The Luminist

by David Rocklin

  “ When?” Charles asked.

  “In due time.”

  “ I wish to review it with you. To be prepared.”

  “ Now is the time to celebrate your wife’s grand vision, and your daughter ’s artistry.”

  “Then I ’ll retire to my study and give it the attention it merits.”

  “ I ’ll take you.” Mary led him through the door.

  “ You are too kind,” Catherine told Wynfield, “to encourage our artistic aspirations. Julia’s, particularly.”

  “Can we not remember a time when we were as passionate about childish things? It is precious to behold. And then it is relinquished in favor of children and caring for a home. Let her enjoy these moments while she can.”

  “Or perhaps she shall be like her mother, eh? Unable to stop until she achieves something beyond that which is permitted her in the world of men.”

  “ I would regret that, madam.” He ran his finger across the image of the Court. “ To embarrass your husband is not what a good mother inspires in her child. She inspires piety. Devotion to her children. She lives her life for others and leaves her interior musings to maids and diaries. A woman’s security is her husband’s standing. When that collapses, a woman learns that charity flows most freely to those who have abided by this man’s world.”

  Jousting like this with her husband’s superior, their antagonism palpable beneath the surface of civil discourse exchanged with the grace of a calling card on a silver tray, was a mistake. An indulgence that could be visited upon Charles.

  She drew a breath. “ I am a lucky woman, to be guided by learned men.”

  “Julia returns. Enough of this.”

  Julia entered with an armful of pages. She laid them on the table. The paper shone in the sunlight. Its surface was roughened, like sand.

  Wynfield stood close to her as she read from them. Catherine stared at the pages too, but there was disturbance in her eyes. Eligius had seen his own mother gaze at Gita that way, when her coughing became a wretched thunder in her small body.

  She summoned Eligius to her side and whispered in his ear. “It is an embarrassment to me that this house is in such a state. Work faster, or I will have no choice but to find someone who can.”

  Sunlight poured through the open roof, washing over the quills, the paper, over Catherine and Julia and the governor. It made them things of considerable beauty, worthy of the Galle Face.

  He stormed off to scrounge up whatever wood might yet have gone unfound. Toting the material to the top of Holland House, he began hammering with reckless defiance.

  Watching him, Catherine regretted her words. Wynfield’s dismissive arrogance, Julia’s casual trespass; the boy had received what she could not loose upon them. It was no more her place to say what she thought than it was Eligius’. Her anger would have to turn elsewhere.

  So be it, she thought. Anger drives the birth of all invention. Even God was born of fury at cold, at death, at what was always lost.

  BY EVENING, ELIGIUS’ back and arms had become raw from the sun. He’d labored until it grew too dark to see where the nails should be placed.

  Another carriage pulled up to the gate in the fading light. “ How they work you!” Ault called to him. “Come, fetch your mistress’ post. Your memsahib will want to see this, no doubt.”

  Eligius found Catherine in the dining room, eating alone. Ewen, spent from his play, slept on the floor beneath his chair, an untouched dinner plate on the table.

  The boy ’s scraps will come to me, Eligius thought as he handed the package over.

  Catherine tore it open and laid its contents on the table. “ We have little time,” she said.

  I enclose specimens of chemical novelty. Cotton, with the deathly attributes of gunpowder owing to a fascinating mix of nitrates, and collodion – a medical salve, and all that holds the guncotton’s volatility still. The eternal stalemate between life and death, and in such simple vessels. Imagine! Their uses are as yet unclear, but what fun I’ve had at their expense.

  We embark tomorrow for Ceylon. Arriving two months. Such sights to show you. John Holland.

  “By the date of this post,” she said, “our guests arrive in little more than a month. You see the paper this is written on? Is the rest of it still in Holland House?”

  “The young miss had me take the paper there. I think she was to use it for writing.”

  “Fetch it. I’ll deal with her later. This is not ordinary paper. It is of science.”

  “Don’t be angry.” Julia stood in the entryway to the dining room. “I only wished to show the governor how far I’ve come in my writing. Did I hear that Sir John is close?”

