House of Small Shadows

EIGHTEEN

The thin teacup rattled against the saucer Catherine had perched upon her lap. From her chair in the drawing room, Edith watched Catherine’s nervous fingers with either pride or pleasure.

‘What is the point of art, Miss Howard, if it does not move us?’ Edith said with a sly smile.

As before, Horatio the dog stared at Catherine with a wet sympathetic eye. The other animals of the silent, stuffed menagerie waited patiently upon their perches for her response to what she had just seen.

‘It’s… extraordinary.’

Edith nodded her head slowly. ‘The very word.’

And it certainly was a word for accurately describing what she had just seen in two of the ground-floor rooms set aside to display M. H. Mason’s early works. Catherine believed she’d just seen at least one thousand dead rats, imbued with human characteristics and apparel down to the minute detail of their uniforms and facial expressions and postures. One diorama depicted nothing as living. No-man’s-land, strewn with shell craters, demolished trenches, blackened tree stumps and rats. Dead rats. Rats that had looked so similar to small lifeless men in filthy khaki, she had been forced to lean over the glass display case to make sure they were, in fact, rats. They had no tails. Some of them were only bones inside hairless grey skin.

The second piece had affected her so much she even thought, for a moment, that she could hear the crackle of rifle retorts, the far-off thunder of artillery and the muffled thumps of exploding ordnance in wet mud. That case had featured a long weary line of men — no, they were rats — walking abreast of each other from a trench and into a pitted horizon wreathed in white smoke. It was called ‘Ten Men Standing at Reveille’. Edith commented only once, to say her uncle had watched three hundred men reduced to ten left standing, in less than six minutes, at the Battle of Bapaume.

Catherine lapped at her tea and wondered if she could endure hours alone in those dim rooms, cataloguing the entire contents of every square inch, of each case, without going mad. No wonder they hid them in the dark.

That morning, the doors to the relevant ground-floor rooms were unlocked and the windows unshuttered in advance of her visit. Maude must have been busy. And Maude had not done more than glance at her since she arrived, and within the solitary glance there was not even a flicker of dismay or surprise at seeing the unwanted guest return. Despite the note, the housekeeper had remained as indifferent and unfriendly as ever. Because she is mad. Edith is mad. Mason and his horrid sister were mad. They are all mad. They live with thousands of dead rats.

Maude was unconcerned by the injury her foot or ankle had sustained since Catherine’s previous visit. She only wore one boot and her hobble was more pronounced as the other foot was entirely encased in a bandage. She should have been resting. Asking Maude about the injury seemed like a useless gesture, and Catherine’s pity would make a weak show of appearing for anyone but herself. Edith seemed entirely unaware that Maude had even suffered an injury and issued orders as if the housekeeper were a slave.

‘You must understand, dear, that my mother and uncle were Victorians. They believed animals had souls. That they were good and evil. The Victorians were fascinated by an animal’s true nature. So they depicted it.’ Edith looked to the red squirrels prancing upon the piano forte and smiled.

And rats are most like us. Pests. Vermin. Scurrying. Frenzied. Determined to survive in any landscape and in any conditions.

‘I think you understand, Miss Howard. Understand perfectly.’ Edith smiled as if acknowledging Catherine’s thoughts that she had heard as loud as the handbell the old woman began to ring. ‘I’m afraid I must rest now. It’s time for you to go. But before you leave your home on Monday, do not pack too much. We don’t like our home cluttered with things that don’t belong here. Just prepare your toilet. We have everything else you will need.’

‘Sorry?’

‘While you work to prepare the world for our treasures, you shall live upstairs with me.’

Catherine nearly choked as she smothered the gasp of horror that tried to slip out. Then felt paralysed by a sense of social awkwardness she imagined growing to unbearable proportions if she ever spent one night beneath the roof of the Red House. ‘No, I really couldn’t impose like—’

‘Nonsense!’

Catherine flinched. Her watery, perfumed tea slopped over the saucer’s edge and on to her skirt.

‘Time is wasted with all this toing and froing in your motor car. The matter has been decided. Maude has prepared your room.’

Catherine coughed to clear her throat. ‘She has?’

‘But you must be patient with us. We are unaccustomed to guests.’

From shock at the very prospect of staying at the Red House, her head felt empty, her mind a void. No thoughts echoed inside her. She felt like a doll; something to be positioned by the insistent and capricious will of a nasty little girl.