Miss Mottram cast him a curious glance.
“You seem to be on rather familiar terms with your employer,” she replied with a sniff, “but I know what I saw, Mr Albarn. Something wicked lies at the heart of Montgomery Flinch’s tale and, with his niece Penelope now playing the part of the prima donna, I fear that she will be the next to fall prey to its poison.”
Alfie stared back at her blankly.
“The prima what?”
“The leading lady,” Miss Mottram wailed, her patience finally snapping. “She has taken the role of Amelia Eversholt and is playing the part of the daughter of darkness herself.”
With this final revelation, Miss Mottram burst into tears. For a moment, Alfie stood there nonplussed, staring in consternation as the young woman’s shoulders heaved with every sob. Then he reached into his pocket to extract his handkerchief, offering it to her with a nervous hand. The once-white material was covered in a spiderweb of ink stains, but Miss Mottram accepted it without a second glance, blowing her nose with a mournful honk.
His mind racing, Alfie tried to piece together everything that she’d told him: Edward Gold turned into a monster by his own invention; Monty flying into a violent rage; and now this declaration that Penny had taken the lead role in the production. Alfie shook his head. He remembered Penelope’s scornful reaction to the picture show they had watched at the funfair. There was no way she’d have ended up starring in one.
Miss Mottram let out another snivelling sob. The woman was almost hysterical. Could he even believe a word that she said? He glanced across at Mr Wigram’s empty desk, wishing the elderly lawyer was here to listen to Miss Mottram’s evidence.
“I’m very sorry,” Alfie began as the former secretary’s sobs finally quietened to a low sniffle, “but how do I know that you’re telling me the truth? What proof do you have for these wild accusations?”
Miss Mottram stared back at him.
“It is of no consequence to me whether you believe me or not, Mr Albarn,” she replied in a trembling voice. “But if you care for Mr Flinch’s wellbeing and the safety of Miss Tredwell, I urge you to do everything in your power to bring an end to this film.”
This warning delivered, Miss Mottram turned and headed for the door. As she opened it, Alfie called out one final question.
“Then why are you telling me all this?”
Miss Mottram glanced back to reply, her red-rimmed eyes now filled with resentment.
“Revenge,” she said simply. “Edward has turned into a monster – more terrible even than any creature that Montgomery Flinch has ever penned. He has to be stopped.”
With that, the front door closed behind her with a slam, leaving Alfie standing there alone. He shivered, her words sending a chill down his spine. He thought back to Penny’s telegram with its cryptic warning:
SOMETHING STRANGE ABOUT GOLD’S CAMERA STOP
Since then he hadn’t heard a thing from her and in his heart the fear grew that what Miss Mottram had told him was true.
He glanced up at the clock on the wall. It was nearly midday. Mr Wigram wasn’t due back in the office until late that afternoon, but if Penny was in danger he had no time to waste. He had to find the Frenchman and discover the secret that lay behind Gold’s camera.
Grabbing his jacket, Alfie hurried to the door. Locking it behind him, he hurried down the steps, racing to leave the shadows of the office behind. He only hoped he could find Jacques Le Prince before it was too late.
XX
Alfie weaved his way through a heaving sea of people, the thickening crowd pressing in from all sides. The excited babble of sound that filled the evening air seemed to be reaching a fever pitch; the candy-striped lights of the fair flickering into life as dusk descended and the day slipped away.
“A penny a ride for the thrill of your life!”
Ignoring the bellowed entreaties of the fairground hawkers, Alfie ducked through a gap in the crowd and headed down a side alley, its stalls showcasing some of the fair’s less savoury exhibits:
Susie the Snake Charmer, Professor Fenwick’s Flea Circus, the Wheel of Fortune and Jack Chadwick’s Boxing Booth.
A card-sharper dressed in a worn velveteen jacket sat hunched over a table, a lit cheroot hanging from his lip.
