My Dearest Edward,
You will believe me when I say that these past eight months have been some of the happiest in my life. I know then that it will not be easy for you to hear that I must leave you for a time. It is not easy for me to write it.
I can provide no explanation—I can only tell you that I must go. I must go from Boston, and from you, and from all else I hold dear.
It is not because we are different. It is something I must do.
I take my leave of you with two promises. The first is that my heart will always be yours, and the second is that I will return as soon as I can.
Yours ever,
Isabelle
THIS HAD BEEN the last from her, and Moody could still feel the same despair, even though more than eighteen years had passed since he had first read those mysterious words. Only that week before, he had ridden with her to the outskirts of the city. There were fields there, and alone, where they could sit in the sunlight without judgment, she had lowered her head when he mentioned the possibility of someday marrying her. He did not understand at that point why she had been compelled to look away. When a honeybee began crawling up a fold in her skirt, she studied it, unafraid.
He was twenty-five years old and she a few years younger. They had everything before them. And nothing.
He knew very little of her past, for the girl had been quiet from the start, as if she had been charged with protecting an entire world beyond herself. What he did know had been revealed to him a few weeks before that day in the fields. She had, for some unknown reason, begun telling him about Ohio.
“It was cold there,” she had said. “The winters were cold there, but not like here. There was a heat that always followed you there, because even in the cold of winter, you weren’t safe.”
He asked her how old she had been in Ohio, and it was then that she told him of her mother.
“I never knew her, of course. She was owned by a horrible man—a French planter from the islands.”
Her words had stopped time. That was it then, Moody thought. That was what those beautiful eyes contained—a sorrow that hid out in the open.
She went on to tell him of Louisiana. How she had been born there—but not on the plantation.
“It was a place called Bellevoix—”
“Bellevoix?” Moody intoned.
The name sounded romantic, musical.
“Yes, Bellevoix. And my mother tried to escape its cruelty, only to be captured and returned a few days later. She was carrying me when she fled, but when they caught her, I was gone. Others took me into their care, and from that moment I was blessed. Later I would learn that they recorded me as stillborn. So from the first, you see, I had to die in order to live.”
What it meant was that she was free. She was free because she did not exist.
She was unclear—rather purposefully, Moody remembered thinking—about her movement from Louisiana to Ohio, and eventually to Boston. She gave details and she didn’t; views from partially curtained windows.
And then she never spoke of it again.
So he invented, because even in those early days, that was one of Edward Moody’s habits. He told himself that her secrets were not something to be feared, but rather something exciting to discover. Yes, it was true, he had been blinded by a sudden love for her—a type of love that had seized his imagination, and placed her in the realm of the sacred. But how her looks confirmed him … drew him in deeper, encouraged his devotion! He was too naïve to think that there might be something from him that she wanted.
During those first months of their meeting, the winter of 1851, she had taken a great interest in his hobby. He noticed that her eyes—for he was always watching her eyes—became spellbound whenever he showed her his experiments. The daguerreotype still reigned over photography then, but Edward Moody was toying with wet-plate collodion, a new method that produced astonishing results on glass negatives. Her fingers touched the negatives, and he could not stop looking at her fingers. She handled the negatives as delicately as one might handle a fallen leaf.
She was fascinated and he would show her. He would be her instructor. This poor girl would love him all the more if he could open her eyes to these wonders.
And so he did, for eight months. He shared with her the secrets of his own obsession: how to mix the iodides and the bromides, the ether and the alcohol, to make the sticky wet substance that would remind her of thinned syrup. When he held the plate by one corner and poured collodion over the glass, he called it “flowing the plate.” She’d been seduced by that. There was little she could do to resist such beauty. On the glass there were lakes and streams, and the reflective silver of other mirrors. Her eyes told him that she would absorb everything he had to give her. She stood so close to him while he worked that he could often feel her breath upon his neck.
These were the memories that he had carried for some years—collected, changed, and refined to suit what he wanted to keep. And then later, as things happened, many of the memories fell away, because the pain that accompanied remembering her surmounted the delight of anything else. It was too difficult for Edward Moody to go on remembering her. There was too much anguish in continuing to think about what he no longer had.
There was one memory, however, that Moody had never quite been able to banish. It was one that reminded him of his early career, working at the back of Mrs. Lovejoy’s as an engraver. His booth was small, sequestered from the reception room, which he liked because it gave him his privacy. Surrounding him, the latest items that awaited his attention: silver teapots, silver trays, serveware, and table cutlery. Mrs. Lovejoy was demonstrating a Geneva musical box to a customer when Moody became aware of the figure standing beside him. She was a servant woman—just a girl, really—yet she hovered over him like an apparition. She had come to order a monogram for a child’s silver rattle.
• • •
FOR A DAY and a night after the Garrett’s photograph, Moody remained so weak that he could not return to his own lodgings. It was as if an accumulation of his many feigned exhaustions had rushed upon him all at once, and finally taken him down.
When he did awake, the room was strange. And at his bedside was Joseph Winter.
Moody moaned.
“You are all right,” Joseph said. “You took very ill after the photograph. The fumes—”
“Where—”
“We are in Mrs. Lovejoy’s apartments.”
Moody looked around the room.
“Of course. How long?”
“A little more than a day. We have not been able to stir you since your collapse.”
Moody blinked. A pink and orange glow was stretching in from two small windows. Joseph Winter was a dark clay figure outlined in the twilight.
“My God—the negative,” Moody said. “Where is the negative?”
Joseph leaned toward the floor and tapped his hand on a plate box.
“It is safe,” he said. “It’s here.”
Moody lifted himself from the pillow. He was not quite remembering yet. There was the plate, and the storm, and the appearance of the spirit …
“The Garretts—” Moody said. “Have there been any inquiries?”
