The Lady of the Butterflies

by Fiona Mountain

  “How could you, Richard?”

  He seemed unable to answer, to utter a single word. He just went on staring fixedly at me, as if he would climb inside my skull. He wore both dagger and sword at his hip and I held the pistol down at my side, but my fingers instinctively tightened around the trigger. He saw me do it. He saw everything.

  “How could you?” I repeated.

  At last he found his voice, but only to echo what I had asked. “How could you?”

  “What did I do?”

  There was the longest silence. “You did not . . . trust me.”

  This answer was so utterly unexpected, that for a moment it stunned me, so that I did not move when he stepped up to me, did not register what was happening until I saw that he had raised his hand, as if he would strike me again or push me over the cliff. But he did not hit me, he did not push me, he touched my cheek, as if he needed confirmation that I was actually there. “You did not trust me,” he whispered again. “Why did you not trust me, Nell? ‘Love always trusts.’ Is that not what Paul said to the Corinthians? But you did not trust. You have always been so ready to think the very worst of me.”

  I wanted to deny it. Could not.

  “You never could hide your thoughts from me and it was always there, on your face and in your eyes. Mistrust. I pretended not to see it, learned to ignore it, hoping it would go away. But every time I saw it, every time you turned away from me, it was like a dagger piercing my side, twisting. When I saw the horror and fear in your face after I carried you in from the rain, and when I read that book Petiver had sent to you about Jesuits’ Powder, I knew that you believed I had willingly brought about Edmund’s death, that I was capable of murder. You believed me wicked enough to have killed my friend. They said you were mad and I wanted to believe them. I had to believe them, do you see? I accused you of madness, I wanted to hear everyone accuse you of madness in the most powerful terms. I wanted them all to sign their name to declarations against you. I needed to convince myself that you knew not what you did, that you had lost your wits. How else could I bear it?”

  He spoke very quietly, very calmly. His words carried neither reproach nor recrimination, but were all the harder to hear for that and there was in his voice and his eyes a mesmerizing quality which meant I could not look away, could barely blink. Could only stare at him with mounting horror.

  “From what James Petiver has told me, I take it you now know that it was Jesuits’ Powder I brought back from London. But you still suspected me, didn’t you? You thought I purposefully gave you the wrong information about how to administer it? I did not. Nor was I negligent or careless with the instructions, Nell. I never had any. You forget that there was so much fear surrounding the powder then. I was served by an apprentice who wanted to rush me out of the shop faster than you could say Hail Mary. He did not trouble to mention dosage, and when you asked me, I did not have the heart to tell you that I had no idea. I could not bear to disappoint you. I so wanted to prove myself worthy of the trust you had placed in me, that I had seen blazing in your eyes when I left for London, that I had seen so very seldom. And never saw again.”

  Tears stung my eyes. I could not shape a single thought, nor shape my mouth to speak. I was aware only of sensations of the most agonizing pain.

  “I rode without rest,” he said. “I was so tired, it was as if I was drunk, and I spoke without thinking, did not believe it mattered so much anyway. Prescriptions are usually so arbitrary, aren’t they? One physician tells you one dose and another tells you quite different. I made the most terrible, terrible mistake and it is that which has haunted me ever since, that which has given me nightmares. You did see guilt in my eyes, oh yes, every time I lay with you and felt a moment’s happiness in your arms. I suffered the most insufferable guilt, but I loved you so much I’d rather have suffered it a million times over than be without you. You chose to believe I was guilty of murder, not of a mistake. You say you loved me, but that is not love, is it? You loved only despite your better judgment. You never for a moment loved me unreservedly. And I needed that, Nell. It was all I ever wanted.”

  “Richard, I . . .”

  But he was not ready to let me speak. “Every time we argued about the marriage settlement, I saw doubt and mistrust in your eyes. Every time. That is why I kept raising it. I hoped your reaction would change, but even after a decade of being married to me, you still half took me for a fortune hunter. That should not have mattered to me so much, when so many marriages are founded on fortune hunting, but it did matter to me. Why did it not occur to you that I resisted that settlement from the start, that it always hurt me, only because I needed some proof, something to hold on to, something to show me that you loved me above all else. I know you did it for Edmund’s children, but I could not help but think that you loved the land and that house more than you loved me. That you loved Edmund more than you loved me. It seemed to me that you gave everything to him so readily, your estate, all of your trust. I wanted you to give to me what you had given to him. There is nothing I would not have done for you, nothing I would not have given to you. I would have died for you, Nell. That is how you know if you love a person, I think. If you would give your life for them. I would have given my life for you. But you gave me so little.

  “The only time I laid a hand on you, you thought I had finally revealed myself as the ruthless villain you had always half suspected me to be. But I had read your treasured letters from James Petiver, and I saw, even if you did not, that he loved you, that for years he had loved you. He shared a passion for butterflies with you, the mainstay of your life, and it was as if you spoke to each other a different language, a language I could not understand; you entered a world with him in which I had no place. If you had trusted me and loved me as I wanted you to, that would not have mattered. But you did not trust me and so I could not trust you. I doubted your love for me and so his presence in your life, your affection for him and his for you, was a torture to me. I hated James Petiver, I hated him, because he loved you and because it was he who sent you that book, the book that damned me in your eyes.”

