The Great Unknown

by Peg Kingman

  “Vertebrate or invertebrate?” asked Miss Buckley.

  “Oh, vertebrate, decidedly vertebrate—but I will not be lured into a game of Twenty Questions!”

  “No? But you will surely answer me this: Is our understanding of our world to be blown up entirely by what he—and you—have risked your all, to bring before us?”

  “That remains to be seen. It is too soon to say.”

  “Oh, isn’t she cruel, though, Julia? Cruel, to taunt us so!”

  Whenever Livia would nap or amuse herself for a time, Constantia donned an artisan’s smock and set to work. Sometimes she worked in the garden-shed behind the boarding-house, picking at the Useless Rubble. For tools, she had a little chisel-edged hammer weighing two ounces; two emery-stone files, one flat, the other round; a stout embroidery needle; and a badger-bristle brush. At the Muséum she had formerly done this work for months on end. Stone yields to the gentlest of the strong forces: water, and women. Minute, meticulous care and inexhaustible patience were required; in that, too, it was women’s work, mothers’ work especially. Bent over a worktable, by the daylight falling through the open doorway, Constantia tapped, chipped, blew, brushed, smoothed, removing a few grains of grit at a time; uncovering fossils in their stony matrix. They were to be uncovered, yes; but not freed entirely, for the matrix in which these vestiges were embedded—evidence and proof of their relationship to one another—was of essential importance. Gradually their forms emerged, in high relief. Was she carving these forms, or was she releasing them? She was only releasing them. She gave up will, intent, design; she was the midwife, not the creator. She was helping them to emerge, not making them. She was cleaning them; and cleaning, always and everywhere, is women’s work.

  A film of white dust overlay everything in the shed: tables, chairs, cloches, watering-cans, and canvas-draped forms. What emerged from the rubble? Marvelous things; surprising things. But it was too soon, still, to say. Do not speak of it yet; do not let the malicious fairies know. Not until it has received the protection of its name.

  To be fair, it must be said that Hugh, too, did a share of this work, whenever he was at home. But he was frequently away during February, negotiating the sale of his two-fifths share in a gravel quarry near Tours to his three partners. He had already, through intermediaries, sold the leases of all his quarry properties in England and Scotland—except for the Coquet Isle lease which, with less than four years remaining to run, was of small worth. The Stevensons were just now converting into cash all the assets they could lay their hands on, with a view to buying a Very Good Thing—though it was still too soon to be spoken of. Between themselves they referred to it as Our Castle in the Air—or, sometimes, Our Hole in the Ground.

  At other times, Constantia would bring out paper and gouaches, uncover her microscope, and set to work painting designs to be sold to a cloth manufacturer. Others might draw pretty mignonettes and bonherbes if they liked, but Constantia specialised in bizarres: those very dress-prints that had so alarmed Lady Janet. She was paid in francs and—as dessinatrice, the designer—she was also entitled to a dozen ells, a dress-length, of any cloth eventually printed from her designs. Some of these lengths she had made up into dresses, but her need for dresses was finite, and she generally sold the surplus lengths for good money.

  Constantia was at work upon a design based upon the elegant architectures of crinoid fossils—that is, of the St Cuthbert’s beads which Hugh had strung into a little necklace for Livia. The technically demanding aspect of composition—accurate placement of the repeats, both vertical and horizontal, so that the design could be roller-printed—was finished. She could now attend to her favourite parts: the drawing, and the colours. In her design, these beads (now in shades of mustard and purple) drifted in schools before a background of vivid pink coral arranged in loose zigzags, all upon a seaweed-green ground. It was an arresting composition which had never existed in life; in unimproved nature.

  Whenever Livia was awake and requiring to be amused, Constantia would set down her files or her brushes, stretch to straighten her back, and pick up her baby. If the weather permitted, she would carry Livia to one of the parks nearby, where entry was open to all, and free of charge. Sometimes she went to the Luxembourg Gardens, to see respectably-dressed people strolling about and feeding the swans; at other times, she went to the Jardin des Plantes. The remarkable tartan cloak, wherever she wore it, excited wonderment and stares from the Parisians—though not, Constantia suspected, any great envy.

