The Spirit Photographer Page 4

  “And what might you expect, Mr. Winter?”

  “A fair share of the profits, no more, no less,” Winter said.

  “You realize that there is more to this than profit,” Moody said.

  “Of course I do,” Joseph Winter replied. “I think you will find yourself quite surprised at what I can realize.”

  And so the unlikely partnership was formed, so quickly and so casually, that by the time James and Elizabeth Garrett were on their way to Moody’s gallery a few months later, Joseph Winter—photographer, Union army veteran, and thief—had established himself as an indispensible “assistant” to Edward Moody. Winter was helping Moody clean the camera when Mrs. Lovejoy interrupted them on that dark and blustery day, after the rain had started to fall. Near the doorway with Mrs. Lovejoy stood two figures, dressed in black. Their garments sparkled with beads of drizzle.

  The Garretts had arrived for their photograph.

  V

  “SENATOR GARRETT, IT is an honor,” Moody said, extending his hand.

  “And Mrs. Garrett—a great pleasure to see you again.”

  Garrett glanced about the gallery. It was a hollow, oblong chamber, long enough to support three skylights. The rain beat down upon the skylights and flowed in rivulets over the glass. On the walls there were portraits—too many to count—enlarged, framed, and displayed like works of art. So, these were the “spirits,” with their sad companions on earth. Every face was long and unfathomable.

  Garrett did not like this room, and he did not release Elizabeth’s arm.

  “My wife has become quite … taken with your art,” he said.

  “I assure you there is no art in it, sir,” Moody replied. “I am merely the connection between this place and the spirit world. And you sir, do you believe—”

  “Do I believe that hocus pocus and humbug are everywhere about us, Mr. Moody? I do. But I also believe in the inexplicable and the impossible. I believe that man is not beyond achieving the impossible.”

  “You yourself, sir,” Moody said, “have helped achieve in your lifetime what most men said was impossible. I am a great admirer of you, sir, as are many of my Spiritualist brethren.”

  Garrett nodded and felt Elizabeth tense. Her attention had been drawn toward the other end of the room.

  “Ah,” Moody said. “May I present my assistant, Mr. Winter.”

  “I did not know that there would be others present,” Elizabeth said.

  “Mr. Winter is a Spiritualist, and an accomplished photographer himself,” Moody said.

  She disliked him at first sight, and knew that her slight recoiling as he approached would not go unobserved.

  “Senator,” Joseph said, turning toward Garrett and seizing his hand. “It is a great honor to be in your presence. I must thank you for all that you’ve done for us. I must thank you for all that you’ve done for me, sir.”

  Garrett loosened. It was typical. His defenses were very different from hers.

  “My good man,” Garrett replied, “yours is a struggle fought but not yet won. Tell me, where did you learn this trade?”

  “In Cincinnati. I trained with an excellent colored photographer there, after the war.”

  “Cincinnati,” Garrett said. “And before that?”

  “I lived in Canada, sir—and Louisiana before that.”

  “Ah,” Garrett said. “I see.”

  Now the scene had changed, and her husband would be more amenable. It was still surprising, Elizabeth thought, how easily his sympathies could be manipulated.

  “Mr. Winter also served in the 5th Massachusetts,” Moody said.

  “The colored cavalry?”

  “Yes sir,” Joseph said. “And it was in service that I first entered into communion with my spiritual brethren. It was during a reconnoiter of Petersburg, after we had lost three men. They spoke to me that night, in a dream.”

  “A dream?” Elizabeth repeated.

  He made it sound romantic.

  At the end of the gallery, under the last skylight in the room, the spirit photographer had positioned the chairs, the backdrop, and the camera. As the Garretts took their seats, Joseph Winter disappeared behind a curtain, and returned some moments later carrying the plate holder for the camera.

  “We must work with the little light that we have on this day,” Moody said. “The exposure will unfortunately need to be longer than usual.”

  The rain splattered the skylights as the Garretts held their positions. The chairs were uncomfortable—excruciating almost—and Elizabeth fought against her impulse to flinch. She and her husband had sat for photographs before, with William Jeffrey even, during those early days of the daguerreotype. But the process had never been quite this—

  “William Jeffrey is here,” Moody said. “Hold! He is here! Hold your position now!”

  Her hands had grown cold, yet a tidal heat was coursing through her. Everything she had been thinking about her husband all at once fell away. There was anger in the room with her now, and her heart began to beat. Was the boy angry? Did he blame her? Did he not understand that she had loved him? She sought answers, and failed. She had once been capable of loving.

  She did not know for how long she sat there. It was quiet, except for her heart. During those moments she realized the torment that the eternity of stillness could bring.

  Then, after some time, the photographer raised his head.

  “It is finished,” he said, returning the heavy cloth to the camera.

  And as he moved, a great noise sounded outside the window—a kind of thud, as if something had hit the glass, and then dropped.

  Elizabeth gasped.

  “It is nothing,” Joseph said.

  The man was standing near the window. The sound had been a bird … or a dislodged piece of wood … or perhaps just a beating from the wind.

