On board, Andrew raised his hand. He gestured toward her. She saw soldiers break free from their cordon and wade into the crowd. Three uniforms moved toward her family like droplets of blood trickling into the slopes of an upheld palm.
Closer to the Royal Captain, servants still holding their employers’ goods handed them over to English porters, then turned and left.
“ Hold me tightly,” she shouted. Locked together by hands, they surged forward to meet the soldiers.
She saw Ault on the gangplank, waving them on. Above him, Andrew watched implacably.
They converged near the front. The soldiers took their belongings and handed them to the porters, who spirited them away. Ault led Ewen and Julia onto the gangplank. One of the porters took Gita.
A soldier laced his fingers around Catherine’s arm. Another took hold of Eligius.
The porter placed Gita on the dock and walked away.
Andrew nodded. The soldiers set about the task of prying Catherine and Eligius apart.
“No.”
Above the roar of the fearful hundreds, Eligius heard Catherine’s protest.
“They can’t come,” Ault cried above the din. The rest of his words broke into stones. Rebellion. Consort. Suspicion.
“ How will I know you live?” Julia screamed from the entrance to the ship. Sir John put his arms around her and sent her up. More soldiers emerged from the dark mouth of the Royal Captain and brought her inside. Sir John turned back to watch helplessly.
Catherine shook free of the hands holding her. She waded forward through the hot amber air and took hold of Eligius as voices rose in strata of sound. Orders to leave, to stay, to get aboard, to clear a path, to go back. Cries of disbelief came from everywhere and were quickly stolen by the hot winds blowing out to sea. People hurried past, awkward under the unfamiliar weight of their own possessions. Children pulled by the arms with kerchiefs pressed to their mouths and eyes, as if Ceylon’s collapse could lodge within them like an infection.
She pressed the folded camera into Eligius’ arms.
“Listen,” she said.
The word rose above everything.
It was no longer a port and a murmuring ship, but the world, reduced to one thing.
Somewhere, Andrew cried that he would leave her to Ceylon, so help him.
Eligius counted breaths.
Catherine felt his hand tighten around hers. The world fell away. The one who will make portrait sitters of the stars, she thought. We promised each other.
He could feel his fingers go bloodless with the effort to remain in hers. He pulled her close; no words would be lost.
“ We promised,” and her fingers curled in his hair, her lips against his ear, “Oh my child, we are not still. We will always move towards each other. Swear to me – ”
“ I swear. Swear to me – ”
“ We will find each other again – ”
She was gone. A curtain of uniforms cut him from her, and the ship, and Sir John and Julia. He heard only what he thought was her voice. Disembodied, floating above the sea of hands like nothing in the world.
“ Remember me,” it said.
He held the camera. Gita sat alone on the dock, crying as the world emptied around her. He went to her and stood over her protectively. It wasn’t enough, to stand. He crouched and made a shell of himself over her and the camera, turning away from everything.
“HOW WILL I know he lives?”
Catherine stood at the rails. She held her children to her.
“I don’t see him.” Sir John scoured the departing colonials still clogging the dock. They could see the end now. The receiving bay and Chatham were empty but for the natives wandering away from the port.
“ None were allowed,” Andrew said. “ Not my doing. These were directives from Parliament. Too much to sort through, the loyals from the seditionists.”
He stood to Catherine’s left, hat in hand, his wife behind him. To onlookers down below, he might have passed for a suitor.
“ He’s a resourceful boy,” Sir John said.
“And Catherine left him with means,” Andrew said.
Below her, the rest of her fellow countrymen came forward to meet their new life. She closed her eyes, counted breaths, yearned for old days, waited for the world to turn back to her. She wanted to be stronger than she was, in front of them all. She wanted to be mother enough to answer her daughter ’s plea. How will I ever know?
The hope that he wouldn’t be alone, that someone would break open the secret of him and love him, was too hard to hold now that the Royal Captain pulled away from Ceylon and met the coming sea.
