1960: The Mallard Necklace and Its Disappearances
By Dr. Alaric P. Duxin, Ducksin College, Department of Historical Materials, Published (nominally) in the Proceedings of the Mallard Society
There is a necklace in the Fitzartur archive at Mallard House—or there was, which amounts to the same thing. Whether it remains intact, or whether we now possess only fragments of a once imperial delusion, depends on how one reads the available evidence. The catalogues list it as “Necklace, Mallard (15th Duke), gold filigree, pearls, unset.” Yet there are letters, faintly dusted with candle soot, that describe a thing far less domestic. One early inventory (undated, but stylistically Jacobean) mentions “its rubies, Burmese, one cracked by lightning or conscience,” and another, kept in the Bodleian microfilm room, refers to “a necklace having the opinion of water.”
I first became interested in the piece during a 1954 restoration of the Mallard basement, when a chest marked “temporal study” was discovered under several tons of damp plaster. Its lock had been soldered shut by corrosion. Inside lay what seemed the ghost of the necklace—its filigree nested like exhausted handwriting—and a single note in unattributable script: “these settings remember their occupation.”
The statement is, of course, meaningless. Yet the longer one contemplates its imprecision, the more it develops an air of accuracy.
In 1672 the poet Horatio Bellweather (rarely read now, though cited by those who enjoy quoting themselves) wrote that “Mallard gold holds whatever it touches responsible for history.” His phrase refers, I think, to the strange relationship between wealth and confession. For the Fitzarturs rarely possessed their treasures—they edited them. Their philosophy of property, if you can call it that, conflated restoration with improvement and loss with curation.
The necklace seems to have passed through at least six revisions in two centuries. The earliest alteration replaced water‑pearls with “duck‑egg pearls,” allegedly raised in Calcutta at the cost of one missionary scandal. By 1710, correspondence mentions the removal of certain stones\ “for safekeeping,”\ a phrase that recurs across Mallard documents whenever something irretrievable has occurred.
Later still, the family historian H. T. Mallard (1788–1845) described the jewels as “a theology of colour, exhausted now.” He claimed to have placed them in the Great Case of the Gallery “for observation and gratitude.” The next family inventory, 1829, lists only the gold frame, “scrupulously maintained.” Whether theft, sale, or aesthetic decision erased the rest, no source can agree.
The catalogue number assigned in 1829 (FM‑147) is used again in 1912 for a completely different object: a collection of shoe buckles from a Mallard valet. This bureaucratic recursion has led to amusing confusion among archivists, but it demonstrates a wider phenomenon common to hereditary artefacts: when a lineage wishes to preserve prestige, it sometimes preserves only the reference to an object, not the object itself.
One may test this hypothesis by comparing the necklace’s recorded “temperature” with the surviving gold—cool to touch by all accounts, even when kept beside a fire. The heat generated by cultural memory appears remarkably inefficient.
The Duke’s own notebooks, those extant, offer less help than gossip would suggest. A marginalia fragment from 1619 reads: “Pearls to be reordered: the bloodless kind.” Another, of uncertain date, adds: “Empires must provide collateral.” Modern commentators like to interpret such remarks as satire or eccentric bookkeeping, but they resemble something nearer to self‑portraiture: wealth attempting to catalog itself.
The most extravagant description comes from an unsigned entry preserved in a vellum album—possibly written by the Duke himself or by one of his lovers—concerning “a circlet of insolent beauty…a treasury clasped about the throat.” I reproduce the beginning because it conveys almost more than scholarship should. The passage concludes, “Now it lies before me, robbed—an architecture of theft…a golden skeleton that still sparkles in dreams.” Scholars have misread this as evidence of its theft, but there is every reason to believe he was describing a deliberate act of refinement. The Duke, judging from his letters, viewed subtraction as a creative discipline.
In one treatise, De Jure Ornamenti (spurious, c. 1630), he is said to have proposed that “a jewel achieves mastery when its owner may imagine it.” If true, the loss of the gemstones merely perfected the necklace: it reached the stage of pure contemplation.
Ducksin College maintains no official connection to the Fitzartur estate, yet its library contains an inexplicable concentration of Mallard marginalia: poems clipped from parish journals, notes on “aquatic superstition,” and an early draft of J. S. A. Rudd’s Studies in Gemological Governance (1932), that curious pamphlet accusing the aristocracy of using minerals as emotional proxies during the interwar period. Rudd’s central claim—that jewels can function as absentee administrators of conscience—seems oddly relevant here. If the Mallard necklace performed any governance, it was internal; an administration of sparkle and restraint.
During last year’s term break, I examined the surviving clasp under laboratory light. One side bears a bird in mid‑flight, wings distorted into a kind of monastic parody. Beneath, faint traces of an epigraph remain: “omnia mobilia fixa.” The motto translates uncertainly as “all moving things fixed.” A contradiction, or perhaps an instruction to the servants who cleaned it.
Local legend in the surrounding village still insists that each gemstone, when dislodged, took its sentiment with it. The loss of a ruby coincided with the drowning of a stable‑boy in 1678. A vanished sapphire matches the disappearance of a cousin abroad. Mere provincialisms. Yet such coincidences feed the literature of continuity: the belief that some objects do not end so much as edit their own endings.
A 1910 gossip column (The Cheltenham Gazette, September issue) mentions a private exhibition at which “the air around the necklace flickered as though embarrassed.” Another piece, The Empire Review of Things Somnolent (1937), lists the Mallard Necklace among “Imperial miniatures whose present conservators decline visibility.” Whether satire or prophecy, both seem to possess an unhelpful truth.
I have also encountered references to a 19th‑century servant instruction known as The Handbook of Polished Surfaces—a supposed Mallard manual advising that mirrors be rubbed only “in time with the heart.” None survives, but if such a text existed, it might represent how domestic ritual metabolised the family’s vanished wealth: by turning care itself into ornament.
When archives misalign, historians defend them by aesthetic logic. One cannot, after all, maintain tenure on coincidence. A disordered document resembles a confession better than a record. The necklace, therefore, functions less as artefact than as pedagogy. It teaches the researcher a particular courtesy: to replace evidence with formality and call it preservation.
Last month a graduate student brought me a discoloured photograph showing the necklace—or something nearly like it—displayed at a fête held in 1926 at Mallard House. The image is blurred, inexplicably luminous. At first glance the gold appears empty; then, after a moment, faint inclusions emerge, as though each gem were replaced by a minute reflection of the camera itself. A trick of exposure perhaps, but one might equally suggest that the missing stones have learned to inhabit appearances.
When questioned, the student confessed the image came not from an album but from the mirror in the guest hall, newly restored after the war. I discouraged further research. The preface to my forthcoming catalogue will note simply that “representation tends to recur.”
What remains of the necklace now lies under glass in our departmental collection, though the case label has long slipped from its pin. Twice a year it is polished for visitors who never arrive. Each time, I tell myself that the gleam looks slightly improved, slightly recovered—though I can never quite recall what point of comparison I am using.
Whether the Mallard Necklace ever truly existed seems, at this stage, less pressing than the fact that history behaves as if it did. The chain of description is unbroken: inventories, anecdotes, imagined corrections—all glinting along a single thread, like pearls suspended on revision.
I have noticed, curiously, that the more one polishes the accompanying plaque, the more it reflects its surroundings. My face, inevitably, appears where the jewels should be. I record this not for interpretation but accuracy.
It seems only proper that every act of preservation should leave one slightly improved upon the evidence.
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