“Is this too much, us together, right now? Does it only add to your worry?” I asked Lucy one night as we lay next to one another on top of her bed, sweltering in the heat of a warm September.
“No, you are a comfort, a haven in the middle of the storm of my mind,” she said, eyes roaming my face, palm curving around my neck.
Was I selfish for believing her, or was I simply trusting in her ability to decide for herself?
“I might ask you the same,” she said. “Am I not a burden to you? Can you love a mad thing like me?”
“You are not mad; nightmares and bad nerves are not madness,” I said, squeezing her shoulder, feeling the sharp edges of the bones underneath. If I called her mad might I not have to call myself the same?
She turned onto her back. “Every time I think I have escaped the nightmares, they come back, scampering after me, hunting me.”
“Is it memories of your mother?”
“Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes it’s other things, odd images and scenes, strange sensations. Sometimes I have the normal kind of dream where one is being chased by some great four-legged beast, but then the beast catches me before I can wake, and I am surrounded by it, smothered by it, like I’m drowning in its fur, trapped there. I know it sounds so silly when I say it out loud, but the timbre of the dream, the terror I feel . . .” She exhaled a long, shaky breath.
My heart was tripping in my chest, but then dreams of being hunted by a beast, and being caught, were common dreams, were they not? “But the museum,” I said, propping myself up on my elbows, “and the animals, they don’t trigger your nightmares or make them worse, you’re sure?”
“I am sure, Hetty, they’re not new nightmares. I’m not a martyr, I would go and stay somewhere else for the duration of the war if I was distressed by your collection. God knows we have the money to rent out a series of lovely homes for me.”
What she was saying might be true—for she had never looked at my animals with terror or fear, only wonder and fascination—but I knew that even if it were not, it was exceedingly unlikely that she would leave Lockwood, for Lucy’s world was getting smaller as her nerves were getting worse.
First it was that she did not want to venture further than the grounds of Lockwood, to traipse through the sunny fields or walk up to the village; and then that she only wanted to walk in those parts of the gardens which had a clear view of the entirety of the house—the front lawn, the orchard, the walled garden, the rose garden, and the flower beds around the little pond; and finally, that she did not even want to leave the house. The progression of this was not quite linear, there might still be days now and then when I could coax her out to the gardens, but I feared what the end to this was—how soon would it be until she could not leave her room, her bed? I hoped that I was only being alarmist and tried my best to help her, not to push her too insistently, but to encourage her, even as each air-raid siren seemed to undo both her and my hard work. What effort could counteract the might of an entire army; where could she hide from the war itself? Would she have to wait until the damned thing was over to find any true peace again?
I observed and cataloged the signs of her anxiety, as if this could bring me answers, and—a cynical part of me thought—as a way of not thinking about my own troubled nights. The way she trembled when I tried to persuade her to sit on the terrace, getting all the way down the stairs before she clutched at the end of the banisters as if she were being swept out to sea and whispered, no, no, as though unfathomable horrors awaited her. The way she tapped her fingertips on tabletops or on her thigh, hands as quick as hummingbirds, if I had managed to get her outside. The way she apologized over and over again for being ridiculous. The way that tears might spill from her eyes if she was particularly distressed, as she muffled quiet high-pitched keens into a cushion, while I tried to soothe her, rubbing my hand along her back ineffectually, as if I was trying to calm an animal that knew it was being sent to slaughter.
“Is it that you don’t feel safe away from the house, or that you worry that the house isn’t safe without you there?” I asked her one evening as she sat in her bath and I bathed her gently with a sponge—not because she was an invalid that could not do such a task for herself, she was not helpless or feeble, but because I liked to care for her. I liked that what we were together, who we were to one another, seemed such a myriad of things: friend, lover, mother, daughter, kin.
“It’s both,” she said with a weary sigh.
I did not say that there was a cruel irony in her anxiety causing her to stay inside, confining her behind walls and doors, in her ever-narrowing sphere of safety. For she was still afraid of the dark, still afraid of being locked inside, even as some part of her wished to shut herself away from the world.
Once, I was too scared to even close my eyes, she had told me, speaking of the blue room and its aftereffects, even with the lights on, as if my eyelids were doors themselves that might trap me in the dark. The sedatives helped with that but they also trapped me in my dreams, made me woozy, made the real world seem unreal, like I had never woken up at all.
