House of Small Shadows (19 page)

Edith looked at her camera with distaste, but nodded.

Catherine took pictures of the tiled floor and the iron drain-grate in the middle of the room. ‘Was this once a scullery?’

‘It was adapted. The mangle and range our old housekeeper used are still in the laundry. A much smaller room.’

The shallow Belfast sink dated from the 1800s, and the glazed ceramic was one of the few items in the house that showed signs of wear. The rest of the room was free of dust, so Maude must have
cleaned it ahead of her visit. A hot-water copper and cold-water hand pump stood beside the sink. When she neared it, a small window above the copper looked and smelled to have been recently washed
with vinegar. Branches from a bush pressed against the glass.

‘This house went on forever. Or so I thought as a child. To me it never ended.’ Edith peered up at the iron drying racks that hung over the long workbench. ‘My uncle needed the
space in here for messy work. And he put it to good use, as you have seen.’ The woman’s smile looked like an indication of delight at her guest’s discomfort.

Catherine forced a smile of her own until her mouth ached. She focussed her camera on the long and bewildering rows of ceramic and glass jars shelved above the workbench. Photographs would
provide good illustrative material for the auction catalogue, though final print copy would require the work of a professional. These pictures she took for Leonard. She doubted another example of
an early-twentieth-century taxidermist’s workshop existed. A great many historians would kill to see the room. Perhaps English Heritage would want to reassemble and display it.

‘Be careful not to touch anything. Sodium arsenite is a poison. Quite deadly. My uncle also used borax, but preferred arsenic.’

Catherine photographed acetic acid beside alizine beside alum and asbestos. She zoomed in and shot pictures of beeswax, boric acid, carbolic, chloroform and cornmeal. Mason had been meticulous
with his labelling, with alphabetizing his ingredients.

‘He killed some of the animals with chloroform. You can see it right in front of you.’

‘How . . . where did they come from? The animals?’

‘Our neighbours. The farmer’s dogs caught the rats, along with my uncle’s rat catchers. And there was a time when only one kitten from a litter was kept. But all of our dear
neighbours knew where to bring a litter so he could take his pick. The squirrels were trapped and shot. The foxes, badgers, weasels and stoats too.’

Catherine turned her face away from Edith to conceal her distaste. The thought of small animals destroyed on an industrial scale, twinned with the appalling stench, made her light-headed. Nausea
wasn’t far away. So she would have to be quick, but wanted more pictures.

She photographed the jars of ether, formaldehyde and glycerine, and unsuccessfully tried to ignore Edith’s enthusiastic narration. When she focussed on the sulphuric acid, Edith said,
‘He made his pickling solution from that. He often allowed me to watch him work and always warned me about that jar. “You must never touch this, Edie. It could burn you!” Beside
it you will see the tow. He used tow on every single rat in his tableau. For winding. For their necks and tails. Their legs are very short. Always the hardest part to get right. My
uncle—’

‘I feel a bit funny. Sorry.’ If she wasn’t mistaken, she could detect an underlying odour of micturition, of decay. Catherine wondered if she’d also inhaled something
poisonous.

Once again, Edith demonstrated her uncanny ability to follow her thoughts. ‘If you can only imagine how many skins were fleshed and degreased in here, Catherine. And some of the carcasses
were not fresh when they were brought here as gifts. My uncle was no stranger to the smell of death. Nor was I.’

Catherine coughed to clear her throat. ‘His tools.’

‘You will not find a finer collection in the county.’

Or even the world, and they were probably made to order. Each handle was inlaid with rosewood. The metal components were oiled and glinted. She couldn’t see a speck of rust upon a single
item. As she raised her camera with weak arms and photographed what resembled implements of torture, she knew she had no stomach for learning their true function.

‘My uncle measured everything first, and made plaster casts before the animals were skinned. The callipers were used to take the most minute measurements for the artificial bodies. The
distance between the outside of the eyes was very important, in order to create the desired expression.’

Catherine repressed a reaction from the smoked kipper she had felt obliged to swallow at the breakfast table. ‘Fascinating.’

