Lady of the Butterflies (43 page)

“They are going to set us on fire!”

I took her shoulders, looked intently into her face. “They will do no such thing, Mary. They will not.”

If at least three, then maybe more. Maybe a whole rabble, come to protest and besiege the house just like the angry mobs that had gathered when they’d tried to drain the Fens. But there was no doubt in my mind that Thomas Knight was the instigator, and Bess would talk sense into him. I must hold them off long enough for someone to fetch her from the cottage where she lived with Ned and Sam.

I ran to the door of the room Susan Walker, the dairymaid, shared with her sister, who worked in the bakehouse. “Susan. Wake up.”

Silence.

I lifted the latch and flung open the door. The room was empty. I flew down the dark passage to the next room, where Mistress Keene slept. She wasn’t there either. Everyone had gone.

My legs were shaking so much I could hardly stand. I was all alone in the house with two small children and a gang of angry men outside, threatening to burn us alive.

Another window shattered.

I ran down the stairs and grabbed my father’s flintlock musket and bayonet off the wall, found the cartridge box in the buffet and ripped the twisted paper tail off the cartridge with my teeth as my father had shown me. With trembling fingers, I half cocked the trigger, poured some of the black powder into the pan to prime it, turned the gun and emptied the rest of the charge and the lead ball down the muzzle. Then I whipped out the ramrod and rammed it down the barrel hard to force the powder and ball into place.

The gun was heavy and nearly as tall as me but as I slung it over my shoulder and headed for the door, I took courage from remembering that women during the civil wars had defended their houses against besieging enemy armies, against neighbors and friends and people with whom they had once shared their meals and whom they had counted as family. If they could do it, then so could I.

The mob that I faced was more than two dozen strong. Thomas Knight was there, Jane Jennings’s husband, Matthew. There was John Hort, the eeler. Ned too, as were the Bennett boys and their father, plus two other tenant farmers’ lads. Two dozen against one. There might just as well have been fifty. They were all armed with pitchforks, axes, pikes and scythes—those cruel and murdering weapons with their long poles and curved blades. Thomas Knight and two of the others were waving flaming torches while swigging something from a small flagon that they handed between them.

Thomas Knight was staring at the musket. “What’s she going to do with that, d’you think?”

“I do not want to do anything with it.” I tried to keep my voice from shaking and looked directly at Ned. “For God’s sake, go home. All of you. Go back to your wives and your children and your mothers.”

“We don’t want any trouble,” Ned said nonsensically.

“Then what are you doing here?”

“You’ve left us no option,” he half apologized. “If we’re to go on being able to afford to put bread on our tables, to feed our families . . .”

“The moor is ours,” one of the farmers’ boys yelled ferociously. “You’ve no right to take it from us.”

They all started shouting at once, each as vociferous as the next, so I could not make out a word. They’d inched forward as one body, drawn more tightly around me. They were gesticulating angrily, pointing at me menacingly with their assorted weapons, stabbing the air between us with their pikes and pitchforks. The sound was deafening, like a crowd at a bearbaiting.

“Get back,” I shouted. “All of you.” I leveled the musket, pressed it against my shoulder, aimed the long barrel into the middle of the crowd. “I swear I’ll use it if I have to.”

They quieted, one or two even backed off.

“Come on, don’t be cowards,” Mark Walker sniggered. “She’s just a lass, and a small one at that. She won’t know how to use it.”

I waved the gun at them, narrowed my eyes. “Do not wager on that, Mark.”

At the edge of my vision I glimpsed someone else, the caped silhouette of a lone rider, some distance off to the right under the trees by Monk’s Pool, but I had no time to wonder who he was or why he was not joining in.

“She might fire at us.” Thomas Knight stepped forward, his sharp jaw clenched, his eyes black as bile, black as pitch. “I wouldn’t put her to the test. She’s never been quite right in the head after all, never been like other girls. And she’s been without a man so long, she’s forgotten what it is to be a woman.” He came up closer to me. “That’s why she’s involving herself in men’s business—business she doesn’t understand.”

“She needs reminding of her place in the world,” John Hort sneered.

“You’re the man for it, Tom,” John Bennett piped up. “You’ve been itching to know what it’d be like to lie in the squire’s bed. Now’s your chance.”