There was no peace for her to be found anywhere, and the comfort I could give her was not absolute, for one person could not stand against the might of Lockwood and its memories, its hidden rooms and ghostly traumas.
The doctors, when she allowed them to visit, had said that rest, and certain pills, would help, that she should take to her bed, but she refused the drugs and tried her best to potter about the house instead of hiding under her blankets, fought against being cloistered even as some forceful part of herself wished so desperately to be.
I had left the site of my unhappy childhood, but her nerves, and circumstances, had kept her here, walking down the same corridors, waking in the same room, while the horrors of her past lay behind locked doors and bricked-up walls. Even without her memories, this house was not a welcoming home—the unsettling number of empty rooms with their sheeted furniture that made one think you were the ghost, haunting a shut-up house; the rows of blacked-out windows, the creaks and murmurs of old floors and walls—it was certainly working its brooding effect on me. Surely a charming little cottage somewhere, a fresh start, a house with no uninhabited wings for the mind to wander through and get lost in, would be the trick—although I never mentioned this to her because it sounded foolish, and because I feared it would give away my own desire for us to live somewhere small and humble by ourselves, away from here.
My mind was searching for my own escape route, and not only from my continued nightmares, because when I was not with Lucy, I was with the museum, where I was fighting a terrible invasion of my own, of beetles and moths, pests that threatened the entire collection of skins and taxidermy, and it was a battle I was losing.
The environment inside Lockwood Manor was not an ideal location for the specimens I had helped evacuate from London, but it was the best that could be done when the other option was the utter devastation of the Blitz, which by now had already irrevocably damaged smaller museums and collections that had not been able to leave. The long gallery was difficult to keep warm during winter and to cool during summer; the roofs, walls, and windows of the manor were tired and patchworked, their cracks letting in all manner of beasts, foxes and cats and birds that had to be shooed away. The fluctuations of temperature and humidity wore at the furs and organic materials of the collection and aged the wood of the cabinets and crates. Bones could swell and shrink and split with changes in the environment. On one cold day which followed an unseasonably warm day before it, I had heard, from a cabinet in the long gallery, the snap of a bone, so loud, so clearly bone snapping right through, that I cried out as if it had been one of my own breaking. And yet all this was somewhat manageable, expected, compared to the influx of insects.
It started when I saw a pile of dust underneath the mounted oxen and, when I studied it with a magnifying glass, I found frass, the droppings of insect larvae, and casts, the skin the insects shed as they grew from larvae. Then it was a race against time to prevent the insects from spreading. I cleaned and vacuumed and dusted down on my hands and knees with a bright lamp to search for eggs in creases and folds, covering my face with a mask as I sprayed insecticides and potions on the mounted animals that ranged up and down that long gallery and its rooms. I ordered more mothballs and hid them around the rooms like a macabre treasure hunt, spread sticky insect traps in all corners, and used my magnifying glass to search for tiny chinks and holes in floorboards and wooden skirting boards for so long that when I stood up the world seemed gigantic and strange.
I had cataloged four different pests and counting in quick succession: carpet beetles, hide beetles, carpet moths, and casemaking clothes moths. Most of the cabinets were safe—and within them the slides and eggs and shells and study skins which were not mounted—but not all, because even wood could contract and expand, as if it remembered being alive, cracks opening up in its side, as if it were in conspiracy with the insects.
I had to open up some of the specimens to clean them and I trawled through the detritus of past taxidermists, discovering the secrets of these animals and their particular insides—for every taxidermist has their own favorite tools, their own methods of mounting and combinations of sawdust, clay, wood, cloth, newspapers. Little scraps of newspaper could tell me the very day that an animal was being brought back into a half-life from its previous flat existence, teased into three dimensions. The careful work that the scientists, hunters, and taxidermists had done was under threat; nature appeared to have had enough and wanted to reclaim these trophies, with the insects as its infantrymen.
It was enough to make one paranoid. I would walk along the long gallery and pause, believing that I had heard the scurrying of tiny feet, the susurration of miniature jaws gnawing on my charges; fearing that if I turned my back, a great plague of insects would appear, a flood of them. It was as if someone was conducting them, waving a baton, a wand, ushering them in waves of attack, I thought wildly, my eyes dry with lack of sleep, my heart sprinting like an animal whipped, my body starting at every creak even if I was the one who had made it by walking across the floorboards.
