Winifred Notty Comes to Ensor House

Twenty-two-year-old Winifred Notty arrives on the Yorkshire moors to take a new position as governess at Ensor House, and she doesn’t keep the reader in suspense about where this is going. Almost immediately, she announces that in three months everyone in the house will be dead.

Winnie is welcomed by the stern housekeeper, Mrs. Able, before meeting her employers. Mr. John Pounds is a wealthy mill owner with an obsessive interest in phrenology, convinced that personality can be determined by measuring people’s skulls. Mrs. Pounds, meanwhile, is deeply insecure about her appearance, puts belladonna drops in her eyes, and insists that Winnie never use corporal punishment on the children.

Those children are eight-year-old Andrew, the spoiled male heir being prepared for boarding school, and thirteen-year-old Drusilla, a vain, languid girl. Winnie immediately establishes that she isn’t going to be an ordinary governess. When Andrew tries to order her around, she tells him that “Fred” is the name of the demon living inside her.

Her odd behavior only escalates. She bites directly into a raw calf’s head in the kitchen, tells the children grotesque bedtime stories, and discovers a hidden garret behind an old hunting arras. During a walk, she uses a cuckoo’s habit of killing its nest-mates as an impromptu nature lesson before crushing a bird’s egg in her hand. When they encounter an injured deer, she brutally smashes its head with a rock in front of the horrified children and calls it mercy.

Yet Winnie and Mr. Pounds begin enjoying regular walks together. As Mrs. Pounds becomes increasingly paranoid, convinced that the servants are calling her ugly, Winnie becomes more interested in her husband.

Winnie’s Violent Past

Ensor House isn’t responsible for making Winnie dangerous. Her history makes it clear that she arrived that way.

As a baby, Winnie’s mother tried to throttle her before sending her to a foster mother who drugged infants with laudanum and strangled them. When Winnie was three, her mother stabbed her in the shoulder with a bread knife.

At sixteen, Winnie was bitten by a rabid man. Rather than panic, she discovered that she seemed incapable of fear. She killed him with a fourteen-pound clock weight, cut the bitten flesh out of her own arm, and cauterized the wound with a hot smoothing iron while laughing.

Her school years were similarly disastrous. At the Clergy Daughters’ School, Winnie hid a rotting crow beneath her bed, eventually chopped it up, and put it into a pudding served to the other girls. The mass poisoning got her expelled. Intriguingly, when she told the other students about her family, she claimed that her father was a man named John Pounds of Harley Street.

Back at Ensor House, Winnie continues testing boundaries. After being forced to spend a night in the dog kennel as punishment, she takes revenge on Andrew by luring him into the stall of an aggressive horse named Creole. Winnie bites the horse, causing it to panic and kick Andrew in the face. His front teeth are smashed and turn black.

Mrs. Pounds fires Winnie over the incident, but because Christmas is approaching, she orders her to remain at Ensor House through the holiday to chaperone Drusilla.

That gives Winnie plenty of time to become even more dangerous.

Winnie Discovers the Truth About Her Father

Mr. Pounds’ obsession with Winnie’s skull takes a startling turn when he measures her head and excitedly discovers that their skull dimensions are nearly identical. He declares them “phrenology twins.”

Winnie is thrilled for a much more personal reason. She possesses old letters written by her biological father to her mother, begging her to kill their illegitimate baby. Those letters bear a family boar crest. The growing evidence confirms what Winnie has long suspected: John Pounds is her biological father.

Her fixation intensifies. She even writes “Winifred Pounds” on a piece of paper and eats it.

At the same time, the house is being subjected to bizarre acts of vandalism. Portraits in the gallery are mutilated, with faces cut out and attached to different bodies, and seven pairs of painted eyes disappear. An innocent sixteen-year-old maid is blamed and sent away to a workhouse in Van Diemen’s Land.

Winnie is hardly concerned with the injustice. Her own crimes are about to become much worse.

Winnie Starts Killing

When Mrs. Fancey visits Ensor House with her infant son, William, Winnie takes the crying baby upstairs. After drinking laudanum and imagining the infant speaking arrogantly to her, Winnie uses her father’s straight razor to slit his throat.

Now she has a dead baby and a house full of people who expect her to return a living one.

Winnie races to a nearby farm, steals a labourer’s baby daughter, swaps the children’s clothing, places William’s corpse inside a doll box, and anonymously mails it to Benedictine nuns. She then gives the kidnapped girl to Mrs. Fancey.

Mrs. Fancey doesn’t realize it isn’t her child.

Winnie’s next victim is someone she initially likes. She becomes fixated on the pretty maid Sue Lamb, repeatedly summoning her to the schoolroom just to see her. But when Winnie tries to bite Sue’s earlobe, Sue recoils, calls her a deviant, and repeats some of the rumors circulating about her.

