The Luminist

To the Gates of Empire


AFTER GRACE, MARY SERVED THE WYNFIELDS FIRST. Charles and Andrew sat at the far end of the lunch, engrossed in conversation. Catherine sat across from Lady Wynfield, who shared stories of her son’s exploits with Sir John as they followed the threads of the star tapestry.

“Rangoon, last we heard. In any event, our visit. For I well recall the difficulties setting up a home. Charles should soon be paid sufficiently to afford some furnishings.”

This caught Andrew’s attention. He ceased his discussion with Charles. “Great work lies ahead.” He offered Lady Wynfield a withering look that shrank her in her seat. “Great reward accompanies.”

“Hence our visit,” Lady Wynfield said uncomfortably. “Andrew, may I?”

Andrew shrugged.

Taking Catherine by the arm, Lady Wynfield led her outside to their carriage. Catherine paid scant attention. As they made their way between rows of empty chairs, she could not get Charles’ expression out of her thoughts. Proud, at times arrogantly so, a man who suffered no one. Summarily silenced by Andrew and humiliated by Lady Wynfield, and he responded as if he expected such treatment. As if he harbored no expectation of better.

Lady Wynfield removed two canvases from their carriage. She unveiled them in the house. “My husband’s sponsorship of yours is a matter of some discussion amongst Ceylon society, you see. Politics, like nature, cannot sustain a vacuum for long.”

“ My husband is an accomplished and well-considered man, lest you see him otherwise.”

“Otherwise?”

“ Dependent. Place-seeking. In need.”

“ You as well, madam. The women with whom I am acquainted speak of you. I wonder, are you as attuned to their speculations in that matter?”

Catherine was silent.

Lady Wynfield unveiled the first painting. A perfectly adequate rendering of Julia while at the Cape. A girl of fourteen poised on the precipice of understanding and intending the communication of beauty. Her smile, the curve of her lips, her loosely pinned hair; George had acquitted himself well with her.

“May I again suggest a luncheon?” Lady Wynfield leaned Julia’s portrait against the wall. “ I chair a group of Directors’ wives. We function as, shall we say, a far-flung adjunct of Christian good works. We sponsor the transportation of children from this savage country to the continent in times of cholera or malaria. We help the edifice of the Galle Face rise. I wish to invite you to organize such a gathering. To do so is to inoculate your husband from needless gossip. For him, shall we say. Here, perhaps this is a painting to hang elsewhere. Obvious reasons, of course.”

She unveiled the second painting.

The infant bore the wings of angels, a quiet smile that spoke of serene rest. It bore Ewen’s face, and therefore what of Hardy could be salvaged.

The light was wrong. The wrong shape in the eye, the wrong density, the wrong compound of tear and flame. She’d done her best to relate to George what she recalled and he had missed everything.

“ Perhaps you can hang this in that shack out there,” Lady Wynfield suggested.

Catherine thought about it. Failures resided in the cottage now, but hope did as well.

She saw, through the window, figures standing at her gate. Oddly, one – tall, lanky, perhaps that missionary? – held an umbrella above his own head while the smaller one stood in the rain, as if the deluge were home.

Something in the space between the figures and here, the house and its quiet, felt familiar.

She placed the angel on the floor, next to Julia’s portrait. “It belongs in here,” she said.





ASCENDING THE PLANKS, Eligius crossed the Colebrooks’ frontage, passing the gray whiskered monkeys that squalled on the banks of the flooded yard. At the canopy, he was met by a young English woman. Her clothes were as simple and workmanlike as her harried, unkempt appearance. “ You’re the servant?” she asked in clipped Tamil. “ From Ault?”

He nodded.

My mistress sent me to see who you were.” She turned, then stopped to see if he was following. “What are you waiting on? The rain’s ready to blow the sheet out to sea! Is that how you want your memsahib to meet you?”

“ No,” he answered in Tamil. “ But I have letters. I was told to present them to Colebrook memsa’ab.”

