Chapter Twenty

Custom remained brisk at Temperance House. Guests continued to arrive in order to consult with the famous Mrs. Elliott, and there were a few farmers and tradesmen who were of a temperance persuasion who came to Wellington for business reasons and needed a place to stay. Now, however, they also had occasional guests who arrived not for the rooms, but for the dinners, as word of Sophie’s talents spread. And the meeting room had been booked again for that evening.

The master of the Orange Lodge had been correct; the members did indeed grumble about the lack of spirits at their meeting, and he had quickly made arrangements with the Wilman Hotel for the use of their ballroom the following Saturday night.

Daniel hadn’t expected the Lodge to return to Temperance House, but it seemed that the Orangemen had managed to turn the tables on the Agricultural Society — the society was now forced to look for other premises for a lecture they had planned for the same evening. They approached Daniel and asked if they could hold it at Temperance House.

“Well, this is all right, isn’t it?” Daniel had said when he gleefully reported the news to Lewis. “It’ll keep us hopping, what with all the guests right now, but we’re in much better shape than we were for the first meeting.”

Chairs were not an issue this time. The Agricultural Society lectures nearly always drew a reasonable crowd, but they appealed mostly to farmers, and any of those who also belonged to the Orange Lodge would probably opt to go to the livelier gathering at the Wilman instead.

Nor was Lewis instructed to stand in the hall until refreshments were called for. The society president made it clear that any of the hotel guests and staff were welcome to sit in. Their guests were duly informed of this at breakfast, but none of them seemed particularly interested when they discovered that the subject of the evening’s lecture was to be the latest improvements in farm implements. It was a specialized subject, to be sure, but Lewis, ever-thirsty for whatever knowledge came his way, found that he was looking forward to the talk.

The guest lecturer was a fussy little man with a huge handlebar moustache who spent most of the afternoon setting up a magic lantern with which to illustrate his comments.

Lewis’s prediction that the lecture would be lightly attended proved to be accurate. Only twenty or so people filtered into the room, but to Lewis’s surprise, Clementine Elliott was one of them. Maybe he shouldn’t have been so surprised — no doubt her evenings were dull. She seemed disinclined to sit with the group of guests who commandeered the sitting room every night after supper, instead keeping herself to her room. Probably any diversion would be welcome, even one that had so dry a topic.

The lecturer reported breathlessly that he had received reports of a new, improved hand-powered threshing machine — the esteemed manufactory of Barrett, Exall and Andrews of Reading, England, were poised to introduce this wonder to the North American market. He discussed this miracle of modern agriculture for a full twenty minutes before moving on to the next topic, which was the advent of a portable steam engine designed for farm use.

“This is used mostly for belt work,” he reported. “Threshing, winnowing, chaff cutting, root pulping, cake crushing …” On and on he droned, outlining in detail how the engine could be used for a myriad of farm tasks.

The farmers in the audience appeared to find the information fascinating, but Lewis soon found his attention wandering from the subject of zigzag harrows and new kinds of seed drills and he began to pay closer attention to the lecturer’s manipulation of the magic lantern. Any of these types of shows Lewis had seen before had used glass plates through which the light shone the image onto the wall across the room. The images could be made to appear to move using this method, but only from side to side and in a jerky, unrealistic manner. This man, however, had mounted his device on some sort of roller behind a screen, and he moved the entire lantern back and forth, a technique that gave the projected pictures a more lifelike sense of movement. Lewis resolved to ask him about it after the lecture.

He had been kept busy with serving the refreshments immediately after the man had finally finished talking, so there were only a handful of people left in the room by the time he got the chance to ask his questions. To his surprise, Clementine was still there, sitting in the same chair she had been in all evening.

The lecturer was only too happy to explain how his lantern worked.

“Yes, many magic lanterns use glass frames, and you can make the image seem as though it’s moving, but as you noted, it’s not a very realistic movement, because there is no depth of field.”

Lewis must have looked puzzled at this, because the man explained further. “In real life, objects don’t just move from side to side.” He demonstrated by picking up one of the wine glasses that had not yet been cleared away. He moved it from right to left in front of Lewis. “Real objects also move up and down and toward and away.” Now he held the glass out to Lewis, as if offering him a drink, then pulled it back toward himself, as if to take a sip. “You see? With the rollers you can vary the size and pace of the pictures and make them seem more lifelike.”

“What are the mechanics of the lantern itself?” Lewis asked.

The lecturer was only too happy to open the back of the device for Lewis to examine.

