The Luminist (34 page)

She opened the shutter. “Oh, my husband,” she wept from beneath. “You have torn my heart from me.”

Julia knelt on the other side of the deathbed. She laced her fingers together and muttered silent words over her father.

So did Eligius. He closed his eyes and found something to pray for that was his alone.

What you did, you are damned for. But it is not how I see you now. Should I ever view this photograph again and follow it back to this moment, I will not find the man who would save Ceylon. I will not find a worthy man. I will find a father who brought into the world a girl with pools of light in her eyes. A husband who stood back and let his woman find what had not been found. It is not a bad way to be remembered.

Catherine emerged from under the cloak. Her face was salted with tears and sweat. She washed the glass. Leaves of silver and shadow rode the water to the floor.

Eligius took the plate from her and left it to the light. Charles came soon, with the two-hearted map of Ceylon above him. On either side, Eligius and Julia knelt reverentially, their heads bowed.

Sudarma approached the plate. The candles behind the glass formed clouds on the image. She clutched her sari and knelt before it.

“ What shall it be called?” Sir John asked. He watched Sudarma's quiet reverie before the glass.

“Ceylon remembers him,” Eligius said.

Catherine cradled her husband's head. Next to her, the image of her husband bled and froze on the glass. “So it does,” she said.

 

BY SIR JOHN'S calculations, they could take five crates' worth of possessions on the ship before running the risk of leaving
their clothes and collectibles behind, to face the ignominy of being picked through by Ceylon's unfortunates. Their furniture and books, all save Charles' most prized legal tomes and treatises, had to stay.

They set about packing what remained. Julia's writings and implements, her favorite dresses. Ewen's calliope, into which a candle could be set to spin the shadows of exotic animals onto the walls. Sir John's maps. For Catherine, her camera and all the plates from the portraits she'd made.

Sir John guessed the ship's captain would forbid her chemicals. “ We'll find new ones in London,” he told her. “Or we'll create our own. Think of the resources we'll have there.”

Eligius told his mother to bind the Colebrooks' possessions with sheets to protect them. In the morning, he would ride to the Galle Face to give the vicar word of Charles' passing. “ I want him to be buried here,” Catherine said. “ Behind the Galle Face. I will grant him his love for this country, but he will rest in the shadow of a Christian God's house. As for whatever else remains here, to hell with all of it.”

Eligius offered his help to Ewen but the boy refused. There was a hint of recrimination in Ewen's dismissive wave. It disturbed Eligius to see the boy behave in such a way, but he gave Ewen wide berth.

Sudarma was in Catherine's bedroom, wrapping Charles' photograph. A sheet lay over Charles' face. Eligius could make out the contours of Charles' beard and nose.

“I've lost you already.” She held the plate to her chest.

A noise startled him. He lifted the winding sheet. Gita played guilelessly under Charles' bed. She cooed with pleasure at being found.

“ I showed her what you did,” Sudarma said. “ You made the dead stay in the world. I told her, we are watching him sail to a strange place and we are happy for him. A boy who can make light do as he wishes can surely find a way home again. But I ask you, meri beta. If you go, take Gita. She'll be safer with you.”

“She would become a servant, amma. A woman without a family in a strange place.”

“She would be worse off if she remained. I don't want her to live like this. Like me. A mother raises her children to leave home and not look back. Let me say I succeeded at just this one thing.”

He put his arms around her. “ You did,” he told her.

 

AS THE NIGHT deepened, the activity of packing paused for sleep. Eligius stood on the porch, considering Sir John's mapped sky. He saw Julia emerge from the gazebo and followed her to Holland House. Inside, she opened the camera's legs and stood it upright.

“ I have to pack this,” he said.

“And you will. Is there a plate and some of that dreadful water you need?”

“There is. But – ”

“Can you make a photograph alone?”

He thought about this. The breaths between the opening of the camera eye and its closing. The amount of chemical needed to wash the exposed glass. The light. “ Yes. I can.”

“Then make it of us.”

He set the candles in a circle around the chair and placed more in a cluster across the floor. Outside were the far sounds of guns, as Ceylon cut deeper into its own throat. Yet the cracks came to him as if he lay under deep water. The lights he set loose rippled in her eyes. There was nothing else to know.

She sat in the chair and watched him prepare the glass. “One night, mother spoke of you to my father. How you wanted to refashion the camera's glass to reach the stars. I think they were discussing mother 's desire for knowledge. For accomplishment and a lasting place. Yet she spoke of you as well, in the same breath.

“ I kept my father company more so than my mother or brother. I understood his treasury of quiet more than they. I knew
how to hear him, and I expected no response from him to mother 's idle chat. But to my surprise, my father said that every night he would gaze at the photograph of me with the light in my hand. He spoke of it as the portrait you both made, Eligius. He said you made me beautiful.”

Eligius slipped the new plate into the camera. He gazed at her as the camera would. “ You were beautiful before I ever saw you.”

He opened the camera's eye, then went to sit next to her. Her arm pressed against his and remained. Around them, the night cooled. It tasted of winter. She would not be under the next rains. Where he would be could no longer be seen.

How strange, he thought as her skin's warmth joined with his and became indivisible from him.

He counted his first breaths. “ What to call it,” he murmured.

Her hand found his cheek and turned him. “ We must be still,” he said.

“We are.”

He felt himself becoming woven into the air, into her. When their lips touched it was like the silver on his skin, replacing his flesh with what they 'd stolen out of time. They would never die. They would always be here.

Soon he told her that enough breaths had passed. He took the plate from the camera. “ Now,” she said, “pack it all. Tomor - row will be as it is. By week 's end we'll be on the sea. My father will be buried here. To make sense of all that's happened is a farce. I don't understand any of it, but there is tonight. I wish life could stand still, here in this moment.”

