The Lady of the Butterflies

by Fiona Mountain

  “It needs stitching,” I said. “Warm some water and fetch some lint and vinegar, my strongest silk thread and needle, and a large measure of Bristol milk . . . make that three. I’ll light the fire and mix up an ointment.”

  “He needs a surgeon,” Bess said.

  I shook my head. “We cannot risk it. Besides, I have more faith in my mother’s remedy book than ever I have had in surgeons.”

  I tipped Thomas’s head back and made him drink the sherry, threw a hefty dose down my own throat, handed the glass to Bess. “Drink,” I ordered. “You’re going to need it.” I gave Thomas a cloth to bite on, so he would not make a noise when he cried out. With Bess still holding the candle, angling it to give the best possible light, I took a deep breath and tried to stop my hands from trembling as I drew together the jagged edges of the skin as well as I could. The feeling of needle going through flesh was horrible, and never before had I wished I was more skilled at needlework. But I sewed as neatly as I could, suturing the wound and leaving an orifice for it to drain before rebandaging.

  I turned my attention to Thomas’s left arm next. It was hanging limp and was badly misshapen just above the elbow. With a glance at his half-conscious face, I put my hands either side of the fracture and did my best to jerk it straight. There was a ghastly sensation of crunching, but if there was any sound it was masked by Thomas’s scream. Bess clamped her hand over his mouth until his eyes ceased rolling in their sockets. I bound the arm to a splint of kindling wood.

  “What do we do now?” Bess asked, her eyes darting toward me as we changed Thomas into one of Richard’s clean shirts that she had fetched from the laundry and she trickled water between her brother’s parched lips. “Where can he go? My cottage is the first place they will look and there is nowhere for him to hide in my father’s, either. Someone will see him. He will be found immediately.”

  “I know what you are asking of me, Bess, and I cannot do it.”

  “If you won’t do it for Thomas, then do it for me, for my father and mother.”

  “I am a mother too,” I reminded her. “I am a mother of two children who need me. For their sake, I cannot risk a traitor’s death.” I did not mention Richard, who had expressly forbidden me to have any contact with the rebels, and who would surely see what I was doing now as traitorous to him and to our marriage.

  “The constable will not come knocking at this door,” Bess said.

  “I cannot guarantee that. And even if he does not, there’s plenty who’d betray us for a bounty of five shillings.”

  “Your father would have been the first to join the Duke of Monmouth,” Bess pleaded desperately. “He’d have gone into battle with Thomas and Ned, you know it. He might have met his death on Sedgemoor, or he might have survived and needed somewhere to hide, someone to take a risk and save him from the gallows. He would not have turned Tom away, in the most dire need, when he had been fighting for the cause. Your father would have been prepared to sacrifice his own life for that cause.”

  “He did sacrifice his own life for it,” I said a little harshly. “And so left me all alone. I would not sacrifice my life so readily when there are two children depending on me.”

  “Then I’ll tell you why you should help Thomas.” We looked up and saw Arthur Knight standing by the doorway. “Mistress Glanville,” he said to me quietly, “if you turn Thomas out this night and do not help him, you are abandoning your own flesh and blood.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Thomas is your half brother.”

  “That is a low trick, Arthur.”

  “I swear it is no trick.”

  “I’ll not believe it. My father would be the last person to . . .”

  “Tom is not your father’s son. He is your mother’s.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “No.” But it was an instinctive response, and even as I gave it, I knew that what Arthur Knight had said must be true. The disparaging comments his wife had made about my mother, my father’s dying words about the base desires and carnality of women.

  “It was when she was engaged to be married to your father,” Arthur Knight began clumsily. “She had always had a . . . a fondness for me. She preferred the company of ordinary folk, had a great love for the people of this estate. She had no time for fine, false gentlemen, she said, or for parties and balls. She liked to be out on the moor, chattering to me while I cut the sedges and taught her to recognize the plants and birds. We never spoke of love. We did not need to. But of course, it could not be. And then . . . Thomas. It was kept very quiet. She went away for a while, to your father’s relatives in Ribston, where he set out to redeem her. He would not let her keep the baby. But my wife loved me enough to love my son, even if he was the child of another woman. Pride made her refuse any payment, though your father did offer it.”

