Charlotte was interested in details. She wrote eloquently in her diary about the minutiae of the collections, about arguments and making up, about Edmund’s ridiculousness and his quiet, attentive virtue. If Jane ever needs to know how to remove grease stains from hardwood or how to pin the femur of a Loris skeleton onto its pelvic bone, Charlotte’s diaries can tell her. It is, Jane knows, one of the reasons she is drawn to the bracelet: Charlotte’s ability to tell a story; the woman’s side of a man’s world, glimpsed in an age of exclusion. Charlotte’s caricature of Edmund carrying the whale on his back was drawn on the bottom of a letter to her sister, a letter in which Charlotte recounted an overture made by Edmund one evening after a glass of brandy with a professor of zoology from Brest. He’d pulled up a chair beside their bed after the professor had left and broached the possibility of purchasing a bowhead skeleton. Charlotte sat up against the pillows and stared at him blankly. “A bowhead skeleton?”
“Hilaire has one,” Edmund said. “It won’t cost much.”
Jane has always liked to imagine this scene and so we see it in the same way she does: Edmund would take Charlotte’s hand in his and kiss her palm, revelling in the lilt of lavender or lilac on her wrist after the fug of the cigars downstairs. Buoyed by expectations, he would glance up at her smart, pretty face only to be surprised at the tightening of her jaw. In circumstances such as these it was his strategy to bide his time, to drop the matter and ask again after the next success: a write-up in the paper, a visit from someone notable. He would demur, say, “We can talk about it later. I shouldn’t have woken you.” Then he would set her hand down on the quilt and drop his own over it.
“Recklessness doesn’t suit you, Neddy.” We can see Charlotte saying this firmly while extracting her hand. Can imagine her yanking the sheets made in Edmund’s textile factory up around her neck as she turns to the wall and demands a proper house in which children can be raised without being subject to fantastical sea creatures and pickaxes. Charlotte informing Edmund, finally, that she refuses to speak to him again until he puts in an offer on the terraced house next door — an offer that, we know, would have demanded considerably more than he could afford.
Edmund Chester did well in manufacturing. His company’s linens, at the end of the nineteenth century, could be found in one out of every eight respectable English houses. At the end of his life he wrote that he had only one real regret — that he would’ve liked to travel more, to have been a man of adventure himself. In the Chester’s early years he’d confessed to Charlotte that he sensed it wasn’t the museum, but his engagement with, and support of, a particular breed of gentlemen that would be his legacy. He believed things ought to be remembered as attached to the people who held them in their hands. “What we pay attention to defines us,” he wrote in a letter to his son, when Thomas was twenty and preparing to enter law school. Edmund Chester paid attention to what the men and women of his time thought mattered, to what they carried back with them from their forays into Africa, Asia, the Arctic, Europe and the Middle East. What they brought back in sacks, caught in traps, nets, cut with chisels, fashioned with their own hands.
He wanted, in those years, to do more than make sheets on looms; he wanted to capture the fantastic and strange, to live a life in the zealous pursuit of knowledge. I did not collect to own, he wrote in one of his last letters. I collected to create a discourse between the men of my day, and the larger world. “For it is not only people that constitute a society,” he’d said in one of his early Thursday evening lectures, “but also places and things, and this museum will explore the relationship between them.”
Edmund did eventually purchase the house next door so that the original site could be renovated and used wholly for displays. Walking through the front doors of the museum today one first enters the high-ceilinged natural history hall, the room’s outer walls rimmed by display cabinets, its centre bare save for the shadow cast by the long sought-after bowhead skeleton, which hangs on near-invisible wires from the second-storey ceiling. The first floor was opened up at the turn of the century to form a gallery around the whale, and today a dozen curiosity-style cabinets dot its walkways. The whale’s phalanges swim so close to the east and west railings that people sometimes lean out and try to touch the nub of the bones with their fingers, a small stitch of space that cannot be bridged.
The sound of a little girl’s shoes clapping across the hardwood floor of the print gallery rouses us. This is the nature of the dream: one minute we are in the world and the next we are Elsewhere trying to understand who and what we see. It is Friday, we remind ourselves, it is Friday, and today the museum is closing. Jane takes a last look at the bracelet, placing it hesitantly back on its stand, and then she locks the cabinet and turns to go downstairs. Our attention is divided, and so some of us start to wander off on our own, to move toward the longcase clock, the Victorian photographs, the Bedford cabinet.
“Stay together!” one of us snaps.
“This way,” demands another.
We try to get our bearings, find each other, round up the stragglers.
“Where’s the girl?” Cat asks.
“Here I am!” the girl calls from somewhere near the botanical gallery.
“I’ll get her,” the poet says, heading off in the girl’s direction — bowing at the stuffed cassowary when he passes it, and lifting a hand in benediction at the stacked bones of the moa.
Those of us who turn to follow Jane stop when the boy cuts across our path. “Aaarrrrrrr, aarrrrrrgh,” he moans, waggling his arms over his head, because last month he wandered down into the cinema and a film about zombies — and now he thinks it’s fun to pretend he’s dead.
The staff room across from Jane’s office is an aggrandized cubby with a kettle, fridge and a microwave. When Jane sticks her head in to look for Gareth she finds Duncan sitting on the counter next to the sink eating takeaway noodles with her chopsticks. He’d been packing the Murchison trilobites all morning, so knee-deep in crates that his sandy hair and T-shirt are covered in bits of cardboard. Duncan is Australian, and although he’s been interning at the Chester for six months he still looks like he wandered in off the beach.
“Have you seen Gareth?”
“Nope, I’ve been with the creepy crawlies all day.”
“Where’s the Murch going again?”
“Auction. It’ll probably end up in a law office in Japan.”
“Do you know anything about the stuff that isn’t going to auction?”
Duncan shrugs. “I dunno — eBay?” He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, slides off the counter and leans in to Jane. “You still the only one with no job to go to?”
“Har har.” She pokes his chest with her finger. When he gets to the doorway Jane says, “I broke a teacup—” and a sense of relief from the admission washes over her.
“Which one?”
“A Grainger.”
Duncan lets out a low whistle. “Well, better you than me. Let’s raid the bar at the lecture to commiserate.”