The Lady of the Butterflies

by Fiona Mountain

  I’d thought every line and curve of his perfect profile was etched indelibly onto my soul. The curl of his long lashes as they lay against his cheeks, the little indentations at the corners of his kissable, childish mouth, the dark curls that fell over his smooth brow and coiled softly into his neck. But it was a ghost that I had been holding on to, a lovely but faded ghost, and here, before me now, in the moonlit rain, his beauty was almost too much for me. And yet I wanted to gaze at nothing else but the exquisite lines of his face. I could look for a lifetime at him and never have enough of looking. He was the brightest star, shining in the darkness. He was everything to me.

  I should have been angry with him for what he had just done, for being so rash and hotheaded. I had not invited him here, was not ready for this, should send him away as I had done all the times before. But I could not find it in my heart to be angry with him, did not want to send him away. I had missed him. So much. I was so glad just to see him.

  His face averted, still soothing his horse, he said, “Aren’t you going to thank me for getting rid of them for you?” It was spoken with an attempt at nonchalance, at the charming confidence at which I knew him to be so proficient, but he did not quite manage to pitch it right this time.

  “Thank you?” I asked halfheartedly. “You wounded a man.”

  “A warning, that’s all.”

  “You think they won’t be back? More of them next time, and better armed.”

  Now at last he turned to me, with those lovely deep blue eyes that had never lost their strange and powerful hold on my heart. “I will stay and protect you.”

  It was said with a touching and ardent chivalry, but at that precise moment he did not look capable of protecting anyone, looked in far more need of protection himself. He looked so tired, his eyelids almost too heavy for him to hold open, and any resolve I had left in me to resist him suddenly vanished.

  He must have seen it, since his lips came up at one side in a sweetly lopsided smile, and he was suddenly surer of himself again. He reached down and snatched the musket from my hand. “Is it primed and loaded?”

  “It is.”

  He looked impressed. “What man would care about dying if it was at the hands of such a pretty little musketeer?” He tossed the gun in the air and caught it. “You were not intending to fire it, though?”

  I smiled at him. “I had been hoping to find a more peaceable way to reach an agreement.”

  He aimed the musket into the sky, pulled the trigger and discharged it with a thunderous crack, turned to me in the drifting smoke from the exploding cartridge. “Aye, so I saw. A whore’s way.”

  “You are not jealous? Of Thomas Knight?”

  He slid from the saddle, propped the musket against a feeding trough. He took off his hat and hooked it over the muzzle. “How can I not be driven half mad by jealousy, when you have kept me away from you for nearly five years?” I heard an ache of loneliness in his voice, but he seemed reluctant to step any closer to me. Did not try to touch me. Then I saw he was looking beyond me into the dark hall. “Did all the commotion wake you, lad?” he said gently.

  I spun round to see Forest, standing there in his long white nightshirt, his eyes wide with wonder. “You stabbed him, sir,” he said, with awe in his voice. “Did you see him, Mama? I watched from the window and saw it all. The horse up on its hind legs, kicking at the air, the flash of the sword and that man running away with blood spurting out of his arm.”

  I heard Richard give a soft chuckle as I went to my son. “Come now, Forest,” I said. “You were far too far away to see blood, and it wasn’t exactly spurting.”

  “It was like a real battle.”

  It was a real battle. “Well, it’s over now, so you can go back to bed. Bid good night to Mr. Glanville.”

  “Good night, sir.”

  Richard smiled at him. “Good night, young fellow.”

  When still he made no move, I took Forest’s shoulders and spun him round, gave him a nudge in the direction of the stairs. “Bed, Forest. Now.” I watched him go reluctantly, dragging his small bare feet, glancing back longingly into the hall where Richard had come, uninvited, to stand close behind me. “Would you like some spiced wine?” I asked Richard. “There’s nobody here to serve you, but I’ll gladly warm some for you myself.”

  He smiled. “I’m sure it would taste all the better.”

  “You can have your usual bed too, if you’d like.”

