“If we drained them, would we become very rich, then?”
Rich to me meant satin and silk and ribbons aplenty. It meant diamonds and rubies. Although not for rich Puritans, of course.
“If only it was as easy as that,” my father sighed. “What William Merrick conveniently omits to mention is the disorder and violence that erupted when attempts were made to drain the Fens, the mobs and riots led by Fenlanders who feared the destruction of their way of life. I would think long and hard before stirring up that kind of strife here. I have lived through enough years of war and discord to value being at peace with our neighbors.”
I knew better than to remind him that some of them, Bess’s brother Thomas for one, were not so peaceful toward us even now; he still looked at me with disdain and contempt whenever I met him on the moor.
My father smoothed an escaped little lock of hair off my brow, rested his big hand on the top of my head, and I looked up at his craggy, kindly face, dearer to me than any other. “Running this estate is the gravest responsibility,” he said. “It is your birthright, precious to us as the crown jewels to a royal heir. Tickenham Court has been in your mother’s family for generations. I want to do what is right in her memory, to safeguard it for you and for your children. I am only a custodian here, after all. This house is your future, your children’s future.”
My mother gave birth to my sister and me late in her life, so I had grown up knowing that there would be no sons to follow, and that one day the manor of Tickenham Court would be mine. I used to dream of being a grand and gracious lady of a grand and gracious mansion. But now I fully understood that what had to happen for me to attain this position was the last thing I wanted. I moved closer to my father and slipped my hand into his as if to hold on to him. “Don’t speak of it, Papa,” I said quietly. “I don’t want you to die.”
He gave my hand a little squeeze. “I’m afraid there’s no avoiding that, Eleanor. We may live in an age when physicians are constantly making new discoveries about the workings of the body, but not even they can shy away from the one inevitability of life: death. You must be mindful of that, living your life in such a way as to prepare yourself for entry into the Kingdom of Heaven.”
God help me and my rebellious heart, but I felt a sudden surge of defiance that was like anger, like desperation. I did not want to listen to him anymore, did not want to be dragged down into melancholy with him. I did not want to be mindful of death. I was eleven years old and I did not want to prepare myself for Heaven.
My sister died of ague not a month after my mother, and to think of her now gave me such a dreadful sense of my own mortality, of death’s nearness and its inevitability. I thought of all the delights of this life that little Margaret would never have the chance to experience, some of which I was not even sure my mother had ever experienced. Music and dancing. Singing and pretty clothes. Beauty and color. Christmas and feasting. Love. I could not, would not die until I had had a taste of those things. I had such a powerful yearning to taste them, such a yearning to be happy, that it made me feel like a chick trapped inside an egg. I knew that all that separated me from light and from life was the thinnest shell, if only I could shore up enough strength to break through, to find my way out. Well, one day I would. Oh, I would. I felt the strength growing inside me all the time, a tough, unshakable determination. For my sister’s sake as well as my own, I was not going to die until I had truly lived.
Summer
1665
A warm spring had turned into the most sweltering summer anyone could remember, and today was yet another day of achingly bright blue skies. Knowing how I preferred to be outside, my father suggested that rather than have morning lessons in the parlor, we should have them out on the moors. “We shall see what wonders of nature we can find to study,” he said, tucking my hand into the crook of his arm.
The moors always had a profound tranquillity in summer, but in the uncommon heat the pace of life seemed to have grown even more restful. The air was heavy with the scent of meadowsweet and the meadows were a riot of color, with orchids and yellow iris lining the ditches and silvery water-filled rhynes, as our drainage ditches are called, and the knapweed like exploding bright pink fireworks. Lazy shorthorn cattle nibbled at the river’s edge where mallards bobbed their heads beneath the surface. Even the Yeo flowed more sluggishly, dotted with water violets, parts of it growing stagnant with weeds.
