The Animals at Lockwood Manor

by Jane Healey

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2020 by Jane Healey

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Healey, Jane, 1986– author.

  Title: The animals at Lockwood Manor / Jane Healey.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019033904 (print) | LCCN 2019033905 (ebook) | ISBN 9780358106401 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780358309352 | ISBN 9780358309437 | ISBN 9780358105251 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6108.E118 A84 2020 (print) | LCC PR6108.E118 (ebook) | DDC 823/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019033904

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019033905

  Cover design by Martha Kennedy

  Cover art: (birds) Bibliothèque Municipale, De Agostini Picture Library/ G. Dagli Orti / Bridgeman Images; (wallpaper) maikid / Getty Images

  Author photograph © Alicia Clarke

  v1.0220

  Hummingbird illustrations by F. L. Fuller originally drawn for The Boys’ Own Paper. © Look and Learn / Bridgeman Images.

  She herself is a haunted house.

  —angela carter,

  “the lady of the house of love”

  Prologue

  Large houses are difficult to keep an eye on, to control, my mother used to tell me, looking fraught and harried, before bustling out of the room to find the housekeeper or the butler or the tweeny maid to demand a full reckoning of what was happening in the far corners of the house. Lockwood Manor had four floors, six sets of stairs, and ninety-two rooms, and she wanted to know what was happening in each of them, at all times.

  It was the not knowing that seemed to concern her most, but she had a long list of specific fears too: mold that squatted behind large pieces of furniture; rotten window frames that let in an unwholesome breeze; mice that had gnawed a home in a sofa; loose floorboards whose nails had pricked their way free in the heat or the cold; wires that sparked and spat; birds that had nested in a wardrobe in some forgotten servant’s room, scratching the walls with their claws; damp that had bled through a gap in the roof tiling; a carpet that was being feasted upon by hungry moths; pipes that rattled their way to bursting; and a silt flood that slithered ever closer to the basement.

  For my grandmother, who had grown up in the time when every task had a servant assigned to it, when calling for tea necessitated the maneuvering of a veritable regiment, it was the servants she suspected. They were lazy, slapdash in their work, prone to stealing; they spent their time idling and daydreaming and making mischief. She wore a vast selection of pale gloves, neatly pressed by her own personal maid, ever ready to sweep a pointed finger along a mantelpiece or a shelf, and if she found the merest whisper of dust she would summon the housekeeper. Because my grandmother was also of an age where the lady of the house did not deign to speak to any servants but the housekeeper, the poor woman was forever being called away from her tasks to rush through the back corridors of the house and appear in front of Lady Lockwood as if from the ether.

  There was thus relief felt among the servants when my mother and grandmother died a few months back in a single awful motorcar accident, and I did not begrudge them it; I knew what harsh taskmasters these two women had been, and besides, I had seen the servants weep dearly at their funeral, so I knew they also cared. I swore that I would not share my relatives’ habit of making impossible demands on the servants, and yet my mother and grandmother’s role—that of keeping an eye on the house, that of keeping it in mind—was one that I reluctantly took on my own shoulders, like the fur coats I was also left; scratchy, heavy things that bristled with the claws and teeth of the beasts that had been skinned to make them, and swamped my form completely.

  Ever since I was a young child, I had suffered from attacks of nerves and a wild imagination that made sleep hard to come by. It was my favorite governess, the one who used to sing lullabies to me when I was a few years too old for them, who taught me a way of tricking my mind into sleep: I should picture myself walking through Lockwood Manor, she said, gliding through the rooms one by one, and count them as if I was counting sheep—and before I could finish even one floor, I would be asleep. It was a method that worked just as she said, although it did not succeed in removing the monstrous nightmares I suffered once I had fallen asleep—dreams of a beast hunting me and, sometimes, of a desperate search through the corridors of my home for a blue room in which I knew some horrible creature was trapped and scratching at the walls, a search which baffled me when I woke up, knowing that there was no such room at Lockwood.

  But after my mother and grandmother passed away, it no longer felt like a simple counting game, a trick to help my mind ease into sleep; it took on a new and frantic urgency. I could not sleep until my mind had completed a full tour of the house, and if I made a mistake—if I forgot the buttery, or the bathroom on the second floor with its sink ripped out, or the housekeeper’s bedroom with the narrow eaves—then everything was ruined and I was compelled to start again from the very beginning, my heart rabbiting in my chest, my back prickling with sweat.

  Sometimes, though it was mad to think so, I felt that if I did not concentrate, if I did not count all the rooms and hold them all in my mind, everything that my mother had feared would occur, and more; that the very edges of the house would spin apart, that the walls would crack and crumble, that something truly terrible, something I could not even fathom, would happen.

