“Do you think there’s something about Lockwood,” Lucy remarked tiredly a week later, as we lay side by side on her bed while her radiators clicked and a pipe clanged somewhere in a wall, “that makes our dreams leak out into the day, that brings them to life?”
She was speaking of the leveret, the hare, that she told me she hunted through the house each night in her dreams, that she woke grasping for.
“No,” I said, because I had never been someone prone to whimsy, to superstition; I was not the type to wake from her own dreams—of beasts and hunts and wild women with teeth sharp as knives and claws that could pluck the eyes from your skull, the tongue from your mouth—and stare around the room clutching at the bedclothes, fearing what I would find there in the dark. My fears were human, rational ones, I told myself—of professional sabotage, of disgruntled servants and petty vendettas—not of ghosts and spirits and hauntings.
I could not sleep, and neither could Lucy, though I lied to her that I could because I did not want her to feel somehow responsible. When I read letters or books the words swam before my eyes, when I picked up specimens to clean and dust, my hands shook alarmingly, and I would enter rooms without ever remembering why I had visited them, or find my legs shaking when I tried to stand up after kneeling to check animals for infestation—and I had slipped just the day before while getting out of the bath and almost knocked myself out on the rim.
My only saving grace was that the Major had left the morning after the mess with the rabbit and without, I assumed, sending a letter to the directors of the museum in London. But what was my job worth if I could not do it properly? What if I dropped another specimen and it shattered on the floor; what if I used the wrong powder to clean a fur and ruined it forever? What was my job worth if I could not keep the animals safe, both from others and from my own mistakes?
In early November, I was woken in my own bedroom in the small hours, not by the usual sound of the air-raid siren, nor by that night’s gale thundering against the walls, but by the loud smash of glass.
When I staggered downstairs from my bedroom in my dressing gown, I found the housekeeper similarly attired, with a fine silk scarf knotted around her pinned hair, and Paul and Dorothy hastily dressed, the group of them huddling by the drawing room next to a night guard shining his torch inside. A terrific wind was roaring through the open door toward us.
“What’s going on?” I called frantically, my voice croaky with tiredness, having only snatched an hour or so of sleep in the past two days.
“It’s the drawing room,” the guard said. “The windows have been smashed.”
“Was it the storm? Has anything been taken?”
I pushed my way into the darkened room where I could see the second guard leaning his head carefully out of the left window frame, its glass edges a barbed halo.
Were the windows smashed from inside or outside, I wondered, my mind still half taken up with the nightmare I had awoken from, of a beast on the rampage through the rooms, still lingering in my shaky limbs, my teeth chattering.
“Was the door locked when you got here?” I asked the night guard.
“Yes.”
But what if someone had been inside the room, hiding, when I had locked it last night? “Hiding where?” I muttered to myself hysterically beneath the sound of the storm. “Underneath the panther?” The guard next to me looked at me strangely.
“Give me your torch,” I said, and swung it round the room, looking for anything missing, the broken glass glittering in the beam of light, the wind whipping the blackout curtains toward me, cloaking the polar bear by the window, while I gasped for breath as if the wind was stealing it.
“Careful of the glass on the floor,” Paul called, and beneath the barrage of the storm I heard the crunch underneath my slippers, and then my foot kicked against something hard and I screamed at the unexpected pain and then fumbled for an explanation as the others turned to me. “I found the brick they threw,” I said, and then repeated it when my voice gave out halfway through the sentence, shining the shaking light of my torch on it so that everyone could see the reason why I had made such a noise.
Pull yourself together, Hetty, I thought. “Are they out there? The thieves?” I asked, pulling my dressing gown around me with one hand, holding the other in front of my face against the elements and so that no one might be able to see how frightened I was.
“I’m going to go out and look!” Paul called. “Let me have the key to the gun room,” he told the guard by the door.
“Be careful!” Dorothy said. “You don’t know how many are out there. Oh, I wish Lord Lockwood were here, he would know what to do now. I thought it was the Germans, I really did,” she moaned, clasping a hand to her chest as Josephine patted her on the shoulder ineffectually. Dorothy grabbed my arm as I walked past and I jumped and stifled a yelp. “They did warn us about parachutists, you don’t think—”
“It won’t be the Germans,” I said, angered by my reaction. “It’ll be the same thieves as last time.”
“I suppose the police should be called,” the housekeeper said, though she sounded halfhearted.
