Chapter 10 #2
There appeared to be several possibilities, even though the owl was long past caring what his next meal might be. An assortment of creatures, dead as well, were displayed across the shop and mounted on the walls.
“How may I serve you this morning?”
I would have sworn the red deer that stood a few feet away had spoken, except for the balding man with shirt sleeves rolled back who suddenly appeared from behind the deer.
“Senor Petrelli?” Munro inquired.
“Yes, and this is Pepito, one of my finer specimens recently completed, awaiting his new owner to arrive,” the taxidermist replied with a smile.
“How may I help you? Something for the young woman perhaps? More and more ladies choose my work. Often a beloved pet that has passed on.”
“I have questions,” I replied as I stepped around another specimen of the small dogs that were popular among the ton in London, and approached the counter as Senor Petrelli stepped behind.
“The ladies often have questions,” he explained with a faint accent. “They want me to know all about their pet before they have it delivered.”
Munro made a sound that might have been a cough from the cold weather. Or not, as he stood before that wall and appeared to be quite fascinated by the stag heads mounted there.
“You have a variety of birds as well as the deer and other animals.”
I did wonder if they were still animals once they were dead and stuffed.
“Oh yes. Most recently I received a pair of falcons the owner has requested to be mounted for his hunting room at his estate in the country.”
I explained that Mr. Woolsey at Jenners had suggested that he might be able to help me identify a feather I had found.
“Senor Woolsey? Ah yes. He is a good man. I often assist with a special request from a customer for a suit or other custom-made garment.”
I retrieved the blue feather and laid it on the glass-topped counter.
“What can you tell me about this?”
He wore his spectacles pushed back at his forehead. He looked around for them on the counter, then the counter along the wall behind.
“I cannot understand how one is supposed to find glasses when one needs them to see,” he commented, searching next in a drawer.
I caught his attention and gestured to my own forehead.
“Ah,” he exclaimed. “There they are.” He pushed them into place, then began his inspection of the feather I had found at the Grassmarket.
“A most unusual colour, and magnificent.”
“Do you recognize it?”
“I have seen them before. It is from the hyacinth macaw. Very rare and expensive. That particular macaw is found in Brazil.” He looked at me with unusually large eyes behind the glass of the spectacles.
“Have you travelled there?”
I admitted that I had not.
“Ah, a gift perhaps, although it seems to have experienced some damage as you can see here.”
Munro joined me after his inspection of the wall of heads.
“Have ye used a feather such as this in yer work?”
“As I said, this particular macaw is quite rare, found in the interior of the country. Feathers such as these are rare as well.”
He was hesitant, evasive.
“For a customer perhaps?” I continued.
“I apologize. I cannot remember, I have many customers.”
I persisted. “You might have a record of such a request.”
He shook his head as he handed the feather back to me. His fingers brushed mine.
It was unexpected almost startling, but as he handed me the feather and our fingers touched, an image appeared at the end of the counter.
It was faint at first, then grew stronger. I tried to understand exactly what it was that I was seeing.
The image gradually became more clear. It was the taxidermist engaged in conversation with someone at the same time he stood across from me behind the counter, a wood tray the taxidermist had brought to the counter filled with blue feathers!
The somewhat short but powerful man who stood across from him picked up one of the feathers in the fingers of his left hand.
I didn’t understand the vision—I only knew that the taxidermist was lying. He knew who had purchased the blue feather along with several more. The image slowly faded. I turned back to Senor Petrelli.
“How many blue feathers did he purchase that day?” I inquired. “There were at least a dozen or more that you showed him.”
The taxidermist stared at me.
“How do you know that?” he demanded.
What could I tell him? That I ‘saw’ his encounter with the customer? What would he believe? I didn't know what I believed. I only knew what I had seen was as real as if the man who purchased those feathers was there.
“Are ye all right?” Munro asked.
I nodded.
But I wasn’t all right. I could hardly breathe as I looked at the heads displayed on the wall that seemed to stare back at me.
Munro thanked the taxidermist, then slipped his arm underneath mine and we departed. I was grateful for that strength, then for the biting cold air as we stepped out onto the cobbled sidewalk by the street.
“He’s lying,” I managed to say as my teeth began to chatter from the cold. “He sold more than two dozen of the feathers to a customer.”
“Aye, it was obvious he chose not to speak of it. Sir McQuarrie’s office is not far. It will be warm there.”
There was more, but I didn’t speak of it then as we walked to the corner, where he found a driver and we returned to the attorney’s office in Parliament Square.
I sat at the carved wood table before the warmth from the hearth in the library in Sir McQuarrie’s office.
The heat from the fire gradually warmed my hands and feet. The cup of hot coffee that Simon brought slowly warmed the rest of me. Almost all of me.
I had no way of knowing what I had experienced at the taxidermy shop any more that I understood the encounter as Munro and I left Jenners Department store. I only knew that it had happened...and had happened before as an old memory returned.
‘It is evil, the things ye see. Yer soul will be cursed unless ye turn away from it. Ye must turn away and repent...!’
I was four years old at the time, as near as anyone knew, as the nun stood over me, my gown stripped from my back, and the lash fell and fell again until it drew blood.
As if she could beat out of me the things I saw and knew that no one else could hear or see.
And so I had learned to survive, to hide the things I saw, and ignore the whispers that spoke to me.
The only thing I did understand was that I had to leave or I would die in that place. The things I 'saw' and 'heard,' the ability that had guided and protected me, no longer appeared.
I thought of that now, my fingers curling with the faint tingling that was there. What did it mean after all this time? How did I know the things that came to me now?
Even now, when I closed my eyes, I saw my friend once more. I didn't know what it meant. I only knew that she was there.
“He was lying. He had a customer who purchased at least two or three dozen of them. It was the man who murdered Dory.”
I didn’t expect Munro to believe me, and I saw the doubt in the expression on his face. Still, he didn’t scoff or berate me, nor did he laugh at me and call me a foolish chit.
Instead he watched me with that piercing blue gaze.
“How do ye know this?”
“I know what I saw at the market,” I replied. As for what I had seen at the department store and then the taxidermy shop...
That was difficult to explain. I didn’t even know how to explain it.
“So, are ye a witch then? Or perhaps the Cailleach?”
I had heard of the goddess that some believed in from the old ways. A hag was a more accurate description, used to frighten small children. But not all of them.
“If I was, I would have turned ye into the toad that ye are sometimes!”
“A toad?” he asked, with more than a little amusement.
Not that I expected him to believe me. I didn’t know if I believed it.
“I know wot I saw!” I argued. “The same as I saw...”
“Wot else did ye see lass?”
It was there, as easily as if I stood once more in the marketplace and the crows swirled overhead in that frenzied flight.
An omen some believed evil, I was told as a child, and I saw it again across the library—in images that slowly faded—that encounter at the Grassmarket.
I didn't understand it all those years before, only that it brought punishment as if the 'evil' could be beaten out of me.
I had buried it deep inside me, refusing to acknowledge the foreknowledge of things, the strange whispers that came as warnings.
Those moments when I felt the heat burn inside me.
All of it smothered down so that no one would call me evil.
It was there now, a whisper as if someone else stood in that room.
“It was the same person who attacked me at the marketplace,” I struggled to acknowledge something I already knew was true.
There was no laughter now.
“Are ye certain?”
I was, even though it made no sense.