Winter at the Taxidermist's

• Chapter 1 The First Frost
• Chapter 2 Arsenic and Sawdust
• Chapter 3 The Patriarch's Needle
• Chapter 4 Whiteout on Market Street
• Chapter 5 Glass Eyes in the Dark
• Chapter 6 Flesh and Wire
• Chapter 7 The Ledger of 1921
• Chapter 8 Whispers in the Drying Room
• Chapter 9 The Frozen Stag
• Chapter 10 Sins Stitched Beneath the Fur
• Chapter 11 A Drift Against the Door
• Chapter 12 Three Generations of Silence
• Chapter 13 The Tannery Cellar
• Chapter 14 Embers in the Hearth
• Chapter 15 Secrets in the Salt
• Chapter 16 A Feathered Confession
• Chapter 17 The Storm Breaks In
• Chapter 18 Unclaimed Mounts
• Chapter 19 Blood on the Workbench
• Chapter 20 What the Snow Concealed
• Chapter 21 The Art of Preservation
• Chapter 22 Fractured Forms
• Chapter 23 The Thaw Underground
• Chapter 24 The Final Stitch
• Chapter 25 Melting Ice
• Chapter 26 Spring Over the Workshop

The cold did not arrive in Blackwood with the gentle grace of a changing season; it struck like a blunt iron spade against the earth. By late afternoon, the wind coming off the northern ridges had turned the slate roofs of Market Street into slick, dark mirrors. In the window of Kroeger & Sons: Naturalists & Taxidermists, the glass had already begun to flower with thick, crystalline ferns of frost, obscuring the display within. Behind that glass stood a massive, eighty-pound timber wolf, its plaster tongue painted a glossy crimson, forever snarling at a row of empty storefronts across the cobbled street.

Inside the shop, the air carried a peculiar, unchanging chemistry. It was a dense cocktail of methylated spirits, dry sawdust, alum, and the faint, copper tang of cold blood. To anyone else, the smell was a warning of mortality; to the Kroegers, it was simply the smell of home.

Silas Kroeger, the patriarch of the family, stood at the high oak counter with a bone-handled scalpel held lightly between his thick, scarred fingers. At seventy-two, his eyes were the color of stagnant river water, but they remained sharp enough to split a hair. Before him lay a male ring-necked pheasant, its plumage a brilliant, tragic burst of copper and emerald against the dark wood of the workbench. The bird’s eyes had already been removed, replaced by two small, temporary plugs of cotton wool.

"The frost is getting into the glue, Albert," Silas said, his voice like stones grinding together in a deep well. He did not look up from the bird. "The hide on this cock-pheasant is tightening up too fast. If the skin shrinks before I get the wires through the tarsi, the feet will shrivel like burnt paper."

His son, Albert, was forty-five and possessed the perpetually stooped shoulders of a man who had spent his youth carrying things too heavy for him. He was standing near the large cast-iron stove in the corner, vigorously stirring a pot of animal glue that smelled strongly of boiled hooves and vinegar. He wiped his brow with a gray rag, though the room was far from warm.

"The coal delivery didn't come, Father," Albert said, his tone flat with the exhaustion of a man who spent his days balancing ledgers that never quite added up. "The man at the yard said the trains are stalled up at the pass. If we don't get a cart down by Friday, we'll be burning the scrap pine from the workshop floor."

Silas made a short, derisive sound in his throat. "We survived the winter of ninety-six on nothing but birch bark and old newspapers, and we kept the shop open. If the coal doesn't come, you wear another waistcoat. But the specimens cannot freeze. If the tissue freezes before the salt-and-alum bath takes hold, the hair-slip will ruin every hide we have in the cellar. Do you want to explain to Lord Hargreave why his pointer’s ears have gone bald?"

Albert did not reply. He knew better than to argue with the myth of ninety-six, a winter his father invoked whenever the realities of 1925 became too difficult to face. Instead, Albert looked toward the back of the shop, where his own son, James, was working in the shadows.

