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flutters before her as she runs. With her other hand Isabelle gathers up her long skirts so she can move swiftly over the stones on the path. When she bursts through the door into the library, she is breathless.
    Eldon looks up at the sound of the door opening. His wife looks crazed, wild and crazed, as if she has been living for weeks in the woods in the company of faeries and spirits. Some of her hair has come loose from its pins. She is panting. Her dress is crooked. Her appearance both attracts and repels him. He approves of the wantonness and disapproves of the madness.
    “Watch the maps,” he says, which really isn’t what he meant to say at all, but he is panicked about her touching the old sheets of paper with her stained hands.
    His warning makes Isabelle hesitate, but only for an instant. She waves the print in front of his face. “My first success, Eldon,” she says. “My first real success.”
    He takes the print and holds it carefully in his hands, although there’s no need as Isabelle has smudged it from handling it so much already. It’s a picture of the new maid and the gardener, Wilks, whom he has never properly approved of. They are costumed in bed and table linen, acting out some dramatic operatic tableau. It is not unlike her other photographic efforts, but Eldon can see what Isabelle wants him to see. There is an intensity to the maid’s expression, a look so clear and true that he could draw a direct line between it and his own eyes as he looks at the photograph. There is nothing between them. It is quite remarkable.
    “Yes,” he says. “I do see what you mean. She looks so…” He wants to say
beautiful
, but that really isn’t the right word for how she looks. He thinks of the bird’s-eye-view perspective on early maps, where you look down at the shape of the landscape and can get a sense of what it feels like to be there. Something felt in what is seen.
    “Right,” says Isabelle. “She looks so perfectly, absolutely right. I cannot believe it. It feels miraculous. I had to come immediately and show you.”
    Eldon is touched by this. Isabelle has a generous spirit, he thinks. She is so different from him. When he discovers something marvellous he prefers to hoard the knowledge, keeps it to himself, treats it as fuel to stoke a fire. If he opens the window on it, he will lose some of the heat. “I am very pleased for you, my dear,” he says, and he is. He sets the photograph carefully on a corner of his library table. They both look down at it between them.
    Isabelle can’t keep still. It’s as though the energy she feels rippling out from the photograph eddies her around the room. The library is not a place to rush about in. There are rules in this room. Don’t touch the maps. Don’t careen around disturbing the staid antiquity of the documents, of the atmosphere. As pleasant as it has been to hurry along here and show Eldon the photograph, Isabelle feels that to stay would just lower her spirits. Her living piece of art would be dragged down by all these dusty old maps.
    “You keep it,” she says to her husband. “I’ve mostly ruined this one anyway. I’ll go and make another.” She shoots past him and disappears through the door. The air trembles in her wake.
    Eldon looks down at the photograph on the table. Those eyes seem to be watching him. The tenor of their gaze is such that you wouldn’t want to be feeling unsure of yourself when they looked at you. Those eyes would find you out, would detect weakness and cowardice. This photograph is a place that has found him, not, as it usually is, the other way around. Eldon puts his hand out and very carefully, very gently, traces around the figures in the picture, feels his way along the lines of Annie Phelan—those ragged as a coastline, those smooth as a worn hillside.
    Eldon runs the flat of his hand over the piece of paper in front of him.
Cosmographia Universalis.
A map of the world. This is what he wanted for himself,