The Luminist (7 page)

“It's not me you should be angry at. They do this to us, Eligius. With their laws.”

The colonial family bade farewell to their eldest as he climbed aboard ship. The child's mother stifled sobs with an embroidered kerchief.

“I don't know the law,” Eligius said, “nor will I ever want to again. I know what I've seen. Men throwing stones and rotted fruit at the Court gate. What good does any of it do?”

“Hiranyagarbha made stones first. As he made more and more things, like any good craftsman, I believe he got better at his task. He made man last, and manmade laws, and laws make consequences for men. Not just us. Them. They will bring the consequences on themselves.”

A constellation of rain glistened on Chandrak's forehead. His breathing came harder, faster.

Eligius glanced around nervously. Were the colonials standing across the street watching? Could they understand Chandrak's words? To be seen speaking in anger in their Port, Indians were jailed for that.

Chandrak's voice fell, as if he knew what Eligius feared. “Stones draw blood. Blood changes law. Laws draw maps around nations, and create them, or destroy them. Now see, we've
found the missionary. More of this talk another day. Calm yourself, boy.”

Tall and gangly, the missionary Stephen Ault was known to most of the southern provinces. He lived, it seemed, to convert them and to funnel the charity of right-minded colonial women who donated blankets and books describing the ways of Christianity.

Eligius followed Chandrak down the length of Port Colombo's dock, along the sea. The waves pushed against the wood stanches, swaying the planks beneath. It felt as if the world strained to turn over.

Ault stood in a swiftly moving line of servants wending its way to the ship's captain. At their turn, each servant called out the name of the family they represented. The captain searched through neatly stacked piles of letters and parcels while the colonials sat shielded inside their carriages, waiting for words from loved ones across the sea.

Ault came to them with a slim parcel of letters. “First to my parish for an umbrella,” he said to Chandrak in slow, rudimentary Tamil. “Then to the boy's employer in Kalutara. Tell the boy to put these under his tunic so they'll stay dry.”

“What need do we have for an umbrella after hours in the rain?” Eligius asked in English.

“How wonderfully you speak! Let me explain. For you, arriving in the appearance of need is expected, and so you shall. For me, it would not do to look as bad off as I otherwise am. You'll learn, if it's in you to learn. Now, no more dawdling.”

They left the docks and crossed Chatham, slipping from tree to tree in an effort to blunt the rain and rising wind. Briefly they shared the canopying fronds of a palm with a Britisher and his young wife. She struggled to keep the crinkled ruffle of her dress out of the downpour while her husband turned her away from two young beggars. Starvation and sickness bent their bodies. Their backs filled with wheezing breath, pressing the accordions of their ribcages against their parchment skin.
They were redolent with the manure they offered to sell for fuel. “Come, yaar, four lakhs of rupees…”

“There's a break in the rain,” Ault said. “Quickly now, before another cloudburst strands us here.”

They followed the missionary across Chatham to a muddy corner, where the monsoons had eaten a gorge into the street. Abridge fashioned from hemp and planks of unshaved wood spanned one side to the other. Down this far from the Galle Face, the buildings reflected none of Port Colombo's relentless gentrification by the British. Still chained to the beginning of the century, the storefronts and rooming houses were constructed from cheap stone and wood gone wormy from the seasons.

Ault's squat tenancy lay at the end of the block, among tobacconists and spice sellers. Its door opened upon a room scarcely larger than the huts found in Matara. The walls were porous stone that bled seawater. The floor was littered with candle drippings. A wooden cross hung from the wall near a small sketch of a man in priestly vestments, holding two fingers up to a blazing star.

“Father Paul Tanford,” Ault said. “He founded the school in which I studied. In his name I came to this jungle. The day I arrived, I felt lost to England. It's been twelve years, and I fear your people remain unknowable to me.” He opened his umbrella in the doorway. The rain had thinned to a sheet of cold pins.

Ault gestured to Eligius' parcel of mail. “Can you read as well?”