And in the course of opening up cabinets and crates and drawers that had not been touched for months, I discovered something else; a large crate that had contained a collection of elephant ivory on its arrival at Lockwood was now bare of all but sawdust and empty sacking.
When I discovered it, I kneeled slack-jawed by the crate, trying to remember the last time I, or one of the movers, perhaps, had crowbarred open the lid, and then I started to cry, silently, tiredly, thinking that this was surely it, the last nail in the coffin of my continued employment.
But if I told no one about it, I thought frantically, and entirely unprofessionally, an hour later, hammering the lid back into place, then no one would know about it, not until the collection was back in London and even a few weeks after that, as the boxes and crates were slowly opened—and by then the blame could not possibly be solely placed on my shoulders. But even with the crate closed, its missing contents still leached their way into my dreams as a beast made from bones, with four bristling tusks, bucked and rattled down the corridors of Lockwood after me.
And then there were the letters from soldiers abroad, sent on from London, looking for advice about exotic pests and vermin—and how could I be an authority on that, when I could barely keep my own animals safe?
What if I cannot do this? I had begun to think. What if I cannot save the museum; what if everything I do is only making things worse? Work had always been my salvation, but now it felt like a curse. I could not seem to save my animals, or Lucy; I could not bloody sleep, or quieten my hysterical fears.
After school restarted in September, Lucy invited the local evacuated children for a trip to the museum, eager to do her bit to cheer them up, if only for an afternoon, for we had all heard about those poor souls that had been lost in London and knew that their parents were still living through the horrors of the Blitz. She asked the cook to make animal-shaped biscuits with sugar saved from our fortnightly rations and was hunting for an atlas that she could use to show them where each animal had come from.
“I want a proper big map for them to look at,” she was saying, as she perched on the top rung of the ladder in the library, finger running down the spines of heavy books, while I watched from the carpet below.
“If I was better at drawing, I could make a large map on some wallpaper and pin it up,” I said.
“Oh, I am terrible at drawing too,” she said, clambering down, forehead creasing delicately.
I glanced behind us to check the door was still closed and then stepped forward to kiss her. She startled and then kissed me back, clutching my face in her hands.
“What was that about?” she asked afterward, with a smile, fingers touching her lips. She had stopped wearing her red lipsticks so often since we started kissing, and when I saw her around the house with her lips a natural peach, I sometimes felt a jolt of electricity, a warm proprietary glow.
“You looked darling, standing there, with your little frown,” I said.
“What a silly thing to say,” she said, pretending to be angry, and then kissed me again. “Wait,” she mumbled into my mouth, her body stilling. “A globe, that’s what we need.” She pulled away.
I needed a moment to remember our last conversation. “Do you have one?” I asked.
“No, but my father does. Come with me,” she said, dragging me out of the library and across the hall to his office. She tried the door but it was locked, and with Lord Lockwood away I thought our very short-lived quest was at an end. “Stay here, I’ll get the key,” she said.
I stood, staring at the door that I had looked at before every awful encounter with her father, feeling the shiver of a transgressive thrill.
“Got it.” She reappeared, holding up two keys, and unlocked the door. I followed her inside.
There was a lingering masculine smell in her father’s office—tobacco, leather, sweat—and the furnishings were as uninspired as ever, dull and dark and lacking any feminine flourish.
“It’ll be through here—I haven’t been in here for years,” she was saying, bypassing the huge mahogany desk to unlock the second door behind it, the door to his personal library, which I had not even seen from the windows, since it looked out on a private courtyard in between the ballroom and the long gallery.
The door swung open with a creak and she fumbled for the light switch. I entered the illuminated room in a daze, walking into a nightmarish vision.
There were vast shelves of books in the double-story space—leather-bound and old, and protected behind glass with brass lock and key—but it was what else he had hidden away in here that had shocked me.
The floor was covered with half a dozen animal skins—zebra, lion with head and mane, polar bear, tiger with its tail, clouded leopard, wolf.
There was a mounted North American brown bear, rearing up on its hind legs, by one wall, opposite a polar bear doing just the same; an Asiatic lion and a Bengal tiger bracketing the sofas.
