by Jane Healey
I checked the specimens again, hands fumbling and feet tripping over air, blinking as if I could make this all go away and find myself waking from a good night’s sleep instead. Nothing was missing, but it felt as though something was, and the wind battering against the new boards outside seemed to jeer at me, while the presence of everyone in the room felt overwhelming, claustrophobic, as if they were all crowding around me, looking at me. I wanted everyone gone, and the storm stopped, and for the collection to be safe again, for these violations to end.
“From now on, every ground-floor window of all the museum rooms must be boarded up from the inside,” I announced, pleased at how confident and rational my voice suddenly sounded. But it was the rational thing to do, I thought: the museum was under attack and its collection must be saved from those who wished it harm. “Can you find more boards from somewhere?” I asked Paul, bypassing the housekeeper, who had just arrived back from telephoning the police, and looked horrendously unimpressed at my words.
“Lord Lockwood will not be happy about this when he returns, he won’t agree with it,” she said, with the sort of tone that implied she would enjoy watching him upbraid me.
“He can take it up with me,” I said firmly, growing in confidence as my plan was formalized.
There was a pause, and then she announced to the rest of the room, “Tonight’s excitement is over now, everyone. The police won’t be here until midday at the earliest, and we need to leave some evidence for them to sift through.” Her eyes were glued to me. “You can start the day’s work if you’re looking for something to keep you busy, else back to bed with you lot.”
The room emptied quickly, leaving her and me standing there, the boards on the windows rattling in the wind.
“Has this happened before, the house being attacked like this?” I asked her, ignoring the fact she had blamed me for the rabbit; the animals were the important thing, not my bruised pride or whatever strange grudge she held against me.
“As I said before, nothing of the sort has ever happened here, not until you arrived.”
“Ever? What about before you started working here?” I said, lifting my chin.
She smiled thinly. “I’ve been here a long time, since I was a girl, and my family have worked for the Lockwoods for longer.”
We left the room and I let her lock the door and then, after she had walked away, I tested it by pressing against it with my full body weight. I returned to my bedroom to wash quickly and get dressed and then spent the rest of the early hours acting as a sentinel downstairs, rambling blearily along the corridors, checking the doors with increasingly feeble pushes of my cold hands, listening to the gale trying to crash its way into the house as I shivered and kept an ear out for any more smashed glass, my mouth dry like bark. The night guards were taking their role seriously for once, patrolling carefully around the house, torches in hand, rifles over their shoulders, which should have reassured me but actually made me nervous lest they confuse me for an intruder.
After the house woke, Paul and the groundskeepers worked to ferry in boards and sheeting to barricade the windows from the inside. I felt sorrowful as I watched the first room be shuttered; there was so little light at the beginning of winter anyway, it felt wrong to darken the house even further. But it could not be helped; the safety of the museum was paramount.
Lucy was the only person who had not been woken by the storm and the attack, and I had not wished to wake her—better that she stay safe asleep, her dreams hopefully untroubled.
She found me in the dining room, where I was helping myself to the last of lunch, my stomach grumbling noisily and my mind in that persecuted state of tiredness where everything about the world is too loud and bright, where the very air seems to abrade your eyes, and it feels as if you might never sleep again.
“What’s this about boarding up every downstairs window? A joke, surely?” she said, pouring herself a coffee.
I put the serving spoon down and turned to her. “No, it isn’t a joke,” I said. “I’m sorry, Lucy, I know that it will make downstairs gloomy and dark, and I’m sorry too if it upsets you,” I added, sincerely, loathing myself yet feeling that there was no other option, “but the museum’s collection must be protected.”
My job and future prospects must be protected too, I added silently, not wanting to allude to the day I would have to leave this house and her.
She put her coffee cup down with a clatter. “Not all the windows?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“That’s mad, you do see that?” she said, slowly. “We can’t barricade ourselves in here. Father will get a whole team of guards, and the Home Guard will help out too. There’s no need to overreact.”
I felt my face folding into a grimace of disbelief. “You think I’m being mad?”
“I didn’t say that,” she said, but she was not backing down. “I only meant that you should get some perspective. You’re getting obsessed with this,” she said, swinging her hand out in a wide sweep. Were her words coming from her nerves, a gut reaction to the idea of being boarded up inside the house? Right then, in the state I was in, I did not care.
“I am mad?” I repeated, in angry incredulity, while the sun shone brightly into the dining room through one of the few bare windows left, and the silver service gleamed before us; while her chin began to tremble. “You’re saying that I am mad?”
I knew that I was hurting her, but what she had said was everything I feared, everything I suspected; that I was mad. And the way the light was hitting the angles of her face—she had looked just like him, and sounded like him too, as she stood there just like him, judging me, and it gutted me to the quick. I felt betrayed, my heart bruised, and so I lashed out viciously, like a cornered animal.
“I’m doing my job,” I said, voice quivering. A job that was precarious, that had been reluctantly assigned to me by those who sought to boot me back to the room of female volunteers. I had no great fortune like Lucy, no home, nothing beyond my employment, for I knew now that there would be no husband on the horizon to support me. “I’m trying to protect the work of hundreds of people, trying to protect specimens vital to science and our understanding of the natural world.”
