“Yes.”
“Is the man in heaven now?”
“I don’t know such things, Alexandra.”
“Mama says that none of you get to go. And Mary gets to go, and I don’t want the man to go and keep hitting her.”
He felt one of her hands leave him. When he looked, she was tracing the sky with a dirty finger. Looking for elephants, he thought.
“Don’t fall,” she told him.
AVERY DIFFERENT pall of smoke hung over Port Colombo’s harbor. Steam, from an immense ship bearing the East India Company ’s branding. The port’s dock was crowded with well-todo families, their belongings stacked like a child’s blocks near a crane and pulley. From the size of the ship and the quantity of the colonials’ lives on display – their furnishings, clothes, even bales of their last good crop – these families were sailing to England. Standing with their children clutched in their protective arms, they grew gray and dissolute as the ship belched clouds that the wind bent to the ground.
He led his band of stragglers to the post at the foot of a warehouse. There he found soldiers seated at a tiny table, carefully enscripting names on a tablet that reminded him of Julia’s beloved pad. He could not speak for himself when the armed men’s suspicious gazes landed on his bloody clothes. “He saved us,” Margaret said before doubling over. The baby was close. She trailed tears down her leg.
They asked him where he served. They told him that the families in Ceylon’s southern province remained in their homes. For how long, they could not guess. “So much depends on the behavior of your lot,” one of them said.
He parted ways with Margaret and her children, leaving them in the Galle Face with a priest and a nurse. The boy was walking from pew to pew, searching the faces of the families. In the first row, the nurse lay Margaret down and began to erect a makeshift curtain of burlap. Soon there would be another life.
He wondered if that one would stay long.
Alexandra amused herself at the church door by tossing a pebble against the wood. For her, he pulled blades of fragrant lemongrass and arrayed them in a blessing near her.
He only turned once on his way to Dimbola, to see the port. By then he was up high; his trail had climbed along a sloping hill. The doorway to the great church was empty, but he did not despair. There was a small shape with a golden crown of hair standing on the docks. She was waving goodbye to the clouds leaving the ship’s stack for their long journey up to the sky.
THE WORDS CAME easier now, like a second childbirth after a wrenching first. My husband is dead.
It was surely true. The widow season was upon her. Everywhere was proof of it. Charles’ absence. Eligius’ absence. Dimbola’s encircling quiet.
The waiting life came at her relentlessly. What to say to Julia and Ewen – to Julia, were there words to repay the debt her daughter had assessed? – how to live alone, how to stay in Ceylon. How to leave. How to hold on to what she’d done.
For now, a light needed tying to a departing man.
She was in the bedroom, arranging the first of Charles’ possessions, when the knocking came.
DIMBOLA WAS QUIET. The porch and gazebo were empty. No one waited for him or for Charles.
Of course they aren’t. They think us both dead.
He knocked at the door. For a moment, dread encased him. What if they ’re on board that ship? What if I am alone?
Then Sir John let him in with a tousle of his hair, a fatherly gesture that Eligius needed more than he realized. “ I could not find him.”
Sir John put a hushing hand up. “ No one could expect so much from you. Rest now. I’ll tell her.”
“ It is for me to do.”
“She’s in her room. No one has come to be portrayed. She despairs of her art even in the midst of all this chaos.”
“Aren’t you afraid of what’s happening? What of your map? You’ll be forced to leave before you’ ve finished.”
Sir John tapped his pipe against the dining room table, dislodging a small coalstone of ash. “ I don’t believe the stars are going anywhere, even if we do. I ’ll pick up a different corner of the sky and come round again. It’s as I told you. They ’re the same forever, in all places. They ’re the only constants I know.”
Eligius found the memsa’ab’s bedroom door open. She’d rearranged things in ways he couldn’t understand. Curtains had been pulled from other rooms and arrayed behind the bed in velvet folds. Palm fronds leaned against the wall. Their tips had begun to curl. Some thick tomes from the study sat on the nightstand next to the headboard. One he recognized as the sa’ab’s indispensable volume of English law, the one he turned to while creating the paper stack he’d locked away in his cabinet.
Catherine stood from her vanity when she saw him. “ You’ ve returned safe. I am so very glad.”
“ I couldn’t find him, memsa’ab.”
She’d placed the camera against the far wall. Its eye fixed on the bed.
“There is more. Mary. I saw her die. I could not help her.”
Catherine straightened one of the palm fronds.
“ Is there to be a portrait, memsa’ab?”
She pulled the bedcovers back. “Come here, Eligius. Lie down for me.”
He didn’t want to. A colonial’s bed, and all his grime and blood! But her voice barely lived and her eyes were windows onto the sorrow inside her. He did as she asked.
She pulled the covers up to his chin, then stepped back. Tilting her head, she examined him from every angle. The worst came when she instructed him to close his eyes and hold his breath. Then he understood the portrait she wanted to make.
He thought of Mary laying in the field, her face and hair blending with the leaves and dirt, becoming Ceylon. The rock, felling a man he might have seen one forgotten day on the roads or at Diwali. They might have greeted each other.
“Thank you, Eligius. You may go.”
