The Lost History of Dreams

by Kris Waldherr

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  For Edward and Joyce Miller, with gratitude and love

  Eurydice, dying now a second time, uttered no complaint against her husband. What was there to complain of, but that she had been loved?

  —Ovid, Metamorphoses

  Every love story is a ghost story.

  —David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

  PART I

  DREAMS LOST

  *

  February 1850

  London

  The Annunciation

  Excerpted from The Lost History of Dreams by Hugh de Bonne, published 1837 by Chapman & Hall, London.

  Whilst the life inside her grew so round

  The dream was lost as it was found.

  Such was it thus : Aft their vows

  Orpheus slept espoused

  Silenced as the One Who Ends

  Came ’mid Helios to transcend

  Amor’s gilt clad arrow.

  Yet in the morn, Eurydice found no sorrow :

  Her eyes clamped mate, her devotion bright.

  Cried she : ‘ ’ Tis love, not sun, that draws the light,

  And Thou, my Spouse, shall be my fame.’

  She knew not when her annunciation came

  Amid Moon, not Sun. For no serpent smites

  Along the ground. Instead, it bites

  And leaves no sound.

  *

  I.

  Robert Highstead’s workday ended with a letter thrust inside his pocket. Before that, it was spent in a second-story parlor in Kensington, squinting into a camera at a corpse.

  Through the camera’s viewing glass, Robert watched a young woman lying as if asleep, her hands cupped against her breast like she’d been called to cradle a dove. She appeared upside down on the viewing glass as though floating. It was a pose Robert had witnessed hundreds of times in the past three years: the serene smile upon the lips, the closed eyelids, the awkwardly draped shawl across the shoulders that a loved one took upon herself to orchestrate. A last display of care before consignment to the grave. The only variant today was a small book, The Lost History of Dreams, by an author Robert had never heard of. The volume was splayed across the woman’s belly, as though she’d just set it down to rest her eyes.

  The thin cry of an infant revealed the cause of the woman’s demise. From the blood-stiffened linens thrown in a heap against a limewashed wall to the slack-shouldered midwife napping beside the wash basin, Robert understood the woman had labored long and hard. “The noblest of sacrifices,” he’d told her sister and husband, to help them grasp whatever comfort they could. Their muffled sobs gave hint to the ineffectuality of language. The winter air inside the parlor was weighed with the tinge of iron despite the geraniums set on the window ledge, the ice beneath the coffin boards. Not that it mattered—after all, Robert had work to do. He needed to be in Belgravia in two hours for a thirteen-year-old consumptive whose family yearned for a last portrait while she could still acknowledge their presence.

  Robert unlatched a long wooden box to remove the silver-coated copper plate for the daguerreotype. He’d already buffed it to a mirrorlike sheen before exposing it to iodine and bromine fumes. As he reached toward his camera, his eyes tripped to the clock on the mantel as he thought of his wife. She hadn’t come home the previous evening—a not uncommon occurrence in their three years of marriage. Nor did it help that this was the third corpse he’d daguerreotyped since breakfast. Though Robert was accustomed to such sights, today it felt too much.

  The widower, who was dressed in the modest clothes of a merchant, approached Robert, the newborn in his arms bawling. “She . . . she was lovely,” he said, his eyes reddening.

  Robert tutted between his teeth. “I’m so sorry.” The more often he repeated the words, the less currency they seemed worth. He set the frame containing the plate inside the camera with a slide that felt as visceral as anything he’d experienced of late.

  “Now the camera is ready,” he announced, ignoring the slight stench already rising from the corpse; the ice wasn’t helping. “The process will take little time, sir. Less than a minute.”

  The widower pressed a palm against his eyes. “I appreciate how quickly you arrived. Very good of you. My sister claims you’re the best daguerreotypist of this sort.”

  “I promise to use all the skills of my art, sir.” Robert’s heart lurched with sympathy; at least he still had his wife, wherever she was. She always comes back. “If there’s anything else I can do to offer comfort . . .”

  The widower’s eyes fixed on Robert with a wet desperation. “Can . . . can you make her look as she did when she was alive, Mr. Highstead?”

  “Ah, I understand! The daguerreotype will record your wife so your daughter—”

  “Son. We’re naming him Charles. After her.” The widower indicated his wife’s corpse with a tight nod. “My wife’s name was Charlotte. Those who care for her called her Lottie.”

  “Then your son Charles will have something by which to recall his dear mother’s life.”

  Robert next took out a thick binder from his satchel. “If you’d care to look at our Catalogue of Possibilities,” he said mildly, setting it before the widower. The leather binding was gilded with the motto “Secure the shadow ’ere the substance fade.” The catalogue showed a journeyman’s ransom of items to spill shillings on. The silver-bordered frame bearing a capsule for a lock of hair. The velvet-lined glass mounts. The alternate views of the departed. Images of the family gathered around the corpse, faces pinched from the effort of not shifting for the camera. The stillborn babies supported by black-cloaked figures.

  “Are they alive?” the widower asked.

