If you make your way to Millworth, New York, you’ll find gaslights still burning twenty-four hours a day on the streets, ornate black bars over the teller’s window at the bank, a wrought-iron bench in front of the post office where you may sit for hours. Both bars in the village are equipped with brass spittoons. There are three churches, one school, one small grocery store, and a white clapboard public library, formerly an academy for girls. Only the children complain that there is nothing to do here. The adults fancy themselves keepers of an important history.
Over breakfast at the local inn you can browse through old photo albums while Mrs. Perry, the owner, tells you the story of the village. She’ll describe with possessive pride the annual Chautauquas that drew visitors from all over the state. She’ll tell you an anecdote about Theodore Roosevelt, who killed a black bear nearby. And of course she’ll tell you about the Craxtons, about their wealth and extravagances, about the strain of madness in their family and their feuds.
It is not that Millworth has remained immune to time. The quaint nineteenth-century touches are, in fact, recent attempts by the few hundred residents to put their tiny village on the map by turning it into a living museum. One young couple opened a Christmas shop last year. Some families have turned their barns into antique shops. The gas lanterns were repainted, the spittoons imported. The inn now serves two dinner entrées: prime rib and roast duck.
In the nineteenth century, the region gained renown for its mineral springs, and aristocrats from upstate cities built mansions to serve as summer retreats, mostly Greek Revivals that exist today in varying states of disrepair. But the leading attraction will be the Craxton mansion, a fifteen-minute drive from the center of the village, on the eastern side of Firethorn Mountain. Renovations will begin as soon as sufficient money can be raised. For the time being, the Manikin remains closed, the windows boarded shut, paint flaking like old scabs from the shingles, wood showing through the broken plaster of the pillars, the portico crumbling, the yard overgrown, nettles knee-high by the end of June. The wild loneliness of the place scares away most visitors, but a few are tempted by the proximity of the past, and they slip inside through a cellar window that was broken open by village scamps years ago and never repaired.
The only permanent residents are gray rats who live in the cider barrels. They consider the Manikin rightfully theirs, having inhabited it for generations. On the wall of the old coal bin the penciled numbers marking dates and tonnage are faintly visible. Most of the rooms on the first floor are empty of everything but dust and bat scat. In the dining room, however, you can see the original painted wallpaper (a scene of a bloody battle between primitive hunters and a saber-toothed tiger), and in the conservatory the leaded glass doors are still intact. The carpets have long since been sold, but their impressions remain—rectangles of dark oak parquet framed by lighter borders. The library and dining room share back-to-back fireplaces with marble mantels, and both rooms smell of damp ashes (vagabonds have lived here for months at a time). The oak panels of the library were once covered with celadon silk but are exposed now. The expansive staircase narrows at a landing, then splits in two, both sides curling to meet again on the second floor. The banisters are mahogany, with spindles carved into coiled ropes.
Many of the bedrooms are still cluttered with Craxton’s Scientific paraphernalia—common fossils, horns and tusks, skulls, claws, feathers, bird nests, seashells, coral, and the animals themselves. Craxton Senior’s main love had been fossils, though his company was best known for its taxidermy department, and at one time his private collection included a rare Madagascar moth with a twenty-inch tongue, a six-banded armadillo, and a resplendent quetzal. In recent years, unfortunately, the more exotic specimens have disappeared, presumably into the knapsacks of thieves.
The remaining items in the zoological collection are gathered in the master bedroom of the Manikin—all long dead and still wide-eyed, as though frozen by a gorgon’s gaze. Only a female gibbon remains from a pair, her arm curled to embrace her absent mate. A snarling cougar lifts a filthy lip, exposing pink, papier-mâché gums, a moose head drips cobwebs, and smaller animals—squirrels, weasels, rats, shrews, lizards, beetles, birds, and fish—are crowded on the shelves. The windows have not been boarded over, so on a bright summer day the sunlight streams in, separated into strands by the grimy windows. With the dust motes hovering in the air, it may seem as though the room has been submerged in water, and the animals are floating around you.
