The Luminist

Remembrance


THE KNOCKING CAME URGENTLY AGAINST THE FRONT door. It pierced Catherine’s grogginess and sent her fumbling for her clothes. No one in the house had slept. Now dawn, come too soon.

She’d spent much of the deep night listening to Julia cry and watching the mist gather itself to leave the sea. The sea isn’t enough for it, was what her mother once said when as a girl she’d wondered about London’s constant shroud. So it comes to land, hoping to find what is missing.

She reached the door ahead of Eligius. Governor Wynfield stood on the porch, hat in hand. Soldiers waited in the road. “Catherine, their carriage was found in a ditch eight miles from here. They ’re searching – ”

“ Where?” Eligius blurted.

“I will not be questioned by a servant about this matter. If something befell him, it’s you who deserves blame. How can we know you didn’t come across him out there, you and the other thugs – ”

“ I want my husband back.” She touched Wynfield’s arm as if it were the thing that had spoken. “ Tell him.”

Were he here, Eligius thought, the old lion might finally believe in her love for him.

“South of here. Outside Devampiya.”

“On the Port road? The trade road?”

“The dirt path. The one your kind takes to the valley below the mountains.”

Eligius was running before he realized that he had moved at all. Wynfield shouted for him to tell his servant where to go. The soldiers swiftly mounted their horses. He scrambled onto Wynfield’s carriage and seized the reins. Panic extinguished everything in him save the sound of sobbing, the quiet cloudbursts that he’d walked away from three nights before.

“ You will not be alone this time.”

Catherine climbed next to him and clasped his hand. The air, thick with rain, fell atop her. The clouds and steel sky followed, and the stars somewhere above it all in the black vastation. It all plummeted down on her.

She heard the carriage door close, felt Wynfield’s weight settle in the compartment below her, but it was all so far away.

Wynfield’s servant took the reins from Eligius. “ Where? Are you listening? Where do we go?”

“The valley of the children,” Eligius said.

And one man, Catherine thought.





AT THE EDGE of the valley, where the low clouds brought merciless storms that quickly liquefied the ground, they came upon Ault’s meager cart upended in a ditch. Eligius told Wynfield’s servant to stop where the trees parted to reveal a walking path overgrown with vines. His skin prickled at the kiss of the cold rain. Mud sucked his feet under when he stepped down to steady Catherine.

“ Which way?” she called above the storm.

“ Into the valley. I know a path.”

Wynfield’s soldiers followed them, but the governor remained on the road. “ You’re sure of this?” he asked from the shelter of the carriage.

“ I thought I heard someone. I cannot be sure.”

“Then undo the damage.”

Soon the road was gone behind them. The going was slow and treacherous. Gradually, he and Catherine pulled ahead of the soldiers, whose heavy boots mired them.

Without Eligius as a guide, the soldiers would quickly lose their way, but their welfare didn’t concern Catherine. Too much time had gone by already. She feared for what she might find; she feared finding nothing at all.

Water. Its sluicing rush rose above the rain. Eligius knew where he was now. The apex of the valley ’s gentle bow towards the sea. The rain had all but eclipsed a path of footprints along the right bank. “There were two,” he told Catherine. He remained on the right side of the water. She took the left. Even a few feet away, they were like clouds to each other.

After what seemed like hours, they reached a part of the valley that years of weather had scrubbed down to rock. Something fluttered from a low branch ahead. Catherine fought her way to it on aching legs.

Eligius saw her path and followed. Exhaustion made a terrible jest of him; he teetered like Chandrak.

A man’s torn and bloody shirt wafted above a shape lying in the pooled water. On stumbling feet they ran to Charles’ side. Charles’ face was swollen. He was naked to his sodden undergarments. His flesh could be read underneath, like words through glass.

Catherine touched him. She pulled the storm from his beard. Leaves and mud and the drowned husks of insects.

A gurgling moan left the old lion’s mouth. “I’ve come to take you home,” she told him.

The soldiers began to ford the brown floodwater. “ Is he alive?” one of them cried.

“Yes!” Eligius called. “ He’s breathing!”

They lifted Charles out of the water. “ Is the missionary with you ?” one of the soldiers shouted, as if Charles was already too far away to hear them. He got no answer. Charles’ body drained water when they stood him up. He burbled pain and collapsed.

Lead us back, one of the soldiers told Eligius. Your master shouldn’t die here.

Charles was whimpering.

“Save your strength,” Catherine whispered, and he quieted. Taking his hand, she told him to close his eyes. She would fight through the rising wind for him.





BY THE TIME they reached Dimbola, the rain began to ease. She cradled Charles in the rear of the carriage. His breathing made her wince.

Eligius helped them out of the coach. The front door of the house opened. Ewen and Julia ran down to the grass.

The air outside smelled of sweet burning wood despite the rains. Soon, Eligius thought, we’ll hear the pops, and they ’ll be closer.

Sir John came from the foyer holding a thick chamois, which Catherine used to wrap Charles. As they brought him into the house, Julia remained on the porch with her brother. They stared without comprehension at the specter entering their home.

