The Luminist

by David Rocklin

  At the end of the week, Catherine told Eligius to hitch the horse. “I want some time in church,” she said. “Ewen and I.”

  “And Julia, memsa’ab?”

  “She is very tired. Let her sleep.”

  Lately, she had only seen Julia in the morning and at night, and only for glimpses. Once that week, she came upon her daughter in the scullery, thieving some cheese. Julia’s eyes were puffy and red. Her native vitality had left her. She was too weary to raise her head in defiance of anything.

  Before leaving, she asked Eligius to bring an extra pillow for the carriage’s hard edge. “We’ll have a guest with us on our return. The missionary Ault.”

  Eligius’ heart sank. This was to be the day Charles left, with Ault as his guide.

  “Does it help?” he asked. “Church?”

  How to explain something that I’ve merely always known, she wondered as Eligius searched her face for signs of strength. She’d come into the world in 1815, Charles in 1795. Twenty years her senior. The man she wed in a civil ceremony bore witness to different times. He had a foot in another century.

  Perhaps not this way, she thought, nor precisely this place, but isn’t this departure merely the truth that has always been here with us, arriving at last?

  “I suppose it prepares me,” she said.

  He brought them to the Galle Face and remained outside with the other servants. The air stirred lightly in the manes of the steaming horses. The church had been largely finished. Only one scaffolding remained where stonemasons tapped nephilim from quarry rock. Its restored windows glittered with the sunlit sea.

  Tying the horse to a thicket, he wandered past the open door of the church. Spotting the memsa’ab was easy enough. She was the only colonial to wear native dress rather than a lacefestooned hat or a head pin of feathers.

  Ewen sat next to her. He was growing fast. Only last summer, his head couldn’t be seen above the back of the pew bench. Now the bench came to his slight shoulders.

  He is still a frail boy, Eligius thought, and Ceylon is so much harder now.

  Wynfield’s servant stood across the crescent lane where the carriages pulled up to the church doors to disembark their passengers. He spotted Eligius and looked away, taking hasty interest in his carriage horse’s bridle. He didn’t look up again until his master and mistress had climbed into their compartment following services. Before closing the carriage door, the servant gestured. Wynfield looked in Eligius’ direction, expressionless, then slipped inside with his wife. George wasn’t with them.

  Catherine and Ewen emerged with Ault. The ride back was quiet. His passengers were lost to their thoughts. In two hours, they arrived at Dimbola. He climbed down and opened the gate. Ewen ran into the yard, suddenly a boy again. Ault held out his hand for Catherine, but she remained seated. “If you must take him,” she said coldly, “watch over him. He is not in God’s hands. He is in yours.”

  “I will. Please know this is not my idea. Charles was quite insistent. Truth be told, I’m not entirely clear what’s to be accomplished.”

  Eligius walked to the porch, where Charles sat amidst a small collection of boxes. His maps, Eligius thought.

  “Place them carefully in the carriage,” Charles said, “so these roads don’t jar everything. No one knows the pitfalls of these roads as do you.”

  “I will take care in packing them.”

  “Your memsahib is coming. Listen to me. Watch over them while I am away.”

  “I will.”

  “You have everything that is precious to me. Do you understand?”

  “Yes. But you won’t be gone long, sa’ab.”

  Charles hooked his arm through Eligius’ and walked to his wife. “I’ve said my goodbyes to Sir John, and to Julia, such as it was. Perhaps you will have some words with her, Catherine, so I might return to a less sullen girl. To be the object of so many suitors, including an esteemed artist, is no cause for ill humor.”

  “I will try, but she is at a delicate time.”

  “When is a woman not at a delicate time?”

  He kissed his wife’s cheek and walked past her. At the car - riage he let his weight fall on Eligius’ shoulders as he took each step. Eligius bore it easily, and Charles’s ascent was smooth.

  “Do you have your maps, sa’ab? Your pipes and tobacco?”

  “I have all I need.”

  “Be well,” Catherine told her husband, “and be home soon.”

  “A few days’ time is all.”

  “All the same. Ceylon is not as safe as when we were young.”

  “Ceylon was never safe, and I was never young.”

  Ault climbed onto the carriage and flicked the lead line. The old horse stuttered forward. In moments, only a dissipating curtain of fine dust remained of them.

  Eligius took Ewen through the front door and bade his mother to put a fire under a kettle of broth. Sudarma asked if Catherine would be dining as well; there might not be enough, though she thought she might stretch it with some roots and a bit of fish.

  He left the boy and walked to the front door. Catherine and Sir John sat in the gazebo, staring at the road.

  “Only for Ewen,” he told his mother in the kitchen.

  He went to his room, for what he didn’t know. There was much to do, yet nothing came to mind.

  A package rested on his sleeping mat, wrapped in simple butcher paper. Watch over it until I return, written in Charles’ unmistakable patrician hand. Before going to sleep that night, he opened it and set Charles’ beloved map of Ceylon against the wall, where his diya had once been.

  3.

  On the failure of Parliament’s second attempt to reform abuses in the East India Company ’s governance of India, nothing was done or attempted to prevent the operation of the interests of delinquent servants of the Com- pany in the General Court, by which they might even come to be their own judges, and in effect to become the masters in that body which ought to govern them.

