The Butterfly Cabinet (15 page)

She called him her magician, said he could make any bump or bruise or scratch disappear. She would run screeching to him, leap into his arms, and he would hold her, pass a hand over the hurt, whisper an incantation in her ear, and all was quiet. Except for the last day. He could not fix his little porcelain doll in the end.

Some would call her precocious, I suppose. She began to talk at around twelve months, much sooner than any of the boys, and surprised us all by speaking in sentences. The boys accumulated language, word on word, a process one could track from one week to the next. They confused sounds, dropped whole syllables, said “pook” for “book,” talked about “elphant” and “graffe,” but Charlotte took to language like it had always been in her and the learning was the learning to uncover it, a patch at a time. Whole sentences emerged intact; the delivery imbued her words with a sense of meaning that was far beyond her years. Questions, all the time, none of them easily answered: Does Caesar
like
to run? How do we know when it is morning? Where does the moon sleep? What do we do when she has gone to bed? Her engagement with life was exhausting.

Her advancement led me to believe that she would do other things ahead of her brothers, but there was one thing she could not or would not grasp, that flouted me at every turn. She would not learn to use the chamber pot. She seemed terrified of it, of the sensation of air around her, the loss of the comfort of her binder and underclothes. Julia suggested that we leave off some of her undergarments in the warmer months, allow her to go about in her chemise without drawers or stockings, to get used to the sensation, and with the added benefit of speed when the time came to toilet her. Against my better judgment, I eventually agreed to try it. Incredible will in a child of two years. She held back: I could see her do it, gripping her nails into her hands, her face growing redder by the minute, until she could not control herself any longer and suddenly there was mess, like sheep droppings, all over the nursery floor. She made herself constipated; we dosed her with calomel; she screeched in pain when the purgative took effect. Dr. Creith came and explained that her bowel had become impacted, that most likely the violent evacuation had caused a small tear in the back passage that only time would heal. He advised that we abandon our efforts to have her use the chamber pot and return to it later when perhaps the memory of the incident had faded. He prescribed sieved fruit and jellied soup, boiled water to drink. I felt utterly defeated. The battle over the chamber pot was no less exhausting or messy with the boys but it was straightforward: they understood what was required of them and they succumbed, after time, to habit and discipline. Not so with Charlotte. The behavior was inexplicable to me. I was thwarted at every turn and it did not help to have my failure witnessed by Julia. Her interference made me more determined to win the battle with Charlotte.

Like Charlotte, I too have questions that are not easily answered. What happens when I leave here? What is it that I am hoping for? I tell myself that all I have to do is endure this year.
That part is not so difficult, not when I consider what lies ahead. Where will I go when I leave? Where will I not be known? I would like to drift, I think, like the sycamore seeds the children used to collect and pick open, a dry husk, boneless, clean, light enough to be lifted by a breeze.

24 October 1968

Dear Nanny Madd,

I’m sorry. I can’t come today. I have to see the doctor. Don’t worry. Everything’s fine. Just the anxieties of a first-time mother, I’m sure. I’ll see you as soon as I can. Conor will bring this.

Anna

Friday 24 June 1892

Eighteen seventy-seven: a clouded yellow year, the sky in June a fall of sunshine flakes. One of Mother’s better days, Father drove us to Nairn, where the butterflies arrived in their hundreds and settled in a field of clover near the beach. At rest, with its wings folded, it might have been mistaken for a brimstone, but in full flight no such mistake was possible. Father pointed out to me how it had camouflaged itself, its wing spots mimicking leaf mold, its leg a stem of clover; how it had uglified itself for a better chance at survival. I fell in love with it then, that hardy little ghost of a butterfly, pale and camouflaged. My first specimen.

Father allowed me his cabinet. He said he had done with gathering rocks and birds’ eggs, a young man’s pursuit, and I could have it for my interest. Mother had always disliked it. She called it an ugly piece, “unforgiving,” but it was perfect for my purposes. A disused dental cabinet he had come by at auction, it had over a dozen swing-out trays that were snug and dark and preserved the butterflies in their original state. He showed me how to feel for the thorax through the net while the butterfly’s wings were folded, how to squeeze gently with my thumb and finger. It was
surprising how soon the little movements stopped. We rinsed out a marmalade jar in the stream, dried it on the picnic cloth, folded our napkins into triangles and wrapped the tiny specimens inside. Father explained to me how the wings would have to be relaxed in order to set them. Apart from the chest that contained my clothes and linen, the cabinet was the only item of furniture I brought with me to Ireland.

