Never be content with what the world expects of you, Meggie, for you will always be more than that. Good luck!

Mildred Birnie

Roanhaven, Buchan, May 1905

Avril gasps when Laura extracts, with a flourish, a broad white feather. She runs the tip of a finger along the yellowing vane, thick as toenails and hollow at the base. It’s not the bird her mind conjures—the wings suspended on a northern thermal, merging white with sodden sky—no, not that. It’s the girl again, the girl with her arm down a rabbit hole, the girl with the gift of a feather and a promise balanced on the palm of her hand.

Laura unwraps something from tissue paper and passes to Avril a wooden hairbrush, the glaze of its back a web of fine lines. Avril turns it over, feeling the stiff boar bristles, and it takes a minute for her to realise what she has in her hand, what is caught in the vintage lint and dust. Oh, she breathes, disentangling one of many long wiry hairs and holding it to the light. Rich, plum-bright, jarrah red.

The last thing in the tin is unrecognisable at first—a dark, decaying pouch of something once soft, perhaps fabric. Avril takes it gingerly from Laura. Yes, fabric, folded over and over into a square, its fibres stiffened with age. You can almost see the shape of the hand that smoothed it flat.

Purple silk, Laura says softly.

And the girl is laughing, her eyes following a swathe of purple shooting into the air, up through the plasterboard ceiling, up through four floors, through the sheet-iron roof of the hospital, up, up into a cold, clear West Australian sky the colour of the North Sea.

Avril hears the cries of gulls on unseen winds. On her tongue, the taste of salt.

33

Laura

Early spring, a bluesky morning.

Laura carries the nylon box frame from the hatching shed to the far side of the garden, where lantana and plumbago compete wildly for a supremacy of colour. Ten am—her favourite time on a day like this when the air is warm enough for release. Carefully she upturns the box frame on the grass, stands back to give them space.

Dozens of Monarchs cling to the nylon mesh, perfectly still until sun and breeze unlock in them some primeval instinct to enact this last small miracle. Each pair of wings quivers, contracting at the base as though preparing for great effort, and at once the air is a sinuous flutter of honey and amber, black and white. It’s over in seconds, this deliverance to the wild, but it’s the only ceremony Laura would wish for. Her reward, the breath of diaphanous wings as a cloud of butterflies drifts through her as though she has become porous, a thing of air. Elemental, these small moments of boundarylessness, of finding your place beside butterflies in the order of things.