“There’s someone been thieving the sugar,” the cook was saying, one day that spring. “It’s hard enough with the rationing and now I can’t scrounge up any cakes.”
I was in the parlor and could hear her in the servants’ sitting room, the smell of tea and cigarettes seeping through the wall.
“The sugar? Someone’s taken my hat,” Dorothy said. “It’ll be one of those new maids, the ones that don’t last a week, thinking that they’re above it all, cheeky buggers, going on and on about their army sweethearts who are going to marry them and set them up in a home. Fat chance of that!”
“You’re worrying about hats, I’m worrying about the Germans—”
“If I see someone wearing it, I’ll scratch their eyes out—”
“There’s too many bloody rooms,” another maid’s voice butted in, putting something heavy down on the floor. “Christ, all these bedrooms, just close them up for god’s sake, who are they waiting for?”
“The Germans?” the cook offered sardonically as the other two laughed.
“If her ladyship, the Major’s mother, was still alive you know she’d be inviting them to tea the minute they invaded, nasty bitch.”
“Dorothy.”
“Well, she was, wasn’t she? And good riddance to her.”
“You might change your tune when we get a new Lady Lockwood, when the Major remarries; the new one might be worse than the others.”
“As if that man will marry again, he’s having far too much fun.” Dorothy laughed.
“Ah, but he’ll have to—didn’t you hear him shouting at his money man on the telephone the other week?”
“What’s this,” the cook said sardonically, “gossip that Dorothy doesn’t already know? Are you slacking in your snooping, dear?”
“Shut up, will you?” Dorothy replied crossly.
The mood in the house was fractious. There had been a flood of servants leaving for the war effort and the housekeeper was struggling to find anyone to permanently replace them. The duties for those remaining—Paul, the cook, Dorothy and Joyce, the housekeeper herself—were overwhelming. Dust was accumulating in corners of the house; fingerprints blazed on streaked windows in the yellow spring light; muddy footsteps lingered for days; and the floors of the bathrooms were slick and mildewed.
Nature herself was pressing in on Lockwood too, ivy crawling up the walls of the house, rosebushes shouldering further toward its windows, moss creeping inside its doors, the odd leafy plant growing through cracks in window frames, muscling into empty rooms. When the cherry tree bloomed, its sodden petals were soon tracked inside or blown by the wind even upstairs. I told Joyce one day, as I saw her struggling with brush and pan, that I would sweep them up and save her the work, but it seemed like a futile task when they stuck to the floor or to my hands, when they rotted to the carpets and refused to be shifted by brush or cloth and left their sour-sweet note of decay in the air.
I was worried about the animals with every news report from mainland Europe, with every bad dream, checking and rechecking where the stirrup pump was, circling the outside of the house each dusk to see that the blackout curtains were firmly in place.
“We are waking up from a childish dream of peace,” the white-haired groundskeeper, who was too old to be conscripted, said to me one day as he stood listening to the wireless reports drifting out of the drawing room window, “to find the monsters at our door, having learned nothing at all from the Great War except how to breed another one.”
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 it. 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?