Lady of the Butterflies (71 page)

I rode on, the rain stinging my face like biting insects, trying not to think that Dickon had been made to travel through this godforsaken place, without a good dinner in his belly to warm him. I could not think that mud might be the least of the dangers facing him.

I rode on to the rickety bridge across the River Nene, thence to the River Welland, which was shallow enough for me to wash myself. I rode on to the River Witham, and into Lincolnshire.

I had run out of money, but I parted with a pearl necklace for a straw pallet to sleep on and a bowl of burned porridge, and cold water to wash in. I felt as if I had been traveling forever, and yet I was only halfway there, with over a hundred miles left to go. I woke feeling feverish. My head throbbed and every bone and muscle in my body ached. I hardly knew where I was, or even who I was anymore.

I held on grimly to the reins with my chapped hands and clung to the image of the boy I was pursuing. I had chased butterflies over fields and ditches and I would follow my son to the ends of the earth, if need be. He would always be my baby, no matter how big he grew. Since the day he was born, every small hurt or minor distress he ever suffered had been as a thorn upon my soul. I would suffer any danger or discomfort, any accusation and slur, any number of locks and chains to know that he was safe. I would willingly trade my life for his, if it came to it.

The roads and days merged, each new town, each new inn very much like all the rest. All I could do was keep going, one step at a time, one mile at a time, counting down the landmarks. The medieval city of Lincoln, with the castle atop the steep hill, the half-timbered Tudor houses and Gothic bridge and the magnificent cathedral, with its central tower like a finger of stone pointing to Heaven. My way lay in a different direction entirely, north, to Driffield in the Wolds, where there were trout streams to cross, further north still, along a straight Roman road to the fortified town of Malton, with a shallow ford over the Derwent.

I passed the alum works and saw the Gothic pillars and arches of Whitby Abbey, standing high on the headland, high above the German Ocean with the black North York Moors behind it, and I could not believe I had journeyed so far to come to such a place. A little fishing port with white houses, closely and irregularly built on narrow cobbled streets. A cold, wet, windswept place of slanting sunbeams.

There were two inns on the harbor side, only one with lodgings above it, more a tavern really, that looked like a smuggler’s den.

The landlady was a wrinkled old woman who smelled of fish. What teeth she had left were blackened stumps and she spoke in a North Country accent that was almost incomprehensible. Yet she looked at me most disapprovingly, warily even, as if it was I who was to be mistrusted. She kept me outside the door of her apartment, only opened the door partway and peered round it, as she informed me that a man and boy and woman who fit the description I gave her of Dickon and Richard and Sarah Gideon had lodged with her but had left on Monday.

“What day is it now?” I had lost all track of days and of time.

“Tuesday.”

I had come all this way and again I had missed him by just one day. I collapsed at the top of the dingy stairwell and wept with fatigue and despair.

The woman took pity on me when I sobbed and told her Dickon was my son. She helped me down to the tavern, where she sat me in a corner and had them serve me smoked herrings in cream.

“They were your boy’s favorite,” she encouraged. “He could gobble up two whole platefuls in one sitting. Surely you can manage a few bites.”

“He was having enough to eat?” I asked. “He was not too thin?”

She looked at me as if my concerns were quite pathetic. “Like I say, he was never full up, like all young lads, but he certainly wasn’t starving to death. It’s you who’s too thin, madam, if you don’t mind my saying.”

I took a bite. The fish melted in my mouth, was delicious. I had not realized how hungry I was.

“Did he seem unhappy or frightened in any way?”

“Cheerful more like.”

“Cheerful?”

“For sure. Especially the last night they were here and he stayed up drinking brandy and talking with his father until past midnight.”

“Did you hear what they talked about?”

“Some of it.” She helped herself to a swig of ale from my pot. “Doctoring mostly. His father was promising to set him up with his own examination rooms.”

I should have been relieved that Dickon was not in distress. But it disturbed me to think that he was so easily won over, with what were surely false bribes and promises. I despised myself for being disappointed to hear that he seemed at ease now in his father’s company, that they were companionable, were making plans together. Then it occurred to me that Richard, or Sarah Gideon, or both of them were entirely capable of bribing this woman to feed me this story.

“Was there no animosity at all between the two of them?” I tested.

“Only over the papers.”

“What papers?”

“Some papers Mr. Glanville seemed keen for the boy to sign. Couldn’t help but notice.” She apologized for her nosiness. “His father pushed them at him that night, before the talk about medicine. The lad pushed them back. Mr. Glanville refolded them and put them back in his pocket, said that they would keep for another day.”

I should not have doubted him. Dickon was just playing along, still refusing to sign anything, stalling until I came to rescue him, as he knew I would.

“Do you have any idea where they might be now?” I asked, hoping to God her inquisitiveness extended that far.

She tapped the side of her nose with her forefinger. “I could make a guess that they are on their way to Newington Green.”

“Near London.” She might as well have said Mexico, for the great distance it seemed to me then. “What makes you think they have gone there?”

