by Jane Healey
“They’re on their way,” she said. “You need to wait out at the front with everyone else!”
“I can’t! My animals!” I looked around. “Where’s Lucy?” Dorothy glanced toward the west wing of the house.
“We need to get a stirrup pump here now, and stop the fire spreading!” I skidded across the floor toward the other entrance to the long gallery, next to the Major’s office. If we kept the door closed, if we sealed the fire in—
The door was open, heat and smoke already coming through.
I could hear a cough as I slipped through the narrow corridor, my dress snagging on the teeth of a mounted lion’s head that had fallen off the wall.
“Lucy!”
“Papa!” she was crying, her form barely distinguishable in the haze.
“We need to keep the door closed!” I shouted, grabbing her.
“He wasn’t in his office or his library; I checked,” she sobbed.
“He won’t be here either! He’s not here! He’ll have gone to the front of the house with everyone else.” I had forgotten to ask Dorothy if she had seen him. But I didn’t need to, I already knew the answer: she wouldn’t have seen him because he was somewhere in the fire, dead, and Mary was somehow responsible.
“He’s not here,” I said again, pulling Lucy along and out of the corridor, turning our backs on the inferno as we scraped past snouts and jaws and noses and antlers, past faces posed as placid prey or ferocious predator, their dark eyes flickering with reflections of the fire that stalked toward them, a final hunter they could not escape from, far fiercer than the man with the rifle, the dog, the arrow, that had killed them first.
Lucy rushed through the house toward the front door as I slammed the door to the long gallery shut, holding my hands against its warming surface as if I could hold the fire back myself. The collections, the work of thousands, the rare specimens, everything—
The kitchen errand boy and one of the guests, still wearing black tie, hurried toward me, carrying another stirrup pump and bucket of water. It wasn’t going to be enough. This fire needed a flood to put it out, a biblical downpour.
The water from the pump turned almost instantly to steam, the smoke curled its way through the tiny cracks between door and doorframe, and the roaring heat of the fire seemed to mock our paltry efforts against its hunger.
“Miss Lucy!” I heard someone call, and turned my head. Dorothy came running through the haze. “She’s gone upstairs,” she panted, grasping my elbow. “I can’t get her to come back. It’s not safe in here. We all need to leave.”
She gestured to me to look up. Up, where the ceiling was smoldering, the plaster burning. The fire had leaped from the long gallery to the first floor of the main house.
“We need to save the other museum rooms,” I said, staring at the ceiling, but I wasn’t thinking about the museum, about the animals ablaze, I was thinking only of a girl, a woman, with dark eyes and a tremulous smile.
I ran back down the corridor, my hands slamming hard into the wall as I took a tight corner.
Lucy.
Forty-Three
I was searching frantically for my father, for his familiar form somewhere among the chaos of smoke and fire. My father—
The things Mary had said.
Little doll, little bird, little rabbit.
The creature who hunted me in my dreams. The lost leveret I tried to save. The beast, the ghost, stalking the corridors of Lockwood—
Was I dreaming? Was this some nightmare I couldn’t escape from? My hands grasped at walls, at doorways, my feet tripped on the carpet, the dry air made me choke as I clambered on. But as I continued through the house, my hunt, my search, changed without conscious thought, just as in my dreams, and it wasn’t my father I was looking for anymore, but my mother, it was always my mother.
How could I leave her alone here to wander these halls, trapped inside with no way out, crying and wailing? How?
Mother, are you here in the flames? Is that your voice underneath the roar of the fire? Are you waiting for me?
The house was groaning, the inferno like thunder, like the end of everything.
If each room of Lockwood Manor held one of my memories, held another secret yet to be excavated, then how could I leave it? If it burned down then wouldn’t I forget everything; wouldn’t I go mad? How could I survive outside of it?
Forty-Four
I raced up the stairs, the skin of my palm burning from the friction of my hand on the banister, the toes of my shoes scraping against the carpet.
“Lucy!” I shouted.
Where was she? I sprinted down the corridor toward her father’s rooms, passing smoke escaping from the doors to my left where the fire had spread, a wall of heat pressing in on me. I burst through the door. “Lucy!”
I could just make out a figure next to the bulk of the wardrobe. I scrabbled for a light switch and the lamp illuminated a room with dark wallpaper and heavy mahogany furniture, a row of mounted heads opposite the large bed.
“She’s not here,” Lucy said, and looked at me with haunted eyes.
“No,” I said, “she isn’t.” I grabbed her hand and pulled her from the room, back toward the stairs, past the flames that were now devouring the right side of the corridor, spreading up toward the ceiling with such heat I cried out and shut my eyes, fearing they were singed.
But when we reached the top of the stairs, Lucy pulled her hand from my damp grasp and headed up, not down.
“No! Lucy!” I cried, clambering after her. All thoughts of my animals, of trying to rescue the last of them, were gone. They were my life’s work but she was living, she was my heart, and I would do anything to save her.
She had reached the second floor; the smoke was thicker here, brown like mud, and rolled up from the warm floorboards.
I stopped a few steps below her and glanced back at the glow of the first floor. We had to leave now or we would get caught here and die.