James was twenty-four, born into the twilight of the Great War and the dawn of a decade that seemed to have no use for the stiff, Victorian monuments his grandfather created. While Silas stuffed beasts to look as though they were leaping into battle, and Albert prepared them to look like respectable decorations for a library, James preferred the quiet precision of skeletal reconstruction. Currently, James was using a pair of brass tweezers to arrange the delicate, translucent ribs of a common barn owl on a sheet of black velvet.

"The wind is coming from the east now," James said, his voice quiet but clear. "The salt marshes will be frozen by morning. If the bay freezes over, the wildfowlers won't be bringing in any more geese. We won't have any fresh work until the spring."

"Then we work on the backlog," Silas declared, his scalpel slicing through the pheasant's skin along the breastbone with the practiced ease of a man who had performed the incision ten thousand times. "We have the badger in the salt bin. We have the two marsh harriers that the schoolmaster brought in three weeks ago. And we have the ledger."

At the mention of the ledger, a brief, uneasy silence fell over the workshop. The only sound was the bubbling of the glue pot and the rhythmic shreep-shreep of the wind rattling the loose sash of the front window.

The ledger was not the standard business book that Albert kept near the till, with its neat columns of debits and credits, its record of glass eyes purchased from Birmingham and excelsior wool bought by the bale. The ledger Silas referred to was a thick, calfskin volume bound in iron clasps, kept in the small, locked safe beneath the floorboards of the drying room. It was a record of things that had no names, of transactions made in the dead of night when the streetlamps were extinguished to save the town's coal supply.

"The ledger is full enough," Albert muttered, turning back to the stove. "We don't need to be looking at it."

"The ledger is what keeps the roof over your head, Albert," Silas said, his fingers working under the pheasant’s skin, gently separating the fat and connective tissue from the delicate pelt. "Without the special commissions, we’d have been bankrupt when the taxidermy fashion turned to those dreadful papier-mâché fish the tourists buy in London. A real naturalist doesn't pick and choose what he preserves. He preserves what is brought to him."

"There's a difference between a naturalist and a man who buries secrets in plaster," James said, not looking up from his owl ribs.

Silas stopped his knife. He raised his head, his gray eyes fixing on his grandson with a cold, piercing intensity. "You have your grandmother’s mouth, James. Too much education and not enough grease on your apron. If you think the world is clean, you haven't been paying attention. Every beast that comes through that door died because something else wanted it dead. We simply make the end of it look respectable."

He turned back to the bird, his thumb pushing the skull through the neck skin to expose the braincase. With a small pair of curved scissors, he snipped the spinal cord and cleared the skull cavity with a small, spoon-like scraper.

"James," Albert said quickly, seeking to defuse the rising tension. "Go down to the cellar and bring up another jar of the arsenic paste. The dry preservative we mixed last week is too chalky."

James looked at his father, seeing the familiar line of worry etched deep between Albert's eyebrows. It was the look Albert wore whenever Silas began to speak of the old days, or worse, when Silas suggested that James should begin learning the "other" side of the family trade.

"I'll go," James said. He laid his tweezers down on the velvet board, ensuring the owl's delicate clavicle was perfectly aligned before he stood.

The cellar door was located at the back of the workshop, hidden behind a heavy curtain of green wool that smelled of camphor and wet dog. Beyond the door, a flight of steep, narrow stone steps led down into the earth. The air here was even colder than in the shop, but it was a dead, heavy cold that did not move.

James took a small tin lantern from a hook on the wall, struck a match, and watched the yellow flame flicker against the damp stone. As he descended, the smell of the shop changed. Down here, the chemical odors were sharper, dominated by the sour, turnip-like stench of fermenting hides in the tanning vats and the heavy, sweetish smell of animal fat being rendered in the corner boiler.

