1892

by Paul Butler

  I gasped and leaned back a little. I had been descending into a chasm of jealousy, terrifying myself with a possessiveness that seemed larger than myself. And for nothing. Louisa’s “he” wasn’t my Tommy. It took a moment to realign everything, to replace wild hair with a soft, bald forehead; a feral, furtive presence with polished manners, trembling hands, and sweat-dampened skin. I dismissed visions of Tommy’s betrayal and weakness. In its place I slotted this unexpected subterfuge. It was a relief, but also a new kind of anxiety. Dr. Glenwood, not Tommy, was the creature scratching at Louisa’s door. “Louisa,” I said taking hold of her shoulders, “this isn’t right.”

  “Why not?” She struggled from my grasp. “Why is it all right for everyone else? You with your men and your late-night assignations? Mother with her society people, and her teas? He’s someone she approves of anyway, or used to!”

  “Used to, Louisa.”

  “He’s her cousin! We’re related!”

  “Not by blood,” I replied knowing that this wasn’t the real problem. The arguments we had thrown up as shields were meaningless.

  “He understands me,” she said, a curious tone of pleading in her voice.

  “What?”

  “He talked about things that matter to me.”

  I couldn’t make sense of this, and tried to imagine the conversation that could have led to Louisa’s delusion of being understood by such a strange man. I just stared at her blankly, one hand still hanging off her shoulder as though in defeat.

  “He understands about time passing, about opportunities dying away before we can take them.” She leaned toward me, pulling up her knees beneath the bedclothes. The music box rolled to the side. “That’s what his machine is about, don’t you see? He wants to preserve beauty before it dies away, like a rose under glass, he said. I have to make you understand, Kathleen.”

  Her eyes seemed to reach into me, begging me to agree.

  “A rose under glass? What about a skeleton under a cloak, Louisa?”

  “He explained that too.” She grabbed the cuff of my nightdress as though afraid I would leave before she had a chance to defend him. “The camera must see good and bad, he said.” She looked down at her bedclothes and nodded at each phrase as though reciting. “It must see death and decay if it is also to see the joy of spring and innocence. He said that one day the moving image will be part of our world, as real as the people whose lives it depicts. Like living ghosts among us, he said.”

  She looked up at me suddenly excited at the thought. “Think of that, Kathleen. To be first in an entirely new world!”

  I sighed and placed my free hand over the one that had captured my nightdress. I thought of Dr. Glenwood’s rapid breathing as he had watched the silken sheet being snatched away. I thought of the moans, and the sweat, and the trembling fingers.

  How could I explain to Louisa what I knew but couldn’t prove?

  Ten

  July 8

  Tommy

  It was the strength of the thing that took me by surprise. I knew all about snakes; they had twisted their way through the stories of my boyhood. I knew about my namesake saint who had purged Ireland from the plague of serpents, claiming the green and glistening land for his Christian god. I had imagined many times their dry, scaly skin, and the venomous pinch of their teeth against my neck.

  But this was different. The creature’s jaws had taken hold of my collar, twisting the cloth, hauling me from rest onto my stumbling feet. A thought tumbled through my mind that this must be a punishment for the blasphemy of last night. By insulting the church of my upbringing, I had somehow unleashed an ancient, pagan force. As such powers of nature are blind, it was myself – its own servant – upon which the serpent preyed.

  Smoke hissed and two red eyes burned into mine as I groped for something to hold onto. A rake slipped from my fingers and then fell. A fence post gave steadier support and as I felt the rough, splintered surface a world of senses swept back to me, replacing the deep, churning river of dreams. What took shape was more mundane than the snake of my imagination, but no less distasteful.

  It was not the jaws of a serpent, but O’Brien’s meaty fists that held me by the neck. The glowing red eyes faded into the pale blue irises of my employer, and the smoke cleared to reveal a bright, clear summer’s morning and two grinning fools – Ann Norris and William Ryan – huddling behind the fence, watching my humiliation.

  O’Brien’s teeth were clenched and he stared intently into my eyes. He pulled me to the side so that my hand lost its grip on the post.

