Watching the astonishment rain across this wizened old man’s face, she thought that most lives, if lived long enough, came to make rational sense. Once per year happenings that filled a letter, matters of no consequence that moved each minute to the next; these made good sense. She believed this. Her life made no sense at all, or else she would not feel what she felt. She would not feel that this was worth losing everything for, to arrest a scientific heart. Such a life could not make sense to anyone.
She told him of the cotton and collodion, the amber for her arrested paintings of light and time. “Still, they escape.”
“But the glass. Such a thing hasn’t occurred before. I will write a paper on this. We shall pierce the mystery.”
He drew closer, touching the plate’s wooden shell. Julia’s image had risen so much more. Turned away from the camera, she sat before utter darkness. The bauble’s refracted light rained white jewels on the curtain behind her. They scattered meaninglessly around her, all save one – the one he directed to rest just above her outstretched hand. That one was enough to make a bedtime story of her. The girl who cradled a star.
“Before it is lost,” Catherine told Sir John, “do me the honor of giving it a name.”
“ Why does one bother putting a name to something that won’t last?” Governor Wynfield stood in the doorway with his son. Behind them, guests gravitated to the cottage, drawn by the proclaimed interest of their most distinguished guest. “Paintings deserve names,” he said. “I can’t say the same for this. We should hardly remember it beyond now.”
“There are many things that come to us that don’t stay,” Catherine said. “You and I differ on their worthiness of memory.”
“For myself,” Sir John said, “I won’t forget the moment this young woman came into the world a second time.”
Julia’s face was becoming dissolute. “It will be lost in moments,” Catherine said resignedly. “I cannot fix the image long.”
“Nor can Reijlander or Talbott, your peers in Europe.”
“Peers,” George snorted.
“Bring it to the door,” Sir John said. “Quickly now.”
Catherine did as he asked. With Julia at her side, she held the fading image out for her guests to see. Sir John joined her. “A marriage of the mortal and the divine!” he announced.
The guests passed the plate. The men took first glance and raised questions of chemicals and time frames. They were analytical and practical, their comments limited to materials and labor.
“Other than time,” Governor Wynfield said loudly, “what is gained by this over a painting? It is vague and offers no more to the eye than can be seen by the average man. There is nothing divine here.”
“Nevertheless, we must find a way to fix it,” Sir John said. “Your post enables you to import from London at will, does it not?”
“It does.”
“I’ll prepare a list of chemicals. Might I expedite receipt?”
The Governor’s eyes narrowed. “I trust you won’t be abandoning your project with my son for this. Not after so much time and money has been invested.”
“There will be due time for both.”
Sir John carried the frame into the yard. Their processional wound between the tables, and with each step they gained a following of guests. “Hurry,” Sir John said, “for those of you who wish to see. This beauty, so like a woman, is fickle!”
“Tell me,” Lady Wynfield asked Catherine when the image came to her for viewing. “How would you portray me? Or any of my friends? Would you have us grasping at stars? Would we stand interminably in your hut?”
“I would simply capture you. What the glass reveals of you is up to the beholder. I would dare say, we might all see something quite different in you.”
“Really, madam. Do you hope to open a portraiture? Hang a shingle, as it were?”
“ Why not? Why not a new manner of portrait, and why not by my hand? While we ponder, I ask, why not more than portraiture?”
“I believe a painter’s eye and a gifted brush will always speak to the soul.” Lady Wynfield tapped the glass plate with a reckless fingernail. All of Julia that remained was her shining iris.
A woman emerged from the guests to touch the frame. She was in her twilight, Catherine thought, but there had been a beauty once. “My husband arranged for me to pose for a painter in Florence. I cannot argue that his work was lovely. But should I not see it daily where it now hangs, I would not remember it at all because its details are not mine. I’m festooned with flowers I did not grow, in a room with a window view I ’d never seen before. He made a dutiful, obedient wife of me. I understand that is what every woman should be. But there was another me. If your contraption finds her, I’ll happily sit in front of it. And if it finds me beautiful, so much the better.”
“Really, Jane,” Lady Wynfield said. “My son is quite capable of rendering you in any manner you see fit to be immortalized.”
“It is difficult to understand, I suppose.”
“For me, it would be a café window in Paris.”
The women stirred at Catherine’s voice. Outsider. Flouter of their lives.
“On the eve of my trip abroad, my mother spoke to me. She said, ‘A good mother should tell you to study, to regard art, to learn to speak of literature and verse.’ But she didn’t. Rather, she told me to learn to drink sherry and watch the world pass from the panes of cafes. She said I would feel wicked and unbridled and unique. I would watch the women walking alongside important men, tethered by the hands to their children. Women looking neither this way nor that. She told me I was young and arrogant, and that surely I would be certain that they never sat where I sat at the moment of their passing. They never saw what I saw. But one day I would understand why such women could not bring themselves to look around. For fear that they might see the likes of me in the window, and in me the girl they once imagined themselves to be.’
“I thought it sad to hear my mother say such things. I was fifteen. I was terrified that before I or my sisters ever came to the world, before she met my father, there had been another woman who lived in the full bloom of expectation for an altogether different life. She could not take refuge from that memory, even fifteen, twenty years later.”