The cellar was divided into three rooms. The first was the wet room, where three large wooden vats held the skins of foxes, otters, and deer soaking in salt, alum, and sulfuric acid. The second was the dry room, lined with wooden racks where pelts hung like empty, inside-out coats, their leather white and stiff.

The third room was the smallest, located behind a low arch of red brick that had once been part of an old bakery oven. This was the tannery cellar, though it had not been used for commercial tanning in thirty years. Now, it was where they kept the chemicals—the massive carboys of nitric acid, the jars of corrosive sublimate, and the gray earthenware crocks of white arsenic.

James walked to the wooden shelves, his lantern casting long, grotesque shadows of deer antlers and stuffed herons against the whitewashed brick. He found the jar of arsenic paste, its red label bearing a skull and crossbones alongside the name of a chemist in Leeds who had been dead since the Queen's jubilee.

As he reached for the jar, his foot struck something hard on the floor. It was a loose flagstone, one that sat slightly higher than the others. He knew what lay beneath it. It wasn't coal, and it wasn't the winter store of potatoes.

James knelt, setting the lantern on the damp floor. He reached out and touched the edge of the stone. It was cold, colder than the surrounding earth, as if the soil beneath were frozen solid. He had seen his grandfather down here three nights ago, well past midnight, when the rest of the house was asleep. Silas had been carrying a spade and a small, heavy wooden box wrapped in oilcloth.

He hadn't asked his grandfather about it. In the Kroeger house, you did not ask questions about what happened after the shutters were barred. You did not ask why certain crates arrived from the docks at three in the morning, or why some mounts were delivered to customers through the back alley under the cover of a carriage leather.

A floorboard creaked overhead. James snapped his hand back, stood up quickly, and grabbed the arsenic jar. The heavy, thick glass was cold in his palm. He took a deep breath, trying to dispel the feeling of claustrophobia that always crept over him in the lower cellar, and made his way back up the stone stairs.

When he returned to the workshop, the atmosphere had shifted. The front door had been opened, and a draft of freezing air had swept through the room, scattering a pile of wood shavings across the floor.

Standing in the doorway was a man wrapped in a heavy wool coat with a collar of dark otter fur. His boots were caked with grey slush, and his face was red from the wind. In his arms, he held a long, narrow bundle wrapped in a coarse jute sack.

"Mr. Kroeger," the man said, his breath forming a thick plume of steam in the shop's cold air. He was Thomas Finch, a gamekeeper from the Blackwood estate three miles north. He looked nervous, his eyes darting from Silas to the rows of stuffed birds on the shelves behind him.

"You're late, Thomas," Silas said, not looking up from his pheasant. "The frost is in. If you've brought me something that’s been sitting in a ditch for two days, you can take it back to the crows."

"It's not from a ditch, Mr. Kroeger," Finch said, stepping inside and closing the door behind him with a heavy thud. He set the bundle down on the long counter, near the pheasant. "It was taken this morning. Up by the high tarn."

The gamekeeper carefully peeled back the wet jute. Inside lay a magnificent specimen of a golden eagle. Its feathers were a rich, dark brown, with the characteristic golden-buff sheen on its nape still bright and undamaged. Its talons, thick as iron spikes, were curled into tight, yellow fists.

"A female," Silas murmured, his interest suddenly piqued. He laid down his scalpel and approached the bird, his old hands moving over the feathers with a strange, almost reverent tenderness. He lifted a wing, examining the underside, then checked the eyes. "Cleanly shot. No tearing of the breast. Who did this?"

"Lord Hargreave's nephew," Finch said, lowering his voice. "He’s down from Oxford for the shooting. He didn't know the bird was protected under the new county act. If the warden finds out..."

"The warden doesn't come here," Silas interrupted, his thumb tracing the eagle's sharp, curved beak. "Not when the snow is this deep. But this is a difficult mount, Finch. The wingspan is over six feet. To do it justice, I'll need three weeks, a custom pine armature, and two pounds of tow."

