The Luminist (8 page)

Something in the space between the figures and here, the house and its quiet, felt familiar.

She placed the angel on the floor, next to Julia's portrait. “It belongs in here,” she said.

 

ASCENDING THE PLANKS, Eligius crossed the Colebrooks' frontage, passing the gray whiskered monkeys that squalled on the banks of the flooded yard. At the canopy, he was met by a young English woman. Her clothes were as simple and workmanlike as her harried, unkempt appearance. “ You're the servant?” she asked in clipped Tamil. “ From Ault?”

He nodded.

My mistress sent me to see who you were.” She turned, then stopped to see if he was following. “What are you waiting on? The rain's ready to blow the sheet out to sea! Is that how you want your memsahib to meet you?”

“ No,” he answered in Tamil. “ But I have letters. I was told to present them to Colebrook memsa'ab.”

“There's time enough for that.” She climbed up onto the veranda and bade him to follow. Her face was creased and puffy, her hair a nest of knots. “ Take hold of this pole and stretch the canopy taut. I 'll have the other.”

She walked towards the corner opposite him. Her gait was that of a shuffling elder, stooped and fussy, as if forever racing the rain.

Together they pulled the poles to opposite ends of the veranda. The canopy was little more than a series of old sheets hastily sewn together. It stretched at the gapping seams but did
not tear when the wind pushed up and under it, threatening to yank the poles from their hands.

He glanced at the audience that had gathered to fill the seats. Thirty, he reckoned, maybe more. To a one they looked none too pleased that a maid and a local stood between them and a drenching. He recognized some of the men from the Court. Their jowls and mutton chops, starched collars and dour expressions, seemed cut from the same cloth. The women were dressed in their finest, yet appeared morose over having to hide their resplendence beneath umbrellas and shawls.

The girl he'd seen in the Court foyer, the spinner of light, sat in the front row. She wore a dark dress buttoned to her neck. Her hair flew freely in the wind. Stray strands clung to the moisture on her cheeks. The men all stole glances at her when their wives weren't looking. From her secret smile, Eligius wondered if she didn't know precisely her effect.

One of the men seated behind her tapped her shoulder, then whispered something. She smiled. “ Who should open the play?” she said quite loudly, drawing the attention of those under the sheet. “ Why, that would be my luckless self.”

She was staring at the veranda. At him. “ Does he know his role, Mary?”

The maid holding the other pole shook her head. “ I haven't given him the playbill to hold, Miss Julia, for fear he'd drop it in this ocean.”

“He looks capable enough.”

The girl ascended to the veranda. She selected from a stack of bound papers on a small table. “ Tell him to hold it just so.” She opened the playbill and pointed the text to the center of the veranda. “ Make sure my mother can see the pages. Should she forget a line, he must be there, but not obviously. She is not to be seen as needing, which is not unlike asking the sun to be discreet in shining.”

He stifled a smile and waited for Mary to butcher the translation, then took the papers from her hand and held them
towards the veranda while struggling to anchor the pole. The cover of the playbill startled him with its audacity. A woman lay under a flowering vine. So vivid was the rendering that she seemed in tormented motion beneath his fingers. A winged naked infant drew a cloth over her. It whispered to the woman the way the man had whispered to this Julia, with a smile and a thief 's heart.

Leonora
, it said.
Translated by Catherine Palgrove Colebrook. London: Longman Brown, 1827
.

“Such fascination with my mother 's work,” Julia said. “ Why, one could mistake him for a reader.”

Mary related her words. He thought about saying something to let her know that he could read, that he could understand. But the gulf between them felt like the best vantage point from which to see her. He responded in Tamil.

“ He's embarrassed to be in your presence while holding an undressed woman,” Mary said.

The restive audience quieted. Julia took her place in the middle of the veranda, her hands raised for silence. She glanced at the book Eligius held, then smiled. “ Friends all, I know you'll join me in wishing my mother health and happiness, for evermore.”

