Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Grand Tour

This story was previously published in the anthology TEMPORALLY OUT OF ORDER, released by the small press Zombies Need Brains LLC.

Late October, 1845

Whitechapel, London

“What exactly…is that?” Madame Magnin eyed the device lying on the table before her.

“A camera lucida,” said John Foxx.

Magnin inclined her head slightly, raising her eyebrows.

“Ah,” said Foxx. “It’s an optical device, you see. For drawing. This small prism here, atop this stem, it projects an image of whatever is before it downward upon a flat surface. Then the image can be traced.”

Magnin blinked.

“On paper.”

She blinked again.

“By me. I’m an artist, you see.”

Foxx was already uncomfortable in the tiny room, with its sagging ceiling and yellowed, peeling wallpaper. A séance! A fool’s errand more likely, and a costly one at that.

But it was what Harriet had asked of him.

“You set it up like this,” Foxx said, assuming an explanation might help the medium with whatever it was she was going to do. He stood the device upright on the velvet-covered table, its spindly shadow scattered different directions by the candles guttering in tarnished sconces. Small and portable, around ten inches high, the camera lucida was nothing more than a thin brass rod with a flat, stable base at the bottom and a prism affixed to the top. Both the base and the prism were attached to the rod by hinges so they could be adjusted to different angles, allowing the prism to be positioned beneath the user’s eyes, which Foxx now did.

“As I adjust the prism to the proper angle and look down with my right eye, just so, past the edge of the prism, an image of whatever is in front of me—which currently is you, sitting across the table—is reflected downward onto the surface of the table. If I had my paper and pencils, well, I could simply trace the image on the paper, making a perfect copy. Of you, right now as we sit here. Or St. Paul’s cathedral if I were sitting on a bench in New Change street. Or Parliament—”

Madame suddenly waved her hands in front of her face and turned away. “Please! Not my image…my spirit. Please, no images.”

“Of course, I’m sorry. I only meant to demonstrate…” Foxx trailed off, returning the camera lucida to the middle of the table and laying it on its side.

The room smelled of sweat and smoke and, faintly, of gin. Perhaps Madame Magnin managed a quick tipple before his appointment. It would hardly have surprised him.

“And your woman, this was hers? She could use this?” The medium was skeptical. “Remember, I require an object that was hers. Perhaps you have a handkerchief…?”

“We shared the camera lucida,” Foxx replied. “Harriet was quite competent with it. I…I have nothing else of hers.” This last admission pained him. Harriet had scrimped to buy him the camera lucida as a wedding gift—selling many of her own personal effects—so he could sketch landscapes, which he would later use as studies for landscape paintings.

Someday. When they could afford a studio. And paint.

Magnin sighed. “Then it will have to do. Come, place your hands in mine. We begin. Now, what questions do you have for your Harriet?”

“I have only one.”

“Ah, of course. ‘Are you with the Lord?’ That is the first—”

“No.”

“‘Are you in heaven?’ That’s very much the same.”

“No, um—”

“‘Are you well? Are you lonely? Have you located grandpa and Aunt Bertie?’”

“No, I—”

Then she smiled, winking. “Ah! Of course. ‘Are your carnal desires—’”

“No!” exclaimed Foxx, red faced.

“What then? What is it you wish to ask of your departed Harriet?”

“I…I…” he stammered, disbelieving his own words even as he spoke them. “I want to know if she’s ready to go to Italy.”

The coach to Dover was bumpy and cold, a mail wagon and a poorly maintained one at that. With what little money he’d had left it was all he could afford, wanting to save what he could for his not-so-Grand Tour.

He bought passage on a paddle steamer to Calais. It was a postal ship, and he transferred to it along with the mail from the coach like so much portage. At sea, Foxx was left to fend for himself on the shelterless deck as the little craft struggled across the heaving waves of the English Channel. A cold, miserable passage.

Paris, of course, was denied him. That great city was the traditional first stop of any Grand Tour itinerary, where wealthy English travelers would begin their cultural holiday polishing their French, touring the Louvre, maybe learning how to fence or dance. But Foxx had neither the money nor the time for that kind of dalliance. He was bound for Italy, and directly.

So he spent his three hours in Paris, between his arrival and departure, negotiating for sour wine, day old-bread, and hardened cheese. Fare for the rest of his journey.

