The Butterfly Cabinet (6 page)

The wean stood there, terrified, at the water’s edge, refusing to go further, and I got down on my hunkers beside her, my head at the height of hers, and took her wee chin in my hand. “There’s nothing to be feared of, Charlotte,” I said. “It’s just the sea—look!” And I turned with her and looked too, through her round gray eyes, and I saw mountains of ocean roll toward us roaring and curling, with no way of stopping them, and I put my arms around her and picked her up.

The mistress said, “Put her down, girl. She must learn not to be afraid!”

But Charlotte’s two hands were locked around my neck, and I said (I can’t believe now that I said it), “You want to see what she can see,” and I carried her back to the blanket beside the bathing boxes.

Charlotte lay on her back and peered up at the clouds. She said, “I’m the judge, Maddie, and this is the game. You must not speak until you see a … giant’s ladle!” I looked up at the sky and sure enough, there it was, and then a fairy bridge, and then a dragon’s tooth. That was her way—she could draw you into a thing, whether you would or not. The mistress said nothing more, but I saw the tight set of her mouth, and I watched her open and close her hand, like I’d seen her do with the horses, and I knew I was in for it when we got back up to the castle.

She called me into the drawing room over there. She was standing with her back to the window, so I couldn’t see her face clearly. She said, “At the beach, Maddie, what did I ask you to do?”

I said: “Put the child in the water.”

“Did you understand the instruction?”

“Yes, madam.”

“Then why did you not do as I said?”

“The water was cold,” I said, “and the waves were so high. When I got down beside her and looked—”

“Did I ask you to test the temperature of the water?” she said. “Or comment upon the height of the waves?”

“No, madam, but the child was shaking—”

“Then I would instruct you in future to do as I say. An opinion is a luxury you cannot afford. It is simple: if you wish to retain your position here, you must learn not to concern yourself in the matters of those who know better. Follow me.”

She walked out the front door and down the steps and I followed her. I thought she was going to put me out the gate. I was
heart-scared she was sending me home to my mother, and what would I do then? What would I tell her? She pointed to the gravel in the drive. “Lie down there,” she said, “facedown.” I didn’t really understand what she meant. I was in a bit of a daze, I think, still wondering if she was going to send me home, but I lay down with my face to the ground. “Stay there,” she said, “until I send for you. Perhaps it will teach you to keep your nose out of the affairs of your betters, and in the dirt, where it belongs.”

I don’t know who saw me there and I don’t know how long I stayed. I was so ashamed, but I didn’t know what else to do. After a while I felt Peig’s hand on my arm.

“Get up out o’ that, girl,” she said.

“I have to stay here till the mistress tells me to come in,” I told her.

“Hell roast the mistress!” said Peig. “There’ll not be a servant left standing in the place if you don’t get up out o’ that now and come in.”

I don’t know what it was about me that rubbed the mistress up the wrong way. She couldn’t bear to have me near her after that. But she couldn’t do without Peig and she knew then that the two of us were a package. Peig wouldn’t have a bad word said about me. Poor Peig. She didn’t deserve what I did to her, God forgive me. Though there’s a big part of my heart that can’t regret it, Anna. And you’ll know why, soon enough.

Monday 18 April 1892

A child today, of not more than eight or nine years old, committed for larceny, along with her mother, who carries an infant still at nurse.

I cannot rid myself of the smell of tar, but still I have not picked enough rope to earn myself a letter. I know that the boys are all settled in their schools and with their charges, but I cannot help but worry about Edward.