  The Jardin des Plantes adjoined the Muséum, where Miss Grant and Miss Buckley were at work. Constantia sometimes stopped by their workroom on the ground floor, to deliver letters or meals, or to admire their progress in their attempts at daguerrean lithography, or to condole upon their disappointments.

  The Jardin housed not only the nation’s botanical collection, but its menagerie as well: caged bears, antelopes, sloths, monkeys, and more. Most of these animals huddled miserably from the March winds. There was a rhinoceros, an African one, rather different from the ones Constantia knew from her early years in Assam. There were two elephants, weary, wise, and patient, just like the ones she knew from Assam; probably their second cousins. In the House for Fierce Animals were tigers, which Constantia avoided. Even at this season the menagerie was often crowded with visitors, and usually Constantia preferred the less-frequented regions of the garden: parterres, copses, and groves, avenues of trees pleached or pollarded, all dotted by charming little follies, towers, hermitages; or else the glasshouses, especially pleasant on cold windy days. Another of her favourite places was the Labyrinthe of yew which spiraled up a mount overlooking the gardens, topped by a fanciful iron gazebo. This was the place where, two years ago, she had first understood that Mr Stevenson was essential to all her future happiness.

  Hugh was having disturbing dreams—of Mackenzie, he admitted to Constantia: the railway contractor William Mackenzie who, while in the pincers of one of those ferocious tooth-aches to which he was a martyr, had flown into a towering rage when Hugh (then master of that quarry near Barentin) had challenged him as to the adequacy of its stone. It did no good for Constantia to list the unforseen benefits that had ensued: “His injustice has proven the greatest of boons,” she declared. “If you had continued delving away there, all content, you might never have made your way to Paris—to the Muséum—might never have made the acquaintance of Professor de Blainville—might never have set out in search of lithographic-quality stone. You might never have dipped into the Muséum’s fossil collections. And without having seen those, you might not have given another thought to the remains you had found on Coquet Isle as a boy, all those years ago. Indeed, if you had not come to Paris, and to the Muséum—to me—then where—when—how—might you and I have met? And if not, how was our Livia to have been born?” Hugh admitted the merit of all her arguments, but his disturbing dreams did not abate.

  One stormy March afternoon—too cold for working in the garden shed and too windy for strolling in the public gardens—Constantia, in her lodging at the top of the house, was in search of some cloth which might be made up as new frocks for Livia, who was fast outgrowing her first tiny clothes. Constantia’s trunk held an assortment of dress lengths in prints of her own designing, but those bizarres—so worldly, so knowing—seemed unsuitable for an infant of seven months. Hadn’t she saved an outworn shirt of Hugh’s that might be cut up and remade for Livia? She plunged her hand blindly into the depths of the trunk. Her fingertips sought the feel of old much-washed linen, but touched instead upon something hard, sharp-cornered: a small book. She drew it out—and recognised the volume she had impulsively bought at Newcastle for five shillings:

  EXPLANATIONS:

  A Sequel to

  “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation.”

  BY THE AUTHOR OF THAT WORK.

  She had forgotten all about it.

  Still kneeling beside the trunk, Constantia opened the book at random, and by some chance her
eye alighted upon this, on page 55: “Now, I cannot tell what good naturalists may say . . . but I feel, for my own part . . .”

  She turned over a few pages more, to page 63, where her eye seized upon: “How a good geologist can have allowed himself to speak in this manner . . . I am quite at a loss to understand . . .”

  How odd, that the style of these phrases should be so familiar! Was it not very odd?

  For once, Livia in her dresser drawer slept on, her fingers in her mouth.

  Constantia got off her knees and into the chair under the window; then turned back to begin again properly at the beginning: “ . . . public favour and disfavour were alike beyond the regard of an author who bore no bodily shape in the eyes of his fellow-countrymen, and was likely to remain for ever unknown . . .”

  It was not mere phrases that were familiar—but entire ideas, images, paragraphs. It was the author’s mind that was familiar. But, she reminded herself, she had closely read Vestiges, so was it not reasonable that this production, from the same author, should seem familiar?

