My dream is always the same. I am running down a corridor whose walls are made of flames. I am running away from that little blue room at the very top of the house which is filled to bursting with white lace and dresses, with animal skins and furs and heads and skulls and bones, a menagerie squeezed within its narrow walls. There is a roar behind me, of fire, of animals and birds and monsters, their voices a howling chorus. My feet are bare and cold on the slippery wooden floor as I bolt down that endless corridor, the flames singeing my hair, plucking at my dress, grasping for my toes, straining to catch my hands. And there is a beast in the inferno behind me that pads after me, its stride three times as long as mine; it stalks me, with white-hot eyes, with fur made of flickering flames and paws of embers, a tail that whips out like a lash of lightning. And when I finally reach the end of the corridor, when I burst into gardens white with ice, it follows me across the grass, treading sparks into the ground, turning the air around it into steam and smoke, its light casting a shadow of myself before me. And then I come to the end of the garden, and my feet will not run anymore, and I am trapped, chest panting, limbs trembling, crying as the beast moves closer, stretching open its mouth to show the fire in its gullet.
But when it reaches me, it does not devour me; it falls on the ground with a huff, sending up a shimmer of sparks toward me, and then it curls around my feet, warming my frigid toes but not burning them, its great purr thrumming through my body as I stretch down to touch its gleaming sides, but before I can, before my fingers reach those first flickers of fur, I wake from my dream with a jolt. I wake up, and there is a large living creature curled around me in bed, a hand thrown over my stomach, a very human face on my shoulder, and pale hair tickling my cheek.
“Hetty,” I whisper, and if she is dozing she will answer, and if she is not, she won’t. “Hetty, I had that dream again,” I’ll say, and she’ll reply with some nonsensical hum that means, I’m here, you’re safe, and wrap her hot little feet around my legs.
When we left the ruins of Lockwood behind, we took the train down to London. We passed barren winter fields, sleepy villages, bustling towns, and factories whose chimneys poured out trails of smoke that I craned out of the window to follow. We passed bomb craters in fields and the wrecks of buildings; stations with no names, their platforms stacked with sandbags and crowded with soldiers in uniform, with ordinary folk wearing hats and gas masks in boxes around their necks, getting on with their days as usual; we passed bare trees waiting patiently for spring; snowmen with scarves and stick arms marooned in the middle of muddy gardens where children played; and Land Girls, their hair tucked inside colorful scarves, winding along lanes back to their farms.
There were Land Girls moving into Lockwood’s farm, which had, through some miracle, not caught alight, the fields and gardens still there to be worked and put to service for the country. The farmer and his wife had offered the farm to me but I did not want it; cozy and well-loved though it was, it was theirs, not mine. Besides, I couldn’t stay there with the wreck of Lockwood Manor looming over my every waking hour, working its way into my dreams. So I corresponded with other estates to find the remaining servants employment in other grand homes if they wanted it—although most had decided to take other war work—and I made sure that the housekeeper would never find employment in any home again, nor be able to ruin the lives of other poor girls. And then I traveled with Hetty to London.
London was a shock of color and life and activity; of holes in roads where bombs had taken buildings and lives; the glitter of shards of glass too fine to sweep from the streets; the smell of dust and charred wood and stone, and of chestnuts roasting, and the steamy insides of pubs and bars spilling out onto pavements, and hot chocolate and good tobacco. Hetty and I stayed in a hotel at first, after she had put up a cursory fight against using my money to pay for the both of us. There were offices to visit and official forms to sign, queues to wait in, and interviews to be had, administration to sort to get us on our feet again. We went together as much as possible, trying to remember that we couldn’t hold each other’s hand as we walked along the streets, but that we might take each other’s arm and pretend we were just good friends instead.
I accompanied Hetty to the museum and waited on a rickety chair opposite the secretary as Hetty sat through the ordeal of her first interview, my fingers clutching at the seat tightly when I heard shouts and Hetty’s tearful voice. She was not jailed, as she had feared, but there was an investigation by the museum, the government, and the insurers. Lockwood had not been properly insured, we came to learn, so I gave a large chunk of my fortune to pay the shortfall of compensation. I didn’t need all that money, I told Hetty, and I did not want it.
