Full passage
Von Rehberg glanced at her. ‘An instrument that allows light to draw.’
Morozov closed his eyes. ‘He has begun speaking like a poet. This will be expensive.’
‘Not draw as an artist draws,’ von Rehberg said. ‘Light does not invent. It touches. It alters. It leaves evidence.’
Rory looked at the lens.
‘On what?’
‘That,’ von Rehberg said, ‘is the difficulty.’
The rear workshop had once stored imported tools. Within a month, it contained black cloth, brass frames, boxes, lenses, jars, trays, charcoal burners, prepared plates, silver compounds, acids, resins, varnishes, and enough conflicting smells to alarm every servant in the house.
Anfisa refused to enter.
‘He will poison us,’ she announced from the doorway.
Von Rehberg, bent over a glass plate, said, ‘Only through gross carelessness.’
‘Whose?’
He looked up. ‘That is difficult to predict.’
Anfisa crossed herself and informed Rory that when the explosion came, she would not provide supper to the survivors.
Rory’s first task was translation.
Von Rehberg had gathered French reports, German papers, private letters from experimenters in Vienna, Dresden and Paris, older discussions of camera obscura, notes on silver salts darkening under light, and speculative chemical procedures written by men who either concealed essential steps or had never performed them successfully.
Some documents described fleeting images that could be seen but not retained. Others described silhouettes. Several contradicted themselves. One French correspondent claimed to have held an image for nearly an hour before it blackened completely. A German chemist insisted that a treated surface might preserve light if the unaltered material could somehow be removed or made insensitive afterwards.
‘Fix it,’ von Rehberg said, stabbing the line with one stained finger.
‘That is what the letter says.’
‘No. He says stabilise. That is not the same thought.’
‘In this context, it may be.’
‘It may be the difference between an image and a stain.’
Rory translated again.
The work was unlike commercial correspondence. Scientific words did not merely cross languages; they altered beneath them. Terms used confidently in French had no exact German counterpart. Russian scientific vocabulary borrowed from both and obeyed neither. Rory began keeping parallel lists: light, surface, exposure, shadow, silver, vapour, plate, lens, impression, trace.
Anna found the lists.
She was thirteen then, slender and serious, with charcoal often embedded beneath her fingernails and a habit of standing so still that adults forgot she was listening.
‘What is a light-drawing?’ she asked.
Rory looked up from the desk. ‘Your mother has been speaking to you.’
‘Doctor von Rehberg was shouting in the courtyard.’
‘That is another possibility.’
‘Can light draw?’
‘He believes it can leave marks.’
‘Light leaves shadows.’
‘Only until it moves.’
Anna frowned. ‘Perhaps the shadow moves because there is nowhere for it to stay.’
Rory set down his pen.
‘That sounds like something von Rehberg would say before asking for money.’
‘May I see?’
‘The workshop is dangerous.’
‘So is the kitchen when Anfisa is angry.’
‘That does not make either suitable for children.’
‘I am thirteen.’
‘Exactly.’
She looked at him with Ekaterina’s gift for turning silence into accusation.
‘Ask your mother,’ Rory said.
‘I did.’
‘And?’
‘She said to ask you.’
He found Ekaterina in the family room and accused her of strategic cowardice.
‘I said she might observe if you judged the chemicals safe,’ Ekaterina replied. ‘They are not safe.’
‘Then she observes from the doorway.’
‘Von Rehberg will encourage her.’
‘Anna is not easily encouraged. She decides.’
‘That is what concerns me.’
Ekaterina smiled. ‘You wanted children who could carry two histories. You cannot now complain that they have minds.’
‘I can complain about anything. Morozov taught me.’
Anna began visiting the workshop under rules she accepted in theory and negotiated in practice. She touched nothing without permission. She remained behind a marked line when volatile preparations were in use. She listened to von Rehberg’s explanations, which wandered across optics, chemistry, anatomy, philosophy, weather and personal grievance without indicating when one subject had ended.
The instrument itself was not impressive.
The earliest box was heavy, dark and badly joined, with a lens fitted into one end and a plate-holder at the other. A cloth could be thrown over the operator to exclude stray light. Its first purpose was familiar enough: to project an image onto a surface so that an artist might trace it. But von Rehberg wanted more.
He wanted the image to remain after the light was cut off.
‘A camera obscura merely borrows,’ he told Anna. ‘I want one that remembers.’