The Taxidermist's Daughter (5 page)

Chapter 5

Blackthorn House

Fishbourne Marshes

‘Is that you, girl?’

Connie jumped. She turned round to see her father standing in the open French doors. He was unsteady on his feet and, even a yard or so away, she could smell the sour ale on his breath and the tobacco sweating through his skin. Her heart contracted first in despair, then pity.

‘Cassie?’ he said, peering at her through sore, milky eyes.

‘It’s me. Connie.’

He often woke from a drunken sleep confused or calling her by the wrong name, but he usually came back to his senses soon enough.

‘Sit down,’ she said gently, as if talking to a child. She pulled the chair from under the table. ‘The sun’s come out for a change. It will do you good to be in the fresh air.’

She could see beads of sweat on his forehead and temples and realised that he was still very drunk. She saw the effort it was taking to stop himself from pitching forward on the uneven stone paving of the terrace. Six days of stubble on his lined face and smudges on his cheeks, as if he had been crying.

‘Come and sit down,’ she said again, worried that he might fall and hit his head. He was still wearing his boots, she noticed, thick with mud from a week ago. Had he changed his clothes at all?

She stood still, knowing the pattern things would take. No sense rushing him, it only made it worse. Sometimes he lashed out when he became frightened about not knowing where he was.

He rubbed the flat of his broad red hand across his face, almost, Connie thought, as if he was trying to erase his own features. Then he held both hands out, turning them over and back again, peering at the dirty skin.

‘Come,’ she said, dropping her voice even further. ‘Sit here.’

He was still in the grip of whatever nightmare had woken him and driven him downstairs. Without warning, he jerked his head up and stared directly at her.

‘Work . . .’

The word exploded out of him. Connie had no idea what he meant.

‘Dress,’ he said, half pointing at her clothes.

She looked down at her plain black skirt, her white collared blouse and black tie, trying to work out what he was seeing.
Who
he was seeing. Then she realised that her sleeves were still folded up from being in the workshop earlier.

‘I found a jackdaw—’ she began, but he cut across her.

‘Schoolroom . . . go on with your lessons and your . . .’

Connie knew there was no point trying to understand what he was saying or follow his train of thought when he was in this state. Words would fall from his mouth, without order or meaning, like notes played out of sequence. Other times he might come up with snatches of ragged philosophy or theology. His mood could vary too. Sometimes he woke from his drinking sleeps full of self-pity, others times shaking with rage, storming against those who had stolen his livelihood from him. Very occasionally, he woke angry. Then there was little she could do except stay out of his way.

He started to laugh. A racked sound, no mirth or joy in it.

‘Please,’ Connie said sadly, ‘come and sit with me here.’

‘Blue . . . thought it was her, but ghost . . .’ He stumbled. ‘Got a letter telling me. How can she be dead? Don’t understand. After all the waiting, not right . . .’

His balance was deteriorating. Now he was paddling from foot to foot, an uneven march to try to keep upright, before staggering over the threshold and on to the terrace. Connie leapt forward, ready to catch him if he fell.

‘Blood . . .’

Connie’s eyes widened, watching in horrified fascination as her father waved his hand, then let a finger come to rest on her sleeve. When she looked down, she saw that the cuff of her shirt was stained.

‘Remember, I found a jackdaw,’ she said patiently. ‘Beautiful. Not a mark on him. I’ve been in the workshop. You see?’

She managed to take his hand and half lead him, half pull him to the garden chair. The wicker complained under the sudden weight, but he settled himself back and sat still.

‘There,’ she said with a sigh of relief. ‘Now, I’ll fetch us some tea. Stay here. Don’t worry about a thing.’

She didn’t want the maid to see him like this. Mary wasn’t a fool; she knew perfectly well what was wrong with Gifford, but Connie didn’t want him to be humiliated. She had to find a way of giving him something settling to drink, and perhaps some toasted bread and butter. She also had to get him out of his unwashed clothes. She couldn’t make him bathe, though if she could persuade him to rest for a while in the drawing room later, she could at least get into his room and clean it. She shuddered to imagine the kind of state it would be in after seven days.

‘. . . all that old traditions tell,’ he muttered, a sound something between a growl and a song, ‘I tremblingly believe . . .’

Connie pulled herself up. He was quoting the same verses that had slipped into her mind in the wet, dark churchyard. She crouched down by his chair. ‘Where did you hear that, Father?’ she said, trying to keep her voice calm. The half-remembered classroom, the voice reading out loud. She clutched his arm. ‘Can you tell me?’

