Lady of the Butterflies by Fiona Mountain

dispassionately now,” Papa said. “But you are just a child still. When you do marry you will be a woman, with a woman’s baser nature, a woman’s low passions and greater temptations.” I was shocked at his sudden severity, especially when the woman he had known most intimately had been my mother, who I considered to be as unblemished as the Virgin Mary. He took a labored breath. “Never forget, Eleanor, that you carry the stain of Eve’s sin upon your soul. Never forget that Eden was lost to her because of that sin.”
    Those were the very last words he ever spoke, to me or to anyone else.
    We gathered round his bed and we watched life slowly leaving him. He grew gradually whiter and colder but the end, when it came, was quiet, very gentle. A breath and then no breath. A heartbeat and then no heartbeat. A little trail of spittle had dribbled from the corner of his mouth and when I wiped it away he looked as if he was only sleeping still. His hand around mine was still warm and I did not ever want to let it go. I wanted to hear his voice again, for him to say something else to me. Anything. I laid my head on his arm, where I used to nestle when I was tired of walking and he carried me home from the moor. It felt so familiar and safe, even now. I twisted my face round to look up at his. One of his eyelids had slightly opened and I saw there was no life at all behind his eyes.
    I let go of him and bolted, his last words ringing inside my head, louder and more ominous even than the death knell.
    I fled down the stairs and out through the garden, running until there was a pain in my side as if I had been stabbed. Only when I reached the moor did I stop.
    It was dusk and a little cooler now, the air fragrant with the heady scents of summer, but all the colors of the wildflowers in the meadows were muted, fading to gray.
    Mary found me in my favorite place, down by the humpbacked bridge. She put her arm around my shoulder. “Let me tell you something,” she said, as we watched bats flit over the fields and listened to the strange triple call of the whimbrel. “When John and I first came here, what immediately impressed me was how, in a land as flat as this, the sky is such an overwhelming presence. I told John that it was a good place for us to be, a place where it’s as if the border between earth and Heaven has been blurred and weakened. Nobody who crosses it is ever very far away when you view it from here.”
    “At least Papa will be with my mother now,” I whispered. “He has missed her so much.” I realized with dismay that I could no longer picture her face. My father’s insistence on modesty meant that I didn’t even have so much as a rough charcoal sketch to remind me. “I can’t remember what she looked like,” I cried to Mary in distress. “I can’t even see my mama’s face anymore.”
    Mary took me into her arms and rocked me like a baby against her soft breasts, stroking my hair as tears poured down my face and soaked the front of her dress. “Yes you can,” she said. “Think hard enough and you can.”
    I felt her own breath turn ragged and I looked up to see that she was crying too, and I forced my own anguish aside. “Mary, you have news from London?”
    “A letter, from my cousin,” she said quietly. “She went to call at my family’s house and found fires burning outside the door and a fearful red cross daubed upon it. The doors and windows were all nailed shut until the contagion passes or all inside have succumbed to it. She saw the children’s little faces at the locked window. Now I see them too. I cannot get them from my mind.”
     
     
     
    BESS AND MARY WASHED my father’s body, wrapped him in the white linen winding-sheet and laid him on the long oak table in the great hall.
    In all other aspects William Merrick assumed control the minute my father was gone and nobody questioned him. I’d been judged too young to take a turn watching over my mother’s body, but when I