“It is only fitting,” Richard said. “How else should a lady and new lord be welcomed back after their wedding?”
I turned to him. “You knew they were planning this?”
I saw by his quiet smile that he had had more than a hand in that planning, had obviously taken it upon himself to visit all the local gentry whom my father, and even Edmund, had failed to count as friends. But clearly they were all Richard’s friends now, had all succumbed to his gentle, winning charm. How could they not?
The commoners and tenants were no different, seemingly. The Bennett boys came up alongside the carriage and threw flowers in at the windows, and Alice Walker rode up with her father and handed me a bouquet of marigolds. Everyone was carrying flowers and wearing flowers and throwing garlands and posies at us all along the way.
“They were all very happy when I said that, instead of draining the land, we were planning a great feast and dole for them all,” Richard explained.
“I am sure they were.”
I insisted we stop the coach so we could get out and ride on top with the coachman for the rest of the journey, so as to have the best view of the cavalcade of drums and bagpipes and fiddlers and dancers that accompanied us, and I smiled at all the well-wishers, reached down to touch their hands.
A girl threw a rosebud and Richard reached out and snatched it from the air. He held it to his lips and looked at me over it with the most roguish, twinkling smile. “Soon your rose will be all mine,” he whispered. “The secret rose you keep between your legs, with petals as pink as these. I shall be like a bee, or one of your butterflies, and put my tongue into those petals.”
“Hush,” I said, flushing as hotly as a greensick girl. Just imagining him doing what he described made me almost delirious. I was glad we were in the open air, that there was a breeze to cool my skin. I was glad I had the procession to watch to distract me. It danced us back to the house and through the flower-filled rooms to the great hall and the wedding table decorated with floral rose cake.
More than a hundred guests sat down for the first sitting, to scoff breads and meats and puddings and cheeses. Fulfilling his duty as groom, Richard served me with beef and mustard, and John Foskett raised a glass and joined in, offering blessings and drinking healths. The merriment was naturally restrained while the clergyman was present and I was impatient for him to go. I was not interested in edification. I wanted mirth and fun, bawdy jests and devilish ditties. I wanted to make a May game of this wedding. I delighted in seeing cakes and ale relished, and every lusty lad with a wench at his side, all pulling at laces and loosening each other’s clothes.
“There is so much kissing and flirting, I doubt many will still be maids by evening,” Richard whispered into my ear.
“It’s like a wedding from the old days,” Mistress Knight came up especially to say to him, her wrinkled old face alight as if she was just a girl again. “I never thought we’d see the likes of it again, now that the gentry folk are so anxious to save their shillings.”
Richard handed her a posy from the table decoration, gave her his most adorable smile. “What is the good of having shillings if they are not spent and scattered amongst friends?”
She beamed back at him and almost danced away with the little bouquet, as if her gnarled old legs pained her no more.
“Damn me,” I said, slipping my hand into his. “But is there nobody my husband has not utterly charmed?”
There was one person, I realized, but I imagined that was because Richard had not even tried. Mistress Knight was seated at a bench with her husband, Arthur, and Bess and Ned, but I noted that Thomas was not with them. How he must hate me, to deny himself a feast rather than be here celebrating my wedding day, and for a moment I felt a little chill. What had I done to make him hate me so much? I shrugged. Well, it was his loss that he was missing out on today.
We had been showered with presents from everyone else. To the ones we had received in church were added more money and silverware and all manner of food or drink: swans, capons, a brace of duck, hares and fish and puddings and spices.
I took a moment to take note of every detail, so I should remember it always. This great hall that had seen such austerity was utterly transformed with sprigs and bouquets on every table, the feasting guests decked out in their silver buttons and scarlet stockings and with scarlet and blue bridal ribbons round their wrists and hands and hats. My children, giddy from too much sun and cider, were hiding under tables with Bess’s Sam and scores of other village children. I did not want the day ever to end. But when it did, I consoled myself that there would be eleven more to follow just like it.
Richard had been softly caressing the inside of my wrist with little circular movements of his thumb, and now his tongue was in my ear. It tickled deliciously and I wriggled away. His arm tightened around my waist, but I came back willingly for more. He kissed me and his mouth tasted of wine. His hand strayed now under the table, found its way up under my skirts, his fingers moving up slowly between my legs, stroking me, touching the secret parts of me.
“I want you, Nell,” he whispered urgently. “I cannot wait any longer.”
The guests must have worried that if we were not soon sent to our bed we would take our marriage joys right there on the wedding table, unable to hold back from doing the act before them all. The bride cake and the posset were speedily brought forth, and then everyone followed us upstairs for the public disrobing, crowding round to catch the ribbons and laces that held our clothes together. I did not even see who caught the most admired trophy, my garter. I had eyes only for Richard, for my husband. And he was looking only at me, smiling at me, that beautiful angel’s smile, and there was nothing else in the world for me but him.
They all took their leave of us eventually and we tore off the rest of each other’s clothes, getting in a tangle in our haste and tumbling each other naked to the bed.
