The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre (28 page)

Louis took the room in. First he became aware of objects—the joints in the rafters, the windowsills, the wooden jewel boxes on Isobel’s dresser—then he thought of the human labor embedded in each thing, how the hours of men’s lives were tallied all around him. What was the point of all this? Was the world just an assemblage of blunt objects? Was a man no different than a hobnail on the Day of Judgment? He got out of bed and went to the window. It was an ordinary winter morning, midway through the nineteenth century. Snow was on the ground. Everything seemed exactly like itself. A catalog of mundane and exquisite beauty stood on the other side of the glass. He did not want to die.

Isobel entered the room with his breakfast. He returned to the bed and got under the covers.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

“A little disoriented.”

“That’s to be expected.”

Louis looked at her. She looked away. She looked back. It was not flirtation so much as a visual verification of the person with the memory, the old man with the boy in the topaz cravat, the sullen-faced widow with the girl in the tuberose crown.

“You make a fine widow,” Louis said after an interminable silence.

“I don’t know that I should thank you for that remark,” she said.

“I mean to say that you have aged with grace.”

“Like an old hen.”

Louis nodded. “And you’ve still got your humor.”

Isobel looked out the window. “Widowhood suits me.”

“How so?”

“I have the means to cultivate my plants, and nobody bothers me.”

“Life still raps at the window now and then, surely.”

“Don’t think me unhappy.”

“I know loneliness, and I smell it in this house. It’s everywhere, choking up the chimneys, fuming in the kitchen.” He lifted his head from the pillow, like a final exclamation point.

“You’re impossible—that hasn’t changed. I am quite happy, thank you. Loneliness is an indulgence of the artistic and the privileged.”

The return of the silence. She was still beautiful. It was as plain as the fact of the ceiling above him. But there was something unapproachable about Isobel in her sixties. She possessed a devoutness, a matronly vigor in her gestures. Louis wondered if she believed in God. As a girl, she’d believed in nothing but nature harnessed—the palliative effect of certain herbs, the fortitude of rainwater, the soundness of walks before bedtime.

“Your dog has died,” she said. “We found it on the doorstep the morning after you arrived. I think perhaps it froze to death.”

“I see,” he said. There was something inscrutable now about the idea of death; he could not grasp it. The wind rattled at the windows. “I ran over that dog in Paris. I took it in because I thought I should do the world a good deed.”

“The stableboy buried it out behind the barn.”

“Yes, good.” He thought of the dog in the cold earth—an object now—and wanted to feel a hint of sadness.

Isobel pulled her sleeves up her arm. She set a small tin bell at his bedside. “If you get hungry before lunchtime, ring this bell.”

“I am capable of calling out your name,” Louis said.

“Well, I may not hear. I will be in the back of the house.”

She turned and disappeared down the hallway.

That evening, Louis got out of bed and dressed in the clothes that had been laid out on the dresser. He wondered if they had belonged to the dead husband or if they were borrowed from a neighbor. He went out into the living room and found Isobel reading by a candle.

“That light is terrible for reading,” he said, taking a seat by the fire.

Isobel was reading her buccaneering novel and instinctively covered it with her hand.

“May I ask what you’re reading?” he asked.

Isobel crossed her legs. “What a woman reads is private.”

“Ah,” said Louis.

Isobel attempted to wedge the novel between the seat cushions, but it fell to the floor and splayed open, revealing its cover. In the same instant, they both looked down at the title—
The Seaward Heart.

He raised an eyebrow. “Sounds riveting.”

“Silly book,” she said. But then she felt an urge to defend it. “It takes place in Madagascar. I’ve always been interested in Africa.”

“Really?”

“The plants and so on.”

“Of course,” he said. He felt an urge to scratch his ankle but resisted. He looked around the room and thought about the letter he had written her. The doomsday list and the letter were in his pocket, like artifacts of another age. He wanted to cut to the heart of things but did not know how to proceed.

“Isobel,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, picking up her book.

He gave in and scratched his ankle through his sock. “Is the weather still good in these parts?”

