The Luminist (20 page)

No matter, she thought, that the picture washes away. We will hold it eventually. One day it will be nothing of consequence, to be stilled.

2.

You have been transported from your houses in Leadenhall Street to the dominion of the richest Empire in the world, and left as if by dream in that amazing pitch of exultation and riches. Rejoice, and hold fast to our course.

I had the opportunity to see each step in the operation of the process. The plate, used for the purpose of stealing my likeness, the polished sur- face afterwards exposed to the action of vapor until golden in hue. The plate was, in my presence, placed in a small box and thereafter in a solution of unknown origin; by this action was my visage to be produced. Yet when the plate was removed, I was invisible. The cry went out: Failure!

 

If only you could have seen it. No longer do I chase shadows as you have counseled against. My house is full of fumes and frames, cut glass and in the cottage house, the blessings of an industrious young Indian man. Where there were holes in the roof, there are now windows and black curtains, and pulleys and levers. Quite the luminist, that one. He can assert at least a bit of control over Ceylon's capricious light.

I fail no more. In truth I cannot say where my son Hardy resides now, nor what has become of my belief in such things as Heaven. But I will never again accept the loss of a child to the distant regions of memory. I know too much now.”

Servitudes

“WHERE IS ELIGIUS, MARY?”

At the sound of her mistress' voice, Mary came to the dining room with a fresh cup of tea. “Outside with the master.”

“Charles is outside? How could you let him outside in his condition?”

“He insisted after mistress Julia spoke with him. On Eligius' behalf, madam.”

She finished her letter to Sir John.

She sealed the letter and brought it with her for Eligius to post. She found him at the gate, holding a large palm frond over Charles and a bent Indian woman standing with Ault. Behind them, stretching past the road and into the trees, were men, women, children, their clothes and faces dusty from walking the dry paths that bound their lives to the colonials' estates.

“These people come from three villages,” Charles said. “Their tale is a tragic one.”

“Please,” Eligius said. “It's been too long that you are outside, sa'ab.”

“There is only one old woman present, boy, and she is over there.”

Eligius exchanged looks with Catherine.

“Stephen,” Charles said, “what do you say about their accounts?”

“I have seen what they're speaking of. Their huts are being razed and their land seized under order of the governor. Since that poor devil's body was found, there have been abuses, Charles. Beatings at the hands of the soldiers. They cite the doctrine of lapse. Does this have any meaning to you?”

“Let these people know that they have my full attention. Eligius, I wish to be in my study with papers and quills. Now, please.”

“Let me help you,” Catherine said.

“No. The boy will do it.”

Eligius led Charles to the house. He helped the old man into the chair at his writing desk and said that he would locate some paper and quills.

“I'm not yet prepared to say that I fully believe you,” Charles said. “Though it would seem your story is corroborated.”

“I thank you for listening, sa'ab.”

He left, and returned with the paper and quills. He asked Charles what would be done with them.

“Certainly I will do what I can, but I am limited in these matters.” His hand rested on the map of Ceylon. “In the Cape of Good Hope, I was given this. I was an old man with no prospects. Convalescing then and ever after, I suppose. I have never been well. This map was the terrain where my redemption was to be found. I thought I would come, make my mark on this country. Give her laws that she might care for herself. No small matter, I thought I would make a coffee fortune and return to London a valued civil servant untouched by his time away. But Ceylon has come to be a part of me in ways I never expected. I love it in the senseless manner that compels my wife in her own pursuits. To love something that eludes me is a terrible enough thing. To see it on the verge of catastrophe, to be too old and too indebted to do anything? I fear what will become of my soul if I leave it like this.”

“Then don't leave it, sa'ab”

“You're young yet. You cannot be expected to understand. What I begin now may end all that I care for. Yet my silence will certainly end all that I ever believed I was. It is a sorry state that I find myself.”

He patted the map. “I sent this away once, with a prayer that it and my wife would return to me. Know this, Eligius. There is no worse thing you could have considered taking from me.”

 

AFTER CHARLES' MEETINGS with the villagers became public knowledge, an even more pronounced scarcity of company took hold in Dimbola. When Eligius walked the grounds at night he heard the lilt of colonial voices carrying over from festive parties the Colebrooks were not asked to attend.

The Britishers are not so different, he thought. They had their own castes.

As Sir John Holland's arrival neared, Catherine planned a feast. Eligius delivered invitations to colonial households in Port Colombo. He erected a tent in front of the cottage house. Tables and place settings were readied. Catherine prepared a menu calling for lamb and pheasant, a whole roast pig, seer fish, pastries and a sheet of marzipan for the children, wine and beer. She gave him the task of placing the order at the market and told him what to say to the butchers and bakers who would surely resist when they heard which family the food was meant for. “Have them speak to the governor of Ceylon,” she told him, “if they doubt my word.”

“Shall Mary accompany me?”

“Mary ministers to my husband. Sir John's arrival is ours to prepare for.”

He understood. Mary was her master's maid now. Openly disdainful of Catherine even on his first day in the rain five months before, Mary now perceived Catherine as aligned with the Indian kutha.

An invisible line bisected the house. The dining room was
neutral ground, the study and kitchen hostile, the trees, the sky and Holland House, theirs.

If it had to be this way, he thought, at least their territory was worth having.

He saw the other servants at the market. Without Mary to intimidate them with her haughtiness, they surrounded him and peppered him with questions about the feast, this man Holland, about his memsa'ab's storied incursions to realms she had no business dallying with.

“Will there be another of her horrid plays?” asked one redhaired girl, her face a riot of blotches. She struck a vainglorious pose.

