James, I have awoken and I am bathed in light. I find I am in the most wondrous place. There are bright, fragrant flowers of unspeakable beauty, and lush green grass and mighty forests and ravines and in the distance a range of mountains that look almost blue. The people of this land are adorned with beads and with the bright feathers of wild birds. The air is scented with honeysuckle and it is alive with butterflies, so many butterflies, with iridescent wings as wide as my hand.
Instead of white swans, there are pink birds living on this land’s swamps. Imagine that! There are crimson birds and birds with brilliant green wings and blue heads. And they are always singing. Here, the sun is always shining, even in the autumn, when the leaves burn with scarlet and gold of such vividness it is a sight to behold. And I hope that, through my eyes, you too can see this magnificent new world you say you are not brave enough to see for yourself.
The old one is dead to me, as I am dead to it. Eleanor Glanville is dead. Water claimed me in the end, as seems fitting. I have no burial place. My coffin was the dark and stinking hold of that ship, my shroud a pair of boy’s nankeen breeches and a shirt, the clothes of Isaac, the butterfly boy, bound for America to help the good Dr. Krieg, to devote every waking moment to collecting specimens, for you. Sleeping belowdecks every night, swaddled in a hammock, my mind turned, naturally, to caterpillars awaiting metamorphosis.
I left the gray English waters behind and sailed to an ocean that glowed with phosphorescence, that was alive with schools of jellyfish, where dolphins swam beside the ship and great whales broke through the waves. The water claimed me, but only so that I could be liberated, baptized, so that I could throw off suffering and pain and enter a bright new world. Like a butterfly, I once gorged on material things; I was entombed; and then I took flight and am transformed.
Now I am free to watch butterflies every day, to do what I was put upon this earth to do. My life is very simple. I live off the land and what you pay me for the specimens I send to you, which will form the bedrock of that great museum, as beautiful a shrine to our friendship as ever there could be.
I am reborn, just as my father always told me I would be. I know now that all that he taught me, on that count, was good and true. And secure in that knowledge, we have nothing at all to fear.
Because if I have learned anything at all, it is this: There is always, always hope, even when it seems that all hope is lost.
So please tell Dickon that he may let his father know that my name now is Hannah. It is a good Puritan name, but I did not choose it for that. I chose it for my own reason. It means the grace of God.
Historical Notes
Lady of the Butterflies is based on fact. The Glanville Fritillary is named after Eleanor Glanville, who is now recognized as a distinguished pioneer entomologist. According to her biographer, she “gained happiness from natural history in the midst of great fear and sorrow.” When her relatives, led by her son Forest, brought lunacy proceedings to set aside her will on the grounds that “no one who was not deprived of their senses would go in pursuit of butterflies,” it became a cause célèbre.
Eleanor’s escape to America is my own flight of fancy, but her true final resting place remains a mystery, as does that of Richard Glanville. Among James Petiver’s many correspondents there was an unknown girl from Virginia, named Hannah.
James Petiver (1663–1718) was the first person to give butterflies English names, many of which—Brimstone, Admiral, Argus, Tortoiseshell—are still used to this day. It is with his catalogues and preserved specimens that the documented history of butterflies begins. After his death, his collections were purchased by Sir Hans Sloane and formed the foundations of the British Museum, later the Natural History Museum, where some of his correspondence with Eleanor and the folios in which he pasted specimens are preserved. It is recorded fact that Eleanor’s son Richard was James Petiver’s apprentice and that he was abducted from Aldersgate Street by his father, though I have brought the period of his apprenticeship and abduction forward a few years for the sake of narrative drive.
After overturning Eleanor’s will, Forest sold the Manor and Lordship of Tickenham. He apparently lived on at various houses in the parish. He died unmarried at the age of forty-four and left no will. None of those who left testimonies had anything good to say about him. Richard Glanville, Jr. (Dickon), married and settled near the Somerset village of Wedmore and was one of the first general practitioners. I understand that his descendants still live in Wedmore. Eleanor’s daughters seemed wary of marriage after their mother’s experience of it. Mary Ashfield died a spinster in 1730, and of Eleanor Glanville II (Ellen) it is known only that she was living unmarried in Rome in 1733. Counter to accusations presented against Eleanor at the Assizes, her son Richard went on lasting record as saying that he had “the best of mothers and the worst of fathers.”
The disease commonly known in the seventeenth century as ague, which claimed so many lives in the Fens and Somerset Levels, was eventually identified as malaria. Peruvian bark, the so-called Jesuits’ Powder, is the source of quinine.
The Tickenham, Nailsea and Kenn moors were not properly drained until the last years of the eighteenth century, but fenland was one of the earliest habitats lost to butterflies. The progressive draining that was begun in the seventeenth century left less than three percent of fenland remaining by the 1900s. This destruction resulted in the first known butterfly extinction, that of the Large Copper, which was last seen in 1851. The Swallowtail survives only in the Norfolk Broads. Seventy-one percent of Britain’s butterflies are now declining and forty-five percent of species are threatened, mainly because of loss of habitat. The Glanville Fritillary is classified as rare, but is still to be found on the Isle of Wight. I am reliably informed that English Nature has plans to reintroduce it to Sandy Bay at Weston-Super-Mare, a few miles from Eleanor’s ancestral home.