‘Schoolroom, all those lessons, good for nothing in the end.’ He gave a long sigh. ‘That’s it, that’s it. Chalk. Back to the classroom. Not in with the birds, not until after lessons . . .’

His eyes were starting to close. Connie shook him. She couldn’t let him stop now he was actually talking. About the vanished days, telling her something whilst forgetting she did not know.

‘Two little dickie birds, sitting on a wall . . . no, that’s not right. Younger before.’ He flapped his hands in the air in front of him. ‘Fly away, Peter, fly away, Paul.’

Connie repeated the lines, hoping to return him to his original spiral of thought.

‘’Tis now, replied the village belle,’ she quoted. ‘Isn’t that how it starts? Do you remember?’

‘Can’t remember,’ he mumbled. ‘Village belle, yes.’

‘Remind me,’ she said softly, keeping the desperation out of her voice for fear of jolting him back to the present. ‘Remind me how it goes.’

If he knew the same poem, then the vanished days might not be completely lost. If there was one shared memory, why not others? But he was sitting silently now, his face slack.

She closed her eyes, trying to drag out of her locked memory, like Ariadne’s thread, the words she once must have known well. Steeled herself to remember an older girl’s voice, and her own, child’s hand shaping the letters on the page to better learn the lines.

‘’Tis now, replied the village belle, St Mark’s mysterious eve . . .’ She squeezed his arm. ‘Your turn.’

‘How . . . how when the midnight . . .’ His words were halting and indistinct, running one into the other, but Connie knew they were right. ‘Green,’ he murmured.

Connie took up the next couplet, then Gifford the next, each remembering a word, prompting a line, until they had recited the poem between them.

‘Amid the silence drear. There,’ she said. ‘That was good.’

Gifford nodded. ‘Very good.’ He gave a small, soft laugh. ‘Top marks.’

Connie drew in her breath, knowing this was the moment, but fearing that if she said the wrong thing, or even the right thing but in the wrong way, the spell would be broken and Gifford would come to his senses.

‘How wonderful that we can remember after so long,’ she said, keeping her voice as light and level as she could. ‘We did well, didn’t we?’

She saw that the fight and confusion had left him. His shoulders were relaxed and his dirty hands resting, still, on his lap. His eyes were closed.

‘After all these years,’ she said, desperate not to let him drift into sleep.

He laughed again, this time with warmth.

‘She made you say it over and over again,’ he said. ‘Verses, poetry, rhymes, very keen on all of that. “A good mental exercise”, that’s what she always said.’

Connie could barely speak. Her heart beat harder. ‘Who said?’

‘Could always hear you. From the museum, I could hear you. Doing your lessons. Windows open. “A good mental exercise, Gifford.” Like a sister to you.’

‘Who?’ she said again.

But he was smiling now, his eyes firmly closed. Connie knew he was lost in the gentle arms of the past, safe from everything that troubled and tortured him. She felt cruel trying to bring him back, but she had to know. Carefully keeping her voice low and quiet, she asked the question in another way.

‘Where is she now?’

For a moment, she didn’t think he’d heard. Then the colour seemed to drain from his face and his expression folded in on itself. Haunted.

‘Gone. Got a letter. Dead, so they say. All for nothing.’

‘Who’s dead, Father?’

A terrible wail escaped from his lips. As if he’d been struck, Gifford suddenly lurched up out of the chair, flapping hands by his sides. Connie sprang back in alarm.

‘Is she here?’ he cried, his eyes wide with terror. ‘
Is
she?’

‘It’s all right,’ she said urgently, as he struck at the air with his raised fists. ‘There’s no one else here. Just us.’ She managed to catch his wrists in her hands. ‘It’s just us, like always.’

For a sudden, clear, lucid moment, Gifford met her gaze. Seeing her as she was, not through a haze of drink or as someone else. Her, Connie. Then his eyes clouded over. Grief, guilt, a pain so deep that it would never leave him.

‘Who is she?’ Connie asked. ‘Please, Father. Please tell me.’

‘Don’t remember,’ he shouted.

Before she could stop him, Gifford was blundering over the step and into the drawing room, lurching from piano to armchair to banister, then the sound of his bedroom door slamming.

Connie sank down on to the low stone wall that divided the terrace from the garden and put her hands on her knees. She hated these scenes. She was desperately sorry for him, but also angry that he let himself get into such a state.

But this time, her dominant emotion was relief. Her instincts were right. Whatever had happened in the churchyard had affected him profoundly.

‘Is she here?’

