Fool's Gold by Glen Davies Page A

sheets of polished glass in a variety of sizes. Battened tightly on the shelf above were a number of large bottles of ether and alcohol, nitrated cotton, silver nitrate, hyposulphite of soda.
    She looked wildly around her, then gently lifted the baby out of the cot. Beneath the quilt and straw on which she lay was a further locker. In it, nestling in a quilted box, wrapped in black cloth, was a Talbot camera with the wide aperture lens necessary for portraiture, a tripod to support it and a case of delicate tints for hand colouring. Underneath she found a box marked ‘patent albumenized paper’ and a pamphlet: ‘All you need to know about the new collodion process, as devised by Mr. Frederick Scott Archer’. The ‘picture man’, unlike so many other daguerrotypers, had believed in keeping abreast of progress. He had moved on from Daguerre’s ‘mirror with a memory’ to the new glass plates for the wet collodion method, which Alicia had only read about, which allowed faster exposures than before and claimed to give better, clearer images even in poor lighting. And paper to print on, in the negative-positive process devised by Fox Talbot — more popular with miners who wished to send their calotypes home, to grieving parents or pining fiancées!
    Chen Kai found her still standing there, in a daze. He picked up the baby from the floor where she was wailing. ‘Something is wrong?’
    She turned to him, eyes aglow.
    ‘Chen Kai! How would you like to leave Dry Gulch — and Sierra City — and never have to go down into Sonora again? Make a completely new start!’
    ‘How? Have you struck gold?’
    ‘In a way!’ she said excitedly. Then, suddenly, her face fell and the animation drained away. ‘But … the wagon isn’t ours and nor is the equipment.’ She sighed heavily. ‘And yet it did seem such a tempting idea.’
    ‘If the wagon belongs to anyone, it belongs to Tamsin, and she won’t want to get up on the box and drive away yet awhile. Can’t be mine: Chinese can’t hold property.’ He looked at her curiously. ‘Were you thinking of selling it? I’ve not heard of any other picture men about the place might be interested in it — leastways, no closer than Auburn one way and San Francisco the other. This one was the only picture man I’d ever seen round the Southern mines.’
    ‘Was there much work for them roundabouts?’
    ‘Plenty. Can’t be more than a dozen men in the whole of California who know how to operate the picture machines. And like the storekeepers and the saloon-keepers: it’s the men who supply the miner’s needs who make the money, not the miners. But this wagon is about as much use as fool’s gold! We have no picture man.’
    ‘Yes we have!’ He looked at her in blank amazement. ‘I can make daguerrotypes. I am the picture man, you must be my assistant — my picture lady!’
    She knew a momentary qualm as she said it. It was, after all, some years since Nuñes Carvalho had shown her how to take and fix the image, and techniques had improved rapidly since then.
    ‘It — it was all a long time ago,’ she stammered.
    ‘If you did it once you can surely do it again.’
    She must. She could not turn her back on this chance of independence — a chance to escape the memory of Robert and the stigma of being Lucky Langdon’s woman.
    And then there was Tamsin. Could she hand her over to some stranger and walk away, never to know how she was being cared for, whether she was loved?
    ‘Everything must be here,’ he said softly. ‘All you have to do is remember what order it goes in. Start practising now; teach me what I must do.’
    Still she hesitated.
    ‘Think of all those rich miners out there in the hills, desperate to get themselves pictured off, to show their families back east how well they are doing.’ He reached out gently and touched her arm. ‘We have both suffered ill fortune in the past: now the Fates are smiling on us at last. It does not do to turn your back on