Lady of the Butterflies (36 page)

“Richard!”

He turned on me defensively, almost violently, his face white and sweat breaking out on his brow. He put his hands to the side of his head, raked his fingers through his hair, clutched at it. “He said nothing. Damn it, nothing! Why would he? He was not prescribing it, only giving me what I asked for.”

“If only Dr. Talbor had been there,” I said. “Maybe his remedy does not contain the powder after all.” I sat by Edmund and put my arms around him as he writhed in pain. Sweat trickled down his brow and his heart was racing. “I do not understand. I did not take Thomas Sydenham for a mountebank and I am sure as I can be that he is no Papist conspirator.” I glanced at Richard. “You are certain that it was Jesuits’ Powder you were given? Peruvian bark?”

“Yes, and Thomas Sydenham swore his supplier was entirely reputable,” Richard said tersely. “That he’d not be one to adulterate the powder with worthless substitutes.”

“But surely he would have warned you if there was even a danger of this?”

“Maybe it means it is working.” Richard’s voice was oddly constricted. “Perhaps you should give him another dose.”

“In all conscience, I cannot.” I laid the back of my hand on Edmund’s pain-furrowed brow and made a swift decision. “Fetch Dr. Duckett. Edmund set more store by him than I ever have—he would want to see him. And after all, he can do no more harm than we have done, can he?”

When the surgeon pulled back the bedclothes, drew up the sleeve of Edmund’s nightshirt to bleed him, we both saw that Edmund’s skin was covered in a livid purple-copper rash. Dr. Duckett lifted the hem of the shirt and I gasped to see that the same rash was all over his body.

The surgeon made no comment, pressed the blade of his knife against the mottled flesh of Edmund’s forearm, and I watched the dark red rivulet of blood snake into a cup until it was brimful, filling the chamber with its ferrous tang. I saw Edmund grow limp, but peaceful at last.

I was alone at his bedside when he awoke later, opened his eyes and cried out in great fear and distress, as if he had seen the reaper himself over my shoulder. I immediately felt his cheek, fearing a return of the fever and delirium. But he was cold to the touch, not hot. “What’s wrong, Edmund?”

“It is so dark. Why is there no candle?”

“Of course there is a candle, darling.” I spoke calmly, quietly, as if to a child. “Bess lit it an hour ago. Can you not see it, over there on the washstand?”

He had turned his head at the sound of my voice, groped for my hand. “I can’t see you. Help me, Eleanor. I can’t see anything.”

I stared into his eyes and saw that they were blank, flickering wildly from side to side, the pupils so dilated that the gray iris was all but gone, leaving his eyes almost totally black. He clutched at me in panic, cried pitifully for me not to leave him.

I called for Richard, but he came no further than the doorway, a half-empty brandy bottle in one hand and a candlestick in the other.

“Hand me your candle,” I said, without taking my eyes off Edmund.

Richard seemed too afraid to come near the bed. I all but snatched the pewter stick off him and held the wildly flickering flame up to Edmund’s face. “Do you see it, Edmund? The light? Do you see it?”

“No.” He stared in the vague direction of the flame, as if into an abyss. “I see nothing. Eleanor, what is happening to me?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.” I looked deep into his sightless eyes, saw the wavering candle flame reflected in the large black centers, but nothing else. I was holding his hand, he was right there before me, but it seemed as if he were already a very long way away.

I did not know what to do anymore, and the only person I could think of who could help Edmund now was John Foskett, the curate, a pimply-faced youth still, who nevertheless was devout and good.

I left him alone to pray with Edmund. When he came out of the chamber to say that my husband had asked for his friend, the color drained from Richard’s face and he looked as though he had been asked to step through the gates of Hell.

“For God’s sake, go to him,” I said. “He wants to see you.”

It was not that I was unsympathetic. I knew that seeing Edmund suffer must awaken for Richard memories of the loss of other loved ones, but it was not as if I had no memories like that of my own, such searing, similar memories.

Had my father been right all along? I wondered in amazement. Right to refuse Jesuits’ Powder, right to fear it?

Richard was not with Edmund long, and then it was my turn. An hour later, Edmund died in my arms. As if lured by the peace and silence into thinking there had been an improvement to Edmund’s condition, Richard came quietly into the room. When he saw, instead, the inert body laid out on the bed, I thought he was going to collapse. He clutched at the bedpost and stared at Edmund in horror and disbelief. I saw that there were tears standing in his eyes.

I should have taken him into my arms and comforted him then. We should have been a comfort to each other. But with all that had passed between us I could not bring myself even to touch him now. Those two words.
I wish
. They stood between us like crossed swords. And he seemed to know it and to feel the same way.

I brushed past his rigid shoulder as I walked slowly out of the room, walking as if in a daze down the stairs to the kitchen, to fetch a carving knife. Then I walked back to the chamber with it held down at my side in the folds of my silk skirts, like a murderess.