  “I’ll curl up by the fire with the dogs. I’d rather. It won’t matter where I am. I shall not sleep.”

  I do not know if he moved closer to me or I to him, but whichever way it happened, there was hardly any space between us anymore.

  “I do not want wine or a bed,” he said quietly. “I just want you.” His arms were down by his sides. He made a small uncertain move to hold out his hand. I did the same. The backs of them brushed against each other. Our fingers caught, turned, entwined. I leaned my head toward his and for a moment we stood holding hands, our foreheads resting against each other. I put my arms around him and felt him shudder against me.

  “If only you knew,” he murmured. “How I have wanted to be with you.”

  “I know.” I lifted my hand onto the back of his head, stroked his soft curly hair. “I know.”

  My mouth found his, clung to it, as if his kiss was the very breath of life to me. And it was. All the time I had been away from him had been as one long night, a little death, and now, beneath the touch of his mouth and hands, I felt every part of me waking, softening, opening, coming back to life—a sweet, agonizing fullness in my groin that was like a ripening, a bursting open. I wrapped my arms around him and clasped him to my heart, cradled his head against my shoulder, and I wondered only how I had borne to be without him for so long.

  He swept me up into his arms and up the twisting stone stairs, my long plait falling around us both like a gilded rope that bound us together. He lay down beside me on the bed, slipped warm hands inside my shift, stroked from my breasts to my belly, moved down between my legs, and I lay quivering beneath his touch until I could stand it no longer and pulled his face down to mine to kiss him again. Then he was kissing my eyelids, my cheeks, my chin, my throat, my ears, my breasts, my stomach. He whispered my name, over and over, the name that only he had ever called me. The sweetest name, the sweetest word I had ever heard. “Nell.”

  He lifted my shift off over my head and I helped him with his shirt. I undid the laces of his breeches and slid my hand inside, and as I caressed him there, his whole body gave a spasm that filled me with a sense of power, of fulfillment. It was as if my body had been made for this and only this, had been shaped and created for the giving and receiving of this pleasure, had been made to love him and for him to love.

  He unfastened my plait so that my hair spilled all over him like a golden waterfall, and he let it run through his fingers. The only light in the chamber came from the hearth, and our bodies were bathed in a dim, red-gold glow. I sat back for a moment to look at him, naked on the high-canopied bed. I ran my fingers over the taut muscles of his belly and his erect penis, made him moan soft and low in the back of his throat. He reached out with both of his hands to stroke my hips, my buttocks, the insides of my thighs, the triangle of pale hair.

  I slid out from his grasp, bent to scatter hungry kisses across his chest, biting, licking, brushing my lips against the soft little hairs that formed a denser line that led down from his navel to his groin. I kissed and licked and sucked at his nipples as if I was a kitten. I moved down that line of dark hair and kissed his hard, flat belly, and the hardness of his sex. He grasped my head in both of his hands and gave an agonized groan, pulled me closer. I could feel his heart beating so fast against mine. Then he rolled me over as a wave will roll a pebble on the shore, so he was above me once more, lying between my legs, straining against me but holding back, so that I almost cried out for him to come inside me.

  But all at once he froze. He hurled himself away from me a
nd off the bed, dragging a rug around him to cover himself. He clutched the carved bedpost and stared down at me, lying on my back, panting for breath, naked save for a pale, gossamer veil of hair. But I knew it was not me he saw anymore. There was a haunted expression in his eyes, a look almost of horror, and I remembered how he had clutched that same bedpost for support as he had stared down at Edmund’s lifeless body.

  It was so very long ago. I had spent a thousand lonely nights in this bed since then. But for the first time it occurred to me that it could be a curse rather than a blessing to be so tied to a place, to be expected to live out an entire life in one house, to be born, to be bedded and to die in the same damned great ancestral bed. It shocked me to see him seemingly so troubled now, for having loved his friend’s wife, when it did not seem to have affected him so much when Edmund was still living. I was a wife no longer but a widow now. I had spent too many nights alone.

