It is fair to say that Hedley Hill was no stranger to death. Death had furnished him with the funds to establish his business in that long cold winter of 1863 when the old world was choking on the new, with locomotives rumbling under Paddington and disease tearing through the city from East End to West. It was death that had set his own engine in motion, cholera sweeping poor Judith into her grave and leaving him with a small bequest from the Stillington family, enough to quit his position at the bank under his father-in-law’s querulous gaze and embark on a much more lucrative enterprise. ‘Morbid’, Enoch had called it and the old patriarch wasn’t wrong in his assessment. Death had become Hedley’s stock-in-trade. And indeed, thanks to circumstance, there was no shortage of customers.
“Blazes, Rod.” Emerging from the carriage on Rake Lane, Knightsbridge, Hedley winced to see his assistant struggling with the carrying box and the case of cosmetics, and stepping directly into a pile of dung. He might’ve advised the lad he’d still be scooping it up if not for his recent recruitment. “Drop my camera and you’ll be back in the tenements of Devil’s Acre come dusk. Hurry along now. We’re expected at number nine.”
“Right you are, gov.”
The camera, a bellows with brass fittings in polished mahogany, had come courtesy of Judith Hill nee Stillington, as had his hat and frock coat, his cane and the pomatum to smooth his wayward dark curls. Despite the soot, the mud and the ever-present stench of ammonia, Hedley mused that a woman who’d found him appealing behind a teller’s desk in cheap half-moon spectacles would’ve positively swooned at the sight of him now. Why should only the worms feed? Rod, in waistcoat and cap, cut a much less impressive figure and now he’d reek even more so of the street. Hedley consoled himself that the smell inside the townhouse was likely to obscure it. Death was his ally once again.
Checking the letter of engagement to make sure of the address, Hedley hissed at Rod to keep a reasonable distance and his mouth shut, and climbed the steps to rap upon the door. It surprised him when one of the mourners answered rather than a butler. A family in a borough such as this one could well afford servants. Hadn’t they offered him the heady sum of a pound for an hour or two’s work? Perform with excellence here and Hedley surmised that the Templetons may well recommend him to other wealthy families in the area and his modest dwelling in Islington might transform into a manse in Mayfair or even Kensington. Oh, he was never going to aspire to the luxurious life of the Prince of Wales and his new Danish princess, but one could dream.
Then Dinah Templeton, his client, was speaking and all such thoughts flew from his head.
“Tardy, Mr Hill.” Behind her veil, a drape of black brocade, her narrow face was a powdered blur; it was her glare that dimmed his enthusiasm somewhat. “I believe we said three p.m. The undertaker left hours ago. You have kept my sister waiting.”
The old Hedley, the Hedley who’d worked in the bank and spent one too many evenings shedding shillings in a Whitechapel pub, might’ve told the woman that Zillah Templeton, the sister in question, perhaps wasn’t pressed for time. The new Hedley doffed his hat and with all the eloquence he’d practised in the bathroom mirror, gave a bow and muttered his regrets concerning the traffic, along with his deepest condolences. Appeased or no, Templeton younger retreated into the hall, her weeds whispering, a gloved hand ushering him and his assistant inside. The aroma of flowers and incense greeted Hedley as he entered, a pall he had yet to get used to, and one that made him fancy he preferred the more honest one of horseshit.
Death, however, liked to wear perfume.
As expected, Hedley found the corpse in the drawing room, placed with her hands folded in the coffin on the cooling board, the lace and the frills around it doing little to disguise its purpose. Roses, lilies and chrysanths blasted a fanfare from every available vase, dull in the smoke and the hour of the day. A crackling hearth lent a degree of light (shortly, he’d have to ask for lamps), which wasn’t reflected in either the mirror above the mantlepiece or the large cheval glass in a corner of the room, both of them covered in sheer black silk. The clock on the wall, he noted, had been stopped just before midnight, likely the precise minute of the lady’s death. The flowers and incense, of course, masked the creeping smell of decay.
Almost.