“There’s time enough for that.” She climbed up onto the veranda and bade him to follow. Her face was creased and puffy, her hair a nest of knots. “ Take hold of this pole and stretch the canopy taut. I ’ll have the other.”

She walked towards the corner opposite him. Her gait was that of a shuffling elder, stooped and fussy, as if forever racing the rain.

Together they pulled the poles to opposite ends of the veranda. The canopy was little more than a series of old sheets hastily sewn together. It stretched at the gapping seams but did not tear when the wind pushed up and under it, threatening to yank the poles from their hands.

He glanced at the audience that had gathered to fill the seats. Thirty, he reckoned, maybe more. To a one they looked none too pleased that a maid and a local stood between them and a drenching. He recognized some of the men from the Court. Their jowls and mutton chops, starched collars and dour expressions, seemed cut from the same cloth. The women were dressed in their finest, yet appeared morose over having to hide their resplendence beneath umbrellas and shawls.

The girl he’d seen in the Court foyer, the spinner of light, sat in the front row. She wore a dark dress buttoned to her neck. Her hair flew freely in the wind. Stray strands clung to the moisture on her cheeks. The men all stole glances at her when their wives weren’t looking. From her secret smile, Eligius wondered if she didn’t know precisely her effect.

One of the men seated behind her tapped her shoulder, then whispered something. She smiled. “ Who should open the play?” she said quite loudly, drawing the attention of those under the sheet. “ Why, that would be my luckless self.”

She was staring at the veranda. At him. “ Does he know his role, Mary?”

The maid holding the other pole shook her head. “ I haven’t given him the playbill to hold, Miss Julia, for fear he’d drop it in this ocean.”

“He looks capable enough.”

The girl ascended to the veranda. She selected from a stack of bound papers on a small table. “ Tell him to hold it just so.” She opened the playbill and pointed the text to the center of the veranda. “ Make sure my mother can see the pages. Should she forget a line, he must be there, but not obviously. She is not to be seen as needing, which is not unlike asking the sun to be discreet in shining.”

He stifled a smile and waited for Mary to butcher the translation, then took the papers from her hand and held them towards the veranda while struggling to anchor the pole. The cover of the playbill startled him with its audacity. A woman lay under a flowering vine. So vivid was the rendering that she seemed in tormented motion beneath his fingers. A winged naked infant drew a cloth over her. It whispered to the woman the way the man had whispered to this Julia, with a smile and a thief ’s heart.

Leonora, it said. Translated by Catherine Palgrove Colebrook. London: Longman Brown, 1827.

“Such fascination with my mother ’s work,” Julia said. “ Why, one could mistake him for a reader.”

Mary related her words. He thought about saying something to let her know that he could read, that he could understand. But the gulf between them felt like the best vantage point from which to see her. He responded in Tamil.

“ He’s embarrassed to be in your presence while holding an undressed woman,” Mary said.

The restive audience quieted. Julia took her place in the middle of the veranda, her hands raised for silence. She glanced at the book Eligius held, then smiled. “ Friends all, I know you’ll join me in wishing my mother health and happiness, for evermore.”

She walked off to polite applause. In a moment, the woman he’d seen at the Court, hiding beneath the spider’s curtain, strode towards him. Her eyes fell to the open text. “ Don’t let’s curse the rain! For isn’t it just a part of God’s covenant to remind us of the flood, and to renew us? Do you believe this?”

Governor Wynfield was seated closest to Eligius, with an attractive woman whose hard features and disapproving gaze remained intent upon Catherine, who basked in Leonora’s funerary lament for her missing lover. “ Endure! Endure! yet break the heart, yet judge not God’s decree. Thy body from thy soul doth part. Oh, may He pardon thee!”

She bowed to light applause from her audience. “ It speaks to your hearts that you ignore this weather and support the efforts of brave souls like Stephen Ault as he struggles to shine the light of Christ across this shadowland. I apologize that my husband cannot be among you today. He saves his strength for the good works of the Court, and with the favor of peers like Governor Wynfield, a new charter for the John Company and a new body of laws shall be his legacy to Ceylon and to England.”

