Sound of Butterflies, The

by King, Rachael

  Agatha drops her voice to a whisper, all the better to scare him with. ‘He disappears,’ she hisses.

  Edwin giggles nervously and puts his face under the covers. ‘More,’ comes his muffled voice.

  ‘Let’s see,’ says Agatha. ‘Have you heard about Archway Annie?’

  His head pops out from under the sheet, and he shakes his head, even though he’s heard the story many times before.

  ‘In the window of the archway to the Old Palace a woman appears to people as they walk below. She’s very sad, and people hear her crying as they walk by. But nobody has ever seen her, except through the window.’

  Edwin squeals. ‘Why is she crying?’

  ‘Her family has been killed — her mother, her father and … her little brother!’ Here she tickles him mercilessly until he screams for her to stop.

  ‘What’s going on in here?’ Agatha’s mother puts her head around the door. ‘Aggie, are you filling that boy’s head with nonsense again? Honestly, you give him nightmares, you have no idea!’

  Agatha laughs and whispers in her brother’s ear, ‘You’re big and strong enough to scare away the ghosts, aren’t you, my sweet?’

  Edwin nods a determined nod, with his eyebrows clamped down and his jaw jutting out. Agatha kisses him on the cheek and turns out the lamp, leaving them in darkness.

  ‘Goodnight, darling,’ she says.

  In her own room, she decides to have an early night. She sits at her dressing table and starts taking down her hair. The loose curls fall in ropes down her back and she takes her brush to start the task of taming them.

  She hasn’t seen Sophie today, but she still worries about her. Her spirits didn’t seem at all lifted by the night at the theatre, not after the commotion on the stairs. They found Thomas waiting for them outside and they went home in silence; Sophie was very tense. When Agatha tried to squeeze her hand, she took it firmly away, as if she were mad with both of them, not just Thomas.

  At least she didn’t just give up, but brought Thomas to church the next day. Agatha knew that the congregation was sympathetic, but blast them! They were all so stiff, and nobody would come forward to speak to them, not even to convey sympathies or to talk about the weather. Instead they cast them pitying looks, which were doing Sophie no good, and certainly not Thomas. Agatha suspects that all he really needs is to be treated normally for a time, for people to bombard him with questions so he is forced to speak up. She didn’t tell Sophie, but she had been secretly longing for someone, anyone, to march up to him and say, ‘What’s the matter, Mr Edgar? Cat got your tongue?’ Well, her wish had come true the other night, and it had certainly provoked a reaction from him, which must be a good thing, mustn’t it?

  She laughs softly to herself, but it turns to a grimace when she catches a knot in her hair and it jerks at her scalp.

  Sophie said that Thomas’s journals had disappeared, but she gave up on them too quickly. Agatha is sure those journals hold the key. Something has happened to him that he must surely have written about, otherwise why would he have hidden them? Sophie may even find something in there to give her hope.

  She stares at herself in the mirror, mesmerised by the light from the lamp behind her. Her mind scrambles over possible explanations for Thomas’s behaviour. He still has his tongue: she’s seen it licking his lips. He smokes cigarettes now, and he has the worn look of someone who has been to one too many parties. Just the effects of jungle living, no doubt. But something must have happened to him. Did he see a ghost? Those Indian cultures are famous for their spirits and whatnot. A wild animal? Maybe he … she hugged herself at the thought. Maybe he did something unspeakable. Maybe he killed a man by accident while out hunting. Or better yet, maybe he did it on purpose?

  Agatha stands and begins taking off her clothes, quickly at first, but, as she reaches her undergarments, she slows. She looks in the mirror as she unlaces her corset, releasing her body. I’m a pre-Raphaelite, she thinks. Somebody should paint me. She unbuttons her chemise and exposes her breasts, imagining she is Robert, seeing herself how he saw her this afternoon. Except then it was by a wash of daylight through the open curtains, instead of by soft lamplight. He wanted the curtains closed and as she reached the window, nakedness to the sky, Mrs Grimshaw walked by on the road. Agatha knew she should hide, but she lingered there instead, until Robert told her to hurry up before she was seen, and Mrs Grimshaw happened to glance up and lock eyes with her before pressing a hand to her mouth and hurrying away.

