House of Small Shadows

TWENTY-TWO

As with her second visit, Edith’s tweed outfit was practical and less of a period costume, so perhaps the black silk dress had been worn for effect that first day. One of the games Leonard warned her about. But Edith’s hairstyle was again concocted from hairpieces and fashioned into a cottage loaf that appeared too heavy for the tiny head the arrangement engulfed. The face under the vast wig was more haggard than ever, if that were possible. The pointy tension of her glare had slipped as if the woman were medicated. Her eyes were unclear and her mouth open, making her look dopey. And if those were false teeth they were in a poor state of repair.

Edith recovered and summoned a glare to cut short her scrutiny. ‘I trust your room is satisfactory?’

‘Yes. Very nice.’ A museum piece.

‘Good. It was once popular with guests, when the grounds were at their best. But that was some time gone. I wonder who used it last?’ She gazed at Catherine with rheumy eyes as if expecting her guest to supply the answer. Edith turned to Maude. ‘Is it time, dear?’

The housekeeper looked ahead, through Catherine, as if she weren’t of any consequence or even present. And pushed Edith’s chair into the adjoining passage on the second floor. Catherine assumed the puppet theatre would be on the ground floor with the exhibits. ‘You were going to show me your uncle’s marionettes.’

No one answered her.

Between the two second-storey corridors, there must have been a dozen rooms. All were closed and locked away in darkness, doors barely lit by the red skylight above the hall and the one arched window at the far end of each communal passage. Catherine resisted the urge to ask for the lights to be turned on while marvelling how their old eyes could even see in such poor light.

Maude halted the wheelchair outside the second door in the dim corridor, the one beside Edith’s room. Without waiting to be dismissed, Maude shambled off and never once looked at the door she’d parked Edith in front of. Her departure seemed born of anger.

‘Are all your rooms furnished?’ Catherine asked, unable to stop herself estimating the value of the Red House’s contents.

‘Of course. Everything still has its place.’

‘I think you might be surprised at the value… of your things. The furniture and the ornaments.’

‘Is it not enough that we must part with my uncle’s masterpieces? Yet you want to sell every stick of furniture out from under us?’

‘No, I just meant… I was trying to say—’

‘Well don’t. The more time I spend in your company, the more I am certain you have very little to say that will be of any use here.’

At first Catherine stiffened with shock at the outburst, then warmed with anger and squeezed her hands together. Why must it be like this? There was never a good time to speak, to venture an opinion. And being in the house had already begun to feel horribly prescribed, like a script was being followed and she didn’t know her lines.

She wondered how much she would be able to stand. Knew she wasn’t up to the visit after the break-up with Mike, and the return of the trances. The quick reminder of Mike and her episodes made her feel weak and sick. The distractions she’d hoped to find here were almost certainly unreachable. ‘I’m sorry. Look, I don’t think I—’

‘Quiet! The door. There. There, girl.’

Catherine reached for the brass handle set within an escutcheon of metal in an oval shape.

‘Don’t touch it! How will they make sense to you if I don’t guide you?’

‘I don’t understand what you want.’

‘They are no longer accustomed to audiences. To strangers. One must be careful. Respectful. Always. My uncle taught me their nature.’

Who or what Edith was referring to was lost on Catherine. She was stuck inside a nonsensical dream. The world within the building never settled into familiarity, it perpetually became unreal, even surreal.

Edith lowered her voice to a reverential whisper. ‘They are shy and gentle creatures. Once they performed freely. But they have not done so in a long time. They are fragile like people, as innocent as children. And can be as cruel. They are blameless and they may seem impassive while they dream. But they are not inert. They wait. Like they waited for my uncle. But like all children, dear, they grow up and they go their own way.’

Catherine closed her eyes and wished she could also close her ears to the nonsense coming out of Edith’s ghastly mouth. The visit wasn’t going to work out. No genuine inventory could be recorded. No auction would take place. Because Edith Mason was insane. Nothing would be possible here, beside her bafflement and torment, before what age and isolation had done to these pitiful old creatures.

The conspiratorial look in Edith’s eyes intensified. ‘They enchanted us once, but they are not toys. They are too powerful to be played with. As my uncle used to say, to truly know them is to know suffering. And dread. For they are a tragic people. One does well to tread carefully, fearfully and respectfully among them.’ The mad utterance was said as a rebuke, or even a warning.