  “Work started without you two hours ago, Fitzpatrick.”

  His spittle touched upon my cheek and I could smell the bacon on his breath. I realized this odour was the smoking sulphur of my nightmare. I had to gulp quickly to avoid throwing up.

  He suddenly shoved me and let go at the same time, so that I fell backward, unanchored into straw and fresh horse droppings.

  The laughter of Ryan and Norris scattered over me like peanut shells, and I could barely manage a glare at the lad who might still be at my mercy come nighttime.

  “Now get to work!” my employer yelled.

  Looking up I could see only a giant shadow of a man, his outline shimmering against the risen sun. “Have my horses washed and groomed. Have the fences on the north side mended, and help Ann and William milk the cows. If it’s not all done by the time I’m back from Freshwater, you’ll be seeking employment elsewhere.”

  He turned and strode off through the crusted earth with his neat beard, his bowler hat, and tight waistcoat.

  “That goes for you too!” he snapped at Norris and Ryan – a rather disingenuous attempt to play the fair but fearsome patriarch since I could tell he had been enjoying the idea of an audience. But it got the shamefaced fools to work, one with a pail, the other with a rake.

  I tried to pick myself up. Although I was hardly aware of having struggled, I was badly out of breath. Heat and acid swirled together in my stomach. My vision tipped oddly to the side as I crouched and lowered my head toward my lap. Resting on the straw a couple of yards from me was something I did not want to see. I kept my eyes from it as I absorbed the knowledge; it was an empty rum bottle, a second empty rum bottle as the first had been launched through the Cathedral window.

  I knew it was coming and it did: a sudden, searing pain in my head, as though an oversized gull was trapped inside and trying to escape, its huge beating wings scraping the inside of my skull. I scrambled over the earth seeking the refuge of the fence, feeling my head throb with every movement. I was thirsty and the sun was hot. I needed whatever shade I could find.

  Suddenly there was a call from somewhere behind the hay rick. It was Norris’s voice. Normally I would have discounted anything she said, but this time her words carried an ominous message. “The pump’s gone dry,” she cried, to no one in particular, it seemed. “There’s no water!”

  Kathleen

  I had drawn plenty of water, filling several pails and two kettles. I read the newspapers when I could and I had seen the warning about the mains work. Still Mrs. Stevens had found it necessary to remind me several times before she left for Harbour Grace. Speaking carefully as though I were a slow child, she had told me that I would need water for any chores I would need to do at breakfast, and for Louisa should she need it when I had gone for the day. I wondered if Mrs. Stevens believed I ceased to exist when I was not working.

  As it was, Louisa was too excited to eat, and I had very little washing to do. I came into the dining room soon after ten o’clock to find her staring at the wall, fidgeting with her hands, making a steeple, turning it upside down. The light streamed in through the lace curtains giving her pale skin the colour and texture of milk.

  “Are you nervous?” I asked softly, because I needed to say something to her that was friendly and encouraging no matter how I felt a
bout it all. But with the words came an almost overwhelming desire to rush out and do everything in my power to prevent this second “experiment.” I imagined myself sending a messenger by train to Harbour Grace to plead with Mrs. Stevens to return immediately. I even thought of going out into the street and calling a policeman.

  But the wheels spun off my chariot with no more than a moment’s thought. By the time Mrs. Stevens would receive the message, it would already be close to the time of her return. A policeman, if I found one, would defer to either Louisa or Dr. Glenwood, not to me. And, in any case, what law would they be breaking?

  “Were you nervous?” she said in reply.

  “Yes.”

  “Strange, isn’t it?” she said, her eyelids twitching under the heavy rays of the sun. “It’s not as though he’s out to capture my soul.”

  An instinct, faint and ill-defined, told me that she was considering backing out. I edged forward. With no movement in the water pipes, the room was unnaturally quiet, like a cocoon waiting for life. Even the usual creaking and groaning had ceased. It was as though the house were afraid of marring whatever tender, delicate growth might be within its walls.

  “You don’t have to, you know,” I whispered.

