The Butterfly Cabinet Read Free

be locked in a room like the room into which I put Charlotte appears indeed to be an apt punishment.
    I have learned to be thankful for small mercies. They have permitted me to wear my own clothes. I must wear mourning, of course, and I am mocked for doing so since, as I was told by the papers, I myself am the cause of having to wear it. I am sick at the sight of black crape. I had only just left off wearing it after Fatherdied, and then Mother, and now here I am sheathed in it again. As if there were not misery enough to be had, without looking down on it every day.
    I confess that I was unaware of the subtleties of degrees of punishment. I was a believer in absolutes. If one were dying, there was no comfort to be had. It was all the same, I thought, to die in a ditch or to die in a soft bed. What difference did it make? The choice of location did not alter the outcome. And if one were incarcerated, then there was nothing to be added or taken away. Nothing, I believed, could ease or exacerbate the truth that one’s freedom was gone. Now, though, I can see that to have one silken square of sky is everything. To be able to see a glimpse of the world that is outside the horror of the place where one is confined, to see the sky change, to observe clouds pass overhead (once, I am sure of it, I glimpsed the flutter of a tortoiseshell): that means everything.
    On a bad day, a sound like a hornet’s wings shoots past my ear and I raise my hand and swipe at the air, at nothing. Tiny specks flit about at the corners of my vision. When I move my eyes toward them, they dart away, a silver-backed shoal of light, always just on the edge of what I can see. They herald the pain and when it comes, it is directly behind the eye like a splinter of light, like something that has been left behind from too much seeing. I feel that if I could reach in and touch it I would find it lodged there, jagged and solid. Then nausea, a heaving, emptying stomach, and each time I put my head down to find the pail, the jag of pain stabs forward again and again. I should recognize the signs by now. Yesterday, I bent my head over the copper basin, scooped the chill water into my hands and over my face, threw up my head to prevent the water dripping on my dress, then felt myself flung backward against the door of the cell, a sound like the beating of small wings in my ear. I found myself seated on the stone floor, staring back toward the window, and it seemed to methat the wall before me had tapered in, had narrowed a good three or four inches toward the ground. When I picked myself up my face and dress were dry. Afterward, in the yard, it was as if I had been blinkered, as if I were seeing everything down the barrel of a telescope. As I walked, the flagged ground, the wall, the inmates, the warders, the scraps of moss the crows had picked off the roof and dropped, the entire scene jolted up and down to the rhythm of my steps.
    And all the time, I am lying here, eyes open, not moving, watching the square of barred light creep down the wall and cross the floor and vanish into darkness. A new skeleton has formed inside the old: it is she who walks about and mouths the words, and I, the split skin, am left discarded here, opened at the seams. There is nothing the prison doctor can prescribe for the headaches, he says, for fear of damage to my unborn baby. My ninth child: what will it be?
    I consider my roll call of children: Harry, the eldest, who is honorable, who will always do the right thing, who takes after Edward in character, who resembles my father in looks. Thomas, whose eyes are green as marram grass and who bends with every breeze, who cannot settle at a task for more than a minute at a time, who in this, as in other things, takes after Edward’s father, Lord Ormond. James, I think, a little like my mother, stern mouthed, somewhat self-indulgent. If he continues to favor her in looks he will never be tall but fine framed and pale, much like my sister,