The Butterfly Cabinet (9 page)

Monday 9 May 1892

They have moved me north, like a parcel, on the mail train from Amiens Street. Second class; but only because there is no third. All dreadfully discreet; that strange Miss Callaghan accompanied me, looking every inch the traveling companion under her brown-feathered hat and not at all like a prison matron. The sergeant and constable from the Royal Irish traveled in a separate compartment, climbed out at every station to make sure I stayed in my seat but never once looked my way. No one would have guessed that the train was carrying such a dangerous criminal. They allowed me a newspaper and I read that the woman suffrage bill has been defeated by a majority of twenty-three. Julia will not be pleased.

Finally, after four weeks of oakum picking, I have warranted a letter from Edward. If I continue in this vein, the model prisoner, soon I will be permitted a visitor.

There has been some unpleasantness at his club. When he sat down to dinner, the dozen members present rose and left the room. Poor Edward. He is unused to cruelty. It is not in his nature to be vengeful or spiteful in any way and it baffles him when he sees it in others. He has resigned his position on the Board of
Guardians, and of course is no longer a justice of the peace. It hits him hard to be treated so. He has done nothing wrong, apart, it could be argued, from marrying me.

Not everyone has abandoned him. He has been to dine with Dr. Johnson. Dr. Johnson is a dreadful bore. He speaks always as if he is suppressing wind, as though the next sound to emit from his mouth may well be an involuntary one. It makes people anxious in his company, inclined to finish his sentences for him before he embarrasses himself. He fell in beside me once at the hunt in Dunseverick, in his tweeds and pot hat. He keeps his own harriers. What was my opinion, he wanted to know, of the long-haired fell hound as opposed to the Kerry beagle; would I concede to the superiority of the Brocklesby kennel; had I heard the story of how George IV’s hounds had to be destroyed when they went mad like the king’s father? I have a clear image of him, turning in his saddle to give me a better look and take note of the cut of my riding jacket: I was eight months confined, with Morris, at the time.

“You’re not hunting today, surely, Mrs. Ormond?”

He seemed to be of Surtees’ opinion that ladies should canter to the meet and home again to work up an appetite for luncheon. I fairly showed him my heels. Although, on reflection, it may have served me better to have acted with more decorum.

Dr. Johnson was the coroner at the inquest. Two days after Charlotte died, eighteen sober-faced men—known to us, every one—lined up on Edward’s mother’s crimson and mahogany chairs in the drawing room at Oranmore. District Inspector James wedged his considerable weight into the walnut armchair; Head Constable Wilson perched on the rosewood piano stool. The loo table was brought out from where it had been propped against the wall under a square of holland, and on it lay Charlotte, concealed by a white linen damask, bordered in white shamrocks. The resident magistrate, Captain Grange, opened the inquest; the jurors viewed the body one by one. I sat still beside Edward, my
eyes on the carpet, imagined the bruises darkening at Charlotte’s small throat.

Captain Grange asked me to tell them what had happened and I did. The whole time I spoke I kept my eyes on the marble-topped spider table to Dr. Johnson’s side. The table was a vile thing, bought by Edward’s mother at an auction; it always looked to me as if it might walk across the floor when no one was in the room.

The coroner showed inordinate interest in the manner in which I had bound Charlotte in the wardrobe room and asked me to demonstrate using Edward. It was a technique taught to me by Edward’s groom, Feeley. He had showed me how to tie up the yearling by attaching the head collar to the tie ring in the stable by a piece of twine. That way, he said, if the youngster pulls back, it will only break the string and not the lead rope or the collar. Sergeant Shier produced the stocking with which I had tied Charlotte, and a length of twine was sent for to the kitchen. Edward stood up, miserable, and put his hands behind his back. I passed the stocking across his chest, bound his hands behind and attached a piece of twine to the stocking to show how it had been fastened to the ring on the wall. I described how, when I found Charlotte, her body was slumped forward, still attached by the twine to the wall, but that the stocking had slipped up and was around her throat, a spot of blood on her lip. I did not say what I was thinking: that a two-year-old horse is clearly stronger than a four-year-old child. The cord did not break. The difference between death and life: a matter of weight, or of inches, or of minutes. I avoided Edward’s eyes as I undid the knots, but in the trembling of his white hands, I understood his anguish.