It wasn’t until he was on the overland coach through southern France that he reflected on what had happened during the séance. He had heard those rituals were supposed to involve spinning tables and ghostly knocking. But his had not. Perhaps he had been shortchanged?

Madame Magnin had gone into a trance, swaying and muttering, and after only a few minutes sat bolt upright, her dark skin suddenly pale, and blurted out, “Yes! Your Harriet said yes. And…” the medium seemed as if she were trying to recall a dream “…she says you must bring…that.”

She pointed a crooked finger at the camera lucida. Foxx glanced at it and noticed it was, unaccountably, standing upright. He was sure he had laid it on its side.

But that could be easily explained. A sleight of Magnin’s hand. A parlor trick for dramatic effect. Easy to accomplish in the darkness with his attention directed elsewhere.

And that was the entirety of the affair. Madame waved him away, declaring the séance over. “Her spirit is strong, Mr. Foxx. Take your seeing device and go.” Foxx felt the medium watching his every move as he folded the base and prism of the camera lucida inward on their hinges—collapsing the apparatus so that it was barely longer than his own hand—and placed it into its small, cloth-lined wooden carrying case. Then he slipped the case into his coat pocket and was back out in the street.

What had he expected? It was all nonsense, and dramatic nonsense at that. Magnin, whose shop was little more than a closet tucked down some nameless Whitechapel alley, had been recommended not because of her reputation for conducting effective séances but because of her reputation for conducting them inexpensively.

Foxx was convinced she was a crackpot.

But Harriet had been so adamant that he try to contact her before he left for Italy. To let her know he was ready to go. The séance had been Harriet’s wish; she had left him money for it, and so he had obliged.

Money wasted, he was sure. Harriet left him all she had, but it wasn’t much, the small remainder of her job teaching history and classics at a school for well-to-do girls.

“You will be a fine artist, John!” she had told him, and not because she was naïve and in love. No. She had an eye for art, although history was her passion, and after all Foxx had trained at the Royal Academy. That’s where they had met, one day when she was touring a new exhibition with her students and he was painting in one of the nearby galleries.

They fell in love, and married.

Their dream was to take the Grand Tour through Italy, that rite of passage that any member of the nobility or landed gentry undertook in the pursuit of the art and culture of Western civilization.

But they were commoners, with only her meager salary and his occasional commission—

a portrait here and there. They would have to consider themselves fortunate to spend a month abroad, maybe two, so Foxx could visit the home of the Renaissance masters, see their works first hand, study their techniques, sketch the landscapes. And then he and Harriet would return to England, penniless but happy, and start their lives.

But soon after they were married, before they could even think of taking their Tour, Harriet grew ill. And did not improve.

When she knew she had only a short time left she made Foxx promise that he would go to Italy without her. He protested and wept and said he could never go alone but she smiled beatifically and promised she would join him, hovering like an angel above him, guiding him as Beatrice did Dante, showing him things no one but they could see. He was too distraught to say no to her sweet, moribund madness, and too grieved after she was gone to not keep his promise.

He patted his pocket and felt the thin padded case with the camera lucida inside.

It was all he had left of her now.

Florence in early November was pleasantly cool, nearly deserted (at least by other Englishmen), and completely glorious. The late Autumn daylight was flat and soft as the sun swept ever lower toward the winter solstice, turning the city’s labyrinth of stucco walls to golden caramel and its terra cotta roofs to molten copper.

Foxx walked around Florence for an entire day—not sketching, just getting his bearings—finding his way with an outdated guidebook he had bought before he left London. He crossed the river Arno at every bridge and wandered through small sunlit piazzas. Tall palazzos announced the former wealth of the Medici family, their terraces climbing to dizzying heights down from which, as night fell and windows glowed, came a gentle shower of music and conversation.

The next day he climbed a nearby hill with his portable drawing table and looked down on the city. Florence from above was dotted with gardens and clusters of finger-like cypress trees. The city’s cathedral dominated the view—Brunelleschi’s great dome rising out of the mists like a ruddy egg. He thought about the Renaissance, and how magnificent it would have been to live in Florence, to be patronized by the Medici as were Botticelli, Leonardo, and Michelangelo.

By a little stone wall at the side of an ancient, cobbled road he unfolded his table, unpacked pencils and paper, and began to frame his scene. How he wished Harriet had been there with him. She had an eye for perspective, for middle distance and foreground placement.

