by Jane Healey
My mother always said that ice cream would give me a stomachache, and my grandmother said it would make me fat, but she wasn’t there that dinner either; it was just my father and me, and two crystal bowls of strawberry ice cream being set down before us. He smiled at me and winked, but before either of us could pick up our spoons to take a bite, there was a telephone call and he left the table without a backward glance. I could hear his voice barking down the telephone as I sat alone at the long dinner table, eating small slivers of the ice cream and trying to enjoy it, watching as his serving melted into soup, thinking about my mother all alone in bed, her hair tangled and wild on the pillow, and then my stomach really did start to ache and I put down my spoon, my teeth chattering at the chill.
* * *
I did not know what happened to the hair I cut off after my mother’s death, the armfuls of it. I had been too hazy with grief to notice, and I was trying my best not to think of it, to worry, remembering the nonsense my mother had said long ago. If any creature had stolen it, it was more likely to be the mice, dragging it through a crack in a floorboard and piling it in some hidden hoard, or the pigeons or house martins carrying it off for their nests. Besides, the servants would have surely swept it outside, I thought, picturing each separate curl dancing in the wind, strands floating across the gardens, pieces of me littering the estate, tangled up with the plants and trees, invisible to anyone searching.
Four
I woke the next morning before dawn to the noise of strange crying, fraught and wild, an animal I assumed, yet it seemed to be coming from inside the house. By the time I had my faculties about me, all was quiet again and I had decided that it was a fox, having heard them screeching often in the garden of my old lodging house.
The weight of the specimens lurking below would not allow me to go back to sleep, so I dressed quickly, pinning a braid across my crown because I had not put my hair in rags before bed—even when I did use rags or pins, my flat hair stubbornly refused to hold a curl anyway—and picked up my notebook and pen.
But when I tried to leave my room, the doorknob stuck in my hand. It was one of those old well-polished brass knobs that slipped underneath my palm as I tried to wrench it round. It simply would not budge. A memory came to me then, of the time several girls at school had tried to trick me by holding the schoolroom door closed from the inside, and I had the unbidden thought that there was someone outside this door too, someone with a strong grip who wished to scare me just the same.
I stepped back and puffed out my hot cheeks. If I was stuck in there, I thought, a planner as ever, how long would it take for someone to notice I had not appeared at breakfast, or for them to come and find me? Were David and Helen’s rooms close enough that they would hear my shouts? It would be evening at the latest, I decided. Or perhaps I could see if there was someone at the front of the house and call out of the window to them.
I looked at my door warily.
This was ridiculous. There was no one outside of it, the gears of the lock were just sticking, it had worked perfectly fine yesterday. I pulled my shoulders back and then reached for the doorknob, which suddenly turned like butter in my hand, and I swung the door open, feeling flustered and silly.
As I closed my door I heard that same cry, at least I thought I did, but it might well have been the squeak of the door hinges, or something else. The sconces had yet to be switched on but ambient light leaked up from the grand staircase, and as I walked toward it, I did so slowly, listening carefully.
There! Another sound, coming from the west wing.
When one lives long enough in a house one builds a map in one’s mind and can match the sounds to different locations, but this house was so large, the sounds echoing strangely, and though I had seen plans, it felt very different inside, almost as if it were not the same house at all.
I passed two doors which were shut and as I neared the third, a figure walked out and screamed at the sight of me, dropping the sheets they had been carrying, which fell in a pale hump on the floor.
“Sorry, sorry, I thought I heard a sound,” I said, feeling very foolish indeed.
“You frightened the life out of me,” the servant said quietly, with a shaking voice, for I could now see the white of her collar and apron. She bent to pick up the sheets. “It’s not good to wander about in the dark, miss, not in this house—our nerves are tired enough with all this talk of ghosts.” She tucked her sheets closer to her chest.
“Shall I turn on the hall lights?” I said, after a baffled pause.
“Oh no, Lord Lockwood is particular about lights being off before dawn,” she replied, and then hurried away.
Downstairs, I dodged around another maid who was washing the entrance hall with a mop and bucket, feeling like I was getting in the way of the natural rhythms of the house, and breathed a little easier as I entered my museum rooms.
I had checked the animals and cabinets, the drawers and boxes and other miscellaneous containers—jars, bottles, cases, and stands—against my list the previous afternoon after settling in to my room, and had found everything as it should be, yet out of my worry and desire for everything to go well under my directorship, I decided to check again while much of the house slept. It was only when I had neared the end of my list, when I had just the last few rooms of the lower west wing to walk through, that I found that the jaguar was missing from its designated place in the billiards room.
Since it was still too early to wake Helen and David without appearing as if our move here had turned me into some kind of tyrant supervisor overnight, it was up to me to dash through the other rooms again, admonishing myself for my earlier hurry and slapdash work. I was sure that I would turn the corner and find the low skulking shape of the jaguar gazing at me censoriously with its glass eyes, its patterned coat unmistakable. But as thoroughly as I looked, and looked again—even in the rooms that were not allotted to the museum in case it had been misplaced there by one of the workmen—I could find neither hide nor hair of it, and my heart kicked frantically in my chest.
