Captured Shadows (11 page)

Mr Everett's house was a charming little cottage on the seafront just at the edge of the town, past the grander houses and shabby hotels. The beach there was quieter, fewer bathing-machines to block the view of the low evening sunlight on the waves, and a little way beyond the house was a small rocky outcrop, slimy with seaweed, where Archie's brothers would spend hours that summer watching crabs and seagulls playing in the pools left behind by the tide.

"Is this it?" Hattie said, delight shining in her eyes as I patted my pockets searching for the great key to the front door. I opened the gate and the
boys
ran ahead, followed by Hattie and Bessie, who had baby Fred in her arms, squirming and crying to be put down so he could chase after his brothers.

Archie was holding Annie's hand; she was pale and tired after the train journey from London, but she saw the flood of overgrowing flowers and a pair of dancing butterflies and started laughing, pulling free from him to twirl in circles amongst the rose bushes. "Ain't it lovely?" she kept saying. "Archie, Mr Sinnett, I never seen a place so lovely, ever!"

As I stepped around her to unlock the front door I glanced over my shoulder at Archie's parents, his father helping his mother untangle her skirts from her feet so she could step out of the last of the three coaches that had brought us from the station, and then at Archie. He was watching Annie spin and laugh and bend her nose to the vivid red velvet of the roses, then perhaps he felt my gaze on him because he looked up and caught my eye. I could see his thoughts in the brightness clinging to his lashes, as though I had suddenly learned the trick of reading minds:
I don't care what we had to do, it's already worth it.

"Come along, Goldilocks," he said cheerfully, reaching out his hand to catch her by the arm and help her up the steps, and as they passed me in the doorway he gave me a smile of such heartbreaking brilliance that I felt a sudden painful lump in my throat, as though I might start crying.

As the time passed it seemed that this strange imbalance was there to stay, this uneasy gratitude; it had taken most of our combined money from Mr Whitlock's photographs to pay for the return train tickets with enough set aside to buy food throughout our stay, and although our lodgings had been a gift from Mr Everett who said there was no reason a perfectly good house should stay empty when there were people who wished to use it, Archie's parents suddenly seemed uncomfortable around me in a way they had never been in London. Mr Wilkes in particular seemed not to be able to speak to me or even look at me without straining, although he was always perfectly polite.

"His pride's hurt," Archie confided on the second evening as we smoked cigarettes outside the back door. "All this, the train and the house, getting out of London, it's something he couldn't provide for his own family, then me and you come along with our mysterious job what pays more than he makes in a week working twelve hours every day, and... it just hurts him. It don't matter when it's me helping out, but you ain't family. It ain't the same. He works so hard all the time and we get by, he don't ever ask for nothing for himself, but all this... I reckon he feels like it's charity we ain't quite poor enough to need. He won't say no, of course, he knows it's good for Annie. It's good for all of us, him too. He just don't like taking off people when he can't pay it back."

"I don't want paying back." I felt pointlessly guilty, almost sick with it. "I didn't mean to upset anyone."

"Don't. It was my idea, weren't it? I was the one asking you for help."

"Yes, but you're not the reason your father's barely spoken a word to me since we came here."

"He'll come round." Archie dropped his cigarette stub to the paving stones and crushed it dead under his shoe, then bent to pick it up. "I'm going to throw this in the fire, shall I take yours too?"

I did the same and he went inside. A few moments later when the door opened again I thought it was Archie coming back, but instead I found myself smiling at Mr Wilkes and my face froze awkwardly until we both looked away.

"Good evening, Mr Wilkes."

"Mr Sinnett."