He ran from the room. In the hall of paintings, he saw his mother. Catherine’s throaty sobs rang in the air.
“ I heard,” Sudarma said. “And the maid. Was it the men?”
He nodded dully.
“ Was there anyone that we know?”
It was hard for him to find the woman she once was. Her face was tanned to a rough hide from too much labor in the sun. The bones of her chest no longer made it possible for him to see the crib that she used to be for him. Someone had balled her up like one of the sa’ab’s discarded writings. Wrinkled, worn, ready for the fire.
“ If they were there,” he told his mother, “ I didn’t see them.”
“ I ’m glad. I cannot think of mere boys like that.”
“But if any one of them were among the men who took down the colonials’ servant, can you doubt they would have joined in willingly if it meant the other men would accept them? Like Chandrak. You brought him into our home and look what he became. Did you know this about him? How easily he could become an animal?”
Sudarma took him by the wrists. She turned his palms up. They bore dry map lines of blood where the rock had sloughed off skin.
“ I know this about all men,” she said.
Remembrance
THE KNOCKING CAME URGENTLY AGAINST THE FRONT door. It pierced Catherine’s grogginess and sent her fumbling for her clothes. No one in the house had slept. Now dawn, come too soon.
She’d spent much of the deep night listening to Julia cry and watching the mist gather itself to leave the sea. The sea isn’t enough for it, was what her mother once said when as a girl she’d wondered about London’s constant shroud. So it comes to land, hoping to find what is missing.
She reached the door ahead of Eligius. Governor Wynfield stood on the porch, hat in hand. Soldiers waited in the road. “Catherine, their carriage was found in a ditch eight miles from here. They ’re searching – ”
“ Where?” Eligius blurted.
“I will not be questioned by a servant about this matter. If something befell him, it’s you who deserves blame. How can we
know you didn’t come across him out there, you and the other thugs – ”
“ I want my husband back.” She touched Wynfield’s arm as if it were the thing that had spoken. “ Tell him.”
Were he here, Eligius thought, the old lion might finally believe in her love for him.
“South of here. Outside Devampiya.”
“On the Port road? The trade road?”
“The dirt path. The one your kind takes to the valley below the mountains.”
Eligius was running before he realized that he had moved at all. Wynfield shouted for him to tell his servant where to go. The soldiers swiftly mounted their horses. He scrambled onto Wynfield’s carriage and seized the reins. Panic extinguished everything in him save the sound of sobbing, the quiet cloudbursts that he’d walked away from three nights before.
“ You will not be alone this time.”
Catherine climbed next to him and clasped his hand. The air, thick with rain, fell atop her. The clouds and steel sky followed, and the stars somewhere above it all in the black vastation. It all plummeted down on her.
She heard the carriage door close, felt Wynfield’s weight settle in the compartment below her, but it was all so far away.
Wynfield’s servant took the reins from Eligius. “ Where? Are you listening? Where do we go?”
“The valley of the children,” Eligius said.
And one man, Catherine thought.
AT THE EDGE of the valley, where the low clouds brought merciless storms that quickly liquefied the ground, they came upon Ault’s meager cart upended in a ditch. Eligius told Wynfield’s servant to stop where the trees parted to reveal a walking path overgrown with vines. His skin prickled at the kiss of the cold rain. Mud sucked his feet under when he stepped down to steady Catherine.
“ Which way?” she called above the storm.
“ Into the valley. I know a path.”
Wynfield’s soldiers followed them, but the governor remained on the road. “ You’re sure of this?” he asked from the shelter of the carriage.
“ I thought I heard someone. I cannot be sure.”
“Then undo the damage.”
Soon the road was gone behind them. The going was slow and treacherous. Gradually, he and Catherine pulled ahead of the soldiers, whose heavy boots mired them.
Without Eligius as a guide, the soldiers would quickly lose their way, but their welfare didn’t concern Catherine. Too much time had gone by already. She feared for what she might find; she feared finding nothing at all.
Water. Its sluicing rush rose above the rain. Eligius knew where he was now. The apex of the valley ’s gentle bow towards the sea. The rain had all but eclipsed a path of footprints along the right bank. “There were two,” he told Catherine. He remained on the right side of the water. She took the left. Even a few feet away, they were like clouds to each other.
After what seemed like hours, they reached a part of the valley that years of weather had scrubbed down to rock. Something fluttered from a low branch ahead. Catherine fought her way to it on aching legs.
Eligius saw her path and followed. Exhaustion made a terrible jest of him; he teetered like Chandrak.
A man’s torn and bloody shirt wafted above a shape lying in the pooled water. On stumbling feet they ran to Charles’ side. Charles’ face was swollen. He was naked to his sodden undergarments. His flesh could be read underneath, like words through glass.
Catherine touched him. She pulled the storm from his beard. Leaves and mud and the drowned husks of insects.
A gurgling moan left the old lion’s mouth. “I’ve come to take you home,” she told him.
The soldiers began to ford the brown floodwater. “ Is he alive?” one of them cried.
“Yes!” Eligius called. “ He’s breathing!”
They lifted Charles out of the water. “ Is the missionary with you ?” one of the soldiers shouted, as if Charles was already too far away to hear them. He got no answer. Charles’ body drained water when they stood him up. He burbled pain and collapsed.
