The Lady of the Butterflies

by Fiona Mountain

  If I kept myself well occupied, I managed not to think of Richard, of what he was doing all alone at Tickenham. But at night, it was not so easy. It was so long since I had slept without him, and I missed the comforting sound of his breathing, missed lying in his arms, missed talking to him, missed making love to him, no matter how much I told myself that that was where I had gone wrong. Had my father not warned me that the heart is seldom wise and that a woman’s body is driven by base desires?

  It unnerved me that Richard had made no effort to contact me in all those weeks. If I am honest, it hurt me too, and in my hurt I took his silence as proof, if ever I needed it, that all he had ever wanted was Tickenham Court and that though he might be willing to let me go, he would not relinquish my estate without a fight. I knew that I must go back and fight him for it. But I could not face it, not yet. The girls were so happy being schooled by Mary; Dickon was happy with his books of herbals and anatomy. I did not know if Forest was happy. I had written to him twice in Flanders. Mary had written to him, but there had been no reply, and I did not doubt that he had had word from his stepfather and had taken his side, as he always had.

  Sometimes, when the shop was quiet, or when I was so absorbed that I worked late into the evening, James came up with two pots of warm ale to join me, or brought up a plate of cheese and bread and fruit for us to share, and I showed him particular marvels I had just unearthed.

  “Look,” I said, “this has to be my absolute favorite.”

  “It is very lovely.” James smiled at my delight and looked closer at the exquisite butterfly from Surinam, with iridescent wings of green and gold and a splash of deepest crimson.

  I was so proud of it that it was almost as if I had discovered it in its natural habitat, rather than in the turmoil of a little London parlor. Almost, but not quite.

  “Imagine how dazzling it would be on the wing,” I said. “How I would like to see such a sight.”

  “You’ll have to travel to Surinam, then,” James said pragmatically.

  “Wouldn’t you like to?”

  By way of an answer, he opened a collecting book he had brought up with him, and I gasped at the enormous Jamaican Swallowtail within. The wingspan was awesome, nearly half a foot at least, banded with luminous yellow and black. “In his covering letter, Allen Broderick described how because of its great size, it must hover before flowers while it feeds,” James explained. “Of course I should like to see that for myself, but I am happy enough just to know it exists. I lack the funds to travel and I cannot neglect the shop and my trade for months on end. Besides, I am not nearly adventurous enough. I far prefer to let others better suited to it do the traveling for me.” He closed the book on the Swallowtail, handed me another specimen to file. “I have promised Edmund Bouhn this will be called Bouhn’s Yellow Spotted Carolina butterfly.”

  I laughed. “A very accurate description, since it has yellow spots, was found in Carolina and by a man named Bouhn.”

  It was a strategic description too. I had learned that James was very wily. Promising his collectors the kudos of having specimens named after them, and seeing their names in print, was one way he spurred them on to bring back more. I had found the catalogues he printed in which he listed finds and named donors.

  “I would like to have a butterfly named after me,” I said wistfully. “I would like to be connected for all time with the most beautiful of all creatures. I would feel then that my life had some significance. That would be immortality, of a kind.”

  “Of all the people in all the world to have a butterfly named after them, it should be you,” James said. “You love them more than anyone I have ever met. You even look like one, as graceful and pretty and joyful as a little brimstone.”

  “But I have no wings.” I smiled. “I can never travel, either.” I spoke with a tug of longing that surprised me with its strength. After days spent amongst these exotic dead creatures and meeting in the shop some of the surgeons and captains bound for distant lands, I realized for the first time just how much I had always yearned to see more of the world, ever since I’d studied the names of foreign lands on my father’s globe. “I am a woman of some means, but I am just as hampered as you, since ladies do not travel alone to far-off continents. And what are the chances of me discovering a new species in England? All the butterflies I see have been seen before by one of your friends. Although I did once see a Fritillary, on the cliffs, that I could have sworn had different markings from all the others.”

  “But there are dozens of undiscovered butterflies still flying in English skies,” James said, in his usual tone of optimism and subtle encouragement. “You could be the person to find one of them.” He looked around the now almost tidy parlor. “After all, it can be no more taxing than trying to find anything in this room, and yet you have found just about everything.”

  “I’m not quite finished yet.” I indicated the piles of letters still stacked against the wall. “They should really be filed.”

  He seemed to sense my reluctance to pry into his correspondence. “You are welcome to read them, Eleanor,” he said. “I keep no secrets from you.”

  Autumn

  1695

  Now that I had unearthed the table, James said he had put it to use and had invited Hans Sloane to dine. “I want Hans to meet you, and you him,” he said with a grin. “Properly, I mean, rather than in disguise.”

  “What about John Ray too?” I asked. “Don’t you want to let him have the collections for his book now?”

  “Regrettably John is too old and ill to come to London anymore. His legs pain him so much, he cannot even walk in his own orchard.”

  “Oh.” I could not hide my disappointment, had such fond memories of the kindly, wise old man. “I was looking forward to showing him what I’ve done. I should enjoy being able to talk to him, without worrying whether my voice sounds too high for me to pass as a boy.”

