The Luminist

by David Rocklin

  “Yes. I’ve picked up quite a bit. I’ve much to do this morning. I’ll check back on you in a while. Make sure all the tables are set with linen and silver. You remember. I showed you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Take your sari off, mother. We are not in Matara.”

  Outside, he climbed to the top of Holland House, the better to see the ship bearing his memsa’ab’s mystery man, Wynfield’s son and their possessions. By the time of their expected arrival, and taking into account the journey from the port to Dimbola, there would be precious little time left to show Holland her work.

  He scanned the sea and found the ship easily. A second ship trailed it. Its shadow cut open the waves like a maid’s mending shears.

  He turned to yell at the house, then paused. Catherine was seated on the porch, awaiting all her guests. There was Ewen, as usual chasing peacocks, but every now and again he slowed a little, his attention wandering away from childish pursuits. There was Sudarma, polishing the last of the plates in the sun. Gita sat at her feet, fascinated with Ewen’s games. And there was Julia, paper and quills at her side, turning the bracelets adorning her wrists like a self-conscious bride feeling the foreign weight of her ring.

  He climbed down and adjusted the curtain over the roof window before walking to the porch. “Two ships in the harbor, memsa’ab. They’re close.”

  “Hurry, then. Guests will be arriving shortly.”

  “I will. I’ll return soon.” He glanced at his mother.

  “I will see that she does all that is required,” Catherine said.

  He nodded and left the porch. He heard his memsa’ab’s voice, louder than usual. “How odd our little family has become. Yet we persevere, eh?”

  The Windowed World

  QUEEN AND CHATHAM STREETS WERE EMPTY. COILS OF voices led him to the St. John Company and its dock. It seemed all of colonial Ceylon had come to greet the ships. Over the heads of the murmuring crowd, great conicals rose like volcanoes stolen from his mother’s mythic bedtime stories, to be machinestamped in British metal.

  The crowd was oddly cheered by the sight of the vessels. Every hint of activity aboard sent a thrill through them, especially the men; they cheered as if at a cricket match.

  The vicar of the Galle Face sat aboard his carriage near the lip of the dock. The carriage door was open to allow the public their glimpse of this reposed creature in white flowing robes. Two boys were in the carriage as well, sitting awkwardly at the vicar’s feet. Dressed in lucent pearl robes of their own, the boys pulled at the ruffled collars mercilessly binding their necks.

  Gangplanks rolled down from the great ships’ bellies. The first men showed themselves above the deck railings, and Eligius understood why all these people had come to holler and preen.

  One after another, the soldiers stepped down the planks of both ships, rifles atop their shoulders, bayonets fixed, their uniforms vivid against the dull gray hulls. They made their way through the crowd to cries of “give them hell all!” and strewn orchids in their path. The grim set of their jaws did nothing to detract from their youth. More boys.

  Eligius stood atop his cart. The rest of the soldiers disembarked, the crowd thinned, and on the first ship, a series of crates emerged from the hold in the hands of unsteady porters. An elderly man with an unkempt silver shock of hair that shuddered in the shore breeze moved to the gangplank on distrusting, seaworn legs. His arm was held by a younger man with curly tresses arranged perfectly on the padded shoulders of his brown jacket. The younger man gazed across the dock with pursed lips. He spat into a kerchief, which he let fall to the ground.

  Eligius tied his cart horse to a sapling and made his way to the dock. “Holland sa’ab? I am sent by Colebrook memsa’ab to meet you.”

  The older man smiled. Close, he was as old as Charles, but thinner. His eyes blazed with intelligence.

  It was Wynfield’s boy who spoke. “Our things,” George said dismissively. “ We will ride with the vicar. I trust that you know your way back.”

  Eligius waved to the porters, who trundled down the gangplank onto the dock. He led them to his cart, where they made a small mountain of trunks and crates. While he tied the crates down, the vicar welcomed both men with a proffered hand and a nod towards the road. They all turned and looked at him.