  Lockwood had too many empty rooms. They sat there, hushed and gaping, waiting for my mind to fill them with horrors—specters and shadows and strange creeping creatures. And sometimes what was already there was frightening enough: empty chairs; the hulk of a hollow wardrobe; a painting that slid off the wall of its own accord and shattered on the floor; the billowing of a curtain in a stray gust of wind; a lightbulb that flickered like a message from the beyond. Empty rooms hold the possibility of people lurking inside them—truants, intruders, spirits. An
d when there is enough space for one’s mind to wander, one can imagine that loved ones are not dead, but only waiting in a room out of the way, a room you forgot you had, and the urge to search for them, to haunt the corridors and the rooms of your house until you find them, becomes overwhelming.

  But there was respite on the horizon, because the house would not be empty for long, and myself and my father and the servants—not that we had many by this stage, for we seemed to find them hard to keep—would soon have company. For it was August, and trucks were on their way from London, evacuees from the coming war looking for shelter within the walls of Lockwood. A population feathered, furred, beaked, hooved, ruffed, clawed, and taloned would soon lodge here, and when the rooms were occupied again, when they had a purpose, and were full to bursting, my mind would settle again, and the house would settle again. No more empty, echoing rooms; no more bad nerves; no more ghosts. I was sure of it.

  One

  The mammals were being evacuated. The foxes went first, in their cabinet with dust underneath so thick it was almost fur; next the jaguar with his toothy snarl; the collection of stouts, their bodies lovingly twisted into rictus shapes by the original taxidermist; the platypus in his box, who was first believed a hoax because of the strangeness of his features; the mastodon skull with the nasal hollow that once caused it to be mistaken for the Cyclops; and then the inky black panther, the melanistic Javan leopard, that had been my favorite since I first saw him as a child visiting the museum. I had taken great care tying him up in sacking and rope so that he would not be disturbed on the trip north, stroked his broad nose as if to reassure us both.

  The animals and the fossils, the specimens of this fine natural history museum, were being dispersed across the country, each department bound for a different location, to save them from the threat of German bombs in London. The mammals were being evacuated to Lockwood Manor and I was accompanying them as assistant keeper, a position I had reached after a rapid series of promotions due to two senior male members of staff enlisting. I would be in charge there, the de facto director of my own small museum.

  It was a position I might have thought forever beyond me only a year ago, when I had made one of those stupid human mistakes that threatens to undo everything you have ever worked toward in one fell swoop. I had been in one of the workrooms under the museum galleries late one afternoon, copying some faded labels for a collection of rodents that had been amassed during the journeys of an eminent evolutionary theorist and which thus had historical as well as scientific importance. I also had the only fossil of an extinct horse species out next to them, ready to clean after I had finished the labels. I had skipped lunch that day, but then that was not out of the ordinary—I was often so fixated by my work that I forgot to eat the sandwiches I brought with me—and I was wearing an older, tired pair of shoes because my usual pair was being reheeled.

  I had slipped as I returned from retrieving more ink, my leg buckling and my shoe skidding on a wooden floor polished by many years of footsteps, and I had knocked both the fossil and the two trays of rodents onto the floor and bashed my forehead on the table edge. But I cared not a jot for any injury I might have sustained as I stared in utter horror at the mess of specimens and labels—I had unpinned the latter from the box so that I could look more closely at them, and now that they were separated from their specimens, the collection had been rendered almost useless. And then there was the shattered fossil. The other occupant of the room, a fellow mammal worker named John Vaughan who was the very last person I would wish as an audience for such an embarrassment because he was forever fond of making snide comments with prurient undertones about my being female, watched with a dark kind of smirk on his face.

  What made my accident worse, as I was reminded during my interview the next day—and the particular tone used by Dr. Farthing, the head of the department, when he said accident made it seem anything but—was that an American visitor was due to arrive any day to study the very fossil I had broken, a scientist who was as rich as those gentlemanly Victorian scientists of old and who the museum had been hoping to woo as a donor.

  I had escaped with a reprimand that day—it would have been hard to fire me from my position since the museum was part of the civil service—but despite my exemplary work on every occasion bar that one disastrous afternoon, I knew that any slim chance of promotion had vanished. It was only the arrival of the war, the enlistment of Dr. Farthing, and the anticipated conscription of the majority of the male members of staff (added to the fact that my wages as a woman were lower than a man’s, and the civil service was keener than ever at penny-pinching) that found me in the position of assistant keeper of the evacuated collection. But as Mr. Vaughan had personally reminded me, before he left to join the navy as his forebears had done during the last war, once this war was over things would be very different: They’ll have you back with the volunteers in no time, just you wait were his exact words, by which he meant, back with the other women. There were only a handful of women on the permanent staff, and myself and Helen Winters were the only two who were not junior members. The rest of the women who worked for the museum—who prepared and assisted the mounting of specimens, who cataloged and copied and studied, who traveled and collected and made countless new small discoveries—were either “unofficial workers” paid a measly one shilling an hour, or unpaid volunteers.

