The Butterfly Cabinet (13 page)

By that time I’d had my summons: I knew I was going to have to give evidence at the trial. I couldn’t stop thinking of a story my father had told. He was coming back one morning early from a
laying-out near Ballyleese. It was June, the time of the year when the sky darkens no deeper than navy blue and the birds sing all through the night. I woke up when I heard his step at the door. Mammy had been sleeping in the chair by the fire, waiting for him coming home, and the door of the room was open a crack. He said he’d seen a strange thing. Coming down over the rocks above the Warren he looked down and saw a black circle on the low ground and something at its middle, and when he got closer he could see that it was a flock of crows gathered round three more birds. He said it was like a meeting of some kind, with the three middle birds all cawing at one another and the rest all looking on. And then, as he was watching, two of the crows left the center of the circle and walked out to the edge and joined the rest of them and just as they did, the whole circle closed in on the one bird. Daddy said when they’d done with it, there wasn’t a feather of it left.

“I don’t like that,” Mammy said, “I don’t like that one bit. What do you think it means, John?”

Daddy said he’d heard tell of them doing that before, maybe when the one had stole a nest or had broken a wing or something, but he’d never seen it with his own eyes, and it was chilling, he said, the way the whole group of birds behaved, like they were letting the accused have its say, before they tore it to pieces.

Me and Peig went to Dublin to give our evidence on the Friday, April Fool’s Day, my first time ever on the train. Everywhere you looked in Dublin there were people rushing around: butchers’ boys in their smocks and aprons with trays of meat on their shoulders; shoe-blacks and the cockles-and-mussels men; boys shoveling up dung from the horses passing in the street, selling it from door to door for garden manure.

“It’s true enough, then,” said Peig, “in Dublin they could sell shite and people would buy it.”

It seemed like everyone had a job to do and in a hurry: I
saw a man in Sackville Street with a pole carrying half a dozen rabbit skins. And the noise of them: the lavender girls crying, “All a-growin’”; the old-clothes men chiming their bells; gypsies shouting, “Chairs to mend”; the knife grinder with his rickety oul’ wheelbarrow. Outside a pub, there was a man balancing a ladder on his chin! The streets were full of tuggers: women in shawls with prams stuffed full of scrap and rags. And the stalls! I’ve never seen such a variety of things being sold: stewed eels and sheep’s trotters; oysters and apples and oranges. It made me think of my quilt that Mammy had sewed for me, and that all the things in all the baskets had sprung to life in Dublin. And then I started to wonder what other magic could happen there; what other dreams could you live out in such a place? It made my head swim, the noise and the color of it. Me and Peig stayed in a boardinghouse in St. Michan’s Street in Smithfield, with no quilts on the bed to speak of.

We had to register at the Four Courts and then we were free to do what we wanted until Monday, when we had to go back to give our evidence. We went for a walk down Sackville Street, past the Gresham, where the mistress and the master were staying. It was very grand, with hackney cabs all waiting outside. I’ve never seen a street as wide as that in my life; it made you feel like you were no size at all. But you hadn’t far to go to see the other side of Dublin: a glimpse down Gardiner Street to ragged, barefoot weans in houses that looked like they were about to crumble. It hadn’t occurred to me that you could be poor in Dublin, yards away from the likes of Clerys department store; poorer even than in a cabin, where at least you’d have a chance of a fish or a potato. There’s nothing there to grow, nowhere to grow it. It’s the nearest thing I’ve seen to an open sheugh, with the water running down the middle of the street and the weans stepping over it, and the smell in the air of sulfur from the coal fires, but above it all, strange enough, hanging on poles out of the upper windows, clean sheets
strung out like flags the whole way down the street. I saw a big red-brick building with white pillars and a grand door with glass in it, and I thought that must be the courthouse, and when I got closer it was the fruit and vegetable market. And the courthouse, when I did see it, good God, as if I wasn’t scared enough! White like an iced wedding cake, and with a green hat on it reflecting in the Liffey. I’ve never seen anything so impressive.

