The Taxidermist's Daughter Read online

  But what had persuaded her father to take the house was the long and light conservatory, which occupied the entire west side of the house. He had turned it into their workshop. And in the furthest south-west corner of the garden, there was a large rectangular ice house made of brick, which they used as a storeroom.

  The gardens to the south and the east were set to lawn. A wooden village gate, cut into the blackthorn hedge at the north-east corner of the property and bordered by one of the many tidal streams that fed into the head of the creek, opened directly from the kitchen garden to the track leading to the village.

  The main entrance was further down the footpath. A black wrought-iron gate led to the front door of Blackthorn House, which faced east towards the Old Salt Mill. On a clear day, there were views all the way across the creek to the water meadows on the far side of the estuary. There were no beaches where children might play, no dramatic cliffs or outcrops, just miles of mudflats and saltings, revealed at low tide.

  There, just half a mile as the crow flies across the water, the tiny church of St Peter & St Mary was hidden in the green folds of willow and beech and elm. Beyond that, another mile to the east, the soaring restored spire and Norman bell tower of Chichester Cathedral dominated the landscape.

  Who’ll dig his grave?

  I, said the Owl,

  With my pick and shovel,

  I’ll dig his grave.

  Connie ran her hand over the surface of the table, still thinking about her father. If only she could persuade him to leave his room. It wasn’t simply a matter of his health, but also because she wanted to ask him why he had gone to the church a week ago. He hated to be questioned, and usually Connie did not press. She did not like to distress him. But this time was different. She’d been patient, knowing she had to choose her moment wisely, but she couldn’t allow another week to slip by.

  In the past couple of weeks, Gifford’s demeanour had changed. He seemed to be in the grip of some complex emotion. Fear? Guilt? Grief? She had no idea, only that when he did emerge from his room, he walked quickly past each window and repeatedly asked if any letters had been delivered. Twice, she had heard him weeping.

  She was worried for him. About him too, she realised.

  A sudden glint from the middle of the channel caught Connie’s eye. A bright flash, like a ship’s warning lamp. Had it come from the Old Salt Mill? She shielded her eyes, but she couldn’t see anything. Just the few small houses dotted on the Apuldram side of the water.

  Trying to quell her anxious thoughts, Connie opened her journal at the entry for the twenty-fifth of April and flattened the pages. She had recorded her impressions immediately after the visit to the church – as she did with all her private reflections – trying to make sense of what had happened. She’d set down the names of those she recognised, done pen portraits of those she had not. The woman in the blue coat too, though Connie had soon realised that although she could describe her clothes and hat, she had no idea at all what she actually looked like.

  She drained the last of her coffee, then began to read.

  A Fishbourne village tradition or not, Connie hadn’t accepted then – and still did not – that so many people would have made their way to the church on the Eve of St Mark without some kind of prior arrangement. And she was certain her father would not normally have been among them. She had never known him attend a service – not at Whitsun, not Christmas, not even on Easter Sunday.

  And that strange whispered question, overheard as the bell began to toll again. ‘Is she here?’ An educated voice, not a man from the village. ‘Is she here?’ The meaning was quite altered with each different intonation.

  Who’ll be the parson?

  I, said the Rook

  With my little book,

  I’ll be the parson.

  Mary’s song continued to swoop and soar around the corners of the house, the notes floating in the sweet afternoon air.

  *

  Connie heard them before she saw them.

  She looked up as a pair of mute swans flew low overhead. Their long necks stretched, the orange flash of their beaks, the steady beating of their wings against the air. She turned to follow their flight.

  A swan. White feathers.

  She was pricked by a sudden, vivid memory from the vanished days. Herself at nine or ten, long brown hair twisted through with yellow ribbon. Sitting on a high wooden stool at the ticket counter at the museum.

  She frowned. No, not yellow ribbon. Red.

