by Jane Healey
I had tried to search during the day, thinking that it would be easier with the natural light from outside, but in the first room I tried, I had glanced out of the window to see Jenkins standing near the back of the house, rifle across his shoulder, the smudge of a fox in his fist, staring right at where I stood, as if he had noticed the curtain was out of place, and I ducked out of sight, nonsensically afraid of—what? being found in one of the spare guest rooms? Still, I took it as a sign that I should restrict my search to the evenings and light my way with my torch.
The barn cats from the farm had been brought into the house for the mice and lolled in awkward spots during the day, staring slit-eyed as we tried not to trip over their fat bellies. They spent their nights on a parallel hunt to mine, and yet they had evolved for such a task, stalking the halls and the rooms of the manor house noiselessly, squeezing their way through hidden passages and holes after their quarry. In the dark of the blackout they would have an advantage over the mice, and myself, with our comparatively poor vision.
I told myself that I had not got where I was by being halfhearted about my endeavors, and that my reputation—my very future—was staked on the welfare of the specimens; and thus it was that I started tentatively searching the second floor, where a handful of servants lodged in the east wing, in rooms that had been refurbished in the last decade and were markedly more spacious than the poky rooms in the west wing that had been barely touched since the turn of the century. I tried to choose days and times when the servants would be busy or asleep, hurrying up and down the stairs and along corridors with my torch in my hand and my heart in my throat, expecting every groan of the floorboards and creak of doors shifting in the creeping drafts to herald my discovery.
It was while I was searching one of these darkened rooms late one afternoon, lying on the hard mattress of the narrow bed while the spiderwebs in the eaves above me trembled, with my head jammed painfully between floor and bed frame, shining my light under the bed, that the door to the room opened with a loud rasp.
“What on earth is going on in here?” the housekeeper demanded as I bashed my head on the bed frame in my hurry to turn my torch off and sit up.
I stared at her, feeling a flush of shame spread down my chest, unwittingly reminded of my mother’s reprimands.
“Miss Cartwright, may I be of assistance?” she asked scathingly.
“I was looking for the hummingbirds, the ones that went missing at the ball,” I admitted, unable to come up with a better excuse.
“But we found those a week ago! Did Dorothy not give them to you?”
“What?” I asked.
“Yes, in one of the guest rooms.”
“But I searched the guest rooms!” She looked at me with something that was almost loathing, but I could not stop myself from asking another question. “Where exactly were they found?”
“Oh, on top of the bedside table in the purple bedroom, in plain sight apparently. I’m sure we’d have found them even sooner, but it is hard for us to manage the whole house with so many maids leaving us,” she said pointedly, almost as if I was somehow responsible for that. Her words, if not her manner, were reasonable, and yet what she was saying could not possibly be right because I had searched that very room top to toe. Or was she right, and I had missed the birds completely?
“If you have concerns about the house,” she continued now, “please come to me; this is the servants’ floor, and neither this nor the other guest rooms are part of the museum.”
You have no right to be here, I heard—and she was right, which was why I was so embarrassed. It was a fault of mine to get obsessive about my work, to be so single-minded as to ignore constraints and niceties—my habit of skipping lunch, the brusque way I had been known to treat people who were preventing me from hurrying back to my desk, my assumption that others were just as focused as I was—but this was something else.
What has this house done to me? I found myself thinking as I returned to my room and stared at the pile of unread books I had brought with me, listening to the tinny sounds of the wireless and laughter from the parlor below.
There was something about Lockwood, about the potential of all its empty rooms. The sheer scale of them made one think that things one had lost, things one desired to find, could be hiding in them, waiting for one to come upon them. The house seemed to encourage wandering, hunting—the long corridor of its first floor, with the wall sconces leading you forward, the tall windows, the neat condition of each room that a dozen servants tended to; the hidden service stairs waiting to be found; the narrow warren of the servants’ floor; and above all the vacuum of life, the absence of people in the rooms that had been so lovingly prepared for them.
Had it been her all along? I thought, when I woke from a nightmare that night, the remnants of my dream—of a woman dressed in white gliding through the corridors of Lockwood after me—lingering and making my heart race. Was the housekeeper playing a trick on me? Had she hidden the hummingbirds, which now sat on my desk ready to be mended and placed back in their home? Or was it me, was I going mad?
Sixteen
T here was a world outside of Lockwood, I reminded myself in the small hours of the night when I woke from nightmares and could not get back to sleep, when the dark shapes of my bedroom pulsed around me and my mouth felt dry and hot, when I felt sorry for myself. I would try to listen to the wireless, thinking that at least I might use the lost hours to keep myself better informed, that my own meager misfortunes wouldn’t stand up against those of others.
But when I fiddled with the dial of the machine trying to find a signal, the hissing sound, the voices in different languages sliding and burbling in and out of range across Europe, made me frightened. As if, were I to turn the dial to the right position, a ghostly voice might speak to me and call me by my name.
