The Animals at Lockwood Manor

by Jane Healey

  Germany had by now invaded Belgium, France, and the Netherlands; our war of nerves was suddenly over, and with British troops beaten back toward the coast of France, the tide was turning against us. How soon would it be until Britain stood alone, we worried, until we were ourselves invaded?

  And then we received the first news of Dunkirk and I learned that two of the museum’s assistants had been lost there on the beaches, two men that I had taken tea with and discussed theories and specimens and research with; who I had blithely said good morning and good night to as if they were a permanent fixture of the world.

  I did not cry when I got the letter from the museum’s director: the news felt too horrible to induce something as easy as tears. Instead, I spent a Sunday wandering lost through the gardens, my breath short and my head so light I thought I would tip back and fall to the ground. Then I wrote a letter to my mother. I swallowed my pride and told her I was sorry for disappointing her, that I hoped we might be able to reconcile, that I wanted to be a better daughter. I cried finally as I signed it, imagining how she might sigh wearily and write me an answer, how a crack might open in the wall between us, how after all this was over I might just have a mother again. After I posted it I felt foolish that I had let myself be so emotional but I did not wholly regret sending it yet—I might still, though, once I received her reply, or if I never did.

  * * *

  Elsewhere in the country, I knew that people were having sleepless nights waiting for the invasion of the Luftwaffe, who, by late June, were beginning to make small-scale raids into Britain, dropping bombs that were like the first few drops of rain before a downpour. But at certain hours of the night when I lay awake at Lockwood, I found myself listening closely—not for sirens and planes and bombs but for the sound of footsteps, the drag of fabric sweeping along the carpet. It was a different kind of incursion I anticipated in those small hours that seemed to stretch time to woozy proportions, a different damage I awaited—and I did not have to wait long, for the day after France officially surrendered, Lockwood was attacked by someone far closer to home than the Germans.

  I was taking an early breakfast, struggling with the previous day’s crossword, when a high-pitched scream sounded from a different part of the house, making my body jolt with alarm, and I dashed out of the room to find the cause.

  “They’ve telephoned the police and Jenkins has run off to see if he can catch them,” Dorothy declared, standing in the entrance hall holding a mop and staring toward the back door.

  The door was open and a pale child’s figure, oddly still, was silhouetted in the low morning light behind it, like an image summoned from one of my nightmares. I let out a high sound in my throat; my gut felt hollow as if I was walking across a tall, narrow ledge. There was something dark on its face, something horrifying, like a gas mask fused to the skin; and white fluff surrounding it in a haze.

  A cloud passed over the sun.

  No, the figure was not a child, or a living creature; it was made of paper and stuffing.

  It was the museum’s ancient mounted juvenile bear, but it was missing its fur. Coming closer, I saw that it had been roughly skinned, leaving the dark muzzle hanging on the remains of the face, with loose packing lying at its feet. I did not think of my animals as living creatures—I was not so far gone in the madness that had gripped me here at Lockwood—and yet I did feel pity, a twang of sorrow, looking at what remained, along with fury at the mutilation of one of the museum’s specimens.

  The bear had come from the collection in the drawing room, and I checked that the other occupants were unharmed before hurrying frantically through all the other rooms, hands shaking as I unlocked each door, awaiting further horrors, snarling beasts or hunched crones, but finding nothing except the usual throng of bones and mounted animals.

  Relieved, though hardly reassured, I returned to the bear mount which I had left at the back door, as if by doing so the fur would be called back to it, as if I would return and find it restored.

  Last night’s guard was there too, trouser leg already rolled up in preparation for cycling home.

  “Did you not hear anything last night?” I asked him, my voice tight with anger and shock.

  “Nothing, miss,” he said, and I did my best not to give in to the urge to shout at him. How on earth had he not heard a smash? Was he asleep? What was the point of night guards if they did not bloody guard?

  “Ah, Miss Cartwright, there you are.” The Major appeared from the direction of his office. “Terrible business,” he said, resting a hand on my shoulder that I immediately wanted to buck off. He took his hand back to open his cigarette case. “Terrible business. What women will do for fur, eh?” he mumbled around the cigarette.

  “Pardon?”

  “They’ll have stolen the fur of the bear for a coat or trimmings,” the Major said, waving his cigarette about.

  “That fur has been treated with formaldehyde and arsenical soap,” I said, touching the stuffing of the naked beast. “They can’t use it for clothes.”

  Had they really been stealing the fur? And if so, why leave what remained here like this, in the hall? Had they been trying to steal the whole thing but decided it was too heavy? No, I felt certain that it was left thus as a taunt, to frighten and perturb us—or rather me.

  “The police are sending someone round but not for some time, I’m afraid; they’re busy,” the Major said. “War seems to have turned half the country into criminals.” There was something self-satisfied about the way he blew the smoke from his mouth.

  “How the hell did no one hear this happen?” I asked, coming back to myself now.

  “There’s no need for language like that, Miss Cartwright,” he said, eyes narrowing, motioning toward me with the cigarette in his hand, which I found ruder than any use of profanity could possibly be to a man who I had heard use the word fuck quite liberally through the walls of my office. “And I might ask where you were? You’re in charge of this fine collection, as you’ve so often reminded us.”

