Isobel and Chloe restored Louis Daguerre one sense at a time. They filled the room with aromatic herbs, linden blossoms, gingerroot. Isobel rested poultices of arnica and rainwater on the wound. They washed him, shaved his face with a straight razor and a paste of soap and aloe. During his convalescing sleep, the mercury damp lessened in his lungs. They massaged his body with rose oil, not the entire body but the arms, legs, and torso, to keep them supple. Isobel recognized his flat hairless chest, his thin arms and looped shoulders. But despite this corporeal ease, neither she nor Chloe could bring themselves to clean his genitals. They cleared the bedpans without looking. Then, at the end of the third day, they sent for the town doctor. He arrived, gouty with the weather and bundled in a fur hat. He criticized Isobel’s stitches as “cross-stitching where loose thread would suffice” and left a phial of smelling salts by the bed. “Use these in case he doesn’t wake up by tomorrow,” he said, latching his leather bag.
“There is one thing more,” said Isobel. She looked over at her daughter, who was looking down at the floorboards.
“What is it?” the doctor said.
“He needs his manly parts cleaned, and neither of us will do it.”
The doctor scowled, his day ruined. He instructed the women to provide him with cold water and a cloth and leave the room.
“Cold?” asked Isobel.
“The man will not die from being bathed with brisk water. It may even help invigorate him.”
“Very well,” said Isobel. She fetched a pan of well water and some torn cloth. After handing it to the doctor, she left the room and closed the door behind her. She and Chloe stood in the hallway, waiting.
The doctor emerged a short time later and said, “Rest assured, ladies, your man is clean.” He left his invoice on a lamp table in the hallway and walked out into the blustery day.
Under Isobel and Chloe’s aromatic care, Louis Daguerre slept the sleep of the dead. The world had not ended, but it was full of turmoil. In Paris fifteen hundred battlements had sprung up overnight. The air smelled of tar smoke and gunpowder. Peasants read petitions atop bronze statues. The National Guard had defected. King Louis-Philippe had been ousted. Revolution spread through Europe like apple blight—Vienna, Venice, Berlin, Prague, Rome. Monuments toppled and the foundries gave over to the manufacture of guns. Louis Daguerre slept, oblivious to what had started.
When he woke on the fourth day, he smelled lavender-scented water and thought for several moments that this was the fragrance of heaven. He lay in a feather bed, beneath a down quilt, his face perspiring. He could hear the sound of women’s voices outside the window. Sitting up in bed, he pushed his covers down and immediately became aware of a gripping pain in his back. He put his right hand to it and felt a corrugated welt. With one hand at the bedpost, he set his feet onto the floor and stood. He ambled towards the window and saw, out in a sodden field, a woman chopping wood while another woman placed the cut logs into a basket. He watched the older woman raise the full-length ax over her head and arc it towards a piece of gnarled oak. The younger woman stood by with her hands on her hips. Something about the way the younger woman moved, some physical certitude, made Louis recall Pigeon’s rooftop portrait, then her name, and finally that the woman standing with the ax was the very person who had ruled his mind for half a century.
“Isobel,” he said, one hand against the windowpane.
After another moment he tapped on the glass, and both women looked up at him. He couldn’t make out what they were saying, but Isobel dropped the ax and they both rushed towards the house. He saw them move, through the warped perspective of the mottled glass, as if underwater. Isobel stopped short of the house and looked up at him. Something moved between them in that short distance of chilled air and glass. Their eyes locked for a fraction of a second, in the interval it takes to haul another human being out of the broth of memory.
The women ran into the room while Louis continued looking out the window.
He heard them come up behind him, and before seeing Isobel up close, he could smell the camphor liniment, the herbage of her skin. He turned slowly and looked into her jade-colored eyes. Her face had aged, but there was something unchanged about her countenance; it had retained the sulky insolence of youth. She was not sullied by time so much as etched deeper into a more resolute version of herself. He would have recognized her instantly in the street. Now he realized those recent sightings in Paris were encounters with phantoms, shards of someone else’s life. He was staring and making her self-conscious. He looked down at his shoes and then at the floorboards.
Isobel came forward and embraced him. Her hands touched the back of his shoulders. He closed his eyes; her smell was all around him.
After a moment he said, “Are we all dead?”
She released him and stepped back to take him in.
He saw a flurry of images from the night of the shooting, the magnesium flare of musket fire.
Isobel said, “You were shot.”
“Angels,” Louis said.
“He’s delirious,” Isobel murmured to Chloe.
“A peasant on horseback,” Chloe offered.
Louis crossed to the window and looked for signs of the post-apocalyptic order. A plume of smoke rose from a distant house, but nothing suggested carnage. “Are we spared?”
“They’re going to get rid of the king forever. That much looks certain,” said Isobel.
“A reprieve, perhaps,” said Louis.
“Have some water.” Isobel poured him a glass from the jug. He drank it and asked for another. The water tasted soft and artesian, as if from a mineral well.
“I’m very thirsty,” he said.
There were still glasses of water to be drunk.
“How long have I been asleep?” Louis asked.
“This is the fourth day,” said Chloe.
“We were about to resort to the smelling salts,” said Isobel, a note of humor in her voice.
Louis looked down at his hands, at their blunt existence. What happened to the righteous fury? Something hooked in his chest and he heaved a mercurial cough. He saw flashes of silver in his peripheral vision. He doubled over and held on to the windowsill.
“Oh, dear,” said Isobel, putting a hand on his shoulder. He waved her away and regretted it before his hand had left his side. He’d waited a lifetime for the touch of that hand.
To take away some of the sting, he said, “I’m an old man. I’ve had this cough for years.”
Isobel stood with her hands in front of her. Louis could see in her eyes that he was a patient, not a man.
“You’re not that old,” said Chloe. “I’ll fetch some food. You must be starving.” She left the room, leaving her mother just a few feet from the love of her youth. Louis rested his eyes on Isobel’s. He felt another undulation of pain. He reached a hand around to the wound.
“I appear to be alive,” he said.
“You will take some time to heal. You should lie back down while we get your food ready.”
Louis edged back towards the bed and sat. Isobel smoothed her skirt, then turned for the door.
Louis, suddenly very weary, reclined against the feather pillows. They smelled of illness, of night sweats. The pain throbbed in his knuckles and shins, bright and pure. There was a hollow feeling in his stomach, a bronzed taste in his mouth. Outside, a horse whinnied; the wind blew under the eaves. The thought tapped, relentless and inexplicable: The world has not ended.