Lady of the Butterflies (28 page)

Autumn

1676

F
ive months later, still in my nightshift, I drew my knees up on the oriel window seat and hugged them as I waited for Bess to come and help me dress. I turned my head and rested my cheek against my folded legs and gazed out of the window. The sky was colorless, an even blanket of thick cloud, and a low ground-mist hung over the rivers and flat fields.

“What’s the matter?” Bess asked.

“My courses have started again,” I said to Bess, twisting my head round to her. “Bess, why aren’t I with child yet?”

She put her arm around me and sat herself down beside me in the embrasure. “Have you been doing it with your husband regularly?” she asked, coming straight to the heart of it as usual.

I stared at my bare toes, twiddled them. “Is every other night regular enough?”

“Not every night? Not several times a night?”

“He’s very considerate,” I said quickly, not wanting her to think less of Edmund.

She gave me a look that was almost pitying. “Does he not like it if you try to lead him, lamb?”

I tucked a loose lock of hair behind my ear, shook my head.

Bess tutted. “Does the man not accept you have needs of your own?”

I smiled. “Oh, I think he’d be most disconcerted by the very idea of that.”

“Doesn’t sound very considerate to me, then.” She sniffed. “Does he at least take longer over it than he did at first?”

“Does that make a difference?”

“Well, it most certainly would to me.”

I could not help but laugh. “I mean, surely it doesn’t make any difference to whether you can make a baby or not? So long as his seed is inside me, surely that’s all that counts?”

“Pumping seed is probably all it takes to make a baby, but if you ask me, it’s most definitely not all it takes to make a husband.”

I laughed again, even as I drew my knees tighter as if to banish and deny the dull ache in my abdomen. “Is it true that a woman has to experience real pleasure in bed for the seed to take root?”

“Absolutely vital. I thought everyone knew that. So has he found your little mound of pleasure yet? Do you still have to pretend?”

I didn’t answer immediately. We had always talked like this, Bess and I, and there had seemed nothing wrong in it until now. I knew Edmund would be so hurt if he knew I had discussed the most intimate details of our lovemaking and found him wanting. And yet I needed somebody to talk to, to confide in.

“Maybe I’ll never have a baby, then,” was all I said.

Winter

1677

I
had woken up hungry in the middle of the night and was in the pantry helping myself, by the light of a single candle, to cheese and rye bread. My breath was misty and I shivered in my nightshift. It was not much warmer when I took my little feast through to the kitchen, where the glowing embers of yesterday’s great cooking fire had been covered over with a brass dome, waiting for the bellows to breathe life back into them come the morning.

I set the round of crumbly cheddar on the long scrubbed table and cut off a chunk. I had just put it in my mouth when I heard a soft tap at the door in the great hall. It was still completely dark outside and I was sure I’d misheard. But there it came again. Firmer this time, more urgent, a definite rap against the thick studded oak. I hesitated, uncertain what to do. There were no servants about yet, nobody else to answer it except me, and I was hardly dressed to receive a visitor. Yet I couldn’t ignore it. Nobody would call at this hour unless it was an emergency.

I took up my candlestick, shielded its guttering flame with my hand as I made my way through the drafty cross passage and across the great hall, bracing myself to find a distressed commoner who’d not been able to rouse the midwife, or had news, God forbid, of a breach in the seawall. I drew back the bolts and swung open the door. Froze.

“Richard!”

“Eleanor,” he echoed, with almost as much surprise. “Not a butler or a serving girl, but the little lady herself. How very fortunate.” He slid one leg forward, swept his feathered hat off his black hair, bowed low and came up again gracefully, the white lace ruffles of his shirt luminous in the dark.

“Is something the matter?” I asked him. “What are you doing here at this hour?”

His eyes twinkled with mischief. “I might have hoped for a warmer welcome. When I’ve ridden all through the night, and a bitterly cold night at that, just to be sure I was the first person to see you this Saint Valentine’s Day morning, just to be sure I was in time to take you as my own Valentine.”

“In time to . . . as your . . . what?”

“Your Valentine,” he repeated with a smile, his teeth biting softly on his bottom lip and his eyebrows slanting rakishly. “Or had you forgotten it’s February the fourteenth? The feast of Saint Valentine? The one day in the calendar when even a wedded girl is free to kiss whosoever claims her first.”

There was not a trace now of the vulnerability he had revealed when he had lain wounded with his head in my lap. I did not know which of these different sides of his personality was the more devastating. One moment he had all the sweetness of an angel, the next all the charm of a Devil. The very way he swung between the two left me breathless and strangely exhilarated.

