The Luminist

by David Rocklin

  After seeing to his mother, he gathered the papers. George had sketched intersecting ovals and circles, different studies of the same subject: her.

  Her face was all that he had detailed. Her mouth. Her castoff eyes.

  “I want to be alone,” she said when he presented the gathered papers to her.

  He held up his hands. “See the black skin. Can you see yourself? I think it will last a long time.”

  She didn’t answer. He waited. He counted breaths and hoped something would surface in her eyes. “I’ll leave you to your thoughts,” he finally said.

  When he’d almost reached the main house, she called to him. “Name my photograph. Before my mother does. It should be yours to name. It was your light.”

  He said that he would, then left her for his bed. Reaching under his mat, he withdrew the feather paper. Daylight would come soon. Until then he would try to think of a name for her stillness. Maybe he would conjure one that fit. Then his heart would murmur like the innards of the camera, and all would remain.

  NEWS OF JULIA’S photograph gripped Ceylon that spring. It eclipsed the whispers of a rising tide among the native populace, of thuggee bands, theft, fires set against shops and even plantations. Seeking something to distract them, the Britishers found in Julia’s image an ember of divinity with which to warm themselves.

  By midsummer, every husband of importance had contacted Catherine. Whether for their wives or themselves, they sought her out for what she provided. Irrefutable proof of one privileged moment in their lives, to hold back what threatened to overtake them. They even braved the monsoon season to show up on Dimbola’s doorstep, yearning for immortality.

  Jane Pike came first. She spoke of her disappointment in the Florence portraitist, and her secret self. “I wanted to sing in the great opera houses. In my dreams, the sound of my voice broke hearts.”

  Catherine positioned the camera further back in Holland House and dressed one wall in curtains. Eligius strew orchids on the floor and put a stand to the left of a small coal line. Mrs. Pike followed instruction assiduously. She held her arms out just so and cast her eyes to the sky. She opened her mouth around the words to her favorite aria. While positioning her, Catherine told Ewen to pretend he was in the audience at a great hall. “Think of something to keep you still,” she said.

  Whatever Ewen thought of brought tears to his eyes. Mrs. Pike’s silently sung note became the second triumphant photograph.

  Ewen appeared in many of the portraits she took that summer. Acolyte, student, muse, even a servant, which made Eligius laugh. Julia had only been in one, before George sought more of her time.

  Some of the women paid for their portraits. She kept many of them for her own uses; Eligius helped her make extra prints from the glass of those she especially liked. She was less drawn to the fanciful, the princesses and the triumphant figures from the Bible so many of the women asked for. She favored sadness in its many forms and saw it in places Eligius did not. Mrs. Pike’s singer, doomed to be heard only in the theater of her mind. Mrs. Greer’s Juliet, dying next to her one true love.

  Her favorite, and Eligius’, was Mrs. Martin. Her Gretel lay atop a tule sea, waiting for God’s hand to take her down.

  She and Eligius developed a wordless alchemy amidst the poisons, glass and light. They knew their roles from the moment a patron entered Dimbola. The provision of tea and an improving quality of biscuits fell to him; elicitation of old dreams and some tears fell to her. The moment water met glass, light met paper, the moment to be taken, the position of the last folded cloth, the lens and the light; all this they shared.

  They each, in their own way, thought of Julia as summer gave way to fall. She was gone for long hours. At night she was too sealed within herself to appear in the gazebo. She would catch herself with her hand up near her hair, or at her lips, and she would shiver the posture away as if it was a spider nesting on her skin.

  There were other moments like that. Charles had yet to emerge from his study, not truly. At dinner he ate morsels in silence. Most nights he needed help with even the simplest movement. His absence became a guest in the house.

  One midnight-dark afternoon, she found Ewen standing at the front door, intent on the shears of rain sweeping the visible world away. She asked what it had been that made him cry, that day in Holland House with Mrs. Pike.

  “Father is always sick.” He spied Eligius in the hall. “The soldiers killed your father. Soon none of us will have fathers.”