  My directorship of the collection that was to be housed at Lockwood Manor was thus not only the chance of a lifetime as a member of my sex, but also a vital opportunity to prove myself for what came after the war, when all the men came flooding back to their old positions.

  Plans for the evacuation of the mammal collection had been in place from the first murmurs of war, even before I had joined the museum years ago, and we had spent weeks packing everything up for the workmen to carry into the trucks. But the museum was too large to evacuate in its entirety, and we had had to decide which animals, dried plants, rocks, birds, and insects would be transported and which would be left to their fate. We played god all the time at the museum; we named and classified and put the natural world into an order of our own making—family, species, genus—and now we would decide which of our specimens were precious enough to be saved.

  Although the collection at Lockwood Manor was only supposed to include mammals, other creatures soon snuck their way into the plans and onto the trucks. The telephone rang with calls from geologists and ornithologists already evacuated: Could we please take the cabinet in room 204, could we fit in the box of nests from the Americas and the collection of ostrich eggs, the chunk of meteorite that was forgotten in the move, or the parrot stuffed by the venerable (and generous) Lady So-and-So? In the final week, items were still being found in corridors and misplaced rooms, their species hastily penned in handwritten addenda to the neatly typed lists we had previously prepared. And then at the last minute we had realized that we had one more truck to fill, and thus the workers carried out in a hurried rush specimens from the entrance hall that were not at all rare—the foxes, weasels, two tigers, a polar bear, a wolf, a lion, and even a plain brown rat.

  * * *

  How quickly the rooms emptied of their inhabitants. I had thought that the sight of their contents being whisked out of the museum would make me frightened of things to come, that the empty rooms would look like tombs ransacked by opportunist robbers, but truthfully I was so thankful to be heading away with the animals, to be employed still with the museum and be part of the only happy family I had ever known, that I only felt excited at the change.

  No one outside the museum knew that I was going away, for I did not have anyone to tell—apart from my landlady at the boarding house, who did not care where I was off to, only that she needed to find someone to replace my rent.

  I had a family once. My parents adopted me when I was very young and they were the only parents I had known. They were relatively wealthy, and old; their three sons had been killed in the Boer War and I was brought in as a kind
of replacement, I suppose. But I was a disappointment to them; a disappointment to my mother.

  After all I’ve done for her, she would say to her closer friends over tea or on the telephone. Such a sulky child, her head always in a book, an ungrateful child.

  How was a child meant to be, how was a mother? These were not questions I thought of until much later, and they still seem odd thoughts to ponder. My mother was strict with me, unhappy with me, and I received many punishments during my childhood. But surely children need to be punished to improve themselves, to learn how to behave, especially orphans like I was? We do not know anything about your true parents, one nurse had told me (for, like other children of the well-to-do, I was looked after by various nurses; some kind, some not), so we must take great care to remove any possible influence. That was the same nurse who used to make me sleep on the floor because my bed was, in her opinion, far too soft, who did not believe that children needed luncheon as it would make them too indulgent as adults, who made me write out Bible verses until my hand cramped.

  The nurses who looked after me did so in separate rooms of the house, and thus it seemed that my mother occasionally forgot that I was there—although perhaps she did not, perhaps that is just a child’s fairy-tale thought, for how could you forget you had adopted a daughter?

  Once, when my nurse was sick, my mother had forgotten that I needed meals and shouted at me when I stole a couple of apples after feeling dizzy with hunger. When she did notice me, she often said that my face was glum and peaky and ugly—when in fact it was only a pale face that has never smiled very easily—and she beat me on the legs with the fire poker for it. She compared me often to her natural sons. I could have left you there, I didn’t have to adopt you, she would say, and I could hear it in my mind even decades later, so buck up.

  I remembered a telephone call from my mother when I was at Oxford studying zoology, and how excited she was at first. I hear that Professor Lyle has taken a particular interest in you, she said. Yes, he’s been encouraging my work on mammalian locomotion, I replied innocently. Oh, you stupid girl, she had said after a gaping silence. When your father and I allowed you to remain at university it was with the understanding that you at least find yourself a husband, however meager his standing might be. I shall hear nothing more of this nonsense. Call me when you are engaged, she had said, then hung up the telephone.