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mosquitoes. I slapped them away as if I could slap away the threat of disease. There was nothing at all to fear, was there? London was miles and miles away. As we walked back toward the garden, scores of butterflies crisscrossing our path, it might have been another world. I turned a cartwheel in the grass, skipped off determinedly through the long sedges, the activity and the prettiness of the bright wings helping me to forget the trembling of my father’s hand. My hands brushed the top of the long grass stems, and a little multicolored cloud of butterflies swirled around my dark skirts and my head like living flowers broken free of their stems.
    In the walled garden, I stopped to watch two sulfur yellows playing together over the flower beds, fresh and rich as new-churned butter. Butter-flies indeed.
    I felt my father’s eyes move approvingly to my upturned face. “It is the duty of everyone, women as well as men, to admire our creator in all the works of His creation,” he said. “Butterflies are an overlooked though beautiful part of that creation, and surely the most wondrous of all. Wait here. I’ll show you something.”
    He strode off toward the kitchen garden, and I watched, delighted and astonished, as he crouched down and started rummaging about examining the underside of the cabbage leaves, his jerkin trailing in the peaty soil. I was filled with warmth and love for him. I was so fortunate to have him for a father, someone scholarly, who was always looking to inspire and stimulate, who delighted in teaching me and wanted to share his knowledge with me. Daily lessons had followed morning prayers ever since I was old enough to hold a quill, and they weren’t confined to a girl’s usual lot, but extended instead to the fascinating subjects generally reserved for boys: botany, geography, astronomy.
    “Hold out your hand,” my father instructed when he eventually came back, for all the world as if he was going to cane me out there in the garden. There was a fervent sparkle in his brown eyes that I had only ever seen before when he was at his devotions.
    I did as he bade, and he placed a little worm on my palm. It was the same color as a cabbage, green with a hint of blue. It wriggled and arched its segmented back, straightened, arched again, crawled toward my thumb. I giggled. “It tickles me.”
    “Consider now, Eleanor,” my father said. “Just as raindrops yield frogs and rotten meat births worms, so this little creature has been spontaneously generated from the leaves of those cabbages over there. And it will eat those leaves that birthed it until it grows rather fatter than it is now. Then it will weave a tiny silken coffin around itself and inside that coffin a transformation will take place that is truly miraculous. The coffin will open and the humble worm will have turned into a beautiful butterfly.”
    I gazed at the squirming maggot. The idea of a grub springing forth from a leaf and then growing bright wings was too fantastical. We were supposed to be living in an age that was throwing aside all belief in magic. But I had not quite lost my childish belief that my father was as omniscient as God, that there was nothing he did not know, and so how could I not believe it? “Where do they build their coffins? How do they do it? Can I see one of them now?”
    “I’ve never even seen one myself.” He patted my head. “I know you always want to see proof of a thing with your own eyes, my little one, but the only way to acquire great knowledge is to read and build on the knowledge of those who have gone before.”
    By which he meant dusty, ancient texts, the pens of Pliny and Aristotle and others who were long dead, could not be called to account.
    “Why do you think God made butterflies?” he asked.
    I thought for a moment, wanting to give the right answer, or a considered one at least. “To make the world beautiful?”
    “In part, no doubt. But as far back as the ancient Greeks, it has been