Rosemary speaks in a burst. “What are you going to do, Jennie, dear? Without Will to marry you, Mrs. Pritchett might just snap her fingers and force ”
“Hush, Rosemary!” Flora’s eyes shoot daggers at her younger sister. “I’m sure Mrs. Pritchett would never dare. Let’s speak of pleasanter things.”
I hesitate, then plunge. “Might I pay a call to your family next week?” A despairing edge grates my voice and embarrasses me, but I press on. “Say, Tuesday? I’d be so glad to steal away for a few hours.”
“Oh. Lovely.” But Rosemary gives care to her next words. “If you could arrange your carriage to arrive by half past two? For that’s when we’ll be finished with dinner.”
I am mute with mortification. Both girls know that Aunt Clara would never permit me use of the carriage for my own amusement. In the pause neither sister offers use of the Wortley coach yet of course they’d be priggishly aghast if I arrived at their doorstep, my hem muddy from walking.
“Or…if you don’t mind waiting until after the New Year for a visit, Jennie? Right now’s the height of the season. Simple as we’re keeping things, what with our boys away, we’ve got so many fittings and invitations. It’s been such a flurry,” Flora reminds.
Debutante season I’d forgotten. Of course, I am not coming out. Nor shall I assume the enviable role of the newly affianced, with all of its attendant teas, dinners, and parties. I am trapped at that house until such a day as Aunt sees fit to cast me off. My future is at the mercy of Aunt’s whim, and there’s not a soul in Brookline who doesn’t know it.
As tedious as it is to be pitied, it is positively frightening to be shunned. Worst of all, though, is to be forgotten. I must find a way to rescue myself. If there is only one thing I am certain of, it’s that.
7.
The Christmas rain lulls my scrambled mind to sleep. It is still sluicing when I’m jolted awake, gagging, panicked, unable to breathe.
The thin chain of my necklace is wound like whipcord around my throat. I clutch at it and hear a whisper fast in my ear. A rush of words just outside my reach.
“Stop it! Stop!”
I kick and thrash, struggling against the stranglehold, but it’s as if invisible hands clamp a vice round my neck. The whispering intensifies. The words seem purposefully distorted. I can’t make any sense of them. All I know is I need to get out of this room at once. Coughing, fighting to breathe, pulling up from the bed, unable even to see my own hands in front of my face, I stumble to the door, yanking it open, and I run into darkness.
At the landing I stop, bending double, heaving wretched gasps as my hands lock my knees. My throat feels crushed, my breath so dry it pains my lungs.
“Another nightmare,” I whisper hoarsely. My eyes roam, adjusting to pick out the outline of the furniture down the corridor the slipper chair, the console. “That’s all.” That whispering was no more than the hum of my own pulse. And that necklace is long lost, strewn and trampled into some bloody Southern field, or tucked into the fat purse of a grave robber.
This lingering sensation of being watched hangs heavy on me. My toes and fingertips are ice, my heart is pounding. But I won’t return to my bedroom. Not just yet.
I hasten down the corridor and the stairs. On the second floor, I follow the weak bar of light under the library door. I peek in. Uncle Henry is slumped in his armchair, staring into the dying embers. His decanter of whiskey is nearly finished. The flickering light scoops dark hollows into his eyes.
“Uncle?” I open the door.
His gaze shifts in my direction. “Amelia?” For a moment I’m confused, and then I remember.
“No, Uncle,” I say quickly. “It’s only Jennie.”
Little Amelia was Uncle’s and Aunt Clara’s daughter, who would have been nearly my age had she lived past her fragile cradle years. Once last summer, when Tobias and I were playing spies in the garden, we’d overheard Aunt and Uncle speaking of their phantom daughter as if Amelia had never died.
“It’s a game,” Toby had said, “to give themselves comfort.”
“A horrid, morbid game,” I’d asserted as we’d sprung like a pair of frightened grasshoppers back to the safety of the house.
“Jennie, your niece,” I prompt, for Uncle’s expression frightens me. Everything in me wants to turn my heel and run. Instead, I venture into the room.