  “It’s not my job to guard the collection from thieves,” I said, thinking of the jaguar that had been lost on the first day here at Lockwood, and of the hummingbirds that had been hidden away in a room upstairs. I should have taken both incidents for a sign. I should have insisted that the museum be housed elsewhere.

  “It’s your museum that has drawn thieves here like mag-pies—”

  “We never had any trouble with thieves in London, Lord Lockwood.”

  “I find that very hard to believe,” he said sardonically, blowing a stream of smoke close enough to me that I wanted to hit him.

  “Are you calling me a liar?”

  We stood only a few feet apart. The light through the back door cast shadows on his face, making him look even more brutish than normal.

  “Well, let me know if anything else is missing,” he remarked finally, and walked outside to join Jenkins, who had evidently given up his search for the culprit and had his rifle over his shoulder, as usual.

  I searched the museum rooms again, since I had no one else to corroborate with and I did not trust myself not to have missed something in the frenzy. When I returned to the hall, Dorothy and Josephine, the new French maid, were crowding around the back door, the naked bear ignored.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, pushing past them.

  Striding up the back gardens in the blinding midmorning light was the Major, another cigarette in hand, and Jenkins next to him, cradling some dead beast in his arms. They had found the missing bear skin.

  “There, you see, all’s well that ends well,” the Major said as he came to the door, and the maids dispersed, back to their work. “Looks like the thief had second thoughts. If it even was a thief; I think it might have just been one of the evacuated boys on a dare. They’re running around like savages at the moment,” he said blithely, as Jenkins held out the pelt toward me distastefully, dropping it a foot away from my arms so it almost slithered through them before I grabbed hold of i
t. The skin smelled of chemicals and the loamy outdoors and had pieces of grass poking between the hairs.

  “Thank you,” I said pointedly, as if I could, out of politeness, encourage Jenkins to be the same.

  “Good luck putting that poor fellow back together,” the Major remarked, nodding toward the bear as he left me there, holding its fur in my arms, my heart heavy.

  I carried the sorry shedding mount and the skin back into my office and sat at my desk, fingers rifling through the bristles of the fur as if it might yet reveal the mystery of who took it, and waited for the police to arrive. When I called the station a little later to hurry them along, they told me that someone at Lockwood had informed them that the pelt had been found. They had no time for dealing with professional squabbles or practical jokes, they said, and were quite curt when I tried to argue my case.

  The person who had skinned the bear had to have had a key, or else been let in by someone with a key. Was it the same person who took the hummingbirds, who stole the jaguar? Was it an intruder, or someone who I passed by every day? A thief would hardly have left it out there in the gardens, but then why else commit such a crime?

  I lingered over a cup of tea, aware of the unpleasant nature of my next task, and then ate a large chunk of the chocolate I had been rationing, for fortification, sucking at my teeth in front of the mirror in the bathroom to remove any stains. As if he will be inclined to treat me any better whether or not food is smeared around my mouth, I thought acerbically.

  The Major seemed ready and waiting for my arrival. “Terrible news, terrible news,” he repeated, folding up the sleeves of his crisp white shirt as I took a seat before his desk.

  “The locks of the museum rooms must be changed,” I stated firmly.

  “You can’t be serious,” he said with a snort. “Many of these doors and their fittings are original to the house.”

  “If you do not have the locks changed, the museum will be forced to find another home. Furthermore,” I added quickly, before he could interrupt, “higher branches of the government will have to be informed of the reason for a second move.”

  “Is that a threat? They will blame the museum for letting their specimens be stolen, not my household.”

  Letting—he was determined to place the blame anywhere but on himself. “I think you might be surprised at where the sympathy of the government officials will lie,” I said, even though I suspected those in positions of power would be likely to side with the Major, to think this all a little squabble and not a definitive threat to the museum’s mammal collection.

  “Fine,” he said, pressing his hands against the top of his desk and then reaching for a cigarette. “Locksmiths will be called out tomorrow.” He waved his hand lazily. “And don’t think about bothering the police with it; they have far better things to do than deal with some jape.”

  “The museum is, as ever, indebted to you and your generosity, Major Lord Lockwood,” I said in the sweetest voice I could summon, and stood up.

  He raised his eyebrows at my cheek. “It’s good that the museum has someone as single-minded as you to guard over it, Miss Cartwright. Frankly, it’s admirable how dedicated you are to your animals, although one might caution against becoming obsessive, at the cost of other, more important, things in life. A husband, perhaps, children, that kind of thing,” he said pleasantly, blowing a stream of smoke toward me as I smiled thinly and left, shutting the door behind me.

  I swore under my breath as I strode through the corridor to the long gallery. There was no one I could go and commiserate with. Lucy had a blind spot for her father, and the servants would be suspicious of my motives, believing that I was trying to trap them into badmouthing their employer; they might even think it was me who did it, just as Joyce had blamed me for the squirrel monkey outside my room.

  There’s only you lot to comfort me, I thought as I came to the first room of mute animals, and what’s the use in talking to creatures who won’t talk back?