"His Lordship doesn't want it mounted for his hall," Finch said, looking toward the curtained doorway that led to the family's living quarters. He leaned in closer to Silas. "He wants it... preserved. Private-like. He said you'd know what to do with the skin. He doesn't want any glass eyes in it. Just the pelt, cured and packed in a cedar chest."

Silas stared at the gamekeeper for a long moment. "A study skin? For a bird of this size? That’s a waste of a magnificent specimen. It should be set on an oak branch, with a mountain hare in its talons. It should look alive."

"His Lordship was very specific," Finch repeated, his tone hardening slightly. "He said you have a way of keeping things quiet. He'll pay thirty shillings. Ten now, and twenty when the chest is delivered to the back gate of the hall."

He reached into his pocket and produced two silver crown pieces, laying them on the damp wood of the counter. They rang with a sharp, clear chime that seemed to linger in the cold air of the shop.

Albert stepped forward, his eyes fixed on the silver. Thirty shillings was more than they had made in the last three weeks combined. It would pay for the coal, if the train ever came, and it would cover the tax bill due at the end of the month.

"We can do it, Thomas," Albert said quickly, before his father could object. "We'll have the skin ready by the turn of the month. Tell His Lordship it will be handled with the utmost discretion."

Finch looked relieved. He nodded, pulled his cap down over his ears, and turned back to the door. "Good day to you then, Mr. Kroeger. Don't keep it on the table too long. The frost is coming hard tonight, and the roads will be closed by dark."

With that, the gamekeeper vanished into the gray twilight, the bell above the door giving a single, mournful tinkle as he shut it behind him.

Silas did not touch the silver. He stood looking down at the dead eagle, his face unreadable in the gathering gloom.

"Discretion," Silas whispered, the word tasting like ashes in his mouth. "They kill the wild things, and then they pay us to make it look as though they never existed. That's not taxidermy, Albert. That's cleaning up after the gentry."

"It's thirty shillings, Father," Albert said, picking up the silver coins and slipping them into his waistcoat pocket. "And we need the money. James, get the bird down to the cellar. We'll start the skinning tomorrow."

James stepped forward and lifted the eagle. It was surprisingly light for its size, its bones hollow and designed for the high currents of the mountains, but to James, it felt as heavy as lead. As he carried it toward the cellar door, he looked back at his grandfather.

Silas had picked up his scalpel again, but he wasn't working. He was staring out the frost-rimed window, his reflection lost in the gray ice that was slowly consuming the glass. The first frost of winter had settled over Blackwood, and with it, the long, dark season of their silence had begun.

The cellar stairs did not so much descend as they plunged, dropping straight down into the cold belly of the building where the earth’s damp breath overcame the meager warmth of the shop above. James carried the golden eagle with a practiced, loose-limbed gait, his fingers buried deep in the thick plumage of the breast to avoid disturbing the alignment of the wing coverts. Each step was a familiar hazard; the third riser from the top was split down the grain, and the sixth always wept a thin trickle of greasy water whenever the street gutters above froze and thawed.

He laid the great bird upon the zinc-topped scraping table in the wet room. Under the flickering glow of the tin lantern, the eagle’s feathers seemed to lose their brilliant mountain sheen, taking on the dull, leaden hue of the cellar walls. It was a magnificent creature, designed for the vast, clean drafts of the high crags, now reduced to a lump of cold meat waiting for the knife in a room that smelled of stale vinegar and decayed fat.

James reached for the gray earthenware crock that sat on the corner shelf, its surface covered in a fine patina of white dust that had settled from the ceiling boards. This was the arsenic paste, the family’s silent partner for three generations. He pried off the heavy stoneware lid with his thumb. Inside, the paste was thick, dull white, and smelled faintly of garlic—a garlic that had gone bad in an iron pot.