The same, whispered question she’d overheard at midnight in the graveyard. And a new name. Her father had got Connie’s name wrong many times before, when he was overcome by drink, but she didn’t think she’d heard the name Cassie before. And spoken so clearly, without hesitation.

A strong memory of being loved, of being cared for. Not by her poor unknown mother, but by someone who had taught her things and who’d cherished her like a sister.

Connie looked back into the dark drawing room, through the French windows. She wanted to go after him, but she knew there was no point. He would either fall deeply asleep, waking later without the slightest recollection of what he’d done or said. Or else – and she hoped this wasn’t the case – he would seek solace in his brandy and try to drown the darkness inside him. If that happened, her chances of learning more were reduced to nothing.

Connie stood up, smoothed down her skirts, picked up her coffee cup and saucer. The afternoon was moving on. If she didn’t go back into the workshop soon, the jackdaw would be ruined.

Her father’s last words before he’d staggered out of the room, were they an apology or an instruction?

‘Don’t remember.’

Chapter 6

Salthill Road

Fishbourne

Harry Woolston was the only person to alight at Fishbourne Halt. The tiny station was simply two narrow strips of platform. Set in the middle of fields, it was flanked by trees filled with nesting black birds. Rooks, were they? Barely a mile and a half from Chichester, and he was in the heart of the countryside.

The driver blew his whistle. A belch of smoke. The fireman, standing on the plate, raised his hat to Harry as the motor steam engine pulled away. The rails began to hum.

Harry was already regretting the impulse that had made him come chasing out here. It was early afternoon, and here he was, in the middle of nowhere. He looked around for a porter or anyone from whom to get directions, but there wasn’t a soul about.

He made his way along the platform. As he reached the road, the door of the keeper’s cottage opened and a rickety old man in the uniform of the South Coast Railway limped out and began to open the crossing gates. One by one, by one by one. It was a slow business.

‘I’m after the Woolpack Inn,’ Harry said.

‘Straight down,’ the keeper said, pointing south. ‘All the way to the bottom of Salthill Road.’

‘This being Salthill Road?’

The keeper nodded. ‘When you reach the main road, turn left. Five minutes’ walk, young man like you, give or take. Two minutes. First tavern’s the Bull’s Head, that’s not the one you want. Keep following the road round, past the Methodist chapel, and you’ll see the post office. Woolpack’s next to it on far side of the road. You can’t miss it.’

*

Harry set off down the lane. The ground was soft underfoot, after the endless rain, but the hedgerows were full and it was pleasant.

Cow parsley as high as his shoulder. Nature didn’t interest him – he was a portrait painter rather than a landscape artist – but he appreciated the colours. Deep moss greens to filigree silver leaves, yellow buttercups and celandine. From time to time, the palette was broken by a tree with magnificent purple leaves, the colour of claret. He thought back to the painting on its easel in his studio, to the woman frozen lifeless in time, and realised it was the colour of her skin he’d got wrong. Too pink, no hollows and shadows. No life in it.

Harry kept walking, still thinking about his failed portrait. Past a small white cottage and a flint-faced building at the junction with the main road. A laundry by the looks of it. Billows of steam and the smell of hot, starched linen. That was another thing. The woman’s bonnet was drawing the attention away from her expression. She seemed like a mannequin, rather than a representation of a real person. Perhaps if he muted down the colour, a pale blue or green, that would shift the focus of the painting?

He turned left and walked east along the main road, such as it was. Here, cottages were tucked in between larger plots with modern, detached red-brick houses. He saw the Bull’s Head on the south side of the road, as the porter had said. A large gabled building with a pleasant facade, a few trees and a low, thatched wooden barn behind, it was rather charming.

On the corner, a gaggle of children stood outside a sweet shop. Girls with smock pinafores over their dresses, hair tied back with ribbons; the boys with grubby collars visible above their jackets.

Harry stopped on the opposite side of the road from the Woolpack. If the Dunnaways man was right, this had to be the place. But the idea that his father might have a rendezvous in this spit-and-sawdust tavern, a working men’s bar, was absurd. His father was fastidious. The kind to put his handkerchief on a park bench rather than risk getting a speck of dirt on his coat. And on occasion, when Harry came into dinner without properly cleaning the paint from his hands, the old man would fidget and struggle not to comment on it. Harry smiled fondly. John Woolston was as predictable as clockwork. He never acted on impulse; he was formal and rather dull, did everything by the book. Absolutely Victorian in his outlook. Obedience, respectability, duty, everything planned to the letter.

Except here Harry was, standing outside a disreputable-looking place in Fishbourne, wondering if his father might or might not be inside.

