I arrived at Lockwood Manor with the kind of headache that came from sitting in a truck with poor suspension for many hours, while worrying about the cargo of the other trucks in our convoy, the animals muffled and blinded by sacking and rope, juddering and swaying and knocking against one another. It was a warm sunny day, but as we drove along the curving driveway around the front lawn, I could not say that the weather made the house look any more welcoming. Lockwood Manor had stood on this spot for many centuries, but most of the house as it was had been built in the Jacobethan style in the nineteenth century. The stone used had dulled to a gray; narrow windows were set in a long, squat, uniform front bracketed by two round turrets, and a pierced parapet with pinnacles bristled against the sky.
I knew from the plans that I had studied that this front hid a more untidy rear, a newer extension to the kitchen in the ground floor of the east wing, and, most importantly of all for the museum, the long gallery. This was a single-storied building that jutted out from the back of the west wing next to a private courtyard, and was Tudor in origin—once part of another building since lost to one of those catastrophic acts of destruction that seemingly happened to very old estates in this country. The long gallery had not been occupied for many years and would have enough room to house many of the museum’s crates and cabinets without furniture needing to be moved or people displaced. Other museum pieces, especially the mounted animals that needed a closer watch for potential damage from atmosphere or pests, would be housed inside the main building, leaving only a few rooms solely for the Major and his daughter. This was their chosen war sacrifice: where other owners of country houses would be preparing for evacuated children and babies, the Lockwoods would receive a quiet menagerie who would not race around or run their sticky fingers along the walls and wake the house with their cries.
I got out of the truck, dropping to the gravel driveway, the four stories of the house looming high above me as if taking my measure. Major Lord Lockwood arrived at the main door with his crowd of dogs, as if he had appeared straight from the photograph that I had seen in the newspaper. The dogs swarmed down the stairs toward me and nudged at my legs. One of them started to growl before the Major called them off me, hitting the offending beast over its back with his stick. Another man with a pinched, folded face like a bulldog rushed down the stairs in a tweed jacket and led the dogs away. I straightened my suit.
The Major welcomed me to Lockwood Manor with an unenthusiastic handshake. “We were expecting a Dr. Farthing,” he said, “but I hear he’s left his post.”
“He’s enlisted, yes,” I replied.
“Well.” He clapped his hands together and we sized each other up. “I’m sure you’ll do just fine. Come along into the house now, they’ve started unpacking already.”
“They really should have waited for me,” I said, under my breath, as I followed him; this was not an auspicious start to my directorship.
Our path was blocked by a woman with white-blond hair and a fur-ruffed cardigan. She was clearly leaving, carrying a rather large suitcase for her slim size, but it was not the suitcase that made me stare—it was the tear tracks down her anguished face and the dark patches on her scarf which implied earlier crying. Her breath hitched as she moved to the side for us to pass and, though she looked at the Major beseechingly, when she turned to regard me it was with such loathing that I felt a wash of shame, as if I had done something terrible to her, this woman I had never met before. She sniffed, her top lip curling, and wiped at her tears with a pale glove as I took a step back, and then she turned away with a furious puff of breath and continued down the front steps, struggling with her load.
“Come along now,” the Major admonished from the gloom of the hallway, clearing his throat impatiently.
I tried to brush off the lingering image of the woman’s tears, of her hatred, as he led me through room after room of the house, which felt dark and close compared to the late summer’s day outside. We started with the parlor and sitting room to the left of the entrance hall, which looked out across the front lawn and would house the Chiroptera and Insectivora that other keepers had begged us to take; then we crossed the hall to the smoking room next to the dining room, where the Marsupialia would live; next we turned right past the ballroom, with its walls of gilded mirrors in which I caught my harried reflection as I passed, and which would be kept empty of museum specimens because the Major wanted to host gatherings for the nearby regiment.
Next, we moved along the west corridor, which held the billiards room, the library, the morning room, the music room, and the Major’s mother’s old sitting room, as well as the summer room, the writing room, which would hold bones related to the Cetacea; and then my office, which had been another parlor and which shared a wall with the Major’s office and his own connected private library, both of which he declined to show me and which would be off-limits.
Next to the Major’s office there was a doorway that led to a corridor through which one could access the long gallery itself. This, as its name suggested, consisted of a long, wide corridor with teak walls and a low coffered ceiling, with a row of half a dozen rooms to either side that were linked together so that the corridor itself only had four doorways cut into its walls. The workmen were carrying boxes and crates along the corridor, and as we made our way through the rooms I was pleased by how full they looked, how many specimens we had been able to preemptively save.
We left the long gallery and went back into the main house and through to the entrance hall.
