The Luminist

A Boy Who Remains


REVEREND AULT SET DOWN HIS TEACUP SO MARY COULD refill it. “I’m told the soldiers have searched through the southern country and found no evidence to identify the perpetrators of the Galle Face’s desecration.”

Eligius hid his bruised face in the mid-day murk of Charles’ shuttered study. There was some comfort to be found in the gloom that the memsa’ab always complained of. It reminded him of his hut in Matara. So little of the light found a way in.

“You left word with the villagers in Matara, then.” Catherine raised her cup, sending Mary back to the scullery for the kettle and another muslin bag of tea. “Someone beat this boy terribly.”

“I must report that I did not. There were no men in the village. Only women.”

“Stephen,” Charles said, “it’s vitally important that you get word to Governor Wynfield and the other directors, that they are to come to me today. We have to discuss this. Afire such as this is slow to spread, but eventually it will.”

That day, the Colebrooks found easy tasks for Eligius to do. He helped Mary cut cold pheasant for lunch, ground the bird’s feathers down to a fine point so Julia might have some writing materials, cleaned the study floor while the sa’ab read a treatise on land rights that bore his name. They were tentative with him, and he thought that it was not all attributable to his injuries. Even Julia, who emerged from Holland House in the late afternoon and took her quills without a word, looked at him as if he were painful with light.

The full Court – nine men in all, ones he’d seen and some he had not – arrived at twilight to an inviting fire and trays of brandy in the study. “Stay near,” Charles told him, “lest their glasses go unnoticed.”

Of the directors present, most seemed aligned with the governor; they even sat on his side of the study. Two remained with Charles. One was older, rotund and pinched around his eyes. The other was a younger man, tall and thin, with a whippet’s spastic alertness and a beard like dusted curtain cord.

Wynfield spoke first. “I have gone forward with my bill on the taxes to the provinces. It will come to a vote of the Court, then on to Parliament. I believe the roll favors me, my friends. I ask your support. Justice Newhope, I see you itch to speak.”

The older director rose from his seat at Charles’ side. “We’ve all heard of the havoc to the north, and it began with an exodus of the men. They bought arms and within weeks there were homes and trades ablaze. Trouble has found us. Should we now levy another property tax here in the southern country, upon men who could not meet the last one and show a penchant for outrage against the church of England? Is it not the height of irresponsibility to push them to their limit?”

“Surely Ceylon doesn’t know of the occurrences so far north,” Wynfield said. “Lack of communication plagues these people, but it can be a boon in such times. These are not related acts.”

Charles leaned forward until he could peer out the study door. “Come here, Eligius.”

Eligius brought a brandy snifter and stood in the doorway to the study. “Tell us,” Charles said, “how long it takes you to walk to our gate from Matara.”

“Less than half the night, sa’ab.”

“It is not so much, then,” Charles said, “to consider men trekking through the jungle, passing word to each village. Let me tell you my thoughts on this bill. Word will spread that our interests have been attacked in Jaffna, and now the port. A hike in taxes that they cannot bear that all the pawnbrokers in Madurai cannot fund? Governor, haven’t we already given them reason enough to despise our presence?”

Their eyes drilled holes in the back of Eligius’ head as he filled glasses and emptied pipe ashes into an urn.

“It is my wish,” Wynfield said, “to avoid violence.” He picked up a framed cartograph of Ceylon from Charles’ desk. “But these men, these howling fools at the Court gates, stand on the precipice of a terrible day. Perhaps your servant can explain their conduct to me. Is this a holiday of some kind? Something for the men alone, that the villages should empty of them?”

Eligius remained quiet.

“ Tell me, boy.”

“It is not.”

Charles clutched his heavy woolen coat about his body. It was as if he resided alone in a country of eternal cold. “Do you know where your fellows are, Eligius?”

He shook his head.

“If you know anything of the men of your village,” Newhope said, “you must tell us.”

“I was with my mother on your Sunday. The other men were still there with their sons.”

“What were they doing?”

“Watching my beating.”

“For what reason were you beaten?” Charles coughed, bringing a sodden handkerchief to his lips.

“No reason was given.”

“There’s been no end of trouble in the provinces,” Wynfield said. “Men like these abandon their responsibilities to mere children. Or is there something else to their disappearance, boy?”

Eligius looked to Charles. The old man seemed intent on the map in Wynfield’s hands.

“Hearing nothing to the contrary,” Wynfield said, “I presume the actions of your fellows speak for you.”

“Do you speak for all here?” Eligius asked.

“Don’t be impudent,” Charles said.

“Is this how servants conduct themselves in your house?” Wynfield asked. “Small wonder, your wife’s distractions from her duties. I don’t wish to see these walls continue to crumble around you, my friend.”

“How dare you insult him in his ill health!” Crowell shouted.

“There’s more to it than you know, sir.”

Charles’ eyes found his young servant in the corner. They filled briefly, then dried. “There is no need for that subject, Andrew. We are not speaking of me, but of the threat of violence swelling in this country.”

“The subjects are linked, I’m afraid. A man of vigor controls his servants as well as his wife. He puts a firm oar in the water. Everything about you speaks of twilight at a time when our obligation to England tips the balance in favor of immediate and vigorous action here in Ceylon. A popular uprising gains traction and leads to rebellion. Commerce halts. Fields die. Taxes cease. To stop these incidents from becoming an issue, we must keep these people focused on working their fields and on paying their debts. Sad but true, it always falls to us.”

Setting Charles’ map down, he went to the door. “We are apart on so many things now, Charles. Have you noticed? Let us find common ground on at least this much. The affairs of her Majesty’s colonies must be equal to their cost, and thus far we have much ground to cover. Her fleet, her trading company, her exports. India is a bride with an insufficient dowry.”

He tucked the bill into the lining of his overcoat. “I’ve drafted an amendment to the Doctrine of Lapse. Where the absence of a feudal heir triggers the natives’ forfeiture of villages now, we will broaden it to include villages where the men are missing and delinquent taxes continue. Parliament has responded favorably.”

“I knew nothing of this,” Charles said.