Of all the animals, it is the snowy owl that appears most insistently alive. Mounted above the door, it stands guard over the collection, and though its feathers are pasted to its skin with a cakey violet mold, the mouth has been wired open to evoke a scream, and the bird is hunched forward slightly, its wings spread into a canopy, its eyes staring not with the ubiquitous wisdom of all owls but with a murderous envy, despising anything more animated than itself. With its round-tipped spuds of feathers and glaring eyes, the white face armored with tiny scales of gold, the fluffy white collar surrounding the open beak, the bird seems a monstrous imitation of a white Bengal tiger.
A crack runs along the panel from hook to ceiling, evidence that long ago someone tried to rip the owl from its mount. But the owl hasn’t been tampered with for years. The locals warn that the snowy owl can never be moved, not without bringing down the entire Manikin upon the head of any would-be thief. And only the most hardened cynic would take the risk to prove this superstition false.
* * *
If this were a medieval court, Boggio would be the aged fool, kept on by order of the king, taunted by the children, fed table scraps by the cook. An ugly, unshaven fool, his skin a sickly shade slightly lighter than his tongue, the stench of dead animals clinging to him. He’s too horrible to be pitied by the other servants—to them, he’s the vision of what they will become, if they’re not careful. To Mary Craxton and her son, he’s the image of their opposite: a misfit, a pauper, a pleasant reminder of their advantages.
Fools are supposed to survive by their wits. But Boggio never has had much quick humor in him. He is too passionate to be witty. Passionate about his trophies, and passionately bitter. He’s as much an expert at what he does as Ellen is at housekeeping—more so, perhaps, if you equate intensity with genius. But his belief that he’s been cheated threatens to corrupt him entirely. Craxton Senior dragged his most talented artisan out to the Manikin and into retirement before Boggio was ready. Damnable man, but he’s dead now, and his son’s a rogue. Boggio has neither friends nor admirers in this godforsaken place. All he has is a roof over his head and a meager pension that could be revoked at any time.
Those who know him assume that he’s long since used up, but Boggio himself looks forward to a change in situation. He’s not in retirement, as he sees it—he’s merely unappreciated. He’s got a rare skill, and local hunters still come round from time to time with a hide for him to mount, in exchange for a pint of bootleg whiskey, which Boggio trades for supplies, since he’s come to prefer sobriety to the early death a doctor once predicted for him. He’s holding himself together, and someday he’ll have another go at a champion, just as he did back at the start of his career. He was only twenty-two years old when the great P. T. Barnum sent an SOS from St. Thomas, Canada, to Craxton Senior. And, as it turned out, Boggio was the first to devise a strategy for this formidable job: the mounting of the circus elephant Jumbo.
On Boggio’s recommendation, the team from Craxton’s hired a dozen butchers to help them carve up the elephant. Jumbo’s skin was shipped straightaway, in a tank of saltwater and alum, to Craxton’s headquarters in Rochester. The rest of the carcass—the skeleton, the viscera, the heart, the eyes, the stomach (containing seventy-three pennies, a bunch of keys, and a policeman’s whistle)—was saved for research purposes and took three days to crate. A new barn had to be erected on the grounds of Craxton’s Scientific Establishment to house the twelve-foot-high wooden manikin. Make him bigger, make him bigger! Barnum wrote to Craxton. And the whole project turned out to be a bigger success than anyone could have dreamed. Akeley took all the credit, but it was Boggio who had the insight to secure the skin with hundreds of countersunk nails to the wooden skeleton and so prevented the hide from shrinking. And though the elephant’s skull had been smashed to bits by the train that had killed him, Boggio was able to reconstruct it exactly with papier-mâché and wood. Never again would the spotlight shine quite so brightly on Craxton’s Scientific as it did during the stuffing of Jumbo. Ears nearly six feet wide, legs as tall as doorways, glass eyes the size of baseballs, and that most important and awesome member … piece by piece, the puzzle of Jumbo had been assembled. Although officially Boggio had been Akeley’s assistant, off the record Craxton attributed all the talent to Boggio—it was an extraordinary coup for Boggio that early in his career. The greatest triumph of his life.
