The Butterfly Cabinet (18 page)

She didn’t stay long. I remember her fussing about the butterfly cabinet, giving instructions that it wasn’t to be touched. She had it covered in a dust sheet and none of us ever went near it. It must have been that time she put the book there, for she never set foot in the house again. She and the master went to Switzerland, and some time after, the word came back that she was dead. A fall from her horse was what we heard. Her skirt caught in the saddle and the horse dragged her for miles. She never spoke again. She was buried in Scotland with her own people. But since we’re in the business of telling the truth, Anna,
I’ll tell you this. Feeley said she was the best horsewoman in the country, and no horse that he knew of would dare to throw her off if she didn’t want to be thrown. I suppose it’s something to have a choice of death; it’s not everyone has that. Charlotte didn’t.

Do you know, Anna, my mother could untangle any thread or rope, no matter how knotted it was? People used to bring them to her and she’d sit, picking away at it, looking as if it was getting more and more tangled by the minute, until there’d be a sudden loosening, and you could see how it would all begin to come apart. Every Sunday I left her to go back to the castle, the same thing: a dead cinder from the hearth in one pocket, a slip of mountain ash in the other. Until the night she gave me something else.

Reach out there, Anna, will you, and open that drawer in the butterfly cabinet. Do you see something glittering there? This night when I was preparing to go, she looked at me strangely and then she unpinned this from her throat, the turquoise brooch Daddy had given her, and she fixed it onto my apron. She said, “You’ll be a woman before you know it, Maddie. That pin is real steel, it’ll keep you from harm. Keep that color on you always.” And I walked back up the hill, with the air so close and still you could hear the train rattle and whistle on the far side of the river and follow it in your mind, echoing through the tunnel at Downhill, on its way to Derry, with Mussenden trembling on the cliff above it. I thought about what she’d said, and about Peig’s stories of warning, and about what Mammy used to say to me when I was a child. She used to say I was got in a jenny wren’s nest. Then one day when she said it, and I said I wasn’t, she said, “Where did you come from, then?” and I realized—I was only seven or eight at the time—that I didn’t know, I hadn’t thought about it. It hadn’t occurred to me there’d been a time when I wasn’t in the world. But I wouldn’t give in, and I said, “The same place as everyone else,” and she laughed and laughed. But it set me wondering. We never had that conversation, Mammy and me:
the one where you find out about where babies come from. I sort of pieced it all together myself, from stories the other youngsters whispered at school, and from one time I watched the sow pig, and from the odd fumble with the boys up at the ferns on the Green Hill, where we went after school some days when the weather was good. And the rest I learned from Madge and Cait up at the castle. I knew enough to know better, that’s the point. That’s what Mammy must have seen. Here, Anna, I want you to have this, it’s for you, and the baby. To keep you both safe. I must seem like a rambling old woman to you, with nothing to say worth hearing. But I’m getting to it. I can’t come at it cold. I’m warming my hands over old stories.

I was fifteen; Charlotte was four years old, Peig and Alphie only about six months married. This particular morning, there was no drying. I knew by the way the fire was burning high, there was frost. The milk, frozen in the larder, an odd watery color, not like milk at all. I had to break it with the ice pick and heat it in big chunks on the range, stir it till the lumps melted into creamy white. By then the frost had lifted, but the mist had left everything damp to the touch. The sun, a day-moon, high in the sky, strange to look on, and the fog boiling up over the dunes at Castlerock, wiping out the sea curve, rolling past the house faster than the tram.

Laundry day: I was heart-scared of washing the mistress’s things in case I would do something wrong. There was so much to learn: soda in the water to stop mauves and violets from running; vinegar for dark green; salt for blue; pepper to protect cambric; ivy leaves for rinsing prints. There’s none of that bother now: everything gets thrown into the machine together and comes out as good as new. But in those days the dyes weren’t fixed; you had to be very careful. The mistress was awful fussy and she’d a shocking sharp tongue in her head, and I’d no desire to hear it.

Peig insisted on the sheets going out, frost or no frost. They’d
come in, stiff as boards that evening, and steam in the laundry all through the night. “At least they’ll have had a breath of air on them,” said Peig, and sent me out with the basket. I was at the line, half-frozen, arms stretched up to drape the wet linen, a cobweb in my face, and I heard a footfall behind me. I didn’t turn, didn’t lower my arms; I knew it was Alphie. A misted breath came over my shoulder, carrying the sweet smell of his tobacco. A finger touched the nape of my neck and began, slowly, to trace the line of my spine, through my shawl and my dress, the whole way down my back. I stood completely still, hardly daring to breathe, with the pain of the cold in my wet hands, still holding the sheet. Then another footstep, and he was gone, and I was left. I was still there when the mist lifted, and there was Castlerock again, the little white houses, the church, unharmed, as if nothing had happened.