  The vicar’s altar boys stepped out of the carriage. They listened as the vicar spoke, then walked towards his cart while behind them, Holland and Wynfield stepped into the Galle Face carriage. “There’s no room for us,” one of the boys told Eligius. “We ride with you.”

  They climbed atop his cart. The bigger boy took up the reins and whippered them ineffectually. Eligius stepped up. The vicar’s boy relinquished the reins and under Eligius’ knowing hand, the horse trundled forward.

  He guided his overburdened cart alongside the vicar’s grand carriage. Inside, the men raised snifters to their lips.

  The journey bled everything out: the air of any comfort, the sky of any cover, the boys of any semblance of civility. Despite his demonstrable understanding of their language, they spoke of the soldiers and what they had in store for Ceylon’s troublemakers. “Back to the dirt that made them,” said the bigger boy. “Vicar prayed it from the pulpit and here they are, come to push the kuthas into the sea.”

  The small one was younger by a good five years. He asked the boy to say it, say how the soldiers would proceed. “Will they march one by one or two by two? Will they march straight through the forest to the drums? Will they make a route of it?”

  “They’ll march straight down the heathens’ throats. Then the fires will go out and it’ll be a different cry goes up.”

  “I hear the Indians don’t use guns.”

  “The sepoys can’t abide that there’s tallow in the cartridges, how’s that for you?”

  Eligius tried to block them out. His mind grasped for the first thing he could hold that wouldn’t break, and it found Julia in Holland House, her hair lit by candles.

  Guests were arriving as he pulled his cart to Dimbola’s gate. The women gathered under the tarp while their men stood smoking in groups. The vicar’s boys half-fell to the ground. Their rowdy energy knew no bounds. Behind them, the vicar’s carriage pulled to a stop. Others followed aboard finely constructed vehicles piloted by top-hatted men dressed for another land and climate, who climbed down and held the hands of dainty, cautious women as they stepped out.

  Governor Wynfield put his arm around his son’s shoulders. Lady Wynfield rose from her table and kissed him tenderly.

  “Keep that crate out of the sun!” the young Wynfield said. “The canvases will be ruined.”

  “I am well aware of the light’s effects,” Eligius said.

  He carried a crate into Holland House. Setting it down, he found that a corner of the lid had been split open. Carefully, he lifted it up enough to peer inside. There he saw a painting of dense blackness. It was woven with swirls of luminous, random shapes made all the more vivid by the void around them.

  He opened the lid further, revealing more of the designs, until he understood what he was looking at.

  Outside, the young Wynfield stood among a group of colonial women. “Tell us of London, George,” one of the older dowagers said between sips of tea. “I suspect our new contrivances are years in the routine for you.”

  “You forget,” George said, “I too have been away these many years now, with Sir John. I pine for civility, though perhaps not as much as you.”

  “But what must our old home think of us?” the woman said. As Eligius passed on his way to retrieve another crate, he saw her hands tremble. “Our unrest. These thugs.”

  “Thuggees,” a younger woman, pretty in pale orchid lace, corrected her. “They attack defenseless women on the street and take what they want!”

  “I myself was offered a civil service post, like my father.” George snapped his fingers at Sudarma. She went to retrieve a cup. “But the call of art was too strong. My blood boils at what I heard on t
he journey here. We docked at Calcutta at my father’s direction, to pick up the garrison. Those soldiers spoke of terrible injustices these people have perpetrated on us, and after all we’ve done. We build rails for them, and now? We use them to ferry our children from their violence and sickness.”

  “Would that we could ferry ourselves from boredom and ennui,” the younger woman said. “Well, I for one have been awaiting your arrival. It’s high time I was portrayed by a legitimate English-bred artist, not these street painters. I insist you schedule me immediately.”

  Eligius finished carrying the crates into Holland House while the colonial wives accosted George for his painter’s hand. Each had a thought as to how she should be depicted. George offered flattering words and promises of great beauty as his parents looked on approvingly.

