by Jane Healey
As I shucked my fine dress, feeling a little like a child who has borrowed her mother’s glamorous but ill-fitting clothes, I stared at my reflection in the mirror, my wan face. There was a handprint smudged on the glass, its fingers splayed. It must have been left by an absentminded maid, for it was not my hand, with the crooked joint in my little finger, and yet I did not remember seeing it before I left for the ball. But maybe the light was different now, or maybe it was because I stood at a different angle.
That night as I slept, with the full moon hidden by the blackout curtains, my dreams were filled with scenes from the ball, with faces and bodies whirling around, with mirrors cracked and cabinets smashed open and mute animals standing vigil.
It was not a restful night’s sleep.
Fourteen
I had escaped the party before it ended and curled myself into a ball under my bedclothes. I had a headache, and the kind of jangling nerves that come from being on show, from being surrounded by a heaving mass of people who seemed to expand to fit inside every room so there was no place left to think, to breathe.
How did my mother do it? She was the host of so many social occasions here at Lockwood: summer soirees, spring celebrations, Christmas, Halloween, harvest; birthday parties and anniversary gatherings; extravagant dinners and weekend get-togethers; hunt balls and debutante comings-out. She liked children’s parties best of all, for there had always been something childlike about her, a love of games and play-pretending. She would hire entertainers—clowns and magicians and men with docile ponies to ride—and invite children from the village to bolster the crowd of family friends and servants’ children. The house would be decorated in various fanciful themes and she would order the servants to create a veritable feast of sandwiches, cakes, and ice cream, and would organize games that she often took part in too—ribbon races in the garden, sporting tournaments and musical chairs, charades, simple card games, and even a maypole on one occasion. But it was my eighth birthday—eight being the age I was when my nightmares first began—when she was unwell that I remembered most of all, and found myself recalling as I sheltered under the heavy weight of my quilts.
It had fallen on my new nurse to take charge of the children’s games, and after Mary, the cook’s niece and my sometime playmate, had made two other girls cry, my nurse announced that we would play hide-and-seek. But unlike my mother, who was wise enough to confine such a game to a corridor or a single floor, the nurse told us to use the whole house, perhaps hoping that the game would last long enough that she could sit down and rest her feet. She made Mary be the seeker and as we set off from the entrance hall, giggling and racing, I glanced back to see her standing there looking sullen even with the nurse’s hands held over her eyes so that she could not peek, counting to thirty in a petulant voice.
The children of the servants, who visited the house now and then and heard the stories of their parents, knew good hiding places, but I who had spent all my life here knew the best ones. That day, I chose one of the servants’ bathrooms on the top floor, the one that was slightly concealed by a large cupboard. Once inside, with the door closed, I climbed into the bath. It still had a shallow puddle of water in it from the last bather, which seeped slowly into my dress the longer I waited.
I was giddy to begin with, from the excitement of hiding and the sharp sugar of the cake we had gorged on, but as time went on, as the light that leaked through the small window dimmed with the arrival of afternoon clouds, as the silence of the house grew around me like something I could touch, like a smothering blanket, I became frightened.
Soon, I was too frightened to even think about leaving and abandoning the game, for my mind had decided that something—someone—was steadily climbing the stairs to my floor, that they had made their silent way along the corridor, eyes unblinking, and lurked just outside the door, that their hand was reaching right now for the door handle that I stared at with utter terror, my teeth chattering, my fingers cold with fear. In my mind, the party guests had gone home hours ago and the other members of the household had all vanished too. It was only me, and them—the person outside—remaining, and there was only an unlocked door between us.
And when that door did finally open—when one of the servants who had been sent to find me opened it—I was hysterical with fear, screaming and fighting as they lifted me out of the bath and carried me down to my nurse, and even though they kept telling me all the while that everything was all right, that I was safe and found, they were indistinguishable to me from the monster who had been stalking me, and I knew I was lost, and could not be persuaded otherwise.