“You’ve no need to worry,” said Peig, “none of us has. Just answer the questions truthfully and you’ll be grand.” And that’s what I did. But I had a dread of the place, standing on the stone flags in the Round Hall, with its big cream pillars and the dome like a chrysanthemum opening up above us, petaled black and white, and all those figures looking down: judges and lawyers from the olden days, statues of Moses, Justice, Mercy, Authority, Wisdom. The more you looked up at them the dizzier you got. The place was packed with pressmen and lawyers and clerks, and people pushing and shoving and trying to get in to hear the proceedings. We were shepherded in by Mr. Crankshaft and put in long wooden seats like church pews, not far from where the mistress came to sit.

When my time came, they put me up on the stand and that solicitor Morell, with his big long legs and his huge bushy eyebrows and his nose like the beak on a hen, and the big blue flowery cravat at this throat, he took off his glasses and he looked at me. He asked me if I’d ever witnessed harsh treatment of the children and I told him about the crying I sometimes heard from the wardrobe room, and about the time Freddie picked up the mistress’s riding boots with his buttery hands when Feeley had just that minute finished boning them. The mistress hit him a clout with her riding crop that nearly sent him into next week. I told them about the time she hit Morris with the umbrella and he asked me if I knew what that was for and I told him she’d found out he was keeping crabs in his chamber pot, and everybody in
the courtroom laughed. He asked me did I know anything about a letter that was written to the Cruelty Society and I told him yes, that it was me that wrote it. And that was all true. It was strange to be standing up there, to be looking at the mistress in front of us, to be answering questions and speaking out, knowing that she was never going to get a chance to speak. I thought about that time at the front of the house, when she made me lie facedown in the gravel, when she told me to keep my nose out of her affairs. I told the solicitor nothing but the truth; I answered every question he asked me. But I didn’t give him the answers to the questions he didn’t ask.

If he’d asked me did I see a key lying on the spiral staircase I’d have told him “Yes.” If he’d asked me did I pick it up and hide it in my hair I’d have told him “Yes.” If he’d asked me did I leave it back, after a while, in the same place where I found it I’d have told him “Yes.” But he didn’t ask me any of those questions. He only asked questions that didn’t matter, one way or the other, and when he said, “You may go,” I got down from there as quick as my legs would carry me.

Tuesday 7 June 1892

It is feared, apparently, by the members of the House, that I am being given special privileges, that upon my infant’s birth, my supporters will win my release on the grounds of ill health. Alas, my health looks likely to thwart me in this, as it continues robust as ever. They move me around like a checker on a board: from Grangegorman to Derry and back again. They do not seem able to determine what to do with me. And still the House has not tired of my case. “A monster of cruelty” is what one Unionist member has labeled me, and demands to know why the separate charges of cruelty have not been pursued. Meanwhile, the Nationalists harp on, counting on their fingers the number of Catholic jurors instructed to stand down at the trial. Edward writes this to me in a letter, not wishing me to hear it from any other source, and to say that his memorial for my release has been rejected. I am to give birth in Dublin, it would seem.

It is not so surprising, I suppose, to hear that my name is mentioned in the House, given my association with Lord Ormond. One editor famously wrote of him, “Neither side of the House listens to him with patience, much less respect, and even
the Home Rule party look with disfavor on their Anglo-national ally.” He locked horns with Mr. Gladstone years before I came to Ireland, over the question of papal infallibility, but we continue to hear of it on a regular basis. He is a most contrary man. Whether it be the price of corn or the fixing of rents that riles him, he can be relied upon always to take the opposite view of whomsoever he happens to find himself in the room with at the time. He is master of the one-liner. Once, on his way to the hunt, he stopped off in the morning room to ask Edward the date of the next meeting of the Poor Law Guardians. They entered into a discussion over the nomination for chairman, which ended, as ever, with one of his enigmatic quips. “You do not know a horse’s character till you place a saddle on its back,” he said, and off he went, leaving us at a loss as to whether his mind was on the hunt or on the nominations.

Edward must appear loyal to his father, of course, no easy task as it transpires, since Lord Ormond, like the good sailor he is, appears to change tack with every shift in the political breeze. He has converted from Episcopalian to Roman Catholic; from high conservative to Home Ruler; from a sound seat in Huntingdonshire to a rocky one in Westmeath to no seat at all; from loyal hound of Disraeli to a lapdog for the newspaper editors to kick. Loyalty to a father is to be admired in a son, but it is difficult in Lord Ormond’s case to see to what one is being loyal. Edward pulls from the ruins of his father’s disastrous choices what he can. I dare say my connection with his family has hammered the nail in the coffin lid of Lord Ormond’s political career.

