The Haunting of Clement Hart

by Riel Rosehill

Maurice Prescott was killed but nobody speaks of it. It hangs in the bone-penetrating chill of the silent rooms, glimmers in the bright glass eyes of his many woodland animal mounts: both dead and somehow still beautiful. The ones Cordelia hates.

“I thought you were getting rid of them.” I place my hand on the mount of a fox at breakfast, secretly pleased. It feels like touching a living thing, softer and warmer than what I would expect from the work of a taxidermist: Maurice crafted them with such care one can’t help but be charmed.

The glass eyes shine with mischief.

“Yes.” Cordelia looks ill, as if someone has replaced her with wax: less alive than the fox under my palm. “Yes, I asked Elsie and—” She bites her lip. Of course, the last of the servants quit last week, leaving us with one charwoman who brings food and builds our fires once a day, crossing herself whenever she steps over the threshold. “Actually, Clement, could you get rid of them please? Just…throw them into that old well at the back.”

I curl my fingers into the fox’s fur. “That would be ridiculous. A museum might want them. I’ll ask around.”

It only takes one week for a new museum to accept the donation. Their men gut the halls and rooms, and while they are packing each mount with care, I pick up a small cape sparrow they missed from a windowsill and slip it into my bedside drawer. It doesn’t feel right to get rid of them all.

It doesn’t feel right to get rid of any.

Without the mounts, Prescott House is emptier, with a jarring amount of space, as if everything that had been Maurice was gone. I take the stairs to his room. Cordelia put his portrait in there, propped against the wall so that he wouldn’t stare down at her in the hall. It is about the only thing left in the room now: the mounts were all taken with the exception of the last dove Maurice had been working on abandoned on his desk, its feathers silky-soft under my fingers. I don’t have his soft touch, and a single feather comes loose, fluttering onto the floor when I pull my hand back. As if it is ripped from deep inside me, not falling from the bird’s back, there’s a sting, a crack, a bleeding.

He will never finish it.

It was an accident, I want to say, but no word comes out.

The midwinter sun hangs low by the time I exit Maurice’s room with his throw wrapped around my shoulders. Descending the stairs, I don’t notice them at first. My eyes are drawn to how the weather has changed, how the misty garden swarms with swirling snowflakes through the weeping windows, and how, even in the hallway, my breath floats in a milky cloud. They belong here, more than I ever will, the small dead beautiful things; it no longer surprises me to see them at the bottom of the stairs, their glass eyes shining up at me like they always have. But after a moment of normalcy, I hold onto the handrail to catch myself.

They aren’t supposed to be here.

They can’t be here—they were all taken, and even if the museum wanted to return them, the roads would’ve turned unpassable again during the afternoon.

“Cordelia?” My voice comes out a few octaves higher than intended.

Emerging from the dining room, she is bone-white, but unsurprised: it must have happened before. Must be why the servants quit. Why that charwoman crossed herself every time upon entering the house.

“Throw them into the well,” she repeats, and this time, followed by those haunted glass stares, I don’t argue. I didn’t realise it was this bad—Maurice never struck me as one who respected the etiquette of the living; it’s only expected he wouldn’t want to follow the rules of the dead either. But maybe it shouldn’t have been more of a comfort than a concern, when the glass eyes of the mounts came alive after I’d shot that “bear.”

#

Cordelia Prescott sat opposite me in a heap of peach-yellow dress, turning her empty china teacup on its saucer. Mrs Prescott—who was keeping Cordelia and I company—had just rung for more tea. It’d been two hours. Time seemed as still as Maurice’s mounts crowding the drawing room. There were dozens of them—every inch of the windowsill was taken up by a rabbit, a crow, or a pine marten, and even under the coffee table, a hare curled in eternal sleep.

I suppressed a yawn—I wasn’t used to visiting my prospective fiancée’s home for more than half an hour, but my carriage hadn’t arrived to pick me up. Behind Cordelia, the blizzard rattled the diamond-leaded windows, and what remained visible through the sleet sliding down the windowpane were only pieces of the landscape, a hint of a well and a wisp of a wall, as if someone had sketched it onto a white page then erased most of it, leaving us floating detached from the rest of the world. Even if we had paid the coachmen double, they wouldn’t have been able to drive into—or out of—the valley.

I wouldn’t have minded getting snowed in at Prescott House, if I’d had better company.

“Do you play the piano?” Cordelia’s eyes were so round she appeared a little surprised or horrified all the time.

“No.” Our voices rang unnatural in the broken silence.

“Oh.” Maybe she was surprised. Or horrified.

“Do you?”

“No.” She pretended to take a sip from her empty cup, and we drifted back into uncomfortable silence.

The clock ticked.

Glass eyes stared.

