The Animals at Lockwood Manor

by Jane Healey

  “If you’re sure,” she said.

  “I am.”

  She squeezed my hand again and then took hers back. “You didn’t tell me about the intruder because you didn’t want to worry me, you didn’t want me to have another funny turn, did you?” she said, without blame.

  I nodded, although there was another reason of course: I had not wanted her to think that I was mad, to have her judge me just like the rest of the house had. It had not been entirely altruistic, I thought, with a small measure of shame.

  “Thank you for trying to protect me, it’s sweet of you, but you don’t need to do that. The museum is important and I’m not a fragile flower, not completely anyway,” she said with a dry little laugh. “Promise me you’ll tell me if something like this happens again, if you’re concerned about something.”

  “I promise,” I said, meaning it. It had been a long time since I had promised someone something. I had the silly thought that we might swear on our pinkie fingers now, or shake on it, but she reached for her water glass instead.

  “I’ll leave you now, and see you down at breakfast,” I said, stepping back from the bed. “Oh”—I suddenly remembered—“I hid your keys in a drawer last night, in case you went for another walk.”

  “Which one?” she asked, swinging her legs to the side of the bed and standing up.

  I motioned toward the chest of drawers and then tugged the right one open, reaching inside the pile of what I now saw were silk camisoles and knickers to pull the keys to the surface. She moved to stand beside me and we both stared at the keys, and the underthings, and suddenly I felt terribly embarrassed, as if I had chosen this drawer specifically, even though I had not.

  “Good,” she said, and I turned away without looking at her, saying a cheery goodbye and closing the door of her room behind me.

  Had there been an inflection on that word, that good, or was I just imagining things? I paused and then smoothed my hands down my blouse and headed for breakfast.

  Twenty-One

  If there was a spirit in this house, it was me; if there was a haunting, it was my own.

  Am I awake? I murmured to my reflection the morning after Hetty had told me of my nightly wandering, watching the slow way my mouth moved, the swallow of my throat.

  Am I dreaming? I thought as I sat on the lip of the bath in my tower bathroom, staring down at my body, my limbs, the pool of water beneath my chilled feet.

  Am I real? I said out loud as I buttoned up my slip and settled a necklace my father had given me for my last birthday around my neck, the empty locket a spark of cold on my breastbone that made me shiver.

  Maybe my mother had been right to lock me in, I thought, as I ran a hairbrush through my wayward curls, as I patted powder over the freckles on my cheeks, and then I screwed my eyes shut so I did not ruin everything and cry.

  Twenty-Two

  As January arrived, so did the coldest winter in living memory—not that one would know we had even a wisp of a cold breeze if one read the newspapers, which were censored from giving out valuable weather information to our enemies—and no matter what Lord Lockwood had promised about modernizing the house, no matter how many radiators there were or special deliveries of coal arranged for the hulking new boiler, it could not mask the fact that Lockwood was an old manor house, and houses like that were always cold in winter. Colder, it sometimes seemed, than outside. Cold enough, one sometimes thought, to have been purposefully built that way, to have the drafts and the chilled stone walls carefully penned in on the plan by the original architect: strange frozen spots in the house, windows that always rattled no matter how much one plugged gaps with rags, and water from the tap so icy one risked frostbite each time one washed one’s hands. A house like that was used to being served by a battalion of servants lighting and tending fires in every single room, black-leading fireplaces, breaking their backs ferrying wood and coal up and down the stairs, shoveling endless bucketfuls from the great mountain in the coal cellar, singeing their fingers with sparks, cleaning rooms of smoke that had blackened their corners. As winter deepened, I started to think that the house was a kind of temple and that without the appropriate worship of enough servants, several of whom had now left for war occupations, it would refuse to heat up fully, even if the physics of radiators meant that it should; that it demanded we tend to it personally.