Catherine’s response was silence.

After such an introduction she was not sure she wanted to even see them. Nor was she keen to regard what she assumed were marionettes as living beings, to maintain a pretence which seemed mandatory in Edith’s company around the preserved animals, and most probably the dolls too. But the charade would need to be maintained throughout her dealings with the estate. Others at the auction would also be expected to adopt such a ludicrous attitude towards stuffed squirrels and antique German dolls. The situation was absurd.

Perhaps all of this was an elaborate joke being played upon her by the elderly woman. A prank the mute servant may have tried to warn her about.

Edith looked at the door with a respect born of wonder and fear, and nodded her head, sagely, as if satisfied she had been understood. ‘Now, if you feel able to treat them as you would wish to be treated, we may go inside,’ she said, as if hearing a response from the other side of the door to an entreaty neither of them had made.

Catherine opened the door upon darkness. Within she heard the faintest creak issue from an item of furniture. Then came silence.

‘The light. There. On the wall. There,’ Edith whispered with an urgency that panicked Catherine.

She found the light switch and clunked it down. A thin yellow glow spread from a dim bulb in a heavy glass shade suspended from the ceiling on a chain.

It was a large room, and unlike the other rooms of the Red House, the walls were painted white and decorated by hand under the picture rail. Frescoes of animals dressed as people encircled the long rectangular space. But before Catherine could properly assess the decor, her attention was stolen by the array of small white beds with metal frames. Children’s beds in a room for children. It was a nursery.

She wanted to throw her head back and shriek with laughter, and also scream, though she didn’t know why.

‘Come, we may go further inside,’ Edith said. And they did, but as they entered Catherine became aware that within each of the ten little beds a small head lay at rest upon each small pillow. She was glad that the heads she could see were turned away from the door.

‘Stop. Here is far enough,’ Edith said and raised one gloved hand when they had moved no more than one full rotation of the chair’s wheels inside the room.

But Catherine needed little encouragement to stop. She didn’t like puppets and never had done. As a child she was always nervous when a puppet first moved, that lazy uncoordinated wobble when a marionette rose from being seated to standing, or the sway before a puppet leapt about a stage. The thin legs had always made her afraid they might step off a set and venture beyond the illusion of reality they commanded on television or a stage, that a step of a small wooden foot through a proscenium arch, and into the audience, was possible.

A ventriloquist’s dummy on television once made her duck behind the sofa of her nan’s house. The waver of an animal’s thin furred legs in a children’s television programme that she vaguely remembered as an infant, even though the long-eared creature’s strings were visible, had endured in her imagination as a thing of a most sinister nature.

And even on occasion in her professional life, she could still feel uneasy when left alone with a lifelike antique doll in a shop. It often struck her as odd that her aversion had become part of her profession. This was not the first time she’d wondered if some terrible and intangible internal magnetism had pulled her towards what she’d feared as a child.

Her unease at the threshold of the nursery room also grew to a suspicion that she wasn’t at the Red House to perform a valuation at all. That her presence was an unwitting invitation to mix in the old woman’s delusions, cruel fantasies and dementia. To participate. She was a novelty and her purpose was still being defined. She was being taken advantage of by an elderly woman who might turn on her, banish her, and end the opportunity of her lifetime. Because there would never, in all of the world, be another like this one.

Edith touched the back of one of Catherine’s hands. The fingertips were hard as if she wore thimbles inside the white satin gloves. ‘Do not touch them. They do not wish it.’

Catherine was happy to comply, and relieved she could see no more than their heads in the thin light. Judging by the pointy lumps of the small bodies under the neat bedclothes, they appeared to be about as large as ten-year-old children, but with some exaggeration to the size of the partially visible heads. Their dimensions were unappealing. She’d hoped for fragile figures hung on a plethora of tiny threads, and crafted exquisitely down to the minute details of their costumes by Edith’s talented mother. But not this.

The fact that most of the heads were covered, or near-covered with a sheet, and turned to face the shuttered windows at the head of the room, gave her the unwelcome impression of the figures mimicking naughty children, who feigned sleep and stoppered their giggles by stuffing bedclothes into their little mouths. The nursery also resembled a room crowded with small dead people whose winding sheets improperly covered their faces.