I should keep my hands busy, I thought next, distract my mind by putting myself to industry. But I had never been good at knitting, and my shaking fingers were forever dropping stitches, and what use would my hats and scarves be to the sailors who needed them if they were full of holes to let in the icy winds of the North Sea? And when I occupied myself with looking through the attic or the shut-up rooms for goods I could give to the drives or to auctions in aid of war efforts, I would only find myself unnerved, partly because old and faded things, broken things, have a tendency to make one feel melancholic, and partly because, as I scrabbled through boxes and cases and under dust sheets by the bright spotlight of the lantern and torches I brought with me, it didn’t feel like I was searching for iron or fabric or whatever else was needed, but something else, something nebulous and shifting, as if I was almost tempting the house to reveal something terrible to me, as if I wanted to hasten whatever horrors it felt like my dreams were foretelling.
But a brisk walk around the gardens—there could be nothing sinister, nothing frightening about that, surely? Every nurse of mine had espoused the wonders of a walk, as had my grandmother, whose walking stick and sturdy boots were kept polished and ready by the door for her twice-daily constitutions.
“She’s surveying,” my mother used to say when we caught sight of her through the windows, arm resting on the crook of her stick as she stood on the lawn and peered back at the house. “She’s checking that everything she owns is still there, still up to snuff; she’s striding the boundaries of her little kingdom.”
One morning we were on the terrace with tea while my grandmother paraded around the garden with the help of a long-suffering servant at her elbow. “The old servants say that Lockwood was a wreck when her husband arrived, that she married him only for his money,” my mother said. “The east wing had been shut up completely, with birds nesting there and wood rot and damp and all manner of mess, and his money filled it with servants again, a whole host of them to do her ladyship’s bidding. She should have been happy, and perhaps she was, but in later life, she has never been able to get over the fact that your father didn’t marry for money as she had
done—because he met me and my family didn’t have any left,” she said with a laugh. “He married me for love, and saved me.”
Saved you from what? I thought later, when her nerves were at their worst, when she blamed my father for ever bringing her here.
They argued about money sometimes, my parents, about the cost of all her parties, even though I knew that my father relished each one, that there was nothing he liked better than sweeping across the ballroom or a crowded drawing room, greeting all and sundry and showing off Lockwood at its best.
Old houses bleed money, he used to say, especially when we had been visited by the men he had to hire from outside—the craftsmen, the blacksmiths, the plasterers and builders—they’re an endless gold pit. That was why, I surmised—because my father had stopped talking to me of money long ago, fearing perhaps that it would only worry me—he had set up his businesses and built his factories, to raise funds for the upkeep of Lockwood.
“Even walls can crumble, remember that, my dove,” he told me once, and I recalled his words as I circled the house on my walks, pausing in the orchard where the arms of gnarled apple trees had been pinned to the worn brick wall, the mortar wet and crumbling beneath my searching fingers.
If I concentrated on the gardens, on my memories of a childhood running through the grass and down the paths and weaving in between the trees, laughing with the other children as we shone buttercups beneath our chins, made daisy chains, and gathered colorful leaves, then I would not be tempted to look up at Lockwood, to let my eyes run across its walls, its windows, its turrets, and its towers. Because there was another motive to my walks, one that I was trying to ignore—for, having searched the interior of Lockwood from top to toe for a room with blue wallpaper, a room with an old candle chandelier and bare floorboards, a room that came to life only in my nightmares, and having found no such room, I was now searching from the outside, counting the windows and the spaces between and mapping out a ghostly floor plan. As if my tired eyes might be able to peel back brick and wood and plaster and find it there, my lost room, and whatever terrible secrets it held.
Seventeen
Afortnight after the hummingbirds had been returned to me and I had placed them back in their cabinet, hidden behind the wooden board that was a temporary stopgap until a new glass front could be fitted, I was working in one of the museum’s rooms, answering letters on a mahogany writing desk I had moved by a chair, when one of the maids, Joyce—who I had cataloged as a Sclater’s lemur for her startling pale blue eyes—came in to dust and clean.
I had arranged my letters in various piles around me and stood up, offering to leave, but she said, “Don’t leave on my account, miss, I can easily work around you,” and the tone of her voice, her exhausted stare, made me feel that if I did get up and leave, it would be some kind of insult to her work.
So instead I sat there, while the clock ticked loudly and my pen scratched louder still, as Joyce circled the room, sighing when she shifted the vases of dried flowers and petals crinkled to the floor.
I found myself following the careful, practiced movements of her hands as she wiped the bases of the taxidermied animals with a cloth and polish, and then brushed her duster along the curved horns of the lechwe, the cabinet holding the Japanese marten, and the back of the snarling honey badger with its white cap of hair and beady eyes.
When I had entered this room an hour ago I had idly noticed the honey badger there on the mantelpiece in front of the gilt-edged mirror, its tail almost curling around the base of the vase of flowers, but now I remembered that it was usually housed in the billiards room on a side table.
“Did you move that in here?” I asked suddenly. “The badger?”
