Lady of the Butterflies (69 page)

Annie’s little brother turned his face into his sister’s wool skirt. “Can we go now, Annie, please. I don’t like this part.”

I saw that Thomas was bending low, trying to tie the top of a writhing hessian sack. I knew, from years of attending these occasions, that the sack contained a litter of kittens.

I listened to the crackle and hiss of the fire. I watched the flames reflected on the floodwater like a river of molten gold. Little sparks and embers shot up into the black sky and looked, briefly, so like golden butterflies that I wondered if I really was losing my grip on sanity. Thomas raised his arm high, the pathetic wriggling burlap sack clenched in his fist. As the effigy of the Pope toppled from his fiery throne, Thomas swung his arm and hurled the sack with all his might onto the flames, just so that the drama of the occasion could be enhanced by the terrible, desperate screaming of the kittens as they were burned alive. I had seen this standard but most gruesome Gunpowder Night ceremony performed many times before, but never had it repulsed me as much as it did now.

The man in the cap had seen me and was hurrying over. Only when he swept off his hat did I see that it was James’s manservant, George. My heart lifted for a moment, so pleased was I just to see a friendly face, one associated with happier times. His eyes were red-rimmed with tiredness, the lines of his face ingrained with dust as if he had ridden hard all day. “Whatever are you doing here, George?”

“Looking for you, Ma’am. I have been looking for you all over.” He held out a letter. “Mr. Petiver said I was to give it to nobody but you and that I was to stay with you until you had read it.”

The seriousness of his tone alarmed me. “Has something happened?”

“Please.” He nodded toward the letter.

I broke the seal and unfolded the paper with trembling fingers. It was quite different from the letters James had sent me in the past, only a few short, hastily scribbled lines, which I could just make out in the lantern Annie held up for me.

I turned to George. “You were there?” My voice was very quiet. “You saw what took place?”

A short nod. “A gentleman came to the shop,” he said carefully. “Dark hair, blue eyes, drunk as a sailor. He demanded to see you, and when I swore you’d gone, it was young Mr. Glanville he wanted. When my master told him your son was not available either, he vaulted over the counter and took hold of Mr. Petiver by the throat, accused him of... well, I won’t repeat the exact words . . . taking liberties with you. I tell you, I thought my master was done for. But your son heard the scuffle and came out of the laboratory. When he saw who it was that had come looking for him, he turned as white as a winding-sheet, but he was very brave. He bade the man leave go of Mr. Petiver and that he did, though his hand stayed on the hilt of his sword. Your boy did not try to make a run for it,” George said finally, “but I cannot tell you he went willingly.”

James’s letter was almost screwed up in my hand, I was gripping it so tightly. “What does he want?”

“That I do not know.”

“He must have said something. What did he say? What does he want with my son?” Dickon was Richard’s son too, I reminded myself, trying to take heart from it. It was Forest who was the heir to my estate. There was nothing to be gained by harming Dickon. “He could not hurt him,” I said, more a question than a statement of fact. “He would not hurt his own son.”

There was a silence. “Is there anything at all that I can do for you?” George asked.

I shook my head. “Only go directly back to London and tell James that I am grateful of his offer to come to me but that he must not. It would only make matters worse. Tell him to stay where he is, in case Dickon comes back or is still in London and needs his help. And, George, tell him . . . tell him to be careful.”

He hesitated. “What will you do, Ma’am?”

“I shall find them. I shall find my son.”

I RAN ALL THE WAY back over the marshy moor, my cloak flying back from my shoulders, my lungs bursting and the muscles in the backs of my calves as hot as irons by the time I reached the stables. There was no sign of the coachman, and I doubted he’d do my bidding now, even if I could find him.

I took a dagger from the armory to defend myself from vagabonds and highwaymen, filled a pouch with some of my jewels so that I could sell them and, stowing both hurriedly in my pocket, ran down to the stable, to my mare Kestrel’s stall. I slipped the bridle over her head, threw on the saddle, tightened the girth, then led her out to the mounting block and swung myself up onto her back. I clicked to her to walk and felt the strong muscles roll beneath me as we clattered out of the yard.

It would have been wise to wait until morning, to set out on my journey in the light rather than in the dark, but I could not wait. I did not know the way to Suffolk except that it lay east, and that first I must therefore pass through Bristol and on into Gloucestershire. I had a dwindling purse of money, which I had brought back with me from London. Together with the jewels, I reckoned it would be enough. It would have to be enough. The mist thinned as I rode out of Tickenham, but the smoke of countless bonfires made it look as if drifting patches of it still lingered. The air was heavy with the pungent smell of burning. There were great bonfires still flaring bright as beacons on village greens and at street corners, and rows of much smaller fires outside the doors of little hovels and cottages. The sporadic explosion of fireworks sounded like the rumble of distant cannon fire, as if all England was at war again, except that everywhere there was revelry and merrymaking. The festivities meant that people were abroad late into the night, drinking and carousing and throwing crackers and squibs, so that the dark roads at least were far from deserted.

I rode on. It grew quieter as I traveled through Bristol and out onto the Tetbury Road toward Cirencester. But the mired, rutted lanes and byways of Somersetshire had given way to firmer, drier ground, which made the going easier and quicker, and I could not think of stopping. I could not rest my head not knowing where Dickon was resting his.

