The Luminist (4 page)

It held no furniture or fixtures. It walls were bare. Its ceiling had been rent open by storms. Yet its vacancy was of a different sort than the main house. The cottage didn't feel empty to her. It felt free. Charles' persistent quiet, the maid's taciturn labors, Ewen's pronounced need; none of it reached her here. In the cottage, possibilities turned in the breeze of the near sea.

The crate and the letter from Sir John arrived by ship's post in September. Mary brought them to her master with no regard for Catherine's name as intended recipient. A message from a man journeying on the largesse of her new master's superior, to her mistress? Inappropriate was too gentle a word.

Charles was a quiet rain after Sir John's delivery. He punished Catherine with silence, unanswered entreaties over dinner, a closed study door.

He didn't understand, nor could she expect him to. She knew this. He hadn't witnessed her in the Cape. Had he known that she'd infused a far away man with hope for the resurrection of her child's first and last day, he would have hated her for needing such things.

She moved the crate, unopened, into the cottage.

Weeks passed. Colonial Ceylon invited them to dinners and a party in Andrew Wynfield's honor, to fete the imminent completion of Ceylon's first grand church, the Galle Face. At Charles' direction, Mary selected a dress and provided Catherine with the hour by which she was expected to emerge, ready. There were instructions pinned to the russetted bodice. Topics about which
Catherine was to be learned, others about which she was to be silent. A map provided her with the location in Charles' library where a book might be selected, should she desire a supplement on the laws her husband had drafted.

Charles didn't speak to her on their carriage ride to the Galle Face.

Near the port, their carriage joined a queue. They were greeted by Tamil children from the Galle Face's newly inaugurated Religious Tract and Bible Class. The children sang lyrics from the Acts while invited Britishers walked a pebbled path to the church entrance.

Charles let himself out and strode off, leaving Catherine to the preachings of the children.

A procession of Bishops led the invitees through a sculpted metal portcullis. Above the entry was a round window embellished with flowing tracery, and through it Catherine saw the grand gable of the roof, the coffered ceiling that swallowed all but traces of the many flickering candles, clustered columns, the topmost ribs of the nave, and the piping and roseglass of the sainted windows. Everywhere she saw the scars of expansion.

The exterior was mapped in cages of scaffolding. The columns pierced the underside of the sky. They were yet to be carved, but soon their snowy marble would be expertly relieved in flower garlands gracing Christ in His infancy.

Inside, the Directors' wives remained at the rear of the sanctuary, where they expressed admiration for the native children's mastery of their prayers and spoke longingly of London boutiques. They asked Catherine to chair a lunch where charities would be formed and decisions made. She was requested to draw up a menu for their inspection.

She saw Charles in line, waiting for Andrew to acknowledge him.

Between the wives she saw the open door, and if she moved slightly to her left, a glimpse of Ceylon's curtain of trees,
its contours and slopes, its painterly last light. Behind everything, far from sight, the cottage and the unopened crate.

The wives invited her to their table. She politely declined. Despite Charles' stare, she remained in the doorway, where the air of this country could be heard and felt.

The evening ended. They returned to their plantation. She could take no more.

“I am grateful you brought us here,” she said, unbidden, the following morning. She'd dressed herself and Ewen for the missionary Ault's service in the shadow of the Galle Face before locating Charles in his study.

She'd come to invite him without knowing why. He had never shared her faith and did not believe in the time church attendance thieved from other pursuits. It was a familiar dance. She asked him to come, he refused. But she felt the need for her husband to sit with her as other husbands did. She wanted him to know the breadth of her belief. There was no other way for him to know how that belief had begun to falter in the Cape, and she with it.

Upon his refusal she made to depart but lingered over his books. Perhaps if she delayed, if she touched them, she might discover why this constituted prayer for him.

“It seems this silence between us persists,” she said. “Shall we declare it done?”

“If you wish.”

“I wish for my husband.”

“Your husband is here. This is what my life is now. Is it enough for you? A man not given to frivolous poetry. I cannot be other.”

“Nor can I. Yet we love each other.” She tapped his papers. “An immutable fact.”

“A law, I suggest.”

“Agreed.”

His first smile since the port. “Know that it pained me, Catherine. I didn't want to leave having just learned you were
with child. But I tell you we will have a life here. The one we want, among English society. Now we have declared the silence between us done. May we also conclude the melancholy I see in you? Just as your journey here, tell me there is a ship and a map to bring you to a state of contentment, and I will pay your passage.”

“You are poetic despite yourself.”

“You inspire matters I didn't know I was capable of. Come, let me show you something of Ceylon.”

He led her out onto the grass. “My predecessor on the Court called this estate Dimbola. A suitably exotic appellation. But look there. Look at the curve of the land to the trees and the sea. Do you see the borders of this country? There, where the land meets the Arabian and stops. Tell me you see the beauty in these things so that I may be sure of you.”

She let moments pass. She devoted herself to the curl of the land into the weave of jungle and sea. “What resides in the crate,” she began, “is somehow of me, as all of this is now of you.”

She could feel him turn inward. Their years had taught her. A sudden distance in his eyes, a stiffening of his stance. But she did not stop. “Odds and ends left from the Cape, sent to the Maclears' because they were the most important Britishers in the area. Sent via Sir John because of the shared connection to Andrew. Andrew does not underwrite charity. He has affiliated himself with two great men.”

“Why speak of it,” Charles said tersely.

“I must have your blessing.”

