The Luminist

by David Rocklin

  In the evening, Charles and Catherine asked him to sit in the dining room with the family. Mary remained in the kitchen, making it clear with her cacophony that she didn’t appreciate a servant’s elevation to the dining room while there was food set out on a tin in the scullery.

  Catherine took her husband’s hand. She asked Julia and Ewen to join in a prayer, for Eligius. “It is a sad thing,” she said, “to be in the presence of someone who has never realized joy.”

  “My life doesn’t have room for such thoughts, memsa’ab.”

  “I’m beginning to understand that, child.”

  “ Tomorrow I want you to speak to the men of your village,” Charles said. “The most influential among them. Whoever the others will listen to. They must stop whatever it is they’re planning.”

  “I don’t know of any plans, sa’ab.”

  “Don’t play with me. I’ll not be thought foolish by a simple servant. They talk of armed revolt. They are not to think of it. Not ever. Every crime, every Indian crime, from this point forward only lends credence to the notion that you’re unfit to have a hand in governing your own country. Do you understand?”

  “I do not.”

  “I would believe that from some people, but not you. There is all manner of notions you understand.”

  “How awful you make that sound,” Catherine said. Charles fell silent. “Eligius, we British came here as friends to the Indian. We have so much to teach you. It is a fatherly hand we offer. But right now, my husband’s is not the predominant view. You cannot maintain crops, yet we can. You cannot rise above poverty and sickness, yet we can. This is what is said of you. They expect you to answer these charges with work, industriousness, persever - ance. If your people respond with thuggishness and insolence instead of reason, as your father tried to do, what is Charles to say on your behalf ?”

  “My father.” He hated the look on her face. Her sympathy enraged him.

  “He was a reasonable fellow,” Charles said. “I could tell. A good man. He had my respect.”

  “My father came to court that day because there was a man who he thought would listen. I know it was you.”

  “Then I make the same point to you that I made to your father. Act from your better nature.”

  “So that you will respect me,” Eligius said, “when you remember me.”

  He saw the color rise in the old lion’s cheeks, bringing red relief to the weary terrain of his face.

  Catherine’s hand touched her husband’s. “You will make your own way. Whether it is a course that allows you to remain with us is your choice. But I’ve seen enough of you to know that the hate already visited upon you at so young an age has not bred hate within you. Don’t give in to it now. Will you think on this?”

  “Yes, memsa’ab.”

  “ You may go,” she said softly. “Tell Ewen I have need of him in Holland House.”

  He did as he was told, with the sounds of their whispers in his ears. They were discussing him. Whether he ought to remain.

  He passed the sa’ab’s study. The sa’ab’s map of Ceylon sat on the desk.

  In a few days’ time he would return to Matara. Chandrak would come from wherever he and the others were, to see what amount of manhood grew in a week. Maybe there would be a fresh banyan strip dangling against Chandrak’s withered side.

  He put the map in his room, under his blanket, then sat next to its dismal hump and wept.

  IN THE STUDY, Catherine blew on the embers in the hearth. They rose to her efforts, glowing a deep cerise.

  “I believe him,” she said.

  “Do you have any understanding, Catherine? Any appreciation for my position on the Court? What if he lies? How shall it affect Andrew’s opinion of me? Of my dependability? My very loyalty to the Crown turns on the unproven word of an Indian boy whose father died on the Court’s very ground. Despite your arrogant belief that nothing is beyond your perception, you don’t know him.”

  She came and sat at his feet. When he’d courted her, it was this posture that she’d selected to portray acquiescence with his proposal of marriage. She remembered how it had softened him then and over the years, to have her at his feet. She wondered if he ever recalled days before she wore his ring, when she was still someone who could speak a word and send him back into the world with no love.

  “I have known you through many different lives,” she said gently. “ Well off. Struggling, as we may be now. Understand that I do not inquire nor worry. You are a man above other men, and I am made confident when I but look at you.”

