The Great Unknown

by Peg Kingman

  Home.

  The evening of January 9th.

  16

  AT 4:32 ON the morning of January 10th, the Barentin viaduct was standing.

  Then, at 4:33, it fell down.

  Who saw it fall? No one; it was still dark. No human person saw it. A pair of dairy maids, sisters, who ought to have been on their way to the cows, had both overslept. A baker, who had been up since 3:00 and was thoroughly awake, happened to have his head inside his oven at that moment. A flock of ducks saw it fall but, being ducks, did not know what they saw.

  The southern end, over the tannery, failed first; there, the weak chalk stone of the piers cracked, bulged, sagged—and, finally, exploded under the pressure of miscalculated tonnage bearing downward and outward. The stones themselves burst. The brick arches above shattered instantly, and the entire viaduct came crashing down like a file of gigantic dominoes. It collapsed entirely, from the southern end to the northern. The ground shook, and the noise was like the end of the world. It was the most complete and spectacular failure anyone could remember or imagine.

  “Have you heard?”

  “Tumbled right down!”

  “Have you heard? Not one brick remaining upon another!”

  “I myself should not care at all for passing over any of their shoddy bridges!”

  “Nor under them!”

  “Well, and the tunnels; what of those?”

  “Just imagine, if a train had been passing over it!”

  “Those English contractors, so greedy! so hasty and careless! So vainglorious!”

  “The job should have been given to good honest French builders, didn’t I say so?” Thus excited and indignant French voices resounded in the street, floating all the way up to the fifth-storey windows just under the eaves, where Hugh and Constantia, warm in a real bed for the first time in days, and still craving sleep, were awakened far too early.

  The sensational news came up to Paris by the early train from Rouen, with the milk and the fish. Most incredible of all, it was reported that (by God’s good grace) no one had been hurt.

  “Were you not engaged formerly, monsieur, upon that very railway?” said the landlady, Mme Mouchy, to Monsieur Stevenson across the boarding-house breakfast table, a little later. “Before you came up to Paris, I believe?”

  Indeed he had been, conceded Hugh, in ’43 and ’44.

  “What is the name of the contractors, pray? The English contractors? Brasseur et Méchant? Brassière et Macaroni? Something like that?”

  “They are Brassey & Mackenzie,” said Hugh.

  The newspapers feasted for some time upon the collapse of the Barentin viaduct. The tanner whose tannery had been crushed gave several interviews. By the grace of God, he said, he had moved his family out from under the viaduct only the very day before the collapse. Because an angel had come to warn him. Oui, an angel. He refused at first to describe the angel, but when pressed, let it slip that the angel had been about the size and shape of a typical human being, and apparently wingless.

  More than a few sermons were preached, the following Sunday, on the subject of the angel who had appeared to Joseph in Bethlehem, advising him to flee with his wife and her newborn son to the safety of Egypt, just in time to escape King Herod’s slaughter of the innocents.

  For a few days, Constantia took to addressing Hugh as “your angelship” when they were in private.

  But no one had been hurt. No human persons, that is; though within a week there were reports of a tremendous dying-off of the fish in the downstream trickle of the Austreberthe, an unexpected consequence of the immense quantity of lime—both mortar and stone—which now all but dammed its flow, and poisoned the trickle that got through.

  The English contracting concern of Brassey & Mackenzie stepped forward instantly to pound its own corporate breast in manly mea culpa, promising to rebuild the viaduct to a far stouter specification, at its own expense, and within the time limit required by its contract. Privately, Mr Brassey blamed the engineer whose design had proven faulty, and the suppliers of the common lime mortar which had not set, and the weather which had prevented its setting. Privately, Mr Mackenzie ordered a supply of expensive but exceedingly reliable stone from a distant quarry of high repute for the rebuilding of the piers at Barentin.

  But no one had suffered even a scratch. It might have been much worse; might have been horrific.