So far. But Boggio wants to outdo himself. His ambition hasn’t been diminished by time. Just the opposite. He is a locomotive with failing brakes plunging toward another Jumbo. There will be another Jumbo. His longing for an equal challenge has become so consuming that it has physically weakened him.
And now he has Junket’s snowy owl, an unexpected gift, the first recognition that Boggio has had in years. The owl is a tribute, as well as an admission that all the wasteful killing for sport must come to an end. Species after species disappears, and it is up to the expert taxidermists of the world to document rare animals before they become extinct. Just recently police investigating an anonymous tip found in a cold-storage warehouse in New York City no less than twenty thousand dead birds—snow buntings, sandpipers, plover, snipe, yellow-legs, grouse, quail, ducks, bobolinks, and woodcock—all slaughtered to provide pretty plumage for the ladies’ hats. Because of incidents like this, Boggio’s dedication, along with his sense of self-importance, has intensified over the years. He casts himself as nature’s savior, the supreme archaeologist not of man-made trinkets but of God-made art. Unlike Craxton Senior, Boggio was never interested in the commercial aspects of the trade. He stuffs animals that other men have killed in order to keep the memory of nature alive.
But his purpose has always been grander than simple reconstruction. Boggio tries to improve the original animal through careful refinement. Live animals can be more grotesque than beautiful. For this reason alone they are taken into captivity and forced to eat their meals with a fork, to jump through rings of fire, to lick their trainer’s boot. The comedy of degradation—this is the appeal of the circus and the zoo. But take the great elephant Jumbo, empty the beast of gory life, and sew the pelt to an intricate wooden frame covered in clay—this is a show fit for a museum. A natural history display: more natural, more dramatic, more lifelike than life itself.
At last, thanks to Junket, Boggio has a new task at hand. Sweet Junket—a good boy, Boggio has decided. Boggio himself is a dwarfish man, thick-limbed, with an odd, prominent nose that bends toward his right cheek, but he can admire Junket’s beauty without jealousy. The boy is among the finest examples of bipeds, with his sinewy limbs and jackal ears, a spray of freckles, narrow, mischievous green eyes. What a shame that the boy has Lore, such a coarse, ignorant bull of a man, for a father.
He was unprepared for the boy’s visit earlier this afternoon, and he had to clear pliers and bits of stuffing wire from a chair before offering Junket a seat. Boggio lives and tinkers in the old smokehouse that has been his ever since Henry Craxton bought the estate. Once a week Ellen sends a maid to straighten up, and until then the mess accumulates as steadily as sand in the bottom of an hourglass.
“Please?” he said, motioning to the chair, allowing a strain of desperation into his voice in hopes that sympathy would make Junket linger. And to Boggio’s surprise the boy sat in the designated chair and folded his hands over his lap. Like a woman, it suddenly occurred to Boggio, who came with bad news.
But Junket anticipated him. “Don’t worry, nothing’s wrong,” he insisted, a touch snootily, kicking a ball of string by his foot, watching as it unwound across the floor. “Nothing’s wrong,” he repeated, which of course made Boggio sure that something was terribly wrong, and during the few seconds spent waiting for him to explain he considered various possibilities, most convincingly, since he’d thought of this before, that Mrs. Craxton had decided to evict him and sent Junket to deliver the notice.
Where would he go? He’s an old cur of a man, he knows that. Only half his teeth left, lately he can’t hold his urine and wakes up in soaked sheets in the middle of the night, can’t get back to sleep, doesn’t bother changing the bed, just lies close to the wall, eyes burning, the pulse in his neck bumping faintly against the skin, his mind as alert as ever while his body falls apart. He’s an old man—what would he do if he were turned out? He’s an old man with plenty of stamina, but—
Junket put an end to Boggio’s escalating panic. “I’ve brought you something, is all.”
A different panic filled him—an eager, fearful greed. “What?” Boggio swallowed the word and all that came out was a shallow bark. What would the boy bring him? Maybe he’d come to play a trick on poor old Boggio—some humiliating practical joke, the manure cookie kind of joke. It wouldn’t have been the first time.