  Garrett looked about the room. On his face there was no sign of the endlessness he too had felt. He knew that his wife had grown to despise him, and the despisal had never been more evident than it was during that sitting. He had waited for a flicker of … something. Something he had lost long ago. But what he waited for never came.

  Then the spirit photographer removed the plate from the camera.

  “Everyone, to the dark room!” Moody ordered. “This plate is trembling with life.”

  MOODY’S DARK ROOM was not a proper room, but rather a large area at the end of the gallery enshrouded by a heavy curtain. Above, he had erected a false ceiling to block out the light, and had covered the windows on the wall inside with coats of thick black paint.

  Moody lit a small amber lamp as Joseph drew the curtain. Then Moody removed the glass negative from the shield, held the glass over the washbasin, and began pouring out the developer fluid. The glass, he assured himself, was the one he had prepared earlier, for even in the darkness he could see where he had marked one of the corners. The Garretts were no professionals, and there was no need to take extra precautions. They were likely to see the spirit even if he botched the whole development.

  “This is simply an iron preparation,” Moody said, “which brings the captured image to the surface.”

  As Moody poured out the developer fluid, the Garretts stood close to him, watching. On the glass, their black clothing remained ghostly and invisible, while their faces emerged like dark masks amidst the silver.

  Joseph stood beside Moody, his breath heavy and regular.

  “There,” Joseph whispered. “There—the spirit comes.”

  At the center of the negative, behind and above the sitters, something—a hazy image—was fading into view. Strange, Moody thought, for he was certain that he had placed the image of the boy much closer to the glass’s edge.

  “Yes,” Moody added. “Yes, the spirit comes.”

  Then the face came into sharp focus—and in an instant, there she was.

  Moody blinked.

  “No,” he muttered. “No—it is impossible.”

  Elizabeth was the next to notice the s
pirit, though she did not yet grasp its identity. All she could see was that a young woman had appeared, standing closely behind her, where William Jeffrey might have been.

  “Mr. Moody,” she said, bending over to look closer, “that’s—”

  But the crash of glass shrieked through the dark room at that moment … followed by the howling of wind. A dull gray light splashed into the room, coating all of them—and the negative—in a soft, luminous glow.

  Moody dropped the negative into the liquid of the washbasin.

  “I am sorry!” he cried.

  For the thing had finally happened.

  Then Joseph Winter lunged to block out the light, and forced a bundled tarp into the space of the broken pane. Though the floor was wet with rain and splintered glass, it appeared that nothing else had come in.

  The room was now black again save for the flicker of the amber lamp, and a dull outline that haloed the bundled tarp.

  “Mr. Moody,” Elizabeth said. “The negative, if you please.”

  But Edward Moody was not quite hearing what Elizabeth Garrett said. The spirit had taken him back. The spirit had come back.

  Moody reached into the washbasin and held the glass up to the lamp. The sudden burst of light had ruined the image. A milky white glow seeped out from one side of the negative—partially erasing Garrett, spreading over most of Elizabeth, and barely reaching the upright woman, whose face remained untouched.

  Elizabeth suppressed her gasp. It was just as she had feared.

  Then Garrett responded, for he too now recognized the face.

  “My God in Heaven,” he said. “It cannot be.”

  Garrett stiffened, and turned ferociously toward Moody.

  “Who are you, sir?” the senator said.

  “You must forgive me—” Moody began.

  But Elizabeth interrupted.

  “James,” she said. “Not another word. Mr. Moody, we must thank you for your time.”

  Elizabeth took Garrett’s arm and disappeared beyond the curtain, leaving Joseph and Moody in the darkness. Moody stood motionless, looking after them for some time, until Joseph pressed his hand on the photographer’s shoulder. Moody held the glass to the flickering amber, scarcely able to believe the glowing shadow before him.

  It was Isabelle—his lost Isabelle. She had finally returned.

  VI

  2 May 1852

  My Dearest Edward,

  You will believe me when I say that these past eight months have been some of the happiest in my life. I know then that it will not be easy for you to hear that I must leave you for a time. It is not easy for me to write it.

  I can provide no explanation—I can only tell you that I must go. I must go from Boston, and from you, and from all else I hold dear.

  It is not because we are different. It is something I must do.

  I take my leave of you with two promises. The first is that my heart will always be yours, and the second is that I will return as soon as I can.

  Yours ever,

  Isabelle

  THIS HAD BEEN the last from her, and Moody could still feel the same despair, even though more than eighteen years had passed since he had first read those mysterious words. Only that week before, he had ridden with her to the outskirts of the city. There were fields there, and alone, where they could sit in the sunlight without judgment, she had lowered her head when he mentioned the possibility of someday marrying her. He did not understand at that point why she had been compelled to look away. When a honeybee began crawling up a fold in her skirt, she studied it, unafraid.

  He was twenty-five years old and she a few years younger. They had everything before them. And nothing.

  He knew very little of her past, for the girl had been quiet from the start, as if she had been charged with protecting an entire world beyond herself. What he did know had been revealed to him a few weeks before that day in the fields. She had, for some unknown reason, begun telling him about Ohio.

