Lady of the Butterflies Read Online Free PDF Page B

clearly a great advantage to be gained from combating the floods and claiming the territory for lush meadows in their stead,” he said mildly.
    “You tell him, Edmund, my boy,” William Merrick said. “For he’ll not listen to me.”
    “On the contrary, William,” my father replied. “I listen to you very carefully.”
    “Yet you do not heed my advice. Even when it seems you have little choice.”
    “There is always a choice,” my father added gravely. “If we trust in God to provide.”
    “And what if His way of provision is by way of reclaiming land from water?”
    My father hesitated, as if to consider, and I held my breath as I waited for his reply. “You know I have the gravest reservations about that, William,” he said. “Your gentlemen adventurers are playing God, tampering with His creation, and not only is that wrong, it is also highly dangerous.”
     
     
     
    THE MIST AND RAIN had cleared when I stood with my father and watched our visitors ride on to Bristol beneath a glorious winter sunset that shimmered on the sheets of water. In the dusky light I could see, both inside and out, the translucence of my face reflected in the panes of gray-green leaded glass, and beyond, the lapwings and redshanks and curlews wading in the shallows and the great herds of swans and wild geese out on the lake, gliding between the rows of half-submerged pollarded willows that were always an eerie sight, no matter how familiar.
    Had Mary Burges been telling the truth when she said I was pretty, I wondered? Never had it seemed to matter so much before. But I wanted to be pretty enough to make a man like Edmund Ashfield fall in love with me when I grew up. Bess constantly complimented my gold hair and blue eyes, but it was their liveliness and brightness she said she liked, and I was not sure that gentlemen would like that at all. Ladies were supposed to be demure and docile and saintly, and I was none of those things.
    “Will Mr. Ashfield come here again?” I asked, making a great effort not to sound as forlorn as I felt.
    “He’d not be unwelcome,” my father said, surprising me. “An extremely likable young fellow. I shall pray for him, that he is not ruined by his objectionable associations.”
    “Do you even know Richard Glanville, Papa?” I asked, feeling a strange need to defend this man whom I had never met.
    “I know of his family.” My father scowled. “I know his type.”
    “Men of pleasure.” I whispered it like a creed. At the age of eleven, my naive notion of pleasure extended not much beyond music and dancing and feasting, all that was forbidden to me and therefore infinitely fascinating and desirable. Was Edmund Ashfield a man of pleasure, despite being a Parliamentarian? He must be, a little, to have such a friend.
    “Young Edmund was probably not as persuasive as William Merrick had hoped he would be,” my father added. “So maybe he’ll be brought back again for another try, since it seems Merrick will use any ploy to try to convince me that we are sitting on a fortune and that our drained fields could become the richest pastureland in all of England.”
    I loved it when my father talked to me as if I was an adult rather than a child, as he had taken to doing more and more, recently. But I remembered Mr. Merrick’s opportunistic smile, predatory as a vulture, and even the small surge of joy I’d experienced at the prospect of seeing Edmund Ashfield again was marred by the notion of its being for Mr. Merrick’s benefit.
    He had even turned being a Puritan dissenter to his own advantage. Barred from the professions, he’d made a great fortune as a merchant trading in tobacco and sugar. My father saw it as a sign of God’s supreme approval that Mr. Merrick’s business ventures had flourished and as a result generally relied wholeheartedly on his financial acumen and shrewdness. Seemingly not in this one instance, though.
    “You disagree with him totally about drainage, then,