She walked off to polite applause. In a moment, the woman he'd seen at the Court, hiding beneath the spider's curtain, strode towards him. Her eyes fell to the open text. “ Don't let's curse the rain! For isn't it just a part of God's covenant to remind us of the flood, and to renew us? Do you believe this?”

Governor Wynfield was seated closest to Eligius, with an attractive woman whose hard features and disapproving gaze remained intent upon Catherine, who basked in Leonora's funerary lament for her missing lover. “ Endure! Endure! yet break the heart, yet judge not God's decree. Thy body from thy soul doth part. Oh, may He pardon thee!”

She bowed to light applause from her audience. “ It speaks to your hearts that you ignore this weather and support the
efforts of brave souls like Stephen Ault as he struggles to shine the light of Christ across this shadowland. I apologize that my husband cannot be among you today. He saves his strength for the good works of the Court, and with the favor of peers like Governor Wynfield, a new charter for the John Company and a new body of laws shall be his legacy to Ceylon and to England.”

“ Hear, hear,” Wynfield said.

“And I apologize as well that because of these storms and the failure of this land to produce a bumper crop of worthy ser - vants, our tea and cakes have not arrived! Words cannot convey my sorrow.”

Eligius saw Lady Wynfield exchange bemused smiles with the other wives seated near her. Their silent condemnation continued while Catherine greeted her guests and collected donations. Unfailingly, their expressions and manner molted into mocking winks when she passed them. Eligius wondered if any of them cared for her at all.

Mary gestured to him to let the pole down. He did, and was promptly showered with a cascade of collected rainwater. He heard Julia laugh, but did not look. He didn't want to be one more man turning to her. Instead he busied himself with folding the sheets.

After an hour, the last of the Colebrooks' guests departed for their own estates. Catherine returned to the veranda, sifting rupees in her hands. She shooed away her maid's efforts to shelter her from the rain. “ So few. Christ will have to pick and choose from the afflicted, it seems.”

“ Let the new boy take the money to the missionary,” Julia said. “ No one should have to go out in this.”

“ I will see to it myself. You're young and the world grows trustworthiness on trees. No, I have something else in mind for the boy.” She gestured to the flood water.

“Mother, he is only one boy.”

“And I am but one woman, in a man's world to boot. Yet look
what I have done. Mary, help me get this across to the boy. Does he see Holland House?”

The name sparked him. He opened his tunic and gave over the letters, with Sir John Holland's on top. Mary took them quickly and kept them beneath her umbrella.

Catherine eyed the top letter without comment. “ Does he see the need afflicting the cottage?”

“The servant's house,” Mary told him. “ Near the eastern fence line.”

Across the floodwater, there stood a separate structure. Though it was built from sturdier elements, it was in no better shape than the battered huts lining his street.

“ Tell him he is to clear a way to Holland House in plenty of time for our esteemed guest's arrival,” Catherine said.

Eligius waited for Mary 's guttural translation before reacting. “Am I to fix it?” he asked Mary. “All of it?”

Catherine smiled at him. “ I can see it on his face, he understands. This is his land. These are his rains. I 'm sure he'll see a way clear, eh?”

Mary led him to the middle of the plank path. He stepped away from her parasol, letting the softening rain feather his skin. From there the hut the memsa'ab called Holland House could be seen more clearly. The rains had separated wall from wall, roof from gutter. They 'd brought the yard's mud to the bowing door in a curl some three feet high, and now the yard had become so saturated that the water ebbed like a captive sea.

“ What is so important about this hut?” he asked Mary.

“ Your memsahib gets many letters. From many great and important men.” Disapproval dripped from her lips. “ Now it seems we're dedicating part of the house to her pursuits. Or pur - suers. Have it as you will.”

So her allegiance was to the sa'ab of the house, he thought.

The youngest Colebrook ran giddily down the planks to latch onto Mary 's leg. She wrapped a protective arm about the boy's shoulders.

Ewen stared up at the dark boy surveying his home.