Uncle has gained weight. His chin folds like dough over his neck, and his buttons strain his waistcoat. He is holding out Amelia’s memento mori. I suppress a shiver. Images of the dead provide not an ounce of comfort for me. The body present, stiff as an unlit candle, with the soul extracted from it.
“Jennie, yes. Come in.” No, not Amelia’s last image, which I had folded into my book years ago with a delicious shudder, but a tintype of Will taken last year, to commemorate his acceptance to Harvard. He’d been there only a few months, though, before yielding to Quinn’s belief that one shouldn’t hide from military duty.
I take the print hungrily and resolve to add it to my collection once Uncle Henry is out at his office. Will looks so alive that I cannot believe he isn’t anymore. I remember precisely the expression on his face when he used to kiss me, the way his eyes had searched mine, those lips on my skin, his fingers tracing the outline of my chin and neck, sketching my body. Even the memories can turn my insides molten.
Uncle Henry breaks my concentration. “Jennie, I am obliged to ask a favor of you.”
“Yes, Uncle?” I wait, vulnerable. At the mercy of whatever this request might be.
“A delicate matter.” He reaches for his drink, his fingers clumsy. “So delicate, in fact, that I cannot make inquiries at the bank, or even the club.”
I nod as he drains the glass, though this couldn’t be good news. What sort of task would be beneath Uncle Henry but proper for his sixteen-year-old niece?
“There is a photographer in Boston. Not the usual sort, this gentleman.
He goes by the name Geist,” says Uncle. “He claims that he can conjure images of the departed. A medium, I think he is called.”
Photographing spirits. “I’ve heard of this.” From Rosemary Wortley, actually. She is fascinated by séances and likes to show off her invitation to a meeting she attended last summer while visiting her Milford cousins. Where, she claimed, she had helped to raise the turbulent soul of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Why would Uncle want to speak with me about such a matter?
“Quite. And I suppose that your father, my late brother-in-law, with all his daft ideas, might have had his hand in something like this. Didn’t he have some like-minded cronies who all gathered at that church on Irving Street?” Uncle strokes his bald patch and continues. “Jennie, with your late father’s connections, I’d like you to make some further inquiries.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.” Although I am quite sure that I do.
Uncle turns and squashes my hand into his. His palm is damp, his eyes bulge with entreaty. “For God’s sake, listen to me, girl. Imagine if Mrs. Pritchett and I could glimpse our son again. Or commune with his spirit, just once more, before we die!”
For all of Aunt Clara’s caterwauling, I suppose I hadn’t given much thought to how Uncle Henry has been affected by the loss of his eldest child. Certainly Uncle was always puzzled by Will, whose tender warmth stood in contrast to both parents’ stylized graces. But Uncle never struck me as the sort to keep company with Spiritualists. Did he and Aunt Clara devise this plan together?
In the pause, Uncle Henry’s fingers tighten, pulling me so close I smell the whiskey on his breath. “We have suffered so much already. And we have been kind to you, haven’t we, Jennie? Frankly, I think it is the least you could do while you remain here at Pritchett House, reaping the benefits of our hospitality.”
Heaven above, he is threatening me.
Spiritualists have no place in upper-class, conservative society. Possibly, neither do I. And so I am the correct choice for this matter.
“Yes, Uncle,” I say.
“I will do what I can. I promise.”
8.
Heinrich Geist is a large, bewhiskered man, younger and stouter than I’d imagined. Under caterpillar eyebrows, his eyes are blunt as bullets. I imagine those eyes staring at us now through his camera lens, and a chill creeps up the back of my neck.
Crammed onto one side of the gravy-brown love seat in Geist’s sunlit parlor, which serves as his studio, with the perfume of Aunt Clara’s oiled ringlets sticky in the air, I wish I’d had a bite to eat this morning. But I’d simply been too nervous. I was ten years old the last time I sat for a formal photograph. Even now I can almost feel the press of Toby’s hand slipped into mine, for comfort.
“Chin up,” he’d told me. “A weak chin is the sign of a traitor.”
“Another minute,” commands Geist, his voice muffled under the drop cloth.
I hold my chin high.
Standing behind me, Quinn exhales through his nostrils, signaling his displeasure.