“It is a service we will provide to Ceylon. In a jungle-covered country like this, diseases of the most malignant character are harbored. Year after year they reap a pestilential harvest from this thinly scattered population. Cholera, dysentery, fever, and smallpox all appear in their turn and annually sweep whole villages away. Gentlemen, I ask you. Can we stand by and do nothing? I for one say no. I have seen enough of the moldering dead. If a village comprising two hundred able-bodied men is reduced by sickness to a population of fifty, can those left behind cultivate the same amount of land? No, gentlemen, it falls to us to clear it away and make something of it. These people have to adapt to us, not the other way around.”

Wynfield rose to leave. His loyalists rose with him. “You have some time to study this as you wish. But not long, my friends. I expect your answer soon. This cannot wait.”

“You have my word,” Charles said as Newhope and Crowell stared at him.

“Excellent. My best to your wife and children. Please, have Catherine send her bill of needs to my staff for the celebration in honor of Holland. As sponsor of his voyage, it is only right. Let your maid walk through the market untroubled.”

Eligius glared at Wynfield as he left. Charles waved him over and handed him an empty brandy snifter. “ Watch yourself, boy. While you glare at one, another sees you and marks you for trouble. There is too much you don’t know to be so impetuous at such a dangerous time.”

“Why doesn’t anyone believe me? I don’t know where the men are.”

“Your wounds are likely all that keep you from being arrested in their place. Now go about your work. Let us alone to talk this out.”

Eligius left the study. How uneasy Newhope and Crowell appeared. How uncertain. He’d never seen a colonial without their attendant arrogance. These men breathed the same anxiety as the men of Matara did around their fires while their ranks thinned and the trees rang louder with new voices each night.

And the sa’ab; he looked ashamed and small. What could such men do to move the governor? Did they even want to? In the end it was just Indians losing their land. A common enough occurrence.

He left the study door slightly open. From the dining room, he heard enough to know that Charles was behaving irregularly in the eyes of his friends. Once there’d been a different man, said Crowell. Newhope reminded him that he was ill, not dead. Would he not rise to Ceylon’s defense, as the man he once was?

Only when Newhope suggested that they contact the Court of Proprietors in London did Charles speak. He asked them to give him time in the same tone that he’d employed with the governor. A kind of prayer. “Let me study this in concurrence with the laws on the subject,” Charles said. “Perhaps there are mechanisms we can employ.”

Mary interrupted his eavesdropping. She handed him a bucket and mop. “Ewen took ill.”

He went to Ewen’s room, grateful for the task. It was better to sop up a boy’s vomit than to hear these old men talk.

In the evening, Charles and Catherine asked him to sit in the dining room with the family. Mary remained in the kitchen, making it clear with her cacophony that she didn’t appreciate a servant’s elevation to the dining room while there was food set out on a tin in the scullery.

Catherine took her husband’s hand. She asked Julia and Ewen to join in a prayer, for Eligius. “It is a sad thing,” she said, “to be in the presence of someone who has never realized joy.”

“My life doesn’t have room for such thoughts, memsa’ab.”

“I’m beginning to understand that, child.”

“ Tomorrow I want you to speak to the men of your village,” Charles said. “The most influential among them. Whoever the others will listen to. They must stop whatever it is they’re planning.”

“I don’t know of any plans, sa’ab.”

“Don’t play with me. I’ll not be thought foolish by a simple servant. They talk of armed revolt. They are not to think of it. Not ever. Every crime, every Indian crime, from this point forward only lends credence to the notion that you’re unfit to have a hand in governing your own country. Do you understand?”

“I do not.”

“I would believe that from some people, but not you. There is all manner of notions you understand.”

“How awful you make that sound,” Catherine said. Charles fell silent. “Eligius, we British came here as friends to the Indian. We have so much to teach you. It is a fatherly hand we offer. But right now, my husband’s is not the predominant view. You cannot maintain crops, yet we can. You cannot rise above poverty and sickness, yet we can. This is what is said of you. They expect you to answer these charges with work, industriousness, persever - ance. If your people respond with thuggishness and insolence instead of reason, as your father tried to do, what is Charles to say on your behalf ?”

“My father.” He hated the look on her face. Her sympathy enraged him.

“He was a reasonable fellow,” Charles said. “I could tell. A good man. He had my respect.”

“My father came to court that day because there was a man who he thought would listen. I know it was you.”

“Then I make the same point to you that I made to your father. Act from your better nature.”

“So that you will respect me,” Eligius said, “when you remember me.”

He saw the color rise in the old lion’s cheeks, bringing red relief to the weary terrain of his face.

Catherine’s hand touched her husband’s. “You will make your own way. Whether it is a course that allows you to remain with us is your choice. But I’ve seen enough of you to know that the hate already visited upon you at so young an age has not bred hate within you. Don’t give in to it now. Will you think on this?”

“Yes, memsa’ab.”

“ You may go,” she said softly. “Tell Ewen I have need of him in Holland House.”

He did as he was told, with the sounds of their whispers in his ears. They were discussing him. Whether he ought to remain.

He passed the sa’ab’s study. The sa’ab’s map of Ceylon sat on the desk.

In a few days’ time he would return to Matara. Chandrak would come from wherever he and the others were, to see what amount of manhood grew in a week. Maybe there would be a fresh banyan strip dangling against Chandrak’s withered side.

He put the map in his room, under his blanket, then sat next to its dismal hump and wept.





IN THE STUDY, Catherine blew on the embers in the hearth. They rose to her efforts, glowing a deep cerise.

“I believe him,” she said.

“Do you have any understanding, Catherine? Any appreciation for my position on the Court? What if he lies? How shall it affect Andrew’s opinion of me? Of my dependability? My very loyalty to the Crown turns on the unproven word of an Indian boy whose father died on the Court’s very ground. Despite your arrogant belief that nothing is beyond your perception, you don’t know him.”

She came and sat at his feet. When he’d courted her, it was this posture that she’d selected to portray acquiescence with his proposal of marriage. She remembered how it had softened him then and over the years, to have her at his feet. She wondered if he ever recalled days before she wore his ring, when she was still someone who could speak a word and send him back into the world with no love.

“I have known you through many different lives,” she said gently. “ Well off. Struggling, as we may be now. Understand that I do not inquire nor worry. You are a man above other men, and I am made confident when I but look at you.”