  Ten

  Rio Negro, Brazil, February 1904

  Dear Mr Ridewell,

  By now you will be waiting for a consignment from us. I’m not sure what the other men have told you, but my work has been hindered, by both illness and outside forces. I have been rather unwell, you see, and I am told I have had a malarial illness. I have lately been having periods where I can get up and move about, even write letters such as this one, but any physical activity weakens me and I am easily tired. I have eaten nothing but orange juice and cashew nuts for two weeks. Thank you for your letter, which arrived while I was in the height of my fever, and for your concern over my wife. It is a matter between my wife and myself. I will write to her when I am able, but please in the meantime do not tell her I am ill, as I do not wish to cause her worry.

  I am plagued by dreams of a normal life at home — reading the morning paper, strolling in Richmond Park, attending church — and feel wretched when I wake up, even though I cannot imagine going home, where I fear things will never be normal for me again.

  At night, as well as dreams, I am hounded by moths. They thump against my lantern, against the doors and roof, trying to get in, with their sticky probosces and their powdery wings, waiting to fly down my throat and choke me. They are ugly brutes in comparison to my gentle butterflies and I can scarcely believe they both belong to the order Lepidoptera. I am so close to my goals here in Brazil, but the jungle and its inhabitants conspire against me. This letter will be taken from me and posted, so I cannot say too much. But I am very close, Mr Ridewell, and if I can rise above my challenges, we will both be very pleased. In the meantime, thank you for your patience. I am amassing my next consignment to you, but am not yet ready to let it go.

  Yours sincerely,

  Thomas Edgar

  He sealed the envelope and left it on his desk for Antonio to collect on his next mission to town, then lay down, spent, in his hammock. It wasn’t just that he grew tired easily; the fever came back to him sometimes and he would wake in the night freezing cold. One night he woke to find he had thrown off all of his coverings and his clothes and lay naked and steaming. A figure bent over him, gently wiping his forehead with a cooling cloth.

  ‘Sophie?’

  ‘No, dear, it’s me. It’s Clara.’

  ‘Your husband,’ he murmured, groping about him for a sheet.

  ‘Shh,’ she said. ‘I am here to nurse you with his blessing. You’ll feel better soon.’

  When he could get up, Thomas learned that George had also fallen ill soon after him, but the others had escaped any fever. Ernie said they were unlucky — there were few mosquitoes in this part of the jungle, but they were almost certainly the carriers of the malaria. Thomas had stopped taking his quinine because of the dreams it gave him, but George insisted that he had not stopped.

  One morning, Thomas lay in his hammock while the rain pelted down on the roof and punished the yard outside. He would have little chance now, he thought miserably, of finding butterflies. They retreated during the rains and collecting became sparse. He had lost his chance.

  There was a knock at his door and Santos entered. Thomas struggled to push himself into a sitting position, and the hammock swung wildly and threatened to tip him out.

  ‘Do not sit up, Mr Edgar,’ said Santos. He drew the chair from Thomas’s desk and sat down next to him. He gripped something in his hands — a small box.

  Now that Thomas’s head was clearer, and the fevers infrequent, he told himself the
valley of butterflies had been a hallucination. Santos had only just arrived back at camp that evening; of course he could not have found him and released the specimen. But no matter how much he told himself, chastised himself for believing it, something in his gut ate at him, nagged him. He did want to believe that it existed after all. It did exist.

  The room had grown dark with the rains, and the air was thick and hot.

  ‘I have something for you,’ said Santos. ‘I think you will be very pleased.’

  He unfurled his fingers from the box and pulled off the lid. He held it out to Thomas, who took it and squinted at it in the dim light. Inexpertly pinned, with a broken thorax and a lopsided setting, a Papilio sophia sat dead in the box. Hot tears sprang to his eyes and he squeezed his lids shut to clear his vision.

  ‘You found it,’ he whispered.

  ‘Yes,’ said Santos, and chuckled.

  ‘Is it … mine?’

  ‘Yours, Mr Edgar? Why, yes. I caught this myself when out with Dr Harris this morning. It is magnificent, is it not? It is my gift to you. I trust you will name it appropriately.’

