Stranger than fiction

A few days ago, I gave a talk for members of the Probus Club, Portstewart, a group of retired businessmen, on the local historical links of The Butterfly Cabinet. Since it’s a little while since I looked at the source material, I went back to refresh my memory on dates and facts, and while I was there I did a little internet investigation as well. At the time that I was researching the story, there wasn’t very much information online regarding the Montagu family or the incident that inspired the novel: the death of the young child of the family at Cromore House, Portstewart in 1892. But since then, a little more detail has come to light. After the book came out, a number of local people told me stories regarding family members. I knew, for instance, that Annie Margaret Montagu, the mother accused of killing her daughter, had given birth to her ninth child while she was serving a twelve month sentence in Grangegorman Prison in Dublin, but because the newspaper reports referred to the infant as ‘it’, I wasn’t able to establish the child’s gender. For the purposes of my narrative, she had become a girl called Florence who, years later, gives birth to Anna, to whom Maddie, the elderly nanny in The Butterfly Cabinet gives her account of the story. I also decided that in my version, Anna would be the only descendant, the natural heir, and I devised fictitious ends for the other family members. I subsequently discovered that the baby born in prison was, indeed, a girl. I’ve been told, although I can’t be certain of this, that she entered a religious order. I’ve also ascertained that, of the seven boys born into the family, three died in the First World War, one of them an army chaplain. The remaining four married, one of them changing his name by royal licence to that of his wife’s family; three of them had children of their own. Just the other day, a member of the Probus Club told me that there is only one female descendant remaining. I’ve no doubt that more aspects will emerge over time. One of my favourite stories was told to me by a nurse who worked in the house after it had been transformed into a residential home. She was standing in the hall at the bottom of the staircase one day when a movement caught her eye. She looked up to the balcony on the floor above and saw a child lean over the railings. The area was used for storage and wasn’t open to visitors. She raced up the stairs, two at a time, fearful that some harm would come to the stray child, but when she got there, there was no sign of her. She searched the storerooms but found nothing. The child had disappeared.