He laughed in spite of himself. “She has been working on something, though it isn't a play. I'm as disappointed as you.”

The girls laughed and offered him a sip of rum from a battered metal flask they passed between themselves. He declined.

“How you must suffer at her beck and call,” another said. She twisted her black braids with a hand shorn of two fingers.

“ Who?” the redhead interjected. “Mary or the mistress?”

“Pick your poison's, what I say.”

He handed his list to the butcher who had rebuffed Mary on his first trip to the market. “Two days from now,” he told the man. “The memsa'ab said the governor's representative had spoken to you.”

“He has. Something about her displaying his life's work, and her own.”

“I've heard of this.”

An elder maid came forward. Her hands clasped in front of her, she moved with the quiet humility of the pious. She was in her forties, it seemed, with deep creases under her eyes and around her mouth, as if pebbles had broken the surface of her skin and rippled outward. “She spoke with my master about it. Inappropriate of her, I thought, but when has she been a decorous woman? She said she had found a way to put a frame around God's hand. Her words.”

The servants confided with each other in hushed tones.

The list trembled in the butcher's hands. “Blasphemous.”

“A lie,” the elder maid said.

“I watched her do it,” Eligius said. “It was something I cannot describe. I cannot imagine it was anything to make your god upset. It is because of him that she tries. It is prayer. Now what of this list?”

His eyes darting from face to face, the butcher set the paper down on his cutting table in a dry place. “Tomorrow. This will be all across the market by then. Me, selling good meat for prayers.” He shook his head.

Eligius made his way to the baker's modest clay oven, where fumes of browning bread made the low sky shimmer. The elder maid followed him. “Your mistress invited my master to come see her triumph.”

“When the day comes, you should accompany him. I will make you some tea and you can watch. It is like a dream to see a face come out of nothing. I do not understand it.”

Her brow furrowed. “Perhaps. But is it wrong?”

“I am a heathen, I think you would say. But her daughter Julia is a Christian, and she was the memsa'ab's first.”

“I wish I could see. Then my mind might rest on this.”

She stepped aside to let him pass. “You know they all speak of you, too. The Indian who chose us over his own.”

“I do not wish to be spoken of.”

He finished his errands, bid farewell to the maids and walked from the market. Away from the colors and braying voices, Queen Street teemed with colonial families shadowed by sunbaked Tamil and Malay, waiting for carts to pass with pallets destined for the John Company. Medicines, cured meats, vegetables, wood and unpolished stone, flowers and exotic birds, the blood and bone of their country departed in wagons and carts on the way to sea. The poor kept watch over the ground, waiting for a bit of waste. When the carts were gone, they scurried onto the cracked dirt to pick up the horses' defecation with the flat side
of rubber leaves. Setting it out to dry, they would sell it later for fuel to their fellow villagers in their own approximations of the colonials' marketplace.

Further down the road, children played in clouds of dust raised by the carts while their mothers worked. One small cough, speckled with wetness despite the dry season, rose above the din of their voices.

Eligius saw Sudarma leave her pile in the road and go to Gita. Behind her, the other women jostled for the abandoned manure. Sudarma raised Gita up and turned her so she might cough her lungs clear.

In each discrete movement he saw where the light was, where he might direct it, what of his mother and Gita might find the way to glass, what of them would be lost.

The sight of them made him shiver. It was like the careless finding of a raw wound, the way Sudarma looked up from Gita to see her son so far from her.

 

CHARLES WAS ON the verge of collapse, yet over the days he pressed on with his writing. His papers were filled with elegant lines. Some drowned in small seas of ink. Others he scratched into oblivion.

Eligius wanted to ask where the answer to his people's problems might be found in those pages. But an illness of distrust still permeated the study, its epicenter the map Charles kept close to his work.

He approached Mary in the scullery one evening while she was pouring goat's milk through a cloth to strain it for cheese. “Do you think the Colebrooks would let my mother come work for them?”

Mary sighed wearily, then kept pouring.

“She would have to bring my sister Gita. But she's a baby and would be no trouble. My mother could clean and wash. She would do as you asked.”

Mary held the cloth above a plate. She scraped it with a flat knife. Crumblings of clotted milk fell away.

“I fear the sa'ab won't be able to stop what is happening. I don't want my family to starve.”

Mary let the cloth fall to the floor, then kicked it towards him. “What's a servant's place?”

He picked the cloth up.

“How'd it get there?” she asked.

“It was my fault,” he said.

“I always knew you were a sly one. I knew it the moment I laid eyes on you in the rain, listening to every word the mistress said. You're watchful and you're quiet. Why, I'll wager when you kill them in their beds, they won't even wake.”

“I would never – ”

“What does a maid do, kutha?”

He seethed. Her words were strips of banyan across his back. “Cooks. Cleans. Tends to the children. Brings dishes and takes them away. Waits to see when the sa'ab's tobacco is low. Bargains. Never tells them they don't have enough money to buy what others have. Makes a little go farther. Never says they smell or spilled. Goes quietly about it all.”

“Sly one, is what you are. Should your mother starve, it would only be one less of you.”

“Your god should damn you.”

“You're quiet and you listen, but you can be provoked. My God will certainly damn me, but for nothing I say to a filthy beggar who pulled the wool over a foolish family's eyes. No, I'll pay for letting a blasphemous woman fritter away what remains of her husband's self-respect. And now she has you to help her. A murderer, I'll wager. Tell me, if she burns the rest of her own home down to raise her dead child, who will you steal from then? Who will you cut open?”