The Lady of the Butterflies

by Fiona Mountain

  An elderly man was sitting on a stone bench beside the moat, a worn blanket over his knees. He was holding a fishing net. The drawbridge was down and I crossed over it, the horse’s hooves making a hollow clop on the damp and rotten planks that sagged alarmingly as we passed over.

  The man looked up. He did not acknowledge me, but lifted the blanket, folded it, rose and came toward me. He had thick hair which would once have been very dark, but was now as silvery as the water in the moat. His eyes had the shape of Richard’s, but were brown, not blue. He must have been in his early sixties, but was tall and still slender, very striking.

  I slid down from the saddle and hooked the bridle over a gatepost. “Mr. Glanville?”

  “That is me,” the man replied.

  “I am Eleanor Glanville, Richard’s wife.”

  “I have been expecting you.”

  “Where is my son Dickon, sir? Have you seen him?”

  “Yes, I have seen him.”

  “Is he well? Is he safe?”

  “I believe so. Please.” He held out his hand to me. “You look very tired. Won’t you come inside and share some supper with me?”

  There was a time when it would have delighted me to be in a place so connected with Richard’s past, and to meet his father. I could not equate him at all with the embittered, uncaring man who had so mercilessly pushed his son to succeed, had thrown him in the lake, to drown or swim. Either Richard had lied to me, as seemed entirely likely, or else time had mellowed him.

  I was shown through to a dilapidated parlor. Despite the dark and heavy decayed furnishings, the faded tapestries that failed to cover the evidence of peeling, badly damp-stained walls, Elmsett Manor was not quite how I had imagined it either, not totally ruined. Only two or three rooms seemed to be habitable, but with sufficient funds to lavish on its restoration, it could be beautiful again.

  We sat at a small worn table and were served with baked trout that Richard’s father ate in the old way, with a spoon, a knife and his fingers.

  “Do you know where they have gone?” I asked him.

  “They headed up the coast. A place called Whitby, in the North Riding of Yorkshire.”

  “Yorkshire? So far away? Why?”

  Richard’s father rested his spoon on the edge of the plate. “None of this is Richard’s doing,” he said. “You must believe that.”

  “I am afraid I find that rather hard.”

  “It was jealousy that drove him to take the boy.”

  “Jealousy?”

  There was a stiffening of the lines of his face, a flicker of anger in his eyes that was strangely familiar to me. “You bound your boy, my son’s boy, as apprentice to your lover.”

  I lowered my eyes, suffered a stab of remorse. It seemed pointless to argue that James and I had become lovers only after Dickon’s apprenticeship had begun.

  “They knew this was the first place you’d come looking for them,” Richard’s father said. “Your boy is refusing to cooperate. They took him to Yorkshire to give them more time to convince him.”

  “Convince him of what? What do they want from him?”

  “Sarah Gideon is the widow of an attorney,” Mr. Glanville explained. “She has a devious, grasping nature and a good knowledge of the law, a formidable mix. They are putting pressure on your son to sign affidavits against you, testifying to your unsuitable way of life, your state of mind, your unhealthy interest in butterflies.”

  “Don’t they have enough against me already?”

  “The boy’s testimony will count for much. He acted as your assistant, I understand.” He picked up his spoon again, put it in his mouth. “I believe they have taken a lodging near the harbor, above an inn.”

  “Why would you tell me that?” I asked, instantly suspicious. “Why help me to find them, when you and I are strangers to one another?”

  “I do not condone this,” he said quietly. “And your son is my grandson.”

  “Then why did you let him go?” I burst out. “Why did you not find a way to help him?”

  He looked at me as if to say that I knew the answer already. A man in his sixties was no match for the unstable, hostile man my husband had become. “I helped your boy every day, in the only way I could. I tried to get pen and ink to him. He wrote a letter to you but Richard discovered it and it seemed to cause him some distress. I am afraid he destroyed it.”

  “Do you know what it said?”