“What am I asked to bless, I wonder.”

“Something has captured my attention. You know what sort of woman I am. Remember the story of my mother?”

“Off with you to Paris. The café windows.”

“Then you know how it is with me. Perhaps you'll be piqued. Whatever resides in the crate is of science, as well as beauty. It must be. It lacks even a name at present.”

His distance widened. It began at the edge of his eyes. She
took his hand and willed him to know her heart.
Your illness is not frailty. Look at us. In Ceylon, so you may structure the Charter that will bring an unruly country into civility and English law. You sit at the elbow of the governor. You are not fated to be less than other men. You have married a woman fated to want what isn't here. I am sorry for that.

“Your place is at my side,” he said. “You understand the importance of this.”

“I do.”

“Then take care not to hurt yourself opening that damned crate.”

It was October. Aipassi. She opened the letter first.

With the letter, Sir John had enclosed images. A tintype of a silvery shroud encircling the harbor at Pretoria. There was a sailboat in the foreground. There was the sea, washed to silver by the setting sun.

Not enough, she thought. There is nothing from life here.

Through the cottage door, she saw the burning lamps of her home. Dimbola. It was the dinner hour. Mary would see her
empty chair and feed her family. She would tell Julia and Ewen to pray and ready themselves for bed. Charles would close his study door.

Her dress bound her too well. She shed it and for a moment she let Ceylon's breathing liturgic winds find her. Then she went to the alcove and selected a sari of washed red. Moving beneath its loose weave was of no consequence.

She unpacked the crate of its parts. Oddly incandescent paper. Small casks of exotically named chemicals. Wood cut into spindles, dowels, a box. A black cloak. Hinges and small mirrors. There were instructions. How to assemble, what to do next. How to approximate what had been done, where to look for what could be.

Above her was the punctured roof of the cottage. Stars, blackness, the sky Sir John deemed the same, everywhere.

She began to build with no sense of what it would be. She only knew that the world was falling away.
Each day of my life must be this.

From Life

ELIGIUS FOLLOWED HIS FATHER ON A WIDE PATH ALONGSIDE stands of palm trees and sawgrass. Swaran led them on an ascent of Prinsep Hill's pinnacle. To the west was the sea, rounded at the shore where it swelled into the white defilements of the colonials' construction. The East India Company, the Galle Face church, Court Directors' homes and plantations, all blemishes from a plague swiftly traveling inland, borne by the Britishers' ever larger machines.

In his years, Eligius had seen simple machetes give way to axes on wheels, pulled by bison and then by elephants and then by something else, some infernal wheezing metal cart that ate a swath through the neem and banyan trees and spilled red mangoes onto the ground like blood. The colonials felled everything in their path to make way for more of what they wished India to be: the breadbasket of London. Yet the azure sea persisted and the jungle always grew back to fill the cavities of whitewashed stone and stained glass with fruit and birds and flowers.

From Prinsep, Eligius could see the roads open to them. The East India Court lay to the west, near the Galle Face. An easterly route would take them away from Port Colombo, away from the waterfront homes and inland plantations devoted to cotton, indigo, jute, and the ever-craved coffee. North would take them to the other villages outside Colombo and Mulkirigala, to slums just like Matara filled with stagnant water that spread
sleep amongst the newborns. A little further and they would find what remained of the elephant temple. Sudarma had often brought him there as a child, despite the day-long trek, to see the shattered gopuram canopied by the treetops. Bearing him in her arms as if he were nothing, she would point to the burnished copper rendering of Lakshmi on her lotus. She would tell him how Lakshmi showered the faithful with gold coins, and how the temple elephants, cousins to the clouds, showered her in turn.

They trekked west until a crescent of the sapphire sea emerged at the horizon line where the jungle gave way to the outskirts of Port Colombo. Following the road, they passed the Overstone plantation and the men laboring in its fields.

“Look at them,” Swaran whispered. “I don't want these men's lives for you, meri beta.”

Eligius watched the workers cut the ground open, seed it and sew it shut again with tools brought from across the sea. Once, these men were the sellers and buyers, the beginning and the end. They were the circle of the world; so his father said. Now they were oxen pulling blades across the dirt for their betters.

They emerged from the jungle at the Court building, near a throng of angry men. Hindu, Punjabi, Sinhalese, Tamil, Sikh, Vedda – Eligius saw every caste, every group. They'd all come to see if chants of protest could make the colonials stop what they'd been doing since the first Charter Act gave the John Company sovereignty. Men in dirty clothes and soldiers in uniform paced their respective sides of the bars, eyeing each other warily.

Swaran avoided the other Indian men. He approached the gate and bowed to the closest guard. The guard waved him over. “I am presenting a bill of concerns to Governor Wynfield and the Court of Directors.”

The guard gestured to Eligius.

“My son.”

“And me.” Chandrak stepped forward. “A servant of no great importance.”

After conferring with his superior, the guard opened a door in the gate and ushered them swiftly through.

A brick flew past Eligius' ears. “Tell the Britishers to pack their things and leave,” a man's voice cried. This stirred the mob up, and they began to surge towards the gate. The man who'd screamed was at the front of the crowd. There was a long stick in his hand. A thick cord of braided horsehair sliced the air with an audible hum as he turned it upon himself.

The crowd began to chant in time to his self punishment. He smiled as his back grew slick with sweat and blood. “I am Ceylon,” he said, his teeth grinding against the pain. “I am Ceylon. Tell them.”