The Luminist (28 page)

He left the boy and walked to the front door. Catherine and Sir John sat in the gazebo, staring at the road.

“Only for Ewen,” he told his mother in the kitchen.

He went to his room, for what he didn't know. There was much to do, yet nothing came to mind.

A package rested on his sleeping mat, wrapped in simple butcher paper. Watch over it until I return, written in Charles' unmistakable patrician hand. Before going to sleep that night, he opened it and set Charles' beloved map of Ceylon against the wall, where his diya had once been.

3.

On the failure of Parliament's second attempt to reform abuses in the East India Company 's governance of India, nothing was done or attempted to prevent the operation of the interests of delinquent servants of the Com- pany in the General Court, by which they might even come to be their own judges, and in effect to become the masters in that body which ought to govern them.

Such a thing, this cobbling of muses and minerals! One may pose a model, arrange deftly her shawl and taper fingers, call her by an appellation of the seasons, yet she is not so. The blurring of what is real and what is artfully imagined is inappropriate. This conjuring is at once an imposter, and too truthful.

“A Critique: Photography in London”
The Times of London, June 1838

It honors me to submit to your exhibition a series of photographs which I hope will please and perchance move you to see in their presentation what it is that made me create them. Think of them what you will, but know of what they are composed: chemicals, light, and within each sub- ject, a secret.

God's Language

CATHERINE WALKED THE GROUNDS. SHE SAT ALONE AT the dining table. She closed herself up in his study and turned the mothwing pages of his legal tomes. She fashioned each gesture, each touch, in her mind before bringing it into the world.
I shall pick up his book. I shall sit at the foot of his chair. I shall walk to the gate and regard the curvature of the lane and the base of the trees he wanted us to see.

She did not mean them to conjure love, or Charles' safe return. These were places they 'd been together, that she had not spent enough time knowing. He would be in each place had he not left.

God, she decided, would favor her and bring him back. He would not let so much space in one woman's life fall silent.

 

DIMBOLA BORE THE first days of Charles' absence the way Charles bore everything else. Stoically, within itself, confined to far corners.

Julia only opened her door once, to ask Sudarma for a clean dress. Sir John, for his part, was taking his morning walk, a time he loudly proclaimed as his alone.

Eligius found Ewen pacing the length of the yard between the gazebo and Holland House. They walked to the barn together. Ewen gathered some straw and fell back in it, wriggling into the crackling nest he'd made but taking no satisfaction
from it. His scowl remained fixed. “I don't like how quiet everyone is. It's too sad.”

“They miss your father.”

“They should pretend he's in the study.”

“Your mother is afraid for him.”

“I know.” He was impatient. “But Julia told me that it was like this before. When Hardy died.”

“ When I first met you, you couldn't say the word for death. You said he left.”

“I did? Oh, I remember now.”

“There's nothing your mother can do. However much noise she might make.”

“She thinks that box will stop everything.”

“It does. But only for a moment.”

From the barn, they went to the well outside the gate. Ewen helped tie the knot around the bucket handle, then climbed up on the stone lip to watch it descend into the water below.

“The first day after my father 's death,” Eligius said, “I told myself that he'd only gone away for an hour. By that night, he hadn't come back. During that time, it was this kind of quiet, where everyone moves as if they might break.”

“What did you do?”

“I listened.”

Hand over hand, he drew the bucket up. Cool water spilled. Soon it would spill into basins, cooking pots, over windows and faces, and if the memsa'ab could be coaxed, the glass twin of a Ceylon society matron or one of its great men. “I listened and I learned that it had a sound all its own. Like a distant ringing. I could hear it over the wind and the sea. Soon I learned to live with it. After awhile I couldn't hear it anymore. I just heard the sound of me, not thinking about him.”

He set the bucket down. Ewen was staring at the ground. “Listen to me, Ewen. I'm just a servant in your house, but I'm also a boy without a father to keep watch over him. I think you will know more years without your father than with him.”

The boy nodded.

“Then don't wait too long to become a man. Being a boy with no father does no good.”

Ewen was sullen after that, yet still followed him to Holland House. While he took up the box he'd been fashioning, Ewen paced along the wall where Catherine had hung her photographs among Sir John's star maps. She was up to a dozen, which she reorganized every couple of days, trying to approximate the ideal constellation for her album. Always, Julia's photo held the center.

Soon Eligius lost himself in his work – the aperture of the box, the corroded hinges he'd bartered for at a bazaar that opened like bronzed butterflies. The day dissolved around him. When he looked up again, suddenly aware that the box's pale wood had fused with the twilight seeping into Holland House, Ewen was curled up against the album wall, asleep.

He touched the boy 's shoulder to stir him. Groggy, Ewen put his arms out to be lifted. It was as if the act woke him; he withdrew his arms and stood, alone. Passing Eligius, he walked back to the main house.

Eligius finished his work. He left three trays filled with well water, set the canister of sodium hyposulfite alongside, and checked to make sure there were candles and lamps with oil, should the memsa'ab decide to escape the quiet of Dimbola and her husband's empty study.

After dinner, he brought the box from Holland House. “Help me test it,” he asked Ewen.

They took a piece of Catherine's paper and slipped it inside. “I want to see if enough light can enter,” Eligius said. “I need something small.”

Ewen searched through the dining room. He held up a spoon. “Perhaps,” Eligius said, “we could use my diya. You remember the oil lamp I had.”

“I haven't seen it in the longest time. Where is it? I'll bring it.”

“Perhaps the spoon after all.” There was nothing to be
gained in accusing the boy. If he took the diya, it was now his; such was the way of things for a servant.

They placed the spoon inside atop the paper and surrounded the box with candles.

