Chapter 24
Her first attempt at photography in the village school the next day was discouraging, a disaster, a chagrin. Mr. Wright explained the camera’s different movements to her, but he used a lot of terms she had never heard before, and she barely got to touch the camera, for he kept doing everything himself. The children of Heather Row, among them little Anne, sat patiently when she first tried to immortalize them on a gelatin plate, but the image on the focusing screen was very dim and upside down, and by the time she had found her bearings, the children were bored and moving. When Mr. Wright suggested she practice on an inanimate object for a few weeks and learn the theory behind dry-plate emulsions, she fled. The children liked her much better without a dark cloth over her head and ran alongside her on her way back to the inn. Anne insisted on putting her small hand in hers, and Hattie felt strangely guilty for not having brought any boiled candy. “I shall be back tomorrow, and bring some toffees,” she told the girl when the Drover’s was in full view. “Will you sit for me again?” Anne regarded her with serious blue eyes, giving no indication whether she had understood, but then she nodded. She gave Hattie’s brown wool skirt a covert little stroke and dashed after her friends back toward the village, her braids bouncing on her small shoulders.
Hattie lingered on the path, breathing in the sweet scent of heather and coal, and wondering whether the idea forming at the back of her mind since leaving the St. Andrews camera shop was genius or deluded tosh.
Lucian was in their room, in the armchair, using the evening light to read the book he’d been reading on the train the day before. At her entry, he raised his eyes from the page immediately and his gaze swept over her. She raised a hand to her hair—the dark cloth had left a strange smell on her skin and disheveled her coiffure.
“What are you reading?” she asked, strolling closer while pretending nonchalance.
Lucian had shed both his jacket and his waistcoat and looked rakish, sprawled in the chair with his braces on display.
He closed the book and put it aside on the windowsill. “Something on peat.”
Sounded boring. “And how was your inspection of the shafts?” The map of the mine’s bowels—tunnels, pits, drainage channels, and ventilation shafts—was spread on the table, a vital piece in Drummuir’s safety plan as well as a tool for gauging the remaining yield.
Lucian’s gaze narrowed. “Is there something you want?”
She clasped her hands before her. “I had an idea.”
His mouth quirked, but not in a mean way, and so she continued. “I would like to take artistic portraits of the people of Drummuir, in addition to functional ones.”
“What for?”
She pulled a chair away from the table and sat down with a sigh of relief. “I have a documentary in mind. An artistic exhibition—to raise awareness in London. All proceeds of tickets and pieces sold would fully be passed on to Drummuir.”
“Awareness,” he drawled. “An artsy documentary … Love, in case it’s slipped your attention, this is the time of the Decadents. People want to read and look at beauty, sensuality, pretty things. Life’s too grim for art to be grim, even for those higher up on the ladder.”
“It’s the right thing to do,” she said firmly. “I feel it in my belly.”
“Ah,” he said. “How was your first lesson?”
She hung her head and rubbed her temples. “Horrid.”
“So naturally it made you want to do more of it, and to critical acclaim no less.”
The lesson hadn’t made her want to do it. Feeling Anne’s small hand in hers had. Seeing Rosie Fraser in her Sunday finery, easily confused with any other respectable matron in the city.
“I know nothing,” she said.
Lucian’s expression was a careful blank.
She gave him a sullen look. “Mr. Wright tried his best, but he has a way of making it all sound dreadfully complicated—he lectured about focal point calculation for thirty minutes, and I nearly cried with frustration because I don’t want to invent new cameras, nor build them myself. I just want to use them.”
Lucian shrugged. “He’s an engineer.”
“But I am an artist. And I require a teacher who understands my artistic ambitions, and then offers the technical solutions.”
“If you find him impossible, we’ll find you someone from London.”
That was her next problem. “I don’t have enough time in any case,” she said. “Delusional of me to think I could manage it in three days’ time.”