The Animals at Lockwood Manor

by Jane Healey

  “I was just talking about the museum—”

  “Because she is very delicate, Lucy. She is not to be troubled with too many difficulties or dramas. And with the loss of both her mother and grandmother a few months ago . . .” He paused. “She’s sensitive, you know. If there are any true problems you must come to me or to the housekeeper, or to my man, Jenkins.” I guessed the latter was the bulldog-faced man in the hall earlier.

  “Of course,” I replied.

  We had foreseen awkward politics with the collection being here, with many of our discussions hinging on that all-encompassing word diplomacy, but I was not expecting it to present itself in a manner quite like this. When we heard that the late Lady Lockwood and her mother-in-law had both passed away recently, there were questions about whether we should choose a different location, but after we sent a carefully worded letter to the Major saying thus, he had insisted that the museum still be housed at Lockwood Manor. The two women had died tragically in an evening car crash on a country road, quite horrible. I remembered that at one of our meetings, David—one of those brutish-looking rugger types who surprises with their hidden bookishness and encyclopedic knowledge of detective stories—said he had asked a journalist friend about the crash and whether there were any suspects, and had been told that the police had thought it an accident. I remembered it because the whole room had paused after he said it, none of us having assumed it was anything other than an accident originally. I hadn’t given it much thought after that, my mind busy with the practicalities of the move, with my animals, but now that I was here, I found myself wondering about the late Lady Lockwood, Lucy’s mother, and just what had happened that night.

  A worker passing the door with his arms braced around a large frame called out for instructions, and I returned to the task at hand.

  “That’s a butterfly case; it goes with the others in the summer room. Just as we talked about,” I said, shortly, because I had pegged this particular worker for a troublemaker back in London. It was a motley crew anyway, with so many men having already enlisted.

  When I turned again to the Major, the lightness was back in his eyes. “I can see that you are eminently reasonable, Miss Cartwright, and I apologize for belaboring my point earlier. Young women can be so flighty, you know, but I can tell you are of sensible stock. You’ll be a good companion for Lucy, I think—she has been lonely these past few months with only me and the servants for company.”

  “I shall do my best,” I replied, after a moment while I thought of what to say. Flighty women? Sensible stock? I sincerely hoped that things would indeed go smoothly here, and that he would not be one of those old bores who would not listen to a woman if his hair were on fire. Would he be paying me to be his daughter’s companion, I wondered, a little absurdly, or would that be covered by my wages from the museum?

  It was no matter. I was intrigued by Lucy in a way I could not quite explain and had felt welcomed by her far more heartily than any landlady previous. It would be rather nice to share a house with her and my animals and cabinets from London, instead of the drab loneliness of the lodging house in Kensington with its sour-faced inhabitants.

  * * *

  When I was a child, I had the frankly nonsensical habit of trying to classify those around me as animals, being generally more fond of them than people, and, embarrassingly, it was not a habit I had been able to shake. I had only told someone about this preoccupation once before—a girl at my school called Constance who I said reminded me of a mongoose, and who told all the other girls that I was trying to insult her, when I really was not, and I was unable to claw my way back from that pariahdom. Lucy had been called a dove by her father but, as a mammal lover, I thought that she rather reminded me of a cat somehow, in her glamour and warm smiles—even though of course I knew that neither of these attributes had anything to do with a real Felis catus. Lord Lockwood, though, I had pegged as a Bengal tiger, wearing his authority coolly, or perhaps a Eurasian wolf. And as for myself, sometimes I was a European badger, blundering around in the dark, and other times a golden mole: pale, solitary, industrious, and rather unenchanting.

  As I walked along the long upstairs hall behind the young maid who was showing me to my assigned bedroom, I felt the rich carpet pull at my feet, a little like the way thick snow makes it hard to walk. My eyes could barely see to the end of the corridor, and I kept expecting a sudden mirrored wall to appear, and almost wanted to keep my hands out in front of me. The museum occupied the ground floors but no higher. On the floors above, there lived a handful of people and many empty rooms. We had already passed five empty bedrooms; three had their doors closed but I peeked in curiously at the other two as the maid named them—the first was the yellow room, dominated by a massive four-poster bed which had its curtains firmly pulled shut, and opposite that was the purple room, with a dizzying wallpaper and a mirror set just opposite the doorway that startled me when I thought my watery reflection was another unexpected guest.

  There were rumors, the maid had said, nervously shifting away from the door, that this room was cursed, that guests who slept there had heard strange sounds at night.

  “I should get back to the kitchen, ma’am,” she continued quickly. “We’re rushed off our feet at the moment. You can’t miss your room; it’s the only one in this wing with red wallpaper.” She bobbed and hurried away, disappearing into the alcove where a mammoth vase and giant spray of dried flowers disguised the doorway that led to the service stairs, put in place so that the servants could enter and leave the corridor without a trace of a footstep on the grand staircase.