  And then a blizzard arrived, and as the snow and freezing rain fell, in quantities no one had seen before this far south, the world outside the manor house became impassable. We could only stare out blindly at the whirling gusts, as half the servants who took rooms in the village were stuck there and the other half were trapped in the house, unable to make it through snowdrifts that were over five feet deep in places. A delivery of coal had been due and the hungry boiler that fed the radiators of the house could not run on the wood the groundskeepers had cut while clearing land at the edge of the forest last autumn. The Major was said to have a new electric heater in his room, but the rest of us had to make do with log fires in ours, which did little to keep away the cold. The housekeeper brought out musty blankets from Lockwood’s stores, moth-nibbled and furred with unidentifiable hairs and dust, which I dutifully piled on top of my bed and shivered underneath at night, struggling to sleep, chilled to the bone.

  After three nights without coal, I woke to a dark house, as if the snowdrifts had been pushed so tightly against the house that they had swallowed it from ground to roof. My breath made a silvery cloud in the air as I scrabbled out from my blankets, emerging from a dream of being smothered by some great creature, of being buried alive in ice.

  It was the electricity, Dorothy told me when I came down for breakfast in the dining room, layered with two jumpers and a scarf. The ice had frozen the cables and brought them down, plunging Lockwood into the past, where the only lights were candles and gas lamps that the servants brought out from the attic, the air smelling of beeswax and oil, flames flickering and casting shadows onto the walls.

  That evening, by some unspoken agreement, the inhabitants of Lockwood—except the Major, who had seemingly barricaded himself in the safety of his room—slowly congregated in the kitchen, where the large wood-fed range was belching out warmth as we sat or stood around the table, cups of tea in hand.

  I stared at the pockmarked wood of the table, trying not to notice if anyone was looking at me strangely, knowing that the servants had no doubt complained heartily about me and my unreasonable demands these last few months. I had never felt comfortable in groups, not after being bullied at school, and it was one of the joys of working at the museum that we very rarely gathered together for meetings or were expected to socialize with one another.

  Lucy was the last to arrive in the kitchen, carrying a great mound of fur in her arms that had me out of my seat with confusion before she dropped it to the floor with a grimace and a little laugh and the heap slid apart to reveal flashes of rich silk innards, in reds and purples and blacks.

  “My mother’s and grandmother’s furs,” she said, lifting a coat up by its collar. “I had the thought that we might as well get some use out of them.” She smiled and I noticed the kitchen maid opposite me looking at the coat with naked longing. “I think there’s enough to go around.”

  “I’m fine, thank you, my lady,” the housekeeper said firmly when she was offered a capelet of mink, but every other servant—Joyce, Dorothy, the kitchen maid, the new laundress, the cook, and the tweeny, even Paul—took a coat and pulled it around their shoulders.

  “Well, this is an adventure,” Dorothy said, as she pushed her arms through a large fox fur that swamped her form. “It’s like we’re in the Arctic or something; what a lark.” The room laughed but I could not join them in their merry mood; I felt unsettled, and the white mink coat I wore was scratching at my neck and wrists.

  “I’m worried about the animals,” I blurted out. I had shut the museum rooms up that day, with the assistance of several of the servants, shrouding the exhibits in the sa
cking they had been transported inside, for fear of the damage the cold would do, and borrowing some of the blankets for some of the more fragile specimens, swaddling them to save them from winter’s icy grasp. But with no night guards making it through the storm, there was no one there now to watch them.

  “You think some hardy thief will be burrowing through the snows to steal a giraffe in this weather, miss?” Paul said, and the housekeeper snorted as others grinned at the image he painted.

  I felt my cheeks blush hot.

  “I’m sure they’ll be just fine, dear,” the cook said, but her wide smile at Paul’s joke undermined the consoling tone of her words, the word dear sounding condescending.

  The fire in the range cracked and a piece of wood inside fell with a thump. The floorboards behind me creaked. I felt penned in and anxious. I stood up and my chair screeched, which had the laundress flinching.

  “I’m going to check on them, on the specimens,” I said, flustered as I grasped for my torch on the floor.