  If I wanted to know why my father was so zealous, here was one answer. He’d feared that my mother’s sins proved her unworthy, that she was not one of the Puritan elect, was not destined for salvation but was condemned. And I too, since I was of the female line.

  After a silence it was Bess who asked: “Does Tom know?”

  “Yes,” I answered, on Arthur Knight’s behalf. “Thomas has always known. That’s why he has always despised me. That is why he told me once that I had stolen from him. Why he looks at me so covetously. He is my mother’s only son. If he was not base born, Tickenham Court would be all his.”

  “We didn’t intend to tell him,” Arthur said hurriedly. “But he was ill with a fever. Your mother came to the cottage then, insisted on nursing him herself day and night. It seemed certain he would die and she asked if she might tell him the truth. I think he would have half guessed it anyway, from the way she was with him. Your mother loved Tom,” Arthur Knight insisted. “She saved his life with her care. She would want you to save it now, with yours.”

  I could not take it in. Did not have time to take it in now. All those years I’d thought I had nobody, I had a brother, living not half a mile away. A brother who hated me, who had threatened me, led a riot to my door to torch my house. Because to his mind, but for an accident of birth, it should have been his. What was mine should all have belonged to him. But I did not have time to dwell on such thoughts. I had to act, to make a decision. “All right,” I said hastily. “He can stay. Just until he is stronger. Help me move him.”

  His father sat beside him and hooked one of Thomas’s arms around my shoulders, stood and hauled him up between us.

  “Where to?” he asked.

  “This way. Quickly, before anyone wakes.”

  I supported Thomas’s other arm, wedging my shoulder beneath his armpit. Bess took his feet and together we half lifted, half dragged him over to the great fireplace.

  “Put him down here,” I said.

  “Here?”

  “Just do as I say.”

  They did.

  I lifted up the candle, ran my fingers over the wall at the side of the fireplace, dug my fingers into the crack in the wainscoting and heaved. The oak panel swung open like the small door it was, to reveal a niche cut deep into the side of the massive chimney breast, just large enough to hide one man, possibly two. “It is not very comfortable,” I said. “But it is warm and dry and, except for me and now the two of you, nobody who lives here even knows it exists.”

  Bess peered inside doubtfully.

  “It was constructed for just such a purpose,” I told her.

  “It’s a priest hole,” Arthur Knight said with wonder. “Where they hid Catholics during the Reformation.”

  “Ironic, really.” I smiled. “Given that Thomas is here because he tried to get rid of a Catholic king.”

  “How did you know it was here?” Bess asked.

  “My mother told Mary Burges and she told me to look for it, which I did, a long time ago.” I shone the candle into a low recess in the thick wall. As I crouched down and crawled in, my chest tightened with the primal fear of confinement.

  We eased Thom
as in and I made him as comfortable as I could, with a straw pallet and blankets and pillows to support his head.

  “Do you think you could bear to stay with him, in case he wakes?” I said to Bess, knowing I was asking her to do something I was not at all sure I’d have been able to do myself. “If he cries out he will endanger us all.”

  Bess nodded fearfully. She squeezed herself up against the wall, took her brother’s hand. Her half brother, I reminded myself. My half brother. It was so odd to think that Thomas was as much my kin as he was Bess’s. We were both his sisters, which made it feel almost as if she and I were related, were sisters too, as I had always felt that we were.

  I brought a jug of ale, a plate of bread and cheese, and some custard tarts, as well as a chamber pot, a small stool and a spare candle. “That should see you through until I can come back again tomorrow night,” I said. “Is there anything else you want me to fetch?”

  Bess shook her head, then grabbed my arm as I turned to crawl back out and leave them. “Thank you,” she said. “I know what a risk you are taking for us.”

  “We are all taking the most terrible risk, Bess. By sheltering a man who, in the eyes of the law, is guilty of treason, we are committing treason too. If we should be caught we will burn, or hang, or be beheaded as enemies of the crown. You do realize that?”

