The Lady of the Butterflies Read online

  He thrust the sweet impatiently toward my face. “Well, go on, then,” he said gruffly. “What are you waiting for?”

  Still I hesitated, then gave a small shake of my head. “I thank you, Thomas. But I had better not.”

  His expression suddenly changed. His deep-set dark eyes narrowed and there was a glint of challenge, of a slow-burning resentment. “Not good enough for you, taking food from the hand of a sedge-cutter’s son, is that it?”

  I was mortified. “Oh, Thomas, please don’t think that. Please don’t be offended. I am grateful, really I am.” With a child’s fear of being seen to be different, I was almost ashamed to admit the real reason, yet it was preferable to having him think me haughty. “It’s just that I’m not supposed to eat anything at all today.”

  “Who’s going to know?” He said it in such a conniving, nasty way that all of a sudden I was no longer so concerned about upsetting him. I didn’t like the feeling that I was being forced to do something against my will. I didn’t want the sweet at all now anyway. “Leave me be, Thomas,” I said quietly.

  Susan Hort, one of the tenants’ daughters, stepped out from behind a gravestone where she’d obviously been hiding and watching. “Told you,” she scoffed. “Told you you’d not get her to touch it. She’s stubborn as a little ox, that one.”

  Thomas shoved the sweet right up under my nose. “Just one bite,” he said. “You know you want to.” He glowered at me threateningly so that I felt a twinge of panic, but I would not give him the satisfaction of seeing it. “Let me alone, Thomas,” I said with as much confidence as I could summon. “I said I don’t want it.”

  I took a step back, but out of the corner of my eye I saw Susan Hort move behind me as if to trap me. Thomas thrust out his arm and forced the sweet against my mouth as though he were going to ram it through my closed lips. With a rush of rage and humiliation I batted his hand away so that the sweet went flying. Almost before I knew what was happening, Susan had grabbed my plaited hair and jerked me back, had me by the waist, trapping my arms at my sides. She was a sturdy country girl and easily tall enough to lift my feet off the ground. I twisted and squirmed, but she held me all the tighter, so I struck back with my boots at her shins.

  “You vicious little rat!” She threw me to the ground, where I fell, sprawled on the soggy grass. I saw the marchpane lying by a clump of sedges right beside my hand. Thomas saw it too and snatched it, and before I could get up he had sat himself down on top of my chest, turning me over and pinning me flat on my back on the damp, chill earth, the crushing weight of him making it hard for me to breathe. He gripped my jaw tightly between his roughened forefinger and thumb and squeezed.

  “Get up. Right now. Leave that child alone.” It was Mary Burges, the new rector’s wife, and at the sound of her firm command Thomas reluctantly released me and scrambled to his feet as Susan fell back.

  Mary was not much past twenty, but she had had five younger brothers and sisters, so she knew very well how to manage scrapping. She was bustling and plump and maternal, with a soft, round face and eyes as sweet as honey. I was always glad to see her, though never so much as now.

  She offered her hand to help me up. “Are you hurt, Eleanor?” she asked, concerned, bending to draw my cloak around me.

  I shook my head, blushing. Bar a few scratches, it was only my pride that was wounded. I stood up straight and tried to be dignified, though there was mud on my shift and I could feel a wet smear of it on my cheek. Tendrils of my hair had sprung free and were falling down around my face. I smoothed them away, rubbed at my dirty cheek. I felt very foolish and embarrassed to be the cause of such a scuffle and over something as trifling as a sweetmeat.

  “What do you think you were doing, the pair of you?” Mary said sternly to Thomas and Susan. “And on our Lord’s birthday, a time of goodwill and peace.”

  Thomas turned his sullen eyes on her and did not answer.

  I licked at my lips and tasted the faintest trace of almond sweetness. “It was nothing, Mistress Burges,” I said, wanting it over and done with now. “Just a silly game.”

