The costume gallery is kept at fifty per cent humidity to the decimal because silk that is a hundred and fifty years old does not forgive. The loggers read every minute. Every night the reading in front of one dress rises and falls, a small amount, twelve times a minute, for about an hour. The conservator looked at the trace and said, without meaning to, that's somebody breathing on it.
I am the collections manager at a museum with a costume gallery, and the loggers are the thing I look at before I look at my emails.
The gallery.
Twenty dresses on mannequins in cases, kept at fifty per cent relative humidity and eighteen degrees, because old silk splits if it dries and rots if it does not, and the margin is small. A logger in every case reads the air once a minute and the readings go to a screen in my office, and a case that drifts sets off an alarm before the dress knows.
Case seven drifts every night.
The trace.
About midnight to one. The humidity in case seven goes up and down, half a per cent, in a rhythm. Twelve times a minute. Up, down, up, down, for an hour, and stops.
I showed the trace to the conservator, who has been doing this for thirty years, and she looked at it for a while and said, that's somebody breathing on it. Then she said, I mean, that's what it looks like. And then she did not say anything else, because there is nobody in the case and the case is sealed and the gallery is locked and the trace is the trace.
The dress.
A wedding dress. 1870s, ivory silk, small, for a woman who was not tall. It came to the museum in a trunk with a house clearance in the 1950s and the label says worn once. It is in the best condition of any dress in the gallery and I have not known why, because a dress that is worn once and put in a trunk should be yellow and cracked by now, and it is ivory and it is whole.
It is warm. I opened the case at one, after the trace stopped, with gloves, and the silk at the front of the bodice, at the height of a face, was warm, the way cloth is warm when somebody has been breathing on it for an hour with their face close.
What has been checked.
The logger, replaced. The case seal, tested, and it is a good seal, and the air in it moves every night at midnight in the pattern of a person breathing.
The gallery camera. It sees case seven. The dress does not move. The mannequin does not move. But between midnight and one the glass in front of the bodice, on the camera, fogs. A patch, at the height of a face, the size of a face, coming and going twelve times a minute, on the outside of the glass, and there is nobody in front of it.
Who.
Worn once. The house clearance had a name and the name had a marriage in the parish register in 1874 and a burial in the same register eleven days later, and the burial was hers, and the cause was not written, and the dress went into the trunk, and the trunk went into an attic, and the attic went into a museum eighty years later, and she has been standing in front of it for an hour every night since, breathing on it, and I do not know whether she is looking at it or keeping it.
Keeping it, I think. Silk that is breathed on stays soft. It is why the dress is whole.
What is done about it.
The trace is logged and the alarm threshold on case seven has been widened so it does not go off, and the conservator has written in the condition report that the dress is in exceptional condition for its age with no cause identified.
What I do.
I manage the collection.
I had the glass on case seven changed. It was standard museum glass and it is now the kind with the coating that does not fog, because the fogging was a mark on the display and the guides had complained.
The trace stopped. The breathing did not happen. For a week case seven was fifty per cent flat and the conservator went into it and the silk at the bodice was cool and, at the neckline, where the silk is thinnest, there was a crack that had not been there, the first crack in a hundred and fifty years.
I had the old glass put back. The trace came back that night. The crack is still there but it has not grown, and the conservator has stopped writing no cause identified in the report, and has started writing, kept, which is a word that means something in conservation and something else in a house, and the dress is warm again at one.