“All right.” He kisses me, helps me out of the carriage, and says, “I’ll see you tonight.”
CHAPTER 4
I take the train across the River Thames to Battersea and emerge from the station into a fog that’s much thicker and colder than in the East End. Battersea is on the bank of the river, engulfed by its moist breath and steam from the waterfront factories. The perpetual darkness of winter starts early here, and although it’s just past one o’clock in the afternoon, it looks as if twilight is descending. A horse-drawn omnibus materializes out of the smoke and fog, and I jump backward just in time to avoid being run over. Dodging porters with handcarts and men in sandwich boards, I make my way to the rank of cabs for hire.
A brief ride takes me to a public house named the Gladstone Arms. Signs on the front advertise Watney ales and rooms to let. I stroll up and down the busy thoroughfare, pretending to browse the shop windows. The grocer’s is stocked with barrels of apples for bobbing at Halloween parties and roasting on sticks over bonfires. I dawdle until I’m sure I don’t see anyone I know and nobody seems to recognize me. Then I dart along the alley to the back door of the Gladstone Arms. I slip in and tiptoe up the back stairs. On the second floor, I find closed doors along a dim passage. I knock on the door numbered 3. There’s no answer. I knock again and again while panic tightens my chest. Then I hear heavy footsteps on the stairs, I turn, and there stands my father, Benjamin Bain, a stocky man with white whiskers.
“Sarah.” His smile crinkles eyes narrowed from a lifetime of peering through a camera viewfinder. “I’m sorry—have you been waiting long? I went to the kitchen for some hot water.” He holds up a teakettle.
My body goes limp with relief. “No, I just arrived.”
One day when I was ten, he didn’t come home. He was just gone, without warning. My mother told me he’d been killed in a riot during a workers’ protest demonstration he’d organized. Two years ago I learned that he was still alive. Last month, after a harrowing search, I found him. Our reunion was a dream come true. Now I realize how afraid I am of losing him again.
He sees my thoughts on my face, his expression turns rueful, and he hugs me. “It’s all right. I’m here.”
He smells the same as I remember from childhood—clean, with a bitter tang of the photographic chemicals that have permanently discolored his hands. It recalls his gentleness and patience while he was teaching me photography, opening my eyes to the beauty and secrets of the visual world. As I embrace him, he feels solid, real. The memory of his love was a steadying force in my life after he disappeared. The knowledge that somebody had once cherished me helped me bear the many years when nobody did, until Hugh and Mick became my friends. When I let go of my father, I fight the impulse to hold on so he can’t vanish into thin air.
We go into his room, small and plainly furnished but clean. His suitcase stands at the foot of the bed, and a little table is set for tea, with cakes on a plate and a white rose in a glass.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t be at your wedding,” he says. “I wanted us to have a little celebration together.”
“How nice. Thank you.” I cherish his thoughtfulness because it’s proof of his love for me, which I crave even though I know he didn’t abandon me voluntarily. For more than twenty years I was haunted by my childhood belief that his disappearance was somehow my fault, but it’s been mere months since I learned the real circumstances.
The day before fourteen-year-old Ellen Casey was found dead at a road construction site, my father had photographed her in his studio at our home. The police later identified him as the last person to see her alive and decided he was guilty. When he disappeared, they assumed he’d run away to avoid arrest, conviction, and hanging. What really happened, according to him, is far different. He’d been in his darkroom in the basement when he heard Ellen screaming. He rushed upstairs to find her half-naked and strangled to death in the kitchen with my mother and her adult son, Lucas Zehnpfennig.
Lucas was the illegitimate child my mother had by a man whose identity I don’t know, before she married my father. I wasn’t aware of his relation to me until recently.
My father discovered that Lucas had raped Ellen and that my mother had killed her to stop her screaming. In the panic of the moment, he struck a terrible bargain with them: he would help them cover up the murder if Lucas agreed to leave England with him for good. He thought he could keep an eye on Lucas and protect other girls, including me, from harm.
He was wrong.
My mother consented, but Lucas went on to do more evil, and in her rage at losing the son she loved above all else, she wove a poisonous web of lies whose effects still cause me pain. I can’t confront her, because she died in 1875. And I’m not the only one who suffers.
Sally hurries into the room, breathless and radiant. “Sarah. Father.” She hugs and kisses him, as reluctant to let go as I was.
Eight years after my father left my mother and me, he came back to England and eventually remarried. Sally is his daughter by his second wife. Later, he disappeared on his second family too. Sally and I share a history of abandonment, of wondering why he left us, unjustly blaming ourselves, and praying for him to come back. She’s the only person of my acquaintance who also knows how it feels to reunite with a long-lost parent. On the ruins of the past, my sister and my father and I have built a new family, precious and fragile.
As we all take tea, Sally and I tell him about my wedding. He smiles sadly as we name the guests. He’s met none of them—not even Barrett, Hugh, and Mick, who are aware that I see him and know the basic facts of his history but nothing else. The fewer the people who know his whereabouts, the safer the secret. Sally and I meet him in obscure places far from the East End where he might be recognized. And there’s another reason I haven’t introduced him to his new son-in-law. Barrett is a policeman, and I can’t let him know the whereabouts of a fugitive. It would be a breach of duty for him not to turn my father in. I trust Barrett with my life, but I hesitate to trust him with my father’s. I know it’s unfair to Barrett, as he has no secrets from me.
“Mick took photographs,” Sally says. “Sarah will show you later.” By tacit agreement we don’t mention the murder, lest it spoil our precious time together.
“That reminds me.” My father goes to his suitcase, removes a cardboard folder, and hands it to me. “A wedding present.”
The folder contains an enlarged photograph of Sally and me. He took it a few weeks ago on the beach in Brighton, where he lives and works as a photographer, taking pictures of tourists. It’s the day I reunited Sally with him. The fact that we’re sisters is obvious; we’re both slender and fair, with angular faces. Sally, younger and prettier than I, beams at the camera while the ocean breeze whips tendrils of our ash-blond hair around our faces. My smile is tempered by my fear that it’s only a matter of time before Benjamin Bain is arrested and punished for the crimes my mother and Lucas committed.
“Thank you.” I kiss my father’s rough cheek. “I just wish you were in it.” I think of Charles Firth’s self-timer.
My father sighs. “Ah, well.”
It’s dangerous for him to appear in photographs, and for his daughters to possess photographs of him. They would be proof that he’s alive and we know where he is—evidence that we’re shielding a fugitive, that we’re accomplices after the fact of Ellen Casey’s murder. This portrait of Sally and me reminds me of spirit photographs I’ve seen. Our father seems more present in it than the ghosts that the charlatans claim to have captured with their cameras.