‘Photography is seen by some to be an art and by others to be a science,’ he began. ‘I believe its future lies somewhere in between. With new cameras and developing processes, it will become possible to catch many of the wonders of nature and hold them for examination forever.’
‘Excellent,’ she interrupted, ‘I am so pleased to see that we are of such similar minds on the subject, that we can envisage the wonders of both worlds being brought together so.’ She flushed with an infant joy and he wilted in the blindness of it. ‘Please, may we now see the pictures you made?’
She extended her hand towards him. He had no choice and no more words, so he opened his satchel and brought out the envelope. Elder Thomas retrieved it from him and brought it swiftly to her side. She opened it and removed the prints, laying the images in her lap.
‘It’s not always possible… ’ he began to mutter, but was halted by the look on her face.
She turned the first print over to view the next image and her expression deepened. The elder peered over her shoulder, his countenance beginning to reflect the same intensity.
‘The third print was more difficult to expose,’ said Muybridge to deaf ears.
As she looked from image to image, he was lost. He had no idea what she thought. It looked as though her face was shifting through amazement and shock, but certainly not into the disappointment he had expected. Her eyes were moist, and small sighs fluttered under her moving lips. Could this be rage, he wondered. She set the prints down in her lap and lifted her head.
‘Mr. Muybridge, I had no idea,’ she gently said. ‘I had hoped something might be possible, but this! I thought at first you seemed a little reticent, a little surprised by my request. Yet these!’ she said, touching the prints and leaving both hands folded over them. ‘These are beyond my wildest hopes. You are obviously a man of significant talents.’
Emotion swept over her again and the elder touched her sleeve. She rose and turned to leave the room, the prints pressed hard against her bosom. Muybridge rose with her, watching as she tottered slightly, robustly supported by the anxious elder. At the door, she turned to look at Muybridge once more, mouthing a silent ‘thank you’ before leaving him alone in the cavernous space of her departure.
He stood awkwardly in the odd room at the centre of the winding, empty mansion, in a state of total bewilderment, awash with flows of contradiction. He glowed at her words but turned to ash at their meaning. There was nothing there, just a few blurred, under-exposed fools sitting at a table. Could she have seen what he did before? Had she shared in the same dim delusion, or had she seen more?
He closed his empty satchel and made his way out to the hallway; he was met by the usher, who conducted him to the street. The door shut firmly behind him. A breeze had picked up and rattled the new buds on the trees. Spring was early, and the old energy of the land flowed back into the newly made streets. The green scent of optimism roamed abroad, and he stood on the porch, seeing it with a magnificent clarity. In his heart, another autumn was stirring.
Marie assumed Maclish’s extended absence was merely a continuation of his increasingly erratic behaviour. She considered for a moment that it was the regret and shame of what had happened on the night of the dinner that kept him away. But that theory did not swill around her experienced mind for long.
She savoured the unexpected solitude, enjoying the quiet space, free for the first time of masculine posture and strut, of those endless noises that men make to convince themselves and others of the necessity and toil of their presence.
She sat and thought about the future of their child. She would be a good mother; she would keep the child safe from any excesses of clumsy love or dictating attitude that her husband might bring to its infancy. She still hoped that he would make a good father, even through all her nagging misgivings. Wasn’t he showing eagerness towards the birth? He had tried to be supportive before, when the last child was stillborn. Hadn’t he even let Dr. Hoffman examine the poor wee thing to understand what had gone wrong? She convinced herself that William would change when their family began to grow. After all, they were stronger now: money was being saved; the house and the job were secure; he was becoming a man of consequence.
She lit a lamp in the kitchen against the growing night and started to prepare food. It was a notably dark night, with only a curved rind of moon to light the way of any late visitor to their home. Her eyes were continually drawn to the window, expecting to see him walking down the hill at any moment, his form silhouetted against the glow of the slave house and its reflection on the chain-link fence. Then it dawned on her why the gloom was so unusually impenetrable: the slave house emanated darkness. Its humped shadow was entirely black. An iced apprehension infiltrated the warmth of her blood. She opened the back door and stepped nervously through it, into the night. The yard was unnaturally still; the quiet held the loneliness of cooling embers. She returned to the safety of her home and locked the door, a shiver escorting her around the room until the air was stirred by her bustling, and the house had stopped holding its breath.
The next morning, the Chinese cook found the slave house empty; the night guard was gone, and a chair had been turned over. Apart from that, the prison felt unused, as if no one had ever lived in it. They found the cold train later that day, but an extensive investigation revealed no trace of Maclish or the Limboia: they had vanished into the whispering trees.
The Timber Guild immediately started a search; one of their representatives was sent to inform Mrs. Maclish. The man would later report that Marie Maclish had seemed taken aback at first but, as he had delicately reassured her that she would not be left alone to struggle, should something untoward have happened to her husband, she had seemed to become less worried, a little euphoric even. He would put it down to shock, and explain that the poor woman was undoubtedly grievously disturbed by the news of her husband’s disappearance.
They searched for a week but found nothing; they contemplated extending the search area, but were unwilling to delve any deeper into the forest. In addition to the loss of their best foreman, there was the more pressing problem of finding another workforce as quickly as possible. Many business empires and livelihoods were utterly dependent on the company’s constant supply of forest timber; the panic of commerce far outweighed the concerns of a lost employee and his tribe of soulless heathens.
But when Hoffman went missing the rumours began to squawk and fly. His working relationship with Maclish was well known, but unclear. Also, for years there had been complaints and rumours attached to the eminent physician’s conduct. These had been brushed under the carpet or paid off, while the larger chunks of accusation had been crushed by threat. All began to surface in his absence.
When officers of the Civic Guard started to look into the doctor’s affairs and lift some of the more conspicuous stones and lumpier carpets, a scree of innuendo came loose and tumbled onto his reputation. They searched his house and laboratory, discovering more facts than rumours, stopping midway to seal the rooms and leave with grey complexions. Pathologists from foreign cities were brought in to continue the search; the findings were never publicly announced. The Timber Guild absorbed the wrongs of its own, even when they revealed malpractice, illegal experimentation and crime. All was stifled and kennelled, patted quiet by wads of money or choke-chained by itinerant accident; perfect erasure by perfect symmetry.
The ancient black hand shone in the flickering light of the small campfire, its tattoos of spirals and sun-wheels spinning as it passed through the circular clearing of the forest. It moved past the two men sitting close to the flames, and whispered in the dancing shadows, stroking the cheek of its grandson before vanishing out of the circle and into the night.