House of Small Shadows

TWENTY-NINE

‘That smell…’ The odour she detected on her first visit, and had been aware of intermittently since, had been seeping out of this room, Mason’s workshop.

‘I’m so used to it. I barely notice unless I come in here.’ Edith smiled. ‘Would you believe it brings me comfort?’

The odour hit Catherine like heat outside an air-conditioned building, and the miasma stung her eyes. She cleared her throat. ‘Chemicals?’

‘Perhaps it is the soap. Shredded soap and chalk in white arsenic. It could be the formalin. Or perhaps a residue of my uncle’s formulas.’

The stench was more than a residue. To linger decades after the space was used suggested it was highly toxic.

‘To this day my uncle’s pickling and tanning processes have remained highly guarded secrets. There were some who would have paid dearly to understand how he achieved such remarkable results. And this is where my uncle spent much of his life. We have left it as he left it. I so wanted to show you.’

The workshop was as perfectly preserved as the creatures he’d restored. Catherine once read how a taxidermist at the Museum of Natural History had been baffled by how the tension in the whiskers and mouth had been achieved in a surviving Mason piece. ‘May I?’ Catherine held up her camera. She hoped to fill the memory card in her camera today, too, to make the best use of her time during daylight hours. Because she was not spending another night here, though she hadn’t told Edith that yet. Her experience during the previous night was not one she was eager to repeat. During breakfast in the dining room, she’d tried to engage Edith’s interest about what she’d heard and seen, or thought she’d seen. Edith had mocked her tentative queries, and made her feel like a foolish, jittery child. Maude, apparently, was a light sleeper. And ‘often roamed’. As was Edith. Catherine’s insistence that she must have heard an animal was met with a snort of derision and the conversation was over.

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.