“Lucy! Come with me!” I begged.
I saw her shake her head. Her face was pale and terrified, and I realized she was that little girl again, haunted by dreams and the living nightmares of her life here.
“I can’t leave it, I can’t leave Lockwood!” she sobbed. “I can’t do it.”
“You can,” I said, and held out my hand. “I’ll help you, take my hand. You can.”
There was a screeching groan of metal twisting and falling, and then the muffled thud of a ceiling crashing to the ground.
Lucy screamed as if the noise had broken through her terror, and reached for my hand.
We ran down the stairs, her leading me now, both of us stumbling, almost falling, as we made our way through the smoke and heat, clutching so tightly to each other’s hands that I could feel the bones grind together, blundering past walls and rooms and furniture rendered unfamiliar by smoke and panic.
The fire thundered to our left and bellowed at our backs as we dashed through the entrance hall and burst into the clean air of the night.
We were out, we were safe, and, once we reached the front lawn, I fell to my knees and was violently sick, hands clutching at the grass in front of me.
Forty-Five
Did everyone get out?” Lucy asked. She was sitting beside me on the grass, shoulder against mine. I could feel tremors working their way through her body but she was no longer crying.
“We think everyone but your father. Miss Lucy, I’m so sorry,” Dorothy said, having walked toward us from the huddle of servants and guests who were staring up at the house. Her face was smeared with soot, her voice cracked from the smoke, and the white of her collar had turned gray.
The housekeeper was standing a little way away from the rest of them, trembling. When she had recovered, I would tell Lucy about her and what she had done; what a monster she was. No wonder she had hated my arrival at Lockwood, my curiosity, my poking about in shut-up rooms. I might have felt a hollow glee at her being so devastated if the museum had not been lost as well.
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“The fire brigade will be here soon.” Dorothy shivered, her arms wrapped around herself. “If the Luftwaffe don’t find us first,” she continued, staring at the clear sky. “We’re like sitting ducks here, we’ve made a beacon to guide their way.” She waved a hand toward the house.
“Dorothy,” the cook admonished and motioned with her head toward Lucy.
At that moment, something inside of the house fell with a boom and a roaring crunch, sending a plume of smoke and flames up to the heavens. I let out a single bark of hysterical laughter.
The fire had taken the whole of Lockwood, silhouetting it against the night—as if the real world were made of flames, and the dark of the night covering it had been cut open to reveal the inferno inside. Any windows we could still see were now white with heat, a mirror of their blackout selves, the glass exploding as we watched, as if the house were expanding, muscling its way out into the grounds of the estate.
“Your animals,” Lucy cried, and clutched my hand.
My animals. I had called them that in my head and out loud to other people, my animals, mine. Had I been covetous of them in my own way, just as the Major was? Had my selfish hubris been their downfall? They were not mine, they were the museum’s, the nation’s. They never belonged to me at all; I was only supposed to safeguard them for the next generation, the better generation, the ones who would not start wars and raze cities to ash and cinder, and murder millions.
“How did the fire start?” Dorothy asked us, the last vestige of formality toward her lady going up in smoke with the manor. “You were in the long gallery, weren’t you, did you see it?”
I glanced toward the cluster of guests. Most of the women were crying; Sylvia was in the arms of one of the officers, her face a rictus of pain.
“I didn’t see it,” I said. “There was an argument, and when we left Lord Lockwood was still by the dinner table.”
“An argument with who?”
“With Mary,” Josephine said, joining our group. “That was her name, his ex-girlfriend, the one with white hair, yes?”
“Where is she?” the cook asked.
Josephine shrugged. “Gone,” she said. “She and her man, they left in their car. The artist and the singer too.”
Had Mary set one of the animals on fire, or the tablecloth, or a fur someone had left behind? Had she done it accidentally, or on purpose? If the latter, did she even know what she was doing?
Or was someone else to blame?
I remembered Lucy squeezing past the dinner table as we left; her fur stole knocking things onto the floor—ivy wreaths, cutlery, candlesticks. I knew the sound of a candlestick clattering onto wooden floorboards; I had heard it when Paul had dropped one down the stairs just a week or so ago. I remembered too that the polar bear had seemed to glow when I stopped on the threshold of the long gallery and looked back—was that the first flames of the fire Lucy had unwittingly lit?
I would never tell her my suspicions. I would not make her feel responsible for destroying her home, as I was responsible for destroying the mammal collection of the museum.
For I had no one else to blame, no one but myself.
I should not have let the Major host a candlelit dinner; I had had the power to refuse him, to call in help from the director in London to support me. I should not have had the windows of the long gallery and the ground floor of the main house boarded up, turning the inside of the house into a heat trap. I should have demanded that the mammal collection was moved the moment the infestation got out of control, the moment the thefts began. I should have never been arrogant enough to presume that I could keep them safe, that I alone could be their brave protector. I had been trying to save face, selfishly trying to prove that the fossil I had smashed had been an anomaly, that I was up to the task.
How wrong I was, how foolish.
