The Lady of the Butterflies Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Part One

  Winter - 1662

  January - 1664

  Summer - 1665

  Part Two

  Spring - 1673

  Summer - 1675

  Autumn - 1675

  Winter - 1675

  Spring - 1676

  Summer - 1676

  Autumn - 1676

  Winter - 1677

  Autumn - 1677

  Summer - 1678

  Autumn - 1678

  Winter - 1679

  Summer - 1680

  Autumn - 1680

  Part Three

  Autumn - 1684

  Spring - 1685

  Summer - 1685

  Autumn - 1685

  Spring - 1686

  Summer - 1687

  Autumn - 1687

  Autumn - 1688

  Winter - 1688

  Part Four

  Spring - 1695

  Summer - 1695

  Autumn - 1695

  Virginia: Summer - 1700

  Historical Notes

  Acknowledgements

  “Fiona Mountain is a major new talent in the field of historical fiction. This is history told with integrity, with an authentic feel for the period and vividly rounded characters. All the colors and textures of the seventeenth century are eloquently and evocatively realized here, in wonderful detail, and against this backdrop is set a haunting and tragic narrative.”

  —Alison Weir, author of Captive Queen: A Novel of Eleanor of Aquitaine

  “It is a rare talent in an author to be able to mix rigorous historical research with the narrative energies and imagination of a true novelist. Fiona Mountain brings all of these skills to her entrancing Lady of the Butterflies. A vivid and fascinating novel about an extraordinary woman, I was gripped from beginning to end.”

  —Katie Hickman, author of The Pindar Diamond

  “A fascinating story . . . Richly and brilliantly detailed and full of love and heartbreak.”

  —Elizabeth Buchan, author of Wives Behaving Badly

  “A lady lepidopterist may seem an unlikely real-life subject for historical romance, but Mountain makes it work in this first-person account of the life of Eleanor Glanville . . . A lush and confidently plotted historical.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Mountain dives into her esoteric subject matter headfirst, telling Eleanor’s moving story against a backdrop of rebellion and religious division and the scientific thinking of the time . . . Partly based on actual events, partly reliant on Mountain’s rich imaginings, Lady of the Butterflies is a big, chunky, absorbing novel, passionately rendered. In a word: Sweeping.”

  —Townsville Bulletin (Australia)

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2009 by Fiona Mountain.

  Published by arrangement with Preface Publishing, a division of The Random House Group Limited.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  PRINTING HISTORY

  eISBN : 978-1-101-51682-9

  Mountain, Fiona.

  Lady of the butterflies / Fiona Mountain.—1st American ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN : 978-1-101-51682-9

  1. Glanville, Eleanor, 1654–1709—Fiction. 2. Women entomologists—Great Britain—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6113.O935L

  823’.92—dc22

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Tim, Daniel, James, Gabriel and Kezia

  Also in memory of my mother,

  Muriel Swinburn

  You ask what is the use of butterflies? I reply to adorn the world and delight the eyes of men; to brighten the countryside like so many golden jewels. To contemplate their exquisite beauty and variety is to experience the truest pleasure. To gaze enquiringly at such elegance of color and form devised by the ingenuity of nature and painted by her artist’s pencil, is to acknowledge and adore the imprint of the art of God.

  John Ray, History of Insects (1704)

  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.

  Sir Francis Bacon, author, courtier and philosopher (1561–1626)

  November

  1695

  They say I am mad and perhaps it’s true.

  Look. Can’t you see? There are butterflies, bright orange butterflies, even though it’s night, even though it’s November. The black sky is filled with them. They are reflected in the dark floodwaters that lie over the wetlands. But no, I realize in an instant that I am mistaken, of course. It is nothing but the glowing ashes of the Gunpowder Treason Night bonfire, flitting upward in the smoke and the mist.

  I hug my arms around myself inside my cloak. I try not to scream.

  At the very time when I need all my wits about me, it is frightening to think I can’t even depend upon myself, that my own mind, my own eyes, might betray me, even for a moment. This turbulent century that is nearly at an end has seen brother turn against brother and fathers take up arms against their own sons, but for my little family the treachery goes on.

  I walk toward the end of the cobbled causeway that stretches straight and unhindered across the floodwater, all the way to Nailsea. The ground is sodden. The mud sucks at me and the sodden hem of my gown grabs and slaps at my ankles. My feet are so cold and wet I can hardly feel them. But there are far worse troubles than cold toes.

