The Vorrh (38 page)

Muybridge’s third visit had focused on the most delicate element of the plan: the installation of Josephine. She had arrived in the middle of a spring downpour, with a companion and one of Gull’s servants. Muybridge had been irritated by the surgeon’s absence; surely such a crucial moment should be overseen by its instigator, especially in a case such as this? But it wasn’t to be. The servant had explained that the companion would be staying for a week or so, until Josephine ‘got to know the ropes of the place’. The servant introduced her to Muybridge and she curtsied, holding herself in a modest way, which he appreciated, but from a professional distance. He certainly had no intention of visiting the rooms while two females lived there, even if they did know their place.

The servant showed him that the rooms were well stocked, with every possible comfort provided for. ‘You’ll be snug as bugs in a rug,’
the man said amiably. Muybridge gave him a withering stare, privately wondering if Gull recruited all of his staff from his list of ex-inmates. The impertinent fellow talked him through the basic details of the house, the most intriguing of which was a small, concealed compartment in the wall to the right of the kitchen door. Hanging inside was a thick, flat cosh made of leather. Its short but significant weight was achieved by the lead shot that filled its interior.

‘Just in case, sir – we all ‘ave ‘em.’

‘Is there a chance I’ll need to use it?’ asked the alarmed Muybridge, who was beginning to have serious doubts about the whole business.

‘No chance, sir. Some of ‘em cut up rough, but not Josie, she’s good as gold.’

Nevertheless, the photographer resolved to always be careful. He would carry his trusty Colt pocket revolver with him at all times; who knew when it might be needed for protection, outside of the rooms or in?

Their first sittings began a little awkwardly. He found her silence uncanny and her eyes unnerving. Whenever he arrived and quietly let himself in, he would find the rooms full of birdsong, as if dozens of bright and active creatures were whistling with great joy. This would stop abruptly, the moment she sensed his presence.

She had been alone in the rooms for the last three weeks, and seemed calm and happy. She made him tea and he drank it in silence, stealing glances at her when she was not aware. Her savage beauty still amazed him. He had seen such perfection occasionally flare in the many primitive peoples he had visited and lived with; he had photographed an Aztec woman of magnificent sensuality in Mexico; he remembered two Moduc women whose striking appearances had remained with him long after his meeting with them had passed, their balanced symmetry accentuated inside their broad, flat faces.

But Josephine had something more. There was a glow of strength and
dignity inside her ideal proportions, which made her every movement hypnotic to him. It soon dawned on him that this was attraction: his masculinity was being nudged awake by her, roused from a slumber he had been hitherto oblivious to; the part of his life he had long considered dead and shrivelled was wakened in her presence. How fat and stupid Flora had been in comparison to this demented vision, and how petty her vanities now revealed themselves to be. But still, it was better to put such thoughts out of his head; they could only lead to pain and confusion, as history had so deftly proven. Better to work, to trust the life he had invented, the one that paid him so handsomely and seemed to ask no price in return.

‘I am going NEXT DOOR to SET UP the CAMERA for your PHOTOGRAPH,’ he said, over-pronouncing each slow syllable as if talking to a deaf person or a foreigner. ‘It will take ONE HOUR; then I will COME FOR YOU, do you UNDERSTAND?’

She nodded and allowed a small smile to grace her lips. Muybridge felt the snag of it in his lungs, as if it were a slow shutter of great precision, catching a fast and out of focus world. He left the room in a daze and shut the door behind him, the room ricocheting with the chirps, whirrs and clicks of the fast, invisible bats held apart from his company.

* * *

Cyrena left her house at noon for another meeting with Ghertrude Tulp, intent on forging a plan of campaign to find Ishmael, before he became irrevocably lost. As she walked through her garden to leave by the side gate, she slowed under the balcony to look up for a moment, then back down at the hard ground where the vase had smashed. Naturally, there was no trace of it: her enduring kindness to her servants kept them diligent
and discreet. She felt a brief shudder of satisfaction before exiting into the narrow street that ran parallel to her garden wall. Her mind, indulging in the private pleasures of rebellion, barely registered the shabby figures that loomed outside her wall, and she would have missed their presence entirely if one of them had not addressed her directly.