Don’t look for your father, Catherine wanted to say to her children. He’s hardly there.

Julia watched her mother through the open door, struggling to keep Charles upright but waving off assistance from the soldiers. “They found the missionary,” she told Eligius. “ He took a terrible blow to the head. He was wandering the road incoherently. They ’re treating him at the church.”

“ I am glad he is alive,” Eligius said.

Sudarma built a fire under the cover of a tree and set a pot of water over it. She stared at him, not comprehending his English. Yet her eyes could read him all his life. He turned away from her.

Julia folded her arms against the wind. “ I didn’t think you’d come back.”

“Then there would be no one to carry your writing to and fro.”

“ You’re an insolent boy.” She was crying. “ I saw my portrait. George brought it here while you were gone.”

“ Did he do the subject justice?” He couldn’t help the fever taking the words from him.

“ Do you see love when you look at it?”

“ I do. However regretful a thing that might be.”

He forgot his mother ’s eyes. They fell away with the rest of the world.





CATHERINE LAY CHARLES in his bed. When the soldiers left she undressed him, dried him, built a fire, and stoked its heat until its radiance reached the far corners of the room. Sitting at his side, she placed her hand atop his chest and felt it rise and fall, felt the flutter within.

He opened his eyes and looked at her. The lion of old, gathering strength he no longer had.

“There are things I am aware of, Charles.”

She went to the door and closed it. Outside, Sir John nodded in understanding.

“Our time is leaving us,” she said. “There is only time for me to tell you, I have ever loved you. For you, there is time to tell me what I do not know of you. You must remain at least that long.”

She cradled him. After a while, the rain slowed, became mist. By then, Charles had closed his eyes and begun to speak.





AT THE LATE hour of the garrison doctor ’s arrival with Wynfield, the sky bled smoke and embers above Dimbola’s turned fields. The winds swept small immolations over Wynfield’s carriage and out to sea.

Eligius led them to the house. Ruby flakes of ash withered and fell. He trod over them, wondering what lives these had been.

The doctor ’s arrival only confirmed the family ’s fears for Charles. A funerary presence, the doctor wore an expression of weary resignation, as if he’d failed before his first ministration to Charles had begun. After ordering a freshened fire in the hearth, he pressed the flat end of a rubber tube against Charles’ chest. “ His heart is terribly weak,” he said to himself. “It may have been better to leave him where you found him.”

“Surely there’s some medicine,” Catherine demanded. “Some poultice to take the cold from him.”

“There is nothing, madam.”

Governor Wynfield stood near the fire, warming himself. “Things have come to a regrettable point.”

“ Keep him warm.” The doctor repacked his things and accepted payment from the governor. “Give him what he asks for should he wake again. That is all I can offer you. That, and make arrangements.”

“The question of location must be addressed,” Wynfield said.

“Outrageous,” Sir John snapped. “ Must such a thing be discussed in front of his children?”

Wynfield waited until the doctor could be seen from the bedroom window, crossing the yard. “ We’ ve no time for the luxury of manners. Or have you somehow been spared from what is happening across the countryside? I cannot offer protection to you indefinitely. I need every available soldier to put down this uprising, and more yet. Another full garrison sails as we speak, but they are still a week away. I can’t spare a man to act as chaperone so you may all continue living here as if nothing has changed. Everything has changed.”

“ Is every colonial being told that they are alone in this?” Catherine said. “Or is this only for us?”

“ I resent whatever imagined skullduggery lies beneath those words, Catherine. I ’m only concerned with the safety of children I have watched grow up and a woman who, whatever our differences, is wife to my friend. Yes, to answer you. In good conscience I cannot allow any of us to remain in Ceylon. All must go until matters are settled here, myself included. I will return as soon as I can. The Court must not lack a voice.”

“And when matters are settled?” Sir John asked.

“The Court shall be reestablished, of course. Laws will be drafted and instituted to prevent this happening again.”

“ I see,” Sir John said quietly. “ In your image, as it were. Who will speak for Charles?”

“ I will, as I always have. We were in agreement on all matters of importance. Not that such things concern you.”

Catherine sat on the edge of her husband’s bed. She stared out the window. “ Where shall we go?”

“ England, I expect,” Wynfield said. “ Unless you have friends or family elsewhere – ”

“ We have nothing.”

A landscape of wonderment lay before her. The thought had only just found her. I stand atop nothing at all.

“ I am aware of that,” Wynfield said.

A terrible quiet took the room. She and Wynfield glared at each other while Charles’ breath rasped. “There are places for you in London,” Wynfield finally said. “ You could become a portraitist. I will be your patron. I shall sit for you at the first opportunity.”

“ I ’m not my husband. I do not wish to be in your debt.”

“And yet you are.”

Wynfield took a poker from its mount on the wall and stirred the fire until sparks danced against the bricks. “ It seems that Julia is to marry George, and so our families shall be bound to each other. You and I. And I assure you, she will have every privilege, and does that not fulfill your every hope for your daughter? Yours is a successful motherhood. Do not end it in ashes. Come to London. I will help you place-hunt. A nanny, perhaps.”

