Leviathan or The Whale

coat, as if its owner had just stepped out of the room. At the other end of the landing stands a pair of mirrored double doors, and beyond them, the Long Gallery.
    Once this was used for indoor recreation, for fencing or strolling in inclement weather. Now it is lined with bookcases and a plaster frieze in seventeenth-century style. It depicts a veritable menagerie of chimerical and transgendered beasts. One has a woman’s torso and breasts, but a stallion’s body and penis. Another shows a snarling, scaly Jacobean whale, fighting to free itself of its entablature; all teeth and flukes, it heads down the hall towards its time-honoured opponent–a giant squid splayed above the door, flanked by a curly-tailed mermaid.
    This antique animation carries on, regardless of the silence of the room, orchestrated by its commissioner, William Constable, whose own portrait hangs below. He is clad in a Rousseauesque gown and turban, a man of Enlightenment tastes–that much is evident from the contents of his cabinet of curiosities, now housed in an anteroom at the end of the gallery. Like the Quakers, Constable was barred from high office by his faith; and just as they directed their energies into business–the business of killing whales–so the squire of Burton Constable was excused the expense of political service, and could spend his considerable fortune elsewhere.
    Chemistry, astronomy, botany, zoology and ancient history all clamoured for Constable’s attention: from ornate shells and polar bear skulls to casts of Roman and Greek coins kept in specially made cases. One cabinet contains early electrical equipment, an elaboration of hardwood wheels, brass cylinders and rubber belts producing sparks to be stored in glass Leyden jars, ready for a Frankenstein experiment. On another shelf lie relics of a true monster: the teeth of the Tunstall whale, arrayed as though newly pulled from a dragon’s jaw.
    John Raleigh Chichester-Constable, the current tenant of Burton Constable Hall, is a dapper man in tweeds, cravat and Geo. F. Trumper cologne. He recalls how, as a boy, more than seventy years ago, he would play in the whale’s skeleton which then stood in the grounds, using it as a giant climbing frame. As heir to the Seigniory, Mr Chichester-Constable is still notified when any cetacean is thrown on this coast, and may dispose of it as he will. He once took a dead porpoise into Hull to have a pair of fashionable ankle boots made for his wife from its skin, only to be asked by the cobbler–who happened to be the father of Amy Johnson, the aviatrix–to take the carcase out of his shop before its smell drove his customers away.
    As a young man, Mr Chichester-Constable was also an amateur pilot, landing his private plane on the long narrow field next to the Whale Belt, while the whale looked on, in an ever more dilapidated state. It endured the decades, exposed to the pouring rain, the freezing frost, the blanching sun, neglected in the nettles and long grass, awaiting the day it would be revived. On a late summer’s day in 1996, the bones were exhumed by Michael Boyd, zoologist and historian. Like Melville before him, Boyd was assisted in his task by Beale’s description in
The Natural History of the Sperm Whale;
by referring to his nineteenth-century predecessor, Boyd was able to salvage most of the skeleton.
    It was a hot afternoon, and exhausted by his efforts as he worked in his shirt sleeves and vest, Boyd felt as Ahab had felt about ‘thou damned whale’. Although the Victorian articulation had corroded, he still had to saw through thick iron bars before the great ribs and vertebræ appeared, remarkably preserved, not unlike the ichthyosaurs he had excavated from the strata of nearby Robin Hood’s Bay. Slowly, the whale emerged, bit by bit, bone by bone. The skull was still riven by rusty bolts as though it had undergone some ancient and rudimentary cranial surgery. And when the jaw bone was uncovered–split in half like a giant wishbone–an unerupted tooth was found in it, as if the whale had reverted to infancy in its interment.
    Now the result has been brought into the great hall, where it lies on the floor, overlooked by ancestral portraits and narwhal tusks, like a hunted tiger laid out for its master’s delectation. In a house filled with strange beasts–dead-eyed impala impaled on the walls, and silver-gilt Chinese dragons crawling up the window frames–the whale is an elegant whimsy to greet modern