by Jane Healey
I gave the children a brief introduction to the collection, a simplified explanation of the various families and genera Lockwood held, and then a quiz about the classification of mammals, which Miss Forbes said she had discussed with them in advance.
Lucy had insisted on being my assistant and she was the one to kneel down by a girl who raised her hand with a question but was too shy to ask it, who accompanied a boy at the back to the bathrooms when she saw him wriggling about, and who listened patiently to the whispered tale of one girl who had a graze on her chin.
“You’re a natural with them,” I said to her later, once I had sent the children on a sedate hunt to find their very favorite animal among the collection. We were standing in the corridor where we might by necessity stand closer than we would in one of the rooms, close enough to smell each note of her perfume but not to touch.
She smiled as she lifted a hand to fix a curl that had escaped from her pinned roll, but it was a sadder smile than she had used in the room.
“Do you think—” I began and paused, studying her face, the way the low afternoon light revealed the freckles on her chin. “Will you have children one day?” I asked, feeling a painful ache in my chest.
“I don’t think so,” she said slowly, carefully. “I’d have to find a husband for that.”
I licked my lips. We did so well not to talk of the future, but the temptation was always there, the knowledge that what we had was, by any logical understanding, temporary.
“I didn’t have the best role model for it,” she said.
“Me neither,” I said as the laughter of a group of children in the library made me turn to look down the corridor.
“But if I don’t have children then this house will be awfully empty in the future.”
“You’ll stay here then,” I said, hating myself for only summoning the bravery for this conversation right now, when there were children wandering hither and thither and servants carting brushes and mops and linen between us as we shrunk toward opposite walls.
“I don’t think I’ll ever leave Lockwood,” she stated sadly. “I would worry too much about it if I were anywhere else. I feel responsible. I bear its name, after all.”
“It bears your name.”
She tilted her head. “It’s strange, I always think of it in the opposite way. That the house has stood for generations while we come and go, that it owns us and not the other way around.”
It doesn’t own you, I wanted to say. It doesn’t, you can do anything, you can live anywhere, don’t you see how brilliant you are, how you’d be wasted here?
“I should close my office door,” I said instead, my voice thick.
“Good idea,” Lucy replied hollowly, stepping back so that her feet were not crushed by children racing past. She strode toward the drawing room. “Be careful where you run, children!” she called.
When I pulled the stiff door of my office toward me, key in hand, I noticed something that had not been there a few hours ago, before the children arrived; a hummock of fur, an animal shape, on my desk.
As I approached, I thought it might be someone’s fur muff—but these children would surely be too poor for that—or that it was one of our animals, or a dried skin that had been pulled out of a cabinet and mislaid. But it was not flat enough to be a skin, and nor did it resemble any of the stuffed animals in our collection.
It was a rabbit, its ears draped softly above its head. It was cold when I touched it, and it had not been skinned, for I could feel the bulging shape of flesh inside. By the smear of blood I found underneath as I lifted it, and the blood that painted my fingers as I searched through its fur for a pulse, I knew that it had been killed only today.
“Miss Cartwright—” Dorothy asked at the door, and when I turned around she saw the red of my hands. “My goodness, are you hurt?”
“No,” I said, as Lucy came up to the door behind her. I held a hand on the rabbit’s back, as if trying to protect it from further harm. “I found this on my desk,” I said, feeling my heart tremble in my chest, and then I looked to Lucy, who was frozen to the spot, the pupils of her eyes ringed with white.
“Where did that come from? Is it real, alive, I mean?” Dorothy asked, coming closer. She touched its fur with a finger. “But what was it doing here?” she said to me with an eager intensity in her eyes.
“I don’t know,” I said, and looked again to Lucy, who was still in the doorway, her chin now dimpling as if she were going to cry.
“I shall see if the teacher knows where it came from,” Lucy said, her voice strange, one of her hands rising to cover her mouth. The heel of her shoe caught on the floor as she left and I started toward her as if I could catch her from all the way across the room, but she righted herself and continued out of sight.
“I don’t like this at all,” Dorothy said, stealing the words from my throat as we stared at a line of blood seeping from the carcass toward the edge of the desk.
I locked my office door until the children’s visit was at an end, leaving the grisly gift where it lay for fear of one of them catching me ferrying it through to the gardens, and when I opened it again Dorothy was at my heel, ostensibly to help clean but really, I thought, because she wanted to wallow in the grim excitement.
“It’s an omen, it is, mark my words.” She hoisted the rabbit by its ears into a bucket and slopped soapy water onto my desk while I hurriedly removed my papers and books to safer ground. “Or a threat,” she said pointedly, turning to consider me with narrowed eyes.
“It’s not one of the kitchen’s rabbits?” I asked, as other servants peered into the room in passing.
“We might be overworked,” she sniffed, “but we won’t have mislaid a carcass on your desk, miss. Anyway, it’s not a rabbit from the farm—the groundskeeper breaks the neck of those, he doesn’t garrote them,” she said, savoring her words as I clasped my hands together tightly and tried to settle myself, tried to appear as if I was yet unruffled by such a clearly personal attack.