  “Sometimes,” Robert replied. He possessed little pride for his ability to pose an infant in a mother’s lifeless arms without the exposure blurring. A few drops of Mother Bailey’s Quieting Syrup worked wonders, though he hated how it affected the child. Yet there was something about his employment Robert couldn’t turn from. Something compelling. He told himself it was because he was offering comfort by transforming loss into proof of memory. Sometimes the daguerreotype seemed like sorcery itself, especially when he saw the image emerge from the plate like a ghost from the ethers. But it was more than this.

  “For an additional fee, the image can be hand-tinted,” Robert added, pointing at a colored daguerreotype. Pink-hued gum arabic over silver foil. Flesh over bones.

  Once coins were exchanged and bills of sale signed, Robert began the delicate process of daguerreotyping the corpse. He steadied his breath as he stared through the glass. He took the lens cap off with a flash of his palm, letting light record shadow on the plate. He ignored the widower’s sobs, the tearful last confessions of love. After all, they weren’t directed for his ears, but to those who could no longer hear. As Robert counted down the seconds of exposure, he anticipated what he would find when he developed the daguerreotype. For he knew in each person’s image he would discover the lost history of their lives: the scars, the wrinkles, the dreams never fulfilled. Or, worse, the lack thereof.

  And then a messenger had walked in and thrust the letter into Robert’s pocket.

  “How did you find me?” he’d asked the messenger, a towheaded boy of no more than fiftee
n. But the messenger had no answer, for he was already out the door.

  * * *

  The letter remained unopened for the remainder of Robert’s afternoon. But it was not forgotten: he’d found himself unable to daguerreotype the consumptive in Belgravia, the first time he’d ever not shown for a client.

  Instead of taking a carriage after he’d received the letter, Robert used his disturbance as an excuse to walk toward Clerkenwell. Toward home. He hoped the exercise would calm him. The simplest thing would be to read the letter. To learn the worst. He couldn’t. Not yet.

  He detoured along Oxford Street, though it took him out of his way. Even on a frigid February day, Oxford Street offered the distraction of shop-lined pavements crowded with silk-clad pedestrians. Such was the effect of Robert’s step—he dragged his left leg to compensate for the weight of his daguerreotype traveling case—that some paused in his wake. Robert understood their interest wasn’t because he was particularly handsome. With his thick pale hair and fair skin, his were the type of looks better described as sensitive than arresting; even now, three years after he’d left Oxford, he resembled the scholar of history he’d been. It was because Robert understood that even they, strangers to him in every sense of the word, knew there was something about him. Something somber. He noted their attention, but he’d grown used to it in the same way a butcher ignores the flies buzzing about his shop. After so much time daguerreotyping corpses, Robert understood death hung off him. Sometimes he imagined it possessing a physical form, like a martyr in a Flemish painting. Other times he fretted he smelled of decay, though he washed his hands nightly in carbolic acid followed by castile soap. This regimen left the skin on his hands reddened, but he couldn’t bring himself to forego it.

  By the time Robert approached Theobald Road, the shock of the letter still hadn’t worn off. He walked quickly, bypassing narrow lanes snaking up into fog-draped indistinction. His pace only slowed once he turned left on Grays Inn Lane at the intersection where it met Laystall Street. His boarding house.

  He ascended the four flights of stairs to his room, ignoring his landlady’s solicitous greeting. He didn’t bother to ask whether his wife had returned home; he knew Mrs. Clarke never noticed Sida’s comings and goings. Anyway, for once Sida didn’t dominate his worries. Mrs. Clarke’s orange-striped tabby followed him upstairs, mewing plaintively. The cat understood Robert was good for a saucer of milk, but not today.

  Once his door was shut, Robert settled the traveling case onto the floor in the room.

  The room was enough for his needs. It contained a bed, a milk-painted dresser, a table the width of his lap for meals, and two wicker chairs. A long worktable held a glittering stack of silvered copper plates he’d begun polishing with pumice powder and oil; his business required a constant supply. Quarter plates, which measured about three by four inches, were Robert’s favorite, for they required only his compact Richebourg daguerreotype outfit. He didn’t like to work with daguerreotypes smaller than this—too hard to view without a magnifying glass. He possessed a camera expressly for this purpose, but preferred not to carry it along with the quarter-plate one. However, if business improved, he planned to invest in a newer American-style full-plate camera. As for the room itself, its walls were angled. No art could be hung on them, which perturbed Sida, who liked to draw, but the view from the windows was compensation. They looked out on chimney pots and muddled skies, where birds collected at dusk. On clear days, he could even spy St. Paul’s to the south. When it grew foggy, Robert swore he could see coal dust suspended midair. The dust would enter his room, lining the plates in grey even after he closed the windows. Regardless, he preferred the windows open despite coal dust and the occasional errant crow at dusk.

  Tonight the room was empty of crows. It was also empty of Sida.

  Robert sank onto their bed, uncertain if he was relieved or disappointed she wasn’t there. If the letter’s sender was as expected, it might upset her more than him.

  Relieved, he decided. Better she not know. She’ll return. She always does. Yet he feared this time would be different.