She waited. If he’d quieted within himself, she could not tell.

“I have never known you to be concerned with the opinions of others. You determine the right and true course and that is that. What is it about this man, governor though he may be, that unsettles you?”

“I am neither unsettled nor a man who is questioned by his wife. Now tell me, Catherine. What is it in the correspondence with a distant man and the services of an Indian boy that emboldens you? You spend more time considering them than me.”

She rose. The simple act turned the air in the study. “I have watched you for far too long, Charles. Recall that I have attended to your duties as a barrister as any clerk. I have seen you argue before judge and jurist and I know when you have the facts at your side. When you redden in the face and growl, you have none. The nature of my correspondence with Sir John has not changed since last you cut me for it. The matter of his science interests me. There is no more to it than that.”

“And Eligius?”

Angry though she was, she could not readily answer her husband’s question. Why believe an Indian boy? What could she know of him that might be relied upon by a man of letters and laws? Nothing. Eligius was born of bruises and poverty. He stood in two worlds and resided in neither.

He was, too, a boy who had left a shadow, and a boy who having seen a shadow, brought it to her. He had not turned away. Most men would find no meaning in a black stain. They would see no grace in the vestiges left on their hands.

Charles waited for her response. Holland House beckoned. Sir John had written of a new chemical combination. New proportions, a longer time open in the aperture.

Who is Eligius, she thought. I think I know who he is not. He is not a boy who could watch pieces of time fall from me into a cistern of water and set fire to it all.

“Eligius,” she said, “is a boy who remains in the mind.”

She left her husband for Holland House.

THEY SPOKE OF him through the night. Julia told him this as he lay on his mat. “My mother will have a ladies’ lunch and ask for money for you.”

“What is it that I’m expected to say, I wonder.”

“Show gratitude.”

“If your parents really wish to help, more rupees. A doctor for my sister. Walls for my mother’s house. I don’t know what to do with women’s prayers for my welfare.”

“This lament is tiresome. You’re able, so do for yourself. You seem terribly confident in my father’s empathy, but I advise you against it, no matter the past. He can turn. The governor’s favor is more important to him. As is my mother’s, though he’ll never admit it.”

She was enj oying this, he thought. But she was right. He needed to relinquish pride. One with nothing but mud and millet had no claim to that luxury. His life and the lives of his sister and mother depended on his ability not to give in to the demons whispering in his ear, that he was worth more than the clothes on his back, that learning their words lifted his price. He had no worth. None of them did.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“I expected more of an argument. Perhaps next time. For now, help me write.”

“I don’t know how to help you.”

“Carry my supplies. Make a fire in the gazebo pit. Talk to me.”

“ What shall I talk about, young memsa’ab?”

She thought about this. “I should like to hear about where you live. How it looks. And I want you to wear the glass I gave you. Unless you’ve sold it.”

He held up the bauble around his neck. This pleased her.

She took him to Holland House and showed him what she’d been working on. A sheaf of her mother’s papers of modest thickness. She’d washed them lightly with boiled water and dried them in the sun that spilled in through the roof. “To lend character,” she told him as he carried her things to the gazebo. “Until I can lend character with my own hand.”

He made a compost of dry palm fronds in the shallow pit dug at the gazebo’s center. It would give off smoke, so he situated Julia’s work downwind. “How will you know when you’re able to lend character?”

“I’ll just know. Or maybe I won’t. Who can say?”

“Then why do this? Why not just look at a thing?”

She was quiet for a time. He wondered if he had offended her.

“I don’t agree with most of what my mother does,” she finally said. “She is not what an English-bred woman is supposed to be. She upstages her husband and chases after her own ends to his exclusion. I fear that this new passion of hers will be our undoing, yet she is tireless. I know there’s something of her in me.”

Goosebumps rose on her arms. He added a bit of scrap wood to the fire, filling the gazebo with a nutty cloud that reminded him of Diwali.

She rubbed her hands together. “She may yet matter despite it all. What a thing, for a woman to matter, eh?”

“That creature in the cottage. It is for that purpose. To matter.”

“The Court was her earliest effort. A poor one. She has not puzzled out how to paint with light.”

He thought of the feather’s shadow.

“Perhaps she’s mad,” Julia sighed. “Spending us into poverty and ridicule just to chase God. To punish him, I suppose.”

“I don’t understand.”

“How would you punish the colonials?”

He couldn’t conceal his shock. “I shouldn’t discuss such a thing.”

“Listen to what I’m discussing.”

“You can be free with your words.”

“ To really punish, you don’t fight. You don’t steal. You show your betters that you can do what they can do.”

The fire crackled, sending a hot shower of stars to the gazebo’s ceiling. Sparks lingered there before falling to the earth and fading like loose grains of sunset.

“My mother is right about this much,” Julia said. “I know what it is to live with someone who has never realized joy. It is a hard thing.”

She hadn’t written so much as a stroke. Yet she wielded her dry quill against the silver-grained paper, weaving unseeable words.

“It is not me,” Eligius said. “She spoke of someone else, perhaps.”

“I know.” Her quill strokes grew softer and slower. She came to the end. “My father.”

She was no ordinary female, any more than her mother. They were both capable of outrageous conduct far outside their station. Yet there was pain at the core of them, even as they dallied with men and with the mechanisms of mysteries like the spider and the written word.

He poked at the fire, rustling up more sparks. Their flight made her smile. “I want to write about them,” she said. “They look like stars.”

He held up a small pot of ink. “Dip your quill.”

“Are you telling me what to do? You are not the right ilk of man.”

“Please.”

She flicked the quill tip across the top of the black ink, then held it up. It sparkled in the fire.

“Now listen while I tell you what you can see of my world from the door of my hut.”

He closed his eyes and waited until his squalid servant quarters were gone and Dimbola was gone, and the men of the Court and the men spitting rage at the Court gates, and the men at the fire and the man who lay with his mother and left his mark in banyan-infused blood, all gone. Only the stars, like embers that stopped rising and remained.

She waited with no complaints. Unusual, he thought, for a Britisher. In time she even wrote, in counterpoint to his voice.