The morning sun was just hitting the Arno, making its surface shimmer, as he adjusted the prism of the camera lucida on its brass stem. Just below him on the road a peasant appeared, stopping to water his cattle at a roadside spring.

Foxx peered through the prism. Not quite. Tweaked the brass rod. Better. The peasant was in frame—good, very bucolic. But the top of the cathedral was still…no. He adjusted the prism again.

Perfect! The entire scene, just so.

The image the camera lucida projected was crisp and airy, almost as if looking through a magic lens onto a fairy world. Sharp lines, ethereal colors. Of course, he would sketch in lead pencil. But the dynamic image was a joy to behold while he did.

He started at the top, the sky with its scudding clouds. Then down to the horizon of distant Tuscan hills. Over the course of fifteen minutes he traced the scene: the cathedral center-right, the Arno snaking away bottom left, the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio dead center. He finished his drawing at the bottom, as was his habit, penciling in the foreground trees and the road up which he had walked.

Finally he sketched the peasant and cows. Superb. He could turn this scene into a beautiful landscape someday. When he could afford paint. And canvas.

Absorbed in his last few strokes he did not hear the approaching feet or the stamp of hooves. Suddenly a procession entered the scene. There, superimposed on his pencil-grey road, came some sort of costume parade. Its participants were dressed as if they were contemporaries of Michelangelo, all Renaissance frippery—flat, broad velvet caps, elaborate shoulders, silken doublets with puffed-out sleeves. Tight trousers, low shoes. At the head of the parade a marcher carried a banner: a yellow shield with five red orbs and one blue one.

He had seen that symbol everywhere around Florence. The Medici crest. Perhaps the parade was some commemoration of that great dynasty.

Now a military guard tramped by. Four abreast, they held long halberds in their mailed mitts, wore red- and white-striped sleeves and pants beneath metal breastplates. A bright spectacle, even though they were clearly hardened soldiers—scarred faces, muscle-knotted bodies.

Foxx had not looked up from the camera lucida when the parade came by for fear of losing his perspective as he drew. Sketching rapidly, he added a few of the costumed marchers as they passed, before finally setting down his pencil and looking up to observe the parade directly.

But nothing was there. The road was empty save for the peasant, now dozing, and his lolling cattle.

Foxx gaped in disbelief, and looked back down through the prism. As he did so the parade reappeared, filing past him on his sketched-in road as if he had never looked away.

It was then he realized they were moving silently, like ghosts. He heard nothing, when he should have heard the stamp of feet and clank of armor.

He looked up again.

Nothing.

This is madness! Like a cuckoo, Foxx’s head bobbed up and down, looking up at nothing, then down again at the continuing procession.

He closed his eyes and rubbed them, convinced he was hallucinating. He opened them, and looked up.

The road was empty, the peasant snoring loudly.

But through the lens of his prism the parade seemed to be reaching a climax as heralds with trumpets—which he quite distinctly could not hear—marched by. And behind them—he had to be hallucinating—loped an African giraffe, muzzled and led by long cords, resignedly following his handlers along the road toward Florence.

Fox sketched like a madman, convinced now that he might in fact be one.

After the giraffe came an opulent gilded carriage, drawn by four cream-white horses. Inside rode a dour man with coiffed brown hair and a hooked nose, staring magisterially down upon the city below him. Then came one final platoon of soldiers before the road was once again empty, save for the sleeping peasant and lolling cattle.

Madness!

“I say!” Foxx called to the peasant below him. “Mi scusi! Mi scusi, signore!”

The peasant opened a bleary eye.

“I say, did you see the parade? The one that just passed by?”

The peasant simply shrugged his shoulders. Foxx ran over to the man, gesticulating in the exaggerated manner that tourists use when trying to convey anything more complicated than “hello” in a language they do not speak.

“Parade! Did you see a parade?” Foxx shouted, even though he was now standing directly before the peasant. Foxx marched back and forth, swinging his arms, kicking out his legs and pretending to play the trumpet. “Parade!” he yelled, even louder.

This merely caused the peasant to burst into laughter.

“Parata!” the man howled. “Parata! L’idiota Inglese vuole una parata!” Then he rolled back over, chuckling, and fell asleep again.

Foxx returned to his table and stared at his sketch. He had captured the banners, the soldiers, the heralds, the giraffe, and then the carriage with its scowling occupant. And although the parade had been much longer than what he had drawn, it was accurate enough.