Eligius turned the top envelope over as they walked. The sender's hand was imprecise, and it took him a moment to discern the author, Sir John Holland. Catherine Colebrook was the recipient.

“Service is one of the paths to the divine in your faith, isn't it?”

Ault was looking at him. As if it concerned him, Eligius thought, whether I crumble. “Is it such a terrible thing to help your family when they need you? Put those envelopes back in
your tunic, so when you present them to the memsa'ab, you'll be seen as concerned for their condition.”

Their path took them out of the jungle at Kalutara, where they followed the sea to a small hill rising from a swath of cultivated fields. There the Colebrook estate stood, like all the colonial homes he'd seen before. Yet there was something about it that spoke of wildness and neglect. Blight twisted much of their fields. A tenacious ivy had overtaken the walls of the main house, erasing the demarcation between it and the ground. The hill it rested on sloped down to a river. Churned by the rains to brown rapids, it had flooded the entire frontage, up to the veranda wrapped around the base of the house. The property was thick with coconut, casuarinas, mango, and breadfruit, but they were underwater to the base of their trunks.

He could see the problem from the gate. The Colebrook estate was a basin, high at either end and dipped in the middle.

A flotilla of wood had been hastily erected to span the flood. The planks led to the side of the house, where a canopy of billowing sheets had been erected. From the gate, Eligius could see rows of chairs facing forward toward the veranda and a canopied stage.

“Your memsa'ab,” Ault said, “lives on superlatives as if they were her daily bread.”

“I don't understand.”

“Flattery,” Ault said. “It will see you through when matters grow dark, as matters are bound to do. Remember to present her with the letters. As I knew nothing of you, I've not told her of your ability with English or your abhorrence at what it is you will be doing. It's best that you find your own place.”

Eligius hesitated at the gate. “Did you know my father?”

Chandrak watched him.

“Yes,” the missionary said.

“Did you bring him to these people?”

“To the people who lived here before. I've known your village for many years. I help where I can. I thought he might find
something of worth here. That happens in the strangest places, I've come to realize. If not him, then someone else. But what of it?”

The back of Eligius' neck was stiff from the cold rain, but he couldn't rub it, or return Chandrak's warning gaze, or move at all. To act was to tilt the world somehow, and then he would not be able to put it right.

“I can remember how he was before the books and laws, when he was a man like other men in my village. He was my father. And then he wasn't. The other men listened to him speak but stopped calling him to the fire. My mother hardly looked at him. Everything that mattered got lost.”

“The boy is upset,” Chandrak said. “Let me speak to him. For his mother. It will help things.”

Ault dismissed them with a wave. Chandrak led Eligius away from the missionary. “There's a greater good to be served,” he told Eligius. “I will tell you what you need to know about these people, and you will listen.”

“No, grama sevaka. I just want to go and come home with rupees.”

Chandrak's hand tightened until a warning of pain blossomed in Eligius' arm. “Do you know they want to stamp England across India's brow? The households they're creating, like the one your father served, are English households. No matter that Ceylon lies just outside the window. In their homes, it's the role of the dutiful wife to govern her family's days and nights, their meals, their sleep, their social obligations and their cleanliness, and yet not be seen to govern anything, or else their husbands look weak. Do you understand this?”

“Yes,” he said grudgingly. It wasn't so different from his own home.

“Your memsa'ab's husband is infirm. She has two children, and with all this to manage and never enough to manage it with, she must maintain their position. A servant who helps his memsa'ab with such things is a great blessing. You will be a servant they depend on. Tell me you will do this.”

Eligius nodded. He wanted to leave, yet something of Chandrak's anger felt familiar, a once-inhabited room violently rearranged.

“I ask you now, be a man like your father. He served them so he would always know how it felt to bear these bastards on his back. It gave him strength to be the man he was.”

The rain left tears on Chandrak's cheeks. “Go. Send your heart away and walk through their gate as if nothing mattered.”

