Portrait of Peril

by Laura Joh Rowland

  We go into his room, small and plainly furnished but clean. His suitcase stands at the foot of the bed, and a little table is set for tea, with cakes on a plate and a white rose in a glass.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t be at your wedding,” he says. “I wanted us to have a little celebration together.”

  “How nice. Thank you.” I cherish his thoughtfulness because it’s proof of his love for me, which I crave even though I know he didn’t abandon me voluntarily. For more than twenty years I was haunted by my childhood belief that his disappearance was somehow my fault, but it’s been mere months since I learned the real circumstances.

  The day before fourteen-year-old Ellen Casey was found dead at a road construction site, my father had photographed her in his studio at our home. The police later identified him as the last person to see her alive and decided he was guilty. When he disappeared, they assumed he’d run away to avoid arrest, conviction, and hanging. What really happened, according to him, is far different. He’d been in his darkroom in the basement when he heard Ellen screaming. He rushed upstairs to find her half-naked and strangled to death in the kitchen with my mother and her adult son, Lucas Zehnpfennig.

  Lucas was the illegitimate child my mother had by a man whose identity I don’t know, before she married my father. I wasn’t aware of his relation to me until recently.

  My father discovered that Lucas had raped Ellen and that my mother had killed her to stop her screaming. In the panic of the moment, he struck a terrible bargain with them: he would help them cover up the murder if Lucas agreed to leave England with him for good. He thought he could keep an eye on Lucas and protect other girls, including me, from harm.

  He was wrong.

  My mother consented, but Lucas went on to do more evil, and in her rage at losing the son she loved above all else, she wove a poisonous web of lies whose effects still cause me pain. I can’t confront her, because she died in 1875. And I’m not the only one who suffers.

  Sally hurries into the room, breathless and radiant. “Sarah. Father.” She hugs and kisses him, as reluctant to let go as I was.

  Eight years after my father left my mother and me, he came back to England and eventually remarried. Sally is his daughter by his second wife. Later, he disappeared on his second family too. Sally and I share a history of abandonment, of wondering why he left us, unjustly blaming ourselves, and praying for him to come back. She’s the only person of my acquaintance who also knows how it feels to reunite with a long-lost parent. On the ruins of the past, my sister and my father and I have built a new family, precious and fragile.

  As we all take tea, Sally and I tell him about my wedding. He smiles sadly as we name the guests. He’s met none of them—not even Barrett, Hugh, and Mick, who are aware that I see him and know the basic facts of his history but nothing else. The fewer the people who know his whereabouts, the safer the secret. Sally and I meet him in obscure places far from the East End where he might be recognized. And there’s another reason I haven’t introduced him to his new son-in-law. Barrett is a policeman, and I can’t let him know the whereabouts of a fugitive. It would be a breach of duty for him not to turn my father in. I trust Barrett with my life, but I hesitate to trust him with my father’s. I know it’s unfair to Barrett, as he has no secrets from me.

  “Mick took photographs,” Sally says. “Sarah will show you later.” By tacit agreement we don’t mention the murder, lest it spoil our precious time together.

  “That reminds me.” My father goes to his suitcase, removes a cardboard folder, and hands it to me. “A wedding present.”

  The folder contains an enlarged photograph of Sally and me. He took it a few weeks ago on the beach in Brighton, where he lives and works as a photographer, taking pictures of tourists. It’s the day I reunited Sally with him. The fact that we’re sisters is obvious; we’re both slender and fair, with angular faces. Sally, younger and prettier than I, beams at the camera while the ocean breeze whips tendrils of our ash-blond hair around our faces. My smile is tempered by my fear that it’s only a matter of time before Benjamin Bain is arrested and punished for the crimes my mother and Lucas committed.

  “Thank you.” I kiss my father’s rough cheek. “I just wish you were in it.” I think of Charles Firth’s self-timer.

  My father sighs. “Ah, well.”