“You speak eloquently of yourself,” Lady Wynfield said.
“If I don’t, madam, I am confident no one else will. I bear no slight to your son’s esteemed talents. But there is in every moment something to startle the eye and the heart. There must be. A painting seeks to make a summary of those moments. This that I do, it is the moment. I point the camera and I wait, and I trust that I might see it. I shall endeavor to improve the process. When I do, may I portray you and make a gift of it, Jane?”
“You’ve had a moment to call your own,” Lady Wynfield said. “That moment, like your piece of glass, has ended.” She walked to her son’s table. Her friends followed.
Let it all come down, Catherine thought. She’d placed herself among the wives however briefly and moved in the appropriately deferential manner. She’d been loyal to a man, and to a sensible marriage built on respect and civility, and love, after a fashion. These were not matters to be lightly set aside because of the tyranny of her desire to lay open time. Yet listening to the chatter of these women only underscored how far away she now was, from the girl who journaled in a café at the heart of the world.
Some lives, she thought, were destined to make no sense.
Sir John patted her shoulder, breaking her reverie. “There will be critics at every turn. You cannot take a step in this world without hearing from them. All the more so for a woman. I’ve no doubt of your ability, Catherine, but I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you that I worry about the propriety of what you do.”
“There are those who question the propriety of mapping the heavens, John. You’ve heard the whispers. As if fixing the location of the stars negates their existence. How do you answer them? Or do you answer at all?”
“Truly,
Catherine, I am coming about to this opinion. You should have been born a man.”
She took the frame from Eligius’ hands. Another baby born to the world, who failed to puzzle out the trick of staying. “Think of all I would have missed,” she said, staring at the empty glass.
The End of the Sky
THE FOLLOWING EVENING, ELIGIUS FINISHED LINING Holland House’s walls with thirty of Sir John’s maps. They spanned the length of the cottage and formed a continuous tapestry of the sky and its boundless constellations. At his direction, Eligius left room for what would come. A map of the southern hemisphere’s canopy.
After, the Colebrooks gathered on the grass. Catherine recited verses from Tennyson’s Ulysses while Charles and Sir John smoked and listened from opposite sides of the gazebo.
Eligius lay on the grass with Gita. She lifted her head and met his hand with her own. He was enjoying his sister’s alertness. Food and a roof agreed with her.
Sudarma gathered up the remains of the feast’s cakes, crushed them with a bit of anise and chutney, and shaped them into delicate squares. She served them with tea and brandy, then returned to the kitchen and filled the quiet evening with the sound of clattering earthenware and splashing well water.
Everyone paused in their conversation to listen. So familiar, so mundane, yet they huddled around the din of normalcy as if it were the first fire of winter.
Matara came to Eligius’ mind. Its own sounds were lost now. One day a child might view its ruins and hear a story of what the crumpled walls once held. A place of magic, where girls’ hands sprouted mendhi veins to mark them married, and men swam with lights at Diwali.
“I wish to offer a prayer,” Catherine said. “For our guest’s safe passage to us.” She bowed her head, as did Julia and Sir John. Ewen fidgeted at his father’s feet, but Charles did not chastise him. He gazed over the grounds.
Eligius bowed his head as well. Catherine had a quiet, calming prayer voice. The words made him think of the great hall of colored glass and stone figures. It had been a long time since she’d gone to the church. Not since its desecration. But she was no less religious. He saw her pause each day before the house’s many crosses.
He was grateful his mother was not outside to see him.
“All that I have prayed for,” Catherine intoned, “has come to be. My children thrive. My husband pursues his great work. My esteemed guest has arrived safely. I ask nothing for myself.”
I cannot pray to you, she thought. What you did cannot be undone. And if my prayers to this golem of wood and glass are answered, then it shall hold my heart. I wonder if you’ll notice the absence of one heart.
“We stand on the cusp of a new year,” she said, “and I am grateful for what has been.”
Sudarma poured brandy for her, Charles and Sir John, who was unfolding one of George’s sketches. “It’s all right. Young Wynfield isn’t here, and it’s my work, after all.”
Eligius surrounded the drawing with candles. The light found hidden hues, blue orchid in the stars and misty gray in the night sky. Despite himself, he had to admit George’s adeptness.
“See here.” Sir John gestured to the drawing’s edge with one of Julia’s quills. “The last of the visible nebulae from Cape Town, as seen from Table Mountain. That’s where Catherine and I met.”
“1836,” Catherine said. “I daresay I was at low ebb.”
“All of us who left England for other lands can be thought of as such. You, Charles, you were there, were you not?”
“Briefly. For all the good it did.”
Catherine patted her husband’s leg. “Charles had complications from malarial fever. It was terrible that year. Yet he risked all to come here. My dearest still suffers from it.”
“It astonishes me, Charles, how you overcame illness to sit on the John Company Board. And you, Catherine. How far you’ve come from that terrible day, when I saw you holding sadness itself in your hands.”