  “Your son said only that you could trust him, and that he trusted you and that he did not believe the many wounding things his father said about you.” He looked down at his plate. “I secretly took him food, even though that woman vowed to have me thrown out of my own home if she discovered one morsel of bread had passed the boy’s lips.”

  I pushed my own plate away in horror. “She means to starve him?”

  “Oh, she threatens much.”

  “What has she threatened?”

  “She has told your lad that if he does not sign the documents, he will starve to death. Or else he will be sold as a slave to plantation owners in the New World. Threats as ludicrous and empty as they are vicious.”

  “But Dickon does not know that,” I shouted. “He will believe her.”

  “Richard would not see harm done . . .”

  “Then why does he not stop her? Why is he doing this? Does he hate me so very much?”

  Mr. Glanville lowered his eyes, did not answer that. “He is not himself,” he said. “He is drinking too much, not sleeping enough.” His father ran his hand over his face. “He has always been rather highly strung. I am afraid I was a very poor father to him. He was a child who desperately needed warmth, affection, a confidant, to be hugged and held. Above all else he needed approval, but I was able to give him none. I had nothing left to give.” His eyes were full of regretful tears. “If ever there was a boy needed a mother’s love,” he said, “it was that little lad.”

  I held up my hand to silence him, stood, walked quickly, distractedly, to the other side of the room. There was a mottled mirror hanging on the wall, and for a moment it was not my face I saw, but Richard’s, as he had looked when I had first fallen in love with him. Youthful, beautiful, troubled. Memories rushed at me. His angelic smile, gentle and uncertain when I held him in my arms, after he fell from his horse, the need and the loneliness I had sensed in him when he had danced with me. The passion and the intensity of that first kiss. I wanted to weep. I felt a dragging in my heart that was like compassion, like love, and a need to protect and comfort that somehow transcended all that was happening now, made it seem completely unreal, almost irrelevant. I suffered a moment of deceptive lucidity, during which I was quite certain that Richard had not murdered Edmund, that somehow I had brought all this upon myself. But the moment passed and reality came back like a blow to my heart.

  I blinked, and his image in the mirror was replaced by my own and I thought how the dilapidated surroundings suited me very well. With violet smudges under my eyes, dirt on my cheeks, my dress filthy and torn and straggles of hair hanging loose and uncombed about my shoulders, I no longer looked like a lady who would live in a fine mansion. I looked like a vagabond, a gypsy who wandered from place to place, who had no belongings and no fixed abode, and I found that I would not mind that at all.

  “I believe Richard has convinced himself this is all for my benefit,” his father was saying. “We were estranged, you see, for so many years. I did not even know he had married, or that I had two grandchildren. And I think he feels guilty for that now, wants to make some kind of recompense. He saw how distraught I was to see this house in ruins when we returned from exile. He knew how important it is to me, to this family, and I think he hoped to find a way to enable me to see it restored before I die.”

  My heart hardened. “He has it in mind to abandon Tickenham Court,” I said. “Doesn’t he? He plans to sell it off to the drainage speculators and use the profit to rebuild Elmsett?”

  It would not matter to Richard if the commoner
s were bent on destruction and vandalism, would not matter if he was loathed and spurned in Tickenham, if he no longer lived there, if he had already taken the money and fled.

  I was not a gypsy. There was somewhere that I belonged. I belonged at Tickenham Court. I was Eleanor Glanville of Tickenham Court. I had sworn to my father that I would protect it from unscrupulous Cavaliers and so far I had made a very sorry job of it, but I would do my best to put it right, just as soon as I had found my son.

  WHIT BY WAS many, many miles away from Elmsett, too many miles, but the route was straightforward at least. All I had to do was go north toward the Fens and the great estuary of The Wash, and then follow the east coastline all the rest of the way.

