Free The Butterfly Cabinet by Bernie McGill Page A

emptied it. God love her. She died alone in her wee white house, with three wardrobes and seven chests of drawers, two to each bedroom and one in the hall. She could never turn away a piece of furniture.
    At her funeral Owen asked me to come round, pick something out. “Mammy always had a good word for you, Nanny,” he said.(Everyone called me Nanny, even then.) “She told me to make sure and have you round when she’d gone. She wanted you to have something of hers.” The truth was, Anna, she’d had something of mine all along, only neither he nor she knew a thing about it.
    I went. Owen was there, and his wife, Greta, and Conor running about the floor. Conor was only about three or four at the time, and he was trying to help, packing up bags and boxes, some to keep and some to pass on, getting in everybody’s way.
    Owen pointed me to the smallest back bedroom. “She has drawers stuffed full of things in there, Nanny. Anything you want you can have,” he said. Greta opened her mouth but he silenced her with a look. “You were always good to us.”
    It felt strange, going through Peig’s things like that. She was a great hoarder. After the mistress died, Miss Julia left out a box of things that none of the family wanted, to be divided up among the servants. The drawers in Peig’s room were full of jumble from forty years before: a handful of brown horn buttons; a calico petticoat, quilted and whaleboned; white lace-trimmed muslin underdrawers; a pair of long blue kid gloves to the elbow—things that Peig had never used or worn. “I’ll keep that for good,” she would have said, but she mustn’t have come across any occasions good enough to unwrap and use them. It gave me a start to see them, those delicate garments I’d slaved over in the laundry, heart-scared of rubbing a hole in them. I was half expecting to feel a hand on my shoulder, a sharp word in my ear. I shook them out, and it was the oddest feeling seeing those long-forgotten but familiar items again, as if all the mistress’s things had come billowing down through time, like clothes blown off a washing line forty years before, and settled in the drawers in Peig’s wee house, with the mistress’s shape still in them. I didn’t take any of them, Greta needn’t have worried. I had enough “good stuff” of my own.
    In the last drawer, I came across a pair of pliers, an aged andwater-stained prayer book, some objects that had been dug up out of the garden: a stoneless brooch, a bronze farthing bearing Queen Victoria’s head, a sacred heart medal. She was a great one for putting a medal into the founds of a new house—to keep the occupants safe, she would say. And I saw her put a medal in her brother’s coffin, for the journey. She’d shower you in holy water every time you stepped out over the threshold; that’s the very least you could hope to leave with. And under a bundle of patterned head scarves, pots of talcum powder in lilac and green and a pile of embroidered antimacassars, I found the first of the stones. A handful in the corner of a white envelope, the edges folded neatly in, and written on the paper in careful angled capitals the words JACK’S, 3 MARCH 1932. In another paper parcel: GRANNY’S, 19 NOVEMBER 1922; in another, SALLY’S, 23 JANUARY 1935. The stones off graves, taken not on the day of the burial but some time after, on a visit: her brother, her grandmother, her friend. And in the corner of the drawer, wrapped up, not in an envelope this time, but in a delicate embroidered handkerchief that had never been used but had been unfolded at least once, CHARLOTTE’S, 3 MAY 1901.
    I took nothing from the drawers, but when I was turning away, my eye caught on a tall, dark piece of furniture in the corner of the room. And would you believe it, Anna, it was none other than the butterfly cabinet. The master must have given it to Peig when the house was being cleared. All that time she’d had it and never mentioned it once. And