by Jane Healey
When I settled down to sleep, hand reaching to turn off my lamp, I noticed a trail of pale petals, like the dregs of confetti left after a parade, leading from my door. I must have tracked them into my room, I thought, and when the room plunged into darkness I strained my eyes to see them there, ghostly white in the gloom.
* * *
The next morning, when I heard Lucy’s voice in the hall speaking to the housekeeper, I came out of my office to meet her.
“I heard that we’ve lost your jaguar,” she said to me, frowning worriedly. I was pleased that she had said “we,” because I had felt as if the housekeeper in particular judged the museum as an unwelcome, nuisance guest.
“Yes, it’s a baffling thing,” I said, and then the Major strode past. “Lord Lockwood—” I began.
“Yes, I’ve heard already,” he said, cutting me off. “It’s a damned shame you’ve lost an animal. A big cat, was it? Still, I’m sure it will turn up soon, there’s a lot of nooks and crannies in a house like this, you’ll get used to it in time.”
“The museum in London is a veritable warren,” I said pointedly, and the corner of his mouth tightened.
He smiled thinly. “Well, best get on, I imagine we both have lots of work to do now. Miss Cartwright,” he said, and nodded curtly before walking away.
“Lucy, how many servants does Lockwood have?” I said, partly as something to say—I had never been much good at small talk—and partly because a maid swept a broom past the door, and I realized that the Major had given us a thorough accounting of the house and its rooms before the museum arrived, but not the servants, as if they were merely static furniture.
Lucy tilted her head and considered my question. “Every time I count them recently, there seems to be one less with so many leaving us; we’ve always had difficulty keeping servants—rumors of ghosts, you know—but the war has made it worse, with lots of men enlisting, and women signing up for other war work. There’s the housekeeper, of course; then my father’s old batman, but he’s ill at home at the moment and not expected to return; there’s the cook; my lady maid; the scullery maid; the kitchen maid; the new laundress; four, no, three housemaids now, one girl has just joined up; and Paul, who’s just started as a footman. And there’s the tweeny as well, and Jenkins, although he’s my father’s man rather than a servant technically . . . I’m sure I’m missing people out.”
“Goodness, a full house,” I said, thinking that I had surely only seen three or four of them—or perhaps I had not looked close enough, perhaps my eye had glided over them just as the Major had in his accounting of the house. If the missing specimen had been small enough to carry, and not a feline as large as a man, I might have been worried that the culprit could have been a servant. Instead, I wondered which of them had been the figure standing at the other end of the corridor my first day here.
“Cook said you didn’t have breakfast,” Lucy said then. “Shall we have some tea and scones?”
“That would be lovely,” I said, feeling my shoulders relax as she led me out onto the terrace into the September sun.
“How are you settling in, aside from the dreadful business with the jaguar?” she asked after we were seated, with tea in front of us in the finest of china, a bowl of sugar cubes with polished tongs to use, and a spread of savory scones and biscuits. She was wearing a summer dress of a green floral print with delicate ruffles around the neck, and in the outside light I feared that my plain blouse and workable trousers looked even more drab in comparison.
“Oh, very well. It’s certainly very comfortable here,” I said, and she smiled above the rim of her cup and then set it down.
“You know where my room is if you need anything, don’t you? One floor up from you and right to the end of the west wing in the turret,” she said. “I have to admit it’s lovely to have the house busy again after the quiet of the last few months,” she added a little haltingly, nudging a cube of sugar with one of the silver tongs before it fell in a clatter and she apologized.
“The museum and I are so terribly sorry about your mother and grandmother,” I told her, thinking that it was impolite to mention her loss so baldly, but doing it anyway because I felt I would rather risk overfamiliarity than say nothing about the pain she must be suffering.
“Thank you. Thank you, Hetty,” she said. I thought about taking her hand but I worried that I would knock over some of the delicate crockery. “I feel I’m used to it now,” she said, touching trembling fingers to her collarbone. “It’s only very rarely that I’ll think of calling for my mother or believe that my grandmother will be sitting there at breakfast time—but I still feel so very sad. I confess that the war starting so soon after, and the blackout curtains on every window, as if the house has been shut up in mourning with us inside of it, hasn’t helped matters, and the doctor still has me on tonics to sleep.” I could see her chin trembling and I leaned awkwardly around the table to touch her arm. She held her hand on top of mine for a moment and closed her eyes.
I had never been the sort of person who was first to offer sympathy, a handkerchief, a listening ear, to an acquaintance who looked distressed, but something about Lucy made me wish to be. I wanted to help her; I wanted to make her smile.
She squeezed my fingers and then reached for her teacup again. “I went quite mad when we got the call from the police, quite mad. Grief does strange things to one, makes one believe all sorts of things.” She seemed to consider saying more, but then smiled a little too brightly. “What about you?” she asked eagerly. “Do you have a large family?”
