The Wonder Chamber

by Mary Malloy

  She wondered how much he thought the information was worth, and if there were any strings attached to it.

  “You don’t need to pay me for anything. I was doing my job and got my compensation from St. Patrick’s College.” She did not reach for the envelope and eventually he put it back in his pocket.

  “Do you plan to say anything about it? I would hate to cause a mass dredging of the Bologna canals by treasure hunters looking for it,” he said.

  “Would you make a claim for it if it were found?” She had already thought about this. Italian authorities would certainly make a claim if he didn’t. The fact that it had been stolen by a Nazi officer during the war would probably make the Gonzaga claim very strong, and now they had the evidence of Maggie’s letters to back it up. But going public with the information would necessitate revealing the details of Greta Winkler Hoffman’s murder.

  “After you sent me the copy of my grandmother’s letter I went to Patrizio to ask him if he would tell me specifically where they dumped Greta’s trunk, but he is like a clam about it now.” Cosimo turned and looked at her. “And the canals have changed so much since then. I don’t think it will ever be recovered.”

  Lizzie stood and adjusted the tuxedo coat and bowtie that Paddy-Boy’s statue was wearing for the occasion. It was a nice touch and she appreciated whoever had done it. As she moved the coat she saw that a tattoo had been painted on the arm, a smiling dragon labeled Draco dandinii. She worked very hard not to laugh as she turned again to Cosimo.

  “Life’s just full of mysteries, isn’t it?” She felt happy. Even picturing the marble Michelangelo lying in the mud of a Bologna canal could not diminish her satisfaction on this evening.

  Cosimo offered his arm and they walked back to the museum. The exhibit looked splendid. She saw Jimmy and Roscoe leading their own tours and joined for a few minutes to hear Jimmy’s enthusiastic descriptions and Roscoe’s more measured commentary.

  Martin was also listening. “Where is your third assistant? Is he here tonight?”

  “I’m happy to say that he wisely decided not to put in an appearance,” Lizzie said. She had noted Prince Beppe Carrera’s absence early in the program.

  They wandered through the exhibit and looked again at the alligator, the Marquesan club, the gigantic marble foot, the sweetly moving Etruscan tomb chests, the rocks and bugs and fish skeletons; and finally stopped at the sarcophagus.

  “I wonder who originally occupied this coffin?” Martin said.

  “A mid-level functionary of the eighteenth dynasty,” Lizzie said automatically, then laughed. “Strange, isn’t it, that the further back in time we go the less seriously we take the details of death. Whoever he was, he might have been just as much a victim of passion and violence as Greta Hoffman, but we don’t have the same response.”

  Jackie had joined them and overheard the last statement. “And if you have been following her story in the scandal sheets, she isn’t treated very humanely either.”

  “I wonder if it would make a difference if they knew who she was and what happened to her,” Lizzie offered.

  “I don’t think so,” Jackie said.

  “You certainly do find a lot of corpses in your work. I think there must be some police detectives who find fewer dead bodies than you,” Martin said, slipping an arm around Lizzie’s waist.

  “Well I’m a historian and that’s just what we do,” Lizzie responded. “We see dead people.”

  “I like the concept that history is just one damn thing after another,” Jackie said. “Or in your case, one old corpse after another.”

  They arrived back at the dell’Arca angel, where the exhibit started.

  “I prefer to think I deal with objects and documents rather than corpses,” Lizzie said. “There are people behind every document and every object, of course, and theirs are the stories I want to tell, but despite what you two may think, I’d rather get at them through something other than their actual corporeal remains.”

  Lizzie remembered how surprised she was the first time she touched the marble on the angel’s wing. It looked so warm but had an unexpected coolness under her fingers.

  “I regret that we can’t let every visitor touch the objects,” she continued. “The tactile part is crucial to me and I’m lucky that as the curator I get to experience it.”

  “I think you did the next best thing,” Martin said. He had helped her assemble a collection of marble and other raw materials that people could touch, which was mounted on a wall with the introductory text for the exhibit. “We all know that even marble gets worn down from constant touching, and it’s less fragile than wood or paint.”

  “I am a document person as you both know,” Jackie interjected, “but I have frequently heard that every object tells a story.”