We had already discussed every mundane detail: the weather, the wedding. What curtains we might hang. How every distant member of our families was doing, and whether I had met her uncle, Henry, at the races. A part of me wanted to shake her, see if anything interesting would fall out. She was to be my wife; she was his sister; why couldn’t she be more like—

Cordelia stretched her legs and her shoes bumped into the hare under the table.

There it was: a more interesting topic than musical instruments. “These animals—”

“Disgusting, aren’t they?” Cordelia said.

A pang of disappointment spread in my chest, and I forced my parting lips into a polite smile. “Where is your brother?” I asked instead of answering.

“Brother?” She blinked at me as if she didn’t know whom I meant.

I had to suck in a calming breath. “Stepbrother.”

Cordelia waved her hand. “He went out earlier.”

“I haven’t met him since…” I gestured to us. I’d started seeing Cordelia a month ago, but Maurice had proved more elusive than I would’ve expected from a person living in the house I frequented. I’d last seen him during Mr Preston’s wake, which had been two years ago. Two years, one month and fifteen days to be precise, our last and only meeting. It was like a splinter beneath my skin, one I couldn’t pull out nor leave alone, and the more time passed, the more unbearable it became. The idea that seeing him again would fix it was absurd—but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t on my mind when my father had floated the idea of this match. Not that I’d chosen Cordelia only because I’d hoped to see Maurice. Or perhaps that was another lie: she was only as good as the other prospects on my father’s list. Squinting, I tried to find some resemblance to Maurice, but while he was dark, she was fair, and where he was unexpected and exciting, she was all scripted pleasantries. She was only his stepsister, after all.

I had met Cordelia before I’d met Maurice, on the same day, at their father’s wake at Prescott House. Mr Prescott had been an acquaintance of my father’s, and he’d insisted the whole Hart family should come. Cordelia stood beside Mrs Prescott, dressed in black, and accepted our condolences. She reminded me of a doll. I trailed my parents, making soulless small talk with strangers and some people vaguely familiar. The expected hushed voices, solemn nods. The pretence we didn’t notice the insane amount of taxidermy work displayed in every room and on every surface. It was a performance, and I was desperate for a break.

While idling near a door, a mere accessory to a conversation, I slipped out of the room, away from the stilted conversations. I climbed the stairs and stepped through the first door I found interesting, one which had been painted blood red. I wasn’t alone in it.

A slight young man sat at a desk, stitching a ratskin onto a mount with a delicate hand. It was so unusual I stayed frozen in the doorway, and even when he raised his eyes, I was unable to speak normally. “I– Erm, you are…”

“Maurice Prescott,” he said. His voice had the same softness his hands showed, now stroking the rat skin.

“Clement Hart,” I managed, and, trying not to gawk at the rat, looked out at the rain. “Dreadful weather, isn’t it?”

“Clement Hart”—he ignored the question—“What do you think is the most beautiful thing in the world?”

Never having contemplated the question, I was fumbling for words. “Sunrise?” I said at last.

He smiled—no doubt laughing at me to himself. I felt like it’d been a trap, and like a cornered creature, I had to bite. “What is it for you, then? Dead vermin?”

Gently, he put the rat down. “Autumn.”

It irked me how he didn’t have to think about his answer. “So you love the mud, then.”

He rolled his eyes as he stood and pulled me into the room, then grabbed my shoulders and turned me to the window and held me there, his hands locking me into place. “This. How the whole world just…burns up, then falls asleep.”

His breath made the hairs stand on the back of my neck. This was so far from conventional chatter, so far from how you should talk to a stranger, I suddenly felt a fool leaving the predictable safety of the downstairs conversations. Outside, the leaves of the forest were a wildfire, and as if it was spreading, there was a lick of a flame in my chest as Maurice put his face next to mine, looking out. I shrugged him off with a forced laugh before I would ignite—the flames of autumn weren’t worth winter’s ice.

“Have you been outside?” I stepped—or scampered—away, too fast, and rubbed my cold hands over my face. “Go get stuck in the mud and tell me it isn’t miserable.”

He didn’t react. Not in a big way. I only caught his eyes flickering to the floor, but I would’ve sworn his whole being had dimmed, and it had reminded me of who he was and why I was in his house. I could’ve kicked myself—he didn’t need my help to be miserable; he had just lost his only parent. In his place, I too would have liked to hide away, fix little broken things and be reminded there were beautiful things in the world.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, and I meant it, but it sounded like something I was just supposed to say.

The corner of his mouth twitched and he turned back to his desk where the rat waited. “I need to finish this one.” The soft voice was hollower, somehow.

I didn’t know what had gotten into me, getting all bristly—I wanted to apologise, tell him the leaves were pretty, his taxidermy was the best I’d ever seen, and there was beauty in death and also after it. That I wanted to be his friend. Yet, just as I started to reach out, I withdrew my hand. I knew better than this. He was the kind of person who toed the line between madness and sanity, the kind of weird that was tempting and contagious—therefore, best avoided.