“ Hear, hear,” Wynfield said.

“And I apologize as well that because of these storms and the failure of this land to produce a bumper crop of worthy ser - vants, our tea and cakes have not arrived! Words cannot convey my sorrow.”

Eligius saw Lady Wynfield exchange bemused smiles with the other wives seated near her. Their silent condemnation continued while Catherine greeted her guests and collected donations. Unfailingly, their expressions and manner molted into mocking winks when she passed them. Eligius wondered if any of them cared for her at all.

Mary gestured to him to let the pole down. He did, and was promptly showered with a cascade of collected rainwater. He heard Julia laugh, but did not look. He didn’t want to be one more man turning to her. Instead he busied himself with folding the sheets.

After an hour, the last of the Colebrooks’ guests departed for their own estates. Catherine returned to the veranda, sifting rupees in her hands. She shooed away her maid’s efforts to shelter her from the rain. “ So few. Christ will have to pick and choose from the afflicted, it seems.”

“ Let the new boy take the money to the missionary,” Julia said. “ No one should have to go out in this.”

“ I will see to it myself. You’re young and the world grows trustworthiness on trees. No, I have something else in mind for the boy.” She gestured to the flood water.

“Mother, he is only one boy.”

“And I am but one woman, in a man’s world to boot. Yet look what I have done. Mary, help me get this across to the boy. Does he see Holland House?”

The name sparked him. He opened his tunic and gave over the letters, with Sir John Holland’s on top. Mary took them quickly and kept them beneath her umbrella.

Catherine eyed the top letter without comment. “ Does he see the need afflicting the cottage?”

“The servant’s house,” Mary told him. “ Near the eastern fence line.”

Across the floodwater, there stood a separate structure. Though it was built from sturdier elements, it was in no better shape than the battered huts lining his street.

“ Tell him he is to clear a way to Holland House in plenty of time for our esteemed guest’s arrival,” Catherine said.

Eligius waited for Mary ’s guttural translation before reacting. “Am I to fix it?” he asked Mary. “All of it?”

Catherine smiled at him. “ I can see it on his face, he understands. This is his land. These are his rains. I ’m sure he’ll see a way clear, eh?”

Mary led him to the middle of the plank path. He stepped away from her parasol, letting the softening rain feather his skin. From there the hut the memsa’ab called Holland House could be seen more clearly. The rains had separated wall from wall, roof from gutter. They ’d brought the yard’s mud to the bowing door in a curl some three feet high, and now the yard had become so saturated that the water ebbed like a captive sea.

“ What is so important about this hut?” he asked Mary.

“ Your memsahib gets many letters. From many great and important men.” Disapproval dripped from her lips. “ Now it seems we’re dedicating part of the house to her pursuits. Or pur - suers. Have it as you will.”

So her allegiance was to the sa’ab of the house, he thought.

The youngest Colebrook ran giddily down the planks to latch onto Mary ’s leg. She wrapped a protective arm about the boy’s shoulders.

Ewen stared up at the dark boy surveying his home.

“ You’re angry,” Mary said. “ Maybe this isn’t a place you’re meant to be. Maybe a field’s the right spot for you. Ewen’s afraid of you.”

“ It’s easy enough to see how this happened,” Eligius said. “And I can see as well what’s to be done.”

“ You don’t rise to bait, do you, little fish?”

“ May I see the memsa’ab?”

Mary smiled. “ You’re a smart one, I ’ll say that. See that you keep your wits about you. Dimbola will tax your senses.”

“ Dimbola?”

“Their name for this house and the land, to the sea.”

He followed her back to the house. “ He wished to see you,” Mary told Catherine.

Catherine stood from her chair on the porch, where she’d been sitting with Julia, examining the contents of Sir John Holland’s envelope.

“ Does he understand his task?”

“ He said so, mum.”

“ My pay,” Eligius interrupted. “ It is to be ten rupees. I want to be sure of this.”

Reluctantly, Mary translated. Catherine’s face grew taut.

