The Lady of the Butterflies

by Fiona Mountain

  “To regulate the temperature, now that it is autumn,” he explained. “Pretend it is summer for as long as possible.”

  “It all looks very scientific.”

  “So it should. We are conducting an experiment after all.”

  “It will work,” I said, my confidence soaring. “I know it.”

  James handed me a trowel. “I thought you’d like to help with the planting and with introducing the little creatures to their new home.”

  I pushed up my sleeves and worked beside him as he took each plant and bedded the roots into the crumbly soil. I watched the firm but gentle pressure of his hands against the soft, dark earth, the hands of a gardener and of a scientist, of an artist and a doctor.

  He sprinkled water from a can and then let me release the worms onto the leaves, while he checked the instruments. “Did you ever master how to use a microscope?” he asked conversationally, as he made a note of the readings.

  I angled my hand to encourage the last worm to wriggle off onto the nettle and shook my head. “You were going to teach me, weren’t you? It is my fault you never had the chance. I never came back to London.”

  “You are here now.”

  I smiled. “And I have distracted you from your work all afternoon. Shouldn’t you get back to the shop?”

  “Probably.”

  “Later, then,” I said.

  “Later,” he echoed, catching hold of my dirty hand as if it was the fragrant, gloved hand of a duchess.

  WHEN I WENT BACK to Hackney, I generally broke in on scenes of such domestic harmony it made me feel superfluous. My daughter, Mary, was either busy with her crayons or with her needle, or reading texts that Mary Burges had set her to learn, while Ellen was regularly to be found balancing a hefty Bible on her lap in a way that would have done her grandfather proud.

  This time, though, Mary was playing the flute and Ellen was dancing around the floor, in wider and wider twirls. When she saw me, she stopped dancing and rushed into my arms, hugging me and crying, “Mama, Mama,” and showering me with kisses.

  I kissed her back and then turned to Mary, saw the despondent look in her eyes. “Still no word from your brother?”

  Mary shook her head. “He used to write to me so regularly,” she said. “What if something has happened to him?”

  “We would have heard,” I reassured her, but I utterly failed to reassure myself.

  DICKON WAS in the laboratory, crushing dry leaves with a pestle and mortar. His forearms had grown sinewy and strong from this regular work and his fair curls flopped over his forehead, in just the way that his father’s dark ones did. He looked up, gave me a confident yet very gentle, very lovely, very charming smile. So help me God, his father’s smile.

  I sat down on the bench beside him, tucking my skirts out of his way. “Are you enjoying your work, Dickon? Do you like it here, after all?”

  He paused from his compounding and set his pestle down on the table. “I like it best when Mr. Petiver takes me with him to visit patients and I help him with letting blood and drawing teeth and administering enemas and blisters.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “Strange boy.”

  He grinned. “I like it when we go to the surgeons’ hall to watch a dissection too.”

  “Ugh. This is the person who once flinched from a dead butterfly?”

  “You told me there was nothing wrong with looking at dead things, so long as you can learn from them. I want to learn all about anatomy. I want to be more than a shopkeeper and compounder of herbs,” he said very earnestly. “I have decided that I am going to be a doctor. One who attends the needs of the sick poor, who cannot afford a physician.”

  My heart swelled with pride, but at the same time I was fearful for him.

  “Then you will be at the forefront of open warfare,” I said lightly. “A bitter conflict that goes back to before even the civil war, when the apothecaries declared for Parliament and the physicians were for the King.” I did not want to discourage him, but neither could I bear to think of him disillusioned, his ambitions frustrated. I knew a little of what that felt like. “You know that apothecaries who prescribe medicines independently of a physician or give separate advice or treatment still risk prosecution?”

  “Of course I know that, Mama,” he said, as patient and kindly condescending as if our roles were reversed and I was the child and he the parent. “I know very well that the Society of Physicians have the right to march into this shop anytime they like and destroy any substances of which they do not approve.”

