The Butterfly Cabinet (21 page)

I think that by the time he was ten or eleven, Peig had worked out that it was no accident that Owen had been left on her doorstep—that he was in fact Alphie’s son. He looked nothing like him. If anything, it was my brother Charlie he took after, but thank God no one ever made the connection, what with Charlie being long gone to Canada. The strangest thing, though: he inherited his father’s voice. That same low hoarseness, the voice breaking on the highest notes; it began to make itself known when he was leaving boyhood behind. And he took, I’m afraid to say, after his father in other ways. He was selfish and disobedient, and he wasn’t good to Peig, who worked her life to keep him and broke her heart over him.

After the castle was closed up, she eked out a living for them both mending nets, kept a few hens, took in washing, whatever she could find. And when the boy got bigger, she got a job in the new creamery, patting out slabs of butter, all the same color, all the same shape—Peig, who had made the best butter in the country. She was a good mother to him, far better than I could have been.

Look, Anna, in that drawer of the cabinet. The only picture I have of him and he’s standing, hands by his sides, frowning into the camera. The ink from the photograph is pooled in his eyes and even though his face in it is smaller than the nail on my wee finger, his expression is unmistakable: he is cross at being photographed. His sweater is pulled down low over the waist of his short trousers. No doubt Peig did that, just before the photo was taken. But she hasn’t caught his undershirt and you can see
the ridge around his middle where it’s ridden up and the dimple below it, through his stretched jumper, of his belly button. The sun must have been behind Peig when she took it, for a strange thing this, can you see? The shadow of her head is cast onto his sweater, a stray bit of hair curling up and away. That’s all I have of her: a shadow on a photograph. She must have been happy then, that day. It doesn’t look like the shadow of an unhappy person’s head. She doesn’t look unhappy.

I kept him for Peig the odd time she needed to go somewhere, to a wake or a sick relation. When he was small, I used to pick him up and nurse him on my knee and rock him by the fire, and when he was older, I told him the stories Daddy used to tell me, about the way St. Brigid lost her eye, and how St. Brendan crossed the whole Atlantic in a currach. He didn’t like the ticking of the clock in the room at night. He liked to chase frogs through the turf stooks, and he loved spuds baked in the embers, the skin black as the coals themselves and the potato coming away from them as dry and white inside as a ball of flour. I’ve outlived a son and he never knew the love I had for him. But that’s the way things were then. That’s the way they had to be. At least Conor will know the truth, if you choose to tell him. It’s in your hands now.

I can’t unwish what I did, because I can’t unwish Owen, or Conor. Or your child, Anna, yours and Conor’s. I can’t unwish yours. You are carrying my great-granddaughter. Oh, it’s a girl all right. I know by the way she’s lying, all to the front, and the big bony head of her. Before too long, her elbows will be sticking out of your belly like wings, trying to get free. She hasn’t much room; she’ll be wanting out. I’d have liked to have made a quilt for you, for the baby, but these fingers won’t work for me anymore. You’ll have to make do with the story instead, pieced together from the scraps of old lives. That’s all I have.

Wednesday 14 September 1892

Father was shocked at first to learn that Edward was Catholic. Edward was honest, said he believed his father’s switch to Rome to have been prompted by political expediency: not long after his conversion Lord Ormond came out in support of the Home Rulers. Edward explained that his father, being a man of sudden passions, had thrown himself wholeheartedly into the new religion, insisted his family do likewise. Edward had still been at Shrewsbury at the time, and was preparing to go up to Oxford, but he had converted gladly and he told my father that he had no intention of reverting. Edward could trace his mother’s ancestry back to the Ulster revolt of 1641, when his Catholic predecessors rose up against the planted New English, before a later family member converted to the Reformed Church. So it was not so much a conversion, he explained, as a reversion to the faith that had originally been that of his mother’s people. He had a strong affinity with his maternal family. Oranmore had come to him from his mother’s father, a gentleman whom Edward is said to resemble in character as well as in looks. I cannot see the resemblance myself. There is a portrait of him hanging in the hall at Oranmore:
a bluff-looking gentleman with a shiny red face and fair hair that curled around his ears, but he did have kind eyes. Edward’s religion mattered little to me, either way. Even I, unversed in the interface between politics and religion, could see that my father considered Lord Ormond a fool. Still, Father did not extend the sentiment to Edward, who seemed to have captured his heart. To me, Father put one question: “Will you take him, Harriet?” And I was only too happy to oblige.