“Dr. Farthing wanted to see the other rooms, so that he could know the architecture of the house and the evacuation routes, I think it was. The parlormaid will show you those,” the Major said, waving me toward a young woman in starched gray and white.
Dr. Farthing was renowned for being nosy, and had probably made this up in order to have a look round. We had a plan of the house back in London, after all, made only a few years ago, so there were unlikely to be surprises. But I was quite thrilled at the chance to see the great backbone of a country house, the engine taking up one ground-floor wing: the kitchen, scullery, flower room, brushing room, the stillrooms, three pantries, the butler’s room, the lamp rooms, the endless doors and shelves and little anterooms, most of them with no window to the outside; and the servants scuttling about carrying buckets and cloths and trays and boxes. At some point in the tour, I lost my sense of direction and could not tell whether I faced south or north or was even in the same wing. The parlormaid brought me out into the grand entrance hall again by the same door I had entered, even though I swore it was another, and there the Major was talking to the man who had taken the dogs away.
“Ah, tour went well?” the Major asked me.
“Fascinating,” I said, although by the slight creasing of his face that was not quite the right word. Perhaps it gave away too much my desire to snoop—which was clearly acceptable from Dr. Farthing, but less so from me.
“Shall we move to the drawing room?” he asked.
Once there, alongside the shrouded animals that had been newly unloaded from the truck and awaited unwrapping, he turned to me with hands on his hips.
“This is still a working estate, Mrs. Cartwright—I hope that won’t be a problem, and that the museum and the house can work harmoniously side by side.”
Obviously he had been put out by my interest in the servants’ quarters. Or perhaps he was hiding something. Was this a veiled warning?
“It’s Miss Cartwright,” I corrected, “and I am confident there shall be no problems at all. The museum is immensely thankful for your generous offer to temporarily house the nation’s most valuable mammal collection while London is under threat, and as the correspondence between Lockwood and the museum has shown these past few years, I do believe our collaborative work will be exemplary.” I intended to bamboozle him with long words and flattery.
“Excellent,” he said, his hands stuffed into his pockets and his eyes already skimming to the door to get away from me. “If you’ll excuse me now, the housekeeper will find you shortly.” He spoke with the louche arrogance of the landed gentry.
Left alone in the drawing room, my eye was drawn to a glimmer of silver, and when I moved past the brocaded sofa, I found a strange sight. A worn kitchen knife had been stabbed an inch deep into the delicate veneer surface of a side table. The incongruity of the weathered knife in a room full of gilt and fine fabrics, and its upright position, as if it was even now being held by some ghostly hand, unnerved me and, without thinking, I tugged it from the table and then dropped it on its side with a clatter, the wood of its handle so worn it had felt soft in my palm. I moved back around the sofa and rubbed at my arms, where the hair had stood up.
“Hullo there,” a pleasant voice said from the door. “Are you Miss Cartwright?”
“I am, yes.”
“Lady Lockwood, but you can call me Lucy,” the woman entering the room said, and I stuck my hand out only for her to move to kiss my cheek instead. She smelled of a perfume so light I knew it was expensive, and had remarkably short black hair, only a few inches long. It was shorter than a boy’s but brushed and pinned carefully as if to hide its length. A fever haircut, I thought to myself, like something out of Austen. Or perhaps she had had an accident with curlers? Rich people were allowed to be eccentric and have silly haircuts, I supposed. She had dark eyes with tired bruises underneath that could be seen through the pale powder she was using, freckles across both cheeks, a square jaw, and perfectly applied red lipstick. She was one of those beautiful women made all the more lovely by her flaws—the little nick of a scar on her chin, the left ear that jutted out slightly more than the right—and something about seeing her here in the sedate surroundings of the house surprised me, as if I had not expected to meet her, but one does not know who one is to encounter for the first time on any given day, so I did not know why I felt this strange resonation.
“Now, here’s a sheet with mealtimes and other information like laundry,” she said as I gathered my wits again, “and keys to the museum’s rooms and to the long gallery. This is a key to the main door of the house; I wanted you to have one on the very odd occasion when no one is manning it, or if there’s an emergency or something.” She handed me a great big heavy thing and I slipped it and the other keys into the pocket of my jacket, feeling their weight against my side.
In the correspondence from the Major and his secretary, he had mentioned that his daughter might be able to help while we were at Lockwood, but in what capacity had been left vague. I had gathered the impression that she was either very young or some society beauty being whisked to and fro by a driver, so would have little time for the museum. I could see now that she was about my age, and seemed very enthusiastic. I wondered if Lord Lockwood was simply one of those men who did not want his own daughter to work.
She looked up from her list and paused, the polite smile fading into seriousness.
