Lady of the Butterflies (66 page)

In the stillness of the dawn, as the rising sun tinged the sky with peach and the air turned a pearly blue, I spread out the blanket on the earthen floor and took his hand, led him to it. We knelt upon it together, slowly undressing each other, as the butterflies drifted down and flickered around us on their silent, velvet wings, like tiny luminous bats. James plucked at the laces of my corset and I felt the air brush my breasts, as if for the first time. We lay down, naked, and traced every line and curve of each other’s bodies, until two of the Red Admirals came gliding down from the shadowy roof and landed on my belly, where James had touched me and left a trace of sweet honey. It was an awesome, exquisite sensation, to feel them walking so lightly over my skin, where it had just been caressed. James kissed me, my mouth opened for him, and I felt as if all the burdens of this life were pouring out of me. Weightless, I had been lifted up on golden wings.

He ran his fingers over my back and down the insides of my arms, his touch as soft and warm as the silken touch of the morning sun, as soothing as a benediction, and I knew that, though he had never given me any hint of it, he had made love to me in his dreams a thousand times over. I stroked him and his muscles quivered like the gilded coffin before it had burst open. The beat of him within me was the firm and powerful rhythm of a Swallowtail in flight over the moors, the pulsing of the newborn Red Admiral as it slowly beat its scarlet and black wings, until they were fully open and shining and perfect. His final release was as mystical as the transformed life that had burst forth from its shell. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, I saw that the final Red Admiral had been born and had risen from its coffin into the light.

JAMES TOOK ME by the hand and led me through to the laboratory.

“What are we doing now?”

He pressed me down onto the bench before the microscope. “Oh,” I said. “I see.”

“That is just it,” he said with a smile. “You don’t see. Not properly. Not yet.”

I felt a tingle of excitement.

He scanned the cauldrons and vials and tubes in the laboratory, but seemed to find nothing suitable. “Wait there,” he said. “I know exactly what you should look at.”

I heard him going up the wooden stairs to his rooms, two steps at a time, and then down them again, just as fast. He had a casket in his hand. Inside were all the letters I had ever sent to him, and beneath them, wings of broken butterflies, but not just any butterflies. I was puzzled at first. One wing was tiger-striped, another vivid green, another small and blue. Stupidly, I took them for the ones James had sent to me over the years and I wondered how on earth they came to be here, when I had left them safely hidden in my Bible. Then it dawned on me that, of course, these were not my wings, but the opposite wings of the same butterflies. Where I had a right wing, James had a left. He had broken the butterflies in two and sent me one of the wings, keeping the other for himself, as others would bite into a coin and keep half each, as a token, a love token.

“Which should it be, do you think? The exotic Brazilian or the pretty little English blue?”

“You choose,” I said.

He selected the blue and I watched his fingers at work, as he skillfully fixed it onto a pin, slid it under the lens. He sat directly behind me on the bench, so that I was perched between his legs, with his arms around me. I rested my hands on his thighs, as he brought his head down over my shoulder, his face cheek-to-cheek with mine. He made more adjustments to the various screws, moving the butterfly up and down and from side to side.

He covered my left eye with his hand. “Look now,” he instructed.

I bent toward the lens, and my eyes widened with wonder. The image was incredibly, breathtakingly clear, and yet I could not believe I was looking at a butterfly. There were ridges of tiny plated mirrors, like the scales on a fish, like a suit of the most delicate polished armor, of an impossibly bright lapis blue.

When I eventually moved back, the rows of shining mirrors still danced before my eyes.

“Tell me exactly what you see.” I felt the breath of his words in my hair, like a soft summer breeze. “Describe it to me, as if you were my eyes and I couldn’t see it for myself.”

“I see . . .” I broke off and thought. “I see the blue of the brightest silk and satin, of the most lustrous taffeta. Of the sky in summer and of the sea. I see the blue of ribbons and of sapphires. I see that all the riches I ever needed are right there.”

Except, said the voice in my head, for the deepest, most beautiful blue of one man’s eyes.

I FED THE BUTTERFLIES in the herbarium every day, and they soon learned that there was always honey or the juice of an overripe plum on my fingers, so that all I had to do was open the door of the little herbarium for all three of them to come sailing down to perch on my hand, my shoulder, my head, sometimes getting tangled in my long hair. I marveled at it each time. It was the simplest, purest pleasure. They made me feel blessed, as if I had been granted a special privilege.

I heard, or sensed, James come in softly through the door at the side, stand watching for a while.

“Don’t take this wrongly, now,” he whispered. “I am not accusing you of communing with the dead. But it is almost as if you commune with those butterflies. Almost as if you are one of them.”