I did not know then that that would be my last opportunity to speak. The statement I made at the inquest was recorded and read on more than one occasion thereafter.

I must admit that when I heard it again in court, the words
I had uttered seemed cold, even to me. “I opened the door, and called her, but she did not answer. I did so again, and, on receiving no answer, went hurriedly into the room, and undid the string, when she fell down to the ground. I lifted her, and ran with her to my bedroom, and at once took off the stocking and her clothes.” But those were, after all, the bald facts of the case. There seemed little point in mentioning the mislaid key. They asked me what I did with it and I said I put it in my pocket, which was the truth.

Dr. Creith was examined and described how he found us all on the Saturday evening; confirmed that he believed the cause of death to have been asphyxia: that the stocking must have slipped and caused pressure on the windpipe; said that the blood on the child’s mouth could probably be explained by her having had a convulsive fit while in the room.

Julia too was examined, but since she had been absent for most of the time Charlotte had been in the wardrobe room, they did not overly trouble themselves with her. She was practically hysterical; we had to call the doctor back to give her something to calm her down. She and Charlotte had been close.

The inquest jury deliberated for an hour only, while I sat in the morning room with the sergeant. He looked decidedly uncomfortable in my floral chintz armchair, sipping tea out of one of Edward’s mother’s gilt-edged cups. We were called back to the drawing room, where the verdict was pronounced—that I did feloniously kill and slay my only daughter—and the case was returned for trial at the Derry assizes. The bail of £400 was accepted, later to become yet another cause for outrage among the newspaper editors of the country. The witnesses were bound over to attend.

Once, early in the year—January, I think, or February—I took Caesar down for a gallop through the surf. A seal pup, stranded high up in the dunes after the high tide of the previous night, was making its tortuous way back down to the water. It had dragged
itself across the sand, and was lying exhausted, yards from the tide line, its mother’s eager head appearing above the waves offshore. As we approached, the seal pup nosed the air, barked and snapped like a rabid dog, raised itself up by its flippers, its useless body anchored in the sand. I gave Caesar full rein, rode to the Barmouth and back, and when we had returned, it was gone, back into the sea, the only trace of it a trail in the sand like a slug might leave in gravel. In the drawing room, at the inquest, when the verdict was given and I raised my head, I looked across the room at Edward, and I thought of it again: weighted down; ridiculously ill equipped; desperate to escape.

A brittle day, the day they came for me, the air so bright and clear that dusk seemed impossible. A skylark in song, I remember, and the holly bush blackened to the north, by frost, or wet, or wind. Charlotte was dead a week, the inquest at Oranmore over, her body buried in the little cemetery at Bushmills. It was surprising. We had not been expecting any further proceedings before the assizes. But later we heard that there had been rumors of our planning a getaway: apparently they thought I might make a run for the continent. The order to commune a hearing had come, apparently, direct from Dublin Castle. The chief secretary was under pressure; questions regarding the inquest and my release on bail had been asked in the House. It was clear to me that the Unionists were point-scoring against Edward’s father and his affiliations with the Home Rulers; the incident had not helped Lord Ormond’s dwindling political reputation. I had no designs for escape. I was fully prepared to face the circus, brain-tired and gritty-eyed as I was.

Julia was alive to every noise in the house, her nerves a-jangle, Dr. Pepper’s quinine and iron tonic never far from reach. I felt the opposite: removed from what was going on around me, strangely cocooned. The morning the sergeant came to escort me to the hearing, I pushed open the window sash in my bedroom, wanting
the feel of the chill air on my face, and as I rested my hand on the sill, the wooden frame dropped straight down onto my fingers. Between the knowledge of what had happened and the register of the pain there was a gap that could have been a second, or a minute, or an hour, or a day. Except that when I heard my voice cry out, everything was still as it had been in the room a moment before, and Madge was still at the washbasin, tidying away. I was glad of the sensation of pain, grateful for the relief of feeling something.

