The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre (31 page)

“It’s all settled, then,” Chloe said from the doorway.

“What have you done?”

“We’re going to have a picnic with him at your old estate. That’ll give you two a chance to patch things up. He’ll drop us back and leave for Paris first thing in the morning.” Chloe ducked down the hallway. Isobel stood, waiting for something to compel her to move. The thought of returning to the glade made her stomach turn. A breeze passed through the broken window of the herbarium. It felt like an exhalation.

They dressed for the picnic, the women in frocks. Louis wore a waistcoat and a wool suit that had belonged to Gerard. He parked the carriage in front of a neighbor’s field and waited beside it, hat in hand. As the ladies came from the house, Isobel was struck by the image he made—a man dressed for the opera, haloed by a field of saffron. Louis helped them up into the carriage; he’d made seats for them with blankets and cushions in the back. He sat on the box seat and clicked at the horses. They rode along the river, through groves of horse chestnut, meadows of sedge pool and hawthorn. The clatter of the wagon made it too loud for them to converse. Louis found this a point of relief.

They waved at men fishing from punts on the Loire. Louis saw washerwomen haul laundry up from the bank, their backs bowed under the weight of their baskets. He thought of the revolution, of the endless battle for liberty. A young woman looked up as they passed, her face ravaged with blisters. Here was brute unpleasantness, he thought. Perhaps it was possible to kill nostalgia, to lift the gauze that softened life’s edges, to live unflinching at the frayed edge of the world.

They headed north, skirting the Paris road, and passed into the district of châteaux. The ruins of the estate were surrounded by sodden, fallow fields. Louis looked off from the road: the brook ran clear and blue down to the Loire; the glade was overgrown with honeysuckle and clover. Beside the razed mansion were burned-out hulls of carriages, charred bed frames, a residue of metal and cinders.

Isobel said, “Haunted as a churchyard cemetery.”

They rode past the front entrance, a single griffin atop a half-wall of stone. Louis saw the last forty years etched into the pastures and yards. The forest to the east had been converted into woodlots where villagers no doubt came to cut and cord their wintering fuel. The stone fences were overrun with moss and wild grapes. Beyond the mansion was Louis Daguerre’s childhood house, mostly intact. He was surprised by its humble appearance—essentially a stone cube with a raised roofline, a box topped with dormer and crest. It resembled a countinghouse on some mundane trade route, a way station of small commerce.

They stopped in front of the mansion and got down.

Chloe said, “I want to know everything you did here.”

“It looks like a scene from Waterloo,” Louis said.

They walked over the ashen ground, over a glass-studded mixture of dirt and crumbled sandstone.

“There were fifty rooms,” said Isobel. “Each of them with a window. There was a great hallway full of armor and wooden clocks and paintings of gouty old Frenchmen with ruffled collars.” She looked at an intact corner of stone and mortar. “This was the gallery, which doubled as a small ballroom on special occasions. The other maids and I would sneak in here and dance the new waltzes from Vienna.”

“I can picture you,” said Chloe. “How did you have your hair?”

“It was a mess most of the time. I kept it up, but it was always falling down in my face. Madame Boulier, the head maid, was always at my throat because of it.”

“Maybe that’s why they volunteered you for tending the head clerk’s son,” said Louis.

Isobel smiled. “They all knew I was good with herbs and poultices. Plus I wanted out of that house.”

“Where did you live?” Chloe asked Louis.

“That humble-looking outbuilding over there.” He pointed across the sea of honeysuckle and clover.

“Let’s go see it,” said Chloe.

Chloe walked between them. For a fleeting moment Louis imagined her as their child, as the unlikely dividend of his youth. He imagined living at the helm of this family, breakfasting together, trips to the South, struck with the wild luck of domestic bliss. Somehow the confusion of another man’s destiny blown across his own, a banker’s lineage small but indelible beside him. They stepped through a series of hummocks where badgers and field mice burrowed and nested. Sparrows and finches flitted and wheeled from the dormers of his boyhood house.