  “Every object certainly has a story,” Lizzie answered, “but unfortunately they frequently don’t tell it. You can sometimes read its history on its surface, or speculate about it based on the context or by a comparison to similar objects, but usually you need the documents as well. Take this beautiful thing,” she said, nodding at the angel. “We know it was made by an artist named Niccolo de Bari, who became famous for designing the fabulous arch over the tomb of St. Dominic, and is now called dell’Arca for that reason. We can speculate, by comparing this angel to the one on that tomb, that they are a pair, but we don’t know why this angel never went on the tomb, and we don’t even know how it got into the Gonzaga collection. Everything we know, except the comparison of the two sculptures, is based on documents.”

  A student waiter came by and offered them each another glass of champagne.

  “And we know that one hundred years ago today Lorenzo Gonzaga gave this wonderful angel to the college in honor of Maggie Kelliher. And that is worth a toast.”

  They clinked glasses.

  “I have learned a lesson in all this,” Lizzie continued, “about both documents and objects. I have a tendency to judge early and be suspicious. Remember how we leapt to the conclusion that Maggie Kelliher was the unwilling pawn in an arranged marriage just because we didn’t think she looked happy in that horrible picture in the New York Times?”

  “Yes, but that is how you have to start a project,” Jackie answered. “You need to have ideas that prompt questions. You kept an open mind and arrived at a very different conclusion.”

  “I was suspicious when the Dutch paintings were missing from the house,” Martin said. “And that turned out to have a completely legitimate explanation.” He saw Cosimo Gonzaga looking at them from across the room and raised his glass.

  “Now I am just wondering what things got left out that will come back to haunt me!” Lizzie said. “There are always things that are discovered just after the exhibit opens or the book is published.”

  “Now is not the time to worry about that though,” Jackie said. “It is a wonderful exhibit, Lizzie.” She lifted her glass again. “To angels and alligators!”

  “I’ll drink to that,” Lizzie said with a laugh, touching her glass first to Jackie’s and then to Martin’s. “And to the Wonder Chamber of the Gonzagas.”

  Behind them, the marble of the angel glowed in soft light against a dark fabric background.

  An interview with the author

  Q. Readers of your first two books might be surprised to find that Lizzie’s job has taken her to Bologna in The Wonder Chamber. Why did you decide to move the setting of her research from England to Italy?

  A. In the previous book, Paradise Walk, Lizzie retraced the pilgrimage of “The Wife of Bath,” a character from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. In addition to going to Canterbury, Chaucer tells us that “The Wife” made pilgrimages to Rome, Bologna, Jerusalem, Cologne, and Santiago de Compostela. I’ve decided to follow her to each of those places. I fell in love with Bologna the first time I went there, and the city is important in the history of
museums, which is another of my interests, so I took advantage of the opportunity to steer the research for the book in that direction. The biggest part of any of these books is the research and I try to choose subject matter that will sustain my interest over the several years it takes to write the novel.

  Q. Can you describe some of the research?

  A. I hadn’t originally intended to include so much about World War II in this book, but when I realized I was sending the character of Maggie Kelleher to live in Bologna during a time when the city was transformed by war, it became a necessary part of the plot. That meant that I had two rather different topics to research: Renaissance collections and WWII in Italy. The first I was already pretty familiar with; I teach a course on the history of museums at Harvard and am working on a non-fiction book on the topic. Seeing what is left of the collections of Ulisses Aldrovandi and Ferdinando Cospi at two museums in Bologna was absolutely essential to me. It allowed me to give what I hope are good descriptions of real objects.

  For my research on World War II and the resistance in Italy, I relied heavily on Iris Origo’s War in Val D’Orcia: An Italian War Diary, 1943-1944. The author was an Anglo-American woman married to an Italian aristocrat and her diary is filled with perceptive observations of the war unfolding around her. I also really liked Beppe Fenoglio’s fictionalized descriptions of his experiences in the Italian Resistance—the novel A Private Affair, and his collection of short stories, The Twenty-three Days of the City of Alba. In Bologna, I found the Museum of the History of the Resistance (Museo della Resistenza) very useful, and traveled with A Travel Guide to World War II Sites in Italy: Museums, Monuments, and Battlegrounds, by Anne Leslie Saunders.