With great care, as if it was somehow possessed, he rolled up his sketch, tied it with a ribbon, and made his way slowly back down to Florence, shaking his head.

Later that evening he sat at an inn nibbling fresh bread and waiting for his stew (the least expensive item on the bill of fare). He unrolled the sketch and set it gingerly on the table, watching it nervously as if the parade might suddenly begin anew.

When the stew was placed before him—an earthenware bowl full of potatoes and onions floating in thick gravy—the waiter stared over Foxx’s shoulder for a minute and then said, in good but halting English, “Is very nice. Good immaginazione! Look just like Lorenzo il Magnifico. And his giraffa. Just like the Vecchio painting.”

“Which painting?” Foxx asked, surprised.

“In the Lorenzo room, Vecchio palace. You get your idea from this painting, yes? When Lorenzo marches into Florence with his giraffa? Very good.”

The next morning Foxx was first in line when the Vecchio opened. It had been Florence’s town hall since it had been built by the Medici family centuries ago and still contained frescos worthy of a dedicated museum. Someone pointed him to Lorenzo the Magnificent’s room. Craning his neck to look upward he saw, painted in a massive fresco high atop the arched ceiling, the very same man, and the very same giraffe, that had marched past him the previous morning.

He walked outside to the broad flagstone expanse of the Piazza della Signoria and consulted his guidebook.

Lorenzo died in 1492.

He left Florence two days later, after trying and failing to recapture the parade from the same spot on the road. Each time he finished drawing the scene…nothing happened. No parade.

And then it was time to move on.

Foxx had no itinerary other than to travel Italy until his money ran out, sketching picturesque scenes that he would someday paint, God willing, back in London.

In Pisa, he made a sketch of the town’s famous tower with its off-kilter angle. Just as he was putting the last lines on the teetering tower and the nearby cathedral of the Piazza del Duomo the scene changed, revealing something unseen.

He watched as a man, beard flowing over the collar of his knee-length coat, dropped balls and other objects of various sizes from high atop the tower. Another man on the ground—an assistant?—made notes, a quill in one hand and sheaf of papers in the other. This assistant occasionally looked upward as if to yell something to the man on the tower.

Foxx grinned. It had to be.

Galileo!

He had just read about Galileo and his experiments in his guidebook.

He sketched the man into his scene, Galileo leaning out over the tower’s precarious balcony. Foxx drew two round wooden balls the man had dropped, one rather large and the other quite small, just before they hit the ground…together.

On the island of Sicily, Foxx climbed the smoking slopes of Mount Etna. He sketched the city of Catania far below, with its neoclassical buildings and Roman ruins, and the spreading blue waters of the Mediterranean beyond. As he outlined the last spiny cactus in the lower foreground, the prism suddenly darkened, filling with ash and fire. Lava poured in a fiery stream just to the right of where he sat and he almost fell backwards in fear, until he looked away from the camera lucida and saw that the mountainside was quite free from lava, the air around him clear and cool.

Looking back down through the prism into the apocalypse that was Etna erupting, he gasped as he saw a group of men climbing up out of Catania, shovels and poles in hand. Sketching frantically, Foxx drew as the men hacked holes in the sides of the lava’s hardening channel, diverting the flow away from their city…until another group, from a small village towards which the lava was now heading, rushed up and chased off the Catanians. And soon the lava was flowing once more toward Catania.

Foxx knew the city was doomed, even before he reread his guidebook: “…Catania was destroyed in the eruption of 1669, most of its twenty-thousand inhabitants killed…”

A few days later Foxx was sketching the plains of Cannae, the site of the brutal defeat of the Roman army in 216 BC. Harriet had loved teaching her students about it; he suspected it was because the arrogant Roman army got crushed so soundly by a smaller but smarter force.

After he finished penciling in the nearby farmhouses, the peaceful scene suddenly became a nightmare as Hannibal the Carthaginian, outnumbered and far from his African home, outmaneuvered and utterly destroyed the defending Roman army. Foxx frantically sketched the charging Roman cavalry and their heedless destruction at the hands of Hannibal’s well-positioned infantry. He drew severed limbs and broken spears and bloodied helmets, piles of bodies stacked like hillocks. He had never sketched so rapidly in his life, and it was all he could do to not leap aside every time a riderless horse or wounded soldier ran past him as he watched the carnage through the prism.