The mirrors had been draped to prevent the soul of the deceased from becoming trapped in the glass, a bizarre superstition if ever there was one. Hedley was far from a religious man—leave that to Judith and her endless church visits, not that they had saved her—but even a handful of months into his venture had shown him how much the bereaved clung to these primitive customs. The advent of photography, he knew, had bestowed on them another. To beautify their loved ones in passing had fast become fashionable, a grim kind of vogue. Children, mostly, comprised his subjects, all of them taken by this or that fever or flu and their parents keen for a keepsake, pale and rosy-cheeked (he had the very tincture for that), and locked behind a gilt frame on some mantlepiece or other. ‘Secure the shadow, ere the substance fades’ was one of many such poetic phrases that Hedley employed to advertise his business and to draw the grieving to him like flies. Having stared death in the face and seen the blood that Judith left him on her handkerchiefs every time she coughed, he could’ve told them that it wasn’t so sweet.
Of all the trappings, it was the rug he stood on that caught his attention. He thought it Persian in design, a broad circle of crimson that swirled around his feet in a dizzying weave of patterns, symbols and letters, all of them beyond his ken. Considering the reputation of the deceased, it wasn’t hard to detect a whiff of the occult in the item, as most in London would’ve done what with an equally fashionable upsurge in seances and spirit rappings and the rags haunted daily by levitating dames and messages from the ‘shadow realm’. In fact, Hedley had considered leaning his business in that particular direction until he’d read about the recent arrests for fraud and settled on the safer ground of a more earthbound enterprise. Photographing ghosts struck him as a mite far-fetched. Corpses one could see for oneself and required no burden of proof when it came to payment.
“Are you familiar with my sister, sir? Once she was the talk of the town.”
Hedley started. He hadn’t realised that Dinah was standing so close to him and her voice was as soft as her dress, a hush over the floorboards. He had, however. Hedley had seen the adverts in the papers with the questionable claim that ‘Zillah Sees All!’, though he very much doubted she’d foreseen her own sudden demise.
“Indeed, madam,” he said. “Ms Zillah was one of our most famed mediums, sitting for baron and colonel alike. I often read of her . . . ” He stopped himself from saying ‘exploits’. “Labours in the Post. She claimed to commune with the angels themselves.”
“And others besides.” Was Dinah smirking? It was so hard to tell behind her veil and she swept away from him before he could be sure, wafting over to the coffin with her gloves perched upon its edge. “Ah, look at her now. Still so refined. ‘Before the gross air of the world has had time to breathe upon the changing dust it hallows’ as Dickens would have it. She was only thirty three years old. And so close to completing her life’s work.”
“I do hope her passing wasn’t too taxing on you.”
“Consumption, I’m afraid. A sore inconvenience. The undertaker did his best.”
The comment drew Hedley’s gaze to the coffin. He had to suppress a grimace. He found he didn’t share Dinah Templeton’s generous sentiment; the artistry was tawdry at best. Powder and rouge couldn’t hide the sallow sheen of the woman at rest, her sunken cheeks, the meek fishbone line of her lips. In life, he imagined that Zillah Templeton had been an austere woman, her mousy hair scraped back in a no-nonsense bun and the lace collar of her Sunday finery her only concession to frills. She wore no jewels. No adornment of any kind. Thankfully, the man had set her features and glued shut her eyes, but disgust aside, Hedley was far from disappointed. A poor job here meant a chance for improvement. And improvement might secure him a tip. He coughed to cover his brief evaluation and Dinah, hovering, took it as a signal.
“Come, Phoebe. Let’s leave Mr Hill to his work. I’m sure he’s well acquainted with the dead. There’s no need for us to oversee the more . . . vulgar aspects.”
Hedley, for his part, started again. Rod the propper gave a yelp. Neither of them had noticed the fourth (or fifth, including the corpse) occupant of the room. Like ink on air, she emerged from the shadows by the curtains, veiled in her weeds, as bony and silent as Dinah. With no word of a greeting, Phoebe Templeton linked her arm through the branch of her sister’s and the two of them withdrew, lost in the smoke. Grief, Hedley reflected, made strangers of them all. But it had also brought change, a happy one, and the dust of which Dinah had spoken settled on his shoulders as he turned to the business at hand.
