The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre (26 page)

The musket shot ripped him open.

The horses whinnied and the carriage swaggered towards a ditch. Louis slumped forward with the deadweight of stone, his hands reaching behind his back where the lead shot had flayed his back open. Pigeon grabbed the reins and steered the horses. The horsemen fell back. She heard the leather straps strain as the horses unleashed themselves, their teeth clacking at their bits. She cinched the reins around her hands; Louis slumped at her feet.

By an old barn she pulled off the road. He was still breathing, his hands quivering by his side. He lay there looking up at her, openmouthed, incredulous, as if another man’s fate had befallen him. “Not here,” he said.

Pigeon laid him flat on his stomach and examined the wound. His woolen jacket was shredded, soaked through with blood. She rummaged in the back of the carriage for a makeshift bandage and came upon the dog, sleepy-eyed but startled. She had seen the strange animal at Louis’s studio before, but in this moment it looked menacing—eyes down, teeth bared, its fur raised. The dog circled a crate and lay back down. She found a piece of torn muslin, came back to the front of the carriage, and wrapped it around Louis’s wound.

“I’ll be furious if you die,” she said.

Louis’s eyes opened, then closed. She got back on the box seat and yanked at the reins. The horses—froth-mouthed, near-broken—barely noticed. She took hold of the riding whip and snapped it out in front of her. It gave a sudden crack and the horses mustered up a trot. She forced herself to sing to Louis as they continued towards Orléans, old songs her mother had taught her about shepherds and monks all protected on their hilltops.

Nineteen

I
sobel Le Fournier had always lived like a maid in her own houses. Her profession as a young woman became her disposition in later life, so she never fully settled into the role of banker’s wife and lady of the house. She bickered with the cook like a surly underling, insisted on clearing her own plate, rose at first crow to leave for her solitary walks via the kitchen. On her honeymoon—a steamer cruise through the Greek islands—she had criticized the tautness of the bedsheets and the flower arrangements in the dining cabin. These were not comments of aesthetic disapproval so much as scathing criticisms of the indolence behind such failures. Although there was a part of Isobel that despised the rigors and small humiliations of servitude, she also secretly believed this was her lot in life and resented those who served ineffectually. Her skill in healing, the fact that she had a reputation in the valley as a master apothecary and herbalist, did not stop her from half believing she was a maid engaged in a hobby, a dalliance with leaves and seeds.

Her widow’s cottage stood on a hectare of marsh and field. She had chosen it for the purpose of growing old in a region where she knew the plants by name. The house had large south-facing windows and a wide veranda where she sat in the afternoons in a wicker chair. Inside there were two sparse bedrooms, a kitchen, a sitting room, a glassed-in room for her plants. There was an unfinished air to the interior, a reluctance to settle. After five years, unpacked wooden crates had become furniture. The curtains were hung with pinned hems. The main exception to this unfinished theme was in the rear of the house, where Isobel kept her herbarium. It had all the order and Latinate charm of a royal botanical garden. She’d had a walnut counter made with transparent drawers in which she stored dormant seeds and the alcohol for her tinctures. Her exotic and medicinal plants were labeled with common and botanical name and arranged in neat rows, the tallest of them farthest from the sun. This ensured an economy of sunlight, a system whereby those that prospered were moved to the back. When townspeople came to buy herbs or potions from her, they went to the back of the cottage and rapped on the glass and iron door. If she liked the customer, she would recommend additional herbs to supplement his or her health: horehound in honey for coughs; rosemary infusions for shiny hair; valerian for insomnia; milk thistle for a healthy liver.

There were runs on certain herbs. A miracle cure for earache would result in mothers of all stripes tapping at her back door, and for a period of time almost every child in Orléans was free of ear infection. She cleared an entire hamlet’s constipation with flaxseed after they ingested excess calcium from their limestone well. Recently, the owner of a restaurant had come to commission a new strand of sorrel and mint for his culinary use. Under Isobel’s hand, these herbs gained a medicinal potency—customers returned to the restaurant just for glasses of minted springwater and river fish infused with sorrel. They claimed the mint cured their bad dreams and the sorrel banished their vertigo. But when the restaurant owner returned to commission additional hothouse plants, Isobel denied him. “This is not a factory,” she said, handing him the last seeds of the wonder mint. She was known for this kind of action, for renunciation at the first sign of prosperity. Isobel’s biggest fear was continuing anything past its prime.

