The Luminist

The Night, Moving


THE CLOUDS PARTED JUST ENOUGH TO LAY A SLIVER OF moonlight across Eligius’ path, easing his way. It was late when he reached his hut. His mother and Gita were both asleep on his mat. For a moment he thought his mother had fallen into sleep clutching a dead child. Then Gita’s distended belly filled and fell, and he could breathe again.

He set the food on his mother ’s altar. Tiny seeds covered the altar top amidst a fine, pungent powder. Ajwain; his mother had been grinding it to medicate Gita’s bowels.

He felt foolish and impotent. The man of the house, whether he wished it or not, and he’d failed to do as he was asked. Food was fine enough, but what did it matter to a child who could no longer keep it down?

“ Know that I ’m here, Eligius.”

Chandrak came from Sudarma’s room. He was half dressed. The withered root of his leg quivered until he shifted his weight off of it. His hair was tousled, his shoulders rouged with scratches. The scars across his left side formed craters atop his skin. Sudar - ma’s scent, cardamom and citrus, radiated from him.

“ I present myself to you with respect for you and your father,” Chandrak said. “ Your mother and sister need two different sorts of men. Let us each be men for them, you and I. Or would you rather she beg in the streets of Varanasi with the widows? Wake up and speak to him, Sudarma. I’ll dress, and then Eligius will talk of his day.”

“This can’t be,” Eligius whispered to his mother as Chandrak withdrew to Sudarma’s room. “This is Swaran Shourie’s home. You have no right.”

“Swaran is dead, meri beta.”

She ignited a thin reed of incense and plunged it into a cup, releasing a veil of sweet smoke that washed the hut clean of musk and sweat. “ From the time you were born, I ’ ve had a vision of you. You’re somewhere else. Somewhere beautiful, watching the lights the way you do. Now I see that I was never supposed to have the men others have.”

“ Make him leave.”

“ Sometime I hope you’ll tell me what you see in the light that holds you the way it does. I think you wouldn’t get so lost if you had a father. I think I wouldn’t worry if I had a husband. Ay, my child, don’t despise me for wanting. We all hate what we turn into. You may still. You won’t be alone. I see women staring at their babies as if they were strangers. Men watch the sea and wish they didn’t have to return home. Your father and I thought that we’d escape the worst of this life. But days drift over us. I’ve done things I never thought I’d do.”

Chandrak came out wearing a clean shirt and pants. “Come with me to the fires, Eligius.”

“Go with him.” Sudarma watched from the doorway as Eligius followed Chandrak into the street.

Chandrak stepped between banyans. He left the road behind. “Come. This way.”

“ But the fires. And the soldiers. It’s past curfew.”

“ We’ll make our own fire.”

He followed Chandrak to a clearing hewn from causarina and breadfruit. There were two other men waiting silently. He didn’t recognize them.

“ You brought food only,” Chandrak said. “ What about money?”

“I had to choose. Gita starves – ”

“Tell me about them.”

“ I don’t understand. Who are these men?”

“ What did you see of their house? What do they have?”

“ I won’t go back.” The sound of his own voice disgusted him. A child’s plea. “Every minute I ’m there, I ’m shamed. I ’ll work in the fields. You have no right to be in my home with my mother.”

“ Let me deal with this boy,” one of the men said.

“No.”

Chandrak took Eligius by the arm and led him back into the jungle. “ It’s unfair of me to expect so much of you without warning, Eligius. But I have a reason. I know you better than you think. You hate them. You remember Swaran dying at their hands, and if you could, you’d do something. I tell you, you can. I see so much of him in you. I ask you now, picture their home. What did you see?”

“ Furniture. A rug. Gas lamps.”

“These are big,” Chandrak blurted impatiently. “Think of small things. Personal things.”

“ I know what you’re asking. I won’t steal. It’s enough that you make me work for them—”

There was only the briefest shudder of air; Chandrak ’s slap made no sound. His open hand snapped Eligius’ head back.

“They ’re murderers,” Chandrak told him. “ We’ ve toler - ated them for too long. Not striking back at them, that is your shame. But you will strike, and I ’m telling you how. You go back. Remember what they have, anything that can be taken a little at a time. For now, that’s enough. When you prove to me that you’re a man, I ’ll tell you of the great work we’ve begun. But hear me. You will do this for your father and for me. You will watch them and I will watch you.”

He left Eligius amidst the swaying boughs. The undertow of the men’s murmurs sank beneath the hiss of air-stirred leaves.

