Lady of the Butterflies by Fiona Mountain Page A

asked, Mr. Merrick said I might do it this time. Or rather, he said that I could do whatsoever I pleased. Nobody had ever said that to me before, but dismayingly, it gave me little pleasure. Even if I could do anything, there was nothing I particularly wanted to do. It was beyond me even to decide if I wanted a cup of small beer or not. Perversely, without my father there to rebel against, I could see little joy to be had from being free to wear ribbons or eat a whole plate full of marchpane. There was no point in anything. No pleasure in being good and clever either, if there was no one to praise and be proud of me. But that felt dangerously close to self-pity, and I would not give in to self-pity.
    My situation was not uncommon, I reminded myself. Mine was by no means the only family to suffer such a loss. Almost every child my age had some close experience of death, had lost a parent, a sibling. People died all the time, every day, every hour, every minute. Remember Mary’s family. Remember them, and the thousands of others dying of plague. The graveyard across the Barton wall and the crypt beneath the church were filled with the dead. Death was perfectly normal and natural. Yet it didn’t feel normal or natural to me at all.
    “Won’t you be very afraid?” Bess whispered, her almond-shaped brown eyes clouded with alarm as she glanced at my father’s shrouded corpse, her normally rosy cheeks pale and pinched. Her hands pecked worriedly at her homespun apron. “What if his soul’s not quite detached, is still hovering nearby? It can happen, you know.”
    Her simple but powerful country-girl superstitions did not touch me. Despite my small stature I felt as if I looked down at her from a great height, or as if a great distance separated her from me, this girl who would soon go home to her brother and both her parents. I stared down at my father’s face, the skin already waxen and sinking against the bones to reveal the shape of his skull. I had no mother and no father anymore. The two people who’d given me life were dead. I was no longer anybody’s little girl.
    I hardly noticed Bess quietly leave the hall, eager for escape. But there were no ghosts here. It was only Mr. Merrick who hovered like a specter by the oriel. He came silently across the floor and moved a lighted taper off the table to the court cupboard in the corner of the room. “There must be no candles near the body, no question of Popish practices,” he muttered, taking up another candle and standing in the flickering light with the stick in his hand. “Your father entrusted me with his last wishes, as he entrusted me with so much else.” I felt his eyes resting on me, wished he would just go. “Now is perhaps not the time, but you may as well know. He has appointed me as your guardian.”
    I stared at my father’s beloved face in consternation. Too late now to ask him why.
    I knew anyway. Wardships were bought and sold just as anything else, and since part of the estate of Tickenham Court was mortgaged to Mr. Merrick, my father would have had little choice but to sell the rest of the guardianship to him. He cared for me but it was more important that the estate was left in safe hands. Tickenham Court, my family’s past and its future. I was just a passing encumbrance, part of the package.
     
     
     
    “WHY MUST it be done in the dark?” I asked Mary, as the wooden bier, draped with black mortuary cloth, was brought from the church after dusk.
    She stroked my hair. “It was your father’s wish that the burial be conducted at night, in the latest Puritan fashion, to help keep the vulgar at bay.”
    There were to be no rings or gloves for the visitors, no feasting or distribution of alms and dole of bread. Biscuits and burned wine were to suffice. With her customary frankness, Bess had told me how peeved everyone was to be denied a spectacle, though they’d expected nothing more.
    I wore a black taffeta cloak and hood and Mr. Merrick and