The Luminist (10 page)

“ Let me deal with this boy,” one of the men said.

“No.”

Chandrak took Eligius by the arm and led him back into the jungle. “ It's unfair of me to expect so much of you without warning, Eligius. But I have a reason. I know you better than you think. You hate them. You remember Swaran dying at their hands, and if you could, you'd do something. I tell you, you can. I see so much of him in you. I ask you now, picture their home. What did you see?”

“ Furniture. A rug. Gas lamps.”

“These are big,” Chandrak blurted impatiently. “Think of small things. Personal things.”

“ I know what you're asking. I won't steal. It's enough that you make me work for them—”

There was only the briefest shudder of air; Chandrak 's slap made no sound. His open hand snapped Eligius' head back.

“They 're murderers,” Chandrak told him. “ We' ve toler - ated them for too long. Not striking back at them, that is your shame. But you will strike, and I 'm telling you how. You go back. Remember what they have, anything that can be taken a little at a time. For now, that's enough. When you prove to me that you're a man, I 'll tell you of the great work we've begun. But hear me. You will do this for your father and for me. You will watch them and I will watch you.”

He left Eligius amidst the swaying boughs. The undertow of the men's murmurs sank beneath the hiss of air-stirred leaves.

Picking his way back to the road, Eligius hesitated. There was the fire, and the men's talk of the fields. There was his hut, where the shapes of Sudarma and Chandrak twinned in the doorway.

He turned away from all of it. This night, Matara breathed new truths.

Somewhere else, he thought. Better to find the way there.

 

BY THE TIME he made it to the Colebrooks, the moon sat low above the sea, plating the visible world in blue. Its light made jewels of the raindrops falling on him as he sat against a thick tree outside the gate. It would be dawn soon. He would be smarter for the next day 's work. He would eat only when obliged to by the demands of his tasks, and take back as much of the colonials' money as he could. Gita needed more than omum powder to keep her from the valley.

He would watch and remember. But would he speak of it? Was Chandrak right?

Lost in his thoughts, he didn't notice the figure standing at the gate, an alabaster doll in the cold moonlight. Julia's pale skin disappeared beneath a fan of hair.

“ Why are you here? My mother will not pay you more just because you beat her to the sunrise.”

Her haughtiness hid something. A restlessness. She was not at ease, and it made him smile.

“ Don't pretend you don't understand me. I was at the table, or did you forget?”

“I did not. I brought home the food and returned because I wanted to see the lion's mouth before I slept.”

“Are you insulting me?”

“No,” he laughed. “It's a place. The highest point in Ceylon. You can see every corner of the sky from there. And since it was more than halfway, and it was already so late…”

“And I think you're lying. I think you're as insolent at home as you are here, and they wouldn't let you through the door.”

“ If you wish.” He bundled himself tighter.

“Did you know there would be trouble that day at Court? I always meant to ask, had I seen you again.”

Shifting position, he turned his gaze towards the sea.

“ I suppose,” Julia said loudly, “ you' ve no interest in why I chose to come out here. Certainly, I could have noted your presence with the same indifference you now display and returned to my bed. Well, enjoy the water.”

She spun on her heels and took a few steps. “ If you must know,” she called, “ I felt you deserved something more for the work you did.”

He stood and walked to the gate. “Come back. Please.”

“ If it matters so much to you.”

She held out a thin chain. The glass bauble he'd seen at the Court caught the moonlight and flared, sending its shards across his chest. “ You cannot speak of this to mother,” she said. “It wasn't right that you should simply receive food. We should all receive food, just as we should receive the next day. This is all I have. I cannot take her money. She knows it too well. But I am told by men more worldly than I that you steal from us and sell our goods at bazaars. If so, I hope you're paid well.”

The bauble spun at the end of her chain. He raised it level with his eyes. It fashioned the moonlight into a calliope of white clouds that overlay the trees, the sea, her.

She was walking away. This time there was no hesitancy in her step. She'd done all that she'd come to do.