  I nodded. “Fair enough. What does James say? Mr. Petiver, I mean. Have you talked to him about this?”

  “He says I am like you, because I am determined to go my own way.”

  I laughed. “Well, I hope you are more successful at it than I have been.”

  “Mr. Petiver says that you are very respected. Mr. Petiver says,” he began again, “that the physicians’ monopoly on medical practice cannot last forever. He says that the physicians are only too happy for us to attend emergencies at night when they don’t want to be disturbed, just as they all fled and left the apothecaries to treat the victims of the plague. Mr. Petiver says the poor already regard us as their doctors, they respect our seven years of training. It is only right that we should be allowed to attend them.”

  “I cannot argue with you.” I smiled. “Or with Mr. Petiver.”

  “I met two young physicians at the coffeehouse yesterday,” Dickon went on eagerly. “John Radcliffe and Richard Mead. Dr. Mead has a plan to start a practice of coffeehouse consultations that could set us up as general medical practitioners and pave the way for us to be given a legal right to practice. It could change medical practice in this country forever.”

  I looked at his soft blue eyes, so alight with hope, with ambition and plans, and I knew then that I had done right in bringing him here. James’s kindness and enthusiasm were evident in every word Dickon spoke.

  I could picture Dickon returning to Somersetshire after his training, a learned professional, surrounded by dogs and cats and several swans and ducks, respected in his village as a general medical practitioner, an alternative to quacks and surgeons like Dr. Duckett, the first person to whom ordinary families turned when they were sick and in need.

  “You were right, Mama. James Petiver is a good man. I can see why you care for him so much.”

  I don’t know which of our faces flushed the brightest. “Listen to me, Dickon,” I said. “James and I have been friends for a very long time. I love him as I would love a brother. I may not be with your father now, but you must understand that I am still his wife. I love him more than I have ever loved any man. I have never been faithless or untrue to him.”

  Dickon’s boyish jaw had stiffened. “James Petiver is more a father to me than Richard Glanville will ever be,” he said, his voice breaking with emotion. “He is kind and good and he guides and teaches like a father should. It is him I want to emulate. My father is a cruel man. I know he hit you. I despise him.” Dickon looked suddenly shy. “Mama, James Petiver is like a father to me. And anyone could see that he loves you and cares for you like a husband should love and care for you, like you deserve to be loved and cared for.”

  I was taken aback. “I don’t know about that.”

  “Well, I do.”

  I HAD STUDIED NATURE all my life, but the sheer ingenuity of creation never failed to surprise and amaze me. I had never been more surprised or amazed than I was when I visited the nettle pot in the herbarium with James and found that the worms had turned architects and builders and constructed a neat little tent out of leaves at the base of the plant. They had bound the leaves tidily together with silk and were inside it, happily wriggling and munching away.

  “Well, that certainly didn’t happen last time,” I said.

  “Different species,” James concluded. “Butterflies are creatures of great diversity, as we know.”

  The tent structure grew, as the worms grew and shed their skins. T
hey cut through stems and pulled the whole shoot over to extend their home. And then half a dozen of them spun themselves little coffins, which hung suspended on small hooks and pads of silk, inside the shelter. We had to peer inside very carefully, so as not to disturb them. The coffins, too, were quite different from the ones I had seen before, grayish and shot with shimmering gold.

  “I feel I’ve witnessed a small miracle already,” I said. “Even if they do not turn into butterflies.”

  “They will,” James replied. “I am sure of it.”

  I was convinced by his quiet assurance, wanted it to happen more for his sake now than for mine. “We should keep a vigil,” I said. “I’ll keep watch and then you take a turn, so we do not miss it.”

  “That sounds a rather lonely way to go about it.” He smiled. “D’you think we could perhaps time it so that our watches overlapped now and again?”

