Bellevoix, Moody thought, she has been calling me from Bellevoix.
Of course there was no way for Moody to know if this were true, but he had been feeling something—feeling Isabelle’s presence deeply. The image that was guiding him was no image of his own making. Was she calling him back? He still did not know. But in believing, there was at least the chance of finding her again.
He struggled, for he had never been a believer … or rather, he had never admitted to himself that he could be one. But he was no different from anyone else trying to recover what they had lost—no different from the hundreds of people who had paraded through his gallery. While Isabelle’s figure had never emerged in other photographs, she was, in a sense, in every picture he ever took. He had not seen her in those first pictures that he had snapped for the Spiritualists, nor in the many others that had helped make his reputation. But those photographs, he now knew, had been doing another kind of work for him: they had been allowing him to escape his past, while at the same time propelling him toward it.
There would never be enough. No … there could never be enough.
When Moody and Joseph approached Bellevoix, during the last moments of an orange dusk, it seemed that the whole place might have understood this. For Joseph, too, craved more than was possible. The house was waiting for them—as the cicadas, and the oaks, and the waterfalls of moss had been waiting—and all around them the air pressed, as if to imply that it possessed secret knowledge. They were at last entering the lost world from which Isabelle’s mother had briefly escaped, and where the inventories had once recorded the woman’s child as “stillborn.” Where had that woman gone? Where had any of them gone? Bellevoix was a magnificent place of lost answers.
Some said that old Mrs. Toussaint—Alexandre Toussaint’s embittered widow—still roamed the halls of the mansion. But nobody knew for sure. At the end of the war she had shuttered up the house and had not been seen by anyone since.
The negative weighed heavily on Moody’s breast as he and Joseph stared out from the dying trees. Yes, at Bellevoix, the ancient oaks had begun to pass away because no one had maintained the levees, and the water had been crawling through the plantation since the war. This time, as in the past, the water seeped in from all directions—from the unrelenting river on one side, and the cypress swamps on the other. Even the sugar fields, which could stand some flooding, were now but graveyards of decomposing leaves and mud.
Alexandre Toussaint had had the good sense to build the house on a slightly raised spot, which acted as a nice deterrent against the greedy water and its inhabitants. Back then Bellevoix was the lively and sparkling center for many gatherings, but now the house slumped there—immense and gloomy, and barely white. Its dark, weather-beaten roof pressed its walls down into the mud, giving the house the appearance of a wheelless wagon that someone had left behind.
Moody and Joseph passed through a dense cluster of dwarf palmetto that edged one side of the plantation. Closer to the house, the cadavers of once-purple ironweed drooped toward the dampened earth. If Isabelle had “returned,” it could only have meant the return to one place. Joseph was convinced that if they could solve the mystery of her birth, they could also possibly uncover the answers behind her disappearance. She was leading them to those answers. Of that much, Joseph was certain.
“It is as awful as they always said,” Joseph whispered once they reached the front steps of the house. For there were many who had not been so enraptured with all of the romance that once surrounded Bellevoix.
“An awful place, truly,” Moody said.
There was pain there.
And as if to scold him for thinking that unspoken truth, a crow cried out and flew away from its sanctuary above the door.
The door opened, and a pack of sparrows fled from another corner of the porch.
“What you be doin’ here?” the voice said. “What’s your business?”
He was a tall man—old and black. The last remaining servant of the house.
Joseph stepped forward.
“Archibald,” he said, “I’m Joseph Winter.”
The man in the doorway expressed no sign of friendliness or recognition. His face was as heavy as the air itself.
“We are looking for the stillborn child,” Joseph went on.
And he waited a moment before adding:
“Isabelle.”
The walls of such houses were impenetrable, especially after the war, and Joseph was relying on strong bonds from the past to gain him entry. He was gambling: was this old man in the doorway indeed the fabled Archibald, who had remained with Mrs. Toussaint after everyone else had left? And would the man even recognize the name of Joseph Winter—a name that resounded with hope in certain circles, and infamy in others?
The man looked at Joseph without moving, and then came out to the top of the steps.
“Winter,” he said. “You don’t mean Fifty-Two Winter.”
“The same,” Joseph replied.
“From the boat?”
“Yes. From the explosion—in fifty-two.”
The old man inspected Joseph.
“You was the only one missing,” he said. “They counted. And boy was there some trouble.”
“I was lucky,” Joseph said. “It was only by the grace of others that I made it out.”
“Huh! Made it out,” Archibald said. “And don’t you talk fancy? Lots of folks assumed you was just dead somewhere, in the swamps. Or at least that’s what they kept tellin’ themselves. They didn’t like when that count kept comin’ up short. Anyone else find you?”
“No,” Joseph said. “They tried. But I made it all the way.”
“Canada?”
Joseph nodded.
“Well, good for you,” Archibald said. “Probably be dead now, if they had.”
Then Archibald’s eyes centered on Moody.
“This is my employer,” Joseph said. “Edward Moody.”
Archibald’s frown deepened.
