by Evelyn James
In short, the horrid box was driving him mad and had everyone in a dither. The people who believed that the last director was onto something would not allow it to be opened without the appropriate arrangements. While others, like the director, just wanted to rip off the lid and demonstrate it was all nonsense. The whole pickle had divided the institute’s faculty and students and was leading to such turmoil that Montgomery had decided the only thing to do was to get an outsider involved – someone who was impartial, who could look into the whole affair and suggest a course of action. He had settled on Clara as the best candidate for the job.
Clara was certainly amused by the matter. She had heard about similar prophecy boxes before; they had become quite a fad in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. She had never actually seen one before, however. She was intrigued enough by the situation to accept the case and head over to the Institute just after breakfast. Professor Montgomery had mentioned in his letter that he was to be found at the Institute between 9am and 5pm during the week, and that he would make time for her whenever she turned up.
Clara could read between the lines of his hastily written letter that he was desperate.
Brighton’s Institute for Astronomy had been built in 1842 on the outskirts of town and close to the coast. It consisted of a sprawling red-brick building behind imposing gates, where various courses were taught on astronomy and related areas of science. There was also an observatory in the grounds, with one of the best telescopes in the country. Astronomers would often visit from other areas to use the telescope and there was always a range of research projects ongoing at the place at any given time. Clara noted as she entered the gates that this was a heavily male-dominated discipline. She noticed the odd girl among the students and researchers wandering about – the Institute did not exclude women – but they were by far in the minority.
Clara walked along a circular gravel drive and came to the main doors. They were open and students were spilling out at speed, apparently heading for lectures in various parts of the building. Clara had to wait until they had cleared before she could enter. A porter was sitting in a tiny office near the doors. He had a window into the corridor so he could see who was coming and going. He saw Clara.
“Good morning, I am here to see Professor Montgomery. He is expecting me,” Clara explained to the porter.
The porter asked for her name and then pulled out an old-fashioned speaking tube that was located next to his desk. There were several, in fact, and they resembled the tubes that connected decks on ships. Clara assumed they went to various departments in the building to enable communication. As the porter tapped three times on the cap of the speaking tube to announce he was about to communicate, Clara wondered that the institute had not installed an internal telephone system, as were appearing in so many public buildings. As a place of modern science, it seemed strange they were using such an old-fashioned means of communication.
The porter stopped talking and rose from his chair.
“Professor Montgomery wishes me to escort you upstairs to his office,” he said before exiting his tiny box of a room into the corridor and leading Clara to a large staircase that spiralled away into the ceiling.
“The professor informed me you were coming,” the porter continued conversationally. “He is very worried about this business with old Professor Lynch’s box.”
“He told you about that?” Clara asked.
“Everyone in the Institute knows about it. It’s the only thing anyone talks about. Professor Lynch was a peculiar sort, doesn’t surprise me he left this strange box. He had very odd ideas towards the end.”
The porter said this last statement with the dramatic declaration of a stage performer. Clara was curious and would have asked him to elaborate, but they were already nearing Montgomery’s office. The porter knocked on a door with a brass label bearing the director’s name and Clara was invited inside. She found herself in an enormous room with a ceiling that seemed to disappear into the heavens. Her eye was caught by the decoration on the ceiling plaster – a complete astronomical diagram of the night sky with all the relevant constellations picked out and named in ornate script. It quite distracted her, and Professor Montgomery had to cough to regain her attention.
“It catches a lot of people like that,” he remarked, as she looked back.
He was stood behind a large Victorian desk, at his back was a vast arched window that let in a great deal of light and a telescope sat just to one side. Professor Montgomery motioned to the seat before his desk.
“Thank you for coming, Miss Fitzgerald.”
“I was intrigued,” Clara replied. “I’ve never investigated a box of prophecies before.”
“I am calling it Pandora’s box,” Professor Montgomery snorted bitterly, “for all the troubles it is causing. I even have the Dean telling me I should just open the damn thing and get it over with, but you see why I cannot? For a start, there is all this nonsense about involving the king, which would draw vast amounts of publicity, and then the whole scientific community would know that we had this box and were taken in by its supposed prophecies and magic. The Institute would be a laughing stock, we would lose all credibility for endorsing such nonsense. How would our students go on to find respectable positions after that? They would be turned away the second people saw where they had studied.
“We cannot risk our academic reputation over such a thing. Honestly, I am very concerned about the wider world learning that the late Professor Lynch was dabbling in fortune telling. He was indulged, you see, due to his age and the length of time he had been at the Institute and he was very respected. He was a very good astronomer, no one cannot deny that, but his external hobbies caused a little embarrassment. We liked to keep them quiet. I don’t care to think what people will say if they discover our former director was trying to predict the future.