  “Do not disturb my materials again. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, mother.”

  “And your passages? I believe you were to start Corinthians tonight.”

  “I will.”

  “Come read it to me here. I feel for something gracious. Eligius, do as I have asked you.”

  He retrieved the paper and quills. On the walk back, he saw something on the top page. A shadow that didn’t move when he removed the quill and the bauble.

  He put the paper down on the dining room table for the memsa’ab to see. She picked up the sheet and studied it. “Julia, to bed with you.”

  “Mother, it is early yet and I haven’t finished.”

  “Now, girl.”

  Julia gathered up the bauble without a word. When she was gone, Catherine held a quill up to the shadow. It was as if the feather rested alongside its black self. The size and detail were perfect. When she took the quill away, its shadow remained in the fibrous weave of the paper.

  “Show me where it was,” she said.

  He did. Standing in Holland House, regarding the table, then the walls, and the stars through the open holes in the ceiling, Catherine murmured to herself. Such joy in her eyes.

  She told Eligius to take the image and keep it hidden under his meager straw mattress, protected by an old cutting board from Mary ’s pantry. “Tomorrow is Sunday. Your day to be with your family. On Monday, great work begins. Do you see the importance?”

  He nodded, uncertain of this shadow now to reside under his sleep.

  “You have been touched. It may not be a moment the world will ever know of, but you are different now than you were even a moment ago.”

  “Perhaps there is a better place to hide it than with me.”

  “You’re afraid of it.”

  No, he wanted to say. I am afraid of who made it.

  “No one will disturb it here because a servant’s quarters are not to be approached by proper ladies and gentlemen unless there is theft. Do you see?”

  He said nothing. She left him alone in its presence.

  Deep in the night, he awoke from a fitful sleep to find Julia standing in his doorway. A candle illuminated the bauble around her neck. “I offer you a chance to ask for it back.”

  He shook his head. Her candle threw shadows against his wall and against himself. A seductive fear gripped him that they would remain.

  “What a strange, sad boy you are.” She left the necklace on his table, then took her light down the hall.

  Mendhi

  THE CHIMING OF LITTLE BELLS STARTLED HIM. FOUR rupees tumbled down on him from Mary ’s hand. They spun to a halt next to his mat while she walked briskly away. He wondered if she’d seen the bauble Julia had left so openly.

  He bought dosai at the port bazaar before completing the trek to Matara where his mother cooked and fed him. She tore a dosa into bits for Gita. “Tell me more of these people.”

  “They have a rug. Very big, but it’s the only one they have. Their maid says they require her to move it whenever the sun lays on it too long for fear that it will fade. And the lamps give off smoke and grease.”

  He felt terribly weary. He wanted his mother to just know what he’d seen in only a week ’s time. He didn’t want to have to speak, and what could he say? Hope of survival lay with him now. He ha
d no choice but to abide in that house, where a shadow that didn’t need light to live awaited his return.

  The sight of the altar where Sudarma prayed for rupees to fall from the clouds seemed sad to him now. “The house they worship in,” he said, “is bigger than any temple I’ ve ever seen. It’s like the light is part of its walls. Come see it with me.”

  “We’ve no need for these places.” She mumbled some words to Lakshmi.

  “What of Chandrak? Has he brought you anything? What do people say about us?”

  “Don’t let your head be turned working for the Britishers.” She stroked Gita’s hair. “I see little of him. He is with men at night. They quiet down when anyone walks by. Three more of our neighbors awoke to the sheets on their doors. They say they won’t leave.” She tore her own food into smaller bits but didn’t eat. “Serve these colonials well. Perhaps they will show you the door to a better life. For you, at least.”

  “They hold nothing for me. They’re colonials.”

  She cut him off with a swat that was not meant to touch him. Her hand sliced through the air. “Do not be like these idle men, chattering about the British while their wives crush palm for a drop of lamp oil. When I grieve, I do it quietly and alone. No one drank with me when Swaran died. I don’t need like men do.”