I could smell the spirits on Thomas Knight’s breath, just like I’d done in the copse on May Day when I’d had a butterfly in my hands, instead of a musket. I felt no safer for the exchange.

“Go on, Tom,” Matthew Jennings said. “I bet she has a different taste from other girls, with her fair skin and her clean hair and her full set of teeth. You can tell she needs it. She’s probably not had a man since her husband, and he died years ago.”

The threat in Thomas’s eyes was not remotely sexual but rather covetous, as if it was not my virtue he wanted from me, such virtue as I had, but something else entirely.

I tensed my shoulders. Strands of hair had fallen loose from my night-plait and I tossed my head to flick them away from my face. He was so close that if I swung the bayonet at him it would cut his cheek, scar him for life or take out his eye. I’d never fired a musket but I couldn’t fail to hit him. I did not want to shoot him or stab him. He was Bess’s brother and his father’s favorite. It would destroy Mr. Knight if anything happened to his son. Also, I saw then that Thomas bore an almost uncanny and disturbing resemblance to my own son. With his black hair and deep-set, belligerent black eyes, he had such a look of Forest that it made the idea of harming him suddenly even more abhorrent.

“We could strike a bargain,” he said. “Like the one you made with those men from Bristol who are coming to take our commonland.”

“What is it that you want?” I said. “Tell me what you want and I’ll do my best to get it for you.”

“Aye, tell her, Thomas,” someone leered. “Tell her that if she lets you bed her now, between clean linen sheets in the squire’s own chamber, we’ll do her no harm.”

“Leave her alone, or I’ll kill every damned one of you.”

It was a well-loved voice, a voice from my dreams, but the rider who came galloping across from Monk’s Pool in a thunder of hooves was very real. He wore a long dark cloak and a scarlet plume in his hat, and his right arm was raised, sword unsheathed.

Richard.

His beautiful face alight with courage, he rode his black Barbary stallion directly into the heart of the mob, wielding one sword amongst a lethal forest of pikes and pitchforks and scythes and flaming torches. John Hort turned on him, brandishing his pitchfork. The spikes glanced off the horse’s flank, making it rear up, high enough to unseat even an experienced rider. But not this one. Grappling the reins in one hand, he lunged with the other. Even from the saddle of a rearing stallion, his aim was true. John Hort screamed, dropped his pitchfork, stared in shock at his assailant and then staggered off toward the church, clutching his arm. Richard sliced the sword through the air above their heads. “Who is to be next?” The ferocity in his eyes and in his voice was enough to make them scatter in all directions. Some dropped their weapons in their hurry to be away and some clung to them, but within seconds all of them were gone.

Richard slid his sword back in its scabbard, not looking at me. A light rain had started to fall again and I felt droplets on my cheeks, like tears. His cloak was studded with raindrops as if with tiny diamonds. The horse sidled, tossed its head and snorted, lifted first one hoof and then the other as if it were prancing on burning coals. Richard leaned forward and stroked its neck, making soft, soothing noises to calm it. All the while, he steadfastly kept his eyes averted from mine, even though he must have felt me watching him.

I’d thought every line and curve of his perfect profile was etched indelibly onto my soul. The curl of his long lashes as they lay against his cheeks, the little indentations at the corners of his kissable, childish mouth, the dark curls that fell over his smooth brow and coiled softly into his neck. But it was a ghost that I had been holding on to, a lovely but faded ghost, and here, before me now, in the moonlit rain, his beauty was almost too much for me. And yet I wanted to gaze at nothing else but the exquisite lines of his face. I could look for a lifetime at him and never have enough of looking. He was the brightest star, shining in the darkness. He was everything to me.

I should have been angry with him for what he had just done, for being so rash and hotheaded. I had not invited him here, was not ready for this, should send him away as I had done all the times before. But I could not find it in my heart to be angry with him, did not want to send him away. I had missed him. So much. I was so glad just to see him.

His face averted, still soothing his horse, he said, “Aren’t you going to thank me for getting rid of them for you?” It was spoken with an attempt at nonchalance, at the charming confidence at which I knew him to be so proficient, but he did not quite manage to pitch it right this time.

“Thank you?” I asked halfheartedly. “You wounded a man.”

“A warning, that’s all.”

“You think they won’t be back? More of them next time, and better armed.”