  9th report of the Select Committee of the House of Commons, 1837

  Such a thing, this cobbling of muses and minerals! One may pose a model, arrange deftly her shawl and taper fingers, call her by an appellation of the seasons, yet she is not so. The blurring of what is real and what is artfully imagined is inappropriate. This conjuring is at once an imposter, and too truthful.

  “A Critique: Photography in London” The Times of London, June 1838

  It honors me to submit to your exhibition a series of photographs which I hope will please and perchance move you to see in their presentation what it is that made me create them. Think of them what you will, but know of what they are composed: chemicals, light, and within each sub- ject, a secret.

  Letter from Catherine Colebrook to Walter Scott Hughes, Curator

  London Gallery of Portraiture, September 6, 1838

  God’s Language

  CATHERINE WALKED THE GROUNDS. SHE SAT ALONE AT the dining table. She closed herself up in his study and turned the mothwing pages of his legal tomes. She fashioned each gesture, each touch, in her mind before bringing it into the world. I shall pick up his book. I shall sit at the foot of his chair. I shall walk to the gate and regard the curvature of the lane and the base of the trees he wanted us to see.

  She did not mean them to conjure love, or Charles’ safe return. These were places they ’d been together, that she had not spent enough time knowing. He would be in each place had he not left.

  God, she decided, would favor her and bring him back. He would not let so much space in one woman’s life fall silent.

  DIMBOLA BORE THE first days of Charles’ absence the way Charles bore everything else. Stoically, within itself, confined to far corners.

  Julia only opened her door once, to ask Sudarma for a clean dress. Sir John, for his part, was taking his morning walk, a time he loudly proclaimed as his alone.

  Eligius found Ewen pacing the length of the yard between the gazebo and Holland House. They walked to the barn together. Ewen gathere
d some straw and fell back in it, wriggling into the crackling nest he’d made but taking no satisfaction from it. His scowl remained fixed. “I don’t like how quiet everyone is. It’s too sad.”

  “They miss your father.”

  “They should pretend he’s in the study.”

  “Your mother is afraid for him.”

  “I know.” He was impatient. “But Julia told me that it was like this before. When Hardy died.”

  “ When I first met you, you couldn’t say the word for death. You said he left.”

  “I did? Oh, I remember now.”

  “There’s nothing your mother can do. However much noise she might make.”

  “She thinks that box will stop everything.”

  “It does. But only for a moment.”

  From the barn, they went to the well outside the gate. Ewen helped tie the knot around the bucket handle, then climbed up on the stone lip to watch it descend into the water below.

  “The first day after my father ’s death,” Eligius said, “I told myself that he’d only gone away for an hour. By that night, he hadn’t come back. During that time, it was this kind of quiet, where everyone moves as if they might break.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I listened.”

  Hand over hand, he drew the bucket up. Cool water spilled. Soon it would spill into basins, cooking pots, over windows and faces, and if the memsa’ab could be coaxed, the glass twin of a Ceylon society matron or one of its great men. “I listened and I learned that it had a sound all its own. Like a distant ringing. I could hear it over the wind and the sea. Soon I learned to live with it. After awhile I couldn’t hear it anymore. I just heard the sound of me, not thinking about him.”

  He set the bucket down. Ewen was staring at the ground. “Listen to me, Ewen. I’m just a servant in your house, but I’m also a boy without a father to keep watch over him. I think you will know more years without your father than with him.”

  The boy nodded.

  “Then don’t wait too long to become a man. Being a boy with no father does no good.”

  Ewen was sullen after that, yet still followed him to Holland House. While he took up the box he’d been fashioning, Ewen paced along the wall where Catherine had hung her photographs among Sir John’s star maps. She was up to a dozen, which she reorganized every couple of days, trying to approximate the ideal constellation for her album. Always, Julia’s photo held the center.

  Soon Eligius lost himself in his work – the aperture of the box, the corroded hinges he’d bartered for at a bazaar that opened like bronzed butterflies. The day dissolved around him. When he looked up again, suddenly aware that the box’s pale wood had fused with the twilight seeping into Holland House, Ewen was curled up against the album wall, asleep.

  He touched the boy ’s shoulder to stir him. Groggy, Ewen put his arms out to be lifted. It was as if the act woke him; he withdrew his arms and stood, alone. Passing Eligius, he walked back to the main house.

  Eligius finished his work. He left three trays filled with well water, set the canister of sodium hyposulfite alongside, and checked to make sure there were candles and lamps with oil, should the memsa’ab decide to escape the quiet of Dimbola and her husband’s empty study.

  After dinner, he brought the box from Holland House. “Help me test it,” he asked Ewen.

  They took a piece of Catherine’s paper and slipped it inside. “I want to see if enough light can enter,” Eligius said. “I need something small.”

  Ewen searched through the dining room. He held up a spoon. “Perhaps,” Eligius said, “we could use my diya. You remember the oil lamp I had.”

  “I haven’t seen it in the longest time. Where is it? I’ll bring it.”