I stopped in the drawing room and studied its occupants as if they might have the answers. The hulking Sumatran tiger, its rich fur a little faded now from when we had originally received its skin during my first few months at the museum; the rare okapi in its large glass case, which had only been discovered by the Western world this century, and which was sometimes called a forest or zebra giraffe because of the white stripes on its legs that contrasted with its reddish-brown coat; the cabinet of foxes, arranged as a family even though the skins had been gathered from different parts of the west country; the massive polar bear; my black panther; and the gray wolf with its right foreleg that a child had injured by kicking it a few months before, as if the animal had personally aggrieved them.
I knew all the stories of the collection; I knew exactly where these animals would sit in the museum in London. I knew what the faces of visitors would look like when they saw each particular animal, the furrowed brows, the openmouthed delight, the look of dismay or horror, the awe and disappointment. And I knew that I had seen the jaguar placed in the billiards room only yesterday.
A missing jaguar is not like a smashed fossil, I reassured myself as I felt perspiration seep into my blouse. It can still be found; all is not lost.
I had yet to find the housekeeper on my search, so I ducked into the dimly lit servants’ quarters and hesitantly tried to make my way to the kitchen, following the fug of hot linens and the echo of voices. I passed two closed doors and then paused at an unexpected sight: a dark, cramped room, bristling with a thick spray of flowers hanging upside down, so thick you could not see the ceiling or indeed the furthest wall, as if they were growing here in some subterranean forest, the air thick with their hazy perfume. Looking closer I saw that the various blooms were pale, their color bled to whites and pastels, and there was a carpet of dropped petals on the floor like thick flakes of snow or ash.
“The funeral flowers,” a voice said from my elbow,
startling me. “I’m Dorothy,” the middle-aged servant said, introducing herself with sleepy eyes and a keen smile, and then waving at the room. “Young Lady Lockwood wants them dried, preserved, and displayed about the house. Poor thing, she was so heartbroken.” Dorothy clucked her tongue. “Most of them are orchids, exotic flowers for the lord’s exotic wife. His mother certainly wouldn’t have approved, she would have chosen good English flowers, but then, god rest her soul, she was no longer here to make her preferences plain.” Dorothy reached out to pick up a bundle of flowers tied like a wedding bouquet, their colors leached from months in the dark, their long petals like ghostly dried tongues. “I think the house misses her—Heloise, I mean; Lady Lockwood—just as much as she does. It has that feel about it, you know? Woeful and difficult.” I was coming to realize that Dorothy was one of those women who seem to take every person into their intimate confidence, and I had already cataloged her as an African civet for the elongated way she held her neck. “The lights in the hall blew out twice last week and I swear every door seems to be sticking. We’ll need them all rehung soon enough. You’ve met Lord Lockwood,” she said then, leaning closer so that I could smell the bitterness of tea on her breath. “Tell me, does he seem heartbroken to you? Because I just don’t see it. Grief can be a funny thing, but I swear he was back to his tricks only a few days after she was cold in the earth—”
“Dorothy, please refrain from idle chatter with the guests,” a crisp voice admonished. We turned to see the housekeeper (who I had earlier distractedly classified as a Ruppell’s fox for the narrowness of her face), who was weighing a large ring of keys in her hand and looking at the both of us distastefully.
“Excuse me,” I said, remembering my initial task, “one of my specimens has been misplaced and I was wondering if you could help me.”
“The servants’ quarters are a maze, Miss Cartwright, and a busy one at that, with boiling water being ferried along the corridor. Next time, please ask another member of staff to fetch me.”
“Of course,” I said. “It’s just that I was worried about the missing jaguar.”
She smiled thinly. “I shall ask the staff if they have seen it,” she said, and then motioned as if to push me out of the servants’ quarters.
Throughout the morning, I heard her tell the servants as they passed that they should look out for a jaguar—although sometimes she called it a panther instead, or a large cat, in a tone of voice that seemed to imply that not only did she think that I was foolish but the whole feline species was—and the servants mostly responded with bemusement or declarations of innocence.
I wanted to ask Lucy, or the Major, but he was away for the day and his daughter had last been seen walking in the gardens. At one point I left the house by the back door to see if I could spot her returning, but there was another figure walking toward the house instead—the Major’s man, Jenkins, with a shotgun across his shoulder.
“Excuse me,” I said, and then repeated myself when he did not look up even though he was only a few yards away.
“Can I help you?” he replied in his guttural voice, a note of irritation unmistakable.
My eyes were drawn to the two rabbit carcasses he was holding in one fist, their blood dripping to the dry grass below.
“One of my specimens is missing, a jaguar,” I said, looking back to his face.
He stared at me blankly.
“I don’t suppose that you’ve seen it anywhere in the house? It was supposed to be in the billiards room.” I felt like a child who has lost their skipping rope.
“Aye,” he said after another pause.
“You have seen it?” I prompted.
“No, it’s a big house,” he replied shortly, as if I was unaware of that very simple fact. Shifting the gun on his shoulder, he made for the kitchen with his quarry.