He told her he would make the photograph. She asked that he pack the camera quickly so her mother wouldn't be angry. “ I will think of what to call it,” she said. “ Without a name, it's an orphan.”

After she left he washed the plate and himself. The nitrate of silver cascaded over his hands. He set the plate to its light and himself with it. Their faces came to glass and skin. An amniotic
haze enveloped them; a pigment of refracted candlelight that they seemed to float in like stars behind milky clouds.

He lay down, weary from the packing. Every second of the last days radiated through his legs, but he wanted to see the tide of them come.

The stain on his hand began to arrange itself. A little mote of pale – her eye, in profile, gazing at him. In the dry crease of his palm, their kiss. She'd asked that life stand still here and he'd lit a candle and burned the two of them into permanence.

“Of course, you know what you' ve done.”

Catherine stood in the doorway, regarding the coming image. Julia and Eligius must have wanted that moment above all, she thought. To be free. To burn down all that held them still.

“ You kept your promise. You made a portrait sitter of a star.”

“ Not yet, memsa'ab. But I will. And you. You tied light to the sa'ab as he departed.”

“ Perhaps.”

They were quiet awhile.

“ It is a marked improvement over mine,” she said. “Clearly, I need your hand with me. Your light. The English sun can be as capricious as Ceylon's.”

“ Is it your desire that I come?”

It surprised her, to cry in front of him. “ You have become a part of my life. I cannot allow you to simply leave it. There's so much we' ve yet to do. You found the way to me. This cannot be meaningless, that you have remained.”

“No.”

“I've always wanted more of the world than I am meant to have. I cannot imagine my life with another hole in it. I cannot imagine not knowing you. And Julia …”

“ Memsa'ab, what do I do?”

“About loving her.”

“About wanting to belong where I do not.”

“ I am acquainted with that problem myself.”

They laughed, content, while the cottage filled with the sounds of their twinned voices.

“ I don't know what will become of you and her, Eligius. It would be hard. But if it matters at all, I think you belong with her.”

He moved to be next to her. “ It matters very much.”

“ May I tell you of things? Of London?”

“ I cannot create a picture in my mind to equal what it must be.”

“ May I tell you of Hardy?”

“ Yes.”

“ I don't think I've spoken of him. Not to anyone.”

“ Look at every image you make. Each time, you speak of him.”

She talked about the child she never knew. She described the lights of London. She told him of people they might portray. Poets, scientists, seers, divines. She told him of the day his father died, of his shadow across the Court floor.

By then the moon had dipped below the trees. He could hear the weariness in her softening voice.

“Look at her,” she said. “ Look at you both. Like one of Sir John's double stars.”

Memsa'ab, you should sleep. The image remains. It will still be here in the morning. So will I.”

“ Tomorrow, then.”

She kissed his cheek and left him. He lay down next to the photo and closed his eyes. Exhaustion consumed him, but the plate and paper hadn't finished with each other yet. When the candles burned down, it would be done. Then he would pack the camera and sleep.

There must be as many candles as stars in London, he thought. I can live among them. I may grow old and be wretched in strange rooms, but I will always have this night. We all wish we were better than we are. It won't matter where I do the wishing.

Before he could stop himself he was still and dreaming of the John Company 's Court on Chatham Street, at six degrees
and eighty degrees below the southern hemispheric orbits. He was in the lobby, watching Julia make her bauble's lights dance across the wooden floor while the memsa'ab tried to arrest it all. Her lights grew brighter and brighter. His eyes stung the way they did when he stood too close to his mother 's cooking fires. The room grew fiercely hot. The lights ignited the floor, the walls, everything was burning—

Life Stood Still, Here

ELIGIUS LEAPT TO HIS FEET AND WENT TO THE DOOR. The stars shimmered sickeningly through the heat and smoke. A sea of flame erupted in the Colebrooks' field. Then they came. Shapes of men emerged from the burning rows. Their hair and clothes trailed tendrils of gray smoke. Some of them carried spent torches. Others carried machetes.

They left the field and moved towards the main house. Flames followed them, engulfing Dimbola's eastern fence line and twisting angry red veins into the cracking wood. Drawing a breath, he broke from Holland House. The men didn't see him as he raced up the porch steps and pushed against the front door. Locked. He ran around to the servant's entrance, picked up a rock and threw it through the window, then scrambled in as glass teeth raked his skin. He screamed for Dimbola to wake up. Trailing blood, he pounded on doors until Julia stumbled into the hall, clutching at her dressing gown. “ Don't go near your windows. They're setting fire.”

She went to her brother 's room. Sir John opened his door, holding his gun in a trembling hand.

Glass shattered somewhere else in the house.

He moved to the memsa'ab's bedroom, terrified. Smoke lacerated his throat and eyes. He pushed the door open. She was on the bed next to her husband's body, cradling his head in her lap. A hail of stones burst the window behind her, showering the floor with glass. Hands took hold of the window frame.

She kissed her husband goodbye.

Sir John appeared in the doorway and cried that the back of the house was on fire. There were men already inside, taking everything they could carry.

“Go to the front of the house,” Catherine told them. “ I have to find my children.”

She pushed them toward the dining room, then ran towards the rear. The hall was full of burning black clouds. In the sooty smoke she heard the cries of the men. Lost as well, they clawed at everything on the walls. They tugged violently at the carpet beneath her feet. Bodies pummeled her as the men careened past without recognition. A gauntlet of hands swept the air, looking for purchase. The sounds of hoarded glass and metal made a terrible music.

Already the smoke was gathering at the front of the house. She found her children and led them there, where Eligius and Sir John waited. Opening the door, she peered out as Dimbola came apart behind them.

“ I see Sudarma,” Sir John said. He pointed to the gate, where Sudarma stood, gazing out at the sea.