His childhood rushed in with the liquidity of a dream. He saw his covens and cubbies, his dens where he’d observed the dynasties and spectacles, both large and small, of nature. Here the old tree under whose boughs he’d studied armies of ants and the kaleidoscope of light through shifting foliage. Here the stretch of rose quartz and granite where he’d observed high noon splintered and reflected. He felt his whole body go loose. The air smelled of distant rain.

They entered the cottage through the front door. It was a grim replica of his childhood house—the walls, windows, and doors were intact but covered with four decades of bucolic rot and mold. It felt more like a grotto than a house. The place where his father had sat on Sunday mornings with his merchant’s daybooks, ordering his accounts, resembled a pigsty. Everywhere the walls were run through with cracks and split plaster. The floors were bloated with moisture. Horizontals of light came in under the architraves and through the derelict shutters. Nobody spoke. The scurry of vermin sounded in the rafters.

They continued through the house, and neither of the women flinched as Louis headed for the narrow stairwell that led up to his old bedroom. He wanted to see what had become of it. This was where life had taken its first important turn.

He asked the women to stay at the top of the stairs while he investigated the room. He opened the door and stepped inside. It was so dark that he could barely see his way to the window. He pulled back the curtains and took down a piece of board covering the broken glass. He turned back to the room, inspected the corners, and then called Isobel and Chloe inside. His old bed—a narrow wrought-iron cot with pyramid coils—was at the opposite end of the room from where he remembered. How many desolate poets, country wayfarers, deserting soldiers had slept in his old bed?

“This was your room?” asked Chloe.

Louis nodded. He looked all around him. There was nothing left. His childhood room had been denuded of all that was familiar. “This is where I lived as a boy,” he said. “Through those very curtains I saw an apparition of a walnut tree. Later, in Paris, that memory convinced me that nature held the means to draw her own image.” He stood by the bed, looking out the window. A spider had webbed in an entire section of broken pane, forming a lacy trap for flying insects. How many generations of spiders and ants had called his bedroom their dingy universe?

Isobel clutched herself, chilled by the dankness and the wall rot. She felt impossibly old. She saw the image of herself at the bedside, her maid’s tunic so clean and stiff. She could remember the feel of the starched linen against her back and neck and remembered how she started to wash her tunic with rose hips to soften it. But the white cloth had turned pink, and this unsightliness had lost her a week’s wages. Was that really the bed where she had witnessed Louis as the edgeling of a man? There lay a boy so supple-bodied and high-minded that he was like a prince of the hallowed wilds. His fevers were brought on by turns in the weather, by witnessing the wood-men cut down an apricot tree without due cause. He was sensitive to the point of frailty. Yet somehow he’d harnessed his own nature, and she realized now, in the tomb of his childhood, that it was this boyhood sensitivity that had stopped her from ever collapsing into her love for him. At one time she had possessed visions of them together, and there was Louis in that future with head presses and his magnifying glasses and India inks. She’d feared a dandy of ostentatious hats and engraved hip flasks. She had believed that he would remain a dabbler lost to distraction, that he would never become a man of means and substance. And how wrong she had been; all along he had possessed the disposition for artistic success. The very traits she feared would create a man of sloth—sentimentalism, distraction, an obsession with beauty—had fanned the embers of his fame like a bellows. She felt a great wave of sadness come over her.
My whole life, I have judged so unfairly.

“I must get out of here before I start a sneezing fit,” Isobel said, turning for the stairs.

“I will be down in a moment,” said Louis. “Mind your step on the way out.”

Chloe turned and followed her mother out of the house.

Louis stood in the middle of his room. He turned to the metal cot and spoke aloud. “You don’t know anything of how the world works yet. You think those feelings pulsing through you with such veracity are felt by everyone, but they’re not. God or a curse has put inside of you a tremulous love of everything that is great and beautiful. You will live to be an old bachelor, in the shadow of an unrequited love. You like to suffer. You will make a career out of it. Do everything you’re going to do. But know what awaits you. There is no grand house with Isobel in your future. But you will capture man’s frailty in your portraits. And that, I suppose, is something.”

He turned and walked out to the stairwell, closing his bedroom door behind him.

Outside, he could see Isobel and Chloe by the brook. He looked up at the sky and saw nacreous clouds advancing from the north. As he drew closer, unseen, he heard Isobel talking about the day that he had proposed marriage from the rock parapet in the middle of the brook. He felt a surge of humiliation, then heard her voice, her words, softened by a discernible fondness. He listened from the shadow side of an old willow.

