The Butterfly Cabinet (27 page)

Why do I write this? How strange to contemplate the shape of one’s own handwriting on the page: its intricate loops and tangled links, like a knotted chain. Is it to pass the hours, to keep a record, to remind myself to appreciate every minute of every hour I have outside of here? Or so as to be heard? And if so, by whom? What I know is, I need to write it. I need to make a mark, need to lay something down. I feel like a sculptor must feel, making a cast out of plaster of Paris, laying down layer upon layer of soaked linen strips in the hope that some recognizable form will emerge. The danger, as with the writing of it, is that the gypsum will set too quick to be molded: the flaws will be all preserved. Perhaps that is just as well. It is, perhaps, the counterargument that I am constructing. I call upon myself, Harriet Ormond, daughter, sister, wife, mother, horsewoman, lepidopterist: witness for the defense.

The truth is, I killed a child, my own. The last thing I can remember having in my pocket is a key that I dropped and that was the beginning of the unraveling of everything. If the key had stayed put, I would have gone back and opened the door and let Charlotte out and she would be alive and I would not be here now, without any pockets at all. What would have been the ending then? How else could I have been stopped?

I took the carriage to Coleraine, into Stewart and Hamilton to see if they could mend my riding boots, which had split up the back on the last outing with the Route. I was politely told that the boots were useless. I got back late for luncheon, where the children were assembled but for Charlotte. Julia was out on a visit to one of the Flowerfield girls, getting up an outing, no doubt. The governess explained that she had sent Charlotte up
to wash her hands and, when she did not come down, went up to find that she had soiled herself and put her directly into the wardrobe room. I had lunch with the children. Morris complained of a cough, I remember, and I gave him a spoonful of syrup of ipecac and sent him back to the schoolroom and then went up to Charlotte. There was little light in the wardrobe room but her eyes had adjusted quickly. She had pulled out some old clothes from the press and gotten into an old dress of mine. Actually it was my green one, the one I was wearing when Edward and I first met. I had kept it in the hope that I would wear it again; of course it never fitted after Harry was born. She had taken off her own dress and stuffed it full of petticoats and stockings and propped it up so it looked like a headless child sitting lolling in the chair. She was talking to it, wagging her finger, telling it how naughty it had been, chastising it. Everything she had touched was filthy from her own mishap. I scolded her severely and put her own dirty clothes back on her and told her that if she insisted on behaving like a dirty animal she would be treated like one and I tied her hands up with one of the stockings and attached it to the ring on the wall to prevent her running around the room and I closed the door on her again and locked it.

I hung my apron on the hook at the back of the nursery door. I went about my usual business of the afternoon. I was in the morning room when I heard Julia return about three o’clock. I went up a little later, reached into the pocket for the key and found it was gone. I was certain that Julia had taken it. I imagined her going quietly up the stairs, turning the key in the door, speaking softly to Charlotte, offering her a drink, going as quietly as she had come. I left the apron there, so she could return the key unobserved by me. It was, I thought, the latest episode in our silent agreement. She would ensure that Charlotte was well; I would maintain the dignity of the one who had punished her. When I went back some time later and the key was still not
returned I began to doubt her. The apron was hanging too high for any of the boys to reach, and besides, they had been in the schoolroom with the governess the entire time. None of the kitchen staff had any reason to be above stairs, but I mistrusted the girl, Maddie. I discouraged any communication between the servants and the children, but Charlotte had become a pet of hers. There was that incident on the beach when she had disobeyed my orders.

I went down to the kitchen but the girl denied having seen the key. I could not say if she was telling the truth. What to do? Confront Julia, an admission that I knew about her tampering, risk upsetting the balance? It occurred to me that perhaps the key had caught in my dress and fallen out between the nursery and the morning room. Peig began to talk to me about dinner and sent Maddie out to the greenhouse to gather some parsley. When I finally got away and retraced my steps I found it, on the spiral stairs, where it must have lain all along. That was when the dread hit me. Charlotte had been alone in the punishment room for three hours.

