The Taxidermist's Daughter (17 page)

Chapter 28

Blackthorn House

Fishbourne Marshes

For a moment, Connie emptied her mind of everything. Then, gradually, the familiar outline of the workshop came back to her – the wooden counter and the silver tools, the glass jars, the paint – and she sighed. Here, at least, she felt safe.

‘Miss Gifford?’

Connie turned in her chair to see Harry standing in the doorway.

‘May I come in?’

She exhaled. ‘Yes, do.’

‘A boy claimed you’d sent him to fetch me,’ he said, inching further into the room. ‘But I won’t stay if I’m intruding. If you’d rather I went, just say.’

‘Davey,’ she smiled. ‘No, I’m pleased you’re here. Come in.’

Harry stepped tentatively into the room. ‘Are you all right?’

She nodded. ‘I slept badly last night, as you might imagine, then the policeman . . .’ She stopped, reliving the wave of panic that had swept through her. ‘It was all rather too much.’

She looked at Harry’s face and realised he was struggling not to stare at the skinned inside-out jackdaw beneath its protective glass dome. With regret, she realised she would probably have to let this one go. She had left it untended for too long.

‘I saw you from the window,’ she said, taking pity on him and throwing a cloth across the glass. ‘I thought it might be better if you didn’t come to the house while Sergeant Pennicott was here.’

‘I must have looked very peculiar out there.’

‘Given that you were standing in amongst the reeds, rather than on the footpath, you did rather.’

‘I was on my way to see you, to make sure you were quite recovered from your ordeal yesterday. Then I saw Pennicott, and I thought I had better stay out of sight . . .’

Connie raised her eyebrows. Harry flushed.

‘The thing is, there have been one or two occasions when high spirits got the better of me – Christmas and the like, you know – and he comes down hard on . . .’

‘He’s a teetotaller. Davey told me.’

Harry nodded. ‘I was knocked off my stride to find Pennicott skulking around – all the way out here – and I suppose I thought it would be awkward if he saw me. Require all sorts of explanations I’d be disinclined to give.’

‘So you hid,’ she said bluntly.

Harry reddened. ‘Well, yes.’

‘Not very well.’

‘Evidently not.’

For a moment, they held one another’s glance. Then they both started to smile, his expression mirroring hers, transforming their anxious faces. An instant of uncomplicated camaraderie. Harry broke contact first, looking round the workshop with naked curiosity. Connie watched his changing expressions and was surprised at how reluctant she was to spoil things by telling him what Pennicott had said. Why he’d come to Blackthorn House.

‘What an extraordinary place,’ he said.

Connie gave a sigh of relief, grateful that he was not plunging straight in either. He had passed a test she had been unaware of setting him. If he had tried immediately to question her, she would have seen it as a lack of good faith.

‘It’s one of the reasons we took the house. Plenty of space for our needs. There is also a disused ice house in the garden that we – my father and I – use for storage.’

He gestured to the rack of tools on the wall.

‘And what are all these things for? Rather grisly, some of them.’

Connie realised that Harry, too, wanted to keep away from the topic that had first brought them together for as long as possible. She liked him the more for it.

‘No more grisly than medical instruments,’ she said, setting another trap for him. ‘You must have seen things like these before?’

Harry caught her gaze, but chose not to question how she knew what his father did.

‘He’s not that kind of doctor,’ he said, and tapped his head. ‘Strictly up here. Paperwork and policy these days, not patients.’ He pointed to the forceps. ‘What are these used for?’

Connie led him along the row, pointing out each tool in turn. How the pincers were used to break bones, the scissors to cut tendons and muscle. She kept glancing at his face, trying to work out his reaction to her, a woman, talking in such detail. He looked fascinated, not a hint of disapproval or distaste in his expression.

‘Taxidermy is a craft. More than anything, it is about beauty. Preserving beauty, representing beauty, about finding a way to capture the essence of a bird or an animal.’