There was a pause. To break the silence I offered him my cigarette case, but he declined and merely continued to look down at his feet. I could see a twitch in his jaw, as though there were words he was fighting himself not to speak, then all at once he took in a breath and said out loud, "Archie
always
thinks he's whispering when he's not. I heard what he said, and what you said. And I wanted to talk to you, Mr Sinnett, and tell you it's true, of course, my pride's been hurt and it's a dreadful feeling, but a worse one is the idea that you might think me ungrateful. I tell you I'm not." He looked up then, and there was a fierceness in his green eyes that seemed so disconcertingly familiar to me. "I want to thank you for everything you've done for us, for Archie especially, and for Annie. Harriet and I won't ever forget it, and I beg your pardon for my rudeness."

I could feel my cheeks burning, even in the cool evening breeze from the sea. There was something terribly wrong about all this. I wished we could go along as though the whole concept of money and favours never existed and enjoy our stay freely with no awkwardness and no bitter feelings; and, as Mr Wilkes gave a stiff nod and turned to go back into the house, I tried not to imagine how different his words would have been had he known exactly what it was that Archie and I had done.

* * *

Sometime the next afternoon, while I was spending the quiet hour
s
after lunch reading through old editions of the London Figaro I had found in Mr Everett's study, I could hear Archie's voice somewhere in the house calling me and finally I found him in the living-room with Annie curled up on his lap looking at drawings of birds in a book. I walked in as he was bawling, "
Sinnett
!" again and his mother, mending a tear in one of the boys' trousers, smiled a good morning at me and threw her pincushion at his head with startling accuracy to make him turn around. "Oh, you're there," he said when he noticed me, throwing the pincushion back and pulling a face at his mother that made Annie laugh. "Does Mr Everett keep cameras and all the kit here?"

"I expect so. Shall I check the studio? There's a darkroom next to the scullery but I don't know how well it's stocked."

"I thought while we're all here we might take a picture."

"If you can round up all the little ones and make them hold still long enough to wash their faces," Mrs Wilkes said wryly, folding the stitched trousers onto the heap already in her basket. "I'll see if I can find them. Bobby's probably buried up to his chin below the tideline by now."

"I'll look for the girls." Archie got up out of the armchair, tipping Annie gracelessly onto the cushion to make her giggle. "You go with Sinnett, sweetheart, help him carry heavy things he can't manage with his puny little arms."

She clutched onto my hand when I held it out to her and looked up at me, all golden curls and enormous hazel eyes like a little doll. "I ain't strong enough for carrying much, Mr Sinnett."

"Archie's only teasing. I won't ask you to, honest. And you might call me Jim, if you like."

"Is Jim the same as James?"

"Yes, but Jim's what friends say."

"Am I your friend?"

"I'd very much like you to be, Miss Annie."

She looked thoughtful at that, considering the proposition as seriously as a judge. "Jim's a nice name, though not so nice as Archie. But James is much, much nicer than Archibald." By then we had reached the studio Mr Everett had set up, a great room with polished floorboards and a wall and ceiling made entirely of windows so that in the bright summer sunlight there was
no
need for flash powders, and she seemed to forget the topic altogether in her excitement at seeing the camera. I lifted her up in my arms so she could inspect it more closely, explaining all the parts and how they worked, and she followed my pointing finger studiously and repeated some of the things I said in her little five-year-old's voice.

"It's an old camera, this one, it's older than I am and quite as simple. See here, there's a smaller box inside the first one, and if you pull it like so – there, it slides back and forth, see? The photographer slides the box about until the image is sharp here on the glass. Any light that goes through that brass lens there reacts with the chemicals on the plate and makes a picture, so we must be careful only to let the light touch it once we're ready. The plate goes in the back here coated in all sorts of things, gun cotton and ether and alcohol and silver, and that's how we make a negative, a sort of backwards picture. Then we take the glass plate with the backwards picture and set it down over a piece of cotton paper prepared with egg whites and salt and silver, and again it's light that makes the picture appear. The dark parts on the plate stay pale on the paper, and the clear parts turn dark."

"It's like magic."

"It's better than magic – it's science."

