Their papier-mâché claws air-dance as she walks closer, and when she stops to watch them, they pretend to hump one another as they blow into a popular John William Hobbs tune, a little chorus that is meant to be sung softly, gently, so as to create irony, but the boys eschew irony for vulgarity and belt it out loud at Rebecca in a surprisingly taut six-part harmony:

Phyllis is my only joy,

Faithless as the winds and seas;

Sometimes forward, sometimes coy,

Yet she never fails to please,

Yet she never fails to please.

The Brontës, confused by the dancing aardvarks, start barking and move, long-legged, round the troupe, whining at their humping with glistening eyes, waffing the boys’ legs with their feather-tails, but Rebecca Ostlet barely registers the boys as she walks through them, ignoring the way they rub their floppy snouts on her bustle and train, oinking Phyllis! Phyllis! like idiot pigs as she lifts it.

She steps one of her small woman-feet onto Titus Downing’s stoop, under the buck heads, then the other, and enters the taxidermy shop.

The man himself is in absentia. Rebecca genially skims Downing’s stuffed geese and stuffed pheasants, his ducks and dogs, all his stuffed fish and stuffed rabbits, a collection of foxes, and is particularly taken with a shiny taupe vixen with an elegant, upturned snout that stands in the center of Downing’s shopwindow.

The tods have been arranged so they appear to protect her, and the arrangement, Rebecca thinks, is absurd. The vixen, known for her cunning, is perfectly capable of taking care of herself and her brood, she needs not the protection of the rather skittish-looking tods—pray, the way Downing has them arranged, it rather looks like an ambush, she thinks—and while the shop fills and refills with Gentlemen all quickly moving past the other taxidermied creatures to make for the aardvark, Rebecca Ostlet, alone with the vixen, puts her hand on its soft head, admiring the look on its face, the eyes half-slanted and competent, as though she has been recently nursing.

Rebecca can count on one hand the number of times she and Richard actually completed the act of love.

“I am so much older, darling,” he would explain when they lay together, or it was difficult for him to quiet his mind from his work, he would say, and he understood if she was disappointed in him, and had to confess that he did not know what she needed but explained that he, for one, needed rather little, which is why the grief she experienced when she learned of his death was compounded.

For although Richard had left her a sizeable income, more than enough to last for a lifetime, it was appearing likely that she, closing fast in on thirty, would not have a child. And how many wasted, lonely months had she spent on Gloucester Walk, walking her dogs in either Holland or Hyde, waiting for Richard to return from his trips, and each time he returned, she could usually get just one night out of him before he fell back into diffidence, self-pity, and it was a peculiar, melancholic side of him that she did not expect when they married, as around everyone and everything else, the man was so abundantly cheerful, so giving, and it was less than a year into her new marriage that Rebecca realized her mistake.