  The contractors, in consultation with the engineers, also announced that all the other viaducts, bridges, and tunnels along the new line would undergo the most stringent reviews, in cooperation with the Ministère de Ponts et Chaussées; and that certain load-bearing elements of those structures would be reinforced—not out of any particular necessity—for they had complete confidence in them—but to reassure the public; to allay any and all anxiety on the part of the public, no matter how unwarranted.

  A series of sensational knife attacks in the Marais some weeks later eclipsed the Barentin viaduct story at last, and drew off the attention of the newspaper-reading public. Mr Brassey and Mr Mackenzie heaved sighs of relief, and got on with their work.

  Mme Mouchy, to whose boarding-house the Stevensons had returned, did not hold out for any increase in the rent she charged them for their top-floor rooms. She did, however, exact an additional sum for use of the garden-shed, which they now required as workshop and housing for the crates of Useless Rubble. She had kept their rooms empty for them all this time, she assured them, out of generosity. The real reason, the Stevensons knew very well, was that her rents were so high, and her table so undistinguished, that everyone except les Anglais shunned her establishment.

  It stood at the eastern edge of Paris proper, near the Jardin des Plantes, the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, and the Halles aux Vins; not far from the Gobelins factory, and the dirty trickle that was the Bièvre River, a sad and bullied and exploited little river, a poxy little street whore of a stream. This was by no means a fashionable quarter; quite the opposite. The only eminent people who slept here were those who could not help it, because they were dead: the worthies (Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau among them) entombed within the honorable and glorious Panthéon—the quondam Church of St Geneviève—on its hill nearby. But the neighborhood was inexpensive, and convenient, and surprisingly safe, compared to certain other quarters of the city. Workers and students lived here, amid carpet-weavers, dyers, and tanners.

  Their top-floor rooms filled with dismal old-fashioned furniture remained exactly as Constantia and Hugh had left them, only dustier. Mme Mouchy was too fat to ascend so far, and her servants too lazy. There was no cradle in the room; Livia slept in the pulled-out bottom drawer of the chest of drawers. Familiar rustlings were still to be heard from the attic overhead. These were not rats. Constantia climbed the ladder on the landing and, raising the overhead hatchway into the attic, opened to a flutter, a bustle: pigeons. Their round unblinking eyes stared at her, unafraid. Did they recognise her? Remember her? Their numbers were undiminished; perhaps even increased, despite having had to fend for themselves for the past half-year. Not even the most knowing Parisian street urchin is better able to scrape, beg, and steal a living than a pigeon.

  Among the residents of the house was an American, Miss Julia Grant, who, with her intimate friend Miss Harriet Buckley, an Englishwoman, occupied the first-floor appartement of two rooms: a little sitting-room in front; a bedchamber behind. Miss Grant and Miss Buckley were overjoyed at the return of their friends the Stevensons, and could not contain their delight over the two new prizes carried home by them: Livia, and the Useless Rubble.

  Miss Grant and Miss Buckley doted upon Livia. When they were at home, their laps were ever at her service. They praised the intellect and the character which they claimed already to discern in her features, her changing expressions, her winning way of flinging her coral to the floor for retrieval, and especially in the smiles and even laughter which they frequently succeeded in wringing from her. Livia, for her part, was particularly enchanted b
y the tinted spectacles that Miss Grant wore.

  “Well, yes; we, too, have had some successes during your long absence . . .” said Miss Grant one day in their little sitting room, where she and Constantia sat mending stockings, while Miss Buckley attempted to induce Livia to taste a dish of sops in bouillon.

  “Insignificant, of course, in comparison to a baby! nothing so impressive as a baby!” said Miss Buckley.

  “ . . . but minor successes all the same, in our own way,” continued Miss Grant. She and Miss Buckley also shared a well-lit corner workroom in the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, where they had long been engaged in a quest to develop a practical technique for what they called “daguerrean lithography.” As the precious fossil remnants in the Muséum’s collections cannot propagate themselves—cannot disseminate themselves throughout the world—it is the duty of humankind to replicate them; to publish descriptions, minutely detailed, with exact measurements. And with illustrations too, prepared by adepts in the arts of etching and engraving on copper or steel; in mezzotint and aquatint; and in lithography. These illustrated descriptions, correct and complete as print facsimiles upon a page may be, are rendered for study by savants everywhere.

