The Animals at Lockwood Manor

by Jane Healey

  “I do, yes,” Lucy said, “and I’m not sure I have the strength for an encounter with her today either. Come on,” she said, taking me by the elbow and pulling me down an alleyway, leading me on a different route out of the village as we walked alongside our bicycles. “We used to play together as children at Lockwood,” Lucy explained. “But I’m not sure we were ever that fond of each other; she was such a cross little girl, and could be a bit of a bully. She stole my doll once and didn’t give it back to me until my father gave her another as a replacement.” Lucy clicked her tongue in mock anger. “I think I might have been jealous of her too; she had blue eyes and lovely blond ringlets, like an angel. She married some rich fellow young and I hadn’t seen her for years before he passed away and then, not long after the accident, she became my father’s girlfriend of sorts.” Lucy winced.

  “Gosh,” I said, and then Lucy’s bike got tangled up with a bush at the front of someone’s garden and clattered to the ground.

  “Oh dash it, the chain’s come off,” she said, hands fluttering above it.

  “I can fix it,” I said, crouching down, pleased I hadn’t thought to change out of my workwear for our trip, eager to help her in this small way at least. “That must have been awkward for you, Mary and your father,” I said, to nudge her back to our previous conversation, while I rocked the bike forward and back and eased the greased chain into place.

  “Awkward is the right word,” she said with a snort, resting a hand on my shoulder. “She practically moved into the house, but I was in such a state then that I couldn’t muster the words to complain to my father. He was only grieving in his own way, I think; he’s not a man that does well alone. But luckily, the arrival of your museum seemed to give my father the impetus to put an end to things. So I must thank you for that, Hetty,” she said with a pat of her hand and a laugh, “and for fixing my bicycle,” she declared, when I had stood up and was wiping my hands on the leaves of the unruly bush and then on my single handkerchief, which was quickly ruined.

  “Here,” Lucy said, “you’ve got some on your cheek.” She rubbed at my cheek with her own embroidered handkerchief, her fingertips tilting my chin up to the waning light.

  “It’s going to rain,” I said, because I feared that we might be here for quite some time if she sought to remove all the grease from my person.

  “Oh, it is, drat,” she said with a tsk and a glance at the darkening clouds. “Race you to the house?” she dared, with a jaunty cock of her eyebrow, and then we were off, the cold air whipping past our faces, our legs furiously pedaling, as I thought about what she had said about Mary and the reason for her hatred of me. She must have thought that I had some personal hand in her being turfed out of Lockwood, and I was irritated anew with the Major for not correcting her assumption.

  Thinking of Mary distracted me at least from the black clouds above us, the rising winds, from the way it seemed as if we were making some descent into a forbidding landscape. The brooding bulk of the house loomed out of the valley, widening to fill the entire vista before me, the graveled path kicking up stones like little needles on my calves, my greased hands slick and uncomfortable when I clutched the handlebars to stop myself from skidding.

  We returned to a house in uproar—a burst pipe that had only been noticed when water had bled through the ceiling of one of the empty bedrooms. Lucy dashed off to find the source of the leak and I left Dorothy in the museum rooms, scouring ceilings for signs of water, and raced upstairs to the servants’ floor and then, following the noise of voices, up to the attic.

  “Have you turned the stopcock?” I asked, out of breath, the dust of the space making me cough.

  “Of course we have,” the housekeeper said. She was speaking to Paul, Lockwood’s youngest servant (who I had named an Old World otter for his easy grin), who was studying the wall in front of him, with Lucy by his side.

  “It’s an old house,” Lucy said, “the pipes are higgledy-piggledy. The water hasn’t reached the museum yet, has it?” she asked me, a hand on my shoulder.

  “No, it’s fine.” For now, I thought.

  “They think it’s something to do with my bathroom. It’s the other side of this wall,” she said, knocking the wood in front of her with her knuckles.

