The Luminist

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 gathered 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 cake 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.”

They helped spread the legs of the stand, upon which they fixed the heavy brass and wood tube. Sir John tinkered with the knobs studding its smooth hide, then cranked its length to almost triple.

“It’s like the camera,” Eligius said. “It has a glass eye.”

“The lens on this is cut in a particular, exacting way, to bring far things close. Here. Look for yourself.”

Sir John tilted the telescope up to the dark skies. Eligius stepped behind it and peered through the lens. He felt exposed, having grown used to the blanketing dark of the camera shroud. “They ’re right with me!”

Millions of pinprick lights on the sky ’s curtain swelled in the eye of the telescope. He thought of Julia’s photo, of the pool in her eye. The stars looked like that up close.

For hours they captured what they saw, each in their language. Julia made renderings of words. Sir John surveyed the stars and drew intersecting lines, then dotted their surface with approximations of the sky ’s lights. Some he named, odd-shaped words that felt exotic in Eligius’ mouth.

While they worked, Eligius pointed the lens to every corner of Ceylon’s sky. He studied the telescope glass, letting his fingers trace its curves and puzzling out how such a lens might be made for the camera. “To reach up there,” he explained when Sir John asked what use such a lens might have for Catherine’s contraption.

“Your intellect is an awful grace.” Sir John bent over his sketches, which covered a dozen pages of minute observation.

“ Why do you do this?”

“Do what, boy? The map?”

“Yes. What good is it to make a map of a place no one can reach? A map of lamps?”

“A question from the unwashed masses! But I will tell you. While I speak, I want you to look at those lamps of yours. Every well-determined star, from the moment I register its place in the veil, becomes to the astronomer, the geographer, the navigator, a point of departure which can never deceive or fail him. Imagine! A light that can guide you all the rest of your journey. Those lamps are the same in all places in the world. Do you see?”

“I think so. But aren’t you afraid someone will make up stories about the stars like they did with the moon?”

“And there lies my cursed head.”

He wasn’t smiling, this man who seemed to have found something like tranquility in his lifetime. “They all laugh at the time I spend on the paths of heaven. It’s my madness, I suppose. The lights of the farthest cities are the only ones I’ve ever cared to see.”

He wrote on his paper. Tearing off a corner, he handed it to Eligius. “This is where you are, in relation to the lamps above us. This is your place on the map.”

Eligius studied the markings. Six degrees and thirty five minutes north latitude, eighty degrees east longitude. A secret language that could guide him the rest of the way through the world. Something to look at, should he ever get lost.





GEORGE ARRIVED AT Dimbola the next evening bearing more portraits of English society for Holland House’s walls. “I am most appreciative of the courtesies you have afforded me,” he told Catherine in the dining room. “I wish for Ceylon to glimpse my portrait of Julia before I ship it to London, where it will hang at the Royal Academy. Prominently, I am told.”

“I cannot hide my curiosity,” Sir John said.

“It is an exquisite rendering of her, I assure you.”

“I daresay. It is the venue, however, that sparks my curiosity. Why here, as opposed to your father’s estate?”

“Because the topic is love, sir, and it is here that love is found. That is Julia’s own sentiment as told to me on the occasion of my requesting her presence before my canvas. ‘If you will paint me, let it be only here. Let it be of love.’ Beautiful words, then and now. I treasure them. Tell me, Julia, did I do justice to your request?”

“I see in it what I hoped to see, yes.”

“I’m glad you are satisfied.”

A party was planned, a menu drawn up, and the day was selected for the unveiling of Julia’s portrait a week hence. Sudarma listened and nodded at the recitation of her duties.

George sought to kiss Julia’s cheek. She turned from him and went into her father’s study. “When does Charles return?” George called after her.

Julia closed the door with no answer. Catherine spoke up. “I expect my husband in the next day.”

“Manner dictates that I obtain his permission. I presume Julia informed you of my intentions.”

“There was no need. From your arrival with Sir John, your intentions towards my daughter have been plain.”

Eligius heard the study door creak. He turned to see Julia’s fingers clasping the wood.

“Where will you settle?” Sir John asked George. “Will you remain in Ceylon?”

“I have commissions in London. My status as a portraitist rises and with due respect to Sir John, I am tired of travel. I do not wish to be his stenographer any longer. Nor do I covet a seat at the John Company, though it is mine for the asking. Its machinations fill me with loathing, never more so than these days. No, I have prospects sufficient to provide a privileged life for your daughter. No doubt you would expect nothing less than a man determined to make his own mark on the world.”