Harry was nodding. ‘I’m a painter. At least, it’s not how I earn my living, but I will. So I feel the same when I’m working on a piece, that it’s about everything that lies behind the portrait as much as the paint on the canvas itself.’ He slid the cloth off the jackdaw in its glass sepulchre. ‘But, this. This is so much harder. How do you manage not to damage the very thing you’re trying to save?’

Connie was delighted at how completely he seemed to understand.

‘In the first instance, the key is a sharp scalpel. If the blade is blunt, the skin will tear and won’t be usable.’

‘Does your father work only with birds?’

‘Mostly. In his younger days, he was one of the best bird taxidermists in Sussex.’

Harry glanced at the jackdaw, then at the things Connie had got ready to use: wood wool and a dish of cleaning solution, a pile of cotton torn into strips, newspaper and paint.

‘He lays out his work bench with admirable precision. My father would approve. The old man’s a stickler for things being in their proper place.’

At the mention of his father, Connie felt a shadow fall over the conversation. She had to tell him about Pennicott eventually – should already have done so – but she was enjoying the discussion too much to bring it to an end. She wasn’t usually conscious of feeling lonely, except at times like this, when she was reminded of how rare such congenial company was. Just a few minutes more.

‘If not preserved properly,’ she said swiftly, ‘exhibits can easily be destroyed. Maggots, moths. It’s why most craftsmen, like my father, set their work in glass cases or display boxes.’

She reached up to the bookshelf and ran her finger along the spines, though failing to find the book she wanted.

‘I was going to show you my father’s bible, if that isn’t too blasphemous a way in which to refer to it, but it doesn’t appear to be here. It’s by Mrs R. Lee. Gifford swears by it.’

‘An authoress?’

Connie waited, again so much hoping that Harry would not fall at this hurdle. Even men who professed themselves to be modern in their views sometimes fell prey to a prejudice that women shouldn’t even write books on taxidermy, let alone practise it.

‘How interesting,’ was all he added.

Connie smiled. ‘Although it is rumoured that her husband wrote it, the reason my father values Mrs Lee’s book is because it concentrates on how the techniques of preserving animals and birds have developed, from Réaumur – who pickled birds in alcohol to try to prevent them from rotting – to Bécoeur, who invented arsenical soap.’ She stopped, realising she was going into too much detail. ‘I’m sorry, I’m boring you.’

‘Not in the slightest,’ he said, perching on the counter. ‘As I said, I know what it’s like to be transported by something.’

‘Well, as you can see, Gifford has built up quite a library. There’s a reference in Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet
,
so for a while, he kept a copy of that play on display here too.’ She pointed at another book. ‘There are writings dating back to the late seventeenth century – this is a copy, of course – describing how the Dutch were the first to bring live specimens and skins of cassowary and other exotic birds into Europe. The first manual, such as it was, was published even earlier than that, in the mid sixteenth century.’

She came to a halt again. She looked across and saw Harry was staring at her.

‘What is it?’ she said quickly.

‘Nothing. At least, I was thinking perhaps you should write a book. You’re very knowledgeable and you explain it all so clearly.’ He traced her name in block capitals in the air:
MISS
CONSTANTIA
GIFFORD
,
THE
TAXIDERMIST’S
DAUGHTER
. It has a good ring to it, wouldn’t you say?’

She blushed. ‘It does rather.’

‘Are you a practitioner too?’ he asked, clearly unaware that it was rare indeed for women to work in the field.

‘I help my father from time to time.’ She looked and saw nothing but interest in his eyes. ‘He was a wonderful teacher. Although I called him a taxidermist, he himself would use the old terminology. A stuffer of birds is how he would introduce himself. He thought “taxidermist” was too fancy. We looked up the origins of the word once, to try to persuade him.’

‘Which are?’

‘It comes from the Greek:
taxis
, to arrange, and
derma
, skin.’

‘Nothing to offend there, I’d have thought.’

‘I agree, though if anything it put him off even more. He said it took it away from what he was doing.’

Harry folded his arms. ‘Which was?’

‘Telling stories,’ she said simply.