  And might not many of these familiar phrases be in general use? More ordinary and more widespread than she had realised? Such as: “A trifling objection.” And “babies are a mere fancy.” And “the great and amazing fact.” And “a scanty and most defective development of life.” Commonplace, these expressions, weren’t they? Not peculiar to the Chambers family? Proof of nothing?

  But when she read this Unknown’s explanation of how rotation must have commenced in the celestial bodies, her scalp tingled and her hair rose. She could not help but remember crossing the Roman bridge at Musselburgh one afternoon with the Chambers children and their mother. Mrs Chambers had called her children’s attention to the eddies, dimples, and little whirlpools in the River Esk below; and hadn’t she cited some professor on that occasion? Hadn’t she cited, Constantia thought, the very extract that appeared here, in this book?

  And then Constantia found this: “It is humiliating to have to answer an objection so mean. There is no statement that the animals came in this order. I have only put the words into this arrangement, in accordance with the custom now commonly followed of observing the ascending grades of the animal kingdom.”

  Constantia shut the book, and then shut her eyes, the better to see in her mind’s eye just where she had read this before . . . one night when she had been fatigued beyond sleep. The Edinburgh Review had slipped to the floor. She had picked it up; opened it. In her mind’s eye she could still see the handwriting in the margins, small and neat, and unknown to her. Whose handwriting was that: “humiliating to answer an objection so mean”? Whose, the indignant commentary which filled the margins of that sneering review of Vestiges?

  Well, whose?

  Livia awakened, fretful, and Constantia had to put down her book—for babies are no mere fancy.

  What plausible explanations were there for this remarkable coincidence? Could even this result from mere chance?

  As soon as Livia was content once more at her breast, Constantia took up the book again, awkwardly in her free hand, and read on. It was as though she were hearing Mrs Chambers’s cheerful and lively voice; as though Mrs Chambers were in the room, just across the table and chatting comfortably over the tuneful teacups and gingerbread.

  Constantia laid down her book and gazed out at the stormy sky, thinking, unseeing. But how astounding! Could it be? How could it be? Was Mrs Chambers the author not only of these Explanations, but also of the fascinating and provocative Vestiges which had preceded it; the publishing sensation of the age? Mrs Chambers, who shut herself into the library each morning, not to emerge until tea-time (her ink-stained fingers then taking up the particular teacup which chimed perfect A)? Mrs Chambers, whose “extensive correspondence” prevented her nursing her own baby? Was Mrs Chambers, then, the Great Unknown, the disembodied author? The Incognita?

  So it seemed!

  So it seemed. What degree of certainty could be assigned to this new idea, this theory, this possibility? What shadow of doubt? The more Constantia thought of it, the more certain she felt. A truth is true even before it can be proven; even before sober proofs can be brought forth; even though it has been only guessed-at, leapt-to; when it is mere hypothesis. A truth is true even if it can never be proven; even if it has left no traces, no evidence amounting to proof.

  Some critics had hazarded an opinion that the author was a woman; had even nominated candidates: Ada Lovelace, Harriet Martineau, Catherine Crowe. But if Constantia was right, the Incognita was not one of London’s celebrated bluestockings. No, she was Nobody: the unregarded Mrs Robert Chambers—Anne Kirkwood Chambers—daughter of a provincial clockmaker, wife of a scribbling journalist, mother of a large family.

  Mrs Chambers! Of no credentials; of no reputation; of no authority. No wonder, then, that those sensational books, Vestiges and Explanations—of unprecedented scope and boldness—had been published anonymously; launched upon the sea of public notice unburdened by any association with their unesteemed author, who bore no bodily shape in the eyes of her fellow-countrymen.

  Chambers. Camera obscura, Constantia now remembered; Mr Chambers had called his wife that. Now she saw into their private joke. For them, the term referred neither to the tourist attraction atop Edinburgh’s Calton Hill, nor to the camera used at Mr Hill and Mr Adamson’s calotype studio. For Mr and Mrs Chambers, the term meant—literally—the “obscure Chamber”: the unknown—the hidden—authoress herself, Mrs Chambers.