Father put no obstacle in the way of our marriage. I cannot help but wonder how he would have felt if his grandchildren were to have borne his name, if I had been a son and not a daughter, proposing to lay aside my cradle religion for the sake of a marriage union. Who is to say? I can only assume that all the other inquiries received satisfactory answers. It was made clear to me that upon his marriage, Edward would inherit his grandfather’s estate in Ireland and that he would be expected to live there and manage it. I had no objection to Ireland. Ulster was not Egypt, that was clear; it was but a hop across the Irish sea, but it was far enough. “His being Catholic can be no obstacle to you now, Harriet,” my father said with a smile, “not since the restriction has been lifted on the value of horses they may own.” It was not such a joke. I would not have entertained for a moment a proposal from a man without stables.

In the months before our marriage, Father grew anxious about my going to Ireland. Stories were reaching us of the activities of the Land Leaguers, of evicted farms lying empty, harvests left to rot, rents withheld. One agent had his ears clipped; cattle houghing was common; there were stories of hunt saboteurs stopping the Kildare hounds, burning kennels, poisoning foxes, destroying coverts. Edward assured us that the tenants in the north were nothing like those in the west and south.

“Ulster has always been different,” he said, and then, smiling, “If you want something to worry you, Mr. McIntyre, worry about the fall in tillage prices.”

Then, the September before we were due to be married, news reached us of Lord Mountmorres’s murder.

“That was in Mayo,” Edward said, “miles and miles and a world away from Oranmore. The people there are a different breed from the tenants on my estate.” His assurances meant little to a person with no sense of the geography of the place. I might as well have been embarking on a journey to India, such was my ignorance. But I began to catch Father’s anxiety, and I believe that even Edward wavered a little: who is to say what can happen when people act as one?

In the end it was his assurances that resolved me to stand firm, although not, I am certain, in the way that he intended. “If you have any disquiet on any account, Harriet,” he said, “I will send you home, I promise.” Little did he know how much that determined me to have no fear. I had no intention of ever going home again.

We were married at the Oratory at ten on a November morning in 1880, the end of a significant year: Gladstone returned to power in London, Parnell elected chairman of the Home Rule party. Edward had his father’s waistcoat retailored to fit him: blue and cream silk, a design of vine leaves and veronica.

“Something old,” he said, “to bring us luck.”

“Veronica,” breathed Julia, “for fidelity; vine leaves for intoxication.” Trust Julia to know the language of flowers.

Had Mother had her way, I would have been dressed in gold, beribboned from head to toe, carrying a cartload of roses. It was my wedding, however, and I had chosen a simply cut dress of oyster silk trimmed with pearls.

The London smog was notorious. “You will be covered in blacks before you reach the church,” was all Mother said.

Edward sent white roses for the bouquets, and when they arrived Julia came into my bedroom with a spray of mixed heather—purple, red and white. She had had it dipped in beeswax
to preserve it. It would have cost her something to have won that battle with Mother. It was perfect.

When she came to visit at Oranmore during my first confinement and saw our wedding picture on the credenza beside Edward’s mother’s hideous bud vase, she said, “Oh, Harriet, you could put your wedding heather there.”

“I could if I still had it,” I said.

Poor Julia. She could not disguise her shock. “You have thrown it away? But it would have kept for years …” She was almost lost for words. “You could have given it to me if you thought so little of it.”

“I have no sentimental attachment to objects that gather dust,” I told her.

“And yet you have your butterflies,” she said.

I stared at her. How could she make such a comparison? Each time I examine a butterfly I see something I did not see before: the unique pattern of markings, the subtle pigmentation. A butterfly is a window onto another world. A spray of dead heather will always be a spray of dead heather. I allowed her the last word. What is the point in trying to reason with that kind of thinking? We will never understand each other, my sister and I. She made her gesture, I appreciated it, I will not forget it. I do not need to keep the thing to know that it was done.

