After a day of three separate air raids, with the mood inside the basement shelter best described as almost belligerent, Lucy pleaded with me for something productive she could do to help calm her whirring mind. I put her to work in my office, organizing letters into different trays. It was a pleasingly domestic scene, me at a writing desk answering the letters while Lucy spread out on my main desk sorting them, calling out a choice word or an interesting passage, while the sun tracked across the room, the light warming and then dipping toward dusk. And yet it was also an oddly transgressive scene, for I knew that her father had forbidden her from any involvement in the museum. How could he begrudge her doing secretarial work like this? Could he not see the way it enlivened her, being useful, learning and setting her mind to things other than the house and her past?
In moments like this I could not help but think I could have it all—the museum and Lucy—that I could put into play the plan that I had yet to tell even Lucy about, that of her coming to London and working for the museum. She was independently wealthy and thus could volunteer with the great number who already did, without the need to worry about a wage, although of course I would fight for her to be properly employed just as I fought for the other women. We might live near one another in the city, and visit regularly, or even take rooms together somewhere; and in London, the night was never truly dark; the city’s gleaming lamps and advertisements and bars and theaters lent the air a glow that snuck through any closed curtain.
Of course, how to remove her from a house she did not want to leave at any cost was the great sticking point, along with her father’s prohibition. But I would not abandon her here, alone, when the war was over—if it was ever over—I vowed that I would try to save her, that when the trucks came to collect the animals and transport them to their rightful home, she would come too, that I would whisk her away, out from under her father’s nose and from this horrid house.
Not for the first time, I thought that all this would be easier if I were only a man. I could marry her then, and she would be under my protection, not her father’s, and we could legitimately get our own house, have our own family.
Be sensible, Henrietta, I heard the memory of my mother say, her favorite phrase.
Did the Major’s manner rub me the wrong way because his disdain was so close to my mother’s; or would it have affected a different Hetty—a Hetty who grew up with a loving, tender parent—just the same? I had yet to receive a reply to the emotional letter I had sent her, and she had given me no word about where she might now be residing. I knew that she would not stay in London during the Blitz—not because she might die, but because of the general upheaval to her routines and the social order, because of her fear of change. I imagined she was in a house similar to this one, except smaller, I thought spitefully, and less grand.
“This man,” Lucy declared, reading out a letter, “says that he has discovered a new amphibious mammal and he humbly puts forward his own name for consideration for its nomenclature.”
I put my elbow on the desk and rested my cheek on my hand, listening to her read the animal description aloud—larger than a pine marten and yet smaller than a dog, slimy, with a distinct tang of iron in the air once it had vanished, a white patch of fur between its eyes—her mouth curled in sardonic appreciation, her eyes bright and large. I let myself picture some halcyon future; let myself ignore the horde of beetles gnawing their way through the long gallery; the planes across the channel being fueled, bombs loaded in their bellies; the great crowd of stuffed animals who waited for the wars of men to be over, hoping that there would still be a museum left in London for them to return to; and the ghost, the intruder, that continued to haunt both my dreams and the house itself.
Autumn had returned by the time the evacuated children came to visit the animals, and when they clattered inside the front door they brought with them a swirl of leaves scorched yellow and a blustering wind that made the chandelier above them sway and groan.
I had never been in charge of child visitors to the museum in London, but in our correspondence, their teacher, a Miss Forbes, said that I should treat them as I would the adult visitors and that they would be too overawed by the house to get into mischief.
Seeing them walk past the animals openmouthed, almost reverent, grabbing silently at each other in excitement, reminded me of my secret thrill of watching visitors to the museum in London, and I felt a pang that we had shut the mammal collection away here at Lockwood, just as so many other museums and art galleries had fled the capital, leaving its remaining occupants bereft of their culture just when they might need it most to get through the barbarous bombardment of the Luftwaffe.
I gave the children a brief introduction to the collection, a simplified explanation of the various families and genera Lockwood held, and then a quiz about the classification of mammals, which Miss Forbes said she had discussed with them in advance.
Lucy had insisted on being my assistant and she was the one to kneel down by a girl who raised her hand with a question but was too shy to ask it, who accompanied a boy at the back to the bathrooms when she saw him wriggling about, and who listened patiently to the whispered tale of one girl who had a graze on her chin.
“You’re a natural with them,” I said to her later, once I had sent the children on a sedate hunt to find their very favorite animal among the collection. We were standing in the corridor where we might by necessity stand closer than we would in one of the rooms, close enough to smell each note of her perfume but not to touch.
She smiled as she lifted a hand to fix a curl that had escaped from her pinned roll, but it was a sadder smile than she had used in the room.
“Do you think—” I began and paused, studying her face, the way the low afternoon light revealed the freckles on her chin. “Will you have children one day?” I asked, feeling a painful ache in my chest.
“I don’t think so,” she said slowly, carefully. “I’d have to find a husband for that.”
I licked my lips. We did so well not to talk of the future, but the temptation was always there, the knowledge that what we had was, by any logical understanding, temporary.
“I didn’t have the best role model for it,” she said.
“Me neither,” I said as the laughter of a group of children in the library made me turn to look down the corridor.
“But if I don’t have children then this house will be awfully empty in the future.”
“You’ll stay here then,” I said, hating myself for only summoning the bravery for this conversation right now, when there were children wandering hither and thither and servants carting brushes and mops and linen between us as we shrunk toward opposite walls.
“I don’t think I’ll ever leave Lockwood,” she stated sadly. “I would worry too much about it if I were anywhere else. I feel responsible. I bear its name, after all.”
“It bears your name.”
She tilted her head. “It’s strange, I always think of it in the opposite way. That the house has stood for generations while we come and go, that it owns us and not the other way around.”