“ Wait. I think that’s him.”
She gazed in the direction Sir John pointed. A lone figure arrived at the entrance to the port, almost at the street. A toddling child stumbled alongside. There was a length of wood in the figure’s arms. At one end, a box that caught the light and sent it back to her as a mote. A brilliant brief glimmer that disappeared when they turned the corner.
She felt the sudden plummet of her heart. Facing Andrew, she slapped him hard enough to bring a shocked cry.
Taking the hands of her children, she walked away.
GITA PUT OUT her arms. “ Up.”
Eligius lifted her. Around them, the mad flights of the colonials could be read from the road. The wheels of their carriages split the dry dirt open and stripped the closest trees of bark. Clothes, furniture, even casks of good brandy littered Chatham.
A faint breath of white ship’s steam rose at the horizon. Gita pointed to it.
“Yes,” he said.
FOR HOURS THEY heard nothing, saw no one on the roads or in the estates. With each step, it was as if they were descending deeper and deeper into a black bottomless well.
When Gita saw a fallen doll that made her smile, he put it into her arms and told her that now, beginning right now, she’d have to learn to care for her own things.
This is what it is to be alone, he thought. To be driven to the ground by silence and dead space.
Dimbola was dark. He placed Gita in the gazebo’s remains and told her to keep her head below the broken trellising in case any more men came. Then he went to the main house to see what might be salvaged. Closing the front door behind him, he held himself until his body stopped trembling. There was a little girl to be fed and clothed.
In the scullery he found some blackened potatoes and a bit of bread, some lard and a few stray morsels of lamb. The water his mother had collected from the rains now reeked of ash. He poured the buckets out of the scullery window and set them in the doorway to be taken to the well.
It was almost a year since he’d first come. If this winter was like the last, the rains would find them soon.
He brought the food, some linens and blankets and some clothes to the front room. The fire had eaten his modest quarters down to the frame. A pile of soot marked his sleeping corner. There was nothing left of his possessions. Everything was dust. The feather shadow was gone.
He walked down the corridor. The paintings had been stolen. The walls were pockmarked with cavities from the men’s crude bludgeoning at the gas light fixtures. Scorched shadows adorned the ceiling where the flames had journeyed through the arteries of the house.
He opened Charles’ door.
The window wall no longer stood. Glass littered the floor in a glimmering trail out onto the grass. The room had been stripped of everything he’d come to know. Curtains, books with spines that crackled like split coconuts when opened, the fronds and step stool and every other trapping of her photograph, all gone.
Charles’ burnt remains had been left to rot atop the debris. He was so bereft. Age and illness had already begun to shrink him, then three nights lashed by the valley ’s bitter rains. Now, finished by fire. Only a hand, upturned like a gnarled root, marked the blackened thing for the once-lion it was.
He closed the door softly, and wondered where his mother fell.
Gita helped him carry everything to Holland Hou
se. He ushered her inside with a promise of some bread and lamb. Sitting her atop a folded sheet, he told her to be still while he swept broken glass from the ceiling window into a corner. While she ate, he set up the camera on its legs. Next to it, he lay Sir John’s telescope. The telescope’s curved eye reflected the room.
He saw the image reflected in its glass, of a gracefully carved wooden frame jutting out from its hiding place under a drop cloth.
He brought the painting out from its alcove, set it against the wall and let the cloth fall away. I asked, do you see love when you look at it?
In time, he thought, I will know every detail of this. Her lips, apart as if captured in the creation of a word. Her hair, her skin, her eyes like submerged pearls. George had painted light into her eyes, remaking the soft glow cast by the lit diya which she held near her heart.
I do, you said. However regretful a thing it may be.
He stayed a long time with her, staring at his diya in her hands until the light drained from the world. But not from her, nor from the memsa’ab’s house. The light stood still, here.
4.
