Part Three
Autumn
1684
FOUR YEARS LATER
Forest and little Mary were playing with a litter of kittens by the stone fireplace in the great hall when I told them we were expecting a guest.
Mary jumped up and clapped her hands. “Who?” she asked eagerly.
I couldn’t answer her. It was too strange, as if time had reeled backward. Sitting beside my daughter, I saw a ghost child in a starched white cap and dark wool dress. I heard my father tell me we were expecting guests. I saw myself jump up and clap my hands and ask who it was, just as little Mary had done.
“William Merrick,” I said, like an echo from that other time.
I saw little Mary’s excitement drain out of her as she turned her attention back to the kittens. She didn’t particularly like Mr. Merrick, just as I had not liked him.
Still, I had anticipated his visit so eagerly that day years ago, because I was curious to meet the gentleman who was to come with him. A gentleman from Suffolk. I had looked forward to meeting him, not knowing that he was to be my husband, the father of my children, the friend of the man I had loved beyond any other.
For all that had happened to me in between, England, and especially the West Country, had not changed so very much. It was not even a safer, more secure place for my children than it had been for me as a child. We had beheaded one king then, and now here we were, a good few years on, and there had been several attempts and rumors of attempts to assassinate the new restored one. It seemed that lessons were not so easily learned, that mistakes were made only to be repeated.
The country was rife with rumors of uprisings and plots to seize London and conspiracies to destroy the monarchy. The King’s dashing illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, claimed to be the rightful heir to the throne and had attempted to displace his named successor, James, King Charles’s brother. The Duke had proved his popular following with a progress through our own county, through Ilchester and Bath, where the children and I had gone for the waters and been caught up amongst the thousands who were there to greet him and strew his way with herbs and flowers. The handbills and broadsheets now claimed he was at the head of the plot to kill his father and had fled to Holland, with a five-hundred-pound price on his head, but everyone knew it was only a matter of time before he would return to the West Country and amass an army of supporters.
At least my son was too young to join them, I thought with relief, though he would leap at any excuse for a fight and harried me at every turn. Right now he was mercilessly pulling a kitten’s tail. She had, with good reason, turned on him with a little hiss and bared her tiny pointed teeth.
“Oh, don’t tease her, Forest,” I said. “You are so cruel sometimes.”
He stuck his lip out sullenly. “You kill butterflies.”
“So that I can study them.” That subtle difference was no doubt entirely lost on a seven-year-old. He was, in all honesty, probably learning something about nature by pulling a kitten’s tail and watching to see how it responded. “Don’t be impertinent,” I ended halfheartedly, with too much on my mind to start another battle with him.
“Don’t be angry with Forest,” Mary said sweetly, defending her brother, automatically siding with him against me, as was the way with brothers and sisters. She never saw bad in anyone, was as placid and good as she had looked from the moment she was born.
In that respect at least, this situation was very different from that other day so many years ago. I had no need to echo my father and tell my own daughter to tidy her hair and clean her hands before our guests arrived, so that she looked like a little lady, not a vagabond. She was only four years old, but bless her, she always looked and behaved like a perfect little lady, and was well loved for it by everyone.
She stuffed her hand in the pocket fastened around her waist and produced a sugared almond, which she immediately offered to her brother.
“Where did you get that?” I smiled at her. “As if I couldn’t guess.”
“From Cook.”
Mistress Keene was forever slipping her tidbits and treats from the kitchen. “She spoils you.” All the servants did. They adored Mary. Would do anything for her. Not that I could blame them at all. I had thought we would be the same, she and I, but we were not. She resembled Edmund physically, with her red hair and freckles, but also in her personality. She was her father in every way, a girl who would be perfectly content with marriage to a man just like him, would look for nothing more than a quiet life of domesticity. In one part of me I was intensely glad for her, but I could not help feeling a little sorry too. Mary would be spared the pain, but she would miss out on the passion.
“Can we go outside?” Forest challenged, in a tone I recognized as far more like my own.
“You may go once you have greeted our visitor, so long as you promise to stay in the garden.”
“You never let us do what we want,” Forest exploded, scowling at me and stamping his feet in a fit of childish rage.
Swift and direct as an archer’s arrow, he had found my most vulnerable point. He knew very well that the one thing I wanted for my children was for them to be as unconstrained and free as it was possible to be. “That is not true, Forest, and well you know it.”
Further argument between us was prevented by a knock at the door. “That must be Mr. Merrick.” Or William, as he insisted I now call him.
Mary stood demurely to receive our visitor, but as soon as Bess had admitted him into the great hall and he had bowed and kissed my hand, Forest slunk straight for the door, head down in a sulk.
William was not impressed and caught him by his shoulders, but Forest threw him off so roughly that if he’d been a year or two older and stronger, he’d have run the risk of unseating our guest’s expensive new periwig. The thought of which made me smile to myself. Was it any wonder my son was such a little insurgent?
“I told him he could go, William,” I said, irritated at the interference. “Rather now through the door, than out of a window at dead of night.”