Picking his way back to the road, Eligius hesitated. There was the fire, and the men’s talk of the fields. There was his hut, where the shapes of Sudarma and Chandrak twinned in the doorway.

He turned away from all of it. This night, Matara breathed new truths.

Somewhere else, he thought. Better to find the way there.





BY THE TIME he made it to the Colebrooks, the moon sat low above the sea, plating the visible world in blue. Its light made jewels of the raindrops falling on him as he sat against a thick tree outside the gate. It would be dawn soon. He would be smarter for the next day ’s work. He would eat only when obliged to by the demands of his tasks, and take back as much of the colonials’ money as he could. Gita needed more than omum powder to keep her from the valley.

He would watch and remember. But would he speak of it? Was Chandrak right?

Lost in his thoughts, he didn’t notice the figure standing at the gate, an alabaster doll in the cold moonlight. Julia’s pale skin disappeared beneath a fan of hair.

“ Why are you here? My mother will not pay you more just because you beat her to the sunrise.”

Her haughtiness hid something. A restlessness. She was not at ease, and it made him smile.

“ Don’t pretend you don’t understand me. I was at the table, or did you forget?”

“I did not. I brought home the food and returned because I wanted to see the lion’s mouth before I slept.”

“Are you insulting me?”

“No,” he laughed. “It’s a place. The highest point in Ceylon. You can see every corner of the sky from there. And since it was more than halfway, and it was already so late…”

“And I think you’re lying. I think you’re as insolent at home as you are here, and they wouldn’t let you through the door.”

“ If you wish.” He bundled himself tighter.

“Did you know there would be trouble that day at Court? I always meant to ask, had I seen you again.”

Shifting position, he turned his gaze towards the sea.

“ I suppose,” Julia said loudly, “ you’ ve no interest in why I chose to come out here. Certainly, I could have noted your presence with the same indifference you now display and returned to my bed. Well, enjoy the water.”

She spun on her heels and took a few steps. “ If you must know,” she called, “ I felt you deserved something more for the work you did.”

He stood and walked to the gate. “Come back. Please.”

“ If it matters so much to you.”

She held out a thin chain. The glass bauble he’d seen at the Court caught the moonlight and flared, sending its shards across his chest. “ You cannot speak of this to mother,” she said. “It wasn’t right that you should simply receive food. We should all receive food, just as we should receive the next day. This is all I have. I cannot take her money. She knows it too well. But I am told by men more worldly than I that you steal from us and sell our goods at bazaars. If so, I hope you’re paid well.”

The bauble spun at the end of her chain. He raised it level with his eyes. It fashioned the moonlight into a calliope of white clouds that overlay the trees, the sea, her.

She was walking away. This time there was no hesitancy in her step. She’d done all that she’d come to do.

He found that if he held the bauble just so, he could throw tiny lights deep into the Colebrooks’ yard, to the gazebo even, and set them dancing with a flick of his wrist. He imagined Julia watching him with the queer mix of her ilk’s imperiousness and the odd wakefulness that had brought her to the gate.

A bit of his light found Holland House. Clearly there would be other tasks. The letters, preparing the yard, perhaps anchoring the pole again while the memsa’ab held forth. He felt certain that Holland House was where he would find himself most often. Then, he supposed, the Colebrooks would have no further need for him. By then Gita might be healthy, and he would find a new way to show his worth at home.

Someone was in the cottage doorway.

He quickly covered the bauble with his hand and looked again. The clouds came and took the moon away. Now he couldn’t be sure of what he’d seen – a figure standing behind a chair in the open doorway. All was night. He couldn’t discern anything.

He settled back against the tree and waited. In time he closed his eyes. Soon he was aloft over a land too dark to see.





Mother and Child


HE LOOKED UP AT THE SOUND OF FEET WHISKING through the dewed grass. Mary stood over him, bowl in hand. “ Bring it into the house when you’ ve finished. There’s a mountain of mud to be cleared, and more yet when you’re past that.” She left him the porridge without a word on finding him just outside Dimbola’s gate.

He ate the thin mixture of cracked rice and milk, then began shoveling the mud away. Gradually, the sun broke through and stirred some warmth in his blood. It felt good to be alone, testing himself against the weight of his country. The glass bauble tapped against his chest in gentle time to his work.

At mid-day, the memsa’ab emerged from the house carrying a parcel of letters. He grabbed his tunic and put it on, tucking the bauble within.