“Indeed,” Catherine said. “I’m sure you’ll understand, I wish to hear from my daughter and my husband on the matter of your proposal.”

“Of course. This is no arranged marriage. We are not heathens.” He slipped a pocket watch from his coat, examined it, then tucked it away. “Please tell Charles when he returns not to do anything to jeopardize our union. I carry that message from my father directly.”

Catherine pushed her tea toward Sudarma, who took the cup to the kitchen. “Your father ’s friendship is a blessing to us and we are grateful. But a blessing does not produce an entitlement, young man. Julia is not yours by right.”

“I think there’s something you should know. Julia, we must speak of it.”

Julia pushed the study door open enough to be heard. “ It is sufficient that I wish to be married. Nothing else matters.”

“Love,” Catherine said. “Love matters above all. If you cannot say it, do not do this. Do not tie yourself to a man you don’t love. What sort of life will this be?”

“There are worse things, mother. Better a man who makes himself known, whatever may be said of him. Do you know about father? A sick and indebted man.” She glanced at Eligius, then dropped her eyes. “He is Andrew ’s servant, nothing more.”

“I’m afraid it’s so, Catherine.” George slipped on his coat. “The John long ago dismissed your husband with a paltry pension. Ceylon needs youth and strength, and Charles possesses none. He is indebted to many. He’s borrowed beyond his means and yours, I’m afraid. My father allows him some dignity, I suppose, and a place in colonial society. He has the gift of gab, my father always said.”

“Does he provide a service?”

Her question perplexed them. She was not mercantile, nor hard in matters of commerce. It was simply what she’d always known, come round for her at last. Her good, stoic, intellectual, distant man, whose eyes lit at the equations of law and governance and at no other time, was just another life that had come to her for want of the ability to survive.

“He must,” George allowed, “or else my father should have no use for him.”

“Then what matter his health,” Catherine said, “or his debts. What matter what he does or can no longer do. He has persisted. That is living, young man.”

“I wish to make myself plain, out of affection for Julia and you. Charles has been stripped of his directorship. But matters are worse than this. I fear, Catherine, there will be no garrisons sent to assist him in this jaunt of his. My father doesn’t believe soldiers ought to be spared for someone who willingly places himself in danger so these people might think him a friend. It behooves him to find his way home quickly, for the sake of his safety and what remains of your station.”

“Your father once called Charles friend. How does my husband deserve this?”

“He shouldn’t be doing it, Catherine! His duty is to the Court and my father, not these people! If every man with a regret or a sight in his eyes that he cannot abide abandoned his respon-sibilities, who would be left?”

“The sights in my eyes are the only thing I care for,” she said.

Julia sobbed quietly. “If that be the case, it’s evident your husband is not among those sights. That’s why he roams the countryside, looking for purpose. How selfish you are, mother.”

In a silent moment, the room emptied. Julia closed herself back in her father’s study. George departed, as did Catherine. She watched the young man leave Dimbola while late afternoon shadows lay at her feet.

Passing Eligius and Sir John, she went into the corridor where Hardy, winged and wrong, rested on his nail. She removed the painting and set it down on the floor. The nail had been driven shallowly; little strength was needed to pull it out of the wall. A bit of powdered limestone fell after it.

She set the nail’s point to the painting. Flecks of black oil flew at her attack, revealing a blight of pale beneath.

Selfish, she thought. The sights in my eyes exclude all around me.

Her face cinched up with anguish. She used the chemical-blackened heel of her hand to wipe her cheek clean.

“Memsa’ab?”

Eligius sat on the floor next to her. “There will be time for tears and anger later. But I think the young Wynfield is right. Your husband is alone out there. Memsa’ab, I know the land. I know what can happen.”

For a moment he thought he’d gone too far. But it haunted him, that the old lion could die with no one. That the gazebo could be empty, now and always.

The light of the gas lamps found a place in his eyes. She saw it quiver, as if threatening to explode. Then it stilled.

“Find him,” she said. “Bring my husband home.”





The Lion’s Mouth


HE DRESSED JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT. OUTSIDE THE SKY shed much of its black skin and bruised over with color. Some dark patches remained where smoke rose over fires that had erupted deep in the night. They had never been this close.