“…he had the entire brook and the sandy bank arranged with flowers…” She laughed. “There was even a turtle, and I swear I think he’d polished its shell to gleam just a little brighter in the sunlight.”

Chloe smiled. She stood barefoot on the sandy shore.

“And he began listing his character traits and strengths. He said he was a good swimmer. It was impossibly sweet. He was fourteen, you understand.”

“Oh, Mother,” Chloe said. “He was smitten. It’s beautiful.”

“Yes,” said Isobel. “It
was
beautiful.”

Louis came out from behind the willow and walked down to the bank. “Ladies, I think a storm is threatening. We may have to delay our picnic.”

“That’s a pity,” said Isobel. “I was just telling Chloe about the way you proposed to me.”

“Yes, I was romantic to the point of absurdity.”

“No, not absurd,” said Isobel. “But always so earnest and dramatic. We were never suited for each other.”

“Love, madame,” said Louis, “is not like choosing a partner for whist. It has a life of its own. Our duty is merely to follow its call. I will meet you back at the carriage.” He turned and headed back across the cloven glade.

Chloe and Isobel waited for several moments on the sandy bank. There was a bite to the air.

“I think he’s right, Mother,” Chloe said. “I don’t think we choose love. It chooses us.”

“Don’t tell me you wouldn’t be daunted if he loved you. Have you seen those eyes? There’s something unworldly about the way that man loves. He’s mad with it.”

They walked to the carriage. The clouds had turned leaden. Louis helped them up into the carriage and they rode off at a pace. From the road, Louis looked back at the ruined mansion, now darkened by the approaching storm.

The deluge hit on the open road. The Atlantic winds gusted from the west, driving the rain horizontal. The women huddled beneath blankets on the bed of the carriage. Louis stopped at an old bridge keep and they took shelter inside. The wind batted at the small mullioned window. The room was ten feet square.

“So much for our picnic,” said Chloe.

Isobel stomped her feet to keep warm. Louis put his coat over her shoulders and handed Chloe his suede riding gloves.

“Thank you,” said Isobel.

Louis said, “The storm will pass and we’ll get you home to the fire. I think we’re only twenty minutes away.”

They stood with their backs to the wall, their shoulders touching, Louis in the middle.

“I can’t believe what’s become of the estate. My father would turn in his grave,” Louis said.

“What did you expect?” Isobel asked.

“I don’t know. A sign of life.”

“I thought it was charming,” Chloe said. “I could picture you two getting into mischief.” She smiled and looked out at the rain.

The windows turned opaque from their breathing. Louis blew into his hands. He looked out at the storm, his eyes harried and quick. Isobel looked at his face in the gloaming of the storm. For the first time in many years, she remembered their first kiss inside the wine cave. She remembered her delight and abandonment as she’d held the boy by the collar. It had been a dare, a wild declaration. But kisses, like births and deaths, set things in motion. They could set a man on a collision course with his own fate. Louis had bundled that kiss through revolution and fame and now, shivering beside her, appeared deeply weary at having carried it this far.

They waited for the better part of an hour. The rain stopped as abruptly as it had started. When they emerged, the world had changed: the Loire was a river of mud; the road was rutted and brown. Louis wiped the horses down with a blanket. Chloe and Isobel climbed up onto the carriage bed. The women were pale to the point of luminescence. Louis climbed up and rode as fast as the conditions would allow.

Back at the house, they got out of their wet clothes. Louis and Chloe made a fire in the hearth while Isobel prepared some dinner. Over a meal of pike and potatoes, they sat and stared at the fire, stultified by exhaustion. They ate each bite deliberately; safety and warmth seemed extravagances. They sipped wine and took brandy when the meal was done.

Louis looked at the fire, then at Isobel. In the bridge keep there had been something new in her face, a softness and vulnerability he hadn’t seen in decades. Now there was the indifference of her mouth and the high forehead that seemed almost belligerent. He felt the old ache. She sniffled, interrupting his reflection. They looked at each other for an awkward interval; a flicker of startled recognition.