Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle Page 4

  Isabelle fumbles around in the dark, bumping her hands through the developer basin until she finds the treated glass plate.

  “Done,” she says, and hauls Annie to her feet, back up the stairs and outside.

  After Isabelle has clipped the photographic paper into the developing frame and laid the whole contraption down on a flagstone in the sun, she sits on a bench at the side of the path and motions for Annie to join her.

  “But, ma’am,” says Annie. “I still have work to do.” It is getting late and she is now behind in her duties for the day.

  Isabelle waves her hand. “There’ll always be time for cleaning,” she says.

  Whose time? thinks Annie. The Lady is much too cavalier on the subject of cleanliness. How would she feel if her chamber pot wasn’t emptied every morning, or her bed sheets changed? But Annie doesn’t protest again. It feels nice to sit in the sun on the bench in the middle of the day. It feels slighdy wicked, in fact.

  Isabelle can barely keep still, keeps hopping up to check the exposure, unclamping the frame, and peeling back a corner of the photograph.

  “Almost,” she keeps saying. “Almost.” She seems very much like Mr. Rochester in her impatience.

  When you just sit somewhere and don’t move, the whole world comes to you. Annie sees things she has never noticed before. Birds and insects circle in the trees above her. Flowers tilt their heavy heads towards the soft-grass ground. The smells of the summer are wide. She looks up at the sun strained through a mass of cloud. How is it then that she sometimes misses Mrs. Gilbey and Portman Square? Is it only because it has been familiar to her? Is that all it is about? The small basement kitchen. The fifty stairs from there to the top of the house. The small darkness of her room, not unlike the coal cellar that she’d crouched in with the Lady Isabelle. The Lady’s breathing in the dark next to her, a hoarse, hollow sound.

  Isabelle is up off the bench again, peeling back the corner of the photograph with one of her blackened hands. “Look,” she says. “It’s starting to appear.”

  Annie slips off the bench and goes over to Isabelle.

  Isabelle peels some more of the photo back. It is exactly right, that look in Annie’s eyes. It has survived the process of the photograph. It is strong and unwavering and griefstricken. It is the vision Isabelle had, made flesh. It is a work of art, her art. It is a miracle.

  The exposure is still too light and the photograph will need to be fixed, washed, and toned to bring out the shadow areas, but Isabelle knows already that it is a success.

  Annie, who has never really looked at herself before, sees the image on the paper and doesn’t identify it with herself. A girl holding on to the ankle of a man. Guinevere and Arthur. She can believe that. She can believe that it is true, that she and Isabelle have made that story come true.

  “Look at you, Annie Phelan,” says Isabelle. “You are made from light.”

  Ophelia

  Isabelle rushes to Eldon’s library, the still-damp print pinched between thumb and forefinger. It twists and flutters before her as she runs. With her other hand Isabelle gathers up her long skirts so she can move swiftly over the stones on the path. When she bursts through the door into the library, she is breathless.

  Eldon looks up at the sound of the door opening. His wife looks crazed, wild and crazed, as if she has been living for weeks in the woods in the company of faeries and spirits. Some of her hair has come loose from its pins. She is panting. Her dress is crooked. Her appearance both attracts and repels him. He approves of the wantonness and disapproves of the madness.

  “Watch the maps,” he says, which really isn’t what he meant to say at all, but he is panicked about her touching the old sheets of paper with her stained hands.

  His warning makes Isabelle hesitate, but only for an instant. She waves the print in front of his face. “My first success, Eldon,” she says. “My first real success.”

  He takes the print and holds it carefully in his hands, although there’s no need as Isabelle has smudged it from handling it so much already. It’s a picture of the new maid and the gardener, Wilks, whom he has never properly approved of. They are costumed in bed and table linen, acting out some dramatic operatic tableau. It is not unlike her other photographic efforts, but Eldon can see what Isabelle wants him to see. There is an intensity to the maid’s expression, a look so clear and true that he could draw a direct line between it and his own eyes as he looks at the photograph. There is nothing between them. It is quite remarkable.