  She waited. If he’d quieted within himself, she could not tell.

  “I have never known you to be concerned with the opinions of others. You determine the right and true course and that is that. What is it about this man, governor though he may be, that unsettles you?”

  “I am neither unsettled nor a man who is questioned by his wife. Now tell me, Catherine. What is it in the correspondence with a distant man and the services of an Indian boy that emboldens you? You spend more time considering them than me.”

  She rose. The simple act turned the air in the study. “I have watched you for far too long, Charles. Recall that I have attended to your duties as a barrister as any clerk. I have seen you argue before judge and jurist and I know when you have the facts at your side. When you redden in the face and growl, you have none. The nature of my correspondence with Sir John has not changed since last you cut me for it. The matter of his science interests me. There is no more to it than that.”

  “And Eligius?”

  Angry though she was, she could not readily answer her husband’s question. Why believe an Indian boy? What could she know of him that might be relied upon by a man of letters and laws? Nothing. Eligius was born of bruises and poverty. He stood in two worlds and resided in neither.

  He was, too, a boy who had left a shadow, and a boy who having seen a shadow, brought it to her. He had not turned away. Most men would find no meaning in a black stain. They would see no grace in the vestiges left on their hands.

  Charles waited for her response. Holland House beckoned. Sir John had written of a new chemical combination. New proportions, a longer time open in the aperture.

  Who is Eligius, she thought. I think I know who he is not. He is not a boy who could watch pieces of time fall from me into a cistern of water and set fire to it all.

  “Eligius,” she said, “is a boy who remains in the mind.”

  She left her husband for Holland House.

  THEY SPOKE OF him through the night. Julia told him this as he lay on his mat. “My mother will have a ladies’ lunch and ask for money for you.”

  “What is it that I’m expected to say, I wonder.”

  “Show gratitude.”

  “If your parents really wish to help, more rupees. A doctor for my sister. Walls for my mother’s house. I don’t know what to do with women’s prayers for my welfare.”

  “This lament is tiresome. You’re able, so do for yourself. You seem terribly confident in my father’s empathy, but I advise you against it, no matter the past. He can turn. The governor’s favor is more important to him. As is my mother’s, though he’ll never admit it.”

  She was enj oying this, he thought. But she was right. He needed to relinquish pride. One with nothing but mud and millet had no claim to that luxury. His life and the lives of his sister and mother depended on his ability not to give in to the demons whispering in his ear, that he was worth more than the clothes on his back, that learning their words lifted his price. He had no worth. None of them did.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I expected more of an argument. Perhaps next time. For now, help me write.”

  “I don’t know how to help you.”

  “Carry my supplies. Make a fire in the gazebo pit. Talk to me.”

  “ What shall I talk about, young memsa’ab?”

  She thought about this. “I should like to hear about where you live. How it looks. And I want
you to wear the glass I gave you. Unless you’ve sold it.”

  He held up the bauble around his neck. This pleased her.

  She took him to Holland House and showed him what she’d been working on. A sheaf of her mother’s papers of modest thickness. She’d washed them lightly with boiled water and dried them in the sun that spilled in through the roof. “To lend character,” she told him as he carried her things to the gazebo. “Until I can lend character with my own hand.”

  He made a compost of dry palm fronds in the shallow pit dug at the gazebo’s center. It would give off smoke, so he situated Julia’s work downwind. “How will you know when you’re able to lend character?”

  “I’ll just know. Or maybe I won’t. Who can say?”

  “Then why do this? Why not just look at a thing?”

  She was quiet for a time. He wondered if he had offended her.

  “I don’t agree with most of what my mother does,” she finally said. “She is not what an English-bred woman is supposed to be. She upstages her husband and chases after her own ends to his exclusion. I fear that this new passion of hers will be our undoing, yet she is tireless. I know there’s something of her in me.”