But although I searched the house, all the cupboards and every inch of the darkroom, I could find no plates on which to take the photograph; there were blank glass plates, plenty of them, but none were prepared with the chemicals. By then all the children had come in from playing on the beach, lined up with freshly-scrubbed faces and delighted expressions; telling them that the photograph had to be postponed felt as awful as striking them, and doubly so because they were all so polite about it. The little ones, Annie and Bobby and Fred, couldn't hide their disappointment, but still they acted nonchalant as though they didn't mind. Tom – almost a man, he kept telling me, at nine years old – was braver than the others and said, "It was all a cruel trick to get us to wash!" which made the others laugh, although I felt no better about dashing their hopes.

Quickly, to make up for the disappointment, I thought up another game to play instead and sent everybody out into the house and garden to fetch the things we needed: "Annie, you go with Bess and fetch us some things from the garden, broken roses, blackberries, cabbage leaves, anything you fancy. Tom, I need you to bring me all the glass plates from the cabinet over there – bring them into the kitchen, and don't run or you'll trip and hurt yourself. Hattie, we need rags, or pudding-cloths or even sheets, anything you can find. Mrs Wilkes, is there a pestle and mortar in the kitchen?"

"Yes, dear, I think so. Freddie, come and help me look."

"You've forgotten me," Bobby demanded with his hands on his hips.

"No, sir, I have not. You're to go with Archie and find some things."

"What sort of things?"

"Flat things. Leaves from the trees in the garden will work. Find me some funny shapes, all different sorts, and see if you can beat the girls back here."

He raced away, pulling Archie by the sleeve, leaving me alone in the studio with Mr Wilkes, who, I was astonished to note, was half-smiling at me for the first time since we left London.

"They're very fond of you. Did you notice they never even asked what you want all this for?"

"Is this your way of asking me what I want all this for?"

His smile broadened at that, crinkling with amusement around his eyes, and I felt a grateful sense of relief that whatever awkwardness had been lurking between us since we came here seemed to be over, or at least postponed. "Not at all. I'm happy to wait and see what you're up to. Is there anything I can do to help?"

"We need paper. I believe there's some in Mr Everett's study if you'd be so kind."

I made my way to the kitchen, joined by the others in ones and twos until all ten of us were clustered around the old oak table with our findings: letter paper, plants, glass plates, pestles and a pair of mismatched bowls, pudding-cloths, a bucket of water I had half-filled at the sink.

"Now what?" Tom asked eagerly, as I lifted Annie to stand on a chair so she could see.

"Now – watch this. Or, even better, why don't you and Bobby show us how it's done?" Mrs Wilkes made room for me between the boys, and I passed each one a bowl and pestle. "Take the berries, one of you, and the other the roses, and crush them to a pulp. Add a bit of water to the roses, it'll be easier." I ought to have expected the mess they made, laughing and splashing each other until Mrs Wilkes told them to settle down; I remembered learning all this myself in that very room when I was younger than Tom, my first introduction to the chemistry of making pictures on a trip to visit the Everetts in the year before my father died, and the way I had laughed at Mr Everett when I saw the blackberry juice all around his mouth because he could never resist stealing a half-crushed one from the bowl every time I paused to rest.

Annie was giggling into her hands. "Tommy, it's all over your shirt."

"Good, we can play soldiers after this and I'll be the wounded one."

"I'm sorry," I muttered to Mrs Wilkes, "I'm afraid I'm causing you extra washing," but she shook her head and for a moment she put her arm around my waist as though I were her son too, laughing and wiping away a fine spray of blackberry juice from her cheek.

"I'd rather wash up after their games than have nothing to do while they sit about being dull. Are these done enough?"

"Yes, I think so." I found some more bowls in the dresser and fetched them down, passing them to Hattie and Bessie. "Hold the cloths over here and pour in the pulp. Keep twisting down, get out all of the juice, and add a bit of water. This is what we're using as emulsion for our pictures, we need to paint it over the paper like a watercolour sky. Annie, Mr Wilkes—" I found a knife and nicked the edges of some old rags to make them easier to tear and knot into little bundles. "We don't have paintbrushes but you can use these."