The landscape here in February is as colorless as a Whistler, everything somber and muted. We left the house in the closed carriage under a wide sky, with just a little blue and green beginning to seep into the day. Blackthorns in the hedge; ivied tree trunks; mossy, rock-exposed ground; six fat-backed sheep. Edward held my hand in both of his, kneading life into my cold fingers. It hurt, but I did not tell him so: I felt the roughness of his fingertips, the ragged, worked skin, not a gentleman’s hands—he spent too long on his turnips. The sergeant followed behind on an outside car. Julia stayed in the house. Edward was saying that there was no reason to fear, that everyone would see what a tragic accident it had been, no undue force used; that sense would prevail. I think that is what he was saying, but I was held by a family of starlings that rose from the trees at the bottom of the avenue and followed the carriage, swarming and re-forming like minnows above our heads, the whole way along the road. Edward leaned back and stretched up his neck in a nervous yawn and I smelled his stale morning breath, and I saw for the first time how he would look in years to come: elderly, ailing, disappointed.

My Edward. Up until a few weeks before, his only trouble had been the progress of his half-acre of mangelwurzel and the effects on it of the new artificial manures. Those days of waiting between the inquest and the hearing were torture. Peig, padding around the house like a tigress, sending up wordless meals. I do not suppose it
was a shock to her; her kind anticipates tragedy. She has probably been expecting all her life to be part of a household with a dead child in it. She cannot be more than five-and-twenty but she carries the years of her entire race. Edward, dumbstruck, torn between grief and anxiety, making efforts to reassure me with the pall of death hanging over him. I avoided the other children. I heard them go about the house from time to time: Freddie’s small feet on the stairs; George’s infant burbling. Edward said the older boys had asked if they could ride out one afternoon. I did not see the harm in it. From the window, I watched Gabriel and Morris lead their horses back in, caught Morris raise his head and look up at me, his eyes even from that distance unmistakably grieving, though whether for Charlotte or for me I cannot say. I do not know if they asked for me.

On our approach to town, at the bottom of Ferryquay Street, the horses’ hoofs began to slip on the icy road and it was soon clear that the pair were not going to be able to mount the hill with a full carriage. Early though it was, there were people in the streets. The sudden prospect of being made to walk to the police barracks in Meeting-House Street, through the Shambles, past the fishmonger and the butcher, the newspaper offices and the milliners, in the custody of Sergeant Quinn, was appalling to me. I jumped down, ran back to the sergeant to ask if I might travel in the outside car until the horses regained their footing. The poor man looked terrified. I believe for a moment he thought that I was going to make a dash for it, but when he understood me he readily gave up his seat and I was saved the ignominy of arriving on foot.

The whole way along the road I could smell the fumes from the distillery chimney in Killowen. Across the bridge at the Clothworkers’ Arms, guests were descending from carriages like it was any other day. A nurse stood on the balcony at one of the windows in the cottage hospital; the fountain outside was still.

The magisterial inquiry was held not in the courthouse but
in a room on the second floor of the barracks, with the window blinds drawn against the street. Edward had insisted that Mr. Crankshaft be my solicitor; he had represented the Ormond family for years. We used to smile, Edward and I, over those notices in the local paper: Mr. Crankshaft contesting the ruling on the setting and lifting of salmon nets; his defense of applications for spirit licenses; his prosecution of the owners of goats that had allowed their animals to graze on the public highway. And now he was defending me.

The charge was read and Mr. Crankshaft politely objected to my being brought there, since it was his understanding, following the inquest, that there would be no further proceedings before the trial at the Derry assizes. He said he thought these actions to be most unusual, but the crown solicitor duly ignored him and carried on as if he had said nothing at all.

The sergeant made a statement in which dimensions featured gravely (“the room is six feet by eight feet”; “the ring was five feet eight inches off the ground”; “the stocking was thirty-seven inches long”; “the ring would carry the weight of the child”).

Mr. Crankshaft objected to the reading of the statement I had made at the inquest, on the grounds that we appeared to be commencing the hearing as if no earlier evidence had been heard and that as such, I ought to be permitted to give a fresh account. Again, his objections were ignored, the whole inquiry appearing to treat him as one would a petulant child whose presence was to be tolerated but whose protestations were not to be seriously considered. “None of us seems to know why we are here today,” he said, and if it had not been for the circumstances, which weighed heavily on all of us, I believe I would have laughed. Dr. Creith repeated his evidence and my testimony was read. I was not required to speak, and if I had been, what would I have said? That I had wanted to impress upon my daughter the value of self-government? That I had not intended that she be left alone in the
wardrobe room for so long? That I had come so far down the road of believing myself to be entirely autonomous that I had forgotten what it was to need and to ask for and to acknowledge help? What good would it have done to have uttered such words?