The Taxidermist's Daughter

by Kate Mosse

  He turned left and walked east along the main road, such as it was. Here, cottages were tucked in between larger plots with modern, detached red-brick houses. He saw the Bull’s Head on the south side of the road, as the porter had said. A large gabled building with a pleasant facade, a few trees and a low, thatched wooden barn behind, it was rather charming.

  On the corner, a gaggle of children stood outside a sweet shop. Girls with smock pinafores over their dresses, hair tied back with ribbons; the boys with grubby collars visible above their jackets.

  Harry stopped on the opposite side of the road from the Woolpack. If the Dunnaways man was right, this had to be the place. But the idea that his father might have a rendezvous in this spit-and-sawdust tavern, a working men’s bar, was absurd. His father was fastidious. The kind to put his handkerchief on a park bench rather than risk getting a speck of dirt on his coat. And on occasion, when Harry came into dinner without properly cleaning the paint from his hands, the old man would fidget and struggle not to comment on it. Harry smiled fondly. John Woolston was as predictable as clockwork. He never acted on impulse; he was formal and rather dull, did everything by the book. Absolutely Victorian in his outlook. Obedience, respectability, duty, everything planned to the letter.

  Except here Harry was, standing outside a disreputable-looking place in Fishbourne, wondering if his father might or might not be inside.

  The smile faded from Harry’s face.

  There was no sign of a taxi outside, though there was a tub trap with a mule in harness. A group of five or six men were standing in the shade – caps, weather-worn faces, short working men’s jackets. At their feet, a black and tan terrier slumbered, oblivious to the danger of hoof and wheel.

  Harry was stumped. If he went in and his father saw him, it would be obvious he must have followed from Chichester. So whatever his father was or was not doing – even if it was a blameless game of dominoes – the situation would be awkward for both of them.

  Aware that he was attracting attention, Harry continued on to the outskirts of the village, where the houses stopped. There, he crossed over and ambled back on the south side of the road. There was a pleasant low cottage, set at right angles to the road, and several substantial houses. At the end of the row was a rather attractive white house with its own stable and coach house. Set behind wrought-iron railings, flanked by mature trees and bushes, with a square portico, it gave almost directly on to the street.

  Harry stopped and lit a cigarette, wondering what the devil to do next.

  *

  Connie went back to the jackdaw, hoping she had not been away from the bird for too long.

  When she’d left the workshop earlier, she’d protected the skin from drying out by folding the head and wings in on themselves, and had placed a cloth over the carcass. But any number of parasites, invisible to the naked eye, could have burrowed their way into gaps between the skin and the exposed flesh at the tips of the jackdaw’s wings, leaving no sign. Only if the bird began to rot would any damage become clear.

  Connie turned the jackdaw over in her hands, examining it thoroughly, and decided to continue. The flesh hadn’t become sticky and it was a beautiful creature; she didn’t want to let it go to waste. This was the moment when it would begin to transform from something dead into an object of beauty that would live for ever. The essence of the bird, caught by her craft and her skill, at one distinct moment.

  Immortal.

  She sprinkled a little water on the skin to make sure it wouldn’t shrink or tear, then continued where she had left off before lunch. She worked her way down the spine, the scalpel squeaking as she scraped flesh from bone, fat from cartilage, wiping the tiniest feathers on the edge of the newspaper. The white tail bone, and a sharp point in the right wing, set at an angle, as evidence of how the bird had died. Shot by the gamekeeper at Old Park, Connie suspected, leaving the jackdaw just enough strength to fly home to die. She had found it lying beside the hawthorn. It would require a certain amount of skill to disguise the disfiguration when the time came to stuff and present the bird.

  Connie was shaken by the scene with her father – the new information he had let slip, as well as the tantalising glimpses of how much more he might tell her if he chose to. She was aware, too, that she must not allow herself to brood. When she was worried or upset, she was more likely to slip between the cracks in time. Those disabling, alarming petit mal episodes had been the reason her father had given for not sending her to school once she had recovered after the accident.