  It’s dangerous for him to appear in photographs, and for his daughters to possess photographs of him. They would be proof that he’s alive and we know where he is—evidence that we’re shielding a fugitive, that we’re accomplices after the fact of Ellen Casey’s murder. This portrait of Sally and me reminds me of spirit photographs I’ve seen. Our father seems more present in it than the ghosts that the charlatans claim to have captured with their cameras.

  “When are you leaving?” Sally asks him.

  “Tomorrow.”

  The more time he spends in London, the more opportunity there is for old acquaintances to sight him and report him to the police. The next time he comes, he’ll stay in different lodgings; never the same place twice. We won’t know when or where until he notifies us via unsigned letters posted from a distant neighborhood.

  Sally’s eyes shine with tears. “I can’t bear seeing you only once in a while.” Because of our jobs, Sally and I have little time to visit him in Brighton, four hours away by train.

  He clasps our hands. “Nor I you.” His voice trembles.

  “We can’t go on like this!” Sally says. “There’s so much of each other’s lives that we’re missing, so much from the past that’s still unfinished.”

  I know she’s thinking of her mother, who hasn’t seen Benjamin Bain in the eleven years since he deserted her, prefers not to believe he’s alive, and doesn’t know we’re in touch with him. With my own mother gone, I don’t have that extra complication, but I feel a heaviness, as if drops of liquid iron in my blood have solidified. The time for reckoning with the past is here.

  I say to my father, “We have to clear your name.”

  His expression says that some of the sins attached to his name can never be cleared. But Sally brightens and exclaims, “Yes! Then you won’t have to hide anymore.”

  “But how?” my father asks me. “Your mother is dead. So is Lucas. Even if they’d ever wanted to confess and exonerate me, they can’t now.”

  This is the man who when I was a child seemed so strong and capable, the man I counted on to protect me. Now it’s up to me to protect him from the law.

  “We have to prove that my mother and Lucas are guilty,” I say, and Sally nods.

  Trepidation clouds my father’s eyes. “If you succeed, will people have to know that your mother was a murderess?”

  “I don’t think it can be kept a secret.” Owing to my own notoriety, the story of Ellen Casey’s rape and murder and my father the fugitive suspect has been splashed all over the newspapers. The press would have a field day with the news that my mother and her illegitimate son were the actual culprits.

  “Sarah, I can’t do that to your mother.”

  “Why not? It can’t hurt her.”

  “I don’t want her reputation ruined.”

  Vexed by his scruples, I say, “She ruined your reputation by letting you take the blame for the murder.”

  “Because of her, you’ve spent twenty-four years as a fugitive,” Sally reminds him.

  He bows his head. “I loved her. That’s why I never told the police what she and Lucas did. I still love her.”

  My animosity toward her verges on hatred. “How can you?” My mother was cold and unloving toward me. Only recently did I discover that it wasn’t my fault; it was because Lucas was her firstborn, her favorite, and no other child could compensate her for his absence.

  “She was my wife.” My father’s gaze pleads for understanding. “She was your mother.”

  “A wife and mother shouldn’t have done to her husband and daughter what she did.” Because of her lies, and her wish to protect herself and Lucas, my father was u
njustly accused and I lost him for all those years.

  Sally, indignant on my behalf, says, “She doesn’t deserve your protection.” Her own situation with regard to my mother is more complicated. If my father hadn’t become a fugitive, he wouldn’t have met and married Sally’s mother and Sally wouldn’t have been born.

  “She was a sad, broken woman,” my father says. “She needed me. I needed to be needed.” He says to Sally, “I don’t know if Sarah has told you this, but I was an orphan. My parents died when I was a baby. I grew up in a children’s home. No one there had any use for me. I was just a burden on charity. When I left, I worked at odd jobs. One was at a photographer’s studio. The man was kind enough to give me a camera.”

  My skin prickles as though in a cold breeze. His experience echoes my own with Charles Firth.

  “I traveled around the country, taking photographs. I stopped in different towns to work when I needed money. That’s how I met Mary. She worked at the hotel where I was staying. She’d had Lucas when she was fourteen. He’d been adopted by her married sister. Mary was an outcast, a burden on her family, without friends. She was almost as alone as I was. It seemed as if we were kindred spirits.” My father smiles, remembering his happiness. “When I married her, I promised to protect her. I always have.” His manner turns defiant. “How can I stop now?”