13 FEBRUARY 1969

St. Valentine’s Day tomorrow, Anna, and not a single card, not even from John Roddy, the oul’ goat. You needn’t be laughing. Everybody needs a bit of loving, even at my age—especially at my age. Aye, loving maybe, but not sleep; the old need little of that. I lie awake in the dark at three and four and listen to the plumbing. It worries me, the sounds it makes. I don’t think they replaced the half of those old copper pipes. I hear them groaning and the water plumping above my head and under the floorboards, and I remember stories of burst tanks. But when I ask them about it the nurses say there’s nothing to worry about, like I was a wean worrying about monsters under the bed. That’s what it is to be old: no one takes you seriously. Worrying about things that are never going to happen—that’s what’s expected of you.

I’ve been lucky, Anna. Your mother’s family was good to me, a warm bed in the yellow house for as long as I wanted it, and I was happy there, till I got the cold from going out to the line in a shower with no cardigan and my lungs caught, and I ended up here again.

The castle has changed hands that many times. The family moved out during the Great War, the place was all closed up, the
gardens planted out with vegetables. And when the Second World War broke out, it was commandeered by the troops, trees torn up, the grounds covered in Nissen huts, unrecognizable.

Then in 1942 the Americans arrived. I can still see the coils of barbed wire along the beach, the soldiers crouching behind antitank guns in the sand. So odd to see that: strangers on the strand, defending us against the enemy. Owen signed up, early on, gave us all a shock; an odd thing for him to do, to sign up for a British war. I don’t know if it was the newsreels that set him thinking; maybe he thought it would be glamorous. Or maybe it was that old wanderlust that he got from his father, that feeling that there must be more to life than this. I kept my distance from him for the most part. It wasn’t my place to stick my nose in his affairs; I didn’t have the right. I watched him court Greta and marry her, and I waited for news of Conor and I celebrated the arrival of my grandson in private with a cup of boiled water and a drop of Bushmills and a spoonful of sugar to sweeten it. I made Conor a quilt too, like the one I’d made for Owen. I gave it into Greta’s hand. I could tell she wasn’t interested; old-fashioned it must have seemed to her, I’m sure. She probably never put it over him. She never passed any remarks about me making it. Nobody pays any attention to an old woman who puts her time in sewing for other people’s babies.

When I heard that Owen had volunteered, I kept an eye on the papers for news of the Coleraine Battery. He must have been one of the oldest recruits; it’s a wonder they took him on at all, but he was a driver for Shivers’ at the time and knew how to handle a heavy vehicle and I think that stood in his stead. Of course, Greta’s father had been in the First War and likely enough put a word in for him with the officers. He became a gunner in the Sixth Light Anti-Aircraft Battery, was recruited above Bobby Love’s seed shop in New Row. I read in the paper how they were entertained in the town hall by the Boys’ Brigade Silver Band;
how they all sang “Tipperary” and “Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line,” and were praised high and low by the president of the Rotary Club. Then there was a final dinner in the Strand Hotel, just below here, and on the twenty-eighth of November 1939, they paraded down the main street in Coleraine, on their way to the train station, and I stood with the rest of the sisters and wives and mothers, hidden in the crowd, and waved him good-bye.

He did look smart in his cap, cocked to the side, and the shine on his buttons and the buckle on his belt, and that white strap coming down his right-hand shoulder, under his arm. And that was the last time I saw him. Nearly a year after that, Bella called at the door in Victoria Terrace and said there was word that the Sixth LAA Battery were on board the
Dominion Monarch
on their way from Liverpool to Freetown and that the ship was in the Irish Sea, passing Rathlin. We got up onto the Green Hill, the pair of us, to see if we could see any sign of it, but it was blowing a gale and we could see nothing but gray seas and white water. He was killed at Halfaya Pass, the seventeenth of June 1941. I’ll not forget that name: Halfaya Pass. It doesn’t sound like a place to die at all. It sounds like a place where you’d go for the scenery.

I loved him, I suppose, but not in the way a mother should, for I never had anything much to do with him and no one ever knew he was mine. No one but Bella. The night before the news came that he was lost, two cats took up station outside my window and the pair of them went on yamming the whole night. Have you ever heard that, Anna? I’m not talking about when they’re in heat and you would hear the female cat screeching round the whole country. The two of them stood facing each other, and the one would open its mouth and say something: yam, yam, yam; and the other would stand and listen and then answer it back. And that was the way they went on, the whole livelong night, till I was ready to put my toe in them. I got up at the finish-up and threw a teapot of water over them. The oul’ people would have said it was
the banshee, but it was no banshee, just two cats talking. And then Owen was dead.

