Sarah was the only benefactor of the fortune earned by the enormous success of the Winchester repeating rifle, the gun that ‘won the west’. It was a greatly evolved version of the clumsier Henri rifle, and a revolutionary design: a tubular magazine sat under the barrel and fed twelve rounds into the breech by means of an under-lever, which also acted as a trigger guard. The lever action carbine could be rapidly fired from horseback. The firepower and speed of delivery made it a superior weapon to all that had gone before it.
It tidied away the few remaining tribes who refused to yield to the white invasion. The gun, and its heavier calibre brothers, cleared the plains of the buffalo and every other creature with a price on its tail or horn. At the outbreak of the Civil War, the northern army bought the gun in vast quantities and money gushed and splashed into the Winchester coffers. It shot one bullet per second, and possessed a trajectory that wiped out half a generation of neighbours and friends.
Sarah’s tears never really ended. After the first five years, they simply turned inwards. Her eyes would well and weep inside her lids, hollowing the flesh beneath the fine skin of her cheeks and finding her throat, so that she might swallow down the wet pictures of little Annie wasting at her breast. The child had nothing except ferocious hunger and pain; between its skeleton and its skin, no flesh or fat grew.
Almost fifteen years later, she would swallow her pain with the rotted lungs of her young husband, as disease ate him away. He, like his screaming daughter, shrivelled in her arms. It was said that she balanced precariously on the edge of madness at the beginning of the 1880s, but some kind of resilience kept her from stepping over its line. She wasn’t sure where it came from: it certainly wasn’t rooted in the mountain of money that grew behind her grief, for she had no interest in that; there was nothing it could buy and so it stockpiled, a burgeoning model of her ballooning anguish. There had to be a reason why so much horror had quenched so much joy; when she eventually found it, it was appallingly obvious.
He had come to explain. With his pale smile and his gentle hands, she had no doubt that it was her husband being described, standing at her side, beyond the reach of her untrained eye. He was here to explain their evolution, and lay her personal guilt to rest: none of this was her fault.
The medium held a handkerchief to her face as she spoke his words for him, consoling him and encouraging him to speak more clearly. He said, through her, that those who had been slain by the terrible weapon were vengeful and returning, that they followed the dollar line back to those responsible, and that she, by default, was the only one left. They had taken William and Annie (who were happily together on the spirit side), but their anger was not extinguished.
Salvation was possible, and it had a physical form. Her husband told her to build a house, a mansion, for herself and the dead to cohabit; one large enough to accommodate every lost soul, before they came homelessly scratching at her existence. She must never stop work on this ambition, he warned. The house must continuously grow; if its expansion ceased, she would die, and they might never meet again on the other side.
Sarah left the séance that day with hope and a purpose; after years of pain, she finally had something worthwhile to channel her money and energies into. She had been given a first deposit on a new life, a pilgrimage that would divert Leyland Stanford’s train lines to the building site of her new home in the west, and she thanked the medium for guiding her in the right direction. She employed an army of workmen day and night to construct a monstrous labyrinth of wood to hide herself in. Llanda Villa multiplied around her, its blind corridors and infatuation with the number thirteen snaking in all directions, funnelling the furious demons and mortally wounded ghosts into blocked passages, insane turrets and flights of stairs which ascended, essentially, to absolutely nowhere – but always away from the nucleus of her grief.
Muybridge had heard it all, but his memory was selective and grievously affected by his need. Sarah Winchester was a woman of influence and beauty; he admired her purity. She had never remarried and was fiercely loyal to the memory of her deceased family. She would understand him, he was sure of it. She must have heard about the incident with Larkyns. He was certain that she would appreciate his justification and see him as a chivalrous gentleman as well as, he hoped, a significant artist.
The carriage stopped before the garden entrance of the growing house. He stepped down and walked up the path, passing by the fountain and up to the porch. The pillared entrance was cool and elegant, a mechanical glade of craftsmanship. The door opened and a hushed man took him inside.
The house was immaculate and squeakingly new. It smelt of polish and sawdust, both scents sharpened by subtle undertones of varnish. The hand-fitted marquee flooring was perfect and infinite; he seemed to follow the man forever, unable to resist occasionally dropping back for a closer examination of each detail and angle. They entered a hall whose possessions outnumbered all the other rooms put together. In the centre stood a piano that dominated the furniture and pictures. These were obviously the occupied parts of the house. The other rooms were token, superfluous, but these rooms had life. He could feel her presence in the next room.
The hushed man left him standing and went ahead, closing the door behind him. His anxiety twitched his hat and cane and he longed to lay them down, but dared not risk causing offence. He fretted and looked around the room, said belongings tapping against his leg. Murmured voices could be heard and then the door opened and his host stepped forward, holding her hand out in greeting.
‘Mr. Muybridge, thank you for coming.’
He was shocked by her appearance. The lady of his historical glimpses was utterly changed. She had thickened, become solid, not with fat or ease, but as if the gravitation of the world around her had changed. She had become compressed by her circumstances, by the weight of the house. Her face was lined and hollowed, yet each line was somehow attached to the plumpness of her skin; she was a contradiction of form, almost as if the contours of her expression had been painted over the wrong surface. The layers of make-up, stencilled over her once flawless complexion, gave her face a strange hint of varnish. Only her teeth remained perfect, though her eyes had retained a glimmer of something constant and disconcerting. In the distance, hammering could be heard, but he tried to ignore it. He bowed slightly and gave her his hand.
‘Thank you, Mrs. Winchester,’ he said, a boyish blush blooming under his pale skin. ‘I was delighted to receive your invitation.’ She smiled graciously and led him through to the smaller sitting room, where tea was already laid out on a small dining table. They sat and spoke politely of weather and acquaintances. After twenty minutes of stiflingly obligatory formalities, the conversation at last began to move towards the purpose of her invitation.
‘The Stanfords have been introducing me to your work, Mr. Muybridge. I must say, I am quite impressed.’
‘Thank you, ma’am. May I ask which photographs you have seen so far?’ he asked.
‘Oh, pictures of mountains, a volcanic place and the primitives dancing in a circle.’
‘Ah, the Ghost Dance,’ he said with glee. ‘I am the only person ever to have photographed it.’
‘The Ghost Dance?’ she said, her attention caught in exactly the way he had hoped. ‘What is that?’
‘It was a belief held by many native tribes that they could summon their dead to help them stand against the settlers who were moving west. They imagined an uprising and a joining of clans, dead and alive, to hold what they regarded as their sacred lands.’
Sarah shifted forward slightly in her hard-backed chair. ‘When exactly did these dances occur?’ she asked.