Who had done this? Jenkins, who was often seen with a dead fox in his fist after catching them in his traps, and seemed to scowl at me every time we crossed paths? One of the groundskeepers? Dorothy herself, out of some twisted desire for excitement? Paul, as a poor joke? Another servant who was resentful of any extra work the museum had brought? The housekeeper? Was it the same person who had stolen the hummingbirds and skinned the bear, and had they been here all this time, watching me?
“It would have been a barn cat, or a dog, or one of the children playing a trick,” the housekeeper said when I went to find her, talking slowly as if to an imbecile. “Or some well-meaning villager who thought you might be looking for fresh specimens. There are many possible explanations before you might start blaming my staff,” she added as I stood there feeling sick.
“I wasn’t going to blame anyone,” I said, unconvincingly. How had she turned this against me, why did I feel at fault?
“Frankly, Miss Cartwright, none of this nonsense happened before you and your animals arrived. And it’s you who always seems to be the center of these things, wandering about the house at all hours and then complaining that someone’s been stealing your animals, giving us more work to do. If there is indeed a mischief-maker in our midst, I have half a mind that it’s you,” she declared furiously, moving so close to me that I could see the pale hairs on her cheek, the angry spittle in the corners of her mouth. “I think you put the rabbit there yourself. I know your type; I think you like the attention,” she sneered, and as she stalked off I cursed myself for standing there mute under her onslaught.
* * *
I was barely composed by the time dinner arrived. I sat there feeling hollow and shaken, glancing at Lucy’s empty chair and wishing I was with her. I had been ushered into the dining room by her father when he caught me ascending the stairs toward her and told me he wouldn’t have dinner delayed tonight, that he had far more important things to do than sit and wait for me to dawdle as his food went col
d.
“I don’t get involved in servant business, I leave that to the housekeeper,” he was saying, cutting into his meat, his mouth stained red with wine, “but when my staff are dropping like flies, when the government keeps stealing them from me, and then you baselessly accuse them of nonsense crimes, frankly, it’s beyond the pale.”
“I didn’t accuse anyone,” I said, my teeth clenched, my plate of food uneaten. “I just want to find out who is responsible.”
“You do make a fuss about things, don’t you, Miss Cartwright? The children who you invited into my home were evacuated from some of the roughest parts of London, they’ve been running wild around the countryside, and no doubt they’ve taken up poaching too, little beasts.”
I sat there silently, breathing tightly, biting my lip so the pain might stop me from crying. When he was finished and rudely pushed his plate away he stood up with a yawn. “I’ll be writing a report for your employers; I’m sure they’ll be eager to hear of your disruptiveness. I might have agreed to house the museum here, my dear, but I didn’t agree to open my doors to someone like you.”
Thirty-Four
Do you think there’s something about Lockwood,” Lucy remarked tiredly a week later, as we lay side by side on her bed while her radiators clicked and a pipe clanged somewhere in a wall, “that makes our dreams leak out into the day, that brings them to life?”
She was speaking of the leveret, the hare, that she told me she hunted through the house each night in her dreams, that she woke grasping for.
“No,” I said, because I had never been someone prone to whimsy, to superstition; I was not the type to wake from her own dreams—of beasts and hunts and wild women with teeth sharp as knives and claws that could pluck the eyes from your skull, the tongue from your mouth—and stare around the room clutching at the bedclothes, fearing what I would find there in the dark. My fears were human, rational ones, I told myself—of professional sabotage, of disgruntled servants and petty vendettas—not of ghosts and spirits and hauntings.
I could not sleep, and neither could Lucy, though I lied to her that I could because I did not want her to feel somehow responsible. When I read letters or books the words swam before my eyes, when I picked up specimens to clean and dust, my hands shook alarmingly, and I would enter rooms without ever remembering why I had visited them, or find my legs shaking when I tried to stand up after kneeling to check animals for infestation—and I had slipped just the day before while getting out of the bath and almost knocked myself out on the rim.
My only saving grace was that the Major had left the morning after the mess with the rabbit and without, I assumed, sending a letter to the directors of the museum in London. But what was my job worth if I could not do it properly? What if I dropped another specimen and it shattered on the floor; what if I used the wrong powder to clean a fur and ruined it forever? What was my job worth if I could not keep the animals safe, both from others and from my own mistakes?
* * *
In early November, I was woken in my own bedroom in the small hours, not by the usual sound of the air-raid siren, nor by that night’s gale thundering against the walls, but by the loud smash of glass.
When I staggered downstairs from my bedroom in my dressing gown, I found the housekeeper similarly attired, with a fine silk scarf knotted around her pinned hair, and Paul and Dorothy hastily dressed, the group of them huddling by the drawing room next to a night guard shining his torch inside. A terrific wind was roaring through the open door toward us.
“What’s going on?” I called frantically, my voice croaky with tiredness, having only snatched an hour or so of sleep in the past two days.
“It’s the drawing room,” the guard said. “The windows have been smashed.”
“Was it the storm? Has anything been taken?”
I pushed my way into the darkened room where I could see the second guard leaning his head carefully out of the left window frame, its glass edges a barbed halo.
