The Luminist (19 page)

The other men converged on the soldier as he ran into the trees. The jungle sprang to life in a downpour of hammering hands and tumbling bodies.

A rifle emerged from the mass. It was closely followed by the soldier's boots, his coat and brass buckles.

Chandrak released his grip. Air forced its way into Eligius' lungs.

The soldier lay splayed-legged on the ground, pinned by a thicket of bodies. Stripped to his underclothes, he whimpered and begged in English. He was young and slightly built. His face was slick with sweat and fear.

The soldier's eyes found Eligius, and hated him. “Listen to me,” he pleaded. “Please, you may have what you want. Please, just listen.”

Chandrak brought Eligius to the weeping soldier's side. The men holding him down tightened their grip. Forcing Eligius to his knees, Chandrak took out a knife and put it into Eligius' hands. He wrapped his own hands around its hilt and pressed it against the soldier's chest. Its gleaming tooth sent tremors through the soldier. His torso pitched wildly, but there were too many against him.

“I won't,” Eligius cried.

Madness filled Chandrak's face. “They left a stain on us. Wash it away.”

Chandrak was scared. Eligius could see beneath the leathered face and the foundry-pocked flesh; he saw the face of the man at Court, crying for home.

Chandrak pressed down on Eligius' hands. Eligius tried to hold the blade away from the soldier's chest, but Chandrak's grip crushed his fingers into the knife handle.

Pain flared through Eligius' wrists, into his arms and shoulders as Chandrak leaned hard against him. The blade's tip sliced shallowly into the soldier's skin. A small trickle seeped to the soldier's shirt. He screamed. Someone's hand covered his mouth, sealing his pleas inside.

Hari came to Chandrak's side.

“Help me,” Eligius pleaded as the men gathered around them.

Hari added his hands to Chandrak's. Tears fell from his chin. “I'm afraid.” He closed his eyes.

Eligius screamed as something fibrous in the reaches of his back snapped. He tore his hands away, jerking the knife
sideways. The thin gash he left in the soldier's chest beaded with blood. The soldier's head shook faster and faster.

Eligius leapt to his feet and bolted past Chandrak's outstretched arms, past the others and into the trees before any of them could react. He heard the violent passage of men rising in angry pursuit of him. Hari's cries mingled with those of the young soldier. English words of prayer erupted into the sky like rousted birds. Then the sputtering sound of someone drowning. Then only Hari, but by then Eligius was too far to be sure of anything.

Soon the sounds behind him fell away. When the night found him, he was still running on legs he no longer felt.

 

AT DEVAMPIYA, HE stopped. When it was light enough to see the abandoned village and its broken huts, he gathered wood apples. Cracking their hard shells, he scooped out their sour custard with his fingers. He took coconuts for their sweet water and gourds to make a bitter stew, the way his mother did. In the trees he found a hung line of seer fish. They were dry and only a little rotten. His stomach would reject much of it, but so be it.

The jungle was a living map, alive with destinations. He could go to the port and operate the cooling punkah fans for the colonials. He could become a water carrier, a messenger, a door opener. He could cut grass, make bricks, sweep children's rooms clear of scorpions. He could build his own hut, plant cotton and become a village unto himself. Or he could sneak back into Dimbola and steal to his heart's content. Maybe he would find other men and throw the Colebrooks' home open to them. What would it require, to ascend in the eyes of his own? A blade, he guessed, plunged into the soft skin of colonials whose names and voices and wants he had come to know.

Around him, the light folded. He waited to see if the shadows of the trees might become permanent on the jungle floor or on his skin. But they kept shifting into each other until the sharp demarcations of the leaves and the broken hut walls melted
away. There were no feathers in the world outside the memsa'ab's camera. Nothing was held, in the dark or the light.

The young soldier's cries would not leave him.

He reached into his tunic. The memsa'ab's correspondence to Holland still lay against his skin, where he'd folded it for safekeeping. Her precious, starry paper from across the sea, wasted on such a sad letter.

