by Oak, B. B.
“Do not force me to register a complaint against you, Mr. Beers.”
His hammer paused midair. “Against me?”
“I am sure Justice Phyfe would be scandalized to hear that you came to the door of a helpless lone female in the middle of the night and demanded that she let you in.”
“I made clear to you that I was investigating a theft, madam.”
“In fact, you were not at all clear, sir. Your diction was slurred, and I believe you were drunk. That alone was reason enough not to open my door to you. Never mind your absurd accusation that I had gone and milked Mr. Chadwick’s cow.”
“Not you!” Beers shouted. “The Negro!”
“What Negro?”
“The one Mr. Chadwick saw!”
“I wager Mr. Chadwick sees many apparitions during his habitual walks in his sleep. And I dare say he won’t even recall reporting that particular hallucination to you, Constable. Even if he does recall it, who would believe him?”
“I believed him,” Beers said.
“But we have already established that you were not sober, sir.”
Beers threw down his hammer and rose from his cobbler’s bench, his face red and angry as he came toward me. “You think yourself a clever minx, don’t you?”
I took a step back, but my gaze did not waver as I faced down the man. His small eyes had a hard malice in them, but his other features were weak, and he was the one to blink first. I took care not to show him the smallest sign of triumph and held up my boot. “Can you fix this, please?”
He snatched the boot from my grasp and gave it a cursory look. “You women and your silly fashions,” he said with the utmost disdain. “A cloth boot is not worth the trouble to repair.”
“But I cannot afford to buy a new pair,” I said most piteously.
“Oh, very well. I’ll stitch it back together properly.” Returning to his bench, he did so in a thrice, using wax-coated thread and a hog’s bristle as a needle.
He charged me two cents, and we said no more about last night. I believe I have convinced him that it is better for all concerned if he does not pursue the matter and involve Justice Phyfe. Beers has always avoided trouble like the Plague, and it seems likely he will continue to do so.
Upon leaving the shoe shop I noticed an enclosed red wagon on the Green. It was stationed by the town pump, and the piebald horse that had pulled it was being led away by the Sun’s stable boy. I strolled across the plush spring grass to get a closer look at the contrivance. The words DAGUERREOTYPE SALOON were painted on it in gold letters, and leaning against it was a slender young man I took to be the itinerant daguerreotypist. He wore tight striped pantaloons, a jaunty cap, and a gold hoop earbob in his right earlobe.
“Why, aren’t you a fine looking young lady,” he drawled, giving me an impertinent smile above a bristle of reddish chin beard. He had freckles sprinkled all over his face like stars. A grouping of them on his cheek was shaped like the Big Dipper. “Have you been taken already?”
“I’m married, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I’m sorry to hear it. But I was inquiring if you’ve ever had your likeness taken, ma’am.”
“No, and I doubt I ever shall. I have no desire to have a frozen-faced image of myself.”
“It will not look frozen, I assure you.”
“Most daguerreotype portraits I have seen make the subjects look like corpses.”
“Not the ones I take. Except, of course, when the subject is in fact dead.”
“You take pictures of dead people?”
“Yes, upon request.”
I pretended a shiver. “How macabre.”
“Not really. Some find it comforting to have a final image of a loved one before the casket is sealed. Indeed, I could make a good living just taking funeral portraits, but I much prefer my subjects to be lively ladies such as yourself. Wouldn’t your husband be delighted to be presented with your likeness?”
“Only if it were that of my corpse in a casket.”
The daguerreotypist looked stunned by my reply for an instant and then laughed. “Aren’t you the droll one?”
“I was being dead serious.”
He laughed again. “You’re a sight more amusing than most people I come across up North. Why do Yankees maintain such a stiff upper lip?”
“To cover bad teeth, I suppose.”
“I wager your teeth are perfect, ma’am. Smile for me, won’t you?”
“Why should I?”
“If you smile for me whilst I take your likeness, I’ll give it to you free of charge.”
