Lady of the Butterflies Read Online Free PDF

to believe, you know.” Mr. Ashfield smiled, his cordiality still totally unruffled.
    “Come now,” my father said. “You’ll not tell me that the news of lewdness and perversion that reached us from Europe was all fabrication? The depravity of the public and private morals of Charles Stuart and his band was the scandal of the country—still is, now that they’ve brought their vile wickedness to Whitehall. It was well reported how they abandoned themselves to their lusts, and drank and gambled, fornicated and committed adultery. How they committed these blackest of sins and saw none of it as any sin at all. These are men in contempt of all decency and religious observation. Or would you deny that they are a crowd of short-tempered quarrelers, violent heavy drinkers and murderous ruffians who would brawl and duel to the death over so little as a game of tennis?”
    Carried away by his fervor, my father seemed to have entirely forgotten that I was standing there in wide-eyed enthrallment, listening raptly to every word. Oh, I was used to hearing him rail against Cavaliers. In many ways they stirred up his moral indignation even more than did Catholics. But never before had he been so specific, and I was caught between utter fascination and an acute embarrassment that made me half wish I could fall into a hole and hide. I felt so dreadfully sorry for poor Mr. Ashfield, though he did not appear at all affronted.
    “I can’t speak for all Royalists,” he said good-naturedly. “But I assure you that Richard Glanville is possessed of great wit and courage and is one of the most cultured and charming young men I have ever had the pleasure to socialize with.”
    “Cultured?” my father snorted. “It is a culture of monstrous indulgence, drunken gaiety and sensual excess that our monarch and his circle cultivate and would wish to impose on this country. The sooner they all rot and decay in their own filth, the better. God forbid it bring us all to moral ruin first.”
    There was an excruciating silence. “I heard young Richard swims as though he were a fish, not a boy,” Mr. Merrick interjected rather desperately. “He’ll have his pick of the new drainage channels and widened rivers next time he visits Ashfield land, eh?”
    Fen drainage was Mr. Merrick’s favorite topic of conversation, one he unfailingly managed to bring up at every visit. It might have made me uneasy, after my conversation with Mary Burges, but I didn’t much mind what the three of them talked about so long as they were not insulting poor Mr. Ashfield and his friend. So long as I could listen to him and watch him and stay near him.
    But it was not to be. “I suggest we move into the parlor for some coffee,” my father said brusquely, remembering his manners at last. “Eleanor,” he said to me. “Find Bess, would you, and ask her to send a pot through to us.”
    I wished I knew why Mr. Merrick was honored with the great luxury of coffee every time he visited, but I was very glad Mr. Ashfield was to be given the best that we had, would not begrudge him anything at all.
    He went with the others toward the oak-paneled parlor, and when I took a step to follow, my father halted me with one of his sharp looks. I actually shivered, as if, deprived of the nearness of Edmund Ashfield’s bright hair and sunny smile, I was being cast back out into shadows and darkness. I lingered like a little phantom beneath the vaulted roof in the empty hall as he took the seat of honor in a carved oak chair that was drawn up beside the fire as the wind boomed outside like distant cannon fire and the rain peppered the windowpanes like tiny arrows. The flames behind him were pale in comparison, only served to make him appear all the more burnished and gleaming. He had all the glorious grandeur of autumn, a blaze of red and gold that defied the closeness of winter.
    He was talking of windmills that were used in his home county to drive back the water. “There’s