She handed the letters to him. “ Take these to the missionary in Port Colombo. He will show you how to post them.”

“ I remember the ship.”

Mary stood nearby. “ Do I need a translator?” Catherine snapped at her. “Clearly not.”

Mary slunk back to the house.

“While you’re in the port,” she told Eligius, “the missionary should give you some materials he’s received on my behalf. You are to bring them back here. Leave nothing behind.”

She deposited a small sack in his hand. “See to it that these rupees make it to their destination. The captain of the postal vessel is an acquaintance, and who can say when I might visit his ship myself? Be sure that my first question will be about his business with you today.”

“ I will not steal your money,” he said. You know it too well.





AFTER POSTING THE letters with the captain, he hid the few remaining rupees in a fold of his tunic and went to the missionary’s small parish. It was empty but for a departing beggar. “Ah,” Ault said when Eligius told him of the memsa’ab’s request for her materials. “I’ve been looking forward to ridding myself of these.”

There were two casks the size of Eligius’ torso. “ How do I carry these all the way to Kalutara?” he asked.

“ I have a cart. If your young back can load these drums, I ’ll take you. It won’t cost you any more than what I hear jingling in your clothes. Come now, give freely to God’s servant. On your memsahib’s behalf, it’s the most tithing she’ll have done in months.”

The remaining rupees went for Ault’s cart and an elder donkey to pull it. Eligius loaded the casks and they were on their way before noon. “ What do they hold?” he asked as Port Colombo’s uneasy queue of battered and new, Indian and British, slipped below the skyline of trees.

“Salts of some kind.” Ault absently turned a single rupee over in his hand. “They came from London. She has them shipped, I believe, from a gentleman there.”

“ Holland?”

“ He and others. William Henry Talbot. Oscar Reijlander. Exotic name, that. Your memsahib maintains a steady correspondence about this endeavor of hers.”

He thought of Mary ’s cluck of disapproval over the acquaintances her mistress kept.

“It does no good to ask our Lady Colebrook what she wants or seeks,” Ault said, as if to himself. “Nor to question her tenacity. Such is her doggedness to find whatever it is she needs to find. Good graces be damned.”

“ What is it she’s doing?”

“I haven’t the first idea. I wonder if even she knows.” Ault placed the rupee in his breast pocket. “Mind your path, Eligius.”

For the sake of the cart and its contents, they took the low road through the valley and arrived at Dimbola’s gates by early evening. Ewen was acting as a lookout. When he saw them, he ran into the house crying Eligius’ name.

“The child has taken to you,” Ault said.

Catherine met them at the gate. Ault climbed down from the cart to greet her with a kiss of her hand. “Such a difference now that your Red Sea has parted. It seems that the servant boy has met your expectations, eh?”

“He is a spirited boy,” she said, “and not without competence. Indeed, I find I have more uses of him than there are days. Such is the life of a director ’s family.”

“How true.”

“I wish for the boy to remain here during the week. He may return to see his family on Sundays. It is a holy day for us, though I don’t expect him to understand that. Please do inform his family of the new arrangement. If there is a problem, I should like to know of it now, so I can find a suitable replacement.”

“I will tell them.” Ault turned to Eligius. “ I hear no objections.”

She watched him. And waited.

Eligius’ mind made shameful short work of it. Forces in his life now were beyond his understanding. He needed to find a far place such as this Dimbola from which to make sense of them all. “ When you are there, please see about Gita. How she is feeling. Tell her and my mother I stay to earn as much as I can for them.”

He unloaded the cart. Ault bid his goodbyes and left him behind. It was that easy. The shift to Dimbola as the place he would see most often was done.

Catherine surprised him by lifting one of the barrels her - self and carrying it to the house. He took one and followed her.

They passed through the front door into a dark foyer. A stairway at the rear, next to an arterial corridor, wound up to a second story marked with a dwarfed brown chest on which a series of grotesque figurine candlesticks stood. Their charred tapers had wilted from overuse. Above him, a black iron candelabra hung precariously from a cobwebbed chain. Dust motes rolled in the breeze ribboning the house, up against the wainscoting and across the stone floors like earthbound clouds.

The visible rooms were crowded with ill-fitting odds and ends. There was a study, its interior dim with old cigar smoke. Despite the gloom he could make out the ivory of a stuffed owl under a glass conical, and next to it a humidor and a pinccone cachepot.

