The Luminist

GOVERNOR WYNFIELD CAME at midweek with the sergeant of the newly-installed Port Colombo garrison. They took statements from Sir John, Julia and Catherine about the men. No one mentioned Sudarma.

The sergeant came to Eligius last. “You, boy. Do you have anything to add?”

“They threatened to come here. I believe they could. They’re angry.”

“I suppose you wish to plead the case of these boys,” Wynfield said.

“There will be no pleading from me.”

After they left, it fell to him to beg forgiveness for his mother’s judgment. Sudarma had stolen, he implored Catherine, but out of fear and obligation to feed starving faces she’d known from birth, not a desire to add herself to Ceylon’s growing restlessness.

“I hold your word in my hand,” she finally said, “that you will be responsible for her. The next transgression and I will have no choice but to say goodbye to you both. And you know how I loathe goodbyes.”

After the jungle, Eligius’ life at Dimbola took on new configurations. While his mother cooked, he ate in the dining room, listening to Catherine and Sir John regale each other with tales of Paris, of gaily dressed people strolling boulevards alive with perfume and music, of boats as intimate as a wedding vow floating through a city constructed of light. Nights were speckled with candles and torches and hissing gas lamps. By day its buildings made gossip of the sun, passing it from window to brass balcony to the street, each adding to the light a bit of itself: hues, density, a stroke from the palette of shadows that only a city of cobblestone and metallurgy could possess.

“That’s where you must find yourself,” Sir John told Julia one night. “If you truly intend on writing, that is. There you’ll see artists simply daub their brushes in the air and put the light on canvas and paper.”

“Now, Sir John,” Catherine said, “answer this question. Why do you encourage Julia to cross the ocean to write, which surely men do, yet you express misgivings for my pursuit?”

“She walks in others’ well-trod footprints, Catherine. You could be first. There is a difference to men.”

“Yet you help me.”

“I’m not one to let social convention stand in the way of learning. I intend to publish our progress, and have a name for it. Photography. We shall see if we can’t arrest beauty, as you so eloquently put it.”

“Do you think I do this only to make beautiful portraits, John?”

“I’ve offended you.”

“No.You’ve underestimated me. I may have no voyages to my name save that which brought me here. But I know things no man can know. In this world, the babies we women raise are yours, the ones we bury, ours. Our losses to bear, and we’re expected to bear them quietly and properly, with only our memories to see us through. I am your equal, and Charles’, and any man in this one way. Men grow ill in the name of their work, just as I surely will in mine.”

Sudarma returned with a plate full of food. “The sa’ab still hasn’t eaten.”

“What is he doing?” Julia asked.

“Writing.”

Julia cast an imploring look at her mother. “Chase these portraits if you must, but if you wish to arrest something of value, arrest him before he is no longer here.”

A tear threatened her eye, but she tilted her head in the defiant gesture that Catherine knew well.

She rose and went to the study. After she was safely away, Julia turned on Sir John. “My mother’s correspondence with you set tongues wagging. He’s disconsolate. She, distracted. It falls to me to state these matters openly.”

“I assure you, I have an abiding respect for your father and no desire to romance Catherine.”

“Would that you could convince the gossips of Ceylon otherwise.”

“Young lady, it occurs to me that it’s your tongue that’s taken up this issue most forcefully. I’ve heard nothing from anyone save you, and that includes Charles himself.”

“Only the women speak up in this house, sir. My father prefers to write. How quaintly quiet.”

Sir John slapped the table and laughed heartily. “Is every woman in this house dead set on having her say? Eligius, be grateful your mother moves through her tasks with the good sense to be silent.”

Sudarma passed through the dining room, her bandaged hands hanging limply. Eligius watched where she went. “A woman’s words are only valuable to babies in my world, sa’ab.”

“Now you’ve seen another world,” Julia said. “What do you prefer, I wonder.”

There was only the smallest hint of play in her voice. “In my world,” he told her, “I would never hear words like these. I would never see what I’ve seen. Amma, are you finished for the night?”

When she didn’t respond, he left for the hall of paintings and his mother’s room. Sudarma stood at the window, staring out at the trees swaying in the dark while Gita cried. “She won’t stop. I’ve nothing to give her.”

