Butterfly Island

by Corina Bomann

  Diana hurried towards him.

  As she approached, she noticed how little Mr. Green had changed since the last time she’d seen him, five years ago. He was in his late fifties by now, but his perfectly trimmed hair showed only a few traces of silver and his tall frame had not an ounce of excess fat. The greatcoat he wore over his suit was so beautifully tailored that he could easily have been taken for a wealthy businessman.

  Aunt Emily had certainly found the perfect butler in Mr. Green, who had been in her service for almost thirty years now.

  “Welcome to London! I’m delighted to see you again, Mrs. Wagenbach.”

  His handshake was as warm and friendly as his smile. Diana couldn’t help wondering whether he had another lady in his life. His last had left him a few years ago.

  “I’m also delighted to see you, Mr. Green,” Diana replied, picking up on a sense of calm in the butler’s manner. She’s still alive, a voice whispered in the back of her mind. I’m not too late. “Did you manage to avoid the traffic?”

  “An excellent journey, madam,” he replied politely, tucking his oversized umbrella under his arm. “I was fortunate enough to find a parking space close to the front of the building, so we should be able to reach the car without getting too wet.”

  Diana smiled to herself. She knew it was pointless to try to have a meaningful conversation with Mr. Green when she’d just arrived. It was only once she’d been there for a few days that the butler would let his guard down enough to exchange a few personal words.

  Outside, they were met by heavy rain. Without flinching, Mr. Green opened the umbrella and held it over Diana.

  “Shall we go, madam?”

  Diana found it hard to keep up with a man whose legs were a good six inches longer than hers, while avoiding the puddles that had rapidly formed on the asphalt.

  They finally came to a black limousine, a 1998 Bentley Brooklands. Although ten years old, the car looked in excellent condition. Emily had probably been driven out in it only occasionally, and Diana doubted that Mr. Green used the car for private journeys—he was far too correct for that.

  The butler took her bag with a smile and opened the door. As she got in, he stowed her baggage in the trunk.

  “I assume you’ll be wanting to go straight to the hospital,” he said, sliding elegantly into the driver’s seat. A few drops of rain glistened on his shoulders and in his hair as he turned to her.

  “Yes, I’d like to,” Diana replied. “Do you have any more news?”

  “Unfortunately not, since I’m not a relative. However, the emergency doctor mistook me for her son and told me that the stroke has severely weakened her. If I hadn’t noticed that she was unable to get up out of her chair, she would probably have died in the night.”

  “You’ve always been very attentive towards her,” Diana said, unable to think of a better response.

  After she had fastened her seat belt, Mr. Green switched on the ignition and the windscreen wipers, and they were soon making their way through the hurly-burly of London traffic.

  St. James’s Hospital exuded an air of cool sterility that gave visitors a twinge in the pit of their stomachs as soon as they entered the doors. Diana had always wondered why a place where people’s lives were begun, saved, or even ended should seem so unpleasant, so unnerving.

  Even the friendly nurse at the reception, who asked her to check in at the intensive care ward, could do nothing to mitigate Diana’s uneasiness. The building, with its smell of disinfectant, gave the impression of wanting to suck the life from every living soul inside.

  She would have been only too pleased to ask Mr. Green to accompany her, but the butler had excused himself for half an hour to go on another errand. He had a guest and a promise to keep, he told Diana. “I’ll wait for you downstairs in the reception area when I get back.”

  Diana had watched him go and now made her way past bustling nursing staff towards the glazed double doors bearing the inscription Intensive Care. Before Diana reached them, the doors swung open to allow a patient’s bed, pushed by two porters, to come out and along the corridor. The white-haired man was almost invisible between the pillows and sheets; portable breathing apparatus was fixed to the foot of the bed.

  Although Diana greeted the porters, they took no notice of her, not deigning to interrupt their conversation about that weekend’s football match.

