The Luminist (11 page)

“Stop it,” Ewen said softly.

“ He is a reticent child,” Catherine remarked. “ Not given to flight. And that painting, I shall say that it lacks grievously of life and leave matters at that. Now, let me ask you something on the subject, as the kind of boy you are means something to me. You know of our Lord and his son?”

“ Let him be, mother,” Julia sighed. “ I wager he'd prefer rupees to religion.”

“ He speaks English. He is named for a servant of God, did you not say so to my husband?”

“ I did.”

“Then by all means, answer my question.”

“ I learned a little of it,” Eligius told her. “The child was born under a thatched roof, like mine. He grew, then died.” He shrugged. “At least he was able to live for a while.”

“Indeed. A child of your poverty of experience would see it
that way, eh?” She took a heavy ring from the thick folds of her sari. Along, skeletal key dangled from it. “ It is evident that you are not close, either to my God or yours. You have not been found in this world. I wonder if it matters to you at all.”

Her family stood in an uncomfortable silence.

“Are you worth the effort it takes to look for you?” she added. “ Perhaps that is the better question.”

“ I 'm not hard to find, memsa'ab. I stand among barrels and paintings. At this moment, it seems I'm easier to see than the child god you speak of.”

“ He should be dismissed for that,” Mary said. “ Feeding their family isn't reason enough for a servant's manners with these lot.”

“That is because they don't know there is more to hope for.” Catherine slipped the bony key into the lock and pushed the door open. “ Place your cask in here, then come to the cottage with me. I want you to see something before another ill chosen word leaves you.”

It stood on black legs. Five feet high, most of its body was draped with the dark hood he'd first glimpsed in the Court lobby. A sheet of paper, its surface grainy and trembling with minute sparkles, lay in a tray next to the beast. Watery and dissolute though it was, he could see the suggestion of the cottage in it, with its door open onto the colorless world, and a chair, empty and waiting. It was like an unfinished painting, like an indelible dark twin of where he stood, only drained of life and light.

Catherine was at his ear. “ Does it frighten you to know that this house contains matters you' ve never dreamt of?”

There were other occupants in this musty place she called Holland House. Trays, stacks of the paper, lines on the floor like sifted coal dust. In one spot on the wall, a rectangle where a painting might have hung above the peg and groove slats that had lifted under assault from unimpeded rain. Next to it, a single square of paper nailed to the wall. Odd textures besmirched its
surface. He wanted to approach it, to see what lay hidden in these stilled waves, but feared to move with the memsa'ab's eyes so alight at his discomfort.

She directed him to look at the paper. To see it, she told him. “ I remember you, you know. From the Court that day.”

“ You remember my father, I am certain. What happened.”

“No. That is where you will find that I differ. I remember you. And you remember me. I see it in your eyes. The moment you saw me. The woman from Court, from under the dark curtain. Why are you still here? We, all of us, are bound to a terrible day. You could go to any colonial house. Do you wish to avenge your father? Do you blame us?”

“ I am not such a man, memsa'ab.”

“Then what sort are you?” She took up the image of the Court. “ Every colonial has objects of value, and they fear your theft. Mine may not be jeweled or inlaid with precious metal. But I fear losing them. I have lost enough in my life. Perhaps you understand this.”

“Yes.”

“ My needs are simple, Eligius. Do not profane who we are or what we do. Do not desecrate what is ours. Do not drink and expect to be welcome here.”

“ Mother, enough,” Julia said. “ What is it you want from him?”

“ Does a boy who speaks English also read it?”

Catherine handed him a letter. He unfolded it.
If this be your life's work, I will continue our correspondence on the science of this. But this is not art, nor is it God. It is the merest shadow of life. Have you not held shadows long enough?

The letter was signed by Sir John Holland.

He understands, Catherine thought. And he does not run.

“ You serve a woman who wishes to prove those words wrong,” she said. “ But hear me on this. Do not let me become familiar with you now, only to yearn to forget you later.”