We watched pond skaters and mayflies and water boatmen. I caught a stickleback and found the conical shell of a limpet to add to my collection. When my father, usually so hale and fit, had to pause to catch his breath, I assumed it was on account of the cloying humidity. “Shall we go to the woods now and look for fungi, Papa?” I suggested. “It will be cooler.”
“That is thoughtful of you, Eleanor. But I am not suffering from the heat,” he said. “Not at all.”
We were by a bend in the riverbank, just upstream of where Susan Hort’s father, John, was inspecting his wicker eel traps. I kicked off my shoes and went to dip my toes in the gurgling Yeo. A heron stood with a fish in its beak and I smiled to see an otter slip out of the reed bed and go for a swim. “The river won’t dry up completely, will it, Papa?” I asked.
He smacked his cheek where the gnats were biting again and I saw that his wrist was ringed with raised and angry sores. “Even if it does there’s always the spring water.”
Springs gushed up through the peat all across the land and it was thanks to them that instead of an island in the midst of a lake, our little manor and its estate were now a lush haven in a desert. The pastures were red-brown in places, not from dust and drought like elsewhere in the country, but from sorrel and herbs.
“We can count on the springs to water our beasts and crops,” my father added. “We’ll have eggs and fowl, beef, cheese and vegetables. Nobody will starve. We must thank the Lord that even if it does not rain for months yet, we will be spared here.”
“You said the same thing when we heard there was plague in London, sir,” John Hort grunted over his shoulder, then turned to face us with a slippery eel writhing in his huge hands. “Those first two cases in St. Giles . . . are you still so sure we’re safe? They say it’s spreading toward the city. What stops it from spreading west?”
My father clutched his leather jerkin tighter around his shoulders and I realized with a stab of alarm that he’d been wearing it all morning, despite the sweltering heat, despite it being the hottest month anyone could remember. I noticed also that his hand shook slightly, and it sent tremors reverberating through my own body.
It was my turn now to fend off the mosquitoes. I slapped them away as if I could slap away the threat of disease. There was nothing at all to fear, was there? London was miles and miles away. As we walked back toward the garden, scores of butterflies crisscrossing our path, it might have been another world. I turned a cartwheel in the grass, skipped off determinedly through the long sedges, the activity and the prettiness of the bright wings helping me to forget the trembling of my father’s hand. My hands brushed the top of the long grass stems, and a little multicolored cloud of butterflies swirled around my dark skirts and my head like living flowers broken free of their stems.
In the walled garden, I stopped to watch two sulfur yellows playing together over the flower beds, fresh and rich as new-churned butter. Butter-flies indeed.
I felt my father’s eyes move approvingly to my upturned face. “It is the duty of everyone, women as well as men, to admire our creator in all the works of His creation,” he said. “Butterflies are an overlooked though beautiful part of that creation, and surely the most wondrous of all. Wait here. I’ll show you something.”
He strode off toward the kitchen garden, and I watched, delighted and astonished, as he crouched down and started rummaging about examining the underside of the cabbage leaves, his jerkin trailing in the peaty soil. I was filled with warmth and love for him. I was so fortunate to have him for a father, someone scholarly, who was alwa
ys looking to inspire and stimulate, who delighted in teaching me and wanted to share his knowledge with me. Daily lessons had followed morning prayers ever since I was old enough to hold a quill, and they weren’t confined to a girl’s usual lot, but extended instead to the fascinating subjects generally reserved for boys: botany, geography, astronomy.
“Hold out your hand,” my father instructed when he eventually came back, for all the world as if he was going to cane me out there in the garden. There was a fervent sparkle in his brown eyes that I had only ever seen before when he was at his devotions.
I did as he bade, and he placed a little worm on my palm. It was the same color as a cabbage, green with a hint of blue. It wriggled and arched its segmented back, straightened, arched again, crawled toward my thumb. I giggled. “It tickles me.”