There is a class system in prison, with privileges to be earned and lost for the most meaningless of tasks, the most minor of insurrections. I am on probation for the first month, after which, if I have gained sixty marks for good behavior, I will be promoted to class four. It is a game, except that the smallest of rewards take on an import that would be considered risible outside these walls. For having dutifully picked oakum for fifty hours and broken every nail on my hands and marked them, indelibly it would seem, with
tar and blood, I am to have cabbage in my soup, and that there is to be cabbage now lifts even my sad heart. We are not permitted to speak to one another: no hardship for me, but the inmates here have found a means to communicate. We are required to attend religious service on Sunday and to raise our underused voices in song, to thank God, it would seem, for the situation in which we find ourselves. The first Sunday I was here, I became aware that the other prisoners were not correctly following the words to “
Adeste Fideles
,” I assumed at the time because they were unfamiliar with the Latin, or that, as a minor act of rebellion, they had refused to learn them. Then I noticed that they seemed to dip in and out of the words, depending on how much attention was being accorded them by the warders who sat at the end of each pew. And last Friday, Good Friday, when we stood up in the church at benediction to sing “
Pange Lingua
,” the prisoner next to me, without moving her head or in any way indicating a change in her demeanor, began to address me directly. “
Pange lingua gloriosi,
” she sang, “
Corporis mysterium / Sanguinisque pretiosi …
” Then her tone lowered slightly and while the other voices continued with “
Quem in mundi pretium,
” I distinctly heard her sing, “When is it your baby’s due?” I almost choked on the next line. It was as shocking a thing as I’d ever heard, to be addressed thus, in the Gregorian chant.

I soon realized that messages are passed along and between the pews in this manner and that the warders are either unaware of it or, what is more likely, choose to tolerate it. Since the prisoners have become so adept, it would indeed be a difficult accusation to prove. I refuse to participate myself and this they have come to realize. I am the faulty link in the chain.

I do, however, hear things. Yesterday, Easter Sunday, at “
Surrexit Christus Hodie
” I learned that a prisoner has been put on bread and water for four days as a result of having been overheard to laugh in her cell. I cannot help but wonder what it was she
found humorous about her situation, but it is a lesson to us all: if you must laugh, do it silently. There is no punishment for crying, as far as I am aware. We are quite safe from retribution on that account.

Today is Easter Monday. Perhaps Edward has ridden out to the races at the Livery Hills, with Mr. Casement or Mr. Walsh—that is, if there are any gentlemen who are still willing to be seen with him.

The night we arrived at the train station at Oranmore after our marriage, we were met by the Flute Band in full uniform: four of the younger men unyoked the horses and bore our carriage to the castle themselves. The air was alight with squibs and crackers, and all along the cliff top blazing tar barrels augured our arrival. I was not quite prepared for my first sight of the castle: the fanciful turrets that stood out against the night sky, the castellation. Perched on a cliff edge overlooking the Atlantic, it has the air, with its battlemented silhouette, of a feudal fortress. In actual fact it is less than sixty years old, built by Edward’s grandfather in the 1830s because, it is said, his wife had tired of looking out over fields and cattle, and wished to look out over the sea instead. A modest enough house in its time, it was extended and modernized by Edward’s father: a new seven-bay façade added to the south, with extra bedrooms and reception rooms to the east and north. There is a gargoyle on the west side, a jowly lion’s head that yawns over the cliff walk, said to have been modeled on the face of Pope Gregory XVI. Edward’s grandfather was a firm Episcopalian, as was his daughter, Edward’s mother; as was Edward’s father until twenty years ago, when he caused a furor by converting to Rome. If it was Edward’s grandfather’s intention to keep Rome at bay with the fierce papal gargoyle I am afraid it failed. He would be most disappointed with us if he had lived to see his house headed
by two Catholic converts and eight little Catholic grandchildren besides. The lion’s head looks out over the mountains of Donegal, and further north, to the island of Islay and the Paps of Jura.

“Look,” said Edward, “you need never miss Scotland. You can see it every clear day.” There were few enough clear days to test his assertion, but Edward need not have worried: I had no intention of missing Scotland.

Thought to be imposing generally, it can be seen from every point on the Parade, from as far along the strand as the Barmouth and, they say, from miles out at sea. Its back is set resolutely against the ocean. To me, it has always looked, and still looks, like a house playing at being a castle. The hall displays a number of paintings known to have come from the Earl of Bristol’s gallery, dour depictions of sour-faced individuals, occasionally carrying a blunderbuss or leaning on a cannon but including, oddly enough, a portrait of the third earl’s bigamous wife with both her husbands. Three-quarter-length oil portraits of long-dead relations in scarlet uniforms, one killed at the Battle of Ferrol, another at the siege of Badajoz, yet another at Madeira, where Edward’s father had himself served. When Julia first saw the house, she declared it to be everything an Irish castle should be and immediately set off to look for a ghost; I thought her liable to swoon when she found the two spiral staircases. Personally, I find the whole place vaguely ridiculous: the neo-Gothic windows with their diamond panes; the eight staring
oculi
of the second story, like portholes in a man-of-war.