  The painted wooden sign above the door – GIFFORD’S WORLD-FAMOUS HOUSE OF AVIAN CURIOSITIES – and her palms hot and sticky from the farthings, halfpennies, and the occasional sixpence. Issuing printed entrance tickets – billets – on a grainy and coarse blue card.

  Another shift of memory. The swan once more. With its grief-clouded eyes.

  Of all the taxidermy exhibits in the collection, she had only hated the swan. Standing inside the main entrance, its wings spread wide as if to welcome visitors in, she was terrified of it. Something about its size and its breadth, the breast feathers moulting in the sun through the glass. The moths and the beads of fat, like blisters on the surface of its skin. Another memory. When she had been told that swans paired for life – who might have told her that? – Connie remembered how she had wept and become quite ill with the idea that the mate of the preserved cob might be searching in vain for her lost love.

  She waited, willing more to come back to her, but already the memory was fading. She did not think the swan had made the journey here to Blackthorn House, as a few of the museum exhibits had. The image of her young self slipped away, unseen again, back into the shadows.

  The vanished days.

  Her life was divided into two parts. Before and after the accident. Connie had dreamlike memories of long and blurred weeks, drifting in and out of sleep, a gentle hand stroking her forehead. Hot air and all the windows open. Her dark hair shorn and rough on her scalp. A scar on the right side of her head.

  When she did recover, her past was lost to her. The first twelve years of her life almost completely wiped from her mind. People, too. Connie had never known her mother – she had died giving birth to her – but she had the memory of being loved. A female voice, gentle hands smoothing the hair back from her face. But who was she? An aunt, a grandmother? A nurse? There was no evidence of any other family members at all. Only Gifford.

  From time to time, there were glimpses of another girl. A cousin? A friend? Eight or nine years older than Connie, but with a youthful, spirited air. A girl with a love of life, not bowed down by tradition or proprieties or restrictions.

  At first, Connie had asked questions, tried to piece things together, hoping that her memory would return in time. So many questions that her father could not – or would not – answer. Gifford claimed the doctors advised that she should not try to force herself, that her memory would come back in due course. And although Connie recovered her physical strength, she suffered episodes of petit mal. Any stress or upset could trigger an attack, sometimes lasting only a minute or two; other times half an hour might pass.

  Her father refused, therefore, to talk about anything other than the accident. Even then, he limited himself to the barest facts.

  Spring 1902. April. Gifford was working late in the museum. Connie had woken from a nightmare and, seeking reassurance, had left her bedroom and gone to look for him. In the dark, she lost her footing and fell, from the top of the wooden stairs to the stone floor at the bottom, hitting her head. She’d only survived thanks to a doctor’s urgent ministrations.

  After that, her father’s account became vaguer still.

  Gifford sold up and they moved away, finally settling in Fishbourne. He did not want to be reminded every day of how nearly she had died, and did not want her to be distressed. Besides, the sea air and the peace and quiet of the marshes would do her good.

  The vanished days. Lost, as if they had never been.

  And now?

  Conn
ie couldn’t be certain, but she thought her flashes of recovered memory were becoming more substantial, more frequent. At the same time, it seemed that the moments when time appeared to stop, and she was sucked down into a black unknowing, were becoming less common.

  Was it true? Did she want it to be true?

  *

  Connie watched as the swans came into land in the orchard of Old Park, where sixty or more nesting pairs had made their home.

  All the birds of the air

  Fell a-sighing and a-sobbing

  When they heard the bell toll

  For poor Cock Robin.

  As the sun moved round behind the oak tree, dropping the terrace into shadow, the ghost child was still there, waiting on the edges of Connie’s memory. A girl.

  A girl with a yellow ribbon in her hair.

  Réaumur received birds from all parts, in spirits of wine, according to the instructions he had given; he contented himself by taking them from this liquor, and introducing two ends of an iron wire into the body behind the thighs; he then fastened the wire to the claws, the ends, which passed below, served to fix them to a small board; he put two black glass beads in the place of eyes, and called it a stuffed bird.