“ You're angry,” Mary said. “ Maybe this isn't a place you're meant to be. Maybe a field's the right spot for you. Ewen's afraid of you.”

“ It's easy enough to see how this happened,” Eligius said. “And I can see as well what's to be done.”

“ You don't rise to bait, do you, little fish?”

“ May I see the memsa'ab?”

Mary smiled. “ You're a smart one, I 'll say that. See that you keep your wits about you. Dimbola will tax your senses.”

“ Dimbola?”

“Their name for this house and the land, to the sea.”

He followed her back to the house. “ He wished to see you,” Mary told Catherine.

Catherine stood from her chair on the porch, where she'd been sitting with Julia, examining the contents of Sir John Holland's envelope.

“ Does he understand his task?”

“ He said so, mum.”

“ My pay,” Eligius interrupted. “ It is to be ten rupees. I want to be sure of this.”

Reluctantly, Mary translated. Catherine's face grew taut.

“ It doesn't bode well, does it?” she said.

 

BEFORE HE BEGAN working in earnest, he asked Mary what Holland House held that couldn't wait for Ceylon's winter rains to pass.

“ Her pride,” Mary told him, “and the attentions of a far off man.”

Seated on the plank walkway, he plotted where to begin. Dimbola lay like a valley, right to the door of Holland House. It would be necessary to level it, to coax the grounds in a different direction.

Julia watched him from a gazebo at the western fence, on a modest bluff above the rainwater. Already he'd learned that
Mary had a caustic tongue and the arrogance of the all-seeing unnoticed. Ewen was a blur of childish need. The memsa'ab was yet unknown to him, but through others' eyes came the vague shape of a woman spoken of only at a distance. The sa'ab of this house was a man to be pitied.

Yet it was the barest of looks from Julia that needled his heart and made him want to walk away from here even as the world whispered consequences: Gita, bathed in another of her inevitable red fevers.

He set to work.

The water could not simply be spirited away. What was needed was what he'd watched Matara's men create, to drain the village of rain and refuse. A catch basin.

He found some planks the storm had pulled free from Holland House and plunged them into the water until they stood like the headstones behind the Galle Face. Then he dug at the accumulated mud while across from him, Ewen chased after a small peacock. Its wings bent at the water as its childish tormentor drove it from the banks into the brackish eddies.

Over three hours while his dam took form, the yard still remained underwater. Miserable, he considered the immensity of the task before him and could think only of his hunger. What kinds of food lay in the main house? He wagered that the feeble sa'ab sat before a feast of fowl and good bread, and fruit carted in from the recesses of the country where the rains fell most sparingly. Money was no object to a director. The Colebrooks' table was certain to be piled high with excess. What was hunger to them? Something for the servants to remedy when summoned, something that a child could endure until the last peacock was rousted.

He worked deep into the day, through dizziness and cramps that doubled him over. All the while the rain fell, making a fool of him. Julia watched from the interior of the gazebo, paper tablet in her lap.

Under his incessant labor, a ditch formed that split the yard
in half. He caught his breath while tracing the falling rain in the water 's reflection, from the ashen sky down to him. As the funereal afternoon light waned, Mary called to him from the veranda. “There's food, if you' ve a need.”

He climbed out of the flood and ran down the planks to the house. Clots of wet mud slid from his body. He held his crusted hands in the rain, letting the storm wash them clean, then accepted Mary 's offering. Coconuts, sliced mango, some bread; all showing their age. Nothing that couldn't be gleaned from the land surrounding the house. He hid his disappointment and ate. When he finished, he took some more bread and wrapped it in his tunic. Looking up, he saw Catherine at the window of the house, watching him.

 

SHE WAITED UNTIL the sun fell below the cradle of trees before emerging. Through the afternoon, she'd watched him work. Charles had asked for tea and she'd bade Mary to respond. Julia sought respite from Ewen's ever-presence and she'd shooed them away. Nothing else beckoned to her as this, the hope that Holland House might be reclaimed by the boy who left the confines of the day she'd first seen him, to turn up before her eyes once again.