Amid this lifestyle of reluctant healing and ramshackle decor, Isobel had discovered solitude for the first time in her life. In her simple stone house, the low-ceilinged rooms smelling of sagebrush, she spent most of every day alone, drinking nettle teas for her cold-prone lungs, reading seventeenth-century novels, and pruning her plants with a pair of nail scissors. She wrote no letters, received only visits of purchase or begging. She kept a stable hand—a boy who slept in the barn rafters and performed chores—but he was too young to be of any use as company. There had been a few vain attempts from widowers and aging bachelors in the area to court her. One man, a Vitien Spargo, became a hypochondriac, complaining of everything from ingrown toenails to premature balding as excuses to return to her back door. Isobel had sent him away, declaring his symptoms were the early stages of syphilis. She woke alone each morning, a little lonely but relieved that she had finally escaped the world of men.

Isobel was home and tending the fire this winter night in February 1848. She didn’t know that the country had risen up again. She placed a piece of oak onto the flames and sat down with her needlework. Embroidery occupied her hands and stilled her mind. Although her days were slow and sometimes dull, her mind rattled with lists—seeds to germinate, repairs and errands. After some time, she set aside the needlework and returned to her novel, a saga about maritime warfare. The hero had just been shipwrecked on an island off the coast of Africa and built himself a shanty out of driftwood. It rained a deluge and the man was sodden through; but as she read, she couldn’t help but think of the wife and child he had in Brittany. Shipwrecks and driftwood shanties seemed like extravagances of men. The wife worked in a soap factory. While her man keelhauled Madagascan pirates, slept with bare-chested sub-Saharans, and ferreted for gold, she worked her hands to the bone.

When Isobel heard the carriage pull towards the house, her first thought was that a customer had come for some emergency herbs. She put her feet back in her slippers, wrapped a woolen shawl about her, and brought a lantern to the back door. The loud banging, when it came, was from the front door. She took the lantern to the front of the house and lifted the crossbar that secured the door. In the doorway stood a ragged woman, muddy in the face, her hair wild with the wind.

“What in the Christian world!” Isobel said.

The woman looked down at her bloody, chafed hands. She shook all over.

“Are you hurt?” asked Isobel, softer.

“Mama, it’s me,” Pigeon said, looking up from her hands. Her eyes were rimmed red, widened back. “I have a man with me and he’s been shot.”

Isobel’s hand rose to her throat, as if to stifle a cough. “Chloe,” she said. The plainness of her daughter on the stoop, bloody-handed. Involuntarily, she took a step back and tightened her shawl. Again, “Chloe.”

“He’s bleeding quite badly. I’ve bandaged it a little.”

Isobel came out into the cold night, wrested from her shock. They walked towards the carriage, where a man lay flat on his stomach, draped with blankets. The stable hand was already un-hitching the ragged horses.

“What happened?” Isobel asked. She pulled back the blankets to reveal the back wound.

“Some peasants shot at us. There’s going to be another revolution,” Pigeon said.

Isobel ran her hand along the wound’s edge. “He’s lost a lot of blood. I’ll fetch a bedsheet and we’ll use it to carry him inside.”

She rushed into the house and returned with a sheet. The two of them rolled the unconscious man onto the sheet and attempted to hoist him from the carriage flatbed. They cleared the railing but immediately had to set him on the ground. They made a dozen small lifts and landings to get him inside and lying on Isobel’s bed.

“If he dies in my bed, it will be the end of my herb practice. The house will be cursed,” Isobel said. She lit a carbide lamp at the bedside and pressed the bedsheet into the man’s wound. He was, at this moment, anonymous—a list of repairs. She retrieved some warmed water left over from her tea, some cloth, her nail scissors, her sewing kit, and a pair of pincers she used on her seedlings. She came back into the room and set these things on the night table. Pigeon sat down on the bed. “By the time we’ve fetched the incompetent old doctor from town this man will have bled to death. I’m going to try to remove the bullet fragments. Get me the brandy from the kitchen table.” Pigeon was lost in the weave of the bedspread. “Chloe, I need your help. Get me the brandy now.” Pigeon stood, retrieved the brandy, and set it down. Isobel heated her nail scissors over the lamp. After a minute or so, she swabbed the scissors with a brandy-dipped cloth. She wiped the wound and began prying down with the scissors, looking for metal glints in the lamplight. Half a dozen fragments shimmered. “Lead shot is everywhere,” Isobel said.

