The Butterfly Cabinet (11 page)

The best view of the town was from the older boys’ rooms on the north side of the house, so I never minded being sent in there to air the beds when the boys were away at school. I used to stand at the windows and watch the tram pootering up the Parade. You would see the funnel first, sticking up out of the front, and the steam flying out of it, and then the conductor in his official hat jumping from one car to the next, collecting fares. And the people all sitting out on top on a good day, with the quality underneath them in their upholstered seats. And up it would come to near the top of the Parade, past the bathhouses and stop outside the hotel. I was there the day the stranger came. I watched him from Master James’s window, a small man in a tall hat, busy and important, stepping with his short legs out of the tram, walking up past the post office and the grocer’s. And then he disappeared and I knew
he must be on the Strand Road and taking the walk up to the gate in the rubble wall and up the drive to the front of the house to knock on the door. I’d never set eyes on him in my life, I’d no way of knowing who he was, but I knew as soon as he knocked on the door that it was me that had brought him there and that it would mean trouble for all of us.

Not long before this, it was evening time, between the lights. Peig sent me out to turn down the gas in the passageways before “the surge,” as she called it, when the gas supply would flare up for the evening and blacken the walls if it wasn’t regulated. I was standing in the main hallway when I heard a bump, bump, bump on the stairs going up from the schoolroom. When I went to the foot, I saw Gabriel’s fair head bouncing off each step, and when I looked up, the mistress was above him, disappearing round the bend in the stairs, but with her hand holding him by the heels, not looking back. I couldn’t stick any more of it, Anna. The boys were rascals, it’s true, but no child deserves that treatment. You wouldn’t treat a dog like that.

I went down into the scullery and I said to Peig, “Do you hear that?”

She was stripping the scales off a salmon, and she stood still with the knife in her hand, listening. “What is it?” she said.

“Gabriel’s head,” I said, “on the steps.”

Peig looked at me with her face white.

“If we don’t do something,” I said, “if we don’t tell somebody what’s going on in this house, one of those children is going to be killed.”

Peig put down the knife and wiped her hands on her apron. “Are you able to write a letter?” she said. I nodded. She went into the larder and came back. “Here, take this.” And she handed me paper and a pen. She had the address of the Cruelty Society rolled up inside a napkin ring and she took it out and put it in front of me. “Write it all,” she said, “write everything.”

The day I watched the man stepping off the tram and coming up to the house, Madge must have seen him too. She put on her clean apron and went to answer the door. Then she went in and told the mistress that the inspector from the Cruelty Society was there and then she went back to the door and said the mistress was out. He said he’d be back at nine o’clock the next morning, and the next morning didn’t the mistress up and breakfast an hour earlier than usual, her and the children, and away they went, I couldn’t tell you where. They were gone for a full week. Twice the inspector came back in that time, and twice he was told the same thing by Madge: the mistress and the children were gone from the house. He got no satisfaction at all. The mistress came back in a black mood. She’d no way of knowing, of course, who’d informed on her, but the guilt must have been written on my face. She found fault in everything I did: the fire was too high or not high enough, the window ledge wasn’t dusted, the carpets weren’t beaten to her liking. But at least things calmed down for a while with the children. They were still put in the wardrobe room from time to time; she must have decided that was acceptable.

There’s things that happens, Anna, where the fault lies with more than one person. Some people are more to blame than others, maybe, but still, it took all those things together to make this one terrible event come about. Charlotte never mastered toileting. When she was four she was put in the wardrobe room by the governess for dirtying herself. The mistress was in town, and when she came back she went up to the child, and tied her by her hands with a stocking and attached it by a piece of twine to a ring on the wall and locked the door and went away and ordered a bath, and by all accounts forgot she was there. I can well imagine what she said; she would have made it clear that this was an “apt punishment,” said something in the way of “If you cannot be trusted to keep your hands clean they will be kept out of harm’s way.” Except they weren’t out of harm’s way. Charlotte must have
twisted, struggled to get free, somehow got the stocking round her throat. She was never one for standing still. Maybe she called out, but no one came.

When the mistress found her, when she opened the wardrobe room door, the cry that came out of her went through the house and stopped everything. I ran up and she screamed at me to bring water, and when I got back with the basin, Charlotte was lying on the mistress’s bed and the mistress was kneeling on the floor, her head flung back and her two hands rubbing, rubbing, up and down her dress. I couldn’t get her to stop or get any sense out of her and when she finally did stop, the skin on her palms was as rough as from ten days of laundry. Charlotte was on the bed, undressed, lying strangely, her lips black, a tiny red mark on her throat. And the mistress was screaming, “She’s gone, she’s gone, she’s gone.”