“Aren’t you going to let me in?” he asked. “Before I catch my death of cold.”

I moved aside and he stepped through the door, pushing it closed with his foot.

I was acutely aware of the contours of my body, silhouetted inside my fine linen shift, my breasts and nipples hardened by the cold and by a desire that descended on me like the mist over the moor, occluding my senses, blocking out all else save his beautiful face, his black curls, the swirling folds of his riding cloak and the soft, velvety richness of his voice. “Since I’ve explained why I’m here,” he said, “why don’t you tell me what you’re doing, wandering around a dark house at night all alone?”

“I was hungry.”

“I can see hunger in those pretty eyes of yours well enough. But I doubt very much that it’s the kind of hunger that anything in your larder can satisfy.”

“Richard, stop it. Please.”

He removed the candleholder from my hand, set it on a little table. He moved closer to me and I took a step back. He followed, as if we were conducting some strange, silent dance. Then he reached out one finger and traced the line of my cheek, making me quiver with a pleasure so intense it was almost like pain. “Please,” I said again. “You have to leave.”

“Not before I have claimed my Valentine’s kiss.”

My eyes moved to his mouth, the lips slightly parted. It was the most fascinating mouth, as beautiful as the rest of him. Small and neat and with a slight pout, it had an almost childish sweetness. His upper lip curved like a bow. It was a mouth made to kiss and to be kissed.

I swallowed. “You aren’t the first to see me this morning at all,” I argued lamely. “Edmund and I share a bed, naturally. So he was the first person I saw when I woke. I am not for the claiming.”

“I assume Edmund was sleeping. He didn’t see you. It does not count.”

“I’ve never heard that before.” I half smiled. “You can’t just make up your own rules, you know.”

“If I can’t make them, I’m quite prepared to discard them if they stand in my way.”

“What would you have done if I had not been awake, had not heard you at the door?”

“I’d have broken in and woken you with a kiss.”

“And what if one of the servants had been about to open the door to you?”

“I’d have told them I had a most urgent and private message to give to you and I’d have sent them to fetch you to me.”

“You had an elaborate plan.”

“But I didn’t need it. You were here yourself, waiting for me, as if you knew I was coming. As if this was meant to be.”

“It is not meant to be, Richard,” I said slowly. “You know that.”

He cupped my face in his hand, his expression suddenly desolate. “Little Nell, I know nothing anymore.”

I struggled for something to say, anything that might anchor me in some normality. “Nobody has ever called me Nell.”

He stroked his thumb firmly along my cheekbone. “D’you like it?”

“Yes,” I said, laying my hand over the back of his, as if to remove it, though instead I just held it closer, tilted my head into his touch. “Yes.”

“Nell,” he said again, making it sound like the sweetest endearment. “You must let nobody but me ever call you by that name.”

“I don’t really think you can take such possession of another man’s wife.”

He let his hand slip away, fall to his side, leaving my cheek feeling suddenly cold and exposed. “I am sorry that I missed your wedding.”

“Edmund did say you are dependably undependable.”

He did not return my brief smile. “You know the reason I did not come.”

“It was very quiet anyway. We had only a few guests.”

“If you were my bride I should want to celebrate it before everyone, with a feast that went on for twelve days.”

“I never can be your bride, Richard.”

He did not answer. There was for an instant an awareness for both of us that what I had said was not wholly true, but that there was only one eventuality that would leave me free to marry again. For one wild beat of my heart I was afraid of what he was capable of and of what he might do. I looked into those capricious, quicksilver eyes of his and for one chilling, insane half-beat of time, it wasn’t so very hard to see him as amoral and corrupt, like the worst picture my father had ever painted of Cavaliers, a murderous dueler, the kind of man who’d stop at nothing to have what he wanted.

“I love my husband,” I said firmly. “I love Edmund.”

“I love Edmund too,” he echoed savagely. “I’ve known him all my life. His father and my father knew each other all their lives. Do not think I am not tortured by guilt for this, for how I feel about you. But I cannot help myself. I cannot help it that for these past months I have tossed and turned in my bed every night for longing for Edmund’s little wife. Nell, I have never wanted a woman as I want you.”

When I said nothing he slid his hand around my waist, drew me closer to him. Then his hand moved around my back as he held me. “You know what it is like to be driven by an obsession, I think,” he whispered. “You know what it is to want something and to strive after it, and to desire it all the more the harder it is to catch, the more unattainable it is.” He fixed me with a melting blue gaze. “I saw Edmund when he was last in Suffolk. He told me how you have a favorite butterfly that is yellow and black but you can never catch one of them. He made me look for them with him, but he wouldn’t look as you look, as if your life itself depended on finding one, as if your whole being was caught up in pursuit of it, in possessing it and having it to keep with you forever. Edmund doesn’t know the power of such an obsession. He is not passionate. He does not know the force of a desire that overrules all reason, a hunger that can never be satisfied yet demands to be satisfied.”

