The night after Louis Daguerre lost his tooth at the observatory, he dreamed of his own death. He was a boy again, running along a beach. It was nighttime and the salt air pressed into his lungs as he ran. The sand was coarse against his bare feet. Something moved swiftly behind him, gaining. The beach tapered to a narrow sandy spit, and soon he sprinted across the shallows. A boat strung with yellow lights sailed for the horizon and he knew that he must swim towards it. It was safety. He plunged into the cold sea, into a great rushing darkness. He tumbled and raked in the blackness. Then everything slowed and shapes emerged; amorphous shadows loomed from the green depths. He struggled, called out, the salt water filling his lungs. Right at the moment when he felt his chest would burst, there came a release, an emptying. He felt himself rise. As he did so, the shapes receded and he could see the luminous stars magnified and blinking through the ocean’s surface, as if through a sheet of ice.
He woke coughing to find blood on his pillow—a chain of small red islands. Sitting up in bed, he looked across the room and thought, I’m dying. The injured dog was asleep at his feet, its breath slow and rasping. Daguerre took a sip of water. He looked around the room, disoriented. A flask of mercury stood on top of his dresser, though he could not remember putting it there. He reclined against his pillow and stared at it—five pounds of the liquid metal, glossed by the yellow of the gas streetlights. This had been his boon, the addition to two millennia of experimentation with fixing a permanent image using sunlight. And he had discovered it quite by accident. It was Divine Providence, the hand of God. He had been chosen to bring this invention to his era.
Once he had discovered the power of this metal as his fixing agent, he delved into its history and lore. He became a devotee, a reader of the epic poem of quicksilver. It was a monarch in the ordained tria prima of alchemy, brother to sulfur and sister to salt. It had been the secret furnace of tantric recipes in India, had been poured into the kernels of Italian hazelnuts to form amulets against bewitching. It was the gleaming polish rubbed onto the point of a Prussian plow to prevent the growth of thistles in a turned field. It was the deathly unguent infused into loaves of hard bread to locate drowned and trapped bodies in the British fens, the loaves sinking to dead men like their souls in reverse. This metal that would not yield to form, that resisted the clutch of the human hand and yet was absorbed by the skin upon touching. A gift from the cinnabar mines of Spain. A metallic sonnet, a love letter written by God and veined through the earth for millennia, fissured through slate and sandstone, waiting for its highest calling.
He looked at the flask and suspected that mercury played some role in the end of the world. Objects and liquids had secret lives. A bent flower or a shiny brass button was part of a larger conspiracy. Everything conferred, leaned in. The signs and portents were coming faster now. Birds were singing on his balcony in the middle of the night. He needed to find Isobel Le Fournier before the world expired.