The Luminist (35 page)

Catherine wrapped her arm around her children. Julia's eyes were vacant. She held her writing pad to her chest as if it would save her. Together they stumbled out, sobbing and screaming down the porch steps and across the lawn. Men carrying paintings and furniture continued to stream in and out of Dimbola through its open wounds.

“Take them to the carriage!” Catherine cried, and left them for the yard.

Eligius brought them to the barn. The old horse whinnied pitiably as he harnessed it and pulled it to the door. Swarms of embers spewed from the field. Some landed on the gazebo. Its roof began to curl as new flames rose.

He pushed Ewen into the carriage and climbed to the seat above.

“ Mama!” Ewen screamed. He pointed towards Holland
House. Catherine was running from the cottage, her arms full. She reached the carriage and climbed in next to Ewen. “ Is everyone all right?”

Ewen sought refuge in her arms. She held him, her living and dead child, his features stained from the heat of the fire.

Thrusting the reins into Sir John's hands, Eligius slapped the horse into motion. In an instant the carriage was across the yard, taking them into the veil of smoke.

They pulled up at the gate. Sudarma handed Gita up to him, then withdrew the stake holding the gate closed. Eligius folded Gita into his arms and made room for his mother.

“There was never a time when I did not love you,” Sudarma said. She backed away from the carriage, shaking her head. “ But I must go where I belong.”

“Amma!” He stood, ready to leap from the carriage. But his mother looked at him as if he were better than he was; the boy who took her from home and broke her over Dimbola's wood and stone. He couldn't move.

“Catherine,” Sudarma said. The English word trembled in her mouth.

This was the amma he'd known, whose word was heeded, whose love was infinite.

“ I know she hears me,” Sudarma said. “ Tell her.”

Eligius translated.

“ Yes,” Catherine said.

“ Finish what I began. Raise my son to be a good man.”

Eligius said the words.

“ Yes.”

“ Do not make a secret of him.”

Ewen touched Catherine's hand. He began to cry. “Bleed.”

Childish words. She raised her palm and marveled at the permanence of all she'd become. Mauve and apparition, interstitched with the skin whorls across her palm. She saw what alarmed Ewen. A trickle of blood from the cut across her hand. She'd gripped the photograph too tightly as she'd fled Holland
House. Now the cracked glass had struck back. There would be a scar, ever. She would look at it one day, under a different sky.

Her cupped hand filled with blood. She listened to Eligius as he translated, then wept. “ I will never make a secret of him. Never.”

The world Sudarma turned and walked into was blackened and quieting. They waited until she entered the remains of the house. As Sir John took the reins and guided the carriage out onto the lane, Dimbola creaked in capitulation to the insistent fire. Pieces of the roof crumpled.

In the murk, Catherine saw the last of Dimbola fall away. A curtain of ash and umber. Flames leapt high into the air, then down to the invisible earth. Over it, she heard the sounds of the wheels.

She took her children into her arms. Ahead there was a ship, and the sea, and a city men crossed the world to glimpse. They made their way to the port, the last of the colonials to depart their lives.

 

FROM THE HILL above Queen Street the Galle Face appeared to clasp Ceylon's jungles and the colonials' dock together in a grid of interwoven color. The jeweled sea washed against the gunmetal of the Royal Captain. A swath of crimson soldiers held a crescent line against the massed knot of crinolines, cashmeres, silks, and cottons of the colonials, who dressed as if decreeing the fires in their once-country contrivances.

At the far end, the hues of saris and dulled white servant smocks, blackened from unwashable labor and uprising. The servants were not moving forward with the mass intent on reaching the ship. They remained behind, near the green carpet of jungle and the seams of fire inching in every direction.

Eligius steered onto a path that narrowed as it descended. Before Ceylon opened to afford them a glimpse of the sea, they saw empty fields, streams of char where the flames had traveled, processions of people.