  The next pair of rooms I passed had their blackout curtains already closed, and in the gloom I could see that each piece of furniture, chandeliers included, was shrouded with dust sheets, turning their recognizable shapes into strange, hulking objects. The room opposite mine had twin beds on either side of the window, whose outside was crowded with ivy, and a loud clock sitting on the windowsill whose ticking I had heard from several rooms away. Beyond my room was a bathroom and two more empty—I assumed—bedrooms with their doors closed, and the shut-up turret rooms. I was the only one staying in the east wing—David and Helen would be in the west wing, and the Major’s suite of rooms was in the round turret at the end of that long corridor.

  I was not a superstitious person, not someone prone to whimsy aside from my classification game, and I liked facts far more than fiction, but there was undeniably something unsettling about a row of unoccupied rooms, like being the only guest in a hotel, or those moments when one is a child and one’s house is so quiet one has the irrational thought that everyone has gone and left you behind.

  As I reached my assigned room, the thought was banished when I saw a flicker of movement in the corner of my eye—this house was truly far from empty, with its busy servants scurrying about.

  I turned. There was a figure at the other end of the corridor. As many sconces as there were, the space was too large to light completely, and the figure was so far away I could not see their face or even tell their sex. Yet I knew that they were staring at me, and that there was something unfriendly about their posture, furious even. The corridor seemed to swell and stretch as I stood and stared back, and then they moved to the left and disappeared, a door slamming so loudly behind them that it made my shoulders jerk.

  An angry figure, a weeping woman who hated me, a lord of the manor who warned me against exciting his fragile daughter, and talk of a cursed room. What kind of place was this? I stepped into my room and shut the door behind me. Every home, and every workplace, had its own human current simmering underneath, histories and grudges and idiosyncrasies; it was only that this was a rather grander setting for them, that’s all. I would concentrate on my work, on the animals, as I had always done, and let the living occupants of Lockwood do as they may.

  Three

  In her last years, my mother grew unwell, the strange fits that she had suffered through all my life multiplying. She became suspicious
of everyone, seeing enemies everywhere, and kept various sets of binoculars stationed around the house to use to peer out of windows and spy on the gardeners or any visitors, or else she hurried up and down the corridors of the house, whipping open doors as if she expected to find people lurking behind them. My grandmother was frail by then and ignored any suggestion that her daughter-in-law was unwell. There was only room for one mad occupant of Lockwood, according to her, and that was me—despite the fact that by that time I only had the occasional nightmare, and I was doing so well that I was thinking of leaving the manor for a life in London. A life all of my own away from the watchful eyes of my mother.

  It was only in retrospect that I thought of how my mother seemed to get worse as I grew better, but when she was alive her concern for me was so smothering, her madness so frightening, that I was desperate to leave her behind, that I did not want there to be any connection between us beyond the fact of my birth.

  Children can be cruel, my father bemoaned when he first heard of my plans. You give them everything and then they leave you with nothing. He said it with a dramatic swoon, with a joking manner, but I knew that he hated the thought of me leaving, that I was precious to him.

  He had been the one to tell me that they had died, coming into the parlor where I sat listening to the wireless, jotting down some half-formed thoughts about my plans for the future, and I had not believed him. They were taking a trip to a friend’s house for tea and they would be back later, I told him stubbornly as my pen fell from my grip and my notebook slid to the floor. They would be back soon, he shouldn’t worry, I said, and he said, Oh, Lucy, it’s only us left now, and the tears in his eyes brought a keen to my throat.

  My plans were set aside, a curtain drawn over my vision of my future. My father needed me, the servants needed me, the house needed me. And besides, with my mother’s and grandmother’s deaths, any improvement in my nerves had also been cruelly snatched away.

  One day, about a week after the joint funeral, after the horror of seeing her coffin so small and narrow and thinking about her there inside, locked away from the world, I had looked in the mirror while I brushed my hair, with tears rolling down my cheeks, remembering my mother brushing it sometimes when I was a child and how back then, when I was small, she had more good days than bad; how, as I grew older, those happy days dwindled to rare afternoons and the rest of the time another mother took her place, a nervous, frightened creature. I had looked at my reflection, my dark eyes and dark hair, the particular bump on the bridge of my nose, and thought that I looked too much like my mother, that every time I saw my reflection again, I would think of her—how I loved her and tried to leave her, how I feared I would one day become her. And so I picked up a pair of scissors and sheared my hair off, close to the skull, ringlets and curls dropping around me like I was shedding a winter coat of fur.

  My father had looked horrified when I emerged from my room newly shorn. He did not like my bad nerves, perhaps because they reminded him of my mother’s, and, when he could, he pretended that my nightmares never happened. We all have bad dreams, he would say, there’s no need to make more of them than that. Still, that day when I emerged from my bedroom with my grief and madness plainly visible, he telephoned the Harley Street doctor he used to call out for my mother, because he did not trust local doctors not to gossip, and I was soon sedated and put to bed, with a pile of blankets over me so thick and heavy I felt as if my body was being pushed down toward the earth, as if I was halfway buried.

  But don’t other cultures cut their hair in mourning? I remembered thinking, as I lay there and the room spun around me, as my eyes burned from lack of sleep and my heart jumped in my chest as if it were trying to run away. Wasn’t this a normal response?