“ Bastard.” It was Julia who spoke.

Wynfield stared at her, his smile harsh and fixed. He went to her and cupped her face in his bearish hand. “ You will be welcomed into my family,” he said, “but I fear this habit of speaking beyond your place must stop now.”

Eligius tried to catch Julia’s eye. She didn’t look up, even after Wynfield left.

Catherine ushered all of them out of the bedroom. She drew the curtains together and shrouded the room from light. She told her eldest to get some rest, that things would be clear with rest. Then she carried her son to his bed in her arms, like a baby.

Eligius had never seen her do that, in all the time he’d been at Dimbola.

He heard the memsa’ab whisper to Sir John in the hall outside Ewen’s bedroom, to begin packing his maps and compasses, his telescope and the chemical casks.

Leaving them, Eligius went to Charles’ bedroom and poked the fire back to life. Charles’ eyes were open. He stared at Eligius with impossible composure. His lips parted, but no sound came. His fingers plucked at the air.

Eligius went to his side and listened. Then he left, to fetch what the old lion had asked for. He found the key in Charles’ study, unlocked the cabinet and brought every last paper. At Charles’ whispered request, he took the old map of Ceylon out of its frame and turned it over. There was a second map hidden behind the first.

“He has come to see you as I do.”

Catherine stood in the doorway. “ Read it, Eligius. All of it. But first, give me your word. Tell me you won’t remember him this way.”





The Madness of Farewells


WYNFIELD’S SERVANT OPENED HIS MAS TER’S DOOR. Eligius peered into the Wynfields’ home. Their interior was a grand expanse of marble and walls washed with a color like goat’s milk. George’s paintings covered almost every available square of space. They portrayed men of importance sitting in lushly quilted chairs, surrounded by birds of paradise arranged in deep crystal vases.

Wynfield descended his curved staircase, binding his black robe. In his broken repose he looked curiously small. “Is it Charles?”

“ Yes.”

“ Has he passed?”

Eligius thought of how Charles looked now. His limbs swimming atop the covers. His eyes rolling like balls in water.

“Soon,” he told the governor. “ But not before he sees you one last time.”





THEY JOURNEYED SEPARATELY. Wynfield’s servant followed Eligius’ carriage back to Dimbola. When the air began to burn, Eligius saw terror on the servant’s face.

He dismounted at Dimbola’s gate and surprised the servant by opening Wynfield’s carriage door before the servant could climb down. “ Your name,” he said to the servant in their shared language. “ You never told me.”

“ Rajadi.”

Eligius smiled at the ridiculous lineage of his name. “ Your village?”

“ Kilkerry.”

“ It’s gone, like mine.”

“I know.”

“ Did you know what was happening?”

“ I don’t allow my servants to speak in that tongue around me,” Wynfield said. “ It’s treacherous to do so, boy.”

They entered the house. It was quiet but for the mumblings of the missionary. In the dining room, Sudarma waited against the wall to be called.

He led Wynfield down the hall to the bedroom, where Catherine sat at the foot of Charles’ bed, surrounded by her family. Wynfield entered and bowed his head. “A terrible time. My deepest condolences. Lady Wynfield succumbed to her fear of the roads, but she is here in spirit.”

Catherine went to the window. “Charles has something to say, but no voice to say it. He wishes it to be read in your presence. He wants to hear from you on it.”

Wynfield folded his arms. “ Very well.”

She spread Charles’ documents. From the stack she selected one sheet and handed it to Eligius. A slight smile tugged at Wynfield’s lips as he began to read.

Andrew,



I have requests of you, and reasons.

My requests: Relieve my family of my debts to you. Take them out of Ceylon, but leave Dimbola in my name and lineage so that it may pass to Catherine and our children, should they ever return. See to their happiness. Provide them a home and means in London. Then join them there. Do not return to Ceylon. Step out of the way of those who will reconstitute the Court when Ceylon ceases her bleeding. It is my sincere hope that they will divide all seized lands equitably between the Crown and the natives, as we should have done.

My reasons:

I have in my possession every piece of paper ever drafted for your aims. They demonstrate beyond doubt your complic - ity and profiteering, your manipulation of the governorship and the Company Charter to bring about the seizure of villages throughout the southern provinces. I have evidence of the accounts you maintain in England, filled with the revenues you have sent back. I have the map you drew of the territories to be identified and targeted for our taking, and the colonial patrons these seized properties would be granted to. I have these documents because I wrote them for you. I advocated your desires tirelessly until any hint of opposition was removed. Did I ever really believe that what we did, we did for the good of Ceylon? Did I think ours were the best hands to hold this country until its children were grown and ready? In truth, I don’t know what I believed anymore. Only that my gift of gab, as you oftentimes promised me, would see my way back from poverty, loss of station and the purgatory of place-hunting I so dreaded. I have chased that spectre since my arrival in Ceylon. I believed these things mattered above my honor, to my shame. I believed you.

