The Butterfly Cabinet (17 page)

How many of them have I outlived? The mistress, of course, and Charlotte. The master remarried after she died, moved to his father’s old estate in England, but he was never right. I felt a pity of him. One day, you’re Mr. Ormond, master of a household, justice of the peace; the next, you’re the father of a dead child, husband to a killer. Everything around you is different and there’s nothing anyone can do to turn it back.

He never took much to do with Florence, left her in Miss Julia’s care. I think he was afraid of the damage she might do to his heart but it gave way in the end, all the same, about 1916 I think it was. Poor Harry was lost in the South African war, always the honorable one, like his father in that way. He can’t have been more than twenty at the time. Thomas and James were both killed in the Great War. Gabriel died in the twenties, a stupid accident. He fell off the roof of a house at a party one night, down in Sligo or Mayo. He was always gadding about, that boy. Morris survived well into his sixties and died of TB, the same as your mother. He’d always had a weakness in his chest. Do you know, it’s an odd thing to say, but I think of all of them Morris missed his mother the most. I think his mischief was a way of calling her to him, and it never failed, for she struck out at him more than at any of them. Freddie died of some childhood disease—he was buried in Scotland; George disappeared swimming one night at a beach in Italy and was never heard tell of again. Miss Julia moved back to Scotland when Florence married. I think she lasted the longest: she must have been in her seventies when she passed away. You were only a child at the time.

A morbid list, that one. Your mother never really knew her brothers, wasn’t close to any of them; she was brought up separately, almost a different family. I looked after her till she was grown and when she married, she asked me to come with her and nanny her children. For a long time we thought there weren’t going to be any. By the time you were born, I was nearly past minding weans, but Florence wanted me to stay with her. None of them but Florence had any offspring that I know of. That just leaves you, Anna, with a heavy burden of family to carry.

You used to love stories, do you remember? You used to beg me to tell them to you at bedtime. “Another one, Maddie,” that’s what you’d say. “Tell me the one about the swans.” That was your favorite: “The Children of Lir.” Do you remember? The terrible spell that Aoife put on her stepchildren, that turned the four of them into swans. I think you liked the sad stories best of all, but you’d hear anything to put off the dark. You’ll need those stories now; you’ll be telling them yourself to the wee one. That’s what we do: tell made-up stories to fend off the night, to put off telling the truth.

Monday 11 July 1892

My child is born. A girl, again. She came easy into the world, did not utter a cry until the midwife slapped her hard on the behind. She is a placid infant with dark wiry curls and a sweet bow for a mouth. She does not seem to object to her surroundings, is no more perturbed by the iron bedstead and grilled windows than are the other infants here. In any case, she will not have the opportunity to accustom herself to these sights. She has brought a visit from Edward.

He is thinner. Little wonder at that. We stood several feet apart, separated on my side by iron railings, on his by a square of wire gauze, and with a warder in the corridor between us. The pauses between our attempts at communication were filled by the shouts of other prisoners and their visitors. Nothing less intimate could be imagined.

“How are you, Harriet?” he tried.

“I am well, Edward. We have a daughter.”

His eyes, at that distance, were black, his face pale and strangely blurred behind the wire netting. He nodded across at me.

“Good news,” he said, with a catch in his voice. “She is healthy?”

“Over nine pounds in weight.”

He managed a smile, and then a thought occurred. “Has she been christened?”

“Almost immediately she was born. The chaplain happened to be visiting.”

“What name have you given her?” As soon as he said it, I saw him brace himself against the uttering of the one name neither of us could bear to hear.

“Florence,” I told him, and he smiled again, relieved.

“Like the city,” he said, and I nodded.

“Like the city.”

There was a pause while we both considered this. Then Edward shouted, “I have found a wet nurse, a quiet girl, from the Salvationists here in Dublin. We will travel back together.”

I tried a smile. “Look after her,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, and the warder shouted, “All back,” and Edward raised a hand in farewell.

What will she remember of me? Can the body carry memory before the mind? Will she know by this touch and this smell that she is mine? Will she know how to mother, not having been taught?