The room across from the study was a riot of flowery brocades and impractically soft settees that bore the imprint of recent occupation. A tea service sat on a low round table littered with balled pieces of paper.

He understood none of what he saw, only that the Colebrook estate bore its once opulent clutter like fruit left on the vine to rot.

Mary took up a corner of the area rug, a faded expanse of brown and white obelisks woven in heavy woolen thread. “ How do I move this with your bloody dead weight on it?”

He stepped off, shifting the cask in his aching arms. She pulled the rug out of the foyer and down the hall.

“This way!” Catherine’s voice bellowed. Ewen and Julia stopped what they were doing to wander after her.

Eligius followed the sound of Catherine’s passage and found himself in a corridor of paintings. They were as vivid as the textured cover of her stage tragedy, only rendered in oils of gold, green and black. There were girls and women, and wiselooking men of learning held in place by scalloped wood frames. The characters in these paintings all stared past him at some point of reverie in the middle distance.

Catherine set her cask down at the end of the hall, beneath a painting of a child with wings as white and stilled as the owl in the study. “ Did the same hand render all these paintings?” Eligius asked.

“ Bravo,” Julia said. “ How did you know?”

“They just seemed related. And the light looks the same. As if they were all painted at the same hour.”

“An acquaintance of our family. He fancies himself a por - traitist of religious awakenings and wealthy colonials. They ’re called gouaches.”

“ May we proceed?” Catherine snapped. It angered her to spend time on George’s work, such as it was. “Are we quite done educating the boy on our paintings?”

Julia and Mary exchanged uneasy looks. Ewen kept his eyes glued to the cask in Eligius’ hands.

“ Look at me,” Eligius whispered to the boy. Surprised, the child gazed up. Eligius studied his face, plaintive and pale, and then the painting above the door. The winged child in the painting resembled the boy before him, so much so that he could not help but stare.

“Stop it,” Ewen said softly.

“ He is a reticent child,” Catherine remarked. “ Not given to flight. And that painting, I shall say that it lacks grievously of life and leave matters at that. Now, let me ask you something on the subject, as the kind of boy you are means something to me. You know of our Lord and his son?”

“ Let him be, mother,” Julia sighed. “ I wager he’d prefer rupees to religion.”

“ He speaks English. He is named for a servant of God, did you not say so to my husband?”

“ I did.”

“Then by all means, answer my question.”

“ I learned a little of it,” Eligius told her. “The child was born under a thatched roof, like mine. He grew, then died.” He shrugged. “At least he was able to live for a while.”

“Indeed. A child of your poverty of experience would see it that way, eh?” She took a heavy ring from the thick folds of her sari. Along, skeletal key dangled from it. “ It is evident that you are not close, either to my God or yours. You have not been found in this world. I wonder if it matters to you at all.”

Her family stood in an uncomfortable silence.

“Are you worth the effort it takes to look for you?” she added. “ Perhaps that is the better question.”

“ I ’m not hard to find, memsa’ab. I stand among barrels and paintings. At this moment, it seems I’m easier to see than the child god you speak of.”

“ He should be dismissed for that,” Mary said. “ Feeding their family isn’t reason enough for a servant’s manners with these lot.”

“That is because they don’t know there is more to hope for.” Catherine slipped the bony key into the lock and pushed the door open. “ Place your cask in here, then come to the cottage with me. I want you to see something before another ill chosen word leaves you.”

It stood on black legs. Five feet high, most of its body was draped with the dark hood he’d first glimpsed in the Court lobby. A sheet of paper, its surface grainy and trembling with minute sparkles, lay in a tray next to the beast. Watery and dissolute though it was, he could see the suggestion of the cottage in it, with its door open onto the colorless world, and a chair, empty and waiting. It was like an unfinished painting, like an indelible dark twin of where he stood, only drained of life and light.

Catherine was at his ear. “ Does it frighten you to know that this house contains matters you’ ve never dreamt of?”

There were other occupants in this musty place she called Holland House. Trays, stacks of the paper, lines on the floor like sifted coal dust. In one spot on the wall, a rectangle where a painting might have hung above the peg and groove slats that had lifted under assault from unimpeded rain. Next to it, a single square of paper nailed to the wall. Odd textures besmirched its surface. He wanted to approach it, to see what lay hidden in these stilled waves, but feared to move with the memsa’ab’s eyes so alight at his discomfort.

She directed him to look at the paper. To see it, she told him. “ I remember you, you know. From the Court that day.”