They arrived at Queen and Chatham. The roads trembled with so many pressed onto the dock. An impenetrable queue of carriages stretched from the Company 's receiving gate back into the road and to the foot of the solemn clock. He brought the carriage alongside another and tied the horse to its brethren.

They took what they could carry and left their horse to whinny amongst its own. Satchels of clothes, a trunk filled with Catherine's photographs and Sir John's celestial map, the camera itself, folded like a dead bird; they dragged their belongings to the foot of the dock. There they clambered over a fallen retaining wall and joined the hundreds. In the pall of smoke and the rattling of fearful voices, they gathered together and braced against the relentless surge of the crowd.

Water washed against the shoreline. Voices at once close and at odd distances drowned all else. The crush of so many made their progress hot and oppressive.

Catherine smelled the bereft odor of ash, sweat, flight. Ahead, the Royal Captain blotted the horizon. She felt the insistence of the sea beneath her feet. It moved under the dock and back again. She could see it in the slow sway of the ship. All around them the men of each family frantically waved bills of entitlement. They shouted at the cordon of soldiers. Men unaccustomed to begging begged uniformed boys for permissions and favors. One more crate. One place ahead in line. Pleas on behalf of sun-poisoned children and wives made mad with close quarters. Promise of tobacco, coin, glowing letters to superiors, introductions to London firms.

She saw Andrew at the ship's rail. He looked old as men approached him and spoke into his ear. He nodded assent to what they said and they scurried off to be replaced by the next.

“He cannot see us,” Sir John shouted.

Eligius brought the bauble out from under his tunic. He held it towards the smoke-blighted sun and twisted it until it found what little light could be sent towards the ship.

Andrew looked up when he saw the light burst from the
crowd. For a moment he was still. The distance was too great to discern his expression.

Somewhere behind them, a roar went up. A great collapsing into the fire. Trees, maybe, dried to splitting, or the collective shudder of falling structures traveling across Ceylon's air like the light of a far sun. Old by the time of its arrival, the remains of something already gone into history.

Eligius heard the dirge of prayer. He felt eyes on him. Faces interspersed among the colonials. They gazed at him with recognition. As the English bodies passed, they held their ground.

Julia took her mother 's arm. She clutched Gita to her chest. Like everyone, she turned at the sound. Now she pulled Catherine close. “ Mother – ”

Catherine grabbed Eligius' hand and pulled him next to her, so no one would mistake him for anything but hers. She'd seen what alarmed Julia. Ahead, the colonials' transit from the dock to the gangplank and safety. Behind, the Indians who had lived among the British. None of them moved forward. They didn't beg the soldiers for passage. Some silent message had already been conveyed.

On board, Andrew raised his hand. He gestured toward her. She saw soldiers break free from their cordon and wade into the crowd. Three uniforms moved toward her family like droplets of blood trickling into the slopes of an upheld palm.

Closer to the Royal Captain, servants still holding their employers' goods handed them over to English porters, then turned and left.

“ Hold me tightly,” she shouted. Locked together by hands, they surged forward to meet the soldiers.

She saw Ault on the gangplank, waving them on. Above him, Andrew watched implacably.

They converged near the front. The soldiers took their belongings and handed them to the porters, who spirited them
away. Ault led Ewen and Julia onto the gangplank. One of the porters took Gita.

A soldier laced his fingers around Catherine's arm. Another took hold of Eligius.

The porter placed Gita on the dock and walked away.

Andrew nodded. The soldiers set about the task of prying Catherine and Eligius apart.

“No.”

Above the roar of the fearful hundreds, Eligius heard Catherine's protest.

“They can't come,” Ault cried above the din. The rest of his words broke into stones. Rebellion. Consort. Suspicion.

“ How will I know you live?” Julia screamed from the entrance to the ship. Sir John put his arms around her and sent her up. More soldiers emerged from the dark mouth of the Royal Captain and brought her inside. Sir John turned back to watch helplessly.