In truth, I was most curious about the process and could not pass up the chance to learn about it at absolutely no cost to myself. So I suppose, despite my European rearing, I am a true Yankee after all. “I accept your offer, Mr. . . .”
“Just call me Rusty, ma’am. Rusty from Delaware.” He swept off his cap and gave me a low bow, showing off his bright red hair.
“Well, aren’t you the Southern gentleman.”
His open, freckled countenance became wary. “Have you a prejudice against Southerners?”
“What makes you think so?”
“Your mocking tone just now.”
“I didn’t mean to mock you. But in truth I do have a prejudice. Not against all Southerners, of course. Only slaveholders.”
“Well, I own nary a slave and never have.”
“Yet you tolerate slavery in your state.”
“That peculiar institution is tolerated by all the states in this great Union, ma’am, for it is tolerated by the federal government.” His tone was weary. No doubt he had made this point many times before during his travels in the North. “But if you no longer wish to pose for me because of where I happened to be born, so be it.”
“I am not so intolerant as that,” I said. “Pray take my likeness, Rusty. I want to see how it’s done.”
He bowed again. “Please step into my saloon, my lady.”
The interior of the refitted wagon, or “saloon” as ’twas Rusty’s pretension to call it, was about twenty feet long and brightly lit thanks to a large skylight. Swaths of pale silk covered the walls, and the scent of chlorine and other unidentifiable chemicals permeated the atmosphere. Rusty had me sit in a velvet “visitor’s chair” and went behind a heavy curtain at the end of the wagon. After a moment he returned with a slender box that he told me contained a copper plate coated with silver. He inserted it in the camera obscura that stood like a vigilant Cyclops in front of the chair, and instructed me to smile and hold still whilst he counted to ten. At the count of one he slid open the box in the camera to expose the plate to light, and at the count of ten he removed the exposed plate.
“Care to join me behind the curtain and watch me work?” he said with a sly smile.
As tempted as I was to observe the process, I did not think it wise to be alone with him in such a small, intimate space. “I will stay here,” I said, “and you can tell me what you are doing from back there.”
He made a big show of looking disappointed, but he obliged me. “First thing I’m doing is putting the plate in a container that holds a cup of heated mercury,” he called through the curtain. “The mercury vapor will amalgamate with the silver and develop the picture.” After a short time of silence he spoke again. “Now I am immersing the plate in a hyposulfite bath to remove the silver coating.” And then, a moment later: “I am now dipping the plate in a gold-chloride solution to gild and varnish the image. And now I am rinsing and drying the plate. It’s about ready to seal under glass. Which would you prefer to have it set in, ma’am—a case or a frame?”
“Whatever is cheaper,” I said, keeping in mind that he was giving me the image free of cost. “How does it look?”
“Wait and see for yourself.” A moment later Rusty pulled back the curtain and extended to me, most dramatically, the framed daguerreotype. “I initialed and dated it in back,” he said. “Does the image please you?”
I glanced at th
e flat facsimile of my face. There was no art in it. No magic. “It pleases me no more or less than my image in a mirror.”
“I should think that would please you very much.”
“Ha! The camera may not be a flatterer, but the camera operator certainly is.”
“I’m being most sincere,” Rusty insisted.
“If you were sincere you would admit that the fixed smile on my face makes me look like a simpering idiot. A smile that is forced instead of spontaneous is rarely attractive. That’s why I do not demand smiles from my own subjects.”
“Your subjects?” Rusty gave me a wry look. “What are you, a queen?”
“A portrait painter.”
“Aha! Then you are even more prejudiced against me than you let on. You must regard daguerreotypists as rivals who will eventually replace limners like you.”
“Indeed I do not! The stilted black-and-white replicas you make with your infernal device can never replace an artistic creation that captures both the subject’s features and essence.”
Rusty smiled. “Time will tell, ma’am. Time will tell.”
I removed my gloves, wrapped them around the rather fragile glass image of myself, and stuck it in my reticule. We exited the wagon, and I saw that a collection of curious townspeople had gathered around it. They eagerly asked Rusty how much it would cost to make a likeness, and the price he quoted was so low that they began to line up to be taken.