IN THEDAYS following his time in the gazebo with the young memsa’ab, Mary remained at a further distance from everyone. She came when called and fulfilled all of her responsibilities, but her moods varied as wildly as Ceylon’s weather. One day she was talkative, the next distant and hostile, the next wounded. Between the two servants only she spoke freely, and only occasionally. Nothing presaged her bouts of openness. They came like cloudbursts.

She betrayed emotion only once. He found her weeping softly in the hall leading to the servants’ rooms. Her room was just to the right of his, yet she rarely slept there. She preferred an unadorned hutch next to the kitchen. It was unusual to find her in this part of the house.

“Don’t,” she said when he asked her what was wrong. Her first words to him in days, and her last for days more.

It was becoming harder to hide Julia’s preference for his company. At night, she would gather her writing utensils and wait for him in the gazebo. He wondered if this was at the heart of Mary’s melancholy. She had been replaced.

As the week wore on, his thoughts turned to Chandrak and the others, and by Saturday his stomach was knotted so tightly he fell short of breath. The options were dismal. He could go home with nothing but a servant’s wages and face the men and their sons, or he could steal and face never returning to Dimbola, where his life consisted of errands to the post ship, to the market, to the roof of Holland House, days in the employ of a man who watched his father fail and die, nights spent sitting like a man, listening to the whisper of a girl’s quill across parchment paper while the true beating heart of Dimbola labored in the dim light of the cottage, to best her god.

That Saturday he was working alongside Mary in the kitchen when Ewen ran by. A bit of light glinted on the boy’s cheek. He was crying. His sobs echoed down the corridor.

Mary dropped her knife and crossed herself when Catherine came to the door and demanded that Eligius accompany her. “I must send word.”

Her face, Eligius thought. She’s trembling with joy.

After laboring over a sheet of her glistening paper, she gave the letter to him and told him to seal it with candle wax. She could not touch it, she explained, and held up her hands to him. Not without staining it.

The marks had not looked like this before. Now, a discernible mendhi of light laced the skin of her palms.

He sealed the letter in the kitchen. It was addressed to Holland. My good friend: You speak of improving the daguerreotype. Perfecting the salt print. Chemicals and processes. Today I put my hand to it. I held it. I have begun the journey to arresting beauty, forever. Catherine.

“Post it,” she said.

He made the journey to the port and back in six hours. By the time he returned to Dimbola, all he wanted to do was lie down and bring the morning on. Whatever happened on the morrow felt like someone else’s cares. He could think only of Gita’s cough and his beating scars. Maybe his mother would close his eyes that night with another story of billowing steam clouds and journeys across the sea.

There were footsteps in the hall, closing. Catherine came to the doorway. She held out her hands. The pale areas he’d seen before had smeared. “Look closely,” she said. “I want you to. I want someone to. It is a wondrous thing. From now on, your labors will be restricted to Holland House. I have already informed Mary. She will not corrupt your time. I can’t do this alone, and at the moment I seem to inspire no one save myself. But a boy such as you can’t say no. You don’t want to.”

After she left he lay upon his mat and let the quiet settle on him. Soon it was broken by muffled sobbing in the hall. He found Ewen tucked in a corner, his knees pulled up to his chin.

Eligius gave him a torn sheet of linen to wipe his tears. Ewen seized his hand. “Mama says she’s going to make me stay still, but I said no. Was it me on her?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Like Hardy. Mama prayed if he could stay, but he couldn’t. Now he’s made of paint. Nothing else.” He stood, letting the blanket fall from his quivering shoulders. “I’ll show you.”

Taking Eligius by the hand, Ewen led him to the painting of the angel bearing his own face. “That’s Hardy.”

“I thought it was of you. I thought you posed for your family friend.”

“Hardy looked like me. After Mama asked God to let him stay, but he didn’t.”

“When did your brother leave?”

“When he was born. Mama said she’s not asking God permission to keep us anymore. She’s going to do it herself.”

Outside, the wind stirred the tops of the palms ringing Dimbola. For a moment the house was alive with the whisperings of Ceylon, then fell quiet again.

“Are you staying?” Ewen asked.

“Tomorrow I go back to my village.”

“But then you’ll come back?”

Mary appeared at the end of the hall. She paused to watch them.

“I have to go to bed,” Ewen said. He let go of Eligius’ hand.

“My father left too,” Eligius said.

“Did you make him a painting?”

“No.”

“Did you get him on your skin?”

He thought of the memsa’ab’s hands. “Such things don’t happen.”

“In there they do.”

Ewen ran down the hall to Mary. She took him away.

Eligius waited until the corridors grew quiet before retrieving his diya. He crossed the yard to Holland House and closed the door. Dimbola was still. No one would see.

He lit his diya. Trays filled with shallow pools of water lined the wall. Little slicks of silver floated on their surfaces. A woodframed square of the grainy paper rested against the spider’s legs. Ripples marred its surface.

Whatever made the memsa’ab shake like a child and Ewen fear sitting still, he saw nothing of it here.

He examined the spider. Its legs were wooden poles, squared at the top to fit into a large box. Under the cloak he found a hole with a glass piece pushed into it.

Setting the flickering diya on the chair, he looked through the hole again. The hole changed the shape of the light, turned it, constricted it.

Another wooden frame lay hidden within the spider’s box body. He slid it out. Holding the captured paper to the light, he saw vague, corporeal shapes that resembled eyes. A nose. A mouth. They could scarcely be seen, but he could tell they were not drawn, not sketched. The shadows Catherine communed with had touched the feather and stolen its soul. They’d made vapors of the Court lobby. Now they’d taken the barest memory of Ewen’s face and pressed it into the fine particles of the paper.

What he’d seen on her hands, he saw now on his own skin. A fine dust of silver sand with inflections of life.

He ran swiftly through the black yard, past the smoking ghosts rising from the snuffed gas lamps and into his room. There he took the sa’ab’s map from its hiding place. Carrying it back to the study, he set it down in its spot.

Mary was in the dining room, tidying up. Their eyes met briefly as he left the study empty-handed.

He hurried to his mat and huddled against the wall. Dawn always began at the far corner of this room, under the window. It would be nearly six when the light reached him and revealed his hand for whatever the night made of it. Then he would know whether he, too, had become a portrait. Nothing – not his flesh, not the dark of this house, could be thought of as empty. Not anymore.