When I grew more practiced, I used the thorax-pinch to stun the butterfly only, to prevent it from beating the scales off its wings, so I could drop it into the killing jar. On the bottom was a piece of muslin soaked in chloroform, courtesy of Dr. Creith. It had an odd effect. Each time I dropped in a new specimen and that overpowering smell escaped, I was reminded of giving birth. Once home, the specimens were transferred to the relaxing jar, so the wings would become pliant enough to set them: a jar partly filled with sand and water and left on a windowsill for the sun to create a little tropic to humidify and relax the wings. Mold is the real enemy. I once had to remove a whole drawerful of
Cupido minimus
because one had become stained.

Butterflies are cold-blooded creatures: they need sunlight to power their wings, and given the climate in this country there is not much opportunity to net them. I know lepidopterists who use bleached linen sheets to attract them. I myself have been known to wander around with a jar of honey, smearing it on tree trunks in order to capture a specimen, but I feel foolish enough carrying a butterfly net. The end result is magnificent; I wish the catching of them could be more dignified.

Mine is not a large collection; I have never seen the point of buying samples from other people’s sets. Each butterfly is personal to me: when I look at them, they take me back to the day I netted each and every one of them. The comma, a rare treasure, an impossible paper cutout, all curves and flourishes, a true amber and brown baroque, netted near some woods in Huntingdonshire.
The large white, easily caught among the cabbages in the vegetable garden at Priorwood, not white at all but the palest of green undersides, veined like a leaf, the most edible-looking of butterflies. The orange-tip, increasingly rare at home, found among some cuckooflower near the brook at Knockancor. The green hairstreak, a reminder from Gallows, caught in a bilberry bush on an outing to Dearna Woods. The rare heath fritillary roosting on some foxglove near Inverness. They take me back to places and times, and then to the people I have known. The small pearl-bordered fritillary: Grandmamma McIntyre before she went into mourning, draped sleeves and voluminous skirts, pearl strung and amber jeweled. The grayling, a shaving of bark, old Peter at the woodshed. Edward: ink-smudged, oak wood dweller, distinguished, graceful, the silver-washed fritillary. Julia: the wood white, insubstantial, only barely there. And Charlotte … Charlotte is easy. The black-veined white: a scrap of charcoal-etched parchment; a bank of snow through a leaded window, a creature of sharp contrasts.

When one holds a butterfly up to the light, one is an alchemist changing matter, transforming solid to vapor with one movement of the hand, from tangible into breathable, from wing into air. Edward did not share my fascination, but the fascination itself seemed, at least at first, to intrigue him. We were introduced at our neighbors the Campbells’, a house I had no reluctance in visiting since Mr. Campbell had his own obsession: a passion for all things African. Their drawing room was filled with exotica, objects collected by Mr. Campbell himself, who had spent time there as a colonial administrator near the Niger. In the right frame of mind, he could be persuaded to play his African thumb piano, a crude instrument, which produced an even cruder sound from cane “tongues” that resonated over a makeshift box. Edward had come down from Oxford with the Campbells’ younger son, Victor, the young man my mother had in mind when she had tried to dress
me that evening, but whose self-absorption and greasy eyelids and incessant talk of cricket left me cold. Mother and I had argued before I had left. I came down in my ruched olive-green silk, a fabric she insisted was impossible for me to wear, and the color of which she declared to be poisonous. I said that nothing could have pleased me more since I had dressed according to my mood and had not made my mind up to be bartered off just yet. She was insisting I go back up and change when Father entered, said we were already fashionably late, that any later would be insulting, that the marrying could wait for another night, and steered me out by the elbow.