William’s square jaw had slackened into jowls with age, but he was as loud and bombastic as ever. “You are far too lenient with the little jackanapes. He’ll become completely ungovernable.”
“He is only seven. And I like his spirit.”
“No good will come of spoiling that child, I tell you.”
I managed to hold my tongue. No good would come of me reminding William Merrick that he wasn’t my guardian anymore, had no jurisdiction anymore over how I chose to run my household and my family. Nobody had any jurisdiction over me now. I had discovered that there was some small consolation to being a widow. To have a husband and see him die, to sleep alone and unloved in a cold bed every night for the rest of her life, was one way for a woman to be completely free. The only way for a woman to be completely free. I had nobody to hold me, nobody to kiss me and caress me, nobody to share my life with, but I was at last masterless. None in the world could call me to account, and I liked that very much.
I told Mary she might go back to the kittens once she had asked Bess to bring us some coffee.
“You’ve a biddable little girl there,” William conceded. “But young Forest needs a man in his life to restore some discipline.”
“If there was a man in his life to discipline him, I’d have to be obedient to that man too.” I smiled wryly. “No, thank you.”
“You’ve had no more offers?”
“I’m a wealthy widow. Naturally I have had offers.”
“From Richard Glanville again?”
Just to hear his name caused an ache of loss and of emptiness in my heart. “From him.”
There had been other suitors besides Richard, fortune hunters one and all. I barely even recalled their names, and if I had not seen them off by subtly refusing every one of their oft-repeated invitations, they soon abandoned their quest when I told them in no uncertain terms that I had no wish to wed ever again. Only Richard had not given up. He had tried
to see me more than a half-dozen times since Edmund’s death. Once every six months or so he rode to Tickenham unannounced, as he had that Valentine’s morning. But each time I had told Bess to send him away. I refused to speak to him. I turned him away from my door, when he’d ridden for days to see me, without even offering him the common courtesy I’d show to a beggar. I didn’t trust myself to let him in, even to offer him some bread and cheese and ale to refresh him after the long ride before I sent him on his way again.
“I thought as much,” William said with some mirth. “I ran into him again last week, drowning his sorrows in a bottle of rum at a dockside inn.”
I felt the prick of tears behind my eyes. I did not want to know. And yet I did. Oh, I did. “You spoke to him?”
“He spoke to me. Begged me to tell him when last I had seen you. If you were well, if there were any other gentlemen paying you any attention. I tell you, I pitied the poor, lovesick lad. But you’ve got to give him credit, he’s mightily tenacious. I guarantee he’ll be back.”
I did not doubt it. But it would make no difference how many times he came. I would not see him. No matter how much my body burned for him and my heart pined just to hear his voice, to see his face, to touch him. This was my punishment, my penance. And it was the price I paid for my freedom. If you could call it freedom, when I was bound by the spiraling costs of this waterlogged land and with maintaining this ancient, crumbling house, bound by obligation to tenants and servants, by the constant nagging fear that my children might fall ill or drown.
“He’d not make such a bad husband, you know,” William said. “Richard Glanville. Nor such a bad lord for Tickenham.”
I found myself wondering then if my former guardian had helped Richard to drown his sorrows in that Bristol inn, and just what the two of them had found to talk about besides me. As if I could not guess. “With his dying breath, my father warned me to be on my guard against unscrupulous Cavaliers,” I said viciously.
“But your father, my dear, could sometimes be a terrible bigot.”
“I will not hear him spoken of that way, sir. Do you hear me?”
“You disagree with me?”
“I do not wish to discuss my father. And I especially do not wish to discuss Richard Glanville. Not now. Not ever.”
He gave a noncommittal shrug. “As you wish.”
“All Forest needs is to be able to go outside to play and tire himself,” I said, changing the subject back. “All he wants to do is fly kites and climb trees and kick his ball about on the moor. And soon it will be safe for him to do all that, won’t it? Soon no more boys will lose their lives trying to save drowning cows. Soon there will be no more floods. That is, after all, why you are here.”
“Indeed.”
“I trust you have more to report this time than the last.”
“I am pleased to inform you that the necessary permissions have at long last been granted, an engineer has almost been appointed, and two hundred pounds allotted to commence work. I have every confidence that a date will soon be set for the summer. My, how long we’ll have waited for such a day!”
To me it felt like a lifetime. I could not help but remember how I had been cajoled into agreeing to this scheme, so that Edmund might solicit my hand, and now, before the first sod had even been dug, I was a widow of four years’ standing.
I WOKE IN THE DARKNESS to the unmistakable and haunting call of a wedge of swans arriving to spend winter on the wetlands. As well as their eerie honking, I swore I could hear the beating of many great white wings.
I waited until dawn and then went to rouse Forest and Mary from their beds.
“The swans are here,” I whispered into their intricate little ears. “Come and see them.”