  Connie began to skin the flesh from the neck until, finally, she was ready to turn her attention to the skull. This was the part of the process she liked the least. The texture and smells reminding her that without death, there was no new form of life. No beauty.

  She wondered if, when it was done – and provided she was pleased with her work – she might try to sell the jackdaw. The last commission had been in the autumn – a preserved rook for a barber in Chichester, wanting something unusual in the shop window to attract customers’ attention – and although her father refused to talk about their household finances with her, she suspected any contribution would be useful.

  She sighed, wondering how she might achieve such a thing without her father’s knowledge. But the truth was, regardless of what happened to the piece, the work itself calmed her. Connie felt most herself when she was alone in the workshop. She and a bird, working together to create something new and extraordinary. The process itself was its own reward. The business of skinning and cleaning and stuffing rooted her in something tangible, kept her tethered to the real world.

  She put down the scalpel and picked up her forceps. Pressing the jackdaw’s skinned head to the table, she inserted the points into the left socket and squeezed. As always, the eyeball was sticky at first. Then, it popped out with a leaking of inky dark liquid. Round on three sides, the surface closest to the socket was flat, the shape of a blueberry. Connie placed it on the table, beside the bird’s thin, black strip of tongue.

  The right eye came more easily. When she had finished, she wrapped it all in a scrap of newspaper and put it in the pail.

  This, now, was the worst of it. She breathed in, trying not to draw the noxious odour too deeply into her lungs. With a blunt knife, she carved a square in the back of the skull. Then, delicately, she began the process of pulling the grey matter of the jackdaw’s brain out of the opening with the same delicate forceps. Little by little by little, a time-consuming and messy process. She let her shoulders drop, rolled her neck, knowing that soon it would be over.

  She would wash and preserve the bird. Then, tomorrow, the process of bringing it back to life would begin.

  Blood, skin, bone.

  Mauduyt, however, did not point out any means of preservation. Sulphurous fumigations appeared to him the nec plus ultra for killing destructive insects. Sulphur does still more, it destroys the skins themselves . . . their upper parts were burned; the sulphurous vapour had changed the red into a dirty yellow, faded the yellow, blackened the blue, soiled the cases, and even the glasses which enclosed them.

  TAXIDERMY: OR, THE ART OF COLLECTING, PREPARING,

  AND MOUNTING OBJECTS OF NATURAL HISTORY

  Mrs R. Lee

  Longman & Co, Paternoster Row, London, 1820

  It has been hard not to reveal myself these past weeks, almost the hardest thing in this long and terrible business. There was a time when a different story might yet have been told. But I lacked the courage and the moment slipped away.

  Dead for all these long and many years. The smell of sulphur and the grave. The smell of rotting and unpreserved flesh. The darkening glass. They sullied the beauty of the place. Destroyed all that was wonderful and made it dark.

  Old sins have long shadows.

  I am embarked now on this road, and now there is no choice but to follow it to the end. It is a tale that begins, as it will end, in a graveyard where the bones and the spiders and the worms inhabit the cold earth. I
give each a chance to do what is right. A chance to make reparation.

  I do not believe they will listen.

  I make no plea for exoneration or sympathy. This is not an attempt to soften your attitude to me in the name of pity or sorrow or remorse. They will choose their fates and I do not expect them to choose well.

  I am watching you.

  Chapter 7

  Blackthorn House

  Fishbourne Marshes

  The scream shattered the peace of the workshop.

  Connie dropped the forceps. Another scream and she was on her feet. Her first thought was fear for her father, then she realised the sound was coming from outside. Mary, not Gifford.

  Throwing a sheet of newspaper over the jackdaw, she picked up her skirts and ran. Out through the scullery and into the kitchen garden.

  ‘What on earth is the matter?’