“Forgive me,” she said, “but you looked shaken for a moment when I walked in; are you all right?” she asked, lightly touching my arm.
“Oh, it’s nothing.” I shook my head, but she was watching me so intently that I felt I should say something. “I was walking around the room and I put my hand out for balance and almost cut myself on the knife on the side table over there,” I said. “I can be a bit clumsy sometimes, I’m afraid,” I added hurriedly, thinking that this was not the kind of pulled-together first impression I wanted to make.
“Oh, goodness me, what on earth is that doing in here?” she said, peering over at it with a puzzled frown. “But are you all right?” she asked, taking my hand and turning it over, looking for a wound.
The slide of her fingers across my palm startled me and the earnestness of her search made me feel a sudden wave of tenderness toward her.
“Oh no, I didn’t get hurt, I caught myself just in time.” It was silly to come up with a lie like that, but then it had been silly of me to tug the knife out too.
“Thank god,” she said, and let my hand go. “I can’t think how someone misplaced that here; I’ll let the housekeeper know. I hope it hasn’t soured your arrival.”
“Oh, of course not,” I insisted. “It’s my own fault for not looking where I was going. You’d think someone that worked around so many sharp-toothed beasts would take more care.” It was an ineffectual joke but she laughed all the same, revealing dimples in her cheeks.
“Well,” she said, “I do hope that you shall be very happy here at Lockwood Manor. It’s such an honor to offer a home to the museum’s mammal collection.”
“It’s a truly magnificent house,” I said.
“It looks even more splendid with your animals inside, Miss Cartwright,” she said, touching my arm quickly. “Now, we’ve put you in the east wing, in the red bedroom as it’s called. I hope that’s all right. It’s a lovely cozy room with views over the front gardens. I used it myself a few times while convalescing as a child because it was closer to my nurse’s room and, truthfully, I’ve never slept better.” She smiled tremulously at me.
I wanted to tell her that even a cupboard would do for me, that there was no need for such concern for the quality of my sleep. I was not used to being catered to in this manner; I was used to landladies who pursed their lips and sighed wearily if I asked for a leaking tap to be fixed and complained that I was too loud when I came in from work late.
“Please, call me Hetty,” I said.
“Lucy!” the Major called then, striding into the room. “Ah, there you are, my dove,” he said. “Cook wants your advice on the menus.”
“Father—”
“Come along,” he said, and swept his arm toward the door.
“The rooms are quite filling up with beasts,” he added, looking around with satisfaction as I watched Lucy leave. She smiled at me and the skin at the corners of her eyes crinkled.
“Are you getting Lucy excited?” the Major said, turning to me once she had gone. I could not quite grasp his tone. His enthusiasm had fallen away in a flash to reveal something hard and intelligent.
“I was just talking about the museum—”
“Because she is very delicate, Lucy. She is not to be troubled with too many difficulties or dramas. And with the loss of both her mother and grandmother a few months ago . . .” He paused. “She’s sensitive, you know. If there are any true problems you must come to me or to the housekeeper, or to my man, Jenkins.” I guessed the latter was the bulldog-faced man in the hall earlier.
“Of course,” I replied.
We had foreseen awkward politics with the collection being here, with many of our discussions hinging on that all-encompassing word diplomacy, but I was not expecting it to present itself in a manner quite like this. When we heard that the late Lady Lockwood and her mother-in-law had both passed away recently, there were questions about whether we should choose a different location, but after we sent a carefully worded letter to the Major saying thus, he had insisted that the museum still be housed at Lockwood Manor. The two women had died tragically in an evening car crash on a country road, quite horrible. I remembered that at one of our meetings, David—one of those brutish-looking rugger types who surprises with their hidden bookishness and encyclopedic knowledge of detective stories—said he had asked a journalist friend about the crash and whether there were any suspects, and had been told that the police had thought it an accident. I remembered it because the whole room had paused after he said it, none of us having assumed it was anything other than an accident originally. I hadn’t given it much thought after that, my mind busy with the practicalities of the move, with my animals, but now that I was here, I found myself wondering about the late Lady Lockwood, Lucy’s mother, and just what had happened that night.
A worker passing the door with his arms braced around a large frame called out for instructions, and I returned to the task at hand.
“That’s a butterfly case; it goes with the others in the summer room. Just as we talked about,” I said, shortly, because I had pegged this particular worker for a troublemaker back in London. It was a motley crew anyway, with so many men having already enlisted.
When I turned again to the Major, the lightness was back in his eyes. “I can see that you are eminently reasonable, Miss Cartwright, and I apologize for belaboring my point earlier. Young women can be so flighty, you know, but I can tell you are of sensible stock. You’ll be a good companion for Lucy, I think—she has been lonely these past few months with only me and the servants for company.”
