The morning after the ball, I went straight to the long gallery and the hummingbird cabinet. A silly part of me had hoped that it had only been a dream, but there was the jagged hole, there the shards of glass on the floor, glittering like sharp snow, and there were the bare branches where half a dozen hummingbirds had once been fixed in place, their dry wings paused in motion, their eyes dark beads of glass. It did not make me feel any better that it was an old exhibit which had never been of much use to scientists, that they were faded and often poorly mounted.
The jaguar, the handful of hummingbirds—surely the third incident would mean the end of my tenure here. I felt angry and hopeless, as if I too were being toyed with by someone, that it was personal, when I knew that rationally it had nothing to do with me, that it was the museum that was being targeted. Evacuation was supposed to mean safety and yet we had suffered more loss and damage than London by this point, and without needing the assistance of the Luftwaffe, who were still biding their time on the Continent.
As I patched the hole in the glass with a board, hiding half of the remaining hummingbirds from view, I thought of the ball last night, of the crowds wandering hither and thither, spirited with champagne and dance. I had searched the museum rooms for the birds, but I had not searched on any other floor. Perhaps the person who had stolen them had discarded them in a different part of the house? Perhaps it had been some poorly thought-out drunken jape forgotten the moment the attacker returned to the party.
I decided I would check myself, rather than asking the housekeeper for assistance, because although she could be cold with the other servants, she was positively glacial when I asked for help, taking any request as a monstrous imposition, and I had no intention of humbling myself further before her by explaining how personal this was to me, how my future might just rely on a handful of dried birds.
That evening, I started with the rooms on my floor, but discovered two problems—the first being that the servants were forever striding up and down the corridor and I was quite conspicuous with my torch, and the second that to search a room for a graying object the size of a thumb would take far longer than I had first supposed.
I only managed to search one room, the twin opposite mine, whose bed linens I had to remove and the beds remake, for fear I would squash the fragile birds if I patted down the covers to discover if they had been tucked under the blankets. I worked to the sounds of the loud ticking of the clock on the windowsill, the disquieting scrape of ivy against the blacked-out window, and frequent footsteps along the hall, none of which were exactly conducive to a calm atmosphere for my search. I looked under the beds, behind the heavy drape of the curtains, in the whitewashed wardrobe with its loudly squeaking door, inside the bedside table (whose drawer required a three-minute jiggle of its handle to pull out), and underneath the heavy rug, in case I found the flattened bird skins there. For my troubles, my clothes were now coated with dust and it was an hour beyond my usual bedtime.
One room down, dozens more to go, I thought as I fell asleep to that same sound of the clock, drifting its way through the crack underneath my door, as if it was a metronome, and the rooms of the house were pipes of some giant organ waiting to be played.
It was not until a couple of days later that I saw Lucy for the first time since the ball. A group of us including servants and the lady of the house were in the drawing room crowded around the wireless, listening to the news of the bombing of Scapa Flow, of the losses to our naval fleet.
“How many men do you think can fit in the Royal Oak?” Lucy asked, face creased with pain.
“More than a thousand,” one of the maids said. “My uncle is in the navy,” she explained.
“A thousand,” Lucy repeated, her voice shaking, and when someone asked about the lifeboats, about air pockets, I left, unable to bear such gruesome talk.
Lucy followed me to the summer room, which had become one of my favorite places to linger because it was as quiet as my office but did not have a stack of work there to upbraid me for being idle. She sat down on a sofa that was situated next to the looming antelope and the cabinet of Tapiridae skulls, in front of the wall of pinned butterflies, wrapping her arms around her shoulders.
“It’s so dreadful, what happened to the sailors,” she said. “I can’t imagine the terror of being sunk, of struggling in the water.” Her hands fumbled at her lighter.
“Here, let me,” I said, cupping the flame and lighting her cigarette.
“There’s a particular nightmare I’ve had since I was young, of being trapped, of being smothered, and I can’t help thinking of it when I think of the sailors,” she said. “Do you ever feel like the anxieties of your nightmares follow you into the next day?” She tapped out ash as she asked the question, and I nodded. “It’s all this waiting around, isn’t it? This agonizing wait for the war to begin in earnest, beyond these dreadful few attacks. I should be mourning them, not hurrying forth more tragedies.”
“We knew the war was coming,” I said. She was wearing a well-loved pair of navy trousers today and their knees were slightly faded. “It’s understandable that everyone wants it to begin, wants to know what we’re up against. We want our fear to have form, to know how we should face it.”