  Mary was hunched over by the washing line, her hands clutched across her chest. The pegs were scattered over the ground and a basket of clean linen was half upturned. The best linen tablecloth, two handkerchiefs with CG embroidered in blue, the tea towel with green trim – all lay in the mud.

  Connie dashed towards her. The girl was still screaming, but her voice was oddly rhythmic, like single, shrill repeated blasts of a whistle. There was no one else there and Connie couldn’t see anything that might have terrified her to such an extent. She put her hands on Mary’s shoulders.

  ‘What on earth is the matter? Are you hurt?’

  The maid stared at her with wide, unseeing eyes, but her mouth fell thankfully silent.

  ‘What happened to send you into such a state? Tell me.’

  Mary gulped at the air, half sobbing.

  ‘You won’t be in any trouble,’ Connie said, feeling the girl’s whole body shaking. ‘Tell me.’

  Connie felt the maid wriggle out of her grasp, heard her take a deep breath. A few moments more, then Mary turned and pointed to the small stream that ran along the northern boundary of the garden. One of the many tributaries leading away into the creek.

  Surely it wasn’t possible she’d been frightened half to death by a water rat? Or one of the thick black eels that lived along the riverbank? Davey Reedman was always out there, fishing with his home-made rod. They were revolting, and there were a great many more of them this spring than usual, but they were harmless.

  ‘Show me,’ she said. After the incident with her father, she had no patience left for melodramatics.

  ‘No . . .’ The girl backed away, shaking her head. ‘I can’t. It . . . Down there.’

  Connie took a handkerchief from her cardigan pocket and held it out. ‘Wipe your eyes. Whatever it is, I’m sure it’s not as bad as you think.’

  *

  At first Connie saw nothing out of the ordinary.

  Then, her eyes fixed on a flash of colour in the middle of the reeds. Cloth. A blue doubled-seamed woollen coat, floating in the brackish water. Visible beneath, a plain green skirt swaying lightly in the current.

  Connie took a deep breath. ‘Go quickly to Slay Lodge,’ she said, thinking of the nearest house. ‘Find Mr Crowther. Inform him . . . Explain that we need—’ She broke off, feeling a wave of nausea rising in her throat. She swallowed hard. ‘In fact, no. Go into the village and fetch Dr Evershed. Tell him what’s happened. Ask him to come. Quick as you can.’

  ‘Is she not . . . dead, then?’

  Connie faltered. She looked with sympathy at the girl. Mary was shaking, her arms wrapped tight around herself. She’d only just turned sixteen. Connie couldn’t be sure she’d even heard her instructions, let alone taken them in.

  ‘Mary,’ she said sharply. ‘Go to Eversfield and ask if the doctor is at home. The white house, you know it?’

  This time, the girl nodded.

  ‘Of course you do. Good girl. Fetch Dr Evershed. He will know what to do.’ She gave her a gentle push. ‘Now.’

  Mary’s eyes held Connie’s gaze for a moment or two, then without another word, she ran, out through the gate and on to the footpath.

  ‘Don’t fall,’ Connie called after her, knowing the wooden bridges were slippery from the endless rain. But the girl was already out of earshot.

  *

  Connie steadied herself, then walked back to the swollen stream. For a moment, she allowed herself to believe it was merely a mistake. That all she had seen – all Mary had seen – was a coat trapped in the reeds, and imagination had done the rest.

  She looked into the water. The body was still there, face down, arms being swayed this way and that in the current, its position leaving no possibility that the woman could be alive. Connie forced herself not to look away. A cloud of chestnut hair, come loose from its pins. The blue coat, bright and waterlogged against the pale stalks of the reedmace.

  Bare hands, bare head.

  Connie stepped back from the water’s edge. She glanced up at her father’s bedroom window. It was shut and the curtains drawn, but surely he could not have failed to hear the commotion? Mary had screamed so very loudly. Already regretting having sent the girl straight away to fetch help, Connie realised she had to talk to Gifford before anyone came. She didn’t want him, in his inebriated state, to say anything foolish or humiliate himself, do something that might be misinterpreted by Dr Evershed or even by Mary. Not that she thought he was involved, of course she didn’t, but his earlier words had been wild and distraught. She would blame herself for not warning him.

