Lady of the Butterflies (39 page)

We were walking along a raised path called Bishop’s Walk that ran along the bank of the Thames. To the other side of us was a wide channel of still water, uncannily like one of the rhynes on Tickenham Moor. But the land behind it was nothing like the moor. It was crowded with trees, not wispy willows, but great stately trunks, with roots that spidered the ground like the veins on an old man’s hand, beneath a canopy of enormous arching branches. “The entrance is only about a quarter of a mile away,” James said.

I slid my hand into the crook of his arm and gave him a quick squeeze. “Stop fretting about me, James. I’m not in the least tired.”

I hardly knew which way to turn my head. On one side of us was the forested garden and on the other was the river, busy with barges and tilt boats and fleets of collier ships, the skyline punctuated with Wren’s graceful spires that had arisen from the ashes of the Great Fire.

We entered the Palace Gardens under an avenue of limes, and I saw then that the wide ditch was in fact a great moat which encircled the entire acreage of the grounds. It was like a scene from a myth. In front of us was a drawbridge and beyond it was the house, or palace, very old and ruinous, with battlemented towers.

“What is this place? Who lives here?”

“It’s been the summer residence of the bishops of London for centuries. The gardens are of great antiquity, have been famous for their beauty and scientific value since the reign of Queen Elizabeth. That’s a tamarisk tree.” James pointed. “From Switzerland. Over there is a cork tree.”

With my hand still resting in the crook of his arm, he led me deeper into the strange and beautiful forest.

“The trees grew even more thickly once,” he said. “Until one of the bishops thinned them. Legend has it that Sir Francis Bacon visited just afterward and said that, having cut down such a cloud of trees, he must be a good man to throw light on dark places.”

“I should like to throw light on dark places.”

“Eleanor, you could do nothing but.”

I gave his arm another squeeze. “Did I ever tell you? I was married in the same church as Francis Bacon?”

“How grand.”

“Actually, it was far from it.”

“Really?”

“‘Truth requires evidence from the real world,’ Sir Francis said. That is such a good creed. My father had his writings in his library but never could agree that there must be evidence for everything before we can believe in it . . . even before we can believe in God.”

“Do you think we can ever see evidence of God?”

“I used to think it was all around us, in the splendor of his creation. I used to think that was the very reason we must study it, to bring us closer to Him. Or that’s what my father taught me. I no longer know which of the things he taught me are true, but I have a hope that it is more than I have come to suspect.” I stopped and turned to him. “James, do you believe absolutely in metamorphosis?”

He pursed his lips. “I am as uncertain as the next man about oft-repeated claims. Experts contradict each other. The only truly reliable approach to the study of the natural world is through one’s own observations. I can’t entirely believe it without the evidence of my own eyes.”

That was not what I wanted to hear at all. “Have any of your friends at the coffeehouse even seen it?”

“They are more interested in collecting and marking one species off from another than in seeing how they are born. Though it has not yet been studied properly, metamorphosis is recognized as a fact, so . . .”

“So what? It was recognized as fact, since the time of Aristotle, that the earth was at the center of the universe. But now we are told that the earth in fact moves round the sun. It seems to me that the only truth we have is that we live in a chaos of superstition and experiment. How can we know where we are while natural philosophy is still vying with the old world of magic and traditional lore?

“Few now believe in unicorns as they once did, but if horned beasts are to be relegated to legend, where does that leave the poor old rhinoceros? We cannot believe Aristotle now, so does that mean we should also question the authority of the Bible? If the earth is not the center of the universe, then where does that leave God and His creation of it? If there is a chance that a piece of rotten fruit, or a cabbage leaf, or a pile of dung can create life, where does that leave God as the ultimate creator? Where does that leave the promise of eternal life?” I ran out of breath and smiled to see James both stunned and speechless.

“Well,” he said at last, “you appear to have rediscovered your curiosity. Along with your voice.”

I laughed. “So I do.”

“What a truly remarkable person you are, and what a pity it is that you can’t join our club. You’ve a quicker and more interesting mind than many virtuosi.”

“Why can’t I join your club? Why can’t I go to the coffeehouse with you?” I waved my hand. “Oh. Don’t even bother to tell me. I already know the answer. It’s only open to gentlemen.”

“I’d welcome you right away,” James said as we walked on. “But I’m afraid we’d be a club of only two.”