‘Pardon lady, pardon us being here so.’

She blinked and stopped, and found herself without speech. There were six of them – all of different ages and sizes – standing together beneath the shadow of her wall. The young man closest to her spoke again, and the juxtaposition of his polite tone and his undeniable poverty amazed her; yet again, sight had given too much information and poisoned his sad voice.

‘We’ve come here to you, lady, to be healed. It is said that you make blind people see and deaf people hear; that’s why we’ve come.’

She looked into his milky eyes to ease the shock of his words, then her own eyes darted to find the lame and diseased parts of them all. ‘I am truly very sorry,’ she faltered, ‘for you all. But I am afraid you are mistaken. I can help nobody. It was I who was healed by another.’

A sinking silence ensued, and those who were able exchanged suspicious glances. The spokesman sensed the unrest and pressed further. ‘Who was it who healed you? Are they here, are they inside?’ He pressed his hand against the wall, some loose stone crumbling beneath his touch. Her pity transformed to annoyance at the thought of them dogging poor Ishmael.

‘He left weeks ago,’ she said, hearing the flutter in her voice.

‘Where’s ‘e gawn then?’ said another, this time without a trace of politeness.

‘I don’t know. He did not tell me, he just left.’

They moved forward into the gap she had created, to hear her voice more carefully. ‘Why did ‘e go then, what made ‘im, did you chuck ‘im out, chuck somthink at ‘im?’

Terror crawled in her sight; she had never known intimidation before. Her fears had always had been internal and speculative, only walking in
the cloisters of her imagined future. This was very real, and she was losing authority over its direction.

‘I don’t know what you mean and have had quite enough of this!’ she said curtly. ‘Now, I must be going, I’m already late. Please do not loiter around my door any longer!’

She turned to leave, but a figure stepped out behind her, blocking her path. He had been born without eyes or nose; smooth planes of skin covered the areas where the sockets and nostrils should have been. He reeked of vomit and gastric juices, and was laughing in astonishing proximity to her face.

‘Well now, m’lady, that’s no way to talk to folk who have come a long way to see ya, is it? Especially when you bin one of us!’ He lurched and grabbed her by the arm, his roughness too quick for her coddled reflexes. She struggled but he gripped harder, leering and laughing uncontrollably. ‘What’s wrong miss, don’t ya fancy me?’

Incensed, she drew back her right hand and slapped him across his featureless face. He bellowed with laughter. ‘You’ll ‘ave to do a lot better than that!’

They scuffled in a tight circle in the dirt of the road, her skin bruising and burning as he tried to pull her down, the others closing in to watch or listen to the fray, when suddenly he stopped, his hands covering his face. Everything became stationary; only the dust still moved in swirls around their ankles, beginning to swoop and settle about their feet. He let his hands drop to his sides, and a gasp rippled through the sighted members of the crowd.

‘What is it?’ bleated one of the blind. ‘What’s happened?’

The question was greeted with silence. The scene before them was impossible, a blackly comedic spectacle of ugliness. Two slits had appeared beneath the brow of the man’s face, small incisions that seemed to be deepening, like cuts in fresh pastry. A clear fluid flowed out, something nameless and unfamiliar. A terrible awe fell upon the crowd.

Cyrena was frozen to the spot, eyes fixed to the horror as her thumbs probed her fingers, checking for ornate rings and plausible explanations, anything that could have split his flesh so swiftly. The man was probing his face repeatedly, pressing his fingers into the slits, making them gape in wide, uneven ‘O’s. They gave him an expression of imbecilic amazement, as if he had been drawn by a child, his eyes rendered as two irregular, hastily pencilled dots. ‘I got eyes,’ he said, the crowd too gobsmacked to correct him. He waved his wet fingers in the air, seeming not to notice as all around him shrank away. ‘Eyes! I got EYES!’

Cyrena jolted out of her shock and rushed at the gate, her keys still miraculously secure in her other hand. Nobody tried to stop her, and those nearest to her cowered away from the power of her speeding presence. She was inside before sense restored itself to them, and swiftly locked the gate as the cries of ‘Eyes! Eyes! Eyes!’ yelped behind her. She ran to the house and slammed the door behind her, hoping to shut out the noise of her spiralling life.

