“Good day to you, Thomas,” I called across to him. “Welcome back.”
He stared at me as if I was not even worthy of acknowledgment. I walked away and Dickon ambled after me. We had gone less than a yard when a little Blue Wing obligingly fluttered past our noses, and with a leap and a reflex swipe of the net, I had it instantly pinioned, my fingers pressing on its thorax.
Dickon was aghast. “Why do you have to kill them?”
“To catalogue them and map the different variations and species.”
“But it is God’s commandment that we must not kill.”
“We kill cattle and geese, Dickon. God would not want us to starve.”
“We do not eat butterflies,” he pointed out.
“But we do need to learn about them.”
He did not argue, and I could see him mulling on that as we carried on.
I threw my arm to stop him in his tracks when I sighted an unusually wide-banded Marsh Fritillary, feeding on the pale domed flower of a devil’s-bit scabious. I put my fingers to my lips to signal that he keep quiet and stealthily started to creep toward it. I was about to whip out my net again, but this time it was Dickon who held me back, with a restraining hand on my arm. “Don’t, Mama, please.”
He sat on his heels and watched as the little butterfly eagerly unwound its proboscis into the flower and waved its distinctive orange-tipped antennae as it outspread its red-brown and yellow wings.
“See?” he whispered. “It is far more interesting alive than dead.”
I let it go on feeding then flit away, just for the pleasure of seeing my son’s sweet, victorious smile.
I stroked his gold hair. “I’ve never shown you my collection, have I? Butterflies that are set well are just as beautiful as those basking in the sunshine. With their wings outspread, they look as if they could fly away at any moment. You’ll see what I mean. And you’ll see that there is a purpose to killing them, I promise.”
But Dickon was not interested in the dead butterflies, was in fact quite perturbed by them. What interested him instead was why there was one book amongst the butterfly paraphernalia which seemed to have no connection with it whatsoever, though it had perhaps more importance to it than any other. The King James Bible. I told Dickon what his grandfather had told me, so long ago now, about butterflies being a token, a promise, and in the telling of that story I felt the stirring of excitement that I had experienced when first I heard it. A wellspring of hope.
When Dickon had gone to bed, I sat down beside the Bible, wary almost to touch it, to open its pages after so many years. Eventually I put the candle on the stand and reached out my hand, lifted the great book into my lap. I felt the weight of it, ran my fingers over the worn leather and tooled gold lettering. I turned it on its side and let it fall open where it would. The Gospel of John, chapter eight, verse twelve. The page where I had pressed the first golden butterfly. The light of the candle caught a very faint indentation in the page, the finest sparkling of bright dust.
I let my eyes rest on the words, words that had once been as familiar to me as my own name but which I had let fall silent.
I read them now out loud.
“Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, ‘I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness but have the light of life.’”
I felt a strange peace descend on me, such as I had not felt for a very long time. I heard my father’s voice, so clear he could almost have been sitting right beside me. The only light you need is the light of the Lord.
I went to Dickon’s chamber. Cadbury, the blind hound which he had found wandering, abandoned on Cadbury Camp, was curled up at the foot of the bed and she gave a low growl as she heard me enter. I crouched down next to her, let her sniff my hand and fondled her ears until her tail started to thump against the floor. “Well done, girl. You guard him well.”
I lowered myself onto the edge of the bed, reached over and stroked Dickon’s golden cheek. “You shall be my example,” I whispered to him. “I shall study living butterflies from now on, do you hear me, my little darling? I am going to rear them, instead of killing them.”
I was going to witness the transformation, from worm, to coffin, to butterfly. From birth, to death, to resurrection.
I WOKE as I had woken as a child, eager and full of plans for the day. At sunrise I slid out of Richard’s arms and out of bed, pulled on a simple morning gown, unfastened my hair from its plait and tied it in a knot at the back of my head. I went down to the kitchen for a widemouthed glass jar and was out on the moor before even the eelers were about to check their wicker traps. Only the marsh birds were awake, twittering and singing away as if they shared my anticipation, a perfect accompaniment to a glorious morning, heralding what would be another hot day. For now, it was neither too hot nor too cool, though the ground was still damp with dew, as I discovered when I got down on my hands and knees and started crawling around in the undergrowth. I paid no heed to the dark wet patches that stained my skirt, nor to the nettles which stung and scratched my hands nor the twigs that caught in my hair. I carried on regardless, even when Thomas Knight, John Hort and the fishermen did come to take up their positions, even when I felt them watching me censoriously. What did it matter if they disapproved? What could they do?
The first worm I found had a brownish-olive body, covered with long white hairs. Hiding under the scabious, I discovered two tiny pale yellow larvae. My search of the nettles revealed a larger worm, greenish ocher in color, with a black head. Satisfied for now, I stood and smoothed my hand over my head and tucked a stray strand of hair behind my ears, smiling to see the scandalized stares of the fishermen, with their early morning catch still twitching on the riverbank beside them. “I bid you good morning, gentlemen,” I said, as if greeting the Earl of Bristol in the parlor, but bending instead to pluck another few nettle leaves to add to my supply. I giggled to myself at the picture I made. Chin held high, swishing serenely through the grass in my damp-stained gown, with my jar of wriggling worms held carefully in both hands like a goblet of finest wine.
