The Butterfly Cabinet by Bernie McGill

reddened, risen up in white lumps where she’d been hit by a nettle. She looked at me, her eyes full of tears. “Is it true, Maddie? Have they stolen me? Am I not Charlotte?”
    I scolded them sore for torturing her; I was raging with Madge for filling their heads full of tales. And I washed and dressed Charlotte but for a long time she couldn’t be settled. In the end I got her a knob of butter and rubbed it into her head and told her the fairies couldn’t take her now ’cause they had no powerover the first butter made from the milk on May Day. And she was quiet for a while after that. But as I was leaving the room, Morris called me back.
    “Maddie, will you tell Mother?” he asked. I said no, I wouldn’t. I didn’t add that I’d be in as much trouble as he would if the mistress found out I’d been in with them. But he gave me the oddest look, like he was disappointed. I could never work that child out.
    After I went up to bed, I heard a footstep on the landing outside, and the door of my room creaked open, and there was Charlotte.
    “Can I come in to you, Maddie?” she said. “The butter’s rubbed off and I’m scared the bad fairies will come for me.”
    What could I do? I turned down my quilt and said, “Five minutes only,” and in she bounced and fell fast asleep. I carried her back down the spiral stairs, past the lamp on the landing that cast our humped shadow on the nursery door, with my heart in my mouth for fear I’d meet the mistress. But she never caught us. All the times Charlotte crept in beside me she never knew a thing about it. And Charlotte never told. Young as she was, she knew how to keep a secret; she knew we’d both be in bother if her mother found out. You know, you look like her, Anna. Not the mouth—you get that from your father’s side—but those same serious eyes, weighing things up, taking everything in.
    Charlotte was everybody’s favorite among the servants, maybe because we all saw what her mother and father failed to see: how tortured and aggravated she was. Her aunt Julia gave her a present of a dolls’ house for her third birthday. It was a fine-looking thing with window frames and sills and a fanlight over the door. We were all taken with it. Peig knitted her a ceiling rose in white wool, exactly like the one in the drawing room. I crocheted a little rug for a bedroom and Peter, grumpy old Peter that would hardly more than give you the time of day, came in one afternoonwith a tiny kitchen table and dresser he’d built for her out of scraps of wood. Him and his big old hands. She was so loved by us. When any of us had a spare minute, we’d be busy making something for the house, sewing covers for the beds, little curtains for the windows. In no time at all, the whole house was furnished from top to bottom. She loved playing with it. You could see her get lost in her own wee world, walking imaginary youngsters up and down stairs, tucking them in, washing their faces. One time she was playing, I had to call her down for her riding lesson, and you could see the wrench it was for her, the change that came in her eyes, how loath she was to leave her fairy world for the one outside.
    There was something about it that the mistress couldn’t bide, that play world of Charlotte’s. She couldn’t see what the wean saw. Charlotte picked up a handful of gravel and made an avenue for her dolls’ house on the nursery floor. There was a moat and a drawbridge and a tiny maze, but all the mistress saw was a pile of mud and dirt. It was the thing that was sure to throw her into a rage, but it was all frustration, I think. Like she was locked out of something she didn’t understand.
    The thing that really riled the mistress was when one of the weans wet or dirtied themselves. You’d think they did it deliberately, the way she reacted. She’d beat the living daylights out of them, and it was into the wardrobe room with them, dirty clothes and all, where there was less ventilation