“ It doesn’t bode well, does it?” she said.





BEFORE HE BEGAN working in earnest, he asked Mary what Holland House held that couldn’t wait for Ceylon’s winter rains to pass.

“ Her pride,” Mary told him, “and the attentions of a far off man.”

Seated on the plank walkway, he plotted where to begin. Dimbola lay like a valley, right to the door of Holland House. It would be necessary to level it, to coax the grounds in a different direction.

Julia watched him from a gazebo at the western fence, on a modest bluff above the rainwater. Already he’d learned that Mary had a caustic tongue and the arrogance of the all-seeing unnoticed. Ewen was a blur of childish need. The memsa’ab was yet unknown to him, but through others’ eyes came the vague shape of a woman spoken of only at a distance. The sa’ab of this house was a man to be pitied.

Yet it was the barest of looks from Julia that needled his heart and made him want to walk away from here even as the world whispered consequences: Gita, bathed in another of her inevitable red fevers.

He set to work.

The water could not simply be spirited away. What was needed was what he’d watched Matara’s men create, to drain the village of rain and refuse. A catch basin.

He found some planks the storm had pulled free from Holland House and plunged them into the water until they stood like the headstones behind the Galle Face. Then he dug at the accumulated mud while across from him, Ewen chased after a small peacock. Its wings bent at the water as its childish tormentor drove it from the banks into the brackish eddies.

Over three hours while his dam took form, the yard still remained underwater. Miserable, he considered the immensity of the task before him and could think only of his hunger. What kinds of food lay in the main house? He wagered that the feeble sa’ab sat before a feast of fowl and good bread, and fruit carted in from the recesses of the country where the rains fell most sparingly. Money was no object to a director. The Colebrooks’ table was certain to be piled high with excess. What was hunger to them? Something for the servants to remedy when summoned, something that a child could endure until the last peacock was rousted.

He worked deep into the day, through dizziness and cramps that doubled him over. All the while the rain fell, making a fool of him. Julia watched from the interior of the gazebo, paper tablet in her lap.

Under his incessant labor, a ditch formed that split the yard in half. He caught his breath while tracing the falling rain in the water ’s reflection, from the ashen sky down to him. As the funereal afternoon light waned, Mary called to him from the veranda. “There’s food, if you’ ve a need.”

He climbed out of the flood and ran down the planks to the house. Clots of wet mud slid from his body. He held his crusted hands in the rain, letting the storm wash them clean, then accepted Mary ’s offering. Coconuts, sliced mango, some bread; all showing their age. Nothing that couldn’t be gleaned from the land surrounding the house. He hid his disappointment and ate. When he finished, he took some more bread and wrapped it in his tunic. Looking up, he saw Catherine at the window of the house, watching him.





SHE WAITED UNTIL the sun fell below the cradle of trees before emerging. Through the afternoon, she’d watched him work. Charles had asked for tea and she’d bade Mary to respond. Julia sought respite from Ewen’s ever-presence and she’d shooed them away. Nothing else beckoned to her as this, the hope that Holland House might be reclaimed by the boy who left the confines of the day she’d first seen him, to turn up before her eyes once again.

Crossing the walkway, she stood above the waves pulling against Eligius’ dams. Mary saw her and ran down the planks. “ Is this what you call work?” she shouted. Ewen pulled up short at her tone.

Julia set her paper down. She watched implacably.

“ You’ ve done nothing! If anything, the Colebrooks’ home drowns in deeper water.”

Eligius waded to the gate and his second dam. His legs burned. His back felt as if it had been hollowed and filled with molten iron.

“ Mary,” Catherine said, “enough.”

“ Your memsahib is doubtless very angry – ”

He pulled the wood slats from the ground. The waters rushed to the gate, now the low point in the yard. Their flow became a flood; the trapped rainfall thundered out, carving the ground alongside the road to Dimbola. It carried away weak vegetation. Even the slats of his dam were borne down the hillside towards the sea.