  She continued to squint from the sun and stared down at the inside-out steeple of her fingers. Despite her nerves I could once more see the ancient, wise woman trapped in the body of a girl. “Too many ‘don’t have to’s’ turn into one lifelong ‘didn’t do,’” she said with a soft laugh. “What are you doing today?”

  I looked to the carpet. My cheeks burned.

  “You’re going to see him, aren’t you?”

  I raised my eyes to find her smiling at me, her dimples and green eyes making her suddenly pretty.

  “Mr. music box man?”

  I said nothing, but nodded.

  “So, we’re both going into the unknown.”

  I was caught for a moment. I wanted to tell her that Tommy Fitzpatrick was less dangerous than Dr. Glenwood; and that a mangy beard, torn clothes, and the manners of a goat can hide layers of tenderness and understanding, while silken ties, top hats, and New York manners can hide the murkiest of motivations. But the urge to say all this withered as a carriage rumbled past the window. I was neither in a position, nor a mood, to preach. The only hypocrisy in the world for me now was the imposing of one person’s will upon another. I thought of the white, manicured hands which had gripped Tommy’s rough clothes, enforcing their “superior” judgment that he had no right to sleep on the steps of the city’s Cathedral. I thought of the censorious voice I had conjured in myself to warn me against Tommy. I had created this directive from various sources, all of them outside myself – Uncle Patrick, the Sisters of Mercy in Dublin, even my mother.

  Mother had certainly warned me against the decisions she had freely made in her own life. Sometimes this caution had come in words, sometimes in an exasperated look in my direction as Father snored and spluttered helplessly in the middle of the day. She would hold my eye to make sure I understood. When I mentioned a boy who had taken a fancy to me she would fix me that look again: “Does he drink?” she would ask sternly and within earshot of my father. If I could not provide assurance that he had taken a pledge, the disapproval in expression and gesture would rise to such a pitch I felt as though I myself was the source of the grief and trouble of all our kind.

  So who was I now to impose views upon Louisa, when I, more than anyone, knew we all have a right to our mistakes?

  Hearing another vehicle slow to a halt outside, I backed toward the door. We exchanged brief smiles before I left the room, and slipped out of the house through the back door. I hurried down the side pathway while Dr. Glenwood yelled orders to the men who had begun shifting the boxes and crates from the cart. The horse threw its head back and snorted, its front hooves restless and stomping on the gravel. A man standing on the curb received the weight of a box on his shoulder and called “calm, girl, calm.” The colleague who had lowered the same box from the cart turned to the horse, alarm on his face. As I hurried by, turning onto the road, I caught a glimpse of the beast’s huge glistening eye.

  The air was uncomfortably hot as I climbed north, yet the animal’s terror had sent a chill through me. I could hear its hooves against the gravel, and the voices of the men trying to soothe its agitation. Could the horse know something about its strange load? It is said that animals can sense oncoming catastrophes and aberrations of nature, and Dr. Glenwood’s machine – at least the macabre purposes for which he used it – was most certainly an aberration. As the hill steepened toward the crossroads, the music-box ditty came back into my brain, its vision of harmony and order a terrible contrast to the horse’s flaring nostrils and watering eye.

  I slowed my pace, feeling the hot kiss of the sun on my forehead, trying to recognize the profound new discomfort that had entered into me. If Dr. Glenwood really had created a new world, as Louisa believed – a world of moving spirits – had I myself not been both witness and accomplice at the birth of this rival creation?

  I caught sight of the Cathedral tower rising above the rooftops, and fear of my own blasphemy made me woozy. I tried to shrug superstition away and thought instead of Tommy, of the progress he must have made since Sunday. My pace sped at the memory of those uncertain, sensitive, dark eyes. Had religion and respectability claimed him since Sunday? Would they be as staff and guide to his troubled soul?

  It was Tommy who filled me suddenly with optimism, not the religion that I hoped would claim him. Religion was a necessary balm. Like a distrustful lover, I had always begrudged the church, knowing it was comfort and hope for those, like my mother, who needed it. I didn’t believe it deserved to wield such power over minds and hearts; I was entirely uncertain of its virtue.

