The Butterfly Cabinet (5 page)

“She sees to them, all right,” said Madge, and got another look from Peig.

To me, Peig said, “You’ll get on fine here, Maddie, if you keep your head down and your nose out of things that don’t concern you. Your mother needs the bit of money you’re bringing in. How the quality raises their children is no business of ours.” Then she said there was a bit of apple cake left if anyone wanted it, and could we girls clear the table.

A few days after that, Peig sent me out to the yard to bring in a bit of turf for the fire. The yard had that look about it, just before the rain comes: the sky dark, hanging over the sun like the lid being lowered on the range and the last of the light catching on the sides of the stables. A sack with its belly full of turf lay where Peter had dropped it outside the coal-house door, and the mouth of it was lifting in the wind, like an old dog nosing the air. The master slammed the carriage door shut outside the house, and two white-bellied barnacle geese flew over toward the east, calling out in a low bark, the loneliest sound I ever heard. I was missing Mammy and Charlie something terrible. Then I heard another sound coming from the back of the coach house: children shouting. I went round and there was a little girl on the ground and two boys standing either side of her, their backs to me, singing and taunting. The taller of the boys, the fair-haired one, had a stick in one hand and was holding the bridle of a donkey in the other. It looked like the girl had fallen off, but the boys were doing nothing to help. The smaller red-haired boy was singing: “Sissy, sissy, Charlotte is a sissy. Crybaby, crybaby, cry cry cry!” She picked herself up and faced them, game girl that she was, but it wasn’t till I stepped in between them that they stopped their chanting and the younger boy took a step back to let her pass. I’ll
never forget the look on his face: a half sneer at me, biding his time. My first meeting with Morris.

“You must be Charlotte,” I said. “I’m Maddie. Come on into the house and I’ll get you cleaned up.” She reached for my hand, still biting back tears, and I led her inside. When I got into the kitchen, Madge and Feeley were at the table with cups of tea; Peig was kneading dough over a floured board. She opened her mouth to ask where the turf was and then spotted Charlotte, her dress dirty and torn.

“What happened you, darlin’?” she said.

“I fell off the donkey.”

Peig gave me a sideways look. “Who else was there?” she said.

“Gabriel and Morris,” said Charlotte.

“Here, Madge,” Peig said, “bring her upstairs.” And Madge put down her cup, took Charlotte by the hand and led her off.

“Those boys,” said Peig, when they had left the kitchen. “They have the child tortured. It’s a game of theirs to put her on the donkey and then whack it hard on the rump so it takes off at a gallop and throws her. They’re devils incarnate, the pair of them.”

“They’re only youngsters,” said Feeley, rising.

“They’ve neither manners nor breeding,” said Peig.

“I’m away,” said Feeley, winking at me, “before the keening starts.”

“Get on out o’ that wi’ ye,” said Peig. “You’re only taking up room.” But when he was left she said: “That Morris doesn’t know what to be at. He was ruined when he was a baby and had the croup: wouldn’t sleep anywhere but in the mistress’s arms. The lengths that wean will go to, to get his mother’s attention.” Then she turned to me again: “Any word o’ that turf?” she said.

It didn’t fit with what I’d seen of the mistress, the idea of her cradling a baby in her arms through the night. But she was very particular about the children. She didn’t like any of us to go near them. And there could have been something in what Peig said. I
found Morris once, sitting on the floor of the stables, and when I asked him what he was doing he said, “Counting my bruises.” He wore them like trophies: scores of affection. What kind of love is that, that leaves its mark on a child’s body?

Peig was one of those people you could never imagine being young. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five at the time I started in the house, but she was so capable she seemed like a woman twice that age. She had a permanent wrinkle on her brow; I never saw her face clear of it, like she carried the worries of the world. Feeley said she was like one of those old women you used to see that went about at wakes with their shawls over their heads, crying for the dead.

She had a scald mark on her arm above her elbow, and when I knew her better I asked her what happened her. She told me she got it the time she was skying the copper, and the thing exploded and put her out through the scullery door. It never healed, for when she got annoyed or agitated about anything, she scratched at it like it was it that was annoying her and not the thing that was going on in her head.