  Faced with an open door and an empty corridor, Diana wondered whether she should simply slip in, but something held her back. She’s here, behind one of these doors, she thought with a thumping heart and tightness in her stomach. Her eyes took in the nurses’ station and the tiled walls punctuated at regular intervals by doors. Will she recognise me?

  “Can I help you?”

  Diana jumped and spun around. She had been so busy taking everything in that she had failed to notice a doctor coming up behind her. The medic, who looked to be around forty, was called Dr. Hunter according to his name tag.

  “Yes, please. My name is Diana Wagenbach. I’d like to see Emily Woodhouse. I understand she was brought in yesterday.”

  “Are you related to her?” the doctor asked.

  Diana nodded.

  “Come with me.”

  The doctor led her to the nurses’ station and instructed one of the nurses to take Diana to room nine.

  The nurse nodded, placed her clipboard to one side, and came over to her as the doctor hurried on down the corridor.

  “Are you her granddaughter?” she asked. Diana simply nodded again, unsure whether she would actually count as a relation if she told the whole story, and whether the nurse would understand the complicated twists and turns of her family history.

  “Good. Come with me, then.”

  They hurried past doors and were met by the beeping sounds of monitoring equipment. Diana and the nurse continued to the end of the corridor to where the doctor had disappeared. They stopped outside a closed door. The nurse opened a small cupboard next to the shelf for the patient’s file. Before Diana had a chance to glance at the notes, the nurse had pressed a light-blue bundle into her hand.

  “Please can you put this on. Your grandmother needs to be protected from germs. In addition to her stroke, she’s also developed pneumonia.”

  “So soon?” Diana replied, her head immediately filling with the horror stories she’d heard about hospital bacteria.

  “It’s probably protracted flu. She was showing the symptoms when she was brought in. If she hadn’t had the stroke, the pneumonia would probably never have been noticed.” The nurse sounded irritated. You’d be irritated, too, if someone made a veiled accusation that you weren’t doing your job properly, Diana thought.

  “When you’ve finished putting the gown on, please can you disinfect your hands. If you leave the patient’s room, you’ll have to repeat the whole procedure when you return.”

  Diana had no intention of leaving before she had to.

  “You can stay for half an hour, but no longer,” the nurse continued as Diana tried to fasten the ties of the thin blue gown behind her back, which turned out to be a fiddly job. “Please could you talk quietly and try not to excite her.”

  Does she think I’m about to burst into a sickroom with a fanfare? Suppressing her irritation, Diana thanked the nurse for the cap she handed her, and assured her that she would obey the rules. Once she had drawn the cap over her hair and a mask across her mouth, she was finally allowed to enter.

  Although she had mentally prepared herself, and had experienced seeing someone seriously ill before—her mother had died from cancer nine years ago—she was still shocked by Emily’s appearance.

  Her strawberry-blonde hair had faded like wool that had been left out for too long in the sun. Her wrinkled face looked shrunken, dark shadows encircling her eyes. Her breathing rattled from her slightly open mouth. Her arms, now completely paralysed, were held in place with straps to prevent them slipping between the bars of the bed frame. Diana saw with shock how thin Emily had become.
The pneumonia had clearly taken its toll.

  Fighting tears and a big lump in her throat, she moved softly to the bedside, which was surrounded by at least half a dozen items of equipment quietly beeping in a regular rhythm.

  “Aunt Emily?” Diana asked gently, leaning over the sick woman’s face. No reaction. Was she able to hear anything? The nurse had left, so she was unable to ask her.

  “Aunt Emily?” she repeated a little louder, summoning all her self-control to prevent herself from crying.

  “Diana?”

  Although Emily spoke with difficulty, Diana listened carefully and managed to understand her. Emily turned her head incredibly slowly in the direction of the voice that had spoken her name, and opened her eyes.

  “Yes, I’m here, Aunty.” Diana was about to reach for one of her hands, but it occurred to her that she wouldn’t feel anything, so she gently stroked her hair and as she did so felt how hot her brow was.