  TAXIDERMY: OR, THE ART OF COLLECTING, PREPARING,

  AND MOUNTING OBJECTS OF NATURAL HISTORY

  Mrs R. Lee

  Longman & Co, Paternoster Row, London, 1820

  I am watching you.

  You sense this, I think. Somewhere in the depths of knowledge and emotion, you know. Somewhere, buried deep in the thoughts you think you have lost, you know and you remember. Memory is a shifting, dishonest and false friend in any case. We cherish what does us good and bury the rest. This is how we keep ourselves safe. How we make it possible to carry on in this decaying, corrupting world.

  Blood will have blood.

  The time of reckoning is coming, getting closer with each sunrise and sunset. But it is their own deeds that will be the cause of their undoing, not mine. I did offer them a chance. They did not take it. Even as I imagine the misery that will follow these revelations, I have the consolation that you will read these words and know the truth. You will understand.

  What, then, can be said without dispute?

  That the spring of nineteen hundred and twelve has been the wettest on record. That the horse chestnuts are late in leaf. That the waters rose higher and higher, and are rising still.

  And the birds. The white birds and the grey and the black. Feathers of ink-blue and purple and iridescent green. The jabbering, cawing and threatening of jackdaw, magpie, rook and crow. For all those years I was away, I heard them in my dreams, calling from the trees.

  I am watching you.

  So here I set down my testimony. Black words on cream paper. It is not a story of revenge, though it will be seen as that. Dismissed as that.

  But no, not revenge.

  This is a story of justice.

  Chapter 4

  The Old Salt Mill

  Fishbourne Creek

  Dr John Woolston stood in the tiny attic room in the Old Salt Mill in the centre of Fishbourne Creek and looked across the water to Blackthorn House.

  ‘Any sign of Gifford?’

  Joseph shook his head. ‘No.’

  Woolston gestured impatiently for the field glasses.

  ‘You can’t possibly see,’ he said irritably, wiping them with his pocket handkerchief. ‘The lens is filthy.’

  He put the cream envelope Joseph had handed him on to the chair, removed his spectacles and raised the binoculars to his eyes. He adjusted the focus until he had Blackthorn House in his sights. It sat on a substantial plot of land, surrounded by open fields. Woolston shifted his gaze. The only access, so far as he could see, was a narrow footpath accessed on the north-east side of the property.

  He returned his scrutiny to the house itself. There was an attic – he observed the steep pitch of the roof – and a peculiar rectangular structure with a dome in the south-facing garden. An ice house, he assumed, though that was unusual for a property so close to the water.

  ‘Just sitting on the terrace.’

  ‘What?’ he said, startled to find Joseph standing so close.

  ‘The Gifford girl. Came out after lunch. Barely moved.’

  Woolston lowered the field glasses and handed them back to Joseph.

  ‘You’re absolutely certain there’s been so sign of Gifford?’

  Joseph shrugged. ‘As I said, I’ve not seen him.’

  ‘There’s no possibility he might have left without your noticing?’

  ‘Not since it got light. Can’t answer for before that.’

  Woolston stared at the litter of spent matches and cigarette ends on the floor. He had no way of knowing if Joseph was telling the truth and had been at his post all the time. He hadn’t engaged the man, though after the events in Fishbourne churchyard a week ago, he had agreed they had no choice.

  ‘What about visitors?’

  ‘Maid arrived at seven,’ Joseph replied. ‘Brought a table and chair out to the terrace about one, give or take. No one else gone in or out.’

  ‘Deliveries?’

  ‘Nutbeem’s doesn’t come out this far.’

  ‘Door-to-doors?’

  ‘I’m telling you, nothing.’

  Woolston looked back through the window, across the creek and the mill pond, to where Blackthorn House stood, peaceful in the sunshine.

  ‘You are . . . prepared?’ he said, then immediately regretted asking.

  ‘Ready and—’

  ‘Not that there is likely to be any need,’ Woolston cut across him.