Do as I ask, Andrew, for the sake of my family. Nothing need be known of the terrible wrongs we have done. Only when you see my family, when your eyes meet theirs, will anything of this be shared. My family will keep their end of this silence in exchange for freedom from my bankrupt influences. I have watched over you all, and I know your ability to live with unspoken regret. My life, I fear, has been spent teaching this very thing to the ones I love most.

I am so sorry, my wife. My children. I could not face you as a man of no means. In the name of money and standing, I agreed to do these things. I see now, when I am fading from the memor y of all but a pitiable few, that I will forever be a part of the destruction of Ceylon. I am lost. Whether I can hear you now or not as this is read, I am further away than I have ever been from the man who arrived in Ceylon to make for himself a notable life.

Yours,

Charles Hague Colebrook.

Eligius gave the paper back to Catherine. She set it atop her husband’s documents. Her son came to her and she put her arm around his waist and held him close. She beckoned Julia and took her in as well; there was room.

The old man’s breathing came infrequently. His face grimaced in pain and concentration, as if by indomitable will he could make whatever world he floated through better than the one he left.

“ It seems we are all in debt now,” Wynfield said.

“Speak to my husband’s words while there is still a chance he can hear you. And know that anything you do for us does not absolve you. Either of you.” She raised a bony blackened finger at him. Her chemicals would never leave her.

“ What I did,” Wynfield began, his voice thin and lacking its sonorous authority, “ what Charles and I did, I would do again. Perhaps I would augment the garrisons against the lack of civility in these people, but that is all. We took a country that at its best could scarcely sustain villages built from mud, and made them estates that offered the Indian man a living wage. Where is the wrong? That we accelerated the inevitable failing of a backward people? That we sought to reclaim some good from that failure? Were I to tell it to the queen herself, I would be rewarded. Perhaps I will tell her myself.

“ But I will honor my friend’s wishes. Do you hear, Charles? I will do this for you. Your family will be seen to with the earnings from all our endeavors to improve Ceylon’s lands. What do you say about that, Catherine? Do you object? Are your morals inflamed? Or in the name of your well-being and that of your loved ones, do you say to yourself, there is a greater good met. None of us are different. Indeed, we belong together. And Charles, should I decide to come back and serve Ceylon, I will do so with no one’s permission. Speak of my work to your heart’s desire. Find someone who will care.”

“Then why leave?”

All my life, Eligius thought, I shall remember his expression, that a kutha could ask such a thing.

There was plain hate in Wynfield’s eyes, shorn of class or race. Hate between men. “ Because I do not want to die here,” Wynfield said, “ with the likes of you.”

He stayed only long enough to issue orders to Catherine. There was a steamer, the Royal Captain, that had veered into Colombo to avoid Calcutta’s sand banks lest it run aground in the Hooghly River. The steamer was due to leave soon, and there was little room left on it. Servants who were English were welcome.

“And Eligius,” Julia said.

“ I cannot speak to that.” Wynfield took his jacket and threw it at Eligius. Turning, he waited to be robed.

Eligius held the jacket open for the governor. “Be sure of your choices, kutha. If by some chance you leave here, there will be no returning for you, no matter the circumstance. Your own will not take you back.”

“ I shall earn my own passage to England, and back again if I choose.”

“ London will teach you a hard lesson. Think on it.” He stormed out without so much as a token touch of Charles’ hem.

Catherine held her husband’s hand. Her expression was unknowable. Eligius had never before seen a woman gaze upon her mate in such a way. Even his mother, pulling a thin blanket over a drunken Chandrak when he fell into an indifferent sleep, even she tended a small ember of affection. This was something else the memsa’ab sent to Charles as he drifted further away.

“ I don’t know what sort of life you’ll have, Eligius,” Sir John said. “ You’re a good fellow. You certainly will make a good husband and father, and even help your country get back on its feet. These are not options for you in England, I ’m afraid.”

Catherine tried to coax Ewen back into her lap, but her son would have none of his mother ’s attention. “ I don’t care if he comes or not,” he said angrily while staring at his father.

A man emerges, she thought.

Footsteps, dry and scuttling, trailed away from the bedroom and down the corridor. “ I must speak with my mother,” Eligius said.

“ Be under no illusions,” she told him. “There is no way to make right what has been done. Do not spend your life in search of such a thing.”

Charles’ stirrings had slowed to nothing. His mouth opened and remained.

“ I am aware,” Eligius said.





HE FOUND SUDARMA in his room. She held the feather print as tears filled her eyes, but he was already trying to forget the sight of her crying; the flush of silence it brought to the world. He wanted his blood to turn cold and indifferent. Then he could begin to forget Dimbola. This place he belonged to.

“ How do you even consider going with them?” she asked. “ Is it her? The daughter?”

He tried to walk away from her. She grabbed his shoulder and spun him roughly. “ Do you think I ’m stupid? I see a man’s coveting in your eyes, but don’t be so foolish to think that the likes of you will ever have the likes of her. You’ll do nothing but move your servitude from one place to another.”

“The servitude you wished for me.”