  Goosebumps rose on her arms. He added a bit of scrap wood to the fire, filling the gazebo with a nutty cloud that reminded him of Diwali.

  She rubbed her hands together. “She may yet matter despite it all. What a thing, for a woman to matter, eh?”

  “That creature in the cottage. It is for that purpose. To matter.”

  “The Court was her earliest effort. A poor one. She has not puzzled out how to paint with light.”

  He thought of the feather’s shadow.

  “Perhaps she’s mad,” Julia sighed. “Spending us into poverty and ridicule just to chase God. To punish him, I suppose.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “How would you punish the colonials?”

  He couldn’t conceal his shock. “I shouldn’t discuss such a thing.”

  “Listen to what I’m discussing.”

  “You can be free with your words.”

  “ To really punish, you don’t fight. You don’t steal. You show your betters that you can do what they can do.”

  The fire crackled, sending a hot shower of stars to the gazebo’s ceiling. Sparks lingered there before falling to the earth and fading like loose grains of sunset.

  “My mother is right about this much,” Julia said. “I know what it is to live with someone who has never realized joy. It is a hard thing.”

  She hadn’t written so much as a stroke. Yet she wielded her dry quill against the silver-grained paper, weaving unseeable words.

  “It is not me,” Eligius said. “She spoke of someone else, perhaps.”

  “I know.” Her quill strokes grew softer and slower. She came to the end. “My father.”

  She was no ordinary female, any more than her mother. They were both capable of outrageous conduct far outside their station. Yet there was pain at the core of them, even as they dallied with men and with the mechanisms of mysteries like the spider and the written word.

  He poked at the fire, rustling up more sparks. Their flight made her smile. “I want to write about them,” she said. “They look like stars.”

  He held up a small pot of ink. “Dip your quill.”

  “Are you telling me what to do? You are not the right ilk of man.”

  “Please.”

  She flicked the quill tip across the top of the black ink, then held it up. It sparkled in the fire.

  “Now listen while I tell you what you can see of my world from the door of my hut.”

  He closed his eyes and waited until his squalid servant quarters were gone and Dimbola was gone, and the men of the Court and the men spitting rage at the Court gates, and the men at the fire and the man who lay with his mother and left his mark in banyan-infused blood, all gone. Only the stars, like embers that stopped rising and remained.

  She waited with no complaints. Unusual, he thought, for a Britisher. In time she even wrote, in counterpoint to his voice.

  IN THEDAYS following his time in the gazebo with the young memsa’ab, Mary remained at a further distance from everyone. She came when called and fulfilled all of her responsibilities, but her moods varied as wildly as Ceylon’s weather. One day she was talkative, the next distant and hostile, the next wounded. Between the two servants only she spoke freely, and only occasionally. Nothing presaged her bouts of openness. They came like cloudbursts.

  She betrayed emotion only once. He found her weeping softly in the hall leading to the servants’ rooms. Her room was just to the right of his, yet she rarely slept there. She preferred an unadorned hutch next to the kitchen. It was unusual to find her in this part of the house.

  “Don’t,” she said when he asked her what was wrong. Her first words to him in days, and her last for days more.

  It was becoming harder to hide Julia’s preference for his company. At night, she would gather her writing utensils and wait for him in the gazebo. He wondered if this was at the heart of Mary’s melancholy. She had been replaced.

  As the week wore on, his thoughts turned to Chandrak and the others, and by Saturday his stomach was knotted so tightly he fell short of breath. The options were dismal. He could go home with nothing but a servant’s wages and face the men and their sons, or he could steal and face never returning to Dimbola, where his life consisted of errands to the post ship, to the market, to the roof of Holland House, days in the employ of a man who watched his father fail and die, nights spent sitting like a man, listening to the whisper of a girl’s quill across parchment paper while the true beating heart of Dimbola labored in the dim light of the cottage, to best her god.