The old lion was out there somewhere. Hari and the others were too. Maybe they’d stolen enough to afford a gun. Maybe they’d even fired it by now, and someone had fallen.

He went to the scullery. His mother was washing the tablecloths in a simmering pot. Later, she was to go to market to place a large order in the Colebrooks’ name for George Wynfield’s portrait feast. Two such orders over the months, he thought, and both paid for in full. Perhaps it would be enough to repair what little remained of the Colebrooks’ reputation.

Sudarma poured him tea. It had been steeping for hours by the bitter, soapy taste. “Memsa’ab told me you were going,” she said.

“There’s fighting, amma. I’ve seen smoke all night.”

“Stay to the trees. Don’t be seen. They know who works for the colonials.”

“Amma – ” His voice broke. Shame and fear set off terrible equations in his head. “I’m scared to go.”

“Then don’t.” She cut the colonials’ bread into soft triangles.

Despite the time spent with it, he still hadn’t become accustomed to its sour taste. Full of air, and how quickly it turned. He longed for a bit of chapati bread baked over stones. He missed Matara.

She handed the bread to him. “Take extra.” There was hope and pitiable loyalty in her eyes. In case you see them and they’re hungry.

“I was wrong to bring you here,” he said. “I’m sorry for how you’ve become. You don’t even pray anymore.”

A gentle crack rose in the air. Far away, long-traveled, like the wind through the valley. How much distance did the gunshot have to journey, he wondered, to find us here?

“Go,” Sudarma said. “I’ve much to do.”

The room began to turn. Sickening black spots appeared in his vision. His stomach boiled an acrid bath into his throat. He vomited tea into a bucket of wash. A pair of pants with pockets. His. Once, she’d told him that she’d cleaned those pants with river water and out of the pocket came the steam of ships that he was fated to take to the wider world.

He wiped his mouth with a trembling hand as the dulled sound of gunshots continued in the distance. Sudarma lifted her head from the boiling cloth and gazed at the pantry wall until the last of the guns fell silent. Then she returned to her work.





JUSTICE NEWHOPE CAME to his door only after Catherine stood at the window and shouted that she wouldn’t leave until she’d heard from him. Even then, the burly barrister only opened it a crack. “You’re a fool to be out alone! What do you want?”

“I must know what my husband said to you before he left. When you and Crowell came. Please, he’s been gone almost four days.”

“Gone all this time? He told us only that he was traveling to Puttalam, to meet with village leaders. That’s half the time at most.”

“He should have returned by now.”

“Listen to me, Catherine. You don’t want to know the things he told us.”

“I know about his debts. How he is beholden to Andrew.”

“That’s the least of it. This whole settlement will be asked to leave before long, until the soldiers can put down the fighting. Return to Dimbola and pack. Charles will have to fend for himself.”

“I cannot. He’s not well.”

“Nor are any of us.”

“I am not a woman in need of protection. You know what I ask. Will he return?”

For a moment, Newhope looked at her as a father, with kindness and sadness. “This land has brought us great misery. Charles knows it, yet he loves it despite all. I think he will die here. I think he wishes for that. Me, I hate this place. There is no hope here anymore.”

She turned away as Newhope closed his door. “You heard?”

“Yes, memsa’ab.” Eligius stepped from the shadows. She’d told him to remain out of sight, lest this terrified colonial see him as a threat.

“I can’t ask you to go any further on our behalf,” she said. “It’s dangerous, and you’re as hated as we.”

“I cannot just return, not without at least reaching Puttalam and Devampiya. They are far. I must try.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“Julia and Ewen need you. If something happened…”

No country for the motherless. Charles, how things have come round to find me.

“Memsa’ab, did you ask him if your husband wants to die?”

She took him away from Newhope’s premises, back to the road. Dimbola lay in the opposite direction from Puttalam.

“I asked a question that I believe I know the answer to. Spend a day on this, Eligius. No more. Or else I will find the way to you.”

“You would do that rather than say goodbye. How you loathe goodbyes.”

He smiled.

She opened her arms and he came to her. They parted without a word. Eligius began his walk to the remains of villages, Catherine to what remained of home.





SEASONS OF RAIN and drought had alternated in a terrible maypole since his last glimpse of the East India Court. All the light had been scrubbed from its exterior. Paint peeled from the eaves just below the lip of the roof, revealing dirty gray stone as pockmarked as the day it was broken free and beaten into walls.

