“Do you remember when we celebrated William and Mary coming to the throne, and George Digby said the Bill of Rights would change England forever?”
“Aye, I remember,” Richard said. He turned over on his side so he could see my face. He was accustomed by now to the no doubt puzzling paths my mind sometimes chose to wander and stroked strands of sweaty hair off my face with the flat of his hand, waiting for me to go on.
I propped my head up on my elbow, looked at him. “By removing any chance of having a Papist take the throne, it has dispelled much of the hatred of Catholics, making England a safer place for them, and others too of differing faiths. In that respect England has changed indeed. Yet some things have not changed at all.”
“Where is this leading us, Nell?” Richard asked wearily.
“We may have a queen ruling jointly with her king, but nothing has changed for women like me, has it? Why should I be viewed with suspicion just because I take an interest in the world? Just because I want to do something other than household accounts?”
“I don’t know, Nell.” The light suddenly went out of his eyes. “But you are right that hatred of Catholics is not the only prejudice. There are others,” he added. “There are plenty of others, and they can be just as malign, just as dangerous.” He rolled away from me, onto his back, threw his arm up over his eyes, almost as if he needed to blot out the sight of my face. I had not the faintest idea what he was talking about, or what I had done now to upset him.
BESS USHERED my apprentice’s scrawny little brother into the parlor. He was carrying a dented but perfectly polished copper pan and he stood on the threshold, wary of coming any closer, as if he took me for a witch.
“You have some worms for me?” I said gently, aware that this was not a question to put him much at ease.
He nodded, gulping down his terror.
“May I see them, Tim?”
He shuffled two steps closer and held out the pan with dirty hands that stuck out from frayed shirtsleeves he had long outgrown.
I looked into the pan, where a few miserable-looking maggots were squirming. The wrong kind of worms entirely, but an easy enough mistake to have made.
“Where did you find them?” I asked.
He swallowed hard again, tossed his head to flick the limp brown hair out of his eyes. “In a cowpat, Ma’am.”
I smiled. Only a small boy would go digging in cowpats. “What a good idea,” I said enthusiastically. “I’d never have thought to look there.”
He thrust the pan at me. “Are you going to take ’em?”
“Thank you, Tim. They will do very well.” I emptied the unpleasant contents of the pan into a pot and handed him his sixpence.
He snatched it off me and bolted for the door, almost forgetting to reclaim the pan and hardly daring to come back for it. That was something I marked well. If a small boy was so eager to be away from me that he would forsake the only means by which his mother could cook his dinner, I must be fearsome indeed.
EACH MORNING when I went to the dovecote, there were more curled corpses to remove from the jars, until there was just a spotted one left, barely moving. When I came back next day, I expected it to have gone the way of the rest, thought at first that it had somehow just vanished. But when I looked more closely I saw something hanging from the muslin I had fastened over the top of the jar to prevent any escape.
Dickon was rubbing Cadbury’s belly when I ran to fetch him. The hound sat up and Dickon looped his arm around her neck. She turned her head and licked his face with her great pink tongue, nearly knocking him over.
“Come with me, Dickon,” I said to him. “There’s something I want to show you.”
We looked together at the small, dark, elongated shape, slightly curved, like a tiny ripening fruit, that had anchored itself to the cloth lid with a minute button of silk.
“What is it, Mama?”
“It is a little butterfly coffin. It has to be!”
I sat down at my desk and wrote to James. I asked if he had his own apothecary shop yet, and was he still corresponding with butterfly collectors across the globe. I apologized for breaking off our correspondence, telling him I had married again, had been busy with babies, but that I had collected more butterflies since last I saw him and had cultivated a butterfly garden. And now I had reared a pupa, and it was like a small kernel of hope.