He lit his battered diya. The flame fluttered in the mirrors of Gita’s eyes. Softly, he began to hum to her. It was an old song, nameless so far as he knew. He pressed the tune into her ear, and soon its sound washed her mewling under.

“I used to sing that to you,” Sudarma said. “To calm your fears.”

“I remember.”

“There was a time when I worried about all the things you feared. Now I hear you sing it to her. I wonder what Gita fears.”

“No matter. Do you have all you need?”

“Yes.”

“I have no choice but to do this, mother. You shouldn’t have taken from them. It puts us at risk.”

“They don’t know where else to go. They would never hurt me, Eligius.”

“No. Only me.”

He closed her door and locked it. Outside, he slid a rusty bar through two slots, sealing her window. She gazed at him through the glass, unmoving. Held.

He walked away before she could fade.





Topographies


OVER THE COURSE OF FEBRUARY AND MARCH, CATHERINE and Sir John experimented with various chemical combinations. They used guncotton to bathe the plates in silver salt. They lacquered skins of collodion onto them and potassium mixed with oil of lavender to lend flexibility. They conversed in drams and durations. Light and shadow became their accomplices. Around a meal or in sleep, there was always a part of them not present; they were pacing the floor of Holland House before Sir John’s star maps, lost to all save the glass and the chemical sea from which their obsession might rise, and remain.

Sir John taught her and Eligius how to grind and polish glass for lenses. They reconfigured the camera’s plate holder with a spring-loaded trap of imported rosewood. For the collodion and silver salt, Eligius constructed vertical baths so the plates might be coated evenly. On his own he experimented with mirrors and angles. By spring he’d created his own topography of the light’s possibilities in Holland House.

It was time to try again.

The morning she chose was cloudy, so Eligius lit candles and placed them in constellations around Holland House. Imagining how they would throw their light once the curtains were closed over the windows and across the ceiling glass, he brought in mirrors. In the corner of the room he fashioned a tiny warren of dark gingham, with an opening at the top to let the heat escape.

She expressed awe at his ability to visualize the light’s path. Even he was a little mystified by it. It had always been a part of him, a good part he hoped would never fade. If anything, working with her had honed his abilities even further. He felt important in his role. She could not conjure her images without him, and told him so.

The Wynfields arrived at mid-morning, interrupting their preparations. Their carriage pulled to the gate just ahead of a long column of British soldiers on the march. The soldiers continued on, pausing to bow their heads at the disembarking family.

Eligius met them. “I wish to see Charles immediately,” the governor said.

“I’ll ask him to come out.”

“Is he so unwell that he cannot take the breeze these days?”

“We are hoping he gets better, sa’ab.”

Wynfield brushed past. “And what of your mistress?” He pointed to Holland House.

“Get my wife some tea. I will see myself to your sahib.”

George exited the carriage last. He opened the gates and strode onto the grounds as if he owned them.

Eligius escorted the Wynfields to the main house. The governor headed for the study, closing the door behind him.

“My tea,” Lady Wynfield said.

He knew Catherine and Sir John were setting up the camera and would have need of him. Circumstances would not wait for long.

“I will make it.” Sudarma stood in the hall. “He has work for the memsa’ab. I will see to any need you have.”

Grateful, Eligius ran out to the yard. Julia and George were in the gazebo. George was speaking to her sternly. She sat with her head bowed as George wagged a disapproving finger at her.

Her writing implements were near; perhaps, Eligius thought, George was critiquing her. But Julia wasn’t answering back. Her passivity disquieted him.

Catherine and Sir John were positioning the camera when he entered Holland House. “Tell her it’s time,” Catherine said. “This cannot wait.”

“She’s coming,” Sir John said. “Young Wynfield is escorting her.”

“How chivalrous,” she said dryly.

Julia crossed the yard as if she’d just awakened from a broken sleep. George linked his arm in hers. “You should be proud of your lovely daughter,” he said. “She is to be my next portrait. I’ve put off all other commissions for her.”

“If you wish,” Catherine said.