“ Yes. I was wrong. Is that what you need to hear from me? Very well. I was wrong and selfish, thinking only of my belly. How much more punishment do I deserve? And what about Gita? Should she be abandoned by her only brother?”

“ What does it matter, to leave or stay? I ’ ve seen how their people and now my own people look at me. I am hated equally. There is no life left for me.”

“ With them you’ll have nothing! Here, at least you have your family.”

“ We have no family left. Only what we remember.”

He sat on the floor and let his head rest against the cool wall. It trembled with the storming of feet in the halls. Julia’s wailing rose. “ I have to go. There is one thing to do yet, for the sa’ab. Come. I want you to watch.”

“I’ve seen all I want to see of them.”

“ Perhaps, amma. But you’ ve seen nothing of me.”





THEY FOUND EACH other in the hush of Dimbola, in the quiet corridors and darkened rooms, and that was how they told each other. One at a time, gentlest with Ewen, who grew still more sullen with the word that his father had died.

Everyone gathered in the bedroom. Charles lay in his finest suit. His hands were clasped across his chest. One eyelid remained stubbornly ajar, enough to see the lightless mote behind.

Catherine placed flowers in an unbound garland around his head. She stepped back to study the scene as tears rolled freely down her face. Eligius whispered in her ear and she sobbed, nodding. He left and returned with Charles’ map and documents. She stood motionless, so he took the liberty of arranging them for her. The documents under one of Charles’ stiffening hands. The map above his head, with the artist’s warm stencil lines facing out.

“ Mother, my tunic.”

Sudarma brought the tunic without a word. Eligius put it on and knelt to the side of Charles’ bed. To let the memsa’ab see.

“ Yes,” she said, weeping.

She arranged candles in a ring around the bed. Eligius removed the glass from Charles’ map. Using the small pane, he caught a sufficient amount of the candles’ flickering glow to direct a golden cloud across the old man’s face, filling it with a false radiance. Then he took up his position at the side of the bed.

She stepped beneath the camera cloak. Never could I have done what I have done if you were not with me, guiding me straight and letting me wander. You never prayed and you never believed enough that I loved you, and you will remain with me.

She opened the shutter. “Oh, my husband,” she wept from beneath. “You have torn my heart from me.”

Julia knelt on the other side of the deathbed. She laced her fingers together and muttered silent words over her father.

So did Eligius. He closed his eyes and found something to pray for that was his alone.

What you did, you are damned for. But it is not how I see you now. Should I ever view this photograph again and follow it back to this moment, I will not find the man who would save Ceylon. I will not find a worthy man. I will find a father who brought into the world a girl with pools of light in her eyes. A husband who stood back and let his woman find what had not been found. It is not a bad way to be remembered.

Catherine emerged from under the cloak. Her face was salted with tears and sweat. She washed the glass. Leaves of silver and shadow rode the water to the floor.

Eligius took the plate from her and left it to the light. Charles came soon, with the two-hearted map of Ceylon above him. On either side, Eligius and Julia knelt reverentially, their heads bowed.

Sudarma approached the plate. The candles behind the glass formed clouds on the image. She clutched her sari and knelt before it.

“ What shall it be called?” Sir John asked. He watched Sudarma’s quiet reverie before the glass.

“Ceylon remembers him,” Eligius said.

Catherine cradled her husband’s head. Next to her, the image of her husband bled and froze on the glass. “So it does,” she said.





BY SIR JOHN’S calculations, they could take five crates’ worth of possessions on the ship before running the risk of leaving their clothes and collectibles behind, to face the ignominy of being picked through by Ceylon’s unfortunates. Their furniture and books, all save Charles’ most prized legal tomes and treatises, had to stay.

They set about packing what remained. Julia’s writings and implements, her favorite dresses. Ewen’s calliope, into which a candle could be set to spin the shadows of exotic animals onto the walls. Sir John’s maps. For Catherine, her camera and all the plates from the portraits she’d made.

Sir John guessed the ship’s captain would forbid her chemicals. “ We’ll find new ones in London,” he told her. “Or we’ll create our own. Think of the resources we’ll have there.”

Eligius told his mother to bind the Colebrooks’ possessions with sheets to protect them. In the morning, he would ride to the Galle Face to give the vicar word of Charles’ passing. “ I want him to be buried here,” Catherine said. “ Behind the Galle Face. I will grant him his love for this country, but he will rest in the shadow of a Christian God’s house. As for whatever else remains here, to hell with all of it.”

Eligius offered his help to Ewen but the boy refused. There was a hint of recrimination in Ewen’s dismissive wave. It disturbed Eligius to see the boy behave in such a way, but he gave Ewen wide berth.

Sudarma was in Catherine’s bedroom, wrapping Charles’ photograph. A sheet lay over Charles’ face. Eligius could make out the contours of Charles’ beard and nose.

“I’ve lost you already.” She held the plate to her chest.

A noise startled him. He lifted the winding sheet. Gita played guilelessly under Charles’ bed. She cooed with pleasure at being found.

“ I showed her what you did,” Sudarma said. “ You made the dead stay in the world. I told her, we are watching him sail to a strange place and we are happy for him. A boy who can make light do as he wishes can surely find a way home again. But I ask you, meri beta. If you go, take Gita. She’ll be safer with you.”