  In another hour, he had unpacked his cart and put everything in the cottage. By then all the guests had arrived; more than Dimbola had ever seen. The vicar occupied a seat of honor next to Sir John at a front table.

  And then Catherine emerged from the house, and everyone paused to look at her. Sir John stepped past George as if he were a low branch in his path. He held out his hands and Catherine came. She let him embrace her.

  They exchanged soft words and as they began to walk together, Catherine felt the want within herself. She longed to give herself over to the sort of benign gaiety she saw in other women. Seeing Sir John again, with her now, she possessed only her struggles. So much had gone past since she’d pressed her letter into his hands and hoped that in the unseeable future, he would be within her sphere, speaking to her of science and loss. Now he was here, come halfway around the span of the world, and all she could think of was what she had lived, with no one to speak to. The qualities of the rain in the cottage. Its sound against the glass Eligius had installed. The smell of the jungle at dusk, strong despite the raw flame in her nostrils from the chemicals. Lustrous light in the emulsions she’d learned to apply from his letters. How his letters were prayer for her now.

  She felt Charles’ eyes, Julia’s, the wives. She stared at the ground and listened to the padding feet moving towards her. Eligius.

  Odd, she thought. To know the sounds of this boy more readily than anyone else’s.

  “It’s almost time,” Eligius said. “I have a suggestion.”

  She excused herself and followed him to the cottage, where he’d set up the camera and prepared solutions of collodion and water to bathe the plate. He fit the frame and operated the pulleys that swathed the roof glass in muslin, trapping the sun in the front of the room.

  Last, he showed her the painting in the crate and told her of his thoughts. “If we can steal a moment out of the air,” he told her, “can we also build one of our own?”

  “Painters make a life of such stagecraft. An interesting thought. Can you direct the light?”

  “I know I can.”

  “Then let us give Sir John an eyeful.”

  She left him to his work on the roof, gauging the sun. It pleased him to see the vigor in her step as she returned to her guests.

  “Have you been prying into my belongings?”

  He hadn’t even heard anyone approaching the cottage. George Wynfield stood in the doorway below. Julia was with him.

  “The crate has been pried open,” George said. “The wood has been split. I saw for myself its condition before we left the ship.”

  Eligius climbed down. “I looked at the painting. I am at fault and I apologize. I’ve seen your paintings in the house, and I get lost when I look. I just wanted to see more.”

  He hoped that flattery would cool any anger and spare the memsa’ab from further gossip. It was enough that colonial Ceylon considered her ill-fitting.

  George touched his finger to a cold smile. “Are you what they call … what was that phrase I heard in Calcutta, marvelously evocative … untouchable?”

  “No.”

  “What does it mean? That no one would have anything to do with you, isn’t that it? Doesn’t that make you one?”

  “There are some who would have something to do with me, sa’ab.”

  “I would suggest that you think very carefully on how you address me. Perhaps Madame Colebrook tolerates your insolence in the name of cheap labor, but I have no need. A word from me and you will be begging in the street, or in prison.”

  “I beg only your forgiveness.”

  Julia’s presence behind him boiled the blood in his stomach to steam.

  “Is something wrong?” Sir John and Catherine came to the doorway. Behind them, Eligius saw the elder Wynfield holding court. Among them were some directors he’d seen with Charles. They were listening to the governor speak and nodding gravely.

  “It seems that this servant couldn’t wait for a look at my work,” George said. “Strange that he appears to be the only servant in this household. One would expect him to be too busy for prying, Lady Colebrook.”

  “I offer my own apologies for my servant,” Catherine said. “I’m sure he meant no harm.”

  “No, I suppose he didn’t. But that’s hardly the point, is it? I shall mention this to my father.”

  “I’m sure there’s no need,” Sir John said. “Certainly there’s no harm that I can see, and no one of consequence has seen it. I think we can put it to rest, George.”

  “I defer as always to your tolerance. Tell me, boy, did you even understand what you saw?”

  “It’s a map, sa’ab.”

  “How could you possibly know that?” George’s anger rose.

  “Perhaps his betters told him,” Sir John said. “Young man, come here.”