“Consider now, Eleanor,” my father said. “Just as raindrops yield frogs and rotten meat births worms, so this little creature has been spontaneously generated from the leaves of those cabbages over there. And it will eat those leaves that birthed it until it grows rather fatter than it is now. Then it will weave a tiny silken coffin around itself and inside that coffin a transformation will take place that is truly miraculous. The coffin will open and the humble worm will have turned into a beautiful butterfly.”
I gazed at the squirming maggot. The idea of a grub springing forth from a leaf and then growing bright wings was too fantastical. We were supposed to be living in an age that was throwing aside all belief in magic. But I had not quite lost my childish belief that my father was as omniscient as God, that there was nothing he did not know, and so how could I not believe it? “Where do they build their coffins? How do they do it? Can I see one of them now?”
“I’ve never even seen one myself.” He patted my head. “I know you always want to see proof of a thing with your own eyes, my little one, but the only way to acquire great knowledge is to read and build on the knowledge of those who have gone before.”
By which he meant dusty, ancient texts, the pens of Pliny and Aristotle and others who were long dead, could not be called to account.
“Why do you think God made butterflies?” he asked.
I thought for a moment, wanting to give the right answer, or a considered one at least. “To make the world beautiful?”
“In part, no doubt. But as far back as the ancient Greeks, it has been believed that butterflies represent the souls of the dead. They are a token, Eleanor, a promise. A caterpillar begins as a greedy worm, which surely represents the baseness of our life on earth. Then they are entombed, just as we are entombed in the grave. They emerge on glorious wings, just as the bodies of the dead will rise at the sound of the last trumpet on the final Judgment Day. God put butterflies on this earth to remind us of paradise, of His promise of eternal life. To give us hope.”
I looked from the caterpillar to the bright yellow butterflies, dancing so joyfully in the bright sunshine over the bright flowers, and I was filled with hope. God must love beauty and color to create such beautiful and colorful things. It was not wrong to want to be happy, to want all the things I so badly wanted.
I DECIDED THAT if I could not see a butterfly coffin, I could at least try to observe spontaneous generation. So next morning I went off to the scullery, where Jack Jennings, the kitchen boy, was peeling a mound of carrots. When I thought he wasn’t looking I sneaked past him to the coolness of the larder, where hung a row of dead, plucked ducks. Bunching my skirt out of the way, I clambered onto a cupboard and hooked down the one that looked the freshest. Its skin wasn’t particularly nice to touch, all pimply and cold, like you’d imagine the skin of a grass snake might feel, though actually they don’t feel like that at all. Snakeskin is quite nice to touch. But I’d never been remotely squeamish and I didn’t even grimace at the dead duck. I hid it behind my back, dangling it by its scraggy neck, peeked out into the kitchen and, when Jack and Mistress Keene, the cook, were busy at last with the various pots simmering over the great hearth, I stepped across the drainage channel and was out the door.
Since I didn’t want the numerous household dogs or cats to maul the duck, the only safe place to take it was my chamber. The chambermaid had done her tidying for the day and it wouldn’t be immediately obvious, since I’d have to cover it up to prove the maggots didn’t get at it from the air. I set it down by the window, reasoning that as not much was born in winter, warmth and sun were likely contributing factors to birth. There was something quite disturbing about the bird’s lifeless beady eyes, so I wrapped it quickly in a thick blanket. Content as it always made me to be caught up in the thrill of discovery and experiment, I ran off gaily to learn of far-flung lands: New Spain, Surinam, and the rest of the Americas.
I’d never have imagined one dead duck could cause such a rumpus. It took Mistress Keene until the following morning to discover that it was missing from the larder. But as soon as she did she came in a fluster to the parlor, where my father was hearing me recite a passage in Latin. Mistress Keene was as round as she was tall and she had a permanently red face and bright beady eyes like a blackbird. “I beg your pardon for interrupting, sir,” she said with a glance at me, as I stood demurely with the leather-bound book open in my hands. “But I’m afraid I have to report that we’ve been robbed of a duck. Fresh-caught and plucked just the other day.”