Surely, he could make Zillah Templeton, the famed medium of Belgravia, look a little less like a withered peach and give them a memento mori worth keeping.
Perhaps worth a half-sovereign more.
The vulgar aspects, as Dinah had put it, were indeed unseemly. First, there was the lifting of the corpse, which no relative would wish to see (or smell) and the chief reason for Rod’s tolerable presence. He was a birdlike lad, but his queuing at the parish pumps had made him hardy and accustomed to unpleasant odours. Naught stunk like the slums. In light of that, a shilling per appointment struck Hedley as fair. It was more than the lad had made shovelling dung and the necessity was just as frequent (a hat tip to death once again). When it came to the positioning of the body, in this case on an overstuffed armchair next to the cheval mirror, Rod showed none of his earlier qualms when it came to the odd slop of fluids on the rug or the embroidered satin pillows (so much like the ones that Judith had favoured and just as splotched by putrefaction). Indeed, the lad barely winced at the crack of bones when he forced Zillah’s fingers apart so she could be sat holding a cherished book and a single rose as instructed. The book in question was an unlikely looking tome entitled The Grand Grimoire, the red-painted devil on the cover in keeping with the departed’s famous (or notorious, depending on ones’ view) former profession. Zillah, while stiff and in the repose of her ‘last sleep’, looked every inch the witch as Rod settled her in for her photograph. Then there was the brushing of hair and a generous application of powder, a reasonable attempt to obscure the undertaker’s amateur mess. A soothing of rouge on the lips and cheeks would help matters. Later, Hedley would have to paint on the eyes in the image, a painstaking skill that he liked to believe had seen some improvement and would lend the photograph the most vivid impression of health. Ah, a spruced witch then. Teased and titivated to rival the ladies of Portman Square! It was likely that Zillah’s posthumous appearance would surpass that of the woman’s in life, or so he told himself.
While Rod occupied himself with the more squeamish side of the business, Hedley set up his tripod and prepared his plate, first coating it with collodion and then dunking it in a solution of silver nitrate for about three minutes, judged by his pocket watch. The room provided enough gloom to rival the soot-coated sheep that grazed in Regent’s Park and the day was dimming by the second, January rattling against the window. To be frank, the stench of rot that rose from the lad’s efforts made Hedley want to gag. It brought to mind the house in Whitechapel when Judith’s sickness had taken a turn for the worse and he’d come home every evening to the dire reminder, the watery stools that streaked the sheets, along with the whiff of vomit and sweat. The gal had not gone down easy, as the Americans liked to say. For weeks, months, the ordeal had gone on, putting him off his meals in the parlour and struggling to sleep whenever his wife called out to him from behind the locked bedroom door, begging for comfort, for congress even, delirium gnawing away at her decorum as much as the fever had her flesh. And he blushing as the nursemaid blushed and neither of them mentioning it after upon pain of dismissal. If he’d realised sooner the boon that Judith’s passing would grant him, he’d have prayed for an end to it all the harder (unbeliever or no) and alighted on a solution long before the reek of her filled all the house . . . It was a mercy, he told himself over and over, and he wouldn’t soon forget it. The handling of the corpses, the proximity of them, remained a matter that he couldn’t half abide. Hence the hiring of Rod.
Once ready, Hedley dispatched the lad to fetch the Templeton sisters and a couple of lamps for ambience. Shadow and light was his paintbox, the blend of them aiding the illusion, granting the faint semblance of life. The sisters had set their hearts on a family portrait, as they’d previously written, one which would serve to remind them of Zillah in her heyday, when the dour doyenne had entertained countless visitors in this very house, doubtless speaking to them in the voices of the dear departed, suggesting secrets, forgiveness, the location of wills and so forth. Judging by the neighbourhood and the fine (though strange) rug he stood upon, the Templetons had done rather well for themselves and Hedley was the last to blame them for that. They were vultures all, feeding off tragedy and sorrow before the worms took a bite. But there was naught vital about Zillah now. She sat, pole-backed, shut-eyed and grim, in the armchair opposite, her pallid face holding a vague air of disapproval. Well, she could hardly chastise him from the grave. He shuddered all the same and concealed a sigh of relief when Rod returned, Dinah, Phoebe and lamps in tow.
