The Animals at Lockwood Manor

by Jane Healey

  When my father died of old age, I came home to see her. She told me after the funeral, and after I had told her about my interest in someday working for a museum, that I was a spiteful girl. I was not allowed to use my full double-barreled surname anymore, she decided; I was renounced. I do not want to be connected to you. You shall be Miss Cartwright from now on, she said, hissing the “Miss” aggressively. So I had been Miss Cartwright ever since, and though I might have wished to be Professor Cartwright, I had still achieved more than I had dared dream.

  I became an adult with a strong sense of fairness, of right and wrong, and I was not cowed by my childhood despite it being as unhappy as I thought it might have been in comparison to others. Even if I had not yet found love, and often felt lonely or sometimes had to go to the bathroom and cry after a difficult encounter with a superior or a coworker like Mr. Vaughan, being dismissed by others only made me work harder to prove them wrong. I was prouder than anything of my work with the museum—at least I had been until my accident—and it was my dearest hope that my time at Lockwood would help restore that confidence.

  I would not let one stupid mistake spoil everything, I swore, as I checked my office for anything I had forgotten before the next day’s journey and folded my coat over an arm; I would not be the useless girl my mother had believed I was, and my time in the country would be my making.

  When I had first heard the name Lockwood Manor I had imagined something out of Brontë—wide, rugged moors and a dark house full of secrets and barely restrained passion. But there were no moors in the home counties, and the house was owned by a major who had, according to the precise letters from his secretary, spared no expense with the modernization of the manor. I knew that if I had told my mother where I was going she would have looked up Major Lord Lockwood in Who’s Who and then, finding out from her friends that he was a recent widower, get desperately excited that I might catch his eye. I had seen a photograph of him in a newspaper after I asked a librarian if she could find me anything on the history of the manor: he looked tanned and fit for his age and had a crowd of lean hunting dogs at his feet. The article was about his investments and imports from the empire, his munitions factories. But all that mattered to me was that he had promised us space for the museum; lodgings for myself for the duration of the war, and temporary accommodation for two other workers from the museum—Helen Winters and David Brennan, who expected to be conscripted soon—who would both be accompanying me initially and staying briefly to help make sure the animals were settled; free range of the entire house; the assistance of his staff should we need it; and retired members of his former regiment, who were too elderly to enlist, for guards. The lovely grounds the house was situated in, the estate, would only be a bonus.

  * * *

  The proctor turned off the lights in the museum with a chorus of clicks and pings, but it did not scare me; I had never been frightened of the dark. The windows had been boarded up but it seemed there was still light sneaking into the building somewhere; it was not quite pitch-black. I stared at the great shape of the mammoth skeleton, which in the darkness seemed to be made of something darker and heavier than air, a silhouette cut out of the afternoon. It was too large to evacuate and would be surrounded by sandbags and ballast in the hope that it would remain unscathed when the war was over.

  When the war was over. Would I be much changed then, I wondered, and what would the museum be like? How many walls would still be standing?

  Two

  I arrived at Lockwood Manor with the kind of headache that came from sitting in a truck with poor suspension for many hours, while worrying about the cargo of the other trucks in our convoy, the animals muffled and blinded by sacking and rope, juddering and swaying and knocking against one another. It was a warm sunny day, but as we drove along the curving driveway around the front lawn, I could not say that the weather made the house look any more welcoming. Lockwood Manor had stood on this spot for many centuries, but most of the house as it was had been built in the Jacobethan style in the nineteenth century. The stone used had dulled to a gray; narrow windows were set in a long, squat, uniform front bracketed by two round turrets, and a pierced parapet with pinnacles bristled against the sky.

  I knew from the plans that I had studied that this front hid a more untidy rear, a newer extension to the kitchen in the ground floor of the east wing, and, most importantly of all for the museum, the long gallery. This was a single-storied building that jutted out from the back of the west wing next to a private courtyard, and was Tudor in origin—once part of another building since lost to one of those catastrophic acts of destruction that seemingly happened to very old estates in this country. The long gallery had not been occupied for many years and would have enough room to house many of the museum’s crates and cabinets without furniture needing to be moved or people displaced. Other museum pieces, especially the mounted animals that needed a closer watch for potential damage from atmosphere or pests, would be housed inside the main building, leaving only a few rooms solely for the Major and his daughter. This was their chosen war sacrifice: where other owners of country houses would be preparing for evacuated children and babies, the Lockwoods would receive a quiet menagerie who would not race around or run their sticky fingers along the walls and wake the house with their cries.

  * * *

  I got out of the truck, dropping to the gravel driveway, the four stories of the house looming high above me as if taking my measure. Major Lord Lockwood arrived at the main door with his crowd of dogs, as if he had appeared straight from the photograph that I had seen in the newspaper. The dogs swarmed down the stairs toward me and nudged at my legs. One of them started to growl before the Major called them off me, hitting the offending beast over its back with his stick. Another man with a pinched, folded face like a bulldog rushed down the stairs in a tweed jacket and led the dogs away. I straightened my suit.