  What troubled Robert most about Sida’s absences wasn’t the possibility of her betraying him; he knew she was too devoted for that. Nor was it loneliness; Robert was the sort of man who found as much companionship in a book as he did in humanity. It was that he never understood the perimeters of her comings and goings.

  When they were together, Robert knew his marriage was a fair trade. Apart, it was difficult to think of anything save Sida’s unpredictable ways. He often wished he could stay home to watch over her. He’d bring her pomegranate seeds and mint tea, red wine and gentle kisses. He’d provide her with peace. But this could never be. Though Robert was the son of landed gentry, he’d abandoned his land right after they’d married.

  The letter reasserted its hold. He glanced anew at the door. What if Sida showed? To distract himself, he’d read. Ovid’s Metamorphoses would do. While at Oxford, he’d written an acclaimed history of Ovid’s world. His second book, a biography of Ovid, had been slow work: the poet had spent the later part of his life in undocumented exile.

  Still, the comfort of old obsessions called. He shifted the book onto his chest and read in Latin: Eurydice, dying now a second time, uttered no complaint against her husband. What was there to complain of, but that she had been loved?

  The words blurred before his sight. Sida or no, the letter would not be ignored.

  He drew the letter from his pocket like it was a snake. It was postmarked Belvedere, Kent. Where he’d grown up. It was addressed in a hand he knew well, though he hadn’t seen it since his marriage. His brother’s.

  “Shit,” he said.

  Just then the door creaked open. He let the letter slide from his fingers.

  Sida’s form was silhouetted against sunlight from the landing. She was wearing a blue-grey silk gown, the one she’d married him in. The sleeves were unusually full about the shoulders, a style she was fond of. He ignored the dark stains marring the bodice; they hadn’t been able to launder them out. Robert’s eyes passed hungrily over her. Sida looked as she ever did: petite, fine-boned, doe-eyed. Her ebony hair was unplaited about her shoulders, damp from an unseen rain. The moisture brought out the gleaming curls of her hair, which reminded him of a Titian Madonna he’d shown her at the National Gallery, the first time she’d ever viewed art in a museum.

  “You’re back,” he said, hoping she wouldn’t notice the letter on the floor. “I missed you.”

  Sida smiled in answer, letting her Kashmir shawl drop as she approached him. The shawl was one her father had brought from India; he’d been a lascar who’d married an English woman when the East India Company had brought him to London. Sida had been employed as a seamstress when Robert first met her. Later he learned her uncle had forced her into service after her parents’ death, but he hadn’t cared. His brother had.

  He opened his arms wide. She slid into them, the gesture easy. This was what he’d needed—not money, not family favor, nor universities at Oxford. This was why he lived in this fourth-story room where birds trespassed at dusk.

  How light she felt in his arms! How soft! It no longer mattered that his days were spent daguerreotyping the dead. Besides, he was good at it. Instead of writing about history, he was capturing it on a silver-lined plate for generations to come. As for Sida, what did it matter she wasn’t as she’d been before their marriage? Neither was he. All this was proof they were fated to be together. They’d never be parted.

  “I love you,” he murmured. “Only you.”

  Robert raised himself above his wife on their bed, ignoring the letter below. Whatever was in it couldn’t be more important than her. The candle beside the bed cast shadows along her cheek, accentuating the bones beneath. He wove his fingers into hers, his skin pale against her dusky hand. He grew aroused, but didn’t dare venture further. Instead, he rested his cheek against her breast, his hand on her waist. Her bodice was soft with moisture.
>
  As the room darkened with the shadows of winter, husband and wife lay together on their bed, head to head, eye to eye, Robert’s breath the only sound in the room before Sida’s eyes lit on the letter.

  II.

  It is not an average day when a gentleman is asked by his brother to daguerreotype a deceased cousin. The day is even less average when the gentleman in question has never heard of this cousin.

  Once Sida spied the letter, Robert could no longer ignore it. She’d forced him to read it. “You can’t avoid the past, Robert,” she’d said, her lips pursing as she prepared for what might be.

  His brother, John, had written on a sheet dated the eighth of February 1850:

  From methods too ungentlemanly to set in words, I have learned of your return to London and your uncommon occupation. Though I’d intended to leave you undisturbed, I now have urgent need of your services for our cousin, Hugh de Bonne. I am uncertain of the logistics of such an endeavor on your end. Regardless, I implore you to arrive on the eleven o’clock coach the morning of the tenth. If you send word confirming your arrival, I’ll have Durkin meet you with the carriage.

  If you or your wife ever bore me affection, I beg you not to ignore my request.

  Robert hadn’t sent word, so no one met him at the coach stand. He’d walked the two miles to his family home alone, the handle of the traveling case containing his daguerreotype outfit pulling at his hands. He was grateful for the walk, for it enabled him to gather his thoughts. Death changes everything, he mulled, yet nothing. When he’d eloped with Sida, it hadn’t been his intention to never speak with his brother. Nor did he bear him ill will. Their estrangement had happened as many do, wrought from good intentions and solidified by discomfort. By the time he’d abandoned Oxford for London, Robert had convinced himself the estrangement was for the best. Now he didn’t know what he believed.