The Woman at Half Past Five

Chapter One: The Sealed Crate

The cellar under the studio in Fen Street smelled of vinegar, damp brick, and the cold mineral breath of the mere that lay two miles east and made itself felt everywhere in Wickholm.

Harriet Bramber went down the eleven steps with a candle in a tin dish and the list her master had written for her, which said, in his cramped copperplate: Views suitable for the London gentleman. Church towers. Windmills. Drainage engines. Nothing with people in unless they are picturesque.

She had been in the cellar a hundred times, but never with instructions to empty it.

Three decades of glass sat on the shelves — negatives in paper sleeves, each with a date and a name, and behind the dates and names three decades of Samuel Trewin's life. Harvest suppers. A drowned ox pulled out of the Ten Foot in '61. Weddings, hundreds of weddings, brides with their hands arranged on chair-backs because the exposures were long and hands would not hold still. The smell of the place was the smell of Harriet's whole apprenticeship, and she had come to like it as other women liked lavender.

October rain went along the pavement grating above her head, quick and thin.

She worked from the front of the cellar backwards, wiping each plate with a chamois, holding it up to the candle, setting it in one of three trays: yes, no, and ask Mr. Trewin. The yes tray filled slowly. Wickholm was not a picturesque town. It was a market town on the edge of the fen, with a broad street of yellow brick, a corn exchange, eleven public houses, a church with a clock that had been wrong since the Crimea and was now right again, and beyond it the black flat country running away to the sky in every direction, cut into squares by dykes and drains, with the sails of the pumping mills standing up out of the mist like the crosses in a churchyard.

Behind the wine bins — Trewin kept no wine, only the bins, filled with plates too old to interest anybody — Harriet's chamois struck wood.

She held the candle low. A packing crate, deal, a foot deep and two feet square, pushed back into the angle of the wall with two empty bins dragged in front of it. The lid was down and the lid was sealed: three blots of red wax along the join, each pressed with the little brass seal Trewin kept on his watch chain, the one with the letter T inside a circle of dots.

On the lid, in chalk, in his hand: OTTERMERE FÊTE, JUNE 1866.

And wired to the handle, a card, written in ink, in the same hand, and underlined twice:

NOT TO BE PRINTED, EVER.

Harriet Bramber sat back on her heels on the cold brick floor and found that she had stopped breathing.

She was twenty-four years old. She had a plain, watchful face, hands stained brown at the nails from silver nitrate that no lemon would shift, and a way of standing very still when she was thinking that people in Wickholm mistook for stupidity. She had been an orphan for three years less a month. She had one dress for Sundays and two for the studio, and a room over the printing frames, and no living relation on the earth that she knew of.

And she had a private reason — a reason she had never spoken aloud to a soul — for wanting to see anything at all that had been made at Ottermere on the twenty-third of June, 1866.

That was the afternoon of the fête. That was the afternoon Louisa Rushton, who owned Ottermere and the mere and eleven hundred acres of drained fen, drowned at her own boathouse in three feet of water while two hundred people ate strawberries on her lawn.

The inquest had said misadventure. The inquest had said the landing stage was rotten, and that the deceased must have stepped upon it and gone through, and that it was a great pity, and that the maintenance of the boathouse and its landing stage had been the duty of one man.

That man was Peter Bramber, boatman, of the Ottermere estate. Harriet's father.

Nobody charged him. Nobody needed to. The coroner had said, in the hearing of the town, that a servant who let good timber rot had a death upon his conscience whatever the law might say, and the words got into the county paper, and after that there was no work for Peter Bramber on the mere or off it. He drank that winter with a steadiness that frightened her. In February he walked out to the boat shed at Ottermere, which was empty and unlocked because the estate had no boatman any more, and hanged himself from the crossbeam where he had hung the eel nets for eighteen years.

Two months after that, Samuel Trewin, the only photographer in Wickholm, a man Harriet had spoken to perhaps four times in her life, had come to the door of the room where she was living on the charity of a laundress and offered her an apprenticeship, three shillings a week, and the attic.

She had never understood why. She had asked him once, in her first year, and he had gone out into the yard and stayed there twenty minutes.

Harriet looked at the wax seals for a long time.

Then she put her three trays where they would be seen, blew out the candle, went up the eleven steps, and said nothing whatever about the crate.

Samuel Trewin was sixty-three, small, stooped, with a white fringe of hair and a habit of polishing his spectacles when he was frightened, which was oftener than people supposed. He had photographed three generations of Wickholm and had a good name in the trade. The commission from London — Views of the Fen Country, a hundred plates, a guinea apiece, engraved from the prints — was the largest piece of business he had ever had, and it had made him almost gay.

"Well?" he said, when she came up. He was in the glass-house at the back, where the north light came through and the sitters' chair stood with its iron head-clamp behind it like an instrument of torture. "Anything?"

"The mill at Slade End. Two of the Ten Foot with the ice on it. The tower from the water meadow."

"Good girl. Good. He'll want the ice." Trewin rubbed his hands. "Ice sells. Londoners think the fen is all summer and eels."

"There's a deal of glass down there yet."

"Then there's a deal for you to do." He looked at her over the spectacles. "You've a smut on your chin."

She rubbed it off. "Mr. Trewin."

"Mm."

"When you've a mind to throw plates out — old ones, private ones, sittings the family never took up — what do you do with them?"

"Sell them to the glasshouse for cucumber frames, same as everybody." He said it easily. Then something crossed his face, the way a bird's shadow crosses a lawn, and he turned to his chemicals. "Why?"

"Only that there's a quantity down there of no use to anyone."

"Leave what's no use," said Samuel Trewin. "Bring me what is."

That night Harriet lay in the attic and listened to the rain on the skylight and thought about a card that said EVER, twice underlined.

A man who meant to destroy a thing destroys it. A man who means to keep a thing labels it. And a man who labels a thing NOT TO BE PRINTED, EVER, and seals it with his own wax, and buries it behind empty wine bins in a cellar, is a man who is frightened both of the thing and of losing it.

She knew about fear. She had watched her father go through the whole alphabet of it in one winter.

At half past twelve she lit her candle, went down through the studio in her stockings, and opened the cellar door.

The wax cracked cleanly under a palette knife. She lifted the lid.

Twenty-two plates in fresh paper sleeves, packed upright in sawdust, each numbered in pencil in Trewin's hand. Nothing else. No letter, no explanation, no bill.

Harriet took the first three up to the printing room, and by the time the church clock struck two she had learned two things: that her hands were shaking so much she spoilt the first sheet of albumenised paper, and that Samuel Trewin had photographed a very great deal at Ottermere on the twenty-third of June, 1866.