  “Do you want help?” Lucy asked.

  “No, I’m quite all right, thank you,” I said, not wishing for her to be put out.

  It was only once I had emerged from the servants’ quarters into the pitch black of the house that I realized I was still wearing the fur coat.

  The quiet of the empty house felt visceral, absolute, but as I moved forward, I could hear the scurrying of mice, the soft shush of snow against the windows, and each of my steps brought forth an answering crack from floorboards that had shrunk with the cold. The walls felt narrow as I swung my torch across them; the corridors of the west wing where the exhibits were kept seemed to have changed dimensions, and when I moved the light to illuminate the ground, the carpet seemed to be manifesting out of nothingness before me, as the bristling pelt of my coat prickled at my neck and nose.

  The keys for the museum rooms were icy cold in my hand as I turned the lock and entered. What am I hoping, or fearing, to find? I asked myself as my torch beam glanced off glass eyes that glinted strangely, the sheen of cabinets, the soft shadows of fur and hide. The furniture looked like strange angular beasts, the rugs had become pools of dark water, and the darkness seemed to come alive and shuffle around behind me, while my breath formed a cloud in front of me. Every time I saw myself in a gilt-edged mirror, or the glass of the exhibits, I was surprised anew by the hulk of my white coat, and, once or twice, there would be a flare of light from the reflection of my torch beam, and I would flinch and see an afterimage behind my closed eyelids, a pale creature with hair as white as my fur.

  I had never been afraid of the dark and I was not now; just apprehensive, watchful, I told myself as I toured through the drawing room, billiards room, library, morning room, music room, summer room, sitting room, and writing room, pressing my hand to cabinets and over the sacking and blankets, peering at each animal snout, each tail and pelted side that emerged from the gloom. Everything was in its place, frozen still.

  I made my way through the short corridor, unlocking the door to the long gallery, where it felt even darker and colder, as if the walls had absorbed the very last glimmers of light and warmth, each scuff of my foot sounding louder, and when I raised the torch I saw that my breath was creating great billows of condensation. I worked through the rooms on the left first, feeling my usual rush of hurt and shame when my torch glanced off the hummingbird cabinet, and then I crossed the hall to the rooms on the right. The first room was just as I had left it the evening before, but in the second there was a shape on the floor, a slumped pile of sacking and rope that had come loose—or been removed?—from a collection of birds of paradise and, turning on the spot, I saw that a cabinet containing fragile birds’ nests had been unwrapped too.

  A sound of dismay escaped my throat and then I saw movement from the corner of my eye and whipped my torch around, catching the flash of something fleeing from the room.

  I ran, racing through the rooms, my slippers slapping on the floor, my torch jolting in front of me, illuminating the brief vision of a figure dressed in white, which disappeared the moment the beam shifted. I fled into the hallway and then dashed through the corridor and back into the main house, pursuing the intruder.

  But once there, I lost my trail, and there was no sign of movement, no sound other than the creaks of the house and the soft hush of the snow outside. I swung my torch around slowly, the other hand curling into a fist, legs trembling at more than the cold.

  There. I pointed my torch toward the entrance hall. Two eyes glinted back, a white snout with a mouse caught between its jaws, the panting red sides of a fox—and then it turned and was gone, back into the dark.

  Had the figure I had seen, the intruder in the long gallery, been the fox? But how could a fox look as tall as a person? Perhaps it was only my own reflection, I told myself, as the beam of my torch shook on the ground before me, as my ears rang and my body locked with panic. The sacking that had been untied, the birds—

  Was there someone here, someone hiding in the dark?

  I turned back around and blundered into something large and warm, something that grabbed me with its large claws and swore as I shrieked with fear.

  “Jesus Christ,” the Major said, squinting as I pulled away from him and shone my torch on his face. “Put that bloody thing down; do you want to blind me?” he bellowed. “What the hell are you doing wandering about down here?” he demanded then, shining his own torch toward me. “And wearing that,” he added furiously. “Where did you get that? Did you steal it?”