  “Yes,” he says. “I do see what you mean. She looks so…” He wants to say beautiful, but that really isn’t the right word for how she looks. He thinks of the bird’s-eye-view perspective on early maps, where you look down at the shape of the landscape and can get a sense of what it feels like to be there. Something felt in what is seen.

  “Right,” says Isabelle. “She looks so perfectly, absolutely right. I cannot believe it. It feels miraculous. I had to come immediately and show you.”

  Eldon is touched by this. Isabelle has a generous spirit, he thinks. She is so different from him. When he discovers something marvellous he prefers to hoard the knowledge, keeps it to himself, treats it as fuel to stoke a fire. If he opens the window on it, he will lose some of the heat. “I am very pleased for you, my dear,” he says, and he is. He sets the photograph carefully on a corner of his library table. They both look down at it between them.

  Isabelle can’t keep still. It’s as though the energy she feels rippling out from the photograph eddies her around the room. The library is not a place to rush about in. There are rules in this room. Don’t touch the maps. Don’t careen around disturbing the staid antiquity of the documents, of the atmosphere. As pleasant as it has been to hurry along here and show Eldon the photograph, Isabelle feels that to stay would just lower her spirits. Her living piece of art would be dragged down by all these dusty old maps.

  “You keep it,” she says to her husband. “I’ve mostly ruined this one anyway. I’ll go and make another.” She shoots past him and disappears through the door. The air trembles in her wake.

  Eldon looks down at the photograph on the table. Those eyes seem to be watching him. The tenor of their gaze is such that you wouldn’t want to be feeling unsure of yourself when they looked at you. Those eyes would find you out, would detect weakness and cowardice. This photograph is a place that has found him, not, as it usually is, the other way around. Eldon puts his hand out and very carefully, very gently, traces around the figures in the picture, feels his way along the lines of Annie Phelan—those ragged as a coastline, those smooth as a worn hillside.

  Eldon runs the flat of his hand over the piece of paper in front of him. Cosmographia Universalis. A map of the world. This is what he wanted for himself, what he thought fifteen years of working on Dunstan’s Library Atlas would make possible, all the years of his employment, from his youthful self to the forty-year-old man he has somehow become. To create a map of the world is to include everything known to human existence. It is to sort through all the various renderings of the earth and choose from the shapes and sizes of the land masses, settling on those that seem the most accurate. It is to read the diaries and logs of explorers and sailors who are journeying into the still-unmapped places of the world—the Far North, the Antarctic, the jungles and deserts and mountains, the remote reaches of humanity. To make a map of the world is to believe in the dotted line that shows the voyage from Portugal to Newfoundland. It is to go through the evidence and make a case for the world appearing a particular way. One of the earliest surviving maps of the British Isles was plotted by a man named Lawrence Nowell. He made no attempt to obtain proper bearings or to include an accurate scale. His map is drawn as if he had just sailed along the coast of England and put down what he saw. The map, drawn on a narrow strip of paper, is over twenty-five feet in length. Eldon imagines Lawrence Nowell, bobbing up and down in a small boat, perhaps rowed or sailed by a friend or family member. Lawrence sitting on the bilge bo
ards, to minimize the motion, looking up at the rocks and bays, the gulls circling, looking down at his shaky line on the wind-blown paper. Did he see England differently, now that he was recording it? Was he confident that he was getting it right? Did what he ended up with on the paper resemble what he saw from the boat?

  There is something comforting to Eldon in those early maps. The lack of perspective. The seeming casualness to the lines. The fidelity to the original shape of a mountain or lake. The concentration on the four elements that were of the most importance to the cartographer in his daily life—towns, the sea, mountains, and forests. The simple purity of the act of making the map, so that the map-maker would find his way back to where he was, so that others could find their way there.