He nodded. ‘When I’m working on a portrait, I’m always thinking about everything that made my sitter the person they are, not just what’s visible on the canvas.’

‘That’s it,’ Connie replied. ‘It’s the sense that if the bird – jackdaw, magpie, rook, whatever – could talk, it would tell you its life story.’

‘So,’ he said quietly, ‘we understand one another.’

‘It appears we do,’ she said, realising that a conversation such as this was as rare for him as it was for her. For a moment, there was a companionable silence between them. Connie caught Harry’s eye.

He let out a deep breath. ‘You were saying your father rejected the “fancy” word, as he saw it.’

‘“Stuffer” is a more modern word, he maintains, not dating back to antiquity. From the French
émpailler
,
to stuff with straw. All very simple.’

‘Does it matter what he calls himself? It’s the end result that counts, isn’t it?’

Connie thought of the days and days at the museum when no one came. Remembered the grief of understanding that something had changed. Saw his skill and his craft and imagination turn to dust until he became bitter and desperate, a drinker. A man brought low.

‘Everything matters,’ she said quietly. ‘We had a small museum once. Gifford created beautiful tableaux. Nursery rhymes, folklore, songs. Used the birds he found, or that were given to him, to create stories. Whole cases filled with hundreds of birds: “Cendrillon”, “Snow White”, “The Sorry Tale of Cock Robin”.’

He smiled. ‘Like Mr Potter’s museum in Bramber.’

‘You’ve heard of it,’ Connie said.

‘Loved the place when I was a boy. I’m sorry to say I never heard of your father’s museum, though. Why did he give it up?’

Connie paused. For once, she was tempted to share something of herself. She looked at Harry’s honest, attractive face, and made her decision.

‘He gave it up because . . .’ She took a deep breath. ‘Because it appears that some of our tableaux were direct copies of Mr Potter’s exhibits. Not all, but enough. I wasn’t old enough to understand at the time, but there was a court case – brought by my father, not Mr Potter, I should say – and we lost. Gifford was forced to sell up and close the museum.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said simply. ‘That must have been hard for him. To lose everything he’d worked to build up.’

Connie remembered the auctioneer appointed by the court. His nose red and pickled, his breath sour with self-importance. Walking around the museum, his cane tapping on the floor like Blind Pew, issuing orders to his men to take note of everything for the inventory. Which things were saleable, which weren’t worth the candle. Not just her father’s tableaux and display cases, but the assets too: the ticket machine, the wooden sign above the door, all her father’s treasures reduced to black squiggles in an accounting column.

‘It broke his heart. He was never the same after that.’

‘May I ask you something? I hope you won’t think it impertinent.’

‘Yes.’

‘I wondered why you call him Gifford?’

Connie became still. It was so obvious a question and yet she could not remember anyone having asked her before. She herself had wondered the same thing, why ‘Gifford’ often came more easily to her lips and why her father often reacted better when it did.

Harry took her hand. ‘I mean, you say “my father” too, but just as often “Gifford”.’

‘Because that’s what Cassie called him.’

The words were out of her mouth before Connie was even conscious of having thought them.

Chapter 29

Connie felt a wave of affection rush through her, then something crueller. Loss. Grief.

She withdrew her hand from Harry’s clasp.

‘Is Cassie the same person you mentioned earlier?’

Connie was reeling. ‘Earlier?’ she said, hearing the echo of her own voice in her head.

‘You said “we”
looked up the word “taxidermist” to try to persuade Gifford to think better of it. Was that Cassie?’

She got to her feet and strode to the opposite side of the room, unable to sit still, arms folded across her chest as if to hold all her emotions tight inside.

She felt Harry come to stand beside her. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry.’

‘It’s not that.’

Harry put his hands on her shoulders. She felt the heat of his palms through the material of her shirt, and a pulse of attraction swept through her. They were so close, she could smell the perfume of the shaving soap he had used and the pomade on his moustache, the sweet fragrance of tobacco on his skin and the underlying hint of oil paint.

‘So who is Cassie?’ he asked.