Ewen dangled his feet in the onrush, cackling delightedly as his legs disappeared to the knees in a froth of mud brown.

Eligius stood at the gate, watching the last of the rain depart. It only took moments for the yard to clear itself. A few pools remained in the aftermath, like mirrors atop the ruin of the Colebrooks’ lawn. Ewen performed a mad dance through the heart of them, spraying mud and rain everywhere as Mary called out halfheartedly for him to stop. “Come on, then!” she yelled to Eligius. “ Do you want to dry off, or stay like that?”

He glanced worriedly at the memsa’ab. She stood by the cottage’s ruin of a door, heedless of the mud overtaking her feet. Silently, she gestured for him to follow the maid.

Something in her eyes unsettled him. An incongruous returning hope.

He followed Mary to the rear of the main house. There he found himself inside a colonial home for the first time.

The entry they passed through led into a dank hallway lit only by a single shuddering gaslamp. Having no ventilation save the door, the hall was thick with noxious fumes that left the floor greasy with soot.

Mary led him past a room that smelled of lingering sickness. The fireplace was stacked with old wood and uncollected ash. There were books on the wall, their spines embossed with the lofty words of the Court.

The sight chilled him. Unbidden moments joined him in the dankness. His father, breathing life into old colonial laws. Bright roses spitting from gunmetal. Himself, in his father ’s emptying eyes.

“ You’re getting water all over the floor,” Mary snapped, “and who do you think cleaning it falls to?”

She took him to the scullery. He knew it immediately by the smell. Caked pots, buckets of rancid vegetables gone to oily black, meat on a butcher ’s table, its marbled flesh infested with flies.

“Servants,” Mary said, “don’t see the filth their betters live in. They don’t smell their stench. Servants concern themselves only with what’s to be done.”

She stacked a single cord of wood atop the iron grate in the scullery hearth, then packed it in with crisp dead palm fronds. Striking a match, she lit a fire and bade him to sit. “I’ve no place for you to wash, and you aren’t about to walk through the house shod in mud. Let it dry and cake. That’ll do for you.”

“ It is no different at home. I ’m used to it.”

“ No doubt.”

She left him. He stripped to his loin cloth and sat close to the fire. The wood was relatively young and green at its core. Its smoke was faintly pungent. The fire would last a bit longer.

He draped his clothes across a stone seat to dry. A sound made him spin, his hands swift to cover his immodesty. Ewen stood in the doorway, dripping wet from the storm. He was naked and carried two towels. Raising one, he rubbed his face frenziedly, then handed the second towel to Eligius.

Eligius peeled ribbons of mud from his skin as he dried himself. Like a sheet of woven silk, the towel was the softest thing to touch him since his mother’s hand. How long ago that had been.

He stretched his sore muscles, willing the heat of the fire into them. The boy sat down next to him and aped his every move.

I should hate you, Eligius thought as he regarded the boy. I should stand at your gate and scream until you leave.

He wiggled his toes. The boy did as well, delighted with the game. They held their hands out, fingers spread, until the light glowed through their skin and the veins could be read like words. Smiling, the boy put his arms out to Eligius. He wanted to be held. To be lifted.

Eligius leaned close to the boy. “ No.”

Ewen’s eyes went wide with shock.

Eligius dressed quickly and left the boy in the room. His clothes were warm and stiff. They crackled as he walked back down the hall. His day was at an end, and with it his station as the holder of poles, the ditch digger, the keeper of charades that the Colebrooks did not smell and did not invite ridicule from their fellow colonials. That their child did not view him as just another Indian to ride.

He followed the sounds of muted conversation to a dining room, where the family sat around a table picking at plates of the meat he’d seen in the scullery. It was enough that they brought their appetite for beef to Ceylon. That they consumed it heedless of its condition sickened him. Didn’t Britishers have the wealth of empires at their disposal? Wasn’t this sa’ab one of the chosen, charged with the colonials’ stewardship of India? Yet they lived the lives of near -villagers.

“ Mother,” Julia said, finally looking up from her plate. Like the others, she ate as if she were a starving Peshwar.