Junket bit his lower lip and scowled, apparently considering whether or not to go through with his plan. Then, without a word, he returned to the door and disappeared outside for a moment.
“This,” he announced, standing at the threshold, holding the limp bundle of feathers at arm’s length in front of him in distaste, though it was a marvelous bird, Boggio could see at once. Within the bloodstained plumage was an owl, an exquisite white owl.
“To mount?”
“To keep,” Junket said, and dropped the owl on the floor. He left in such a hurry that for a moment Boggio hesitated to reach for the bird.
But there it was: one of the magnificent owls from the north. Not Jumbo’s rival, of course. Not a black bear. But an impressive specimen, however mangled. He calculated its weight at twenty pounds or more. A bird so wonderful it hardly seemed real. More like a creature plucked from a fairy tale. A female snowy owl. Boggio picked her up, cradled her broken head as though she were an infant. He’d put together a shattered animal before. He’d do it again, he told himself. Perfectly. Brilliantly. Pushing aside the clutter on the table, he laid down the owl and ran his hand over the body, starting at the broken head and over the woody, pocked beak and down the breast. With his thumbnail he absentmindedly scraped off flecks of dried blood.
Then he noticed that his fingers were trembling. He looked at them in surprise. Shh-shh-shh—they made this slight noise as they brushed against the feathers. He tried to stiffen his hands, but he could not stop the shaking. His ten little slaves. He closed his fingers into fists but they were still trembling when he opened them again. Ten little mutineers dancing anarchical jigs. First it was his bladder. Now his fingers. Come on, they whispered to the rest of his body. Follow us.
But Boggio, stern captain, wouldn’t stand for it. He rapped both hands against the table hard enough to split three knuckles. Hah! That shut them up, for the time being.
* * *
Outside, Indian summer fills the air with a ghostly sort of warmth, soothing and foreboding at the same time. Lore’s muscles bunch into hard knots of strength as he lifts a full bushel. He hears Sid whistling from the far side of the orchard. He hears the rattle of a woodpecker, the screech of blue jays, the buzz of horseflies. The sky is pearl white, and the intense, cidery fragrance of neglected windfalls is dispersed from underfoot by the breeze. Lore’s belly grumbles with hunger. He sets the bushel on the back of the truck, slips an apple into the deep pocket of his overalls, and reaches for another bushel.
As he works he thinks about the season ahead, his three-month battle against the tidal snow, and then the early spring plantings and the expanse of lawn to seed and then cut back. And then the fall again, apples to harvest, bulbs to plant. If he were a different sort of man his work might bore him with its repetitions. But he has never doubted the usefulness of his labor—he’s well aware that every apple he gathers contains a few hours of sustenance and so will help to keep alive a stranger, a friend, a child, himself.
* * *
Inside, the scents of wood polish, Baume Bengé, and lemon teacakes fresh from the oven mingle in the air. Ellen pauses for a moment to dig out silt from under her thumbnail. Her joints make a slight clicking sound when she crouches to brush a dust bunny into the pan. She sneezes. Sylva reprimands a child in the kitchen—“You know better!” Above Ellen’s head the boards creak as Eva cleans the bedroom. Ellen must remind her to wipe down the windowsills. And where is Billie? Billie should be back from the vestibule by now, carpet sweeper in tow.
Just then the harsh jingle of Mrs. Craxton’s bell sounds in her bedroom, and Ellen quickly empties the dustpan into the wastebasket, wipes her hands on her apron, and tucks the loose strands of hair behind her ears. The bell rings again, more insistently, and Ellen hurries off, mildly irritated because there aren’t enough hours in the day and nothing she can do about it.
But there is one advantage she’s determined to claim, extra help to be had, and after Mrs. Craxton has eaten her lunch and retired for her nap, Ellen goes looking for her daughter. Peg may be an educated girl, but since she finished her schooling she’s shown no interest in looking for work. Well, there are plenty of jobs to be done around the Manikin. Peg could grind the coffee or clean the glass in the conservatory or even set up the coffee table, with supervision. But Peg is neither in the library nor in the kitchen. Ellen calls out the door, “Peg? Where are you, Peg? Peg? Sylva, have you seen my daughter? Peg! Peg!”