During the course of my writing this novel, Britain was hit by repeated and devastating floods, caused in part, according to leading environmentalists, by the loss of wetland floodplains. In 2007, the study of butterflies was formally accepted by the government as an important environmental barometer.
Acknowledgments
I referred to many books while researching the various aspects of this novel.
For details of Eleanor’s life and for suggesting the title of this book, I am indebted to The Making of a Manor: The Story of Tickenham Court by Denys Forrest (Moonraker, 1975). Further biographical material on Eleanor is from “Elizabeth Glanville, an Early Entomologist” by Ronald Sterne Wilkinson (Entomologist’s Gazette, vol. 17); “The Life of a Distinguished Woman Naturalist, Eleanor Glanville” by W. S. Bristowe (Entomologist’s Gazette, vol. 18); and “Mrs Glanville and Her Fritillary” by P. B. M. Allan (Entomologist’s Record and Journal of Variation, vol. 63).
Details of James Petiver’s life and career are taken from “James Petiver: Promoter of Natural Science” by Raymond Phineas Stearns (Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, October 1952). Michael A. Salmon’s The Aurelian Legacy: British Butterflies and Their Collectors (Harley Books, 2000) contains invaluable advice on early butterfly collecting and collectors, while more timeless information about butterflies is to be found in Butterflies by Dick Vane-Wright (Natural History Museum, 2003), The Millennium Atlas of Butterflies in Britain and Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2001), and Breeding Butterflies and Moths: A Practical Handbook for British and European Species by Ekkehard Friedrich (Harley Books, 1986). The Spirit of Butterflies: Myth, Magic, and Art by Maraleen Manos-Jones (Harry N. Abrams, 2000), The Pursuit of Butterflies and Moths: An Anthology by Patrick Matthews (Chatto and Windus, 1957), and Butterfly Cooing Like a Dove by Miriam Rothschild (Doubleday, 1991) go a long way to capturing the magic of butterflies.
For details of life in seventeenth-century England, I relied very heavily on David Cressy’s Birth, Marriage & Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford University Press, 1997), The Weaker Ve
ssel: Woman’s Lot in Seventeenth-Century England by Antonia Fraser (Phoenix, 2002), and Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution by Lisa Jardine (Little, Brown, 1999). Also of great assistance were The World of the Country House in Seventeenth-Century England by J. T. Cliffe (Yale University Press, 1999), Liza Picard’s Restoration London: Everyday Life in the 1660s (Phoenix, 1997), Bonfires and Bells by David Cressy (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), Women and Property in Early Modern England by Amy Louise Erickson (Routledge, 1993), Mind-Forg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency by Roy Porter (Athlone, 1987), and The Cavaliers in Exile, 1640–1660 by Geoffrey Smith (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). For the history of malaria, I referred to The Miraculous Fever-Tree: Malaria and the Quest for a Cure That Changed the World by Fiammetta Rocco (HarperCollins, 2004).
Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen (Routledge, 1992) helped me find Eleanor’s voice and some of her vocabulary, while The Somerset Levels by Robin Williams and Romey Williams (Ex Libris, 1996) and The Natural History of the Somerset Levels by Bernard Storer (Dovecote, 1972) helped me describe her home. Michael Williams’s The Draining of the Somerset Levels (Cambridge University Press, 1970) and Robert Dunning’s The Monmouth Rebellion: A Guide to the Rebellion and Bloody Assizes (Dovecote, 1984) were also invaluable resources.
I had almost finished writing Lady of the Butterflies when I discovered two books, one old and one newly published, that provided me with fresh inspiration and information on the quest to understand metamorphosis: John Ray, Naturalist: His Life and Works by Charles E. Raven (Cambridge University Press, 1950) and the wonderful Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis by Kim Todd (I. B. Tauris, 2007), the latter the fascinating biography of a seventeenth-century butterfly collector and artist who was obsessed with butterfly life cycles and traveled on an expedition to the New World to study them.
My great thanks go to Stewart Plant, who gave me access to Eleanor’s lovely home and the now well-drained moors, as well as providing insight into what it is like to grow up and live at Tickenham Court. Thanks also to Dave Goodyear of the Natural History Museum and the researchers at the Guildhall Museum.
For endless encouragement and patience, my thanks as always to Tim, and to Daniel, James, Gabriel and Kezia (who was born at the same time as the idea for this book). Also to Jane Gridley. A big thank you to Broo Doherty for her belief and support, and to Rosie de Courcy and all at Preface. Last to David, for being my inspiration.
The Lady of the Butterflies Page 60