“An experiment!” Sir John walked into the dining room. He peered into the box, careful to keep his unruly mane clear of the candles. “Eligius, I have a task for you. I would like you to lead a small expedition. It's only just dark, and we' ve hours of evening yet. I'd very much like to see this lion's mouth of yours. Let us see who will accompany us.”

Catherine begged off. “I intend to bring my Bible into the study. I shall read a bit of old wanderers until Charles' safe return.”

She forbade Ewen from going. The disappointed boy stormed off to his room, taking the newly-anointed paper and its indelible spoon shadow with him.

Before leaving, Eligius knocked at Julia's door. She opened it a crack. “We're going to the lion's mouth,” he told her. “Sir John will begin mapping the southern skies tonight. He will bring his telescope. He says the stars will seem as close as flowers in the garden.”

“George has requested me to remain at Dimbola while he is painting me.”

“Many times I have seen your father or mother instruct you. This is the first time I've seen you obey.”

“You bait me.”

“I simply observe.”

Her bony shoulders slumped. She seemed weary even of the effort it took to remain standing. It worried him.

“The things he tells me,” she said. “I cannot stand to sit for him.”

“Then stop.”

“I don't have the luxury of stopping. Only he does.”

“Has he made a servant of you?”

She pushed her door closed. “Listen,” he said, to the
patterns of splitting wood. “For when you write, this is what can be seen from the lion's mouth. There is a rock overhang that looks like the open mouth of a stalking lion. The moss in its mouth swings when the wind comes. Below, a valley. In the valley, a neem tree by a stream that fills when it rains. The sharpest eye cannot tell where we broke the ground open under that tree and buried my father. But I can. To not come is to miss … what is the way to say it … the world of it.”

“Your world.”

The sound of the latch washed over him. “Wait for me,” she said.

 

THE WALK TO the lion's mouth was a blur of leaves and distant sky lights. Eligius hefted the heavy tube Sir John gave him to carry. It had legs like the memsa'ab's camera, but smaller. The tube was almost as long as he was tall.

The footing was difficult for a pale English girl unaccustomed to the jungle. He offered Julia a hand but she waved him off, hiked up her gauzy dress and clambered further ahead on the rocky path. Below them, buried in a sea of mist and darkness, lay the valley of the departed, miles of dense vegetation, villages and to the west, Port Colombo and the sea.

“Let her be, Eligius.”

Sir John toted his sketches and calculations in a worn leather valise. Eligius could hear the old colonial's breath in his chest. This walk was taxing enough to young legs. He suggested they stop, but Sir John refused. “Let me tell you of my exploits to take your mind off of your labors. Have you ever heard of mathe - matics?”

“No.”

“God's language is numbers. With them, I can bridge the veils of oceans and sky. Did you know that together with Sir Robert Nysmith, I calculated the duration of the seas? He set sail with a dozen cryptographs and as many cartologies as his ship
could carry. We calculated the time of the tides to within a fortnight, give or take…”

Eligius didn't ask what the colonial's words meant. They came in a flood and he set his pace by their strange cadence. Sir John's enthusiasm for his own work was something joyous and foreign. He'd only known men who pitied their lives.

“ Point in the direction of this lion's mouth for me.”

“ You can't see it in the dark, sa'ab.”

“ No matter. I like to fix on the horizon line and stare it down until it is revealed. A habit born of too many voyages, I suspect.”

He had a kind smile, Eligius thought. Good teeth for a colonial, free of the rot and yellow cake so many of them suffered. It occurred to him that he knew nothing of Sir John's private life. Was he married? Were there children or grandchildren waiting for him in this London he'd heard so much about? Was this yet another man who thought nothing of wandering far from his family?

“There.” He pointed Sir John in the right direction. The moon bobbed just above his finger.

In half an hour they arrived. Julia made her way between the lanyards of moss. She brushed them with her fingers and watched him. Behind her, clouds floated in from the sea. He walked to the lip and saw the neem trees below fill with pale moonlit rivers. The world we knew is gone, appa.

“ When I was a boy,” he told her, “my mother would take me to the sea on Diwali. We brought little lamps with oil, and we would light them and set them out on the water. She would point to the sky and say ‘look up, remember your diya? That's where they go to live and they never go out. Your light is always there for you to see.'”

They stood in silence, listening to the wind murmur in the valley. He hoped a childish hope that his father could see him up here, speaking to a girl who'd never beheld the landscapes of absence that made up his world.

“It's beautiful,” she said. “You spoke truly of it.”

“You're not writing.”

“Better to just look. Someone told me that once.”

“He sounds very wise.”

She leaned into him, bumping his shoulder, and it was so easy to forget who they were. It was dangerous to put faith in such things. They didn't last. They weren't real.

“Come,” she said. “Let us see what mischief Sir John has in store.”

They helped spread the legs of the stand, upon which they fixed the heavy brass and wood tube. Sir John tinkered with the knobs studding its smooth hide, then cranked its length to almost triple.

“It's like the camera,” Eligius said. “It has a glass eye.”

“The lens on this is cut in a particular, exacting way, to bring far things close. Here. Look for yourself.”

Sir John tilted the telescope up to the dark skies. Eligius stepped behind it and peered through the lens. He felt exposed, having grown used to the blanketing dark of the camera shroud. “They 're right with me!”

Millions of pinprick lights on the sky 's curtain swelled in the eye of the telescope. He thought of Julia's photo, of the pool in her eye. The stars looked like that up close.

For hours they captured what they saw, each in their language. Julia made renderings of words. Sir John surveyed the stars and drew intersecting lines, then dotted their surface with approximations of the sky 's lights. Some he named, odd-shaped words that felt exotic in Eligius' mouth.