When Peg was little, Ellen could keep her within the boundary of the lawn by telling her stories about wolves and witches lurking in the forest’s depths. The girl would wander to the edge of the woods, but never farther. And if a sudden, sharp noise came from the mysterious center, the coven where witches danced and chanted and boiled children in great vats of broth, Peg would run as fast as she could back to the Manikin, back to Ellen, and bury her face in her mama’s skirt.
Things were so simple back then—as simple as the fairy tales that Ellen told. The same that her mother had told her. And the songs: “Come my Dolly, come with me, dance beside the frothy sea.” But now Peg goes where she pleases—deep into the Craxtons’ forest, deep into the Craxtons’ library. If Ellen only had the time to look … but she doesn’t, and it’s too late to do anything about it. Throughout her daughter’s childhood, Ellen spared her both from chores and from punishment, as she herself had been spared for the first eight years of her life. But after her parents died within six months of each other, she and her brothers and sisters were dispersed to relatives. Ellen went to live in America with her aunt Lila, who taught her how to tuck a sheet around the corners of a mattress, how to dry china without leaving streaks, how to sweep, how to dust, how to arrange a tea service, how to obey. Not that her aunt was unfairly stern. A mild woman, herself a maid in a boarding house for many years, she wanted only to secure a position for her niece. A position. Ellen was brought up to aspire only to this.
No one was more surprised by Ellen’s marriage, at the age of seventeen, than Ellen herself. And when her husband died six years later, leaving her with a meager pension and a young daughter to raise, the shock of widowhood passed quickly and Ellen settled into the life she had expected for herself. She found a position easily enough in the Craxton household, thanks to Aunt Lila’s training. She moved up from the rank of scullery maid to chambermaid. And to housekeeper seven years ago, when Mrs. Webster left.
But knowing what she does about work, and recalling with nostalgic abandon her youth on the coast of the North Sea, she has been determined to let Peg enjoy a full childhood and a decent education, never foreseeing the impudence spawned by freedom. Ellen can manage the upkeep of twenty-seven cluttered rooms, but she cannot manage her own daughter.
“Peg!”
Now that it’s time to put her to work, Peg is nowhere to be found.
* * *
Here she is: deep inside the Craxtons’ two thousand acres, paging aimlessly through a book about owls. Gathering more information to add to the hodgepodge in her head. Peg wanders at will through the shelves of books and the grounds of the estate. But despite her schooling, or perhaps because of it, her knowledge remains piecemeal—an arbitrary accumulation. From her teacher she knows what a middle-class girl her age is supposed to know in order to make a good housewife. From the books in the Craxton library she knows about the life of the honeybee, variations in domestic breeds of pigeons, hybridism, falconry, heredity, Galvani’s experiments on frogs’ legs—and, most recently, the migratory habits of snowy owls. And thanks to Lore, she can find fossils in a creek bed where most people would see only rocks, she can load a rifle, bleed a deer, skin a rabbit. Yet it is all as useless to Peg as an index that refers to nothing.
Peg Griswood, daughter of a housekeeper. Daughter of a housekeeper. She reveals her background in the way she sets her lips together or holds her fork or speaks. Daughter of a housekeeper. Modern chattel. Her mother hoped she’d go directly from school into a profession—teaching young children, perhaps, or cataloging books in a library, or any other job that would make good use of her education. An educated girl can find decent work, and she won’t have to marry the first griffin who comes along. Work, Peg, work until you drop. That’s what her mother wants for her—a career that is just a shade more dependable than domestic service. So of course Peg wants just the opposite. She wants to be a modern girl, whatever that means—she’s not sure, but she imagines city streets at night, bathtubs full of champagne, rooms thick with cigarette smoke, couples necking in dark hallways. She wants to have the wildest adventures the era has to offer, and to have enough money to pay for them. A borrowed dream, she’d be the first to admit, unworthy of her tough intelligence, though how can she help it when she has so little experience of the world?