  I rode first toward Stowmarket and had to cross a tributary of the River Gipping to the south of the town. It was deep and fast-flowing, and Kestrel shied and sidled when I tried to urge her to walk into the water. She would not be persuaded and I had to dismount and lead her in. When the water was up to my waist I climbed back into the saddle and leaned forward, my arms wrapped around her neck as her hooves slipped on the smooth rounded stones on the riverbed and she bucked and stumbled.

  We made it through with no mishap but my skirts were still dripping wet and I was shivering when we reached the market town of Bury St. Edmunds, a place famed for its beautiful situation and wholesome air, with a ruined abbey haunting the town center. The monks had long gone, replaced by gentry and people of fashion, who thronged the fair to buy toys and trinkets. There was a time when I would have loved nothing better than to stop and join them, to browse and to shop. But I had nothing in common with such people anymore. I felt very distant from them now, and I could not have made polite conversation if my life depended upon it.

  Just as dusk was falling, I arrived in Thetford, another market town with another ruined priory and buildings of flint stone. I stopped at the Bell Inn and was served a supper of sprats and given a bed with sheets grimy and infested with lice. I spent the night itching and scratching and continued itching as I rode on again to King’s Lynn, the port on the east bank of the Great Ouse, the vast-mouthed river that carried the outfall of all the waterways which drained the Fens.

  King’s Lynn had a guildhall with a medieval flint-checkered façade, fine medieval merchants’ houses on cobbled lanes, and a new customs house overlooking the medieval harbor and quay, where grain and butter, hides and wool were loaded onto ships bound for the Netherlands. But for all its ancient grandeur, it felt like a town on the margin, a final outpost of civility at the edge of the flat lowland of the Fens and the vast three-sided bay that was The Wash.

  I fed Kestrel a bag of oats and rode out into the wilderness. A bleaker, more inhospitable place I had never seen or dared to imagine. The wildness and vast desolation of The Wash made the marshland of Tickenham seem tame in comparison. It was raining, a cold, windswept rain that poured down from banks of leaden clouds and was carried over the expanses of salt marshes and shifting sandbanks.

  The tide was far out, exposing the ridges of sand and mud and sheets of shallow water cut with deep channels as far as the eye could see. There were dense flocks of wetland birds, oystercatchers and terns, geese and ducks and waders, and their forlorn cries added to the utter desolation and strangeness. A few souls braved the treacherous wastes, hunting for shrimps and cockles, but their presence did not make the place seem any less lonely. So caked were they in mud from head to toe that they scarcely resembled human beings at all.

  The flat lowland was such a quagmire that Kestrel sank up to her shanks, so I had to dismount to urge her on, slipping and sliding from one clump of higher ground to another. Time after time, I went into bog up to my knees. I was accustomed to Somersetshire bog and marsh, but this was different, a sucking, viscous, frightening mud. I hauled myself clear with difficulty. My boots were so heavy and caked that it felt as if I had rocks tied to my feet. I had mud up to the tops of my legs, over my hands and splattered on my face. My skirt and cloak were slick with it and wet from the rain, and my hair was plastered to my head. I grunted with effort and frustration and despair. But not once did I consider turning back.

  I rode on, the rain stinging my face like biting insects, trying not to think that Dickon had been made to travel through this godforsaken place, without a good dinner in his belly to warm him. I could not think that mud might be the least of the dangers facing him.

  I rode on to the rickety bridge across the River Nene, thence to the River Welland, which was shallow enough for me to wash myself. I rode on to the River Witham, and into Lincolnshire.

  I had run out of money, but I parted with a pearl necklace for a straw pallet to sleep on and a bowl of burned porridge, and cold water to wash in. I felt as if I had been traveling forever, and yet I was only halfway there, with over a hundred miles left to go. I woke feeling feverish. My head throbbed and every bone and muscle in my body ached. I hardly knew where I was, or even who I was anymore.

  I held on grimly to the reins with my chapped hands and clung to the image of the boy I was pursuing. I had chased butterflies over fields and ditches and I would follow my son to the ends of the earth, if need be. He would always be my baby, no matter how big he grew. Since the day he was born, every small hurt or minor distress he ever suffered had been as a thorn upon my soul. I would suffer any danger or discomfort, any accusation and slur, any number of locks and chains to know that he was safe. I would willingly trade my life for his, if it came to it.