“Fancy trying your luck, lad?” he called out to Alfie with a wink. “Find the lady and win yourself a half-crown.”
Shaking his head, Alfie hurried on. It had been an arduous journey that had brought him to this place, travelling halfway across London by omnibus, tram and underground train to reach Upper Green on the outskirts of the city just in time for the last night of the Mitcham Fair.
Back at The Penny Dreadful, Mr Wigram was probably cursing his name; the pile of unread proofs on Alfie’s desk getting higher with every hour that he wasted on this wild goose chase.
He peered at the stalls ahead with a frown. If he had to return to the office without finding Jacques Le Prince, there was no way that he’d be able to convince the elderly lawyer of the truth of Miss Mottram’s warning. Mr Wigram would probably think he had just taken a half-holiday and dock him a day’s wages for sure.
The noise of the fair seemed quieter here, its well-oiled patrons far fewer on the ground as these more remote attractions failed to live up to their billing. Richardson’s Waxwork World of Wonders, Madame Xanadu Fortune-teller, Tales from the East – an Exotic Magic Lantern Show. Then Alfie saw it: a shabby-looking booth at the far end of the row; its once brightly painted facade now peeling and tired, but the words above its door could still be read:
The 5 had been scored through and the number three crudely painted in its place – a desperate attempt to draw any passing trade inside.
Alfie’s chest swelled with pride. Sherlock Holmes himself – God rest his soul – would’ve been impressed by his detective work. In a city of more than six million people, it looked like he had managed to track Jacques Le Prince down. Now it was time to find out if he had any answers.
A makeshift curtain was drawn across the entrance to the booth, but as Alfie approached this he heard the sound of a sob emanating from the interior.
“I never thought I would see her again!”
Alfie jumped back in alarm as with an anguished cry, the curtain across the door was flung open. A distinguished-looking gentleman stepped out from the photographer’s booth, his silver hair and smartly clipped whiskers framing plump cheeks that were puffed out in an expression of wondrous disbelief. In his hand he clutched a large photograph and, as Alfie glanced down at it, he saw the man’s face staring back at him in black and white, but with the figure of a woman standing beside him.
Her expression was shrouded in shadows, her eyes meeting the camera’s gaze with a coal-black stare. Below the frosty rime of her hairline, the woman’s face seemed to have an ethereal appearance, her skin almost translucent. Alfie shivered as he glanced up from this ghostly image to see the man’s eyes stained with tears.
“There is another world,” he breathed, clutching the portrait to his chest. “Beyond this vale of tears. And now that I know that my beloved Alice is waiting for me there, I can live my life in peace until we are together again.”
Wiping a tear from his eye, the man turned away, heading back towards the heart of the fair. With a sense of unease growing in the pit of his stomach, Alfie pulled back the curtain left dangling across the entrance and peered inside.
The booth was lit by two arc lamps, stationed at either side of a grubby white sheet that hung across the far wall: the missing bed linen from number 5 Leicester House discovered at last. In front of this sheet, a straight-backed chair stood ready for the next sitter, whilst across from the chair the figure of a man crouched behind a camera tripod. His glasses were perched halfway down his nose as he peered into the camera’s interior. With an expert touch, he slid a roll of film out from the boxlike camera, placing it into the small canister that was open at his feet.
As Alfie stepped inside the booth, letting
the curtain fall behind him with a swish, the man glanced in his direction.
“I will be with you in one moment,” Jacques Le Prince said. “I just have to prepare the camera to shoot the next carte de visite.”
Taking a small penknife out of his pocket, he scored open a fresh roll of film, carefully unspooling it as he threaded it into place inside the camera. With the film secured, he closed the door of the camera with a click and then rose to his feet to greet his new customer.
“Now, monsieur,” he began. “Who is it that you wish to see? A beloved parent perhaps or maybe a long-lost friend? I am afraid there is no way of telling which spirits the camera will capture.”