  “What else could we do?”

  I fitted the paneling back in place and had rested my back against it, glanced up into the dark stairwell to where Richard must still have been sleeping, oblivious of what I had done. Arthur Knight touched my arm, as if he was too overcome with gratitude to speak. “It is nearly dawn,” I said to him. “Go home, before anyone sees you here.”

  I walked weakly up the stairs. Only when I sat on the edge of the bed did I realize my legs were trembling uncontrollably. I felt sick, sick to my stomach and sick to my heart. I made myself take long, deep breaths, like I did when I was ill whilst carrying Forest. I realized then I had been feeling sick on and off for days, that my monthly was late. How late? I saw that my nightgown was stained with Thomas’s blood and with sudden horror tore it off, bundled it up and pushed it under the bed. I climbed naked under the sheets and nestled up close to Richard, resting my cold cheek against the smooth dark hairs on his warm chest. He stirred, gathered me into his arms and turned onto his side. I felt his cock probing my belly, stiff as a cudgel. He found my hand, guided it down and I wrapped my fingers around him.

  He sucked his breath in with a hiss. “Hell’s teeth, where have you been, Nell? Your fingers are icy. It’s all right,” he added quickly, with a smile in his voice, grabbing me as I went to withdraw my hand. “I don’t mind if you warm them on me.”

  He mounted me, looked down into my eyes with love and desire and I felt so deceitful, was so sure that he would read my deception, was so afraid of having him read it, that I averted my face.

  He froze.

  I turned back to him, saw his hurt. “Richard, I need to tell you something,” I said. But he tensed, as if he suspected what it might be, and the words lodged in my throat.

  At my sudden silence, he pushed up on his arms, pinning me beneath him, his hipbones jutting painfully into my belly. “I am listening,” he said.

  I felt totally trapped. How could I keep such a dangerous secret from him? How could I tell him the truth when I had already broken my word to him? I could not tell him Thomas was my half brother when I could scarce comprehend it myself.

  “I feel sick,” I said feebly but truthfully. “Let me up.”

  He released me, sat with me as I gulped deep breaths, waiting until I looked to be recovered before he pressed me again. “What is it that you need to tell me, Nell?”

  I rested my hand on my belly. “Nothing,” I said. “It was nothing.” I could not even tell him that I thought I might be carrying his child.

  “I heard at the inn last night that Monmouth has been executed at Tower Hill,” he said quietly. “It is over now. Thank God, it is all over.”

  But I knew, by the way he hurled back the covers, that he had seen, rightly, that I could not share his relief, not at all, and that he believed, wrongly, that it was because I wished the outcome had been different.

  I ASSUMED THAT Richard had gone for a swim. It was not the first time that he had been driven out of the warmth of our bed to the coldness of the sea, as if by unnamed demons he could only seem to banish with an early morning dunking in the waves. I had tried not to dwell on what it was that he seemed to need to wash away after he had lain with me, what he needed to cool, to exorcise, but this time I knew all too well, and this time it did not seem to have worked. Previously he had always returned before I was even dressed, but now it was mid-morning and still he was not back.

  I took Mary to fly her kite on the moor, anything to be out of that house, where my eyes constantly drifted to the panel by the fireplace in the great hall.

  “Higher,” Mary kept begging. “Higher.” And I reeled the kite out further, shielding my eyes to watch it soar into the infinite blue as still it tugged and tugged against its tether to be free. Then the wind suddenly dropped and it plummeted to the ground, landed with a crash that I felt in my very bones.

  Mary ran with it and threw it into the sky, but it was not quite windy enough to get it properly airborne again. I suggested to the children that we ride out to Ladye Bay, but I did not find Richard there as once I had done. I sat on the cliff top and watched Mary and Forest down on the beach, skimming flat pebbles across the waves. Gulls screamed, the sound harsh and desolate, and I felt a first prickle of fear. What if, in his anger, Richard had swum out too far, had not been as alert as he should have been to the currents and the undertow? I tried not to think of how he could have been dragged out to sea, his body hurled against the rocks.

