New York - The Novel

know. Did you ever see a photograph of that famous day?”
    “That’s a good story,” said the journalist.
    “Let me show you the West,” said Theodore.
    It had been an excellent opportunity. A government commission, to go into the western wilderness with the surveyors and bring back photographsthat would attract settlers to take up land there. He’d done a good job. Big, rich-looking landscapes; pictures of friendly Indians. The government men had been delighted. One charming picture of a little Indian girl had caught Frank Master’s attention, and he’d paid Theodore a good price for a print of it.
    But the journalist was bored. Theodore could tell. Swiftly he took him into the biggest room.
    “So,” he said cheerfully, “these are the pictures I’ve been told not to show.”
    For they were of the Civil War.

    Nobody wanted to know about the Civil War now. While it was still being fought, everyone did. When the dour Scotsman, Alexander Gardner, had taken his picture,
Home of the Rebel Sharpshooter
, it had made him famous. Yet when his collection, a world classic, was published the year after war’s end, it didn’t sell.
    Then there was Brady himself. People often imagined he took every picture of the Civil War. After all, his name was on so many of the pictures taken by the photographers he’d hired—a fact they sometimes resented. Yet to be fair, it was Brady who’d been the first in the field. At the start of the war, when the Confederates smashed the Union men at Bull Run, Brady had been there on the battlefield, lucky not to be a casualty.
    It wasn’t Brady’s fault that his failing eyesight made it difficult for him to take the pictures himself. But he’d sent out those keen young men, set them up, provided them with movable darkrooms, all out of his own pocket. And what had he got from it all, when the war was over? Financial ruin.
    “People don’t want to be reminded of those horrors,” said Theodore. “They wanted to forget them the moment the war was done.” In the South, he’d heard, the agony of defeat was so terrible that quite a few photographers had even destroyed their own work.
    “So why do you show this work?” asked Horace Slim.
    “Same reason you write, I dare say,” answered Theodore. “A photographer and a journalist both have a duty to record: to tell the truth, and not let people forget.”
    “The horrors of war, you mean—the killing?”
    “Not really. That was important of course, Mr. Slim, but others had already covered it.”
    “Like Brady.”
    “Exactly. In ’62, when the most terrible battles began, Brady had photographers with General Grant when he went into Tennessee. They recorded the carnage at Shiloh. Brady’s boys were in Virginia that summer, when Stonewall Jackson and General Lee saved Richmond from destruction. They were there when the Confederates struck back at us in Kentucky, and they were up in Maryland that fall, when Lee was turned back at Antietam. Do you remember the great exhibition Brady organized after Antietam, when he showed the world what the battlefield looked like after that terrible slaughter? It was a wonder to me, sir, that those photographs did not stop war altogether.” He shook his head. “Brady had photographers at the Battle of Gettysburg the next summer also, but I wasn’t one of them, you see—I didn’t become a Brady photographer until a couple of months after that. So maybe my task was different. Anyway,” he gestured to the photographs on the walls, “this is what I did.”
    The journalist took his time, which was exactly what Theodore wanted. The first picture that seemed to interest him was entitled
Hudson River
. It showed a New York street, and had a grainy, dusty feel to it. A couple of blocks away the street ended and beyond was a great emptiness which was clearly the Hudson, although you couldn’t actually see the water.
    “Draft riots?”
    “That’s right. The third day. Wednesday.”
    “Why call it
Hudson River?
The river’s hardly visible.”
    “Because that’s the name of the man you see.”
    There was only one man in the picture. A blackened bundle hanging from a tree. Blackened because he had been burned after he was lynched. Burned almost to a cinder.
    “He was called Hudson River?”
    “Yes. He worked in a saloon, for Sean O’Donnell.”
    “I know him.”
    “O’Donnell had hidden him in the cellar. Didn’t even know he’d got out. Reckons he could have been drinking down