He let it slip from his fingers, and his glass with it.

 

HE AWOKE IN a beam of morning sun. His skin felt agreeably warm. The glass shard broke the light into pillars that touched everything within his bleary sight.

Rising stiffly, he squinted as the light's reflection on the glass burst brilliantly before him. He put his hand over his eyes, letting bubbles of color fill and fade back into the dusk of his palm.

The memsa'ab's letter lay on the ground, under the glass. Bits of leaves and dew drops were trapped between them like insects in amber. He lifted the glass to brush them off, but something of them remained. The letter was dotted with discolorations in the shape and location of the leaves. They were on the glass as well, in the same configuration.

He held the glass into the sun. Faint as dissipating mist, their images spattered the shard's surface, unmistakable in shape, down to the perforations and hushed tracings of veins.

Something stirred his mind. He wiped some dew from fallen leaves and slickened the memsa'ab's paper. Finding a larger leaf, he laid it atop the paper and pressed it into the light.

The last of the bauble was rapidly departing his skin. Days in the jungle had all but scoured it from his hand.

The bauble had been in Julia's hand, that day in Holland House. It made a halo of sun on her skin. Nothing else of her survived the journey through the camera to the memsa'ab's paper, nothing but its image.

There. A dream of the leaf began. Faint tracings of veins,
threading from the silver salt to the glass. As he breathed, they darkened ever so slowly. The light moved with the sun's rise and he moved with it, keeping the paper and glass bathed. Over countless minutes the leaf filled in. He withdrew it from the sun. It held, like the feather. Like Julia, but only that part of her touched by the bauble's bent, concentrated light.

He left Devampiya's ruins behind.

 

MARY OPENED THE front door. He raced past her without a word. She gave chase but he moved as if devils sped after him.

Catherine was in the study, composing at a small table set up by Charles' chair. Charles' color had not improved. He stared vacantly out the window.

“Madam, I'm sorry.”

Catherine and Charles looked up at Mary's voice. Eligius stood in the doorway, heaving with the effort to take breaths. His hair and face were slickened with sweat. Catherine despised the thought rising from the tumult in her. He looks as if he's just been born.

Eligius raised the glass. She saw the image imprinted there. A stain bearing the unmistakable marks. The veins were as frail as thread. The leaves bore scalloped edges. The faint permeable light of it told her that he had somehow brought it forth from life.

Charles and Mary, their stares of indignation; the both of them could join hands and stroll to hell. Look at it.

“I need a hammer,” Eligius said.

“Mary,” Catherine said, “get him a hammer.”

“What? I will not – ”

“Now.”

In the yard, Eligius found the ladder and ascended to Holland House's roof. His entry had roused Julia and Ewen. While Catherine set up the camera, they gathered at the foot of the structure to watch him pull his crude wooden patches loose and toss them to the ground. The shadowy interior of Holland House
filled with sunlight. When the strongest light found the chair, he went inside, where he took out the window panes with a gentle tap of the hammer.

“How?” Catherine held up the leaf.

“The light. The light was on Julia's arm. It was the only part of her that came. And the feather sat atop your paper in the sun before I patched the roof. If we concentrate more light on the work, it will stay longer. I know it. We'll use glass to make the light stronger.”

He wielded the hammer to fashion rough, cracked squares from the window panes. Catherine brought silver salt. Somewhere, she thought, Sir John is smiling at the woman who longed to possess shadows, who now finds the missing light.

“Wait,” she said. “In one of the letters I received, Sir John enclosed cotton. He spoke of life and death.”

She gave him her key to the locked room.

“All of your most precious things are in there,” he said.

“Go. Bring his letter to me. I think there may be a way to hold these images still.”

He ran. His heart ran ahead of him. In her room, he found Sir John's letter, the guncotton and a tin. Life and death, Sir John had written, in eternal stalemate.

