The Butterfly Cabinet (4 page)

In the picture Julia took of Charlotte, the child is seated beside her dolls’ house, intent on her play, not looking at the camera at all. Her profile is as it was when she was a baby. What is it about an infant’s face that captivates one so? An arrangement of curves and dips to stir the heart, to make one love it.

Yesterday the chaplain paid a visit. He is young and perhaps has ideas of reforming me. He reminds me a little of Harry, our eldest: his narrow frame; his eyes that are dark and serious, well intentioned; his hair that does not behave.

“God be with you,” he said. God be with me indeed. God be with all of us. When he was leaving he stood up and put a book down on the mattress.

“I have no need for a missal,” I said, but he simply nodded and left. When I opened it, the book was empty: pages of lined paper, and the stub of a pencil. Perhaps he thought I would make my confession. Perhaps I will. The warders do not know I have it, or if they do, they choose to ignore it. I have worked a hole in the mattress with the lead and pushed the book inside. When I lie down at night I feel the lump it makes under my head. The princess and the pea.

There’s odd things happens in this place, Anna. Mrs. Riley, who hasn’t put her foot to the ground this two years or more, who needs a bedpan for her motions, and to be fed every drop of food that goes into her, Mrs. Riley walked past my door last night, and the nightdress near tripping her and her dead to the world. What can cause a person to do that? To think themselves incapable of walking when they’re awake, and fit for anything when they’re asleep! Isn’t the mind a wonderful thing that can fool you?

I like your hair, Anna. Is that the style now? You’ve always had great hair. How do you get it to curl out like that at the ends? Oh, I couldn’t sleep with rollers in my hair at night. Nurse Jenny does mine. She’s very good. Not that there’s much of it to do now. Like feathers on an oul’ plucked turkey! But it was nice, at a time—at least that’s what I was told. Mammy used to say that the fairies must have woven threads of their own into it while I was sleeping, for in among the brown that was the color of hers, there were strands the color of the copper kettle and others that were as yellow as a corn stook. It hung all the way down to my waist, for she said it’d be a sin to cut the light out of it.

My first day at the castle, Mammy helped me pin it all up tight under my cap and it was the oddest feeling walking along, like
I would overbalance if I wasn’t careful, carrying all that weight about on top of my head. That and the strangeness of being shod: I never had shoes on my feet before I came to this house. Shoes change the way you walk, Anna. It took me a long time to get used to them.

I couldn’t tell you what I had for my dinner last night, but other things, things from years ago, I can see like they’re right in front of my face. June mornings, Daddy going out of our cottage in Bone Row with my brothers Sam and William, carrying the drift net. They’d haul the net at dawn, arrive back between five or six in the morning with the smell of bacon drifting out over the lane to meet them.

It was July, I remember, not far into the month, and not long after St. John’s Day and the blessing of the boats. The fleet set off from the harbor just before midday, and headed for the mouth of the river trawling for turbot and sole. Three yawls, the
Ruby
among them, Sam and William and Daddy on board and a ton of stones in ballast for drawing the net astern. The wind fresh from the northwest, a bit of white water out by the Barmouth. The women, me and Mammy among them, standing on the slipway and the rocks, the way we always did, watching till they dropped anchor. About a mile out, a wave rose from the leeward, gathered itself up the height of the castle, moved steadily toward the
Ruby
weighed low in the water, and when it had passed, there was nothing left to be seen. The Logans, nearly at Downhill by then, saw that something was wrong, cut their net adrift and turned back. Jim Baker and Tam Molloy, in the third boat, bore down on the place where the
Ruby
had been, spotted William in the water, clinging to an oar. They shouted for him to hold on, and when Tam was within an arm’s length of him he reached in to pull him on board. But William’s hand slipped; he lost his hold and went under. Within an hour of them leaving the harbor and us waving to them, there wasn’t a sign of boat nor man.