“She would become a servant, amma. A woman without a family in a strange place.”

“She would be worse off if she remained. I don’t want her to live like this. Like me. A mother raises her children to leave home and not look back. Let me say I succeeded at just this one thing.”

He put his arms around her. “ You did,” he told her.





AS THE NIGHT deepened, the activity of packing paused for sleep. Eligius stood on the porch, considering Sir John’s mapped sky. He saw Julia emerge from the gazebo and followed her to Holland House. Inside, she opened the camera’s legs and stood it upright.

“ I have to pack this,” he said.

“And you will. Is there a plate and some of that dreadful water you need?”

“There is. But – ”

“Can you make a photograph alone?”

He thought about this. The breaths between the opening of the camera eye and its closing. The amount of chemical needed to wash the exposed glass. The light. “ Yes. I can.”

“Then make it of us.”

He set the candles in a circle around the chair and placed more in a cluster across the floor. Outside were the far sounds of guns, as Ceylon cut deeper into its own throat. Yet the cracks came to him as if he lay under deep water. The lights he set loose rippled in her eyes. There was nothing else to know.

She sat in the chair and watched him prepare the glass. “One night, mother spoke of you to my father. How you wanted to refashion the camera’s glass to reach the stars. I think they were discussing mother ’s desire for knowledge. For accomplishment and a lasting place. Yet she spoke of you as well, in the same breath.

“ I kept my father company more so than my mother or brother. I understood his treasury of quiet more than they. I knew how to hear him, and I expected no response from him to mother ’s idle chat. But to my surprise, my father said that every night he would gaze at the photograph of me with the light in my hand. He spoke of it as the portrait you both made, Eligius. He said you made me beautiful.”

Eligius slipped the new plate into the camera. He gazed at her as the camera would. “ You were beautiful before I ever saw you.”

He opened the camera’s eye, then went to sit next to her. Her arm pressed against his and remained. Around them, the night cooled. It tasted of winter. She would not be under the next rains. Where he would be could no longer be seen.

How strange, he thought as her skin’s warmth joined with his and became indivisible from him.

He counted his first breaths. “ What to call it,” he murmured.

Her hand found his cheek and turned him. “ We must be still,” he said.

“We are.”

He felt himself becoming woven into the air, into her. When their lips touched it was like the silver on his skin, replacing his flesh with what they ’d stolen out of time. They would never die. They would always be here.

Soon he told her that enough breaths had passed. He took the plate from the camera. “ Now,” she said, “pack it all. Tomor - row will be as it is. By week ’s end we’ll be on the sea. My father will be buried here. To make sense of all that’s happened is a farce. I don’t understand any of it, but there is tonight. I wish life could stand still, here in this moment.”

He told her he would make the photograph. She asked that he pack the camera quickly so her mother wouldn’t be angry. “ I will think of what to call it,” she said. “ Without a name, it’s an orphan.”

After she left he washed the plate and himself. The nitrate of silver cascaded over his hands. He set the plate to its light and himself with it. Their faces came to glass and skin. An amniotic haze enveloped them; a pigment of refracted candlelight that they seemed to float in like stars behind milky clouds.

He lay down, weary from the packing. Every second of the last days radiated through his legs, but he wanted to see the tide of them come.

The stain on his hand began to arrange itself. A little mote of pale – her eye, in profile, gazing at him. In the dry crease of his palm, their kiss. She’d asked that life stand still here and he’d lit a candle and burned the two of them into permanence.

“Of course, you know what you’ ve done.”

Catherine stood in the doorway, regarding the coming image. Julia and Eligius must have wanted that moment above all, she thought. To be free. To burn down all that held them still.

“ You kept your promise. You made a portrait sitter of a star.”

“ Not yet, memsa’ab. But I will. And you. You tied light to the sa’ab as he departed.”

“ Perhaps.”

They were quiet awhile.

“ It is a marked improvement over mine,” she said. “Clearly, I need your hand with me. Your light. The English sun can be as capricious as Ceylon’s.”

“ Is it your desire that I come?”

It surprised her, to cry in front of him. “ You have become a part of my life. I cannot allow you to simply leave it. There’s so much we’ ve yet to do. You found the way to me. This cannot be meaningless, that you have remained.”

“No.”

“I’ve always wanted more of the world than I am meant to have. I cannot imagine my life with another hole in it. I cannot imagine not knowing you. And Julia …”

“ Memsa’ab, what do I do?”

“About loving her.”

“About wanting to belong where I do not.”

“ I am acquainted with that problem myself.”

They laughed, content, while the cottage filled with the sounds of their twinned voices.

“ I don’t know what will become of you and her, Eligius. It would be hard. But if it matters at all, I think you belong with her.”

He moved to be next to her. “ It matters very much.”

“ May I tell you of things? Of London?”

“ I cannot create a picture in my mind to equal what it must be.”

“ May I tell you of Hardy?”

“ Yes.”