“Oh, look at her, Phoebe.” Pausing before the chair, Dinah clasped her hands together, though the husk of her voice betrayed more glee than awe, her features remaining hidden. “It’s as if she’s merely sleeping after one of her seances. Not that Zill ever appeared so calm.”
“We do our best, ladies,” Hedley told them with his saddest smile. “Compassion is key. Why, the entire affair is an act of love, designed to preserve a cherished likeness as was. My work should last for generations, handed down from . . . ” Here, he adjusted himself again. “ . . . mother to daughter and keeping one’s memory alive forever.”
To Hedley’s alarm, Dinah laughed, the sound of dry twigs snapping in the room.
Rod shot him a look like an echo. Laughter wasn’t something they’d heard at a wake before. Victoria herself would’ve blushed.
“Hear that, sister?” It wasn’t clear who she was addressing, Phoebe or the primped up corpse. “Forever, he says. Seems Mr Hill has a touch o’ the sight.”
Phoebe, dark, veiled and rejoining the shadows by the wall, said nothing.
“One can’t claim that,” he returned, all polished sombre poise. The arcanity of it made him itch, his starched collar feeling tight and damp. “Few could equal the spiritual heights of Ms Zillah.”
“Pssht. She’d have gone a lot further had she lacked a cunny,” Dinah said. “No right to vote. To property if wedded. ‘The angel in the house’, isn’t that so, Mr Hill? But then the domestic sphere wasn’t the one that drew the old bitch. Where shall I set this lamp?”
Hedley, blinking and repressing a splutter, flapped a hand at the mantlepiece. Then he gestured to the sisters, those living, to stand beside the dead one on either side of the armchair, and in a rustle of skirts they obliged him. And then another hand flap, less visibly, at Rod to clear out from the frame, the lad shuffling backward and half knocking into the cheval mirror, its draped surface shuddering. Satisfied, Hedley went around the front of the camera and removed the lens cap. The exposure had started. It would take a minute or two at best.
“Do try to stand as still as possible,” he told them beforehand, the three of them upside-down in the glass. “We wouldn’t want the image to blur.”
“Zillah should find that no trouble at all.”
Dinah spoke between clenched teeth, a rictus in place of her sister’s.
Never had a minute seemed so long, stretched between the shadows and the lens. Like the air in the Whitechapel house while Judith had wheezed, seeped and, yes, wrested to the last, the incense and hearth smoke hung over the room like a burlap cape. Nor was there the tick of a clock to measure out the sitting, every hand stopped at the reaper’s call. Outside, the cabs on Rake Lane sounded dull in the twilight, a faraway creak like the cawing of crows. Oh, insidious tradition, Hedley thought. Filling my head with darkest of fancies. As instructed, Dinah and Phoebe stood still enough to rival a statue let alone the dead and Rod was seemingly holding his breath, the poor lad stiff in his waistcoat and atremble in the sisters’ shadow. Between them, Zillah sat with her book and her rose, appearing less than at ease or impressed, the discomforting fact of her rigidity one that Hedley knew would nonetheless serve the end result of his work. Luck be cursed—and despite his sombre guidance—it was the photographer himself who broke the silence with a gasp of dismay.
“Good lord! The damnable man . . . ”
His shock was such that he hadn’t thought to check his impiety—and here in the midst of the reverent business! Rod, stumbling to make the cheval glass shudder, followed his gaze and vented a cry. The sisters, hands to their breasts, gawped first at the photographer (they paid no mind to the urchin who may as well have been invisible) and then followed suit, their veils swinging as they turned to peer down at their Zillah.
“Heavens!” This from Dinah. “She awakes.”
