The Cabinet of Curiosities (Pendergast #3)(19)
There was a slow shuffling, then the sound of numerous locks being unfastened. The door opened, revealing a short, round, elderly man. He had a vastly hooked red nose, and a fringe of long white hair descended from the gleaming dome above it. As he looked up at her, a smile of greeting broke out, dispelling the air of melancholy on his veined face.
“Ah, come in, do come in,” he said. “Don’t let all these locks frighten you. I’m an old man, but I don’t bite. Fortunate senex!”
Nora took a step forward. Dust lay everywhere, even on the worn lapels of the man’s jacket. A lamp with a green shade cast a small pool of light on the old desk, piled high with papers. On one side sat an elderly Royal typewriter, perhaps the only thing in the room not covered in dust. Beyond the desk, Nora could see cast-iron shelves laden with books and boxes stretching back into a gloom as deep as the ocean. In the dimness, it was impossible to judge how far the room extended.
“Are you Reinhart Puck?” Nora asked.
The man set up a vigorous nodding, his cheeks and bow tie flapping in response. “At your service.” He bowed, and for an alarmed moment Nora thought he might reach out to kiss her hand. Instead, there was another loud sound of phlegm being forced against its will somewhere within his windpipes.
“I’m looking for information on—on cabinets of curiosities,” Nora continued, wondering if that was the correct pluralization.
The man, busy re-locking the door, glanced over, his rheumy eyes lighting up. “Ah! You’ve come to the right place. The Museum absorbed most of the old cabinets of early New York. We have all their collections, their papers. Where shall we begin?” He slammed the last bolt home, then rubbed his hands together, smiling, clearly happy to be of service to someone.
“There was a cabinet of curiosities in lower Manhattan known as Shottum’s Cabinet.”
He wrinkled his brow. “Shottum’s… Ah, yes. Yes, indeed. Quite popular these days, Shottum’s. But first things first. Please sign the register, and then we can get started.” He motioned her to follow him around the desk, where he produced a leather-bound ledger, so old and rubbed that Nora was tempted to ask for a quill pen. She took the proffered ballpoint, wrote in her name and department.
“Why all the locks and bolts?” she asked, handing back the pen. “I thought all the really valuable stuff, the gold and diamonds and the rest, was kept in the Secure Area.”
“It’s the new administration. Added all this red tape, after the unpleasantness a few years back. It’s not as if we’re all that busy, you know. Just researchers and doctoral candidates, or the occasional wealthy patron with an interest in the history of science.” He returned the register, then shuffled over to a huge bank of old ivory light switches, big as clothes pegs, and snapped a few on. Deep in the vast space there was a flicker, then another, and a dim light appeared. Puck set off toward it at a slow hobble, his feet scraping on the stone floor. Nora followed, glancing up at the dark walls of shelving. She felt as if she were walking through a dark forest toward the distant glow of a welcoming cottage.
“Cabinets of curiosities, one of my favorite subjects. As you no doubt know, Delacourte’s was the first cabinet, established in 1804.” Puck’s voice echoed back over his stooped shoulders. “It was a marvelous collection. A whale eyeball pickled in whiskey, a set of hippo teeth, a mastodon tusk found in a bog in New Jersey. And of course the last dodo egg, of a Rodrigues Solitaire to be exact. The egg was brought back live in a crate, but then after they put it on display it appeared to have hatched, and—Aha, here we are.”
He stopped abruptly, reached up to drag a box down from a high shelf, and opened its lid. Instead of the Shottum’s Cabinet material Nora hoped for, inside was a large eggshell, broken into three pieces. “There’s no provenience on these things, so they didn’t accession them into the main Museum collection. That’s why we’ve got them here.” He pointed reverently at the pieces of shell, licking his lips. “Delacourte’s Cabinet of Natural History. They charged twenty-five cents admission, quite a sum at the time.”
Replacing the box, he slid a thick three-ring binder off an adjoining shelf and began flipping through it. “What would you like to know about the Delacourte Cabinet?”
“It was actually Shottum’s Cabinet of Natural Productions and Curiosities that I was interested in. John Canaday Shottum.” Nora swallowed her impatience. It would clearly be useless to rush Mr. Puck.
“Yes, yes, Shottum’s.” He resumed his shuffling down the row of boxes, binders, and books.
“How did the Museum acquire these cabinets?” she asked.
“Once the Museum opened, with free admission, it put most of them out of business. Of course, a lot of the stuff the old cabinets displayed were fakes, you know. But some of it held real scientific value. As the cabinets went bankrupt, McFadden, an early curator here, bought them up for the Museum.”
“Fakes, you said?”
Puck nodded portentously. “Sewing two heads onto a calf. Taking a whale bone and dying it brown, saying it came from a dinosaur. We have some of those.”
As he moved on to the next row, Nora hastened to keep up, wondering how to guide this flood of information in the direction she wanted.
“Cabinets were all the rage. Even P. T. Barnum once owned a cabinet known as Scudder’s American Museum. He added live exhibits. And that, young lady, was the beginning of his circus.”