  That Saturday he was working alongside Mary in the kitchen when Ewen ran by. A bit of light glinted on the boy’s cheek. He was crying. His sobs echoed down the corridor.

  Mary dropped her knife and crossed herself when Catherine came to the door and demanded that Eligius accompany her. “I must send word.”

  Her face, Eligius thought. She’s trembling with joy.

  After laboring over a sheet of her glistening paper, she gave the letter to him and told him to seal it with candle wax. She could not touch it, she explained, and held up her hands to him. Not without staining it.

  The marks had not looked like this before. Now, a discernible mendhi of light laced the skin of her palms.

  He sealed the letter in the kitchen. It was addressed to Holland. My good friend: You speak of improving the daguerreotype. Perfecting the salt print. Chemicals and processes. Today I put my hand to it. I held it. I have begun the journey to arresting beauty, forever. Catherine.

  “Post it,” she said.

  He made the journey to the port and back in six hours. By the time he returned to Dimbola, all he wanted to do was lie down and bring the morning on. Whatever happened on the morrow felt like someone else’s cares. He could think only of Gita’s cough and his beating scars. Maybe his mother would close his eyes that night with another story of billowing steam clouds and journeys across the sea.

  There were footsteps in the hall, closing. Catherine came to the doorway. She held out her hands. The pale areas he’d seen before had smeared. “Look closely,” she said. “I want you to. I want someone to. It is a wondrous thing. From now on, your labors will be restricted to Holland House. I have already informed Mary. She will not corrupt your time. I can’t do this alone, and at the moment I seem to inspire no one save myself. But a boy such as you can’t say no. You don’t want to.”

  After she left he lay upon his mat and let the quiet settle on him. Soon it was broken by muffled sobbing in the hall. He found Ewen tucked in a corner, his knees pulled up to his chin.

  Eligius gave him a torn sheet of linen to wipe his tears. Ewen seized his hand. “Mama says she’s going to make me stay still, but I said no. Was it me on her?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Like Hardy. Mama prayed if he
could stay, but he couldn’t. Now he’s made of paint. Nothing else.” He stood, letting the blanket fall from his quivering shoulders. “I’ll show you.”

  Taking Eligius by the hand, Ewen led him to the painting of the angel bearing his own face. “That’s Hardy.”

  “I thought it was of you. I thought you posed for your family friend.”

  “Hardy looked like me. After Mama asked God to let him stay, but he didn’t.”

  “When did your brother leave?”

  “When he was born. Mama said she’s not asking God permission to keep us anymore. She’s going to do it herself.”

  Outside, the wind stirred the tops of the palms ringing Dimbola. For a moment the house was alive with the whisperings of Ceylon, then fell quiet again.

  “Are you staying?” Ewen asked.

  “Tomorrow I go back to my village.”

  “But then you’ll come back?”

  Mary appeared at the end of the hall. She paused to watch them.

  “I have to go to bed,” Ewen said. He let go of Eligius’ hand.

  “My father left too,” Eligius said.

  “Did you make him a painting?”

  “No.”

  “Did you get him on your skin?”

  He thought of the memsa’ab’s hands. “Such things don’t happen.”

  “In there they do.”

  Ewen ran down the hall to Mary. She took him away.

  Eligius waited until the corridors grew quiet before retrieving his diya. He crossed the yard to Holland House and closed the door. Dimbola was still. No one would see.

  He lit his diya. Trays filled with shallow pools of water lined the wall. Little slicks of silver floated on their surfaces. A woodframed square of the grainy paper rested against the spider’s legs. Ripples marred its surface.

  Whatever made the memsa’ab shake like a child and Ewen fear sitting still, he saw nothing of it here.

  He examined the spider. Its legs were wooden poles, squared at the top to fit into a large box. Under the cloak he found a hole with a glass piece pushed into it.

  Setting the flickering diya on the chair, he looked through the hole again. The hole changed the shape of the light, turned it, constricted it.