Catherine set down her fork and its speared coal of meat.

“ My pay,” he said to Mary.

“ He’s inquiring about the rupees,” Mary said. “ I ’ll tell the boy that he may first return the extra food he secreted into his pockets. Does he think I ’m blind? Very little goes on in this house that I do not see.”

It was all he could do to stay quiet while Mary wrestled her words into Tamil. “The food is for my mother and sister,” Eligius told her. “ My sister especially. She is sicker every day. This is why I am here.”

Catherine stood at the sound of footsteps. “Charles. We’ ve saved food for you. How goes your work?”

The man she called Charles put his hand on the back of a chair, steadying himself as he sat. Only then did he look up at the Indian boy before him. His face grew still as air before a storm. His hands trembled.

Eligius trembled as well. I remember you, he thought. Old lion.

His eyes were so like Ewen’s that Eligius thought he might hold out his arms to be lifted.

Mary started to translate, but Charles interrupted. “ I understand, and so does he. The food or the rupees. It cannot be both. Or else how will he learn the value of honest labor?”

Julia began to protest. “ It’s not fair, father. You agreed to – ”

“ Let it be food.”

He’d spoken in their English. “ In the time it takes me to bring rupees to market and buy the food, Gita might die. But I don’t believe the food I have amounts to ten rupees. I shall take more. My family has seen too much loss.”

He stood and waited, and wondered if this god of theirs – sometimes a baby, sometimes a man who simply bled and died, like other men he’d known – would pull the world out from under him. It would be such a simple thing to do to a servant.

“There is something memorable about you,” Catherine said.





IN ALL, MARY gave him enough food to last into the next day. Some bread, some beli fruit, and some wrapped lamb battered in coconut milk and chick pea flour, a reasonable effort by her at kamargah. All covered in another of those wondrous cloths he’d dried off with. “ Your memsahib’s got more that needs doing,” she told him at the gate. “There’s the rest of the yard, and the harder chores, and of course her postings, which must go out daily. She’s an irrepressible correspondent, that one.”

“ With Holland.”

“ Him. Others. Disciples and divines, the missionary always says. Her letters fly to and from Dimbola like these bloody insects.”

“ I will do all of these things for rupees, or for food.”

“ My, we’re a cheeky one. I can see I’ll wear myself out keeping you in line. The most important task lies with Holland House itself. The whole thing ought to have washed out to sea with the mud, if you ask me. There’s repairs to be done, and plenty of, if it’s to be ready for his arrival. Now go home. No doubt she’s watching and wondering what we’re talking about. The wife of a director can see conspiracies in the blowing of leaves.”

He glanced back at the house, but saw nothing in the darkened windows. Dimbola was so still; it arose in him a childish contemplation that the day had been a dream.





THAT EVENING, CATHERINE braved the mud. She crossed the yard and closed herself up in the cottage to consider the day ’s events. The boy could be provocative; Charles and Mary especially heated at the sound of his voice. To them he was surly and entitled. He withheld his appreciation of English to mock them or worse. Perhaps he’d think overnight on what this colonial family did not have, how it lagged others, and not return.

She busied herself with tucking Julia’s portrait in the cottage alcove – Julia had shown scant interest in it – and examining her failures under the light of the crossing moon, but she could not stop thinking about the boy. Strange, that they ’d first encountered each other when neither knew the other ’s name, and now this. A cleared path. His footfalls in Dimbola. The shadow she’d seen at Court, emerged from a bloody day to life.

She found the Court image among the faded moments that she’d tried and failed to hold. It was nothing but a stain on paper to anyone else’s eyes. Little more than dust. Yet she could find everything in its murk. The ampitheatrical lobby of the East India Court, the elusive, glimmering light, the boy’s silhouette, prone and quivering in the streaming sun. His gray shadow across the marble floor like a spill of ash.

She drove a nail into the cottage wall and hung the paper from it. A rainwashed inference of structure and a boy, now with a name. Eligius.