The Butterfly Cabinet (14 page)

Something has broken in me, something irreplaceable. I cannot get back to where I was before; there is no way back from here. I try not to dwell on the things I miss: the salty waft of kelp when it catches one unawares on the Parade, the sensation of cool cotton when one slips one’s naked legs between the covers at night; the sound of the longcase clock striking in the hall. Would that I could go back there, open the casing, wind back the hands, shorten my life by a critical three hours.

At Oranmore, Gabriel rose one morning complaining of itching and when his arms and legs were examined, his pale skin was found to be covered in bites. We had to call for Mr. Carter to come and dismantle all the beds in the nursery and have the children moved to the guest rooms. The beds were taken outside to be washed, Keating’s powder sprinkled everywhere. For days the smell of sulfur hung about the nursery. I have become so used now to prison fleas that if I were to have a night without them I think I would not sleep at all.

In the yard today the liquid pain sloshed about my head like milk in a gourd. Then, before me, a young woman with the most serious face, her eyes gray, her hair pale and parted, exposing a perfect line of bone-white scalp, a tiny scar the shape of a crescent under her right eye. She neither smiled nor frowned but, wordlessly, reached out her hand and put the palm flat on my brow, where it rested as cool and smooth as a pebble from the brook at Cappaghbeg. I felt the pain from behind my eyes pool beneath it. After a moment, she drew the flat of her hand
away from me, until only the pad of her index finger rested on my brow, pointing straight at me. I felt the pain move again, line up behind the point where her finger touched my head, and then slowly, like a seamstress winding a thread onto a spool, the finger began to circle and turn and she pulled the pain straight out of me. She sighed once, betrayed only a slight weariness, then she crooked her finger into her hand and slipped it into her pocket. She said some words that my ear did not catch: foreign, I think, from some other place or time, a melodious lilt and fall, not a language I could understand. I had not seen her before and I have not seen her since. No warder approached us the whole time we were there.

It is exactly seventeen weeks since the high sheriff’s Grand Ball. All that has happened between then and now is time. Some movement has occurred, nothing sudden, but everything surprising. It is a good thing we cannot see what is ahead of us.

It is hard to believe now that only ten days previous to my appearance before the magistrate in Coleraine, I was at the county courthouse, guest of our friend Mr. Potts, JP of Lismore House, high sheriff of the city and county of Londonderry. It occurs to me now that had my case not been transferred to the Four Courts (abominable interference from the fool parish priest, who accused the all-Protestant jury of bigotry) it would have been heard in that very same building in which I had so recently been a guest. The Misses Grange were there, poor things, in last year’s colors; they never seem to tire of their cousins’ castoffs. Miss Dawson was resplendent in Limerick lace; I thought at first she was wearing a bustle, despite its having been out of favor these last three years, but I soon realized her rear was her own. I cannot look at her without thinking of a cello; she has an unnaturally long neck and no breasts to speak of. And Mrs. Hardy was in the most extraordinary creation: a kind of pink and white confection of a dress; it cheered me to see it, though I doubt that
that was her intention in wearing it. It was a variety of striped tulle marshmallow, but with something of the admiralty about it.

She sidled up to me, attracted by my mesmerized look, and from behind a marabou fan whispered: “‘
Directoire
,’ Mrs. Ormond, absolutely
de rigueur
this season. You heard it first from me.” She attempted to engage me in conversation for some minutes but I could not hear a word she was saying above that dress. It was not until I was rescued by Captain Grange that I found myself able to concentrate.

“May I help you to some
baba au rhum
, Mrs. Ormond?” he inquired at my elbow, and I gratefully accepted. We were surrounded on all sides by sheriffs and regimentals in ceremonial dress. I was not to know then that the next time I saw him it would be in the drawing room at Oranmore, he in his capacity as resident magistrate, I in my new role as the accused.

