Those of us who are in the room stop skimming the newspaper on the counter, stop staring at the blinking lights on the microwave. We turn to see if she’ll confirm whether or not she’s going to the lecture. All morning we’ve sensed flight in her, a waver she pushes down by thinking about the tasks at hand: after the tea set there’s the Bedford collection, then a group of astronomical drawings to prepare, Lord Dutton’s Italian glass, a set of French and German clocks going to a buyer in India. In storage there’s a crate containing the hunting weapons and personal effects of the last of Louis the XIV’s menagerie keepers, which Gareth had asked her to re-inventory weeks ago.
“You in there?” Duncan waves his hand in front of Jane’s face.
“Yes. Barely.”
“Chin up, it’ll work out.”
“What will?”
“Whatever it is you’re mulling over.” He pecks her on the cheek and she can smell the tang of soy sauce on his breath.
“Hey, start washing my chopsticks or get your own.”
Duncan glances over to the sink where he’s dropped them. “The museum’s closing, Jane, it’s not like I’ll need them again.”
Heading back to her office Jane thinks about the day Gareth hired her, how he’d asked her to come in to sign some papers, suggesting they meet in his office at six p.m. when things wouldn’t be so busy. When all the paperwork was done he’d taken her on a tour around the museum. By then there was only a cleaning staff of two and a security guard in the building. He’d already arranged for a temporary pass and let her swipe into the old elevator at the back of the natural history hall. When the door opened on the second floor he’d handed her a pair of cotton gloves. “I’ve got all the keys and codes,” he said. “Tell me what you want to look at and we can take it out.” Over the next hour she held the claw of a Tyrannosaurus, a pine cone that Darwin had brought back on the Beagle, a pocket compass that had belonged to Franklin and an original folio of one of Marlowe’s abandoned plays. “Edmund collected everything,” Gareth laughed. “There was no subject — no aspect of science or art — that didn’t interest him.”
In the science gallery next to a brass model of the solar system, Gareth had explained to Jane that the intention behind the design of the museum was to evoke the warm and cluttered feel of the parlour where Edmund had first exhibited his collection, to display the objects in the same half-light to which the men who first studied them would have been subject. He pointed to an ornate wall lamp and added, “There was overhead track lighting put in during the seventies but I had it taken out.” He leaned in to examine the drawer of beetle specimens, saying, “There’s something to it, isn’t there.”
And Jane had agreed there was, though she didn’t mean the lucent quality of the beetle shells under the gauzy circle of lamplight, or the metronome of the grandfather clock in the corner. In that after-hours visit, she had felt something else, felt that she was in someone’s home — that any minute its occupants might clamber up the stairs and find her gawking at their things, find her somewhere she didn’t belong.
6
The electric shock machine sits in the middle of the science gallery in a room that was once Edmund and Charlotte Chester’s bedroom. The wallpaper, a hunter green with narrow beige stripes, is faded where the back of a wardrobe once rested against it, and the dark hardwood floors are worn in a line from the doorway to the wall where the dressing table once sat, and in a halo in the alcove near the window. Visitors today are guided around the room by narrow carpets that wind past the outer wall cabinets before angling toward the two vitrines in the room’s centre: one containing eight astrolabes collected by the astronomer Jacottet and the other a display of nineteenth-century medical implements belonging to Ambrose Bedford.
In her dissertation work on rural asylums Jane had come across Bedford’s name a few times, twice in relation to the Whitmore Hospital for Convalescent Lunatics. A relatively minor figure in Victorian medical history, he was known mostly as an innovator of galvanizing, or “electrotherapy,” machines, though his practitioner’s licence was revoked after the deaths of two of his patients. His surgical implements and three of his electro-medical prototypes had been willed to the hospital nearest his estate after his death at the turn of the century. The collection, some twenty items all together, included three galvanizing machines, two trephines to bore into the skull, a hysterotome, various saws with tiny pointed teeth, a half-dozen mouth gags and two sets of restraining straps — one made of cloth and the other of leather. They’d arrived at the hospital in a large wooden crate and were promptly relegated to storage. In 2005, when a new administrator discovered them wedged behind an old X-ray machine in a corner of the basement, she’d contacted a handful of curators at some of the larger museums. No one was interested. Eventually a local archivist who’d done her MA degree with Jane directed the administrator to the Chester, and the Bedford collection became Jane’s first acquisition.
We know that Charles Leeson was introduced to the electric shock machine a week before his escape into the woods. He turned forty-three years old the day it happened. If the Whitmore staff had consulted his casebook they would have noted that the day’s date, the 26th of July, corresponded to the anniversary of his birth, which would have explained his boisterous behaviour in the day room and insistence at breakfast that he be given a collop of bacon off everyone’s plate.
A month after Leeson began his tenancy at the Whitmore, it had been reported that he was improving, and his brother had come up to see him, arriving in a hack and presenting Leeson with a paper bundle of cured meats and ripe cheeses. That appearance had not been repeated for a number of months, although Leeson had taken special care to strike off the days as late July approached in the hope that another such visit would occur on the occasion of his anniversary. He had spent the better part of a week imagining it in vivid detaiclass="underline" Richard appearing in the day room in his smart hat and gloves, carrying a parcel bound in twine and stepping aside gallantly to present Emily. But this was where the daydream fell apart, because try as Charles might to change it, Emily’s expression always crumbled when she caught sight of her husband: a gaunt-faced man folding and unfolding his hands, his eyes darting around the room even as he attempted to fix them. In this reverie, the gift Richard pressed into Charles’s arms was heavier than expected, as if it were a whole rump or shank of ham. When Leeson dropped his nose toward it, something inside it gave a kick and the parcel moved, causing him to search his brother’s needle-like face for an explanation. None was offered, so Charles turned back toward Emily, only to find her over by the games table stroking Wick’s cheek with a palm leaf and laughing at his pursed lips and upturned chin. Then the rain came, falling inside the day room, and Richard spoke between clenched teeth, glancing Charles with spittle, saying, “The dark forces are upon you—” saying, “The Lord giveth—” saying, “The country will rally against—” saying, “At a fixed rate of two percent interest—” saying, “You will never see her again.”
This was how the daydream always ended, although Leeson tried, day after day, from the windows that faced the front lawn, to imagine Richard arriving all over again: Richard in his smart hat and gloves carrying a parcel bound in twine, stepping aside to present Emily. The idea of Emily was the one surety he depended on, though it became looser around the edges as the weeks passed by. In truth, Leeson knew that he could do without his brother, could live complete even if he never set eyes on his sour face again. Richard’s arrival in the dream was a formality, a tic he needed to move past, some mental obstacle that blocked the real thing.