The Logans attached a buoy before they came ashore. It was two days before the steam tug came from Moville to overturn the boat and by that time, Mammy had spent so long praying that the net she’d been knitting before they went out had crushed a weave into her knees. The first day she said God wouldn’t be so cruel as to take all three of them. The second day, she prayed they’d be found and we could bury them in a green grave. Sam was got in the net; Daddy inside the upturned yawl; William a way off. We stood on the quay, Mammy holding me tight by the hand, my other brother, Charlie, at her side, and me thinking it was more like a gala or a party of some kind, with all the people that were there. We waited for the
Eagle
to bring them in.

They took them into the ice house until the inquest was got ready in the hotel. Jim and Tam and Eddie Logan told the coroner what they had seen and then the coroner told us what we already knew. There was barely a mark on them: a scrape on Sam’s chin, a bump on the side of William’s head, and all of them whiter than the belly of a trout and bloated with seawater. By the time they were given back to us and put on the grocer’s cart, every shop and hotel and house had its shutters down, and we had to walk home along the sweep of the long Parade, behind the cart, in the dark.

There was a wake and the neighbors came and told stories I’d never heard. Why do people wait till a person is dead to do that? Tam Molloy said he thought Daddy could never be drowned, for in the drought of September 1876 he had walked dry shod between the tides across the bed of the Bann at the Barmouth; from Portstewart to Castlerock and back, with me in his arms. I was hours old, there isn’t any way I could remember that, but there are days now when I can feel the suck of the mud at his shoes, smell the sour smell of the seaweed drying in the riverbed, look up and see the white bellies of the barnacle geese as they fly in over the sea. Have you ever remembered something that you couldn’t remember, Anna, a memory that belongs to someone
else, that isn’t yours at all? That’s the way I feel about it. He’s the only person who has ever stood there, before or since. Isn’t that something to be proud of, something to tell your children?

Mrs. Graham organized a subscription list; Mammy made work for the Industrial Society, knitted caps for babies and embroidered napkins for the fancy stall to be sold at the sale of work. I helped her when I could but I wasn’t a great hand at the sewing. Charlie ran errands for Mr. Faulkner, the grocer who paid him in flour and the odd bit of meat. Mammy said Faulkner was a crook and that his tea leaves were full of sand, but there wasn’t a lot of work about and we didn’t have much choice. What with that, and the bit of something the neighbors could spare us, and the money Mammy got for her eggs and butter, we got by. Then the spring after, the teacher, Miss Turner, put a word in for me at the castle, said I was obedient and just clever enough, that Mammy could use the money more than the help, and the mistress sent word for me to come. I was given seven yards of black merino with lining to make my uniform, and I was to have five shillings and two pounds of soap a month and every Sunday afternoon free.

One April morning in 1891, Peig met me at the yard door and led me into the kitchen. I couldn’t believe the size of it; it would have housed the whole of our cottage twice over. Rows of gleaming white crockery on the dresser and racks of shining copper; a table spread with scrubbed wood chopping blocks and the fire blazing in the hearth. There were ovens to either side of the fire and a roasting jack and meat screen to the front, the sun slanting in the high arched windows and the smell of soda bread baking in the oven.

Peig sat me down and poured me a cup of tea and said, “I can tell to look at you there’s no point in describing your duties ’cause you’ll not take in a word of it. Never mind. You’ll learn as you go along. I’ll show you the house.” She was right about that. I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror going through the hall, and for a
second I thought it was some other girl walking about in black and white with her back straight and her feet pinching and her hair pinned into a cap. It didn’t look like me; I didn’t feel like myself. Everything was strange. I thought about all the times me and Charlie had spent down on the rocks below the castle, collecting barnacles for Daddy to bait the lines, reaching in behind the brown kelp, twisting the shells off the rocks, all the times we’d raced each other home to see who had the most and who’d won a story. It hit me like a fist in the chest all those months later that we’d never do that again, that Daddy was gone. That this was my life now. And I walked about after Peig, winded.

Peig went easy on me that first day, giving me things to do that gave me a chance to find my way around. I got my first good look at the mistress when Peig sent me into the small sitting room for the tea tray. I’d thought the room was empty; Peig said the mistress had gone into the garden. But when I lifted the tray and turned round to leave, I caught a movement in the corner of the room. She was there with the master, her butterfly net resting against the divan. Neither of them noticed me, or if they did, they didn’t show it. He had his hand on her elbow, looking down into her face. Her brow was straight, her features all at rest, her movements quiet, unhurried. She was holding a butterfly in the air on the point of a brass pin, holding it up to the light of the windows, showing how its wings changed from primrose to butter to cream. When she turned, the sleeve of her morning dress fell down and caught the April sun and then she was a halo of light, and for a second only, she looked like she might vanish into the full, thick, yellow air.