"Don't go sparing it on the skull," Albert’s voice drifted down from the top of the stairs, followed by the heavy, rhythmic thud of his boots. He descended slowly, carrying a clean wooden tray filled with fresh pine sawdust and a bundle of dry tow. "If the braincase isn't coated clean to the beak, the beetles will find it before the winter is out. His Lordship might want a study skin, but he won't want a bag of feathers and bone-dust by spring."

"I know how to cure a skull, Father," James said, his voice flat. He took up a small, stiff-bristled brush from the tool rack. "I've done enough of them."

"You've done thrushes and magpies," Albert said, setting the tray down on the scrap table with a hollow clatter. He stood over the eagle, his hands tucked deep into his apron pockets for warmth. "An eagle is different. The skin of the head is tight, like cured leather, and the orbital bones are deep. You have to scrape every scrap of fat from the auditory canals, or the grease will seep through the crown and ruin the gold of the nape."

Albert reached out and touched the bird's yellow leg, his thumb tracing the thick, scaly skin of the tarsus. "A fine bird. A shame to skin it for a drawer. If Silas had his way, this would be set on a simulated rock of plaster and peat, looking down on a stuffed hare with its wings half-spread. He likes the drama of it. He likes the beast to look as though it’s about to scream."

"The world doesn't want screaming beasts anymore," James said, dipping the brush into the white paste. "They want things neat. They want specimens they can put in a cabinet and forget about."

"His Lordship doesn't want to forget about this one," Albert muttered, his eyes wandering toward the dark archway of the old bakery oven. "He wants it put where the game warden won't see it. That's what thirty shillings buys you in these parts—not our skill with the wire and the thread, but our ability to hold our tongues when the law comes looking for a missing bird."

He turned back to the stairs, his shoulders slumping under his heavy waistcoat. "Get the skin off tonight, James. If we leave it until tomorrow, the fat will start to turn, and the skin around the vent will green. I'll be upstairs checking the ledger before the fire goes out."

James watched his father disappear up the steps, the door closing behind him with a soft, final click that cut off the faint murmur of the street outside. Left alone, the silence of the cellar grew dense, broken only by the steady, slow drip of water from the condensation pipe in the corner.

He took up his scalpel, the steel cold against his thumb. He began the long, delicate incision along the breastbone, working his way down from the throat to the vent. The skin of the eagle was surprisingly tough, resisting the blade with a dry, papery slide before yielding. As the cut opened, the smell of the bird—wild, clean, and smelling of high wind—was instantly replaced by the sharp, metallic tang of cold blood and the greasy odor of subcutaneous fat.

With his left hand, James gently peeled back the skin, using his thumb to separate the connective tissue from the muscle beneath. With his right, he dusted the raw flesh with white sawdust from the tray. The sawdust was their shield; it absorbed the blood and fat before they could stain the pristine feathers of the breast, binding the moisture into gray, heavy clumps that rolled off the skin like crumbs of bread.

Taxidermy was a trade of constant negotiation between preservation and decay, a slow battle fought with dust and salt. The arsenic was the final arbiter. It was a terrible, quiet poison, one that worked its way into the fingernails of every Kroeger who had ever held a brush. Silas’s hands were permanently stained a yellowish-gray at the cuticles, his nails thick and split from fifty years of handling the white powder. The old man claimed he could taste the arsenic in his tea, a sweet, metallic flavor that had become as natural to him as the salt in his bread.

James worked methodically, his mind drifting as his fingers performed the familiar choreography of the skinning. He cleared the thighs, snapping the femur bones with a clean, sharp crack of his pliers, leaving the lower legs attached to the skin. He worked his way up the back, his fingers sliding under the skin to release the wings at the shoulder joints.

The most difficult part was the head. The skin of an eagle’s skull must be turned inside out, pulled down over the bone like a tight stocking, until the eyes and the brain cavity are exposed. James worked with minute, careful cuts, freeing the delicate blue membrane of the eyelids without nicking the outer skin.

