The Luminist (2 page)

Imagine, arresting beauty at the very moment beauty comes into being and passes out of the world. Imagine if life could be held still.

The End of This

THE NOISES OUTSIDE HER WINDOW WERE OF WIND AND the near sea, of clay chimes kilned to crystalline tones. Natives not opposed to Britishers had strung them at odd heights from the thatching of her bungalow roof to ward off demons during her pregnancy. Their sound filled her sleep and informed her dreams.

Ewen and Hardy nestled against her still-swollen midsection. Before, when the pains of labor had ruled her, this would have filled her heart.

She took her babies into her arms and bundled them. Folding the letter carefully, she brought them to the carriage and placed them next to her. At the flick of her reins, the old bay stumbled into motion.

She gazed at her newly-arrived sons and tried not to think of the future.

 

THE RIDETO the Maclears' home in Table Bay was not ritual, yet her passage through the Cape of Good Hope's sifting littorals possessed equal weight and hollowness. She struggled to think of the right word for this, her second foray along the sea path to the lonely Dutch outpost of stone imposing itself on the African sky.

Her sons jostled alongside her. She wanted simply to place the letter in Sir John Holland's hand and leave, and be whoever it was that she would be tomorrow.

When the bend in the road opened onto the sea's turquoise at the mouth of Agulhas, she thought of Sir John's lecture. That
night at the Maclears' he'd marveled at how the Cape marked the place where a man traveling from the equator ceases traveling southward and begins traveling eastward without ever having changed direction. The world changes without changing. Wondrous, he'd said, his shock of white hair a cloud above his face.

The world is capable of such things, she thought.

The road was rutted. Ewen cried out. Catherine brought her children close and told them that they traveled over the same dirt and lichens, past the same protea, as the Voortrekkers who fled the sea to escape the rampaging Xhosa, and found peaceful vistas inland where they grew their rye and gathered their wool. Boys, she thought, are fond of narrow escapes and bloodthirst. These are the sorts of things they will remember as men, when they find themselves soldiers or surgeons: once as a child, they made believe they were brave.

She regarded Hardy's face for the first time since the mote of light slipped from his eyes.

They passed through the port market, a slipshod constellation of many-hued fruits, dyed cloths, hung meats, animals braying at the blades of the butchers, macaws on horsehair leads, natives porting crates to and from ships on callused feet, swearing under their breath in Capie and broken English.

The Maclears' home stood next to the Cape lighthouse, atop a red rock jetty. Its view of the whalers and tall mast ships was the envy of the expatriates. A line of carriages filled the road at the base of the house. Porters brought the parcels of voyage from the front door. Sir John's departure on his star map travels was imminent.

The Maclears' servants fell silent at the sight of her binding her horse to the low boughs of a fig tree. She was late in her forties, but still possessed a severe, weathered beauty. She was unadorned of jewels or those impractical satchels other colonial women carried, and all the more striking for it; there was nothing else to consider but the shaded hollows of her cheeks, the quartered mango of her lips, the expanse of her slender neck.
She'd pulled back her brown hair and fastened it with mother of pearl sometime in the long night, but strands had come loose to brush her skin. She was swathed in local cloth, shod in sandals, uncaring of her appearance.

She took her babies to the front door.

Sir John came shortly, still wet from bathing. A towel was loosely draped about his neck. His eyes were crinkled with age and recent sleep.

Early, she realized. In another time, I would think a visit at this hour quite inappropriate.

“My lord,” Sir John whispered when he saw Hardy.

She hefted her babies higher against her chest. Ewen protested, but she needed a free hand to extend the letter.

“I hope you remember me,” she said.

Inside the house she saw the Wynfield boy, George, portraitist at seventeen and already of some renown. He would be accompanying Sir John to fashion a painted record of their travels. The sights and ports of call, the map itself.

“You know who I am,” she called out to George. He was intent on his canvas. “Your father and my husband are allied in Ceylon.”

“I am aware, madam. Your Julia has sat many hours watching me work. A delightful creature. I've spoken of her to my father.”

“I should like to commission you to paint my children.”

He regarded her from across the expanse. He could not see clearly. “Of course,” he said.

Distantly, she felt herself bleed.

“I am so glad to see you before you leave South Africa,” she said to Sir John.

“We met some months ago, did we not? You're Catherine Colebrook.”

He could not look away from her boys.

He will remember, she thought. What I ask will be tied to this moment. He will carry it with him.

“I'm grateful that you recall. It is important that you understand, I am not mad. I am a woman. We let go of nothing.”