Connie heard, behind the simple words, his genuine concern and interest. She raised her eyes to his and saw him looking at her – properly, seeing her as she was – wanting to know what she was thinking, wanting to know about her. At that moment, all they should have been discussing and had been avoiding, everything that had brought them together, seemed to melt away. All utterly unimportant compared to this moment of connection.

‘I don’t know,’ she admitted.

‘You don’t know?’

She shook her head, unable to bring herself to speak. For a few, long moments they stood in silence, connected by everything they did not know about one another, then Connie took a step away. As if they had come to some kind of agreement, she sat back at the counter. Harry fetched himself a chair too and set it down opposite.

‘Miss Gifford – Connie – you can trust me.’

She looked at his concerned, gentle expression and felt that she could.

‘The vanished days,’ she said.

*

‘Any more of that paste?’ Davey asked. He was enjoying himself.

Mary turned round from the sink. ‘Greedy little scrap, aren’t you?’

He grinned. ‘Growing boy, me.’

Mary wiped her hands, then walked into the larder, took a jar of Shippam’s meat paste, and put it on the table beside a loaf of fresh bread sitting on a wooden breadboard, with a square of butter on a Willow-pattern plate. Davey reached to help himself.

‘I’ll do it,’ Mary said, snatching the bread knife out of his hand. ‘As if I’d let you go at it all heavy-handed. The master’s not made of money.’

‘What, a great big house like this?’

‘Eat your tea,’ she said, flicking him with the tea towel, ‘then I can get on. Having you here’s putting my day right out.’

Davey had helped her carry the Nutbeem’s delivery from the gate, and she’d given him a glass of shandy. They got on well enough, him and Mary, when there was no one around to see. When there was, she put on superior airs and talked harshly to him. He didn’t mind.

‘Do you like working here, Mary?’

Mary went to the dresser at the side of the kitchen and started to look through the drawer.

‘I do, as it happens. No one to tell me what to do.’

‘Miss Gifford a good mistress?’

‘Lovely to work for. Never takes advantage, leaves me to my own devices. As long as everything gets done.’ She shut the first drawer and moved on to the next. ‘Mind you, she’s too much on her own – Ma thinks so too, but Miss Gifford doesn’t seem to mind.’

Davey jerked his head towards the workshop.

‘What’s all that about then? This Harry bloke?’

‘It’s nothing to do with you, that’s what that’s about.’

Davey took another large mouthful of bread spread liberally with paste.

‘She keeps herself busy. Helps the master out. Does more than he does, if truth be told. And always scribbling in that notebook of hers.’

Mary paused for a moment, remembering that she’d failed to find the current journal. Not that it mattered in the long run. When Miss Gifford had used up one, she put it away and started another.

She shut the second drawer and moved to the third.

‘A couple of months back, we had a bit of trouble,’ she said. ‘Stones being thrown at the windows of the master’s workshop, knocks on the door and running away . . . You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that?’

‘Me?’

‘You,’ she said firmly. ‘It’s only that I notice we haven’t had any trouble for a few weeks now.’

‘Well, as it happens, I might.’ He tapped the side of his nose. ‘All I can say is, I had a word and no one won’t be bothering you any more.’

Mary grinned. ‘So you’re not such a wicked boy as they say.’

‘Who says I’m a wicked boy?’

‘Half of Fishbourne,’ she teased, continuing to search through the drawer.

‘What are you looking for?’

Mary shut the last drawer and stood up. ‘Key to the padlock for the storehouse,’ she said. ‘It’s gone missing. Mistress asked me to fetch the spare for her, but I can’t find that either.’

‘Do you want me to have a gander?’

‘Go on then,’ she said, stepping back. ‘Fresh pair of eyes might do the trick. It’s about so big, silver. I reckon a magpie took it; they’ve been hanging about the house for days.’

*

‘The vanished days,’ Connie repeated. ‘At least, that’s how I think of them.’

She paused to gather her thoughts, realising she had never told the story to anyone before. But then, who would she have told?