Were the windows smashed from inside or outside, I wondered, my mind still half taken up with the nightmare I had awoken from, of a beast on the rampage through the rooms, still lingering in my shaky limbs, my teeth chattering.
“Was the door locked when you got here?” I asked the night guard.
“Yes.”
But what if someone had been inside the room, hiding, when I had locked it last night? “Hiding where?” I muttered to myself hysterically beneath the sound of the storm. “Underneath the panther?” The guard next to me looked at me strangely.
“Give me your torch,” I said, and swung it round the room, looking for anything missing, the broken glass glittering in the beam of light, the wind whipping the blackout curtains toward me, cloaking the polar bear by the window, while I gasped for breath as if the wind was stealing it.
“Careful of the glass on the floor,” Paul called, and beneath the barrage of the storm I heard the crunch underneath my slippers, and then my foot kicked against something hard and I screamed at the unexpected pain and then fumbled for an explanation as the others turned to me. “I found the brick they threw,” I said, and then repeated it when my voice gave out halfway through the sentence, shining the shaking light of my torch on it so that everyone could see the reason why I had made such a noise.
Pull yourself together, Hetty, I thought. “Are they out there? The thieves?” I asked, pulling my dressing gown around me with one hand, holding the other in front of my face against the elements and so that no one might be able to see how frightened I was.
“I’m going to go out and look!” Paul called. “Let me have the key to the gun room,” he told the guard by the door.
“Be careful!” Dorothy said. “You don’t know how many are out there. Oh, I wish Lord Lockwood were here, he would know what to do now. I thought it was the Germans, I really did,” she moaned, clasping a hand to her chest as Josephine patted her on the shoulder ineffectually. Dorothy grabbed my arm as I walked past and I jumped and stifled a yelp. “They did warn us about parachutists, you don’t think—”
“It won’t be the Germans,” I said, angered by my reaction. “It’ll be the same thieves as last time.”
“I suppose the police should be called,” the housekeeper said, though she sounded halfhearted.
“Yes,” I called, voice breaking as the wind picked up to a high wail, screeching its way past the jagged edges of the windows. “And have you got a spare blackout curtain or some board? This one has been torn,” I said, trying to bat it away while dodging the stuffed wolf by my side, feeling close to tears at the noise and mayhem, at the attack on the museum that felt like an attack on me too. “And we need to turn the light on in here to see what the hell has happened.” I turned to the guard who was still near the window, leaning forward against the force of the storm. “Have they taken anything? Did you see them?”
“I didn’t see anything,” he said, wiping his face of rain, his white hair plastered to his forehead. He put out a hand to steady himself on the head of the Sumatran tiger and then took it back when he remembered who I was. “We came running the moment we heard the smash,” he said. “We thought it was the storm. God help anyone who’s out there in it, there’ll be trees coming down tonight.”
Josephine and the housekeeper came into the room with two boards and I helped prop them against the windows with arms that felt weak and trembling. We pinned the curtains as best we could, and pushed the crowding animals out of the way with groans of effort that were echoed by the howls of the wind. Then someone switched on the lights and I blinked painfully as the dark, heaving shadows of the room, the hidden audience of animals that had watched us mutely, came into focus.
There was nothing missing: the thieves had not clambered inside, if that was indeed their intention, and if it was thieves at all. The brick they had thrown was on the floor in front of the left window but something else, an unfamiliar shape wrapped in newspaper, had been thrown through the window on the right. I bent over it and cov
ered my hands in the folds of my dressing gown to brush away the shards of glass, and started to unwrap it, heart in my throat though I knew not why.
“Stand back!” the guard called out, dashing forward, “It could be an explosive—” He stopped abruptly when the newspaper came free and, startled by the object I was holding, I dropped the uncovered projectile on the floor.
It was a worn porcelain doll, dressed for winter in a white fur cloak almost as pale as its blond hair. I had felt the tightly curled hair and the fur of the cloak in my hands and been spooked by the thought that what I held was warm and alive. Now she lay at my feet on her back, her blue eyes staring up at me, and it felt as if my voice had been stolen from my throat, the edges of my vision prickling with dark spots.
Josephine had screamed when she saw the doll, further adding to my terror, but now she was tutting and repeating some choice French swear words underneath her breath.
“How perfectly horrid,” Dorothy exclaimed with a whimper and then crouched down next to it as the winds picked up again. She nudged it with her finger. “What a ghastly, spooky thing.”
“Is it one of Lucy’s?” I asked, unable to make sense of the object in front of me, of the room and the people and the attack. Was I still asleep, I wondered, blinking and shaking my head.
“I shouldn’t think so,” the housekeeper remarked. “Lady Lucy got rid of all of those long ago.”
Paul eventually returned from outside, soaked to the skin and failing to hide his grin at his adventure, having caught no sight of our intruder. He and the guards nailed the boards properly against the smashed windows, sealing up the room from the storm, while Josephine swept away the glass and Dorothy wandered the room, ostensibly setting things to rights but mostly lingering among all the excitement, returning to the doll at intervals, shaking her head and sucking her teeth as if the doll meant something other than an attempt to frighten us; to frighten me.