“Yes,” I called, voice breaking as the wind picked up to a high wail, screeching its way past the jagged edges of the windows. “And have you got a spare blackout curtain or some board? This one has been torn,” I said, trying to bat it away while dodging the stuffed wolf by my side, feeling close to tears at the noise and mayhem, at the attack on the museum that felt like an attack on me too. “And we need to turn the light on in here to see what the hell has happened.” I turned to the guard who was still near the window, leaning forward against the force of the storm. “Have they taken anything? Did you see them?”
“I didn’t see anything,” he said, wiping his face of rain, his white hair plastered to his forehead. He put out a hand to steady himself on the head of the Sumatran tiger and then took it back when he remembered who I was. “We came running the moment we heard the smash,” he said. “We thought it was the storm. God help anyone who’s out there in it, there’ll be trees coming down tonight.”
Josephine and the housekeeper came into the room with two boards and I helped prop them against the windows with arms that felt weak and trembling. We pinned the curtains as best we could, and pushed the crowding animals out of the way with groans of effort that were echoed by the howls of the wind. Then someone switched on the lights and I blinked painfully as the dark, heaving shadows of the room, the hidden audience of animals that had watched us mutely, came into focus.
There was nothing missing: the thieves had not clambered inside, if that was indeed their intention, and if it was thieves at all. The brick they had thrown was on the floor in front of the left window but something else, an unfamiliar shape wrapped in newspaper, had been thrown through the window on the right. I bent over it and covered my hands in the folds of my dressing gown to brush away the shards of glass, and started to unwrap it, heart in my throat though I knew not why.
“Stand back!” the guard called out, dashing forward, “It could be an explosive—” He stopped abruptly when the newspaper came free and, startled by the object I was holding, I dropped the uncovered projectile on the floor.
It was a worn porcelain doll, dressed for winter in a white fur cloak almost as pale as its blond hair. I had felt the tightly curled hair and the fur of the cloak in my hands and been spooked by the thought that what I held was warm and alive. Now she lay at my feet on her back, her blue eyes staring up at me, and it felt as if my voice had been stolen from my throat, the edges of my vision prickling with dark spots.
Josephine had screamed when she saw the doll, further adding to my terror, but now she was tutting and repeating some choice French swear words underneath her breath.
“How perfectly horrid,” Dorothy exclaimed with a whimper and then crouched down next to it as the winds picked up again. She nudged it with her finger. “What a ghastly, spooky thing.”
“Is it one of Lucy’s?” I asked, unable to make sense of the object in front of me, of the room and the people and the attack. Was I still asleep, I wondered, blinking and shaking my head.
“I shouldn’t think so,” the housekeeper remarked. “Lady Lucy got rid of all of those long ago.”
Paul eventually returned from outside, soaked to the skin and failing to hide his grin at his adventure, having caught no sight of our intruder. He and the guards nailed the boards properly against the smashed windows, sealing up the room from the storm, while Josephine swept away the glass and Dorothy wandered the room, ostensibly setting things to rights but mostly lingering among all the excitement, returning to the doll at intervals, shaking her head and sucking her teeth as if the doll meant something other than an attempt to frighten us; to frighten me.
I checked the specimens again, hands fumbling and feet tripping over air, blinking as if I could make this all go away and find myself waking from a good night’s sleep instead. Nothing was missing, but it felt as though something was, and the wind battering against the new boards outside seemed to jeer at me, while the presence of everyone in the room felt overwhelming, claustrophobic, as if they were all crowding around me, looking at me. I wanted everyone gone, and the storm stopped, and for the collection to be safe again, for these violations to end.
“From now on, every ground-floor window of all the museum rooms must be boarded up from the inside,” I announced, pleased at how confident and rational my voice suddenly sounded. But it was the rational thing to do, I thought: the museum was under attack and its collection must be saved from those who wished it harm. “Can you find more boards from somewhere?” I asked Paul, bypassing the housekeeper, who had just arrived back from telephoning the police, and looked horrendously unimpressed at my words.
“Lord Lockwood will not be happy about this when he returns, he won’t agree with it,” she said, with the sort of tone that implied she would enjoy watching him upbraid me.
“He can take it up with me,” I said firmly, growing in confidence as my plan was formalized.
There was a pause, and then she announced to the rest of the room, “Tonight’s excitement is over now, everyone. The police won’t be here until midday at the earliest, and we need to leave some evidence for them to sift through.” Her eyes were glued to me. “You can start the day’s work if you’re looking for something to keep you busy, else back to bed with you lot.”