Richard’s eyes widened almost in fear and he stepped away from me. “What the devil are you doing?”

Lifting my cumbersome skirts, I clambered up on the bed beside Edmund. With silent tears spilling down my face, I cradled his head in my silk-draped lap and took a lock of his copper hair between my fingers. Tenderly, with utmost care, I sliced right through it with the knife. I coiled it around my finger, dragged a silver ribbon from my own head to tie around it. “I always loved his hair,” I said. “It was the very first thing about him that I loved. Its brightness. I don’t ever want to forget. I don’t ever want it to fade.”

Richard left the room, and Bess told me later that he had left Tickenham without even saying good-bye to me.

I BARELY NOTICED when it grew dark again. I was worn-out from caring for Edmund and yet I didn’t want to sleep now that I could. I didn’t want to wake to a new day that Edmund would never see, to know that already, so soon, I had left him behind. I sat at my writing desk with a candle, at dead of night, and wrote out a list of tasks for the arranging of a funeral. But it was to be a very different funeral from the last one I had attended. On no account was Edmund to be buried at night. He was to be laid to rest in the morning, inside rather than outside the church, where it was always dry.

When Mary and John Burges traveled back to Tickenham after hearing the news of his death, I told Mary how much it would amuse Edmund that even in the matter of his funeral I stood contrary to Puritan preferences. “I know he will not mind me doing it as I want it done.”

“It will be hard for you to be barred from being there,” Mary said, her arm about my shoulder, as we sat on the Tudor settle by a flickering fire.

I placed my hand protectively on the mound of my belly. “I would not risk harmful spirits reaching this baby,” I said. The precious last baby Edmund would ever give me. “But even if I am not there, it must not be as before.”

I did not even want to think of another dark pit in that wet and misty graveyard, another coffin descending into the watery ground. Even to think of it was to feel myself sinking too, to feel darkness closing around me, finally and forever.

Mary drew me into her embrace.

“I can’t believe he is gone,” I said, weeping against her plump shoulder.

I should have been used to it by then, the terrible finality of death. But I couldn’t accept it. Even if butterflies rise from coffins and we are like them and will rise again into everlasting life, even if Edmund and I were to meet again one day in Heaven, I could not bear to think I would never, ever see him again in this world. His boots were still where he had left them by the door, still shaped to the contours of his feet. I couldn’t believe he would never wear them again. His fishing pole and net were still propped in the corner. How could it be that he had used them for the very last time? He’d never again sit with them by the humpbacked bridge in the sunshine, or ride his horse, or eat his supper with me, or play with his son and see him grow.

“I just want him back,” I said. “I want him back.”

I COULD NOT QUITE conform to the ideal of a courageously constant and modest widow, any more than I had been able to conform to the ideal of a modest wife. On the day of Edmund’s funeral, I stood alone in my chamber at the latticed casement. As I looked down at the funeral procession, weaving between the brackish pools of floodwater, I found that my eyes were involuntarily seeking a man who was still very much alive. Despite myself, despite everything, I was looking for Richard. It was not with any desire that I sought him, just to know that he was near. That was all I wanted, for him to be close.

Then I reeled with self-disgust at what I threatened to become: that most feared and despised of all women, the lascivious widow. A temptation and provocation to morally upstanding gentlemen, a threat to the natural order, a girl who had sampled the pleasures of the flesh and craved them still from the confines of her desolate widow’s bed.

I ran down to the great hall and I stood in the middle of the empty room, beneath the vaulted roof, as far away from any window as could be. I turned my head from the view of the Tickenham floodplains to the far wall, where hung a faded tapestry depicting the Great Flood, the flood sent by God to cleanse the world of sinners. I wished it would take me. I wished that I could die for my sin. It did not seem right that I lived, when good, kind Edmund lay moldering in a coffin.

I had begged forgiveness, but still I had not been true to my husband in my heart and it was for this that I was being punished now. Or maybe there was no one who could punish or forgive me or hear my prayers. Maybe ague was a random executioner and there was no almighty power to intervene on our behalf. God had not saved my sister, or my mother, or my father, or my husband, and I totally failed to see any divine purpose in the loss of them. It was previously impossible for me even to consider the idea that God did not exist, but I found myself considering it now, dabbling with atheism, disregarding finally everything that I had ever believed in.

I rested my forehead against the stitched image of Noah’s Ark and pummeled it with my fists. “Why? Why?” Never had that question screamed at me so loudly. “Why?”

Even as I cried out, the answer insinuated itself in my head. It was my fault. It was Richard’s fault. I needed someone to blame and I blamed him the most. I was dissolute and wanton, but it was he who had made me so, he who had unleashed that wantonness within me. My father was right to condemn long Cavalier curls as a dangerous incitement to lust. Edmund had died because I had acted like a whore, because I had not loved him enough, because I had broken God’s sacred commandment. I had broken my wedding vows. Edmund’s death was punishment. Because I had not loved him and no other as I had forsworn to do.