  The Maker leaves the marks of His fingers upon His Creation (her fingers; her creation). In its language, its ideas, its arguments, this book bore Mrs Chambers’s inky finger-prints throughout.

  Constantia felt herself bursting with sudden revelation. It was not precisely knowledge; it was instead enormous conviction, something akin to religious faith. Her conviction about the parentage of this book was like her conviction about her own parentage.

  At first she felt she must tell someone. Tell Hugh! Tell Miss Grant and Miss Buckley! But Hugh was away, in the south. Miss Grant and Miss Buckley were at their Muséum workroom. The urge to tell someone soon passed away, and was replaced by a resolve, born of delicacy, loyalty, and discretion, to keep her discovery to herself.

  By the middle of March, Constantia and Hugh were nearly certain that their Useless Rubble was of incalculable value. One Sunday morning when the spring light was good, they invited Miss Grant and Miss Buckley to the garden shed, for its unveiling. “I fear it is always chilly in here,” admitted Constantia as they all sidled into the narrow margins left around the large draped work table, “but Mme Mouchy has promised to bring out our tea very soon, to warm us, and Livia simply must wear her mittens, whether she likes them or not.”

  “I’d no idea of its being so large as this,” said Miss Grant.

  “There remains yet more work to be done,” said Hugh, “but we desire that you should see it, and give us your opinion of the state of preparation we have achieved thus far—and perhaps help us to arrive at some estimate of its value to the world, too.” With a flourish Hugh drew off the canvas drape.

  “Oh!” cried Miss Grant.

  “Ah!” cried Miss Buckley.

  “But it’s—surely—”

  “Isn’t it a—”

  “The astounding length of the neck—”

  “And the smallness and narrowness of the head—”

  “The abundance of the digits in its four paddles, each still in its proper place—”

  “Well?” said Hugh.

  “A plesiosaur, surely,” said Miss Grant. “A very fine specimen, and beautifully cleaned, too.”

  “It certainly has a most plesiosaur-like appearance,” said Miss Buckley, “though I should wish to examine the vertebrae for the characteristic fossets before pronouncing with certainty—”

  “Have we Baron Cuvier’s Le Règne Animal? There is an excellent plate which—”

  “Yes, we have it here, in Mr Pidgeon’s translation: The Animal Kingdom—with the
very plate. Listen,” said Hugh, and read aloud: “‘The magnificent specimen from Lyme is composed of many stones, which fit well to each other. The only doubt that can possibly be attached to them relates to the narrowest part near the base of the neck.’ For quite some time, you see, it was doubted that the neck and the body could belong to one another, for the neck was so preposterously long, so unlike any other creature whatsoever—at least half neck—and totaling some forty cervical vertebrae—”

  “Yes, yes, we know,” interrupted Miss Grant. “But with your magnificent specimen, there can be no doubt whatever as to the relation of neck and body: One sees them together here, perfectly preserved, in the same unbroken stone matrix.”

  “Ah! And here,” said Miss Buckley, “we may easily see those small oval fossets by which the plesiosaur is recognised.”

  “Yes,” said Hugh. “And my beast, too, like the Lyme specimen, lies on its belly, its ribs nearly in their places, the sternal apparatus apparent beneath.”

  “Now do look at this, Julia,” said Miss Buckley. “Here are the belly ribs, and there, the pelvic structure. What puzzle, though, lies here? The bones repose intact, complete, in an entirely convincing relation to each other, undisturbed, it would seem. Yet what have we here? A pile of rounded pebbles, all tumbled about and mixed with—with fragments of bone, I think.”

  “Hollow bones—pterodactyl bones, surely,” said Miss Grant.

  “Yes, it was those which first attracted my notice,” said Hugh.

  “You don’t suppose it might have swallowed these pebbles by mistake—while feeding along a muddy sea floor, for instance?”

  “No. That is preposterous,” said Miss Buckley. “How is one to believe in any creature which fails to distinguish rocks from food? Livia, your mitten.”

  “Deliberately swallowed, then?”

  “Plesiosaurus could tear—but not chew, not with those teeth,” said Hugh. “Like birds of prey. How do birds chew their food? Pigeons, for instance?”