As he cleared the skull, he exposed the large, empty eye sockets, two deep, white basins that had once held the keenest sight in the valley. He cleaned the braincase with his scraper, removing the soft, gray matter and replacing it with a firm plug of tow soaked in the arsenic paste. He painted the white paste into every crevice of the skull, over the jaw joint, and down into the narrow channels of the nostrils.

The paste was a recipe Silas had brought from Germany in his youth—a mixture of white arsenic, soft soap, camphor, and potassium carbonate, boiled down in a copper kettle until it reached the consistency of thick lard. It was a lethal concoction, but nothing else worked as well. It kept the museum beetles at bay; it kept the mold from taking hold in the damp winters of the north; and it preserved the work of Kroeger & Sons long after the hands that made them had returned to the earth.

James finished the skull, turning the head skin right side out again with a gentle, rolling motion of his thumbs. He smoothed the feathers of the crown back into place, aligning the golden-brown hackles with the point of his needle. The bird’s face looked strangely flat without its eyes, the empty sockets filled only with white cotton wool that showed through the lids like cataracts.

He laid the skin flat on the zinc table, its underside showing the clean, white leather of the hide, dusted with arsenic and pine shavings. It looked like an empty coat, a hollow garment that had once flown over the peaks of the high tarn.

As he reached for the rag to wipe his hands, his eyes fell once more upon the loose flagstone under the red brick arch.

The lantern’s flame was dying, the oil low in the reservoir, casting long, sputtering shadows that seemed to jump across the floorboards. James stood still, his breath catching in his throat. In the silence of the cellar, he could hear the faint, muffled sound of his grandfather’s boots moving across the floorboards directly above him—a slow, deliberate pacing that went from the counter to the front window and back again.

He knew what his grandfather kept in the safe beneath the floorboards of the drying room. It was not just the ledger of their late-night commissions, but the receipts for things that had no business being in a naturalist’s shop. There were letters from men in Liverpool who dealt in things that came off the West African steamers, and small, velvet-lined boxes that arrived under the label of "scientific apparatus" but contained nothing but dry, brown powder that smelled of nothing at all.

James walked to the brick archway, his boots making no sound on the damp earth. He knelt by the loose stone, his fingers tracing the cold, rough edge of the slate. He knew he shouldn't touch it. Silas had a way of knowing when things had been moved, an old man’s instinct for the slight alteration of his domain. A single grain of sawdust out of place, a tool laid down at the wrong angle on the bench, and Silas would know.

But the curiosity was a cold weight in James’s chest, heavier than the eagle’s skin, more persistent than the smell of the arsenic.

He slid his fingers under the lip of the stone and lifted. The slate was heavy, damp with the moisture of the cellar floor, its underside gray with mold. Beneath it lay a shallow, brick-lined cavity, no larger than a boot box.

Inside the cavity was the wooden box he had seen Silas carrying three nights ago. It was made of dark mahogany, its corners reinforced with brass brackets that had turned green with corrosion. The box was wrapped tightly in a piece of oiled canvas, secured with a length of tarred twine.

James reached in and touched the canvas. It was cold and greasy to the touch. He hesitated, his thumb hovering over the knot of the twine.

Above him, the floorboards creaked sharply. A heavy object—perhaps a chair being moved, or a coal scuttle being set down—thudded against the floor.

James quickly let go of the canvas, lowered the slate flagstone back into its recess, and stood up. He wiped his hands on his apron, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He snatched up the arsenic jar, his fingers trembling slightly as he screwed the stoneware lid back onto the crock.

He took the eagle’s skin, folded it carefully into the wooden tray, and covered it with a clean sheet of gray blotting paper. He would leave it to dry in the cellar overnight; the air was cold enough to keep the fat from running, and the arsenic would begin its silent work of preservation before the morning light reached the street above.

As he climbed the dark stairs, carrying the lantern before him, James felt the white dust of the arsenic clinging to his skin, a fine, invisible glove that tasted of garlic and secrets, binding him to the shop, to his father, and to the old man who waited for him in the shadows of the room above.