  Q. Objects are a source of information in all three Lizzie Manning books, but you stress them more in The Wonder Chamber. Why do objects matter?

  A. There is a progression over the three books in the way I think about Lizzie’s research that is related to my own research projects. When I started The Wandering Heart, I was working on a doctoral dissertation and I saw the novel as an antidote to the limitations of non-fiction history writing, which requires that you stick pretty close to your source materials. I started by creating documents for Lizzie to discover, but quickly found that I wanted her to get information from objects and paintings as well. Both are important sources of historical information, but neither are used as often as they might be by historians.

  The second book, Paradise Walk, starts from a document (a journal of a pilgrimage to Canterbury) and an object (a reliquary of Thomas Becket), but I wanted to use the landscape of the English countryside, as well as literary texts, as additional sources of information. In addition to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the texts included Arthurian romances, English poetry, modern narratives of long walks, and song lyrics (from ancient ballads to rock and roll). If I were to summarize how I thought about the three Lizzie books, The Wandering Heart is about documents and paintings, Paradise Walk is about works of literature, and The Wonder Chamber is about objects. Obviously, I am especially attracted to objects and what they can and do represent.

  I am intrigued by the question of “why objects matter.” I think there are two answers. The first is related to the physical properties of objects. We respond to their design, color, shape, and material composition. The other, usually more important answer, is tied to the people, events, and places with which an object is associated. Sometimes we become attached to objects for personal reasons. For example, we often become particularly attached to objects that are acquired through family connections, received as gifts from people we care deeply about, or associated with important memories. An object may also be given heightened value due to its ties to fame or celebrity. This is not just a modern phenomenon. We often appreciate something more if we know it was made or owned by someone famous or because it represents something bigger than itself. Plymouth Rock is the perfect example of this. It is a boulder sitting on a beach that was almost certainly not stepped on by pilgrims as they landed in small boats from the Mayflower, and yet it has gained iconic status for Americans. At some point, someone carved the date “1620” into it and built a sort of Greek temple around it. We have, over a few centuries, somehow agreed as a group, a culture, to let this stone represent the early Colonial period of our shared history.

  Because I say so much about relics in this book, I should mention them as well. Relics represent how we invest faith in objects, even tiny splinters of wood believed to be from the cross on which Jesus was crucified. There were no pieces of the “true cross” circulating for several centuries after Christ and the true cross relics that began to appear after that time are almost certainly all fakes. This should strip them of their meaning, but many people continue to believe in spite of the evidence. That’s a powerful object!

  Q. This is the third in your Lizzie Manning trilogy. Did you always see this as a trilogy, or can we expect other books in this series?

  A. I always conceived of this as a trilogy, but I love the character and her friends, and the research is always fun, so I am willing to consider continuing it if there is a readership to warrant it.

  Q. Are you interested in writing other mystery novels?

  A. It was actually never my intention to write classic mysteries, where the investigator is usually solving a murder, and I haven’t been entirely comfortable with that designation for my books. Nonetheless, Lizzie is a historian and historians are detectives, though the puzzles they solve are not generally crimes. That said, historical events often have consequences that linger for generations, which is how Lizzie gets into so much trouble.

  The novel I am currently working on is a more straightforward historical novel, set in medieval Ireland, when the English were claiming territory and the Irish clans were fighting among themselves. I love that period. There was such strong intellectual presence in Ireland at that time, and yet, just beneath the surface, a world of fairies who meddled in human activities.

  The Author

  MARY MALLOY is the author of the novels The Wandering Heart and Paradise Walk. She is also the author of four maritime history books, including the award-winning Devil on the Deep Blue Sea: The Notorious Career of Samuel Hill of Boston. An authority on musical traditions on shipboard, Mary has performed the songs of American mariners at museums and colleges around the world. She appears on four albums of traditional sea music, including the Aaargh-rated Pirate Songs! She has a Ph.D. from Brown University and is Professor of Maritime Studies and Director of the Global Ocean Program at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Mass. In addition, Mary teaches Museum Studies at Harvard University, where she won the Shattuck Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2010.