“Thank you, Hetty,” she said, smiling a little sadly and rubbing a hand across her collarbone. “You know just what to say to comfort me.”
I do? I wanted to ask.
“I heard about the poor hummingbirds at the ball,” she continued. “I’m so sorry about that; what an awful thing for someone to do. You still haven’t found the birds?”
“No.” I sighed. “Perhaps they are wherever the blasted jaguar is,” I added drolly.
Her mouth twitched in a smile and then she shifted her legs to cross her ankles. “I also wanted to apologize for my father,” she said gingerly. “I know he can be quite brusque in his manner.”
Only if brusqueness is a politer way of saying that he is a bully, I thought. “I had assumed that he would be quite busy with his businesses. He had implied that he took regular trips elsewhere, and I wonder if it is not just that he feels the museum is very underfoot, you know,” I said diplomatically.
“Then I should definitely be the one to apologize. Because it’s true, he isn’t keen on being cooped up here all the time, but I think he’s worried about me, after losing Mother and Grandmother, and the funny turn I had.”
“Oh goodness, I didn’t mean to suggest—”
“Of course you didn’t,” she said, picking up my hand and squeezing it. “I am perfectly well now; he is overprotective to a fault, my father, especially now that my mother and grandmother are no longer around. I’m sure he’ll be off soon and leave you to it.”
“The museum has found a wonderful home here,” I said, glancing down at our hands. I had been so busy getting irritated at the Major, as if he was trespassing here, that I had forgotten that this was Lucy’s home too.
“I just enjoy the house being full again, especially knowing that we’re likely to lose more of the servants to the war, even if Father rants and raves to the War Office about them being absolutely essential. As if losing them to rumors of ghosts wasn’t bad enough.” She stubbed out her cigarette and sat back to regard the room. “It’s so diverting having your animals here, Hetty. Even when I’m not helping with the cleaning, I love to wander through the museum rooms; it’s like my own private exhibition, and every time I walk around I spot new things in the cabinets, as if they’ve been shuffled around by stagehands behind the scenes.”
“Yes, quite,” I said, slightly disconcerted by her words—for was I not still noticing that the animals and the smaller cabinets looked out of place when I opened up the rooms in the morning, as if they had shifted in the night, mad as that sounded?
I did not tell Lucy about my new quest for the hummingbirds. I was not sure why, only that I did not want her to feel troubled. Evening after evening, I continued my search through the unoccupied rooms of the first floor, but there was another hurdle to overcome, for the day after the news about Scapa Flow, it started to rain heavily and, as the news came in about further bombing raids on the Scottish coasts and attacks on our merchant fleet, it became apparent that Lockwood Manor leaked. And so the servants and I were to be found hurrying about with pots and pans and dishes, looking for puddles and damp patches, ears pricked as if we were listening for Morse code and not drips and splashes of water. I wanted to blame the Major for the poor condition of Lockwood’s roof but I knew that rain like that—great, thick sheets that drummed on every surface with a loud roar—caused the same kind of leaks back at the museum building in London.
I could not blame him for the mice either, who had retreated from the floods outside into the warmth of Lockwood, with its large kitchen and stores, with its mounted animals waiting for the little rodents to gnaw on, and who remained even after the rain had cleared, delighting in the exotic wonders of their new home. We set endless traps and took it in turns between us to unlock the museum doors in the morning, breath held to wonder how many dead mice we would find, and then ferry them at arm’s length out of the back door. When I would lock up the museum rooms each night, I could not help but feel I was only locking in the mice, that I was condoning their feast somehow, saying, here, have at ’em. The mice liked the cabinets as well, god knows why, maybe it was just the lingering smells and scents of animals and human visitors, or perhaps something in the varnish. They chewed on the corners, a horrible scratching sound that echoed, so that you thought you might turn the corner and find a whole crowd of them and not just one industrious fellow who fled quick as a shot when he saw your foot.
And of course, mice could be of a similar size to hummingbirds, the birds’ feathers a gray like the rodents’ hides, so now when I searched for my missing birds in the last of the rooms on the first floor—as I lifted rugs, threw back dust sheets that clouded the air with their catch, opened drawers, swung back heavy wardrobe doors, and billowed curtains away from windows; as I discovered the lesser secrets of Lockwood—the furniture that covered up patches of mold and peeling paint, the scribbles of ink in various hands inside wardrobes and underneath beds, the spots of damp that chilled a wall, the slight depressions where old doors or windows had been bricked up; as I tried to be as quiet as possible for fear of being discovered myself, I had in the back of my mind the thought that if I did find a little gray hump, it was just as likely to be a mouse, alive or dead.