“ You remember my father, I am certain. What happened.”

“No. That is where you will find that I differ. I remember you. And you remember me. I see it in your eyes. The moment you saw me. The woman from Court, from under the dark curtain. Why are you still here? We, all of us, are bound to a terrible day. You could go to any colonial house. Do you wish to avenge your father? Do you blame us?”

“ I am not such a man, memsa’ab.”

“Then what sort are you?” She took up the image of the Court. “ Every colonial has objects of value, and they fear your theft. Mine may not be jeweled or inlaid with precious metal. But I fear losing them. I have lost enough in my life. Perhaps you understand this.”

“Yes.”

“ My needs are simple, Eligius. Do not profane who we are or what we do. Do not desecrate what is ours. Do not drink and expect to be welcome here.”

“ Mother, enough,” Julia said. “ What is it you want from him?”

“ Does a boy who speaks English also read it?”

Catherine handed him a letter. He unfolded it. If this be your life’s work, I will continue our correspondence on the science of this. But this is not art, nor is it God. It is the merest shadow of life. Have you not held shadows long enough?

The letter was signed by Sir John Holland.

He understands, Catherine thought. And he does not run.

“ You serve a woman who wishes to prove those words wrong,” she said. “ But hear me on this. Do not let me become familiar with you now, only to yearn to forget you later.”

She walked out of the cottage. “ I cannot stand goodbyes,” she called. “ Tomorrow you will work and I will provide you food and a rupee perhaps. What more can a soul do?”

Mary took the letter from him. “She may take pity on you, but I don’t. Be sure of that. As hard as I work, I ’ll not let your smart tongue in this house. Know your place. There are a hundred more just like you, less the cost and half the trouble, I can see already. But she’s cast her eye on you, the good Lord knows why. I’ll see you leave before long. Do you understand those words?”

“I understand.”

“Children, to bed with you.” She took Julia by the arm and led her away. Ewen lingered a moment. Eligius tolerated it.

“ Ewen,” Mary said. Ewen went to her, obedient. “ Put out the lights, Eligius. It’s your duty now, not mine.”





THE NEXT MORNING he took to the roof of Holland House, cutting wood into rough planks with the only suitable tool he could find, a corroded machete. Hacking until his hands bled, he wondered if his father had wielded such an instrument in similar circumstances, before his life among the colonials sent him from Dimbola to the Court, to beg for crumbs and ash.

Repairing the roof was painstaking, tedious work. The machete was dull. He ran out of strength and worse, wood.

Before climbing down, he peered into the bowels of Holland House. The last of the daylight revealed the spider, patient and still, resting in the sun among his memsa’ab’s bits and pieces.

That evening, he told the memsa’ab that more wood was needed, and a proper cutting blade, if she had any hope of keeping the sky out of her beloved Holland House. “ I shall pray on it,” she said and walked away after telling Mary to bring him some food.

He suspected that other Britishers were better off than the people he found himself among. The others’ pockets were filled with gold, no doubt, and rupees fell like rain from them as they walked through fields of thriving coffee that brushed the blue canvas of the world.

The week wore on. He ministered to the roof as best he could. As time passed he took notice of the family ’s peculiarities. The sa’ab rarely asked him to do anything, even fetch tobacco for his pipe or a splint to light it with. When the pipe went cold, he simply sat as night fell over him.

Eligius was grateful for the sa’ab’s isolation. He couldn’t bring himself to look the old lion in the eye.

The memsa’ab doted on her husband, albeit in flurries and during daylight only. She brought him a bit of food – there seemed to be little more in the house than a body needed to get through the day – or a cup of tea and a word about the writing forever in the sa’ab’s lap. Then she was lost to the task of composing her letters. She wrote several each day for Eligius to post.

“ Place it on our account,” she would say before dismissing him for the port. The expression he saw on the captain’s face told him those words had been spoken too often.

The sa’ab couldn’t abide bustle. The memsa’ab equally opposed stillness. Their marriage puzzled him, never more so than at night. At that hour there were no more tasks to busy with and he could watch these people. The sa’ab always retired first. He would put down his quill, bid goodnight and remain in the study. Not even his children drew near once he entered that frail, enveloping quiet. Julia would take up her book of paper and gaze about the house, while Ewen occupied some middle space between his parents.

The memsa’ab simply closed herself into Holland House with the spider, to do who knew what. Occasionally she brought the angel painting of Ewen in with her, then replaced it in the corridor deep in the night. The sound of the wood frame as she mounted it back on its nail seeped through the porous walls.