  Thomas’s head snapped sideways to look at him. His lungs closed.

  ‘Appropriately? But I have already chosen a name for it.’ His voice sounded small in the close air of the hut, which undulated with humidity while the rain came down in dark sheets outside.

  ‘Which was surely conditional on your finding it. But now I have found it.’ His voice was matter of fact, betraying no emotion. If he was capable of any.

  Santos patted him on the shoulder. ‘I will leave you with your prize,’ he said. ‘If I were you, I would give that name some good thought. My first name is José, as you know, if that helps you.’ He stood and with two long strides was gone.

  Thomas lay back, holding the box still in his hand, and stared at the ceiling. My head is clouded, he thought. I cannot think straight. The turmoil he felt refused to clear so that he could identify his feelings and eliminate them. He had it. And yet … he did not have it. Santos had stolen it from him. If he had not stolen the actual specimen, he had stolen the glory. He let the thought sink in, and it burrowed into his bones.

  His life was not worth living without this discovery. He had nothing. He would return home with nothing but a collection of insects to sell to fat rich men who didn’t know a papilio from a morpho.

  He would take this specimen home with him as the only thing to show for the legend that had driven him. And he could not even name it for his wife. The naming was the only thing that had kept him from shrivelling with guilt, and now he had taken that away from her. She had been wronged with no compensation in sight, and only a failure of a husband. Another tear fell from his eye and slid down to his ear, where it tickled him. He gave a bitter chuckle. It wasn’t even a perfect specimen. He brought it up to look at it again. Its black wing was torn, and the body was broken nearly in half. It was as if Santos had caught it by standing on it, or by smashing it out of the air with a stick. There was something else wrong with it: it was much smaller than he had anticipated. It was not even half the size of his hand. The one he had caught in the forest — even if he had imagined the whole episode — was not what one would call a giant, but it was certainly large for a butterfly. The rumours had made out that it was a giant, and … there was something else. This wasn’t even a papilionidae; it was from some other order altogether. Instead of the elaborate decoration of the swallow-tail, it was plain: a dinner jacket rather than tails. The yellow was pale, almost white, and the black …

  Thomas swung his legs out of the hammock. He swayed for a moment as the blood rushed away from his head and the beating of wings filled his ears and fluttered in front of his eyes. He pressed his fingertips to his eyelids to calm them.

  The black was dull and watery, not iridescent as he had imagined it would be. It should have been like a pool of oil, black in its base, with greens and blues swirling and shimmering over the top. The black wings hung lower than those on the other side, as if weighted down. He looked closer, and pinched the pin that held it to pull it out. As he did so, the butterfly lost half its body, but Thomas was no longer concerned with this. At the bottom of the box, in the space under the butterfly’s black wings, were two smudges. Of ink. The butterfly’s wing had been dipped in Indian ink and whoever had pinned it so roughly had not even waited for it to dry.

  He roared and threw the box against the wall of the hut.

  Outside, the rain had eased, and Thomas stumbled into the quickening light. Ernie stood at the door to his hut, took one look at Thomas’s face and doubled over with laughter. Thomas marched over to him, light-headed, with legs as insubstantial as air, his hands bunched together in tight fists.

  ‘It was just a joke, old man,’ said Ernie, straightening now, wiping the corner of his eye. ‘It was Santos’s idea.’

  Thomas just stood there, impotent, his rage curling and dying inside him.

  One by one, the other men emerged from their huts. George stood unevenly, face pale and sharp from his illness; John filled his doorway, his face cast in shadow from the hand at his forehead. Even Pedro, the cook, stood at the door of the cooking hut, rubbing his hands on a cloth. Only Santos smiled along with Ernie. Clara was a shadow at his shoulder, looking at Thomas with a face pinched with sorrow.

  The rainy season was well and truly upon them. The river swelled, and many creeks they had leapt over became deep rivers to be navigated or avoided. Water coursed into the forest, submerging the trunks and lower branches of trees. Where monkeys had sat and jaguars walked, was now the domain of dolphins and fish. Thomas imagined sitting on the riverbed as they swam through the trees towards him as if they were flying.