When Charlotte was born, Dr. Creith suggested that I should try nursing her myself. He hinted that nursing was widely believed to reduce family size. Perhaps he thought we had been holding out for a girl. I declined to follow his gentle advice; I had no wish to be further confined by the demands of a feeding infant. Yet when this little scrap was born, quiet and gentle, in a chloroform haze, and they laid her on my breast in the bare prison hospital ward, and she turned her tiny mouth toward me, I did nothing to stop the nurse who unbuttoned my nightgown and put her to my breast. Love is like water, it gets through regardless, and a bricked-up
heart is no defense against it. There is a nursery here where prisoners are permitted to keep their babies, up to the age of two. Florence is three days old and they are taking her away from me. Night and day, I hear babies crying.

The wall is dark today: “the black stone wall” in which there is not a single black stone to be seen. Gray like the sea from Harbor Hill; rusty brown; pale mortar; bird droppings. The stones are arranged in strata, layer upon layer, one above the other, and the more I look at it, the less it seems like a recent structure built up out of the ground, and the more it looks like something ancient that has been unearthed, laid down centuries before and only now brought back to light by the archaeologist’s brush. I can picture him, the serious explorer, safari clad, brushing gently at the soil; his excitement as a ridge of wall emerges, a chimney, roof tiles, eaves, then guttering, lintels, casements and sills all revealed intact. A delight: a dolls’ house, for his entertainment. How excited he must be when he finds it peopled! I feel like I have been here for decades, and only now am dug up, exposed to the light.

The wall is the height of five men. There is a jagged crack that runs like the path of a thunderbolt down its height and disappears, all energy dissipated, before it reaches the ground. My square of view is cloud soiled, the palest of grays, moving across, or rather away from, the window. It feels like the sky is receding, and I traveling away from it, like a passenger on the last train carriage, looking back down the railway line at a scene that is disappearing.

The occupant of the cell next to mine is the woman accused of being a Fenian. I hear the priest go in to her. I hear her voice, steady, and then his, low and quiet; I think he is hearing her confession, which is, of course, forbidden, if she is still a member of a secret society. I have watched her trudge the circle in the yard, eyes down, lips moving, fingers keeping count, and she could be one of Edward’s poorer tenants walking round the wellhead, counting off the decades of the rosary. For her, prayer is a ladder
that leads up and out and away from here. She is here and not here, brought back to herself only by the jangle of the warder’s keys. Escape is entirely within her means.

I wonder is there a special place in hell for the killers of children? I am shocked to know suddenly that I do not believe in the hereafter. I suppose I must have believed in it at a time, and I cannot point to the moment when that belief abandoned me, but there is the truth of it now. I have no faith. How can there exist a heaven or a hell when life is as chance as two bodies that fit together in the dark, when death is as arbitrary as a mislaid key? We all go to nothing.

There was a January morning on the point above the Herring Pond, looking back toward the village, the rainbow gone, the sun above the castle deadened by mist, blackened battlements daguerreotyped against a white sky. The strand beyond, and the hills and dunes devoid of color, shades of black, and white, and gray: a charcoal drawing. The sea glittered, a heaving expanse of flint and spray. Where I sat, mounted on Caesar above the harbor, the color bled back into things, the grass, green, swaying, bending away from me. Ahead of me, on the path, the sky puddled in a little sea. When the rain finally came in, in fine glittering drops, it was as if the sun had shaken itself out. And the sea was a blanket over a sleeping child, all that energy dormant: the power to jump and shriek and cry and throw and pick paper off the walls and overturn bowls and spill and soil and emit life and elicit love, asleep.

We are, at any given time, only a heartbeat away from chaos, a horde of outcasts ruled over by a handful of senseless warders. What makes us behave as we do? What forces us to get up and dress and eat and walk about and nod to one another as if anything has any meaning? I am a stranger here, an interloper. I have learned the language; I know the new names for things. I alter my markings in order to blend in. The others seem prepared
to accept the artifice and now that I have played this part for so long (how long is it now? Weeks? It feels like years) I have to remind myself that it
is
a part. It takes a certain energy to do this. I am in danger of forgetting who I am. I am free only inside my own head, and in this little book.

The arrogance of the living and the free is near palpable. They saunter around, behave as if they are immune to pain and weakness, forget it as soon as it is passed. That is what it is like with childbirth. It is more than one ever thought one could bear, and yet the memory of it fades, until the next time the pains grab at the stomach and it all comes flooding back, too late.