Edward is a good son, and an indulgent landlord to his tenants, and they abuse his good nature, take advantage of his affection for his grandfather’s estate. The election results of 1885 caused a stir throughout the nation: eighty-six seats for the Irish Parliamentary Party, undoubtedly a Nationalist victory; the prince and princess of Wales pelted with onions on their visit to Cork.
Since then the tenants, with the National League behind them, have consistently demanded rent reductions, at times of up to 30 percent. Edward has had no option but to sell part of his land. The only thing that has saved us is that the Catholic Church is the mortgagee and has brought its own considerable weight to bear on its congregation. It angers me to see Edward so blinkered by his love of the place. The tenants line up to speak to him each morning after breakfast, carrying their grievances and tales of woe about the fall in the tillage prices or the price of butter. They do nothing but murmur and grumble. The rents on the estate are set far below the Poor Law valuations, and if there is a bad year for potatoes or grain they come memorializing in their droves, the
Freeman’s Journal
tucked under their armpits, claiming that the fixed-rent system is unfair where the quality of land is so variable. Edward sympathizes with them, accepts a cartload of turf or a day’s plowing in lieu of payment. Left to his own devices he would have us all destitute.

“Did they come,” I said to him, “last year, when they were getting over seven shillings for a hundredweight of potatoes, and say, ‘We have over and above what we need this year, your honor, and would gladly put something down against a bad harvest’?”

“Of course not,” said Edward, “nor would I, if I were they.”

In my opinion, therefore, they have no argument. If weather or disease or the market is an excuse in times of want, why is it not a reason in times of plenty? Let them put something by for when they need it. They make no provision against a worse time, and so long as it is not required of them, they will never learn industry or foresight. Charity lessens self-respect as well as self-reliance. The potato blight hit just as hard in Scotland as it did in Ireland and not one of my grandfather’s tenants died of starvation. And he could never have been accused of having a soft hand. He knew how to manage an estate: how to be fair and yet firm; how to encourage industry in his tenantry, to administer relief where it was due.
Edward’s grandfather knew the skill of it, but Edward … I do believe Edward would be content to be a tenant on his own land, if he could be left alone to try out the best methods for turning the soil, and never be troubled with matters of landlordism. In these days of tenant rights and rates tribunals and fixity of tenure, Edward, it would seem, has no say in the matter of who may tenant his land nor what they may pay.

I have just now remembered my checkered skipper experiment: the little green-and-white-lined larvae I collected from Mountsandel Wood in October, safely encased inside their grass-blade tunnels and housed in a hat box on top of my wardrobe. There was nothing much to observe over the winter months: soon after I collected them they stopped feeding on the false brome and began to pupate. They must be ready to emerge now, if they have not done so already. What excitement: to lift the lid and peer inside and see not pupae but fully emerged butterflies, beating their powdery brown wings. If they have emerged early, they may already be spoilt. I will ask Edward to release them. He is not capable of setting them. It requires just the right amount of pressure on the thorax to still the wings, the correct angle for the pin to pierce and hold the abdomen in place. He would not know to secure the front wing behind a vein. He would not be up to the task. I am sad to have missed it, my first rearing. Had I been there, they would have been perfect.

Today, the strangest kind of rain, hardly rain at all, a damp flurry blown about by every draft and breeze, the sun shining throughout. Not wet enough to mark the ground or dampen the air, an undirected, ineffectual falling. There is a face in the grain of the wood of my platter, a downturned countenance with one closed eye and a wrinkled cheek and chins that become scarves that stretch all the way to the edge of the plate. Beside it, there is
another face, a long curved nose, a mouth that could be a smile or the hope of one, an eye that looks askance, away from the other. I cannot escape the impression that they are the faces of old children, too long in the womb, emerging misshapen from lack of space, born knowing too much. I dread this birth in this place. What kind of legacy will this child carry, born behind bars to a mother convicted of killing its sister?