Hedley rather disliked this comment, but he could understand the woman’s impression. The embalming, it seemed, was more inept than it had first appeared, the blasted undertaker thrice cursed! Thread would’ve proved better, fine and stitched through each wrinkled eyelid, securing the corpse’s peaceful guise. Whatever layer of glue that the fool had employed had evidently softened in the warmth of the room, peeling apart like an old envelope. Further dislodged by her shifting, Zillah Templeton’s eyes had popped wide, the bracket-faced madam presently staring at Hedley through the gloom.
There was naught pleasant in the sight. The better of Zillah’s eyes spoke of a cataract she’d borne in life, a large, hard orb like a marble matching her skin for milkiness. Alas, the other displayed the obvious signs of tache noire, a grim discolouration streaked across it, the cornea and iris rendered black and lending the woman a goatish aspect, one that caused Hedley to wince. Had he doubted the power the medium had commanded in life, drawing so many to this curtained chamber to parley with those beyond, the last of it fled from him. Rigor had etched her brow with a permanent archness, her lips drawing all of her features towards them as if her disfavour might suck up the room. Held by her stare, Hedley quailed, for she seemed to perceive the very heart of him, alarm at her undoing and what it might cost him eclipsed by that sudden piercing, stirring an unbidden pang of shame. When he cursed again, it was under his breath. He addressed the sisters to mask it, thankful for the opportunity to break the elder Templeton’s unblinking gaze.
“Quite, quite normal, I assure you. Ladies, I beg you. Be not affrighted.”
Breathing in sandalwood and soot, Hedley was already lamenting the half-sovereign slipping through his fingers when Dinah returned her attention to him.
“Oh, we are quite, quite confident, Mr Hill,” she said. “You are no stranger to death, after all. Isn’t that so, Phoebe?”
He’d written as much in his advertisement, printed in the Illustrated News. It should’ve sounded less strange to hear it quoted here, which was clearly meant as a gesture of encouragement. Oh, but the smirk that played at the corner of Dinah’s mouth . . . what of that? There was humour in death to be sure; the papers were full of it with sketches of finely garbed skeletons at balls and helming the parish pumps among all the dismal reports of disease. He could find no mirth in the circumstances. Had he not been occupied with the question of how many seconds had passed before the beldam’s eyes flew wide and the prohibitive price of the chemicals should the plate prove wasted, he might’ve sensed a taunt in the comment. Why he should think of Judith then, the same mix of longing and repulsion, he couldn’t say. Why on earth should Dinah know a thing about that? Gossip travelled far and wide, but from Whitechapel to Knightsbridge? Unlikely.
As before, Phoebe said nothing, regarding him with the same blank air of expectation behind her veil. Hedley answered for her.
“Quite, madam.”
The misgiving played on his mind as much as the murk, the hearth crackling like laughter. Keen as he was to conclude the afternoon’s business, he had a needling suspicion that the session had entirely failed, the image blurred and distorted—or worse, immortalising the doyenne’s terrible stare. Then he reminded himself that eyeballs could be painted over and wages happily retained. Gathering his breath, Hedley peered down at the rug, the esoteric symbols and whorls between his feet, summoning up the proper sequence of words with which to better assure his clients that all was well, commence the packing up of his equipment and bid a fond (and hasty) adieu to Number Nine Rake Lane. Next time, he vowed, he’d bring a needle and thread to a sitting himself and to hell with the bungling undertaker!
He snapped his fingers at Rod by the cheval glass—don’t just stand there—urging the lad to at least make some attempt at decorum and reseal the cadaver’s eyes. That was when the mundane considerations in that house became as certain as the smoke.
In an instant, all the lights went out. It was as if some unseen personage had opened the drawing room windows and invited January inside, a chill gust of air blasting through the room. Lamps and hearth snuffed out in a manner most unnatural, some untold funnel of wind drawing the flames up through the flue, embers and sparks scattering on the rug. In their fading glow, Hedley observed three impossibilities, each one sinking into him like ice and likening him to the corpse he’d come to capture. First, he noticed how the symbols and whorls at his feet seemed to surge in the shadows, circling upon the polished floorboards. Second, he saw how Dinah and Phoebe both turned to face him, as elegant as dancers, the former’s hand dropping to her sister’s inflexible shoulder. Third, and most arresting of all, he observed the covering of silk fall from the cheval mirror, pooling on the floor, and how a silhouette seemed to stand in the glass, too tall and wiry for Rod’s reflection, an insinuation of Sunday dress and finely brushed hair caught in the fleeting wink of firelight.
