House of Small Shadows

SEVEN

Speechless, Catherine turned about. And saw red squirrels in frock coats paused in the eating of nuts upon the piano. She looked away and a fox grinned at her from the low table it stalked across. A company of rats in khaki uniforms all stood on their hind legs on parade on the mantel.

She turned again and came face to face with a crowd of pretty kittens in colourful dresses, jostling to get a look at her from inside a tall cabinet. Some of them were taking tea. Others curtsied.

Animals cluttered the room, all silent and still with what felt like caution at her intrusion. Or perhaps they were poised in anticipation of their next moves. Not a square foot of any surface was free of them.

Beside a vast ornamental fireplace of marble, Edith Mason sat alone within the confines of a black antique wheelchair and seemed pleased with her guest’s reaction. Beside the chair, a long red setter had stretched itself around one wheel. A dog that watched Catherine with a single wet brown eye under a raised brow. In the sunlight that fell through the arched windows the dog’s ruby fur shimmered. The dog, at least, must be real.

‘Even now my uncle’s marvels can still affect me, and I see them every day. But for you, I think the cat will have your tongue a while yet.’ The woman smiled and her thin teeth looked yellow within the small mouth. ‘Please take a seat. Maude will bring tea,’ Edith Mason spoke without acknowledging the presence of the housekeeper, whose removal from the room was announced by the angry thud of the door pulled shut.

But even a perfectly conserved Victorian drawing room filled with preserved animals could not upstage the visage of Edith Mason in the flesh. So much powder clung to the woman’s ancient face that the skin papered to the bony features looked bleached, and her tiny eyes were made ghastly by their red rims. The lips about the teeth were non-existent and the nose was a blade, the light seemed to pass through the side as if it were pure cartilage. It was a difficult face to look at and Catherine struggled to do so.

Her scrutiny moved to the elaborate hair, styled about the shrunken head in a cottage-loaf fashion. A mass of silver hairpieces threaded with the woman’s own grey wisps. There must have been a kilo of padding inside the arrangement. Catherine had only seen the style in costume dramas, or photos of women in the early 1900s. She was tempted to believe the outfit was for her benefit, some bizarre display of fancy dress prepared and laid on for the valuation. She didn’t know how to react, what to say, or do. She just stared.

‘I’m ninety-three, my dear. And I have not once been tempted to paint that hideous rouge upon my mouth.’ Edith Mason stared hard at Catherine’s lips. ‘Once upon a time it was considered offensive. The mark of a whore.’ Whore came across the room with sufficient force to make Catherine blink. The word was delivered with spite, a riposte to her horrified leering at the elderly woman’s head.

She should leave. Despite the evident riches a single room promised her bewildered eyes, her most trusted instincts warned that if she were to stay, she would be made to suffer. In her professional experience, the greatest treasures were most often guarded by the slyest and cruellest dragons.

‘But what do you girls know? You are slaves to so much. And we girls have never had much say in the way of things.’ The old woman smiled, but this time with her eyes too.

Catherine was compelled to return the smile, though her body felt ready to shatter like the porcelains at an end of the mantel that two stoats in convict uniforms were entwined about.

‘Please.’ Edith Mason wafted one bony hand in the air. So pallid were the fingers before the black silk of the woman’s high-necked dress, Catherine’s eyes followed the hand’s trajectory as if mesmerized. And she was glad to see the hand was, in fact, gloved. ‘Take a look. I know you must be dying to mooch among our things. I bet you can’t wait to get your hands on them. To put prices on them.’

‘There’s no hurry.’

‘Don’t be coy with me. I have no patience with all that. So let’s be clear about one thing: we did not invite just anyone here to dismember our estate. Things that no soul in this world has the skill to craft now. Let alone appreciate their true value and meaning. We want someone who will understand what was once created here. We may have dealt with your firm in a satisfactory manner before, but only when we have found a person with the necessary insight and sensitivity will we allow an auction. So consider this an interview.’ The word ‘auction’ seemed to cause the old woman great pain and she grimaced. If Catherine were not mistaken, her eyes also shone with tears before she looked away to the windows.

‘Your home…’ Catherine didn’t know what to say, but felt she had to say something. ‘Is incredible.’

The woman’s expression changed swiftly and Catherine struggled not to recoil in distaste. Edith Mason’s smile had broadened to reveal more of her teeth and what gums were left to hold them in place. ‘If only you knew how unique. But perhaps you will come to.’ The smile turned into a glare. ‘If we decide to employ your firm.’

‘We’re so excited about this opportunity. To be invited here and to—’

‘Yes, yes. All right, dear. I was starting to like you. From the moment I saw you in that lane I knew you had humility. That it was genuine. And we like good manners here, Miss Howard. We like silence. We like to be left alone with our endeavours… But we don’t like…’ Her train of thought drifted and she stared out across the room again, as if listening to an earpiece. A trickle of soot struck the grate inside the fireplace. They both flinched.

Edith looked to that side of her chair, warily, then returned her terrible stare to Catherine. ‘What do you know of my uncle?’

Catherine glanced at the floor to evade a scrutiny she found awful, and saw hand-woven carpets with oriental rugs arranged over them. She tried to organize her thoughts that reared and fell over themselves. The medieval geometric design of burgundy and green in the carpet weave bombarded her mind. Small lifelike eyes watched her from every angle, gleeful at her awkwardness. Only the dog appeared to feel sorry for her.