The horse plodded through the night and its steady gait made me drowsy, even though I tried to stay alert to the many dangers of the night road, especially for a woman traveling alone. I could not get out of my mind the last time I had seen Dickon, when he had told me that he had the best of mothers and the worst of fathers and then waved good-bye. He had always been afraid of his father, but I hoped he trusted me enough to know that I would be coming to get him.

I rode on. Dawn broke cold and windy. I was so tired I fell half asleep in the saddle and woke only when I almost slipped off it. I stopped to breakfast at an inn on the outskirts of Tetbury, hoping the wheaten bread and butter would revive me a little, before continuing on to the Roman town of Cirencester, now a flourishing wool town with a large and bustling market square that drew people in for many miles around. I was sure that there must be somebody there who could tell me the way to Suffolk. I asked two stallholders, but in the end it was a cloth merchant who said that I should head toward Oxford and thence to the large village of Aylesbury. He knew the way well, since it was a center for lace-making and he had traded there.

“You should reach Oxford by nightfall with the wind behind you,” he said.

I rode, saddle-sore and exhausted, through the rolling Cotswolds. Through the riverside village of Bibury and up the steep, narrow track through Burford, each secluded village made desolate and almost apocalyptical by the smoldering heaps of cinders that marked the places where the bonfires had been. There was a keen wind. It blew the gray ash into the air, like a storm of dirty snowflakes.

I rode on. Oxford was a very pleasant place, with its twilit towers and spires and noble high street that was surprisingly clean, well paved, and of great length. I rested again, slept a little, and next came to the village green at Aylesbury. I stopped to eat at a humble inn, where a woman served me mutton stew that had been stewing for much too long, but was at least piping hot. She insisted on talking to me, but I was so fatigued I could barely make my lips move. She told me proudly that her husband and son were both craftsmen. I told her, just as proudly, that my son was an apothecary, but was going to be a doctor to the poor.

“Send him this way,” she said with a chuckle, and I did not tell her that he had probably already passed through Aylesbury.

I came to Cambridge. Cromwell’s country. Where Richard had gone to college and developed a love of music and literature. Where once fluttered Fritillaries and Large Coppers and Swallowtails. It reminded me of home, surrounded as it was by willows. It lay in a valley, with marsh and bog and fen all around it. The buildings were indifferent and the streets narrow, badly paved and dirty, but I felt more comfortable there than in almost any other place I had stayed on this interminable journey. When I asked the innkeeper for directions to Suffolk, he agreed to let his son guide me partway, in the morning, for a shilling.

The boy did not say much as he trotted alongside me on a little mule, except to caution me that Sudbury was a grim town on the River Stour, very populous and very poor. But I was still ill prepared for the strange hinterland I found myself traveling through, a place of ramshackle dwellings and narrow, filthy lanes. Great gangs of urchin children ran around barefoot, their pinched faces pockmarked and their feet red-raw in the November frost. A little beggar boy ran up to us, with running sores on his hands and around his mouth, and I tossed him a coin when he told me his sister and his mother were both dead of the bloody flux.

“How far to Elmsett?” I asked, desperate to be away from these harrowing sights that filled me with nothing but apprehension.

He frowned. “Don’t know it. But Ipswich is only about ten miles away.”

My guide and I parted company and I rode on to Ipswich alone. It was as different from Sudbury as could be, a large seaport on the banks of the River Orwell, with prosperous houses and streets that were clean and broad and paved with small stones and led down to the waterfront. More houses huddled alongside the extensive docks that were crowded with tall-masted ships being loaded and off-loaded with timber and iron, corn and wool. Masters, mates, boatswains and carpenters milled about. I stopped half a dozen of them, but they were either arriving from Newcastle or Scandinavia, or embarking for the Low Countries. They had never heard of Elmsett either.

I rode up into the town center with its abundance of medieval churches and an inn called the White Horse, right at its heart.

There was an old gray-bearded man behind the bar, who looked more like a sea captain than any man at the harbor. “Can you tell me how to get to Elmsett, sir?” I felt like a person from a ballad or myth, doomed to keep on traveling, repeating this one question, searching for somewhere that did not exist, that I would never find.

“Eight miles northwest of here,” he said. “Look out for the elm trees and the ancient church above the valley.”

I SAW the small flint church, a stark outline against the colorless November sky. It stood on a hill above valley sides that were cloaked with a forest of autumnal elm trees. I rode past a farm and a mill and came to a small village green, with a large tree where the smithy had his forge. A farmer was waiting to have his horse shod and the blacksmith was at work with his anvil and hammer on a glowing horseshoe. I asked the farmer the way to Elmsett Manor, for what I hoped was the last time.

He shielded his eyes to look up at me in the saddle, my gown and riding cloak clearly of good quality but dusty and disheveled.

“I take it you’ve come to see young Mr. Glanville.” He winked aside to the blacksmith, as if to hint that I was just one in a line of loose but well-bred young women who had come looking for Richard Glanville in the wilds of Suffolk. “You’re too late, I’m afraid. He was here, but he left about a day or so ago.”

My spirits plummeted. “Are you sure?”

He nodded. “Just his father there now, old Mr. Glanville.”