I shared a room in the attic with Susan. There wasn’t much to it: two beds and a strip of carpet between, that had traveled the length and breadth of the house before it’d ended up there. It must have held the dirt of every shoe that had ever walked over it but I was glad of it to have my bare feet to put on in the mornings. Before I came, Mrs. Quinn had given Mammy an old sample book from Brown and Thomas, and Mammy had cut them all up into wee triangles and then sewed them together in a basket pattern to make a quilt for my bed. She sewed all the scraps into the tops of the baskets so it looked like every one of them had something in it, and I would lie in bed at night and imagine what it was: mandarin oranges, eggs, turf and potatoes, chocolate, apples. There was great heat in the quilt, for the under part of it was an old coat of Daddy’s with the buttonholes sewn
up and when she was sewing up the pockets she put a handful of rosemary into one and a handful of lavender in the other, to help me remember home, she said (even though I was only yards away from my own front door), and to help me rest easy. I unpicked one of the pockets. I used to fall asleep with my hand where Daddy’s hand used to be. I could smell the lavender and the rosemary, but underneath it smelled of turf, and the blackened skins of spuds that had been baked in the ashes, and the sea. Always the sea, salty and wild, under everything.

A while after I came to the castle, I was asleep one night, Susan in the bed to the other side of me, when I was wakened by a low crying and moaning. It sounded like it was coming from the room below and I was heart-scared it was a ghost or some otherworldly thing. After a while I took my courage in my hands and called out to Susan could she hear it too, and she must have been lying awake listening, for she answered me right away. She said: “It’s one of the children, I don’t know which.”

“Should we not go down to them?” I said.

“No,” said Susan, “there’s no point.”

“But whoever it is must be sick,” I said. “Or they’ve hurt themselves, falling out of bed, maybe. Should we get Peig?”

“There’s no point,” Susan said again, “go back to sleep.”

The crying carried on, a heartbreaking sobbing but with no words in it and no appeal for help. I got out of bed and reached for the candle.

“What are you doing?” Susan said, sitting up.

“I’m going down to the nursery, to see what’s wrong.”

“They’re not in the nursery,” she said. “Whoever it is they’re in the wardrobe room, locked in. You’ll not be able to do anything. There’s nothing you can do.”

I sat down on the bed. “Why?” I said. “Who would put a child in there? For doing what?”

“The mistress,” said Susan, “and God knows what for. For
answering back, or for dropping a knife or for not saying their prayers or for sneezing; it could be anything and nothing at all. If you’ve any sense, Maddie, you’ll get into bed and put the pillow over your head and go to sleep and pretend you can’t hear it. That’s all any of us can do if we want to stay here.” She lay down again and pulled the cover up to her ears. “Some nights it’s not that bad,” she said.

I got back into bed. I must have fallen asleep. When I woke in the morning the house was quiet and Susan wouldn’t look at me.

I went to look for the wardrobe room. I knew there was a door off the nursery and I went over when the children were at breakfast and I was emptying the chamber pots and I put my ear to the door and said: “Is there anybody there?”

A boy’s voice called out and said was it time to come out, but the door was locked and there was no sign of a key. I went out through the nursery onto the landing and I nearly jumped the height of myself, for there was the mistress with a face on her like a week of wet weather.

She said, “What were you doing?”

“I heard crying,” I said.

“Were you talking to Gabriel?”

“I don’t know who it was.”

She looked at me like I was something that had stuck to the sole of her boot and she said, “The servants are not permitted to speak to the children. See that you observe that rule.”

I said, “Yes, madam,” and after that I stayed out of her way as much as I could.

The mistress couldn’t keep servants, and there weren’t enough of us for all that was to be done. Susan took off a week or two after I arrived. She was such a hard woman, the mistress—Scottish originally, did you know that, from Inverness? She dealt out love the way she dealt the flour out of the store cupboard to Peig: as if there was only so much of it to go around;
as if you could only divide it up a certain number of times before it was all used up. As if love isn’t like yeast, and rises where it’s needed.