Dimbola is dark now.Its feverish life and bustle are stilled as are the lights which shined there. Servants, scientists, disciples, painters, astronomers and divines, all those who came to her in hopes of burning themselves into memory are gone. Silence is the only tenant left. But I have seen their faces across this land and others, and I say they live.
SIR GEORGE WYNFIELD
Portraitist to the Royal Family, on his memories of Ceylon, 1902
Departing
ELIGIUS PICKED DEAD PETALS FROM THE TAMARIND growing near the broken wall. He’d planted it in an effort to pretty up what remained of their hut, but it had gone to pulp in only a few days, a victim of the unrelenting rains. He rolled the petals into his palm, using his thumb as a mortar until a fine rust smear remained.
Gita’s laughter at this distraction filled the bones of Matara. Four years and as many monsoon seasons had passed over his old village since the soldiers felled it. Little remained to mark the place. Yet this burial ground was where she chose for her reading each day.
It was the colonials’ June, in their year of 1842. His sister no longer remembered her own mother ’s face.
It had taken him many days of scavenging before he’d found Sudarma at the rear of the house. She had fallen in the memsa’ab’s sacred room; he found her lying on the floor, covered in the smoke and ash she’d breathed until no air was left in her.
He could see the neglect tattering away at Gita’s memory of her mother and he let it happen. Let her fill the void with a woman of her own fashioning. A perfect union of doll parts. Sustainer, beauty, angel, ghost.
Gita no longer cried in outrage that her brother’s hands tucked her in for the night. Yet something in her yearned for her old home and he had long since given up fighting with her about her desire to sit outside the hut she’d been born in and hear of Gretel slipping beneath the waves.
Gita began kicking through the mud. Her four -year old’s attention span had reached its limit. “ Very good today,” he said. “ Your pronunciation is much better.”
She shrugged. Progress in the colonials’ language mattered little to her.
“ Let’s start back.” He picked up the book. “ I ’ll make you rice with curd.”
“ Stay.”
She took such joy in chasing her shadow among the banyans. When she was ready, she smiled and then ran without waiting for him, down the rain-carved road towards the jungle. It was the long way back. But it was the only route she tolerated. She loved the sea.
He gave in, as he always did. He’d come to perceive unexpected things in her childish tantrums. He needed to give her everything she wanted. Safety and certainty above all, because in her outcries he heard his own death, and the void after him, and how she would fill it with memories of him.
Let them be worth keeping, he thought. I can give her so little else.
The wind was with them. The journey was not so daunting to her little legs. They found the road and followed it back to Dimbola, where they saw a carriage waiting at the gate. Its doors bore the ornate crest of the Galle Face.
Gita’s face darkened. When the vicar ’s messenger stepped out, she dropped her eyes as she always did around others. Even ones she saw often enough to know, soldiers and colonials and this boy. She refused to make eye contact at his awkward pleasantries.
Her poor eyes, Eligius thought. Always expecting to see the worst.
“ We need to speak,” the vicar’s oldest altar boy said.
Eligius told his sister to mind the church’s horse. He led the boy to the main house. The boy – he never did see fit to give Eligius his name, and Eligius never asked – seemed more comfortable there. The colonials liked their formalities.
“There is a family.”
There always is, Eligius thought.
The boy covered familiar terrain. Address, societal position. None of it mattered much. Eligius knew his role, and what it was worth. “ My fee.”
“They will pay you when you arrive. You may meet the ser - vant’s gaze only. The master of the house will not have it.”
Again, he thought, familiar terrain. “A favor, of the vicar. May Gita stay at the church until I am finished?”
Starchy indignation crept into the boy ’s eyes. “ It’s harder for her when she’s alone.” He paused, letting the lie settle against his tongue. “She finds peace at the church.”
“ Very well. But you should go before the light fades.”
“ I make my own.”