“Nobody else would stay if I was there?”

“They’d be afraid a woman would hinder and corrupt their flow of ideas, cast a malign influence over their experiments.”

I rolled my eyes in exasperation. “You do know that is ridiculous?”

He grinned. “I certainly have no evidence of it.”

“The Duchess of Newcastle was permitted to attend the Royal Society meeting,” I ventured.

“Just once. And she, poor lady, is considered a freak of nature, an embarrassment to her sex and her family, for her interest in science.” He tucked my hand back under his arm. “There’s something I want to show you. The conditions are perfect, so I’m sure they’ll be there.”

“What will be there?”

“Wait and see. It is a surprise.”

We came to a copse of magnificent oaks with a small clearing in the middle.

“There,” James said, and looked up.

I followed his gaze into the shelter of green leaves and filtered rays of gold light.

Flickers of violet. A dozen indigo wings. Purple-black butterflies, like the drawings from the pages of the book James had made for me after first I met him.

I ran ahead a few steps, into the glade. The butterflies flitted just a little higher, riding the currents of the air. I stood with face upturned to the arching branches and the sky beyond. Something about their twirling flight made it impossible to stand still. I turned round slowly, watching them. I held out my arms like a swaying tree, dancing in the breeze, my silk skirt swishing. The butterflies flitted higher and higher toward the tops of the trees and I was suddenly giddy.

James caught me as I almost lost my balance. As he set me back on my feet and looked into my smiling face, the light seemed to dim in his own eyes, as if he had transferred all his strength and happiness to me and had nothing left for himself. “James, you look so sad.”

“Not at all. And neither are you anymore, I think.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know how you do it.”

“Do what?”

“Make me feel again how I felt as a little girl. That everything is there to be discovered. Everything is possible. That life can be good.”

“It is the study of butterflies that makes you feel that way, and having a passion, and never, ever letting go of it.”

“Thank you,” I said. “For not allowing me to let go. For bringing me here.”

He appeared about to say something more, then changed his mind. “Those purple butterflies are so shy, you’ve no chance of netting one unless you come prepared.”

“Which, of course, you have.”

He produced from his pocket not a flower but a small lump of meat wrapped in paper. He set it at some distance from us on the grass.

We watched. We waited. Soon enough a flicker of purple descended from above, came drifting down and settled on the carrion, to be followed by another. They fluttered their wings once or twice, then folded them up, revealing an underside of shimmering purple, like shot silk.

James didn’t pounce, as I was about to do. He seemed content to watch, to stand back respectfully and admire from a distance, to let them just be.

“Now, what name would you give to them?” he whispered.

I was entranced, as in the presence of a king all cloaked in royal purple. One was smaller than the other, and one brighter. Was one a female and one a male, one a princess and one an emperor, and if so which way around was it? Purple Emperor. Purple Princess. I’d never considered there could be butterflies that fed on meat, like human beings. They seemed to be relishing the little feast we’d brought for them.

“Do they have teeth?” I asked quietly.

“Ah, now, you’d only find that out by observing up close. Would you like to have one of them, for your collection?”

“You have one already?”

“A perfect pair.”

“Did you catch them here?”

“Last spring.”

“So they’re likely to be of the exact same species?”

We could study James’s specimens, learn from them; we didn’t have to take anymore. But that didn’t stop me craving one of these exquisite beauties for myself. And James knew it. He knew me too well. Without a word from me, he was already creeping toward the spot where the butterflies had alighted. He moved very slowly, as if in a dream; then at the last moment was quick as a cat with a mouse. He clapped his net around the two of them, pinched one, then the other, between his fingers, impaled them on a pin upon the brim of his hat and placed his hat back on his head, while I was still marveling at the deftness of his fingers.

Standing in the middle of the sunny clearing, wearing a pincushion on a ribbon like a medallion, his hat adorned with purple butterflies, he looked like a very young and clever magician. He conjured two boiled eggs from his pocket and handed me one. We peeled the eggs and ate them; then he handed me his flask of whiskey. “Not a very grand picnic, I am afraid.”

I took a nip and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “It is the very best kind.”

As we walked back through the oaks toward the moat, I glanced at my butterflies on his hat.

“They’ll be perfectly safe,” he assured me. “I told you, a hat’s the finest receptacle there is.”

“I can see it. I’m just thinking what a shame it is that I don’t have that kind of a hat.”