“ I don’t think I’ve spoken of him. Not to anyone.”

“ Look at every image you make. Each time, you speak of him.”

She talked about the child she never knew. She described the lights of London. She told him of people they might portray. Poets, scientists, seers, divines. She told him of the day his father died, of his shadow across the Court floor.

By then the moon had dipped below the trees. He could hear the weariness in her softening voice.

“Look at her,” she said. “ Look at you both. Like one of Sir John’s double stars.”

Memsa’ab, you should sleep. The image remains. It will still be here in the morning. So will I.”

“ Tomorrow, then.”

She kissed his cheek and left him. He lay down next to the photo and closed his eyes. Exhaustion consumed him, but the plate and paper hadn’t finished with each other yet. When the candles burned down, it would be done. Then he would pack the camera and sleep.

There must be as many candles as stars in London, he thought. I can live among them. I may grow old and be wretched in strange rooms, but I will always have this night. We all wish we were better than we are. It won’t matter where I do the wishing.

Before he could stop himself he was still and dreaming of the John Company ’s Court on Chatham Street, at six degrees and eighty degrees below the southern hemispheric orbits. He was in the lobby, watching Julia make her bauble’s lights dance across the wooden floor while the memsa’ab tried to arrest it all. Her lights grew brighter and brighter. His eyes stung the way they did when he stood too close to his mother ’s cooking fires. The room grew fiercely hot. The lights ignited the floor, the walls, everything was burning—





Life Stood Still, Here


ELIGIUS LEAPT TO HIS FEET AND WENT TO THE DOOR. The stars shimmered sickeningly through the heat and smoke. A sea of flame erupted in the Colebrooks’ field. Then they came. Shapes of men emerged from the burning rows. Their hair and clothes trailed tendrils of gray smoke. Some of them carried spent torches. Others carried machetes.

They left the field and moved towards the main house. Flames followed them, engulfing Dimbola’s eastern fence line and twisting angry red veins into the cracking wood. Drawing a breath, he broke from Holland House. The men didn’t see him as he raced up the porch steps and pushed against the front door. Locked. He ran around to the servant’s entrance, picked up a rock and threw it through the window, then scrambled in as glass teeth raked his skin. He screamed for Dimbola to wake up. Trailing blood, he pounded on doors until Julia stumbled into the hall, clutching at her dressing gown. “ Don’t go near your windows. They’re setting fire.”

She went to her brother ’s room. Sir John opened his door, holding his gun in a trembling hand.

Glass shattered somewhere else in the house.

He moved to the memsa’ab’s bedroom, terrified. Smoke lacerated his throat and eyes. He pushed the door open. She was on the bed next to her husband’s body, cradling his head in her lap. A hail of stones burst the window behind her, showering the floor with glass. Hands took hold of the window frame.

She kissed her husband goodbye.

Sir John appeared in the doorway and cried that the back of the house was on fire. There were men already inside, taking everything they could carry.

“Go to the front of the house,” Catherine told them. “ I have to find my children.”

She pushed them toward the dining room, then ran towards the rear. The hall was full of burning black clouds. In the sooty smoke she heard the cries of the men. Lost as well, they clawed at everything on the walls. They tugged violently at the carpet beneath her feet. Bodies pummeled her as the men careened past without recognition. A gauntlet of hands swept the air, looking for purchase. The sounds of hoarded glass and metal made a terrible music.

Already the smoke was gathering at the front of the house. She found her children and led them there, where Eligius and Sir John waited. Opening the door, she peered out as Dimbola came apart behind them.

“ I see Sudarma,” Sir John said. He pointed to the gate, where Sudarma stood, gazing out at the sea.

Catherine wrapped her arm around her children. Julia’s eyes were vacant. She held her writing pad to her chest as if it would save her. Together they stumbled out, sobbing and screaming down the porch steps and across the lawn. Men carrying paintings and furniture continued to stream in and out of Dimbola through its open wounds.

“Take them to the carriage!” Catherine cried, and left them for the yard.

Eligius brought them to the barn. The old horse whinnied pitiably as he harnessed it and pulled it to the door. Swarms of embers spewed from the field. Some landed on the gazebo. Its roof began to curl as new flames rose.

He pushed Ewen into the carriage and climbed to the seat above.

“ Mama!” Ewen screamed. He pointed towards Holland House. Catherine was running from the cottage, her arms full. She reached the carriage and climbed in next to Ewen. “ Is everyone all right?”

Ewen sought refuge in her arms. She held him, her living and dead child, his features stained from the heat of the fire.

Thrusting the reins into Sir John’s hands, Eligius slapped the horse into motion. In an instant the carriage was across the yard, taking them into the veil of smoke.

They pulled up at the gate. Sudarma handed Gita up to him, then withdrew the stake holding the gate closed. Eligius folded Gita into his arms and made room for his mother.

“There was never a time when I did not love you,” Sudarma said. She backed away from the carriage, shaking her head. “ But I must go where I belong.”

“Amma!” He stood, ready to leap from the carriage. But his mother looked at him as if he were better than he was; the boy who took her from home and broke her over Dimbola’s wood and stone. He couldn’t move.