Another day I was standing under the archway to the yard. I’d come out with the ashes and, because it was winter, and early, there were still stars in the sky, and I’d stopped on my way to the dump under the wet laurels. I was looking up at the North Star, which I know from its brightness, when Alphie’s voice beside me said, “Old light.” I turned and looked at him and he said that the light I could see was not the star shining that morning but what it looked like when it shone hundreds of years before and that that star might already be dead. He raised his arm and his sleeve crept up and there was a tiny heart tattooed in Indian ink on the inside of his wrist. He said that the starlight I could see could be as old as Dunluce Castle. I looked at him and I told him he talked the biggest load of nonsense I’d ever heard, and he smiled at me and my heart turned over. Then he walked away, up the yard, swinging the oil lamp in the dark, with the light trailing behind him, like the tail of a comet.

Christmas Eve, I’d washed my hair as always because Mammy said if you washed your hair on Christmas Eve you’d never take
a headache in the year, and it was hanging loose, drying on my shoulders. We were all doing the Black Fast and our bellies were rumbling the whole way through our work. I was helping Peig to clean the kitchen before the prayers, and the men were nearly all out in the yard and stables, doing a bit of tidying up for the holy day. My hair’s not much to look at now, Anna, but it was a different matter then. I don’t know if that’s what Alphie saw when he stepped in the door, straw and hay sticking out of his
geansaí
. But whatever it was, it stopped him in his tracks and he looked at me like he was seeing me for the first time.

I don’t blame anyone, Anna. I wasn’t much more than a child, that’s true. I didn’t know what would happen, but I was curious to find out, and I couldn’t, no matter what I tried, stay out of Alphie’s way. Collecting eggs in the barn, he was in the doorway. He stepped aside to let me pass but it was me who stopped beside him, the warm eggs wrapped in my apron, he who leaned across and kissed me gently on the lips, me who walked on, shivering, into the kitchen.

Madge teased me and said I must have a boy on the go, for I couldn’t carry the milk in without spilling it and the spuds were only half-scraped when I dropped them in the pot. Paudie told her to whisht and not judge everyone the same as herself. But I couldn’t stop thinking about him: the way he looked at me, the things he said. It was harmless enough, I told myself; I hadn’t done anything wrong. There was no harm in smiling back at him, no harm in imagining his fingers on my spine, no harm in remembering his lips brushing against mine. No harm at all. But at night, in my little bed in the attic, I dreamed of stretching out beside him, skin against skin, his hands in my hair, my legs wrapped around him, and I didn’t want to wake up from that. I wanted that to happen.

Wednesday 17 August 1892

Edward writes to say that the
Buddleia davidii
I planted next to the wall is in full bloom and is already doing its astonishing work. “Yesterday,” he writes, “I spotted a small tortoiseshell, a peacock and a red admiral. I wish you were here to see it.” My darling Edward, how he makes my heart ache. He cannot tell one butterfly from another but he has found out their names to lift my heart. He tells me the outcome of the election: Gladstone is back in, but only just, and only with the help of the Irish Parliamentary Party. And, he adds, Mr. Morell, staunch anti–Home Ruler, my erstwhile prosecutor, queen’s counsel at the Four Courts on the day of my trial, Mr. Morell has won a seat for the Unionists and Dublin University.

I was thinking today of the day Morris ran away, three-quarters of a ragged moon hanging over the castle from noon. We searched for him for hours, calling through the house and the gardens until our throats were raw, and every minute that passed, the moon climbed higher and the sun sank lower in the sky. At four o’clock,
the milk cart came with him, a sorry sight, his cap perched on the side of his unruly red hair. They had picked him up on the road to Coleraine and, not knowing to whom he belonged, took him into the village, where he was recognized by Dan Faulkner. That was another black mark against me, of course. And Grocer Faulkner was only too glad to testify, at the readjournment in the courthouse in Coleraine, to the boy’s alleged mistreatment and neglect. Faulkner with his hooded eyes and the neck hair that bristles up over his collar. He puts me in mind of an oversized moth, the gray dagger, in tailored clothes. He was still smarting from the dispute over his right of way that he imagined ran across the bottom of Edward’s field of turnips but that, actually, ran nowhere at all, except in his imagination. If I had been permitted to speak, in the place of my buffoon of a lawyer, I would have asked the jury this. Was there
ever
a boy who has been reprimanded by his mother or father, and has said that the punishment was just? Insufferable interference.