In Holland House Catherine opened the tin of collodion and dipped one of Julia's quills into it. Afoul, heady stench filled the air. “Sir John said it had the power to hold the guncotton still. Why not this?”

She brushed collodion onto the glass. Tilting it this way and that, she directed the crawling tide across the surface until it was coated with a second skin that bent the colors from the light.

Eligius slipped it inside the camera.

“Mother.”

Julia sat in the chair, wrapped in a brocade shawl. Her head tilted up, a girl of great privilege and station.

He arranged the glass around her. Sunlight sparkled from one pane to the next, bathing her in gold.

“Is it right?” Eligius asked. He held up the cloak for Catherine.

“Let us see.” Slipping under, she captured Julia through the lens. The light made baubles of her daughter's eyes.

Julia let her shawl slip from her shoulders. Her lips parted. Her gaze wandered from the eye of the camera to Eligius.

Great swaths of daylight passed as they waited; so many breaths passed before she pulled the plate from the camera and bathed it, and prayed that they would make the glass live this time.

It came in tides of shape and shadow. Julia's folded hands, her arms, the soft lace of her dress, her thin neck and her hair cascading over her shoulders, unfastened to catch the wind. Her face came and stayed, longer and more vividly than ever before.

“Bring your father,” Catherine said. “Hurry.”

Julia ran for the house and returned with Charles.

“Watch me,” Catherine said to her husband. “This once.”

She bathed the plate with water while Eligius held it. The collodion writhed beneath her fingers. Her flesh buzzed with chemical.

Later, Eligius thought, I may see her on me.

Charles drew close to it. His hand flickered, then came back to rest atop the golden buttons of his overcoat. Catherine leaned to be near him. Together they gazed at the dripping frame, the remains of their eldest child washing away. Everything around them stilled; the cold world he lived in, and the world that she knew, made of lost children and the lights that illuminated the way back to them.

She examined their faces. Eligius, Charles, Julia. They know. For them, for me, this will remain.

In that held moment, Eligius saw what it was that bound these two strangers together for all their remaining days. He'd seen betrothal, and obligation, and the silent suffering of wives
following their husbands from fallen huts to dirt roads. But he'd never before seen how small, how easily missed, how impregnable love could be until the memsa'ab had added her solutions to his light, and burned it into glass.

Soon she was lost to her work. She studied the light of it and let the world fall. She saw only what came after Julia's arrested moment. It glinted through the coated glass and the liquid fog that was her child's face. There was a beauty in its leaving.

Eligius approached Charles and spoke quietly. “There is a man, Chandrak. He is from my village. He was the other man shot on that day, when my father died.”

“I remember. What of him?”

“He is the one stealing. He and others. Men follow him. They're trying to get guns. He wanted me to steal from you.”

“This doesn't excuse what you did. I've no trust in you.”

“He killed a soldier.”

Julia stared at him. Charles took his face in his hands. Tremors passed from the old lion's fingers into the hollows of Eligius' cheeks.

Tears fell from Eligius' eyes. He told Charles of the clearing. “He was little more than a boy and he's dead because of me.”

“And you swear to me, this is the truth? You had no hand in this?”

“I ran away. I ran to you.”

“I believe him.” Catherine stood beside Eligius. “He puts himself at terrible risk, coming to you.”

“Will you testify to this?” Charles demanded.

“Yes.”

“For the present,” Charles said, “I will keep you here under my protection while this matter is looked into. The governor will need to be informed. No doubt he'll send soldiers after this man, and then to the gallows with him. But Eligius, I pity you if I learn other than what you've told me. You have no country, boy.”

“You're right,” Catherine said. “And now you will listen to me, husband. He came to you for the same reason his father did.
Do something to be worthy of it. Give him another reason to remember you.”

She took the glass plate outside and held it up to the sky. As its collodion skin peeled away in drops of silver rain, she wept. The last tattered flecks of Julia fell away to the ground.