The Butterfly Cabinet by Bernie McGill

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The Butterfly Cabinet by Bernie McGill is a haunting and atmospheric novel set in 19th Century Ireland and inspired by true events.

You had a story for me...I wasn't ready to hear it before but I'll hear it now.

When Maddie McGlade, a former nanny, receives a letter from Anna, the last of her charges and now a married woman, she realises that the time has come to unburden herself of a secret that has gnawed at her for over seventy years. It is the story of the last day in the life of Charlotte Ormond, the four-year-old only daughter of the big house where Maddie was employed as a young girl. The Butterfly Cabinet also reveals the private thoughts of Charlotte's mother, Harriet. A proud, uncompromising woman, Harriet's great passion is collecting butterflies and pinning them into her cabinet; motherhood comes no more easily to her than does her role as mistress of a far-flung Irish estate. When her daughter dies, her community is quick to condemn her. At last Maddie, and Harriet’s prison diaries that Maddie has kept hidden under lock and key in the cabinet she has inherited, will reveal a more complex truth.

Going into the The Butterfly Cabinet, you know that four-year-old Charlotte died and her mother, Harriet, was sent to prison for it. One would think that Harriet would be easy to condemn, her guilt assured. We see Harriet as Maddie sees her - cold and exacting of everyone around her, including her own children. Her methods of discipline horrified me, as it horrified those around her. YET - unlikely as it seems, Harriet somehow coaxed reluctant sympathy from me.

By alternating the first person narrative from Maddie's to Harriet's perspective, McGill slowly exposes in heartwrenching detail of the misunderstandings and mistakes that added up to the tragic death.

McGill depicts these two voices - servant Maddie and aristocrat Harriet - masterfully. Each is distinct and instantly immerses you in each character's personality. Maddie's voice is young and idealistic, while Harriet's is proud and unflinching, sharp and precise as a pin. After initially seeing Harriet as a monster, I found myself almost in admiration of her. But for having had a cold mother herself, Harriet's inner passion and intelligence could have grown to a softer and more forgiving nature. So too, Harriet's driven personality was confined to the wrong era; had she lived in a more modern world, perhaps she would have had more outlets for her energies other than being a wife and mother.

"They think I will be afraid of her ghost, but what can her ghost do to me? They do not know the meaning of 'horror.' It is a silence in a dark room where there should have been an answer, it is a spot of blood on a lip; it is a small, slumped body; it is a doctor shaking his head; it is eighteen dark-dressed men in the drawing room with a dead child between them; it is the bile that rises in the throat each time one opens one's mouth to speak; it is the sound of words at an inquest that make no sense."

I didn't think the death of four-year-old child could become any more horrifying, but by the end, the sadness in knowing the full story was overwhelming.

"If I had been asked before I would have said that grief was a question of sadness, a matter involving tears. I did not know anything of the horror involved, the nagging nausea at the neck of the stomach, like an early pregnancy. I did not know that it was looking around at everyone and everything important in one's life with the knowledge that there was more pain to come: that every one of them has the potential to cause agony; that despite one's very best efforts, one has laid oneself open to loss."

Like Harriet's passion for collecting butterflies, to which the title refers, The Butterfly Cabinet has the ephemeral, tragic beauty of a pinned butterfly.