  It was Dr. Glenwood, of all people, who now reminded me of such doubts. Even at the time of his experiment I had realized dimly that I had not been nearly as shocked as I should have been. Instead I had focused on Louisa and Mrs. Stevens, feeling a small tug of envy at the horror they were feeling. As soon as my own discomfort had faded, I realized Dr. Glenwood’s moving picture made perfect sense. Creation was not a thing of beauty and order, in spite of what the music-box ditty said. This was why the tune held such beauty and charm; it was an irresistible lie. Darkness and shadows lurked behind the world’s conception. Why should Dr. Glenwood’s rival creation be any different?

  Eleven

  Tommy

  The tavern was awash; blue light skimmed through a gap under the shades, colouring the tobacco clouds, and illuminating the sawdust around my feet. The pain in my head subsided with the cool, yeasty beer which made me belch but also settled my stomach. For all the supposed profligacy of my kind, I always kept ahead of the game where money was concerned. My practice was to keep a crown buried in a crevice under the upright of a hay rick on O’Brien’s farm, another under the root of a tree near my father’s tombstone, and a third in a split in the heel of my shoe. These were my banks from which I drew only in emergency. With my head pounding and the merciless sun fettering me to the crusty ground of O’Brien’s farm, I had known it was time to reach to my foot and access the nearest of these accounts.

  Heedless of eternal torment though I had been most of my years, I had always been wary of the cruel physical punishment of being penniless and sober. When others would be at their wit’s end, shuddering in doorways, wailing down by the harbour, I would preserve these hiding places and unlock the door to many hours of sweet forgetfulness. A crown would see me straight through until a new dawn, and during the slow descent into sleep I could always imagine awaking to a sunburst of possibilities.

  I could not expect wages this week. Without water I could not follow O’Brien’s orders, and water was yet to return to the pump. He would not care about excuses and would see it as a weakness on his part to give part pay for part of a week’s work. As
I had heard him boast one day in his cups, people such as he were part of the “backbone of this colony” and part of his duty was to bring those below him into line. A full week’s work, he would say, or nothing.

  I drained my fourth glass, and the weasel-faced barman reached to fill it.

  “No work, today, Fitzpatrick?” came his comment through the sloshing of the beer.

  “I can’t work without water,” I said taking the glass.

  I noticed his sidelong, smirking glance to someone on my right. I turned and saw an ancient man, his face gnarled like tree bark but reddened like a cherry. Blue smoke from the pipe curled around his green hat and rose to the ceiling of withered beams.

  “What about you, father Abraham?” I asked. “Are you too near the grave to think of work?”

  Both the old man and the barman were silent, but again there was an exchange of looks between them. The smell of tobacco had given me a new and surprisingly eager pang for a smoke. Rooting nervously in my pocket, I took out my own empty pipe and fingered it.

  The barman, who had begun wiping the surface of the bar, glanced at my pipe and allowed himself a grin. “Don’t tell me you’re going to waste good money on anything but beer and liquor, Fitzpatrick?” Again he looked at the old man who began to make a low, crackling noise I didn’t immediately recognize as laughter because he remained so entirely still even as the sound filled the room. At last he reached up with his swollen red hand, removed the pipe from his tortoise-thin lips and spoke: “You’ll need a smoke, lad, to cover up the smell of horseshite from your clothes.” His reptilian skin stretched into a grotesque smile. The barman’s shoulders began moving with spasms of laughter.

  The coolness and relief of the last hours gave way to an intense heat, and the sweet blue smoke of the old man’s pipe was acrid and stifling. I touched the coins in my pocket to check the devils hadn’t robbed me, though to do so would have been near impossible, then spun around quickly from the bar and strode to the door. A few more pints, I thought, and I’d be armoured from these jackals or any others my roving feet might find today. But now everything was raw and nerve-tingling and, as I pushed open the door into blinding sunlight, the thought passed through me that the whole world might be populated by such devils whose only function was to laugh at my expense, and that I might be descending deathless into my own private torment.