I knew then that I was carrying again. With every new birth I am diminished: for each one more of them there grows less of me. There is a type of wasp that lays its eggs in the body of a caterpillar. As the eggs hatch, the wasp larvae eat the host, devouring it from within. If one is unfortunate enough to collect such a caterpillar and keep it for weeks in the dark as it forms a cocoon, hoping that one’s patience will be rewarded with a flowering of orange or purple or green, there will be disappointment. On the lifting of the lid one will uncover not a butterfly but a vicious swarm, and nothing left of the grub. For each little birth, a little more death. Will it work like this, now in reverse? Now that Charlotte is gone, will there grow more of me? There certainly seems to be more of me lately, for I am everywhere. In every newspaper, on every tongue, even on the billboards outside the courthouse. But I am spread very thinly.

When the older boys were young—Harry, Thomas and James—they tried my patience sorely. Their incessant taunting drove me to distraction; when I crossed them they eyed me as a
pack of wild dogs might eye a wounded lioness. I could not pierce their conspiracy. The idea that I could be both enemy and prey to my children was a shock to me. I beat them and it stopped them at the time but it had no effect, it seemed, on their behavior thereafter. They made no association between the punishment and the transgression. The harder I hit them, the sooner they forgot. And they never understood the disproportionate amount of time they occupied; they never knew their place. Once, I remember, I caught Thomas whipping Caesar, on a whim, it seemed, for no good reason other than that he could. He looked at me with those insolent green eyes of his when I questioned him and I chased him around the house with the riding crop. Afterward Edward came to me, concerned at the blood he had witnessed on Thomas’s shirt.

“There is a time to whip a horse,” I said, “and that time is not when it is housed in the stable.”

“The boy must learn,” said Edward, “but it seems most severe to treat him as he treated the animal.”

“He had the advantage of being able to run,” I said, but I could see that Edward was not smiling. “He will not forget the punishment. The association will be strong in his mind.”

“All the same,” said Edward, “perhaps we should adopt a different policy, one that does not result in a bloodied shirt.”

“What do you suggest?”

“Isolation? Allow him to cool his heels for a while? Think over what he has done?”

So we agreed: the wardrobe room, windowless and without a fire, would serve as punishment from then on.

There was an evening in the nursery, trying to put the three of them to bed. I must have been carrying Gabriel at the time: three boys under the age of five and another on the way. They thought it was a game to kick off the covers as soon as I had them settled. I scolded and threatened but nothing I said could curb their spirits: they must have sensed that I had not the energy to
lift my hand to them. I turned from them, walked to the fireplace, dug my nails into the wallpaper and dragged them down the wall and screeched. I can still feel the sensation of the paper and plaster gathering under my breaking, bleeding fingernails.

So much is in question here. I do well not to think too long, better to allow my limbs to operate according to habit. A second’s hesitation and I am lost. How does one go about the business of buttoning a dress, tying on an apron, washing one’s hands? I am a child again, relearning the simplest of tasks. Luckily for me, it seems, the body has a memory; one’s limbs know what is required of them.

The walls close in. There is a new kind of seeing, each dimension in sharp contrast, every object more vital than before, angles sharper, colors more vivid. One finds oneself asking if that window bar came down in quite that same way yesterday. It seems impossible not to have noticed it before. That face in the wooden platter, that crease, just so, in the mattress.

There is a kind of trick employed by the snout butterfly when it pupates. It attaches itself by means of a silken thread to the underside of a twig, hangs upside-down by its feet and begins the process of divesting itself of its skin. When it has shed all but the covering on its legs—the legs that are still attached to the twig, preventing it from dropping to disaster on the ground—it performs an acrobatic twist, shakes off the last shreds of its molt and reattaches itself, by means of a silken hook, to safety. How hard the smallest of creatures will try for life. Constantly under threat, they devise new methods for survival. Everything they do is for the continuation of the species: to mature, to reproduce, to die. One aim, one goal in mind, so beautifully simple. I wonder, have I succeeded or failed? I am better than what I have done, than the one act for which I have been reviled, will be remembered.