  The roads and days merged, each new town, each new inn very much like all the rest. All I could do was keep going, one step at a time, one mile at a time, counting down the landmarks. The medieval city of Lincoln, with the castle atop the steep hill, the half-timbered Tudor houses and Gothic bridge and the magnificent cathedral, with its central tower like a finger of stone pointing to Heaven. My way lay in a different direction entirely, north, to Driffield in the Wolds, where there were trout streams to cross, further north still, along a straight Roman road to the fortified town of Malton, with a shallow ford over the Derwent.

  I passed the alum works and saw the Gothic pillars and arches of Whitby Abbey, standing high on the headland, high above the German Ocean with the black North York Moors behind it, and I could not believe I had journeyed so far to come to such a place. A little fishing port with white houses, closely and irregularly built on narrow cobbled streets. A cold, wet, windswept place of slanting sunbeams.

  There were two inns on the harbor side, only one with lodgings above it, more a tavern really, that looked like a smuggler’s den.

  The landlady was a wrinkled old woman who smelled of fish. What teeth she had left were blackened stumps and she spoke in a North Country accent that was almost incomprehensible. Yet she looked at me most disapprovingly, warily even, as if it was I who was to be mistrusted. She kept me outside the door of her apartment, only opened the door partway and peered round it, as she informed me that a man and boy and woman who fit the description I gave her of Dickon and Richard and Sarah Gideon had lodged with her but had left on Monday.

  “What day is it now?” I had lost all track of days and of time.

  “Tuesday.”

  I had come all this way and again I had missed him by just one day. I collapsed at the top of the dingy stairwell and wept with fatigue and despair.

  The woman took pity on me when I sobbed and told her Dickon was my son. She helped me down to the tavern, where she sat me in a corner and had them serve me smoked herrings in cream.

  “They were your boy’s favorite,” she encouraged. “He could gobble up two whole platefuls in one sitting. Surely you can manage a few bites.”

  “He was having enough to eat?” I asked. “He was not too thin?”

  She looked at me as if my concerns were quite pathetic. “Like I say, he was never full up, like all young lads, but he certainly wasn’t starving to death. It’s you who’s too thin, madam, if you don’t mind my saying.”

  I took a bite. The fish melted in my
mouth, was delicious. I had not realized how hungry I was.

  “Did he seem unhappy or frightened in any way?”

  “Cheerful more like.”

  “Cheerful?”

  “For sure. Especially the last night they were here and he stayed up drinking brandy and talking with his father until past midnight.”

  “Did you hear what they talked about?”

  “Some of it.” She helped herself to a swig of ale from my pot. “Doctoring mostly. His father was promising to set him up with his own examination rooms.”

  I should have been relieved that Dickon was not in distress. But it disturbed me to think that he was so easily won over, with what were surely false bribes and promises. I despised myself for being disappointed to hear that he seemed at ease now in his father’s company, that they were companionable, were making plans together. Then it occurred to me that Richard, or Sarah Gideon, or both of them were entirely capable of bribing this woman to feed me this story.

  “Was there no animosity at all between the two of them?” I tested.

  “Only over the papers.”

  “What papers?”

  “Some papers Mr. Glanville seemed keen for the boy to sign. Couldn’t help but notice.” She apologized for her nosiness. “His father pushed them at him that night, before the talk about medicine. The lad pushed them back. Mr. Glanville refolded them and put them back in his pocket, said that they would keep for another day.”

  I should not have doubted him. Dickon was just playing along, still refusing to sign anything, stalling until I came to rescue him, as he knew I would.

  “Do you have any idea where they might be now?” I asked, hoping to God her inquisitiveness extended that far.

  She tapped the side of her nose with her forefinger. “I could make a guess that they are on their way to Newington Green.”