‘Isn’t it!’ Edith had never been so excited. ‘Above you. Look there. There! To the right. You will see the carving tools. Look. Look up, dear! He first made the heads
from balsa and plaster moulds. But found the natural skulls were far better. He would clean the flesh away. Boil it off. You can see the brain spoons. Not there, dear. There! He refashioned the
muscles of the head with tow and cotton. A master sculptor could not have bettered the facial expressions of my uncle’s pieces.’

The room seemed to grow darker as the terrible smell overwhelmed Catherine’s sinuses, and then the entire space of her skull. She looked at the window with longing. Wanted to cast it open
so she could gulp at the air. The flies were back. As heavy as ripe blackberries they circled the window and occasionally propelled themselves against the panes of glass. There were at least a
dozen. Two landed and investigated the frame for access. She intuited a will, a desire to get inside. ‘I don’t feel—’

‘That knife was his favourite. It was always in his hand. The long blade disjointed the larger bones.’

Catherine held her breath for a while, but felt heavy and exhausted and almost began to pant. ‘The garden. May I? Which way?’

‘But you haven’t seen the awls and curriers’ knives. His diagonal cutters were made for him specially, in Birmingham. They were adapted for the smallest bones. How else do you
think he managed so many rats?’

Edith’s thin, pale face was alive with an excitement that might also have been rage, or even ecstasy. It was hard to tell in Catherine’s swimming vision. Her scalp chilled and her
vision speckled with tiny flashes. She tried to get around the wheelchair, but it filled and blocked the doorway. A shadow passed across the small window, as if someone had leant down to peer
inside. Either that, or she was about to faint. The stench had poisoned her. ‘Another time.’

Edith’s voice seemed to come to her from a great distance, and then it reappeared inside her ears as if through headphones. ‘Look, look. The ear openers. They may look like a
jeweller’s pliers, but they open the other way. He used them on every set of rat ears. Can you imagine the patience that required, dear? You haven’t even seen the needles. Don’t
you want pictures? Three-cornered for the hides. Surgeons’ needles for the thicker pelts. Those are the curved ones. You are not looking, dear.’

‘I’m . . . sick. Please.’ Catherine fell as much as stumbled to the large galvanized metal tub and seized the side with both hands to prevent herself from toppling over.

‘Be careful. Don’t lean on that.’

The blocked window, the cruel locks and chains looping like serpents from the drying racks, Edith’s discoloured teeth inside the lipless mouth, the brain spoons, all floated through her
liquid vision. She leant her head over the side of the tub.

‘It’s had gallons of ethanol inside it, dear. It’s poisonous. It’s where my uncle pickled—’

She didn’t hear the rest. Only the noise of her own gullet emptying itself of Maude’s oatmeal and kippers onto thin sheet metal.

Outside of her blindness and choking, her panic and misery, Edith’s handbell began a terrible racket close to her head. She wished and she wished that it would stop.

Blue-black, the heavens pressed at the earth with an angry weight, as though night was too close to a summer sky and breaking through. A storm, anticipated by the warm
motionless air. Occasional gaps in the funnelling hedgerow allowed Catherine glimpses of the sky, the fields. Above the pink and yellow flowers and the golden waves of the meadow, the air shimmered
in a thick heat.

But the further she walked from the Red House the more her senses and her head, and so much more, began to clear. The bone-deep weariness and pallor that overwhelmed her in Mason’s
workshop dissipated. She tugged the fragrant air into her lungs, and after running from the house without looking for the kitchen she longed for a bottle of water.

Her red Mini was like the sight of a familiar face after days amongst hostile strangers. Through the car windows the sight of her AA map, sunglasses, chewing gum in the coin holder, even the
steering lock, hit her with a sudden awareness of modernity. An impulse to clamber into the car, drive away and return to a world that made sense, was wrestled down with reluctance.

She caught a whiff of the terrible chemical stink that hid traces of decay. It was in her hair, or on her skin, or caught within her clothing. Even outdoors she reeked of the Red House and its
artful mutilations. She panicked at the idea of being tainted.