The fire gorged itself on Lockwood, on its rich woods and fine wallpapers, its oriental carpets and Turkish rugs, its silks and velvets and linens, its wardrobes bursting with dresses and suits and furs, its shelves of books, its brass fittings and crystal chandeliers, its silverware and copper kitchenware, its porcelain and glass, its marble and flagstone, slate and tile, its feather mattresses and plush sofas, embroidered cushions and oil paintings. It devoured skins and furs and mounted animals, cabinets and cases and crates, jars and drawers, skulls and bones and teeth, pickled flesh and dry feathers, hides and tails and hooves.
There was a woman in there too, I imagined, my mind fire-drunk and hysterical; ablaze and white-hot, she strolled down corridors, sparks like petals flung from her hands, burning beasts at her heel; and she crooned as she bent over the body of a man whose bones were reduced to cinders, while the walls of the flaming house screeched and hummed a chorus.
Could everything be blamed on Mary, on the Major and the housekeeper? All those sightings of a ghostly figure, the handprints on mirrors, the wild animals drawn to the house, the feverish scent of orchids that lingered even after the dried flowers had crumbled—could everything that had happened within the walls of Lockwood be explained?
* * *
Soon, the front lawn was crowded with people, a great host of villagers come to see the end of the big house whose foundations had been here longer than the village itself. Voices calling and crying, and sirens and shouts; the shattering and falling of the last beams and walls; the crackling of the fire that was still burning despite the efforts of the fire brigade, who had finally arrived, and all the people who ferried hoses and buckets along from the lake.
Go back to your homes, find shelter, the ARP wardens told us. The fire could draw the enemy; they might think it’s a target—a factory or an aerodrome. But we could not leave, we could not look away; Lockwood seemed to demand our vigil, one final service from all of us, whether or not we had worn the livery of its servants.
By now, everyone had heard that the lord of the manor had died inside, surrounded by his great wealth, his possessions. I could hear people sharing stories about him—most mythologizing him, a few cursing his memory, all the old gossip about the Lockwoods spilling forth, talk of curses and bad luck, of the inheritance of madness, as they tried to catch a glimpse of Lucy. I was sheltering her with a blanket given to me by the ambulance, the both of us propped against the great trunk of the oak tree opposite the house, whose bare branches, tipped with the reflection of the fire, reached out into the lightening sky.
For a time after dawn, the glow of the fire surpassed the light of the sun itself, and then as the day lengthened and the flames retreated, with no more fuel to burn, with water from the lake sprayed on the lawns and gardens about the house so it would not spread, the sun won out and we began to shiver in the late December cold. It was winter, we remembered suddenly, the heat of the fire’s false summer disappearing. The villagers returned to their homes, the guests gave statements to the police and drove off, packed into the cars that had not been damaged by falling masonry.
But the inhabitants of Lockwood—the surviving servants; the mammal keeper who had lost her mammals; the daughter of the dead lord, the inheritor of this burned-out shell of a grand manor house—remained behind, shivering still and looking at the pile of rubble and debris and blackened stone, the glow of the last embers, the smoke sending its unintelligible trails into the sky.
A monstrous bonfire, a funeral pyre for a monstrous man who had got his wish—for the mammals would remain here now, surrounding his corpse.
Somewhere inside that building were the ashes of the museum’s mammal collection: the jaguar, the stouts and weasels, the foxes, the polar bear, the shells and feathers and butterflies and beetles, the black panther, the platypus, the mastodon skull, the okapi, the hummingbirds’ nests, the infested owl, the tiger, the wolf, the lion, the lynx, the elephant.
An ark had been dispatched to safety but had burned inside the four walls meant to protect it. The years of work by hundreds, maybe even thousands of people who strove to preserve the past, to dissect the world of animal
s and understand them, classify them, to mount and preserve them—all gone, in one night, as nature took her children back to the earth from whence we had taken them or dug them up; from where they had been felled by a hunter’s shot or a trap or a net; from where they had been stolen before they could be buried and mourned and turned into fodder for new life.
What would grow from the ashes here; what plants would feed on animals that had never stalked this land, never taken a breath here, but instead been dragged, dead, to stand in its dusty halls? In days and months to come, mice and insects would nibble on exotic leathers and charred, unfamiliar bones; and, as months became years, worms and fungi and bacteria in the soil that would creep its way into the house would have a rare feast indeed.
Meanwhile, the echoing building in London would forever bear a hollow where my collection should have been; a void that would only be more obvious when the other evacuated collections—the reptiles, the birds, the butterflies, the invertebrates, the rocks and fossils—returned to mark the absence of their fellow beasts who had not returned from war.
I had lost the collection and with it my future employment and career. I would find no other job in my specialty—what job was there for me when most of the mammal collection of the museum had been destroyed? And who would hire someone whose own negligence had caused their priceless charges to go up in flames?
But what was one destroyed house compared to all the others in London, or on the coasts, in the Midlands, and in the north? What was one building in comparison to the cities and towns that had been razed across Europe, to the people who had been stolen from their homes and interned into camps? Lockwood was but a speck of dust in the rubble of Europe. Even the museum’s mammals were only a small part of the hoard of historical and scientific collections under threat from bombs and tanks and guns and men starting fires.
