This Golden Land (8 page)

     "We need keep him immobile only for fifteen minutes."

     "But how?" she said, looking down at the unconscious child. Donny's head rolled from side to side with the rocking of the ship. "The mayor of Bayfield had a photographic portrait taken, and the whole village turned out to watch. He had to sit with his head fixed into a clamp. The photographer said there must be absolutely no motion for the entire sitting."

     "I know," Neal said, rubbing his hands together, "but I'm wondering if we can immobilize Donny's head somehow, and then stabilize my camera so that when the ship rolls, the boy and the camera would roll synchronously. In essence, it would be as though there was no motion at all."

     But more importantly, Neal had to make sure of adequate sunlight. "Can the window in your cabin be secured open, Miss Conroy? Mine does not. The thing keeps crashing closed, and we will need ten minutes of sunlight to make a positive image from the negative."

     "Yes," she said, having no idea what he was talking about.

     "We shall have to move quickly."

     "Tell me what to do," she said.

     He knew they hadn't much time. The immigrants on the main deck were growing angrier by the moment. Shouts could be heard, threats. "I will fetch my equipment," Neal said.

     While Mr. Scott was gone, Hannah moistened her handkerchief and pressed it to Donny's lips. She looked at his pale face, the sweet features peaceful in repose. She knew that if he died, it would spark a bloody conflict on the
Caprica.

     Neal returned with his camera box and tripod, and he slipped into the small sickbay, leaving the door open. As he began to set up his equipment, he said, "Geologists have been sketching rock layers and formations for years, but
I
believe the new technology for capturing photographic images will revolutionize science. Geologists will be able to record precise details without possibility of error. That is why I was hired by the colonial office to help survey the western coast of Australia."

     With the ship dipping and creaking, Neal used ropes to immobilize the wooden box-camera on its tripod, tilting the lens downward at the child. To stop Donny's head rolling from side to side, Hannah removed a ribbon from her chignon and laid it on his forehead, firmly tying each end to the bed. She brushed Donny's bangs over the ribbon, and disguised the ends by bunching the sheet on either side. Hannah and Neal shared an unspoken worry as they worked quickly: What if this backfired? What if a photographic image of her child sent Mrs. Ritchie into such hysterics that the main deck became a bloody battlefield?

     As Neal secured the camera at the foot of the bed, he watched Hannah's slender body bend over the child, tenderly counting his pulse, studying his face, listening to his soft respirations. Hannah's hair had come loose at one side and streamed over her shoulder, giving her a disheveled look that was strangely erotic.

     Stepping past Hannah, Neal lifted the horizontal glass pane in the port hole, flipping it up so that daylight streamed into the cabin. He looked at Hannah. She nodded. They were as ready as they were going to be.

     From Neal's supply of photographic paper, prepared by himself back in London and stored under his bunk in his cabin, he had retrieved one sheet and painted it with gallic acid and nitrate, and fixed it in a wooden frame which he now slid into place at the back of the large box camera. Shifting the back of the camera to and fro until he saw Donny's image come into focus in the view finder, Neal removed the brass lens cap and looked at his pocket watch. The exposure would need fifteen minutes.

     While Neal studied the watch, Hannah kept her eyes on Donny. She prayed she was not making a mistake. Was fifteen minutes too long to let him go without water? She realized she was frightened. And the silence in the narrow cabin only served to heighten her fear. She looked up at Neal Scott, who studied his timepiece. "You must be very close to your own mother," she said.

     He snapped his head up. "I beg your pardon?"

     "To go to such trouble to comfort Mrs. Ritchie. You said it was something she had said . . . I thought perhaps she had reminded you of your own mother."

     He stared at her. He felt the ship creak and groan around him, rock gently from side to side as minute by minute Donny's features were captured inside the box. Neal wondered if he dared tell Miss Conroy the truth.
If I had told Annabelle sooner, would things have gone differently?

     Had Annabelle known the truth ahead of time, before Neal asked for her hand, she would not have flung his engagement ring at him, her father would not have brought a lawsuit against him for breech of promise and defamation of his daughter's character, and the whole ugly mess that had brought shame and embarrassment to Neal's protector, Josiah Scott, would never have happened.