  He waited for her to stop trembling. The light shrank away.

  “I dreamt of you last night.” She took Gita in her arms. The child coughed gently into the folds of her breasts. “When I boiled your tunic to clean it of the colonials’ demands on you, I heard the words of other countries. Fat clouds of steam hissed from your pockets like the long pipes of ships crossing the ocean. These things I see, they ’ll find you. It’s as I told you. You will not always be here.” “I will never leave you,” he said.

  She hummed softly. Gita stared at him, at his eyes, as if expecting to find something there.

  HE HAD JUST begun to dream when his mother woke him and brought him to the door. Men and boys waited in the street. Their bodies came alive with firelight.

  “Come outside,” Chandrak told him.

  Eligius recognized one of the men. I am Ceylon, he’d chanted at the Court, his whip hand and the moans of the masses rising together. Tell them. I am Ceylon.

  Sudarma cradled Gita in the hut doorway. He understood she could not help him. To be a man, he had to discover his place among the landscape of men’s eyes and mothers’ arms wrapped around their babies. Anyone reading a map was inevitably alone, in a foreign place.

  Lakhan, a neighbor, exited his hut with his sobbing wife draped across his shoulders. He shook her free. She fell anguished to the dirt, a crumpled dove clutching a wadded paper. “A man tells you to go with him and you go! Where will he be when the soldiers throw us out like garbage?”

  Eligius didn’t need to see the paper to know what it said. Soon there would be clothes and pots in the street, and another family would be driven away from their lives. Before long, the soldiers would hammer a nail to the wall of his hut.

  The men followed Chandrak to the clearing. No fire; the soldiers’ patrols had increased. In the dark there was talk of Matara’s men, and Devampiya’s, and others. Who would come soon, who continued to place their trust in the colonials’ grace. They spoke in insular fragments that Eligius couldn’t understand, that traced back to other nights and other hushed meetings.

  Men brought forth their sons and made them stand sideby-side. Chandrak led Eligius to the front and asked him to set an example for the other dusk outlines of boys. “Tell us what they have,” Chandrak said, “that may be of value.”

  Heads nodded, sons after their fathers.

  “Books.” Eligius dropped his gaze so none would sense the flowers of fear opening in his veins. “Casks of salt. They have little.”

  “He lies.” A man, not of Matara. Angry as only a stranger could be.

  Chandrak put himself between the men and Eligius. “Are you protecting them?” Chandrak asked him in a low voice. “Don’t put yourself at risk for them.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Just something, to secure your place here.”

  “But they don’t seem like other colonials. Their things are old.”

  “Your father watches you always.” He turned to address the other men. “So here is what we must do. To be sure of this boy, we will go to their home. Tonight. Who is there, after all, but a feeble old man and women?”

  Other boys spoke up about what they ’d seen while working the docks and the fields. They recited the keepsakes that next time they would take. The rings and pocketwatches and carriage headposts that gleamed when the light caught them and made them precious.

  Eligius thought hard of the Colebrooks’ halls, the rheumy study and the space where he’d seen things that could be carried, but what value did they have to anyone else?

  He thought of Catherine. She was a stern mistress but she’d paid as promised, and she’d captured some sort of otherness from the secret place in the world where such things hid. That meant something.

  He thought of Julia in the gazebo, writing and smiling at nothing he could see. Her face forced the words from him.

  “I know a place. Their church. The Galle Face, at the port. I saw inside.”

  He listened to their voices, to the scuttle of leaves and dirt beneath his feet, to the glide of animals across the boughs. He waited to see what manner of thing he had just brought into the world.

  Chandrak shifted his weight off of his left side. He stared. Then he smiled at Eligius.

  It was done.

  THEY INSTRUCTED HIM to keep his eyes on the port road. Another boy watched the trees for colonials or soldiers. The sound of the church lock crumbling under Chandrak ’s brick seemed like thunder. Eligius exchanged terrified looks with the boy.