“We have rivals who would use it as an excuse to deride us. The discipline of astronomy is a cut-throat business, we don’t get the same level of interest as other popular sciences that are seen to be more… useful. Chemistry and biology, for instance, attract all sorts of funding because they are the means for producing new industrial processes and medicines, and all manner of other things that everyday folk find important. No one appreciates that the study of the solar system is also important. The Institute must fight against other similar bodies for financial support, I won’t lie about that. We rely on generous donations from wealthy sponsors not just to keep running, but to continuously upgrade our equipment.
“This box could ruin all that. We might lose sponsors who think we have lost our heads. Then where will we be? I have tried to make this point to those among my colleagues who are obsessed by the box, to no avail. They seem blinded.”
Professor Montgomery paused, somewhat breathless from his long speech. His face had a desperate look to it.
“I feel under attack, Miss Fitzgerald, I feel there are brutes and thugs on every side waiting for me to misstep so they can assault me,” Montgomery clenched his hands together. “Our yearly financial reports just arrived, the Bursar was sitting with me for two hours yesterday as we went through them. The Institute is in serious debt, we need to raise extra funds to secure our future. I fear that if the story of this box becomes public, we shall lose any chance of that.”
Professor Montgomery grimaced.
“Unfortunately, the Bursar is one of those enamoured with Lynch’s box and is pushing the idea of having it opened as a way of attracting attention to us. He seems to think we can use it for fundraising, rather like a novelty act. He does not appreciate the long-term damage such a stunt could do to our academic standing. We would lose more than we would gain, I am sure of it.”
Clara understood the difficulties Montgomery was under and the anxiety he was suffering as a consequence. He had dark shadows under his eyes and a nervous twitch in his fingers.
“You are under a lot of pressure,” Clara said sympathetically. “But, I do have to mention tha
t my services are not free. If you are already in debt…”
“Miss Fitzgerald, say no more, I intend to pay you out of my own purse. For the sake of the Institute, I am happy to go to the expense.”
Clara now saw that to Montgomery the Institute was more than just a job, it was his passion, his home, his life. That was why he was so upset and desperate, he feared how much he could lose not just from a financial position, but from an emotional one. Clara suspected the professor was the sort of man whose world revolved around his work, who let that work define him and could not imagine a life without it.
“I shall do everything I can to help. I assume you want me to find something to convince your colleagues that this box is just an old man’s fancy?”
“Broadly speaking, yes,” Professor Montgomery nodded. “If you could determine the contents of the box without opening it, all the better. We have retained all of Professor Lynch’s notes and papers from his time here, it was another of the stipulations of his will. You may be able to find something among them.
“I hate to say this, because I was fond of Lynch too, but if you could find evidence that the man was… losing his mind a little towards the end, then that would probably go a long way to ending this talk about a grand opening of the box. Ultimately, I don’t know how to resolve this, and I am hoping that an outside perspective will see things I do not and offer me hope.”
Professor Montgomery pulled a tight smile.
“I am sure my predecessor never meant for this to happen. He loved this Institute as much as I do. He was tireless in seeking funds to improve our observatory and get more powerful lens for our telescope. Once, he was a great man, who pursued the stars with a passion few have today. He wanted to promote astronomy not as a hobby science, but something important, something vital. I don’t know what went wrong and why that changed.”
Professor Montgomery became quiet and Clara saw there was more to this than just his fears about the Institute. He was genuinely upset at the thought that such a great man, a man he admired, had slipped into superstition and pseudo-science. Clara didn’t think she would be able to help him with that, but she might be able to help with this box.
“Can I see the box?” She asked.
Professor Montgomery roused himself.
“Of course, it is in the library, where it has always been,” Montgomery pulled a face. “Had I known of its existence, I might have seen to it that it discreetly vanished.”
He sighed.
“Too late for that now.”
Chapter Three
The library proved to be on the third floor of the Institute, an area that many would think of as an attic, but which had been transformed into a functional space for the purpose of storing the thousands of books and papers the Institute possessed. The panelled walls were lined with shelves and over them rose an arched roof, divided into rectangular spaces by thin beams of wood. The space within these rectangles was painted white and contained the section name for that particular part of the library’s collection. One rectangle proclaimed the section it expanded over was ‘Ancient Greek Astronomers’ while another informed you that the shelves beneath it contained books by or about Isaac Newton. Clara could not see any rectangles that talked about books on prophecies or sealed boxes.
The middle space of the library contained a number of reading tables and a handful of students were seated at them working their way through heavy-duty volumes on stargazing. In the corner opposite the entrance door, was a circular desk ornamented very grandly with carved images of the zodiac. Whoever had built the Institute had certainly spared no expense on the fittings and fixtures. The librarian was behind the desk; a little old man, with brilliantly white hair and a pair of gold half-moon spectacles that clung perilously to the very tip of his nose. He was remarkably short, not quite the height of Clara and she was only around five foot three. This meant he constantly had to peer up at everyone and the position of his glasses forced him to squint. There was something extremely comical about the man’s appearance, though it was far from intentional.
