The World Before Us (9 page)

“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.”

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 detail: 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.

The dimmest of the hospital attendants during Leeson’s stay was a thicknecked man called Bream. His features were contradictory—eyes small but heavily lashed, nose pocked but noble, the lips under his patchy
moustache plump. Because of this he appeared both dainty and brutish, the latter quality inevitably winning out when he opened his mouth to speak. Perhaps this was why it came as a surprise to Leeson that Bream, of all people, would have been aware of his anniversary, entering Leeson’s ward as he did, carrying a mahogany box on a silver tray. And perhaps it was because Bream was smiling that Leeson believed he was being brought tea—not tea slopped from a pot into a cup as usual, but tea displayed in a proper tea box, one that, when opened, would reveal rows of canisters containing a variety of imported leaves. Never mind that the gesture did not make sense after Bream’s behaviour following breakfast: the big man had chased Leeson around the day room for upending the card table, had crossed his arms over Leeson’s so that he couldn’t move, had walked Leeson back toward his bed step by step, as if they were a four-legged monster in a sensation play.

“I’d rather—” Leeson had entreated before sensing the futility of his overture. Still, a few scuffled steps later, Bream, sensing Leeson’s resignation, had relaxed his grip and the solicitor had wriggled free, marching quickly toward his ward unescorted.

A short time later, Dr. Thorpe strolled into the ward. He conferred with a tall, sallow-looking gentleman with reddish hair and a trimmed beard. Leeson grinned, delighted at the possibility of a party in his honour.

“Leeson,” Thorpe began, slowly and clearly, “this is Dr. Bedford. He is going to help ease your agitation.” Having announced this, Thorpe turned to Bedford and began to reiterate in low tones his patient’s predicament, listing off the symptoms he’d later record in his report: increased anxiety, troubled sleep, fleeting moments of clarity as to the exact nature of the harm he’d caused and demands at odd hours to see a commissioner who could release him to Emily so that he might plead forgiveness for his error.

After this, Bedford sat stiffly on the edge of the mattress and
repositioned the box Bream had set on the side table. He made a few notes about his perception of the patient—an amiable-seeming man who smiled up at him with pleasure, an expression that was both unexpected and welcome. Bedford had thus far taken his galvanizing machine to three asylums and his patients had ranged from wary to hysterical. The last patient here at the Whitmore, Hopper, had gone so far as to wrap his hands around Bedford’s neck, reddening the medical electrician’s skin before the attendants managed to free him.