She desperately wanted a breeze to air her clothes of the stink. But the air did not move at all here, it never did during her visits. Was always still and heavy, weighted by expectation, or
exhausted and snatching a reprieve after some mighty exertion that was soon to resume.

The more she looked at the great indigo sky and the waist-high meadow grasses, the more she felt too visible, but also insignificant, alien even, and defenceless, tense. Being physically free of
the house only made her think of being inside it. Where she was manipulated.
Prepared.
Introduced to terrible things that weren’t right. Unnatural things that had no place or context
beyond that huddle of spiny roofs and between those murder-red walls.

The horrid old women were trying to asphyxiate her with terror and nauseate her with disgust. She’d begun to hate them. Yes, they were horrifying her. Deliberately. All of what she had
experienced had been staged. She was sure of it. They were hamming it up, even Edith was wearing costumes. Tricksters. How could they be bothered at their age? She’d thought as much while
being sick into the horrid tin bath, with the plump bodies of flies crawling around the window. She was being tormented, unwound and rewound back to times and feelings she’d long tried to
forget. But why? It felt horribly personal, and prescribed, if not inevitable. Either the world was unpleasant or she evoked its harms. She was never sure.

Or perhaps her hosts had lost the ability to behave in any other way, while her paranoia and anxiety had been kick-started by it. It was hard to tell. Here, the mad led the mad.

Edith had not wanted her to go outside for a walk. Had asked that she would remain inside and ‘accompany’ her to the stifling drawing room, to sit amidst the clutter of dead animals
and their antics amongst the busy ornaments. Edith wanted her sealed inside like another doll added to her collection. ‘But we must do the fitting, dear. There is no time for strolls.’
The fitting.
What was that? She hadn’t paused to ask.

‘And the pageant is nearly upon us. You must be correctly outfitted. It comes but once a year.’

In her haste to get into fresh air she’d also lacked the presence of mind to ask about this pageant. The will of Edith and the will of the house were terrible, tangible. A constriction
against her thoughts. She’d been rejected by the present, was confined by the past. Totally enclosed. Her journey had taken a detour she had no control over. She felt as if she was being
pulled back rapidly towards something she could not define, and wanted to see coming before she was lost.

Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.

Catherine stopped and held her head until her thoughts slowed down. She was too sensitive to such things. To everything.

She was paranoid. She had to remember that. She needed to reactivate the ritual of cognitive behavioural therapy exercises. To identify the seeds that grew to these elaborate conspiracies that
she wove around her mind until she couldn’t move or function. Mike’s betrayal had paralysed her. He’d even brought her trances out of remission. That was the root of this.

But for God’s sake, don’t let your job contribute too. If you lose that you’ve got nothing.

Her bag and laptop were still inside the house, and she’d left her camera in the workshop too. The exhibits, the furniture, the grand interior, the catalogue, press release, the unsigned
contract, the news story, the immediate elevation of her firm’s profile, Leonard, who had done so much for her, who had been so kind . . . all of these things twisted. They built into
something like heartburn.

It was not possible to leave yet. She’d run from the unpleasant for so long she might never stop if she ran now. And where could she go if she left today? Back to her flat, and to work in
house-clearances containing a few silver items, incomplete dinner sets, the occasional oil painting of a racehorse? After being exposed to the treasures of the Red House, it would be hard to get
excited about a Napoleonic sword ever again.

An old house with a strange history, and occupants who were unstable refugees from another time. Elegant rags on half-forgotten bones. Little could prepare a person for them. But she should have
been prepared. She had seen the mouse-infested warrens of two separate shut-in millionaires, one in Ludlow and one in Monmouth, who had not just died, but become desiccated upon the beds on which
they expired, in rooms with sealed windows. Spaces so cluttered with rubbish they’d probably not been refreshed by natural light for decades.

And she was familiar with the apocryphal tales of her trade, the Turners, Constables and Bacons found in the attics of the deceased. Weirdness went with the territory. And this was her find, her
moment. An opportunity. Not a trial she could run away from like London and university and school and her hometown, and everyone that she ever encountered in any of those places.