She smiled, folded her hands. “Windy and cold in the winter, mild in the spring. It hasn’t changed since we lived on the estate.”

“Ah.” He hated everything about himself: the sound of his voice, the drift of his thoughts. “Please excuse my sudden appearance. I thought something terrible was going to happen, and I had to find you.”

“I’m glad you did. Forty years is too long.”

“Did you ever think about me?”

“Never,” she said, her mouth holding back a smile. She looked at the fire. “Of course I did. I read about you in the papers. Once there was even a photograph. But you look different in person.”

“I have not been well. Some nervous complaint the doctors cannot cure.”

“Perhaps herbs can do a better job than leeches.”

“Perhaps.”

Isobel shifted in her seat. “And you never married?”

Louis leaned forward. “We’re having a conversation that moves from leeches to marriage. That’s what I’ve missed about you. The fact that everything is linked to everything else—love to insects, dirt to heaven.”

Isobel laughed. “Are you avoiding the question?”

“Yes,” he said, spreading his hands. “And in a moment I may have a coughing spell to extinguish the question altogether.”

She folded her arms. “Come now, out with it.”

“No, I never married.”

“That seems surprising, given your wealth and fame. I would have thought that women were standing in line to marry you.”

“At best, I dabbled in women.”

“Is that like dabbling in wine and gambling?” she asked.

“Largely. Although the odds with horse races are much better.”

She nodded seriously, picked up her needlepoint, set it down, then said, “What happened to your ideals about love and the ever after?”

“My ideals about love went into my paintings.” Louis looked off at the windows.

Something changed in the room; they could both sense it. Isobel picked up her needlepoint again. The sound of Chloe singing in the kitchen came into the room.

“You have a lovely daughter,” Louis said.

Isobel pulled some thread through her fingers. “I can’t take much credit for that.”

Louis looked at the needlepoint design. It was a bird with brocade plumage. It reminded him of a thought he’d had forty years earlier, the night he’d seen Isobel at the opera—that she was like a bird with an injured wing—and he marveled that his mind could fish such items from the sea of memory.
Do memories have a life of their own? Do they float like clouds through the ether of the mind?

He looked at the floorboards and said, “Besides, I gave up on love after that night at—” He stopped himself, folded his arms, then added, “I don’t think you realize what happened to me after I learned you were pregnant.”

Isobel had wanted to keep things light. She had no desire to rake through the past. “Does it still matter?”

A beat of silence.

“If the course of a man’s life matters, then perhaps it is important.”

“Such melodrama,” she said, though she instantly regretted the hollowness of such a comment.

Louis stiffened and shot up from his seat. A bolt of anger took hold of him, and at first he thought it was a seizure. There was a bitter taste in his mouth. Now that he was standing, he could not remember what he had intended to do. Should he leave the house and go out into the night? He stood there a moment, his eyes down. Finally, he rifled through his pockets for the letter and crossed to the fire. He placed the envelope in the flames and managed to scald his fingertips. He shook his hand loose, as if he had just punched a man. They both watched the letter ignite.

“What is that?” Isobel asked.

“A letter seeking your friendship.”

It was satisfying to watch it burn. He returned to his seat slowly, his footsteps measuring the pause before her response.

“It’s quite likely that I am not worthy of your friendship.”

He felt his throat go dry. “Self-pity is not becoming in a woman.”

“I know my own character and what I deserve from life.” She set her needlepoint aside once more.

“You don’t know the first thing about yourself.”

She straightened her skirt. “Why did you come?”

“You’ve haunted my life.” His hands were gripping the chair arms.

“And you want to put the ghost to rest? Is that it?” She resented the shrillness in her voice but continued. “Well, yes, it is a curse, and like some kind of bewitching, it makes very little sense.”

Looking at a spot above the mantel, he said, “I think I may still love you.” He had not intended to say those words, not yet, and felt an urge to actually cover his mouth with his hand. He could not look at her.

“A kiss in a wine cave when you’re fourteen does not amount to love, Louis.” She said it as gently as she could.