“Mistress Gideon asked me to post a letter for her. Then lo and behold a letter comes back and the next day they set off. My bet is she was writing to a relative of hers to ask if they could pay a visit. I think I can just about remember the address.”

I would always be a few miles, a few hours behind them. They had not covered their trail very well but they did not need to. So long as they kept on moving from place to place, I would never catch them. But I would die before I ceased trying.

I PARTED with my last necklace in Lincoln and bought a brown wool dress from a secondhand clothes seller. It was too big for me and it undoubtedly had lice living in the seams, but I had lice aplenty already and at least it was thick and warm and not in rags and tatters like my own gown.

I stayed at the same inn in King’s Lynn that I had stayed at before, but the landlord did not recognize me. Instead of giving me the best room that was reserved for quality folk, I was allotted a pallet under the eaves.

It took me two weeks to reach Newington Green, to find the small cottage owned by a shady character whose name was Street. He denied all knowledge of Sarah Gideon or of Richard Glanville until I gave him every last penny I had, and he told me that they had gone to Mitcham.

“Mitcham?”

“It is the Montpellier of England, don’t you know, surrounded by fields of lavender and chamomile and peppermint for the London perfumers.”

“But why have Sarah Gideon and Richard Glanville gone there?”

“There are many fine, fine houses. John Donne lived there, and Sir Walter Raleigh.”

“Please, sir. I have no more money to give you.”

“Sarah had an appointment with a French tailor, to be measured for her wedding gown.” He closed the door in my face.

I FILCHED A PIE from a market stall and spent the night beneath a tree, shivering myself to sleep, with my fingers wrapped ever more tightly around the dagger. I was in fear for my life now. I was searching for Richard and yet I was in terror of him finding me first, of him finding me and taking his sword to my throat. Of Sarah Gideon doing the job for him.

She was no longer content to be his mistress. She wanted to be his wife and Richard was evidently prepared to overlook entirely the fact that he already had a wife. It was no longer enough just to prove I was mad and to lock me away. They were not prepared to wait until eventually nobody even remembered I existed. Sarah had gone to Mitcham to have her wedding gown made. They wanted me out of the way immediately, altogether, forever.

James had written to me of Mitcham, so long ago it seemed like a dream, a dream of swaths of violet flowers that exuded the most soothing fragrance and attracted clouds of white butterflies. There was no lavender now. The fields were brown instead of purple. There were no white butterflies. It seemed there was no beauty left in the world, no hope.

I rode over the common to the manor of Mitcham Cannons. If Mitcham was anything like Tickenham, whoever resided there would be aware of any visitors to the village. The benevolent gentleman who opened the door took me for a beggar woman and invited me in for bread and cheese and to warm myself by the fire. He never even had the chance to tell me his name. My own name caused too much of a stir.

“I am Eleanor Glanville of Tickenham Court in Somersetshire,” I said, my voice croaking with disuse. “I am looking for my son. He is traveling with my husband, Richard Glanville, and a woman. I was told they were in Mitcham.”

The man stared at me aghast and I thought I knew why. I was still clutching the dagger beneath my tattered riding cloak, beneath which I was wearing an old dress that hung off my shoulders and trailed past my feet. My boots had holes in them and my hair hung in snarls around my dirty face. I had been traveling so long that I had quite forgotten how to be still and I paced back and forth, as I chewed on bread that I held in fingers cracked and bleeding from the cold. I must look like a madwoman for sure. I felt like one.

“He told you I was mad, sir?”

He shook his head very slowly. “No, madam. He did not tell me you were mad. He told me that you were dead.”

My feet stopped pacing. “Dead?”

“It was my understanding that Richard Glanville’s wife died of ague some months ago.”

How cruel. It was the cruelest mockery, to claim I had died of the disease that had killed the rest of my family, the disease that I had feared all of my life.

“Dead?” I repeated, walking again. I took five paces forward, came up against the wall and turned, took five paces back. “Dead of ague?”

“They obviously feared it might be called into question. While she was having her wedding gown fitted, Mr. Glanville had an appointment with a solicitor, to have an affidavit drawn up to present to the clergyman who was to conduct their wedding, to prove that he was free to marry, to prove that his first wife was no longer living and that he was a widower.”

Five steps forward, turn, five steps back. “Who signed it? Who signed the affidavit?”

“They planned for the boy to sign, Mr. Glanville’s son.”

“Did he do it?”

“Apparently he came down with some affliction and was unable.”

“He is my son too,” I said. “And he is a good boy. He will not commit perjury to enable his father to commit bigamy. He would not swear before God that I am dead, when he knows it for a lie.”

“Then you should take great care, madam,” the gentleman said. “Maybe your boy will leave them no option but to turn the lie into truth.”

“Where are they now?”

“They were on their way to Somersetshire.”

THE LIVERIED FOOTMAN who opened the door of William Merrick’s grand square-fronted residence on King Street in Bristol took one look at me and would have shut the door on me immediately, had I not anticipated his reaction and stuck my foot in the way.