  I scrambled from the bed, quickly gathered up a pile of pillows and rugs, took them over to the fireplace. I felt him watching me as I deposited the bedding by the hearth, quickly arranged it into a little nest. I stood beside it in the warm orange glow of the flickering flames and I held out my hand to him, but still he did not move. The shadows had gone from his eyes, were replaced by something else entirely.

  “God, Nell, you are so beautiful.”

  “Come to me, then,” I said softly.

  He shook his head, almost imperceptibly. “I cannot,” he said. “I need . . . I need . . .”

  “What do you need, love?”

  “More than this. Don’t you understand? I need more than a romp with you every five years. I need to know that you are mine forever. All mine. Only mine.”

  I waited for him to say it, to ask me. He did not. But he did come to me. “Hold me,” he said. “I need you to hold me.”

  I lay down on the rugs and he lay beside me and I held him and stroked his hair until he went to sleep, his arms wound tight around me and his beloved dark, curly head resting between my breasts.

  IN THE MORNING I awoke stiff and cold and alone on the floor by a fire that was no more than a few embers.

  I dressed myself and, not even pausing to fasten back my tumbled hair or put on stockings, ran downstairs. Bess was going about her daily duties as if nothing had happened. I had no time for her, for any of them. All I cared about was one person. His was the only face I wanted to see. But he was not there.

  I ran out into the yard to see if his horse was in the barn, but it too had gone.

  “He left about twenty minutes ago, Ma’am. You’ll probably catch him if you ride hard.” Ned carried on forking fresh straw in the stable, ashamed to look me in the face, looking instead at my bare ankles poking out from beneath my long skirts, which I was still holding up from running.

  Ned was a good man. I couldn’t believe he’d really meant any harm last night. He was just concerned for the future, like the rest of them. All he wanted to do was care for Bess and raise their son and have enough food to feed them all. He’d been saving for years for enough to pay for a tenancy and thought I was threatening that future. He was doing his best to make amends.

  “Which way did he go, Ned, do you know?”

  “Clevedon. Ladye Bay.”

  Without waiting to be asked, he led my mare from the stable, but before he’d exchanged the halter for a bridle and saddled her, I led her to the mounting block, hitched up my skirts and grabbed a handful of her mane, mounted her bareback and astride like a boy. I touched my heels to her flanks and urged her into a gallop, my hair flying out behind me. I let the mare have her head, as she charged full pelt toward the rutted trackway over the ridge that led all the way from Tickenham to the coast, a distance of some four miles or so. It was a mild morning that carried a promise of summer on the faint sea breeze. It was a lovely walk on a fine day, and a short ride, but it wasn’t short enough for me then, when all that mattered to me was getting there fast enough to find Richard.

  Ladye Bay was a rocky cove, very secluded and cut deep into craggy cliffs, with a shingle beach that was scattered with boulders. I’d spent hours there, with my father, alone, and then with my own children, scrambling over the rocks and upturning stones, hunting for sea anemones and ferns. I didn’t take Richard for a geologist or a botanist, I just hoped little Ladye Bay had enough to occupy him for as long as it took for me to get there.

  I smelled the sea, and then my heart danced when I saw his horse at the top of the cliffs, tethered to a rock and contentedly nibbling grass. I left my mare there too and clambered down the steep winding path that led to the shore, slipping and sliding on the stones, sending them tumbling before me in my haste.

  At high tide the waves crashed against the rocks with an explosion of white froth and foam, but the tide was low now and the sea was as calm as the water that lay over the moor in winter.

  The small, secluded beach was deserted. I was about to turn back, assuming that for some strange reason he must have dismounted and carried on along the coastal path on foot. Then I saw something, far out in the middle of the bay, just above the surface of the gray ocean, sleek and secretive as an otter. But it was no otter, it was the head of a man, a swimmer, heading out toward the headland and the wide, open sea.

