The Luminist (22 page)

“Do you require anything else?” he asked.

“You are called. The mistress outside.”

“In the morning, I'll come wake you. I'll show you where everything is to make breakfast. The food for the feast will arrive at dawn, and you'll start cooking immediately. Some of it is being roasted by the butcher in a pit. There will be much to see to. I'll help you as best I can.”

“I know you will. I know all you've done is for us.” She was a storm of discontent. “I don't want to die here. I don't know these walls. Their stares are worse than I ever thought. I would never have sent you if I'd known what it was like to be looked at this way. Better the fields. I want to see my home.”

“And him? You were lonely. It wasn't like it was with appa.”

She was silent.

“He took a life and life has to be made whole. It's done. Make a home of it here, mother. As I did. As I was asked to do. Our village is gone, don't you know that? We are in their house now, and we have to make of these small corners something like a life. That's all. Nothing else.” She nodded.

Later, he thought, he might reflect on her in this moment. It was just a little nod of her head. A simple enough thing. But after a lifetime supporting unbearable burdens, the words that finally sank her to her knees were his.

“If you go to your window,” he said, “you and Gita can see me. I'm not far away.” His eyes wandered. “May I take that?”

“Go.” She went to the window.

He took the battered diya and ran outside gratefully. There was wind, and the trees to give it voice.

That evening, his mother sat at her new room's window, facing the side of the yard and the jungle beyond. Her body was cut from candlelight. He couldn't see her features but felt certain she was watching him.

Julia wrote of Holland House as being much more proximate to the gazebo than it was in fact. When she began to shape the diya with her words, he told her it sounded so real that he wanted to pick it up from her paper and see the two of them reflected in its dimpled brass hide. She smiled.

It was awhile before he glanced at the house again. By then it was late, and his mother was gone from the window.

 

BEFORE DAWN, HE stoked afire in the oven and surrounded it with porous stones as Mary had done, to radiate heat to the ends of the oven's crevices. It would stay piping for hours, and keep the meat and breads warm without burning.

He slipped through the still house. The brisk air pulled his skin into a million tingling little knots. Outside, he surveyed the grounds, envisioning the throngs that would descend on Dimbola in anticipation of Sir John Holland's arrival. By then he would have staked torchiers along the path they would walk, to be lit when the humidity drew the insects.

The smells of roasted pig, charred lamb and game hen filled the air long before the butcher's cart sidled into view. Together they unloaded the cart and stacked the meats in the ovens. “I'll wager you've never seen such food in this house,” the butcher said. “Nor will you again, unless your mistress charms her way to another suitor.”

“Suitor?”

“It's what's being said, boy. She cares little for her husband's
reputation or else she wouldn't race the devil to outdo it. You wouldn't know such things, but she's a shame in polite society. Bringing her conquest over the ocean, no less.”

“The man who comes is a teacher and friend. He comes for his own work. She has said.”

“What would a servant know? My customers are her betters. I put my faith in them. Ah, I see I've troubled you.”

“It is no business of mine.”

“Do you know that my best customer now employs the Colebrooks' girl, Mary? She asked me to send word to you. They are in need of a boy for their horses.”

A servant who only performed one task? he thought.

“Come to the market.” The butcher stepped up to his cart and took up the reins. “Ask for Seward. That's me. I'll get you to a paying house.”

“What does it matter to Mary, what happens to me?”

“I can tell you for a fact it doesn't. But they'll put an extra shilling in her pocket for locating a boy. And she'll take care of me in turn.” He grinned. “I'll be looking for you.”

Eligius returned to the house. His mother was in the kitchen, staring at the ovens. “Baste them regularly,” he told her.

“Our master and mistress were arguing.” She kept a hand on Gita, who crawled over the cutting block. “The master is upset at the cost of all this.”

“He didn't pay. It's of no matter to us. It's for you to cook this as if it were always here.”

“How you've learned.”