  He walked away, nodding as if considering the worthiness of what he’d said.

  She watched her son return his childish attention to the great outside world. Perhaps he was beginning to understand. Melancholy images resonated in him. Love, dreams. These were things always in the next moment, always ahead. Sadness, though, was a loyal thing. It waited.

  MRS. PIKE RETURNED at summers’s end. By then, the rains had lessened. Autumn took hold of Ceylon and made a twilight world of it. “The photograph has had such a profound effect on me,” Mrs. Pike confessed, “that I am compelled to beg of you. Share them.”

  She brought forth a small velvet sack. In it were more rupees than Eligius had seen in one place before, and a slip of paper.

  Catherine turned the paper over in her hand. “This is an address in London.”

  “My brother manages a gallery there. I would be pleased to send him some of your portraits.”

  “I’m honored, but I am not a worthy enough artist.”

  “Let others be the judge of that. All I know is that I cannot stop thinking of the photograph. Each time I look at it, I find something I didn’t notice before.”

  Catherine spoke to Sir John of the invitation. He favored the idea. “Make a collection of these portraits, Catherine. An album. Important men, perhaps, that will make the appropriate impression in London or Paris. If others see how posterity favors them, there will be a line of society members from the door to the gate. You’ve already done a world of good distracting your neighbors from Ceylon’s troubles. That is no mere trifle.”

  Seeing her room aglow late into the night, Eligius brewed some tea and brought it to her. He set the cup and saucer down on her desk, next to Julia’s photograph and a glass with a dry film of brandy. “ Will you send Julia’s to London?” he asked.

  “ No. Not that one.”

  He was glad.

  “ Have you noticed this before?” She gestured to a bright glow in Julia’s left eye. A reflection of a candle, imprecise and pale as milk.

  “ I see it, memsa’ab.”

  “It was chance that I caught it. The life in her eyes. I’ve nothing to do with it. Why do I chase this? I can only fail.”

  Brandy and a photo had reduced her to a child. The chemical fumes had burned her cheeks and made a butcher’s table of her hands but she could not stop nor imagine stopping, not at Julia or Mrs. Murphy or Mrs. Pike, or at an album of Ceylon’s most important people.

  “When my father died,” Eligius told her, “I saw myself in his eyes, and the soldiers behind me. I will never see it again. It left with him. I don’t know what you hope for. But I can tell you that while I don’t remember any particular leaf, I know the one we made will remain. Maybe that is enough.”

  “Stay with me a while.”

  They looked at the images they ’d created. They spoke of Sir John’s ideas for grinding new breeds of glass lenses. Eligius promised her. “ I will make such a lens one day that will make portrait sitters of the stars.”

  She promised him. “ We will burn dreams onto glass. We will carve memory in light.”

  “Perhaps we say the same thing. These promises.”

  “Perhaps we are saying that we will always be together, doing this. Or perhaps we are just hopeless romantics, you and I.”

  He smiled at the notion, and pored over the images while time let them be. Finally he glanced up and saw that she’d fallen asleep with her head resting atop her arm, and the images displayed before her.

  H
e left her. His thoughts drifted on a sea of doubts and questions. He wondered if she would dream at all. If she would spend the night making maps of the light in her loved ones’ eyes. The topography of the way from here to there.

  A Map of Ceylon

  IN THE MORNING, SHE ASKED CHARLES FOR HIS PERMISSION to be photographed. “ No false settings. No candled clouds. Just you, my husband.”

  She reached over his desk to take a sliver of mango from his plate. He hadn’t touched any of the breakfast Sudarma had prepared. Coffee, tea when Sudarma brought it from market, some biscuits Sir John had secreted in his luggage, brandy and an evening smoke – this was what he had been subsisting on for weeks.

  That and his work, she thought as she sat in the study with him. An edifice of paper grew six inches from his desk.

  “You worry so,” Charles told her. “You think me on the brink.”

  “It’s not that.”