Soldiers milled about near the locked gate. A contingent of thirty stood in a phalanx just on the other side of the iron bars, monitoring the Indian men who occupied the road and the cleared field beyond. Eligius saw twice as many soldiers talking in groups, rifles within easy reach.

He crossed the field. A thicket of Tamil men watched the Court and its surrounding buildings. Some turned to see who made the dry sticks break. They nodded at him and returned to their vigil. No one spoke to him or to each other. Whatever had been planned, it was done.

It filled him with dread, watching them wait.

In five hours, he encountered only one village still intact. The sounds of guns broke the stillness every few miles. Through the day they came faster, lingered longer. Not far off. Soon, he’d find them.

At a plantation near a clear stream, he knelt to drink. Warm water broke the dust in his throat. He splashed it over his face and neck, then surveyed the grounds. The estate was prosperous and well-kept. He could see the family on the porch. A young woman in a dress as yellow as saffron, with a hat pulled down to shade her. Her three children played on the grass while an older woman sat in a chair swinging gently from two chains.

The late afternoon light was thinning. There was no one around to ask whether they’d seen Colebrook and the missionary. He wasn’t sure how far he’d come and didn’t recognize any of the landmarks around him.

A handful of Indian men toiled in the field abutting the house. They picked fat cotton from the coil of green that reached to their ankles.

He was surprised to see anyone still working for colonials. “My brothers,” he asked, catching the attention of the closest men. Two of them looked to be his age, but worn to poles by their labors. “Are these fields the colonials’?”

“Everything is theirs.” An older man raised his hand to shield his tearing good eye; his left was as cloudy as egg white. “We only get what’s dead.”

“It used to be our land,” one of the boys said.

“Part of it,” his peer commented. “Our village was over there.” He pointed to the trees. “It was sold to them.”

“I’m looking for two of the colonials,” Eligius interrupted. “An old man and a missionary. They would have traveled two, maybe three days ago. Maybe they came to your village.”

The one eyed man spat on the ground. The younger ones took their cue from him and turned away. “I saw them,” the man said. He glanced over his shoulder at the house. The colonials were far away and attending to themselves. “They passed through Devampiya a day and night ago.”

“Heading south?”

The man shook his head. “North.”

Moving away from Dimbola. Towards the smoke and the guns.

“I was still living in Puttalam even though it lay in ruins,” the man said. “It was still my home. When I saw them, the older one was ill, and the missionary made him rest in the shade for a long time. Then he helped him up. The old one was upset that there was no one important to speak to. They had a cart. The old one lay down in the back, where servants would ride – ”

A cry went up in the fields as a monstrous plume of smoke rose above the trees. It engulfed the sky over the plantation. The colonial children screamed. Their father came to the porch with his rifle.

So close, Eligius thought. No more than half a mile.

In the fields, one man dropped his hoe. He walked to the road. Two more fieldworkers followed. They marched past the colonials’ property line in a parade of rags and coffee skin.

The colonial put a protective arm around his wife. His children and the old woman went into the house.

“Son,” the one-eyed man said, “forget the colonials. They ’ll get what they deserve. Find a weapon or a place to wait, but don’t be found doing nothing.”

Eligius nodded.

“I spoke to the old one. I brought him some water. Do you know he was the only colonial to ever speak to me like a man?”

“What did he say?”

“That he was sorry for many things. For Swaran Shourie.”

Another plume rose. Eligius heard more screams.

“Offer a prayer over the old one.” The man dropped his bag of cotton and began to walk. “ When you bury him. And one for me. I’ve no family left to mourn me.”

Eligius waited for more of the field workers to leave, then joined them. They passed the house gate, the mob of them, singing old songs he first heard as a child playing on the beach where the fishermen made beautiful melodies that compelled the waves to return day after day.

Now all the colonials were inside the house. He could see movement at their front windows. The children, watching without comprehension.

He thought of plumes of smoke rising over Dimbola.

When the workers turned into the gate, axes and hoes held high, he ran in the opposite direction. Soon the sounds of shots were too faint to hear.

He ran into the night, and the next morning, through a ribbon of sounds and smells, voices and fighting and burning. He slept only awhile, and only when he reached the lion’s mouth, as the first bruise-violet light could be seen over the mountains. Once, he woke in the night to what sounded like sobbing coming from the valley below. The wind was blowing, he thought, and the dead were whispering their secrets to the appa of the neem tree. He’d tried to will the sound away, then got up and started walking until he couldn’t hear anything but the jungle stirring.