I could tell then that she was dead. Everyone who looked at her knew it. But still, we had to help the mistress slip her into the hip bath filled with warm water, separate her lips, pour brandy down her throat and over her chest, and still not a breath from Charlotte.

When Charlotte died, that feeling, the feeling from the time our boat went down, came rushing back to me. I can remember standing there on the rocks as the
Ruby
was swallowed up by the sea, expecting to see it bob back up again, not able to believe it was gone in one instant. Not able to believe I could be witness to something so black and so terrible, and not able to do anything about it. I remember Mammy stretching out her hand, out over the water toward the boat, as if by some will of her own she might reach it, pick it up, right it again. If wishing and hoping and praying had been enough it would have been done. It all came back to me then: that impulse to reach out, to stop the thing that was happening, to go back and make it unhappen, by whatever means.

The mistress was a study in the days after, kept to her room the whole time between the inquest and the hearing; there were whispers even then that she was carrying again. Madge said that in itself would keep her out of prison: she’d never heard of a child of the quality being born behind bars. Peig said that nothing would happen to the mistress, that nothing ever did; there was one law for them and another for us, and that’s the way it’d always be. But Paudie said the times were changing, and wait and see. “There’ll come a knock to the door one day,” he said, “and after that, things won’t ever be the same.”

For days and weeks afterward, I woke at the creak of the door, a draft, and I knew that it was Charlotte’s fairy footfall I was waiting for, her shape in the doorway, the whispered request to come in to the heat of me. It was the lack of a thing that woke me, like when the rain suddenly stops at night. She has taken a long time to leave this place, each day faded a little more, grown less here than she was before. But I’m not convinced she’s gone yet, Anna. Even now, I think she may still be here.

Friday 20 May 1892

The procession I witnessed this morning has imposed something upon me of the seriousness of the fate that I have escaped. A few minutes before light, before the prison bell sounded and the gas flared up and the first cry of “All out!” I rose and looked out the window to catch the first lightening in the sky. Two warders walked into the yard carrying lighted tapers, a prisoner between them with his hands bound. Two clergymen followed, also bearing lights. They walked a few paces, from what I now know to be the condemned cell across to the scaffolding room. Midway, the procession halted and the warder to the right produced a white cap that he slipped over the prisoner’s head. After that there was silence, and an hour later, a black flag hoisted on the tower. They say he killed his wife, the condemned man, in a fit of jealous rage.

I had woken from a strange dream. My mother, a red admiral, darkly velveted and crinolined, bordered in red satin, white fur at her throat and cuffs, was roosting on the edge of the divan in the sitting room at Oranmore, where she had never visited. She was talking earnestly to me, telling me something important, and I was a brimstone, pale green with thickly veined wings,
fruitlessly trying to mimic an ivy leaf, hopelessly conspicuous on the red and gold divan. I could smell the cod liver oil she took for her joints, slightly fishlike, a little distasteful. What was it she was trying to say? I cannot remember. It glides from me as I reach out to catch it.

The strongest sensation that is left from a dream is the feel of it, that other body that one has inhabited. The detail fades over time, color, texture, even smell, but that sense of being oneself and at the same time being someone or something else—that is what lingers. It is only when one awakes that one sees the absurdity of it, but while one remains asleep, inside the dream, one does not question the sense of it. I was about Charlotte’s age when Julia was born. I can remember Father in a jacquard silk waistcoat, smelling as always of leather, leading me by the hand into Mother’s room, where Mother was arranged, as if for a photograph, on several white pillows on the four-poster bed. The heavy green drapes cast a shadow on her pale face. On her cheeks were two round spots of color. She looked, in her lace cap and cambric nightgown, like a porcelain doll. Father said, “Come and meet your new sister, Harriet,” and I walked to the nurse, who was holding a bundle of muslin, and looked at the baby’s tiny head and hands, the pale down at her temples, smelled the milky breath of her. “This is Julia,” said Father, and her name was a jingle of silver. The room was as it had always been, ordered and still. The pier glass gleamed in the candlelight; two crisp white towels hung from a rail on the birch-wood washstand; the hip bath was polished and dry, angled into the corner. The stage was set, but there was something different: a pulse, a sensation as if some calamitous event had taken place and had been hurriedly tidied up, swept away, all made to look normal. I do not know why, but I felt that the success of this domestic scene rested on me, so I smiled, said, “She is very small,” which seemed to be exactly the right thing to say, for they all smiled back, Father and the nurse, even
Mother, and there was a kind of sigh in the room, like we had all performed our parts as required.