Mary, meanwhile, was never convicted, there being no evidence that she had started the fire, no witness to the aftermath of her confrontation with my father.
My father—
My mother. Had she, in her madness, been trying to save me, to protect me? To lock me away from what might hurt me? I thought she was the monster who haunted Lockwood, and though it is true that what she did could never be justified by any measure of sanity, there had been a greater threat stalking the house, a predator lurking in plain sight.
I do not think about my father much these days, nor my mother, which is strange since my thoughts were almost consumed by the both of them during my time at Lockwood. While I was living there, in their house, I had been like a child, even when I was years past the schoolroom, and when I left, when it burned down, I relinquished that protracted childhood too.
Hetty and I lived in London for two weeks, spending most of our nights in the opulent basement of the hotel during air raids, while I trembled and cried and tried not to look too pathetic among the crowd of worldly-wise Londoners, and then we moved into rooms further out of the city and took the train in for meetings and interviews. We tried to find a bar or a club for women like us, to dance there together, but our search was futile, for we did not know who to ask or where to look, even though we sometimes passed women in the street who looked the right sort, their clothing mannish or their eyes glancing across other women in a familiar way.
And when our business in London was at an end, when I had instructed my solicitor to sell the Lockwood estate for me and present me with the papers to sign when they had done so, we fled north, past the Midlands and the whole of northern England, all the way to Scotland, which I had visited once on a happy holiday with an aunt, and where I bought a small cottage in a village outside of Edinburgh for us both.
It has two bedrooms with large windows, one which we keep dressed for appearance’s sake, and the other where we sleep in one double bed, our limbs tangled together underneath blankets and thick quilts and, more recently, the purring forms of two tortoiseshell house cats. I have become a housewife with my new leisure time, and with the exemption from service that came with my bad nerves, although I do my best to volunteer now and then for the local WI, to help out with its collections for soldiers and its stalls, with donating to help evacuated families who have lost everything just as I did. I hope that if I am well enough in the future I might use the money from the sale of the estate to become a teacher or organize a charity for women in service, as a small way of making amends for the horrors that occurred under my roof without my noticing.
Hetty got a clerking job with the government in the city and takes regular fire-watching shifts locally for the ARP. Although she likes to say that I lost everything, ignoring the fact that we are both now orphans, it’s she who seems to struggle the most to adapt to our new life. She had given all of herself to her work, to the museum, and feels that she has nothing to show for it, that her years of study are now wasted.
“Who am I, without my work?” she asks sometimes, standing in the garden at night, smoking, the familiar planes of her face lit up by the moonlight, her head lolling back on her neck. “What was it for, all that work, what use am I to anyone?”
And, depending on her mood, I either tease her, tell her to get over herself in order to make her laugh, commiserate with her, remind her that she is worth something to me, that she is doing important work now for the government even if she says it’s the kind of work that anyone with half a brain could do, or suggest that she might find another job after the war where she can use her zoological knowledge.
Despite the idyllic nature of our new surroundings—our cottage with its neat kitchen garden and banks of rosebushes, the comfortable velvet couch in front of the parlor fire, our shelves of books that grow almost daily; my weekly attempts at baking vegetable cakes that never taste as good as regular cakes, and the bracing walks I take through the fields around our home; the late nights loving one another to exhaustion in all the rooms of the house, dozing together in the bath afterward—my own anxieties have not vanished completely. Hetty had to hold my hand a lot in those first months, squeezing it tightly until my mind returned from its horrors, until I could right myself. The air raids have not got any easier to bear either, for they still feed into my old fear of being trapped.
Walls can crumble, but the destruction of one’s prison or cage—which was also one’s Eden, one’s home—does not fix nerves that have been delicate since birth. Yet it did give me my freedom; it gave me a path to somewhere, to a future where my happiness would outweigh my sadness and anxiety, a future that I could decide for myself.
A future that we can decide together, I muse, as today’s morning light sneaks its way underneath the blackout curtains; as we share a pot of weak tea in bed, lazily planning a trip to the seaside, listening to the wireless tell us that the end is in sight, that the war will be over in but a few months; as a house cat pads across the quilt above our legs and then yawns, showing off its teeth, and burrows its head in the hollow between our legs to doze, while its tail twitches happily in the air.