  I stood with the waves lapping at my slippers and the hem of my gown, my hair whipped by the sea breeze, and I watched him grow smaller. I was gripped with fear, could barely blink my eyes lest I open them again and didn’t see him anymore, and yet a part of me was thrilled and awed to see a man so at one with the ocean, that wildest and most untamed aspect of the whole of creation, exerting such power over lowland dwellers like me.

  He had turned round and begun swimming back toward the shore with surprising speed.

  When he was about ten feet away from me, he stopped swimming and stood up, waist deep, with water streaming off his shoulders, his naked chest and his black hair. I smiled to myself with a sudden certainty that he had intended it to happen just this way. He knew I would come to look for him, and had gone swimming to impress me, to demonstrate his prowess for my appreciation. He was aware, undoubtedly, of how extraordinarily beautiful he looked, striding through the breaking waves in his wet, skintight breeches. He walked toward me out of the water, like the most vivid early dreams I’d had of him, waking dreams that I’d had before I’d ever met him. He came to stand in front of me, his bare feet shining wet in the sand, grains of it stuck to his toes. The fine covering of dark hairs on his chest glistened with droplets of seawater.

  “Will you teach me how to swim?”

  He ran his fingers through his hair to shake some of the moisture from it. “You’d faint from the cold.”

  I turned my face up to his, which was framed by wet black curls, his long eyelashes spiked with saltwater. “Remember how quickly I learned to skate? I surprised you then, did I not?”

  He smiled, touched my hair. “Skating. Dancing. Swimming. Is it my role to bring excitement and danger into your quiet little life?”

  “It is certainly quieter when you are not here. Safer too. But I never did want a quiet life. Or a safe one.”

  “Didn’t you?”

  I gave a small shake of my head. “No. I wanted my life to be like . . .” I cast about for a way to describe what I was trying to say. “A firework. I wanted to live in an explosion of color and light.”

  He smiled. “And why are you so eager to swim?”

  “I want to know what it’s like. How it is done.” I had such a desire just to touch him again, to bend my head to his chest and lick the droplets of salt water from his skin, to feel the tautness of the muscles in his arms, muscles that had the strength to propel him through waves. “I’ve lived all my life in a world of sky and water. I’d like to know what it is like to fly like a bird or a butterfly, but since that’s impossible, the next best thing is to learn to swim like a fish.”

  “Did no one ever tell you it was dangerous to be too inquiring, little Pandora?”

  �
��They did, many times. But I chose not to listen.”

  He smiled. “You’d make a better bird than fish, I think. You are most definitely of air and angels.”

  I recognized the line from John Donne. “I did not know you were a poet.”

  “There is so much you do not know about me, Nell. Though you must surely know that for just one of your impish smiles, I’d do anything you asked of me.” He made a slow scan of the sea, as if considering how it was best done. The waves made a hushing sound, sucked at my feet, impatient to drag me in.

  “Is it really so cold?”

  “No woman I’ve ever met would last more than one minute in it.”

  “One minute, you say?”

  He grinned, held up a finger. “Aye, one minute.”

  It was all the encouragement I needed. In an instant I was out of my dress, laughing and running headlong into the waves in my cambric chemise. The first shock of the water snatched my breath away, made every muscle in my body go rigid, made me pull myself up straight and suck in my belly. I held my arms out of the water, bent like wings, and plunged on in until I was up to my waist, bracing myself as each wave slammed into my body, almost knocking me over. I let one pass and then carried on, waited for the next onslaught, pushed through it. Already, I felt a little less cold. The salt water was soft as silk against my legs.

  “That’s far enough,” called Richard, raising his voice above the tumult of the pounding breakers, striding through them to stand in front of me. “Wherever are you going? I did not think we were walking to Wales.”

  “So what do I do?”

  He cleared his throat, as if he was unsure how to begin, held his arms out in front of him. “Push out, then round and back,” he said as he demonstrated. “Kick with your legs at the same time.”

  “Like a frog.”

  “Yes, I suppose. Like a frog.”