Catherine shook free of the hands holding her. She waded forward through the hot amber air and took hold of Eligius as voices rose in strata of sound. Orders to leave, to stay, to get aboard, to clear a path, to go back. Cries of disbelief came from everywhere and were quickly stolen by the hot winds blowing out to sea. People hurried past, awkward under the unfamiliar weight of their own possessions. Children pulled by the arms with kerchiefs pressed to their mouths and eyes, as if Ceylon's collapse could lodge within them like an infection.

She pressed the folded camera into Eligius' arms.

“Listen,” she said.

The word rose above everything.

It was no longer a port and a murmuring ship, but the world, reduced to one thing.

Somewhere, Andrew cried that he would leave her to Ceylon, so help him.

Eligius counted breaths.

Catherine felt his hand tighten around hers. The world
fell away.
The one who will make portrait sitters of the stars
, she thought.
We promised each other
.

He could feel his fingers go bloodless with the effort to remain in hers. He pulled her close; no words would be lost.

“ We promised,” and her fingers curled in his hair, her lips against his ear, “Oh my child, we are not still. We will always move towards each other. Swear to me – ”

“ I swear. Swear to me – ”

“ We will find each other again – ”

She was gone. A curtain of uniforms cut him from her, and the ship, and Sir John and Julia. He heard only what he thought was her voice. Disembodied, floating above the sea of hands like nothing in the world.

“ Remember me,” it said.

He held the camera. Gita sat alone on the dock, crying as the world emptied around her. He went to her and stood over her protectively. It wasn't enough, to stand. He crouched and made a shell of himself over her and the camera, turning away from everything.

 

“HOW WILL I know he lives?”

Catherine stood at the rails. She held her children to her.

“I don't see him.” Sir John scoured the departing colonials still clogging the dock. They could see the end now. The receiving bay and Chatham were empty but for the natives wandering away from the port.

“ None were allowed,” Andrew said. “ Not my doing. These were directives from Parliament. Too much to sort through, the loyals from the seditionists.”

He stood to Catherine's left, hat in hand, his wife behind him. To onlookers down below, he might have passed for a suitor.

“ He's a resourceful boy,” Sir John said.

“And Catherine left him with means,” Andrew said.

Below her, the rest of her fellow countrymen came forward to meet their new life. She closed her eyes, counted breaths,
yearned for old days, waited for the world to turn back to her. She wanted to be stronger than she was, in front of them all. She wanted to be mother enough to answer her daughter 's plea.
How will I ever know
?

The hope that he wouldn't be alone, that someone would break open the secret of him and love him, was too hard to hold now that the
Royal Captain
pulled away from Ceylon and met the coming sea.

“ Wait. I think that's him.”

She gazed in the direction Sir John pointed. A lone figure arrived at the entrance to the port, almost at the street. A toddling child stumbled alongside. There was a length of wood in the figure's arms. At one end, a box that caught the light and sent it back to her as a mote. A brilliant brief glimmer that disappeared when they turned the corner.

She felt the sudden plummet of her heart. Facing Andrew, she slapped him hard enough to bring a shocked cry.

Taking the hands of her children, she walked away.

 

GITA PUT OUT her arms. “ Up.”

Eligius lifted her. Around them, the mad flights of the colonials could be read from the road. The wheels of their carriages split the dry dirt open and stripped the closest trees of bark. Clothes, furniture, even casks of good brandy littered Chatham.

A faint breath of white ship's steam rose at the horizon. Gita pointed to it.

“Yes,” he said.

 

FOR HOURS THEY heard nothing, saw no one on the roads or in the estates. With each step, it was as if they were descending deeper and deeper into a black bottomless well.

When Gita saw a fallen doll that made her smile, he put it into her arms and told her that now, beginning right now, she'd have to learn to care for her own things.

This is what it is to be alone, he thought. To be driven to the ground by silence and dead space.

Dimbola was dark. He placed Gita in the gazebo's remains and told her to keep her head below the broken trellising in case any more men came. Then he went to the main house to see what might be salvaged. Closing the front door behind him, he held himself until his body stopped trembling. There was a little girl to be fed and clothed.