Blue and purple butterfly on a foot

The lane was white with rime when the post van finally came up, so I'm writing this by the stove rather than walking down to the box. The frost has got into everything. Your uncle's cabinet of butterflies sat in the cold parlour all December, and yesterday I finally lifted the lid, because the glass was gathering damp and I didn't want the cork to rot. Forty-one specimens, each pinned and labelled in his square capitals. The blue ones from the Brazil trip are still the colour of a kingfisher's back, and the magenta edges haven't faded at all.

There was one I couldn't account for: a purple-winged thing with a tear in its hindwing, pinned at the far corner with no label. I've spent the morning trying to remember when he brought it home. His notebook for that year has gone missing, but a scrap of paper turned up under the cork tray, folded very small. It said only, 'Not in the case. Look where I kept my dancing shoes.'

So I went through the wardrobe. The black court shoes he bought for our anniversary dance in 1971 were still in their tissue, and inside the left heel, pressed flat between two sheets of glassine, was the butterfly. Not a real one at all, I think, but a painted print he must have cut from a seed catalogue and tucked there, the way he hid everything he loved and wouldn't say so.

I've put it in an envelope with a stamp, and I'm sending it to you because you were the only one who ever asked him what the blue was called. Keep the shoes if you like. They still fit nobody in this house.

Love, Aunt Margaret