So it went as Foxx zig-zagged across Italy, the camera lucida showing him the impossible as he sketched his way toward Rome, where he would spend the remainder of his time until the money was gone—just as he and Harriet had planned.

Rome in mid-December was a city gone dormant: bare trees, few tourists. Foxx walked quiet streets, a rough woolen scarf around his neck to stave off the chill.

Now comfortable with whatever the camera lucida revealed to him, he drew Rome with abandon: Senators taking their baths; merchants selling olives from huge clay pots; dark-skinned Africans and red-haired Gaels being sold in the slave markets, their wrists and ankles in chains; crusaders passing through on their way to the Holy Land; the great dome going up, brick-by-brick, over St. Peters. Whatever period of time he concentrated on as he drew was what came alive through the prism when his sketch was finished.

One cold afternoon he sat sketching the Colosseum. He had just traced the rounded walls with their stacked arches when the camera lucida showed him throngs of Romans, milling about and waiting to see the day’s combat. Some were well-to-do citizens, most were plebians, poor and restless—the mobs Emperor Vespasian had built the Colosseum to mollify.

Foxx was sketching the Romans filing into the arena when a tall gladiator swaggered up out of the stone tunnels from beneath the Colosseum. The giant man walked along the flagstone street while the gathered crowd cheered, at least visibly. Foxx could, of course, hear nothing.

The gladiator’s strutting brought him near where Foxx sat, giving him a close-up view of the polished iron helmet pushed back on the fighter’s broad forehead. Foxx drew in the man’s leather and iron armor, the greaves strapped around his thick calves, the sandals on his feet. He could almost smell the dust and sweat as his pencil flicked and scratched, his memory capturing and filling in the details even after the gladiator disappeared back underneath the Colosseum.

A breeze twirled leaves around the legs of his drawing table as he sketched, and it was then, from the corner of his downcast eyes—out from beyond the perspective of the prism—that Foxx caught sight of the toes of a pair of fine leather boots.

He had grown used to people looking over his shoulder while he drew. Most only stared for a minute before moving on, occasionally commenting on his clever historical embellishments.

But today these boots stayed. Three minutes. Five. Then ten. Foxx was absorbed with the gladiator and soon forgot about the observer.

When he finally put down the pencil, the boots shuffled and a voice said, “I say. Very sorry to disturb, but that’s quite remarkable.”

Foxx looked up.

The man was tall, about his own age. English—his accent conveyed breeding and wealth. He was dressed expensively, an ivory-topped cane in one hand, a well-tailored coat over his shoulders.

“Thank you.”

“Your speculations on the attire of the Roman citizenry, and that gladiator, seem quite specific,” the man said, indicating the sketch. “An educated guess? Perhaps based on the displays in the museums?”

“Something like that.”

“Well, an impressive drawing, accurate or not. You’ve a good imagination, and a great hand. I wonder…”

The man trailed off, scanning the exterior of the Colosseum. Foxx followed his eyes and saw a young boy, small wooden sword in hand, running back and forth among the arches. The child was engaged in mock combat with unseen adversaries.

“That’s my son,” the man said, a note of sadness in his voice. “He’s recently lost his mother. He’s been inconsolable, so I thought a trip to Rome might do us both some good. Warmer climate, exploring the ruins. Oscar—that’s his name—is fascinated with the Romans. Anything to do with their battles and armor and weapons. Mark my words, someday he’ll either be teaching classics at Oxford or developing strategy at the Royal Military College. He’s obsessed. But at least it keeps his mind off of…”

Foxx said nothing, letting the man talk. The late afternoon sun spread long shadows across the cobbles and a distant church bell tolled. Otherwise the streets were quiet, a few Romans hurrying home, or to mass.

The man continued. “We return to London in a few days. Oscar has wanted a souvenir of our trip, something unique. Do you perhaps do commissions? Something like your sketch there. He would be thrilled, as would I.”

“Commissions?” said Foxx, surprised.

“I’ll pay you, of course,” the man continued quickly, misinterpreting Foxx’s reaction. “Would five guineas do it?”

Foxx nearly choked. “F-f-five?” he stammered. That could keep him in Rome for another two months.

“Dear me, I’m sorry. That must be terribly insulting. Your sketches certainly are unique, and well contrived. I do hope I have not offended you, Mr…?”

“Foxx. John Foxx.”