The place has one curiosity, though, in the small walled garden to the southwest, where old Peter grows rhubarb and red currant trees, gooseberries and marrows cheek by jowl with raspberries, artichokes and violets. A single apple tree has been trained to grow against the wall, its branches spread out in a perfect fan, its trunk flattened from the roots, as if it had been growing where a wall had accidentally taken root and been split
in two by its ascent. As if, around the other side, one might find its other half. I went to look. There was nothing there but laurel trees, lush from years of growing out of the waste of the house, and a patch of nettles, full of caterpillars.

Even Edward seemed taken aback at our reception that first evening. There were speeches of welcome from the local hoteliers, an illuminated address from the tenants, many toasts drunk to our happiness and long lives, much praise for his grandfather. On reflection, it may have been relief that the tenantry was expressing: to be finally rid of Edward’s father, Lord Ormond, as landlord and a hope that Edward, who they say resembles his grandfather in looks, would take after him in other ways.

Lord Ormond had assembled a cast of local dignitaries for our first dinner: Mr. Casement, Mr. Walsh, Mr. O’Hara, Mr. Shiels, Mr. Macky. I walked in with Lord Ormond, me in my wedding dress; Edward with Lady Bucknell. The cook had done us proud: artichoke soup and fillets of Bann salmon, plovers’ eggs from White Park Bay, followed by lamb and new potatoes, wild duck, stewed celery, watercress. I was barely nineteen, Edward was twenty-two: we were the youngest couple seated at the table by a margin of a good ten years. It was an odd feeling, to sit there in a strange house for the first time, not as a guest but as its new mistress.

Although Edward’s mother was long dead, her presence was everywhere I looked. Nothing can prepare one for the shock of the pattern of another woman’s choice of plate, in this case Staffordshire chinoiserie, cobalt blue with red enameling. I could barely find my food, so busy was the design. Nothing looked familiar. The table was served by eighteen balloon-backed mahogany chairs, upholstered in crimson. Lady Ormond had had a brief flirtation with aniline dyes when they first appeared: there was experimental evidence on the dining room walls of fuchsine and Tyrian purple. She was, by all accounts, a timid and temperate woman and had
evidently refrained from redecorating the entire room. She had retained the dusty old Turkey carpet and gargantuan curtain poles, each end of which finished in a kind of tortured hyacinth bulb and which allowed the oppressive crimson curtains to trail across the floor, no doubt to defy that old enemy, the draft. The overriding sensation was of dust and of weight. I resolved, as soon as I could, to embark on the redecoration of the rooms.

The meal was served
à la russe
and my neighbor Mr. O’Hara helped me to a slice of lamb. To his other side Mr. Walsh, an avid ornithologist, spent the evening discussing the coastal birds of Ireland. They seemed to occupy the poor man’s head like characters in a novel. Happily, I was not required to speak so I nodded my head, raised an eyebrow occasionally (at “fulmar” or “kestrel” or “white-tailed sea eagle”) and introduced forkfuls of food to my mouth. Edward’s aunt Ormond sat to Edward’s right, chewing on the celery, looking to all the world like a young horse getting used to the bit, though young she most certainly was not, even then, almost twelve years ago now. Beyond Lord Ormond sat Lady Bucknell, and beside her Mr. Shiels, Lord Bucknell’s accomplished huntsman, who was being complimented on his skill at the hunt.

“I do not favor the lifting of the hounds,” Lord Ormond said to me. “It may speed the hunt but I would rather take my ease and let them find the scent themselves.”

“When the hounds threw up at Beardiville,” said Lady Bucknell, “Mr. Shiels made a cast and had them off again in no time.”

“The hunting is always good there,” Lord Ormond told me. “They never meet before eleven until after the overnight drag is gone. It means the foxes run faster and the hunt has more speed.”

“It is not for the fainthearted, Mrs. Ormond,” added Mr. Shiels, “but it is an excellent hunt. The farmers on the estate refrain from culling and keep wire out of the fences.”