  Mary glanced at me appreciatively. “It seems little Eleanor here has enough goodwill for all three of you.” She fixed Thomas with a reproachful look, as if she knew him to be the main culprit. “It didn’t look like a game to me, but if you both apologize and run and take your seat in the pews, we’ll say no more of it.”

  Thomas glowered menacingly at me while he and Susan mumbled an apology of sorts and slunk away. I watched them scurry together into the bright church, where the fiddlers and drummers were starting to play. Only now did I realize that I was trembling.

  “We’d better get you back to the house,” Mary said kindly. “Before your father finds you’re missing. Look at you, child. You’re not even properly dressed.”

  Someone came to close the church door and the emission of lovely, gilded light was abruptly shut off, leaving only the darkness and the cold moonlight. “Why does Thomas hate me?” I asked. “Is it just because we are Puritans?”

  “That is no doubt part of it.” Mary put her hands on my small shoulders and looked down into my face. “But I expect it is not only that.”

  “What then?”

  She smiled. “Well, it does not help that you are such an unusual child. When people see you down on the moor climbing trees for birds’ eggs, pond dipping and hunting under rocks for beetles and whatnot, they do not understand why a little girl should take such an interest in such things—a little girl who will one day be their lady of the manor at that. Most people are very fond of you, for all your strange ways, on account of your sweet nature and kind heart. But that does not mean that gossip does not get passed around and exaggerated. One of the first things the kitchen boy told me when we first came here was that you have a collection of animal skulls and bones in a little casket in your chamber.”

  “Oh, but I do,” I said honestly, my disappointment suddenly forgotten in a rush of enthusiasm. “It is amazing what you find in owl pellets. I think the bones must belong to water voles or mice, since they are the right size and owls hunt them. I have a dead grass snake and damselfly too, and all kinds of shells and feathers and fossils.”

  “I am sure they would look very well in a curio cabinet,” Mary said. “But in a little girl’s bedchamber?”

  “If I was a boy nobody would think it so strange, would they?”

  She did not deny that. “The trouble is that people fear what they do not understand, and all too often that kind of fear makes them hostile.”

  My eyes widened. “Thomas Knight and Susan are afraid of me?”

  “A little, perhaps.”

  It seemed extraordinary, unlikely, but not altogether unpleasing. I had never considered that I could be capable of frightening anyone. Then I remembered the flinty resentment in Thomas’s eyes and I shuddered. “No,” I said. “There is more to it than that, some other reason he does not like me. I’m sure of it.”

  “Well, it’s not a problem you’ll have with many lads in a few years’ time,” Mary said, smiling down at me. “No boy with eyes in his head will be able to do anything but fall in love with you, since you are so uncommonly pretty.” She stroked my cheek with the back of her finger. “Even with dirt on your face.”

  “Thank you,” I said politely as we started walking together, but I was sure she was only trying to cheer me. My father’s wish to protect me from the depravity of the world had not stopped me glimpsing the tall and curvaceous Digby girls from Clevedon Court and the Smythe sisters from Ashton Court. I saw them riding out to suppers at their fathers’ mansions and to Bristol, in their ringlets and ribbons and gowns of satin and brocade. Though I did not possess a single looking glass, I’d seen my reflection in the water and in windowpanes plenty of times. I knew that my hair was thick and fair and my eyes were large and wide-set and blue as cornflowers, but my skin was not marble white like those other girls’, it was honey-colored from being so much outside, and rather than a long,
straight nose to look down, mine was small and turned up very slightly at the end, like an infant’s nose. And there was something else. “I am so small,” I said to Mary despondently.

  “You are indeed,” she agreed. “You are as delicately delightful as a pixie.”

  I pulled a face, not at all sure of the appeal of that.

  Mary laughed. “You are a dear child and I am glad you are so humble.” She fell silent, then went on in a less happy tone. “Your father strives after humility above all else, and so far it has served him well. He commands respect and affection, despite being such a zealot. But I do fear for him, for you, if ever he gives in to the pressure he is under to drain these wetlands. If the people are hostile to you now, a move like that will stir up no end of trouble.”