“No, I don’t. Just my mother now, but I’m adopted,” I admitted, as I had not admitted even to many of the people I knew at the museum. There was something raw about Lucy that made me want to share my own hidden hurts, if only so that we were on the same footing and it did not feel like I was simply a voyeur. “And our relationship has always been—strained. I view the museum and its animals, all its workers, as my family.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry to hear about your relationship with your mother. But I love the way you speak of the museum,” she said. “And to be in charge of this collection at your age, it’s marvelous. I wonder”—she broke a biscuit in half and then, shrugging, decided to take both halves anyway—“do you have a favorite piece?”
“I have several favorites. I can show you them, if you want?” I offered, surprising myself, since I was never the type who enjoyed giving tours, preferring to ensconce myself at my desk and get on with my work.
“Would you mind awfully? I’m not stopping you from doing something important?”
“No, there’s so much to do that an hour or so won’t make a difference. Besides, it’ll be nice to show someone what we do have, rather than racing around the rooms looking for what we don’t,” I said, as if I could convince myself as well as her that the matter of the missing jaguar might be easily brushed off.
“Wonderful. Then lead the way,” she said, holding up the biscuit halves, “I have sustenance for our safari.”
I smiled, already utterly charmed by her.
We started in the long gallery, working from the south to the north, and as I guided her around, naming and classifying specimens, I felt my usual calm return: everything was in its appropriate place, fixed and knowable, the only mysteries here were of the intellectual sort—the evolution of a particular foot or the mating habits of a reclusive species.
I showed Lucy the drawers containing delicate bat skeletons, the two-headed lamb fetus in its spirit jar, the armadillo skins, and the baby Brazilian tapir, and I eagerly studied her reactions to each new sight. I showed her the wide Victorian hummingbird case set in one of the furthest rooms in the long gallery, which from a distance seemed to hold a small shrub, before you got closer and realized that every cluster of leaves on the bare branches was in fact a single hummingbird, faded by time, and that the case held hundreds of them, so many that it became something horrifying and cruel. I explained how our methods of collecting and curating
had changed since the Victorian era and its voracious love of excess; and she seemed as unsettled as I still was by the tableau. Then I led her back to the main house to see the lynx, the polar bear, and the Bengal tiger, and finally the black panther in the drawing room.
“I am a cat lover myself, so I approve,” she said. “It’s funny that we used to have its twin.” Her hand was hovering over the soft fur of his head.
“You can touch it if you like, gently,” I said, without telling her that this was a very rare offer for me to make.
She stroked toward his nose with the tips of her fingers; the pink of her nail varnish standing out against the midnight black of his fur.
“What did you mean, its twin?” I asked.
“My father owned a panther just like this one; he used to keep it in his office. I spent many hours as a child sneaking in there and watching for the pattern on its fur to appear when the sunlight was strong enough. I even tried to ride it once until he found me and spanked me for it. It got eaten up by moths, I think, and had to go.”
“Does he have other taxidermy in his office?”
“He did have a stag and a wolf but they aren’t there anymore. I don’t really remember what became of them, but I assume they came to the same fate.”
“Fur is hard to keep well,” I said.
“I know.” She nodded. “The women in my family have had a dreadful time keeping our furs from harm. I have inherited quite the collection.” She stroked a finger across the panther’s ear. “My father used to love coming back from a trip into London with a fur for my mother, or for me when I was old enough—ones to wear, I mean, not to stuff.” She laughed lightly. “Some of them are a little too extravagant, the ones with all the claws attached and the clasps made out of jaws, you know, but others are quite gorgeous, soft and so very warm, although I don’t have the opportunity to get much use out of them, living here.” She tapped the hardened nose of the panther.
“My dove,” the voice of the Major called from another room.
“Sorry,” Lucy said, standing up and brushing her hands on her dress. “I should see what he needs.” She stopped with her hand on the frame of the door. “Thank you for joining me for tea and giving me such a wonderful tour,” she said, smiling at me.
“It was my pleasure,” I replied. “I should like to do it again some time; there is still lots you have yet to see.”
“I should like that very much,” she said ardently.
I had the same feeling I’d had at our first meeting, that she was keen for us to be friends but seemed to fear I might reject her offer of friendship, when she need not have worried at all, for I was surely the more eager party. I could not imagine that a woman like Lucy—who was both kind and glamorous—could want for friends. Nor that, if she got to know me, she would continue to want me for a friend, with all my awkwardness and shy conversation.
She gave a wave, and as she left to meet with her father, she used the same hand to gingerly press her short curls back into place on the side of her head. I turned back to the panther. There was a small, darker, patch of fur where she had brushed against the direction of the hair. I smoothed it back and was oddly sad to remove the only evidence of our time spent together.
Six
The rooms were full again, crowded with all manner of beasts and wonders, with creatures gathered from every land. The museum workers strode up and down the corridors with clipboards held in their industrious hands and with eager eyes, checking lists and putting everything into order. I felt more settled during their working hours, soothed by the hum of new noise, by the weight of the new inhabitants of Lockwood.
But at night, my nightmares had returned, and they took the same form every time.