Now at last he turned to me, with those lovely deep blue eyes that had never lost their strange and powerful hold on my heart. “I will stay and protect you.”

It was said with a touching and ardent chivalry, but at that precise moment he did not look capable of protecting anyone, looked in far more need of protection himself. He looked so tired, his eyelids almost too heavy for him to hold open, and any resolve I had left in me to resist him suddenly vanished.

He must have seen it, since his lips came up at one side in a sweetly lopsided smile, and he was suddenly surer of himself again. He reached down and snatched the musket from my hand. “Is it primed and loaded?”

“It is.”

He looked impressed. “What man would care about dying if it was at the hands of such a pretty little musketeer?” He tossed the gun in the air and caught it. “You were not intending to fire it, though?”

I smiled at him. “I had been hoping to find a more peaceable way to reach an agreement.”

He aimed the musket into the sky, pulled the trigger and discharged it with a thunderous crack, turned to me in the drifting smoke from the exploding cartridge. “Aye, so I saw. A whore’s way.”

“You are not jealous? Of Thomas Knight?”

He slid from the saddle, propped the musket against a feeding trough. He took off his hat and hooked it over the muzzle. “How can I not be driven half mad by jealousy, when you have kept me away from you for nearly five years?” I heard an ache of loneliness in his voice, but he seemed reluctant to step any closer to me. Did not try to touch me. Then I saw he was looking beyond me into the dark hall. “Did all the commotion wake you, lad?” he said gently.

I spun round to see Forest, standing there in his long white nightshirt, his eyes wide with wonder. “You stabbed him, sir,” he said, with awe in his voice. “Did you see him, Mama? I watched from the window and saw it all. The horse up on its hind legs, kicking at the air, the flash of the sword and that man running away with blood spurting out of his arm.”

I heard Richard give a soft chuckle as I went to my son. “Come now, Forest,” I said. “You were far too far away to see blood, and it wasn’t exactly spurting.”

“It was like a real battle.”

It was a real battle. “Well, it’s over now, so you can go back to bed. Bid good night to Mr. Glanville.”

“Good night, sir.”

Richard smiled at him. “Good night, young fellow.”

When still he made no move, I took Forest’s shoulders and spun him round, gave him a nudge in the direction of the stairs. “Bed, Forest. Now.” I watched him go reluctantly, dragging his small bare feet, glancing back longingly into the hall where Richard had come, uninvited, to stand close behind me. “Would you like some spiced wine?” I asked Richard. “There’s nobody here to serve you, but I’ll gladly warm some for you myself.”

He smiled. “I’m sure it would taste all the better.”

“You can have your usual bed too, if you’d like.”

“I’ll curl up by the fire with the dogs. I’d rather. It won’t matter where I am. I shall not sleep.”

I do not know if he moved closer to me or I to him, but whichever way it happened, there was hardly any space between us anymore.

“I do not want wine or a bed,” he said quietly. “I just want you.” His arms were down by his sides. He made a small uncertain move to hold out his hand. I did the same. The backs of them brushed against each other. Our fingers caught, turned, entwined. I leaned my head toward his and for a moment we stood holding hands, our foreheads resting against each other. I put my arms around him and felt him shudder against me.

“If only you knew,” he murmured. “How I have wanted to be with you.”

“I know.” I lifted my hand onto the back of his head, stroked his soft curly hair. “I know.”

My mouth found his, clung to it, as if his kiss was the very breath of life to me. And it was. All the time I had been away from him had been as one long night, a little death, and now, beneath the touch of his mouth and hands, I felt every part of me waking, softening, opening, coming back to life—a sweet, agonizing fullness in my groin that was like a ripening, a bursting open. I wrapped my arms around him and clasped him to my heart, cradled his head against my shoulder, and I wondered only how I had borne to be without him for so long.

He swept me up into his arms and up the twisting stone stairs, my long plait falling around us both like a gilded rope that bound us together. He lay down beside me on the bed, slipped warm hands inside my shift, stroked from my breasts to my belly, moved down between my legs, and I lay quivering beneath his touch until I could stand it no longer and pulled his face down to mine to kiss him again. Then he was kissing my eyelids, my cheeks, my chin, my throat, my ears, my breasts, my stomach. He whispered my name, over and over, the name that only he had ever called me. The sweetest name, the sweetest word I had ever heard. “Nell.”