“Mr. Foxx. Shall we say ten guineas, then? I hope that is more acceptable.”

Foxx nodded, stunned, and the man extended his hand.

“Settled, then. I’m Clifford Rotham. Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Foxx.”

“Clifford Rotham? Earl of Lowestoft?” Foxx said, stunned once more.

“Yes, yes,” the man said. “But that matters not here, eh, Mr. Foxx? I’m just a father, trying to secure some measure of happiness for his son.”

Then he turned toward the Colosseum. “Oscar! Come here please.”

The boy disengaged from imaginary combat and walked toward them, sulking at being brought back to reality. Foxx knew all too well how that felt, and thought perhaps he could do something about it.

“Oscar, this is Mr. Foxx. What do you think of his drawing here?”

The boy stared down at the strutting gladiator and his scowl disappeared. “Brilliant!” he beamed. “Can he do one for me? Please, papa?”

“How about,” Foxx said, an idea forming, “I do one of you?”

The sketch of the boy fighting inside the Colosseum had been easy enough to manage, even in the fading daylight. They made their way inside the arena, and while Foxx set up the camera lucida and sketched the interior from the perspective of a spectator in the stands, the boy and his father, following Foxx’s instruction, found a flat spot down on the floor, careful to avoid the areas that had collapsed over the centuries.

By the time the boy was in position Foxx had finished his sketch. He thought of the gladiator and the Colosseum—to Foxx’s eyes at least—came alive. Colored banners streamed from the highest arches, canopies hung over long poles for shade, and bare-chested drummers beat giant sideways drums. The crowds were thick, the seats nearly full. Foxx could imagine the tremendous noise of such a spectacle.

Down on the arena floor, two gladiators—chained together at their waists and each bearing a short sword and small, round shield—battled a half-starved bear. The bear eventually lost, but not before delivering a nasty gash to the leg of one of his attackers.

Then the gladiator that Foxx had drawn earlier appeared from behind two wooden doors, and the crowd stood to cheer. He was far bigger than the two who had just killed the bear, and he was their next challenge. Though Foxx could not hear the crowd, he knew they were rooting for this lone champion, who raised a long spear over his head and pumped his arms.

The boy, Oscar, was juxtaposed over this scene in Foxx’s prism. Foxx called down to the boy to act like he was in combat with a gladiator. The boy started posturing, shouting, “How’s this, Mr. Foxx? Shall I jab, or swing wide?”

“Whatever you like!” Foxx called back, and drew the boy—attacking aggressively here, parrying there—so that little Oscar appeared to be battling the champion in different locations across the arena floor.

The lone gladiator, strong and swift as he was, should have defeated the two smaller combatants. But to Foxx’s surprise the pair eventually overcame him, by clever use of the chain that bound them together to trip him up and their swords to finish him off. As they stood over the fallen champion’s body, Foxx called down to Oscar.

“Stand over there. No, there! Yes, good. Now, lift your foot and bend your knee just so. Excellent!” And he drew the boy, foot atop the fallen champion, sword raised high.

Oscar was beside himself with the finished sketch, delighted to see himself drawn as an ancient gladiator—attacking, feinting, parrying, and finally victorious over a much larger foe.

His father was even more pleased.

“He hasn’t smiled this much since before his mother passed,” he said as he pressed the payment into Foxx’s hand.

Ten guineas, as agreed, plus one extra.

“For his happiness,” the Earl said. And then, as if an afterthought, he handed Foxx a small card. “If you’ll be in Rome next summer, please send word to me at this address in London. I’ll be sure to recommend you to those in my circle who will be making the Tour. If you do other Roman scenes—you know, the baths for the ladies, chariot races for the men—with your artistic skill, and a copy of Tacitus or Gibbon…why, Mr. Foxx, you could be a very wealthy man!”

They disappeared into the late December evening, the sketch rolled under the Earl’s arm and Oscar swiping emphatically at invisible foes.

December became January, which passed into February. With the money from the Earl’s commission, and frugal living, Foxx could afford to remain in Rome through summer.

He rented a small room near the Pantheon and spent his days sketching.

He mastered the trick behind whatever it was that made the camera lucida open a vista onto the past. All he had to do was draw the scene before him, and then think about some known historical event that occurred there. The more detailed his thoughts, the more specific the scene would be. And then, as if someone pulled back a curtain, the past came alive before him.