The days, the evenings, a bit of sleep and to the roof again. His first week among the colonials was strangely dislocating. He and his mother had a fraction of their space, none of the furniture, not even the food, yet he longed for the dirt floors and the bristling sleeping mat of his hut. He longed to hear Gita breathing in time to her dreams. Now his own last sights before sleep were white stone walls, a bench with his servant’s tunic draped over it, a window through which he could see a smudged sliver of the jungle.

He wanted to go back to Matara and whatever awaited him there before the very notion of his village fell away, and he became just one more piece of clutter set aside and forgotten in Dimbola.

Perhaps that was best, he thought. Dimbola is a mad woman’s empire. In such a place, it was better not to be seen.





EARLY SATURDAY MORNING, Mary interrupted him while he ran the machete blade over a whetstone in hopes of an edge. “I need meat for today. We’re going to the butchers.” She handed him a pail. “ Mine shouldn’t be the only back that aches.”

Catherine was at the gate with Ault and Charles, who clutched at the corners of a heavy woolen coat as if it bound his bones together.

The missionary sat atop his cart. A Tamil unloaded burlap sacks onto the road. “ Namaskaram,” Eligius said to the worker. It felt good to use his own tongue. “ What village do you come from?”

The man was older and burly. A lifetime of field work had been written into his skin. He stepped past Eligius without a word. Kneeling in the Colebrooks’ field, he ground dead leaves to a powder between his palms.

“A man of Governor Wynfield’s,” Ault said. “A loan, with their compliments.”

Catherine’s face flushed. She wanted Charles to rise up to the insult but he merely gazed across the fields, as if the missionary’s words were just another passing breeze. She did not inquire into his dealings with Wynfield and resented having to consider them at all. It was not her place to worry about money, or to defend him. Now, in front of servants, it was no longer possible to believe that the family of a Director flourished.

“ We need no help keeping up with our fellows,” she said stiffly. “A man who has devoted his life to affairs of state at home and abroad need never place hunt.”

“ I did not mean to offend – ”

She cut the missionary off with an imperious wave.“ I am in the wrong,” Ault said, sighing. “I apologize without reservation.”

“Charles, do you accept?”

“ We are not at Court, nor are we under scrutiny from our friends and neighbors. Our coffee and cotton crops are poor. We need help, not manners.”

“ You are my husband, and I only wish to glorify you in whatever meager way a woman can.”

“The matter is closed.”

His indignation rose only for her. She relented. “The children and I are accepting his kind invitation to church, where I shall ask God’s grace on this field and on your health. Won’t you come?”

“Spend your time as you wish. I ’ ve work to do. I can either finish my work on the charter or Wynfield will finish it for me.” Awry smile crossed his lips. “ Have you seen our home, Stephen? It is enough of a church to rival any.”

“ My husband is in a quiet humor today. The work of championing this country and its people is a burden. Children, come! We have church.”

Julia and Ewen ran from the house, dressed in their finery. They took seats atop Ault’s cart.

“Some meat,” she told Mary. “Something to fight the pallor in my husband.”

Ault tugged at the reins and his donkey – gray as spent coal, bloated in the stomach, her hind quarters a landscape of weevil bites – stepped gingerly forward. Mary kicked Eligius’ pail. “ Will you be much longer in the clouds?”

In a moment they were walking along the well-worn ruts in the road, following Ault’s cart tracks to Port Colombo and the marketplace there. “ Heaven forfend they should spare us the walk,” Mary grumbled. She spat onto the ground. “ Your countryman seemed morose, don’t you think?”

“I greeted him but he didn’t answer.”

“It’s a hard lot working for the Governor, I’ve no doubt. He’s arrogant with his money.”

He thought about what she was saying. “He gives the Colebrooks seed and a man to plant them?”

“The master doesn’t make what these others do and don’t think a maid doesn’t know it. It’s left to me to stretch their money and make them look a part of society, and do I get thanks? That’s where they ’re most impoverished.”

He had so many questions, but Mary ’s bitterness gave him pause. Everything about her – her bent posture, her headlong gait, her weathered hands – spoke of the harsh physical labor that informed her life. Yet he felt her need to speak unfurling like a sail. They were just two servants away from their masters, tongues loosening with the miles.

“ I know that the sa’ab and memsa’ab make the decisions,” he said, “but from what I’ve seen, it is you that runs Dimbola.”