The Canals and the Sea


IN THE MORNING, SHE MADE ELIGIUS A PART OF IT.

First, the water. Three full buckets brought from the sea. After the water, the silver nitrate crystals.

Eligius sifted the glistening sand. He listened to the names for these things. The sand, the glass, the beast itself. Camera. The memsa’ab called out the words from Holland’s correspondence; each piece took its place.

Reading from Sir John’s letter, she instructed Eligius through the process. She showed him how to immerse the paper in sea water, dry it over candles, then brush it on one side with the silver nitrate. All was completed in shadow, which she thought ironic. This man who lectured her from across the sea, hadn’t he been the one to warn her against holding shadows for too long?

Lifting the paper to the light, she pronounced it acceptable, then slid it into a wooden frame. “Julia, come sit. It’s time.”

Julia watched their progress from Holland House’s doorway. Her lace dress gathered in the air, then settled around her porcelain legs. The chair was no more than a few steps from her, yet she eyed it as if it were a distant point she’d been ordered to.

“No more of this baseless fear,” Catherine told her daughter. “This is science, and a little faith. There is nothing of the devil at work. I will explain each thing I do. Will that finally calm you?”

“This nameless pursuit shouldn’t be yours,” Julia said. “It is a man’s avocation. If father isn’t taking it up, it’s not for us to do so.”

“If it suits you to bow quietly, then do so. I see what Charles does not. I pray, where Charles considers and reasons. We differ. Perhaps you are more his child than mine. All the more reason for you to sit.”

Julia did as she was told, grudgingly. She arranged her dress over her legs and stared vacantly at the wall behind the camera.

“When I’m ready, you will look as I require. Until then, have your sulk. Eligius, we place the paper into its frame, and the frame in turn into the camera. She lifted the cloak for him. “Come look.”

He slipped under, entering darkness. Her hand joined him. It opened a small sliding door. “The aperture,” she said. “Press your eye to it.”

He did, and Julia was instantly in the dark with him. A familiarly arrogant girl with an imperious tilt to her head. It was as if she’d been made a sunlit painting of flesh.

Her eyes misted. Her hands fluttered every few seconds. She could not sit still as her mother told her.

She is afraid of becoming a shadow, he thought.

He took the bauble from around his neck, left the camera’s cloak and let the bauble’s string coil into her upturned palm. The glass momentarily shot through with veins of sun, passing them onto the skin of her arm in an emulsion of light. Its touch calmed her.

“Smile or don’t smile,” Catherine told Julia. “But don’t move. Hold yourself still until I say otherwise. This will be a while.”

“Yes, mother.”

“Begin.”

For an interminable time, Julia kept herself composed. Her hands folded demurely in her lap with the bauble for company. Its surface dangled bells of light onto her skin that moved with the sun.

While she sat, Catherine read from the letter. She spoke with wonderment of the circuitous path her daughter’s image might follow. If all was well and ordained, Julia would rest as a second skin upon the paper.

“Talbot and Daguerre have failed thus far to reproduce the images as anything but faded stains on paper,” she read from Holland’s account. “They can take a moment – a tree, a cathedral – and oddly invert it. Turn its natural light inside out, as it were. But to truly hold it for all time? Paper to paper, we lose what we hold immediately, and what we are left with is faint, vaporous, dying. No, something is capricious in this process and won’t be tamed with mere paper. I’ve tried it myself. Once I saw my assistant George as black Elgin marble on the treated sheet. But I could not slow the crystals’ reactions. Instantly, he was no more.”

In the afternoon, she withdrew the plate from the camera while Julia wept frustrated tears. She daubed at the paper with tufts of gauze she dipped gingerly into a small beaker of rust-colored liquid. Boils of silvery air rose from the surface, then burst.

Eligius came to her side. In thirty breaths, they saw it stir.

Waves of silver slowly spread through the paper’s fibers to form a cloudy streak. No more than an inch, the patch disgorged mercurial edges in either direction, then became dissolute.

Seizing a second sheet, she pressed the papers together. “Eligius, help me!”

He reluctantly put his hands on the sheets next to hers and pressed as hard as he could. Something like warmth passed into his skin.

“Stop, stop!” she cried, as a blaze raged in her palms. She threw the papers down and upended the bucket. Water twinned with silver and flecks of something else, the fleeting essence of pale skin, splashed over Eligius’ hands.

“It’s gone,” she moaned. “Only the merest moment of her. But you saw.”

“It was water catching light,” he murmured. “Nothing more.”

“You saw her breathe.” She crumpled Holland’s letter. “Salt prints. Daguerreotypes. It is not enough! I will make these moments draw themselves, and I will not watch them fade. God can strike me down if I don’t.”

She threw the wooden frame against the wall and stalked out.

“What did you see?” Ewen whispered.

Eligius closed his eyes, and it was there. A hazy patch the hue of milky coffee. The bauble. Next to it, a hint of Julia’s hand.

“I see only a mess to be cleaned up,” he said, but the boy’s eyes spoke of his disbelief.

A small spot of black formed on the web of skin between his thumb and forefinger. He wiped it against his tunic. It remained. In its center was a point of lighter pigment. A curvature he’d learned by heart. He shook his hand until he felt his bones rattle, but the bauble’s shape did not leave his skin.

MY DEAR JOHN,



I fear it is no better with me than with you in the matter of the camera. I can neither raise nor hold more than a vestige.

I lose hope by the day. I cannot afford to continue throwing heart and soul into paper and silver and iodide. For what? Failures. Shadows. Do I ask too much to beseech you for more of these precious commodities? Yet I do. Please send what you can, and should the Lord in His boundless goodness see fit to raise Charles from his worries over matters of state and health, I will repay you. Our crops fail. Charles’ standing and pride fails with them. I remind him of his place on the Court and all its prestiges. Why, just the other day the entire Court was here, and the Governor himself! But he is gripped by worries I cannot reach. I fear for our future, which grows as dark as these terrible windows I fashion from paper. The worst kind of black, John. It takes my hope. Yet I persist. You steam to Ceylon as I write, and what do I have to show you? Nothing. I fear I burden you with my soul’s contents. For that, I beg your pardon. I wish I could end this cursed need of mine to see more. I wish I could be content with what I have. Things would be easier. Sadly, I have never been a contented woman, but why should I be? Women keep nothing of themselves. Nothing lasts in the end, eh? Write to me, even if it is harsh. Send what you can, but if not, send at least your words. It grows quieter here.