Tacitus and Gibbon, indeed! He found second-hand English copies of The Histories and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, read everything he could on the Renaissance masters, and daily congratulated himself for having paid such close attention to Harriet’s fervent historical discussions.

One glorious April morning during Holy Week, when the trees on Palatine Hill were a riot of pink blossoms and Rome was filled with pilgrims, he convinced a priest at the Vatican to let him into the Sistine Chapel between morning Mass and afternoon Vespers. After sketching the silent, gorgeous chamber he thought of Michelangelo, high on his scaffold, dabbing at the ceiling.

And then, through the prism, the chapel was suddenly filled with rickety wooden platforms. On the topmost stood the master himself, painting his fresco. From down below Foxx watched as the artist’s arm reached up and spread wet plaster, then applied a few strokes from his brush before it dried. Inch by inch, a small section of one of the Renaissance’s most celebrated frescos was painted before his eyes.

Foxx also learned with regret that once he observed a scene, he could not go back and observe it again. So it was. But with all of history at his disposal, he never seemed to run out of material. And so he adopted Rome as his own even as the city, and the rest of the Italian peninsula, grew restless. There were rumors of revolution, that the great patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi might even return from South America to lead the fight to unify Italy’s various kingdoms into a single state.

Meanwhile his money dwindled. In March Foxx had sent a short letter to the Earl in London, politely reminding him of their meeting, and informing him that during the coming tourist season Foxx would be doing sketches daily at the Colosseum, in the Forum, in front of St. Peters, and elsewhere around Rome. Foxx included his address, hoped for the best, and eventually forgot about the letter until late May, when a small package arrived.

It was a copy of Murray’s Hand-Book for Travelers in Italy, 1846—a small red book, sized to fit in a coat pocket, freshly printed. A white card was inserted near the middle, and when Foxx opened it to that page he found a section of text had been circled in thick, black ink.

…As to souvenirs of Rome, the Earl of Lowestoft reports that a certain expatriate sketch artist, by the name of Foxx, does remarkable drawings with his camera lucida in which tourists are inserted into imagined recreations of past events. We have observed a drawing that this Mr. Foxx has done of the Honourable Oscar Rotham, the Earl’s son, and it is truly remarkable, casting the boy in the likeness of a gladiator engaged in combat within the Colosseum itself! Such fanciful historical sketches would make wonderful souvenirs for the traveler who already has enough of the olive-wood carvings and leaded-glass religious baubles that constitute the usual Roman momentos. Mr. Foxx can be found sketching in the vicinity of the major attractions of Rome, or can be hired for commissions directly at his studio near the Pantheon…

The bookmark was another of the Earl’s calling cards. On the back was a short message:

Good luck, Mr. Foxx!—C. Rotham

He smiled. June was just around the corner. The days were lengthening, and already the first English accents could be heard calling through the streets of Rome.

Foxx hurried out to buy more paper.

November, 1851

Mayfair, London

Foxx’s Historical Artworks was a small place on Cork Street, just north of the Burlington Arcade and a two-minute walk from the Royal Academy of Art. It had a small shop in front, where light from tall windows fell upon display tables stacked with books and woodcuts, and a private studio in the back. The little bell on the front door chimed as someone stepped in off the sidewalk.

Foxx’s assistant, George, stood to greet the customer while Foxx himself, back in the studio, finished inscribing copies of his latest folio book, Historical Sketches, Vol. 18: The Late Italian Renaissance Reimagined.

When the London publishers saw samples of his work coming up out of Italy in 1846, and learned of his growing popularity among wealthy vacationing nobles, they outbid each other for themed volumes of his sketches, which Foxx sent to London from his studio in Rome. Renaissance Italy Revealed was an instant bestseller, and was followed by other wildly popular works, some now into their fourth or fifth printing: Florence Through the Ages, Rome During the Time of the Apostles, and Leonardo in his Studio. And although no one was willing to admit it openly, Foxx’s Techniques of Michelangelo, though never an official part of the curriculum of the Royal Academy, was secretly read and reread by the faculty and students alike.

By the end of his first summer doing souvenir sketches in Rome, he was as much a tourist attraction as were the Trevi Fountain or the Spanish Steps. But in June of that year Rome had a new Pope, Pius IX, whom Italian patriots believed would support their unification efforts. Tensions heightened all over Italy and by the following summer of 1847 the tourists were far fewer. Foxx read the writing on the wall; before the revolutions broke out in January, 1848, he left Italy and took his camera lucida north of the Alps.