“None,” Joseph assured him. “And Mrs. Lovejoy closed the gallery.”
The gallery. What had happened? Yes … the Garretts had arrived at the gallery. William Jeffrey Garrett. Moody had been trying to get the boy.
She had come to him.
Then Moody remembered—Joseph had flowed the plate. Joseph had gone into the darkroom, and returned with the plate in its holder.
Ah, that was it then. A perfect explanation.
But no—
“Sir?” Joseph said.
“What kind of mischief are you playing at?”
“I don’t understand.”
“I prepared that glass myself,” Moody said. “With the picture of a child. I marked the glass in the corner, and I made sure to show you the mark. And when I developed the negative … the mark was there.”
“I assure you,” Joseph said, “I used the marked plate that you prepared. When the woman appeared, I thought that you had decided upon another spirit.”
“I did not put that woman on the plate!” Moody said.
“Nor did I!” Joseph protested.
Surely, if anyone had wanted to play a trick on Edward Moody, Joseph Winter was the man who could have done it. But there was something so different about this picture—something so frighteningly authentic about the image—that to Moody it seemed beyond even Joseph’s capabilities.
“Who is the woman?” Joseph asked. “You know who she is.”
And that’s when Moody saw the eagerness in Joseph’s eyes, an eagerness that Joseph could not conceal. Joseph Winter was no different from any of the others. They all wanted something—wanted some piece of Edward Moody. And the most disheartening part about it was that Edward Moody remained alone.
How was it that she had come back to him?
“She was—” Moody began.
But he stopped, because for the first time he realized what he had never wanted to know: if Isabelle had truly come back to him in this photograph, it would mean that she no longer walked amongst the living.
“She was the one I loved.”
There he was again, in the darkroom, where he had not been with her for more years than he could remember. He had wanted to forget that day. He wished that it had never happened. But he had done it, and the memory of it would never disappear.
She had been close to him, watching him, breathing upon him—she touched him. Her hand had touched him and his entire body had surged with irrepressible fire.
He was methodical—precise. Everything was under his control. Caressing the photographic preparations in the way that he knew she loved.
It had not been an accident. Her hands were on him.
She was sad.
“Isabelle—”
Her breast was heaving.
“Isabelle, what is the matter?”
He placed his hands upon her arms. Her body was also trembling. The amber light was very dull, and darkness was all around them.
“Edward,” she whispered. “I don’t know what to—”
The motion of her mouth … the way her lips swelled and moved. She was saying what he had been longing to hear. Her tears, the apprehension shining in her eyes, were all because of him. Because she loved him but could not say so.
His grip tightened, and he pulled her closer toward his body. And even then she did not resist him.
She barely whispered the words.
“No, Edward,” she said. “Please, no …”
For the first time he could not resist, and surrendered to what he knew he must do. A fevered pushing, a blinding moment of release. It would not take very long for her to forgive him.
But he would never forgive himself. The years would not bring forgiveness.
“We were young, with no hope for a future,” Moody said.
Joseph eyed Moody.
“And what happened to her?” Joseph asked.
“I don’t know,” Moody said. “She left.”
Silence followed that last word, as if the word itself had sent her away.
“This woman is a powerful spirit,” Joseph finally said. “But why did she leave? And where did she go?”
Moody did not answer. In that moment he hated Joseph Winter.
“Mr. Moody,” Joseph said, “I swear there is no trickery here. I coated the plate as you instructed, and verified the corner mark before I began. The plate was prepared as you prepared it—no other was in the rack. My belief is that something did not go wrong; rather, something went terribly right. Even with the damage, you can see that the woman in the photograph is truly … of the divine.”
She had become his, even after his transgression. It was a miracle that she had excused him. He had tried to erase the images—of his groping, of her slapping his face right after he had finished. But nothing about her or that day had ever really left him.
And now Joseph Winter dared to speak of the divine. Moody did not want to hear it.
“When I saw the image,” Joseph said, “I was convinced that you had placed a more powerful spirit there for the Garretts. She is a powerful spirit. Mrs. Garrett could not abide the sight of her. And the senator was unsteady.”
Then Moody turned toward Joseph.
“What are you saying?”
“The spirit,” Joseph said. “That spirit is the one they did not want to see.”
And then it became clear, what Joseph Winter was trying to say. But what Joseph Winter said was preposterous. The spirit in the photograph belonged to Moody—not the Garretts. Isabelle was Moody’s spirit.
“The senator was about to say something when Mrs. Garrett pulled him out of the room,” Joseph said. “She did not want him to speak, and it was evident. But the senator’s face—I can still see it now. The senator was defeated by the spirit.”
“I could not see anything else but the negative,” Moody said.
“The Garretts recognized that woman—I am sure of it,” Joseph said. “Did you not know her to be related to them in some way?”
Isabelle—related to the Garretts?
His Isabelle.
“I don’t know,” Moody said. “She did things … she was gone. I did not know what she did. She worked as a servant—in houses.”
“For the Garretts?”
“Perhaps. I did not know of the Garretts then.”
“Think,” Joseph said. “You must think back to the time you knew her. Is there any reason—any reason at all—why she might want to appear now with the Garretts?”
“No,” Moody said. “I can only think of why she would want to appear to me.”
As he admitted these words, Moody’s face darkened with his own disgust—disgust at what he had believed in all these years, and what he had chosen to forget. The great Edward Moody, the spirit photographer—yes, that was who he was. But he was also someone who had loved a long time ago, and who had died from the inevitability of loving. There was nothing that could change him, nothing that could challenge him—but that one thing, lost and forgotten. And in the confusion that was rapidly dismantling everything he believed in, only this much was clear to him now: this vision of Isabelle could not have been more real had he placed her in the photograph himself.