The Luminist (27 page)

“I've not been myself.” Charles patted the pocket absently. “Not for as long as I can remember. Catherine, would you remain with me if I lost everything? If I were forced to take charity?”

“I've never pried into your affairs, but I'm not blind. I know illness limits your abilities on the Court. We have less than others, but we get by. That's always been enough. Now please, tell me what is wrong. Is it the Court? Wynfield? Charles, is it me?”

He touched her, nothing but a cracked, age-spotted hand on her cheek. Yet the simple gesture stunned her. She'd never known Charles to reach for anyone.

“Soon,” he said, “I will sit with you and speak of things that have been on my mind for a long time. I fear that moment, Catherine. I fear a great many things, it seems, and that causes me to be a difficult man. I know this. It causes me to act in ways I never thought I would.”

“I love you.” She took his hand and kept it. “There's nothing you can say to part us. Don't you know that?”

He blinked back tears. “The thing you do with Eligius. Those photographs, as Sir John dubs them.”

“Yes, my husband. It is an amazing thing.”

“I should not be held. It would be better if I faded, like the first ones.”

 

CHARLES REFUSED DINNER and spent the evening poring over a detailed map of southern Ceylon. Eligius brought his food back to the kitchen, hoping the old man would take it later.

Sudarma came from the well with a bucket of fresh water to rinse potatoes from the plates. “At market, everyone is speaking your name. That you said a word and Chandrak died. That you raised a gun against your own. Against children.”

She set her bucket down. “In the fields, the men believe you a traitor. Did you know this?”

“ What would they have me do? Should I kill a soldier?”

“You had a chance to do something.”

“When did you become this person, amma? Once, it was
enough to send me off to work for them, to feed you and Gita. This I have done. Now you'd have me kill them in their sleep. These people are not like the others. They suffer too.”

“ Every night I pray that you wash these people from your eyes. That woman has captured you in that contraption of hers. Why can't you see this?”

“Perhaps if I drank and beat you, you'd think more of me.”

Her hands went to her cheeks. She began to murmur prayers.

“And as for that light box, one day I will show you what it does. You will see there is something of me in every glass portrait that will never die. I will always be. Not even my father could say such a thing.”

He left her there, whispering to the walls.

 

THE MAP ON Charles' study desk was more detailed than the old lion's beloved, spare rendering of Ceylon. This one marked the villages that had fallen across the region's south and midsection, from the Arabian eastward.

Eligius saw a circle around Matara.

Sir John pointed to the village of Puttalam. “Charles, do you see how far you'll have to travel? There's unrest spreading through the very provinces you'll pass.”

“And for what?” Ault rocked nervously in his chair. He'd come at Charles' request. “What can you say that could possibly change things? They have no control over these mobs, nor do you. The populace has been looking for a reason to get angry.”

Charles shook his head. “The populace is looking for justice. They don't want a rebellion any more than we. These are the actions of a few, but they are spreading out of anyone's control. If I can gather the remaining provincial leaders, we can restore calm. Stephen, you need not make this journey. I will ask the governor for some soldiers. But I must at least try to do something.”

“Look at me, Charles.”

Catherine searched his eyes. Blankness, as if finally there was nothing left to think about. The man who wrote her a letter of remembrance and prayer for return, the man who needed nothing save to matter, wasn't there.

“ I know what this is.” She took his hand and held it as if it might break. “Forget the court. You' ve given them more than any man could. Please forgive what I tell you now. It does no good to battle anymore. You' ve never been fully well, and God alone knows how many years we' ve left. Spend this time in the study, in thought. Pursue what you can have.”

“What good will I ever have been to anyone if I do nothing?”

“I don't want to see you lose your life over this. Whether your health or the countryside, you're not fit to withstand it. I 'm sorry, but I must say it. You're not the same man. You're ill.”

“It's done. Make your peace with it, Catherine.”

“I will not. What becomes of us if something should happen to you?”

Charles' eyes fluttered. They became pale windows. He gestured for the plantation shutters to be closed against the rising sun. “I've failed in everything I've done,” he said while Eligius closed them. “I've failed to protect the dignity of my family. Or else you would not turn to seeking money from your own endeavors. You would not turn to another man.”

“There is no one else!” Catherine stood and stalked away to the other side of the study. “Sir John is a colleague!”

“I know what I am,” Charles said, “and what I am not. I care nothing for stars and wisps on glass. I don't know how. I only care for the land, for its people, for my children's future, and my wife's station. May God help me, but right now, I care most of all for the boundless conquest of all these things by dishonest men. I may be sick, dying even. But if this is all I have to carry away with me, it will be a miserable parting.”

He rose unsteadily. “I'll tell the children. Eligius, I have a task for you.”

At Charles' request, Eligius rounded up Justice Newhope,
the rotund barrister; and the youngest director, the dour Kenneth Crowell. He brought them back to Dimbola, where Charles took the papers from his cabinet and gave them over to his fellows. They read in silence. Crowell began to pace feverishly, while Newhope simply folded his paper and stood quietly, head bowed.

“Please say something, my dearest friends.”

“How does it come to this?” Newhope asked.

“Let us take a walk, gentlemen.”

Charles asked for his heavy woolen coat. Eligius brought it and slipped it about his shoulders. “ I should like to speak to you of morals,” Charles told his guests. “Just what was it that brought us far from home with the hope of spreading our particular brand of civilization? Perhaps we can reclaim something of that youthful optimism in our twilight.”

He smiled at Eligius as he allowed himself to be buttoned into his overcoat. In it, he appeared small and lost.

He's shrunk, Eligius thought as he helped Charles to the door. Even in the past week, he's grown smaller.

At the front door, Charles asked Eligius to leave them. “ I can still walk my lands,” he said.