“Yes. I've picked up quite a bit. I've much to do this morning. I'll check back on you in a while. Make sure all the tables are set with linen and silver. You remember. I showed you.”

“Yes.”

“Take your sari off, mother. We are not in Matara.”

Outside, he climbed to the top of Holland House, the better to see the ship bearing his memsa'ab's mystery man, Wynfield's son and their possessions. By the time of their expected
arrival, and taking into account the journey from the port to Dimbola, there would be precious little time left to show Holland her work.

He scanned the sea and found the ship easily. A second ship trailed it. Its shadow cut open the waves like a maid's mending shears.

He turned to yell at the house, then paused. Catherine was seated on the porch, awaiting all her guests. There was Ewen, as usual chasing peacocks, but every now and again he slowed a little, his attention wandering away from childish pursuits. There was Sudarma, polishing the last of the plates in the sun. Gita sat at her feet, fascinated with Ewen's games. And there was Julia, paper and quills at her side, turning the bracelets adorning her wrists like a self-conscious bride feeling the foreign weight of her ring.

He climbed down and adjusted the curtain over the roof window before walking to the porch. “Two ships in the harbor, memsa'ab. They're close.”

“Hurry, then. Guests will be arriving shortly.”

“I will. I'll return soon.” He glanced at his mother.

“I will see that she does all that is required,” Catherine said.

He nodded and left the porch. He heard his memsa'ab's voice, louder than usual. “How odd our little family has become. Yet we persevere, eh?”

The Windowed World

QUEEN AND CHATHAM STREETS WERE EMPTY. COILS OF voices led him to the St. John Company and its dock. It seemed all of colonial Ceylon had come to greet the ships. Over the heads of the murmuring crowd, great conicals rose like volcanoes stolen from his mother's mythic bedtime stories, to be machinestamped in British metal.

The crowd was oddly cheered by the sight of the vessels. Every hint of activity aboard sent a thrill through them, especially the men; they cheered as if at a cricket match.

The vicar of the Galle Face sat aboard his carriage near the lip of the dock. The carriage door was open to allow the public their glimpse of this reposed creature in white flowing robes. Two boys were in the carriage as well, sitting awkwardly at the vicar's feet. Dressed in lucent pearl robes of their own, the boys pulled at the ruffled collars mercilessly binding their necks.

Gangplanks rolled down from the great ships' bellies. The first men showed themselves above the deck railings, and Eligius understood why all these people had come to holler and preen.

One after another, the soldiers stepped down the planks of both ships, rifles atop their shoulders, bayonets fixed, their uniforms vivid against the dull gray hulls. They made their way through the crowd to cries of “give them hell all!” and strewn orchids in their path. The grim set of their jaws did nothing to detract from their youth. More boys.

Eligius stood atop his cart. The rest of the soldiers disembarked, the crowd thinned, and on the first ship, a series of crates emerged from the hold in the hands of unsteady porters. An elderly man with an unkempt silver shock of hair that shuddered in the shore breeze moved to the gangplank on distrusting, seaworn legs. His arm was held by a younger man with curly tresses arranged perfectly on the padded shoulders of his brown jacket. The younger man gazed across the dock with pursed lips. He spat into a kerchief, which he let fall to the ground.

Eligius tied his cart horse to a sapling and made his way to the dock. “Holland sa'ab? I am sent by Colebrook memsa'ab to meet you.”

The older man smiled. Close, he was as old as Charles, but thinner. His eyes blazed with intelligence.

It was Wynfield's boy who spoke. “Our things,” George said dismissively. “ We will ride with the vicar. I trust that you know your way back.”

Eligius waved to the porters, who trundled down the gangplank onto the dock. He led them to his cart, where they made a small mountain of trunks and crates. While he tied the crates down, the vicar welcomed both men with a proffered hand and a nod towards the road. They all turned and looked at him.