  “Oh, he’ll not do it,” I said confidently. “Tickenham Court was my mother’s. He’d want it to stay just the way she left it.”

  “I’d not be so sure about that.”

  ONE THING I was entirely sure of was that I would not escape the severest punishment if my father found out where I’d been. I had intended to be back long before he woke for morning prayers and so drew back into Mary’s shadow when I saw him waiting for me in the gloom by the cavernous stone fireplace in the great hall, beneath the impressive display of armory. I trembled a little as he came to loom over me in the flickering torchlight, taking in my muddy cloak and state of undress in one scornful glance. His frugal suppers of a single egg and draft of small beer had always kept him lean, but now grief for my mother and my sister, coupled with long bouts of penitence and fasting for the punishment of their deaths, had made him gaunt. His craggy face, with its long, aquiline nose and strong jaw, had lost nothing of its power and authority, though. In his black coat with starched square white collar worn over it, he was as imposing as ever. He was every inch Major William Goodricke of the Parliamentarian army, Cromwell’s formidable warrior.

  But he was all I had in the world now and I loved him above anything. I was truly sorry for displeasing him, knew that what I had done was wrong. It was just that it had not felt so wrong, and in my heart I could not regret it. Life could be so confusing sometimes.

  “You should be ashamed of yourself, Eleanor,” he said.

  I hung my head only half in repentance, but also so that he would not see the lack of contrition in my eyes.

  Mary Burges tightened her arm protectively around my shoulders and drew me into her skirts. “On the contrary, you should be very proud of your little daughter, sir. She showed great courage and strength of will this day.”

  I stole a glance at my father and relaxed a bit as I caught his look of faint relief and pleasure.

  “I am glad to hear it,” he said, as if he would have expected no less from me.

  “Some of the village children had dared each other to make her eat marchpane,” Mary explained. “But Eleanor refused to so much as touch it, even when they had her pinioned on the ground. There’s not many a child would not give in to such taunting and temptation.”

  My father harrumphed as he addressed me. “Who was it?”

  “Thomas and Susan, Papa. But they said they were sorry,” I added quickly. “They didn’t mean anything by it.”

  I desperately didn’t want my father to cause more trouble with their families. Puritans could be as harsh and unforgiving as their God sometimes, and after what I had seen, and what Mary had told me, I wasn’t at all sure we could afford to be.

  The Somersetshire nobility, along with most of the people hereabouts, had been Royalist during the civil war and now Anglicanism was increasingly the religion of the gentry, so for one reason or another our own class had largely disowned us. And every member of our household, every one of our neighbors and servants who were made to attend the secret Puritan prayer meetings in our great hall, saw their lord’s empty pew during church services, knew that my father’s deliberate absence from church branded him a recusant, still a capital crime. It would take only one person to denounce him to the court or the bishop to render him liable for fines and penalties, to send him to gaol, or worse. So far his fairness and the esteem in which he was held locally had secured his safety, my safety, and enabled him to continue to stay true to his conscience and practice his beliefs in private. I did not want him to demand Thomas Knight be punished. We had already set ourselves far enough apart from the rest of this little community. There seemed nothing to be gained from drawing more attention to the fact that we were different.

  My father reached out and took me by the arm. “I thank you for bringing her back,” he said brusquely, dismissively.

  Mary gave me an encouraging smile as she turned to leave.

  “I only went to watch, Papa,” I said when we were alone. “I just wanted to see what it was like.”

  “And did you like what you saw?”

  I hesitated, not wanting to appear defiant but feeling too passionate to lie, even if it might spare me much trouble. “I liked it very much,” I said. “Oh, Papa, it was so lovely, and so holy. Not sinful at all. If you would only go and see for yourself then I know you’d . . .”