  “Catherine, your devotion to this pursuit is trivial. There is too much happening in Ceylon right now. Oh, I’ve wounded you.”

  “It is no matter. You’ ve not been yourself. I scarcely see you.”

  “So this portrait shall serve in my place, then.”

  “You’re terribly skilled with words, Charles. I just wish they were mine you heard, when I tell you I want to do this for you. Instead, you seem to listen for what you can cut yourself on.”

  “ Eligius, open that cabinet. The one with the key in the lock.”

  Charles gave Eligius his papers and told him to place them inside the cabinet. Eligius locked them in and brought Charles the key, which the old man secreted in the pocket of his woolen coat.

  “I’ve not been myself.” Charles patted the pocket absently. “Not for as long as I can remember. Catherine, would you remain with me if I lost everything? If I were forced to take charity?”

  “I’ve never pried into your affairs, but I’m not blind. I know illness limits your abilities on the Court. We have less than others, but we get by. That’s always been enough. Now please, tell me what is wrong. Is it the Court? Wynfield? Charles, is it me?”

  He touched her, nothing but a cracked, age-spotted hand on her cheek. Yet the simple gesture stunned her. She’d never known Charles to reach for anyone.

  “Soon,” he said, “I will sit with you and speak of things that have been on my mind for a long time. I fear that moment, Catherine. I fear a great many things, it seems, and that causes me to be a difficult man. I know this. It causes me to act in ways I never thought I would.”

  “I love you.” She took his hand and kept it. “There’s nothing you can say to part us. Don’t you know that?”

  He blinked back tears. “The thing you do with Eligius. Those photographs, as Sir John dubs them.”

  “Yes, my husband. It is an amazing thing.”

  “I should not be held. It would be better if I faded, like the first ones.”

  CHARLES REFUSED DINNER and spent the evening poring over a detailed map of southern Ceylon. Eligius brought his food back to the kitchen, hoping the old man would take it later.

  Sudarma came from the well with a bucket of fresh water to rinse potatoes from the plates. “At market, everyone is speaking your name. That you said a word and Chandrak died. That you raised a gun against your own. Against children.”

  She set her bucket down. “In the fields, the men believe you a traitor. Did you know this?”

  “ What would they have me do? Should I kill a soldier?”

  “You had a chance to do something.”

  “When did you become this person, amma? Once, it was enough to send me off to work for them, to feed you and Gita. This I have done. Now you’d have me kill them in their sleep. These people are not like the others. They suffer too.”

  “ Every night I pray that you wash these people from your eyes. That woman has captured you in that contraption of hers. Why can’t you see this?”

  “Perhaps if I drank and beat you, you’d think more of me.”

  Her hands went to her cheeks. She began to murmur prayers.

  “And as for that light box, one day I will show you what it does. You will see there is something of me in every glass portrait that will never die. I will always be. Not even my father could say such a thing.”

  He left her there, whispering to the walls.

  THE MAP ON Charles’ study desk was more detailed than the old lion’s beloved, spare rendering of Ceylon. This one marked the villages that had fallen across the region’s south and midsection, from the Arabian eastward.

  Eligius saw a circle around Matara.

  Sir John pointed to the village of Puttalam. “Charles, do you see how far you’ll have to travel? There’s unrest spreading through the very provinces you’ll pass.”

  “And for what?” Ault rocked nervously in his chair. He’d come at Charles’ request. “What can you say that could possibly change things? They have no control over these mobs, nor do you. The populace has been looking for a reason to get angry.”

  Charles shook his head. “The populace is looking for justice. They don’t want a rebellion any more than we. These are the actions of a few, but they are spreading out of anyone’s control. If I can gather the remaining provincial leaders, we can restore calm. Stephen, you need not make this journey. I will ask the governor for some soldiers. But I must at least try to do something.”

  “Look at me, Charles.”

  Catherine searched his eyes. Blankness, as if finally there was nothing left to think about. The man who wrote her a letter of remembrance and prayer for return, the man who needed nothing save to matter, wasn’t there.