  The Major welcomed me to Lockwood Manor with an unenthusiastic handshake. “We were expecting a Dr. Farthing,” he said, “but I hear he’s left his post.”

  “He’s enlisted, yes,” I replied.

  “Well.” He clapped his hands together and we sized each other up. “I’m sure you’ll do just fine. Come along into the house now, they’ve started unpacking already.”

  “They really should have waited for me,” I said, under my breath, as I followed him; this was not an auspicious start to my directorship.

  Our path was blocked by a woman with white-blond hair and a fur-ruffed cardigan. She was clearly leaving, carrying a rather large suitcase for her slim size, but it was not the suitcase that made me stare—it was the tear tracks down her anguished face and the dark patches on her scarf which implied earlier crying. Her breath hitched as she moved to the side for us to pass and, though she looked at the Major beseechingly, when she turned to regard me it was with such loathing that I felt a wash of shame, as if I had done something terrible to her, this woman I had never met before. She sniffed, her top lip curling, and wiped at her tears with a pale glove as I took a step back, and then she turned away with a furious puff of breath and continued down the front steps, struggling with her load.

  “Come along now,” the Major admonished from the gloom of the hallway, clearing his throat impatiently.

  I tried to brush off the lingering image of the woman’s tears, of her hatred, as he led me through room after room of the house, which felt dark and close compared to the late summer’s day outside. We started with the parlor and sitting room to the left of the entrance hall, which looked out across the front lawn and would house the Chiroptera and Insectivora that other keepers had begged us to take; then we crossed the hall to the smoking room next to the dining room, where the Marsupialia would live; next we turned right past the ballroom, with its walls of gilded mirrors in which I caught my harried reflection as I passed, and which would be kept empty of museum specimens because the Major wanted to host gatherings for the nearby regiment.

  Next, we moved al
ong the west corridor, which held the billiards room, the library, the morning room, the music room, and the Major’s mother’s old sitting room, as well as the summer room, the writing room, which would hold bones related to the Cetacea; and then my office, which had been another parlor and which shared a wall with the Major’s office and his own connected private library, both of which he declined to show me and which would be off-limits.

  Next to the Major’s office there was a doorway that led to a corridor through which one could access the long gallery itself. This, as its name suggested, consisted of a long, wide corridor with teak walls and a low coffered ceiling, with a row of half a dozen rooms to either side that were linked together so that the corridor itself only had four doorways cut into its walls. The workmen were carrying boxes and crates along the corridor, and as we made our way through the rooms I was pleased by how full they looked, how many specimens we had been able to preemptively save.

  We left the long gallery and went back into the main house and through to the entrance hall.

  “Dr. Farthing wanted to see the other rooms, so that he could know the architecture of the house and the evacuation routes, I think it was. The parlormaid will show you those,” the Major said, waving me toward a young woman in starched gray and white.

  Dr. Farthing was renowned for being nosy, and had probably made this up in order to have a look round. We had a plan of the house back in London, after all, made only a few years ago, so there were unlikely to be surprises. But I was quite thrilled at the chance to see the great backbone of a country house, the engine taking up one ground-floor wing: the kitchen, scullery, flower room, brushing room, the stillrooms, three pantries, the butler’s room, the lamp rooms, the endless doors and shelves and little anterooms, most of them with no window to the outside; and the servants scuttling about carrying buckets and cloths and trays and boxes. At some point in the tour, I lost my sense of direction and could not tell whether I faced south or north or was even in the same wing. The parlormaid brought me out into the grand entrance hall again by the same door I had entered, even though I swore it was another, and there the Major was talking to the man who had taken the dogs away.

  “Ah, tour went well?” the Major asked me.

  “Fascinating,” I said, although by the slight creasing of his face that was not quite the right word. Perhaps it gave away too much my desire to snoop—which was clearly acceptable from Dr. Farthing, but less so from me.

  “Shall we move to the drawing room?” he asked.

  Once there, alongside the shrouded animals that had been newly unloaded from the truck and awaited unwrapping, he turned to me with hands on his hips.

  “This is still a working estate, Mrs. Cartwright—I hope that won’t be a problem, and that the museum and the house can work harmoniously side by side.”

  Obviously he had been put out by my interest in the servants’ quarters. Or perhaps he was hiding something. Was this a veiled warning?

  “It’s Miss Cartwright,” I corrected, “and I am confident there shall be no problems at all. The museum is immensely thankful for your generous offer to temporarily house the nation’s most valuable mammal collection while London is under threat, and as the correspondence between Lockwood and the museum has shown these past few years, I do believe our collaborative work will be exemplary.” I intended to bamboozle him with long words and flattery.

  “Excellent,” he said, his hands stuffed into his pockets and his eyes already skimming to the door to get away from me. “If you’ll excuse me now, the housekeeper will find you shortly.” He spoke with the louche arrogance of the landed gentry.