Today is January the eighteenth in the new year of 1865. “A significant date,” Geist had assured us as he’d ushered us into his sunny parlor, “for communing with our departed.”
Quinn had snorted at that, too.
“Your folly surprises me,” my cousin had rebuked when I’d first approached him. “Photographers are opportunists. Like cockroaches on the battlefield, scurrying for their capital on the dead.
A boy’s face for sale to his grieving family makes a tidy profit.”
“Mr. Geist is more than a photographer. He is a medium.” I’d shown Quinn the business card Geist had enclosed with his reply to my letter. “And Father’s friends at the Swedenborgian church aren’t charlatans they were kind to me when I asked about Mr. Geist. I’m sure he’ll be a gentleman as well.”
“Perhaps.” Quinn’s lips had tightened to signal his doubt. “But most mediums are frauds who’d steal the pennies off a dead man’s eyes.”
“Yet the movement has believers,” I’d insisted. “And Mr. Geist writes in his letter that the more family I bring, the better our luck. Come with us, please?”
“It’s nonsense that Mother and Father agreed to such claptrap. But I’ll do it for you, Jennie. Know that.” His silver eyes had been steady on mine, and in a tingling moment I knew that Quinn hadn’t forgotten that kiss after all.
Blushing, I’d dropped my eyes to study the laces on my shoes. “Thank you, Cousin.”
In the end, I rationalized, he’d probably relented only to relieve his boredom. There are only so many trips around a garden that a young man can make. I hoped it was a good sign that Quinn was looking to become more sociable again.
My own reservations have more to do with money. Five dollars seems like an extravagance for a single portrait seating, and Geist had requested that we pay five more when we are delivered a photograph. I can’t help but think of the warm winter cloak, new hat, and boots I could have enjoyed for the same price.
Services will be Promptly rendered, but with no Assurance of Spiritual
Communication, Geist had clarified in his letter.
But this first attempt at spiritual communication is anything but otherworldly. My eyes itch, while my face is stiff as a cold caramel. Only a few minutes have gone by, but it feels like an eternity.
“Persevere, family,” Geist intones. “William Pritchett is close at hand.”
Will has never seemed so far away. He’d laugh to see us now. How fascinated he’d be with Geist’s instrument and tripod. What amusement he’d take in Aunt, who holds one of his Harvard photographs balanced upright on her plump knees.
According to Geist, the photograph provides passage for Will’s spirit to enter this gathering of Aunt Clara, Uncle Henry, Quinn, and me. “The deceased are drawn to their loved ones like butterflies to sugar water. Our beloved often appear to us through vapor or mist,” Geist had clarified. “Other times, another passed soul such as an angel or a Native Indian is sent to serve as messenger.”
This had provoked a dramatic gasp from Aunt Clara, who has a fondness for angels.
Now Geist jumps out from under the muslin drape and darts around to the front of the camera.
“Oh, dear. Is something broken?” squeaks Aunt through gritted teeth.
“Not at all.” Geist fits the cap on the lens then slides a rectangular plate into the body of the instrument. “Exposure to the light is crucial to our success. But now we’re finished. I have cut the light. The butterfly is in the net, so to speak. You are free to move. I feel certain that
William Pritchett was with us! Did you sense it?” His eyes rove the room as if following a starling. Then he slips behind the camera and removes a wooden box, the same dimensions of the plate, from its body.
Geist then hands the contraption to his waiting housemaid, who scurries off with it at once.
“A most confounded thing,” declares Uncle Henry, “but I experienced a tickling in my fingers.”
“A chill down my neck, perhaps,” Aunt Clara whispers.
“What rot.” Quinn sighs. His suit bags at the seams, but a faint glow of health in his cheeks offsets his auburn hair, and he has traded his bandages for an eye patch, which I privately think makes him look rather rakish.
“And you, Miss Lovell?” The photographer folds his black-tipped fingers over his chest and rolls back on his heels. Judging by my imploring letter, Geist must think I’m the most susceptible of us all.
I incline my head politely and say nothing.