  “I do not mean to disparage your particular skill, Mrs Stevenson,” said Miss Grant. “You know we are great admirers of your designs. And of course the Muséum’s artists and engravers are superbly accomplished—”

  “I am glad to hear you acknowledge it, Julia,” said Miss Buckley. “It is so tiresome always to have to insist upon it myself. We artists and engravers do hold ourselves and our productions in the highest esteem. Engravers especially.”

  “But you understand, Mrs Stevenson, that it is precisely the eye and the hand of the human artist which we are determined to eliminate,” said Miss Grant; “the artist who, being human, cannot help but exercise human judgment—”

  “Whether it is to simplify, or to elaborate; to amplify, or to suppress, unadorned nature; unimproved nature,” interrupted Miss Buckley smoothly. “Nature, with its ample scope for improvement. No, we are determined to induce the light reflecting off the relic, through the agency of the camera’s lens, to imprint its own image upon the printing plate—”

  “Or the printing stone, as the case may be—”

  “—by irresistible and infallible chemical means—without the intervention of any human eye or hand, of any human perception or judgment, of any human ‘improvements.’ As an image inscribes itself upon the silvered plate of the daguerreotype.”

  “As an image from a calotype negative writes itself upon the salted paper.”

  “I remember,” said Constantia, when she could, “that you were striving, before I went away, to make the daguerrean process bite deeper into the plate, deep enough indeed to engrave it—to make a plate fit for printing by the intaglio process—”

  “Alas, we accomplished nothing; we succeeded only in burning holes in our clothing with Julia’s vile acids, most vexing!—Oh, come, Livia, we mustn’t spit—”

  “—but during your absence we shifted our efforts instead to lithographic limestones—”

  “We are deeply indebted to Mr Stevenson for his hint, aren’t we, Julia?”

  “—and have been trying them with a variety of preparations deriving from Mr Fox-Talbot’s discoveries; and it seems—it does seem—that we shall perhaps succeed—have indeed actually succeeded—”

  “To a very small degree, thus far—”

  “—to a small but encouraging degree, in making an image of our model—”

  “An elk; we are using the skull of an ancient Irish elk for our patient, long-suffering, perfectly motionless model—”

  “—inscribe itself in a hydrophobic material upon the lithographic surface, of its own accord.”

  “It cannot help it.”

  “It cannot help it any more than Homo sapiens can help but reproduce itself.”

  “As regards Homo sapiens, I believe I have just made an important new discovery,” said Miss Buckley. “Which is, that Livia, the present specimen, does not care in the least for sops in bouillon. Who can blame her? Nasty soggy stuff. But such a lovely tooth she’s got! Neither the Cylindricodon nor the Cubicodon—no, not even the remarkable Labyrinthodon!—has got so charming a tooth as our Livia’s! Don’t fuss; where’s the darling girl’s coral? There, wipe it off; good as new.”

  “Just a moment, Harriet; I’d like to see that coral; thanks. Ah! A rather good example of Corallium rubrum, isn’t it.”

  “No, Julia, it is not.”

  “Indeed it is, Harriet. I am certain of it.”

  “But you are quite wrong nevertheless. It is a Corallium cuvier. Do I not always freely yield to your superior knowledge in the realm of chemistry? I do; but when it comes to invertebrate identifications, my dear Julia, I wonder that you should think of contradicting me.”

  “Hm!” said Miss Grant, and then, to Constantia, abruptly changed the subject: “Will there never come a time when it will be safe for you and Mr Stevenson to return openly to Britain?”

  “I’m sure I read somewhere that Mr Pickering returned, a year or two ago,” said Miss Buckley.

  “Yes, Pickering did return,” said Constantia, “and, oddly enough, goes about to this day quite unmolested by the Crown’s officers, just as though there never had been a price upon his Chartist head. But, by a strange and suggestive coincidence, Mr Cooper and Mr Newton were taken soon after; and tried; and convicted, upon evidence that only Pickering could have produced. Mr Cooper was transported, and Mr Newton was put to two years of hard labour. He broke down after eight months of stone-breaking, and died in his prison cell. I daresay we too might openly return—if my husband liked to betray his old associates.”