“Very well, sa'ab. Call if you need me and I will come.”

“I know.”

He seemed to be waiting for Eligius to do something. Then he broke away. “My friends. Let us discuss how we should be remembered.”

 

CHARLES HAD SET something in motion. That much Eligius knew, and it was momentous enough to send Crowell and Newhope home in silence. They engaged in none of the disparaging banter he'd grown used to when among other Britishers, who seemed most alive when in pursuit of one of their own. On the journey to their homes, he longed for more of their words. Then he might know what was happening, how many villages had fallen and would yet fall before it was over. But he was a servant,
and servants were above all else quiet. No one spoke of the Court or Charles' papers, and it was not his place to ask.

He returned to Dimbola to find Catherine in Holland House with Sir John, sipping tepid tea and bemoaning the imperfec - tions in her photographic plates. White lines had mysteriously appeared across some of the prints. Some turned a pale shade of green, as if they were squares of bread spoiling in the larder. Hairs, cracks in the plates from overuse, dirt, all imperceptible, yet all had become vines and boulders to her now.

He'd noticed these imperfections before but made no mention of them. They were a part of the world she'd created and seemed to him to have as much place within the frame of the print as her subject. Yet her upset caused him to consider how to guard against them. He began to devise a box with a lid that could seal tight, with a window through which light might pour, but imperfections might be kept out. It was almost enough to turn his attention away from the despair gripping the Colebrooks.

At the end of the week, Catherine told Eligius to hitch the horse. “I want some time in church,” she said. “Ewen and I.”

“And Julia, memsa'ab?”

“She is very tired. Let her sleep.”

Lately, she had only seen Julia in the morning and at night, and only for glimpses. Once that week, she came upon her daughter in the scullery, thieving some cheese. Julia's eyes were puffy and red. Her native vitality had left her. She was too weary to raise her head in defiance of anything.

Before leaving, she asked Eligius to bring an extra pillow for the carriage's hard edge. “We'll have a guest with us on our return. The missionary Ault.”

Eligius' heart sank. This was to be the day Charles left, with Ault as his guide.

“Does it help?” he asked. “Church?”

How to explain something that I've merely always known, she wondered as Eligius searched her face for signs of strength. She'd come into the world in 1815, Charles in 1795. Twenty years
her senior. The man she wed in a civil ceremony bore witness to different times. He had a foot in another century.

Perhaps not this way, she thought, nor precisely this place, but isn't this departure merely the truth that has always been here with us, arriving at last?

“I suppose it prepares me,” she said.

He brought them to the Galle Face and remained outside with the other servants. The air stirred lightly in the manes of the steaming horses. The church had been largely finished. Only one scaffolding remained where stonemasons tapped nephilim from quarry rock. Its restored windows glittered with the sunlit sea.

Tying the horse to a thicket, he wandered past the open door of the church. Spotting the memsa'ab was easy enough. She was the only colonial to wear native dress rather than a lacefestooned hat or a head pin of feathers.

Ewen sat next to her. He was growing fast. Only last summer, his head couldn't be seen above the back of the pew bench. Now the bench came to his slight shoulders.

He is still a frail boy, Eligius thought, and Ceylon is so much harder now.

Wynfield's servant stood across the crescent lane where the carriages pulled up to the church doors to disembark their passengers. He spotted Eligius and looked away, taking hasty interest in his carriage horse's bridle. He didn't look up again until his master and mistress had climbed into their compartment following services. Before closing the carriage door, the servant gestured. Wynfield looked in Eligius' direction, expressionless, then slipped inside with his wife. George wasn't with them.

Catherine and Ewen emerged with Ault. The ride back was quiet. His passengers were lost to their thoughts. In two hours, they arrived at Dimbola. He climbed down and opened the gate. Ewen ran into the yard, suddenly a boy again. Ault held out his hand for Catherine, but she remained seated. “If you must take
him,” she said coldly, “watch over him. He is not in God's hands. He is in yours.”

“I will. Please know this is not my idea. Charles was quite insistent. Truth be told, I'm not entirely clear what's to be accomplished.”

Eligius walked to the porch, where Charles sat amidst a small collection of boxes. His maps, Eligius thought.

“Place them carefully in the carriage,” Charles said, “so these roads don't jar everything. No one knows the pitfalls of these roads as do you.”

“I will take care in packing them.”

“Your memsahib is coming. Listen to me. Watch over them while I am away.”

“I will.”

“You have everything that is precious to me. Do you understand?”

“Yes. But you won't be gone long, sa'ab.”

Charles hooked his arm through Eligius' and walked to his wife. “I've said my goodbyes to Sir John, and to Julia, such as it was. Perhaps you will have some words with her, Catherine, so I might return to a less sullen girl. To be the object of so many suitors, including an esteemed artist, is no cause for ill humor.”

“I will try, but she is at a delicate time.”

“When is a woman not at a delicate time?”

He kissed his wife's cheek and walked past her. At the car - riage he let his weight fall on Eligius' shoulders as he took each step. Eligius bore it easily, and Charles's ascent was smooth.

“Do you have your maps, sa'ab? Your pipes and tobacco?”

“I have all I need.”

“Be well,” Catherine told her husband, “and be home soon.”

“A few days' time is all.”

“All the same. Ceylon is not as safe as when we were young.”

“Ceylon was never safe, and I was never young.”

Ault climbed onto the carriage and flicked the lead line.
The old horse stuttered forward. In moments, only a dissipating curtain of fine dust remained of them.

Eligius took Ewen through the front door and bade his mother to put a fire under a kettle of broth. Sudarma asked if Catherine would be dining as well; there might not be enough, though she thought she might stretch it with some roots and a bit of fish.