The hours were long: up at half five or six when the fires were lighting, and never in bed until twelve or after it. Lugging buckets and water jugs up and down three flights of stairs. My hands went from coal to spuds to soda and soap and then back again the livelong day. The job I hated most was sieving the salt: a big seven-pound block of it, and it would get in under your nails and in all the scratches and skelfs you’d got during the day and your hands would be raw at the end of it. And the coppers all had to be cleaned with sand and salt and vinegar. My feet were never warm from the day and hour I entered this house. The flagstones in the kitchen were like blocks of snow. Is it any wonder my joints are full of rheumatism?

The mistress was fond of a sea bath, and when she took a notion for it, the men would be sent down to the Big Strand with the copper cans on the cart to fill them with water. She had it in her head the salt and seaweed were good for the skin. And maybe there was something in that, for she had a lovely complexion, smooth and fine, hardly a line. Peig said it was smiling that gave people wrinkles and that’s why the mistress didn’t have any. “But,” said Peig, “I’ll take the wrinkles happily.”

I wasn’t long started at the house when one day Paudie and Feeley came back with the cans full of water, and Peig bid me boil it up in the laundry copper and then pour it back into the two-gallon cans to be brought upstairs. The men left the yard door open and a hen wandered in, and I was shooing it back out again and I made a swipe at it and hit the copper and over it went, and all the seawater, out over the floor of the laundry.

Peig heard the clatter and ran into me. “Jesus, girl,” she shouted, “you could have been scalded.” But I was more scared about what the mistress would say when she heard I was
responsible for her bath flooding out the yard door and the hens picking through it.

When the two of us had gathered ourselves, Peig said, “Mop up that floor before somebody breaks their neck on it,” and she went to the pump and filled the two coppers up again, and threw in a handful of salt. “When that’s boiled,” she said, “tip it back into the cans; there’s still a bit of seaweed sticking to the bottom. She’ll be none the wiser.”

And neither she was, for she said nothing about it. I don’t know why Peig saved my skin. Some of it was maybe to do with saving her own, but there was more to it than that. She was the kindest, the absolute kindest soul I ever met in my life.

Charlotte got it from all sides. Her brothers teased her something shocking. Morris was the worst of them: he was freckled and red haired with a temper to go with it, a sly look about him, like he was always plotting. He started a row in the dining room one morning, over whose turn it was to have the blue-patterned porridge bowl. He pulled the slip off the table and threw a spoon at Charlotte that caught her under the eye and near blinded her. We had to send for Dr. Creith; the cut left a scar. Even Gabriel, who was older and the mildest mannered of all of them, could be cruel. He and Morris hid her clothes and made her late getting dressed in the mornings. They rubbed horse dung into her new calf-kid boots that the mistress had brought her from Tyler’s in Belfast; they emptied calomel into her milk and gave her the scour for a week. And she, the wee mite, hadn’t the wit; she always went back to play with them again. As for the mistress, she never gave out to them for the way they treated Charlotte; over disobedience to her she beat the life out of them, but never for cruelty to each other.

“It’s a hard station for a child that’s shown no love by its mother,” said Peig, “especially a girl-child that reminds her of what she used to be.” I don’t know if there was any truth in that, but I know I never heard the mistress give Charlotte a kind word.
For all her young years, there was a knowledge about the child that her mother couldn’t stomach.

Last night, between watching and sleeping, the day at the Ladies’ Bathing Place came back to me. You remember it, Anna. Me and your mother used to take you there when you were a wee slip. Just below the castle here, where the sea comes in gentle. I can see it from the windows on the east side. You used to love going down the chute into the water. There were still bathing boxes then for the modest, but there’s none of that now: it’s all bikinis and shorts these days. Nobody cares who sees what part of them. In my day, you’d have been scared to show your knee to a man, for fear of what it would do to him. Oh, the world’s changed, that’s for sure.

This day, anyway, down at the water, I’d maybe been started at the castle for a few months. No heat in the day, a white ball of a sun hanging low in the sky, and the mistress, already in the water up to her middle, bidding me bring the wean down, and her not more than three at the time. She was a bonny child, your cousin Charlotte. No, not your cousin. Your mother’s older sister. She’d have been your aunt if she’d lived. That’s a strange idea, to think of her as a grown woman with a niece like you, and maybe children of her own. “Winsome” is what people called her and winsome she was to all but the mistress. Hair the color of corn, and tight curls around her ears. She had a way of looking at you, like she understood every word you said to her.