Catherine

Eligius returned the letter to its envelope when he heard footsteps approaching. Catherine came from her husband’s study into the dining room. She held out his rupees and told him to post her correspondence.

“But he is at sea, memsa’ab.”

“I’ve written the name of his ship. It will find its way, through ports of call. What matters is that I send these words somewhere. They cannot remain here.”

“Will you try again, memsa’ab?”

He saw her eyes fill before she turned away. “The feather shadow is still under my mat,” he told her. “It came. Maybe we cannot be held. Only small things.”

“Are you still afraid of it?”

He nodded. “But I will bring more casks, if you want me to.”

“Have the missionary bring you back by cart if they’re too heavy to carry.”

He took the memsa’ab’s sad letter. She had written it on her special paper.

It had only been a week since he was last in the jungle, yet it felt like seasons had gone by. The sensations he loved – the dewy lushness under his bare feet, the wind cutting between leaves and bringing faint hints of spice and rain, the low mewlings of unseen animals – filled him with a fresh appreciation for his country.

On the outskirts of Rahatungode, he heard a sound behind Ceylon’s green curtain. It began as a murmur that at first he thought he was imagining. Only the subtly cocked heads of the field hands at the plantations he passed told him he wasn’t alone in hearing it. By the time he reached the village of Devampiya, four hours’ walk away from Dimbola, the sound became a rain of screams. Women’s lamentations. The only men’s voices he heard belonged to colonials.

He dropped to the ground when he spotted the soldiers. They had taken positions before a grove of teak trees ringing Devampiya. Three of them stood over a weeping woman. Her children clung to her as she pled for their compassion. Other soldiers took the last of her meager belongings and tossed them into the street. Two glistening servants hefting sharp-bladed shovels began cracking her home open. Wailing rose. There was still someone inside.

Part of the hut wall crumpled inward. An old woman screamed that they were killing her.

Two children brought Ault from the far side of the village road. “Why are you doing this?” he cried.

“Their land is forfeited,” one of the soldiers told him. “It’s mandated by the governor’s law. Devampiya’s men are missing and presumed to have abandoned their village to the tax assessor. Old woman, I won’t ask again. You can stay and let the walls bury you for all I care!”

Ault came to her door, pleading in his ragged Tamil. “Please come out. There is nothing more we can do.”

From his hiding place between the root coils of a fig tree, Eligius watched the rest of the old woman’s home bow to the insistent blades. It was over in minutes. When the soldiers were done and a safe distance away, he went to the missionary.

“What are you doing here?” Ault demanded. “It’s dangerous.”

Eligius pressed his rupees into Ault’s hand. “Give these to my mother. Whatever she needs for tax. I swear I will pay you back. I will work it off. Do not let this happen to her.”

“Are you going to join these men, Eligius? The ones from your village, and this one, and all the others? Will you kill me in my sleep?”

Eligius turned and ran. Dimbola was hours away. Behind him, a village very much like his own fell into memory.





HE POUNDED THE servant’s side door until Mary opened it. “You shouldn’t be here,” she said.

“I know it’s late.”

“No one is asleep.” She stepped aside to let him pass. He found the Colebrooks gathered in the study. Only Ewen was missing, likely in his bed.

Charles sat in his chair. His legs and arms were swaddled in blankets that radiated the last of the hearthstones’ heat. His snowy beard rose and fell with his coughing.

“Forgive me,” Eligius said. They were all staring at him. “The hour, and your Sunday. But I have been to Devampiya. The governor’s law has already started, sa’ab. He is not waiting for you to tell him anything. The village has been destroyed.”

“On what basis does a servant accuse the governor of destroying whole villages?” His voice shook.

“Sa’ab. I was there – ”

“How dare you accuse an Englishman?”

“Father.” Julia looked up at Charles from her seat on a blanketed duvet. “He’s trying to help you.”

“He is a thief! Is it not true? Have we not heard enough tonight to know that?” He pounded the armrest of his chair. “Was it my friend the governor who came into my study in the dead of night to steal from me? Tell me, boy. Did you find something that would fetch a good price in here? Were you going to buy a gun with it? Would you lead your men through our doors after all we’ve done for you?”

Mary quietly stepped away from the study door. Eligius hadn’t noticed her until just now, and with her silent retreat, he understood. “I took nothing.”

Catherine’s eyes were on him and he couldn’t simply stand there, damned before her.

“Yes, I thought about it. But I didn’t. I left it where I found it. Please. I have done nothing wrong.”

“ What was it to be?”

He pointed to the map of Ceylon.

“Fitting,” Charles said.

“My husband, I cannot be quiet.” Catherine tucked Charles’ blanket around his legs. “If this boy was a thief and a seditionist, the bauble around his neck that your daughter made a gift of would already have been sold for guns or butter.”

Julia’s face reddened.

“There is a place for forgiveness, husband. The Christian thing to do – ”

“Who is master of this house?” Charles’ words pulled him up from his chair. “The time has come to resolve this question, which is on the lips of our neighbors and the men of the Court. Who is master of this house?”

“You,” Julia said.

“Yes,” Catherine said.

“And do you take the word of a servant you don’t know over the word of a maid who has served my predecessor, and now us, for years? An English girl?”

“I place you above all,” Catherine said.

“Do you, Catherine? Do you place me above your own ambition? Is it me you think of in the guest house? Or am I found further down your list, behind that contraption and the written attentions of Sir John Holland and God knows who else? And all of these efforts are to what end? You make a pathetic figure.”

“I cannot bear this.” Catherine left the room. In a moment she was crossing the yard toward Holland House.

“Eligius. Look at me.” The old man’s eyes were rimmed with red. “You must leave us now. I wish it weren’t so, but I have done what I can. You reject your father’s path, it seems.”

“You’re wrong,” Eligius said.