She walked out of the cottage. “ I cannot stand goodbyes,”
she called. “ Tomorrow you will work and I will provide you food and a rupee perhaps. What more can a soul do?”

Mary took the letter from him. “She may take pity on you, but I don't. Be sure of that. As hard as I work, I 'll not let your smart tongue in this house. Know your place. There are a hundred more just like you, less the cost and half the trouble, I can see already. But she's cast her eye on you, the good Lord knows why. I'll see you leave before long. Do you understand those words?”

“I understand.”

“Children, to bed with you.” She took Julia by the arm and led her away. Ewen lingered a moment. Eligius tolerated it.

“ Ewen,” Mary said. Ewen went to her, obedient. “ Put out the lights, Eligius. It's your duty now, not mine.”

 

THE NEXT MORNING he took to the roof of Holland House, cutting wood into rough planks with the only suitable tool he could find, a corroded machete. Hacking until his hands bled, he wondered if his father had wielded such an instrument in similar circumstances, before his life among the colonials sent him from Dimbola to the Court, to beg for crumbs and ash.

Repairing the roof was painstaking, tedious work. The machete was dull. He ran out of strength and worse, wood.

Before climbing down, he peered into the bowels of Holland House. The last of the daylight revealed the spider, patient and still, resting in the sun among his memsa'ab's bits and pieces.

That evening, he told the memsa'ab that more wood was needed, and a proper cutting blade, if she had any hope of keeping the sky out of her beloved Holland House. “ I shall pray on it,” she said and walked away after telling Mary to bring him some food.

He suspected that other Britishers were better off than the people he found himself among. The others' pockets were filled with gold, no doubt, and rupees fell like rain from them as they
walked through fields of thriving coffee that brushed the blue canvas of the world.

The week wore on. He ministered to the roof as best he could. As time passed he took notice of the family 's peculiarities. The sa'ab rarely asked him to do anything, even fetch tobacco for his pipe or a splint to light it with. When the pipe went cold, he simply sat as night fell over him.

Eligius was grateful for the sa'ab's isolation. He couldn't bring himself to look the old lion in the eye.

The memsa'ab doted on her husband, albeit in flurries and during daylight only. She brought him a bit of food – there seemed to be little more in the house than a body needed to get through the day – or a cup of tea and a word about the writing forever in the sa'ab's lap. Then she was lost to the task of composing her letters. She wrote several each day for Eligius to post.

“ Place it on our account,” she would say before dismissing him for the port. The expression he saw on the captain's face told him those words had been spoken too often.

The sa'ab couldn't abide bustle. The memsa'ab equally opposed stillness. Their marriage puzzled him, never more so than at night. At that hour there were no more tasks to busy with and he could watch these people. The sa'ab always retired first. He would put down his quill, bid goodnight and remain in the study. Not even his children drew near once he entered that frail, enveloping quiet. Julia would take up her book of paper and gaze about the house, while Ewen occupied some middle space between his parents.

The memsa'ab simply closed herself into Holland House with the spider, to do who knew what. Occasionally she brought the angel painting of Ewen in with her, then replaced it in the corridor deep in the night. The sound of the wood frame as she mounted it back on its nail seeped through the porous walls.

The days, the evenings, a bit of sleep and to the roof again. His first week among the colonials was strangely dislocating. He and his mother had a fraction of their space, none of the
furniture, not even the food, yet he longed for the dirt floors and the bristling sleeping mat of his hut. He longed to hear Gita breathing in time to her dreams. Now his own last sights before sleep were white stone walls, a bench with his servant's tunic draped over it, a window through which he could see a smudged sliver of the jungle.

He wanted to go back to Matara and whatever awaited him there before the very notion of his village fell away, and he became just one more piece of clutter set aside and forgotten in Dimbola.

Perhaps that was best, he thought. Dimbola is a mad woman's empire. In such a place, it was better not to be seen.

