First chapters: Better The Blood by Michael Bennett
Winner of the 2023 Ngaio Marsh Award for best first book.
Award-winning screenwriter Michael Bennett turned his hand to writing novels and found he’s just as good at that as he is at writing film and documentary scripts. Bennett’s Better the Blood won Best First Novel at this year’s Ngaio Marsh Awards, given to local best crime, mystery and thriller books. It was also shortlisted for an Ockham Award. It’s not the first-time Bennett has won a Ngaio Marsh Award; 2016′s In Dark Places won Best Non-fiction.
With Return to Blood due for release in April, we revisit Better The Blood with its first chapter.
A SMUDGE ON THE PAGE OF HISTORY
5 October 1863.
His hands move quickly as he polishes the sheet of silver-plated copper to a perfect mirror finish. He is well practised at this. On a good day, say on a day where he has been engaged to create portraits of a number of members of a wealthy London merchant family, he could easily craft thirty daguerreotypes, perhaps more. In this godforsaken place on the other side of the world, though, it is far more difficult. Engaged by the Queen’s army to make permanent records of the colonial campaign, he finds himself again and again practising his art in the field where he has no permanent studio, no light-safe room where he can prepare the materials.
It is a challenge. To say the least. But he prides himself on his professionalism.
Under cover of a black cloth, the daguerreotypist places the highly polished plate in a sensitizing box containing iodine crystals. He waits patiently for the fumes to react with the silver.
Others there are not so patient.
‘We haven’t got all day for this,’ says the captain of the troop. ‘Hurry up, man.’
The captain is quite drunk and has been so for hours, ever since his men successfully apprehended the captive. If truth be told, he is inebriated far more often than he is sober, a fact his men know well, attested to by the ongoing lack of rum in their evening rations, and while none would dare make a complaint about the situation, the captain’s appetite for the bottle has made him no friends amongst his subordinates.
Under the black cloth, the daguerreotypist quietly counts the seconds for the chemical reaction to take hold sufficiently. Twenty-five elderflower, twenty-six elderflower . . .
‘What are you up to under that damn sheet?’ the captain demands, impatient to get back to his tent. His bottle is only half finished and there’s little left of the day.
In the darkness under the sheet, the daguerreotypist sighs. Thirty-five elderflower, thirty-six elderflower . . . For a while, he entertained grander plans for his life. He once had dreams of studying at the Royal Academy Schools, imagining a life as a painter who might reinvigorate and modernize the Flemish style for an adoring British art world. But as the son of a long line of blacksmiths, there was scant hope of either being accepted into the Academy Schools, or being able to afford the extraordinary tuition fees. Faced with the horror of carrying on the family trade of horseshoes and iron gates, he settled instead on this new art form, the imprinting of the light spectrum onto silver plates. Preserving frozen images of life not in oil or watercolour but in copper and mercury and silver. A way for him to make a shilling while using his considerable skills in the play of light on the landscape or on the human form.
It’s not painting. But it will do. Forty-five elderflower.
He emerges from the black cloth. ‘About fucking time,’ says the captain.
The daguerreotypist goes amongst the soldiers, care- fully moving and repositioning each of them to most advantageously address the stark New Zealand light as it falls through the branches of the towering tree they stand beneath. ‘This is modern-day alchemy,’ he enthuses, aware that for those unfamiliar with this new technology, the process of creating a daguerreotype can be disarming. ‘A little piece of magic. Your images are captured for all time; this moment will remain long after your bones are dust.’
‘Get a move on,’ slurs the captain. ‘I need a shit.’ ‘Rum does that to a man’s bowels,’ one of the soldiers says, being sure it is not loud enough for the captain to hear.
The daguerreotypist returns to his box apparatus, irritated by the captain’s drunken disregard for his art. ‘This is called the lens,’ he explains, indicating the small protrusion that emerges from the middle of the wooden box. ‘When I remove the cap, you must stay perfectly still.
Perfectly still. The slightest movement and you will be but a smudge on the page of history.’
Apart from the captain’s rum breath and flushed face, the soldiers have approached this process with gravity, polishing their uniform buttons, cleaning their tall dress boots to a shine.
‘How are we meant to look?’ one of them asks. ‘Do we smile?’
‘Was Christ smiling in The Last Supper?’ snaps the daguerreotypist.
‘He was about to have bloody great nails hammered through his hands,’ the youngest soldier points out. ‘No wonder he wasn’t bloody smiling.’
Ignoring the laughter, the daguerreotypist perseveres. ‘Did Michelangelo carve a fool’s grin onto David’s face? Smiling makes a man an idiot,’ he insists. ‘Smiling is for simpletons. Don’t smile.’
He positions himself by the lens.
‘Ready,’ he warns. ‘Quite still, please. And . . . hold.’ He removes the cap.
Instantly the exposed image ricochets between a series of mirrors within the body of the wooden box, the light finally falling upside down against the polished silver plate. The photochemical reaction begins to capture the moment.
The six members of the troop, the inebriated captain and his five men, are gathered under a towering pūriri tree on the crest of a volcanic cone overlooking Auckland harbour. As the reaction develops, it is plain that, despite not attending the Royal Academy Schools, the daguerreotypist has an instinctive grasp of the rule of thirds. The image has a sense of proportion that is almost classical.
Below the tree, the six soldiers face the lens in an aesthetically pleasing curving semicircle. Suspended above them, a few yards over their heads, secured to one of the lower branches of the great tree by a length of twelve-strand British Army rope noosed tight around his throat, a seventh person forms the apex of this carefully considered composition.
The dead man is naked, the captive stripped and humiliated before he was executed, retribution for having evaded the pursuing troop for a quite embarrassingly long period. As well as the rope around his neck, his hands are tied in front of his torso, his feet bound at the ankle. The man is Māori, and the tā moko* tattooed on his face and body show the markings of a high-born leader. He is silver-haired, in his fifties, and the swirls and lines gouged deep into his skin tell a tale of his lineage, his status, the knowledge he carries, the whakapapa† passed down to him across generations.
A rangatira, a chief of great stature.
‘How much longer?’ the captain slurs.
‘Do not speak,’ the daguerreotypist barks. ‘You will be a smudge on the page of history!’
After the necessary sixty seconds, the cap goes back on the lens.
* Tā moko – traditional form of Māori tattooing, signifying status or social standing
† Whakapapa – genealogy, line of descent