  JAMES ASKED ME if I would like to go with him to visit John Ray and I said that nothing would please me more. I helped him fill a saddlebag with as many carefully wrapped specimen trays as would safely fit. Then, wrapped in cloaks against the autumnal breeze, we set off on horseback for the hamlet of Black Notley, near Braintree in Essex, where John Ray had grown up, the son of a blacksmith, and where he still lived in a small Tudor timber-framed house called Dewlands. It stood on a knoll and had dormer windows that looked out over a stream, the smithy and a small cluster of cottages.

  We were welcomed by John Ray’s wife, Margaret, twenty years his junior and a former governess to his friend’s family, who showed us into a parlor that was built around a great chimney and crowded with books, collections and four small, noisy little girls with lace caps on their heads. Margaret went to fetch her husband from his study over the brew house, and John Ray greeted James with a hug of great affection before turning to me with interest. “Ah, Isaac, my boy,” he said with a gentle humor. “I must say you are suited much better to petticoats than you are to breeches.”

  I let out a ripple of laughter.

  “How long have you known?” James exclaimed.

  “Since you never mentioned your butterfly boy again, but spoke instead, constantly, of your Lady of the Butterflies.”

  “Ah.” James busied himself opening up the portmanteau and handed the trays to John Ray while his girls crowded round to watch.

  Seeing how poor Mr. Ray was obviously racked with pain from the sores on his legs, I helped him shift books off the comfortable but threadbare chairs, so they could all sit down by the crackling fire. All the books were marked with soot from the chimney and ink stains from the children, but their father made no apology for that fact.

  “You have Eleanor to thank for the cataloguing,” James said, as John Ray’s eyes lingered on a tray of blues. “It is all her work.”

  “Excellent work it is too.” He asked his eldest daughter to take the trays to his study and bring back his manuscript.

  “Insects are so numerous and the observation of all kinds of them so difficult, I think I must give the task over to more able and younger persons. But the chapter on Papilos I will endeavor to continue, if I manage to live through the winter.” He handed the sheets over to James. “Please pardon my scribbling. Some days I can scarce manage a pen.”

  Even so, the writing was elegant and flowing, and it pleased me to see that the lists of butterflies were catalogued after the fashion I had adopted, but had descriptions not just of the imagos but of their caterpillars and pupae too. James’s name appeared many times, and I felt a surge of pride to see it, as much as if it was my own name. Butterfly blue. Mr. Petiver found in garden near Enfield. Mr. Petiver thinks it a different sex rather than species.

  Margaret Ray brought wine, and despite his pain, her husband demonstrated his phenomenal memory as he talked about his completed books: on fishes, birds, plants, flowers, the wisdom of God. He spoke fondly of a recent visit by Dr. David Krieg, who had stayed two days and made several exceedingly good drawings. He spoke most lovingly of how, now that his legs had failed him, his four young daughters went out with their nets at dusk, to collect nocturnals to bring to him.

  When it was almost time to go, James presented John with the parcels of sugar and tobacco and a bottle of canary wine we had brought for him. “With my very best wishes,” James said.

  “You are too generous, James. Thank you. But you do not need to bring gifts. You should know that your company and your collections are ample enough.”

  “I’ll take these to Margaret, then,” James said amiably. “She has the common sense to be appreciative.”

  James went off to the kitchen, two of the girls skipping after him.

  “I have a dread of loneliness,” John said to me candidly, scooping one of his daughters up onto his lap, trying not to grimace at the pain it clearly caused him. “I find it hard to understand why any man would choose to live alone. But I gave up urging James to find himself a wife long ago. I knew there was some secret lady who was preventing him from forming any other attachment.”

  I stared at him.

  “Come, you must know, surely?”

  “Sir, are you saying that James . . . ?”

  “That he loves you, my dear, always has, for as long as I’ve had the pleasure of his acquaintance, and I suspect always will.”

  “He has never really given me any indication.”