  “I’m so glad I’ve been able to see you again,” Emily whispered, gazing intently at Diana. “You’ve grown even prettier. You look so like your grandma Beatrice. She was also beautiful, once she’d recovered a little from her hardship.”

  Diana suppressed a sob, but couldn’t prevent a tear from trickling down her cheek and dripping on to the sheet. “You’re beautiful, too, Aunty.”

  “I’m tempted to believe you for once,” Emily replied, showing a brief glimpse of the sense of humour that had made her so popular. “So why are you crying? Do I really look so bad?”

  Diana shook her head. “No, it’s just that . . .”

  “That I’m nearing my end?” A smiled fluttered across her face. “Oh, child, we all have to go sooner or later. I’ve had a long life—not always happy, as you know, but a long one, and at least I’ve been able to assuage some of the guilt that’s been hanging over our branch of the family.”

  Guilt? Diana raised her eyebrows. What guilt could this kind, loving woman have taken upon herself? Or her family?

  “Maybe once I reach the other side I’ll finally be able to meet Grace, the woman who shaped my life in a way, even though I didn’t know her in person,” Emily continued, as beads of sweat formed on her brow.

  Diana would have liked to tell her to rest and conserve her strength, but Emily had never allowed another to silence her. Some things didn’t change.

  “I’m going to tell her that her love is still bearing fruit, and that I’ve done all I can to seek forgiveness for Victoria. The dead know the guilt that people have taken upon themselves . . .”

  An outbreak of coughing caused the machines to beep. Diana drew back in alarm and was about to call for the nurse when everything settled back to normal.

  With a moan, Emily sank back against the pillows. “There’s a secret hanging over our family. One that Grace didn’t know about.” As her eyes opened again, she looked enraptured, as though she could see in the distance those who had died before the war. “My grandmother had a dreadfully bad conscience about it.”

  Her breath was coming in gasps, as though the words were placing a terrible strain on her.

  “I’m sorry I can’t tell you exactly what it was about. I always suspected that my mother knew more details, but she never let me in on it. The only thing Mother told me on her deathbed was that Grandma Victoria had a secret that should not be disclosed until only one of us was left. You’re the last of our family line, as I wasn’t blessed with children of my own. So the time has finally come.”

  Diana’s stomach tightened. It was true; she was the last. The descendants of the Tremaynes were few—and they had all been female, which meant that the old name had long since vanished from the annals.

  “In the old study there’s a secret compartment behind the bookshelves, towards the middle of the wall. The key has been missing for a long time—not even my mother knew where it was—but it shouldn’t be a problem to have another one cut. Take what’s in there and do the best you can with it. Draw the threads together to complete the story.”

  Diana heard footsteps approaching the room. Time had run away from her. Were her thirty minutes up already?

  Emily stared at her with wide eyes. A tear ran from the corner of one eye. A tear from the heart, as her mother had always called them. “Promise me that you’ll find everything out and put it all together. Grace and Victoria . . .”

  “Mrs. Wagenbach?” The nurse was standing in the doorway, her voice ruthless as a prison warder. “Your half hour is over. Please will you say your farewells? Your grandmother needs to rest.”

  Diana nodded and pondered the strangeness of Emily’s revelation as she waited for the nurse to go. Then she leaned back towards Emily and kissed her brow. “I promise I’ll put all the pieces together.”

  Her aunt smiled at her, reassured. “You really are a lovely girl who deserves all the happiness the world has to offer. If you uncover our secret it will bring you peace, too, I’m sure.”

  Emily sank sleepily back into the pillows.

  “I’ll come back tomorrow,” Diana promised, stroking her hair once again. She did not know whether her aunt heard the words because no sooner had she stood to go than Emily was asleep.

  Mr. Green was waiting in the reception area as promised. Diana hurriedly brushed away the tears that had leaked out on the way to meet him. Her glowing cheeks gave her away, but that was better than crying for the world to see.

  “Ah, Mrs. Wagenbach!” Mr. Green folded up the newspaper he had been reading to while away the time, and rose. “May I ask how Madam is?”