“ It is not so much to light a candle,” the boy said haughtily. “ We light hundreds each evening in the church and we are not prideful. It’s unseemly for anyone, let alone such as you.”
“Then you should have no trouble finding someone else to attend to this family’s needs.”
There were but a few others in Ceylon who had taken up the art. He’d heard of them. Colonials who came to shore in the months following the violence to stake claims on the abandoned estates. They brought a new crop of tea that they hoped might circumvent the blight that had taken such a toll on the coffee plantations, and another garrison of soldiers who kept troublemakers at bay. They brought as well new cameras that were smaller than his, with lenses like prisms, and new ways of coating the glass plates. But they were prisoners of their new world and its capricious light. None knew its ways like he did. None were willing to bathe in poisons like he was. Hobbyists, that was all they were. Effete portrayers of fox hunts and christenings. No one save he went to the families needing their darkest moments arrested. Only him.
Sometimes he wondered if those families were behind the odd peace he’d come to know in Ceylon. Perhaps they kept Matara’s roaming boys from the one who made death a portrait sitter.
He chose not to belabor the point. There was no need. On the church’s behalf, the boy had performed this minuet many times. Never did these people feel closer to their God than when they unleashed their contempt.
“I am grateful to you and to the vicar for thinking of me,” Eligius said, “and for taking Gita. Of course I will go shortly.”
The boy left Eligius for his carriage. Gita was dutifully petting the horse. Eligius gave her the book. Its page was bent to Gretel’s tale. “ Practice your words one more time before you go to bed,” he told her.
“ I don’t want to go.”
He hushed her. “They are always nice to you. They cook good food and keep you in a warm room. There is nothing to object to. I will look in on you tonight, when I am done.” The church carriage propelled forward with a sharp jerk. Her face appeared in the window, quietly disconsolate. She had grown to be obedient. Too much so. He could put her in anyone’s hands and upon his word, she would do whatever was asked of her. Hers was a life too easily ruled.
She thrust her hand out of the carriage window and waved.
She had four years of memories, and he’d done what he could to make som
ething tolerable of them. Will you have room for one more, Gita? Just one, just a goodbye. And from it, I hope you will make something like forgiveness.
He waved back.
THE INDIAN GIRL who answered his knocking was young, with luminous eyes and smooth skin. Eligius touched his camera. “I have been sent for.”
She stepped aside for him. He brought the camera in and leaned it against the wall. Slipping his rucksack off, he checked to make sure the glass plates survived the journey. Giggles drew his attention to a doorway across the tiled foyer. Three small boys covered their mouths and jostled each other. Maybe Gita’s age or younger.
The servant girl rushed up the curved stairs to the master of the house waiting at the top. He whispered to her and walked away, letting a small velvet satchel fall from his fingers to the floor just outside an open door. The girl came to the banister and waved. Eligius brought his tools upstairs. “Close the door,” he told her. She obeyed.
He set down his camera and spread its legs before considering the room. The curtains were open in the mistaken belief that every available drop of light was required. He asked the girl to close them, careful to keep his voice low and his gaze averted from the master standing in the corner, mumbling words into the silence. She did as he asked. The room sank into a murky haze.
Eligius lit the first candle. He dipped a taper into the bobbing light and brought it to the others.
“Are there enough?” the girl asked him.
It was always good to hear something like his own language in these places. “ Yes. You did very well.”
The room was oddly shaped. Like an oval, but with one end smaller than the portion with the bed. That end would require more light. He brought candles to surround the bed and gazed upon his subject for the first time. I remember you, memsa’ab Pike.
Her family had surrounded her with pieces of themselves. A tiger figurine fashioned from the husks of coconuts rested in the crook of her arm. Satin cloth embroidered with her family crest made a cloak around her head. A garland of hyacinth crowned her dry hair. A crucifix hung on the wall above her. The Bible – there was always this book, he thought, closer at hand than it likely ever was in life – lay open across her midsection.
The Luminist Page 27