The maid reappears in the parlor door. She is a plain thing. Buck-toothed and as jumpy as India rubber. “Dinner’s in the sitting room.”
“Thank you, Viviette,” says Geist. “And now, if you’ll excuse me to my darkroom.” He takes swift leave through the parlor.
“Absurd,” Aunt Clara mutters. “Viviette.” She mistrusts servants who sport exotic names. She thinks it makes them sound wanton.
Eyes averted, the maid leads us to a sitting room cluttered with bric-a-brac. My father once said that the character of a household can be known through the behavior of its staff. I don’t know what to conclude from Viviette’s refusal to meet my gaze.
The sandwiches and cakes are stale, the tea too strong, and the tables and walls are blanketed in photographs of vistas and monuments my eyes are caught by a daguerreotype of Big Ben, the largest clock in London, which I yearn to see. There are also several portraits of Geist himself and stacks of cartes de visite of Geist and of his maid, modeling evening dress, street clothes, and even swathed in Grecian garb. Stealthily, I slip a few into my pocket.
“He watches us, even in his absence.” Quinn rolls his eyes, and we trade a humorous glance.
Silence holds the room until the spiritualist returns. There’s a bounce in his step. “Promising, promising! Now we wait until the varnish has dried and the photograph is printed. Then we shall see the fruits of our labors.”
With no mind to his blackened hands, Geist helps himself to sandwiches and tea before launching into a fascinating recount of his youth in Paris.
“I studied under the esteemed photographer Monsieur Disderi. Odd fellow but brilliant. Disderi made his money in his portraits of the upper classes, such as the present emperor, Napoleon, who considers him to have procured his very best likenesses. But Disderi will also go to great lengths to authenticate rumors of spirit activity. Why, that gentleman once stood sentinel for twenty-four hours at the Place de la Republique in order to photograph Marie Antoinette’s ghost on the scaffold, in her mobcap and with her hands bound.”
“How did he…when did he…?” A crumb trembles on Aunt’s lip.
“There’d been sightings every October sixteenth, the anniversary of her death. Doubters dismissed these as hearsay. Disderi proved them wrong. One glimpse of this image of the last queen of France would turn your hair stone gray. But that is nothing on Disderi’s journey to Scotland and his singular images of pagan spirits who have haunted Tulloch Castle since the twelfth century.”
Geist’s anecdotes are so
captivating that eventually even Quinn leans forward in his chair.
“I want to travel the Continent,” he confesses.
“Go first to the City of Light,” says Geist. “Fill your mind with beauty.” He jumps up to leave the room and returns with a stack of tintypes. “Locke ought to have stayed there. He’s destroyed his sanity. But his images will bear witness to this war long after we are departed.” Geist hands them around for us to examine.
I examine portrait images of young boys with guns high as their chests. Rows of the dying. Rows of hospital beds. A look at Quinn, and I can tell that each image has hit him as a punch.
The pictures have a dizzying effect on me, too. I’m not sure if I’m mesmerized or daydreaming, but the heat is with me all at once as my memory catapults me back to last year, a languid August afternoon. Will and I had strayed from our picnic spot to go boating, and a boy, watching us push off from the bank, had decided to rifle through the belongings we had left behind, including Will’s sketchbook. Ripping out the pages…yes, I remember…the little troublemaker had then set them afloat in the water, and Will had blazed with fury. I’d never seen him in such a temper, and it had taken him the rest of the day to calm himself.
My eyes are staring into Will’s eyes black irises ringed in pale blue.
I open my eyes and Will stands before me in blazing life in his Union uniform. The bottoms of his trousers are wet, and water darkly pools the carpet. His anger is palpable. He is so real, so alive, that I can inhale the tang of the salt water that he has carried in with him. If I reached forward, I could ball my fingers in the rough broadcloth of his jacket, my mouth could find that secret space where the carved notch of his collarbone met his throat and
“Miss Lovell!”
Everyone is looking at me.
I blink. Will is gone. I am slumped in my chair, my teacup has fallen, and its liquid has soaked the carpet.
Quinn has left his chair and is bent on one knee before me.
“Jennie?” he whispers softly. “What’s the matter?”
Picture the Dead Page 3