The Vorrh

calm and happy. She made him tea and he drank it in silence, stealing glances at her when she was not aware. Her savage beauty still amazed him. He had seen such perfection occasionally flare in the many primitive peoples he had visited and lived with; he had photographed an Aztec woman of magnificent sensuality in Mexico; he remembered two Moduc women whose striking appearances had remained with him long after his meeting with them had passed, their balanced symmetry accentuated inside their broad, flat faces.
    But Josephine had something more. There was a glow of strength and dignity inside her ideal proportions, which made her every movement hypnotic to him. It soon dawned on him that this was attraction: his masculinity was being nudged awake by her, roused from a slumber he had been hitherto oblivious to; the part of his life he had long considered dead and shrivelled was wakened in her presence. How fat and stupid Flora had been in comparison to this demented vision, and how petty her vanities now revealed themselves to be. But still, it was better to put such thoughts out of his head; they could only lead to pain and confusion, as history had so deftly proven. Better to work, to trust the life he had invented, the one that paid him so handsomely and seemed to ask no price in return.
    ‘I am going NEXT DOOR to SET UP the CAMERA for your PHOTOGRAPH,’ he said, over-pronouncing each slow syllable as if talking to a deaf person or a foreigner. ‘It will take ONE HOUR; then I will COME FOR YOU, do you UNDERSTAND?’
    She nodded and allowed a small smile to grace her lips. Muybridge felt the snag of it in his lungs, as if it were a slow shutter of great precision, catching a fast and out of focus world. He left the room in a daze and shut the door behind him, the room ricocheting with the chirps, whirrs and clicks of the fast, invisible bats held apart from his company.
    * * *

    Cyrena left her house at noon for another meeting with Ghertrude Tulp, intent on forging a plan of campaign to find Ishmael, before he became irrevocably lost. As she walked through her garden to leave by the side gate, she slowed under the balcony to look up for a moment, then back down at the hard ground where the vase had smashed. Naturally, there was no trace of it: her enduring kindness to her servants kept them diligent and discreet. She felt a brief shudder of satisfaction before exiting into the narrow street that ran parallel to her garden wall. Her mind, indulging in the private pleasures of rebellion, barely registered the shabby figures that loomed outside her wall, and she would have missed their presence entirely if one of them had not addressed her directly.
    ‘Pardon lady, pardon us being here so.’
    She blinked and stopped, and found herself without speech. There were six of them – all of different ages and sizes – standing together beneath the shadow of her wall. The young man closest to her spoke again, and the juxtaposition of his polite tone and his undeniable poverty amazed her; yet again, sight had given too much information and poisoned his sad voice.
    ‘We’ve come here to you, lady, to be healed. It is said that you make blind people see and deaf people hear; that’s why we’ve come.’
    She looked into his milky eyes to ease the shock of his words, then her own eyes darted to find the lame and diseased parts of them all. ‘I am truly very sorry,’ she faltered, ‘for you all. But I am afraid you are mistaken. I can help nobody. It was I who was healed by another.’
    A sinking silence ensued, and those who were able exchanged suspicious glances. The spokesman sensed the unrest and pressed further. ‘Who was it who healed you? Are they here, are they inside?’ He pressed his hand against the wall, some loose stone crumbling beneath his touch. Her pity transformed to annoyance at the thought of them dogging poor Ishmael.
    ‘He left weeks ago,’ she said, hearing the flutter in her voice.
    ‘Where’s ‘e gawn then?’ said another, this time without a trace of politeness.
    ‘I don’t know. He did not tell me, he just left.’
    They moved forward into the gap she had created, to hear her voice more carefully. ‘Why did ‘e go then, what made ‘im, did you chuck ‘im out, chuck somthink at ‘im?’
    Terror crawled in her sight; she had never known intimidation before. Her fears had always had been internal and speculative, only walking in the cloisters of her imagined future. This was very