Devoted as a mourner, I took to visiting the little coffin and sitting beside it for long stretches at a time, as the pigeons and doves flapped and cooed around me. I did not know how long it took for a butterfly to emerge but I would not risk missing it. I came half dressed at dusk, and at sunrise, and in the afternoon. I watched and I waited until my limbs grew stiff from sitting so still. Over a matter of days the coffin changed, almost imperceptibly, grew paler, nearly translucent, so that I almost believed I saw the ghost of wings beneath its gossamer casing.
But then, when Annie and Dickon and I went to check on it together, we saw it changed again, blackened, shriveled to an empty shell, one from which the life had not been expelled but had been entirely extinguished. There was to be no newborn butterfly.
“Damn it,” I said quietly.
“Why is it so important to you, Mistress Glanville?” Annie asked.
I looked from Dickon’s nervous eyes into Annie’s hungry ones, looked at her bony little body, tried to explain. “The preachers have been telling us all this century that the end of the world is nigh,” I said. “They have been preaching that the Horsemen of the Apocalypse are nearly upon us. In my short lifetime I have lived through war and plague and fire, and now it seems that if the harvests continue to fail, we are on the brink of a famine.”
Annie nodded gravely. I was telling her nothing she had not already heard from the pulpit a score of times.
“They say the comets that were seen crossing the skies before the war foretold these calamities that have befallen our age.”
She nodded again.
“Well, all I wanted, all I was hoping for, I suppose, was to see a more promising sign for once, something to hold on to in this dark time we live in.”
“A sign?” Annie said. “From a worm, Ma’am?”
“I hoped I would see it become more than a worm.” I smiled weakly.
“That it is, Mama,” Dickon exclaimed. “Look!”
I stepped back in revulsion. The shriveled pupa was disintegrating before our eyes. Something was emerging from it after all. Instead of a butterfly there was a small swarm of tiny nasty pesky flies, like the ones that fed on carrion, as if to prove to me once and for all that nothing glorious ever arose from any coffin, that a tomb was a place only where rotting flesh was devoured and turned to dust.
Old habits die hard. It was still a struggle for me to discount signs and portents as nothing but superstition, hard to believe that what I had just seen meant nothing. That was why, despite instantly recognizing the untidy handwriting on the package which Richard held out to me, had indeed come down to the dovecote especially to give to me, I took it from him with some foreboding, not wanting to open it right away. That it should arrive at just that moment!
“What is it?” Richard asked me suspiciously.
Our recent differences had been set aside, if not exactly resolved, which was the best I could ever hope for. Sometimes I knew why my husband was angry or withdrawn or had fallen into a dark mood, but usually I had no notion. I did know that there was no point in asking him, since he would never talk about it, but that it would pass. All I could do was try not to aggravate the situation by retaliating, try to be patient with him, which was not always easy.
I was glad to see now that he was in good spirits, and did not want to risk spoiling it by having him find out that the parcel was from James Petiver.
“I think it must be a book,” I said, wondering what it was that James had enclosed with his reply to my letter. Well, whatever it was, it could wait.
I set the package aside, took Richard’s arm and walked with
him out onto the sunlit moor. The sky arced above us, a heavenly blue, tufted with wispy clouds that were driven along by the silkiest breeze, rustling in the willows and the long grass.
“Did you ever lie on your back and look for shapes in the clouds?” he asked me.
I smiled. “Doesn’t everyone?”
“I don’t know. Do they?”
“I am sure that everyone who lives under a Somerset sky, or a Fenland one, must.”
We had been walking over an area of grass and sedge, grazed short by the cattle, but he drew me off to the side, into a patch where the grass was still thigh high, and took off his coat and spread it out. He pulled me gently down with him, lay out on his back with his arms behind his head and his legs crossed at the ankles.
I lay next to him and he unfolded one arm for me to pillow my head upon, bent it down and around my shoulder so his hand rested lightly over my breast. We were completely hidden and it was surprisingly comfortable. The ground was soft and spongy, and the air was filled with the scent of crushed grass.
“What do you see, then?” I asked him.
“In truth, not much.” He laughed.
I watched as two white butterflies played in the air above us like living snowflakes.