He found that if he held the bauble just so, he could throw tiny lights deep into the Colebrooks' yard, to the gazebo even, and set them dancing with a flick of his wrist. He imagined Julia watching him with the queer mix of her ilk's imperiousness and the odd wakefulness that had brought her to the gate.

A bit of his light found Holland House. Clearly there would be other tasks. The letters, preparing the yard, perhaps anchoring the pole again while the memsa'ab held forth. He felt certain that Holland House was where he would find himself most often. Then, he supposed, the Colebrooks would have no further need for him. By then Gita might be healthy, and he would find a new way to show his worth at home.

Someone was in the cottage doorway.

He quickly covered the bauble with his hand and looked again. The clouds came and took the moon away. Now he couldn't be sure of what he'd seen – a figure standing behind a chair in the open doorway. All was night. He couldn't discern anything.

He settled back against the tree and waited. In time he closed his eyes. Soon he was aloft over a land too dark to see.

Mother and Child

HE LOOKED UP AT THE SOUND OF FEET WHISKING through the dewed grass. Mary stood over him, bowl in hand. “ Bring it into the house when you' ve finished. There's a mountain of mud to be cleared, and more yet when you're past that.” She left him the porridge without a word on finding him just outside Dimbola's gate.

He ate the thin mixture of cracked rice and milk, then began shoveling the mud away. Gradually, the sun broke through and stirred some warmth in his blood. It felt good to be alone, testing himself against the weight of his country. The glass bauble tapped against his chest in gentle time to his work.

At mid-day, the memsa'ab emerged from the house carrying a parcel of letters. He grabbed his tunic and put it on, tucking the bauble within.

She handed the letters to him. “ Take these to the missionary in Port Colombo. He will show you how to post them.”

“ I remember the ship.”

Mary stood nearby. “ Do I need a translator?” Catherine snapped at her. “Clearly not.”

Mary slunk back to the house.

“While you're in the port,” she told Eligius, “the missionary should give you some materials he's received on my behalf. You are to bring them back here. Leave nothing behind.”

She deposited a small sack in his hand. “See to it that these rupees make it to their destination. The captain of the postal
vessel is an acquaintance, and who can say when I might visit his ship myself? Be sure that my first question will be about his business with you today.”

“ I will not steal your money,” he said.
You know it too well
.

 

AFTER POSTING THE letters with the captain, he hid the few remaining rupees in a fold of his tunic and went to the missionary's small parish. It was empty but for a departing beggar. “Ah,” Ault said when Eligius told him of the memsa'ab's request for her materials. “I've been looking forward to ridding myself of these.”

There were two casks the size of Eligius' torso. “ How do I carry these all the way to Kalutara?” he asked.

“ I have a cart. If your young back can load these drums, I 'll take you. It won't cost you any more than what I hear jingling in your clothes. Come now, give freely to God's servant. On your memsahib's behalf, it's the most tithing she'll have done in months.”

The remaining rupees went for Ault's cart and an elder donkey to pull it. Eligius loaded the casks and they were on their way before noon. “ What do they hold?” he asked as Port Colombo's uneasy queue of battered and new, Indian and British, slipped below the skyline of trees.

“Salts of some kind.” Ault absently turned a single rupee over in his hand. “They came from London. She has them shipped, I believe, from a gentleman there.”

“ Holland?”

“ He and others. William Henry Talbot. Oscar Reijlander. Exotic name, that. Your memsahib maintains a steady correspondence about this endeavor of hers.”

He thought of Mary 's cluck of disapproval over the acquaintances her mistress kept.

“It does no good to ask our Lady Colebrook what she wants or seeks,” Ault said, as if to himself. “Nor to question her tenacity. Such is her doggedness to find whatever it is she needs to find. Good graces be damned.”

“ What is it she's doing?”

“I haven't the first idea. I wonder if even she knows.” Ault placed the rupee in his breast pocket. “Mind your path, Eligius.”