  I watched, appalled, as a single tear slid down his face. He wiped it away impatiently with his sleeve like a child and went on. “I thought that in some way I could atone for what I had done to Edmund, by being a good father to his son. That is why I worked so hard at winning Forest’s trust. Because I wanted to be a father to him, since he had no other. But even that disturbed you, didn’t it? You distrusted my motives.”

  “Why did you not say something?” I cried. “Why did you keep all this to yourself ?”

  “What could I say? What would it have changed?” His face was wet with tears now and he let them fall, unchecked. “Half of the time I did not even know how I felt. It is astonishing, the capacity we have for denial, to practice deception upon ourselves, to block out a truth that is too painful to bear.”

  I moved closer to him and he did not move away. He let me put my arms around him and his own arms went around my back, his fingers clutching at me. He turned his face into my neck and I felt the wetness of his tears and the scratch of stubble against my skin.

  I stroked his tangled windblown curls and he made a sound, half moan, half whimper, and his shoulders shuddered.

  “Hush,” I said, holding him tighter, kissing him and sobbing into his hair. “Hush.”

  I did not need a court to judge me. This felt like my own day of judgment. I had thought myself so enlightened. And it was as if only now had a mirror been held up to my own face, and I saw that I had been as blind as Dickon’s hound, as blind as Edmund when he died.

  It was not only Edmund who had been poisoned, it was me, and it was a far more dangerous, invidious poison I had taken than Jesuits’ Powder.

  Oh, yes, I had been so bent on questioning my father’s every belief: in eternal life, in metamorphosis, resistance to land reclamation, hatred of Papists; but I had clung in the pit of my being to his most ardent contempt for the men who had be
en his enemies in the civil wars, the men he believed to be untrustworthy, depraved and dissolute, morally corrupt. The things he hated and feared most, because my mother had broken her most sacred vows to him and committed adultery with a sedge-cutter. So deep had mistrust been rooted within me that I never had entirely overcome it. Reserve judgment until the truth is compelling, wasn’t that what John Ray had once said? Yet that is not what I had done.

  There was a certain justice in my current predicament, I realized. Thomas Knight had used as his weapon against me the prejudice against women who did not behave as was expected of them. But I was guilty of a far worse prejudice against my own husband. I had been reared on hatred and I had allowed the vestiges of that hatred to taint my judgment of the man I loved, who had so loved me.

  He drew away. “When you left me I went to get drunk in Bristol,” he said. “I have no recollection of it. I do not know how long I was there, or how much I drank, or how I ended up in her bed.”

  “You don’t need to explain any more.”

  “She told me she wanted to be my wife, to have my baby. She wants our baby to inherit Elmsett, as if I had never had another wife, as if you had never been. And I wanted that too, Nell, I wanted it. I wanted to obliterate you. I did not care what she did,” he finished. “I was beyond caring, about anything.”

  “And you hated me,” I said softly. “You wanted vengeance, you wanted to hurt me, as I had hurt you. You wanted to betray me, as I had betrayed you.”

  He did not answer, did not need to. That is the danger of loving too deeply. The capacity to hate just as deeply is always there. The light and the dark.

  “Can you ever forgive me?”

  “I love you,” he said simply, starkly. “I can forgive you anything.”

  “I love you too,” I sobbed, stroking his face. “I never stopped loving you. You need to know that. Even when I feared what you had done, what you would do to me, even when I saw that you hated me. I still loved you.”

  He gave me a little smile and it lacerated me. “Can you forgive me, Nell? I need you to forgive me.”

  “What is there to forgive?” He had taken a manipulative, scheming Jezebel into his bed, but only after I had turned him out of mine. He had taken our son, but only after I had already taken him from his father and placed him in the care of a man who was my lover. He had accused me of madness, and what was it but a kind of madness not to trust the man who had given me so much love? What was it but madness to accuse of the worst possible crime the man whose smile had always lit up my heart with its gentle charm and beauty? “There is nothing to forgive,” I said. “Nothing.”

  But how could we ever even begin to find our way back from here, how ever could we find a way forward? There was too much against us. I did not see how it was possible. And yet how could I go, how could I begin anew, as James had suggested, without the person I loved most in all the world? How could I ever leave him now? How could I go on living without ever seeing that lovely smile, without ever looking into his beautiful eyes? How could I kiss him good-bye and know it was the last kiss?

  How could I stay?

  I let go of him. I turned my back and walked away down the narrow rocky path to the bay. I carried on down the beach, and at the water’s edge I waited for him. The tide was coming in, crashing against the headland, as low gray clouds scudded above us. The encroaching waves hissed on the shingle, like the whispers of conspirators.

  He wrapped his arms around himself, his hands tucked under his armpits.

