The Animals at Lockwood Manor

by Jane Healey

  I woke often to the sound of a cry—my own? Or someone else’s? The hazy boundaries of sleep made it difficult to tell—and with the rumble of a growl that seemed to shake my bed. I had twice jerked in horror when I opened my eyes and thought my desk chair was something crouched and lurking.

  “I’ve slept so well here,” Helen remarked on her last morning—for she and David were to return to London that very day, having successfully seen the specimens settled into their new home (if, indeed, losing one of those specimens could count as successful)—as she carefully sliced a green apple. “I’ll be sad to leave.”

  “I will too,” David said, his smile exaggerated by the smear of marmalade at its corner.

  “It’s the quiet here, I think, and the lovely thick beds. I’ve been quite happy to be tucked away here in the countryside and not in London worrying about when the war will finally begin for true.” David made a noise of agreement. “What about you, Hetty? Will you miss us when we’re gone?” Helen asked after a pause.

  “Oh yes,” I said, not wishing to start off a conversation about dreams. “It’s lovely and quiet here, though, as you say.”

  Too quiet, I thought as we left the breakfast table and I returned to the first floor and my empty wing of the house. Was that why my sleep was disturbed, why I did not feel at ease in any of the rooms here? Was I only missing the comforting hum of London outside the window, the sounds and smells of every other human in my boarding house, the crush of people on the underground, and the crowds of visitors in the museum? I had never thought of myself as someone that needed the company of others, but I found myself disconcerted to see Helen and David leave, for without them I would have to face Lord Lockwood’s imperiousness alone. Without them, I would be solely responsible for the museum’s precious collection’s safety—and was I really up to the task, I thought later, feeling a wash of prickling anxiety when my colleagues brought their suitcases down to the hall and waited for the car to be brought round.

  “You won’t run yourself ragged on museum business, will you, Hetty?” Helen said outside, pausing at the top of the steps with a kind smile that hurt me for what it seemed to say—that she questioned my ability to do my job.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said firmly, as if trying to make myself believe it too. “You look after yourself too.”

  “And good luck with Lockwood’s ghost!” David added mirthfully before he carried both their suitcases down the steps, and my mood soured further.

  I did not believe in ghosts, but neither did I enjoy these jokes and hints, the overheard conversations of the servants, that spoke to something irregular happening here, to nightly wanderings, to a house so large that its remaining occupants could not be certain what might be occurring elsewhere in the building.

  * * *

  “I wondered if I might ask you something, Hetty,” Lucy said that afternoon as she sipped on her tea, leaving a red lip print on the rim of the pale china cup.

  “Of course.”

  “I’ve been feeling at a loose end, you see. I had thought about volunteering to help the WI or the WVS, but I’m not sure I have that much to offer besides providing a meeting place here. I had wondered though whether I might help out with the museum. I overhead one of the maids complaining about dusting and cleaning the taxidermy, that it was unnerving her, that she didn’t like them watching her as she did it,” Lucy related with a wry smile.

  “You don’t have to clean the animals, that’s the museum’s responsibility,” I said. I might have called Lucy and I friends, although there was still some barrier of politeness, of things not said, between us. I liked the idea of her helping with the museum very much, with being able to share more of my world with her, although I did not wish her to feel pressured.

  “I want to, I want to help,” she pressed. “Especially with David and Helen gone. Let me help, Hetty. Besides, this gives me a chance to get closer to the animals, which I confess is something I’ve been dying to do.”

  “If you’re sure,” I said, and she nodded firmly.

  I showed Lucy how to dust and clean the mounts that were open to the air, with vacuum cleaner and duster and spirit and cloth. And when we met every other day for tea she would report back and ask questions about the taxidermy, about the seams she had found on the animals and the delicate glass eyes that were hand-painted for each beast, the frames made of clay or of plaster and wire, and all manner of stuffing hidden beneath the skins. She liked to work with her hands, she said, to concentrate on a task, and feel that she was doing something useful, and I was thrilled to have someone who shared my zoological interests.

  She found the type specimens particularly interesting, though most of these were carefully hidden away in drawers. I had explained that the collection here at Lockwood was unusual in that we had a mixture of the animals and curiosities we normally had on show, and those that were kept in storage, like the type specimens. These were the whole skins, skeletons, or even parts of an animal that were used to identify a new species and which became, after the species classification, the example of that species—the type—that researchers would compare with new finds. This was why the evacuation of our animals was particularly important, for we held some of the only examples of certain species and very many of the type specimens.

  “So it’s a little like Noah’s ark, the collection,” Lucy said one morning over breakfast.

  I had it perfectly timed now—I would wake early and do some work in my office, before eating a late breakfast with Lucy, thus avoiding Lord Lockwood, who always ate as early as possible, and in whose company my small talk felt even more graceless than usual.

  “Yes, I suppose so,” I said uncertainly, “although they cannot actually repopulate the earth, and we only have one each, not a pair.”

  “Yes, it’s not a metaphor that works if one looks at it too closely, is it,” she said, laughing deprecatingly.

  I admired Lucy’s good humor, and her laugh, which was deep and almost mannish.

