The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

For the twentieth time, Jerome reviewed the invitation that had brought him, more than prompt, to the parlor in the doctor’s obscure manor house. Mr. Kennelworth, Brief interview granted, ten minutes only, be prompt. Signed, Lambshead. It appeared to be his actual signature, and not a note by some assistant.

The stooped housekeeper, who no doubt had been with Lambshead for decades, had guided him here to sit on a velvet-covered wingback chair and wait. The loudly ticking clock sitting at the center of the marble mantelpiece over the fireplace now showed that Lambshead was three minutes late. Would his ten-minute interview be reduced to seven minutes?

Not that sitting in the parlor wouldn’t have been fascinating in itself, if he weren’t so anxious. He’d arrived at the village the day before, to prevent any mishaps with the train, and spent the night in one of those little country inns with a decrepit public house in front and sparse rooms to let upstairs. The included breakfast had been greasy and now sat in his belly like lead. The village had exactly one taxi, whose driver was also the proprietor at the inn. Jerome had had to practically bribe him to drive him out here. He needed that interview, if for no other reason than to make sure the newspaper reimbursed him for his expenses.

But all he could do was wait. Breakfast gurgled at him. Perhaps he ought to review the questions he hoped to ask the doctor. Doctor Lambshead, what of your sudden interest in occult experimentation? Is it true the Royal Academy has censured you over the debate about the veracity of certain claims made regarding your recent expedition to Ecuador?

He ought to be making notes, so that his readers would understand what he was seeing. The parlor was filled with curios of the doctor’s travels, glass-fronted cabinets displayed a bewildering variety of artifacts: elongated clay vases as thin as a goose’s neck; squat, mud-colored jars, stopped with wax, containing who knew what horrors, wide baskets woven with grass in a pattern so complicated his eyes blurred. Weapons hung on the walls: spears, pikes, three-bladed daggers, swords as long as a man. Taxidermied creatures of the unlikeliest forms: a beaver that seemed to have merged with a lizard, a turkey colored scarlet.

The tapestry of a unicorn hanging in the center of one wall amid a swarm of serious-visaged portraits seemed almost ordinary—every country manor had at least one wall containing a mass of darkened pictures and a faded, moth-bitten Flemish unicorn tapestry. The beast in this one seemed a bit thin and constipated, gazing over a pasture of frayed flowers.

Jerome was sure that if he got up to pace, the eyes in the portraits would follow him, back and forth.

When he heard footsteps outside the parlor, he stood eagerly to greet the approaching doctor, and frowned when the doors opened and a young woman appeared from the vestibule. She stopped and stared at him, her eyes narrowed and predatory.

“Who are you?” they both said.

She wore smart shoes, a purplish skirt and suit jacket, and a short fur stole—fake, no doubt. A pillbox hat sat on dark hair that curled fashionably above her shoulders. She had a string of pearls, brown gloves, and carried a little leather-bound notebook and a pencil. He pegged her—a lady reporter. A rival.

In the same moment, she seemed to make the same judgment about him. Her jaw set, and her mouth pressed in a thin line.

“All right. Who are you with?” she said. Her accent was brash, American. An American lady reporter—even worse.

“Who are you with?” Jerome answered.

“I asked you first.”

“It doesn’t matter, I got here first, and I have an exclusive interview with the doctor.”

“I have the exclusive interview. You’ve made a mistake.”

He blinked, taken aback, then held out the note, which he’d crushed in his hands. Chagrined, he tried to smooth it out, but she took it from him before he could succeed. Her brow creased as she read it, then she shoved it back to him and reached into her handbag for a very similar slip of paper, and Jerome’s heart sank. She offered it to him, and he read: brief interview granted, ten minutes only, for the exact same time. The exact same signature decorated the bottom of the page.

His spectacular opportunity was seeming less so by the moment.

“So the professor made a mistake and booked us both for exclusive interviews at the same time,” she said.

“Evidently.”

James A. Owen’s depiction of the medieval tapestry from Lambshead’s collection, the original so badly burned in the cabinet fire that only the fringe remains (now on display in the International Fabric Museum, Helsinki, Finland).