Lead us back, one of the soldiers told Eligius. Your master shouldn’t die here.
Charles was whimpering.
“Save your strength,” Catherine whispered, and he quieted. Taking his hand, she told him to close his eyes. She would fight through the rising wind for him.
BY THE TIME they reached Dimbola, the rain began to ease. She cradled Charles in the rear of the carriage. His breathing made her wince.
Eligius helped them out of the coach. The front door of the house opened. Ewen and Julia ran down to the grass.
The air outside smelled of sweet burning wood despite the rains. Soon, Eligius thought, we’ll hear the pops, and they ’ll be closer.
Sir John came from the foyer holding a thick chamois, which Catherine used to wrap Charles. As they brought him into the house, Julia remained on the porch with her brother. They stared without comprehension at the specter entering their home.
Don’t look for your father, Catherine wanted to say to her children. He’s hardly there.
Julia watched her mother through the open door, struggling to keep Charles upright but waving off assistance from the soldiers. “They found the missionary,” she told Eligius. “ He took a terrible blow to the head. He was wandering the road incoherently. They ’re treating him at the church.”
“ I am glad he is alive,” Eligius said.
Sudarma built a fire under the cover of a tree and set a pot of water over it. She stared at him, not comprehending his English. Yet her eyes could read him all his life. He turned away from her.
Julia folded her arms against the wind. “ I didn’t think you’d come back.”
“Then there would be no one to carry your writing to and fro.”
“ You’re an insolent boy.” She was crying. “ I saw my portrait. George brought it here while you were gone.”
“ Did he do the subject justice?” He couldn’t help the fever taking the words from him.
“ Do you see love when you look at it?”
“ I do. However regretful a thing that might be.”
He forgot his mother ’s eyes. They fell away with the rest of the world.
CATHERINE LAY CHARLES in his bed. When the soldiers left she undressed him, dried him, built a fire, and stoked its heat until its radiance reached the far corners of the room. Sitting at his side, she placed her hand atop his chest and felt it rise and fall, felt the flutter within.
He opened his eyes and looked at her. The lion of old, gathering strength he no longer had.
“There are things I am aware of, Charles.”
She went to the door and closed it. Outside, Sir John nodded in understanding.
“Our time is leaving us,” she said. “There is only time for me to tell you, I have ever loved you. For you, there is time to tell me what I do not know of you. You must remain at least that long.”
She cradled him. After a while, the rain slowed, became mist. By then, Charles had closed his eyes and begun to speak.
AT THE LATE hour of the garrison doctor ’s arrival with Wynfield, the sky bled smoke and embers above Dimbola’s turned fields. The winds swept small immolations over Wynfield’s carriage and out to sea.
Eligius led them to the house. Ruby flakes of ash withered and fell. He trod over them, wondering what lives these had been.
The doctor ’s arrival only confirmed the family ’s fears for Charles. A funerary presence, the doctor wore an expression of weary resignation, as if he’d failed before his first ministration to Charles had begun. After ordering a freshened fire in the hearth, he pressed the flat end of a rubber tube against Charles’ chest. “ His heart is terribly weak,” he said to himself. “It may have been better to leave him where you found him.”
“Surely there’s some medicine,” Catherine demanded. “Some poultice to take the cold from him.”
“There is nothing, madam.”
Governor Wynfield stood near the fire, warming himself. “Things
have come to a regrettable point.”
“ Keep him warm.” The doctor repacked his things and accepted payment from the governor. “Give him what he asks for should he wake again. That is all I can offer you. That, and make arrangements.”
“The question of location must be addressed,” Wynfield said.
“Outrageous,” Sir John snapped. “ Must such a thing be discussed in front of his children?”
Wynfield waited until the doctor could be seen from the bedroom window, crossing the yard. “ We’ ve no time for the luxury of manners. Or have you somehow been spared from what is happening across the countryside? I cannot offer protection to you indefinitely. I need every available soldier to put down this uprising, and more yet. Another full garrison sails as we speak, but they are still a week away. I can’t spare a man to act as chaperone so you may all continue living here as if nothing has changed. Everything has changed.”
“ Is every colonial being told that they are alone in this?” Catherine said. “Or is this only for us?”
“ I resent whatever imagined skullduggery lies beneath those words, Catherine. I ’m only concerned with the safety of children I have watched grow up and a woman who, whatever our differences, is wife to my friend. Yes, to answer you. In good conscience I cannot allow any of us to remain in Ceylon. All must go until matters are settled here, myself included. I will return as soon as I can. The Court must not lack a voice.”
“And when matters are settled?” Sir John asked.
“The Court shall be reestablished, of course. Laws will be drafted and instituted to prevent this happening again.”
“ I see,” Sir John said quietly. “ In your image, as it were. Who will speak for Charles?”
“ I will, as I always have. We were in agreement on all matters of importance. Not that such things concern you.”
Catherine sat on the edge of her husband’s bed. She stared out the window. “ Where shall we go?”
“ England, I expect,” Wynfield said. “ Unless you have friends or family elsewhere – ”
The Luminist Page 24