“I shall do my best,” I replied, after a moment while I thought of what to say. Flighty women? Sensible stock? I sincerely hoped that things would indeed go smoothly here, and that he would not be one of those old bores who would not listen to a woman if his hair were on fire. Would he be paying me to be his daughter’s companion, I wondered, a little absurdly, or would that be covered by my wages from the museum?
It was no matter. I was intrigued by Lucy in a way I could not quite explain and had felt welcomed by her far more heartily than any landlady previous. It would be rather nice to share a house with her and my animals and cabinets from London, instead of the drab loneliness of the lodging house in Kensington with its sour-faced inhabitants.
When I was a child, I had the frankly nonsensical habit of trying to classify those around me as animals, being generally more fond of them than people, and, embarrassingly, it was not a habit I had been able to shake. I had only told someone about this preoccupation once before—a girl at my school called Constance who I said reminded me of a mongoose, and who told all the other girls that I was trying to insult her, when I really was not, and I was unable to claw my way back from that pariahdom. Lucy had been called a dove by her father but, as a mammal lover, I thought that she rather reminded me of a cat somehow, in her glamour and warm smiles—even though of course I knew that neither of these attributes had anything to do with a real Felis catus. Lord Lockwood, though, I had pegged as a Bengal tiger, wearing his authority coolly, or perhaps a Eurasian wolf. And as for myself, sometimes I was a European badger, blundering around in the dark, and other times a golden mole: pale, solitary, industrious, and rather unenchanting.
As I walked along the long upstairs hall behind the young maid who was showing me to my assigned bedroom, I felt the rich carpet pull at my feet, a little like the way thick snow makes it hard to walk. My eyes could barely see to the end of the corridor, and I kept expecting a sudden mirrored wall to appear, and almost wanted to keep my hands out in front of me. The museum occupied the ground floors but no higher. On the floors above, there lived a handful of people and many empty rooms. We had already passed five empty bedrooms; three had their doors closed but I peeked in curiously at the other two as the maid named them—the first was the yellow room, dominated by a massive four-poster bed which had its curtains firmly pulled shut, and opposite that was the purple room, with a dizzying wallpaper and a mirror set just opposite the doorway that startled me when I thought my watery reflection was another unexpected guest.
There were rumors, the maid had said, nervously shifting away from the door, that this room was cursed, that guests who slept there had heard strange sounds at night.
“I should get back to the kitchen, ma’am,” she continued quickly. “We’re rushed off our feet at the moment. You can’t miss your room; it’s the only one in this wing with red wallpaper.” She bobbed and hurried away, disappearing into the alcove where a mammoth vase and giant spray of dried flowers disguised the doorway that led to the service stairs, put in place so that the servants could enter and leave the corridor without a trace of a footstep on the grand staircase.
The next pair of rooms I passed had their blackout curtains already closed, and in the gloom I could see that each piece of furniture, chandeliers included, was shrouded with dust sheets, turning their recognizable shapes into strange, hulking objects. The room opposite mine had twin beds on either side of the window, whose outside was crowded with ivy, and a loud clock sitting on the windowsill whose ticking I had heard from several rooms away. Beyond my room was a bathroom and two more empty—I assumed—bedrooms with their doors closed, and the shut-up turret rooms. I was the only one staying in the east wing—David and Helen would be in the west wing, and the Major’s suite of rooms was in the round turret at the end of that long corridor.
I was not a superstitious person, not someone prone to whimsy aside from my classification game, and I liked facts far more than fiction, but there was undeniably something unsettling about a row of unoccupied rooms, like being the only guest in a hotel, or those moments when one is a child and one’s house is so quiet one has the irrational thought that everyone has gone and left you behind.
As I reached my assigned room, the thought was banished when I saw a flicker of movement in the corner of my eye—this house was truly far from empty, with its busy servants scurrying about.
I turned. There was a figure at the other end of the corridor. As many sconces as there were, the space was too large to light completely, and the figure was so far away I could not see their face or even tell their sex. Yet I knew that they were staring at me, and that there was something unfriendly about their posture, furious even. The corridor seemed to swell and stretch as I stood and stared back, and then they moved to the left and disappeared, a door slamming so loudly behind them that it made my shoulders jerk.
An angry figure, a weeping woman who hated me, a lord of the manor who warned me against exciting his fragile daughter, and talk of a cursed room. What kind of place was this? I stepped into my room and shut the door behind me. Every home, and every workplace, had its own human current simmering underneath, histories and grudges and idiosyncrasies; it was only that this was a rather grander setting for them, that’s all. I would concentrate on my work, on the animals, as I had always done, and let the living occupants of Lockwood do as they may.