“Mr McGhie,” Professor Montgomery approached the librarian. “I have a visitor who I would like to show Professor Lynch’s box.”
Mr McGhie’s previously open and merry face became sullen at the mention of this. He scowled at Clara with surprising ferocity and had she been of a shyer nature she might have felt intimidated. As it was, she was merely amused and curious at his demeanour.
“I don’t know about that Professor Montgomery. I don’t know if Professor Lynch would like it being shown to random people, especially a woman. Professor Lynch was very sceptical about women astronomers,” despite his short stature, Mr McGhie did an impressive job of looking down his nose at Clara.
She smiled back at him, refusing to take offence.
“Professor Lynch has been dead these last twenty years and I doubt he cares anymore who looks at his box,” Professor Montgomery said, trying his hardest to keep his temper. “And I happen to be the director of this institute and I can show the box to whoever I please.”
Mr McGhie looked duly chastened and fussed with his glasses.
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” he muttered to himself as he went through a small door just behind him and into what Clara presumed was his office. They could still hear him talking to himself. “What would poor Professor Lynch say? It was his box and he put it in my hands for special keeping. I don’t know, doesn’t seem right. He’ll be turning in his grave.”
His words were accompanied by the sound of keys rattling in a lock. He finally reappeared with a small metal box in his hands. It looked rather like a biscuit box, the sort you buy great grandma at Christmas, only this did not have the usual cute decorations of scampering Scottie dogs or a quaint cottage on it. It was a dull colour and you could see where the edges of the metal had been folded over each other to make the sides. It was wrapped in parcel string; two strands going from front to back across the lid and two strands going across the lid from the sides. Where the strings crossed over, they had been heavily covered in sealing wax and impressed by a stamp that appeared to be an intertwined P and L.
“Thank you,” Professor Montgomery said to the librarian, taking the box from his reluctant hands. “We shall bring it back shortly.”
Mr McGhie twitched the corner of his mouth; the horror of the box being removed from his care almost too much for him. Then he recovered himself and went back to his work.
“You see the spell it has over some people?” Montgomery whispered in Clara’s ear. “These are men of science! Yet they act as if they are no better than medieval peasants viewing a magician’s tricks. Their gullibility is shocking!”
Clara had no comment, she did not think a passion for science excluded people from being somewhat superstitious. Sometimes the black and white of academic studies made people crave the unexplainable.
Professor Montgomery placed the tin box on a table well away from the students in the room and waved his hands at it.
“There you go.”
Clara took a seat and examined the box closely.
“It appears handmade. I was expecting a box from a factory, something a machine pressed, but this is really rather crude,” Clara ran a finger over a side seam. “Someone has created the shape of a box out of metal, then folded it up – rather like making a cardboard box – and finally overlapped the edges and very roughly soldered them together. I would hazard a guess that Professor Lynch made this himself.”
Professor Montgomery did not seem pleased with the revelation.
“I would rather he had used a biscuit tin. It would have made the thing all the more laughable. You can’t take a prophecy seriously when it is in a tin that formerly contained shortbread.”
“I imagine that is the reason he made his own box,” Clara said gently. “He went to a lot of trouble. I am afraid this means that Professor Lynch was probably very serious about his prophecies. I had wondered if this was a ort of joke, Professor Lynch seeing
how long he could have people fawning over this box. Now, I think he believed in it. This is too much trouble to go to for a very insular prank.”
“Towards the end, Professor Lynch was very obsessed with astrology,” Professor Montgomery explained. “Many people confuse the two disciplines, I have been accused of being an astrologer before now. As astronomers, we watch and study the motions of the stars and other celestial bodies to understand our universe better. It is a science, pure and simple. Astrology attempts to link those movements of stars and planets to world events or to things that occur in people’s lives. Astrology is about discovering if the motion of the planet Venus can influence whether you are going to be an optimist or a pessimist, whether you will be lucky in love or have vast wealth. It is pure nonsense. Planets and stars have no concern about us.
“Yet there are those that firmly believe in these things and draw up astrological charts – horoscopes – to predict the future. They might create charts for themselves, for family or even for politicians and monarchs. They might attempt to use astrology to predict the future of our nation. Before the scientific revolution, astrology was deemed as much a science as alchemy. Queen Elizabeth I had charts drawn up for her, and many people dabbled harmlessly in the subject. But it was never real, never quantifiable. Astrology is guesswork and sometimes the astrologer gets lucky and by chance predicts an event, or at least seems to, as most astrological predictions are wholly vague and easy to interpret as you please.
“These odd triumphs give hope to people who believe in this stuff. They ignore all the times the astrologers were wrong and instead fixate on this one dubious claim of success. Astronomers should never be astrologers, it is like a doctor dabbling in magic charms to heal his patients. You cannot find a person credible when they do something like that.”