He turned from Eligius and shambled into the gathering storm. The soldiers' guns had made a ruin of him. His wearying, tilting gait carried him away from the estate onto the muddying road.

Ault waited impatiently at the gate. “What is so bothersome to you? I really must know, or else think of you as a boy too selfish to be concerned with his family, especially where the father of the house has met with such an end. Now tell me or else put this childish sulking aside.”

“I don't want to be here,” Eligius said.

“Is it that I knew your father? Does his shadow stretch over the kindness of Christian labor?” Ault considered him a moment. “I think your father simply learned to have hope that things could be made better, and hope became important above all else. Above soldiers, above dying, above you. What can anyone do for such a man?” He opened the Colebrooks' gate.

Eligius entered. He heard the gate close behind him, and the sound of Ault's departing over the pebbled road. Outside of it all, the day moved.

To the Gates of Empire

AFTER GRACE, MARY SERVED THE WYNFIELDS FIRST. Charles and Andrew sat at the far end of the lunch, engrossed in conversation. Catherine sat across from Lady Wynfield, who shared stories of her son's exploits with Sir John as they followed the threads of the star tapestry.

“Rangoon, last we heard. In any event, our visit. For I well recall the difficulties setting up a home. Charles should soon be paid sufficiently to afford some furnishings.”

This caught Andrew's attention. He ceased his discussion with Charles. “Great work lies ahead.” He offered Lady Wynfield a withering look that shrank her in her seat. “Great reward accompanies.”

“Hence our visit,” Lady Wynfield said uncomfortably. “Andrew, may I?”

Andrew shrugged.

Taking Catherine by the arm, Lady Wynfield led her outside to their carriage. Catherine paid scant attention. As they made their way between rows of empty chairs, she could not get Charles' expression out of her thoughts. Proud, at times arrogantly so, a man who suffered no one. Summarily silenced by Andrew and humiliated by Lady Wynfield, and he responded as if he expected such treatment. As if he harbored no expectation of better.

Lady Wynfield removed two canvases from their carriage. She unveiled them in the house. “My husband's sponsorship of
yours is a matter of some discussion amongst Ceylon society, you see. Politics, like nature, cannot sustain a vacuum for long.”

“ My husband is an accomplished and well-considered man, lest you see him otherwise.”

“Otherwise?”

“ Dependent. Place-seeking. In need.”

“ You as well, madam. The women with whom I am acquainted speak of you. I wonder, are you as attuned to their speculations in that matter?”

Catherine was silent.

Lady Wynfield unveiled the first painting. A perfectly adequate rendering of Julia while at the Cape. A girl of fourteen poised on the precipice of understanding and intending the communication of beauty. Her smile, the curve of her lips, her loosely pinned hair; George had acquitted himself well with her.

“May I again suggest a luncheon?” Lady Wynfield leaned Julia's portrait against the wall. “ I chair a group of Directors' wives. We function as, shall we say, a far-flung adjunct of Christian good works. We sponsor the transportation of children from this savage country to the continent in times of cholera or malaria. We help the edifice of the Galle Face rise. I wish to invite you to organize such a gathering. To do so is to inoculate your husband from needless gossip. For him, shall we say. Here, perhaps this is a painting to hang elsewhere. Obvious reasons, of course.”

She unveiled the second painting.

The infant bore the wings of angels, a quiet smile that spoke of serene rest. It bore Ewen's face, and therefore what of Hardy could be salvaged.

The light was wrong. The wrong shape in the eye, the wrong density, the wrong compound of tear and flame. She'd done her best to relate to George what she recalled and he had missed everything.

“ Perhaps you can hang this in that shack out there,” Lady Wynfield suggested.

Catherine thought about it. Failures resided in the cottage now, but hope did as well.

She saw, through the window, figures standing at her gate. Oddly, one – tall, lanky, perhaps that missionary? – held an umbrella above his own head while the smaller one stood in the rain, as if the deluge were home.