  This time it was Hans Sloane who looked as if he had come in costume. I would never have recognized him if James’s manservant, George, had not announced him, so regal had he become. He had served as physician to the Duke of Albemarle, governor of Jamaica, and was now secretary to the Royal Society, physician to King William and Queen Mary, but he looked like a duke or a king himself, as opulently dressed and stately, with a lustrous periwig and heavily embroidered coat, a widening girth, broad chest and genial, booming voice.

  James introduced us.

  “Ah.” Hans Sloane gave me an ebullient smile and swept a gracious bow. “Petiver’s Lady of the Butterflies. James has told me so much about you, I feel as if we have met already.”

  I restrained a giggle, did not dare look at James. “Likewise, sir.”

  I heard James choke back his own mirth.

  We were joined for dinner by James’s friend Samuel Doody, who was as obsessive about moss and ferns as James was about insects, and by James’s new lodger, Dr. David Krieg, a Saxon physician and artist, who had come to London in the service of various noblemen and who was soon to sail again for America. Also present was Edmund Bouhn, he of Bouhn’s Yellow Spotted Carolina butterfly.

  “I’m too sunburned and wind-beaten now for you to see,” Mr. Bouhn said jocularly. “But beneath this tan, I’m still jaundiced from a bout of yellow fever. I was practically the same color as my butterfly. Though fortunately, I was spared the pox, so I’m not spotted as well as yellow.”

  Mr. Bouhn seemed never to tire of talking about America, and Mr. Sloane never tired of talking of Jamaica and his collection of bright hummingbirds. I was sure I could have listened to their travelers’ tales all day. As they talked, the carriage wheels and the constant clop of hooves on the cobbles outside the parlor window faded away, so that I was transported to a new and shining land.

  “You could explore the Americas all your life and never know half of it,” Mr. Bouhn said, sipping his wine. “It is so wild and so vast and so empty, so full of promise and possibilities. There are wild horses and thousand-acre forest
s full of bears, rivers teeming with fish. The soil is so fertile that the flowers grow waist high, and there are crabs almost as big as turtles. I envy you, Dr. Krieg. I would return there tomorrow.”

  I envied David Krieg too, as I envied all the sea captains and ship’s surgeons who every day staggered into the shop on their sea legs, who made my mouth water for the taste of pineapple and pomegranates, who spoke of giant spotted cats and fish that flew and butterflies with great wings of flashing metallic blue. I could have listened to their travelers’ tales all day.

  “I am very fortunate,” David Krieg said. “But I have Mr. Petiver to thank for the fact I do not have to return to Germany and can travel, safe in the knowledge that my family will want for nothing while I am away.”

  Everyone around the table cast warm appreciative glances at James, and I had the sense that everyone here apart from myself knew exactly what Dr. Krieg meant, but I had no chance to discern more, because the discussion rapidly moved on.

  Hans Sloane cut a piece of the lamb. As he carved, he told us he had just spent a vast sum on the purchase of a new selection of butterflies. “I don’t suppose you’re any more inclined to sell yours to me, James?”

  “No, Hans,” James replied, amiable but firm. “Not for a good while yet, at any rate.”

  “But how am I to found the British Museum if my dearest friend will not even contribute?”

  James poured some more wine. “Is there no end to your quest for legacy?”

  Hans eyed James with a grin. “You should have a mind to your own legacy, my friend. Especially since you show no sign of fathering a dynasty of little Petivers. Or are you content to go down in history as the father of British entomology, the man who made natural science popular?” He drummed his fingers on the table. “Then again, I suppose that is not such a bad epitaph.” He gave an even heavier sigh. “We will all of us be buried with our own dead butterflies, like the ancients were buried with their gold.”

  “I think I’d rather have living ones fluttering in my tomb,” I said.

  “Hmmm. That’s a very pretty image, my dear,” Hans mused. “Almost mystical. Like a fable.”

  “I fear it is a fable that butterflies are birthed from their own little tombs,” I said. “I reared a pupa, and all I got for my efforts were flies. But I imagine even flies deserve a place in the British Museum, sir.”

  “Indeed so,” Hans enthused. “Well said, my dear. Well said.”

  “Why not go the whole way and call your collection the Hans Sloane Museum?” James asked.

  “Too parochial.” Hans stretched back in his chair, patted his tight paunch. “The British Museum would always be the biggest and the best, unsurpassed.”

  James laughed. “You are an arrogant swine, Hans.”

  Hans Sloane had the grace to laugh too. “The cocoa importers called me arrogant when I said their therapeutic drink was not palatable to the Europeans when mixed with honey and pepper, like they take it in the West Indies. But when I suggested they drink it with milk, I was hailed as a veritable genius. Now drinking chocolate is a delicacy as fashionable as coffee.”

  “And you have made your fortune from the commercial production of it in ingenious blocks,” James put in.

  “I made a greater fortune from importing Jesuits’ Powder as a remedy for tertian ague.”

  “What does it look like?” I asked abruptly, urgently. “Jesuits’ Powder, what color is it?”

  “Dark rust red,” Hans said. “Like cinnamon. It is flaky. Very bitter to taste.”

