SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Whitechapel, London

“What exactly…is that?” Madame Magnin eyed the device lying on the table before her.

“A camera lucida ,” said John Foxx.

Magnin inclined her head slightly, raising her eyebrows.

“Ah,” said Foxx. “It’s an optical device, you see. For drawing. This small prism here, atop this stem, it projects an image of whatever is before it downward upon a flat surface. Then the image can be traced.”

Magnin blinked.

“On paper.”

She blinked again.

“By me. I’m an artist, you see.”

Foxx was already uncomfortable in the tiny room, with its sagging ceiling and yellowed, peeling wallpaper. A séance! A fool’s errand more likely, and a costly one at that.

But it was what Harriet had asked of him.

“You set it up like this,” Foxx said, assuming an explanation might help the medium with whatever it was she was going to do. He stood the device upright on the velvet-covered table, its spindly shadow scattered different directions by the candles guttering in tarnished sconces. Small and portable, around ten inches high, the camera lucida was nothing more than a thin brass rod with a flat, stable base at the bottom and a prism affixed to the top. Both the base and the prism were attached to the rod by hinges so they could be adjusted to different angles, allowing the prism to be positioned beneath the user’s eyes, which Foxx now did.

“As I adjust the prism to the proper angle and look down with my right eye, just so, past the edge of the prism, an image of whatever is in front of me—which currently is you, sitting across the table—is reflected downward onto the surface of the table. If I had my paper and pencils, well, I could simply trace the image on the paper, making a perfect copy. Of you, right now as we sit here. Or St. Paul’s cathedral if I were sitting on a bench in New Change street. Or Parliament—”

Madame suddenly waved her hands in front of her face and turned away. “Please! Not my image…my spirit. Please, no images.”

“Of course, I’m sorry. I only meant to demonstrate…” Foxx trailed off, returning the camera lucida to the middle of the table and laying it on its side.

The room smelled of sweat and smoke and, faintly, of gin. Perhaps Madame Magnin managed a quick tipple before his appointment. It would hardly have surprised him.

“And your woman, this was hers? She could use this?” The medium was skeptical. “Remember, I require an object that was hers . Perhaps you have a handkerchief…?”

“We shared the camera lucida ,” Foxx replied. “Harriet was quite competent with it. I…I have nothing else of hers.” This last admission pained him. Harriet had scrimped to buy him the camera lucida as a wedding gift — selling many of her own personal effects — so he could sketch landscapes, which he would later use as studies for landscape paintings.

Someday. When they could afford a studio. And paint.

Magnin sighed. “Then it will have to do. Come, place your hands in mine. We begin. Now, what questions do you have for your Harriet?”

“I have only one.”

“Ah, of course. ‘Are you with the Lord?’ That is the first—”

“No.”

“‘Are you in heaven?’ That’s very much the same.”

“No, um—”

“‘Are you well? Are you lonely? Have you located grandpa and Aunt Bertie?’”

“No, I—”

Then she smiled, winking. “Ah! Of course. ‘Are your carnal desires—’”

“No!” exclaimed Foxx, red faced.

“What then? What is it you wish to ask of your departed Harriet?”

“I…I…” he stammered, disbelieving his own words even as he spoke them. “I want to know if she’s ready to go to Italy.”

The coach to Dover was bumpy and cold, a mail wagon and a poorly maintained one at that. With what little money he’d had left it was all he could afford, wanting to save what he could for his not-so-Grand Tour.

He bought passage on a paddle steamer to Calais. It was a postal ship, and he transferred to it along with the mail from the coach like so much portage. At sea, Foxx was left to fend for himself on the shelterless deck as the little craft struggled across the heaving waves of the English Channel. A cold, miserable passage.

Paris, of course, was denied him. That great city was the traditional first stop of any Grand Tour itinerary, where wealthy English travelers would begin their cultural holiday polishing their French, touring the Louvre, maybe learning how to fence or dance. But Foxx had neither the money nor the time for that kind of dalliance. He was bound for Italy, and directly.

So he spent his three hours in Paris, between his arrival and departure, negotiating for sour wine, day old-bread, and hardened cheese. Fare for the rest of his journey.

It wasn’t until he was on the overland coach through southern France that he reflected on what had happened during the séance. He had heard those rituals were supposed to involve spinning tables and ghostly knocking. But his had not. Perhaps he had been shortchanged?

Madame Magnin had gone into a trance, swaying and muttering, and after only a few minutes sat bolt upright, her dark skin suddenly pale, and blurted out, “Yes! Your Harriet said yes. And…” the medium seemed as if she were trying to recall a dream “…she says you must bring… that .”

She pointed a crooked finger at the camera lucida . Foxx glanced at it and noticed it was, unaccountably, standing upright. He was sure he had laid it on its side.

But that could be easily explained. A sleight of Magnin’s hand. A parlor trick for dramatic effect. Easy to accomplish in the darkness with his attention directed elsewhere.

And that was the entirety of the affair. Madame waved him away, declaring the séance over. “Her spirit is strong, Mr. Foxx. Take your seeing device and go.” Foxx felt the medium watching his every move as he folded the base and prism of the camera lucida inward on their hinges—collapsing the apparatus so that it was barely longer than his own hand—and placed it into its small, cloth-lined wooden carrying case. Then he slipped the case into his coat pocket and was back out in the street.

What had he expected? It was all nonsense, and dramatic nonsense at that. Magnin, whose shop was little more than a closet tucked down some nameless Whitechapel alley, had been recommended not because of her reputation for conducting effective séances but because of her reputation for conducting them inexpensively.

Foxx was convinced she was a crackpot.

But Harriet had been so adamant that he try to contact her before he left for Italy. To let her know he was ready to go. The séance had been Harriet’s wish; she had left him money for it, and so he had obliged.

Money wasted, he was sure. Harriet left him all she had, but it wasn’t much, the small remainder of her job teaching history and classics at a school for well-to-do girls.

“You will be a fine artist, John!” she had told him, and not because she was naïve and in love. No. She had an eye for art, although history was her passion, and after all Foxx had trained at the Royal Academy. That’s where they had met, one day when she was touring a new exhibition with her students and he was painting in one of the nearby galleries.

They fell in love, and married.

Their dream was to take the Grand Tour through Italy, that rite of passage that any member of the nobility or landed gentry undertook in the pursuit of the art and culture of Western civilization.

But they were commoners, with only her meager salary and his occasional commission—

a portrait here and there. They would have to consider themselves fortunate to spend a month abroad, maybe two, so Foxx could visit the home of the Renaissance masters, see their works first hand, study their techniques, sketch the landscapes. And then he and Harriet would return to England, penniless but happy, and start their lives.