The smile faded from Harry’s face.

There was no sign of a taxi outside, though there was a tub trap with a mule in harness. A group of five or six men were standing in the shade – caps, weather-worn faces, short working men’s jackets. At their feet, a black and tan terrier slumbered, oblivious to the danger of hoof and wheel.

Harry was stumped. If he went in and his father saw him, it would be obvious he must have followed from Chichester. So whatever his father was or was not doing – even if it was a blameless game of dominoes – the situation would be awkward for both of them.

Aware that he was attracting attention, Harry continued on to the outskirts of the village, where the houses stopped. There, he crossed over and ambled back on the south side of the road. There was a pleasant low cottage, set at right angles to the road, and several substantial houses. At the end of the row was a rather attractive white house with its own stable and coach house. Set behind wrought-iron railings, flanked by mature trees and bushes, with a square portico, it gave almost directly on to the street.

Harry stopped and lit a cigarette, wondering what the devil to do next.

*

Connie went back to the jackdaw, hoping she had not been away from the bird for too long.

When she’d left the workshop earlier, she’d protected the skin from drying out by folding the head and wings in on themselves, and had placed a cloth over the carcass. But any number of parasites, invisible to the naked eye, could have burrowed their way into gaps between the skin and the exposed flesh at the tips of the jackdaw’s wings, leaving no sign. Only if the bird began to rot would any damage become clear.

Connie turned the jackdaw over in her hands, examining it thoroughly, and decided to continue. The flesh hadn’t become sticky and it was a beautiful creature; she didn’t want to let it go to waste. This was the moment when it would begin to transform from something dead into an object of beauty that would live for ever. The essence of the bird, caught by her craft and her skill, at one distinct moment.

Immortal.

She sprinkled a little water on the skin to make sure it wouldn’t shrink or tear, then continued where she had left off before lunch. She worked her way down the spine, the scalpel squeaking as she scraped flesh from bone, fat from cartilage, wiping the tiniest feathers on the edge of the newspaper. The white tail bone, and a sharp point in the right wing, set at an angle, as evidence of how the bird had died. Shot by the gamekeeper at Old Park, Connie suspected, leaving the jackdaw just enough strength to fly home to die. She had found it lying beside the hawthorn. It would require a certain amount of skill to disguise the disfiguration when the time came to stuff and present the bird.

Connie was shaken by the scene with her father – the new information he had let slip, as well as the tantalising glimpses of how much more he might tell her if he chose to. She was aware, too, that she must not allow herself to brood. When she was worried or upset, she was more likely to slip between the cracks in time. Those disabling, alarming
petit mal
episodes
had been the reason her father had given for not sending her to school once she had recovered after the accident.

Connie began to skin the flesh from the neck until, finally, she was ready to turn her attention to the skull. This was the part of the process she liked the least. The texture and smells reminding her that without death, there was no new form of life. No beauty.

She wondered if, when it was done – and provided she was pleased with her work – she might try to sell the jackdaw. The last commission had been in the autumn – a preserved rook for a barber in Chichester, wanting something unusual in the shop window to attract customers’ attention – and although her father refused to talk about their household finances with her, she suspected any contribution would be useful.

She sighed, wondering how she might achieve such a thing without her father’s knowledge. But the truth was, regardless of what happened to the piece, the work itself calmed her. Connie felt most herself when she was alone in the workshop. She and a bird, working together to create something new and extraordinary. The process itself was its own reward. The business of skinning and cleaning and stuffing rooted her in something tangible, kept her tethered to the real world.

She put down the scalpel and picked up her forceps. Pressing the jackdaw’s skinned head to the table, she inserted the points into the left socket and squeezed. As always, the eyeball was sticky at first. Then, it popped out with a leaking of inky dark liquid. Round on three sides, the surface closest to the socket was flat, the shape of a blueberry. Connie placed it on the table, beside the bird’s thin, black strip of tongue.

The right eye came more easily. When she had finished, she wrapped it all in a scrap of newspaper and put it in the pail.

This, now, was the worst of it. She breathed in, trying not to draw the noxious odour too deeply into her lungs. With a blunt knife, she carved a square in the back of the skull. Then, delicately, she began the process of pulling the grey matter of the jackdaw’s brain out of the opening with the same delicate forceps. Little by little by little, a time-consuming and messy process. She let her shoulders drop, rolled her neck, knowing that soon it would be over.

She would wash and preserve the bird. Then, tomorrow, the process of bringing it back to life would begin.

Blood, skin, bone.