  At first no one dares to meet my eyes. They regard me with superstitious fear, as if I were a will-o’-the-wisp. Tenant farmers, eelers, fishermen, wildfowlers and sedge-cutters, they are all gathered here with their kin at the edge of the flooded fields, their faces ghoulish in the flickering flames. No one misses this annual festival of hatred, but in Tickenham this year, it feels as if much of the ha
tred is turned upon me. My heart is beating too fast and my legs feel weak as reeds. But I keep my head held high. I keep on walking. Though I may only be slight, I am much stronger than people always assume. None shall see that I am afraid.

  Fingers reach out to clutch at my cloak; others claw at my arm, at a windblown wisp of my hair. Alice Walker, once my little cookmaid, is the first to throw a rotten apple. It hits my shoulder and splatters. Surprisingly hard they are, apples, when turned into missiles. There is a dull pain and the sudden cloying smell of decay. Someone else spits and the disgusting gob lands on my cheek. I wipe it away with the palm of my hand and pretend not to care. These people were once my neighbors, servants and friends, my family, but now, instead of warm greetings, I hear only their insults, their whispered accusations:

  “Papist!”

  “Whore!”

  “Witch!”

  “Lunatic!”

  I am none of those things, am I? How could a passion for small, bright-winged creatures have led to this? Just as it led me to James Petiver, the dearest friend any person could hope to have.

  But it was another man who set passion burning within me more fiercely than all the fires that flame across England this night, who consumed me until I am nothing but a husk blowing on the wind. It is Richard Glanville, beautiful as a girl with his black curls and blue eyes, who brought me light in the darkness and warmth in the cold in a way that no winter bonfire ever can. In my memory his caress is like the brush of a butterfly’s wing upon my skin, upon my breasts and the secret places beneath my shift, but all memories have turned to dust in the glare of what I have discovered.

  What have you done, Richard? What have you done? Is it the flames of Hellfire that you conjured? My own Judas, did you betray me with a kiss?

  Why?

  I began keeping a journal to record my work. Though I don’t presume it amounts to much, is of any great significance to the world of natural philosophy, James told me it was the best way to record my observations and to learn. I’m glad now that I’ve done it, for reasons I’d never have considered.

  The time is coming when my voice maybe silenced for good. God in Heaven, how has it come to this? It is well known that lust brings madness and desperation and ruin. But upon my oath, I never meant any harm.

  All I ever wanted was to be happy, to love and to be loved in return, and for my life to count for something.

  That is not madness, is it?

  Part One

  Winter

  1662

  THIRTY-THREE YEARS EARLIER

  I was woken in darkness by the joyful pealing of church bells. The church stood not a hundred yards from my chamber window, just across the Barton wall, so the room was filled with the merry and insistent clamor. My head was filled with it, and my heart. It was the loveliest sound. I stuck out my hand to part the heavy crewel drapes that were drawn around the great bed-frame to keep out the icy winter drafts, but it was bright silvery moonlight that shone through the chink in the curtains at the window. Why ever were the bells ringing with such jubilation in the middle of the night? Then I remembered. It was Christmas morning. The bells were calling everyone to the predawn Christmas service, everyone except my father and me. Christmas was to be celebrated across the whole of England again this year, in practically every household, except for a few of the staunchest Puritan ones, such as ours, where it was still forbidden, as it had been under Oliver Cromwell.

  I dropped back against the pillows, fighting tears. I was nine years old, not a baby anymore. I was too old to cry just because I could not have what I wanted. I knew that in any case crying was a waste of time, would make no difference at all. With a little sigh I pulled the blankets up to my chin, wriggled down beneath them seeking nonexistent warmth, and stared up at the dark outline of the bed canopy. I should be counting my blessings rather than feeling sorry for myself. I was very privileged, after all. I lived in the manor house of Tickenham Court, with its medieval solar wing and dairy, its ancient cider orchards and teeming fishponds. My father owned all the land for miles around, over a thousand acres of furze and heath and fen meadow, or moors as they were called in Tickenham. I was far more fortunate than the village children, wasn’t I? The children who at this very moment were clutching excitedly at their mothers’ hands as they left their holly-bedecked cottages to make their way in their little boats over the flooded fields to church, with the prospect of a day of feasting on plum pottage and mince pies and music and games before them.

  I laid my hand on my flat belly as it rumbled its own protest. In rejection of what my father saw as the evil gluttony of Christmas, I was to be made to fast all day. All day, and already I was hungry. If I were really lucky, there’d be a dish of eel stew tomorrow, bland and unspiced, according to Puritan preferences.