But two years and a month and fifteen days later, I thought he had been avoided long enough. And if the coachmen couldn’t work in deep snow, maybe I would finally see Maurice.

“He keeps to himself,” Cordelia said when I pressed her to speak with him. “And it is better this way; you know he is…eccentric.”

“Still. I’m visiting every week. And this is his house.”

Cordelia picked at one of her nails. “If anything happens to him, it will be ours.”

I shifted on the sofa. “I hope you don’t mean—”

“My stepson has inherited his parents’ fragile health and his father’s aversion to reason. We worry about the boy, that’s all,” Mrs Prescott said with an edge to her voice. “Pray God nothing happens to him.”

“Of course.” Looking out into the darkening blizzard, I hoped he wasn’t out there.

I must’ve dozed off, because I was awoken by a small gasp and for a moment I didn’t know where I was: still in the drawing room full with Maurice’s work. Still with Mrs Prescott and Cordelia in the room, but they were now standing by the window.

The snow was still falling in fat flakes, but the sky had turned dark, and now the snowy parts of the view were what floated detached in the darkness. In one of those floating pieces—halfway across the yard—something moved.

I stepped closer to the window, my words fogging the glass. “Is that a bear?” It was both very much and not at all like a bear: a bear but somehow wrong. A little too tall, a little too slim, a little too unsteady in the deep snow. Uncanny.

The Prescotts exchanged a look. “If it’s a bear, someone needs to shoot it.”

I wasn’t against hunting, but something about the idea of shooting that creature made me break out in cold sweat. “Me? But I didn’t bring a gun.”

“We still keep Mr Prescott’s by the backdoor. Loaded.” Mrs Prescott was already ringing for a servant, and before I knew it, I had the gun in my hands. A gust of snow blew into my face as Cordelia opened a window, ever so helpful.

“Hurry,” she whispered. “It could hurt someone out there.”

Was anyone out there? No chance. Not unless someone climbed the hill on foot in this storm, which would be mad—but Maurice was the kind of person who toed the line of madness. I aimed the shot. Licked some sleet off my lips. Perhaps because I had just woken up, it felt like I was still inside of a dream, struggling to think clearly, and I had this sliding feeling I was missing something crucial and obvious. “There shouldn’t be—”

“I imagine Maurice will love that skin,” Cordelia remarked, derailing my thoughts. “A bear, no less. He is going to be so happy when he returns, he will kiss you on the mouth.”

Her words summoned the ghost of that flame I’d run away from, a long two years ago. It was fainter now—less intimidating—and perhaps I had caught some of the madness, because instead of feeling scared, I wanted to watch it grow.

And I pulled the trigger.

I trudged through the snow, to the dead and beautiful thing, a dark heap in the whiteness, steps crunching and the wild wind in my ears, but as I inched closer, all noise faded out, as if I had lost all sense of hearing. I must’ve known before I saw his boots. There was a splutter of red and a bear’s skull on top of a dark head, fangs bared, the skin worn like a cloak against the weather. Under, the front legs wrapped around Maurice’s neck like a hug with claws.

#

The well swallows them one by one, owl, badger and hedgehog, and my fingers are so numb from the cold I no longer feel their softness, only the icy grasp of winter. I’m not sure if my hands shake more from the cold or the unease gripping my heart.

With the last animal in my hand, I pause. It’s the rat Maurice worked on the day we met, bead-eyed and silver furred. The one I called a vermin.

It shouldn’t have ended like this. If the snow never came and my carriage turned up on time, if I never pulled the trigger—But it all comes back to this: if I dared to love him, Maurice would be alive.

It was an accident. That’s what Mrs Prescott and Cordelia said. And I couldn’t argue—I couldn’t admit, but whether we’re punished by the living or not, the dead knows, and lingers, and reminds me of my sins. By God, I wanted to see him, but it’s a gunshot too late to be friends now. After what I’ve done, he will want to stitch my skin onto a wire cage packed with cotton wads and shape me—gently—into the person I should’ve been.

“I’m so sorry,” I whisper to the rat as I release it into the well.

I’ll be rid of this guilt.

Mounts drowned, well sealed.

After, a cold night’s sleep.

In my dream, the mounts are in the house again, their eyes shining with a life not respecting death’s laws, their shapes blurring, as if sinking under water, playing hide and seek with the veil between life and death.

The pale winter sun slips inside through the gap between the curtains. I sense it through my eyelids, and wish it away. That, and the unburdened rise and fall of Cordelia’s soft breaths—I won’t ever forgive that they belonged to her. When I think of where he is, the room begins to shrink to a suffocating tightness. The walls close in, and I feel him around myself, inside each animal in their usual place, but prowling closer, closer.

This time, I won’t be stepping away.