On the night of Edward’s visit, Mr. Campbell was in ebullient mood, in his clan tartan, and was entertaining the company with his rendition of “The Gypsy Laddie” on the thumb piano. The merriment was infectious, and as I sought Father across the room, my eyes fell instead on Edward’s face, as he leaned gracefully against the back of a settee, his gray eyes looking directly at me. I turned to cover my confusion, but not before I noted his long lean limbs, the smile that played around his lips beneath a well-trimmed mustache. I lifted a strange little figure of black-painted wood from the mantelpiece and began to examine it minutely. Its eyes were chalked white and its bald head and body bristled with tiny pieces of hammered metal from its head to its knees. The song was ending. A voice at my elbow asked if I had an interest in African art, and I turned to find Edward, alarmingly close and not at all injured by my arsenic-green dress. His light hair was parted to the right, cut well above his ears, but when he bent to look at the object I held in my hand, I saw how it kinked and curled at the back of his neck, against his starched collar. I’d never before felt the urge to touch a man’s throat, smooth an eyebrow with my thumb, breathe into the whorl of an ear.

“Ah, Miss McIntyre, you have found out my
nkisi,
” bellowed Mr. Campbell from across the room. “A fine specimen.” He was
coming toward us with that startled expression he always bore, as if he had only just discovered himself to be alive and was amazed at the concept. “The natives believe that the metal tokens will bring harm to those who wish harm upon them. It is a kind of primitive attempt at natural justice, you see. Rather crude, but fascinating, do not you think?”

I was trying to replace the figure. Every head in the room was turned toward us.

“Look closely, Mr. Ormond,” he went on to Edward, taking the figure from my hand. “See the decoration on the feet and the eyebrows. Really quite detailed. An interesting piece. Of course, the natives believe it has other powers. It is used for swearing oaths, for example, and for ensuring that promises are kept.” His old eyes twinkled; I am almost certain he winked. He leaned in: “Will we need it for that purpose here, do you think?” And off he went with a guffaw, leaving the two of us stranded.

Edward asked if he might call upon us when we were next in London, perhaps accompany us on a tour of the British Museum, where he believed there was an interesting collection of Egyptian and Assyrian artifacts. He may have mistaken my sudden excitement for something else. In 1880, the natural history room at the British Museum housed some of the oldest butterfly sets in the world: Sir Hans Sloane’s famed collection, now almost two hundred years old; the rare Glanville fritillary; and at that time, it had just acquired a number of Bates’s famed Amazonian specimens. Sixty-six species of butterfly are native to the British Isles, three hundred and twenty-one to Europe; within an hour’s walk of the small Brazilian village where Bates spent eleven years of his life, he found seven hundred different species of butterfly.

It was on that visit that I decided to marry Edward. It is a day that will stay with me for the rest of my life.

When the fated morning arrived, Father (prompted, no doubt, by Mother) claimed pressing business matters and allowed
Edward and me to go unaccompanied. We walked through valleys of mahogany-doored cabinets, each one standing taller than Edward, each one holding dozens of drawered specimens, each one a box of unimagined treasures. For someone who has never excelled at French, or at drawing, or at piano or at needlework, to find an interest that helps one to feel talented, knowledgeable, informed, is to create an obsession. We stopped at Wallace’s milkweeds, jewels of color, toxic and nontoxic females and males, greens and browns.

“What an astonishing color,” Edward said.

“It is a message,” I told him, “designed for potential predators. By choosing it, she means to say that she is unpalatable to taste.”

“Is she? Unpalatable to taste?”

“I cannot tell; I am not an experienced collector. Some are and some are not. Bates has written about it. The butterfly may be mimicking a bad-tasting species of similar coloring in the hope that a predatory bird will know to avoid her.”

He looked at me, clearly impressed. Then he said, “I do not think she tastes bad. I think she is bluffing.”

“You can think what you like. It would take a brave jay to test the theory.”

“I believe I would be willing to risk it,” he said, and he wandered off down the row of cabinets, with a smile playing around his lips.

Julia never understood my interest. For all her proletarian rant she one day declared herself surprised that I should be so preoccupied with what was primarily a middle-class pursuit. “All that chasing and pinning and labeling,” she said. “What is the point of it? I find them as pretty as does the next person, I like to see them flutter past, skit from flower to flower, yes, it lifts the heart even, but close up, gathering dust in a cabinet, with all their ugliness on show—I do not see the point of it.”