  “It’s still a thrill to enter a room I thought I knew well and find it full of exotic animals. They seem so out of place here,” she said as she passed me the milk before I had the chance to ask for it.

  On the contrary, what I found most discomforting about the museum’s new home was that the animals did not look out of place in here at all. There used to be many more private collections of taxidermy in stately homes such as this one. The Victorians had gorged themselves on collecting treasures from across the empire, and it seemed to me, oddly, as if the collection had come home to roost here. No longer pretending to be about education and scientific research, the collection had now become trophies in a manor house, jewels in the crown of a single aristocratic man; a notion that disturbed me.

  But I did not say that, for it would not endear me to Lucy to obliquely insult her father. He had not won me over during the brief time I spent in his company—at meals or in passing in the house—and I still smarted from his dismissive response to the lost jaguar. It was a particular annoyance that my office was so close to his across the narrow hall that led to the long gallery, for it meant that I was a party to his occasional telephone conversations, the majority of which appeared to be to various women he often called “darling,” as if he had forgotten their individual names, with a good number of conversations being composed of him soothing their understandably hurt prides.

  “Things were getting too serious, too quickly, you know that, darling,” he said that afternoon, his voice close to a croon through the wall. “It’s only been several months, I can’t be seen to have a girlfriend just yet, and there are too many eyes about the house with that blasted woman and her menagerie, too many visitors poking into things.”

  A pause and then a laugh. “Nonsense,” he continued breezily, “don’t be silly, you know I get invited to events, you know I need to socialize for business. I can hardly bring the same woman along to each one, can I? Think of what that would look like so soon after my wife died. And besides,
don’t think I haven’t heard about you,” he said, voice becoming sly and harsh, “and your own visitors, your dalliances.”

  Another pause and then the sound of his door opening.

  “Can a man get a decent cup of tea?” he called into the hall, genial and long-suffering, and then returned to his call. “You’re working yourself up into a state. Of course you’ll still be invited to the soldiers’ ball, I’m not a monster, I just think you need to get some perspective, there were never any promises made, my angel.”

  I could feel the grimace on my face as I got up and left for another room, not wishing to hear more of his easy cruelty, or more ridiculous blame placed on the museum for his own actions. I had been right to imagine him as a Bengal tiger, I thought, picturing his callous grin and those lazy piercing eyes.

  * * *

  In contrast to her father’s irritation with the museum, Lucy continued to embrace its presence, although there was an awkward element to her assistance. Occasionally I would walk through the rooms and find some of the smaller animals out of place—not that there was any particular reason they needed to stay where I had first arranged them, I supposed. There was no visiting public here to educate with careful groupings of different species or pleasing contrasts; the only need was for the specimens to stay safe and undamaged—but when I brought this up with Lucy she said that she was extremely careful to make sure that nothing was moved. It must have been the maids being absentminded in their cleaning, so I left it as a quirk of the museum’s new home and endured that odd discombobulating feeling of entering a room that looked ever so slightly different from when you had seen it last—the glint of eyes from a different corner, a snout sneaking out from behind a cabinet, the curling tail of an animal whose back has been turned.

  * * *

  On my third Saturday at Lockwood, after waking from another horrible nightmare and being further panicked when I blundered across my bedroom and saw a reflection in the dresser-top mirror and thought it some ghostly specter, I decided that I had simply been cooped up in the house too long. I therefore took a walk to the village, hoping to work my frustrations and worries out on the brambled path that led away from Lockwood. The village was similar to ones I had seen on day trips as a child, the villagers unremarkable, but as an adult I noticed elements I would not have before: the shops shuttered by the depression, the shabbiness of the houses—flaking paint and shoddy slate repair—and the heavily darned clothes of some of the people I passed.

  The seam on my watch strap was coming loose and as I hunted for a jeweler’s or a cobbler’s to fix it, I found myself almost knocked over by a woman hurrying out of the newsagent. It was the same woman I had encountered on my first day at Lockwood, the one with pale blond hair and tears down her cheeks, and once again my appearance seemed to turn her face sour with loathing.

  “I’m sorry,” I offered awkwardly—for getting in her way and perhaps for whatever I had done to displease her.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, peering at my clothes with such distaste that I glanced down to see if I had picked up stains on my walk over.

  “I’m trying to get my watch strap fixed,” I said, and then yelped as she snatched out a hand to clutch my wrist.

  “Was it a present?” she demanded, twisting my wrist to see.

  “No,” I said, tugging my hand from hers with a huff. “It’s old.”

  “I can see that,” she said, rudely.

  “Do you know where I might get it fixed?” I asked, as I held the offending watch behind me, trying to find some polite way of ending this conversation.

  “I suppose you could try the cobbler,” she said curtly with a wave of her hand toward the lane opposite us. She was staring at my hair now and my scalp was prickling.

  “Thank you,” I said, then, “I’m sorry, I don’t think I caught your name.”

  “Mary.”

  “Well, thank you, Mary,” I said breezily, and turned away, doing my best not to look back because I feared she might still be there watching me. “What an odd woman,” I muttered under my breath.

