The Spirit Photographer Read online

  THE SPIRIT PHOTOGRAPHER

  A Novel

  JON MICHAEL VARESE

  FOR FANS OF Cold Mountain and The Alienist, The Spirit Photographer is a stunning debut novel of historical suspense about a charismatic conman haunted—perhaps literally—by a ghost from his past.

  Boston, 1870. Photographer Edward Moody runs a booming business capturing the images of the spirits of the departed in his portraits. He lures grieving widows and mourning mothers into his studio with promises of catching the ghosts of their deceased loved ones with his camera. Despite the whispers around town that Moody is a fraud of the basest kind, no one has been able to expose him, and word of his gift has spread, earning him money, fame, and a growing list of illustrious clients.

  One day, while developing the negative from a sitting to capture the spirit of the young son of an abolitionist senator, Moody is shocked to see a different spectral figure develop before his eyes. Instead of the staged image of the boy he was expecting, the camera has seemingly captured the spirit of a beautiful young woman. Is it possible that the spirit photographer caught a real ghost? When Moody recognizes the woman in the photograph as the daughter of an escaped slave he knew long ago, he is compelled to travel from Boston to the Louisiana bayous to resolve their unfinished business—and perhaps save his soul. But more than one person is out to stop him …

  With dramatic twists and redolent of the mood of the Southern Gothic, The Spirit Photographer conjures the Reconstruction era South, replete with fugitive hunters, voodoo healers, and other dangers lurking in the swamp. Jon Michael Varese’s deftly plotted first novel is an intense tale of death and betrayal that shows us how undeniably the ghosts of the past remain with us, and how resolutely they refuse to be quieted.

  Copyright

  The author would like to thank the following people for their contributions to this work: Thomas Banks, Serena Benedetti, Donald Booth, Manoah Bowman, Jessica Breheny, Lisa Campbell, Nicolas Campbell, Myriam J.A. Chancy, Rosana Cruz, Mary Curtis, Chelsea Cutchens, Pam del Rio, Christopher de Spoelberch, Jacques de Spoelberch, Malcolm Gaines, Joseph Geller, Rebecca Godson, Margaret Hogan, James Ivory, John Jordan, Karole Kelly, Sofie Kleppner, Emily Mather, James Maughn, Elizabeth Musser, Elizabeth Pérez, Alex Rothenberg, Jeremiah Rusconi, Thomas Uskali, and Carolyn Williams. Also thanks to Lissa Capo, Daniel Hammer, Mary Lou Eichhorn, and Jennifer Navarre at the Williams Research Center, Historic New Orleans Collection, and to Ott Howell at the Beauregard-Keyes House, New Orleans, Louisiana.

  This edition first published in hardcover in the United States in 2018 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  NEW YORK

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected]

  or write to us at the above address.

  LONDON

  30 Calvin Street

  London E1 6NW

  [email protected]

  www.ducknet.co.uk

  Copyright © 2018 Jon Michael Varese

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  978-1-4683-1588-2

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Book I: Reunion

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Book II: Vision

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter XXXII

  Chapter XXXIII

  Chapter XXXIV

  Chapter XXXV

  Chapter XXXVI

  Chapter XXXVII

  Chapter XXXVIII

  Chapter XXXIX

  Book III: Union

  Chapter XL

  Chapter XLI

  Chapter XLII

  Chapter XLIII

  Chapter XLIV

  Chapter XLV

  Chapter XLVI

  Chapter XLVII

  Chapter XLVIII

  Chapter XXVII

  Historical Note

  About the Author

  For Jacques de Spoelberch

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This work of fiction is inspired by events that took place during the Spiritualist movement in nineteenth-century America. While some of the story is based on the life of William Mumler (the first American spirit photographer) and other historical figures, it makes no claims to accuracy with regard to characters, places, or events.

  If I do not remember thee,

  let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.

  Psalms 137:6

  BOOK I

  REUNION

  Banner of Light

  Boston, Massachusetts

  Saturday, August 5, 1865

  A NEW PHASE of spiritual manifestations is exciting a great deal of attention and wonder in those who take an interest in the grand and beautiful subject of spirit communion. If this phenomenon in spiritual manifestation be genuine, it is the greatest and the best yet given to outside perception, and bears incontrovertible evidence of the truth that spiritual communications are what they claim to be, viz.: actual manifestations of the “dead” to the “living.”

  Mr. Edward Moody is the medium and the artist who makes photographs of spirits. His business has lately been ornamental engraving—a very profitable business, which he says has paid him upwards of nine dollars a week—but, from causes he cannot explain, he is being forced to leave it and engage in photography, which art he practiced under the employment of Mr. Matthew Brady in the years before and during the war. Mr. Moody is not a Spiritualist, nor, he says, has he ever believed in Spiritualism, but on the contrary has opposed and ridiculed it. He has many times been told by mediums that he was a very powerful and peculiar medium. This he did not believe, and only laughed at the communications.