It doesn’t own you, I wanted to say. It doesn’t, you can do anything, you can live anywhere, don’t you see how brilliant you are, how you’d be wasted here?
“I should close my office door,” I said instead, my voice thick.
“Good idea,” Lucy replied hollowly, stepping back so that her feet were not crushed by children racing past. She strode toward the drawing room. “Be careful where you run, children!” she called.
When I pulled the stiff door of my office toward me, key in hand, I noticed something that had not been there a few hours ago, before the children arrived; a hummock of fur, an animal shape, on my desk.
As I approached, I thought it might be someone’s fur muff—but these children would surely be too poor for that—or that it was one of our animals, or a dried skin that had been pulled out of a cabinet and mislaid. But it was not flat enough to be a skin, and nor did it resemble any of the stuffed animals in our collection.
It was a rabbit, its ears draped softly above its head. It was cold when I touched it, and it had not been skinned, for I could feel the bulging shape of flesh inside. By the smear of blood I found underneath as I lifted it, and the blood that painted my fingers as I searched through its fur for a pulse, I knew that it had been killed only today.
“Miss Cartwright—” Dorothy asked at the door, and when I turned around she saw the red of my hands. “My goodness, are you hurt?”
“No,” I said, as Lucy came up to the door behind her. I held a hand on the rabbit’s back, as if trying to protect it from further harm. “I found this on my desk,” I said, feeling my heart tremble in my chest, and then I looked to Lucy, who was frozen to the spot, the pupils of her eyes ringed with white.
“Where did that come from? Is it real, alive, I mean?” Dorothy asked, coming closer. She touched its fur with a finger. “But what was it doing here?” she said to me with an eager intensity in her eyes.
“I don’t know,” I said, and looked again to Lucy, who was still in the doorway, her chin now dimpling as if she were going to cry.
“I shall see if the teacher knows where it came from,” Lucy said, her voice strange, one of her hands rising to cover her mouth. The heel of her shoe caught on the floor as she left and I started toward her as if I could catch her from all the way across the room, but she righted herself and continued out of sight.
“I don’t like this at all,” Dorothy said, stealing the words from my throat as we stared at a line of blood seeping from the carcass toward the edge of the desk.
I locked my office door until the children’s visit was at an end, leaving the grisly gift where it lay for fear of one of them catching me ferrying it through to the gardens, and when I opened it again Dorothy was at my heel, ostensibly to help clean but really, I thought, because she wanted to wallow in the grim excitement.
“It’s an omen, it is, mark my words.” She hoisted the rabbit by its ears into a bucket and slopped soapy water onto my desk while I hurriedly removed my papers and books to safer ground. “Or a threat,” she said pointedly, turning to consider me with narrowed eyes.
“It’s not one of the kitchen’s rabbits?” I asked, as other servants peered into the room in passing.
“We might be overworked,” she sniffed, “but we won’t have mislaid a carcass on your desk, miss. Anyway, it’s not a rabbit from the farm—the groundskeeper breaks the neck of those, he doesn’t garrote them,” she said, savoring her words as I clasped my hands together tightly and tried to settle myself, tried to appear as if I was yet unruffled by such a clearly personal attack.
Who had done this? Jenkins, who was often seen with a dead fox in his fist after catching them in his traps, and seemed to scowl at me every time we crossed paths? One of the groundskeepers? Dorothy herself, out of some twisted desire for excitement? Paul, as a poor joke? Another servant who was resentful of any extra work the museum had brought? The housekeeper? Was it the same person who had stolen the hummingbirds and skinned the bear, and had they been here all this time, watching me?
“It would have been a barn cat, or a dog, or one of the children playing a trick,” the housekeeper said when I went to find her, talking slowly as if to an imbecile. “Or some well-meaning villager who thought you might be looking for fresh specimens. There are many possible explanations before you might start blaming my staff,” she added as I stood there feeling sick.
“I wasn’t going to blame anyone,” I said, unconvincingly. How had she turned this against me, why did I feel at fault?
“Frankly, Miss Cartwright, none of this nonsense happened before you and your animals arrived. And it’s you who always seems to be the center of these things, wandering about the house at all hours and then complaining that someone’s been stealing your animals, giving us more work to do. If there is indeed a mischief-maker in our midst, I have half a mind that it’s you,” she declared furiously, moving so close to me that I could see the pale hairs on her cheek, the angry spittle in the corners of her mouth. “I think you put the rabbit there yourself. I know your type; I think you like the attention,” she sneered, and as she stalked off I cursed myself for standing there mute under her onslaught.
I was barely composed by the time dinner arrived. I sat there feeling hollow and shaken, glancing at Lucy’s empty chair and wishing I was with her. I had been ushered into the dining room by her father when he caught me ascending the stairs toward her and told me he wouldn’t have dinner delayed tonight, that he had far more important things to do than sit and wait for me to dawdle as his food went cold.
“I don’t get involved in servant business, I leave that to the housekeeper,” he was saying, cutting into his meat, his mouth stained red with wine, “but when my staff are dropping like flies, when the government keeps stealing them from me, and then you baselessly accuse them of nonsense crimes, frankly, it’s beyond the pale.”
“I didn’t accuse anyone,” I said, my teeth clenched, my plate of food uneaten. “I just want to find out who is responsible.”
“You do make a fuss about things, don’t you, Miss Cartwright? The children who you invited into my home were evacuated from some of the roughest parts of London, they’ve been running wild around the countryside, and no doubt they’ve taken up poaching too, little beasts.”
I sat there silently, breathing tightly, biting my lip so the pain might stop me from crying. When he was finished and rudely pushed his plate away he stood up with a yawn. “I’ll be writing a report for your employers; I’m sure they’ll be eager to hear of your disruptiveness. I might have agreed to house the museum here, my dear, but I didn’t agree to open my doors to someone like you.”