  For Eldon to do as Dunstan wants and make a theme map of the world is to go against all those early map-makers, to go against what they believed in. It is as if Lawrence Nowell sat in his small creaky boat only marking on his map the composition of the rocks on the shore, not looking for anything else, not trying to include all that he saw. To mark down the mineral deposits in South America relegates the map to a mere guide. Exploration loses its edge of curiosity and becomes only a reason for exploitation. Eldon can believe in Lawrence Nowell’s desire to make his map as something exalted and noble, unselfish. Who will see Eldon Dashell’s map of the world’s mineral resources as a testament to his vision of the limits of human endeavour?

  Eldon looks down at the map in front of him. Trust me. That’s what maps are saying. Trust me. Never mind that early metal globes were cut in half and used for pots by hungry sailors. Never mind that all forests and mountains on maps throw their shadows to the east, because draughtsmen usually work with the light on their left, which means that on a map it is always a sunny afternoon. Where you find yourself is always afternoon. Never mind that the most common method for projecting the world, the Mercator projection, flattens the round earth and alters the spatial perspective, thus making Greenland nine to twenty-two times its actual size. Europe becomes the centre of the world. Africa is smaller, so too South America, slipping down the side. Making something round into something flat, to sail off the edge of the world, again.

  Distance. Position. How to find your way back when where you are depends on where everything else is. Here we are. Here is everything else. A compass of the human body—head as North, feet South, right arm East, left arm West. North as up. The top of the page. Up more important than down. Look up. Stars, the dark night sky screening eternity.

  This is where you are. This is what it looks like. Never mind that you don’t recognize anything.

  Trust me.

  Eldon finds the new maid behind the potting shed. She is sitting on the small stone step with her back up against the door.

  “Hello, Annie,” he says. She turns her face towards him and he sees that she doesn’t look at all like Isabelle’s photograph. Eldon is glad of that. “What are you doing?” he asks.

  Annie feels embarassed to tell Mr. Dashell the truth. “It’s my afternoon off,” she says.

  “And?”

  She won’t tell him how long she has been sitting on the step of the potting shed. “And I don’t think I know what to do with an afternoon off. I’ve never had a proper one before.”

  Eldon feels pity for her as a physical pain in his chest. It makes him angry and sad and eager to come to her defence, all at the same time. “Well,” he says. “If you had family nearby, you could go and visit them.”

  “I have no family, sir.”

  “You could take a fly into town.”

  “I have nothing to buy in town,” says Annie. And nothing to buy it with. She doesn’t want Mr. Dashell to know that she is penniless. Mrs. Gilbey died without paying Annie her quarterly wage and the solicitor who settled the estate refused to believe this was the case, thought that Annie was trying to cheat him when she mentioned it.

  “Well,” says Eldon. “I am going for a walk to clear my head. You could walk with me. I will show you over some of the countryside.”

  Annie can’t think of a persuasive reason why she should not walk with Mr. Dashell. She is sure it is not proper to do so, but all the rules are different here, and she is tired of sitting on the step trying to think up something to do with the afternoon. One can only explore the house and grounds so many times. “I would be pleased to walk with you, sir,” she says.

  They trudge along in silence for a while. Eldon occasionally points out meadowlarks or berries in the hedgerow with an easy authority. The sun is shining, making the countryside soft and hazy. Annie has never seen so much land. There are fields and copses. Seams of sheep, ragged across the green. In the distance the small cottages of the tenant farmers. The wideness of it all makes her want to put her arms out from her sides and fly down the dirt laneway. The sun on her back, like a warm hand, guiding her along.

  “Annie?”

  It takes her a full breathing moment to realize that Mr. Dashell has just said something to her and she hasn’t been paying attention.

  “Sorry, sir. What were you saying?”

  “Earlier,” says Eldon. “Back at the house. You said you had no family.”

  “My family were Irish, sir. They died in the hunger.”

  “How was it then that you escaped that fate?”