I was not the choice that Edward’s family would have made for him, I suppose. We were not a particularly wealthy family, but at the time they made no real objection. No doubt, they wish now that they had. I had much to learn—about Edward, about Ireland, about the part that religion had to play. I am not sure I know any more now.

Edward enjoyed some fun at my expense. Soon after we took up residence, he read to me from the newspaper that there had been a meeting in the town hall of the Tenant Defense Association to discuss the land question. He was quick to assure
me that this did not mean that we were surrounded by Land Leaguers intent upon burning us out. They had spoken openly and condemned agrarian crime; they were supporters of the crown and of the constitution, loyalists to a man, determined to have their grievances heard through proper constitutional means. I asked him to spare me the details and read me the fixtures for the Route Hunt. He did so, mechanically, and then said, “Of course, you cannot ride, for there are sure to be Orangemen at the meet.” I threw my breakfast napkin at him. One thing of which I am certain: the only religion among huntsmen and -women is a good scenting day or a bad one, and that, I vowed, would be the only thing to occupy me.

Still, from time to time events reached us that pricked even my armor of indifference. When Mr. Porter, Liberal MP for the county and champion of tenants’ rights, was elected solicitor general the following year, the hillsides were ablaze with bonfires lit by his supporters. Until some of those unhappy with the outcome smashed the windows of those establishments that were known to be owned by his followers. Edward passed it off as high spirits at election time, but it was coming a little too close. It seems to me that when people do not wish to confront agitation or unpleasantness of any kind, they distance themselves from it using whatever means are at their disposal.

It was the stance Edward and his father agreed upon when Lord Cavendish and his undersecretary were murdered ten years ago in Phoenix Park. Shocked as they were, they were in agreement: “It could never happen here.”

Something did happen. May Day morning last year Julia ventured out unseen. She had hatched a plan with the girls from the Dooey and from Flowerfield. They had agreed to meet at the ruined church between the two houses which Peig had told them was the site of the meeting of three townlands. West Crossreagh, the Glebe and Garrylaban, and the best possible place to collect
the early morning dew which they were afterward to use on their faces as a means to eradicate eczema and guarantee eternal beauty. She has no wit: tramping about in mist where anything could happen. She is a liability.

On her return to the castle in the first light, she stumbled and fell and dropped her precious booty. We heard the cries from inside and when we ran out, we could see nothing but the lawn sloping gently down to the wall and the gardens beyond, but still Julia crying out. Paudie ran down toward the sea wall, where a small mound of earth had appeared, and we saw him stop and look, and then just as suddenly disappear, all but for his head and shoulders. Edward ran to him, and Hill, and Feeley, and then, like in some medieval tale, like the earth had decided to give her up, there was Julia emerging intact. By the time I reached them, they were all again visible and we stood, the six of us, staring down into what had held Julia: a freshly cut rectangular hole six feet in length, three feet across, six feet deep. The sides were as neat as a turf bank, the spade marks clearly visible: a perfect grave. I looked at Edward, who stood grim faced; at Julia, whose face and hair and dress were smeared with earth.

“Fill it in,” was all he said, and he turned on his heel and strode back to the house.

We all knew what was the source of the threat. A number of Edward’s tenants had had their cases heard in the Land Court and been awarded considerable reductions in rent. Awarding a reduction and offering an abatement, however, were two separate issues. The lands were mortgaged. To have done what the Land Court had ruled would have reduced the rents to below what Edward was required to pay in interest. It was an impossible situation and for the first time Edward had turned them down. I began to see the wisdom of Lord Ormond’s words: sell the lot and be damned. To me Edward said that the threat was nothing, little more than a drunken prank, a few troublemakers from the village
bored and in want of some diversion. The stories that came to us during the Plan of Campaign from the south and west were as of a foreign land: houses guarded by dragoons; landlords attacked with stones and blackthorn sticks; the agent of the Marquess of Clanricarde murdered on his way to church in Galway.