Lady of the Butterflies by Fiona Mountain Page B

the other men had black silk weepers falling from their hats down their backs, but true to my father’s last wishes, neither the house nor the church was hung with mourning drapery. Mr. Merrick headed the pallbearers, who carried the lead-lined oak coffin the short distance to the churchyard. The bells gave one short peal, and the procession, lit by links and flaming torches, moved with silent dignity through the dark. Reverend Burges met us at the church stile, and the coffin was taken into the church and set to rest on two trestles near the pulpit, where just a few candles burned, flickering wildly in the drafts and casting an eerie sepulchral glow.
    My father had naturally wished to forgo all ceremony but at the final hour Reverend Burges lost the courage entirely to abandon standardized church practice. He began with a touching eulogy praising my father’s virtues, followed by a sermon designed to draw attention to our own mortality.
    The coffin was taken to a prominent position beside my mother on the south side of the graveyard. Reverend Burges read from the Order of the Burial of the Dead. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of the resurrection.”
    My father had surely been certain of it. Was I? I did not know.
    I stared down into the dark pit of the grave. It was supposed to be six feet deep but was not nearly that much because of the water and the soft black peat, which flowed back to fill any hole or ditch as quickly as it was dug. Even in the worst drought the country had known, our land was still waterlogged at its very heart. Water had disappeared from the surface but was still there, had merely retreated to its subterranean depths. It was glimmering now, in the torchlight, as at the bottom of a well.
    The coffin was lowered and I heard a faint plashing as the wood slapped against the water, like a little boat being put to sea.
    “Ironic, isn’t it?” Mr. Merrick was standing at my shoulder and spoke in a hushed voice, for my ears alone. “Duckett and Thomas Sydenham were both of the opinion that it was living in such close proximity to marsh and floodwater that killed him, and now in death the water is receiving him into its depths.”
    “He need not have died.” Tears stung my eyes, blurred my vision, so I was only vaguely aware of everyone staring at me. “He could have been cured.”
    I had a sudden disturbing realization that my father was not infallible; he was not incapable of making a mistake, of being foolish and stubborn. He was just a man, a normal man, with weaknesses and failings just like everyone else.
    I was standing suddenly on sand, with the waves sucking it away beneath my feet. Everything I believed in, everything my father had told and taught me, the very foundations of my life were all stripped away from beneath me, cast into doubt. I did not know if butterflies rose up from tiny coffins as he had said they did. I did not know if death was the beginning or the end. I knew only one thing for sure. It was not bad air that had taken my father from me, nor ague. It was Puritan fanaticism and prejudice that had killed him.
    I turned and ran through the churchyard, crashed through the gate in the Barton wall, all the way into the darkened hall of the house. I climbed onto a bench and reached up to the sword that hung on the wall. It was heavy, nearly as tall as I, but I had good, strong muscles from climbing trees and wielded it like an avenging angel. I was already halfway up the winding stone stairs before I saw torches coming through the dark garden.
    I flung the sword on the bed and ripped off my black dress. Holding it at arm’s length, standing like a ghost in the darkness in just my shift, I slashed at the black material with the sword, slashed and slashed with all my might, until my dress was torn to shreds, a mass of black ribbons. Black for mourning. Black for Puritanism. Black for despair.
    I threw it on the floor and dragged my other identical dress from