I would find myself standing in one of the rooms of Lockwood, a different room each time, with no memory of how I had got there. I would be searching for something, something small—a young hare, a leveret, orphaned and shivering, that had been brought inside for safety—but it was nowhere to be seen.
I knew where this dream had come from but not why it was repeated each night, why I felt so deathly afraid.
When I was a child, perhaps six years old, I had found an abandoned leveret in the gardens—though later, when I knew more about animals, I wondered if it had really been abandoned, and not just waiting in the long grass for its mother to return from foraging—and brought it inside in a cardboard box, declaring that I would care for it and raise it.
My mother, who looked at the world through kinder eyes back then and was indulgent of my childhood games, swiftly fetched a plate of carrots to feed it and a bunch of straw from the farm to help line the drawer she pulled out of my chest, and cooed over it with me as I stroked my fingertip over its back and tried to comfort it.
“What shall we call it?” she asked, chin resting on the heel of her palm, legs crossed in the air behind her.
I didn’t remember if I had answered her, or if I had ever named it, but I remembered my father arriving at the nursery and how I had chattered to him excitedly about my new pet before he had sighed and said, “It’s not worth it, darling, it won’t survive for long inside the house. Your mother is cruel to get you so excited.”
“I am the one who is cruel?” my mother had replied with a strange laugh. “And why shouldn’t it survive, if we’re careful?”
She set out to prove him wrong and slept on the couch in my nursery so that she could help tend to the leveret at all hours, gathered all sorts of foliage from the gardens, and quizzed the gardeners and the farmer and the cook for advice, spending hours next to me watching it, trying to play with it as we let it loose in the room and it cautiously hopped about.
When I thought of that week now, I felt such a tenderness toward her, the lady of the manor marshalling all her resources to keep an orphaned animal alive, at how dedicated she was at trying to make my wishes come true. But my memories were also colored by knowing that she failed, that my father was right.
The leveret had been too young to be parted from its mother and Lockwood Manor was no home for a wild animal. One morning, we had woken to find it listless and poorly, and not even my returning it to the patch of grass where I had found it—in some childish repentance for bringing it inside, for trapping it within the walls of our house—could save it.
Now, years later, I was searching for the same leveret in my dreams, my chest tight with panic as I raced down the corridors of my home, darting in and out of every doorway, desperately following the quiet scrabble of claws, the soft hush of fur brushing against a doorway, the thump of feet on hardwood floors. But Lockwood was a maze, even more so when I was asleep, and each night, as I continued my panicked search, I became convinced that the leveret had returned to one of the rooms I had already searched, that something terrible was happening to it there, behind me, where I could not see, or far at the corner of the house, in the shadows.
And in the very worst of these dreams, I would run after it and find myself in a strange room, with blue wallpaper crawling with horrible shapes, with a cobwebbed chandelier swaying violently as if the whole house was shaking apart, but when I tried to leave and scrabbled at the door, it was locked, and the leveret was gone, and terrible eyes were staring out at me from the fireplace and I was trapped there, alone with some horrible creature—
And then I would wake with a cry caught in my throat, hands grasping for a doorknob, for the soft silk of the leveret or its warm, trembling sides, finding only the cold, still sheen of my bedclothes in their place, and weep.
The next day, I would find myself leaving doors ajar, nervously double-checking their handles and locks, or scurrying outside to spend my morning under the open sky with the grounds and the hills unfolding before me. Later, when I returned inside, I would see a dropped scarf that I supposed was the leveret and leap toward it excitedly before I remembered that there was no leveret, or pass a book on a table in the parlor and think it an animal crouching and waiting for me.
It was such
a silly nonsense dream to cry over, to let affect me, and yet the notion that I should be searching for something in the house, that there was something that I was not paying attention to, something that I could not see, could not be swept away like the grains of sleep from my eyes. It was only that the museum had just arrived, I told myself. Once its occupation had become more commonplace, my nerves would soothe, and I might begin to dream of other things again. The blue room I found myself trapped inside did not exist, after all, and that hare that I had rescued as a child was long gone, there was nothing I could do to save it now, nor any way I could turn back the clock to happier times when my mother had still been here with me.
Seven
Each morning at Lockwood, I would wake from strange nightmares that set me on edge for the rest of the day. In London, my usual nightmares were of a logical fashion—that I had dropped a specimen and it had shattered on the floor; that the mount I had made for a new specimen had unfathomably collapsed and the animal had sagged pitifully like a too-large coat; that I had tripped on the stairs and a cloud of fluttering labels had spilled out into the air while the director of the mammal collection stood waiting for me at the bottom, hands on hips, and I knew that the next words out of his mouth would be the termination of my employment—but the ones I experienced at Lockwood were not. In my dreams, there was a beast hunting me through the corridors on padded feet as I fled, dressing gown flapping behind me like the useless wings of a flightless bird. The beast was larger than a hound, too large for any mammal without hooves native to this island, and sometimes it was not a beast at all, but a woman with the claws of an animal and crazed eyes smeared with soot, who crawled out of a mirror dressed in white and trailed pale petals in her wake.