The room emptied quickly, leaving her and me standing there, the boards on the windows rattling in the wind.
“Has this happened before, the house being attacked like this?” I asked her, ignoring the fact she had blamed me for the rabbit; the animals were the important thing, not my bruised pride or whatever strange grudge she held against me.
“As I said before, nothing of the sort has ever happened here, not until you arrived.”
“Ever? What about before you started working here?” I said, lifting my chin.
She smiled thinly. “I’ve been here a long time, since I was a girl, and my family have worked for the Lockwoods for longer.”
We left the room and I let her lock the door and then, after she had walked away, I tested it by pressing against it with my full body weight. I returned to my bedroom to wash quickly and get dressed and then spent the rest of the early hours acting as a sentinel downstairs, rambling blearily along the corridors, checking the doors with increasingly feeble pushes of my cold hands, listening to the gale trying to crash its way into the house as I shivered and kept an ear out for any more smashed glass, my mouth dry like bark. The night guards were taking their role seriously for once, patrolling carefully around the house, torches in hand, rifles over their shoulders, which should have reassured me but actually made me nervous lest they confuse me for an intruder.
After the house woke, Paul and the groundskeepers worked to ferry in boards and sheeting to barricade the windows from the inside. I felt sorrowful as I watched the first room be shuttered; there was so little light at the beginning of winter anyway, it felt wrong to darken the house even further. But it could not be helped; the safety of the museum was paramount.
Lucy was the only person who had not been woken by the storm and the attack, and I had not wished to wake her—better that she stay safe asleep, her dreams hopefully untroubled.
She found me in the dining room, where I was helping myself to the last of lunch, my stomach grumbling noisily and my mind in that persecuted state of tiredness where everything about the world is too loud and bright, where the very air seems to abrade your eyes, and it feels as if you might never sleep again.
“What’s this about boarding up every downstairs window? A joke, surely?” she said, pouring herself a coffee.
I put the serving spoon down and turned to her. “No, it isn’t a joke,” I said. “I’m sorry, Lucy, I know that it will make downstairs gloomy and dark, and I’m sorry too if it upsets you,” I added, sincerely, loathing myself yet feeling that there was no other option, “but the museum’s collection must be protected.”
My job and future prospects must be protected too, I added silently, not wanting to allude to the day I would have to leave this house and her.
She put her coffee cup down with a clatter. “Not all the windows?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“That’s mad, you do see that?” she said, slowly. “We can’t barricade ourselves in here. Father will get a whole team of guards, and the Home Guard will help out too. There’s no need to overreact.”
I felt my face folding into a grimace of disbelief. “You think I’m being mad?”
“I didn’t say that,” she said, but she was not backing down. “I only meant that you should get some perspective. You’re getting obsessed with this,” she said, swinging her hand out in a wide sweep. Were her words coming from her nerves, a gut reaction to the idea of being boarded up inside the house? Right then, in the state I was in, I did not care.
“I am mad?” I repeated, in angry incredulity, while the sun shone brightly into the dining room through one of the few bare windows left, and the silver service gleamed before us; while her chin began to tremble. “You’re saying that I am mad?”
I knew that I was hurting her, but what she had said was everything I feared, everything I suspected; that I was mad. And the way the light was hitting the angles of her face—she had looked just like him, and sounded like him too, as she stood there just like him, judging me, and it gutted me to the quick. I felt betrayed, my heart bruised, and so I lashed out viciously, like a cornered animal.
“I’m doing my job,” I said, voice quivering. A job that was precarious, that had been reluctantly assigned to me by those who sought to boot me back to the room of female volunteers. I had no great fortune like Lucy, no home, nothing beyond my employment, for I knew now that there would be no husband on the horizon to support me. “I’m trying to protect the work of hundreds of people, trying to protect specimens vital to science and our understanding of the natural world.”
“And I am—what?—a layabout? Worthless?” she said, tears dripping down the cheeks I had kissed just yesterday afternoon. “The madwoman locked upstairs?”
I was silent. She bit her lip and shook her head. We stared at one another, and then she walked out of the room, letting out a sob that brought a lump to my throat as I turned back to the lunch I had lost all appetite for, my hands shaking as I set aside my plate and tasted the salt of the tears that caught in the corners of my mouth instead. I had let her down, I knew that, but what else could I do? Why must I be forced to choose between my duties to the animals and my love for her?