The vicar's altar boys stepped out of the carriage. They listened as the vicar spoke, then walked towards his cart while behind them, Holland and Wynfield stepped into the Galle Face carriage. “There's no room for us,” one of the boys told Eligius. “We ride with you.”

They climbed atop his cart. The bigger boy took up the reins and whippered them ineffectually. Eligius stepped up. The vicar's boy relinquished the reins and under Eligius' knowing hand, the horse trundled forward.

He guided his overburdened cart alongside the vicar's grand carriage. Inside, the men raised snifters to their lips.

The journey bled everything out: the air of any comfort, the sky of any cover, the boys of any semblance of civility.
Despite his demonstrable understanding of their language, they spoke of the soldiers and what they had in store for Ceylon's troublemakers. “Back to the dirt that made them,” said the bigger boy. “Vicar prayed it from the pulpit and here they are, come to push the kuthas into the sea.”

The small one was younger by a good five years. He asked the boy to say it, say how the soldiers would proceed. “Will they march one by one or two by two? Will they march straight through the forest to the drums? Will they make a route of it?”

“They'll march straight down the heathens' throats. Then the fires will go out and it'll be a different cry goes up.”

“I hear the Indians don't use guns.”

“The sepoys can't abide that there's tallow in the cartridges, how's that for you?”

Eligius tried to block them out. His mind grasped for the first thing he could hold that wouldn't break, and it found Julia in Holland House, her hair lit by candles.

Guests were arriving as he pulled his cart to Dimbola's gate. The women gathered under the tarp while their men stood smoking in groups. The vicar's boys half-fell to the ground. Their rowdy energy knew no bounds. Behind them, the vicar's carriage pulled to a stop. Others followed aboard finely constructed vehicles piloted by top-hatted men dressed for another land and climate, who climbed down and held the hands of dainty, cautious women as they stepped out.

Governor Wynfield put his arm around his son's shoulders. Lady Wynfield rose from her table and kissed him tenderly.

“Keep that crate out of the sun!” the young Wynfield said. “The canvases will be ruined.”

“I am well aware of the light's effects,” Eligius said.

He carried a crate into Holland House. Setting it down, he found that a corner of the lid had been split open. Carefully, he lifted it up enough to peer inside. There he saw a painting of dense blackness. It was woven with swirls of luminous, random shapes made all the more vivid by the void around them.

He opened the lid further, revealing more of the designs, until he understood what he was looking at.

Outside, the young Wynfield stood among a group of colonial women. “Tell us of London, George,” one of the older dowagers said between sips of tea. “I suspect our new contrivances are years in the routine for you.”

“You forget,” George said, “I too have been away these many years now, with Sir John. I pine for civility, though perhaps not as much as you.”

“But what must our old home think of us?” the woman said. As Eligius passed on his way to retrieve another crate, he saw her hands tremble. “Our unrest. These thugs.”

“Thuggees,” a younger woman, pretty in pale orchid lace, corrected her. “They attack defenseless women on the street and take what they want!”

“I myself was offered a civil service post, like my father.” George snapped his fingers at Sudarma. She went to retrieve a cup. “But the call of art was too strong. My blood boils at what I heard on the journey here. We docked at Calcutta at my father's direction, to pick up the garrison. Those soldiers spoke of terrible injustices these people have perpetrated on us, and after all we've done. We build rails for them, and now? We use them to ferry our children from their violence and sickness.”

“Would that we could ferry ourselves from boredom and ennui,” the younger woman said. “Well, I for one have been awaiting your arrival. It's high time I was portrayed by a legitimate English-bred artist, not these street painters. I insist you schedule me immediately.”

Eligius finished carrying the crates into Holland House while the colonial wives accosted George for his painter's hand. Each had a thought as to how she should be depicted. George offered flattering words and promises of great beauty as his parents looked on approvingly.

In another hour, he had unpacked his cart and put everything in the cottage. By then all the guests had arrived; more
than Dimbola had ever seen. The vicar occupied a seat of honor next to Sir John at a front table.