I would have been happy to capture the visages of each and every one of them on canvas. But of course I would have taken weeks rather than minutes to do so and charged far more than most of them could afford. Perhaps Rusty was right. We limners were on the way out. Never mind artistic skill and talent. Never mind years of training and discipline. We might soon be replaced by one-eyed mechanical monsters and their operators. But even as this dire realization sank in, up floated ideas of how I might use this newfangled invention to my own advantage as an artist.
Musing upon this as I headed home, I did not notice Granny Tuttle’s ward, Harriet Quimby, standing at the door of Adam’s office. She waved to get my attention, which surprised me, for I am accustomed to Harriet running the opposite way whenever she spots me. The girl has always made it clear that my very presence in Plumford is obnoxious to her. And I have always hoped she might come to accept me or at least outgrow her childish animosity toward me.
“Where is Adam?” she demanded as soon as I was within hearing distance.
“Out on the bog, no doubt,” I replied. “He and Henry Thoreau organized a search for a runaway slave who went missing when—”
“Yes, yes,” Harriet interrupted impatiently. “Adam told Granny and me all about that last night. But I was hoping he hadn’t left yet. Now what am I to do?” She began wringing her hands.
“What’s wrong, Harriet? Has Granny taken a turn for the worse?”
“No, but she very well might if she leaves her bed,” Harriet said. “She is all in a biver about Mr. Thoreau’s expected visit this afternoon and means to be downstairs when he calls. She wants me to help her, for she is weak as a kitten and cannot manage on her own. I have never gone against her wishes, but it seems this time I must. The least exertion might do her harm, and I promised Adam I would keep her abed. I came to fetch him to talk some sense into her. Granny always listens to Adam.”
After such a whoosh of words, Harriet had to pause to catch her breath, and I took the opportunity to make a suggestion. “Perhaps I could reason with Granny.”
“You?” Harriet looked most doubtful, and no wonder, for Granny Tuttle has disliked me for even longer than Harriet has.
“Come along,” I said, grasping Harriet’s hand. “I haven’t visited the old dear for a while, and now’s as good a time as any.”
Off we went to Tuttle Farm, a brisk twenty-minute walk from town on a road that rose and dipped between orchards and pastures and was quietly shouldered by the Assabet River. Farmers were out in the fields plowing whilst their wives were out in their kitchen gardens hoeing. Many a folk hallooed to us along the way, and Harriet and I called Good Day back at them. Nary a word did we speak to each other, however. I gave my silent walking companion an occasional sidelong glance, but her yellow straw bonnet shielded her countenance from me as much as it shielded her complexion from the sun’s rays.
It was such a fine spring day that I threw off my own bonnet for an unhampered view of my surroundings. Everywhere I looked I saw Nature’s abundance and beauty. Hedgerows enclosing the fields were chock-full of flowering hawthorn, nanny-berry, and pin cherry shrubs, and velvety violets bloomed along the road. The meadows were studded with sunlit dandelions, and the tall tulip trees showed off gigantic yellow and orange blooms. Long yellow catkins hung from the poplars, releasing cotton puffs that floated in the soft air like fleecy snowflakes. The hill pastures had turned a rich, thick emerald green, and a herd of brown cows driven by a flaxen-haired boy trotted down the road toward us, most likely on their way to the pastures to graze. Harriet and I stepped aside to watch them pass, and we both laughed at the sight of the frisky calves gamboling alongside their mothers. I heard wild screeching above us and looked up to see a pair of red-tailed hawks dipping and rising and circling each other.
“Look, Harriet! Two hawks a-courting!” I said, pointing to them. “They are dancing together in the air and screaming out their passion for each other. It’s their way of canoodling.”
Harriet looked at me instead of the hawks, her round, young face pinched with disapproval. “I do not care to hear you talk of such things! It is unseemly.”