  * * *

  It was not the first time I had taken scissors to my own hair—for I had cut off a chunk of it on a dare when I was young, during the summer when my mother was on bed rest after what I later learned was a miscarriage, when I roamed the gardens half-feral with children from the village. It was Mary, the niece of Lockwood’s cook, and her brother who were the wildest, along with another girl who dressed like a boy and begged her mother for a haircut like one too. In the summer months, our days were endless. We made dens in the woods and in the hedges, gorged on stolen unripe apples that made us sick, stripped off our clothes and swam in the lake, climbed trees and roofs, made up complicated sports with ever-expanding rules, and played giggling kissing games. I did not always take part in the dares—to run for a hundred yards with one’s eyes closed, to climb the rickety hut with its loose tiles, to jump from the topmost branch of the beech tree, to grip rose thorns in one’s hands, to try to steal eggs from the chickens without the farmer noticing—but I did that day we used gardening shears to cut off pieces of our hair, because I had had enough of Mary jeering at me for being pretty and vain.

  I hadn’t known what to do with the thick lock of hair once I had cut it. The others threw theirs at each other, or into the bushes, but I felt anxious about letting it go, as if it was still a part of me, even though it had been separated. If I threw it away there in the gardens, the birds would pick it up and use it for their nest, and the idea of that, of naked, wrinkly hatchlings curled up in my hair, disturbed me. Instead, I kept it clutched in my fist until it became damp with perspiration and, when the day’s excitement finished, I took it back inside and hid it in the drawer of my childhood dressing table.

  My mother had found it after summer was over, my forgotten curl of hair, when she had come into my room to wake me from a nap for dinner.

  I woke to her asking for my hairbrush and the sound of the drawer opening and then she let out a fearful gasp that had me sitting up in bed, clutching the blankets.

  “What is this?” she asked, holding the hair up as if it was dangerous. “Is this yours? What are you doing with it? You know you have to be careful,” she said, her voice cracking. “She can make a spell with this; she can use it against you. Haven’t I told you to be careful of her, of la diablesse, of the woman in white and her beasts?”

  It wasn’t the first I had heard of her, the devil woman, the ghost, the spirit that my mother said was haunting her, haunting us. When she had first told me about her, we had been playing a game of hide-and-seek—for as much as my mother could be distant when her nerves were bad, when she was well she could also be lighthearted, eager to see the world through a child’s eyes again, as if we were playmates and not mother and daughter. She had hidden while I covered my eyes and counted and when I came searching and opened the last door in the corridor, that of the purple bedroom, expecting to find her waiting on the other side of the door, for her to smile delightedly and take me in her arms as if she had found me and not the other way around—There she is, she would always say. My very own girl, my looking-glass girl—I found her glancing around at the room as if in a trance.

  “It was here,” she said. “This was where I first saw her.”

  “Saw who?”

  “The woman in white,” she said, her voice thin. “I had dreamed of her as a child, out there in the forest waiting for me, hunting me with her beasts.” She’d folded her arms in front of her chest as if trying to protect herself. “She was haunting me,” she said, “and I was desperate to leave, to get away from her, and your father was my escape, he saved me and brought me here.”

  I had been spellbound by the look on my mother’s face, the tender joy, the happiness. I could picture even then how she must have been as a bride, young and hopeful, arriving in a foreign land arm in arm with a handsome lord.

  “On my wedding day my husband gave me a tour of my new home, of Lockwood,” she had continued dazedly. “Room after room after room, all his, all mine, with no thick jungle outside, only a neat lawn and woodland beyond. Room after room, and then we came into this one, the purple room, he called it, with this sloping floor and the window that rattles in the wind and I turned to my left and there she was, waiting for me. I saw her.”


  She’d turned toward me, her face a mask of horror, her hands now flitting like trapped birds in the air before her.

  “I hadn’t escaped at all; she was here, she had followed me, she’s here,” she had said, and then our game of hide-and-seek was at an end and my mother took to her bed for the week and each night I heard her cry out in her sleep, shrieking and whimpering.

  That day when she discovered my lock of hair she came and kneeled beside me, took my face in her warm hands. “All I want to do is protect you,” she said, desperately. “I want to keep you safe.”

  Then she fled from my room and retreated to her bed again, cocooning herself like some animal who wished to sleep away a season and wake to find the world changed and new again. She did not come down to dinner and I stared at her seat as I swung my legs back and forth over the edge of mine.

  “Your mother has a headache,” my father had said, looking up from some papers he was reading in between courses, and noticing my gaze. “She won’t be joining us. But since she isn’t here, we might just help ourselves to some ice cream,” he added, motioning to the maid.

  My father was often busy—with his businesses and with my mother and their turbulent relationship—but he had far more time for me than many other fathers of his ilk and could be kind and indulgent, calling me his little doll, tweaking a curl and smiling as I narrated some childish concern of great importance—the new barn kittens or the dress I was going to wear to Sunday dinner or the paper cut on my finger. He was also the one who insisted later that I be taught at home by a tutor instead of going to the local school, saying what was the point in having a child if she spent all day with other people, that he would miss me if he could not drop into the schoolroom and say hello, and furthermore, that I would surely be spoiled by mixing with the grubby local children.