“Do you know, Cabbage White butterflies have the most extraordinary and elaborate mating ritual,” I told him very softly. “They are the most erotic little creatures on earth.”
He idly stroked my breast with his elegant fingers. “I think you are the most erotic little creature on earth.”
I smiled, nestled closer to him and tilted my head closer so it rested against the side of his. “I have watched them often,” I said. “They chase after each other and flirt for ages, until they alight on the same flower and join their bodies. But the amazing thing is that they stay together like that and carry each other upward into the sky. Sometimes they remain locked together for hours after their coupling, and sometimes they cannot separate at all and they die still joined. They literally die of love.”
Richard lifted himself above me, looked down into my face and gave me a gentle kiss that had in it much of sorrow and regret. Or maybe that is just how I remember it, because of what happened afterward. A kiss of farewell.
It was a glorious pleasure to me to make love outside, to feel fresh air on my thighs, on my breasts, to feel the prickle of the sedges and grass beneath me and the sun on my face as our bodies moved and rocked together, the murmurs and sighs and little moans of lovemaking mingling with the calling of the marsh birds and the distant croak of a frog.
He stayed inside me awhile after he was spent, and then moved over so we lay side by side, still wrapped in each other’s arms.
“There is much to be said for being a white butterfly,” he said, his mouth in my hair and a smile in his voice.
“If I died now,” I told him, “I should die quite happy.”
I stroked his tumbled curls and saw that more clouds had come into the sky, not fluffy white ones for lying and gazing up at, but massing, gray, windblown clouds that scudded much too fast ever to see shapes in. A chill had crept into the air that was almost wintry. The summer was over when it had only just begun. The world was turning back into darkness once more. But when I looked back to that time, afterward, I had a notion that if only I had closed my eyes, the storm clouds would have rushed on over us and eventually have passed us by, and that I could have kept Richard safe in my arms forever. That we could have been like the white butterflies, two souls joined, drifting together on the warm currents of the air for all eternity.
I TOOK JAMES’S PARCEL to the willow tree in the bend in the river, where I had read countless other letters from him. Inky rain clouds had gathered now on the horizon, were advancing toward the moor. With the sun still shining behind and around them, they cast a heavy golden-blue light.
I doubted I would finish the letter before the rain began, given that it was such a very long one, many pages long in fact, as if James had been saving up things to tell me all these years. It was indeed a book he had enclosed with the letter, small and slim-bound, but I set it aside without so much as a glance at the title, suddenly eager only to read what James had written. He began by answering my questions. Yes, he said, he had his own shop, at the sign of the white cross on Aldersgate Street, and it was prospering. His customers included sea captains and ship’s surgeons who still collected specimens for him from all over the world. His friend the botanist John Ray had recently recommended him for Fellowship of the Royal Society, and he had been elected for membership a month ago.
That gave me pause. I knew how much it would mean to James to be welcomed into Fellowship of the foremost scientific society of Europe. He had described for me the great laboratories of Gresham College, where crucibles and furnaces were used to investigate the properties of rocks and minerals and curiosities from distant lands. He described the activities of the Royal Society so well that by the time I reached the last page of his letter, I almost felt I’d met its president, Samuel Pepys, and Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley, had listened with my own ears to the hot debates on classification, as well as to experiments in the more marginal sciences of astronomy, mathematics and physics. I felt almost as if I had witnessed for myself the dawn of science, of a new world. But I had not. When James spoke of a general feeling that England was at the center of a worldwide scientific enterprise of lasting importance, what he really meant was London. Not Somersetshire.
And the little book he had enclosed? He said he had wanted to send it to me years ago, when first it was published, but had not done so because it would have seemed a strange thing to send to me out of the blue. It had been translated from French, he said. The author was Robert Talbor, the feverologist, who, it transpired, had sold the formula for his cure for ague to King Louis of France, on condition it not be made public until after Talbor’s death. James said he remembered the interest I had once shown in Jesuits’ Powder and thought I would be interested, therefore, to learn that it was indeed the secret ingredient in Talbor’s mysterious miracle cure. A strong infusion of it, mixed with six drams of rose leaves and two ounces of lemon juice.