I went directly to the dovecote, a lime-coated corner which I had decided to appropriate for my butterfly birthing room. It was sheltered and warm and, with the rows of separate openings for the birds, always well ventilated.
Over the course of the next day and night, I tended my quadruplet worms as devotedly as I had tended my four babies. It was a similar toil and done with similar willingness. I brought them fresh leaves, cleaned out their droppings, fretted over whether they were too cold or too warm, were sleeping too much or not enough, were having enough to eat. I kept a record of it all, but I had to record that, one by one, all the worms died.
I threw them out and swilled the jar clean in the horse trough. A good proportion must perish in the wild. I just needed a greater quantity to guarantee success.
Ellen and Dickon were keen to help me, and Dickon also recruited Annie Sherburne, one of the tenant farmers’ daughters, who sometimes went to feed the ducks with him. She was a tall girl with flyaway soft brown hair and the doleful eyes of a puppy. She wore a woolen dress that was thin with age and several inches too short, but which still hung off her skinny frame.
Annie proved herself a diligent little helper, young and naive enough in the ways of the world not to be too perturbed when I took her out into the fields and beat at bushes with a long stick, when I gave her a linen sheet and instructed her and Dickon to hold it spread out beneath the bushes to collect the worms dislodged from the branches by my thrashing.
“Will you sell them at market?” she asked, as I crouched down to scoop a score of them into ajar.
I managed to keep my face straight at this natural question from a farmer’s girl, for whom every crop had a market value. Why would caterpillars be any different from apples or eggs or pike, gathered in to be sold for profit? “No, Annie,” I told her kindly. “Nobody would want them.”
“Why d’you want ’em, then?”
“How valuable, exactly?” She leaned on the beating stick, her little face very serious. “I told my brother Tim what I do for you, and he has been collecting worms too,” she explained. “How much would you give him for ’em?”
“Well now, how about twopence a dozen?” I suggested. “Would he accept that as a fair price, do you think?”
She nodded vigorously.
“Good. You tell him to bring me however many he can find.”
“We need every penny we can get,” Annie said, “with the bad harvests we’ve had these past two years and bread so costly. Ma says we’ll soon have to choose whether to eat or have a roof over our heads, especially with two extra mouths to feed now.” She clamped her little hand over her own mouth as if to push back the words.
“What extra mouths, Annie?”
She shook her head, much afraid.
“You can tell me. I promise I shall not be angry.”
“My cousin and her baby,” she murmured. “She was thrown out of her parish when they found out she was with child. I know it is forbidden, but she had nowhere to go so we took her in.”
“I should hope you did. And did she have a little boy or a girl?”
“Boy.” She smiled. “He is called Harry.”
“It must be very cramped in your cottage,” I said. “With all your sisters and brothers and grandmother.”
“There’s ten of us now, Ma’am. It’ll be a squeeze come winter, when it floods downstairs and we all have to live in the one room up top.”
“Tell your mother not to worry about the rent,” I said. “She can pay half, or whatever she can afford. And tell your cousin that she can have the cottage along the lane from yours, for a penny. It has been empty for I don’t know how long.”
Annie’s eyes were round with surprise and wonder. “They’ll never believe me.” She looked like she didn’t believe her luck either.
“And how would you like to be my apprentice, Annie?”
“Oh, but my father can’t pay you for an apprenticeship.”
“Why should he pay, when it is you who is doing me the service? No, it is I who will pay you, Annie. A good wage. Here.” I put my hand in my pocket, took out a coin for her. I had spent too long squandering money on things that I was now coming to realize mattered not at all. “You tell your brother to bring those worms. I might even give him sixpence if they are good ones.”
RICHARD HAD RIDDEN OUT to the village, collecting rents with the steward, and as usual they had ended up in the inn, but when he waylaid me on my way back from the pantry, where I had gone for a fresh collecting jar, I saw that it had not put him in a very good humor. He caught me in his arms in a gentle enough embrace that nevertheless held me fast. “What are you doing, Nell?” he asked probingly.
“Something that I love,” I said. “I had forgotten how much. Please do not try to stop me.”
“Could I stop you?” he challenged. “If I asked you to give it up, would you do it?”
I reached back and put my hands over each of his, slowly but deliberately pushing them down and away from me. “Would you be asking, or would you be ordering?”
“Would it make a difference?”
I shook my head. “In this instance, I think not.”
“I am your husband. You vowed to obey me. You are commanded by God to obey my orders.”
I stiffened. “So, are you ordering me, Richard?”
“God knows I should do,” he said. “For the sake of local harmony, if nothing else. You need to know that Jack and Margaret Sherburne are none too comfortable about their Annie spending so much time with you, even if you do pay her for it. Her father is swayed by the wages and your rash offer of reduced rent, but Annie’s mother does not want her here, not even with those extraordinary carrots dangled before her. I take it you have a plan as to how we meet our debts, by the way, if you reduce rents to a peppercorn on a whim? Perhaps in future you’d at least do me the courtesy of informing me of your decisions, even if you see no need to discuss them.”