It was Bella I went to. She opened the door to me, her hands covered in flour and the house full of the smell of sodas on the griddle. I said, “Owen’s dead,” and she nodded and took me in and sat me down and held my hand in hers with the flour and the buttermilk sticking to them, until I’d cried every tear that was in me.

Oh, I’ve lived too long. The young ones shouldn’t die before the old. It’s not the right order of things. Charlotte is seventy-seven years dead today. Impossible to think of her as an old woman of eighty years and more. When I think about it now, about the way things were back then, I think I must have lived three lives. It’s all so long ago.

Some ghosts are so quiet you would hardly know they were there. This morning I woke with ten more minutes of night in the sky, the moon tinting from behind a cloud, not a star to be seen. There’s a bough that hangs broken from one of the elms in the avenue. It’s landed in a crook in the lower part of the tree and it rocks like the rib from the keel of a boat, or a cradle, one solitary bone of a branch, blackened by rain, keeping me awake, rocking bony lullabies the whole year round. And then a draft at my back, a shadow over the chimney breast, and when I looked, there was Charlotte at the end of my bed. People think that the dead leave quickly but Charlotte died in a windowless room, behind a door with the key turned in the lock. There was nowhere for her to go and she is here still. Little wonder. The living need to let go of the dead, and how could the mistress ever have let go of her? She’d have had to let go of guilt. We both would. And guilt’s a sticky thing, sticky as sap, hard to rid yourself of.

In the sky this morning, there was one small curl of pale blue to the east, and it was the space between his forefinger and thumb when Alphie used to make his hand a spyglass and peep through,
one-eyed, monstered, and say he was a pirate, Calico Jack, come to steal a princess. Charlotte would scream and run straight at my knees, catch in my skirts, trouser me. Alphie steadied me by the elbow and said, “Charlotte, don’t annoy Maddie, now,” and winked at me and turned away.

The air and the light today are as thin as a cobweb: a sky that would break your heart. A glimpse of what could be. Down on the shore in the early morning light, a fox scavenging for sand eels in the low tide. Peig never liked to see a fox on the beach. There was one there the day Charlotte died.

“That’s before something,” she said. And she was right. Everything, from then on, was after.

About four o’clock, Peig sent me up to empty the hot water bottles and flush down the toilets, and when I opened the nursery door, there was a chair behind it that scraped back across the carpet when I went in. I put it back against the wall and it was then I heard sobbing from the wardrobe room. I went to the door and spoke in and it was Charlotte who answered me. I tried to quieten her, for there was nothing else I could do. I headed back down to the kitchen and there was nobody about so I took the spiral staircase, and near the bottom, at the bend in the stair, I found a key on the step. I knew it was the key to the wardrobe room, and I knew Miss Julia was out of the house. I picked it up and stuck it in my hair, under my cap, and went downstairs to get Charlotte a drink of water. Outside the schoolroom, I passed Morris, going in, wheezing, a sly look about him as usual, something glinting in his hand, under his sleeve, blue glass. He knew I shouldn’t have been on that stair. He was probably storing that up to use against me. When I got to the kitchen, Peig wasn’t there, but she’d left the spuds soaking for me in the scullery. I heard a step, and I stuck my hands in the water of the sink, for fear it was the mistress coming looking for me, but it was Alphie saying the mistress wanted a sea bath, and would I give him a hand in the cellar.

In the dim light, Alphie took off my cap and unpinned my hair and combed it out with his hands. He said it held all the colors of the stars, the dead ones and the living, and when he did that, he combed every thought out of my head except the one: that I wanted him, that I chose to have him.

A while later, the mistress came into the kitchen and asked if anyone had seen a key. She looked me straight in the face and I looked straight back at her and said, “No.” I went looking for it as soon as she’d left and I found it after a while on the cellar floor. I slipped back up and left it on the stairs. We read in the papers that she told the inquest she had it in her pocket the whole time. Why did she say that? In her mind, was losing a key as criminal as losing a child? I forgot about her, Anna. I forgot that Charlotte was in the wardrobe room.