“He is a photographer,” Joseph added. “We take photographs. We’ve come from Boston.”
“Ain’t nothin’ to photograph here,” Archibald said. “Things around here don’t like to be photographed.”
“We have not come to take a photograph,” Joseph said. “We’ve come looking for the dead child.”
Archibald’s face remained immovable, but his body leaned back slightly when Joseph said this.
“Lots of dead children around this place,” Archibald said.
Moody had been silent up until this point, but a burst of impatience now overcame him.
“She was alive,” Moody said. “The girl did not die.”
Archibald looked at Joseph, as if Joseph himself had made the claim.
“Everybody know that,” Archibald said. “Everybody except … some folks.”
“But the books recorded her as stillborn,” Moody said. “At least that’s what she told me.”
This last bit seized Archibald’s attention, and he couldn’t help but twist toward Moody.
“She told you?”
“Yes, she told him,” Joseph said. “She was in Boston. She worked the railroad in Boston. She is the reason I am standing here.”
Archibald raised his hand to his cheek and scratched. Then he stared down at his shoes.
“I see,” he said quietly. “Never saw her myself, of course. Only heard about her, born out there in the swamp, during the escape. There was a child used to run through the cane fields at night, making all kinds of racket. None of us ever bothered her. Never knew what she was.”
Everyone from the plantation had fled after the war, but Archibald had stayed behind—he and Mrs. Toussaint. People said that it had something to do with a strange indebtedness he felt toward her. She had once convinced her husband to spare him from the lash—and there had been murmurings of other things, too.
“We would like to inspect the books,” Moody said, “if such a thing is even possible.”
Again, Archibald ad
dressed Joseph.
“She belong to him?” he asked.
“In a way,” Joseph answered.
Archibald looked at Moody with an interrogating, paternal air.
“You know that girl?”
“Yes, I knew her,” Moody said.
“And?”
“And what?”
“And … ?”
Archibald was eyeing him severely.
“And she was remarkable,” Moody said. “And she was wronged. Somehow, she was wronged.”
“Wronged by you?”
Moody hesitated.
“No … not by me.”
“This place has something to tell us,” Joseph said. “And the books might be of some help. Another name, another—”
But Archibald was gently laughing.
“Those books can’t tell you nothing,” he said. “They all ashes now.”
At once Moody felt a pain in his chest—near the place where the knife had sliced him. He had become convinced, along with Joseph, that the records would reveal what Isabelle wanted him to see.
“And what the books going to tell you about a ghost anyway?” Archibald said. “If she’d come here—dead or alive—I would know.”
“Did she?” Moody said. “Did she come here?”
Archibald shook his head.
“What year she leave you?”
“Fifty-two,” Moody said. “The same year as Joseph—”
Archibald shook his head again.
“Lot of trade back then. Lots and lots of trade. The white folks was getting more and more anxious every day. And Justine—because that’s who we talkin’ about here, Justine was the mother of that child—he went and locked her up in the hothouse for what she done, but—”
Moody and Joseph both watched his mouth in anticipation.
“Well, he was trying to make an example,” Archibald said. “He made an example alright.”
The agony of it hit Joseph—for it touched that part of him that had never escaped.
“He was mighty upset about losing her,” Archibald went on, “but wasn’t nothin’ they could do about it. Just wanted to forget it after that. Not often a soul run off from a place this far south anyways. Farther up north, maybe, but not down here. There was a reason for that.”
“Mrs. Toussaint,” Moody said. “Might Mrs. Toussaint know more about the girl?”
Archibald thrust his hands into his pockets.
“She won’t see nobody,” he said.
There was silence between the three of them that lasted for some time. It was dusk, and the cicadas were deafening.
“She won’t see nobody,” Archibald repeated.
“This is not to satisfy an idle curiosity,” Joseph said. “We are trying to make things right.”
Archibald was motionless. He would want to make things right too. Years earlier, the others had called him a fool for staying behind, but there was no denying the palpable sense of gravity that surrounded him. He was, after all, the man who had done things that others could not. It was even storied that in the old days he had sent the feux follets back into the swamps.
“I can’t ask her to see you,” Archibald finally said. “If I ask her, she’ll say no. So I have to take you up without asking.”
Then, turning, and dragging his feet toward the front door, he said:
“Come along—you might as well follow me.”
The boards of the porch steps creaked and splintered as Moody and Joseph ascended them. The front door was open, and inside everything was darkness.
Archibald turned around.
“Now you listen, and you listen good,” he said. “Sometimes she no good. She not been the same since the war. She wasn’t all that great even before that, but the war—it done her in. So you listen to me. If she start cryin’ or carryin’ on or anything of the sort, and I tell you to go, you go. Understand?”
Joseph and Moody nodded. A porch sparrow returned to its nest.
The three men stepped through the front door of the house, and Archibald lit a large candelabra. The flames of the candles cast a soft glow over the entryway as the last remains of sunset peeked in through the shutter slats.