I frowned, no more than puzzled at first. If Jesuits’ Powder was a miracle cure rather than a deadly Papist poison, why had Edmund died?
My brain seemed to be working very slowly and the obvious, natural explanation eluded me, hovering somewhere just out of reach, too grotesquely ugly to face. As realization dawned, the rushing of the river faded away. The sound of the wind in the trees dimmed. In absolute silence, the book slid from my fingers. It seemed to take the longest time to fall, and when it tumbled at last into the grass, the sound of it was like a falling tree, like a breaking heart.
I sank back against the trunk of the willow, slid down it to the ground. Realization was like a wave crashing over my head, dragging me down. I felt ice cold, as if I had been washed away. I felt something twist and tear irrevocably inside me.
If Jesuits’ Powder was a cure and not a poison, then it could not have been Jesuits’ Powder that I had given to Edmund. It could not have been Jesuits’ Powder that Richard had brought back from London and given to me for him.
My heart had turned to lead. It felt too heavy to go on beating. The first raindrop fell on Robert Talbor’s book, then on my hands, my face. The downpour came on quickly, heavily, but I could no more stand up than take flight. I did not think I would ever be able to stand up or walk again. I watched the ink on James’s letter start to blur, the words begin to run. I drew up my legs away from the book, as if it was tainted. I wrapped my arms around my knees, watching the rain pimple the cover. The river began to rush, but there was no break in the clouds. In what seemed like no time at all, dusk had fallen, deepened by the rain that came down now in a slanting torrent and had soaked me to my skin. I did not feel it, did not feel anything, was totally numb, wanted only to stay that way for as long as I could. I dreaded the numbness receding, as it must, giving way to a horror that would be intolerable.
I rested my head against my knees, closed my eyes, wished I could sleep, sleep forever and never wake.
I did not even hear the soft thud of a horse’s hooves on the damp earth. I let Richard pick me up in his arms and put me carefully into the saddle. I watched him pickup the pulpy little book and letter and put them in his pocket. I let him hold me gently all the way back over the moor to the house. He carried me into the great hall and up the stairs to the bedchamber. Bess rushed in and started fussing around me, but it was Richard who unfastened my sodden gown, pulled my wet chemise off over my head as if I was a small child. It was Richard who loosened my hair and gently dried it. I let him wipe my face, rub my arms. I let him wrap a warm blanket over me and I knew that soon, when feeling returned, I should not be able to bear for him to touch me ever again.
“Nell, in Jesus’ name, what is the matter?” he said, sitting down beside me.
I turned my eyes on him dumbly, unable to reply. I wanted only to scream: What have you done? Oh God, Richard. What have you done? Did you kill Edmund? Did you have me murder Edmund?
“It is just a turn, I’m sure,” Bess said. “She’s had too much sun to her head. We’re not used to it, after all the cold.”
Richard looked cold now, and frightened, very frightened. But he would do, wouldn’t he, harboring a guilt such as that for years? No wonder that haunted, guarded look so often came into his eyes. No wonder the black moods, the nightmares, the sleeplessness. No wonder the distance between us.
I watched in a trance as he took off his shirt and untied the laces of his breeches. My eyes were drawn to the thin scar on his left thigh, remnant of an injury he told me he had sustained when, aged eight, he had engaged in swordplay with a particularly vicious Parisian boy two years older than he. He had damaged his shoulder that time he had tried to jump his horse over the River Yeo, and by the end of each day it tended to stiffen, though I knew just where to rub it to make the ache go away. I had kissed that little scar so often, stroked it with my fingers. I knew his body as intimately as I knew my own. It seemed there was not a part of it I did not know, had not caressed and kissed, but had I ever known the soul that resided in that beautiful body at all?
The Lady of the Butterflies Page 48