At the readjournment Mr. Crankshaft made a valiant last-minute attempt to have me acquitted. “Scandalous rumors have been put in print,” he said. Everything had been done in the power of the press to hold me up to contumely and odium. My case, he attested, had been “seriously prejudiced in the eyes of the public.” He proclaimed me to be a person of the utmost candor who had done nothing to conceal the happenings of that fatal day. I thought I traced a note of regret in his voice; I almost felt that he wished for a more amenable client, one whose statement had been less concise and detailed, one whose recorded words had betrayed more confusion and distress. I am not sure that the public would have thought differently about me had the press championed my cause. Mr. Crankshaft might as well have saved his breath. The bench took no time at all to return the case for trial to the assizes with two of Edward’s fellow justices of the peace (one of whom, Mr. Gregory, had sat on the jury at the inquest) acting as bailsmen
for me. As it happens, there was worse to come. The crown had brought a further charge against me under the Act for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, about which Mr. Crankshaft appeared to have no previous knowledge, and off we went again, Mr. Crankshaft appealing to the bench not to proceed, on the grounds that a hearing would prejudice the case that had already been returned to trial. Mr. Crankshaft was once again duly ignored and the case was heard.

Faulkner was not alone among my detractors. There was no shortage of disgruntled former servants, only too delighted to have their fares paid back from Dublin or Liverpool, or indeed Kidderminster, for their moment of celebrity, to testify to my unmotherliness. Interesting that, how they assembled them all so quickly. It would seem that the Cruelty Society was already preparing a case against me, before Charlotte’s death.

It took me weeks to negotiate the warren of passages and entrances in the servants’ quarters at Oranmore. Down there, there was a palpable sense of machinery. It was all winches and wheels, as if we above were the figures one sees on those strange German clocks: automatons kept moving by the machinations from below—hidden revolutions underfoot. As I listened to them in the courthouse in Coleraine, powerless to defend myself, I began to feel the noose tighten about my neck. The list of witnesses for the crown I could have drawn up myself: Susan Barry, who, when she was dismissed for stealing five shillings, swore she would make money out of me yet. Madge Adams, insipid lazy child, whom I suspect of philandering with the footman. Cait Jones, who spoke to the crown about the children’s swollen hands and feet, and pieces out of their toes “as if they had been cut.” One would think the girl had never seen chilblains. I warned the children not to put their cold feet directly onto the hot water bottles, but of course I was ignored in this as in other things. At least Maddie, insolent as she is, and Peig and Elise, the governess, stood firm. If not exactly glowing in their terms, they spoke no
lies. And Mr. Walsh, the ornithologist (he of the gannet tales), sat on the bench and dissented from his fellow justices. He hinted at prejudice on the part of the witnesses and objected to the charge of cruelty on the excellent grounds that if everyone’s discharged servants were to be called to give evidence, “if all the little details of our own households” were to be brought to light, we might none of us come out of it well. Indeed we might not. Fortunately for them, and unfortunately for me, my household was the only one under scrutiny.

There is one incident that stays in my mind. I had been out in the yard with Feeley, breaking in the two-year-old. She was softening up nicely. I entered the house through the front. A tinkle of crystal, a silvery sound, coming from the dining room as I passed through the hall in my riding habit. I dropped the lunge whip into the umbrella stand, imagined a breeze passing through the opened windows. Then the sound again, louder, more savage, and another sound, a whoop, a stifled shout. I turned at the bottom of the stairs, put my hand on the doorknob and walked in. Gabriel and Morris, dressed in the naval costumes they had worn for the Christmas party, with a rope each and a loop on the end, were taking it in turns to lasso the Venetian chandelier, which was swinging wildly across the room from window to door, plaster dust falling gently from the ceiling rose as the great screws in the floor above loosened with every movement. It had taken me months to find it, almost a year of correspondence with Sib-thorpe’s before they secured exactly what I wanted, and now it looked as if I might have to watch it shatter to the floor, all twelve arms of it, over a hundred pieces of delicate Italian crystal. They both stopped, red faced, sweating, one blond, one redhead, arms raised, frozen to the spot. I yelled for Feeley, who ran into the room and then stopped, eyes fixed on the swinging chandelier.