I smiled up at James through my lashes. “I am surprised you are not a great distraction to them,” I said. He had been to the Master’s Day celebrations at the Apothecaries’ Company Hall in Blackfriars, and he looked very fine and handsome in his ceremonial livery of dark blue with gold braid. “Shut in here all their lives, the poor little things have never seen anything half so bright.”

“They have seen you.” James smiled.

The butterflies flew off and I watched them go dancing upward, not toward an open sky but a dark entrapping roof. “I know I cannot keep them forever,” I said sadly, as protective and possessive as a new mother. “They are a week old now, already. We should set them free, shouldn’t we? It is not fair to keep them here.”

James did not answer, and I was sure he felt as I did, that when the butterflies were gone, everything would come to an end. Their serenity, their carefree joy and simple beauty were symbols of the brief idyll of the past few weeks, an interlude which could not last forever. In a few days it would be November. The summer had ended long ago. I had been in London for weeks, too many weeks.

“You believe Richard Glanville is responsible for your first husband’s death, don’t you?” he said quietly. “You believe he poisoned him with Jesuits’ Powder.”

“How did you . . . ?”

“You fear him. More than you would fear a person whose only crime was to accuse you of insanity. Edmund suffered from ague, the cure for which is the powder, and yet you asked Hans how much could kill a person.”

“I sent Richard to London for it,” I said steadily. “I gave it to Edmund and he died, a horrible, painful death. For a long time I believed that the worst I had heard about Papist poison must be true. Then you sent me Robert Talbor’s book, and I knew it was a cure, after all, and so I was sure it was something else Richard had given to me. Now I know he just told me to give Edmund a dose that was too high, fatally high.”

“Eleanor, the physicians still do not know how much of the powder is most effective. Maybe it was just a mistake. And maybe it was not even his mistake. Maybe it was the mistake of the apothecary who sold it to him.”

“You do not really believe that?”

“I do not know what to believe. And neither do you, I think. You have not confronted him with this, have you?”

I shook my head. “He would only deny it.”

“With words, perhaps. But unless he is a monster, you will know if he is telling the truth or not.”

“That is just it. I already know, James. I saw his guilt, as clear as day.”

He regarded me almost sadly. “It is just that your heart will not accept it, will it? Because you loved him, because you love him still. And so you cannot accept the evidence of your eyes, or of your head. Nor should you. Listen to me, Eleanor. There are times for weighing evidence and making reasoned deductions and times when you should set all that aside, when you should listen to what your heart tells you, though your eyes cannot see it and your mind cannot understand. ‘If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.’ ”

“Francis Bacon?”

“But Sir Francis’s admirable philosophy cannot be applied to love. With love it is just the opposite. There must only be certainties. Beginning with doubts is no good, no good at all.”

“But I have always doubted Richard,” I admitted. “I could not help but love him, desire him, but I have always had my doubts about him, and now I know that I was right to doubt.”

One of the butterflies was fluttering round my head again and I raised my hand to let it settle. I walked past James with it still on my palm and I pushed open the door. The sun was shining, a dying autumn sun, very soft and rich. I stood and let the butterfly feel the air on its wings, before I gently tossed up my arm. I watched it flutter off, over the herb garden and away. One by one the other butterflies went soaring after the first, until all three of them were gone, over the rooftops and the trees, into the sky, which suddenly looked very small compared with Tickenham’s skies.

“I have to go home, James,” I said.

“I know that you do. Whether he is guilty or not, whether you love him or not, the law of the land says that you married him and therefore belong to him.”

“Oh, a pox on the law.”

James laughed. “You are a glorious, lawless little person, Eleanor Glanville, and you should belong to no one. You were born to be as free as the Red Admirals. It is a tragedy that you are not.”

“But I shall not be locked up,” I said. “If Richard still claims that I am mad, I know I have friends, powerful friends, who will refute those claims. I have you, and I have Hans Sloane and John Ray, three of the most respected natural philosophers in the country. I can depend on you, can’t I?”

“Always.” James put his arm around my shoulder. “And you must keep on writing to me regularly now,” he said, half serious. “For if you do not, I shall fear something is amiss and I shall be haring up to Somersetshire to rescue you.”

“I shall hold on to that.” I put my hand over his. “I swear I shall never break off our correspondence again,” I said. “Not for anything.”

“When will you leave?”

“After I’ve seen Dickon go off with you on the herbalizing expedition tomorrow. He wanted to show me the state barge.”

A LARGE AND NOISY GROUP of apprentices and their masters boarded the grand apothecaries’ barge that was drawn up by the steep river steps at Blackfriars, ready to take them on a last collecting trip before winter. A picnic had already been loaded onto the boat, baskets of bread and cheese and meats and a barrel of ale, and all the apprentices, dressed in their blue uniforms, carried an assortment of glass bottles and pencils and collecting books. Bright pennants and banners cracked in the stiff breeze beneath a leaden sky.