     He looked at Hannah, sitting on the floor next to Donny's bed, looking up at him with an open expression, those nacreous eyes framed by dark lashes and finely shaped eyebrows—

     Suddenly it was very important to Neal that Miss Conroy knew the truth. "I am not close to my mother, Miss Conroy," he replied. "I don't even know who my mother was. You see, I was a foundling."

     He allowed a moment for it to sink in, a moment in which Miss Conroy could adjust to the fact that he had just told her in polite terms that he was a bastard.

     "I see," she said softly.

     Neal returned his attention to the face of his pocket watch. "Twenty-five years ago, a young lawyer named Josiah Scott came home from his Boston law office to find a cradle on his doorstep. It was made of oak, very nicely crafted, with a hood. I was a few days old, wrapped in a white satin christening gown edged in pearl-beaded lace. There was a note, asking Josiah Scott to place me with a good family. But Josiah Scott kept me, thinking that whoever had left me might have a change of heart and come back. But weeks, and then months went by and no one came for me, and in that time Josiah Scott grew fond of me. He kept me and raised me, and then he adopted me, giving me his name."

     Neal lifted his eyes from the watch face and said, "I was lucky. Josiah Scott is a kind and decent man. He never married. It was just he and I. We have had a good life together." As Neal studied the sweeping hand tick away the seconds, he thought of the chemically treated paper coming to life
within the camera, and of a young unmarried lawyer with an infant suddenly on his hands.

     "Did you ever find out," Hannah began and then stopped, realizing she was prying.

     Neal did not mind talking about it. "I thought of searching for my real parents. But they left no clues, and I took this to mean that they did not wish for me to find them. Besides, I had no idea how I would even begin such a search, and now it's been twenty-five years."

     "So you do not know if you have brothers and sisters?"

     "No idea." He cleared his throat and looked at her. "What about you, Miss Conroy? Do you have siblings?"

     "My older brother and two younger sisters died in a diphtheria epidemic. Now both my parents are gone and I am alone in the world."

     There eyes met in the dim confines of the cabin. "As am I," Neal said softly.

     And then, remembering himself, he returned to marking the time.

     The sweep hand ticked off the seconds as the
Caprica
rolled and groaned along its course. Sounds from the rigging—clanking, snapping—drifted through the open window. Heavy footfall thudded on the deck above. Neal kept his eyes on the watch. Two minutes to go. He thought of the angry immigrants lined up against the
Caprica
's crew, while Hannah watched Donny's face, his chapped lips, wondering if this had been a mistake. The little boy desperately needed water.

     "You know, Miss Conroy," Neal said, wondering why he felt the need to explain such things to her, "in a way I am a very fortunate man."

     "How so, Mr. Scott?"

     "Most men are born into a predetermined station in life. There are expectations of them at the moment of their birth and few can break from that mold. But I was born free of those societal and familial fetters. Josiah Scott raised me to be anything I wished. When the day came in which I declared my desire to go away to university and study science, he did not forbid it on the usual grounds—that I had to follow in the family business, or join him in his law practice. And when I told him I wished to come to Australia and explore this new continent, he did not say to me whatever young men
are told to discourage them from answering the call of wanderlust. In fact, he gave me his blessing. There! That will do it!" Neal said as he snapped his watch closed and replaced the brass lens cap on the camera. "Now we must hurry."

     Quickly dismantling the apparatus, Neal silently exited the sick bay and returned to his cabin.

     Hannah retrieved her ribbon, tied her hair back, then revived Donny with the smelling salts. He took a few more sips of water this time, and seemed to remain conscious a little longer. Making sure Donny was secure in the bunk, comfortable and dry, she went to her cabin to clear space and fix her porthole window open, as Mr. Scott had requested.

     Working in the semi-darkness of his own cabin, Neal donned protective attire, then he removed the fine, semi-transparent paper that had captured the image of Donny Ritchie and dipped it into a solution of potassium bromide to stabilize it. Next he pressed the sheet into a glass frame that contained a stronger, light-sensitive paper and brought it into Hannah's cabin where he exposed the framed papers to the sunlight streaming through the porthole. This would require ten minutes.