  “Oh! I see. That is disgusting to think of.”

  “How dreadful it must have been, to feel yourselves in danger at every moment.”

  “So it was. Hugh loathed skulking about—and putting his kind friends at risk, by our presence. But the warrant for his arrest is still in effect. His face is well known; and of the many bitter out-of-work men roaming the Northumberland coast, one or another among them, upon recognizing him, might well be desperate enough to betray him for the sake of the reward proffered by the Crown. Even before the election, he had a very wide circle of acquaintance, and not only among Chartists. Any stone-carver or mason or builder in southern Scotland or northern England might have recognised him, so he did not dare to stir off—well . . . the secluded place where we cloistered ourselves. And then, when we had to separate after all—when it became apparent that twins were to be expected, or, at least suspected—matters became a great deal more difficult still. For one thing, once apart, we could not communicate freely.”

  “Not letters?”

  “They are opened, you know. Oh yes, Miss Grant, of course they are, by the orders of the Home Office. Opened, copied—then resealed and belatedly delivered. The very postmasters are under the rule of the spies of the Crown. Our friends had evidence that their own mails were under surveillance. Oh yes! I assure you: unaccountable delays; letters clumsily re-sealed and sent along—so we could not feel confident that letters for Hugh under cover to them were safe. Nor was it possible for Hugh to send letters to me, not even by my pseudonym, not even if carried by, ah, our friends to be posted from elsewhere; from some distant town. No, any such doings would have aroused a towering curiosity in any postmaster or postmistress. Instead, I contrived to send only a few essential messages, very brief ones—by pigeon! And though my Scottish friends—the Edinburgh friends who received me for my lying-in—were kindness itself, still, no kindness could compensate for being separated from my husband at such a time.”

  “Childbirth: bad enough!” said Miss Buckley. “One quails at the thought. But twins!”

  “How is one to respect the designer of such a system?” said Miss Grant. “Surely there must be a better solution to this problem of reproduction—of replication. You and I, Harriet—old maids though we are—mu
st redouble our efforts.” Seeing Constantia’s perplexity, Miss Grant added, “I mean, of course, at daguerrean lithography.”

  “And your Edinburgh friends—were they in on your secret?” asked Miss Buckley.

  “No; they received me for the sake of old acquaintance, having known me formerly when I was Miss Babcock. I abhorred the necessity of dissembling—of concealing so much; even a matter so essential as my name,” said Constantia. “Indeed, I could not do it very thoroughly. I made no secret of ‘MacAdam’ being only a convenient pseudonym, assumed for reasons which, though secret, were not dishonourable. But secrecy has of itself a tint of dishonour; we do place a very great value upon candour. The best I could do was to declare, frankly and openly, that I had a secret, and was determined to keep it.”

  “As we have got onto the subject of secrets, Mrs Stevenson . . . when are we to be allowed a glimpse of your prodigious fossil?”

  “We long to lay eyes upon it.”

  “We ache to lay eyes upon it.”

  “You shall be the very first, I assure you,” said Constantia, “as soon it is ready to be seen; quite soon now, I hope. We are preparing the specimen for presentation to Professor de Blainville—”

  “But first, to us; your promise!”

  “—quite soon; certainly before the great conference in April.”

  “How fortunate that Mr Stevenson’s wonderful fossil was still there, in that remote—nameless—place, after all these years.”

  “And just as he remembered it.”

  “Oh, but it was not!” said Constantia. “Or we should have harvested our prize much sooner. You will imagine our bitter disappointment upon discovering that twenty years of storms and waves had carried away the relics he remembered from boyhood. But then came the discovery that those same storms and waves had uncovered something . . . even more intriguing. More telling, more valuable, we hope and trust; but also far more difficult and time-consuming to extricate than we ever had anticipated.”