It should have vexed me, I suppose, to be reprimanded by a mere girl of sixteen, but I found her misdirected prudishness rather amusing. “Pray what is so unseemly about pointing out two lusty birds performing a mating ritual, Harriet? They are doing what nature compels them to do, and there is no sin in it.”
“But there is sin in it if you are a married woman,” she muttered.
That surely took me aback. Why would Harriet say such a thing unless she knew of my intimate relationship with Adam, which was indeed sinful in the eyes of state and church? In the eyes of Miss Harriet Quimby too, if I had heard and interpreted her remark correctly. Rather than ask her to repeat what she’d said, I did what many a woman in my dubious position would do—I pretended I had not heard her.
On we continued in silence, and soon the Tuttle farmstead could be seen from the road, poised on a level piece of ground in the center of a grassy field halfway up a hill. We took the long lane that led up to it. It was overhung by maple trees and bordered on either side by low stone walls thrown by Tuttle settlers who began clearing the land over two hundred years ago. Adam, a Tuttle on his mother’s side, is the last surviving male descendant in the line, and his grandmother never lets him forget it.
As we drew closer the sight of the Tuttle apple orchard frothy with pink blossoms filled me with delight. I recalled the first time Adam had brought me there in the spring. A city child, I had never been in a blooming orchard before, and I had wept, overcome by the beauty. Adam had laughed at my mawkish gushing, as most boys of nine would have. But then he had taken my hand and given the back of it a big, wet smack of a kiss.
Upon reaching the farmhouse, I saw that the enormous chestnut tree that stands in front of it was already in full leaf. The tree is most impressive, but the house itself is not. Its roof is slightly swaybacked, and its rough, uneven clapboards have been left in their natural state, rather than painted white or yellow as is the current fashion. It is a most comfortable abode, however, and trailing back from it are a succession of attached buildings of varying sizes, making it possible to walk under cover of roof from kitchen to buttery, woodshed, cow barn, henhouse, wagon shed, and sheep barn. The Tuttles gave up raising sheep years ago, and Adam has converted the end barn into living quarters for himself.
Harriet and I entered the house through the kitchen door, and the moment I stepped inside I felt the difference. Yet nothing had changed. Dried herbs
still hung from the heavy ceiling beams, and the old flintlock musket that Adam’s great-grandfather had fired in the War for Independence still hung above the fieldstone fireplace. Granny’s footed pots and blackened three-legged skillets, along with her hodgepodge collection of hefty ladles, skewers, and skimmers, were still gathered around the yawning hearth, and a small bed of coals glowed within it, as always. However, no pot of simmering stew hung from the swinging crane above the coals, the brick chimney oven was cold, and there was no rising dough or freshly baked bread on the bleached oak table. What felt so different in Granny Tuttle’s kitchen was her absence from it.
We went up the narrow flight of stairs to her bedroom. The windows were open, and a warm breeze puffed out the homespun linen curtains and carried the scent of lilacs into the room. Granny lay on the four-poster bed she had shared with Eli Tuttle for forty years. She was covered with a blue and red counterpane that she’d most likely knitted herself, using wool she’d sheared from a sheep she’d raised up from a lamb; wool that she’d dyed with crushed plants from her garden and spun into yarn on her wheel. Now these ever-busy, nimble hands lay motionless atop the cover, fingers so twisted with arthritis they looked like claws. Her bright eyes, however, moved quickly enough when she swung her gaze from the window to me.
“Well, if it ain’t Julia Bell,” she said, calling me by my full maiden name as she has done since I was eight. “High time you paid a visit to a poor, sickly old woman.”
“I came last week, ma’am.” I would never call her Granny to her face, for she has never given me leave to do so.
“Last week? Then what in tarnation are you doin’ back so soon? Ain’t you got better things to do than bother a poor, sickly old woman?”
I had to laugh. Granny was as contrary as ever, despite her illness. But then I saw that the effort of being ornery had cost her dearly, for she closed her eyes and lay still and silent, her thin, drawn face white as the pillowcase.
“Yes, she is far too weak to get out of bed,” I whispered to Harriet.