     Hannah stared at Neal as he situated the glass frame on top of her trunk, where the light was the strongest. He wore goggles, rubber gloves and a rubber apron. When he saw how she looked at him, he said, "The chemicals used in the developing process can be quite harmful, dangerous in fact."

     When the exposure was done, Neal picked up the frame and hurried back to his cabin. Hannah said she must return to Donny and that she would await the results.

     With his cabin door shut against the outer light, Neal rinsed the positive print in water, applied a coat of gallic acid and silver nitrate, and then dipped it into a bath of sodium hyposulfite. When he was finished, he removed his goggles and gloves, gently dried the new photograph and lifted the stained glass pane of his porthole, holding it open to admit light. He stared at the astonishing image in his hand.

     It was perfect.

     Neal studied the details from an objective point of view, satisfied with the balance of shadow and light, pleased that there was no clouding and
very little grainy effect. And then he took it down the corridor to the sickbay, where he found Miss Conroy once again giving Donny small sips of water. When she was done, she rose to her feet and gave him an expectant look.

     He handed her the photograph. "What do you think, Miss Conroy?"

     She stared at the picture, her eyes wide. "Mr. Scott," she said in a whisper. "This is a miracle."

     He smiled. "It
is
rather a good image."

     "A good image," she said, her gray eyes filled with wonder. "Mr. Scott, this is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. I had no idea . . . The boy looks so peaceful. One would not guess that he was so dreadfully ill. Oh Mr. Scott, you have worked a miracle!"

     Neal had thought of it as a basic scientific experiment with nothing miraculous about it. But when he looked at the image of Donny Ritchie again, he saw what Miss Conroy saw: an angelic little face, eyes closed in peaceful slumber, boyish hair combed down on his forehead. Because the calotype photographic process didn't produce the sharp focus that Daguerre's process did, Donny Ritchie lay in a soft glow, the edges blurred so that it almost appeared as if he floated on a cloud. The ragged sweater did not look torn and threadbare, but soft and woolly like a lamb's coat.

     "It's wonderful, Mr. Scott!" Hannah said and he was taken aback by her sudden smile, the glow on her features. His heart rose to his throat. Her pleasure washed over him like a sweet rain and he realized he was experiencing genuine happiness for the first time in ages.

     Suddenly they heard a commotion on the deck. Mr. Simms, the cabin steward, materialized in the outer corridor, to inform Neal and Hannah that Mrs. Ritchie had become so hysterical that some of the immigrants had brought her topside and had made a bed for her on the deck. But her wails were agitating the immigrants all the more. "Captain's distributed weapons to all the men, myself included, sir, and I've never fired a pistol in my life!"

     "Our timing couldn't be better," Neal said to Hannah. "Shall we show this photograph to Mrs. Ritchie?"

     "Oh yes! But you go. It's your miracle, Mr. Scott. I will stay with Donny."

     Two sailors on the quarterdeck tried to block Neal's way, for his own protection they said. But down the stairs to the main deck he went, through
the crowd to where Captain Llewellyn faced a knot of angry men.

     "Stand down, you lot, or I'll lock you all in irons."

     "Can't lock up over two hundred of us," came the growled reply, and the immigrants curled their hands into fists. "We want to know what you're going to do about the contagion."

     "Captain," Neal said.

     "This is no place for you, Mr. Scott."

     Neal found where Mrs. Ritchie had been laid, and he knelt next to her, holding the photograph up for her to see. Everyone fell silent as they wondered what the gentleman was up to.

     They saw Agnes wipe her eyes and frown at the piece of paper that looked like it had a picture of some sort on it. They saw her squint at it, and then look more closely, her expression turning to one of puzzlement. They saw her blink. Her mouth opened. Her eyes widened. And then they saw all the lines and shadows vanish from her face. "Why . . ." she said in a whisper, reaching for the photograph and bringing it closer. "It's my Donny." She looked at Neal in wonder. "How did you do this, sir?"