Free The Clairvoyant Curse by Anna Lord

voice.”
    “Ah! I see you’ve met her too.
I’m guessing she was the one who led you here?”
    “Please don’t hold it against
her. I can be very persuasive.”
    “And she can be very
naïve.”
    “Let me go back to my train of
thought before I lose it. How is the image created on the cloth? It
reminds me of the Shroud of Turin and no one has been able to
figure it out for centuries but I wondered if it had something to
do with a camera.”
    “You’ve read about Secondo
Pia’s photograph then?”
    “Yes, though I haven’t actually
seen it for myself - only a photo of the photo.”
    “Same here, but I’ve seen the
Shroud. I lived in Italy for several years. It was Champollion’s
idea to make a shroud for the show. We could have merely used a
slide as most of the magic lantern shows do but Champollion likes
to give the audience something tangible to touch afterwards, hence
the levitating chair and the camera obscura. He asked me to come up
with something similar to the Shroud. I’d already spent years
wondering about the Turin Shroud and rose to the challenge.”
    The Countess put up her hand to
stop him. “Let me guess from here. You dipped the linen in a
solution of silver sulphate and hung it up to dry.”
    He nodded.
    “The silver sulphate gave the
linen cloth the same properties as photographic paper and that’s
why the images on the shroud look like negatives.”
    Again he nodded.
    “You used a camera and set it
on long exposure, possibly for six hours.”
    He gave a wave of his hand to
indicate more, like a conductor waving a baton or a magician waving
a wand.
    “Seven hours.”
    He waved his wand-like hand
higher.
    “Eight hours.”
    He nodded.
    “That means you had to have
something to photograph such as a human female form, but as it was
long exposure and no one would be able to stand motionless for
eight hours, it suggests you used a life-size statue. You
photographed through the cloth so that the image appeared on the
cloth without using any pigments.”
    He nodded.
    “Next, you washed the cloth
with the negative image on it in a solution of ammonia to remove
the silver so no one would ever associate it with a
photograph.”
    “A woman with an algebraic
brain,” he noted not unkindly, “that’s rare.”
    She accepted the back-handed
compliment with good grace. “Do you think the Shroud of Turin was
made the same way?”
    “It’s possible. Magic lanterns
were in use by the 1650’s using an oil lamp or candle so it’s not
improbable that they might have been used by some clever forger. In
fact there are stories of forgers being tortured to confess the
shroud is a forgery. Later, it’s the opposite. What did Calvin say:
St John must be a liar!”
    “That reminds me of Pope
Gregory’s tenet: The more outrageous the religious claim the more
the people must rely on faith.”
    “And the less they will apply
any logical thinking,” he finished for her as people do who are
following the same thought.
    “How about some more of la
fee verte before I leave?” proposed the Countess. “I’d like to
toast my success in advance.”
    “Artemisia wins the day yet
again!” He retrieved the bottle and removed the cap. “But you still
don’t know what the image was.”
    “Not yet,” she said
confidently, “but I think I might find it Madame Moghra’s bedroom
and that’s where I’m going when I leave here.”
    He raised the bottle high in
the air in the form of a mock toast and passed it to her.
“Congratulations on your success, Artemisia. I hope your wager was
for something substantial.”
    She took a swig of absinthe. “A
cruise on the SS Pleiades.”
    Shaggy blond brows registered
his surprise. “I predict we will meet again in the not too distant
future, Countess Varvara Volodymyrovna.”
    “You have the gift of second
sight, Mr Ffrench,” she teased as she turned her back on the room
full of ghost shrouds and the poet-scientist who had probably
solved a religious mystery