 

EARLY SATURDAY MORNING, Mary interrupted him while he ran the machete blade over a whetstone in hopes of an edge. “I need meat for today. We're going to the butchers.” She handed him a pail. “ Mine shouldn't be the only back that aches.”

Catherine was at the gate with Ault and Charles, who clutched at the corners of a heavy woolen coat as if it bound his bones together.

The missionary sat atop his cart. A Tamil unloaded burlap sacks onto the road. “ Namaskaram,” Eligius said to the worker. It felt good to use his own tongue. “ What village do you come from?”

The man was older and burly. A lifetime of field work had been written into his skin. He stepped past Eligius without a word. Kneeling in the Colebrooks' field, he ground dead leaves to a powder between his palms.

“A man of Governor Wynfield's,” Ault said. “A loan, with their compliments.”

Catherine's face flushed. She wanted Charles to rise up to the insult but he merely gazed across the fields, as if the missionary's words were just another passing breeze. She did not inquire into his dealings with Wynfield and resented having to consider them at all. It was not her place to worry about money,
or to defend him. Now, in front of servants, it was no longer possible to believe that the family of a Director flourished.

“ We need no help keeping up with our fellows,” she said stiffly. “A man who has devoted his life to affairs of state at home and abroad need never place hunt.”

“ I did not mean to offend – ”

She cut the missionary off with an imperious wave.“ I am in the wrong,” Ault said, sighing. “I apologize without reservation.”

“Charles, do you accept?”

“ We are not at Court, nor are we under scrutiny from our friends and neighbors. Our coffee and cotton crops are poor. We need help, not manners.”

“ You are my husband, and I only wish to glorify you in whatever meager way a woman can.”

“The matter is closed.”

His indignation rose only for her. She relented. “The children and I are accepting his kind invitation to church, where I shall ask God's grace on this field and on your health. Won't you come?”

“Spend your time as you wish. I ' ve work to do. I can either finish my work on the charter or Wynfield will finish it for me.” Awry smile crossed his lips. “ Have you seen our home, Stephen? It is enough of a church to rival any.”

“ My husband is in a quiet humor today. The work of championing this country and its people is a burden. Children, come! We have church.”

Julia and Ewen ran from the house, dressed in their finery. They took seats atop Ault's cart.

“Some meat,” she told Mary. “Something to fight the pallor in my husband.”

Ault tugged at the reins and his donkey – gray as spent coal, bloated in the stomach, her hind quarters a landscape of weevil bites – stepped gingerly forward. Mary kicked Eligius' pail. “ Will you be much longer in the clouds?”

In a moment they were walking along the well-worn ruts
in the road, following Ault's cart tracks to Port Colombo and the marketplace there. “ Heaven forfend they should spare us the walk,” Mary grumbled. She spat onto the ground. “ Your countryman seemed morose, don't you think?”

“I greeted him but he didn't answer.”

“It's a hard lot working for the Governor, I've no doubt. He's arrogant with his money.”

He thought about what she was saying. “He gives the Colebrooks seed and a man to plant them?”

“The master doesn't make what these others do and don't think a maid doesn't know it. It's left to me to stretch their money and make them look a part of society, and do I get thanks? That's where they 're most impoverished.”

He had so many questions, but Mary 's bitterness gave him pause. Everything about her – her bent posture, her headlong gait, her weathered hands – spoke of the harsh physical labor that informed her life. Yet he felt her need to speak unfurling like a sail. They were just two servants away from their masters, tongues loosening with the miles.

“ I know that the sa'ab and memsa'ab make the decisions,” he said, “but from what I've seen, it is you that runs Dimbola.”

She straightened haughtily. “ More so than any of the maids we'll see at market. More than should be my weight. ‘Fortune doesn't always smile where she should, and sadness grows in her absence.' Ault says that. It's a place of sorrows we' ve come to, Eligius. Yet what right do I have to complain about it, or leave it? None.”