man, you could cause a sensation.”
The Lady of the Butterflies Page 32