“Nevertheless.”

“His family will starve,” Julia said.

“They are a resourceful people.”

“If he were to apologize – ”

“I cannot.” Eligius walked to the door. “I stole nothing. I have given you more than you had a right to. It is you who took from me.”

Julia ran after him and caught him in the yard, just below the porch where he had first seen her in the slanting rain. “I’ll talk to him,” she said breathlessly. “Tomorrow, without my mother to kindle his feelings. He’ll see nothing is missing.”

“I’m a servant. It shouldn’t matter to you.”

“Nevertheless.” She composed herself. Her head tilted as if she looked down at him from a great height. “A wrong has been done. That is all.”

He removed the bauble.

“No,” she said.

“Take it or they will take it from me. Then there will be another gun.” He held it out and waited.

“I’ll send word through the missionary,” Julia said. “About your return.”

“If you wish.”

“ What made you decide not to take father’s map?”

He stood quietly, wondering the same thing. “Taking it from you,” he finally said, “is not something my father would have done. I am a man like my father.”

Her hand opened. He let the bauble fall through black space.





SHE STOOD BACK from the cottage doorway so she would not be seen. So she would see no more of this, the drift of her life. Out there, Eligius returned Julia’s gifted bauble. He turned and left Dimbola.

Behind her, the Court image fluttered in the breeze leaking in, to become trapped between the walls of Holland House.

She’d said nothing.

Ault would know how to get word to Eligius. In time there would be softening. Charles would relent. This would pass into the dustbin of memory with the other regretted words of a marriage.

The terrible shaking began in her faint-stained hands. In Paris she’d learned of the far flung canals of the heart. How they traversed the breadth of the body like streams in search of the sea. The shaking took her at the shoulders, traversed her, found her heart and washed her away.

She sobbed until her chest burned. She’d said nothing to stop this.

Dimbola was quiet where Eligius had been.

She remained where she was. Movement felt like the will of someone else. Standing there, halfway in, halfway out, she thought that this was the first time she’d found refuge in the cottage, yet it was something outside that remained with her.





Thirty Breaths


FROM THE SAFETY OF THE BANYANS, ELIGIUS WATCHED Gita play in front of their hut. Her hands stretched hopelessly at a macaw preening in the low boughs. Over a year old and still no words. Chronic illness had slowed her, the way it did so many of Matara’s babies.

At twilight the cooking scents made him giddy with hunger, yet he still couldn’t bring himself to leave the safety of the trees. If he did, he would have to tell his mother he’d failed even at being a servant.

Sudarma came out. She folded some chapati in a banana leaf and walked into the jungle not thirty yards from him. Gita nuzzled her neck, breathing her mother’s skin in sleep.

In the fading light, the purpling swell under Sudarma’s left eye shone like blood. Her lip was split raggedly. Sounds made her flinch. The jungle was no longer a house she knew.

He waited for her to open a safe distance, then followed. Immediately, he knew where her path would lead.

Teal and jackfruit formed a canopy above his head, crowding out the faint stars. The air grew crisp. He kept well back from his mother as the trees overtook the horizon. At its highest point, the beach at Port Colombo resembled a sea of fine dust. The last of the fishermen perched above the gentle tides on stilts, their reflections shaded to shadow by the waning light. Austere, blazingly white government buildings and Dutch merchant houses lined the coastline inland to the Galle Face.

They passed the first of three caves where long dead priests had painted his people’s history in raw colors. Buddhist frescoes told of the hell awaiting those who strayed from the path.

Soon the route gave way to a sharp turn alongside a plunging waterfall that irrigated cultivated terraces of rice. It was still the greenest, mossiest place he’d ever seen.

He stopped near a pillar of the elephant temple. His mother kissed her fingertips gingerly and touched a plaque as if it were Gita’s cheek. Flat, of brushed copper, it had been hammered by artisans with the likeness of Ganesha, elephant-faced lord of obstacles and beginnings.

Sudarma went up a short flight of stone steps into the temple’s broken sanctuary. In a moment he heard Chandrak. “There isn’t enough for all of us.” Drunk.

Gita started to cry.

He clenched his fists impotently, listening to the sound of his mother’s beating. After some minutes, the others – he heard many – stopped their approving grunts. His mother emerged on the stairs. She held Gita in her arms and was careful not to fall. Distant monkeys howled at her passing.

When she was clear, he climbed the stairs.

A dozen men lay on woven mats, licking their fingers. Teethgouged fruit littered the temple’s stone floor, next to a small pyre of broken bottles. The smell of spilled lihuli permeated the air.

He recognized two of the men as once-friends of his father. Lalajith, a fisherman who sold in the market until his drinking overtook him. Then, even his son wouldn’t share nets. Varini, who pulled a hansom for the colonials in Tangalla. They were insufficient for the world. Not strong enough to provide for their families or resist the soldiers.

Reaching down, he plucked a large, flat shard of glass from the pile. Gray as a storm sky, resilient in his hands, it would make for a distraction when the sun reappeared and he could resume his redirection of the light. He wondered where he could keep it. He wondered where he lived, now.

Chandrak stared at him.

“I bring nothing,” Eligius told him.

“And yet you’re here.”

He sat on the opposite side of the dying fire. “I can gather more wood.”

“We keep it small. So we can’t be seen.”

“What happens when it dies?”

Chandrak hoisted a bottle.

“No,” Eligius said.

“Be a man tonight. Tonight, a son joins me.” He raised his fist and shook it. There was still some blood on his knuckles, drying in the fire’s heat. “We’ll make room for you. All is forgiven.” He offered his bottle again.

Eligius picked it up and drank. Bitter liquid scoured his throat. Another man, thrown away.

Chandrak’s head nodded loosely. “Be quick with the wood, Eligius.”

Eligius got up. The sound of rustling paper in his tunic was like thunder through the trees, yet when he glanced over at them, the men hadn’t stirred. Their rubbery bodies faded towards sleep.

Under the copper shield, where the elephants waited for their cousins the clouds to lift them, he searched his tunic for the memsa’ab’s letter. He found it, but found no clouds of steam rising from his mother’s prophesy to carry him away.

The liquor raced up into his gullet. In a thicket of orchids, it left him.