I was a clumsy child, bony and angular, embarrassed by the space I took up. I recall my mother wincing at my overtight, elbowed efforts to show affection. I did not persevere for long. That pained attempt of hers at a half-smile was discouragement enough. Once I saw her rub her upper arm as though I had bruised her. Around her, I felt obscenely well. I felt my robust health to be an affront to her every time she looked at me. Yet she was always glad of Julia’s light step. I never seemed able to make myself silent enough. I knocked into furniture; objects put themselves in my way. One day when she had one of her headaches, I sat for hours in her darkened room reading under a low lamp while she slept, not once uttering a word. At last, Julia glided in, placed her hand on Mother’s brow, and without opening her eyes Mother sighed and said, “Ah, Julia, you have the touch of an angel.” I sat still, holding my breath, not moving. Mother turned her head the slightest fraction toward me, the sleeve of her day dress draped over the back of the divan, linen lawn, blue and white, trimmed at the wrist in satin and lace. I can still see her small hand, encased in a satin glove that failed to disguise the swollen knuckles, the witch deformities. She said: “Harriet, ask Lily to bring up some tea.” For hours I had sat there, listening to the house move around me, believing I had made myself
disappear, and all the time she had been aware of me. One touch from Julia and she was well again.

“Only criminals and lunatics and women are without the vote,” says Julia. I begin to fear that I fall into all three categories. I look around me now, at the disenfranchised. The Fenian woman has begun a hunger strike. Not much of a hardship, considering the fare on offer. That’s one way to end, I suppose—in a protest. It would not be my choice.

We drink from tin cups that we do not keep in our cells. They are taken away each evening and returned the following morning containing a slick of what passes for cocoa, along with a crust of stale bread. If one looks inside when they are emptied, it is sometimes possible to make out a message that has been crudely scratched on the base, using a nail or a piece of copper wire. Since the writer can have no control over the direction of her message, these missives are unspecific. Once I thought I made out “Take heart,” another time, “All pain ends.” Today I read, “She is quiet now.” When the warder came to collect my utensils, she looked inside and left without uttering a word. There is a sound in me that is stuck in my throat, that will never be heard.

13 NOVEMBER 1968

They don’t do it anymore—name a newborn child after a child that’s been lost. Anna Charlotte. Do you ever use your second name? Your mother, Florence, was born in Grangegorman Prison, five months after Charlotte died. They sent her home to the castle when she was just a few days old with Bella, the wet nurse the master had found for her in Dublin. By then all the other youngsters had gone, Freddie and George, the two youngest boys, to a convent in Bognar, the older boys back to the Jesuits at Stonyhurst, Gabriel and Morris along with them, sent early to school. They went straight from Dublin, after the trial. The governess, Mademoiselle High-and-Mighty, hightailed it back to France, and Miss Julia went back to the castle to manage the house and help look after Florence.

Bella was a quiet girl, a Salvationist, with a story of her own. I asked her what it meant to be a Salvationist and she said it meant they had been good to her when she hadn’t a friend in the world. They’d taken her in when all others turned their backs on her and she would never turn her back on them, not till her dying day. She used to sing hymns to Florence, airs I’d never heard before with strange names, “Calvary’s Fountain” and “Sins of Years,” and
when she sang, her voice was like a place where you would want to go and live. Lucky Florence, growing up with that sound in her ears, and not the ring of the mistress’s voice.

Your mother was a bonny baby, placid and content. After she was weaned, I had the care of her for most of the day, me and Miss Julia. Every little thing I hadn’t been able to do for Charlotte I did for her. She was like my own. We weren’t allowed to talk about the mistress, or about what had happened. To hear the family, you’d have thought she’d gone to the continent for a few months to take the air. But you can’t make a thing vanish just by not talking about it. The mistress came back once—Florence was about a year old at the time—and when I saw her again she looked almost the same. Her hair was as black as boot polish, short under her cap; the same broad forehead and pointed chin. She was thinner, I think. You could see her cheekbones sharp against her face. If anything, she was more handsome than she was before. She must have been about thirty-two or -three then, I suppose. Peig used to say she had the mouth of a tyrant, the eyes of an angel. But after she came back, her eyes were different, pools as dark as the water round the Black Rock. The first thing she did, she ordered Feeley to get her horse ready, and rode out by herself, across the gardens and down toward the Big Strand. And the baby waiting in the nursery to see her mother.