She declined his offer of food and a doctor's attention. “I have a daughter. A little younger than George Wynfield by the look of him. She's alone and afraid.”

“But you are not.”

“The worst has passed.”

In time, she returned to her cart and her home in the Cape. The shanties around the port were coming to life. A steady current of vendors made their way along the water. They sold fish and shells, flowers and exotics fresh from the tethered boats newly arrived from places she once imagined she'd visit. Here and there she saw the other European expats, their easels, open pages of poetry, unfolded letters of distant news and regrets passed across months at sea. They sat in makeshift tents, hoping to sell their foreignness and continental birth for food and the means to remain far from home.

She'd extracted promises from the scientist. That he would pray for her. That he would read her letter and remember her.

JULIA MET HER at the door to their bungalow. She was still and wary while the chimes made their hushed music. Behind her, a gracefully folded linen lay on a table, next to a basin of water. “I bartered for a sheet at the bazaar,” she said. “I hope you find it suitable.”

Her hazel eyes were rimmed red. Her oft-brushed hair was matted against her scalp. She tried to stand as tall as her mother, but her shoulders were rounded with lost sleep.

Amother should not weigh on her child, Catherine thought. She took up the cloth. White as blanched bone, soft. “You are a blessing to me.”

Julia's jaw clenched. “You shouldn't be up.”

“I'm well,” Catherine said. “We must pack.”

“Travel? Oh, mother. Your health.”

“We are expected at your father's side. It's right, to be there.”

“Mother, you brought Hardy with you.”

“Fetch the priest, Julia. The Anglican. He is all we have to choose from in this place.”

“I'll go if you lie down.”

“Very well. You're a good daughter.”

“Mother, where were you? Where did you go?”

“To have time with him. To say one day that I showed him the sun and the sea.”

Julia left, satisfied. Catherine returned to her bed with her sons. Nursing Ewen, she unfolded Charles' letter and read
the parts directed to her. The rest – Council doings, musings on the amendments needed to align Ceylon's regulatory infrastructure with the needs of modern commerce, the map he'd enclosed; all that he rebuilt himself by – she would leave to him.

Say you'll come
, he'd written.
And if you will not, raise our children. Julia, and the child who has arrived since last I saw you. I will send money quarterly. Do not send our children to Ceylon. This is no country for the motherless
.

In a week there would be a ship, and the clouds and the sea storms blowing south to southeast, and she would not hold any of it forever. Each day she would pick up a moment and sacrifice the one before it. Each day something fell out of the world.

The priest arrived at dusk, redolent with the nightblooming flowers that grew along the sea road. By then she had lain Hardy in a separate bed fashioned from sheets of washed cotton that were patterned with all manner of woodland scenes befitting a boy. Boys, she imagined, longed for forests to explore. To wander through, with the sun always overhead, broken by leaves into bits of light. Boys needed to look for signs of hiding light.

“I wish to bury my son,” she told the priest. Julia sat at her side, rocking Ewen. “His name was Hardy Hay Colebrook. He never breathed.”

Aipassi

EACH MORNING OF ELIGIUS SHOURIE'S LIFE, THIS HAD been the world. The women of Matara cooked what they foraged and mended what the village's men hadn't torn beyond redemption. The youngest children mewled from their huts, in thrall to hunger and the cholera that swept in with the previous summer's monsoons. The older ones who survived such things by Kali's grace communed with their futures. Girls painted errant mendhi and dreamed of betrothal. Boys gathered near the banyan trees where their fathers met each morning to smoke before breaking themselves against the flesh and bone of the country. If the men spoke at all, it was of the taxes. Which of them would lose their hut next and leave Matara behind, to beg on the streets of Port Colombo.

Things had begun to change after the colonials' celebration of their new year, 1836. There had been no particular day, no one moment. One night, he simply noticed what he hadn't before. That his father Swaran, still in his servant tunic, ministered tirelessly to books of colonial laws, the Britishers' paper reasons for being in Ceylon. The man who walked with him at Diwali and mimicked the chatter of monkeys to make him laugh, now read feverishly through the night hours that once belonged to endless bedtime conjurings of Ceylon's past, its gods and hymns. His father could make so much come with nothing but a candle and a bit of broken glass to magnify the light into a nova; just outside the circle that illuminated them both, the night would move.

It frightened Eligius to see that there had been something in his father that he'd never guessed at. A burning to exchange his life.

One night his mother told his father that she no longer knew him. “I want to make things different for you,” his father said. “It's in their words.” His eyes were so bright; he was a man in terrible love with an imagined better day.