  Left alone in the drawing room, my eye was drawn to a glimmer of silver, and when I moved past the brocaded sofa, I found a strange sight. A worn kitchen knife had been stabbed an inch deep into the delicate veneer surface of a side table. The incongruity of the weathered knife in a room full of gilt and fine fabrics, and its upright position, as if it was even now being held by some ghostly hand, unnerved me and, without thinking, I tugged it from the table and then dropped it on its side with a clatter, the wood of its handle so worn it had felt soft in my palm. I moved back around the sofa and rubbed at my arms, where the hair had stood up.

  “Hullo there,” a pleasant voice said from the door. “Are you Miss Cartwright?”

  “I am, yes.”

  “Lady Lockwood, but you can call me Lucy,” the woman entering the room said, and I stuck my hand out only for her to move to kiss my cheek instead. She smelled of a perfume so light I knew it was expensive, and had remarkably short black hair, only a few inches long. It was shorter than a boy’s but brushed and pinned carefully as if to hide its length. A fever haircut, I thought to myself, like something out of Austen. Or perhaps she had had an accident with curlers? Rich people were allowed to be eccentric and have silly haircuts, I supposed. She had dark eyes with tired bruises underneath that could be seen through the pale powder she was using, freckles across both cheeks, a square jaw, and perfectly applied red lipstick. She was one of those beautiful women made all the more lovely by her flaws—the little nick of a scar on her chin, the left ear that jutted out slightly more than the right—and something about seeing her here in the sedate surroundings of the house surprised me, as if I had not expected to meet her, but one does not know who one is to encounter for the first time on any given day, so I did not know why I felt this strange resonation.

  “Now, here’s a sheet with mealtimes and other information like laundry,” she said as I gathered my wits again, “and keys to the museum’s rooms and to the long gallery. This is a key to the main door of the house; I wanted you to have one on the very odd occasion when no one is manning it, or if there’s an emergency or something.” She handed me a great big heavy thing and I slipped it and the other keys into the pocket of my jacket, feeling their weight against my side.

  In the correspondence from the Major and his secretary, he had mentioned that his daughter might be able to help while we were at Lockwood, but in what capacity had been left vague. I had gathered the impression that she was either very young or some society beauty being whisked to and fro by a driver, so would have little time for the museum. I could see now that she was about my age, and seemed very enthusiastic. I wondered if Lord Lockwood was simply one of those men who did not want his own daughter to work.

  She looked up from her list and paused, the polite smile fading into seriousness.

  “Forgive me,” she said, “but you looked shaken for a moment when I walked in; are you all right?” she asked, lightly touching my arm.

  “Oh, it’s nothing.” I shook my head, but she was watching me so intently that I felt I should say something. “I was walking around the room and I put my hand out for balance and almost cut myself on the knife on the side table over there,” I said. “I can be a bit clumsy sometimes, I’m afraid,” I added hurriedly, thinking that this was not the kind of pulled-together first impression I wanted to make.

  “Oh, goodness me, what on earth is that doing in here?” she said, peering over at it with a puzzled frown. “But are you all right?” she asked, taking my hand and turning it over, looking for a wound.

  The slide of her fingers across my palm startled me and the earnestness of her search made me feel a sudden wave of tenderness toward her.

  “Oh no, I didn’t get hurt, I caught myself just in time.” It was silly to come up with a lie like that, but then it had been silly of me to tug the knife out too.

  “Thank god,” she said, and let my hand go. “I can’t think how someone misplaced that here; I’ll let the housekeeper know. I hope it hasn’t soured your arrival.”

  “Oh, of course not,” I insisted. “It’s my own fault for not looking where I was going. You’d think someone that worked around so many sharp-toothed beasts would take more care.” It was an ineffectual joke but she laughed all the same, revealing dimples in her cheeks.

  “Well,” she said, “I do hope that you shall be very happy here at
Lockwood Manor. It’s such an honor to offer a home to the museum’s mammal collection.”

  “It’s a truly magnificent house,” I said.

  “It looks even more splendid with your animals inside, Miss Cartwright,” she said, touching my arm quickly. “Now, we’ve put you in the east wing, in the red bedroom as it’s called. I hope that’s all right. It’s a lovely cozy room with views over the front gardens. I used it myself a few times while convalescing as a child because it was closer to my nurse’s room and, truthfully, I’ve never slept better.” She smiled tremulously at me.

  I wanted to tell her that even a cupboard would do for me, that there was no need for such concern for the quality of my sleep. I was not used to being catered to in this manner; I was used to landladies who pursed their lips and sighed wearily if I asked for a leaking tap to be fixed and complained that I was too loud when I came in from work late.

  “Please, call me Hetty,” I said.

  “Lucy!” the Major called then, striding into the room. “Ah, there you are, my dove,” he said. “Cook wants your advice on the menus.”

  “Father—”

  “Come along,” he said, and swept his arm toward the door.

  “The rooms are quite filling up with beasts,” he added, looking around with satisfaction as I watched Lucy leave. She smiled at me and the skin at the corners of her eyes crinkled.

  “Are you getting Lucy excited?” the Major said, turning to me once she had gone. I could not quite grasp his tone. His enthusiasm had fallen away in a flash to reveal something hard and intelligent.