“And I am—what?—a layabout? Worthless?” she said, tears dripping down the cheeks I had kissed just yesterday afternoon. “The madwoman locked upstairs?”
I was silent. She bit her lip and shook her head. We stared at one another, and then she walked out of the room, letting out a sob that brought a lump to my throat as I turned back to the lunch I had lost all appetite for, my hands shaking as I set aside my plate and tasted the salt of the tears that caught in the corners of my mouth instead. I had let her down, I knew that, but what else could I do? Why must I be forced to choose between my duties to the animals and my love for her?
Thirty-Five
A lone again, I felt the walls of my bedroom, of any room I stood inside, crowding me, felt the horrors of my nightmares rising up in my chest, darkening the edges of my vision.
I took to walking the corridors of the house by night, torch in each trembling hand, as if testing my fears, my eyes wide and open, watching and listening and waiting.
Was I hoping to find the woman in white on my nightly wanderings, or to become her, in my pale dressing gown? Was I already, always, her; had I done all those things?
Whether or not I was, I knew that I alone had been the one to break my heart, that it had been no shadowy second self who had said those things to Hetty. I had called her mad, when the truth was that I worried she could not really love a mad thing like me.
I had been foolish to think we could ever remain together, that there was a happy future waiting for me—what had I thought, that she would agree to stay here when the war was over? Hetty had imagined a future for us in London, I know she had, but how could I leave this house? I felt panicked at the thought, thin as if I were made of chiffon and would blow away with the wind the minute I stepped out of the front door.<
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I would remain here, would live here until I died, like my mother and grandmother. And all that would remain of Hetty—of our relationship—would be the initials we carved one giddy afternoon in the wardrobe of my room, and a few stray hairs fallen from the animals, faded patches where the great beasts once stood.
I hated the idea of the animals being trapped in their rooms downstairs by the boards on the windows, in the dark alone. Did I think I was one of them—frozen, dusty, untouched, unloved? My actions had certainly made me so. I did not feel betrayed by Hetty; it was not that I thought she was locking me in, and I understood how worried she was. This house could not seem to keep her animals safe, just as I had been unable to keep my mother safe.
On my nightly patrols, greeting the snoring guards who startled to see me, smiling nervously, forgiving my actions as those of the mad aristocracy, I would pause outside the museum rooms listening for noises, holding my breath. But the only movement I caught, the only intruders, were the living animals—the cats and the mice and the foxes I spied hurrying down corridors and slipping inside darkened doorways.
I slept in the daytime now, once my room was bright with winter sunlight and all its corners and shapes had become familiar again.
But when I dreamed, it was always dark.
And in my dreams, I was hunting that lost leveret again. I was racing down the corridors and the stairs, stumbling, falling; I was throwing my hands out against the walls, bruising my palms and scraping my knees. And when I stood up, sobbing, to run again, I realized that I wasn’t hunting the leveret at all, but that something was hunting me; something larger than a hare, something wilder, stronger, stalking me through the house. And I would wake in my bright bedroom and know that I could not escape, that Lockwood and all its inhabitants were in the gravest of danger, and that there was nothing I could do to save them.
Thirty-Six
Lucy and I were now estranged from one another, with neither of us making the first move to apologize, and the both of us knowing how much our words had wounded the other; and my heart was broken.
Sometimes, during the aching loneliness of all those years I had spent a spinster, the years spent living alone in one room at boarding houses and tired lodgings, I would have moments where I would realize how long it had been since anyone had touched me—even a handshake, or a hand placed on my forearm, a simple hug—and my body would ache, my soul would feel so heavy I would have to go out with shaking legs for a walk no matter what the weather was, because I feared that if I curled up on my bed like I so dearly wished to, I might remain there and never get up again. If humans are animals, I would think, then do we not require touch as well as food and water and air and a roof over our heads in order to live, to survive? It was a histrionic state of mind, these sudden funks, I knew that, but I could not escape them. And now, now that I knew what it was like to share my bed with another, to have a lover there to touch and hold and be held in return, now that I knew the true pleasures of sex, or how it felt for your jaw to ache from too much kissing, the rub of skin against skin that left a burn, the tight clasp of a hand in your hand, this estrangement felt even worse. I was marooned, adrift with no sight of land, for where or how would I ever meet someone like Lucy again, someone that could love me?
* * *
Although I had prepared to face the Major’s wrath for boarding up his home, when he returned from his trip he did not mention the windows at all, not even in a veiled aside. Paul said that he had narrowly escaped a direct bomb hit while in the north, so perhaps he had had a change of heart where matters of security were concerned, and yet he still did not join us in our nights in the basement during air raids, preferring to stay tucked up in bed with Sylvia, the heiress, who Dorothy had said he might ask to marry him soon. Her throaty laugh had become a common sound in the hall outside the Major’s office, but unfortunately for the rest of us they did not confine themselves to his office and private library—where I pictured her reclining on the skins on the floor, her pale skin a pleasing contrast—nor his suite of rooms upstairs, but made good use of the museum rooms to dawdle in and do heavens knows what else. He had his own set of keys to open up the rooms and then to lock them when they were finished, and he was irritatingly catholic about doing so, so I had no excuse for confronting him about putting the animals at risk.
