The Luminist (17 page)

“Did you get him on your skin?”

He thought of the memsa'ab's hands. “Such things don't happen.”

“In there they do.”

Ewen ran down the hall to Mary. She took him away.

Eligius waited until the corridors grew quiet before retrieving his diya. He crossed the yard to Holland House and closed the door. Dimbola was still. No one would see.

He lit his diya. Trays filled with shallow pools of water lined the wall. Little slicks of silver floated on their surfaces. A woodframed square of the grainy paper rested against the spider's legs. Ripples marred its surface.

Whatever made the memsa'ab shake like a child and Ewen fear sitting still, he saw nothing of it here.

He examined the spider. Its legs were wooden poles, squared at the top to fit into a large box. Under the cloak he found a hole with a glass piece pushed into it.

Setting the flickering diya on the chair, he looked through the hole again. The hole changed the shape of the light, turned it, constricted it.

Another wooden frame lay hidden within the spider's box body. He slid it out. Holding the captured paper to the light, he saw vague, corporeal shapes that resembled eyes. A nose. A mouth. They could scarcely be seen, but he could tell they were not drawn, not sketched. The shadows Catherine communed with had touched the feather and stolen its soul. They'd made vapors of the Court lobby. Now they'd taken the barest memory of Ewen's face and pressed it into the fine particles of the paper.

What he'd seen on her hands, he saw now on his own skin. A fine dust of silver sand with inflections of life.

He ran swiftly through the black yard, past the smoking ghosts rising from the snuffed gas lamps and into his room. There he took the sa'ab's map from its hiding place. Carrying it back to the study, he set it down in its spot.

Mary was in the dining room, tidying up. Their eyes met briefly as he left the study empty-handed.

He hurried to his mat and huddled against the wall. Dawn always began at the far corner of this room, under the window. It would be nearly six when the light reached him and revealed his hand for whatever the night made of it. Then he would know
whether he, too, had become a portrait. Nothing – not his flesh, not the dark of this house, could be thought of as empty. Not anymore.

The Canals and the Sea

IN THE MORNING, SHE MADE ELIGIUS A PART OF IT.

First, the water. Three full buckets brought from the sea. After the water, the silver nitrate crystals.

Eligius sifted the glistening sand. He listened to the names for these things. The sand, the glass, the beast itself. Camera. The memsa'ab called out the words from Holland's correspondence; each piece took its place.

Reading from Sir John's letter, she instructed Eligius through the process. She showed him how to immerse the paper in sea water, dry it over candles, then brush it on one side with the silver nitrate. All was completed in shadow, which she thought ironic. This man who lectured her from across the sea, hadn't he been the one to warn her against holding shadows for too long?

Lifting the paper to the light, she pronounced it acceptable, then slid it into a wooden frame. “Julia, come sit. It's time.”

Julia watched their progress from Holland House's doorway. Her lace dress gathered in the air, then settled around her porcelain legs. The chair was no more than a few steps from her, yet she eyed it as if it were a distant point she'd been ordered to.

“No more of this baseless fear,” Catherine told her daughter. “This is science, and a little faith. There is nothing of the devil at work. I will explain each thing I do. Will that finally calm you?”

“This nameless pursuit shouldn't be yours,” Julia said. “It
is a man's avocation. If father isn't taking it up, it's not for us to do so.”

“If it suits you to bow quietly, then do so. I see what Charles does not. I pray, where Charles considers and reasons. We differ. Perhaps you are more his child than mine. All the more reason for you to sit.”

Julia did as she was told, grudgingly. She arranged her dress over her legs and stared vacantly at the wall behind the camera.

“When I'm ready, you will look as I require. Until then, have your sulk. Eligius, we place the paper into its frame, and the frame in turn into the camera. She lifted the cloak for him. “Come look.”

He slipped under, entering darkness. Her hand joined him. It opened a small sliding door. “The aperture,” she said. “Press your eye to it.”

He did, and Julia was instantly in the dark with him. A familiarly arrogant girl with an imperious tilt to her head. It was as if she'd been made a sunlit painting of flesh.

Her eyes misted. Her hands fluttered every few seconds. She could not sit still as her mother told her.

She is afraid of becoming a shadow, he thought.

He took the bauble from around his neck, left the camera's cloak and let the bauble's string coil into her upturned palm. The glass momentarily shot through with veins of sun, passing them onto the skin of her arm in an emulsion of light. Its touch calmed her.

“Smile or don't smile,” Catherine told Julia. “But don't move. Hold yourself still until I say otherwise. This will be a while.”

“Yes, mother.”

“Begin.”

For an interminable time, Julia kept herself composed. Her hands folded demurely in her lap with the bauble for company. Its surface dangled bells of light onto her skin that moved with the sun.

While she sat, Catherine read from the letter. She spoke with wonderment of the circuitous path her daughter's image might follow. If all was well and ordained, Julia would rest as a second skin upon the paper.

“Talbot and Daguerre have failed thus far to reproduce the images as anything but faded stains on paper,” she read from Holland's account. “They can take a moment – a tree, a cathedral – and oddly invert it. Turn its natural light inside out, as it were. But to truly hold it for all time? Paper to paper, we lose what we hold immediately, and what we are left with is faint, vaporous, dying. No, something is capricious in this process and won't be tamed with mere paper. I've tried it myself. Once I saw my assistant George as black Elgin marble on the treated sheet. But I could not slow the crystals' reactions. Instantly, he was no more.”