I had tried to search during the day, thinking that it would be easier with the natural light from outside, but in the first room I tried, I had glanced out of the window to see Jenkins standing near the back of the house, rifle across his shoulder, the smudge of a fox in his fist, staring right at where I stood, as if he had noticed the curtain was out of place, and I ducked out of sight, nonsensically afraid of—what? being found in one of the spare guest rooms? Still, I took it as a sign that I should restrict my search to the evenings and light my way with my torch.
The barn cats from the farm had been brought into the house for the mice and lolled in awkward spots during the day, staring slit-eyed as we tried not to trip over their fat bellies. They spent their nights on a parallel hunt to mine, and yet they had evolved for such a task, stalking the halls and the rooms of the manor house noiselessly, squeezing their way through hidden passages and holes after their quarry. In the dark of the blackout they would have an advantage over the mice, and myself, with our comparatively poor vision.
I told myself that I had not got where I was by being halfhearted about my endeavors, and that my reputation—my very future—was staked on the welfare of the specimens; and thus it was that I started tentatively searching the second floor, where a handful of servants lodged in the east wing, in rooms that had been refurbished in the last decade and were markedly more spacious than the poky rooms in the west wing that had been barely touched since the turn of the century. I tried to choose days and times when the servants would be busy or asleep, hurrying up and down the stairs and along corridors with my torch in my hand and my heart in my throat, expecting every groan of the floorboards and creak of doors shifting in the creeping drafts to herald my discovery.
It was while I was searching one of these darkened rooms late one afternoon, lying on the hard mattress of the narrow bed while the spiderwebs in the eaves above me trembled, with my head jammed painfully between floor and bed frame, shining my light under the bed, that the door to the room opened with a loud rasp.
“What on earth is going on in here?” the housekeeper demanded as I bashed my head on the bed frame in my hurry to turn my torch off and sit up.
I stared at her, feeling a flush of shame spread down my chest, unwittingly reminded of my mother’s reprimands.
“Miss Cartwright, may I be of assistance?” she asked scathingly.
“I was looking for the hummingbirds, the ones that went missing at the ball,” I admitted, unable to come up with a better excuse.
“But we found those a week ago! Did Dorothy not give them to you?”
“What?” I asked.
“Yes, in one of the guest rooms.”
“But I searched the guest rooms!” She looked at me with something that was almost loathing, but I could not stop myself from asking another question. “Where exactly were they found?”
“Oh, on top of the bedside table in the purple bedroom, in plain sight apparently. I’m sure we’d have found them even sooner, but it is hard for us to manage the whole house with so many maids leaving us,” she said pointedly, almost as if I was somehow responsible for that. Her words, if not her manner, were reasonable, and yet what she was saying could not possibly be right because I had searched that very room top to toe. Or was she right, and I had missed the birds completely?
“If you have concerns about the house,” she continued now, “please come to me; this is the servants’ floor, and neither this nor the other guest rooms are part of the museum.”
You have no right to be here, I heard—and she was right, which was why I was so embarrassed. It was a fault of mine to get obsessive about my work, to be so single-minded as to ignore constraints and niceties—my habit of skipping lunch, the brusque way I had been known to treat people who were preventing me from hurrying back to my desk, my assumption that others were just as focused as I was—but this was something else.
What has this house done to me? I found myself thinking as I returned to my room and stared at the pile of unread books I had brought with me, listening to the tinny sounds of the wireless and laughter from the parlor below.
There was something about Lockwood, about the potential of all its empty rooms. The sheer scale of them made one think that things one had lost, things one desired to find, could be hiding in them, waiting for one to come upon them. The house seemed to encourage wandering, hunting—the long corridor of its first floor, with the wall sconces leading you forward, the tall windows, the neat condition of each room that a dozen servants tended to; the hidden service stairs waiting to be found; the narrow warren of the servants’ floor; and above all the vacuum of life, the absence of people in the rooms that had been so lovingly prepared for them.
Had it been her all along? I thought, when I woke from a nightmare that night, the remnants of my dream—of a woman dressed in white gliding through the corridors of Lockwood after me—lingering and making my heart race. Was the housekeeper playing a trick on me? Had she hidden the hummingbirds, which now sat on my desk ready to be mended and placed back in their home? Or was it me, was I going mad?