The party ended abruptly, the other children all having returned from their hiding places of their own accord after growing bored waiting to be found. A doctor was called for me as I lay on the floor of my nursery inconsolable, fending off arms trying to pick me up, while my mother, who had emerged from her sickbed after the guests left, with a scarf around her ears, upbraided the nurse for letting us wander the whole house. But it was only when the servants were halfway through clearing up the detritus that Mary herself, the missing seeker, returned, dangling one of my dolls in her fist. She had not found a single hiding child because she had fallen asleep, she said, looking flushed and chastened, dropping the doll in a heap of limbs on the floor and running outside swiftly before her aunt could spank her.
My father, once he emerged from where he had taken sanctuary in his office, decided it had been the game that had frightened me and told my mother that she should not play such a game with me again, an order that she did not keep. But perhaps she should have; perhaps he knew that there was something frightening about the games of children—all those blindfolds and chases and hunts, the make-believe and play-pretend. Perhaps a child like myself with a wild imagination should have stuck to books and wholesome walks in the gardens, or studious needlework, and never raced down the long corridors of Lockwood while my mother laughed and chased me until we were both winded and silly, giggling in a heap on some faded Turkish rug, gazing up at the dust motes dancing in the air above us.
My mother should still be here, keeping her beady eyes on the house, being beautiful and glittering and difficult. Now all that was left were her clothes, her shoes, the painting of her on my father’s bedroom wall, and the memory of her lingering in each room just as her funeral flowers did. It wasn’t fair; she had been so careful, so worried that something, someone, was out to get her, that her death was somehow foretold, that she had lived her last years crazed with terror.
And if she was right, a sly voice inside me said, if she was right about her death, then might she not be right about all her other fears, about the ghost haunting Lockwood?
It was only the ball, I told myself, as I turned over and pushed my face into the pillow—only the guests reminiscing about my mother, the women in their furs.
In my dreams, the fur coats in our wardrobes kept coming alive, the mice gnawed at my bedposts, and the leveret skittered away from my fingers; in my dreams I was always searching, always weeping, as blue walls crept closer and enclosed me tight. The bathroom where I had hidden so many years ago did not have blue walls and the bath itself was a faded cream, so that was not where those particular nightmares began, and though I had searched for it in the daylight, that room I dreamed of was nowhere to be found.
And when I didn’t sleep, when I lay awake in the quiet of the early morning hours, I couldn’t help but notice that if I listened hard enough, the shush and thrum of my blood sounded like soft footsteps, like a dress dragging across the floor outside my room.
Fifteen
The morning after the ball, I went straight to the long gallery and the hummingbird cabinet. A silly part of me had hoped that it had only been a dream, but there was the jagged hole, there the shards of glass on the floor, glittering like sharp snow, and there were the bare branches where half a dozen hummingbirds had once been fixed in place, their dry wings paused in motion, their eyes dark beads of glass. It did not mak
e me feel any better that it was an old exhibit which had never been of much use to scientists, that they were faded and often poorly mounted.
The jaguar, the handful of hummingbirds—surely the third incident would mean the end of my tenure here. I felt angry and hopeless, as if I too were being toyed with by someone, that it was personal, when I knew that rationally it had nothing to do with me, that it was the museum that was being targeted. Evacuation was supposed to mean safety and yet we had suffered more loss and damage than London by this point, and without needing the assistance of the Luftwaffe, who were still biding their time on the Continent.
As I patched the hole in the glass with a board, hiding half of the remaining hummingbirds from view, I thought of the ball last night, of the crowds wandering hither and thither, spirited with champagne and dance. I had searched the museum rooms for the birds, but I had not searched on any other floor. Perhaps the person who had stolen them had discarded them in a different part of the house? Perhaps it had been some poorly thought-out drunken jape forgotten the moment the attacker returned to the party.