  At the same time, Connie couldn’t shake from her mind the image of her father staggering out from the church a week ago, his hands naked and raw. Gifford, the last to leave, tramping down the path through the broken bodies of the songbirds.

  Had he seen the woman in the churchyard too? Had he also seen the woman watching the house?

  Connie ran back inside and upstairs to the first floor.

  ‘Father?’ she said, knocking on his closed door. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, but I must talk to you.’

  There was no sound from inside the room.

  ‘Father?’

  She banged harder and rattled at the handle, unwilling to accept that he could have fallen into so deep a sleep in the short time since they had parted company. To her surprise, the door opened.

  ‘May I come in?’

  Inside, the atmosphere was even worse than she’d anticipated. A sweat of stale beer and tobacco and spent matches washed over her. And something else.

  Despair. The smell of despair.

  ‘Father, before anyone comes, I must talk to you.’

  As Connie’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, she picked out a lumpen shape in the bed. Quickly, she crossed the room and drew the curtains, unlatching the window at the same time to let in some air.

  ‘Wake up,’ she said, her voice now sharp with anxiety.

  She reached out her right hand, hovering it over the bed for an instant, then let it drop on to her father’s shoulders. Soft, not hard. She threw back the covers to see an old pillow and her father’s mothballed frock coat rolled up in the centre of the mattress.

  For a moment, Connie stared at the bed, unable to accept the evidence of her own eyes. Then she ran back to the window and looked out, her sharp gaze scanning the landscape for as far as she could see. A shaming image of him staggering into the Bull’s Head, drunk and unkempt, came into her mind, quickly crushed. He couldn’t have gone on to the footpath without her noticing. She and Mary had been in the back garden the whole time. They would have seen him leave. The only way he could have gone was to the south, or to the open sea, or the fields to the west towards the large estate of Old Park. And why would he?

  Connie took a deep breath. She couldn’t lose her head. There was no question of going to look for him, when Mary could arrive with Dr Evershed at any moment. Besides, where would she start? Another unwanted picture of her father, stumbling into the marsh, his nose and mouth filled with choking black mud. She pushed this image away too. It was broad daylight, the sun was shining. Even in his inebriated state, t
here was no reason why he should fall.

  Trying to persuade herself that it was, in fact, fortunate he would not be here when the doctor came, Connie cast her eyes around the squalid room for clues as to why he had left so abruptly. Was it their conversation that had caused him to bolt? Or had the same secret distress that had led him to take refuge in his bedroom now driven him to leave it?

  Her sense of dread grew stronger. Had Gifford looked out and, in the rising tide, also noticed that same blue coat floating in the water? Or even worse to contemplate – and she felt disloyal for allowing the thought to come into her mind – had he known all along that the body was there?

  With a knot in the pit of her stomach, Connie shook out the bedclothes. She returned the frock coat to the wardrobe, noticing that his daytime coat was not on its usual hanger. The floor was littered with empty beer bottles and broken glass. There was nothing large enough in which to carry all the detritus downstairs, so she pushed it under the bed with the tip of her boot. She would return later to clear it up properly. There was nothing to be done about the smell – the whole room needed a thorough airing – but she emptied the ash and spent matches into a brown paper bag and stacked the dirty saucers ready to take back to the scullery.

  Then, she stopped.

  She put her hand back into the bag and fished out the fragment from the remains of the cigarettes and matches. Plain cream writing paper, of adequate quality, nothing distinctive about it. Black cursive letters.

  Holding the remains between her thumb and forefinger, she blew off the warm ash. She could make out only six letters: d r a c r o. There was no way of knowing if it was a name or part of the address, or what came before or after. There appeared to be a small space between the third and fourth letters, but she couldn’t be sure.