  “That is not his way, is it? He seeks to make others happy, rather than be happy himself. He is the most selfless man I’ve ever met, doles out friendship and love, and all he asks in return is . . . well, butterflies and beetles.” A wry grin. “You are from Somersetshire, aren’t you? I had the privilege of making a tour of that spectacular county, in the year after the Great Fire, and of hunting out the little white pointed leaves of the water parsnip. I do so regret no longer being able to go out in the field to collect flora and fauna. But James told me in his last letter that you are as interested in breeding butterflies as in collecting them. Tell me, did the hints I passed on prove successful? Have you hatched a pupa yet?”

  “Not quite yet. But it looks promising. Forgive me. I did not know you had a hand in it.”

  “Well, well. I am glad to see that James isn’t always quite so self-effacing. That just once in a while, he is capable of a little ruse, in order to impress a lass.”

  Did he want to impress me? Did he really?

  “You have bred butterflies too, then?” I asked.

  “My chief concern has always been to reinterpret the Christian faith in the light of a sound knowledge of nature. Understanding transformation is a matter of the greatest importance. To study just the imago is to study but half a life. Now, did you come up against the disturbing problem of false metamorphosis, when you hatched a fly instead of a butterfly?”

  “Yes!” I exclaimed. “The first time. That is exactly what happened.”

  “Ah,” he said, turning grave. “It has blighted the hopes of all us breeders at one point or another, but we are still not much closer to knowing quite how, or why. I truly believe we are on the brink of discounting the theory of spontaneous generation, but that is the final prop, still taken by some as proof enough that lice can be created by dirty hair and an old shawl be the originator of a moth, which in my personal opinion is bunkum, used to erroneously diminish God’s power and undermine our faith in Him.”

  “It never undermined your faith, sir?”

  “Have you ever dissected a pupa?”

  “I could never bear to waste one.”

  “It is no waste. The intermediate state between caterpillar and butterfly is a formless broth. Only a divine creator could organize that broth into a new creature. Only a divine creator, and one with an artistic flair, I might add, could design wings of such perfect symmetry and diversity and beauty. We’ll debunk spontaneous generation one of these days. We’ll prove that life comes from God, not matter, if only we have enough young naturalists, like you and James, with a love of insects.”

  Margaret Ray sent us back to London
with fresh bread and homemade cheese, in a parcel twice as large as the ones we had given to her.

  “You see,” James said to me, when we dismounted under an old oak tree to eat our picnic amidst a carpet of gold and crimson leaves. “There is a gentleman who is proof, if ever you or anyone else needed it, that devotion to natural history is a sign of learning and piety, rather than of insanity.”

  “Oh, but our circumstances are so very different, James.” I fingered a piece of bread. “John Ray has published books that more than compensate for the strangeness of what he does. They have brought him respect. I am not respected in Tickenham. Here, in London, when I am with you, with John Ray or Hans Sloane, I am an entomologist, a natural philosopher, an experimenter. But in Somersetshire, I am no different from your collector in Spain, alone with my net and my love of shape-changing insects that are commonly believed to represent the souls of the dead. I am a witch, a madwoman, a sorceress. A necromancer.”

  James held my eyes, as a sudden squall of wind shook the tree and sent a flurry of golden leaves floating down on our heads. “So leave Somersetshire for good,” he said simply.

  I half expected him to finish by suggesting I stay in London, with him, but he did not.

  JAMES HAD BROUGHT BREAD to toast on a fork in the brazier in the herbarium and had skewered the first slice. There was a nip in the dusky air and we had both huddled close to the heat, our toes touching. He leaned forward to put his bread in the fire and I leaned forward too, my elbows on my knees and my chin propped in my hands, to watch the bread slowly browning and crisping. He turned to me in the flickering firelight and our lips were so close we could have kissed, but he made no attempt to kiss me.

  He handed me my toast and I crunched a corner. “How long do we carry on?” It had gone on for days, one week that had stretched into two, now nearly to three.

  “You have had enough already?”