  Paul had a crowbar in a gap between two panels of the wall. “What color is your bathroom, my lady?” he asked Lucy.

  “Pink.”

  “Not blue?” he said.

  “Blue?” she repeated, her voice gone strange.

  I glanced at her just as Paul pulled two wooden panels free with a loud crack and saw an expression of absolute terror bloom on her face at the sight of what he had revealed.

  I turned to look through the gap in the wood, to see what had so horrified her.

  A small room, with faded blue Chinoiserie wallpaper and bare floorboards, a narrow black fireplace that gleamed in the light spilling from some crack in the roof, a bricked-up doorway opposite us, and an old cobwebbed chandelier swaying gently in the breeze.

  Eighteen

  As if the panic of the leak, which had been hastily fixed, and the stormy winds outside, which were currently plucking tiles off the roof of Lockwood, were not enough, and the house was desperate to make the most of the season, that same night, around one o’clock in the morning, its occupants were woken up by screams, bloodcurdling and savage, the kind that had you leaping up with an answering noise trapped in your own throat.

  I wrapped myself in my dressing gown and came blundering out of my room. There were figures at the west end of the hall, the same direction the noise was coming from.

  “What’s happening?” I asked Joyce, who was standing there with her hair in rags.

  “It’s nothing, miss. You should wait downstairs.”

  “But what—who—is it?” I said, even though I had a terrible idea of who might be in distress.

  “It’s Lady Lucy, she’s had a funny turn.”

  “Is she all right?” I asked, aware that this was a useless question, that from the sound of her cries she was obviously not all right.

  “Her father is with her—he returned a few hours ago—and the housekeeper too, and I imagine the doctor has already been called.”

  The night guard came laboring upstairs to investigate the noise and I turned and told him that all was well, and that he should go back to his post. I was about to reluctantly return to my room when the screams hit a new pitch, and I was rooted to the spot.

  “Stop talking nonsense and pull yourself together, girl!” I heard the Major exclaim.

  I told myself that if I heard him slap her, I would go up there and stop him, and my legs tensed in anticipation. But the screams only turned into sobbing, interspersed by high keening notes. I wanted to help her, to comfort her, but what use would I be compared to a doctor and a father and a housekeeper who had known her for many years? I could feel sympathetic tears prick at my own eyes.

  “If you go and wait in the drawing room, I shall come and bring you some tea,” Dorothy said to me, having also emerged from the dark behind our group.

  “Oh no, please, there’s no need,” I said, coughing to hide the thickness of my voice.

  “Nonsense, miss, it’ll give me something to do too. I got quite the fright when I woke up to the screaming,” she said, looking toward the end of the corridor distractedly.

  * * *

  I sat awkwardly in the drawing room surrounded by my looming animals; although they normally gave me comfort, tonight I felt particularly lonely, and pictured the servants who had been woken huddled together in the warmth of the kitchen. In London there was always a siren or the sound of motorcars passing on the street, feet tripping their way along the pavement, and voices calling no matter what hour it was, and I missed the city suddenly with a great ache.

  After an interminably long amount of time, Dorothy arrived at the door to collect my cold tea.

  “Poor thing,” she said, motioning her head toward the thin, reedy cry that could
still be heard—for the hum of the wind did little to camouflage the sounds coming from upstairs—and which plucked at my heart. “It was terrible what happened to her. She was such a happy little thing until she turned eight or so. The troubled year, us servants called it; sometimes children have those difficult times, don’t they, but hers stuck with her. There was the incident at her birthday, of course, the game of hide-and-seek that went on too long and frightened her, but if you ask me, it was the bird that decided things, that traumatized her.”

  She paused and looked sideways at me. She did not often have the opportunity to tell this story and was obviously savoring the occasion.

  “What happened?” I asked, because I was curious and desperate to know more about Lucy, for an explanation for her anguish, even though I knew that what I should have done was to respect her privacy and not listen eagerly to gossip.