  “Lucy brought the coats down for us to wear,” I said, voice still shaking from the shock.

  “She did, did she?” he said as if he did not believe it.

  This was his wife’s coat, I thought, feeling ashamed, and here I am prancing around the house in it.

  “The rooms I gave you and your museum are not enough for you now, you desire to be clothed in the finest Russian furs too, hmm?” he said silkily.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, feeling close to tears.

  “What are you doing wandering about in the dark, Miss Cartwright; have you gone quite mad?” he asked, moving closer.

  His breath smelled sour, his body of exertion, and his eyes were shadowed.

  “I was checking on my animals.”

  “In case they’ve shifted about while you’re not looking?” he asked slyly. “Or run away?”

  My words seemed trapped in my throat; I felt like some miscreant being reprimanded for breaking into a locked wardrobe, for dressing in my mother’s fine clothes.

  “You’re a very curious girl, aren’t you?” he said.

  Woman, I thought, gritting my teeth, lady, anything but girl. “I knew from the very first day you arrived; your beady eyes, your greedy looks. Curiosity can be dangerous, Miss Cartwright, digging into secrets, opening locked doors. You should take more care wandering around in the dark.”

  He shouldered me aside and walked toward the stairs. “Get to bed, Miss Cartwright,” he called back, “and stop using my hallways like a cross-country route.”

  “Damn him,” I muttered once he had gone and I returned to the long gallery, breath hitching from adrenaline and anger. I checked the rooms there carefully, trying not to notice how the beam of my torch shook, and swathed the cabinet and birds back in their sacking. The servants must have been too slapdash with their wrapping, I decided, and a cold draft had done the rest, that was all.

  It would be madness to think anything else, to believe that what I saw was anything but a cloud of breath, my reflection, or maybe the shadow of the fox elongated by my torch—but shadows are black, not white, are they not, and I had never asked myself to disbelieve the evidence of my own eyes before.

  As I locked the door to the corridor, I finally took off the coat and folded its bulk over my arm.

  “Have the animals vanished into the night then?” Paul asked when I returned to the kitchen, and I noticed that a bottle of rum had now been opened on the table.

  “Some of t
he sacking had slipped off two specimens in the long gallery,” I replied, not in the mood for further mockery.

  “Oh,” he said, deflated, brow creasing. “Did I not tie it right this afternoon?”

  “Evidently,” I said, still standing there under the eager gaze of the revelers, as Lucy got up from her seat by the range. “And I saw a fox.”

  “Inside?” Dorothy asked, leaning forward. Her cheeks were flushed with warmth, or rum. “That’s an omen, that is, mark my words.”

  “In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s a blizzard outside,” the tweeny drawled.

  Dorothy gave her a withering look. “Weren’t you the one who came knocking on my door last night after seeing the ghost?”

  “It was nothing,” the tweeny, who had the wide-set eyes of a tamandua, said, crossing her arms. “It was only a nightmare.”

  Dorothy raised an eyebrow. “Well, let’s hope you don’t have one tonight, my dear, your elbows are uncommonly bony.”

  The tweeny brushed a hand sharply through her hair.

  “I’m off to bed now, if you’re heading in that direction,” Lucy murmured, coming to my side.

  “Yes,” I said, giving her a small smile. “What should I do with your coat?” I held it out.

  “Oh, you can borrow it for tomorrow too. Keep it until the snows stop,” she said, and it felt too impolite to say no, I’d rather not have it anywhere near me. “That goes for all of you,” she added.

  “But not when you’re working,” the housekeeper added tightly. “I’ll not run a house where my staff wear furs.”

  The new laundress giggled and then ducked her head when the housekeeper glared at her.

  “She would have killed us for borrowing her furs, the last Lady Lockwood,” Dorothy whispered to Joyce, who was dozing on her hand. “I can picture her now, flying at you with those mad eyes of hers—”

  I hoped that Lucy had not heard her words, but I knew by her stillness that she had.