  Annie stops walking. The narrow road stretches ahead of them, twists to the right around a corner. The earth is hard and rutted from carriage wheels.

  “I had two brothers,” she says. In her dreams it is her brothers she most often glimpses, not her parents. Her mother, her father, she senses in an anxious, ghostly way, but it is her brothers—Connor and Michael—she sees. She is small, too small to move on her own, wrapped tightly and laid at the side of the road. There are no birds opening windows of song in the summer sky, only the sharp noise of steel hitting rock and the heavy sound of stone against stone. Over that, close by, is another noise, as rhythmic as the digging. It is the sound of one of her brothers, coughing.

  “I had two brothers, sir,” she says again. They have stopped walking. She can hear her words strike as clearly as the shovels of her parents on the road. “Their names were Connor and Michael. They worked with my parents on the road.” This is the truth as she has been told it, but in her dreams they are never working, are always beside her. They smell like grass. One of them coughs. They sometimes rock forward into their knees and sing soft songs to match the hammer of the road noise. They smell like earth. Their skin is warm from where they sit beside her, sometimes touching against her swaddled body with an arm or leg. She can lie there and they are huge above her, guarding her. She is safe with them, her brothers.

  “What road?” asks Eldon.

  Annie knows so little about where it is she comes from. She only has what Mrs. Cullen told her. She was born some time in 1845 in County Clare. In the summer of the next year the blight spread throughout Ireland and the potato crops blackened and rotted in the fields. The stench was apparently so great that one could smell the rot well before seeing it. In the fall of that year the English government implemented relief schemes. Public work relief schemes. Her parents and brothers worked building a road. In January her father died on the road. Her brothers were sick now, with fever, and Annie’s mother wanted the Cullens to take all her children with them when they went to England, but they wouldn’t take the boys because they were sick and couldn’t travel easily. Annie’s mother gave the Cullens what litde of worth she had to pay for Annie’s keep. A silver locket belonging to her mother. Her wedding ring. I had to sell them, Mrs. Cullen told Annie, several times over the years. For our survival. Annie does not blame Mrs. Cullen. Each time she was told of the locket and the ring, it was as if the telling itself was solid, was something she could turn over in her hands, hold up to the light to see it shine.

  “Public works,” says Annie. “Relief. At first the roads were necessary ones. Ones that needed repair. New ones to connect places up. But there were too many people working and so the
y started to make other roads. My parents worked on a road that went nowhere. It was not for anything, did not tie this place to that. No one could ever walk down it expecting to get to the next village.” She looks ahead, at the road they’re on, how it turns the corner, funnelling ahead with great purpose, with the momentum of those who travelled upon it carrying it forward. “My father died on that road. I was sent to England with a family who were leaving for there. My brothers were sick with fever and I expect they died soon after I left. When we reached England the family sent word to my mother that we’d arrived, but she was already gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Dead, sir. God took her.”

  Annie’s mother is a story. Her mother is a far-off feeling that she sometimes falls out of when she wakes. She has nothing real left to her from that life. Only stories and the dream of her two brothers hovering above her like spent breath.

  “I dream about the road,” she says. “It is torn up and noisy with people and carts and the hauling of stones. I never see my parents, don’t know what it is they would have looked like. But I do see the road. And when I dream about it, the road, it doesn’t look like this one. It doesn’t look like anything of this world.”

  They continue walking. Annie cannot speak. She has told no one of her dreams before. She feels the words gone from her body. With the lightness of moths they fluttered out of her mouth and now they are lifted on the breeze, away from her. What she has said won’t come back to her, and be hers alone.

  Eldon cannot speak. He feels the gravity of Annie’s words pushing him to ground. Any sympathetic response he might utter is not strong enough to stay her words. He cannot do anything except walk beside her along this road that will now, forever, be for him a road that has merged with the one of Annie’s dreams, a road that disappears into the past.

  “If we were different people,” says Eldon, “I could take you for a meal.”