  “Her parents were hosting a late summer party in the gardens, tea on the lawn and croquet and a brass band,” Dorothy said, “and she was dressed like a little angel, all lace and froth and a necklace of pearls given to her by her daddy. She came tripping along the path”—she pointed toward where the garden was, out in the dark of the night—“and we had the dovecote still then, of course. So she comes skipping down there and turns the corner at a hedge, and crunch.” She sucked the breath in through her teeth. “She had stepped on a little bird, feathers and wings and all! And she had bare feet. Can you imagine?”

  “The bird died?”

  “Of course, though we tried to tell her it was going to die anyway, lying there on the path; its wing was probably already broken,” she added, twisting one shoulder up to illustrate her point. The lights in the drawing room flickered for a minute and we stopped and stared at them, as if remembering that there was a war and a threat of planes out there, outside. But the electricity settled and she continued, “She was inconsolable. She shrieked and cried and fair tried to claw her own eyes out. She had marks across her face for a month after that. They had to call for a doctor and drug her that week, she wouldn’t stop crying. That’s why she walks the way she does, I reckon.” She lifted a foot.

  Had I noticed that Lucy had a half limp, a cautious footstep? At that moment, Dorothy could have convinced me that she did.

  “They say the body remembers what the mind doesn’t,” she continued. “The feel of that little dove under the sole of her foot.” She shivered and the teacup rattled on its saucer in her hand. “And after that . . . poor thing. Would have given anyone a fright, I bet.”

  I thought about the little girl and the bird as I listened to the wind shake the window frames and whisper through gaps in the floorboards, chilling my toes. And then, just as Dorothy left and shut the door behind her, I stopped with a start. But, my dove, I thought. He calls her “my dove.”

  I went back up to bed, but even when the noise, which now had the soft timbre of a hurt animal and wrenched the soul, finally faded away, I could not sleep. I had felt a sudden burst of shame after sliding into bed, like biting into a sour raspberry and feeling the wash of juice prickle the back of your tongue. What was I doing talking about Lucy to Dorothy like that; what was I doing betraying her trust? Had I been so long an observer of other people’s friendships that I did not know how to behave inside of one? I vowed that I would tell her what had been told to me, even if she chose not to be friends with me in return.

  I was losing my professional distance living here, the focus that had won me the directorship despite my mistake, listening to stories of ghosts and making a mad hunt for lost hummingbirds. Lockwood was a claustrophobic world in miniature, with old hierarchies still in place, with its maze of rooms, and sometimes it felt like those of us who lived in the manor were the only people alive and that the war was but a dream. The “phony war,” they called it, since the promised bombing of London had yet to start, but even London itself sometimes seemed phony to me, a city I had imagined, full of an anonymous crowd of people and streets stretching endless to the horizon. The atmosphere here was so stifled and close, no wonder Lucy was ill at ease.

  * * *

  The Major had strong words for me at breakfast, his eyes sunken and tired, his manner terse. I kept hoping that someone else would come in and disrupt him but no one obliged.

  “The housekeeper said that you’ve put Lucy to work with a vacuum cleaner, dusting your animals,” he said as he cut up his cooked tomato. “Need I remind you that you are a guest here, in my home?” He set his knife and fork to either side of the plate and leaned forward on his elbows.

  “I haven’t put her to work; she kindly offered to help for a few hours here and there,” I said.

  “You should have turned her down; she was only being polite. I told you on your first day here that my daughter was sensitive, that she was not to be troubled. Encouraging her to spend her days combing the coats of dead animals is beyond the pale, and you will stop this, right now.”

  “It’s up to Lucy,” I insisted. “I can’t physically drag her away.”

  However troubled he—and she—felt she was, she was not a child to be ordered around, and I would not treat her like one.

  “Don’t make me regret inviting the museum here, Miss Cartwright,” he said, and picked up his knife and fork to attack the rest of his breakfast.