My father bade her wait until I had finished my recitation, which I achieved, somehow, with only the faintest faltering in my voice.
“Well done, Eleanor,” my father said, indicating I might close the tome. “That was a pleasure to listen to.” He condemned the reciting of Latin in church and advocated the Bible being written in English for all to understand, but he accepted that Latin was still the gateway to science, the language in which all the most interesting books were written, and he was very keen for me to be fluent. “Nobody who heard you as I do could go along with the common belief that one tongue is enough for any woman.”
Pride leapt inside me like a hare in springtime. But one glance at Mistress Keene and I feared my happiness was going to be very short-lived. I didn’t want my father to be angry with me, to let him down. Nor did I want to be locked in my chamber again, especially on such a lovely sunny day. But I did not see how it was to be avoided.
My father had returned his attention to Mistress Keene. “Now, just one duck, you say? Nothing else? None of the cheeses or butter or cider?”
“Not that I am aware of, sir. But a duck is a duck.”
“Indeed,” my father agreed.
“I know how insistent you are on honesty, sir,” Mistress Keene simpered, wiping her hands on her apron. “I’d hate you to blame me or little Jack.”
I sneaked my hands behind my back guiltily, as if I could hide what I’d done. I’d concealed the duck under my bed away from Bess and the other maids, but now that they had finished upstairs, it was back by the window again, plain as day.
“I am not blaming anybody,” my father was saying patiently. “Now, did you see anything suspicious? Anyone lurking about in the kitchen the other day who shouldn’t have been there?”
“Well, sir.” Another glance at me that was enough to tell me she suspected exactly where the duck might be. “I don’t like to say.”
“Out with it, Mistress Keene.”
She didn’t get a chance to come out with anything, for just then Jack Jennings came bursting in through the parlor door, holding the duck up by its neck so its body swung back and forth.
“It is found,” he proclaimed, triumphant as if it was a cache of silver that had been recovered. He threw an odd look at me, his eyes wide. “You’ll never guess where.”
“I don’t have time for puzzles, Jack,” my father said.
Mistress Keene had gone over to Jack to relieve him of the dead bird. “Poof!” she said rather melodramatically, grasping her nose with one hand while holding the bird at arm’s length with the other. “It reeks to high Heaven. It surely can’t be the same bird you plucked just the other day, t
o have gone bad so quick.”
“It was laid beside the window in Miss Eleanor’s chamber.” Jack announced it with a mixture of scandalmonger’s glee and horrified awe. “Swaddled tight in a good blanket it was, lying in the sunshine, just like a small babe that needed to be kept warm and snug.”
All eyes were on me now, sickened and appalled. My heart had started hammering and I gripped my own hands very tight.
“Surely you knew it was dead, miss?” Mistress Keene asked me patronizingly, as if I was two years old or a simpleton. “Surely you’ve lived on this moor long enough to know a dead duck when you see one and to not let it upset you?”
“Of course I knew it was dead,” I said quietly. “I wasn’t upset. I wasn’t trying to keep it warm.”
“Then what were you doing, wrapping it up and keeping it in your chamber, child?”
“Seeing if maggots would grow in it.”
My father made a noise in his throat, a mixture of a suppressed laugh and a groan. Mistress Keene gave a sharp intake of breath and her hand flew to her throat. Jack Jennings flinched away. The two of them looked at me as if, instead of a slight young girl with fair hair and blue eyes, wearing a long, plain black wool gown, they saw a freak, a grotesque hunchback, or a child with two heads. They looked at me as if the Devil himself had come to sit upon my shoulder. Tears pricked my eyes, and my belly fluttered with fear. Why did they look at me like that? I remembered what Mary Burges said about people being afraid and aggressive toward what they did not understand, and I had a sense then that I might make life very difficult for myself if I did not curb this passion I had for discovery and observation. And yet I did not want to curb it, did not think it was even possible. Nor, in truth, did I see why I should.
The Lady of the Butterflies Page 4