“I’m being careful with the locks, Miss Cartwright,” he called out one day, when I left my office at the same time as he left the long gallery, as he bent to turn the key in the door, with lipstick on his cheek, and Sylvia leaned languidly against the wall, a loop of loose hair falling down her neck like a tail.
He patted the lock once he was done, tilted his head to me with a sardonic smile, and walked off, Sylvia following in his wake.
I grimaced as I stared at the long gallery door, trying not to imagine what he had been up to in there with only my animals for an audience, trying not to think of him tainting my workspaces with his lusts, his seedy trysts.
The museum rooms had once felt like a safe haven for Lucy and me, our own little hideaway from the rest of the house, and the fact that he was now intruding on them made me feel even more wretched.
My work was the only thing I had to keep me company those winter months, but there was little consolation to be found. I lost a striped owl to a moth infestation and nothing I could do would save it at its advanced stage of decay, so I sealed it up in its cabinet where it would die a slow second death as I watched through the glass. A sacrifice so that the moths that feasted on its viscera would not jump ship to a new host once they were finished. My fingers stunk of glue and poison, my arms burned from sweeping and vacuuming, and my eyes were strained from peering into corners, searching for tiny, wriggling things that I could never see.
Meanwhile, the animals stood and waited and watched me, with their silent eyes and fading fur, with feathers so dry and stiff they would not flutter in the strongest of winter winds, with the floor creaking and shifting in the cold beneath them. And whenever I finally slept—on those occasions when exhaustion or loneliness claimed me—I would toss and turn, my dreams monstrous and terrible, and then startle awake, my ears pricked ready for sounds: the engines of bombers muscling their way through the sky; the first dampened note of the siren before the wailing crescendo; Lucy’s whimpering cries as she woke from another nightmare—and should I hear that, would I go to comfort her, I wondered, or would I be the last person she wished to see?—the shrieks of foxes in the gardens come to join their brethren already hiding inside; the muted smash of another window being broken and the silence afterward when the interloper realized they had been boarded; or the sound that I seemed to fear the most, an everyday sound that would be transmogrified by the darkness, by the quiet of the east wing which was empty of all living souls but for myself: the sound of footsteps padding along the hall toward me. For I was more convinced than ever that whoever had been attacking the museum was not an intruder at all but came from inside the house itself, and that they had fixed their sights on me.
* * *
In late November, the Major announced he would be having a grand Christmas dinner party at Lockwood on 18 December, and that he had chosen for his setting not the dining room, nor the ballroom, but the long gallery itself.
“I want to showcase the specimens at their best. A couple of my guests have expressed interest in donating quite large sums to the museum,” the Major told me over breakfast. It was just the two of us, for Lucy hardly ever came down for it now.
“What room were you thinking of putting the table in?” I asked.
“Oh, the corridor itself. I am going to have some of the larger, more impressive mounted animals from the museum collection brought out there, and surround the table with them, put the paintings back on the walls, and generally return the place to its former glory.”
He was, was he? Nice of him to tell me what he was planning on doing with my animals.
He set down his knife and wiped his mouth with one
of the fine linen napkins that came as standard here at Lockwood. “No thoughts?” he said sarcastically, and I pursed my mouth. “You can’t object to my plan, surely, Miss Cartwright? For we will be watching the animals beadily; there can be no theft from right under our noses.” He tapped his nose mockingly as he said this. “Or are you nervous about my guests being rowdy with them?”
I was, after seeing the behavior of the officers who had come to the one and only ball I had attended here. “How many guests will you be having?” I asked.
“Oh, about twenty or so. We shall just about fit on the two dining tables pushed together. It’s a select group coming; old friends, army officials, a couple of politicians, a sprinkling of artist types for color, you know. I suppose you’ll be invited too, as a representative of the museum,” he said, glancing at me over the rim of his coffee cup.
As a director of the museum, I thought, and wiped my own mouth with a napkin, using it to hide my scowl.
“Sylvia thinks that candlelight will add marvelously to the atmosphere; she’s got all sorts of ideas,” he said, twiddling his hand in the air in lieu of a more detailed description.
“The notion of having candles so close to the specimens does give me pause, Lord Lockwood.”
“Oh, come now, we’re not using them as candlesticks. They’ll be a good few yards from the table. We need to have room to sit at it, after all. I’m not going to all this trouble just to feed the animals.” He gave a short laugh. “I tell you, it’ll be quite the coup, Miss Cartwright, for Lockwood and the museum,” he said, cutting into his sausage.
What could I do? I had no useful argument except that I did not want them damaged. I felt too tired to argue with him, my hands shaking around my cup of coffee, my thoughts treacle-slow.