In the afternoon, she withdrew the plate from the camera while Julia wept frustrated tears. She daubed at the paper with tufts of gauze she dipped gingerly into a small beaker of rust-colored liquid. Boils of silvery air rose from the surface, then burst.

Eligius came to her side. In thirty breaths, they saw it stir.

Waves of silver slowly spread through the paper's fibers to form a cloudy streak. No more than an inch, the patch disgorged mercurial edges in either direction, then became dissolute.

Seizing a second sheet, she pressed the papers together. “Eligius, help me!”

He reluctantly put his hands on the sheets next to hers and pressed as hard as he could. Something like warmth passed into his skin.

“Stop, stop!” she cried, as a blaze raged in her palms. She threw the papers down and upended the bucket. Water twinned with silver and flecks of something else, the fleeting essence of pale skin, splashed over Eligius' hands.

“It's gone,” she moaned. “Only the merest moment of her. But you saw.”

“It was water catching light,” he murmured. “Nothing more.”

“You saw her breathe.” She crumpled Holland's letter. “Salt prints. Daguerreotypes. It is not enough! I will make these moments draw themselves, and I will not watch them fade. God can strike me down if I don't.”

She threw the wooden frame against the wall and stalked out.

“What did you see?” Ewen whispered.

Eligius closed his eyes, and it was there. A hazy patch the hue of milky coffee. The bauble. Next to it, a hint of Julia's hand.

“I see only a mess to be cleaned up,” he said, but the boy's eyes spoke of his disbelief.

A small spot of black formed on the web of skin between his thumb and forefinger. He wiped it against his tunic. It remained. In its center was a point of lighter pigment. A curvature he'd learned by heart. He shook his hand until he felt his bones rattle, but the bauble's shape did not leave his skin.

Eligius returned the letter to its envelope when he heard footsteps approaching. Catherine came from her husband's study into the dining room. She held out his rupees and told him to post her correspondence.

“But he is at sea, memsa'ab.”

“I've written the name of his ship. It will find its way, through ports of call. What matters is that I send these words somewhere. They cannot remain here.”

“Will you try again, memsa'ab?”

He saw her eyes fill before she turned away. “The feather shadow is still under my mat,” he told her. “It came. Maybe we cannot be held. Only small things.”

“Are you still afraid of it?”

He nodded. “But I will bring more casks, if you want me to.”

“Have the missionary bring you back by cart if they're too heavy to carry.”

He took the memsa'ab's sad letter. She had written it on her special paper.

It had only been a week since he was last in the jungle, yet it felt like seasons had gone by. The sensations he loved – the dewy lushness under his bare feet, the wind cutting between leaves and bringing faint hints of spice and rain, the low mewlings of unseen animals – filled him with a fresh appreciation for his country.

On the outskirts of Rahatungode, he heard a sound behind Ceylon's green curtain. It began as a murmur that at first he
thought he was imagining. Only the subtly cocked heads of the field hands at the plantations he passed told him he wasn't alone in hearing it. By the time he reached the village of Devampiya, four hours' walk away from Dimbola, the sound became a rain of screams. Women's lamentations. The only men's voices he heard belonged to colonials.

He dropped to the ground when he spotted the soldiers. They had taken positions before a grove of teak trees ringing Devampiya. Three of them stood over a weeping woman. Her children clung to her as she pled for their compassion. Other soldiers took the last of her meager belongings and tossed them into the street. Two glistening servants hefting sharp-bladed shovels began cracking her home open. Wailing rose. There was still someone inside.

Part of the hut wall crumpled inward. An old woman screamed that they were killing her.

Two children brought Ault from the far side of the village road. “Why are you doing this?” he cried.

“Their land is forfeited,” one of the soldiers told him. “It's mandated by the governor's law. Devampiya's men are missing and presumed to have abandoned their village to the tax assessor. Old woman, I won't ask again. You can stay and let the walls bury you for all I care!”

Ault came to her door, pleading in his ragged Tamil. “Please come out. There is nothing more we can do.”

From his hiding place between the root coils of a fig tree, Eligius watched the rest of the old woman's home bow to the insistent blades. It was over in minutes. When the soldiers were done and a safe distance away, he went to the missionary.

“What are you doing here?” Ault demanded. “It's dangerous.”

Eligius pressed his rupees into Ault's hand. “Give these to my mother. Whatever she needs for tax. I swear I will pay you back. I will work it off. Do not let this happen to her.”

“Are you going to join these men, Eligius? The ones from
your village, and this one, and all the others? Will you kill me in my sleep?”

Eligius turned and ran. Dimbola was hours away. Behind him, a village very much like his own fell into memory.

 

HE POUNDED THE servant's side door until Mary opened it. “You shouldn't be here,” she said.

“I know it's late.”

“No one is asleep.” She stepped aside to let him pass. He found the Colebrooks gathered in the study. Only Ewen was missing, likely in his bed.

Charles sat in his chair. His legs and arms were swaddled in blankets that radiated the last of the hearthstones' heat. His snowy beard rose and fell with his coughing.