The Butterfly Cabinet Read Online Free

brief sojourn as nurse to Mother and Father must have terrified her: I could see her relief when we invited her to live with us. I wonder how she will fare when the novelty of Oranmore has worn off, when she grows tired of playing at mistress of the house, when the tedium of those hours in the kitchen with Peig, managing the household, becomes apparent: the perennial dilemma between mutton and lamb; the controversial question of whose job it is to break the sugar or order the coal. She must be excited at the prospect of having free rein in the house without me in it, but I doubt that that will be enough to sustain her for very long. Her enthusiasm over new projects is generally short-lived.
    She will not have much time for her newest interest. Aptly, she has decided to become a photographer, a thief of time andlight. She has no idea how ridiculous she looks. She insisted on photographing the family, of course, returned from a visit to London with her apparatus in tow, boxes and baskets of mysterious chemicals and bewildering equipment. Explained the whole process to Edward over dinner. How glass-plate negatives have revolutionized photography, made it possible for her to traipse about the countryside photographing out of doors. She might as well have been speaking Greek for all the sense she made to me. She planned to visit Dunluce Castle and the Giant’s Causeway, to capture them for posterity, she said. And people, too—she wanted every face in the house. Edward humored her. He had a soft spot for my dark-lashed half-suffragist sister.
    “With every new preoccupation of Julia’s I thank God it was her sister I married,” he used to say.
    I wonder if he still feels that way. She had me sit for her. She wanted me with my hair loose, in a silk dressing gown of hers, under the tulip tree in the garden. I came down in my Busvine, red and green herringbone, dressed for the hunt, my hair pinned tight under my riding hat. “Oh, Harriet!” she cried when she saw me. “If you must wear a hat, why not the hummingbird? Put it on, dearest, do. It would be perfection!”
    I ignored her, took up position behind the green leather chair in the library. She has made her views on my jewel of a hat perfectly clear—a real hummingbird, ruby throated, quick eyed, every feather a surprise of beaten metal, green and silver and blue. It is mounted, as if still hovering above a head of wild columbine. I have never seen anything so lifelike. Edward brought it back from Paris. When I showed it to her first, expecting admiration, she said, “How exquisite, Harriet, did you stuff it yourself?” She will grant me no pleasure. I will not defend it, and I will not be guilted out of wearing it by Julia, but I will not wear it in her company.
    She positioned herself to my right-hand side, asked me to look to my left. In the photograph, one can clearly see the dustyold boar’s head on the wall behind me. She had the likeness hand-colored to her own instructions but the studio assistant made a poor job of it. My color is too high, and the shade of my costume a dull red. I look a fool in it, dressed for the hunt, leaning over the back of the library chair, the boar leering behind me. Julia made Edward a gift of it. She said every man should have a “revealing” portrait of his wife. Honestly, “revealing”! Buttoned up to my throat. How is it possible to make one look a fool in a photograph?
    Pretty Julia with her kitten’s teeth. And she is pretty, when her face is at rest, which is infrequent now. She is slight and pale, was the type of child that adults patted on the head, the type of woman men wish to protect, I believe. Her nose is a little wide, however, and her mouth somewhat too expressive, and her head, I always think, seems a little too big for her body. We are nothing alike: me, with my dark features and long limbs, a jawbone too strong for a woman’s, large hands; one would never take us for sisters. Mother was beside herself when