“This particular camera obscura, or should I say more properly laterna magica, uses a double-image device. It is this, combined with the rollers, which allows manipulation of the camera itself. A skilled operator can then more closely imitate the movement of real life. So, the light from the lamp” — here he pointed to the oil lamp that had been set on a table directly behind the camera — “enters the box, providing the illumination of the glass plates. The light shines through them and exits the camera,” — he indicated the aperture at the front of the box — “and shines onto a flat surface, in this case the wall, some feet away from it.”

“What is the mirror for?” Lewis had practically stuck his head inside the box to look at it.

“Oh, if you don’t have a mirror, the image comes through reversed,” the man said. “Everything would appear to be backward and upside-down. This, like so many things we don’t understand, was originally ascribed to some sort of natural law and was thought to be an insurmountable problem. Then as time went on, someone realized that if the image was reflected in a mirror, it would project in the correct manner.”

“I hadn’t realized that,” Lewis said. “Upside-down you say?”

“In the old days, of course, the only source of light strong enough to effectively project pictures was the sun, so magic lanterns were used only in the daylight. Now, with our superior lamp oils, it’s not only possible to operate them at night, but in some respects it’s better, as you can more effectively exclude other light sources. The roller system is a vast improvement in terms of making the images move more realistically, but we have a long way to go, I’m afraid, before we can ever match the effect of projecting a real object.”

“It’s possible to do that?”

“Oh, yes.” The man chuckled a little. “When the camera obscura first came into use, many unscrupulous people used it to dupe the unwary. Some scoundrel would set up in a darkened room and when he had assembled an audience, a confederate would move around in front of a pinhole light and it would appear that a ghostly image was in the room. The unwary audience could be convinced that spirits were being called back from the dead.”

Lewis was aware of someone pushing back a chair, and then of someone walking away. When he looked around, he realized that Clementine Elliott had abruptly left the room.

“Is it possible to make an image that would be life-size or something approaching life-size?” Lewis asked.

“It all depends on the focal length of the lens used,” the lecturer replied. “With a portable camera like this one, the pictures remain fairly small. The longer the lens, the larger the enclosure would be the rule of thumb. Not terribly practical for casual use, I’m afraid.”

Lewis thanked the man for his trouble in explaining the inner workings of his contraption and bade him goodnight.

He lay awake a long time that night, digesting the information he had gathered at the lecture. It was now clear to him how Clementine had produced the ghostly image on the wall. The curtains she had hung across part of the room obviously concealed a camera obscura, and she required Horatio to be present for her sessions, not as a chaperone, but as a living image, projected on the wall by the natural light from the window. She had been unable to solve the problem of the reversed image, however. The size of the mirror required to correct a life-sized image would present far too many difficulties for a travelling show. The camera itself must fold down somehow, in such a manner that it would fit easily in a trunk.

Somewhere she must have come by a general description of Mrs. Sprung’s daughter, and by designating Amelia as the conduit through which the other spirits spoke, she was able to convince any other questioners that contact had been made. Lewis didn’t know if Horatio assumed other disguises — he had only attended the one session — but he assumed that by wearing various wigs and hats and varying the pitch of his voice, the boy could represent almost anybody, depending on what Clementine had been able to find out about the circumstances of the questioner. He wondered where she had discovered Mrs. Sprung’s recent loss, and then he realized that she seemed to be on excellent terms with Meribeth Scully — Meribeth, who heard everything that went on in the village, and passed the information on without a second thought.

There were other aspects of Clementine’s performance that still puzzled him, however. He had no explanation for the wispy streams of matter that had emanated from her ears or for the strange mirror-writing she had exhibited. Her voice had changed dramatically as she spoke, as well, but this could be a theatrical trick, easily acquired with a little practice.

His conviction that it was all just a parlour trick now became a certainty. He wondered if there was any way he could sneak inside Mrs. Elliott’s sitting room to examine the camera she had obviously set up there. He was already sure of the method, but he was keenly curious about the mechanics of the device, and perhaps closer examination would reveal the answers to his other questions, as well.

But the sitting room doors were always firmly locked. He supposed he could attend another session, but the deceptive tricks would already be in place for the willing victims. He could scarcely bluster in and start tearing down curtains or rummaging under the table. Daniel would consider that a gross violation of his guests’ privacy and the rules of hospitality, and it was, after all, Daniel’s hotel. The alternative was to break into the room somehow.

He wondered if he was being obsessive again, like he had been when he suspected Renwell of murder. It certainly seemed within his character to become so, and it was a trait that he had vowed to guard against. Breaking into a room in order to satisfy his curiosity would definitely fall into the category of obsession, he decided. Then he wondered if he should bother doing anything at all. Now that Hiram Elliott had died, it remained only to settle his estate, and no doubt Mrs. Elliott would soon be on her way to somewhere else, taking her outrageous activities with her. As he drifted off to sleep that night, Lewis resolved to put the entire matter out of his mind.