I had forgotten how to breathe. “That sounds like madness.” Except that I understood exactly what he was talking about, saw that he understood me, as if he had seen into my soul.

“If it is madness, little Nell, then it is you who have driven me mad,” he said. “And I must have my kiss, or I cannot account for what I might do.”

“Very well,” I said quietly, feeling my lips already softening to receive him. “A Valentine kiss. That is all it is.”

Almost before I knew what was happening he bent his head and pressed his mouth against mine, so softly at first, slow and tender, and then harder, deeper, more insistent. Sensation rippled down through my body, through every limb, to the ends of my fingers and the tips of my toes, to an agonizingly sweet peak of sensation between my legs. I felt the firm, warm moistness of his tongue as it slipped inside my mouth and sought my own, tasting and exploring. I raised my hand in a halfhearted attempt to push him off, but he caught my wrist and held it, poised in midair, as if time itself had stopped, as if the night would never end and the sun would never rise. For once I didn’t mind, didn’t long for morning, for light, only for this, only for him.

He clasped me to him, his fingers splayed against the small of my back, pressing me urgently against his groin. I could feel the shaft of his arousal through my shift, against my belly. I did not move away but found myself pressing back. With his other hand he was caressing my breast, stroking and kneading. Entirely of their own accord, as if driven by instinct alone, my own hands had slipped up inside his shirt, were traveling up the warm nakedness of his back to his smooth shoulders, round again onto his taut belly, brushing against the fastenings of his breeches. He trembled at my touch, his eyes closed, long lashes shadowing his cheek. He moaned softly. I tipped my head back as his tongue traveled from my lips and down my throat. He held me tighter, pushed his leg between mine.

“No!” I broke free and shoved at him with both palms against his chest. “No. I cannot.”

His eyes opened and they were full of hurt, of rejection, shadowed now by the agony of frustrated desire that matched my own.

“Go!” I said hoarsely, feeling faint, wanting to weep with desire for him. “You’ve had your kiss. You’ve got what you came for. Please, just go!”

“I have had what I came for, but I find it wasn’t nearly enough,” he said. “It can never be enough.”

I COULD NOT SLEEP. I felt ill. So ill that I thought love must indeed be a sickness. I was lovesick. I must have been suffering what the physicians called erotic melancholy, the dangerous, infectious malady that was caused by excessive passion and unfulfilled desire. A physical disease that inflamed the body, boiled the blood, took possession of the mind, caused the humors to combust and consumed the liver. A rage of love that could, it was said, actually burn the sufferer’s heart so that, upon examination after death, the organ resembled a charred timber.

I did manage to doze, eventually, but when I woke later in the morning I gagged the instant I sat up. I reached for the ewer and was violently sick, sicker than I had ever been since I was a child and my mother stroked my brow and murmured to me that she was there.

Now it was good, kind Edmund who sat with me on the edge of the bed and stroked the hair off my face and I was swamped by intolerable, crippling guilt. I thought how I had never felt so wretched, but fully deserved to feel much worse. Wanted to feel much worse. I spewed into the basin again and when I had done, Edmund handed me his own cup of warm ale, holding it for me while I sipped.

“Eleanor, my love, can it be . . . ?”

My lips still felt bruised by Richard’s kiss, my cheeks still scratched by his stubble. I could still taste him, could feel his body imprinted against my own. I could not bear to look at Edmund’s trusting, expectant face. I hardly dared to hope myself. It was preferable to lovesickness, at any rate. It could be true. I was hungry in the night, sick in the morning. Was I with child? “Maybe,” I said hesitantly.

Edmund kissed my hand, in that formal, chivalrous gesture of his, but his kindly, freckled face was radiant with such pure joy that it made him look saintly, and beside him I felt like the very blackest and most wicked of sinners.

“Oh, Eleanor, that’s wonderful news, the best news.” He kissed the side of my head. “And I almost forgot. It is Saint Valentine’s Day.”

I HAD BEEN TAUGHT to be observant of signs and portents, but did not wholly believe in them and for that I was very glad. For if I saw this pregnancy as a sign that my marriage had been blessed, that the sin I had committed would go unpunished, there soon followed more ominous signs that the blessing might be taken away.