“In point of fact, the theme of this portrait is love.” He took Julia’s hand and kissed it. “We begin immediately. I shall insist on a dress suited to the theme. Julia, see to it.”

“Yes.”

“ Till tomorrow, then.”

Julia took her seat. Hot blush decanted her cheeks.

Catherine peered through the camera lens. Julia sat at its center, yet scarcely occupied the frame.

Eligius moved candles closer to her until a pale shadow rippled the door behind her. “Did he hurt you?” he whispered as he arranged the candles in a circle.

“What would a servant do about such a thing?” Julia’s eyes found something within the years-old shadow on the wall; the memory of a portrait.

He lit the last of the candles. Catherine selected a glass plate. Under her watchful gaze, he held it steady as she lacquered collodion onto the glass and slid it into place.

Smoke from the candles made ripples in the air. Inside the camera, a process moved like the carrying sea. She could almost hear the rustling of Eligius’ light as it burned this silent, remembering girl into a sculpture.

Julia was looking away. It was too late to change her.

“Willful child,” Sir John muttered.

Under the cloak, Catherine let go. She lost the touch of the wooden box. The partition of glass at her eye ceased its separation and became simply her sight.

She studied her daughter’s frank beauty. The turn of her head. The casual clasp of hands in her lap. The serenity on her face; no longer did the muscles of her mouth or the aperture of her eye speak of youth in perpetual search of adolescent outrage at perceived slights. When had she become a woman? When had so much of the child departed?

There was in Julia’s repose something terrible and powerful. Only death was as still as this.

This thing I do, she thought. May it tie a bit of light to we who come into the world already on the path to departing it. Just a bit of light, so we can be seen a little while after we’re gone.

“Now,” she said.

They coated the glass with sodium hyposulfite, then bathed it. She felt the burning sink through her skin, running into her blood like groundwater.

Positioning the plate inside the warren, she lit more candles and put a mirror next to the light, intensifying it. Julia’s image came in a thin cumulus. Haze from the smoking candles came with her, wrapping her glassed face in a gray fog. Her eyes glistened with silver and steel.

Her image did not leave. The boy next to her could have breathed and breathed. The glass held her.

“My lord,” Sir John muttered. “Catherine, my lord. Look at it. The first.”

“Let me see.” Julia came no closer than the edge of the candle circle. She held out her hand for the portrait.

“The first triumph is of you,” Sir John said.

“How odd, that it should happen to be this moment and no other. There is a tyranny of happenstance to it.”

She knelt and blew the candles out, then slipped over them carelessly. A few tumbled in the wake of her dress, spilling droplets of wax that swiftly hardened on the floor. “You are to be congratulated, mother. Perhaps later, I can see it again in a different light.”

She returned to the gazebo. There, George motioned for her writing pad. He sat across from her, studying her and making swift strokes across the paper with a quill.

“Such indulgence,” Sir John said. “Really, Catherine. Your eldest gives free reign to her every emotional whim.”

He considered the image. “This cloud, Eligius, is this from the smoke? An interesting effect and not at all unpleasant. Catherine, you can re-create this at will. Now, what to call it? Catherine, are you listening?”

Hardy, so still at her side. The light in the bungalow at the moment he came and did not breathe. The ride to the Maclears’. The lichen blooms along the sea path. All of it had slipped between her fingers long ago. All of it, now too far away to bring back.

What she’d prayed for, she held. The stilled moment told her that prayer meant nothing.

This was something else. Prayers were dead words elevated to divinity by finite men. But this.

I brought forth the holy. I made light stop.

Outside in the gazebo, George stood over Julia. She kept her gaze to the ground. The distance and the somber gauze of threatened rain veiled her. To those in Holland House who saw her, she was as marble-gray as her photograph.





SUDARMAASKED TO be locked in early that night, after the last dish was cleared and fruit set aside to ripen for the morning meal. Gita was crying again, only this time Eligius could not find the diya to calm her. Ewen had taken it for a plaything, he concluded. A servant had little right to object.

Julia remained in the gazebo after the Wynfields departed. The wind took up loose sheets from her writing pad and made scattering leaves of them.

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.

He 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 should 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.

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.