“Catherine,” Sudarma said. The English word trembled in her mouth.

This was the amma he’d known, whose word was heeded, whose love was infinite.

“ I know she hears me,” Sudarma said. “ Tell her.”

Eligius translated.

“ Yes,” Catherine said.

“ Finish what I began. Raise my son to be a good man.”

Eligius said the words.

“ Yes.”

“ Do not make a secret of him.”

Ewen touched Catherine’s hand. He began to cry. “Bleed.”

Childish words. She raised her palm and marveled at the permanence of all she’d become. Mauve and apparition, interstitched with the skin whorls across her palm. She saw what alarmed Ewen. A trickle of blood from the cut across her hand. She’d gripped the photograph too tightly as she’d fled Holland House. Now the cracked glass had struck back. There would be a scar, ever. She would look at it one day, under a different sky.

Her cupped hand filled with blood. She listened to Eligius as he translated, then wept. “ I will never make a secret of him. Never.”

The world Sudarma turned and walked into was blackened and quieting. They waited until she entered the remains of the house. As Sir John took the reins and guided the carriage out onto the lane, Dimbola creaked in capitulation to the insistent fire. Pieces of the roof crumpled.

In the murk, Catherine saw the last of Dimbola fall away. A curtain of ash and umber. Flames leapt high into the air, then down to the invisible earth. Over it, she heard the sounds of the wheels.

She took her children into her arms. Ahead there was a ship, and the sea, and a city men crossed the world to glimpse. They made their way to the port, the last of the colonials to depart their lives.





FROM THE HILL above Queen Street the Galle Face appeared to clasp Ceylon’s jungles and the colonials’ dock together in a grid of interwoven color. The jeweled sea washed against the gunmetal of the Royal Captain. A swath of crimson soldiers held a crescent line against the massed knot of crinolines, cashmeres, silks, and cottons of the colonials, who dressed as if decreeing the fires in their once-country contrivances.

At the far end, the hues of saris and dulled white servant smocks, blackened from unwashable labor and uprising. The servants were not moving forward with the mass intent on reaching the ship. They remained behind, near the green carpet of jungle and the seams of fire inching in every direction.

Eligius steered onto a path that narrowed as it descended. Before Ceylon opened to afford them a glimpse of the sea, they saw empty fields, streams of char where the flames had traveled, processions of people.

They arrived at Queen and Chatham. The roads trembled with so many pressed onto the dock. An impenetrable queue of carriages stretched from the Company ’s receiving gate back into the road and to the foot of the solemn clock. He brought the carriage alongside another and tied the horse to its brethren.

They took what they could carry and left their horse to whinny amongst its own. Satchels of clothes, a trunk filled with Catherine’s photographs and Sir John’s celestial map, the camera itself, folded like a dead bird; they dragged their belongings to the foot of the dock. There they clambered over a fallen retaining wall and joined the hundreds. In the pall of smoke and the rattling of fearful voices, they gathered together and braced against the relentless surge of the crowd.

Water washed against the shoreline. Voices at once close and at odd distances drowned all else. The crush of so many made their progress hot and oppressive.

Catherine smelled the bereft odor of ash, sweat, flight. Ahead, the Royal Captain blotted the horizon. She felt the insistence of the sea beneath her feet. It moved under the dock and back again. She could see it in the slow sway of the ship. All around them the men of each family frantically waved bills of entitlement. They shouted at the cordon of soldiers. Men unaccustomed to begging begged uniformed boys for permissions and favors. One more crate. One place ahead in line. Pleas on behalf of sun-poisoned children and wives made mad with close quarters. Promise of tobacco, coin, glowing letters to superiors, introductions to London firms.

She saw Andrew at the ship’s rail. He looked old as men approached him and spoke into his ear. He nodded assent to what they said and they scurried off to be replaced by the next.

“He cannot see us,” Sir John shouted.

Eligius brought the bauble out from under his tunic. He held it towards the smoke-blighted sun and twisted it until it found what little light could be sent towards the ship.

Andrew looked up when he saw the light burst from the crowd. For a moment he was still. The distance was too great to discern his expression.

Somewhere behind them, a roar went up. A great collapsing into the fire. Trees, maybe, dried to splitting, or the collective shudder of falling structures traveling across Ceylon’s air like the light of a far sun. Old by the time of its arrival, the remains of something already gone into history.

Eligius heard the dirge of prayer. He felt eyes on him. Faces interspersed among the colonials. They gazed at him with recognition. As the English bodies passed, they held their ground.

Julia took her mother ’s arm. She clutched Gita to her chest. Like everyone, she turned at the sound. Now she pulled Catherine close. “ Mother – ”

Catherine grabbed Eligius’ hand and pulled him next to her, so no one would mistake him for anything but hers. She’d seen what alarmed Julia. Ahead, the colonials’ transit from the dock to the gangplank and safety. Behind, the Indians who had lived among the British. None of them moved forward. They didn’t beg the soldiers for passage. Some silent message had already been conveyed.

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 House. 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.