As she attempted to calm herself with a pot of exotic tea, Cyrena sat and reflected on what had just passed. There was no way that her hands could have inflicted those wounds – if wounds were what they were. She examined the flat of her hand again. There was nothing there to cause more than a slap. So how could she have made that happen? There was only one explanation, and it was not one she considered easily. She regarded the balcony warily, then crossed to the doors, opening one just enough for the faint breeze to edge its way in and catch the fine hairs on her neck. Beyond the wall, a rise of discordant voices still made jagged sounds; cries of ecstasy and abuse, amplified by passion. She called her servant to her side with feigned ignorance.

‘Myra, why is there such a commotion outside the gate?’ she asked, with suitable distance.

‘I’m not sure, ma’am,’ the girl said in surprise. ‘I’ll send Guixpax to
see.’ She left and Cyrena sat in the plush window seat, sipping at her tea and trying to appear ambivalent, while secretly straining to catch a shard of word from beyond the muffling wall. Down below, Guixpax, the gatekeeper and gardener, had been outside, and Myra returned with news from the street.

‘It’s rather unusual, ma’am,’ said Myra nervously.

‘Go on girl, I want to know!’

‘Well, it seems there is a poor, deformed mad man outside; the crowd are calling him a miracle worker!’

‘A miracle worker?’ Cyrena asked nervously.

‘Yes, ma’am! Apparently he walked straight up to a blind man and…’ The girl hesitated, her excitement faltering.

‘And?’ demanded her mistress.

Myra bit her lip. ‘His sight came back, ma’am!’ she exclaimed, her eyes examining the carpet. ‘It’s a miracle, just like yours!’

Cyrena’s eyes cooled knowingly on the waiting servant. The girl had crossed an unforgivable line, and even the kindest of mistresses could never accept such impertinence; it was the final straw after the disgusting incident outside her gate. With her head still full of the hideous language and the stink of peasants, she turned her hard back against Myra, and made her voice ten degrees colder than her eyes. ‘Dismissed,’ she said.

Later that night, she could not meet her own eyes as she brushed her hair before the bedroom mirror. She had always done it there, ever since she was a child; her mother had taught her so, in the warm greyness of her daughter’s sightless space. She closed her eyes tight against this moment and tried to grasp something positive in all that had happened. Perhaps she had been too harsh towards her servant, too quick in her response? But it had been
her
miracle, and not the property of others. It was not something to be shared, begged or taken.

In her bed, she was sure she could still hear the crippled mob whispering down in the street, their blind eyes seeking her like darting fireflies in the hot darkness.

Over breakfast the next morning, Cyrena learned that the newly sighted man who had insulted her had touched a lame girl, who was then able to crawl off without pain. This rumour confirmed her fears that the miraculous gift had been passed on, and was now turning into a kind of wondrous game of tag, a contagious gift of healing. The news made her feel hollow and deepened her isolation. She stayed in the house and only gave orders to Guixpax.

Soon after, she was informed that the healed girl had gone blind while cleansing a leper, and something akin to gratification passed through her shrunken soul. The purity and originality of her own miracle had not been taken. In the sick hands of those who had been cruel to her, the benediction had turned septic and been passed on; a blessing defiled into a curse.

* * *

After the slightly jerky start, their first session had been brilliantly successful. She was one of the best sitters he had ever had, possessing the same stillness and distant focus that had made the plain’s Indians such perfect subjects, but with a vibrancy that shone and showed the camera the great battery of power stored inside her. She sat without any guile of expression or artifice of intent: the camera simply loved her.

He did not think it proper or necessary to use any of the post-hypnotic responses; the bell and the mirror stayed in their box. He processed the negatives before departing, and was amazed at the clarity of her white face and black teeth. He said he would be back soon and she nodded. In truth, neither could be sure when he would return; his diary was stuffed with appointments, lectures, demonstrations and meetings, and their moments
at the studio would have to be stolen ones; she would be just another jigsaw piece in the multi-faced puzzle of his identity. The principle of this arrangement appealed to him as much as the participation, but he suspected he would soon seek more time to truly appreciate and savour the theatre of it.