  I gripped my hands, twisted them. “Is there any other substance that resembles it?”

  “Undoubtedly.”

  “Something poisonous?”

  Hans glanced at James. James glanced at Hans. It was James who spoke. “Jesuits’ Powder is highly poisonous, Eleanor,” he said carefully. “Given in high enough doses, it is lethal. Anything above eight drams is dangerous. The Protestants were right to fear it, in a way, though I do not believe for a moment the Catholics ever intended to use it to harm them.”

  “How many drams are there in two spoonfuls?”

  James frowned. “A dozen, maybe more.”

  “What are the symptoms of poisoning?”

  James deferred to Hans. “Ringing in the ears, stomach cramps and vomiting, chaotic pulse, skin rash, blindness, headache.”

  “Death?”

  “In some instances, yes. Not thinking of poisoning anyone, are you, Mistress Glanville?” Hans’s tone was teasing, until he saw my face. “My dear lady. Are you unwell?”

  I put my hand to my cheek, almost as if to remind myself of the way Richard had hit me, the violence with which he had accused me of insanity, the look of absolute and unmistakable guilt that I had seen so clearly in his eyes. It made no difference that he had given me the right medicine but the wrong dosage, did it? It changed nothing.

  “HANS WAS MUCH TAKEN with you,” James said when everyone had gone. “It is no small thing to count as your friend and patron one of the most powerful and esteemed scientists of our day.”

  It was the right thing to say, as he always did find the right thing. He sensed I wanted to talk no more of Jesuits’ Powder now, had always understood me implicitly, had always known what I most needed, even before I knew it myself, and now he made a suggestion. “Would you like to try to birth a butterfly again? I’ll gladly help you.”

  “Oh, James, there is nothing I would like more.”

  He smiled. “We can start just as soon as you finish sorting those letters.”

  “And I was worried that when they were done, I would have no more reason to be here.”

  “You do not need a reason,” he said warmly. “You should know that. But now I have given you one anyway.”

  There was no sign of George coming to clear the table, so I gave up waiting and went to sit on a stool with my back against the wall. I picked the top letter off the largest stack, then the next, checked date and signature, started two new piles.

  James had very many devoted friends. That was very plain from the sheer volume of letters he had amassed. What struck me most was the loyalty and dedication of his correspondents, the warmth with which they addressed him and the considerable efforts and often even more considerable dangers to which they had gone, time after time, to collect specimens for him.

  As I read, I had found a recurring theme. Payment had been made to the English wife of ship’s surgeon Robert Rutherford, and to the wife of Patrick Rattray, shipmaster in Virginia, to whom James had also given free medical advice about the pox. I remembered Dr. Krieg’s comment over dinner, which hinted that he was only free to travel because he was certain his family would want for nothing.

  There was only one explanation. With sublime generosity James had undertaken to offer succor and support to the needy relations his many correspondents and specimen gatherers were forced to leave behind, while they sailed the seas. It made no difference whether the men were in the pay of the British navy or of merchants, James had still made their dependents his responsibility. No wonder he said he could not afford to leave the shop, to go traveling himself.

  It was my own personal experience that James was good and kind, but I had not realized the great extent of his goodness and his kindness, had not realized that I was by no means the primary recipient of it, that others received it in equal or even greater measure. It made me wonder now if I had been wrong, all those years ago, when I had worried that he wanted there to be something more between us. It seemed that I was the very poorest judge of character.

  I did not find my own letters to James amongst the piles, and wondered where they were, what had happened to them.

  When the door opened at last, it startled me. It was only George, but he had not come to clear the table. “Mr. Petiver asks you to join him in the shop immediately,” he said. “He has something he wants to show you.”

  THE SOMETHING James had to show me was a batch of hairy green caterpillars in a chip box.

  “Yo
u’re not the only one who has been busy this afternoon.” He beamed. “I took George with me to Primrose Hill and we have scoured every bed of stinging nettles.”

  “And brought half of them back with you, by the look of it.” I nodded toward the bucket of spiky green plants by his feet. He had collected not just the leaves, as I had done, but dug up entire plants by their roots. While I had been discovering the depth of his kindness, he had been out all afternoon doing the kindest of things for me.

  “I’m sure the key to rearing butterflies must be to re-create an environment that mimics conditions in the wild as closely as possible,” he enthused, holding out his hand to me. “Come and see what I’ve done.”

  I let him lead me out through the garden, to a small stone herbarium at the end of the grass path, which housed a collection of dried plants, some mounted and classified and labeled, and, inevitably, a great many that were not. But because the building was reserved for plants alone, there was an order to it, a certain serenity. There was tree bark stacked like driftwood in one corner, and little dishes of seeds. The plants, like orchids, that could not be pressed without losing their form were suspended in jars of liquid on a shelf that ran all around the room and gave the little building a strangely exotic and dreamlike quality.

  On a table just inside the door James had set up a large breeding cage, inside which was a large earthenware pot filled with soil. Beside it were a brass barometer and a thermometer. On the ground by the table was a charcoal brazier already glowing with coals.