She straightened haughtily. “ More so than any of the maids we’ll see at market. More than should be my weight. ‘Fortune doesn’t always smile where she should, and sadness grows in her absence.’ Ault says that. It’s a place of sorrows we’ ve come to, Eligius. Yet what right do I have to complain about it, or leave it? None.”

“So what the memsa’ab said about their place with the others, like Governor Wynfield and his wife, isn’t true?”

“She should watch her tongue around her husband. The way she hangs bits of honey on her words, she must think she lives among fools.”

The road parted at a copse of trees, opening a crevice of color. Silks and muslins fluttered in the wind. The air carried the voices of merchants and the smell of butchered meat, like iron and sweet wine.

He worried about being seen by someone he knew. What would his neighbors think of him, toting a colonial’s food past the hungry mouths of his family?

“ I don’t understand what it is on this earth that moves her,” Mary said. “ In my short time, I’ve seen her suffer with pains only another woman could know. There was no one for her but me. I’ve seen her tear at herself with worry for the next farthing for taxes. And now this. These casks while her husband withers. No one for me to tell but you. It’s a funny sort of world, I’ll say that. Who are you to me, but someone to pass by?”

The market was a heady swirl of cultures and tongues. Mary led him through the Indian-run stalls of spices and artisan offerings. They went to the colonial area instead. Underclass British maintained wooden stalls of vegetables, meats, fish and imported textiles from London. Women’s fashion fought for space with slaughtered lambs, tallow candles and papers bringing news of the crown.

Other servants gathered around the butchers’ offerings. The maids were younger than Mary, and not as severely bent by their work. They milled around the stalls of the apprentices, sinewy boys who wielded their cleavers against cavities of marbled meat and cages of bone.

Flirtation sparked from servant to servant. Giggles rippled like windblown leaves when one of the boys offered cuttings of lamb fat in exchange for a kiss.

Mary pushed past the milling girls to the front of the largest stall. “The Colebrooks have an order.”

A powerfully built Britisher, his hair as bursting with red as the carcasses strewn at his feet, scraped his cutting table clean of innards. Bloody remains clotted on the sawdusted ground. “ No more credit for your house,” he told Mary.

The other servants hushed.

“The madam has a list.” Mary handed a slip of paper to the butcher. She held her bucket up expectantly.

“Show me money or move out of the way. I’ll not go without payment another month. A Director ’s family, broke as beggars. Shame.”

One of the servant girls approached very cautiously, her eyes on the ground. “ I work in the Trothers’ house. Their hearts are good, and I know they would not object to a kindness.”

Mary ’s hand swooped out of the air, snapping the girl’s head and filling her eyes with shallow pools. “My house doesn’t need your charity. Now let me get back to bartering. Maybe watching ’ll teach you what it means to drive a bargain. Don’t slander us again.”

The girl retreated in tears. Her fellow maids put comforting arms around her.

“Give me your rupees,” Mary said to Eligius in his tongue.

He shook his head.

“Give them here or the Colebrooks go hungry. There’s the matter of a sick old man and a child who need not miss another supper.”

“ I know what it means to starve.”

“ To be a Britisher and starve in plain sight of your neighbors, there’s something you don’t know. It’s not our place to go without.”

Eligius put his pail down. He expected the next slap was his and didn’t want the embarrassment of dropping his servant’s tool like a maid. “Should the memsa’ab need money, she can find a roof to patch, like me.”

Mary ’s eyes narrowed. She fished into her pocket and brought out a small palmful of coins. “The list,” she told the butcher.

“ I ’ll give you only what this buys. Tell your madam her credit is done.”

When he finished with them, their pails held stringy cuts of goat meat, bony oxtail, and some fat for cooking. Still, Mary strode away from the marketplace as if toting a feast.

“ Is this what becomes of me?” Eligius shouted at her. The smell of sun-grayed meat gathered around him. “ I do servant’s work so that you try to steal from me?”

“Had that been you in my place, forced to bargain with nothing in your pocket, would you be taking a servant’s pity?”

“ It isn’t pity to help a neighbor. It is custom in my village.”

“ Your ways have no place. They ’d bring shame on your employers, and that’s the thing to avoid at all costs. Maybe pity ’s more acceptable when it’s passed between the pitiable, but there’s the matter of standing to consider here.”

