He opened the meeting with a round of sherry and a short explication of the beetle collection. The Society members stood alongside the mahogany table while Edmund passed some of his samples around on cuts of paper. The men brought the specimens close to their faces for inspection, or moved the beetles up and down on their palms as if testing whether an insect’s heft might further reveal its aspect.
“This one is from southeast Africa, from the family Scarabaeidae,” Edmund said, holding up a large beetle with a glossy emerald-coloured shell. “It’s known to feed on flowers.” He handed the specimen to Norvill Farrington who had come to stand beside him. He saw now that Norvill was taller than him by six or seven inches, and dressed more formally than the evening demanded, as if he’d come from somewhere other than his own house.
Norvill took the beetle from Edmund. “That one was brought back by Nicholson last month,” Edmund added. “He has about twenty of them.”
“I’ve seen one of his already,” Norvill replied, turning back to the table. “He brought it to lunch in a snuff box.” Norvill angled the cut of paper toward the lamplight to better gauge the beetle’s luminescence. “This one’s antennae are quite distinct—”
The door at the back of the parlour swung open and Norvill paused as Mrs. Chester strode toward the gathering in a bustled blue dress. She was carrying her hat in a gloved hand as if she’d just returned home, and her dark hair glossed in the candlelight. Edmund kissed his young wife’s cheek, and then responded to Norvill’s comment about the antennae. “They’re allegedly for fighting over the females.”
Charlotte nodded at the assembled men, taking in each of their faces quickly; she knew all but one of them. “Gentlemen,” she said as she curtseyed. She squeezed Edmund’s arm. “I’ve come to say good night.” Norvill stepped back to let her by and she glanced down at the beetle in his hand, said, “It’s a pity it’s so delicate; it would make a very interesting piece of jewellery.”
In the end it was Norvill who remembered Charlotte’s comment about the beetle and who, three years later when the collections were first opened to the public, suggested that Edmund commemorate the event by presenting his wife with a bracelet featuring the glass-encased scarab. Charlotte mentioned this in her diary — her surprise that Norvill would have paid such attention to a trifling comment on the night they first met.
It is just past one o’clock when Jane comes back from lunch. She is thinking about Charlotte’s bracelet as she crosses the marble floor of the natural history hall, and we traipse behind her through the crowds who’ve come for the last day of public exhibition: a woman in a beaded shirt shaking her son’s arm for rapping the shell of the giant tortoise, a young couple peering into a cabinet of sea stars. When Jane reaches the wrought-iron stairwell that curves up to the first-floor gallery she takes the steps two at a time, then follows the narrow spiral up again to the galleries on the second floor, thinking about Gareth’s earlier words. Sitting on the bench outside the Chester, they had come back to her — his comment about the feliform hare, the cat — rabbit hybrid that was part of a collection of early Victorian hoaxes, an anatomical impossibility stitched together by a taxidermist and passed off for almost a year as a new species. She saw Gareth holding it in its spirit jar and saying, “I might keep this chap” as the cat spun slowly around. It hadn’t occurred to Jane when he said it, or in the stress of the weeks before, that certain things might not go to auction, those bits and pieces of a collection with less determinable value. Packing the containers of her lunch bag back up it had come to her with a jolt: the Chester family archives and the dozen or so personal objects associated with Edmund and Charlotte would be exactly the type to fall through the cracks. If Edmund Chester’s museum — his life’s work — was no longer supportable, who would care about his walking stick and ivory letter opener, Charlotte’s pearl hair combs or her scarab bracelet?
Charlotte’s bracelet is on display in a small room that was once their maid’s quarters. There are five galleries on the second floor: the zoological specimens are in the centre gallery, with the scientific, botanical, ceramic and print galleries in satellite rooms. The Chester cabinet is in an alcove off the print gallery. When Jane walks through the main archway she finds a half-dozen people looking at the wall of early Victorian photographs and a man studying the explorer Fitzgerald’s hand-drawn map of the Kalahari Basin but no one at the Chester cabinet, so she takes out her key and unlocks its glass door.
The Chester family collection wasn’t properly archived when Jane was hired, even though Gareth had been wanting a display for years and had been setting aside any relevant documents or artifacts he’d come across since he was brought on as the museum’s director. The cabinet now contains some five shelves of the family’s belongings including a handwritten copy of one of Edmund’s Society speeches, his open ledger, an invitation to the museum’s first public exhibit, yellowed newspaper clippings and old photographs of early displays. On the middle shelf are two facsimile pages of Charlotte’s diary in which she describes the delivery of a pair of mammoth tusks, as well as a sketch she made of the natural history hall in the 1880s and a caricature of Edmund carrying a whale on his back. Her hand-held mirror and pearl hair combs are nestled on the lowest shelf next to a square of needlework, two smelling-salts bottles, a jet brooch and the scarab bracelet — the beetle mounted in an overlarge bauble of glass and braced like a cameo on a wide velvet band.
There is no official history of the Chester Museum, but Jane, as the compiler of the Chester family’s archives, has sifted through a number of descriptions of the museum’s early years. Most of the details come from Edmund’s letters, although Charlotte’s diaries and various Society announcements have added to his account, and objects in the collection — like the presentation notes Edmund wrote up on cards for that first night’s exhibit — have added to Jane’s sense of how those early evenings unfolded, the men usually staying late for a round of drinks and cigars that Edmund gamely provided.
In the eight months it took Jane to catalogue Edmund’s letters and ledgers she came to imagine him clearly, and often it was the ephemera that revealed him to her the most: the arrangement of objects for his first exhibit hastily drawn on the back of his wife’s note to the maid about cleaning the wainscotting; the names of those he’d invited in his daybook, each attendee ticked off diligently in a firm hand or crossed off in bold strokes. This is one of the marvels of existence, Jane thinks, as she takes the bracelet off its support and lays it gently over her own wrist: that so much can be recreated; that all the bits and snippets — the receipts for roses, inventories tucked into books, even sherry glasses or cigar boxes or the worn clasp on a velvet band — are enough to conjure whole lives.
Three years after Edmund Chester’s first exhibition in the parlour of his home, his “museum”—a roped-off arrangement of three rooms on the lower floor of the house — was opened to the public. Visitors could come weekdays from noon until two and all day Saturday with tickets at a half-shilling. Thursday evenings the house was open from six until eight for gentlemen members of the various societies, and once a month, on the last Friday, it was open to those gentlemen and their wives — though the florid regrets tucked into Edmund’s daybook indicate that the wives rarely visited a second time. The lower rooms of the house had, by then, started to take on a distinctive fetor from exhibits that were not always properly preserved, and from the constant traipsing in and out of what Charlotte called “the rabble”—men on their half-day off, reeking of the pubs, or women carting their children and market purchases. Even the padded chairs in the breakfast room adjacent to the display suites had started to emit a fusty smell, despite Charlotte’s weekly airing of the house and her attempts to beat the cushions into scentless submission. By the end of the museum’s first year Charlotte gave up, and she, Edmund and their young children removed themselves to the upper floors, resettling the “step girl” in the almost uninhabitable attic.