  “ I know what this is.” She took his hand and held it as if it might break. “Forget the court. You’ ve given them more than any man could. Please forgive what I tell you now. It does no good to battle anymore. You’ ve never been fully well, and God alone knows how many years we’ ve left. Spend this time in the study, in thought. Pursue what you can have.”

  “What good will I ever have been to anyone if I do nothing?”

  “I don’t want to see you lose your life over this. Whether your health or the countryside, you’re not fit to withstand it. I ’m sorry, but I must say it. You’re not the same man. You’re ill.”

  “It’s done. Make your peace with it, Catherine.”

  “I will not. What becomes of us if something should happen to you?”

  Charles’ eyes fluttered. They became pale windows. He gestured for the plantation shutters to be closed against the rising sun. “I’ve failed in everything I’ve done,” he said while Eligius closed them. “I’ve failed to protect the dignity of my family. Or else you would not turn to seeking money from your own endeavors. You would not turn to another man.”

  “There is no one else!” Catherine stood and stalked away to the other side of the study. “Sir John is a colleague!”

  “I know what I am,” Charles said, “and what I am not. I care nothing for stars and wisps on glass. I don’t know how. I only care for the land, for its people, for my children’s future, and my wife’s station. May God help me, but right now, I care most of all for the boundless conquest of all these things by dishonest men. I may be sick, dying even. But if this is all I have to carry away with me, it will be a miserable parting.”

  He rose unsteadily. “I’ll tell the children. Eligius, I have a task for you.”

  At Charles’ request, Eligius rounded up Justice Newhope, the rotund barrister; and the youngest director, the dour Kenneth Crowell. He brought them back to Dimbola, where Charles took the papers from his cabinet and gave them over to his fellows. They read in silence. Crowell began to pace feverishly, while Newhope simply folded his paper and stood quietly, head bowed.

  “Please say something, my dearest friends.”

  “How does it come to this?” Newhope asked.

  “Let us take a walk, gentlemen.”

  Charles asked for his heavy woolen coat. Eligius brought it and slipped it about his shoulders. “ I sho
uld like to speak to you of morals,” Charles told his guests. “Just what was it that brought us far from home with the hope of spreading our particular brand of civilization? Perhaps we can reclaim something of that youthful optimism in our twilight.”

  He smiled at Eligius as he allowed himself to be buttoned into his overcoat. In it, he appeared small and lost.

  He’s shrunk, Eligius thought as he helped Charles to the door. Even in the past week, he’s grown smaller.

  At the front door, Charles asked Eligius to leave them. “ I can still walk my lands,” he said.

  “Very well, sa’ab. Call if you need me and I will come.”

  “I know.”

  He seemed to be waiting for Eligius to do something. Then he broke away. “My friends. Let us discuss how we should be remembered.”

  CHARLES HAD SET something in motion. That much Eligius knew, and it was momentous enough to send Crowell and Newhope home in silence. They engaged in none of the disparaging banter he’d grown used to when among other Britishers, who seemed most alive when in pursuit of one of their own. On the journey to their homes, he longed for more of their words. Then he might know what was happening, how many villages had fallen and would yet fall before it was over. But he was a servant, and servants were above all else quiet. No one spoke of the Court or Charles’ papers, and it was not his place to ask.

  He returned to Dimbola to find Catherine in Holland House with Sir John, sipping tepid tea and bemoaning the imperfec - tions in her photographic plates. White lines had mysteriously appeared across some of the prints. Some turned a pale shade of green, as if they were squares of bread spoiling in the larder. Hairs, cracks in the plates from overuse, dirt, all imperceptible, yet all had become vines and boulders to her now.

  He’d noticed these imperfections before but made no mention of them. They were a part of the world she’d created and seemed to him to have as much place within the frame of the print as her subject. Yet her upset caused him to consider how to guard against them. He began to devise a box with a lid that could seal tight, with a window through which light might pour, but imperfections might be kept out. It was almost enough to turn his attention away from the despair gripping the Colebrooks.