To follow orders is not so much of an ordeal, so long as one understands the rules and knows how to avoid punishment, but to be constantly watched is an unbearable incursion. They have taken
great pains to impress this upon me. The spy hole in the door of my cell is a work of anatomical perfection. It has been carved and painted to resemble a human eye, with pupil, iris, eyelashes and eyebrow, always open, always on the watch. There is no escaping it, there is nowhere one can go.

These are the things I know. That the last occupant of this cell was a clever woman. She knew that the bracket for the gas jet was set too low for her to hang herself, and that eating soap produced horrifying agonies of the stomach. She had witnessed fellow inmates sew copper wire into a leg wound in order to make it fester and gain a week or two’s respite in the sick ward. She had eyed the netting that hung newly suspended between the galleries around the upper stories of the prison to prevent “accidental falls.” She saw all this and still she knew that she could not bide another morning of waking up cold to the rancid smell of gruel and creosote and the burned chloride of lime that had failed to obliterate the stench of the waste of a hundred other miserable individuals. Another day of headache and nausea at the whiteness of the walls and the threat of the canvas dress for insubordination. She had calculated that if she tied the sheet from her bed in a loose knot between the bed frame and the gas jet on the wall that she could lever the heavy bed off the ground. With practice, she learned that the knot would hold for a given length of time until she pulled it in a certain way. She understood that it would be possible to lie down on the cold floor, directly underneath the place where the bed leg had rested, and to pull one end of the knot so as to untie it. If this were done suddenly, then the bed would fall and the leg would come down with enough force to go through her head and kill her outright. She was an excellent theoretician, and then, like the best kind, she proved it to be true. This I know because I have been whispered it in relayed messages, by the prostitute, or the thief, or the madwoman. And now that I know it, there is a mark under the bed that will not scrub away.

They think I will be afraid of her ghost, but what can her ghost do to me? They do not know the meaning of “horror.” It is a silence in a dark room where there should have been an answer; it is a spot of blood on a lip; it is a small slumped body; it is a doctor shaking his head; it is eighteen dark-dressed men in the drawing room with a dead child between them; it is the bile that rises in the throat each time one opens one’s mouth to speak; it is the sound of words at an inquest that make no sense. “I tied her hands and attached the stocking to the ring to prevent her running around the room and picking the paper off the walls.” I tied her to prevent her from making a mess, and look at the mess I have created. I have my own ghost; I brought it with me. There is no warder’s search that will locate it. Charlotte is with me like a song without the music. I carry the melody of her; she wraps herself around my every thought.

She never lost the smell of being birthed, the smell of blood, and sweat and vomit and soiled linen. It was strong on her skin for days, a kind of metallic undertone, impossible to miss, the smell of the inside of me. No one should have to smell that every day. Lighter and smaller by far than any of the boys, she was the most difficult birth of all. She seemed happy where she was, reluctant to emerge into the blinking light. In the days before her birth, I experienced a sensation like a claw being dragged along the inside of my womb. She was born with nails grown beyond her fingertips; two tiny teeth, chips of bone extruding from her gums, like she was ready for the world, whatever it threw at her, like a thing hatched rather than born. She rarely cried, a serious child, often frowning. She knew her own mind; that much is certain.

Edward doted on her, of course. He could not help himself. Those serious gray eyes, those waxy curls. She was afraid of the dark and he arranged for a lighted oil lamp to be left on the landing table. He told her he would engage a fairy to guard her
and that if she woke in the night, she might just see the light from its wings flicker underneath the door. She was not to come out, he said, because fairies do not like to be seen by humans, and if she did, it might go away and never come back. He used to balance her on his feet: her right on his left; her left on his right. She’d throw her arms around his legs and he would stumble forward, walk her backward, his arms outstretched, calling, “Charlotte? Charlotte? Has anyone seen Charlotte?” until she collapsed into laughter and sang: “Here, Dadda, I’m here,” when Edward would feign surprise and discover her, suddenly, right under his nose.

Then he would pick her up and hold her tight and say, “There you are! I thought you were lost. Where have you been?”

And the answer was always the same: “In your shadow, Dadda. You could not see me for looking!”