‘I had an accident when I was a child. The spring of 1902. I was twelve. My father was working late in the museum, finishing a last few things before we were to leave. I know now that it had already been sold. I didn’t know that then. I woke in the night, was frightened and so went to find him. In the dark, I fell down the stairs and hit my head. I only survived thanks to the good fortune that a doctor was visiting a patient in a neighbouring house and he helped. My father never knew his name.’

Harry frowned.

‘I remember being in bed for such a long time. Months and months. Hearing adults talking over me, not realising I could hear. I wasn’t expected to recover.’

‘Who looked after you? Your mother?’

‘No, she died when I was born. I never knew her. There was a nurse, I think. Someone kind.’

‘What about this Cassie? Was she there?’

‘This was someone older,’ she said. ‘I don’t remember being scared. Detached, if anything. I have a sense of kindness and care, but I can’t remember.’

‘What about your father?’

‘He was there, but not there, if you see what I mean.’ She took a deep breath. ‘In time, I recovered. A year, perhaps, and I was back on my feet. Physically, there was nothing at all the matter with me, but I’d lost my memory. Everything from the first twelve years of my life had gone, wiped clean. No memory of people or places, the child I’d been. Nothing. The only person I remembered from before was Gifford.’

‘And Cassie?’

‘No, not even her. It’s only recently that I have started to remember her. It’s as if my mind is full of ghosts. People I know. They are there inside me, yet I can’t see them or remember them.’

‘What does your father say?’

‘He refuses to speak of it. Apart from telling me about the accident itself. My questions distress him. He never got over losing the museum, everything he had worked so hard to achieve, though he claimed he’d sold it because he was unable to bear the constant reminder of how close he’d come to losing me.’

‘Which you now know to be false?’

Connie nodded. ‘As I got older, I realised there was much about my father’s account – the authorised version, as I came to think of it – that didn’t make sense. It was both plausible, and yet somehow a bit pat.’

She sighed. ‘When I was eighteen, and without telling Gifford, I went back to Lyminster – where the museum had been – to see if I could jolt my memory.’

Harry leaned forward. ‘And?’

‘Our old house and attached building were gone, burnt down in a fire.’

‘Deliberate?’

‘I don’t know. I could find nobody who remembered us, the little girl and her father who’d lived there. Then, two years ago, I discovered my father had been declared bankrupt in March 1902 – a few weeks
before
the accident. At that point, realising that the explanation Gifford had given for the sale of the museum was untrue – or at least, only partially true – I started to question how much else of what he’d told me was false, and . . . and why even now he will still not talk about the past.’

Harry lifted his hand and rested it gently against her cheek. Connie felt, for the slightest fraction of a second, that her heart had stopped.

‘Isn’t there anyone you can ask? About Cassie, I mean?’

‘Who could I ask? No one knows us from back then.’

At least, that was what she had believed. Given what Pennicott had claimed, Connie realised it might not be true.

‘And you don’t remember anything before the accident, nothing at all?’ Harry asked.

‘For years, nothing. Just impressions, the memory of emotions, I suppose, more than events or people. I suffered – I still do occasionally – from
petit mal,
where I lose track of my surroundings for a moment. The strangest thing is that as these episodes have become less frequent, I’ve started to remember things more clearly. Things I’ve not thought of before, snapshots of my life. Only glimpses, not the whole picture.’

‘Well, that’s a good thing, isn’t it?’

Connie thought of the dread that flooded through her with each recent recollection. The twist in the pit of her stomach, the fear that there was some black secret hidden within her clouded memories.

‘I’m not sure.’ She met his gaze. ‘I think something else happened back then – not only my accident, but something more. The consequences of which are coming back to haunt us now.’

‘Us?’

‘My father and I, Cassie – wherever she now is – and . . .’

Connie stopped. The conversation had finally come around, of its own volition, to the subject she had been avoiding. She could no longer put off telling him about Sergeant Pennicott’s questions.

‘And you, Harry.’

‘Me?’

Connie nodded. ‘You and your father. That’s why Sergeant Pennicott was here.’