It took him until midmorning to find something to eat in the pantry of an abandoned house. How strange, he thought, to see these walls broken like those of the villages. A week since it burned. Maybe less.

A garrison of weary soldiers shuffled by on the road outside. He hid until they passed, then went to find the colonials’ well. Drawing up the bucket, he soaked his torn feet and wondered where else to look. Nowhere, everywhere. The sa’ab could have simply gone, never to return out of shame. Maybe he’d already passed Dimbola in the dark. A last look before he fell to the land he loved but increasingly did not know.

If he failed to find the sa’ab, he thought he might do the same.

He left the house and shadowed the garrison until midday. In a field swaying with razor grass, he parted company with the soldiers. They continued up the road.

Pulling up clumps of blades, he cut a patch into the field big enough to sit down in and not be seen. He promised himself that he’d only rest awhile. His feet were cracked and bloody. His back ached; he could only bend forward a fraction before daggers pressed against his spine. What would it matter, he thought, if he never returned to Dimbola? What would be missing? A servant. A water bearer, a carpenter. A mover of light. Catherine would make her way with photographs of her betters, depicting their once-hoped for selves. Sir John would map stars. That he would be precise about it would only matter to him. Julia would marry and raise children with Wynfield. She would become a lady under a wide hat that kept her well hidden.

Perhaps she would lose one of her babies, like her mother. She would mourn the stranger that came to her new world broken, then go on.

I would never see what her idea of love was. I would never make portrait sitters of the stars.

A sound grew on the road. Carriage wheels churning up rocks and dirt, and the jagged wheeze of a horse driven too hard.

He peered over the tops of the grass blades. The carriage emerged on the far side of the field. It pulled off the road and the driver hopped down to help a woman out. She moved in a wobbling, unwieldy way. Her distended belly pulled her forward like a cast anchor. She knelt to the dirt. The sounds of sickness filled the air.

Behind her, another woman stepped out unaided. A maid or midwife, Eligius thought, followed by two small children. The downed woman barked at them but the distance made cotton of her words. She held out a demanding hand but still her children slipped into the grass, two blurs of curls melding with the green.

He started to smile, until the high sun glanced off of something brilliant and shiny in the trees across the road from the family. Metal.

He was up and running before those trees parted, before the men spilled onto the road. Like beetles pouring from a split rice sack they scrambled up and over the carriage and its driver. Eligius saw him slip under a rolling wave of blades. The car - riage tipped over with their weight. Its horse crumpled as its lead line hung it sideways.

An awful stew of cracking wood, pitiful whinnies and an abrupt cry reached his ears. He scanned the field, terrified. The world spun in a smear of green and flashes of gold hundreds of yards away. The children. They were screaming for their mother. Soon the sounds of last life and the breaking carriage would quiet. They would be heard.

He ran for them as the winds swept the stiff blades against his bare legs, gashing him relentlessly. The children clutched at each other and cried when he reached them. Kneeling next to them, he told them to hush in a harsh tone. They obeyed, eyes wide.

He lay them flat, his palms against their cheeks. Holding them down, he craned his neck. There were men at the carriage, pulling it apart and carrying it off. There were others gathered at the tree line.

He took one child under each arm and rose cautiously. His neck and back burned. Carrying them like parcels from the butcher, he set them down behind a thick coil of neem roots. The children were so small. They slipped into the gaps. The boy held his sister’s hand.

“Don’t move,” he told them. “Don’t make a sound.”

The boy’s eyes flickered with primitive recognition. His hand left his sister’s and covered her eyes.

Eligius’ heart broke. They think they’re about to die from me.

A sound made him spin around. Far in the field, one of the men raised his blade into the sun and brought it down, scattering grass into the air and with it, a tumbling sheaf of the maid’s frock.

“Hold your sister tight,” Eligius ordered the boy. “Don’t let her see.”

The boy’s lip trembled. Tears sprang from him.

“I’m going to cover you both so you won’t be spotted. Only I will know where you are. Don’t move until I come for you. Do you understand?”

The boy nodded. His little chest filled and fell.

Eligius covered them both with leaves until only a bit of their golden curls protruded like treasure. He found a heavy rock and ran, leaving his mind behind with the children. He ran as if in a silent void, with only the rock in his hand and bubbles of light descending from his vision to dazzle the green swaying grass.