  “Ah, the lady from the museum,” the cobbler said when I entered his cramped hut. Was there something obvious about me that marked me out as not from around here, I thought, or was it only that the village was small and that everyone knew everyone’s business? “It’s quite the coup for us, having you here,” he said as I handed over my watch, “and for Himself,” he added. “How is our lordship?” he asked as he drew out his tools and got to work.

  “He seems well,” I replied tentatively, unsure what else to say.

  The cobbler sniffed and tipped the cap on his head further up his forehead. “I bet he is. No mourning clothes for him. I knew his wife well, I did, she used to come and get her shoes fixed, even though she could have had them sent over. A lovely thing, she was, bright as a button when she arrived here; she loved this place and we loved her. All those garden parties she hosted, the fairs for the children, the money she gave to the church. It was his fault what happened to her, how troubled she became; he shut her away, trapped her there. My niece used to work at the big house, she said that Lady Lockwood became quite ill, that she felt like something was after her, poor thing.” He gave a troubled frown. “It’s not a happy house you’ve come to, I’m afraid, miss,” he remarked.

  When I emerged from the gloom of the hut, buckling my watch around my wrist, I saw that Mary was standing with two other women by the entrance to the lane, and as I passed they laughed and I knew by their looks that they were probably laughing at me.

  Smarting from my encounter, I made my way back to Lockwood, descending into the shallow valley, the thick grass of the verge whipping against my ankles. The gates to the house gleamed dark in the hot day and I shielded my eyes from the glare of a window that had become a fiery mirror of the sun. As I slipped past the gatehouse, my feet crunching on the gravel of the driveway, a sudden thud against the fence made me jump. The wood shook again, as if something was trying to break its way through to me, and then there was a growling bark, then several thuds and barks. My heart hammered and I let out a yelp, reminded unwittingly of my dreams. My eyes lifted to one of the shadowed gatehouse windows and I saw a man’s face—Jenkins, I presumed—and then the curtains were pulled smartly across. I eyed the fence, hoping that it was strong enough to hold back the dogs, wishing I could ask the Major to have them sent to some other estate somewhere where they could not bother me, and then I turned back to look at the manor house. The sun had shifted, and the lit window was dark again, indistinguishable from the rest.

  The tinny sound of starched, officious voices came drifting out from the wireless in the drawing room before I even stepped across the threshold. The housekeeper had recently bowed to pressure and the wireless was now turned on for the different daily news reports which, even if one did not crowd around to hear like the others, still floated through the house and set one on edge. We had also had our first trial run of the manor’s air-raid siren a few days ago and though we had all been prepared in advance, the sound was utterly alien, turning the stately rooms of the house into the setting for unimaginable horrors.

  If an attack on the manor was imminent, we would not have time to evacuate the museum’s collections, only to gather what we could carry by hand and take down to the damp cellars with us. My mind kept conjuring up images of the collection in ruins—every single egg, nest, shell, and bone shattered; the glass from the windows embedded in the furry sides of the mammals; the cabinets collapsed and the few spirit jars we had brought exploded so that the floor would be tiled with oozing, rotting scales. The dust in the air would be thick with hair and skin and feather fragments; fossils crumbled, as humans and their bombs managed what thousands of years of geological forces had not. So many years of work, so many patient hands and long nights, our best attempt at gathering the great and the good, the vicious and the venomous, the tiny and the large of the animal world in one place; all gone. From a selfish point of view, a direc
t hit on the manor would mean the end of my job, and what was my life without it?

  That evening, I could not find my blasted watch. I was sure that I had taken it off and put it on the shelf of my desk while I wrote a letter, but it was not there and nor was it on the floor or in a drawer. I had dragged the sheets off my bed to check inside them and gone through all the papers piled up on my desk downstairs, passed through the museum’s rooms to check tables and surfaces even though I knew I had been wearing it when I came upstairs.

  Frustrated, I sat on my bed to pull out my earrings, but my hand fumbled and dropped one, which fell with a plink. And of course, it had to be the pair that was false jade and impossible to find in the dim light of the room. I sighed, kneeled down, and peered first at the floor and then beneath the grand wooden base of the bed, smoothing my hands back and forth to try to feel the earring or possibly the errant watch. Nothing. I leaned in further and stretched my arms as far as they would go under my bed, and felt something against my fingertips that made me jolt up in alarm and bash my head on the underside of the bed. It felt soft, furred, like matted hair. I reached for it again and dragged it toward me.

  A doll made of straw and linen, about the size of my hand, dangled from the pale yellow wool of its hair, with black beads for eyes, and a dress made out of scraps of white lace. But what was most disturbing about it were the three large pins that had been poked into the doll, one in the forehead, one in the heart, and the third in the belly.

  Eight

  The doll was dusty, so I knew that it had not been put here recently, purposefully, to scare me, and I did not think it was one of Lucy’s old toys: it was too rough-hewn, too hurriedly made and from packing and straw, not the velvets and satins that would be available to a child living in a house such as this. The white dress—the woman in white—was beside the point, I told myself; anyone might be unnerved to find such a thing stabbed with pins under their bed.