  “She’s been speaking to me,” Diana said, “but she’s very ill. The nurse said she’s also picked up pneumonia; she must have been harbouring it for days.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it. If your aunt was already ill, she certainly didn’t show it.” Mr. Green looked remorseful. Diana sensed that, as the butler, it was his duty to run the household, but his mistress’s personal state of health was not his concern unless she said something to him or he noticed she was unwell.

  “That sounds typical of her.” Diana’s brief laugh sounded more like a sob.

  “As you can see, England’s showing her best side, as far as the humidity’s concerned,” Mr. Green remarked drily as he elegantly unfurled his umbrella. The rain had eased somewhat, but there was still no sun to be seen. “Would you like to stop for something to eat on the way, madam?”

  “No, thank you, I’d like to go straight home.”

  Home. It was only as she left the hospital that she’d realised how easily she used the word in relation to Tremayne House, which had been the backdrop to her childhood summers. As though her life in Berlin had never been.

  3

  The congested city streets gradually gave way to more rural roads lined with hedgerows dotted with trees and wild rose bushes. Lulled by the sonorous humming of the engine, Diana allowed her mind to drift through a series of images.

  She saw Emily in her early fifties bending over her bed when Diana was a child and lovingly stroking her hair. A few years later she bustled around as Diana sat drawing at the kitchen table. Diana had spent all her school holidays at Tremayne House because her mother, who had moved to Germany at the age of eighteen, kept returning to the place where she had been born.

  The picture shifted to Emily in her sixties, sitting proudly in church for Diana’s confirmation, her elegant attire attracting admiring glances from the other guests. She came to Berlin a second time, when she was over seventy, for Diana’s university graduation. At that stage she wasn’t showing the slightest indication that time was eating away her strength.

  The last time Diana visited her was just after she had suffered her first stroke, but she still had not lost any of her courage or determination.

  Diana remembered telling her with pride that she was about to open her own legal practice with Eva. After her father was killed in a car accident and her mother died of cancer, grief had threatened to overcome her. But Emily, ready as always with emotional support, had invited her
to Tremayne House to give her a whole summer of time for herself.

  Philipp had then entered her life, and in the following years he and the practice had meant that she had only been in touch with Emily occasionally, and had no longer visited her, which Diana now deeply regretted.

  She was always there for me, she thought. And I let her down. Sadness was mixed with resentment towards Philipp. Maybe if it wasn’t for him I’d have come here more often . . .

  But Diana knew only too well that if it hadn’t been Philipp, there would have been another man in her life. A better one perhaps, but she would nevertheless have paid more attention to him than to her aunt in England.

  “Here we are, madam,” Mr. Green announced, as if to make sure she didn’t miss her first sight of the house.

  From the small rise as they approached, they had a view of practically the whole estate, which consisted of the elegant two-storey manor house, an annex, and a stable block.

  Built near the Thames, the property had apparently belonged to a notorious member of the aristocracy who had been involved in a conspiracy against Elizabeth I. The queen’s infamous spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, was said to have lived nearby. The Tremayne family had acquired the estate in the seventeenth century from Charles II after the restoration of the monarchy. Since then, the family’s descendants had managed to keep the house going without having to open it to the public to pay the bills.

  On this dismal afternoon, Tremayne House looked like a wet dog lying remorsefully at its master’s feet, looking up at him with big, beseeching eyes. Fat drops of water dripped from all the bay windows, the roof, and the gutters, and the run-off down the side of the steps sought in vain to catch the flow.

  Mr. Green parked the Bentley on the circular drive with a fountain at its centre and reached for the umbrella he had laid down in the footwell.

  “Wait there, madam. I’ll see you to the door.”

  Before she could remark that she could manage the short distance to the front door without dissolving like a sugar cube, Mr. Green was already opening her door, the umbrella up. On his shoulder he was carrying her bag, which she had almost forgotten about.