Jacques Le Prince held out his hand in greeting as Alfie emerged from the shadows, but then curled his fingers into a fist.
“You,” he hissed in disbelief. “Le voleur!”
Alfie shrank back in fear. The sight of the knife jutting from the photographer’s shirt pocket reminded him of their last encounter. But Penelope wasn’t here to help him now.
“Why do you still plague me?” Le Prince asked, advancing on Alfie with a snarl. “Hasn’t Eddie Gold stolen enough from me already? This is all I have left.”
“You don’t understand,” Alfie stuttered, desperately searching for the words that would quell the Frenchman’s fury. “I’m no thief. I’ve just come here to find out the truth about Edward Gold’s invention. What can you tell me about the Véritéscope?”
This question stopped Jacques Le Prince in his tracks. A momentary look of confusion crossed the photographer’s face, then his shoulders sagged as if the burden that he had been carrying had finally become too much for him.
“The Véritéscope is mine,” he replied, the gleam of anger in his eyes now dulled to a weary spark. “Eddie Gold stole it from me.”
XXI
“We used to be partners, you see,” Jacques explained, lifting his hand to gesture around the shabby interior of the sideshow booth. “Eddie took me under his wing when I first came looking for work on the fair.”
He rested his hand again on the boxlike device fixed to the tripod.
“All I had then was this camera – my father’s invention – but when Eddie saw the pictures I could take, he said we would make our fortune together.”
“Your father?” Alfie asked.
“Oui,” Jacques replied. “My father was Louis Le Prince. In France he had studied biology, chemistry, painting and photography: the science and the art of life. When he came to this country, he met my mother and, after my brother and I were born, he found work as a portrait photographer, but then one day he made the discovery that would change all our lives. When developing a family portrait in his darkroom, my father noticed on one plate of film a shadowy figure lurking at the back of the picture, where no actual figure had stood. On looking more closely, he saw that this was his own father – my grandfather – who had died some ten years before.”
The photographer paused for a moment to push his glasses back up his nose.
“At first my father endeavoured to capture this ghostly presence again, taking countless photographs without success. Then he made the momentous decision to harness the power of science to solve this great mystery. He sought to invent a camera that could peer beyond this mortal realm with every click of the shutter and photograph the spirits of the dead. My father toiled for years, investigating the alchemy of light and sound, experimenting with different lenses and chemical processes before he invented this prototype camera which could capture these ghosts on film.”
Alfie listened intently, trying to follow Le Prince’s explanation, but in truth struggling to believe a fraction of what he said. Since the camera had been invented, countless charlatans had claimed that they could photograph the dead, but each and every one had been exposed as a fraud. Was Le Prince just another of these fly-by-night con artists trying to swindle grieving widows out of their life savings?
“But my father’s invention was greeted with derision,” Jacques continued, his words echoing Alfie’s own doubts. “His friends and colleagues refused to believe that the spirit photographs he produced were more than mere trickery. Broken-hearted, my father returned to his workshop, vowing that this time he would create a camera that would make the world believe the wonders that he’d seen. After countless more months of experimentation, he made yet another breakthrough: a camera that could take a flurry of photographs every second – the first moving pictures the world had ever seen, long before Lumière and Edison invented their cinematographic devices. Unlike my father’s first prototype, this moving picture machine could not glimpse the afterlife, but the sights that it showed made everyone who saw it weep with astonishment. The magic of reality captured forever on a reel of film. He shot countless sequences – street scenes and city life – even a film of my brother and I playing in the garden.”
A slight dampness appeared in the corners of the Frenchman’s eyes, his voice cracking slightly as he continued to speak.
“My father saw that this new invention could make him his fortune and planned to travel to America to patent his machine and demonstrate its wonders to the public at last. He sent my mother and brother ahead, whilst I stayed behind with the intention of following them all as soon as I had completed my studies. However before my father departed for America, he travelled to France to visit my uncle there and, somewhere on his return, the terrible fate befell him that tore my family apart.”