Mr. Hal Craxton, world traveler, might have been more useful in this matter if he’d had decent manners. Hal Craxton, with his greased hair combed forward to cover his bald pate, the smell of smoked fish on his breath, his fingers expensively manicured. Peg likes to shrug him off as the necessary mistake of a young girl who didn’t know the first thing about romance. She knows a little something now, thanks to Mr. Craxton.
One day summer before last he’d surprised her by giving her permission to browse through his father’s books whenever she pleased. Until then, every room except the kitchen and her attic bedroom had been off limits, but for some reason—easily deduced, had she been shrewder—Hal Craxton offered Peg this special favor. And the very first evening she’d gone to select a book, he’d joined her in the library, sat on the arm of the wingback chair where she was curled up reading, and without a word had started combing his fingers through her hair, gently easing his way through a tangle. The memory is powerful enough to cover her with gooseflesh. Why had she let him touch her? Maybe it was the surprise of the encounter that made it seem so natural—one moment she was just a child, the daughter of the housekeeper, and the next moment she was desirable. The fact that she found him vaguely repulsive only added to the thrill. His touch was too proficient to be resisted, and she felt herself succumbing to an unfamiliar state of docility.
If her mistake was to let him touch her at all, his was the common one of a man accustomed to paying women for their favors. How quickly his tenderness moved toward its own selfish fulfillment. In a matter of minutes he’d snuffed the reading lamp and was leaning over her, kissing her greedily, groping, squeezing, so there seemed to be at least two men bearing down on her, and the encounter suddenly felt like an assault. It wasn’t that he frightened her; rather, his casual lust angered her, and though she would have liked the experience that an experienced man thirty years her senior could have offered, she pushed him away and made a fast, silent exit, leaving him enraged and humiliated—or so she thought.
She had expected trouble from him after that, but he’d given up the pursuit without a whimper, and during the remaining days of his stay he hardly glanced at her on the few occasions when their paths crossed. Peg wanted to believe that she had won his respect by refusing him. Yet she suspected that Hal Craxton ignored her only because he didn’t want to bother with such a trifle.
He left the Manikin for Europe at the beginning of July, and he hasn’t been back for over a year. She doesn’t dread seeing him again, since it’s become clear that he’s had hundreds, thousands, of similar encounters, some successful, some not, and he had swiftly forgotten every one. Fine with Peg, since she prefers to think of Hal Craxton as a false start.
She will try again soon, though to tell the truth she doesn’t mind lingering here for a while, passing time in a birch-bark canoe or a library or an old hunting blind, floating through life. As hungry as she is for a taste of the modern world, she’s grateful for this temporary calm and solitude. In some ways she’d prefer to stay in this forgotten hunting blind forever and spare herself all the trouble of change.
Through the roof of dead hemlock branches, Peg can see the flat white of the sky. The damp bed of needles is home to a large wolf spider, which occasionally crawls in its emphatic fashion over her boot to remind her of its claim to the blind. As long as she minds her own business, the spider leaves her in peace. Her skirt forms a tent over her legs, trapping hot air between her thighs, making them itch, and she reaches beneath the hem and scratches first one leg and then the other. She notices a red ant crawling up her arm, and she blows it off with a gentle puff, only to find it climbing along a spiral course up her ankle a moment later. She flicks the ant onto the ground and watches it disappear beneath a decaying pine cone.
Smashing anthills, stealing Sylva’s teacakes, tormenting old Boggio—this used to be daily fare for Peg and Junket. Not anymore, now that Peg is no longer interested in childish things. She won’t admit to herself that Junket has come to love her—instead, she thinks of him as a favorite pet that she has nearly outgrown. And since she won’t take her place among the adults who work at the Manikin, she has no place.
Peg wants an absolute freedom and assumes that the crowded world outside this estate will be her refuge. She is prepared to leave everything behind: her mother, the Manikin, her past. But without any money of her own, she has no means of escape, and for now she makes do with imagining the future, relishing its intrigue and mystery, believing that she can make up the story of her life and exclude from it whomever she chooses.