  His loyalty to my mother humbles me despite my ill will toward her. Only a few hours ago, Barrett and I promised to protect each other. The gravity of the marriage vows strikes me harder now than ever. Will we abide by the vows as literally as my father has? But I can’t let his misguided loyalty stand in my way.

  “Sally and I have no obligation to protect my mother,” I say. “Our concern is for you. We won’t let you sacrifice your life for her.” Exonerating him isn’t my only objective. I crave revenge on my mother; I want her to pay, albeit posthumously, for what she did to him and me. But he doesn’t need to know that.

  “Father, we’re going ahead with or without your permission.” Sally sits up straight, as if armored for battle. I smile at her, thankful that I needn’t shoulder the whole, challenging responsibility for his exoneration by myself.

  “But even if I told the police what she and Lucas did, they would think I was lying to save myself,” my father says.

  That’s a big problem I can’t deny. “We’ll treat this as if it’s any murder investigation. We’ll gather information and look for evidence.”

  “How can we?” Despite her faith in me, Sally notes the weaknesses of my plan. “The murder happened twenty-four years ago. What evidence could be left?”

  “The witness.” I look to my father. “Meaning, you. We need you to tell us everything that happened the day of Ellen’s murder.”

  Now Sally sparkles with inspiration. “Father, I’ll interview you. I’ll write down all the details, no matter how small. You might remember something important.”

  He frowns as he nods. I can tell that he feels as if he’s betraying his wife. I love him because he’s not a vindictive man who would hurry to punish her for her sins when given the opportunity to benefit himself. I love him all the more because he’s cooperating with my plan because of his love for Sally and me.

  “What will you do, Sarah?” Sally says.

  I dread the task I’ve been avoiding. Beneath my anger toward my mother, some vestige of a child’s love and loyalty remains. “I’m going to investigate my mother’s life. Maybe some evidence against her will turn up.”

  CHAPTER 5

  I leave Sally with our father. She’s eager to begin interviewing him, and he’s agreed to stay in London until they’re finished. I take the train to Victoria station and transfer to the underground train, heading home to change my clothes. I can’t traipse around town, hunting secrets from my mother’s past, in my bridal dress. But I stop at Blackfriars station and walk to Fleet Street, thinking I should see if Mick has developed the photographs from the crime scene.

  These are excuses. My real reason is that I’m afraid of what my hunt will reveal. Maybe I’ll discover that my mother isn’t the only parent who lied to me.

  Maybe my father did too.

  When I found him, I learned that he, by his own admission, is capable of murder. Maybe the blood on his hands includes Ellen Casey’s. I’m forced to acknowledge the other reason I can’t introduce him to Barrett. It’s because Barrett, with his policeman’s instincts, might think my father is guilty and feel duty bound to arrest him. I can’t let that happen unless I find out, heaven forbid, that it’s true.

  On Fleet Street, the headquarters of the Daily World dominates the other tall buildings where rival newspapers have their offices. Its huge size, Greek columns, Moorish arched windows, and Baroque turrets still impress me even after I’ve worked there for more than a year. It rises up among the smoke and steam from printing presses, impervious to the traffic of wagons, omnibuses, and pedestrians. Above the giant clock on the corner, the Mariner insignia—a marble sculpture of a ship—honors Sir Gerald’s past as a shipping magnate.

  Inside, on the ground floor, the giant presses and Linotype machines clatter. The whole building vibrates, and I taste the fumes of chemical ink, hot metal, and engine oil. It seems extraordinary that I was married this morning and I’m now at work as usual. Despite the troubles my work has gotten me into, I like it much better than I would a life of nothing but domestic chores. Barrett’s mother wouldn’t understand.

  On the second floor are the photography and engraving studios. I find Mick in one of the darkrooms, with negative plates in the rack and wet prints hanging from pegs clipped to a string above the work top.

