MEMENTOES.

You were in the photograph, but you ought not to have been there. You were only a maid after all, just a servant. And probably you would not  have been there had Mr Barten not agreed to you being there, standing by the French windows with your hands folded behind your back as if they were naughty children out of sight.

"Smile," Clara said. And each one presented what they termed a smile and Clara Barten stood poised, her body at an angle behind the camera and black cloth, and a flash made you blink. "Wait," Clara said. And everyone remained where he or she were as if frozen by her word. "I want to take another."

"Are we to be in a gallery of family portraits?" Frances Barten asked, standing behind her father in his wheelchair, her face frozen in a grim expression as if she had heard bad news. "I have things to be doing," she added, stiffening her frame, raising her head like a horse.

"I will not be long, Frances," Clara said and hid beneath the black cloth again like a mole. Everyone stood still. It seemed as if you all awaited death. Each one staring at the camera with your confessions ready in case the Almighty Himself were waiting for you once the light from the flash had left you blinded.

You hold the photograph and stare at it. Its edges are dog-eared and the faces have faded a little, but it still manages to take you back to that day forty years before. You look at Mr Barten in his wheelchair. He was ill then. A few years later, his mind had gone and he had been confined to an asylum. He was kind. You remember his kindness. His way of smiling at you as if you were one of his many daughters, even though you were not.

"Don't stand there gawping," Frances had said to you after the photograph had been taken the second time. "There are things that need doing." Frances never let you forget your place in the family or that you had things to be done. She had a sternness all of her own. Her eyes could melt ice. Her face had a stony expression even when she occasionally smiled which was rare. You stare closer at her in the photograph. Even now, you can hear her voice snapping at you like some terrier let loose.

You trace your finger across the photograph and touch her face. You and she were the only ones left in the house after Mr Barten had gone and the other girls had gone away to follow their vocations in various convents at home and abroad.

You allow your finger to remain poised over her face. If only she had permitted me to get closer to her, you muse, removing your finger, bringing the photograph closer to your eyes. But she hadn't. She kept you at bay; kept you in your place as she saw it. If she had only allowed me to get near to her, you think, letting your eyes peer at her stiff frame and stern features. The hands held each other just over her father's head as if she wanted to bless but was unable.

Clara would have made a better companion had she been the one left behind after Mr Barten had been taken away. She had a gentleness that belonged to her childhood, which had not been abandoned. You look at the photograph. She was always taking pictures. At any given moment, she would set up her camera, gather everyone, and capture him or her in a frozen moment of time. However, she herself was seldom captured in a photograph. No one had the same skill as she had with the camera. It was only once, after she had shown you how to work the camera that she had been captured and then shyly, with an awkwardness that portrayed her humility. That photograph was now lost. Like so much of those times, it was lost except in your memory.

You let your eyes move along the photograph until they come to Tessa Barten. She stands on your left with her hands held in front of her. Her eyes peer straight at the camera as if challenging it to portray her other than she was. You slide your finger over her face and clear a little dust that had gathered. The Little One, Mr Barten had called her. His youngest daughter.

She appears at ease in the picture as if she wanted to be captured for all time and not be lost in the long gallery of eternity. Not long after the camera had captured her here, she had left for some convent with her father's blessing, but also, you think now, his heart and mind beginning to break.

She had placed her arm around your shoulder once, after one of Frances's tirades at you, had left you in tears. You can still feel her arm about you some nights as you try to sleep and can't, and think over those years. The face in the photograph peers at you. There is a child-like expression there; an innocence that remains in your mind even after all these years. She died a few years after her father had finally lost his life as well as his mind and heart.

You return your gaze to Frances. She's dead now, too. Died in some obscure convent outside Paris. She wrote to you the once. Her words not clear in her scrawling hand-writing. Nevertheless, you have the letter still, tucked away in your prayer book with other small mementoes of your life. She had written to say how she had at last found what she had always wanted: to serve God. To recline in His arms. She said she hoped your new employer would appreciate you as she and all the Barten family had done. And as you stare at her now in the picture, you recall the words at the bottom of the letter: I love you, written small and almost indecipherable just above her signature.

You smile and tuck the photograph away inside the prayer book with the letter and other items of your past. You replace the prayer book on the bedside table and watch, as Frances sits on the end of your bed, her hands poised in front of you, as if she were about to blow you a kiss, or bestow  on you a long awaited final blessing.