  The church doors opened and the men scurried inside in knots of hunched backs and grasping hands. Some of them emerged immediately, bearing crosses, cups, pillows of blood velvet, and satchels of the colonials’ incense.

  There are rooms inside, he heard one man say. There must be children because look what I found.

  The other boy accepted his father ’s gift, courtesy of the now-absent children. A doll with pitch eyes, its shell face cavitied by too much salt air. Take it to Sonia, the man said. They walked into the trees together.

  “ Here.”

  Chandrak held something out to him. “This is not to sell. It’s for you to keep. Your mother told me of your games with light.”

  Eligius accepted the square of ornate glass. The size of Gretel’s pages, it was framed in silver and laced with rivulets of red and blue. The rest of the glass woman and her baby emerged from the Galle Face in fragments, with broken piping trailing her pieces like roots. In moments she was gone.

  He peered inside the church. A wound stood high in the wall where she’d been. Like the pane in his hands, it was lifeless in the dark. “ When they see what we’ ve done,” he said, “they’ll search every home.”

  “We don’t have homes,” Chandrak said. “We have mud huts. They’ll find nothing. Come.”

  THEY MADE THEIR way back to Matara’s outskirts, at the cliffs overlooking the sea. In the trees they lay what they ’d taken on the ground. Some spoke of their desire to keep what they’d spir - ited away. Others wanted to sell their prizes at bazaar.

  Chandrak told them to leave their hoard where it was.

  Before dawn a man came. Corpulent and bearded, he conferred with Chandrak while appraising the pieces. They arrived at an accord, then shook hands and walked a short distance to a thicket of tangled tree limbs. In a moment they returned with two long boxes.

  Chandrak raised his hands for quiet. “I’ve heard from Karampakam and Jaffna. All through the peninsula, we’re becoming a movement, bandhutva. For this, we’ll be blessed. If you take back what the colonials have taken from us, I promise you they ’ll fall.”

  He opened the first box and removed a rifle of silver and wood. Slipping a finger around th
e trigger, he aimed it at Eligius.

  Eligius thought, this is what appa saw.

  Chandrak shouldered the rifle like a soldier. “ Now that you understand how well-placed you are, will you do this? Did Swaran raise a man as these others have?”

  His hand came to Eligius’ face. It sank deep, as if willing itself through to his heart. “Say yes, meri beta.” There was little confidence in his voice. “ I see it in you.”

  The bearded man approached. “You’ll take care of this,” he told Chandrak. “I see fear in his face. I think there are no men in your home. I think your good name will be swept out to sea.”

  “He’s not my father,” Eligius said.

  There was more talk of buying powder and bullets, sending boys to other colonials’ homes. The bearded man counseled them to steal what sold most readily. The most personal things. His voice was soothing. He laughed easily.

  At home, Chandrak removed Eligius’ tunic that held, somewhere, the ashen steam of ships. “Take anything you see in the Colebrooks’ home,” he said. “Bring it to me and we’ll buy a rifle for our brothers. Few men have raised enough money, so we’ll be considered important. Tomorrow, when the others see you, they must know I am a man who means to raise a man. They must see.”

  Eligius turned so that the banyan strip would lace his back. “Swaran, you are a part of history,” Chandrak said, and wept.

  The banyan’s serrated edge fell. Soon Eligius’ sight left him. His mother and Gita, awake now and cowering in the corner next to Lakshmi; all slipped below the surface of a warm, gathering dark. The beating became less of his flesh and more of sound and light. It slipped clouds beneath him and took him up through the holes in the hut roof. There was no pain. There was only a shadow of a feather in his hands. Its blackness seeped into him, weaving a stain of him into the walls of the world.

  CATHERINE HEARD THE first cry well into the night. She was in the cottage, ministering over her latest attempt. A local girl, dark, diamonds for eyes and a boy’s muscled shoulders. One of the many urchins who routinely came to the windows of passing carriages offering something forlorn and filthy for sale. A few rupees had purchased the girl’s stillness over a long afternoon. Now the sotted paper yielded only a blot of dark space. Failure, again.