  Eligius approached the crate. “You’ve seen maps before?” Sir John asked.

  “Yes.”

  “But how could you see this as a map? Do you not see mere points of light?”

  “Only up close. But if I make my sight wide, I see shapes.”

  “Make your sight wide?”

  “I learned to do it when I was little. There’s a place where I go to see the sky, and I can see small or wide. One star or all.”

  “I would like to see this place.”

  “I will take you, sa’ab. From there, maybe you will see a map.”

  Sir John laughed, a warm chime that made Eligius smile. “From there, I will see the untied end of the tapestry I have been weaving for many years. Science brings me from one end of the earth to the other so that I can map the whole of the heavens. George here is painting my map according to my notations. He takes excellent direction.”

  “Thank you,” George said quietly.

  “And now I hear I’m to see yet another advance in science, isn’t that right, Catherine? What of this portraiture of yours? Tell me you’ve found a way forward, out of the mire.”

  George lifted the camera cloak and peered beneath it. “I should hardly equate portraits with what our host dabbles in, this fad of phantoms on glass.”

  “Nor would I equate it,” Catherine said, “with your paintings or anything else. It is but an inquiry. Certainly nothing to seize the mind, as with your remarkable journey.”

  “Memsa’ab, the sun is just right.”

  “Gentlemen, I beg you to excuse us. Please enjoy the feast, and I’ll rejoin you shortly.”

  George let the camera cloak drop. “Julia, shall we leave your mother to her contraption and spend some time reacquainting ourselves?”

  “I need her,” Catherine said. “I ask for your patience.”

  “Of course. Sir John, I shall have to settle for your quite familiar face.”

  “Might I stay?” Sir John asked Catherine. “I’d like to see the process.”

  “Indulge me just this one time, so that I might startle your eyes. After that, you may both grind these images down with analysis.”

  “Then I shall set a seat aside for you, if your husband won’t mind.”

  “I’ll find you.”

  “Bring the servant with you,” Sir John said. “I would like to hear more about the southern
skies from someone who lives beneath them.”

  After they left to rejoin the feast, Eligius drew the curtain closed.

  “I’m only glad father isn’t here,” Julia said. “It’s enough that he draws into himself at the thought of hard earned money paying your posts to another man. Must you be so obvious on his property?”

  Catherine busied herself with the camera lens. “I’ll not hear of this. Not now. I have been waiting a long time to show Sir John what I can do with the science he helped bring into the world.” She opened the aperture. “Do you think I simply want to seduce him? Is that as far as you can see? Outside there is an arrogant boy, and if you think no more of yourself than what men think of you, he will own you too. Now sit still and follow my instructions.”

  Julia turned away. She raised a hand to her pale eyes to shield them from the sun.

  Eligius put the bauble in her hand. Points of light danced across the wall. He turned it until one jewel came to her fingertips.

  “There,” Catherine said. “Yes, Julia.” She opened the camera shutter.

  He let out his breath as Julia’s face burned into glass. In time, he tipped a clay pot and washed the glass plate. Catherine retreated with it to a shaded corner. She cradled it in her arms. In a moment, she lifted her head. “Go. I can see it.”

  Eligius ran from the cottage. He saw Gita sitting on the grass near the edge of the Colebrooks’ land, watching the other children make their mad dashes around her. It amazed him that she didn’t cry at the chaos. Already, she had seen so much.

  He found Sir John at Charles’ table. “The memsa’ab asks that you come now.”

  “I can see excitement in your eyes,” Sir John said. Behind them, George and his father also rose. Eligius thought of protesting, but held his tongue.

  “My boy,” Sir John said. “Your hand.”

  His palms and the tips of his fingers were black, save the pinprick of light glinting from the spread flesh between his thumb and forefinger. “Sometimes, sa’ab, her portraits live on more than glass.”

  He brought Sir John to the cottage door. Catherine held the plate up like a mirror to Sir John. “My God,” he whispered. “Catherine, tell me how.”