It was clear to me that I had not been expected to love Julia, and though I made an attempt to appear as though I did, I fooled no one. The gap between us was too great. We had nothing in common, she and I. I yearned for the outdoors, open spaces; she asked for nothing more than to sit by Mother’s side and sew.

Mother’s health deteriorated after Julia was born. Eventually the doctors told her that her only hope of improvement was to travel, live abroad, in Egypt, they suggested, or Africa. I could barely contain my excitement. Those stories I had read in the
Quarterly Review:
Isabel, Lady Burton, riding through the deserts of Syria, a bowie knife in her belt, a rifle strapped to her back, her silken headdress flowing in the wind. I could see myself, scandalously astride a silver-gray Arabian steed in Palmyra or Luxor, where one could see for miles on end, breathe air that had traveled for centuries and had not once paused to scale an orchard wall or a clipped hedge. I would pick about among ruins, making sketches, deciphering hieroglyphs, my only companion a trusted native guide. And at night I would lie down under the stars, and there would be no limit to the thinking I could do. Childish aspirations, and short-lived. It was soon clear that separation from my father was not an option. Mother chose to linger at home on the sofa, while her joints slowly fused into immovable knots, reminding us all of how ill she was. She chose a half-lit life with him and to shun the sunshine completely in a blinded room. Years later, I learned that Lady Burton was born in 1831, the year before my mother. How different can two lives be?

There was a picture among the things that Julia brought from our London house when she came to us: a cutting from the
Illustrated London News
. It was of Blondin, from an engraving made at the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace the year of my parents’ marriage. The acrobat is sitting on a chair, at a small table
with a glass of wine raised in his hand, and for the first few seconds of looking, he seems an unremarkable, somewhat overtheatrical, but relatively ordinary sort of man. Until one allows one’s eyes to travel down to his feet and one sees that he is shoeless; that with the toes of his right foot he is gripping a tightrope; that forward of this, his left foot is poised on the bottom rung of the table and that it in turn is steadied on the rope; that with the weight of his whole body he is balancing the chair on which he sits on its cross-rungs; that with his entire concentration he is keeping himself upright, preventing himself from plummeting to a depth of twenty feet or more. Remarkable balancing act: a triumph of coordination of mind and body; how totally in tune he must have been, how completely aware of his utmost capability. What made my mother keep it, I wonder. Her own sense of imbalance, perhaps; her growing failure to find purchase on solid ground? A difficult trick to master, the skill of staying erect, which might explain my mother giving it up entirely. These days, it is a skill I have to work at myself.

Julia uses it to explain herself, of course, the fear of ending one’s days as an invalid. Hence her compulsion to be constantly on the move, grappling with the newest fad. Our parents permitted her a visit with me at Oranmore during my first confinement. While she was there, Edward presented me with the Italian dresser, a gift for our first wedding anniversary. I say Italian—it was clearly Flemish in origin, an odd, delicate, unsteady-looking piece with a dozen useless drawers and barley-twist legs and stretchers, which it must have acquired on its dubious journey through Italy. Bizarrely, also in Italy, some semitalented romantic had painted “scenes” on the drawer fronts: there was the Duomo and Baptistery from Florence; the Venetian Santa Maria della Salute; St. Peter’s Square; the open-air amphitheater at Verona where Rossini’s music had drifted out over the poplars. I understood Edward: he was sending me a belated postcard
from our honeymoon, a souvenir from those first months alone together, when he could not bring himself to let go of my hand. Julia thought it the sweetest gesture; I actually think I saw tears in her eyes. And it must go in my bedroom, of course. There was no other place it could possibly reside. Julia cooed over the artistry of it, vowed to go to Italy as soon as she could manage it and filled the dresser full of brushes and hair ornaments. It has a dark marble top that is much too heavy for the piece itself, but with one redeeming feature. It was placed under the window, to the left of the brass half-tester bed, and when Madge came in the morning to open the curtains and I lay in bed waiting for the house to rise and the day to begin, a little piece of sky appeared, mirrored on the still pool of its surface, a living transfer, complete with the passage of gulls and clouds.