charm bracelet, you’ll get a good idea of how they were viewed. For another thing, if whoever had owned it had lost more of it—the clasp or the main jewel—she would have turned the place upside down looking for it.”
“The way that someone will look harder for a gold coin, but won’t bother so much over a copper one,” I said.
She nodded. “It might have been a gift from a husband, and it was emblematic, if you will, of a lady’s position as queen of her household.”
“Queen of little enough, in those days,” I said half to myself. The light caught the silver and gleamed brightly.
But Dr. Spencer disagreed. “I don’t like to write that off so easily. Don’t forget, there was tremendous power to be found in the home. People like to think of colonial ladies being immured in the house, but just stop and think what was going on at all those endless tea parties. Gossip, matchmaking, a political hint dropped from one husband to be transmitted to another over the tea and via their wives—no, I think there was quite a lot going on that we just don’t know about. It just wasn’t written down all that often. Who’s going to give any attention or credence to women’s gossip, after all? But it had its uses, and its power too. Remember Dangerous Liaisons?”
She picked over the links and squinted at them carefully. “Okay, definitely sterling silver, most likely of English manufacture—”
“How can you tell? Is there a mark that I missed?”
“No, no mark. It’s just that it feels English to me, as opposed to Continental or colonial. You just get a knack, develop an instinct after a while, you look at enough things. Where did you find it?”
“At the Chandler House.”
“Was it from a good…I don’t know what word you’d use.” She ran her fingers through her hair and smoothed out a tangle. “We’d say provenance, to describe where a thing was found and how it might have gotten there—who owned it, that sort of thing.”
“We use the English pronunciation—provenience—or context. All they mean is where it was found and what it was found with and how old it is.”
She nodded recognition.
“Yes, I think so,” I said. “I think it is an early-eighteenth-century stratum.”
“And there were wealthy women there at the time? That was the first generation of Chandlers, wasn’t it?”
I nodded. “Margaret Chandler might certainly have been rich enough and important enough to have had such a thing. I think she was the only one old enough and rich enough to have had one at the time.”
Dr. Spencer looked out the window a while, thinking. “I can recommend a few books to look at, if you like, to compare this with other chatelaines. Of course, those won’t have been broken and buried, like this one was.”
“Oh, I know. Museums prefer to deal with whole objects.” I looked over her shoulder and studied the object. “I wonder what would have been attached to that hook.”
“Difficult to say. A lot of objects were made attached right to the chain, not meant to be removed. Perhaps a key to a cupboard or a clock or a jewelry box? A seal? Something pretty and personal and valuable.”
I looked through the magnifying glass at the little bits of metal. Smooth, silver-gray, rounded, and shiny, they were actually pretty plain, but when you knew what they were a part of, suddenly they contained all sorts of meanings.
“We don’t even know if it belonged to the Chandler family, do we?”
I shook my head. “It might have belonged to a guest or a visitor.”
The curator looked at the links. “I don’t know how you can stand not to have the whole thing, now, not be able to study it all, to touch it, get to know it.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “You’ve got the light of greed in your eyes, Dr. Spencer.”
“Please, call me Mary Ann. Of course I do. It’s the best job in the world, this one. I get to have all the things. And pretend they’re mine.” She shrugged again, but she was smiling this time, which did a lot to mitigate the squalid ambience of her room. “Of course, I get to use all those gorgeous, yummy adjectives too, to describe them. It’s all things and words, with me.”
“Come out to the site some time. I’ll be happy to show you how we make do with just the broken pieces.”
“Oh, thanks. I couldn’t.” She heaved a theatrical sigh. “All those