“She’s upstairs,” Archibald said. “She don’t hardly ever come down no more.”
At the center of the entryway was a grand, angular staircase that rose halfway to the second floor before splitting off in two directions. On the wall of the landing, a strange scene had been painted: a canal of beribboned gondolas on one side that commingled with a field of young shepherds on the other. There were willows near the shepherds, which seemed peculiar since there was no water. And in the flickering light of the candles, one could see that the mural’s colors had once been brilliant.
When they reached the second floor, Archibald turned around to look at Joseph and Moody again.
“One more thing,” he said, gravely. “It’d be best if you let him do most of the talking.”
He had jerked his head toward Moody, though he had addressed the words to Joseph.
“She was once the mistress of a great house, and in her mind that’s who she still is. You can’t be expectin’ her to answer a bunch of questions from some well-dressed negro.”
The three men continued along the corridor until they arrived at a closed wooden door. Archibald knocked, and a voice from within called “Enter!” And Moody and Joseph followed Archibald into the room.
It was a dark room—dark like the rest of the house—with silk wallpaper that was fraying at the seams. Those walls had once been beautiful, but their now lackluster color hinted at the sorrow that had deadened them. A massive, four-poster canopy bed dominated one side of the room. And on the other side, next to a hollow, unlit fireplace, two shabby chairs stood on unsteady legs, their seat bottoms sagging toward the floorboards.
In one of these chairs, the old woman sat, skeletal in an emerald green evening gown from the finer days before the war. The neckline was unforgiving against her bony, colorless shoulders.
The woman looked up from her lap as Archibald stepped toward her.
“Someone’s come to see you, ma’am. This is Mr. Moody—and Mr. Winter.”
At first the woman looked confused, as if she were waking from a dream. Then her eyes set on Moody, and brightened.
“We receive guests so infrequently these days,” she said, extending her hand. “I suppose you’ve come to see about some previous debt of my husband’s?”
Moody took the woman’s hand. It was a collection of bundled bones.
“No madam,” he said. “I’ve come for nothing but the pleasure of your company. And perhaps … to talk of times past.”
He was feeling the heaviness of Bellevoix, even hearing the voices, but the old Moody was there with him too.
“And what a fine gown you’ve chosen for this evening,” he said.
“Why thank you,” Mrs. Toussaint replied. “I’m sorry, Mr.—?”
“Moody, madam.”
“Moody. Not from around here, certainly. Where do you come from, Mr. Moody?”
“A place quite far away, madam. Where the winters are long and difficult.”
“It’s all difficult now,” she said. “Winter, summer—doesn’t matter which.”
She turned her head toward one of the windows, and her eyes caught the dying sunlight. She had been a beautiful woman—that much was evident.
“That your negro?” she asked.
“Yes madam,” Moody said. “My manservant.”
“Manservant,” she huffed. “That what you call them where you’re from?”
And she extended her hand back toward Archibald, who was standing with Joseph some distance from the chairs.
“My Archibald,” she said. “Ever my sweet, sweet child.”
Her lip quivered.
“The only soul in my life who has never abandoned me.”
Emotion swept over her face but directly receded—as if she had remembered something, and then lost it.
“Archi
bald,” she said, “please fetch Mr. Moody some tea. It’s still early enough, I think. And bring some fresh mint too.”
“Yes ma’am,” Archibald called, “I’ll do that right away.”
But Archibald did not leave the room. He remained with Joseph in the shadows, listening.
“I do so love mint, Mr. Moody. But it takes over the whole yard. Senseless plant with no respect for borders. But oh my …”
Her voice trailed off, and she sat back in the chair. There was a faraway smile on her face.
Then she leaned forward again and locked eyes with her guest.
“Now, Mr. Moody,” she said. “You must tell me a little something about yourself.”
“Well, madam,” Moody replied, “I was hoping we might talk about—”
And he paused, for even in his infinite experience, he was not quite sure how to make the approach.
“Yes?” Mrs. Toussaint asked.
“The business,” Moody said.
“The business?”
“Yes, the business … and the account books from before the war.”
Mrs. Toussaint squinted, as if trying to think of an impossible answer.
“The books …” she whispered, bringing her fingers to her lips.
Then, like a burst of sunshine upon the room’s dead light, she exclaimed:
“Ah, Mr. Moody—I used to have a splendid hand!”
And she raised her fingers, and inspected them. The fine jewelry was now but a memory.
“It was me that kept the books, you know,” she said. “My husband adored my hand.”
Moody’s heart raced—a breakthrough was within reach. Her mind was clearly lost, but perhaps it was something he could help her recover.
“Yes, it was all under my hand,” she said. “The sugar, the boilers, the negroes—everything. Things used to run so beautifully around here. That’s what they never understood.”
“I don’t doubt the superiority of your hand,” Moody said.
Mrs. Toussaint smiled again.
“Do you have any of the old books?” Moody asked.
“Books?”
“Yes, madam—the ledgers. I would love nothing more than to see this excellent hand myself.”
The Spirit Photographer Page 20