Light acts on the nitrates of silver. Some may ask why? No one knows and no one may ever know. The great machine of science is helpless in the explanation of causes. She discovers effects, claims the phenomenon under her control, but leaves the wonderful influence that light bears on these chemical agents untouched.

For seven years after she had dismissed her life with her former husband as a horrible disappointment, Mme Barnard had established herself a pretty fortune investing her late father’s small inheritance into the textile industry and had quietly retired to the northern countryside. Her investment had proved savvy with the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway and by the time of the Rainhill Trials she had conceived a child by a young gentleman by the name of Mr. James Betty, a solicitor who, although having passed the bar chose not to be a barrister as his father, but rather enjoyed a life of leisure playing with ball and racquet. Mr. Betty would be later devastated because the emergent popularity of lawn tennis lent him not a single commendation for its growing popularity. Younger more limber fellows, immigrants from Ireland and France no less, would regularly beat him and in a decade he had established a flourishing law practice in the heart of London. The new source of income provided a new wing on the west side of the manor and meant that the house would be well-staffed for the entirety of George’s youth.

Mrs. Betty was born to British aristocracy but spent the majority of her youth on their property in Cote d’Azur due to poor health. It was from there that she attributed her excitable nature usually common to those races of more swarthy complexion. At her house in the country there was hardly a night that guests were not had and the Betty Manor was known throughout England for having the most spectacular, if not unpredictable parties. Even death was welcome, as the time when Mr. Betty brought back the opium his colleague working for the Honourable East India Trading Company had received as a cure for his rheumatism but had of yet not consumed. Though many at the party were experienced with tobacco, the novel idea of opium use for recreation was an exciting prospect. However, the opium was collected fresh and the liquid latex made smoking it on tobacco difficult. Sir John Francis and his two colleagues from the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, Sir George Brown and Sir Llyod Canrobert devised an intelligent plan inspired by their studies on the Great Apes at the Natura Artis Magistra some years before. The most effective mode of conveying medicine through the body was through the rectum and into the colon which had absorptive properties similar to the sponge or other Porifera. A baster was brought from the kitchen and the syrup was administered to the great well of curiosity. Unfortunately, Sir Brown did not wake from his sleep, but Sir Canrobert and his wife as well as Sir Francis and Mrs. Betty all conferred that they had a most pleasant experience. Mr. Betty thought it was a wonderful feeling, but was horribly embarrassed at the small mess he had made.

The resulting inquiry brought unwanted attention to the house and from the age of two until his matriculation at Oxford University, George’s time in the country was mostly idyllic, only disturbed by the occasional Dutch or Swiss uncle or Mrs. Betty’s occasional guest. By the time he was eight, the negro servants that had once joyfully graced the halls of the manor were but all gone leaving only a cook, three maids, one attendant, and a governess.

That is not to say that George’s childhood was lonely, for before Sophia there was his governess, Miss Isolde Berger. The middle-classes which for so long had been a problematic subculture to reconcile had recently acquired an appreciation for the free market. The burgeoning trade of the time made penny-millionaires and fathers bought their son and daughters the education required to converse and perhaps even endear the ear of the aristocracy, which were very tuned to the populist musings of the day. Isolde was well educated in sewing, singing, Latin, but not Greek, and unconventionally had an affinity for the natural world. Her talent in drawing and watercolors were praiseworthy, although not greatly above average, and made up for her indolent and childlike technique at the piano. Instead of landscapes though, she turned her eye toward the garden and drew numerous botanical sketches during her education. However, her beauty, although in the eyes of George as delicate and supple as his mother’s, were nothing to write home about and she could not wish to marry anyone remotely desirable. Thus, she took to the profession of governess and it welcomed her to be far away from Scotland and the degenerate Scottish peoples.

Although today we have cultivated a delightful fascination with the freaky and the untamed strangeness in both male and female sexuality, in her time Isolde was not thought to be attractive. If you were to see her as a baby though, you would not believe that she was the same person. Even the doctors noted that her eyes, which had turned a stale greyish-blue by now, were beautifully large and seemed to shine brighter than the greenest jade from the Orient. Nurses playfully jested about kidnapping her for themselves. But a morbid pubescence with a prolonged growth streak left her gaunt with features prominent in only the most taunted boys. She was taller than most boys her age and her arms and legs were gangly and she was not born a blonde. George could recall how her prominent cheek bones and slender neck reminded him of the depiction of the hanged Jesus that hung so mournfully over the altar at St. Peter’s Cathedral.

She was sixteen when they hired her for the instruction of the eight year old, George, in French, singing, and grammar. She wore a gingham dress of red and white and her chestnut hair lay flat upon her underdeveloped bosom. For George, it was exciting to have someone besides the maids to play with and he still had an intellectual brightness to him that we know fades as we grow more disenchanted with life. One day, Isolde brought George into the garden.