“I’m sorry. I should have talked to you.”
“Why should you?” he said acerbically. “It is your right to do as you wish. After all, it is your estate.”
“God in Heaven, Richard, just for once can we not come back to that? I wonder that you ever agreed to marry me, when you knew you could not have Tickenham Court as well, or were you counting on the fact that I loved you enough for the settlement to make little difference? I have never denied you money, never denied you anything, have I? So why can you never let it rest?”
He was staring at me very oddly and I feared I had gone too far, but I could not seem to stop. “Is that why you favor Forest over your own son? Because he is my heir?”
I saw the warning flash in his blue eyes, like lightning in a summer sky, swift and searing, a charge of angry power that suddenly made me almost afraid of him.
“Forgive me. I should not have said that.”
“By all means.” His tone was very cold. “It makes no difference whether you say it or not. If it is what you think.”
“I don’t think. I wasn’t thinking. I am just angry. Why do the Sherburnes not want Annie to work with me, for God’s sake?”
“They are not the only ones who think the girl should not be doing what you’ve had her doing,” he said flatly.
“Collecting caterpillars and assisting with their care? What the devil is so wrong with that?”
“Have you even paused to wonder why Mistress Keene has lost her help in the kitchen and since yesterday there is no longer anyone to work in the brew house?”
Admittedly I had been rather preoccupied of late, but the issue with the kitchenmaid I did know about. “Alice Walker was needed at the mill, wasn’t she?”
“Only because her brothers didn’t want her near this house. They have heard tales,” Richard said. “They have all heard tales.”
“What kind of tales?”
“That you seek out caterpillars and keep their coffins, waiting for the worms to grow wings. They say only a witch would be concerned with such things. They say it is evil.”
I felt my spine tingle at the use of those words. “I had hoped it was godly.”
“Shape-shifting, Nell? Use the brain God gave you! They see it as unholy, akin to attempting to breed a werewolf.”
That was not quite so preposterous as it might sound, since metamorphosis had been put forward as proof that werewolves could exist, just as it had been used to argue that alchemy was a possibility. “This is tavern talk,” I said angrily. “Vicious tattle. Malicious gossip. It is Thomas Knight’s doing. He’s not been back a month and already he’s causing trouble for me. It is he who has been stirring them all up, isn’t it?”
“Whipping them up, more like, but then you have made it so damnably easy for him.”
“Why can’t he leave me alone?” I exploded. “Why can’t they all leave me alone? I harm no one.”
“Except for yourself. Except for your reputation. And mine.”
“You did tell them it is all nonsense?” I studied his face. “You didn’t, did you? You did not speak up in defense of me at all. For pity’s sake, Richard. Why not?”
“I saw nothing to be gained from having them think that both of us are cracked.”
Tears pricked my eyes. I could bear being talked about, gossiped about, so long as I had his support. If he even half believed them, sided with them against me, I did not know what I would do. “I am cracked?” I raged. “Is that really what you think of me?”
“What I think,” he stormed. “What I think is that you have been writing to him again, haven’t you? That is what has got you started on all this again, isn’t it? You have been writing to that damned quack apothecary.”
“His name is James. And he is no quack. I have not written to him for years, but rest assured, I shall,” I shoute
d vengefully. “Oh, I shall. Just as soon as I have something to tell him.”
Richard snatched the glass jar out of my hand and hurled it against the wall, where it shattered into shards like splinters of ice.
We stood, eyes flashing, chests heaving. Out of habit, I smoothed the loose tendrils of hair off my face, and at that familiar gesture of mine I saw the anger in his eyes change into passion of a different kind. I knew that this argument would end the way most arguments between us usually did, with lovemaking, and I wanted that as much as I knew Richard did. Having him inside me was the only way I ever felt close to him anymore, though even then it never seemed close enough.
He stepped nearer to me, pushed me back against the wall, his body pressing against mine. I matched his hard, angry kisses with hard and angry kisses of my own, kisses that had in them more despair than desire. I hooked one leg up around his thigh, my arm around his shoulder and my hand in his hair, to bring him nearer. His fingers were working at the fastenings of my gown, but it was taking too long, for both of us.
I put my lips to his ear. “Rip it,” I whispered. “I want you to rip it.”
I turned round to face the wall, flattened myself against the stone and swept up my hair with my arm, so he could get more easily at the row of tiny buttons down my back. I felt him give a sharp, swift tug which sent them scattering like hailstones.
He stripped the gown off me and slammed into me, took me quickly and passionately up against the wall, but though the pleasure was intense, I could tell he was left as strangely dissatisfied as I.
It was no better when we did it again in bed, more slowly and lingeringly. There was something missing, always something in the way, standing between us and keeping us apart. What?
As I lay in his arms afterward, my thoughts returned to the local unrest, then ran off, as they were wont to do, on a tangent. The window was open and a faint breeze blew in, scented with river water and new-scythed grass. I drew little circles with my finger in the hairs on Richard’s chest.
The Lady of the Butterflies Page 47