“In truth, I’m surprised you ever agreed to favor me with inclusion in your work. Why did you? Am I merely a muse?”
“Catherine, my enquiries are nothing more than theorizing. There is no blood in them. Questions to be answered in my corner of the ellipse, on the journey to the next question and the next. But then I saw you that day…”
His voice trailed off.
She knew where it had lost its way.
“I shan’t forget the child’s face, you see. You have tied him to this work. I’ve not experienced such a thing before. Not even in the starmap. I came to the end of the visible sky in Alexandria, now to the hemispheric expanse above Ceylon, and yet I think of the boy.”
Julia held her father’s hand tightly.
Eligius could see the old lion’s sad anger emerge. He could see as well Catherine and Sir John, lost in the memory of a child Charles never glimpsed.
“You came to the end of the sky?” he asked, hoping to shift the moment to a simple Indian who needed British guidance. “How is it possible to know?”
“I mapped all that I could and marked where I left off by the Arc of Meridian. I spent the next six years establishing an observatory to sharpen the sight we mortals can train on that great house.”
He brought Julia’s quill to a cluster of stars that resembled a crouched child. “Every night I made sketches of what I saw around that constellation. Over these many months, I hope to finish.”
“Will you pinpoint the cities of the moon?” Charles asked.
“Hasn’t Sir John suffered enough of that nonsense?” Catherine said curtly. “Please don’t display your ill temper for our guest.”
“Cities on the moon?” Julia asked.
“A hoax,” Sir John said resignedly. “Courtesy of an American journalist. He published a series of newspaper articles, all attributed to me, detailing life on the moon. The scamp went so far as suggesting my father had discovered it and bequeathed to me the continuation of his work. That truly was the insult. The rest was simply a child’s prank as far as I’m concerned. Yet I still hear of it. Those who seek introduction to me place it in their letters. ‘I’m familiar with your observation of our moon brethren.’ Imagine.”
“Did your father show you which star to start with?”
Sir John turned to regard Eligius. “A servant who asks such questions. It is truly a blessing to see our intellectual curiosity rubbing off on these people. Charles, it is a validation of all you came here to do.”
“I suppose,” Charles said quietly.
“Eligius, my father Sir William built his house of stars for a king.”
Into the night Eligius listened to Sir John’s living map: his father’s astronomy for King George, his own first survey of the skies above England and France, his career at Cambridge and election to the Royal Society, his tally of a thousand nebulae in Orion, his bearing witness to the return of a flying star the colonials called Halley’s, and his meeting Catherine in the Cape, where cholera and malaria thinned Britishers like drought thinned his people.
“Since then we have sought to perfect this process from our respective points on the globe,” Catherine said. “There are others. Reijlander has ideas.”
“And now, I have a question of our curious young Ceylonese.” Sir John relit his pipe. “Where did you learn to shape the light? Catherine told me how you helped construct that marvelous image of beauty.”
“When I was very young, I would take glass from the men of my village and play with the sun. I taught myself to make the lights dance in the trees and burn the eyes of the village boys as they played. I helped my father read.”
“Glass is precious,” Sir John said, “especially to poor people. Was your father an artisan? Did he work on the church I saw at the port?”
Catherine caught Sir John’s eyes. She shook her head.
No matter, Eligius thought. I wear your daughter on my skin and keep your shadow under me as I sleep. What trouble could it cause, to talk of difficult things in a place such as this? “My father served this
house as I now do. But in my village, many men drink. They smash the bottles when they’re done. What was broken, I learned from.”
“I’m sorry, my boy.”
“Don’t pity him.” Charles gripped the arms of his chair, sending creaking shudders through the woven wood. “My father drank. He made a fool of himself and made cowards of my mother and sisters. Drink diminishes the man, but only if he allows it.”
He shook his daughter’s hand from his. She looked at him, stricken. “I don’t feel well,” he said. “I want to go inside. Eligius, see to it.”
“I will help you,” Catherine said.
“Eligius.”
Eligius took him to his study and put the ratted blanket over his legs. “A cigar and my writing implements, boy. I have work to do.”
“Perhaps you should rest. It’s late.”
“Someone must do this and I don’t see anyone to help. Do you?”
He was angry. It was better to give him what he asked for.
When he finished ministering to Charles, he went outside. Gita was asleep next to Ewen on the grass. He picked her up and put her to bed, and only then did the quiet of the house strike him. His mother’s tell-tale sounds had fallen to nothing.
The kitchen was dark. His mother’s quarters were empty, but the window was open. He heard branches and leaves being swept aside. She was in the jungle, moving fast.
He followed her trail through the accumulated growth of centuries, a thick stitching of shrubs, vines and branches that reassembled themselves in his wake. Beyond a copse of breadfruit he saw the boxed roof of a familiar plantation and realized that his mother’s path paralleled the one he took back to Matara. But this one was covered, a secret to British eyes.
He saw his mother ahead, moving towards a small clearing amongst the trees. She didn’t walk like a woman visiting her once-home. She seemed to punish the land beneath her; the food in her arms made soft colliding sounds, like a sari over grass. She came to a stop at the clearing edge, plates in hand. Waiting.
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