  I tried not to think of the treason trials that were already under way, but now that I myself was amongst the guilty, all that I had read in the gazettes over the past weeks seemed suddenly very vivid.

  The trials had begun in earnest at Dorchester, where three hundred and forty were brought to court accused of rebellion. They were pipe makers and yeomen, tailors and butchers and merchants, ordinary men who’d had no real craving for another revolution. To serve as the most awful warning to all would-be rebels, many of the condemned were to be taken down from the gallows before they were quite dead, to have their entrails drawn out of them and their bodies butchered. And so that none would miss out on the spectacle, these most gruesome of executions were taking place at crossroads and marketplaces and village greens all across the West Country. Heads and limbs were being boiled in salt and tarred for preservation and public display. The streets of Somersetshire were running with blood again, and it seemed to me that even here the very air reeked of decomposing corpses.

  The danger of discovery seemed greater now that the Assizes had come closer, to Wells. Of the five hundred and forty arraigned, five hundred and eighteen were accused of levying war against the King. The fortunate ones were sentenced to transportation to the plantations of Barbados and Jamaica. A hundred were to be hanged, as widely as possible, in Wells and in Bath. And at Bristol.

  My eye was caught by a tawny and black butterfly, and my mind latched on to it, my time-honored salvation from sorrow and distress. The wing patterns were subtly but crucially different from those on the Marsh Fritillaries that frequented the moor and a Straw May Fritillary that James had once drawn for me. They were redder. This one was more orange and had unusual white-and-black-spotted tips to the forewings. There was another, just the same, just as different from all the Fritillaries I had seen before, on the wing or even on paper. I swiped at it almost angrily and felled it, stowed it away in the pocket I wore fastened round my waist, called down to the children that we were going home.

  I was sitting on the window seat, watching the mist curling off the river, when Richard finally stumbled in, none too steady on his feet.

  “Where have you been?” I asked him.

 
“Bristol,” he offered too readily, his voice slightly slurred. He unbuckled his sword, threw it down with a clatter on the table. “The talk there is all of the treason trials. People are calling them the Bloody Assizes.”

  “Please, Richard. Not now.”

  He came to stand over me. “Where are they, Nell?” he said very low.

  “Who?”

  “You know damn well who. Ned Tucker and Thomas Knight. Do you take me for a fool? That is what you almost told me this morning, isn’t it? You know where they are, don’t you?”

  “No.” The lie had come to my lips of its own volition.

  He said no more, nor did he move. He seemed to be waiting for me to reconsider, for me to say something else. When I did not, he flung the latest copy of the gazette at me, called for Bess to bring him a bath in front of the chamber fire.

  My eyes strayed to the print. Tentatively, I reached out my hand and picked up the newssheet. What I read made me tremble so much I had to rest it out on my lap to finish it.

  Chief Justice Jeffreys and his judges are determined to show no mercy to the harborers of fugitives. Lady Alice Lisle, widow of a man who had sat on the High Court of Justice, was accused of sheltering an escaped rebel, a dissenting minister, who had not even been tried himself. At any sign of sympathy Judge Jeffreys swore and cursed in a language no well-bred man would use at a cockfight, and he decreed that Widow Lisle should receive the only sentence possible for a woman condemned for high treason, that she was to be burned alive. Ladies of high rank tried to intercede and a plea for mercy was made by no less than the Duke of Clarendon, the King’s own brother. On account of the widow’s age, the sentence was commuted from burning to beheading and Lady Lisle was put to death on the scaffold in the marketplace at Winchester. She suffered her fate with serenity and courage.

  After a while, I don’t know how long, I made myself go up to Richard. He had undressed and climbed into the steaming, scented water. He was resting against the linen-draped back of the tub, arms extended along the sides, his eyes shut, dark lashes casting little shadows over his cheeks in the firelight. His black curls framed his pale face, lovely as a seraph’s. I knelt at the side of the tub, leaned over and kissed his closed lids, felt the lashes brush my lips.