  A few Sundays since, he being alone with Mrs. Lovejoy in her photograph saloon above her silver goods store at 258 Washington Street, he produced a picture of Mrs. Lovejoy, which, to his great astonishment and wonder, revealed not just the sitter on the developed plate, but also a picture of a young woman standing by the sitter’s side. While looking upon the strange phenomenon—the picture of two persons upon the plate, instead of one—the thought and the conviction flashed upon his mind, THIS IS THE PICTURE OF A SPIRIT. And in it Mrs. Lovejoy recognized the likeness of her deceased cousin, which is also said to be correct by others who have seen the picture, and who knew her.

  Mr. Moody related this wonderful experience to some persons who were interested in Spiritualism, and they at once eagerly sought to have the e
xperiment tried upon themselves, the result of which has been that some ten or more persons have now had their pictures taken, and the picture of one or more spirits has been upon the same plate. Many of them have been recognized as friends that once lived on earth. The picture of the spirit is fainter and less distinct than that of the one who sits. The pictures of the spirits are not alike, each one being extraordinary and different.

  I

  ON THE DAY before Senator Garrett’s departure for Boston, news of impending storms had disrupted the city, and so by the time his brougham began climbing up Pinckney Street toward Louisburg Square, nearly all of the windows on Beacon Hill had already been locked and shuttered. Up ahead, on the corner of Pinckney and West Cedar, Garrett spied two lone figures, their hands firm on the brims of their hats. It was old Dovehouse conversing with the new choirmaster from King’s Chapel.

  The carriage approached, its wheels rattling in the street.

  “Back again, old boy?”

  “I am, sir,” Garrett replied.

  “Good to have you. Congratulations on your victories. I never doubted them for a second.”

  The senator returned a nod. Dovehouse never doubted anything—a characteristic that had been amusing Garrett for close to forty years. The “victories” to which old Dovehouse referred were the many Republican triumphs from the previous congressional session: the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, giving freedmen the right to vote; the passage of the first Enforcement Act, empowering the Federal Government to prosecute the Klan directly; and the election of Hiram Revels, a black Mississippi minister, to Jefferson Davis’s old seat in the Senate chamber—a change unimaginable twenty years earlier, when Senator James B. Garrett, at the age of thirty-nine, had begun his career as a statesman.

  “I suppose we can move on with things now!” Dovehouse called out as the senator’s carriage continued up the street.

  Garrett offered no reply. With the readmission of Georgia—the last of the outcast Confederate states—back into the Union, there were those, like Dovehouse, who had emphatically declared the country reunited. But Garrett had no intention of “moving on”—at least not until he had secured fundamental rights for all the country’s citizens.

  When the senator at last arrived at his house, it too was dark and motionless, except for the swirling clusters of maple leaves in front of it. The house glared at him as if it were displeased with his lateness, and its unblinking frown gave him no comfort. When the front door opened, and Garrett descended from the carriage, a sudden gust of wind scattered the leaves from his path. In the doorway stood a heavyset woman wearing a gingham dress.

  “Welcome home, sir,” Jenny said.

  “Dear Jenny … is something the matter?”

  “It’s Mrs. Garrett—she’s received a letter. She’s waiting for you in the drawing room.”

  His Jenny. She had been with him for nearly twenty years now. He stepped inside, handing her his hat and his gloves. His face, he knew, betrayed him.

  “Sir?” Jenny said.

  “Thank you, Jenny,” Garrett said.

  The groans of the hinges welcomed Senator Garrett as he opened the great doors of the drawing room. The room’s curtains were drawn, blocking out most of the day’s remaining light, and outside the wind howled unmercifully.

  “Elizabeth?”

  In the dimness, his wife’s profile emerged.

  “James—” she said. “We’ve heard … we’ve heard from …”

  Elizabeth’s chin fell, and Garrett moved toward her. She released what was in her hands with a surprising lack of resistance. Garrett approached the curtains and held the letter near the split of light.

  17 July 1870

  Dear Mrs. Garrett,

  I write to inform you of the miraculous news—we have received word from your son, William Jeffrey. He has made contact through a dream, and he is bathed in flowers and sunlight.

  I realize that this message arrives sooner than I had predicted, but the movements of those in the spirit world can be rather sudden, and as such we must move with great speed. Please come to the gallery tomorrow at one o’clock in the afternoon, so that we may execute your photograph immediately.