I heard her say: “It’s important to get the pin through at just the right angle: you must be careful with the wings, not to brush off that delicate luster. The specimen would be useless then.” And the master looking at her, like she was an angel come down from heaven to him.

Peig didn’t stand on ceremony. As both housekeeper and
cook, she was entitled to eat in her own room but she chose to eat with the rest of us in the kitchen. That first meal was the first time I’d sat down with anyone but my family, and I barely managed to swallow a bite. Peig put me between Susan, the housemaid, and the parlor maid, Cait. The two of them talked over my head at each other and across the table to the lady’s maid, Madge. Madge was a jittery type, full of energy and devilment. Most of her talk was directed at the two younger men who sat at the bottom end of the table: Feeley, who’d been introduced as the groom; Paudie, who Peig said was a footman. At the bottom end sat Mr. Hill, the butler, who hardly spoke, and oul’ Peter, the gardener, who was half-deaf, I think. Mr. Hill, I found out later, was a bit overfond of the ether, but he never seemed the worse for it in the mornings.

“You’ll never guess!” said Madge as soon as the prayers were said and the food on our plates. “I went up to empty the water from the basin in the moiselle’s room …”

Susan leaned over. “Have you met the moiselle, Maddie?”

I looked at her, unsure. “Do you mean the mistress?”

Cait burst out laughing and sent a mouthful of cabbage over her plate. Madge looked at her in disgust and opened her mouth to protest but Peig silenced the both of them with one look.

“No,” said Susan, “Mademoiselle Elise—she’s the governess, French. You’ll know her by her velvet tam-o’-shanter.”

Cait snorted again but more quietly.

“Anyway,” said Madge, “you’ll never guess what was sitting on her dressing table.”

Peig gave her a worried look. “No telling tales, Madge, not at the dinner table.”

“Oh, Peig, you’ll love this,” said Madge. “You know what she’s like, preening about the place, fixing at her hair, waxing her curls, getting me to pull her waist in till she can hardly stand, never mind run after the children.”

“What was it?” Cait burst out. “Tell us, Madge.”

“You’ll not believe it,” said Madge, “but I swear to God it’s the truth.”

“There’ll be no swearing at this table,” said Peig.

“Sorry, Peig,” said Madge. “Cross my heart and hope to die, when I went up what did I see on her dressing table—only a brown hairpiece the exact color of her hair.”

“I don’t believe it!” said Susan.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” said Cait.

“What did I just say,” said Peig, “about swearing at the table?”

“Sorry, Peig,” said Cait. “But a wig! I don’t believe it!”

“I’m telling you it’s the God’s honest truth,” said Madge. “What do you think of that, Feeley? What do you think of your French pussycat now?”

“God help us and bless us,” said Peig. “What would she want with a thing like that?”

“Well,” said Susan, stabbing a piece of bacon with her fork, “the fashion in France must be for the more hair the better. That would explain the mustache on her lip.” And the whole table erupted then, Peig and all, into a fit of laughing. Only Mr. Hill and oul’ Peter at the bottom showed their lack of interest by carrying on eating their dinner.

“She wants to let on she’s twenty years younger,” said Madge, “and her with a big bald patch at the back of her head. She must be thinking of marrying.” And she shot a look again at Feeley.

“You needn’t bother with your needling,” said Feeley. “I have no interest in her and she has none in me. The whole thing’s in your own daft head.”

Peig stopped laughing and shook her head. “How could you expect a person with notions like that to be responsible for the education of children?” she said.

After a while I thought I’d better say something so I asked: “How many children are there?”

“Too many,” said Madge, and got another look from Peig.

“There’s eight altogether,” said Susan, “but the three eldest boys are away at school. We don’t have much to do with the children. The mistress sees to them most of the time.”