Then all was darkness.
To his alarm, Rod gave a cry. There came a strange splintering sound, reminiscent of breaking glass, and then the lad fell silent, as certainly doused as the light in the room.
“Rod? Are you well?”
Rod did not answer him.
“Lucifuge.” Dinah’s voice came then, an incomprehensible murmur, silk drawn over glass. “Rofocale.”
Hedley was unfamiliar with her Latinate curse, though the cause of it was plain. Spurred by unease, he reached out to steady himself, fumbling for the mantlepiece, a chair. Instead he stumbled, the tripod rocking, and he clutched at it like a sailor in a storm, keen to salvage his equipment and his work. The smoke in the room, the flowers and incense, were all of a sudden too dense, too thick, and it took a masterful effort to collect himself, calling through the gloom.
“Ladies, perhaps one of you should strike a match. I can’t see a blasted thing.”
With a dryness that threatened to wrench his heart through his mouth, Dinah Templeton chuckled.
“Be not affrighted, Mr Hill. Zillah sees all.”
Hedley appreciated this less than her weird imprecation. He had a mind to spin on his heel and hasten for the drapes, draw them back to illuminate the room, although true night had fallen, London descending into its usual adumbration. Perhaps a street light might shed clarity on affairs and help resolve the confusion . . . He paused, his breath catching, gauging the depth of the stillness in the room. For a moment, all he could hear was his own alarm, a pounding of blood in his ears. Where was Rod? What ruse was afoot? If the Templetons meant to rob him, they’d find themselves rewarded with farthings and fluff, no more. If they intended to scare him, impress on him some illusion of the afterlife for their own prospecting ends, then they’d find him a less than gullible mark. What in blazes were they -?
The silence amplified the noise when it came, along with a vague shifting of shadows in the room. There came the whisper of silk, he thought, the soft thump of cushions falling to the ground, the furnishings so much like the ones that Judith had favoured, that she’d clung to in her last days, the covers stained and rank. Why he should think of them now was unhelpful, for their dislodging was the very footfall of doom. It was an impression bolstered by the faint creaking in the gloom, the sound of old leather stretched taut, and a sigh like the rain against the window pane, yet holding none of its moisture. It was easy to imagine tendons, each one whispering, frayed, seeking a suppleness long gone under heatless flesh. And blast the vision that followed it, the imagined horror of Dinah and Phoebe lifting their veils to reveal not faces gaunt with grief, but ones of grinning and polished bone . . .
Stop this. It’s foolish.
The next moment, the smoke and the incense were mingling with another odour, one as sweet and familiar, yet with no trace of pleasantness. Oh, Hedley would never grow accustomed to its scent! It brought to mind tears and unanswered prayers. Cemeteries in snow. The souring of flesh as it withered under the cruel hand of time. It was the breath of the open grave. Well he knew its name, had courted its pervasive favour.
He swallowed, tasting dust.
“Ladies, I implore you. Please leave the corpse where she sits.”
Had they moved her, Zillah? Why not speak? What else could account for the rising stench?
“Oh, do cease your prattling, Mr Hill. The transference shan’t take a moment or two.”
Hedley liked this least of all. Whatever the Templeton sisters were about (and whatever had become of poor Rod, whether the lad had fled or met with some benighted mishap), it occurred to him then that it was nothing polite. He had a mind to follow his assistant’s imagined retreat, fumble his way for the drawing room door and the promise of the street outside when he found that he could not. The rug he stood upon, a garish Persian oddity, appeared to have either swallowed or adhered to his shoes. Lord! He could only cling on to the tripod for support, a grunt of dismay flying from him. Despite the deepening chill, sweat broke out on his brow. He had every intention of venting his outrage, overcome the fluttering in his breast, when the next sound stuffed it back down his throat.