  Insect collecting had now become sparse and difficult; butterflies in particular hid from the rain, but George complained, too, of coleoptera waning. Only John’s work didn’t abate — in the rain, plant life thrived.

  A languid laziness took hold of Thomas and George, which they attributed to their recent illness, but both knew was a lethargy caused by having too little to do. Thomas slept through the morning until lunchtime, when Clara accompanied John. Santos, when he was about, walked with Ernie or stayed behind to converse with George and, on occasion, Thomas. He also went to Manaus for extended visits, but Thomas again fell to avoiding Clara, so worried was he that Santos had guessed what was between them. He used his time alone to redirect his focus to his wife. He wrote Sophie letters, which was like wading through mud, and could not bring himself to send them.

  He decided to take John’s advice and get to know some of the locals. Antonio was usually wherever Santos was, and Manuel and the boy, Joaquim, acted as guides and assistants to whoever was out collecting. That left Pedro, the cook. Thomas practised his Portuguese on him.

  ‘De onde a sua família é?’ he asked, inquiring where his family was from.

  ‘De todo lugar,’ said Pedro, indicating with a wide sweep of his arms that they were from everywhere.

  Thomas asked him if he could watch him while he worked, and Pedro gave him a look as if he were quite mad, but nodded all the same. He limped slightly as he pottered around the cookhouse, and, on a more intent look, Thomas realised the cook had a toe missing on his right foot. Although it would be impolite of him to ask, Thomas was struggling for topics of conversation, so he pointed to the foot.

  ‘Como … dedo … ferir?’ he asked, and Pedro smiled a wide smile at his appalling skill with the language. He proceeded to answer, but Thomas could only make out certain words. He ascertained that Pedro had lost the toe when he worked as a fisherman. The big black variety of piranha, though dangerous, was delicious to eat, and one had jumped off his hook in the boat and taken his toe in an instant.

  Thomas must have looked horrified, and Pedro laughed again. His two brothers had lost their toes in the same way. Evidently the piranha was a delicacy worth risking digits over.

  Thomas asked him if he liked working for Santos, and Pedro shrugged but would not look at
him. Thomas had noticed that Pedro took all his orders from Antonio, but when he served Santos, his manner changed. He walked more slowly around him, and the hand that spooned meat onto Santos’s plate often shook uncontrollably. Santos didn’t seem to notice, or, if he did, ignored it.

  For a week, Thomas came and sat with Pedro for an hour or more a day, and Pedro began to help him with his Portuguese. By the end of the week, Pedro called him ‘magro’ for being so thin, and flicked pieces of food at him as he cooked, which Thomas dodged when he could, and wiped away from his eye with a smile when he could not. Thomas’s language skills were improving and he surprised Clara and John one night by contributing to their conversation at dinner. John slapped him on the back with a smile, but Clara just stared at him. Her eyes pulled him in and a heat rose in the air between them. When he broke away, John was looking from one of them to the other; he had stopped eating, but held a morsel of food in his slightly open mouth. Thomas looked at his plate, burning. He felt as if he had been caught poaching pheasant, while the gamekeeper looked on.

  He stood. ‘If you’ll excuse me,’ he said, ‘I’m not feeling very well.’

  The following morning, Thomas slept late. He was awoken by Antonio.

  ‘Senhor Santos would like you to have tea with him, Senhor Edgar, before the rain starts.’

  ‘I’ll be there presently,’ said Thomas. Antonio left him and he lay and stared at the ceiling. He had not allowed himself to be alone with Santos. The others would no doubt be off collecting somewhere, and the man needed someone to talk to. He let himself out of his hammock and put his clothes on with shaking hands.

  ‘Ah, Mr Edgar.’ Santos sat in a shady corner of the yard at a low table with an extra chair beside him. Pools of water and mud were dotted around from the recent rain, and the thick air promised more. Manuel stood by, fanning Santos with a large banana leaf. As always, Santos managed to appear perfectly cool. Thomas was used to the damp heat now; he had even begun to enjoy the sensation of a warm bath, provided he could have a swim or a cool bathe at the end of the day. His shirts were all marred by the same yellow stains under the arms, and he had given up fretting over them. Santos’s shirts, however, were always crisp and clean, as if he wore a brand new one every day.