Richard raised himself above me and I parted my legs for him, but for a while he seemed to want to do no more than hold himself against me as I stroked him and he gazed intently into my face. The hardness of his cock was pressing into me, stirring me, and when he began to move, very slowly, my need for him became so unbearable that my body took charge and responded to him of its own accord. I pressed back, began thrusting softly against him. I did not stop, could not stop, wanted more and more of him, just to touch and be touched, to give myself to him, to give myself up to feeling. It was a letting-go. Like dancing and letting the music take hold of my body, like skating on ice and not caring if I could not stop, like the wonderful weightlessness of swimming. It was beauty and bliss unbound. The sensation of his skin against mine, such soft skin, on a body that was hard and lean, took me to a world beyond any world I had ever known, a world of fire and of ice, of the deepest darkness and the brightest light. Curls as black as night and eyes as bright as a summer sky . . .
“Love me,” I whispered. “Make me yours.” And he did love me, as I had never been loved before. It was a love to be completely lost in, consumed by. It was like being split open and it was like being made whole, like receiving a blessing, like coming home.
I wept against his shoulder and cried out and clutched his hair, and when he stroked me with his warm hands it was as if the music that had played all day played on in my head, a glorious cacophony of sound. Entangled, grappling, our limbs entwined, we were warmed as if by the hottest, brightest midsummer sun, even as dusk was falling. A bead of sweat trickled down the small cleft between my breasts, and his thighs glistened as if he had just walked out of the sea.
It was all that life could be, all that it was meant to be, a sensuous explosion of touch and taste, of sight and sound and smell. The taste of his mouth, his skin. The smell of his warm perfumed curls, his sex. The sound of his moans of ecstasy. His naked body was beautiful to behold and the hardness of his cock a delight.
His hands were all over me, caressing every part of me, making my skin tingle until it was as if it was fused wi
th his, so I could not tell where he ended and I began.
“I can’t hold on any longer,” he whispered. “I want to be inside you.” And the feel of him penetrating me at last made me cry out with the joy of being able to give myself to him completely, to give to him finally all that I had to give.
I wrapped my limbs tight around him and arched my back to draw him deeper, wanting to be closer to him still, closer, understanding only now what it meant for two bodies to become one. When I cried out for him to finish it and he finally found his relief, it was as if the sun had burst inside me, the music rising in a great crescendo and all the church bells ringing, ringing, for Christmas.
WE WERE LYING in each other’s arms and I was drifting in the pleasant transitory state just beyond wakefulness when Richard suddenly cried out in his sleep, words that were unintelligible but full of distress. He pushed me roughly away from him, thrashed his legs, kicking out at me as if he was fighting me off, as if in his dream I was something to be feared and meant him harm. His eyes were tightly closed, his brow furrowed, as if in pain or anguish.
I reached out to him and took hold of his shoulder, gave it a gentle shake. “Richard.”
He turned his face into the pillow, twisted his head back again violently, as if he was trying to escape from something.
I shook him a little harder. “Richard. Wake up.”
His eyes flew open, stared at me, unseeing but filled with terror, so that I knew he was not properly awake but still trapped in a nightmare world.
I stroked his hair off his face and felt that it was damp with sweat. “I’m here,” I said. “It’s me.”
I slid my arm up under his and around his back and found that his body was running with sweat, and yet he was trembling. I held him tighter, felt the ferocious pounding of his heart through my bones.
“You had a dream,” I said. “Do you remember what it was?”
He shook his head, his eyes suddenly guarded, so that I wondered if he did remember quite clearly but was either too ashamed or too afraid to talk about it.
“It’s all right,” I murmured, kissing his brow, my mouth wet with his sweat. “It’s all right.”
Gradually his heart steadied, but he held on to me as if the fear had not left him.
WHEN I WOKE, the morning of Friday the twelfth of June, it was to a greeting of more drums and fiddles and bawdy laughter. I dressed and went below stairs to find the tables laid with food and my husband happily breaking his fast with the new guests, who were arriving from the more far-flung villages to bring their congratulations.
Goodwill and joy rang through the hall until Thomas Knight burst through the doors in a state of great agitation. He climbed up onto one of the tables, trampling the flowers beneath his boots, and seized a musket from the wall. Silence fell instantly and completely, as if everyone had been turned to stone.
“This is no time for feasting,” he declared before anyone had had a chance to react. He clutched the weapon to his chest, excitement gleaming in his eyes. “Every able man must take up his arms and make ready. I have it from a messenger. The Duke of Monmouth’s fleet landed at Lyme at sunset yesterday. Hundreds are rallying to his support.”
I threw back my chair and ran outside to the orchard. Richard tried to grab my hand to stop me, but I would not be stopped. I needed air, sky, space.
Not now. It could not happen now.
The sun was still shining. The sky was a perfect summery blue and the birds were twittering. I was still newly married. But the wedding feast would not go on for twelve days. Instead of music and laughter, the air would reverberate again with the sound of cannon fire. Instead of sharing hospitality and good cheer, neighbor would turn once again against neighbor. Blood was to be spilled once more over Somersetshire’s black peat. I had wanted this marriage to begin favorably, in a blaze of color and in joy. Instead it was to begin in darkness and in battle.