“Pardon?” Joyce said, looking put out. “This creature? No, of course not, I’m very careful with my cleaning, miss, and besides, I wouldn’t like to pick it up and touch it.” She grimaced. “I’m sure it’s important from a scientific point of view, but you’ll forgive me if I find it a bit horrid.”
I was sure that I had seen it in the billiards room only the previous evening, when I made my final check of the specimens before locking them up, not here in the sitting room. And the large-spotted genet that I had idly walked past in the music room when I opened up this morning, had that not been in the library on top of the squat cabinet by the door previously?
I gathered my papers, thanked Joyce, and left the room, trailing through the museum’s collection, ducking around tails and outstretched wings, circling the hulk of larger mammals, peering along rows of smaller animals, species who would never have a chance to meet in the wild now squashed next to one another on the fine marble mantelpiece of an English lord, their fur dry, their eyes unblinking glass baubles.
The pine marten, with its orange neck and small snout, had it been turned to face the wall or had it just been knocked out of place by a stray elbow or someone dusting?
I had not been here long enough to form a map in my mind of each animal and its rightful location; I must simply be remembering wrong, I thought, reaching out to touch the raised paw of the black bear in the drawing room, an animal that I knew for certain was still in its correct place, for I had gazed at it a week ago while pondering how to politely refuse the request of a researcher asking to study a particular set of bones that were shut up in crates in the long gallery of Lockwood.
It must just be my mind playing tricks on me, or one of the maids cleaning. As long as no other exhibit followed the jaguar’s example and disappeared, there was nothing truly amiss.
Still, that afternoon, I put aside my pressing work and made another inventory of the museum’s collections—finishing well into the evening, my legs sore from kneeling and squatting before each specimen, my back from twisting and bending around cabinets and to look inside chests—but found no other animal besides the jaguar missing.
It was nothing, I told myself as the weeks went by, and I had far more important things to be doing—a mountain of letters to answer and forms to fill out, the Ministry of Works and Buildings to coordinate with, the upkeep of the mounted animals themselves—than checking if the specimens had been moved ever so slightly.
It was nothing, and yet each night in my restless dreams I was forever walking through the museum rooms and seeing the shift of movement from the corners of my eyes, turning around to find the entire space rearranged, or a marauding beast charging after me, and waking with a panicked snort.
It was nothing, and yet I was confining myself inside the house even though the autumn weather had turned the gardens glorious with color; crisp with bright, clear days that were always my favorite for a tramp across London’s parks.
I had forgotten what a small relief it was to take a train home from my place of work, to have no responsibilities beyond my lodging room and never to worry that the museum’s exhibits might be tampered with in the night, trusting the guards and the soaring museum building to keep its inhabitants safe. Living among and above the specimens made it hard to escape from them; I felt them there underneath me at night when I was too nervous to fall back to sleep, a great crowd, a silent hum, so many eyes in the dark waiting. How many more autumns would I spend here, I thought in the loneliest hours before dawn, how many more years of broken sleep and worry?
* * *
One day in early November, desperate for a respite from the house and its walls that seemed to press in ever closer, I caught Lucy leaving by the front door and asked her if she wanted company on her errands.
“I was going to cycle up to the village today,” she said, “get there and back before it rains. Can you ride? I’ll get someone to bring out my mother’s old bicycle.”
“I can ride, but please, you needn’t go to all that fuss, I can join you another day.”
“It’s not a fuss,” she said with a smile, as a second bike was wheeled out to join the first.
“All right then,” I said, feeling warmed by her easy inclusion, and as we rode away from the house, I made a point not to lo
ok back, not to allow myself a moment of worry.
Lucy was wearing a coat with a fur neck and trim that made her look impossibly elegant, her cheeks flushed with health once we had made the rise of the hill out of the valley and puffed our way up to the village.
As we entered the tobacconist and rounded past the huddle of children peering at the jars of sweets, I was still trying to catch my breath, having spent far too much time in the past few months secluded inside. The man behind the counter greeted Lucy warmly, just as others we had passed in the village had done, with varying levels of deference, as she asked them how their families were, their sons who were off to war. It must be strange to have everyone know who you are, I thought, as Lucy’s polite smile became increasingly strained, to know that they were all watching you and would report back their observations, gossip about your family.
“Cigarette?” Lucy offered when we left the shop, lighting one for herself. “I know it’s terribly uncouth to smoke in public,” she added as a matronly woman looked over in disapproval. “My grandmother would have had a fit. Perhaps that’s why I haven’t caught myself a husband yet,” she joked, and I was trying to think of a way to ask why she didn’t have a husband, when I noticed a familiar figure at the end of the street, her pale hair like a beacon.
“Oh god,” I muttered.
“What’s wrong?”
“That woman over there.” I nodded. “Mary, I think her name is, I had a terrible encounter with her the first time I came for a trip to the village. She seems to loathe me and I haven’t the faintest idea what I’ve done. Do you know her?”