“Do you know what these are called, George?” she asked pointing to the scarlet begonias that inhabited the bed next to the fountains.

“That’s a begonia and the other one’s a lily,” George said proudly.

“Why, that’s very nice,” said Isolde, “and that one over there?”

“I don’t know, Miss Berger.”

“That’s a marigold and every morning they are kissed by faeries. It’s been said that if you you sleep with a petal on each eye lid, you will be transported to their world in your dreams,” Isolde said as she bent over to pluck it out of the garden and put it her hair. As she was lifting her skinny and pale arms, George could not help but notice the sun shine upon her gentle skin and illuminate several golden hairs protruding from her otherwise barren scape. It reminded him of the grass in summer and he could feel the first time a desire to feel what those delicate hairs would feel on him. For years, he held these desires to himself, secretly relishing her moist kiss on the cheek goodnight and her touch guiding his hands through the otherwise tedious piano exercises. He would keep playing the piano for years, far past the point where Isolde could longer tutor him. These emotions probably exacerbated an already strenuous pubescence complicated more by their trip to Vienna when he was twelve.

But even though the thought had yet to penetrate society as fact quite yet, the idea that the infancy of a child could provide great insight into his or her future character was intuited by many. But even a keen study into George’s infancy could not reveal the sweet pleasure that he recalled in those days of wonder in Vienna of the pangs and joy of falling in love with Isolde. George never tasted the sweet tit of his mother as a wet nurse sustained him until he was fourteen months. Compared to the nurse’s voluptuous breasts that were as ripe as ground-dwelling melons swollen with water after a sudden summer shower, Mrs. Betty was far more angular in figure and her skin softly wound around her boney skeleton was sleek and mysterious to George. Isolde was longer but just as mysterious and both she and Mrs. Betty had passions of such coital intent that even from the darkest of the delinquent Spaniards would arise shock and disapproval.

Isolde was charged with watching over George during the family trip to Vienna. Winterreise had recently received positive reviews and the melancholy mood attracted both Mr. and Mrs. Betty, both of whom adored the idea of listening to the dying words of a syphilis plagued genius. Neither had any venereal diseases themselves but it seemed to afflict only the most exciting and beautiful individuals. The family stayed at the small country house of the Larivière’s, family friends of Mrs. Betty, or Becky as they called her, a short 15 minute carriage ride from town. The Larivière’s owned the largest publishing company in Vienna, the First Viennese Publishing Company, and were among the town’s most prominent citizens. But the Jew’s are a funny people, and many writers and composers found their practices deceitful and overly cunning. The newly founded Second Viennese Publishing Company had began to usurp many of the Larivière’s patrons and the Larivières appeared to be a household in decline. Some social functions even took the liberty to excise them from the guest list, but they did hold with them their great trump card, the backing of the Society of Friends of the Music in Vienna or Musikverein which would prove immensely valuable in a couple generations.

They had a Shabbos goy named Christopher who was at fifteen a hardworking peasant of Prussian descent, though he wasn’t as bad as the townspeople treated him. He would light stoves for the Larivieres during the winter and cook meals on the Sabbath. He had short blond hair and had a sturdy build of medium height. He was slightly shorter than Isolde, but had a much larger head. Now the Bettys and the Larivieres had left George with Isolde and left for the theater, but it was a warm night and the steamed milk had all but put George into nocturnal fancy. As he lay on the couch wrapped in his warm comforter, Isolde had called over Christopher to meet her in the West lawn.

What George saw that night cannot be adequately described clearly, as it was dark and confusing for a young boy. The gently moaning of inelegant objects in friction stimulated George’s mind with ideas. Dark and warm ideas, and prophetic ones. But across the field from him were two lovers, and George sensed that his petit bolete was in the process of metamorphosis. Two words stuck with him that night. He would look them up in a dictionary many years later when writing poems for class at the University. Nabokov, and you will see that Ada could not have influenced this writer at this point in his book more than it has, provides the first of the two words. Lip: “Either of a pair of fleshy folds surrounding an orifice,” though George saw much more in those crepuscular hours. The moon was bright and many objects were irradiant, as the petals on the windowsill, a snake wetly folded around the overflowing fountain and the grass wilting with dew. According to my dictionary, dew has two definitions: “1. tiny drops of water that form on cool surfaces at night, when atmospheric vapor condenses. 2. wet (a part of someone’s body) with a beaded or glistening liquid.”

George would ask a horrified Isolde about that night, but it was made known to him that no one was out there as Christopher had been sick with a stomach ache that day and could not have possibly made it to the house. It would be years before George himself would melt into a sea of ecstasy in such a manner, but the mystery of that particular incident inspired within him a burdensome thirst for the sublimity that many future experiences would prove fruitless to capture.