  “I haven’t developed the crime scene photos yet,” he says. “I did the pictures of your wedding first. The society editor wants ’em for tomorrow’s paper.”

  I hate the idea of my wedding splashed across the society page, and not only because I need my privacy. Publicity about me could lead to more coverage of Ellen Casey’s murder and more calls for information regarding my father’s whereabouts.

  Mick points to the prints. “I think they turned out pretty good.”

  “Yes, splendid.” He’s done a good job with composition, focus, and lighting, but I wince because my face so clearly reveals my emotions. I feel as exposed as if I were naked. And Mick didn’t neglect to get a shot of Barrett and me kissing.

  “Don’t give the editor that one,” I say.

  Mick grins and nods.

  “Let’s develop the crime scene photos.” I set down my satchel, which contains, amid the necessities I carry around, my father’s photograph of Sally and me. It’s another that will never appear in the paper.

  “Ain’t you got other things to do on your weddin’ day?” Mick says.

  “I’m not meeting Barrett until later.”

  We pour fresh chemical solutions into trays, set out the four flat cases that contain the negative plates from Charles Firth’s cameras, and turn off the gaslights. Accustomed to working in complete darkness, by touch, we open the cases one by one, remove the plates, and immerse them in the solutions. The darkness makes it easier to talk about personal matters.

  “I’m sorry about Catherine,” I say.

  Mick pauses before he says, “Yeah, well.”

  “I’ll give her a talking-to next time I see her.”

  He sighs. “Don’t bother. Come to think, I’m glad she gave me the air. Showed me it’s high time I gave up.”

  I’m sorry that I’m happily in love while he’s not. “There’ll be someone else for you.”

  “Right.” Mick doesn’t sound convinced.

  With the negative plates safely in the fixer solution, we put the lights on and study the results. The dark and bright values are reversed, but we can see that three images are of the empty crypt.

  “If there were any ghosts, he didn’t get ’em,” Mick says.

  The fourth shows Charles Firth. It’s very light—underexposed—and out of focus, as if he moved while the shutter snapped. I sh
iver, knowing it’s the last photograph of him alive.

  “He musta taken his own picture by mistake while he was setting up,” Mick says.

  “It doesn’t look like there are clues in these. But let’s print them just to make sure we don’t miss anything.”

  Working in the red light of the safe lamp, we enlarge and make duplicate prints of the four photographs. In those of the empty crypt, the rough texture of the brick walls and the carved ornamentation on the stone sarcophagi are visible; they’re long exposures. When we behold the photograph of Charles Firth, Mick says, “Whoa!”

  Sometimes a print is so different from the negative, it’s as though photography is a magician’s act. The reversal of the values is a black cloak, and the secrets behind the cloak are revealed when the printing process restores the values to normal. This print is still out of focus and too dark, but it reveals subtle details that we missed in the negative. Charles Firth stands with his body tilted and arms out to his sides, as if he’s stumbled off-balance. The air hose on the self-timer device is a fuzzy line connecting his right hand to the camera outside the frame. A pale figure, blurred by motion, assaults him. It’s vaguely human in shape, only its head distinguishable from its amorphous body. Firth’s face is blurred too, but I can see that his eyes are wide, his mouth open as if in a scream of shock and pain.

  “Is that a ghost?” Mick says, his voice hushed with awe.

  My skepticism provokes me to immediate resistance. “Of course not.” A ghost in the photograph would lend more credence to the theory that a supernatural force is responsible for the crime. The waters are getting muddier, the logical process of identifying suspects and motives more complicated. But the photograph is an astonishing and not entirely unwelcome new clue. “But it looks as if Charles Firth took a photograph of his own murder.”

  * * *

  Sir Gerald’s office is located on the top floor of the building. Although it’s past six o’clock, Mick and I aren’t surprised to find him there; he often works late. In addition to the newspaper, he runs the banking empire that earned him his second fortune. His first fortune came from his shipping fleet. He now owns several newspapers around the kingdom, and he’s building himself a news empire. It’s the rags-to-riches story of a cabin boy from Liverpool.