He stopped, took it off and placed it firmly on my head. It slid down over my eyes, so he adjusted it, tilted it slightly at a jaunty angle. “Very becoming.”

“I’ve often thought I’d be best suited as a boy.”

“Well, I’m sincerely glad you’re not one.” He gave a little cough, as if to cover what he’d just said. “If you were a boy, I’d have no female acquaintances at all,” he finished.

“I don’t believe that for one instant.”

“Well, it is quite true.”

Surely there were plenty of girls, one girl at least, who’d like to see his bright, clever eyes light up even more brightly with love for her, for her alone? “You must have a sweetheart,” I questioned curiously. “Surely there is some pretty girl whom you’ve restored to health with your magic potions and who has lost her heart to you?”

“I wish that was so,” he said. “But I’m afraid it has not happened.”

For a moment I thought I could almost be that girl. For James had cured me, undoubtedly he had. But my heart? It was most certainly lost, but long before this day. When Edmund ambled into the hall of Tickenham Court out of the rain. When I first saw Richard Glanville smiling down at me from the saddle of his black Barbary stallion, like a winter prince. In such different ways, I loved them both. I mourned Edmund still, with a grief sharpened by remorse. And I missed Richard. I missed him so much. I still met him in my dreams—sweet, tortured, passionate dreams that made me wake restlessly in the morning, with the pain of parting from him as fresh as if it had been only yesterday that I had told him never to touch me or come near me again.

I was a typical lusty widow after all, wasn’t I? I saw something in James’s eyes that made me think I must tread very carefully with him. It would not be fair, even for one moment, to let him think he could love me, even if he had a mind to. He was my dearest friend and I could not imagine him as anything else. I would not risk hurting him, ruining our friendship, when I needed a good friend far more than I needed another lover. My heart had been split in two. And a thing cannot be split without being broken.

I took James’s hat off my head and put it firmly back on his, for all the world as if I was handing him back his heart. “There. You look after my butterflies for me.” I lifted the pincushion that hung round his neck, let it rest in the palm of my hand. “Why so many different-sized pins?”

“If you stick a small fly with a large pin its joints will break and it will fall to pieces.”

I looked up at him and spluttered. “Well, if I ever marry again, then, I’d best make sure my husband’s yard is not too big, since I am so very small.”

He froze, mouth agape. The years fell away and he was the unworldly boy he’d been the first time we’d met. I collapsed in laughter. He started laughing too. We both laughed until we were bent double like a pair of crones, clenching our sides with pain, tears rolling down our cheeks.

Autumn

1680

J
ames was coming for dinner and there was something of great importance that I had to ask him.

“Mary, would you take the children for me awhile?”

“You know I’m glad to have them anytime.” She glanced at me quickly, as she carried on with her brocading. “But we shall be going to mass later. They’ll have to come with us.”

I gazed down at my little daughter, asleep in my arms, and I almost said no straightaway. “I’m not sure.”

“Since you no longer care for any religion, what does it matter if they attend an Anglican ceremony or a Papist one?”

Because Jesuit poison killed their father. “I do not know. But it does. Force of habit, I suppose.”

“A father’s influence runs so deep you can never be entirely free of it, especially when that father was as commanding and powerful as yours.” Mary stuck the needle into the brocade, set it to one side and gave me her full attention. “But you know, not all your ancestors were so set against Catholics, or Cavaliers for that matter. Your uncle, who lives in Ribston Hall in Yorkshire, is a baronet. Your mother’s father, Rice Davies, is still remembered in Tickenham for being as noble as they come. It takes ambition and desire for grandeur to build a great house such as Ribston or Tickenham Court, to be granted acres of land. It takes favors from the King. Your family has the blood of brave knights running through its veins. Who knows? Maybe even royal blood.”

Mary smiled as she saw my eyes open wide at the daring, almost traitorous thought that I, the daughter of one of Cromwell’s men, could have royal blood. I almost felt it stirring dangerously inside me, rousing me.

“And it’s not just royal blood you may have,” she said with gravity. “When you go back to Tickenham, you look very carefully at the wainscoting around the chimney breast in the great hall.”

I smiled. “Is this a riddle?”

“There’s a tiny chamber, a cell, built into the side of the chimney,” she said. “There used to be a tunnel from it that led to the church, but I understand it is now blocked. It’s a priest’s hole,” she added with great significance. “Where they hid Catholic priests during the Reformation. Your Catholic lineage, your children’s Catholic lineage, is strong.”