  “On his deathbed my father warned me to protect Tickenham Court against unscrupulous Cavaliers,” I said. “And it was those words which stayed with me, which shaped the way I saw you, saw everything. And because of that I don’t want Tickenham Court, not any of it. The very thought of it sickens me. I cannot be Eleanor Glanville of Tickenham Court anymore. But there is only one way for me to be free, truly free.” Only now did I hold out the letter.

  When he reached out and took it, I saw that his hand was trembling.

  “If I had known what you have just told me, I might not have written it,” I said. “But I think, in a way, it is as well that I did. I’ve told Dickon to sign the affidavits that say I am mad. Or that he may sign the one that says I am dead. I told him he could not be accused of perjury, whatever he says about me. If he swears that I am dead he will be committing no sin. I shall be dead, dead to this world and gone to a new and better one.” I let my cloak slip to the ground and shrugged off my secondhand woolen dress. I bundled them both up and handed them to Richard. “Put them on the rocks for me. Where they will easily be found, when they come to search for me. It will be all the proof they need. They think I am mad, and this is what the mad do.”

  “But Nell, you can swim,” he said desperately. “I taught you how to swim.”

  “You did.” I smiled. “You taught me well. And Dickon knows it. James too. Nobody else. I am asking you to guard my secret for me, Richard. You wanted me to trust you and I am putting all of my trust in you now.” I put the clothes on the pebbles by his feet. “Will you do this for me? Will you do as I ask?”

  “Do not ask it of me!” He lurched for me and grabbed my hands and somehow we both collapsed on our knees in the lapping water, were pulled down with each other. I sank beside him in the wet sand and took him in my arms, held him tight and we clutched at each other, rocking together to the rocking of the waves.

  “Please, Nell, I beg you. Don’t go. Stay with me.”

  He stroked my face, kissed it as I kissed his, both wet with tears.

  “I have to go,” I wept. “I have to.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know yet. I shall only know it when I find it.”

  “I will come to you,” he said. “Let me come. Wherever it is.”

  “You need a home,” I said gently. “You cannot go back to wandering. Whereas I . . . I think I need to wander.”

  “Then so do I. All the years I was in exile, I dreamed of coming home. I thought that home was a manor house, surrounded by water meadows and filled with beautiful things that I would never have to lose or leave. But Elmsett is not home. Tickenham Court is not home. You are home for me, Nell. Only you. Wherever you are is where I want to be. I told you once I’d love you if you had nothing to give me but your heart. I swear I will ask nothing from you but that. There would be no secrets between us now, nothing that we cannot share. Believe me, trust me, as you have never trusted me before. Send for me and I will come. Wherever it is that you are going.”

  I did not tell him that it could not be. I gifted him hope. I gifted it to myself. For is not hope the most precious gift there is?

  Virginia: Summer

  1700

  FIVE YEARS LATER

  To, James, we go on with our letters, just as we began. This is a new beginning for me, in a new world. It has taken me many months and much hardship and subterfuge to reach it, but now I am here. In God’s own country.

  My clothes were found on the rocks where Richard left them, and he and Dickon and you are the only ones who knew I exchanged them for the shirt and breeches you had left for me, with your uncanny foresight, even before I came back to Tickenham. With the moonlight making a silver path on the black sea just like the gold path the sun had made earlier, I walked as a lad to Bristol and found David Krieg and, with him, later boarded the ship bound for America.

  It was such a typically thoughtful suggestion of yours that the little orange and black butterfly be named the Glanville Fritillary. I like to think that Richard’s name will live on too, that he and I are bound together for all time, that we shall soar forever together on those lovely bright wings.

  It is only love that prevails in the end, and there are so many different kinds of love, aren’t there? And one of the most precious of all must be a mother’s love, of which Richard was deprived, a love that is unconditional and eternally forgiving.

  I can forgive Forest entirely for what he has done. Of course I forgive him. There i
s surely nothing a child could do to a mother that she could not find it in her heart to utterly forgive.

  I always knew that my will would never stand and that he would use my alleged madness to try to have it overthrown. I knew that the girls would take direction from their older brother, would be swayed by him, as they always were. I wanted them all to be free, as I am now free, but they were, of course, perfectly free to choose differently. And if Forest had accepted my last wishes, there would not have been the grand spectacle of the court case. How I should have liked to be there to see that for myself!

  All those affidavits presented against me, signed by the people of Tickenham, accusing me of committing the very great sin of beating bushes with sticks for worms, wandering the moors at dawn with my clothing in disarray, and surely the greatest crime of all, having to send out to the inn for ale, because I did not brew my own as a gentlewoman should!

  I am glad I was so vilified. Had I not been, then the great Hans Sloane and John Ray would not have been subpoenaed to come to the Assizes in Exeter, to defend me, to testify that entomology is a sane and sober science, and that I was a great entomologist. It does not matter that even their testimony was not enough to prove my sanity, to prove that it is a valid occupation to observe butterflies. It was enough for me. I was so astonished and so touched to know those gentlemen regarded me so highly. It is just a pity that recognition so often comes only after death.

  I am glad that I saved Thomas Knight’s life, for he has given me mine.

  If I had not been so maligned, I should not be here.

  Awake thou that sleepest and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.