  Nineteen

  I thought I knew all the rooms of the house, I who spent my evenings mapping them, walking through them in my mind. I thought I knew what was real, a memory, and what wasn’t, what was just a dream.

  There were stories from my childhood that I thought only nightmares, things I thought I had only imagined, and others that had left behind only a feeling, a fear, an echo. But I remembered now; as if the room had held the memories for me, like an egg, and when the wooden panels of its wall had been cracked open, they had oozed out.

  My mother used to lock me in that room, when I was nine years old, I remembered now.

  Had it started like one of our hide-and-seek games? It must have, for I remembered the first few times, of waiting in there with the short candle she left me, of peering around the room as the wallpaper shifted and whirled with the flicker of the flame, and of seeing the blue tiles set into the fireplace, the blue tiles with their painted hares, their eyes dark blobs of midnight. I remembered waiting for her to open the door and find me and, when too much time had passed, trying the door myself, only to discover it locked. I remembered when the usual sour, fizzing thrill of waiting to be found curdled into terror. I remembered when the candle went out . . .

  You tricked me, I cried to my mother when she finally let me out and hugged me to her, I thought it was a game.

  It was a game, she said with a bright smile and nervous eyes.

  It wasn’t, it was mean, I sobbed.

  But she didn’t stop doing it, didn’t stop locking me in there even as I battered my hands against the door trying to open it and calling for her to let me out.

  I’m trying to protect you, she said desperately when she brought me in there, even as her voice shook. I’m trying to keep you safe, to stop your nightmares.

  You’re lying, I screamed, and then called for the servants to help me, for anyone, my voice dying down when I got no response. Maybe no one could hear me, would ever hear me, maybe I would stay here forever in the dark alone, I had thought, weeping silently.

  I’m here, I started saying to the room whose walls disappeared in the gloom, as if trying to convince myself I existed and had not melted into the darkness. I’m here, I said. Please, I whispered as I cowered by the fireplace, feeling the thin breath of air fall from the bricked-up chimney, my fingers slipping over the cold tiles, as if the hares painted on them could come to life and comfort me.

  And then when the door was finally opened and the rush of light swept inside and my mother brought me out, saying here she is, my very own girl, I would weep like a wounded animal, sickened by her soft touches, by what felt like a parody of love.

  I’m trying to protect you from her, my
mother said in a small voice a few weeks into this horrifying routine. I had asked my grandmother for help and she had said that if my mother was punishing me it was only because I was a rotten girl. My father had barely been in the house at the time, he was working such long hours for his businesses, and though Martha and several other servants tried to whisk me away to different floors and rooms, my mother always found me.

  She was sitting on the floor, her arms around her knees as if she was the girl and I was the poorly mother.

  She didn’t have to tell me who “her” was, for she had already talked of the ghost she feared had followed her from her childhood home.

  Her mad confession only added to my fears, for now when I was locked in the room and my candle went out, I worried that I was not the only one there in the dark, that at any moment I would hear the shift of a dress on the bare floorboards, feel the sigh of someone’s breath brushing across the back of my neck, or a sharp hand grabbing me from the gloom.

  I no longer tried to talk to myself in there, for fear of my voice sounding like someone else’s, but instead tried to keep as still as possible, tried to breathe quietly even as my heart raced like it was trapped too; I shut my eyes and wished I could disappear, wished I could be so small and quiet that she would never find me.

  It was my father who saved me, after what must have been only a month or so of my mother putting me inside that room—but it had felt like years.

  One day, I had emerged from my terrified trance to hear him shouting outside the blue room at my mother. Where is the key, you witch! he was shouting. What the hell have you done to my daughter? Give me the fucking key. My mother screamed back about how she was protecting me, how I was safe in there.

  He broke down the door in the end and I cried so violently I was sick, trying to cover my eyes because the light hurt like dag-gers after hours of dark.