  “Perhaps the spoon after all.” There was nothing to be gained in accusing the boy. If he took the diya, it was now his; such was the way of things for a servant.

  They placed the spoon inside atop the paper and surrounded the box with candles.

  “An experiment!” Sir John walked into the dining room. He peered into the box, careful to keep his unruly mane clear of the candles. “Eligius, I have a task for you. I would like you to lead a small expedition. It’s only just dark, and we’ ve hours of evening yet. I’d very much like to see this lion’s mouth of yours. Let us see who will accompany us.”

  Catherine begged off. “I intend to bring my Bible into the study. I shall read a bit of old wanderers until Charles’ safe return.”

  She forbade Ewen from going. The disappointed boy stormed off to his room, taking the newly-anointed paper and its indelible spoon shadow with him.

  Before leaving, Eligius knocked at Julia’s door. She opened it a crack. “We’re going to the lion’s mouth,” he told her. “Sir John will begin mapping the southern skies tonight. He will bring his telescope. He says the stars will seem as close as flowers in the garden.”

  “George has requested me to remain at Dimbola while he is painting me.”

  “Many times I have seen your father or mother instruct you. This is the first time I’ve seen you obey.”

  “You bait me.”

  “I simply observe.”

  Her bony shoulders slumped. She seemed weary even of the effort it took to remain standing. It worried him.

  “The things he tells me,” she said. “I cannot stand to sit for him.”

  “Then stop.”

  “I don’t have the luxury of stopping. Only he does.”

  “Has he made a servant of you?”

  She pushed her door closed. “Listen,” he said, to the patterns of splitting wood. “For when you write, this is what can be seen from the lion’s mouth. There is a rock overhang that looks like the open mouth of a stalking lion. The moss in its mouth swings when the wind comes. Below, a valley. In the valley, a neem tree by a stream that fills when it rains. The sharpest eye cannot tell where we broke the ground open under that tree and buried my father. But I can. To not come is to miss … what is the way to say it … the world of it.”

  “Your world.”

  The sound of the latch washed over him. “Wait for me,” she said.

  THE WALK TO the lion’s mouth was a blur of leaves and distant sky lights. Eligius hefted the heavy tube Sir John gave him to carry. It had legs like the memsa’ab’s camera, but smaller. The tube was almost as long as he was tall.

  The footing was difficult for a pale English girl unaccustomed to the jungle. He offered Julia a hand but she waved him off, hiked up her gauzy dress and clambered further ahead on the rocky path. Below them, buried in a sea of mist and darkness, lay the valley of the departed, miles of dense vegetation, villages and to the west, Port Colombo and the sea.

  “Let her be, Eligius.”

  Sir John toted his sketches and calculations in a worn leather valise. Eligius could hear the old colonial’s breath in his chest. This walk was taxing enough to young legs. He suggested they stop, but Sir John refused. “Let me tell you of my exploits to take your mind off of your labors. Have you ever heard of mathe - matics?”

  “No.”

  “God’s language is numbers. With them, I can bridge the veils of oceans and sky. Did you know that together with Sir Robert Nysmith, I calculated the duration of the seas? He set sail with a dozen cryptographs and as many cartologies as his ship could carry. We calculated the time of the tides to within a fortnight, give or take…”

  Eligius didn’t ask what the colonial’s words meant. They came in a flood and he set his pace by their strange cadence. Sir John’s enthusiasm for his own work was something joyous and foreign. He’d only known men who pitied their lives.

  “ Point in the direction of this lion’s mouth for me.”

  “ You can’t see it in the dark, sa’ab.”

  “ No matter. I like to fix on the horizon line and stare it down until it is revealed. A habit born of too many voyages, I suspect.”

  He had a kind smile, Eligius thought. Good teeth for a colonial, free of the rot and yellow cak
e so many of them suffered. It occurred to him that he knew nothing of Sir John’s private life. Was he married? Were there children or grandchildren waiting for him in this London he’d heard so much about? Was this yet another man who thought nothing of wandering far from his family?

  “There.” He pointed Sir John in the right direction. The moon bobbed just above his finger.

  In half an hour they arrived. Julia made her way between the lanyards of moss. She brushed them with her fingers and watched him. Behind her, clouds floated in from the sea. He walked to the lip and saw the neem trees below fill with pale moonlit rivers. The world we knew is gone, appa.

  “ When I was a boy,” he told her, “my mother would take me to the sea on Diwali. We brought little lamps with oil, and we would light them and set them out on the water. She would point to the sky and say ‘look up, remember your diya? That’s where they go to live and they never go out. Your light is always there for you to see.’”

  They stood in silence, listening to the wind murmur in the valley. He hoped a childish hope that his father could see him up here, speaking to a girl who’d never beheld the landscapes of absence that made up his world.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said. “You spoke truly of it.”

  “You’re not writing.”

  “Better to just look. Someone told me that once.”

  “He sounds very wise.”

  She leaned into him, bumping his shoulder, and it was so easy to forget who they were. It was dangerous to put faith in such things. They didn’t last. They weren’t real.

  “Come,” she said. “Let us see what mischief Sir John has in store.”