She doubted she would be given much space here to talk in, and that nothing she said would be of interest to the elderly woman. If she did speak, she assumed what she said would only serve as ammunition, that she would be rebuffed and contradicted. An attitude she’d never become accustomed to, even after a lifetime of practice.

She forced herself to concentrate. ‘We know…’

‘Not we, you.’

‘I… I am, of course, aware of his skill. As a taxidermist.’ She thought of the catalogue copy she’d mentally drafted the previous week. ‘From what little of his work has ever been shown, perhaps he was the greatest of them all. And my colleague tells me your uncle was also a legendary puppeteer—’

Edith was not to be flattered. ‘They are not for sale. They were like children to him and they are not for strangers.’

‘Of course. But just in this room, from what I can see, we’d have enough for an exhibition.’

The old woman glanced about herself. ‘These are mine. He made them for me when I was a child. And they will accompany me to the grave, my dear. So you’d do well to keep your hands off them.’

Then why am I here? she wanted to ask.

‘They keep me company in my room here. They help me pass the time. And there has been much time spent here. More than you can imagine.’ She sounded sad now. ‘Don’t you, darling?’ Edith Mason reached one spidery hand down to touch the dog’s head. But the red setter seemed more interested in their guest and continued to stare at Catherine with what looked like sympathy for her predicament. She offered the dog a weak smile in acknowledgement.

Edith issued a sudden unpleasant laugh that rang off the china and glass. ‘Still fooling people, brave Horatio. He was my uncle’s favourite hound. His champion rat catcher. But poor Horatio caught his last rat in 1928. My uncle left him to me, to look after. And he’s still waiting for his master to return. Day and night. Aren’t we all, my brave darling?’

Catherine stared at the dog. It wasn’t possible the animal was preserved. The expression and the posture, the glossy lustre of its fur, a wet nose, moist eyes… how? She stood up and approached the squirrels who watched her from the piano. Looked at them quickly, but with an expert’s eye, and wouldn’t have been surprised if one of their noses twitched, or if one of their red-coated bodies leapt up the curtains to hang from the pelmet.

These weren’t the tatty and patched horrors of junk shops, nor what sat in the darkness of attics, only to be brought back to light in house clearances. And Mason had crafted at least fifty gifts for his little niece in one drawing room. As a child, Edith must have slept in a room full of dead kittens wearing party dresses made of taffeta, chiffon and delaine. No wonder she was mad.

But what else pounced, sat up, stalked and pranced out there in the many rooms of this vast building, perfectly preserved by a grand master? It was a big house and the last original Mason diorama sold for eighty thousand pounds at Bonhams in 2007. An individual piece, of the quality displayed about her, could fetch up to ten today. Mason had been the best of them all and the market had been starved of new pieces since the 1970s, when there were few takers for taxidermy. She knew only too well that less than five per cent of Victorian taxidermy had survived until the next century, the rest had fallen apart or been destroyed. But not here. Not inside the Red House.

What was she even doing here? If this room was an indication of the treasures within the building, one of the big London firms should have been notified. This was a job for Sotheby’s, not small fry like Catherine Howard of Leonard Osberne, Valuer and Auctioneer. She fought to conceal her excitement; revealing it might be a mistake.

The American museums paid a lot for birds too, the ones the Victorians had stuffed into extinction after enclosing their habitats. ‘No birds?’

Edith’s head trembled in a brief palsy of rage. ‘Birds! My uncle was no plumassier. He had no time for feathers! These,’ she wafted a thin white hand in the air, ‘are trifles. He mostly composed with rats. Animals like us. He had his Damascene moment during the war. At the front. I recall him once telling my mother, his dear sister, that we were all just “vermin under the stars and nothing more”.’

‘I see.’ Catherine gazed around herself again. ‘He did so much. I never knew.’

‘My uncle only considered commissions when the house required it of him. Some of those pieces you may have seen in your grubby trade. It was all that ever got out. He had no interest in fame, competing, or exhibiting, like the others. When the demand for his work dried up, he sold land so the Red House would survive. We have been prudent, but we need to be maintained, dear.’

‘He did all this… for its own sake?’

Edith smiled. ‘I think you begin to understand a little. He only began his great works when interest in his craft had gone. It was out of vogue, dear, for most of his working life. My uncle was no scientist, and no worshipper of nature. He was an artist. A magician! And now… now we get letters coming to the house. People want to know if there are any more animals? Are they valuable, dear?’

Catherine suppressed a smile. ‘Could be. To collectors. That is what I’d like to find out.’ The door clicked open and Maude shuffled in, burdened with a tray laden with what looked like one grand’s worth of original Wemyss ware.

‘And you might, Miss Howard. In good time. I’ve decided I like you enough to show you a little more. You have respect for his work. I can see it in your lovely eyes. But we must take tea first. The cakes are home-made. Will you pour? My hands are not so good.’

‘Of course.’ Suddenly glad she never fled, Catherine smiled at the dog and thinking nothing of it, she said, ‘I must say old Horatio is very well trained. He never even sniffed at the cakes.’

What little warmth existed in Edith’s face slipped away, and her bloodless features stiffened into a grimace. ‘If you are trying to make a joke, please don’t. You are not to make fun of my uncle’s things. Not ever. Am I understood?’