The photographer’s voice had dropped to a whisper, the words almost too painful to utter.
“My father never stepped off the train in Paris – he simply disappeared. The police called it suicide, but I know that he would never have deserted us, not on the eve of his dream coming true. They never found his body and all his possessions, including his cinematographic invention, were lost too.” Jacques glanced up to meet Alfie’s gaze, a reluctant tear running down his cheek. “That was ten years ago now. My mother and brother were stranded on the other side of the ocean, whilst all I had left of my father was this first prototype camera. No money, no family, no home. I was lost.”
Alfie shifted uncomfortably as Jacques unburdened himself of a decade of grief. His tale sounded more like a plot from the pages of The Penny Dreadful with its stories of ghosts and strange disappearance. A worry itched at the back of his brain. What exactly was Penny caught up in here?
As if sensing his unease, Jacques now began to explain how the partnership of Gold & Prince Pictures had come to be.
“As many who fall on hard times do, I drifted to the fair, hoping to lose myself in its maelstrom. I had the vaguest notion of offering my services as a fairground photographer, and when Eddie took an interest in my talents, I thought I had found a true friend. When he saw the pictures I could take with my father’s still camera, Eddie threw his flea circus out into the fields and transformed his sideshow booth into Gold & Prince Pictures – spirit photographers extraordinaire.”
Jacques ran his fingers through his close-cropped hair.
“I promised myself that as soon as I had saved enough money I would travel to America to be with my family again, but somehow with Eddie in charge, there was never enough.” He let out a bitter laugh. “I trusted him then – fool that I was.”
Alfie tapped his foot impatiently, small clouds of sawdust rising from the floor. He couldn’t wait any longer.
“But what about the Véritéscope?”
In response to this question, a bitter smile played across Jacques’s lips.
“Eddie started to worry that my portraits of the afterlife were losing their appeal,” he replied. “As he stood outside the booth he saw the crowds queuing for the newfangled cinematograph shows: the Bioscope booths and Phantasmagoria. I tried to reassure him, told him that these moving picture shows were pale imitations of my father’s last and greatest invention, but this only seemed to enrage him. Eddie called me a liar and challenged me to prove what I said. He said that if my father’s machine had been as great as I clai
med, then it would make me enough money to buy a thousand tickets to America. All I had to do was invent it again.”
The photographer’s eyes narrowed behind his half-moon glasses.
“I couldn’t let such an insult go unanswered. Burying myself in the darkroom at the back of this booth, I set about trying to recreate my father’s last invention. By building a brand new camera, even improving on my father’s design, I would show Eddie Gold the truth of my words. First, through a wearying process of trial and error, I discovered a way to replicate the chemical composition of the film from my father’s still camera. Transferring this to a cinematograph reel, I found that by modifying the mechanisms of a conventional camera I could increase the frame rate by a thousandfold, producing flawless moving pictures, whilst the addition of chromatic filters and magnetic recording apparatus enabled the capture of colour and sound as well. But that wasn’t all. Turning the camera’s winder for the very first time, I made the most marvellous discovery.”
Jacques’s hands traced strange patterns in the air as if reliving this moment again.
“As I looked through the viewfinder on to the scene of the bustling fair, I saw a miraculous sight. Strange shadowy figures flitted amongst the crowds; ghosts stalking the footsteps of those who still lived. With this invention, I had finally solved the riddle of death. I could see the souls of the departed separated from the living by the merest of vibrations; their ethereal forms existing beyond the spectrum of light visible to the naked eye, but captured by the lens of my machine. I glimpsed the face of Evangeline, a trapeze artist who had died in a fall a mere few months before, and as she looked into the camera lens I knew she could see me too. Emboldened, I tried to speak to her, but although her lips moved in reply, I could not hear her words, and when the reel of film ran out, her shadow disappeared as though it had never been there.”
Shadows of the Silver Screen Page 12