* * *
David and Helen helped as best they could once they had woken up and I had told them the news, but three pairs of eyes were no better than one at finding something that simply was not there, and I felt the shortness of breath that came before frustrated tears.
Eventually, because as worried as I was about my own position, I was also by nature quite dutiful, I put a call through to London to check that we had not left it behind, despite being sure that I had seen it with my very eyes yesterday. The harried secretary who answered said they would get back to me in a few days’ time, because they were rushed off their feet—problems with the country house where the ornithology department was lodged, she said. When I set the receiver down I hoped that she would forget to mention the missing jaguar, or, uncharitably, that problems with another department might overshadow my failure.
“You mustn’t fret,” Helen told me kindly as we took our lunch in the dining room. Her small face and red hair, her neat mannerisms, had always put me in mind of a nervous red squirrel. Being one of the only other women employed by the museum, it was supposed by all that she and I should be good friends—but Helen herself seemed mostly startled when I tried to start conversations with her, as well she might, for I have never had the gift of polite everyday conversation.
“I imagine all the departments are the same,” Helen continued. “That there have been half a dozen things missing. We’re not a military outfit; we can only do our best and that is all.”
“Yes, but a jaguar,” I said. “A mounted animal about as long as a person. How on earth can that simply go missing? It’s not a loose button or a sheaf of papers.”
“I don’t know, but it has,” Helen said, and then reached a hand out as if she was thinking of patting me on the arm, before retracting it—to the relief of both of us, I think.
“It’s a funny thing,” David said, as he dabbed at his mouth with a napkin. David (a brown bear, or perhaps a walrus) was the taxidermy specialist among the three of us, and although we were all competent enough to do repairs if need be, he had the lightest touch despite his large hands and meaty fingers. “Lord Lockwood might know more about where it is, or his daughter.”
Yes, I thought, but if it is not in any of the rooms of the house then how can they know any more than we do? But I did not say this, because they were only trying to console me.
Added to our missing feline, the other problem that the museum’s temporary lodgings had thrown up was the condition of our collection, for we were quite literally seeing the animals in a new light. In the museum, they were displayed in dusty cabinets with painted backdrops, but many of the specimens had been liberated for the evacuation because they were easier and smaller to transport and rehome individually than in their monstrously heavy glass cases. Now the myriad windows and lamps of Lockwood Manor had revealed faults and shabbiness, even in the dim long gallery—places where fur had worn away, thread or glue had loosened, eyes become scratched or dull, cabinets bashed or rotten.
It was as if, I thought, pausing at the end of the gallery, the animals had already been waiting here for some time, neglected and alone, mute and fading; as if the war had already raged for years outside these walls and they, and the sparse human occupants of Lockwood Manor, were the only thing that remained of the living world. I could not suppress a small shiver at the thought.
Five
That afternoon, I tried to put the missing jaguar at the back of my mind and busied myself with making a very long list of repairs needed, as if the length and thoroughness of the list might prove my competency. Then I met with the six retired men from the Major’s old regiment who would be serving as the museum’s night guards on alternating nights, and who seemed a bit bemused by my forcefulness in emphasizing how important the collection was and how much care should be taken guarding it, with one of them using the phrase “how they do things in London,” as if to suggest that the home counties were a locale free of all crime, unlike the horrors of the Big Smoke—a notion I was not feeling too charitable about after the loss of one of our animals.
Later, as I worked at my desk under the watchful glass eyes of the dik-dik perched on
the shelf above me, I heard several of the servants congregate by the back door.
“Goodness me, have you seen the strange beasts they’ve brought here?” one was saying, her voice muffled as if she had put a hairpin between her teeth while she fixed a curl.
“However odd they are, I’ll take them over evacuees. At least stuffed animals don’t need fresh linen and feeding three times a day.”
“It gives me the willies, the way the eyes glint at you when you walk in a room,” the first said with a huff, as I set my pen down. I was used to all manner of reactions to the museum’s animals, some startling in their vehemence.
“I wonder what Lockwood’s ghost will make of the new guests,” the second woman—whose voice I now recognized as Dorothy’s—mused, her tone conspiratorial.
“Oh, Dorothy, I wish you’d shut up with all that, really.”
“You’re saying you’ve never seen anything funny working here, never walked out of a room and seen a figure gliding down the corridor out of sight?”
“All old houses have ghosts,” a third woman said, tsking, “but they’re harmless.”
“Like the ghost that her late ladyship swore she saw? The woman in white she thought was out to get her?” Dorothy asked.
“I don’t blame a ghost for her accident,” the other woman replied.
“Ah, but you do blame someone . . .” Dorothy said, before the clinking of keys heralded the housekeeper’s arrival and the servants quickly dispersed.
That night, after an interminably long day, I tried to wash my tiredness from my face, still not used to the particular distortion of the mirror in my bedroom, nor the snaking twists of the densely patterned red wallpaper behind me. The window of my room was larger than that of any room in a lodging house, but the red of the wallpaper, the dark walnut of the desk and chair, the dizzying oriental carpet, and the high bed with its thick mattress, made the room feel heavy and sepulchral.