“Maybe that explains my hankering for satin and gold.”

“Maybe it does.” She paused. “So, the little ones can come to mass, then?”

“I suppose they can.”

JAMES ARRIVED just after Mary and John and the children had left. He brought part of his collection, in pine boxes of yellow and white and blue, because later he was going on to join his club at the Temple Bar coffeehouse. And I was determined that he was going to take me with him. They might not talk so freely in front of me and I would surely never be allowed to come back. But like Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, I was going to risk all and go just the same, just once.

“Will you show these to your friends?”

James looked at me over a little square box of blues, neatly arranged in pairs, a female beside a usually larger and more brightly colored male. Quick as a flash, I thought of Edmund’s red hair, and of Richard Glanville in green silk, and me in drab Puritan black, fluttering toward them both. Was I a butterfly or was I a moth, fluttering irresistibly toward a bright flame that would burn me alive?

I looked at James, with his hair the color of ripened corn and his extraordinary multicolored eyes. Now, why could I not have fallen in love with someone like him?

“Leonard Plukenet and Adam Buddle will be there tonight,” he said. “They like to see my latest acquisitions, are as passionate about butterflies as you and I.”

“You could discuss the differences between the sexes?” I said leadingly.

“Maybe.”

“A one-sided debate, given the single sex of your club.”

He smiled, feigning innocence. “We’re a botany society. We’ll talk about male and female butterflies, or ants, or the reproduction of flowers, not about men and women. But still.”

“Still, what?”

He frowned, his finger over his lips, making a show of giving something the greatest consideration.

I giggled. “What, James?”

“There are greater differences between men and women than between male and female butterflies, for sure. But the differences are not so great if the woman is, how can I say it . . . not as voluptuous as the fashions of our age usually dictate.”

“Well, there’s no need to be rude.”

“Not at all. I have no time for fashion, as is surely evident.” He lifted one of his feet, encased in outdated flat-heeled shoes. “I think it is far more appealing for a lady to have the delicate prettiness of a butterfly.”

“Well redeemed.”

But he was still studying me, as if reflecting on a possibility. “What differences there are could perhaps be concealed, with a little ingenuity,” he said.

I had an inkling then of where this was leading, but I didn’t dare hope. Didn’t dare hope that, once again, James knew me so well that he knew what I wanted or needed, almost before I knew it myself.

“There is perhaps one insurmountable difference,” he deliberated. “The small matter of courage. It’s generally accepted that a man is far braver than a woman. A man would take risks that a woman would not. A man would keep his head where a woman would lose hers at the first sign of trouble. In which case it could never be achieved.” His playful tone had turned more earnest. “I would lose the trust and respect of my friends, all I’ve worked for. If they found out I’d be a laughingstock. Would never be taken seriously again. No. It’s no use. It cannot be done.”

I held my breath and leaned forward, arms pressing on my knees, and peered into his face. “What cannot be done, James?”

He expelled a long breath. “It’s no good telling you now. It’ll only spoil your evening.”

“It is already spoiled,” I admitted. “Because you are going off to your club and leaving me behind. You were thinking you could take me with you, weren’t you?”

He grinned. “Now, whatever gave you that idea?”

I grabbed his hands. “Take me with you, James. I
am
brave, as brave as any boy. My father told me he wished he had men of my courage marching with him for Cromwell. I will not be intimidated by anyone, I promise you. I won’t fail you.”

He wavered, or pretended to waver, then sized me up. “When we first met we were almost exactly the same size, wouldn’t you say?”

I knew what he was going to suggest before he said it.

“My scheme, extraordinary as it may seem, was to take you along in disguise, dressed as a boy.”

I clapped my hands. “James, that is the most harebrained, madcap idea!”

“One you might have thought of yourself, I think?”

“Only far better. It’s perfect. But who would I be?”

“I thought to introduce you as my assistant, my butterfly boy.”

“And what would be my name? I’d have to have a name.”

“Isaac, I thought, in homage to the great Mr. Newton himself, founder of the most exclusive scientific society in Britain and the investigator of light.”

“Isaac . . . I can be Isaac. Oh, let me be Isaac. Let me do it. I will not disappoint you, I swear it.”