Protruding from the bedclothes on the bed closest to her, from what little she could see, the puppet was a depiction of an animal more than a recreation of a human character. The tatty brown head of the hare had its black mouth open too, which was heavily whiskered and jagged with ivory teeth.

What may have once been a fox or a badger, wearing a bonnet, lay in the bed beside the hare. And she realized with distaste that the puppets were probably an extension of Mason’s taxidermy, constructed or adapted from preserved animal remains.

But the idea that Mason had built the small beds and dedicated a room to them was the most disturbing thing of all.

‘Puppets have long been messengers. You do know that dear?’ Edith whispered her madness from the chair and Catherine wished she would stop speaking. ‘My uncle told me they were first created as depictions of gods by ancient peoples. And spirits. Maybe even angels. That possessed sacred knowledge. The puppeteer communicated their wishes to the world. He was a priest, a shaman, a wise man. His troupe is ‘other’. It is why there is a special tension whenever the lights come on in a theatre and they appear. We don’t admit it. We tremble in secret. Nothing in all of the performing arts can match such drama. Don’t you agree, dear?’

Edith turned her thin head, her eyes alight with an intensity and enthusiasm Catherine found unpleasant when so near the small beds. ‘What accounts for that? That is the question you would ask if you saw my uncle’s troupe perform. But who is the director? The master or the actors? In the end my poor uncle and mother could never decide.’

I bet they couldn’t, but neither can you.

‘You may ridicule what I tell you, but your doubts are the doubts of a blind and unfeeling world. One that has lost touch, that is unseeing. Sightless before enchantment and mystery. Much of this died before my uncle’s time. But he sought it out in a world determined to destroy its innocence and magic. And he kept it alive. He made the unknown known and the unseen seen. There is no greater skill. And you must relearn the fidelity and openness of a child, or all of this will be lost on you, for ever.’

Catherine’s eyes darted from what looked like the rear of a crudely carven wooden head, mercifully concealed by the pillow that the weight of its head indented, to what appeared to be a shock of unruly black wig that splayed across the white pillowcase like a long-haired animal.

She glanced from this to what looked like the muzzle of a preserved dog’s head on the far side of the room, and felt her gut tighten at the sight of a pale-blue sun bonnet that was water-stained, but spilled luxurious chestnut curls, suggesting the presence of a real girl asleep beneath the patchwork quilt. That figure also seemed uncomfortably familiar.

And what little she saw of the troupe had nothing to do with innocence and magic. It was a testament to a man deranged by war and loss and isolation.

At the foot of each bed stood a pair of tiny boots or slippers. Beneath the closed scarlet curtains was a large leather trunk, studded with rivets at the joints and down each side. She was sure it was the very same case she had seen at the guest house in Green Willow. If the light had been better, and under a closer inspection, she was certain the initials M.H.M would be stencilled below the iron lock.

‘Let me tell you their names.’

Please don’t.

‘Why, here’s Little Mad Moll. Beside her is John Swabber. There’s Leatherhead, Rhymer Warble, Knavish Fiddle and Riffraff Tattle, always the villains of my uncle’s plays. Grizell-Killigrew, Trusty Baiter and Fair Rosamund on the other side. And that’s Nobody on the far end beneath the window. There were once twelve, but poor Jack Pudding and Popelote Tumbler were lost a long time ago and never recovered.’ Edith dropped her voice to a fainter whisper. ‘It was a tragedy for such a group of close friends. I shouldn’t even mention their names in here. The others won’t like it. Now, we mustn’t disturb their rest any longer.’

Catherine swallowed. ‘Quite.’

‘The light. Quick.’

Catherine’s hand was on the light switch before Edith finished speaking.

‘Take me out. We have intruded for long enough.’

Glancing back to make certain no small head turned to watch her go, she couldn’t pull the wheelchair out the room fast enough. But a curious sensation engulfed her as she hauled Edith away. One she had only experienced in moments of panic before an adversary in her professional life, but she now endured the notion that the occupants of the room were listening to her thoughts. That somehow her feelings were amplified within the space of the room. Even more alarming was the idea that she would be sleeping on the very same floor that housed the nursery.

She tried to keep her anxiety out of her voice. ‘The lock. I mean, the door. Key. Shouldn’t it be locked?’

Edith looked pleased. ‘No, dear. This door is never locked. Would you lock a child in a room?’