A fringed surrey passed by. Mary bowed her head until it was well up the road. “Almost a week I’ve known you,” she said, “and all I’ve seen is defiance. Not a word of the servant who came before you in another man’s house. Should I be blaming the quiet minds you’re all said to possess, or are you just forgetting that I knew your father before these Colebrooks arrived?”

They were near the port. The Galle Face stood over the trees, its parapets swept by low clouds.

“Swaran served his sahib loyally,” Mary said, “and suffered every indignity with restraint. He was exactly what he was supposed to be. He carried the sahib’s children like they were his and took reading lessons with them, like a child. Never did he mention you or your mother. Once we shared some ale and he spouted nonsense about making laws like the Directors. Even that foolishness didn’t soften the house in his favor. He was still expected to bow. Maybe he didn’t deserve what he got, but there’s a lesson all the same. You and me and everyone like us, we don’t make a mark on this country.”

A terrible heat gripped Eligius’ heart.

“That’s what it is to serve,” Mary told him, “and above all, to serve her. Her casks and paper and godly designs. This is your life now, and what’s there to do about it? If you walk away, you’ll end up in the fields or with the men who leave their families at night and talk about trouble they don’t have the strength to make. If you stay on at Dimbola, well, I wager it’ll be the same for you. Why worry about the loss of a few rupees when there are such things to think of? Be about the business of getting what you can. The world is a wide window if you’ ve got the courage.”

They left the dried mud road for the paved streets of Port Colombo. Colonials passed them on either side with children in hand. Servants followed dutifully behind, carrying the day ’s shopping in heavy bags. The poor sat under the shade of jackfruit trees, waiting for alms to be tossed from the hansoms that rolled solemnly by.

“Learn this route,” Mary told him. “ It’ll ingratiate you.”

She crossed Chatham Street to the Galle Face. Its iron doors were open. She paused in the threshold of the church and bowed her head. This gesture seemed a world away from the ser - vility she’d shown the passing carriage. She appeared chastened.

A cloud of perfumed air as biting as crushed clove emanated from the open doorway. Rows of benches stretched into a murky fog of shadow and soft candlelight. The flickering lights were as innumerable as the stars breaking the night above the lion’s mouth. Those who were seated in the rows – maybe one hundred, but far too few to fill the church – raised their voices at the behest of a man holding a cup of shimmering silver. Their tune was foreign but lovely, and somehow sad.

“ Bow your head,” Mary whispered shrilly. “She sees you.”

The memsa’ab and her children sat with Ault in one of the rearmost rows. They ’d turned in their places and were looking at him as if they ’d never laid eyes on him before. Their bodies were aflame with the midday sun streaming through a stained glass fresco that filled the rear wall. It was of a woman. Her robes were held aloft by serving children. A ring of white light glowed above her head. The baby in her arms wanted it; its chubby hand sought it, perhaps to teethe on it the way Gita chewed on the charms adorning his mother ’s mourning sari. That the babe had its own light seemed not to matter.

The sun carried the woman to every corner of the church. Her colors bled across the faces of the faithful. Her garment, indigo where the light streamed through, lay over Ewen. Her skin became the gold in Julia’s hair.

Catherine sat in darkness. The light passing through the frescoed child fell at her feet. Where she was, where the other Directors’ wives and colonials far from home were, was a prayer house. The world was meant to be cut away from here. Pared down to the one thing. Money. Influence. Health. Love.

Something once within her had come undone since the Cape. Its absence had oddly multiplied matters. She could no longer reduce the world to the thing she needed.

The priest raised a cross into the dust-flecked air. Suddenly the church became the floor of the Court foyer, a canvas on which stars danced.

“Come on, then,” Mary said. “We’d better be getting this meat home before the sun spoils it any further.”

That night, Mary cooked the rancidness out of the meat by impaling it and holding it above the fire until it charred, then boiling it with parsnips and heavy pepper. The memsa’ab scolded her by name every time she and her children sneezed, while Charles laughed.

Their voices followed Eligius through the corridors where he sought refuge away from them. There was something terribly tedious about being forgotten at the end of a long hall, listening to the cacophony of a strange family. A servant, bemoaning a servant’s life.

The light fell away as Mary snuffed out the gas lamps to save her employers’ lungs. Ewen’s whimpering faded over the minutes – a child’s sleep that he would never again know.

He stared at the painting of the winged boy and tried to imagine him alive with light, like the woman of glass. He couldn’t. He told himself that he might have been able to in another time, but that sort of sight was lost to him now.