The man never heard him. He was in mid-swing, his machete soaring up in a curtain of red drops and a fluttering flag of lace wrapped stubbornly around the blade, and he never heard Eligius descend on him with the rock. The stone struck bone and didn’t stop. The man fell limply.

The maid lay on her back. Her face was turned to one side, demure. She was covered with blood, dirt, and grass. The skin of her cheek lay open and imbrued The man’s indiscriminate swings had left that side of her unrecognizable. She was breathing shallowly, expelling ribbons of red foam.

He’d once gone hunting with his father and other men. One was skilled with a slingshot and brought down a bird before it had a chance to escape. Breast split, it waited. He could remember the look in its eyes as their shadows fell over it. How it trembled as his father picked it up and twisted its head until its neck snapped.

The maid looked at him like that. There was nothing to be done to stop her leaving.

He left the dying woman and crept through the grass to the remains of the carriage. They’d torn apart the horse in the same manner. Bits of both lay in broken mounds.

He knew the men could see the road. Were he to take the children that way, they would be spotted.

“Leave me alone!”

He got onto his haunches. Between the men’s ranks, he saw the young woman screaming. The remains of her dress hung from her arms. Her breasts and womanhood were bare. Her hands lay protectively across her pregnant belly. The man closest to her set his blade down and went to her, forcing her to her knees. He wore a tunic. A servant once, maybe a day and a lifetime before.

A shot rang out. One of the men who’d stepped forward for a closer look fell. More shots cascaded like rain, and more of the men fell. A small cadre of soldiers ran towards the quickly scattering men, firing flame. The men slipped between trees and were gone. The soldiers followed them.

As quickly as it began, the road fell silent. The sounds of fighting grew muffled behind the canopy of jungle.

He ran to the woman. “Come with me quickly. I have your children safe.”

The woman rose but didn’t walk.

“Hurry. They could come back.”

They reached the trees and for a moment he thought the children were gone. Then one twig rolled from its perch atop a soft rise and a finger wriggled through. He uncovered the children and bid the woman to lie down with them.

“My servant,” the woman said. “My driver.”

“Stay here. You need clothes.”

She embraced her babies against her breasts. They burrowed into her as if seeking away back.

He returned to the field. The maid was still. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. Gently, he pulled her frock from her shoulders and down her torso. It was stained with blood but whole. At least the young mother would be covered.

The dress snagged under the maid’s body. He pulled harder, not wishing to touch the ruin of her. His efforts caused her head to loll lazily over, revealing a smooth, clean cheek.

He took a step back as the world spun away from him. A voice rose in his head, bitter from a life of work that never received its adequate due. What does a servant do? You carry on and you don’t see what’s plainly there. Kutha.

He pulled Mary ’s dress free and brought it to the young mother. While she slipped it over her head, dislodging her children only for the instant it took to let the dress fall across her nudity, he asked her where her home was. Near the port, she responded.

“Near Dimbola,” he told her. “Near the Colebrooks.”

“You’re their servant. The one who helps Catherine with her portraits.”

He helped her climb out of the clump of tree roots. They walked through the grass to the road. “She served us well,” the woman said when they cleared the field. Her children clung to her maid’s dress. The little girl pressed herself against the fabric, leaving a swipe of red on her forehead.

The spot where Mary lay could no longer be discerned from the expanse of grass.

He crossed the road and found a machete. “We stay in the jungle. It’s not safe to be seen.”

“We should wait for the soldiers to come back,” the woman said.

“There are more of us than them, memsa’ab. We’re alone. Can you walk?”

She nodded.

“We have far to go. If your children tire, we will carry them.”

“Mary told me of you. She said you were good.”

“She said nothing of the kind.”

The children stood in the shade of a tree canopy, waiting for someone to do something. Were he to leave their mother and take them by the hand, he felt certain they would go willingly. Such was their state of shock.

“Why are you doing this?” the woman asked. “We’re nothing to you.”

A strong wind blew up around them. One of the dead men lay not far from them. His clothes rippled in the unceasing air.

The noise roused the woman. “My name is Margaret. My baby cannot be born here. My husband won’t hear of it.”

“It’s not long off by the look of you.”

“Don’t speak to me that way.” She was breathing too fast. Shock overtook her. “Help me,” she pleaded. “That my children should see me like this.” She held Mary’s bloody garment away from her skin.