  ‘Waiting,’ Joseph finished, patting his pocket.

  Woolston disliked the man’s attitude, but Brook assured him that Joseph knew the village like the back of his hand and was the best man for the job. Did what he was told, no questions asked. Woolston hoped Brook’s confidence was not misplaced. He thought it a mistake to put their trust in such an individual, but it had not been his choice to make.

  He put his hand in his pocket and handed over a plain cotton bag.

  ‘Thanking you,’ Joseph said, then tipped the bag upside down.

  ‘It’s all there,’ Woolston snapped. ‘The sum we agreed.’

  ‘Best to be sure, sir. Saves any unpleasantness later.’

  Woolston was forced to watch as Joseph counted the coins, one by one, before slipping them into his pocket.

  ‘A couple of smokes to keep me going? Manage that?’

  Woolston hesitated, then handed over two cigarettes with barely concealed anger.

  ‘Your instructions are to stay here.’

  ‘It’s what you and your colleagues are paying me for, isn’t it?’

  Provoked beyond endurance, Woolston stepped forward. ‘Don’t make a mess of it, Joseph. This isn’t a game. If you do, I will break every bone in your body. Is that clear?’

  A slow, contemptuous smile appeared on his face.

  ‘Aren’t you forgetting something,’ he said, picking up the envelope and holding it in front of Woolston’s face. ‘Sir.’

  *

  Joseph listened to the doctor’s angry footsteps on the narrow wooden stairs. He waited until he heard the latch of the door at the bottom of the mill click shut, then made an obscene gesture with his fist.

  As if he’d be intimidated by so feeble a specimen as Woolston. Or even by the men behind him. Scared of his own shadow. He’d met plenty like him before, men who never got their hands dirty. Pillars of the community, so called. He’d had to bow his head to enough of them, up before the City Bench. Yet the instant there was trouble, they came knocking same as anyone else. Brothers under the skin.

  He cleared his throat, spitting the filaments of loose tobacco out of his mouth, then took one of Woolston’s cigarettes from behind his ear and lit it. Joseph didn’t care why he was being paid to spy on a wreck of a man and his daughter. Not his business. He turned the coins over in his pocket. He couldn’t deny the money was goo
d.

  He smiled. It paid to listen.

  He blew a ring of smoke up into the air, pierced it with his finger, then blew another. Joseph made it his business to notice things. So he knew about the maid, Mary Christie, what time she arrived each day, what time she returned to the modest row of cottages nearby the pumping station where she lived with her widowed mother and kid sisters. That they were stalwart members of the congregation of St Peter & St Mary. He knew that Archie Lintott waited for the girl at the end of the lane every Saturday afternoon.

  He knew Gifford by sight from the Bull’s Head. He could have told Woolston where the man could be found most afternoons, between four and ten, slumped at the table in the corner. No need to set up surveillance on the house. But no one had asked him. And why do himself out of easy earnings?

  Joseph heard rumours about Blackthorn House, same as everyone. Stories of the stink of rotting flesh when the wind was in the wrong direction. How the workshop was filled floor to ceiling with stuffed birds and moth-eaten foxes, skeletons. Monstrosities. A two-headed kitten in a glass jar, stolen from some museum over Brighton way. An unborn lamb suspended in liquor. Then, last week, Reedman’s lad claimed he’d heard unnatural sounds coming from inside the house. Joseph grimaced. Everyone knew Davey Reedman would make up any kind of wild story to talk his way out of a hiding. Been out poaching likely as not.

  ‘And what of it?’ he muttered. God helps those who help themselves, wasn’t that what old Reverend Huxtable used to preach from the pulpit? Same sermon every Sunday, rain or shine. The new Rector had a bit more variety, or so they said.

  Joseph smoked his cigarette down to the end, sending a final ring of smoke into the air, then opened the window and flicked the stub out and down on to the exposed mudflats. He wondered if the tide would take it, then shrugged. Not his problem.