The Ghosts on the Glass

I'll probably take this down in a few weeks, but this challenge seemed like a good time to share an excerpt of the novel I finished. The Ghosts on the Glass follows the career of engraver-turned-photographer William Mumler from 1862 to 1875. This page comes at the end of chapter one.

I hope, someday, that my novel finds its publishing home so I can share it with you all.

“You may use the camera, if you wish,” Hannah said, “and lock up when you have finished.”

“Thank you… I think I shall,” William said.

“I will see you in the morning, Mr. Mumler.”

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Stuart.”

She left to heal the supplicant woman. He stood for some minutes before passing to the room with the window facing the sky.

The sun had passed the prime position, but he knew sufficient light remained. He had learned by watching these six months. The gallery had chemicals to organize, glass plates to clean, prints to mount and roll: much more than enough for a woman running her own business, let alone one who was also called to employ her strange gift. He had seen a man faint who had felt her life-giving magnetism. He had doubted, at first. But what is electricity? A force that passes silently and invisibly over the wire and performs its work. Hannah places her hands on a patient’s body, the current courses through the tissue, and another sufferer heals. It is scientific; it is wonderful.

The machine waited for the command to capture light. A box with a lens, a black cloth, a piece of ground glass for viewing. Hannah had shown him its workings, revealed how the same elements he handled in his shop could engrave the world itself on glass, smoothly, without the touch of any blade.

He ducked beneath the cloth to make the focus right. In the dimmed light, he could see on the ground glass viewer what the camera could see. The lens cast the image upside-down, floating. The colors appeared so rich they belonged in a dream: a tied cord held a blue curtain behind a table and a handsome chair, deep coffee brown with woodworked curves decorating its top rail. The camera circumscribed and transfigured all.

He had grown ineluctably from helper to hobbyist. For all his skill with a graver, this was something else. He remembered the first daguerreotype he’d seen, as a boy, at the Historical Society on Tremont Street. His father had taken him. It had shown the portico of the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, each column stark in silver. He had asked how a man could make such a thing.

Clean the glass plate with solution of rottenstone, wipe away the calcium carbonate, coat with collodion, bathe in silver nitrate. Carry the plate in the shield, which sits in the opened camera. Pull the dark slide out from the shield, remove the cap from the lens and expose the glass to the light.

He would stand. The photograph would illustrate a man at work in vest and sleeves. William’s hand would rest firm on the chair, his beard in strong relief against the white wall. He would meet the lens’s gaze, and he would hold the cloth in one hand to show what he had done.

Mumler yanked the black cloth from the camera.