They hewed tightly to the trees as they walked. The children began to cry and he sang Gita’s lullaby. In a while it was all he could hear.

Outside Chilaw they found an estate that appeared intact. Margaret broke clear of him and her children and tottered as far as the estate’s lush field of coffee before Eligius grabbed her. He clasped his hand over her mouth and pulled her behind the weathered timber of the estate’s fence line. “I have been traveling for a day and a night,” he whispered, “and I have learned to listen.”

She stopped struggling as the sounds of breaking glass reached them. A band of men emerged from the house, their arms full of tapestries, silver, anything that could be pulled from the house and from each other.

Eligius dragged her back behind a stand of areca without being seen. There, in front of her children, he slapped her hard enough to draw tears. “If you leave again, I will let you. I will take your children. They will be raised by someone with more sense.”

She hung her head and cried, but did not try to seek help from her kind again. There was none to be found. All the colonials were gone, from Negombo to Weligama.

Under his urging, the children managed to coax another hour from their swollen feet before crumpling to the ground and sobbing. “I know a place where we can rest,” he told them. “It’s a magical place I know you’ll like.”

The boy shook his head; what little pride he’d found in protecting his sister had wilted in the face of his maid’s death and a day of trudging through terrifying landscapes. But the little girl stood up and brushed leaves from her dress, a yellow frock he suspected she wore to high tea. She looked like a sunflower after a storm. “What kind of magic?” she asked warily.

“The kind that will get you home.”

He brought them to the elephant temple on the last droplets of their endurance. The boy curled up against the top step and fell into a troubled sleep. His limbs jerked violently, warding off phantoms.

Margaret sat next to him and stroked his hair. Eligius constructed a hasty lean-to, shading her from the sun and the wind. She would not look at him.

Exhaustion lapped at him. He found the gold plaque and sat beneath it, the machete lying across his thighs. A radiating warmth drizzled his scalp and neck; reflected light from the plaque, bent upon him. The sensation filled him with dread at returning to Dimbola with no word of Charles. What words could he use, to say such a thing?

The trees across from the temple rustled. He saw the glint of a rifle, its barrel aimed at him. “I’ll kill you.” English. A young Britisher emerged. His weapon quivered wildly. Blonde stubble dotted his young chin. Sixteen, if that. So like the soldier that day. All the ones who fought the colonials’ battles, did they all have to be boys?

Eligius let the machete fall to the ground. “I’m not one of them. I ’m traveling with a young memsa’ab and her children. We are making our way back to Port Colombo.”

“Lies. How have you survived out here with children and a woman?”

“I know this land.”

The boy’s rifle lowered. He sniffled. “Tell me it’s true.”

“It is.”

“I’m lost. I was running with my family – ”

“The governor and most of the Court live in Colombo. I expect your family is there.”

“Show me the woman and children. I want to see them for myself.”

He led the boy up the first steps. In the center of the temple, Margaret dozed with her son. The girl was making a leafy lean-to, a tiny version of her mother ’s. She smiled when she saw Eligius.

Eligius woke Margaret. “ We have a guest. He will be walking with us.”

“Where are you from?” she asked the boy.

“My family’s in Tangalla.”

“Not here. From home.”

“Isle of Wight, ma’am.”

Eligius left them to speak of England. He knelt next to the girl. “What’s your name?”

She spread her leaves carefully. “Alexandra.”

“Alexandra, I promised you magic.”

He took her to the temple wall and let her run her hands along its carvings. “They ’re cousins to the clouds,” he said.

She pursed her lips. “They don’t look like clouds.”

“Nor do you and your brother look alike.”

“Elephants don’t fly.”

“That’s why sometimes you see clouds near the ground. They ’re visiting.”

“That’s nice of them.”

“Say goodbye to the elephants. We have to go.”

“I’m very tired.”

“I’ll carry you.”

He lifted her onto his shoulders. Margaret stirred her son and the boy, who’d fallen asleep with his rifle in his arms. Eligius gave the boy his machete. The jungle wasn’t as thick from here, he explained, and were they to come upon any soldiers this close to port, he did not wish to be seen with a weapon.

“Another hour,” he told Alexandra. “ Hold on to me.”

She bounced atop him. She let her head fall back and stared up through the trees. Her hair tickled his neck. “ I saw you make the man fall down,” she said. “ In the grass, with Mary.”

“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.