  Twenty-Six

  Late that evening, sometime after dinner, I was sitting in the drawing room, the skinned bear having been moved to my office for fixing and leaving a dusty gap in its place. I had a flask of tea on the low table in front of me, two cups, two sandwiches on a plate, a novel to read, and my unfinished crossword. There were two torches on the seat beside me, and three blankets draped over the arm of the sofa.

  There would be three night guards on duty tonight, but I refused to put the safety of the museum in their apparently incompetent hands, so had decided to spend a night in the drawing room myself, where the okapi, one of the museum’s rarest specimens, was kept, before the locks could be changed tomorrow and the doors properly secured. I was aware that I looked half-mad doing thus, but no longer cared. It was no less than what those in London were doing, the caretakers of galleries and museums and factories and offices and houses, preparing for the long night of glancing at the sky, waiting for the Luftwaffe.

  I was trying out different cushions as backrests when I heard Lucy’s voice in the hallway.

  “What are you doing with all that bedding, my dove?” the Major asked, his evening shoes clipping along the floor of the hall.

  Over the past few months, I had waited for the Major to upbraid me again for “allowing” Lucy to work for the museum, but he had seemed busier than ever, shut inside his office at all hours, dashing off to meetings in his motorcar with Jenkins. Lucy said he was having trouble with one of his factories, that it was something to do with the war effort and that was why he had a greater petrol allowance. In the evenings, he was occupied with various female visitors who were whisked in and out of Lockwood so quickly and who all dressed so similarly that it almost appeared as if it were the same woman each time. I tentatively asked Lucy her feelings about her father’s lurid love life, but she only shrugged and looked awkward. He’s not a man that does well alone, she’d repeated.

  Do you do well alone? I wanted to ask, but something held me back. Why don’t you have a beau, a bevy of visitors, or even a husband? Is it just your nerves, or is it something else?

  I did not ask her because she could easily have turned the question around on me and what would I have said? That I was shy of others; that I was lonely, and yet used to it? That I seemed to lack some vital element that other women had which made it easy for them to love and be loved in return.

  “Miss Cartwright is going to spend the night in the drawing room,” she said now, in response to his question, “in case the thief returns tonight, and I’m going to join her.”

  He let out a disbelieving ha! sound that made me roll my eyes. “My dear Lucy, I don’t care if that woman builds herself a hut like a savage in there, you are not joining her in her madness. I forbid it. Do you not remember the state you got into last time you were involved with the animals?”

  A pause.

  “Now take your blankets back upstairs, my dove, and forget all this nonsense,” he said.

  I heard the muted noise of footsteps ascending the stairs, followed by the Major calling to Jenkins to start the car, and the front door slamming as he left the house.

  He was heading to a party hosted by his latest girlfriend, Lucy had told me earlier—she had come to my office to commiserate with me about the bear—and I had told her my plan, whereupon she had said straightaway that she was going to join me, that it was the least she could do. I did not put any effort into dissuading her; I had come to know how stubborn she could be and, besides, I welcomed the company, and I could not think of anyone I would have liked to spend a night’s watch with more than her.

  Why then was I feeling an odd bubble of nerves in my stomach, separate from the curdle of anxiety over the threats to the museum? Why did my heart jolt in my chest when I heard the sound of soft footsteps approaching and recognized them for hers?

  “Good evening, Hetty,” she said conspiratorially, as she swept into the room carrying a great mound of blankets and quilts and pillows, and I smiled at her, immediately feeling
the kind of warm happiness that she seemed to bring with her whenever she entered a room, a calming of my frantic thoughts.

  She settled on the couch next to me and put a flask of her own down next to the tea. “Crème de menthe,” she said, “our favorite.” Her eyes searched my face as I looked back.

  She was wearing pajamas and the pink silk dressing gown she had worn when I had caught her sleepwalking, her hair in a plait that failed to tame the curls that were coming loose and framing her face.

  We were silent for a moment.

  “If my mother could see me right now,” I blurted out with a short laugh. “It’s everything she feared,” I explained, as Lucy looked at me, “that I would put my career ahead of everything else, that my interest in natural history was obsessive. You can’t marry a stuffed panther, you know, she would say.” I shook my head. “Except she wouldn’t, that would be too whimsical a thing for her to say.”

  “My mother,” Lucy began, smoothing her hands down her thighs and then tipping her head back, “my mother would have forbidden me, like my father, or she might have joined us here for our watch. Or locked the door.” She sighed and her mouth quirked up as if she was trying to smile. She seemed restless suddenly, and stood and walked along the row of animals. She was working her way up to saying something, I thought, and I was quiet, hoping to encourage her.

  She stopped at the panther, bending low to meet its glass gaze. “I don’t know how you get any work done, Hetty. If I was employed by the museum I’d get fired within a week for spending all my time staring at the animals.” She moved to the polar bear, which stood on its hind legs, far taller than her. She brushed a hand down its belly and I did not stop her.

  She turned around. “That blue room, that attic room next to my bathroom that I was frightened of—my mother used to lock me in that room in the dark; she said she was trying to protect me,” she confessed.