‘Don’t move while I’m counting.’
For fifteen seconds she sat motionless and he watched her through the lens.
His best portraits – the most lifelike – were of people whose characters were by nature placid, slow to move from one state to the next. Lively souls were frequently reduced by the camera: their essence escaped the lens and all that was captured was a wax dummy, all outward resemblance with none of the quicksilver.
With Rita there was none of the goggle-eyed staring or nervous blinking that novices often displayed. Instead she opened her eyes to the camera with perfect composure. From under his cover, he saw one swell of living thought succeed another in an endless shifting movement, while all the time the muscles of her face remained unaltered. This was not one photograph, he knew by the end of the fifteen seconds. This was a thousand.
‘Come,’ he said, as he removed the plate, still enclosed in its case against the light. ‘I want to show you how it works.’
They made their way swiftly to Collodion. He was holding the plate carefully, and she did not need help climbing aboard. In the cabin, the shutters already blocked out the day. He lit a candle and placed a red glass shade over it, then closed the door. A red glow illuminated the small space. They stood side by side, hemmed in by the developing table that he had extended and the bench on which he could sleep when he spent nights aboard. The planks of the ceiling were only inches above their heads, and beneath their feet was the lulling rock of the river. Daunt tried not to be aware of the size and shape of the space between their two bodies, the places where the jut of her hip narrowed it, the curve of her waist broadened it, her elbow almost closed it.
He mixed liquids from three glass bottles in a tiny vessel only an inch high and the smell of apple vinegar and old nails filled the air.
‘Ferrous sulphate?’ she wondered, sniffing the air.
‘With acetic acid and water. It actually is red, it’s not just the light that makes it look that way.’
He slid the plate from its case. Holding it carefully in his left hand, he tipped a minute quantity of the light-red liquid on to the plate so that the acid mix flowed across the entire surface. It was a graceful motion, fluid and economical.
‘Watch. The image starts to form almost instantly – the lighter things first, but they show as dark lines … This line here is your cheekbone, highlighted from the window … Now the rest appears, blurrily at first, but then …’
His voice faded as they watched her face appear on the glass. They stood close in the red light, watching the shadows and lines on the glass coalesce, and Daunt felt a falling sensation in his stomach. A great dive. It resembled the feeling he’d had when, as a boy, he had let himself drop from the apex of a bridge into the river. He had met his wife while skating on the frozen Thames, one wintertime. With her he had glided into love – if it was love, and not some lesser cousin – unknowingly. This time he plummeted – and it was unmistakeable.
Then she was fully present on the glass. Her face delineated by light and darkness, the orbits shadowed and the pupils full of enigma. He felt that it would take very little to bring him to tears. It might be the best portrait he had ever taken.
‘I must photograph you again,’ he said as he rinsed the plate.
‘What’s wrong with this one?’
Nothing. He wanted her at every angle, in every possible light, in all moods and all positions. He wanted her with her hair loose around her face and pulled right back, concealed under a hat; he wanted her in a white chemise open at the neck and draped in folds of dark cloth; he wanted her in water and against tree trunks and on grass … There were a thousand photographs waiting to be taken. He had to have all of them.
‘Nothing’s wrong. That’s why I need more.’
He slid the plate into a tray of potassium cyanide. ‘This will get rid of the blue tint. See? It turns black and white and will be permanent now.’
Next to him, Rita in the red light looked with interest at the alteration, while through the clear viscosity of the liquid her eyes on glass continued to gaze thoughtfully, as they would now do for the life of the plate.
‘What were you thinking about?’
She cast a quick, assessing glance in his direction – (I want that look) – and weighed something up rapidly (and that one too).
‘You were there at the beginning,’ she began. ‘I suppose she would not be here at all if it were not for you, so …’ and she recounted in calm detail the encounter she’d had with the man on the river path a few weeks before.
Daunt paid close attention. He discovered that he did not like the thought of Rita being accosted by a ruffian one bit, and his instinct was to offer reassurance, but Rita’s account was so crisp, her manner so entirely unperturbed, that such chivalry would have been out of place. Yet he could not hear of the assault without some protective gesture.
‘Did he hurt you?’
‘There was bruising to my upper arm and grazing to my hands. Very minor.’
‘You’ve made it known locally that there is a ruffian about?’
‘I told them at the Swan and I let the Vaughans know of his interest in the child. They were already considering putting locks on the windows and that decided them.’
Given so little opportunity to display gallantry, he allowed Rita to lead him into analysis instead.
‘Yeast and fruit …’ she said.
‘A baker-cum-thief? That’s not very likely. Distilling, perhaps?’
‘Yes, I wondered about that.’
‘Who does distilling round here?’
She smiled. ‘That’s a question you won’t easily get an answer to. Everybody and nobody, I should think.’
‘Is there a lot of illicit liquor?’
She nodded. ‘More than there used to be, according to Margot. But nobody knows where it comes from. Or nobody is willing to let on.’
‘And you caught no glimpse of him.’ Daunt, for whom vision was everything, frowned.
‘He has unusually small hands and is a head shorter than I am.’
He eyed her quizzically.
‘The bruises where his fingertips dug into my arms were smaller than expected, his voice came from a spot lower than my ear, and I felt the brim of his hat dig into me here.’ She indicated where.
‘That is small for a man.’
‘And he’s strong.’
‘What do you make of his questions?’
Rita peered at the photograph of her thoughtful self. ‘That is what I was considering here. If he wants to know whether the child will speak, that suggests he is concerned at what she might say. He might be frightened by what she could tell, which would imply that he has something to hide regarding the child. Perhaps he is responsible for her being in the river.’
There was a sense of something unfinished in her voice. Daunt waited. She went on, speaking slowly and carefully, as if she were still weighing it up in her own mind. ‘But he was also particularly interested in knowing when she will speak again. Which might suggest his interest is less in something that has already happened and more in something to come. Perhaps he has some plan. Some notion that depends on her continuing silence.’
He waited while she organized her train of thought.