  “It was cold there,” she had said. “The winters were cold there, but not like here. There was a heat that always followed you there, because even in the cold of winter, you weren’t safe.”

  He asked her how old she had been in Ohio, and it was then that she told him of her mother.

  “I never knew her, of course. She was owned by a horrible man—a French planter from the islands.”

  Her words had stopped time. That was it then, Moody thought. That was what those beautiful eyes contained—a sorrow that hid out in the open.

  She went on to tell him of Louisiana. How she had been born there—but not on the plantation.

  “It was a place called Bellevoix—”

  “Bellevoix?” Moody intoned.

  The name sounded romantic, musical.

  “Yes, Bellevoix. And my mother tried to escape its cruelty, only to be captured and returned a few days later. She was carrying me when she fled, but when they caught her, I was gone. Others took me into their care, and from that moment I was blessed. Later I would learn that they recorded me as stillborn. So from the first, you see, I had to die in order to live.”

  What it meant was that she was free. She was free because she did not exist.

  She was unclear—rather purposefully, Moody remembered thinking—about her movement from Louisiana to Ohio, and eventually to Boston. She gave details and she didn’t; views from partially curtained windows.

  And then she never spoke of it again.

  So he invented, because even in those early days, that was one of Edward Moody’s habits. He told himself that her secrets were not something to be feared, but rather something exciting to discover. Yes, it was true, he had been blinded by a sudden love for her—a type of love that had seized his imagination, and placed her in the realm of the sacred. But how her looks confirmed him … drew him in deeper, encouraged his devotion! He was too naïve to think that there might be something from him that she wanted.

  During those first months of their meeting, the winter of 1851, she had taken a great interest in his hobby. He noticed that her eyes—for he was always watching her eyes—became spellbound whenever he showed her his experiments. The daguerreotype still reigned over photography then, but Edward Moody was toying with wet-plate collodion, a new method that produced astonishing results on glass negatives. Her fingers touched the negatives, and he could not stop looking at her fingers. She handled the negatives as delicately as one might handle a fallen leaf.

  She was fascinated and he would show her. He would be her instructor. This poor girl would love him all the more if he could open her eyes to these wonders.

  And so he did, for eight months. He shared with her the secrets of his own obsession: how to mix the iodides and the bromides, the ether and the alcohol, to make the sticky wet substance that would remind her of thinned syrup. When he held the plate by one corner and poured collodion over the glass, he called it “flowing the plate.” She’d been seduced by that. There was little she could do to resist such beauty. On the glass there were lakes and streams, and the reflective silver of other mirrors. Her eyes told him that she would absorb everything he had to give her. She stood so close to him while he worked that he could often feel her breath upon his neck.

  These were the memories that he had carried for some years—collected, changed, and refined to suit what he wanted to keep. And then later, as things happened, many of the memories fell away, because the pain that accompanied remembering her surmounted the delight of anything else. It was too difficult for Edward Moody to go on remembering her. There was too much anguish in continuing to think about what he no longer had.

  There was one memory, however, that Moody had never quite been able to banish. It was one that reminded him of his early career, working at the back of Mrs. Lovejoy’s as an engraver. His booth was small, sequestered from the reception room, which he liked because it gave him his privacy. Surrounding him, the latest items that awaited his attention: silver teapots, silver trays, serveware, and table cutlery.
Mrs. Lovejoy was demonstrating a Geneva musical box to a customer when Moody became aware of the figure standing beside him. She was a servant woman—just a girl, really—yet she hovered over him like an apparition. She had come to order a monogram for a child’s silver rattle.

  • • •

  FOR A DAY and a night after the Garrett’s photograph, Moody remained so weak that he could not return to his own lodgings. It was as if an accumulation of his many feigned exhaustions had rushed upon him all at once, and finally taken him down.

  When he did awake, the room was strange. And at his bedside was Joseph Winter.

  Moody moaned.

  “You are all right,” Joseph said. “You took very ill after the photograph. The fumes—”

  “Where—”

  “We are in Mrs. Lovejoy’s apartments.”

  Moody looked around the room.

  “Of course. How long?”

  “A little more than a day. We have not been able to stir you since your collapse.”

  Moody blinked. A pink and orange glow was stretching in from two small windows. Joseph Winter was a dark clay figure outlined in the twilight.

  “My God—the negative,” Moody said. “Where is the negative?”

  Joseph leaned toward the floor and tapped his hand on a plate box.

  “It is safe,” he said. “It’s here.”

  Moody lifted himself from the pillow. He was not quite remembering yet. There was the plate, and the storm, and the appearance of the spirit …

  “The Garretts—” Moody said. “Have there been any inquiries?”

  “None,” Joseph assured him. “And Mrs. Lovejoy closed the gallery.”

  The gallery. What had happened? Yes … the Garretts had arrived at the gallery. William Jeffrey Garrett. Moody had been trying to get the boy.

  She had come to him.

  Then Moody remembered—Joseph had flowed the plate. Joseph had gone into the darkroom, and returned with the plate in its holder.