Other bestsellers soon followed: The Construction of Chartres Cathedral, Paris and the Court of Louis XIV, and Famous Battles of the Thirty Years War. Even as the revolutions of 1848 spread out of Italy and engulfed Europe, Foxx traveled and sketched, careful to avoid the areas where the uprisings were most destructive. He eventually returned to London in 1851.

Thus six years passed and Foxx became a minor celebrity. His display in the Fine Art Courts of the Crystal Palace at London’s Great Exhibition that year was constantly filled with visitors. Prince Albert came through and shook his hand, and after that every English family with a claim to noble blood wanted a Foxx historical portrait—showing them triumphant on the fields of Agincourt, or looking grave and solemn at the signing of the Magna Carta. Those who could not afford a private sitting gladly settled for one of his limited-edition “historical recreations”—Wellington at Waterloo, Nelson at Trafalgar. Military victories were perennial favorites. But the gruesome posthumous beheading of Oliver Cromwell’s corpse was, somewhat disturbingly, far and away his best seller.

Money, in short, was no longer an issue. If only Harriet were with him now. She would be so pleased. But Foxx had been discouraged as of late, spending all his time satisfying London’s desire for fanciful historical “reimaginings,” while neglecting his own desire to paint.

He looked around his studio, saw the blank canvases he had purchased and the many tubes of paint sitting unopened on shelves.

Do not complain, he reminded himself. He had been given a great gift: enough wealth to be comfortable along with fame for his masterful, if “fanciful,” artistic skill.

Yet even now, his work with the camera lucida was not coming along as readily as before. It was as if the clarity and intensity of the historical scenes themselves were fading with his lack of interest.

“Mr. Foxx?” It was George, appearing from the front of the shop. “There is a woman here to see you. She claims to have met you many years ago. A Madame Magnin? Funny old bird.”

Foxx started. “Yes, of course. Please, send her back.”

A minute later the old woman shuffled into the studio slowly, flicking a cane ahead of her with each step, tik-tik-tik.

“Ah, Mr. Foxx,” she said, looking around. “This is a nice place, quite fancy.”

“Thank you.” Foxx motioned for her to sit down on the cushioned chair next to his, but she shook her head.

“It has been many years, Madame. How can I help you?”

“I have a message, Mr. Foxx.”

“From whom?”

“Your Harriet.”

Foxx paled.

“She visited me. She said you have been harder to see lately. Distant. She said I was to speak to you. I’ve come across London. It is a long walk from Whitechapel to Mayfair, Mr. Foxx.”

“What…what is the message?”

“You must leave the past behind now. It is time for your future. That thing,” she pointed to the camera lucida, “has served its purpose. Now you must paint.”

She turned and began to shuffle out again.

“Wait!” said Fox, chasing her. “That’s the message? Just…paint?”

“Yes.”

It felt incomplete, anticlimactic. Foxx tried to stall her. “But…Harriet! She is well? She is happy? She is…with the Lord?”

Magnin smiled, still shuffling forward, tik-tik-tik. “Ah! That’s usually the first question, you know.”

When her hand was on the doorknob at the front of the shop, Foxx remembered his manners and pulled a crown from his pocket, offering it to her. She shook her head.

“Please,” protested Foxx. “For your troubles.”

“The messages are not troubles,” she said, pushing his hand away. “They are gifts.”

Then she walked out the door and disappeared into the crowds on Burlington Arcade.

Suddenly, from the studio, there was a shout and the sound of something breaking. A distraught George appeared, a bent brass rod and broken prism in his hand.

“I’m…I’m sorry, Mr. Foxx! I bumped the table when I was moving the books you signed. It must have fallen off!” He looked desperate. “Please, take it out of my wages!”

Foxx took the broken pieces of the camera lucida and stared at them for a moment. Then he patted George on the shoulder.

“A simple accident, George. Don’t upset yourself. This day is nearly over anyway. Why don’t you lock up and go home. I’d like to spend a little time alone.” Foxx eyed the stack of large, empty canvases in the corner of the studio. “Although perhaps, before you go, you can help me lift one of those onto an easel?”

“Of course, Mr. Foxx,” said George eagerly. “Anything you say, sir!”

When George had gone, Foxx set the pieces of the camera lucida on a shelf and began to open tubes of paint, one by one.