  The bells chimed on, ringing out their tumult in the darkness, the high tinkling of the treble bell and the low boom of the tenor, and round again in a circle. It was as if they were summoning me, had an urgent message to impart. Oh, I did so want to go. We had a merry king on the throne of England now, a king who had thrown open the doors of the theaters again and restored the maypoles, much to my father’s disgust. But I did so want to know what it was to be merry, to dance and sing and laugh and wear bright, pretty gowns and ribbons. Even just to see the candlelit church would be something. What harm could it do just to look? If God had gifted me with my irrepressible curiosity, surely he would forgive me for giving in to it now. Wouldn’t he?

  I pushed back the blankets, exhaling mist, bracing myself for the rush of icy air through my linen shift. But it was not the cold that made my fingers shake as I crouched by the stone fireplace to light a candle from the dying embers. I was afraid of going out in the dark on my own, wary too of the reception I would receive from the villagers. The serving girl had warned me that, since we shunned all their celebrations, my appearance at one might well be regarded with animosity, mistrust. But inquisitiveness eclipsed all else, as it always did for me. I was too impatient to put on my woolen dress, and I left my hair in its long, thick golden night-plait. In bare feet I crept down the narrow spiral stone stairs that led from the solar to the great hall. I put on my mud-stained shoes and my hooded riding cloak. It was made of the thick red West Country cloth that was so traditional in Somersetshire that even my father did not balk at its bright color.

  My heart hammering fit to burst with a mixture of excitement and terror, I slipped out of the door and through the gate in the Barton wall that led into the misty moonlit churchyard, stole silent as a ghost through the silvery lichen-encrusted tombstones, past the graves of my little sister and my mother, both dead over a year now. I breathed deep of the cool air and listened to the honking and trilling of the swans and marsh birds feeding out on the floodplains, the beating of hundreds upon hundreds of wings. An owl hooted and the air was redolent with the familiar tang of marsh and peat and mist. Out on the vast, dark water there was a straggling line of bobbing lanterns from the rowing boats carrying the worshippers to the service. They seemed to me like small stars traveling through the night to join with the great illumination that emanated from the wide-open door of the church of St. Quiricus and St. Juliet, a holy golden light that blazed a welcome.

  I peered tentatively round the great oak doorway, not quite daring to let my feet cross the threshold, and I gasped wide-eyed at the beauty and color of it. There must have been a hundred candles or more, all around the altar and the pulpit and lining the nave and pews. There were garlands of rosemary and holly and fresh-scented rushes strewn on the floor and wicker baskets of marchpane sweets and sugarplums set out for the children. The fiddlers and drummers were waiting to begin the music and the players were already assembled at the front of the church, the kings with beautiful velvet cloaks trimmed with real ermine, the shepherds accompanied by real sheep. Two cows had been brought in too, and a placid-looking donkey.

  I felt a light tap on my shoulder and nearly jumped out of my skin. It was Thomas Kni
ght, the dark-haired, dark-eyed son of a sedge-cutter. He was over a foot taller than I and three years older, twelve years to my nine, and for some reason I’d not been able to fathom, he hated me. I wanted Thomas to like me, as all children want people to like them, I think, and I had made a consistent effort to be friendly and polite to him, even when sometimes what I really wanted to do was stick out my tongue at him. But it seemed to make no difference what I did. Except that now, there was the definite curve of a smile softening his long, swarthy face. I returned it gladly, but warily. “Hello, Thomas,” I said.

  “Merry Christmas, Miss Eleanor,” he said, with what I took, delightedly, to be complicity, acceptance.

  “Merry Christmas to you too,” I replied. The forbidden greeting felt peculiar on my lips, beneficent as a charm, not like a sin at all.

  “D’you think it so very evil then?” He nodded toward the gilded interior of the church.

  “Oh, Thomas. I’ve never seen anything so lovely.”

  “Here. I’ve got something for you.” People were walking toward the porch now and Thomas grabbed hold of my arm and pulled me round the side into the dark. I was not frightened, only surprised and very interested to see what it was that he had. He uncurled the palm of his big hand to reveal a little marchpane sweet, delicate as a rosebud, incongruous against his chapped and cold-reddened skin. My mouth watered, but even if it hadn’t looked so delicious and appealing, I’d have wanted to take it, just because Thomas had been so kind and generous as to think to offer it to me. I hated to think how I might hurt his feelings if I rejected his gift.