rolls back onto his heels, his fingers webbed across his chest. “So what can I do for you, Miss Lovell? For I presume there’s a purpose to your call?”
“Yes. You were correct, after all.” I give him my print and prepare myself for his astonishment.
He stares, lifts his brows. “Intriguing.” He hands it back. “Yet I find it curious that you’d want to dupe me.”
“Dupe?” I almost laugh. “You think I meddled with this image?”
“What else should I think?”
Bewildered, I look for what Geist sees. In new light the black curlicues of the iris petals look different. A delicate but all-toohuman work of quill and ink. “I swear on my life, sir. I didn’t touch it.” My finger crosses my heart, a gesture of childlike earnestness and yet I am feeling increasingly, mortifyingly childlike.
“And I swear on mine, neither did I. And so now we circle each other, wondering who is the charlatan?”
Truly, not the outcome I’d expected. “I don’t know what to say…” I falter. “Except that no matter what you think of this photograph, I’m here as a believer. On my last visit, you were convinced that Will’s spirit had come to me. I couldn’t bring myself to admit it at the time. I’d had a vision right in your parlor, of one afternoon during my last summer with Will, when a prankster had destroyed his sketchbooks by pitching them into the water. But then it was more than a memory. It was as if Will had conjured his very life energy to stand before me.”
Geist is listening. I take it as a sign to continue. And so I confess my choking nightmares and my belief that the black irises in the photograph linked me to my discovery of Private Dearborn, which couldn’t possibly be pure coincidence.
Finally, I take Will’s letter from my purse and hand it to him. Geist opens it and reads.
“You see, it’s my proof,” I tell him. “Will must have got himself a into some terrible trouble, before the end.” My fingers twist at the place where my engagement ring once sparkled. I’m as unused to its absence as I was to its weight. “Whatever Will has done, perhaps he wants to communicate something to me. I think he wants me to know that he is angry enraged about something. Just like that day by the lake. If your photo ”
“He mentions yellow jackets and mosquitoes,” Geist interrupts, lifting his eyes from the letter. “A pestilence of summer.”
It takes me a moment to understand. “But hardly ever found in spring,” I say slowly. “Will was killed May sixth.”
“He was
I nod, thinking of it in my book. “I did. Signed by a Captain Fleming.”
The spiritualist looks puzzled as he rocks back on his heels. “Undoubtedly, Fleming acted on the power of his best judgment.”
“What are you saying?”
“I am saying that a man cannot die twice, both in the spring and in the summer. Somewhere there is a falsehood. Most likely with Fleming’s record.”
“Well.” I am taken aback. An answer, but not the one I’d have wagered. “If there’s a cover-up, my cousin Quinn knows more than he’s telling.”
Geist frowns. “Perhaps you should let sleeping dogs lie.”
“Except that nobody is sleeping,” I say. “Nobody is at rest. That’s why I’m here. Mr. Geist, you said on my last visit that if you took my photograph it might help me commune with Will. And so I thought if we could take the photograph today, I’d have another chance ”
But he is tut-tutting me. “Your visit is ill timed, Miss Lovell. The photogenic process is a recipe of art and science. There’s not enough light today. Exposure would be interminable.”
Geist must see my disappointment. “Stay for tea,” he says. “Though it’s not a perfect day for a photographic portrait, I have several sheets of albumen paper drying in my darkroom. Perhaps in an hour or so the clouds will have broken up. And then,” he says, with another dubious glance at Will’s letter before he folds it and returns it to my hand, “we shall see what we shall see.”
17.
“Light destroys the image. But light also creates the image.”
Geist explains this carefully, as he has been explaining everything. I hardly want to blink, I am so fascinated. It is akin to a glimpse inside the magician’s top hat, or a peek inside P. T.
Barnum’s museum.
After a desultory meal of Swiss cheese, sliced pickles, cranberry nut bread, and strong Ceylon tea, Geist had thrown open the velvet curtains of his studio and risked the dubious noonday light to take my photograph. The exposure time had crawled on longer than one of Reverend Meeks’s Sunday sermons. And even in church I am allowed a scratch or two.
But I’d kept calm as marble. Chin lifted, hands folded. I had filled my mind with Will. Worked with all my power to recapture that surge of his presence, the undertow as I’d first known it that day in Geist’s sitting room. Only there was nothing. No feverish heat. No fury. No pull.
My intense concentration had its own effect. When Geist capped the lens, I was weak with yearning. Geist seemed to understand, for after he’d removed the plate, he gave me his a handkerchief before hurrying off to his darkroom. “Find me when you’re ready.”
Curiosity dried my tears, and soon I had followed him to the tiny chamber off the parlor where he worked. Its windows are papered against the light, and the trapped air is sharp with chemical solution. I watch as Geist prepares to develop the plate by pouring a vinegar solution over it and then waiting for the image to appear. “Developing a photograph is chemically similar to rubbing the tarnish off silver,” he explains. “A scrub for the treasure beneath.” Geist pours water over the plate.
“And both processes leave blackened hands.”
“Indeed. Some even call photography the ‘black art.’”
“I like that.” But in my photograph I look grim and grainy. I’m not sure what we’re hoping to find, but I don’t dare ask Geist. Not while he is working so intently. He slides the plate into a wooden box.
“Fixer…to preserve the image.” He leaves it for a few minutes to bustle about, selecting from a distracting array of bottles filled with a sharp bite of chemicals before removing the plate and washing it again with water.
Geist holds the plate over an oil lamp. “The varnish adheres best when the plate is warmed.” He tips the glass this way and that. “I’ve used a Rapid Rectilinear portrait lens, a gift from Locke. I did sense a sharpened focus when I adjusted the aperture opening. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating.”
He warms the plate a few more minutes before returning to his worktable, where he unstoppers a decanter and flows a thin solution onto the plate’s surface.
“You added that liquid to the plate before you placed it in the camera,” I mention.
“Not quite. That was collodion a combustible blend of ether, iodides, bromides, plus a bit of my own magic.” He winks. “Collodion on the front. Then a bath of silver nitrate. Both compounds sensitize the plate before exposure. But we’re finished with exposure.”
“What are you pouring?” I sniff. It stinks.
“Varnish, to preserve the picture. It’s a delicate balance. Too much varnish destroys. Whereas too little will not protect.”
There are more steps to the process than in a Viennese waltz, and it requires such a mindful eye and steady hand that I feel shamed remembering how I’d dismissed Geist as a fraud and nothing else.
He is as skilled as a surgeon, but with his artist’s eye I’m reminded of Will, who would have found astonishing artistry in this process.
When Geist holds the varnished plate at arm’s length, my heart flutters.
“But I look…”
“Like a ghost? Not to worry, Miss Lovell; it’s only the negative image. Not the finished print. Let’s set it here