For the sake of the cart and its contents, they took the low road through the valley and arrived at Dimbola's gates by early evening. Ewen was acting as a lookout. When he saw them, he ran into the house crying Eligius' name.

“The child has taken to you,” Ault said.

Catherine met them at the gate. Ault climbed down from the cart to greet her with a kiss of her hand. “Such a difference now that your Red Sea has parted. It seems that the servant boy has met your expectations, eh?”

“He is a spirited boy,” she said, “and not without competence. Indeed, I find I have more uses of him than there are days. Such is the life of a director 's family.”

“How true.”

“I wish for the boy to remain here during the week. He may return to see his family on Sundays. It is a holy day for us, though I don't expect him to understand that. Please do inform his family of the new arrangement. If there is a problem, I should like to know of it now, so I can find a suitable replacement.”

“I will tell them.” Ault turned to Eligius. “ I hear no objections.”

She watched him. And waited.

Eligius' mind made shameful short work of it. Forces in his life now were beyond his understanding. He needed to find a far place such as this Dimbola from which to make sense of them all. “ When you are there, please see about Gita. How she is feeling. Tell her and my mother I stay to earn as much as I can for them.”

He unloaded the cart. Ault bid his goodbyes and left him behind. It was that easy. The shift to Dimbola as the place he would see most often was done.

Catherine surprised him by lifting one of the barrels her - self and carrying it to the house. He took one and followed her.

They passed through the front door into a dark foyer. A stairway at the rear, next to an arterial corridor, wound up to a second story marked with a dwarfed brown chest on which a series of grotesque figurine candlesticks stood. Their charred tapers had wilted from overuse. Above him, a black iron candelabra hung precariously from a cobwebbed chain. Dust motes rolled in the breeze ribboning the house, up against the wainscoting and across the stone floors like earthbound clouds.

The visible rooms were crowded with ill-fitting odds and ends. There was a study, its interior dim with old cigar smoke. Despite the gloom he could make out the ivory of a stuffed owl under a glass conical, and next to it a humidor and a pinccone cachepot.

The room across from the study was a riot of flowery brocades and impractically soft settees that bore the imprint of recent occupation. A tea service sat on a low round table littered with balled pieces of paper.

He understood none of what he saw, only that the Colebrook estate bore its once opulent clutter like fruit left on the vine to rot.

Mary took up a corner of the area rug, a faded expanse of brown and white obelisks woven in heavy woolen thread. “ How do I move this with your bloody dead weight on it?”

He stepped off, shifting the cask in his aching arms. She pulled the rug out of the foyer and down the hall.

“This way!” Catherine's voice bellowed. Ewen and Julia stopped what they were doing to wander after her.

Eligius followed the sound of Catherine's passage and found himself in a corridor of paintings. They were as vivid as the textured cover of her stage tragedy, only rendered in oils of gold, green and black. There were girls and women, and wiselooking men of learning held in place by scalloped wood frames. The characters in these paintings all stared past him at some point of reverie in the middle distance.

Catherine set her cask down at the end of the hall, beneath
a painting of a child with wings as white and stilled as the owl in the study. “ Did the same hand render all these paintings?” Eligius asked.

“ Bravo,” Julia said. “ How did you know?”

“They just seemed related. And the light looks the same. As if they were all painted at the same hour.”

“An acquaintance of our family. He fancies himself a por - traitist of religious awakenings and wealthy colonials. They 're called gouaches.”

“ May we proceed?” Catherine snapped. It angered her to spend time on George's work, such as it was. “Are we quite done educating the boy on our paintings?”

Julia and Mary exchanged uneasy looks. Ewen kept his eyes glued to the cask in Eligius' hands.

“ Look at me,” Eligius whispered to the boy. Surprised, the child gazed up. Eligius studied his face, plaintive and pale, and then the painting above the door. The winged child in the painting resembled the boy before him, so much so that he could not help but stare.