RICHARD HAD HIS FEET UP on the wedding table, amidst the crushed flowers and debris of the abandoned feast. He was quaffing a cup of canary wine from a leftover flagon, his eyes strangely bright and glittering. I rested my hand on his shoulder, dropped a kiss on the top of his curly head. “I am so sorry that marriage to me has landed you in the West Country now,” I said softly. “If you had stayed away from me, far away from me, you might not have been embroiled in this rebellion.”
He reached back and laid his hand upon mine. Swinging his feet to the floor, he pulled me gently down into his lap. “I could not stay away from you, Nell,” he said, almost ominously. “I had to have you, even if it meant my damnation.”
They were words he might have intended as flattery, no more than that. They meant nothing. No. They meant something, though I did not know what. Did not in truth want to know, even to contemplate.
He tipped the cup to my lips for me to drink, but I pushed it away. “Will you go now? Will you go and help try to put down the rebellion?”
“You mean, will I fight for our crowned and anointed King?” With the backs of his fingers he traced the low, lace-edged neckline of my gown and he smiled that lovely inquiring smile of his. “I had a healthy regard for our second King Charles and his passion for wenching and wine,” he said. “But I can’t say I care as much for his brother. So maybe I should join the rebels instead, support the heroic Protestant duke? Would you like that, little daughter of a Roundhead, my little Puritan maid? Would you like me to turn renegade for love of you?”
I flung my arms around his neck. “All I want is for you to stay with me,” I blurted, close to tears. “I do not want you to support anyone.”
“Then perhaps I won’t.”
But I did not for a moment believe this studied indifference. He was blessedly unfettered by dogma, prayed like a perfect Anglican, but this rebellion was not just about religion, not for him. He had an unshakable alliance to the monarchy, and the monarchy was once again under threat.
I pushed back so I could see his face. “Thomas Knight and Ned and John Hort have already gone,” I said.
“Good for them.”
“They see it as their duty to fight for the cause their fathers fought for,” I added carefully.
“Hah! It is more that they are ready to fight for any cause, especially one led by a colorful popular hero such as the Duke of Monmouth. Albeit that he is King Charles’s bastard son, he is a very courageous and charming bastard. It’s not so very hard for the political agitators to rouse a band of young hot-blooded men, ready for action and glory. They’d ride into any battle so long as it gave them a chance to wield a musket or a pike and be a hero. You have a little boy. You know the games boys like to play.”
“Thomas and Ned are both older than you,” I said. I knew he was just toying with me, knew he would go and lead the militia, would be lured, like the rest of them, by the promise of action and adventure and glory. More than that, even if he would not admit it even to himself, he would surely also be lured by what he could not fail to see as a chance, finally, to avenge the death of his brother and the ruin of his family fortunes.
I linked my arms around his neck, threaded my fingers into the silken black curls and kissed him, frantic little kisses, all over his face. “I will not let you go,” I said. His eyes were so deep and so blue that I felt almost as if I could dive into them. How I wished I could. “If you do join the militia, then I am coming with you. I shall be like a camp follower in the war, the women who went to be with their husbands, to face whatever perils they faced. I will cook for you and make sure you fight on a full stomach. I will be there to tend to you if you are wounded. I will lay down my life and die on the battlefield with you, if it should come to that.”
“I would not have you put in danger,” he said. “Not for my sake.”
“But you will be in danger,” I cried.
He gazed at me as if he wanted to fix an image of me in his mind, and I saw in his eyes a fatalistic acceptance of the hand that might be dealt him.
“Are you afraid, love?” I
asked him.
“Of scythe men and musketeers?” He shook his head. “No.”
“Of what, then?”
“I am afraid of losing you.”
“You will not lose me. Why would you lose me?”
He did not reply.
“You are frightening me, Richard. Don’t look at me that way.”
“What way?”
“As if you might never see me again.”
He stroked the stray tendrils of hair from my cheek. “I waited so long for you, my little Nell, so long. But maybe you were right. Maybe we should not be together. Maybe we do not deserve happiness, even now. Maybe I do not deserve it.”
I took his lovely face between my hands, forced him to look at me. “You do deserve it, Richard,” I said adamantly. “You do. And you shall have it. I shall make you happy.”
He kissed me, almost savagely, as if to defy a fate, or a God, that might break us apart, and then he left me. He swung himself up into the saddle and rode away from me and into battle.
BESS AND I WAITED together for news, even though the men we loved were fighting on opposing sides, even though good news for one of us must mean bad news for the other. We waited in the same empty rooms for the same empty, eternal days, when even the long hours of warm summer sunshine could not dispel the darkness that had fallen over Tickenham Court once again. As I tossed corn to the clucking hens, collected eggs, weeded the soggy vegetable patch, helped Sam do his father’s work and feed and groom the horses, waiting for them to be requisitioned for who could say which side, I did not feel like a new wife fresh from the marriage bed. I felt like a widow still, a widow who had lost not one young husband but two.
I was helping Mary with her Latin and Bess was sweeping the floor when Florence Smythe, John’s tall and elegant eldest sister, rode over with news, finally, but news that brought no relief to either of us, that made the waiting even more unbearable.
The Lady of the Butterflies Page 40