HE HAD BROUGHT a parcel of clothes, and I laughed to think how our thoughts ran in such extraordinary parallel. All the time I’d been plotting how to find a way to go with him to the coffeehouse, he’d been plotting how to enable me to do it, packing up his own shirts and breeches and waistcoat and boots to disguise me in.

He handed the parcel to me, but I hesitated. I realized there was one problem and did not know how to broach it, without risking having him take it the wrong way.

“You need assistance with unfastening your gown?” he asked, very pragmatically.

I nodded. “Bess and Mary’s maid have the afternoon off. There is nobody else here, and I can’t do it on my own.”

We went up to my little sloping-roofed chamber above the schoolroom and locked the door. Discreetly, James went to look out of the little dormer window, hands lightly clasped behind him, his flaxen pigtail falling down the middle of his back.

I took the parcel then and laid all the items out on the bed, ran my fingers lightly across them. There was something rather poignant about them. They were the clothes James had worn as a boy, when he’d been about the age he was when I first met him, and been the same size as me. The shirt had been freshly laundered and carried a faint scent of lavender, but I could see where the cuffs had frayed slightly around his hands, and the cloth breeches still bore the faint creases which had formed as he had worn them, as he had walked and sat and knelt down to examine herbs and flowers and butterflies. Too small for him now. He had grown and I had not.

“I’m ready,” I said.

He made a great show of breathing deeply and gathering himself, as if he was about to do some onerous but unavoidable task. I turned my back to him so he could get at the tiny buttons and laces that held my costume together.

I expected to feel fumbling, nervous fingers, for him to take a long time over it, but instead I felt him working the tiny row of pearl buttons with the deftness with which he pinned a tiny butterfly. The realization hit me and surprised me: He knows exactly what he is doing. He had done this before. This was no gauche boy who’d never undressed a woman, never seen one naked. He had done this before, with some other girl, maybe with many more than one. There was no one special, he said, but he had taken his pleasures somewhere. And there were, after all, plenty of places for a young man to take his pleasures in London, plenty of willing orange girls and pretty whores who could be had for a few pennies. Plenty of maids who’d give themselves willingly, for free, to an ambitious and clever young apothecary with warm, bright eyes, who, it was plain to see, was on the rise.

I wanted to turn round and look at him, to see if this new realization made him appear any different to me. I didn’t feel jealous of these unknown girls at all, but the thought of James as a man, with a man’s needs and urges, did make me feel strange. In the way that noises become louder in the dark when you cannot see, I was acutely aware of every movement of his fingers at my back, every slight change in pressure. I let my dress fall to the ground and felt him loosening the laces of my corset. I peeled it off, turned round and, in just my chemise, I stepped out of the watery-blue circle of silk.

I wondered then if I’d been entirely wrong about his past experiences. For he stood transfixed, like a boy who’d never seen a woman’s body before, except in his most secret dreams, as if he couldn’t tear his eyes away from me. And I, who’d been a wife and borne two children and tasted another man’s ardent kisses and caresses, was acting as shy and chaste as a virgin on her wedding night.

There was no need. I was not wedded anymore. I was no virgin either. I was free and ready to love another man. I did love another man. And it was not this man. My chemise slid off my shoulder. Quick as lightning, James came out of his trance and reached behind me for the shirt, held it out to me. “I’ll wait outside while you put it on.”

When the door had softly closed behind him, I took off my undergarments. Alone and naked, I slid my arms into the arms of James’s shirt. The linen had worn very soft. It was so strange to think of my small shoulders and elbows where James’s elbows and shoulders had so often been, and it was almost as if the impression left by him, the ghost of him as a boy, was still there, slipping his arms along the entire length of mine, holding me, wrapping me in a gentle embrace.

Not a lover’s embrace, but the enfolding, secure and protective embrace of a brother, a twin, a part of myself. The shirt was a little too big for me, and yet it felt as if it fit as well as a hand in a glove, as well as my own skin. It still carried the faintest trace of him, the scent of herbs and fresh air that was so familiar to me. It was as if he were still in the room, standing right behind me, as if he would always be with me, no matter what.

I stepped into his breeches, smiling to myself now at the thought of which parts of his body had been in this particular garment before. I tugged the belt tight around my waist and pulled on his boots, which he’d padded with straw to make them fit. I looked down at myself and laughed out loud at the picture I made, like a she-soldier from a ballad.