He allowed those words to hang in the air for some time. He was afraid of what he might say if he remained in that chair a moment longer. He stood slowly and said, “I dressed and came out here because I was thinking of taking the dog for a walk. Have you seen him?”

Isobel waited a moment before answering. “I imagine he won’t be needing walks anymore.”

Louis strained his eyes through the darkening room, trying to gauge her meaning. “Is he lost?”

Isobel looked baffled. “I told you this morning that your dog had died.”

Louis grappled for the details but had no recollection. His memory was unraveling in patches and runs, like the hem of an old gown. Some days he could not remember what he’d eaten for breakfast but could remember an afternoon, in all its detail, from his childhood.

“Of course,” he said. “I was making a joke. Good night, Isobel.”

“Louis,” she said.

“Yes,” he said, turning.

“I continue to feel a great fondness for you and what we have shared. Please know that.”

He straightened his back, felt the uneasiness of his wound, and walked into the bedroom. The room was on the verge of darkness, and he felt a dozen objects looming towards him.

Isobel sat there for a long time. She felt on guard and slightly numb, then resented that Louis Daguerre’s arrival had un-moored her. She would go check on the horses and help Chloe prepare dinner. She stood, fetched a lantern, and went outside to the barn. Louis’s carriage stood by the horse stalls, still unpacked. As she passed it, she noticed part of an exposed picture frame from beneath a wrapping of hessian. She was curious to see Louis Daguerre’s work, to see what had become of his talent. She unwrapped the frame and held her lantern to the plate. At first the image was vague—a cornice, some snow, a rooftop terrace in winter—but then she saw the naked figure. Chloe’s face looked into the camera with a bemused smile; her body reclined, so utterly naked. There were tuberoses about her feet. Suspended before her, Isobel imagined, were five years distilled to a single moment. She angled the plate in several directions and each time garnered new evidence of her daughter’s decline in Paris—the brandy balloon to one side, her hair a tangled curtain about her face, the skyline behind her suggesting the brasseries and tenements of Montmartre. Her daughter sat in the cold snow with the flowers of nostalgia in her hair, mementos from the glade. There was something depraved about the portrait—a still life of a lonely man’s fantasy. Isobel threw the hessian back on the portrait and walked towards the house. She saw Louis standing in the yellow light of her bedroom, looking out into the wash of night. She was suddenly appalled that this man was sleeping in her bed.

Twenty-Two

E
ach morning for a week Isobel left a breakfast tray by Louis’s bed. There was a briskness in her manner that he did not like. Had he imagined the look on her face when he first rose from the bed? Couldn’t they find solace in the vintage of their affection—all those small moments on the glade? But whenever he brought up the past, impatience washed over her face and she found some chore or ailed plant to tend. One morning he deliberately closed his curtains to provoke the distant memory of their curtain-closing game when he was sick in his rooftop bedroom. He watched her come into the dim room with her tray. She set the breakfast things down and pulled back the curtains in one swift movement, oblivious to the past. She even opened the window a crack. The smell of fog and marsh salt come into the room.

“A sick man can’t heal without sunlight and fresh air,” she said briskly.

“I thought the sick needed to block out the light.”

“Only the feverish,” she said. “The rest need daylight. Your fever has already broken.”

He looked and waited for the slightest sign of tenderness. She tended him like a sick calf, her movements steady and bucolic, a pat here, a pat there, the distant and managed concern of animal husbandry. It occurred to him for the first time that he had made an enormous mistake, that he’d spent his life in love with a ghost.

One night Louis got out of bed to join Isobel and Chloe for dinner. When he came into the living room, he found Chloe standing by the fire in a velvet dress. She was holding a glass of wine and staring into the flames.

“What’s the occasion?” Louis asked.

She turned and smiled. “Louis, how are you feeling?”

“Fine, I suppose. Are you having a party?”

“I told Mother we should celebrate the revolution, and she’s making a special dinner.”

He looked down at his plain clothes. “I wasn’t aware.”