  Yours sincerely,

  Edward Moody, Photographer

  258 Washington Street, Boston

  Garrett read the “news” with a mixture of uncertainty and disdain. Two weeks earlier, Elizabeth had written him in Washington to tell him that she had made a visit to Mr. Moody—the so-called “spirit photographer” who had achieved notoriety in recent years. “It appears that Mr. Moody has a gift,” she had told her husband, and when he read those words he was surprised, for his wife had always been the more skeptical of the two of them. A man who could photograph spirits? It was not something one would have expected Elizabeth to believe in. He had thought that her initial letter might have described a whimsy; but when a second letter arrived, citing Colfax’s highly publicized visit to Moody, he recognized that his wife had become attached to this idea.

  Now she was looking over at him imploringly, which was another strange thing, because his wife usually demanded rather than implored. But he understood, for just the sight of his son’s name scribbled on a folded piece of paper was enough to unbury what so much rehearsed forgetting had kept secreted away for years.

  “Elizabeth—” Garrett said.

  And when he said her name she knew, because she was able to read him better than he could ever read himself.

  “James,” she said, “I know your thoughts on this matter. I too have my reservations. But if he is a man of extraordinary power, as some claim, and if he could provide us with—”

  She paused, no longer his supplicant, but his commander.

  “Think of what it could mean.”

  He studied the letter again, read it from beginning to end.

  “James, we must waste no time.”

  The senator inhaled deeply.

  “Very well then,” Garrett said. “We’ll go tomorrow afternoon, as he says.”

  That night, as Elizabeth breathed quietly beside him, Garrett clenched the bed sheets and stared at the moving shapes above his head. The wind had grown even more impatient, causing a violent parade of shadows on the ceiling.

  II

  THERE WAS NOTHING new about the spirit photographs—they had been circulating since the end of the war—but the recent acceleration of publicity around them had won Edward Moody widespread attention. Elizabeth Garrett had paid her first visit to him after reading of a woman whose lost child had appeared standing beside her in a photograph. The article was one of hundreds of pieces that the Spiritualists had been publicizing in their papers.

  Dovehouse, of course, dismissed the Spiritualists as swindlers and imposters, and since her husband held Dovehouse’s opinions in such high regard, Elizabeth knew that she would need to tread carefully. In her fashionable Boston circles, there were the women who believed and those who didn’t, and while the Spiritualists had managed to penetrate into every rank of society, it was still a delicate matter as far as the electorate was concerned. Elizabeth had successfully avoided ever declaring precisely where she stood. An inquiry about a portrait need signify nothing more than curiosity.

  Mr. Moody worked in the central part of Boston, in the building where Elizabeth had once gone to have an addition to her bridal silver engraved. She was initially surprised by the photographer’s appearance. Attractive—even handsome—but terribly unkempt.

  “Mrs. Garrett,” he said, “I trust you have come because you are a believer in spiritual communion?”

  His voice lacked energy. That too came as a surprise.

  “Mr. Moody, I—”

  She paused, wondering if the famous “Moody” was the same dishevelled man who sat before her.

  “Worry not, Mrs. Garrett,” he said. “These wonderful concepts are often difficult to grasp at first. In your letter you mentioned your son—”

  “Yes, William Jeffrey.”

&n
bsp; “How long?”

  “Eighteen years. He was three. It was eighteen years ago now.”

  “And it was the fe—?”

  “Yes—I believe he contracted it when we were in Washington. I have found it very difficult to return there ever since.”

  “Unfortunate.”

  “Yes.”

  His eyes were profound—beautiful and lonely. The eyes of a man who was heartbroken.

  “And the senator?” Moody said. “He will be sitting for the portrait as well?”

  “I have not yet told my husband of this design,” Elizabeth replied.

  “Mr. Colfax was here, as you probably know.”

  “Yes, I am acquainted with the vice president’s portrait. The Harper’s article has excited great interest in it, and I know that it has become much talked about in Washington.”

  “A vast majority of the community, having fought the cause for abolition, are sympathetic to much of the good senator’s beliefs. If there is any hesitancy on your part due to the senator’s unique position, dare I suggest that a photograph might even work to his benefit?”

  Elizabeth perceived his meaning.

  “Mr. Moody,” she said, “I can assure you that is not the intention of this investigation. My husband’s reputation is not something he would ever surrender to the charms of spiritual fanatics and—artists.”

  Her emphasis on that last word produced its intended effect. Moody failed to respond, and she observed his hands moving uncomfortably in his lap.

  “Mr. Moody,” she said, “I don’t mean to be unkind, but you can understand my concern. Many have expressed their doubts.”

  Moody’s face became rigid, and his eyes fixed on hers.

  “Your son is everywhere around you,” he said. “And soon, Mrs. Garrett, you will not doubt that!”

  He was so emphatic—it was almost like an attack—and her momentary confidence was gone.

  “The photographs—” he continued, softening, “They give us an opportunity to go back. They reunite us with those we’ve lost. We call spirits forth from their beautiful kingdoms, beckoning them to return to this hard and earthly world. We cannot determine how long they will linger … we can only hope for some gratification. There is such sweetness in it, when it does come.”