It was the tap of heels on the floorboards, soft and uncertain. Had one of the sisters stepped toward him?
“I beg your pardon, madam? I do not understand.”
Again, he gagged, the pall of death overwhelming, as if the worm-riddled earth were filling his mouth. His eyes watered even as they picked out the approaching figure. Thin she was, and pale, her broom handle frame emerging from the gloom. No jewels adorned her, no frills of any kind, and yet Hedley knew her, recognised her face. His heart shrivelled to the size of a walnut. Indeed, she was death. No stranger at all. And far from welcome.
In the restless dark, one eye regarded him, milky and floating before his face. The other was black, as distant as the mares of the moon, colder still. And Madam Zillah saw him, he knew. Saw him for who he was, he who’d dined so well on the dead of London, risen to the position of self-appointed psychopomp by the generous bequest of the Stillingtons. And she saw, oh, she saw poor Judith as well. Judith with her worsening sickness, her vomit, her shit and her cries. Judith with her cherished silk cushions, each one stained and rank. One of which, mere months ago, Hedley had snatched up in despair from the reeking, loveless bed and pressed hard across her face . . .
Zillah Templeton saw all.
Hedley, trembling along with his tripod, lacked the strength to scream. The dear departed, Zillah, reached out to him, her brittle fingers spread.
In that long cold winter of 1863, Hedley Hill’s business was booming. Trains rattled on and the photographs grew ever in popularity, fuelled by the unhappy (yet lucrative) event of cholera, scarlatina and all the other privations of growling London to offer any who asked the perfect keepsake, preserved forever behind glass. By the time the March rains swirled with the soot and the shit on Rake Lane, Hedley had decamped his modest dwelling in Islington and taken up permanent resident in Knightsbridge, indeed in the house of one of his more prominent appointments, the aforementioned Number Nine. Though there never was any sign of Rod the propper (and none who came to ask after the lad), barely a day went by in which letters of engagement did not fill the letterbox or grieving callers stopped by the residence, securing Hedley’s prestigious skills. As a consequence, Hedley took it upon himself to hire not one, but three more lads from the slums, training each in the art of cosmetics and the cleaning and setting up of the equipment, leaving him to the photography at hand. The spring winds were blowing through the city and while they bore germs and death, yes, they also brought change. The bank and the stern regard of the Stillington family had become but a memory. Ironic when one considered that memory had become Hedley’s stock-in-trade. Mere weeks ago he would’ve thought it death, and said so, who kept him in guineas. These days he knew better. Indeed, death he’d come to have little time for. There was so much to be done. And a fortuitous surplus of time in which to do it.
By the window on Rake Lane, he’d sit with the sisters, Dinah and Phoebe, and read. Ofttimes, the books sported peculiar covers and dubious titles in Latin and Greek, even Old Norse and Egyptian. Between the covers, symbols adorned every other page, printed in languages thought long lost and bounded by figures both horned and winged. In silence, while London spluttered on (and frequently choked), the Templetons had welcomed him home.
Bustling as it was, there were none in the city who knew Hedley well enough or had such poor manners as to remark on the milky blindness of his left eye, the result of a cataract or some mysterious accident, absent one day but not the next. Soon enough, he’d taken to concealing it behind a patch to better put his customers at ease. One eye alone, bright, intent, seemed sufficient to navigate a lens. Or to read tea leaves and cards for his other callers who always came to Knightsbridge after dark. And naturally, there were few who entered Number Nine Rake Lane who passed comment on the new gilt-framed photograph that rested upon the mantlepiece, gleaming in the ruddy light of the hearth. There were certainly none curious enough to note that the image of Zillah Templeton was perfectly fine, with a marked vim in her rosy cheeks, more hale than any she’d shown in life. And none would dare enquire after her somewhat troubled gaze, the silent need in her painted eyes—both bright and clear—forever frozen in glass.
Had they looked a little closer, all would have agreed that the artist rivalled Daguerre himself and had effectively held death at bay.