Pigeon watched her mother dig through the constellation of lead-blue stars. She considered briefly revealing his identity, but with each cut and retrieval, Louis Daguerre receded, becoming little more than this augered rent of flesh. Isobel’s hands worked nimbly for an hour—cutting, probing, dabbing—until a neat row of shrapnel lined out her nightstand. She cleaned the wound with soap and water, then stitched it with the thick-gauge cotton she used for brocade work. The close stitches seamed the divided skin, creating small red nubs between the threads of cotton. She covered the wound with a bandage.

“Who is this poor wretch?” she asked.

“An artist from Paris,” said Pigeon.

Isobel set Chloe up in the spare bedroom with warm water and fresh clothes. She put some soup on the stovetop, staring down through the metal hatch at the coals. The world did not contain the words of magnitude to redress five years’ silence. What was she meant to do? Inquire with civility, offer bread. She stared into the embers. It came to her that Chloe had been born on a Friday in August, at midnight.

Isobel fetched her daughter a bowl of soup and they sat by the fire. Pigeon fell asleep near the end of the soup. Her spoon pinged against the stone floor. Her head slumped against her chest. Isobel watched her for some time. Chloe had aged, and there was the suggestion of excess in her face—day freckles, worry lines, ashen half-moons beneath her eyes. Paris had not treated her well. Sometime after midnight, Isobel got up from the fire and draped a blanket over Chloe. She leaned down and smelled her daughter’s hair. She wanted to kiss her forehead but didn’t. She went to check on the shot man in her bedroom. He slept soundly, his face half submerged in her pillow. She pulled the blanket up to his collar and whispered, “May you wake without pain.”

Pigeon woke in the empty and cold hours of the morning, her body stiff from the chair. She checked on the sleeping Louis, then went to find her mother. Isobel stood in the herbarium, leaning over a plant with her nail scissors.

“Do you operate on them as well?” asked Pigeon.

Isobel looked up, smiled briefly, cocked one eye at a frayed leaf edge. “Good morning, Chloe. How did you sleep?”

There was something formal and stiff in the greeting. Pigeon reminded herself that she was Chloe again. “Not very well. I had frightful dreams.”

“A fog’s come up overnight. They say fog is bad for your dreams.”

“Who says that?”

“People who have bad dreams when it’s foggy.” Isobel placed her nail scissors on the bench. “Would you like to take a walk before breakfast?”

Chloe nodded. They went to the front of the house and bundled into the coats and hats that hung by the door. Isobel un-latched the door and they stepped outside. They walked without speaking for a while, back behind the house and the woodpile, where the acreage gave onto a marsh and a thicket of leafless oaks and sycamores. Fog ribboned across the marsh and they both watched it, waiting for the other to speak.

“Where have you been, Chloe?” Isobel said. “I finally gave up making inquiries. Somewhere in Paris, that’s all I could find out.”

Chloe put her hands into her coat pockets. “I’ve been trying to survive. That’s not easy to do in Paris.”

“You could have asked me for money.”

“No. I didn’t want your support. Not after what happened with Richard.”

“I admit I didn’t want you to marry that man. He had no way of supporting you.”

“When Father offered him money to stay in England, you never spoke up for me.”

“He didn’t have to take your father’s money. But he did, and you never forgave him for not coming back.”

“No, I never forgave you and Father.”

They came to a stand of oaks and walked the edge of the marsh. Neither of them looked up from their feet.

Chloe said, “I was already old when I met Richard, Mother. He may have been my last chance.”

Isobel could hear their footsteps on the ice-laden grass.

Chloe said, “After Father died, you wanted me to be a spinster. You wanted someone to get old and lonely with.”

“That’s unfair,” Isobel said.

“Is it?”

They stopped walking. Their breath smoked in front of them.