Together we stood by the window in my chamber, a child on either side of me, my arms draped around their shoulders, as we gazed out over the dawn-lit flooded moor, empty yesterday save for the mallards and a few geese, but now miraculously thronged with hundreds, almost thousands it seemed, of our serene white winter visitors.
I was not too absorbed by the magic and mystery of their appearance to miss the exchange of glances ’twixt my son and daughter, which resulted in Mary’s putting forth a request. “Could we take the boat out to see them up close?” she asked tentatively.
“All right.” I acquiesced, thinking how there might be few chances left. “So long as you both wrap up warm.”
They scampered off gleefully and Mary came back minutes later, carrying cloak, bonnet and muff. Forest had put on his thick riding coat and boots. Mary took hold of my hand and Forest’s and we walked linked together.
Forest wanted to row the boat and I watched him proudly as he pulled on the oars with enough might to propel our little vessel between the majestic gliding birds.
“Beautiful, aren’t they?” I said, wrapping my cloak tighter around me.
Forest’s face was a picture of indifference, no sign of wonder or love for this land etched there at all, despite my best and continued efforts to instill such feelings in him.
“Have you ever wondered where the swans go in summer?” I asked both children.
Disappointingly, my question was met with the shaking of two heads, one dark, one copper. Mary was too young, I consoled myself, and Forest too obstinate. If he did wonder, he would never admit it to me. Yet I so wanted him to love this land that would one day be his, wanted it to mean as much to him as it did to me.
“When I was a little girl, I used to wonder,” I told them. “I used to imagine that perhaps they came with the winter and flew away again in spring, because they were white and were snow birds who took the cold away with them. It is the same ones who come back every year, though I have no idea how they find their way. I did sometimes wish I could fly away with them, wherever it was that they went, or rather that I could do the opposite of what they do, and leave Tickenham in winter and return in spring when the floods have gone. But soon the floods will be gone for good, Forest,” I said to him, wondering where the swans would go then. “The drainage work will begin. By the time you are a grown man, it will be complete.”
This at least appeared to have spiked his interest, though for entirely the wrong reasons. “And I shall be as rich as William Merrick?” he asked with a keenness that made me uneasy, young as he was.
As he had grown, the greedy side of Forest’s nature had increasingly tended toward an unpleasant avariciousness that I did not like at all, did my utmost to discourage. “You will only be as rich as Mr. Merrick if you are as devious and ruthless as he is,” I said severely. “Which I sincerely hope you will not be.”
“What are we to have for dinner?” he asked then. “I’m hungry.”
“So am I,” Mary agreed.
“I hope it is not pike again,” Forest grumbled.
“I hope it’s not, either,” Mary echoed supportively.
Forest stuck out his tongue, pretending to gag. “If we eat any more pike, we’ll look like one.” He sucked in his cheeks and pouted his mouth, fishlike, making Mary giggle behind her hand.
“What would you like to eat, then?” I asked.
“Venison,” he said. “Like Mr. Merrick always has.”
“Hmmm. Well, when you are squire you can eat venison every day if you like, but for now I suggest we send to the inn for a barrel of oysters. As a treat, we shall all three of us eat them by the fire.”
Forest scowled at me until I screwed up my face and scowled back comically, managing at last to make him grin.
Spring
1685
There were several occurrences in the course of the spring that proved the people of Tickenham were as resistant to drainage as ever.
First the ale barrels in the buttery were prized apart, allowing the contents to swill all over the floor. Days later, the chickens were all found dead in their coop, their necks wrung, and the fresh eggs broken in a mess of yolk and white and shell. Then two of the pigs were butchered in the sty, their throats slit wide, splat
tering so much bright red blood that it resembled a slaughterhouse.
I was more angered by the needless waste than by the destruction of my property, but at least anger served to hold fear at bay, for a time. Unsurprisingly, all around me had suddenly been struck mute, deaf and blind. Nobody had seen or heard anything, it seemed. When the constable questioned them, tenants and commoners and servants all denied having even the glimmer of a suspicion about who might have committed these vengeful crimes. Even Bess remained guiltily tight-lipped, her loyalties clearly torn in a way that disturbed me more than anything, made me more certain than ever that her brother was behind it all. She refused to meet my eye, even when Forest told me, in her hearing, that Thomas had asked him, some while ago, if he knew what a Fen tiger was.
“And do you?” I asked Forest cautiously, wondering if that was why he had taken to following me around and standing quietly at my side.
“Thomas told me they are not really tigers at all,” he said. “But angry men.”
We were in the great hall. I sat down on the settle, and for the first time in I don’t know how long, Forest let me take him onto my lap. I wrapped my arms around his strong little body and held him tight. “Did Thomas say anything else, Forest?”
“He said the tigers were being bred in Somersetshire now. Right here, in Tickenham, and that Somersetshire tigers are angrier even than their Fen cousins. He said they would take revenge on us for robbing the commoners of their way of life.” He twisted round to look at me. “It’s them who killed the pigs and the hens, isn’t it?”
The Lady of the Butterflies Page 34