There was a stuffed panther and a stuffed wolf, the same ones Lucy had mentioned that she had not seen for many years, and a whole wall of mounted hunting trophies—stag, antelope, bison, lion, boar—alongside rifles and spears and swords.
And there, next to the working fireplace, was my missing jaguar.
And there, propped up against a wall of bookshelves, was my missing ivory.
I turned around to face a startled-looking Lucy. “Did you know?” I demanded. “Did you know he had all this here, that he had stolen the jaguar and my ivory?”
“I didn’t, I swear it,” she said, shaking her head, moving toward the towering brown bear as if she was being pulled to it, reaching out a hand to it before recoiling. “I haven’t been in here for years; no one has. I think the housekeeper is the only one he lets clean his rooms.”
The same housekeeper who had listened to my woes about the damned jaguar and said she would do her best to help find it.
“I found the globe,” Lucy said in a small voice, standing next to it, her body tucked behind the polar bear.
I was still circling the room, noticing more and more of the Major’s treasures—ivory figurines dotted around on shelves, fur cushions, a fox fur stole draped over a sofa as if left behind by the last female visitor, antlers used as a hat stand, snakeskin curiosities, a goblet made from a ram’s horn. The sense of ownership, the arrogance of taking museum items for his own collection, as if no one would notice them missing, or more likely, not caring if they did, infuriated me.
“How can you stand him, your father?” I implored. I felt teary-eyed at the scene before me, impotent in the face of it. “He’s a liar, a thief. He’s a tyrant.” I swore.
She was tracing the continents on the globe. I studied her face for reminders of his but found none. “He’s set in his ways,” she said, looking at me pleadingly.
“He’s rude and cruel. He wouldn’t understand this”—I motioned between us—“us. You know that, don’t you?”
“He’s my father, Hetty,” she said. “I don’t know what you want me to say. I know he’s not the nicest of men, but beggars can’t be choosers, and he’s all I’ve got left now.”
“You’ve got me,” I said.
But what about when the war ended? What about when I left Lockwood? Those were the questions I could see on her face.
I turned away, throat thick with sorrow and anger, covering my mouth with the back of my hand.
This room was everything I disliked about natural history collections—the emphasis on the hunter; the animals posed as threats when they were the ones killed, often with a single shot from behind; the hoarding of all this natural wonder behind a locked door for the benefit of a single rich man. If a man’s office, his private rooms, can be said to resemble his soul, then Major Lord Lockwood was a brutish huntsman at heart.
“I’m going to get Paul. We need to carry the ivory and the jaguar back to their proper places,” I said, leaving her there, a girl surrounded by snarling beasts.
Naturally, when the Major returned to the house from his travels a few days later, it was he who came storming into my office to accuse me of trespassing where I did not belong.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing? My office and library are off-limits, that was explicit in the contract I signed with the museum,” he said furiously, almost shouting, looming over the desk I sat behind.
“And where in the contract did it say you could purloin what you wanted for your own private collection, that you could steal from us?” I asked, voice shaking with anger.
“Steal,” he jeered. “Once again you lose control of your wits, Miss Cartwright. There is no need to be hysterical,” he said, when he was the one who had entered the room like a crazed bull.
“I can take out the copies of letters if you like, the ones I sent to London and the other evacuated departments, asking about the jaguar that had gone missing,” I offered.
“You needn’t bother,” he said, leaning back from the desk, hiding his beastliness under a cool sneer again. “That would only prove you believed it was missing.”
“It was missing; you stole it and hid it in your private, locked room.”
“Yes, a locked room. It was safe as houses in there, unlike some of your other animals.”
“It’s your house; if things have been going missing, it’s your fault,” I said, standing up.
“You never reported the ivory missing,” he said, fingering the vole skull on my desk distastefully. “That doesn’t reflect well on you.” His eyes cut to mine. “And I doubt the museum director will be keen on you braying about missing things when you’ve found them again. What a waste of paper those angry letters would be. Come, come, now, Miss Cartwright.”
“You won’t accept any blame for this?”
“Blame for what? Your specimens are inside the house and they are safe.” He shrugged meanly and neatened his dark tie that stood out from the blinding white of his crisp shirt. “But if I find out you’ve trespassed in my locked rooms again, I’ll have you fired, and that’s a promise. No one will hire you again. I’m very thorough in my dealings, Miss Cartwright, unlike some people.”
And with that threat made, he swept out of the room.