I decided I would check myself, rather than asking the housekeeper for assistance, because although she could be cold with the other servants, she was positively glacial when I asked for help, taking any request as a monstrous imposition, and I had no intention of humbling myself further before her by explaining how personal this was to me, how my future might just rely on a handful of dried birds.
That evening, I started with the rooms on my floor, but discovered two problems—the first being that the servants were forever striding up and down the corridor and I was quite conspicuous with my torch, and the second that to search a room for a graying object the size of a thumb would take far longer than I had first supposed.
I only managed to search one room, the twin opposite mine, whose bed linens I had to remove and the beds remake, for fear I would squash the fragile birds if I patted down the covers to discover if they had been tucked under the blankets. I worked to the sounds of the loud ticking of the clock on the windowsill, the disquieting scrape of ivy against the blacked-out window, and frequent footsteps along the hall, none of which were exactly conducive to a calm atmosphere for my search. I looked under the beds, behind the heavy drape of the curtains, in the whitewashed wardrobe with its loudly squeaking door, inside the bedside table (whose drawer required a three-minute jiggle of its handle to pull out), and underneath the heavy rug, in case I found the flattened bird skins there. For my troubles, my clothes were now coated with dust and it was an hour beyond my usual bedtime.
One room down, dozens more to go, I thought as I fell asleep to that same sound of the clock, drifting its way through the crack underneath my door, as if it was a metronome, and the rooms of the house were pipes of some giant organ waiting to be played.
* * *
It was not until a couple of days later that I saw Lucy for the first time since the ball. A group of us including servants and the lady of the house were in the drawing room crowded around the wireless, listening to the news of the bombing of Scapa Flow, of the losses to our naval fleet.
“How many men do you think can fit in the Royal Oak?” Lucy asked, face creased with pain.
“More than a thousand,” one of the maids said. “My uncle is in the navy,” she explained.
“A thousand,” Lucy repeated, her voice shaking, and when someone asked about the lifeboats, about air pockets, I left, unable to bear such gruesome talk.
Lucy followed me to the summer room, which had become one of my favorite places to linger because it was as quiet as my office but did not have a stack of work there to upbraid me for being idle. She sat down on a sofa that was situated next to the looming antelope and the cabinet of Tapiridae skulls, in front of the wall of pinned butterflies, wrapping her arms around her shoulders.
“It’s so dreadful, what happened to the sailors,” she said. “I can’t imagine the terror of being sunk, of struggling in the water.” Her hands fumbled at her lighter.
“Here, let me,” I said, cupping the flame and lighting her cigarette.
“There’s a particular nightmare I’ve had since I was young, of being trapped, of being smothered, and I can’t help thinking of it when I think of the sailors,” she said. “Do you ever feel like the anxieties of your nightmares follow you into the next day?” She tapped out ash as she asked the question, and I nodded. “It’s all this waiting around, isn’t it? This agonizing wait for the war to begin in earnest, beyond these dreadful few attacks. I should be mourning them, not hurrying forth more tragedies.”
“We knew the war was coming,” I said. She was wearing a well-loved pair of navy trousers today and their knees were slightly faded. “It’s understandable that everyone wants it to begin, wants to know what we’re up against. We want our fear to have form, to know how we should face it.”
“Thank you, Hetty,” she said, smiling a little sadly and rubbing a hand across her collarbone. “You know just what to say to comfort me.”
I do? I wanted to ask.
“I heard about the poor hummingbirds at the ball,” she continued. “I’m so sorry about that; what an awful thing for someone to do. You still haven’t found the birds?”
“No.” I sighed. “Perhaps they are wherever the blasted jaguar is,” I added drolly.
Her mouth twitched in a smile and then she shifted her legs to cross her ankles. “I also wanted to apologize for my father,” she said gingerly. “I know he can be quite brusque in his manner.”
Only if brusqueness is a politer way of saying that he is a bully, I thought. “I had assumed that he would be quite busy with his businesses. He had implied that he took regular trips elsewhere, and I wonder if it is not just that he feels the museum is very underfoot, you know,” I said diplomatically.