Winnie explodes. She smashes a glass against a globe and drives a shard into Sue’s neck. Mrs. Pounds unexpectedly enters moments later, and Winnie casually wipes her bloody hands on the hem of Mrs. Pounds’ dress without being noticed. She then drags Sue’s corpse into the secret garret.

Christmas Guests Arrive

Ensor House soon fills with holiday visitors, including the Fanceys, widowed Mrs. Manners and her daughter, Miss Manners, Marigold and her husband, an abrasive Dowager, and Mr. Art Fishal, who entertains everyone by unveiling and unwrapping an Egyptian mummy.

Winnie quietly prepares for something much more violent. She steals a silver letter opener, takes a heavy metal fox trap from the gamekeeper’s cottage, and later obtains weapons from the house’s armoury.

Drusilla is causing trouble of her own. Mrs. Pounds discovers that she has been exchanging romantic letters with the lecherous painter Mr. Gotthard Johnson, and burns them. Winnie later finds a letter revealing that the painter has actually rejected Drusilla because she bit him.

Winnie becomes suspicious of Drusilla after finding a drawing of birdsfoot trefoil, a flower associated with revenge. She worries that the girl may know about the murdered baby or Sue’s death and considers killing her.

When Winnie finally corners her, however, Drusilla’s secret is something else entirely.

“I know you love Father,” she tells her.

Winnie’s killing continues anyway. One night, she sees a figure in the darkened gallery and attacks it with the stolen letter opener, believing she’s stabbing the portrait of Grandfather Pounds in the eye. Instead, she has stabbed Fergus, the hall boy. Winnie drags him away, but he dies, and rumors of a murderous ghost begin spreading through the terrified household.

Christmas Morning Becomes a Massacre

On Christmas morning, Winnie finally goes to Mr. Pounds and reveals the truth. She tells him that she is his illegitimate daughter and presents him with the stolen painted eyes of their ancestors as a grotesque Christmas gift.

She expects some kind of recognition.

Instead, Mr. Pounds is disgusted by her and orders her to leave Ensor House.

Winnie responds by killing almost everyone in it.

The massacre is chaotic and inventive. She chops off Miss Manners’ hand with a kitchen cleaver and attacks Mrs. Manners with her mourning brooch pin. Mr. Fancey is strangled with a bootlace, while the Dowager’s head is crushed with her own cherub-headed cane. Winnie impales Art Fishal with a mounted stag skull and pushes Marigold’s husband into the fireplace.

In the kitchen, she force-feeds the cook and kitchen maid poisonous salt of sorrel. A valet, lady’s maid, and coachman are bludgeoned with a heavy scrubbing stone. Winnie then arms herself with a crossbow.

Andrew, whose torment began almost as soon as Winnie arrived, is shot through the forehead. Mrs. Pounds is shot as well. Mrs. Fancey—the woman unknowingly raising the stolen baby—is strangled with Winnie’s bare hands. Mrs. Able has her face smashed in with a brass bed warmer. A fleeing French nurse trips over one of the corpses and falls over the banister, breaking her neck.

Eventually Mr. Pounds steps into the metal fox trap Winnie stole earlier. Trapped and helpless, he becomes the final target of the daughter he refused to acknowledge.

But Winnie doesn’t kill him alone.

Drusilla joins her.

Winnie shoots Mr. Pounds with the crossbow, and Drusilla drives a rapier through her father’s heart. The two then continue through the house together, killing the remaining servants, including a maid in the Great Hall and the butler as he hangs from the crystal chandelier.

By the end, Winnie’s opening promise has essentially come true. Ensor House has become a house of corpses.

Drusilla Betrays Winnie

For the next twelve days, Winnie and Drusilla remain inside Ensor House with the dead.

They eat whatever food remains, pillage the rooms, and allow horses to wander freely through the halls as the bodies decay around them. For a brief period, the two behave almost as though the bloodbath has liberated them from every rule that previously governed the house.

Then the police arrive.

Winnie discovers too late that Drusilla has no intention of sharing responsibility for what they’ve done.

Drusilla ties her own wrists to an oven handle and covers herself with cake and blood, transforming herself into what appears to be another traumatized survivor of Winnie’s rampage. When the authorities enter, Drusilla gives them a simple explanation:

Winnie did everything.

“She killed them. She killed them all.”

Drusilla maintains the story and eventually testifies against her.

Winnie is arrested, tried, and convicted of the Ensor House murders. Her crimes turn her execution into a public spectacle, with approximately 30,000 people gathering to watch her die.

Even facing the gallows, Winnie shows no remorse. She refuses to wear the executioner’s white hood because she wants to be able to see what happens.

Winifred Notty is hanged.

Afterward, a plaster cast is made of her head. In keeping with the macabre humor that has followed Winnie through her entire story, her final observation isn’t about the murders, Drusilla’s betrayal, or even her own death.

She’s annoyed that the cast makes her chin look too large.