appeared to be leaking. She raised the lid to find one bottle dislodged from its compartment but mercifully undamaged. She had less luck in her plate storage box. Two glass plates of the Church had been cracked diagonally. The scenes would certainly have to be taken again. And here she would stay until they and several others were perfected, ignorant savages or no ignorant savages.
She turned her attention to the camera tripod. The injured leg was the result of the iron ferrule driving up into the wood. Any weight on it would widen the crack.
When water had been brought and she had washed and tidied herself, Bronwen went downstairs. There was nobody about, but she did not trouble to ring the handbell on the bureau. After so many explorations of the village she remembered her way round well enough.
It took only a few minutes to find the carpenter’s shop in West Lane. The sagging fence and the gate yawing on its hinges were no great advertisement for the craftsmanship of the occupant; but from the shed came the pleasing tang of newly sawn wood, and through the gaps in the planking she saw the gleam of yellow deal.
An elderly man within was completing work on a coffin.
When Bronwen pulled the door back he looked up and froze, then began to tap the end of his screwdriver on the lid.
‘I wonder if you could repair a camera tripod for me? One of the legs has split.’
‘That has?’ A shrug, a shake of the head. ‘Got my hands full right now.’
‘I don’t believe it would take long. Even if you could manage only a temporary repair, to keep me going while I’m here, it would be a help.’
He lowered his gaze and contemplated the coffin. ‘I’m likely to be asked for another one. Got to get this finished, and then there’s the talk of me having to do another one this next couple of days.’ His head went on one side, sly and accusing.
‘If it isn’t repaired,’ Bronwen persisted, ‘my work here will take me a lot longer.’
That seemed to strike home. ‘Well, I’d have to see it first.’
‘I’ll bring it round. I do assure you, it’s a fairly simple job.’
‘That do depend.’
‘If I go back and fetch it now—’
‘Leave it till tomorrow art’noon, then.’ He beat out a slow tattoo on the woodwork.
She left before he could change his mind. The light on the church, as she crossed the square, was just right for a picture. Now was as good a time as any to attempt a replacement of those cracked plates and at the same time to check that the camera itself was undamaged. She paced round the edge of the green in search of the best vantage point, and a solid base for the camera.
Of course. The lower platform of the pillory. The camera would need only the slightest tilting to take in the whole church tower, and the rising lens devised by her father would prevent vertical distortion. Bronwen went back into The Griffin and fetched the bulky box and cloth of her portable darkroom. When she had propped it against the pillory she went back again for the camera, glancing twice from her window to make sure that nobody was meddling with the equipment on the green.
In the hall as she came down this time, Dr. Caspian was talking to the barmaid, a plump girl with milky complexion and lips gone slightly sour—lips which now pouted and promised, under the spell of the slim, tall man and his extravagant presence.
‘Them footsteps, sir? Well, they do wholly puzzle every one of us. But we reckon it’s best to say nothing and let ’em go away.’
‘You can tell me exactly where I may observe this manifestation, Leah?’
He spoke her name as if he had been speaking it intimately for years. She swayed enticingly towards him and giggled. ‘Fancy someone coming all this way from London just because of old Josh Serpell’s maunderings!’ She edged herself closer to Caspian and, at the door, took his arm and leaned her left breast against him. ‘Your best way, sir’—her face was turned up to his—‘is turn left outside here...if you could wait till later...wanted me to show you the way....’
Bronwen swept past them and across the cobbles and grass to the pillory.
She balanced the camera carefully and established that she could achieve quite an agreeable composition. Satisfied on this score, she set up the equipment box on its stand, shook out the folds of lightproof cloth, and slid aside the flap of the red-tinted window. Wriggling under the cloth until it was draped over her head and shoulders and down to her hips, she prepared the collodion coating for a plate, and then transferred the plate-holder to the camera. Again she ducked under a cloth, and groped forward to adjust the focus.
Upside down, hanging beside the church tower like a bat hanging by its feet, Dr. Caspian swam into view with one hand on his cane, the other raised to doff his hat. Bromven was about to shout and wave him aside. But the plate was ready. Dr. Caspian’s exaggerated pose before the tower was as good a test piece as any, and she wanted to waste no more time. She pressed the bulb.
As she took the exposed plate quickly back to the tent, Caspian observed: ‘A somewhat outmoded technique, surely? I understood the day of the wet plate was past.’
‘Dry plates do not produce results of the same quality. Useful when one is moving about, but not for serious studies. My father refused ever to work with them.’
‘Ah. I am told Charles Lutwidge Dodgson recently gave up photography altogether for similar reasons.’
‘Besides,’ said Bronwen, plunging back into her dark-tent, ‘one can check one’s results in a matter of minutes.’
Most important if you could not be sure of returning to a site to rectify mistakes. And once she had left this surly place, she doubted if she would wish ever to return.
Carefully she poured on the solution of acetic and pyrogallic acid, and slid the plate into its hypo bath. Now, as on so many occasions since his death, she could almost believe that her father was still at her shoulder fussing, squeezing in under the cloth, or grunting a ‘Hm, hm’ outside, and a ‘You’ll lose it if you don’t look lively’, or at most a ‘Well, I’ve seen worse, mm, yes.’
The picture clarified. She was glad her father was not there to see the final result. The tower was as she would have wished it, Dr. Caspian emerged strong and clear, just as he himself would have commanded it. But between him and the tower, a peculiar shadow swirled and thickened, darkening into a cap above the darkness of his head. It was vexing. And more than that. Even in the negative form, where white was black and black was white, she was disturbed by the grimace of that faceless shape behind Caspian’s shoulder—something warped and violent, some hint of predatory lips and menacing talons.
‘You let some light in,’ her father would have chided her. ‘Isn’t that it, mm? Or someone crossed the green and you didn’t even notice.’
* * * *
Meredith Powys had been a Caernarvon architect who discovered early in the experimental days of photography the advantages of showing prints of existing buildings to his clients when explaining his own plans. He also, for his own satisfaction, amassed a collection of pictures of his native Wales, and in due course ventured across the borders. Unlike so many of his contemporaries he was horrified by the demolition which went on in the name of industrial progress: several