“Then I should definitely be the one to apologize. Because it’s true, he isn’t keen on being cooped up here all the time, but I think he’s worried about me, after losing Mother and Grandmother, and the funny turn I had.”
“Oh goodness, I didn’t mean to suggest—”
“Of course you didn’t,” she said, picking up my hand and squeezing it. “I am perfectly well now; he is overprotective to a fault, my father, especially now that my mother and grandmother are no longer around. I’m sure he’ll be off soon and leave you to it.”
“The museum has found a wonderful home here,” I said, glancing down at our hands. I had been so busy getting irritated at the Major, as if he was trespassing here, that I had forgotten that this was Lucy’s home too.
“I just enjoy the house being full again, especially knowing that we’re likely to lose more of the servants to the war, even if Father rants and raves to the War Office about them being absolutely essential. As if losing them to rumors of ghosts wasn’t bad enough.” She stubbed out her cigarette and sat back to regard the room. “It’s so diverting having your animals here, Hetty. Even when I’m not helping with the cleaning, I love to wander through the museum rooms; it’s like my own private exhibition, and every time I walk around I spot new things in the cabinets, as if they’ve been shuffled around by stagehands behind the scenes.”
“Yes, quite,” I said, slightly disconcerted by her words—for was I not still noticing that the animals and the smaller cabinets looked out of place when I opened up the rooms in the morning, as if they had shifted in the night, mad as that sounded?
* * *
I did not tell Lucy about my new quest for the hummingbirds. I was not sure why, only that I did not want her to feel troubled. Evening after evening, I continued my search through the unoccupied rooms of the first floor, but there was another hurdle to overcome, for the day after the news about Scapa Flow, it started to rain heavily and, as the news came in about further bombing raids on the Scottish coasts and attacks on our merchant fleet, it became apparent that Lockwood Manor leaked. And so the servants and I were to be found hurrying about with pots and pans and dishes, looking for puddles and damp patches, ea
rs pricked as if we were listening for Morse code and not drips and splashes of water. I wanted to blame the Major for the poor condition of Lockwood’s roof but I knew that rain like that—great, thick sheets that drummed on every surface with a loud roar—caused the same kind of leaks back at the museum building in London.
I could not blame him for the mice either, who had retreated from the floods outside into the warmth of Lockwood, with its large kitchen and stores, with its mounted animals waiting for the little rodents to gnaw on, and who remained even after the rain had cleared, delighting in the exotic wonders of their new home. We set endless traps and took it in turns between us to unlock the museum doors in the morning, breath held to wonder how many dead mice we would find, and then ferry them at arm’s length out of the back door. When I would lock up the museum rooms each night, I could not help but feel I was only locking in the mice, that I was condoning their feast somehow, saying, here, have at ’em. The mice liked the cabinets as well, god knows why, maybe it was just the lingering smells and scents of animals and human visitors, or perhaps something in the varnish. They chewed on the corners, a horrible scratching sound that echoed, so that you thought you might turn the corner and find a whole crowd of them and not just one industrious fellow who fled quick as a shot when he saw your foot.
And of course, mice could be of a similar size to hummingbirds, the birds’ feathers a gray like the rodents’ hides, so now when I searched for my missing birds in the last of the rooms on the first floor—as I lifted rugs, threw back dust sheets that clouded the air with their catch, opened drawers, swung back heavy wardrobe doors, and billowed curtains away from windows; as I discovered the lesser secrets of Lockwood—the furniture that covered up patches of mold and peeling paint, the scribbles of ink in various hands inside wardrobes and underneath beds, the spots of damp that chilled a wall, the slight depressions where old doors or windows had been bricked up; as I tried to be as quiet as possible for fear of being discovered myself, I had in the back of my mind the thought that if I did find a little gray hump, it was just as likely to be a mouse, alive or dead.