  “I am going nowhere, child,” he said stonily. “And neither are you for a good while. It is not those village children who need to be taught a lesson, I think, but you.”

  He took me by the arm and led me back up the narrow stone stairs to my chamber. Fear tightened my throat when he put his hand in his pocket and produced a large key. I’d have preferred to have my hands or backside whipped, really I would. Anything was better than being locked up. I hated being inside for any length of time. I needed open air and space and the sky above me and freedom to roam. Even in the winter, when I had to go everywhere by boat and there were weeks and weeks of rain and mist and ice, I loved to be outside, lived to be outside. I had a strange terror of doors and walls and of locks and keys. Of being confined.

  “You’ll stay in this room until this day is done,” my father said. “And if you have any sense you will spend much of that time on your knees praying for forgiveness for your disobedience.” He turned to go, his hand on the door latch.

  “Why is it so wrong to celebrate the birth of Jesus?” I asked quickly.

  My father turned back to me, as I had known he would. “You should not need me to tell you, child,” he said, exasperated but patient, always ready to answer my questions and explain. “The Bible does not tell us to observe Christ’s birthday. Christmas is just an excuse for debauchery, a commemoration of the Catholic idol of the mass.” He took a deep breath and I saw the dangerous glint of fanaticism in his eyes. “We must be on ever more constant guard now that the King has placed a Catholic queen on the throne of England. The danger from Rome is present now more than ever. The hand of the Jesuit is still too much amongst us.”

  The questions were pushing against my lips and I had no choice but to ask them. “Most Puritan ministers call themselves Protestants now,” I persisted, my mouth drying at my own audacity. “Why can’t we be Protestants? Why must we always be different, always excluded?” I gulped a breath. “What’s the harm in lighting up midwinter with a church full of candles?”

  I braced myself for my father’s rage, but instead he regarded me with deep sorrow, as if I was the greatest disappointment to him. More than that even, as if he feared that all the time he had spent answering my questions and explaining his doctrines had been wasted. He looked at me as if he feared for my immortal soul. I was appalled to see there were tears in his eyes. I had never seen my father cry, not even when my mother and my sister died.

  I ran to him and threw my arms around his legs. “Oh, Papa, I’m sorry. Please don’t be upset. I’ll try to be good from now on, I promise.”

  He uncoiled my arms and held me gently away from him. “Little one,” he said with great weariness. “Will you never learn? The only light we need is the light of the Lord.”

  With that he turned away, picked up the candle and left me, closing the low, studded door behind him. I heard the key turn with
a grating click in the rusty lock. My chest tightened. I felt as if I couldn’t breathe, as if all the air were being pressed out of my lungs, and I was sure that I was going to faint. I forced myself to resist the urge to rush at the door and hammer on it until my fists were bruised and bleeding. I knew it would do no good, only make matters worse. I was expected to accept my punishment meekly and with penitence, no matter how frightening it was, no matter how unjust I believed it to be. What was the use in trying to be virtuous? I might as well have eaten that marchpane, since I was being punished anyway.

  I went to sit quietly on the edge of the high bed, picked up my poppet doll and hugged it. I took deep breaths, tried to think calm thoughts, to imagine myself somewhere else. It was a trick I had practiced ever since my mother’s death, to take myself back in time to another place, a happier, better place. If I concentrated hard I could see her kind and radiant smile quite clearly, as if she were still with me. Almost.

  Dawn had only just broken but it would be a short day, would be pitch-dark again in just a few hours, and I had no candle. I had always been petrified of the dark, no matter how much I tried to rationalize the terror away. Eleanor Goodricke, I told myself very sternly now, how can you ever hope to be a natural philosopher if you are prey to such superstitious fears? But I did not dare turn my head toward the far corners of the chamber where strange-shaped shadows already lurked. If only I had a candle. But I knew there was no use calling for that either.

  The only light we need is the light of the Lord.

  I bit my lips against blasphemy but still my heart cried out: It is not enough for me.

  January

  1664