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back in Calistoga, the old Wild East country of San Francisco. A year later, the murder charge was dropped: he was justified. He remained justified all his life, and even now, in his seventy-first year, he was not a man to be disobeyed or questioned. He had broken the brain of his deceitful wife and spitefully rejected his son with the certainty of Abraham. He had posed as Abraham once, for the set of photographs that made him known throughout the civilised world – naked, wielding a pickaxe, with taut muscles and hard sinew, stern and unflinching in his sixtieth year.
    Now he stood erect at the centre of the great barn in his native Thames Valley. Five men and a horse waited, cold air streaming in at one end from the tall, open doors. They talked quietly, nodding to his instructions. One man led the horse outside, the others took up their positions in the delineated interior. The walls and the floor had been painted black, immaculately clean and precise. White lines were drawn into the controlled darkness in chalky paint, grid patterns that framed the space into a stiffened concept and held the smells of the farm at bay. When the generated light came, it scrubbed the rural out, a fizzing brightness that tightened the interior into a fiction. This was a reversal of California: the cameras inside, the bright sunlit action outside. In rainy England, all studio life was interior – he had come to prefer it that way.
    Her Majesty’s government had called him out of retirement for this day. They made him a physical negative of his previous studio, where he could photograph what he wanted without anybody knowing. They had dragged him out of his docile years for these images, built his equipment into the old barn, followed every instruction and requirement he had given. He even insisted on the colour of the horse.
    ‘It must be white, pure white,’ he had told them. ‘Preferably with a flowing mane.’
    Some of the government men had speculated, behind their hands, that this was a narcissistic whim, that he wanted an animal that looked like him. But they had been wrong: the photographer had another horse in mind, one from a stable of madness and violent dreams. But that was his business, not theirs; he was ready to make a picture that the world had never seen.
    Muybridge picked up a handful of cables and nodded to the two men at the far end of the barn. One put his fingers in his mouth, while the other lifted what looked like a forging hammer from a polished wooden box. Muybridge called to the other, lesser man, who shuffled nervously at the far end, by the doors. The signal was given. The man outside whipped the horse hard into a stampede. The man with the fingers in his mouth whistled, a series of tearing notes. The horse bolted between them into the glaring, disembodied light of the fathomless hall. The other man lifted his iron. The thunder of the hooves rattled the painted grid as the horse steamed into the light. The camera shutters twitched insect frenzy and divided the time. A vast and unexpected fist of fire leapt from the huge gun in the man’s hand, and the sound that followed swallowed everything else. The horse collapsed onto its running legs, sending up a cloud of black, swirling dust, its thrashing body digging into the white grid and splattering the walls from the exit wound in its spine. It snapped its neck in the violence of its death throes which, like everything else, seemed to be instantaneous. With its last snort of breath, the cameras ceased and a tidal wave of silence wallowed into the barn.
    All stood still in the settling air. After a moment, the nervous new electricity was turned off. The scene became operatic in the sliding light of the opening doors. The whistler and the horseman put on overalls and began to clean up around the corpse; the shooter put the monstrous gun back in its icon-like box and unpacked a maroon-coloured rubber apron and gloves and a box of equine surgical instruments. Some of