“WAKE UP, BOY. We’ve need of you.”

Varini shoved him again. Eligius rose groggily to his feet. His body felt encased in stone.

Chandrak was gone, as were the others.

Varini motioned for him to follow. In the half-light of dawn, Eligius saw another boy waiting for them near the treeline. As he drew closer, he saw that it was Hari. His once-neighbor had grown gaunt and hard since Diwali, when he’d pronounced Gre - tel’s death in English to Eligius’ approval.

“Where are we going?” Hari asked. His lips were thin and bloodless with hunger.

“Be quiet, the both of you. There are colonials across the clearing.”

Varini led them around the crescent perimeter of a field carpeted with woven vines and the far-flung root coils of the surrounding trees. Eligius studied the furthest wall of the jungle for signs of the Britishers, but saw only Chandrak, who waved them over. They entered the trees, careful to keep low.

“Walk into the clearing,” Chandrak told them. “Both of you.”

“Varini said there are colonials,” Eligius protested.

“They’ll see us! We’re trespassing.”

“There’s only one. Let him see you.”

“For what reason?”

“He is useless,” Lalajith said. “Hari will be obedient.”

“Give me a moment with him.”

Chandrak turned Eligius away from the other men standing among the trees. “Do you love Ceylon?”

“Yes,” Eligius said uncertainly.

“Do you understand now, they will not do as your father hoped? They will not allow us a voice in our own lives. You left their world and came back to ours. Do you see that I am all you have?”

His bitter breath lit Eligius’ eyes. It pushed rivers through his body and made him long for the lion’s mouth. Up so high above the neem growing out of the mountainside, nothing could reach him.

“We’ve no other way to live, Eligius.”

“I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

Chandrak pushed Eligius and Hari to the tree line. “Do not stand up until you’re halfway.”

They fell to their knees and began to crawl. Glancing back, Eligius saw faces peering between the leafy curtain. The sun broke through the pickets of tree trunks and glinted brilliantly from the silver blades of machetes.

He froze.

“What are you doing?” Hari hissed. “We’re not halfway.”

“I can’t do this.” He slowly stood into the young light and waited for Chandrak to emerge in a hobbled-leg rage. But Chandrak remained hidden with the others.

The husk-dry sound of breaking branches spun Eligius around. A man entered the clearing from the opposite end of the field, his uniform like blood across the lush growth.

Hari whimpered against the ground. When he gazed up at Eligius, his eyes were terrible eclipsing moons.

“Soldier,” Eligius mouthed.

“You there!” the soldier cried.

Hari leapt to his feet and ran. Eligius couldn’t move. The soldier leveled his rifle and all Eligius could see was the black cave at the end of the barrel. There would be no warning when the ruby light rose and gray smoke belched, and he would seep sticky glistening ponds into the dirt like his father before him.

A shot rang out and he sprinted without realizing he’d moved. Something hot and humming flew past his head. A tree trunk ahead of him burst open in a split flower of bark and green wood.

Chandrak knocked him down the moment he pierced the trees. He clasped Eligius’ throat and pressed him against the jungle floor as Hari flew past, tears streaking his face. The veins in Hari’s neck were as thick as tack lines. His lips peeled back as if by the force of winds.

The other men converged on the soldier as he ran into the trees. The jungle sprang to life in a downpour of hammering hands and tumbling bodies.

A rifle emerged from the mass. It was closely followed by the soldier’s boots, his coat and brass buckles.

Chandrak released his grip. Air forced its way into Eligius’ lungs.

The soldier lay splayed-legged on the ground, pinned by a thicket of bodies. Stripped to his underclothes, he whimpered and begged in English. He was young and slightly built. His face was slick with sweat and fear.

The soldier’s eyes found Eligius, and hated him. “Listen to me,” he pleaded. “Please, you may have what you want. Please, just listen.”

Chandrak brought Eligius to the weeping soldier’s side. The men holding him down tightened their grip. Forcing Eligius to his knees, Chandrak took out a knife and put it into Eligius’ hands. He wrapped his own hands around its hilt and pressed it against the soldier’s chest. Its gleaming tooth sent tremors through the soldier. His torso pitched wildly, but there were too many against him.

“I won’t,” Eligius cried.

Madness filled Chandrak’s face. “They left a stain on us. Wash it away.”

Chandrak was scared. Eligius could see beneath the leathered face and the foundry-pocked flesh; he saw the face of the man at Court, crying for home.

Chandrak pressed down on Eligius’ hands. Eligius tried to hold the blade away from the soldier’s chest, but Chandrak’s grip crushed his fingers into the knife handle.

Pain flared through Eligius’ wrists, into his arms and shoulders as Chandrak leaned hard against him. The blade’s tip sliced shallowly into the soldier’s skin. A small trickle seeped to the soldier’s shirt. He screamed. Someone’s hand covered his mouth, sealing his pleas inside.

Hari came to Chandrak’s side.

“Help me,” Eligius pleaded as the men gathered around them.

Hari added his hands to Chandrak’s. Tears fell from his chin. “I’m afraid.” He closed his eyes.

Eligius screamed as something fibrous in the reaches of his back snapped. He tore his hands away, jerking the knife sideways. The thin gash he left in the soldier’s chest beaded with blood. The soldier’s head shook faster and faster.

Eligius leapt to his feet and bolted past Chandrak’s outstretched arms, past the others and into the trees before any of them could react. He heard the violent passage of men rising in angry pursuit of him. Hari’s cries mingled with those of the young soldier. English words of prayer erupted into the sky like rousted birds. Then the sputtering sound of someone drowning. Then only Hari, but by then Eligius was too far to be sure of anything.

Soon the sounds behind him fell away. When the night found him, he was still running on legs he no longer felt.





AT DEVAMPIYA, HE stopped. When it was light enough to see the abandoned village and its broken huts, he gathered wood apples. Cracking their hard shells, he scooped out their sour custard with his fingers. He took coconuts for their sweet water and gourds to make a bitter stew, the way his mother did. In the trees he found a hung line of seer fish. They were dry and only a little rotten. His stomach would reject much of it, but so be it.

The jungle was a living map, alive with destinations. He could go to the port and operate the cooling punkah fans for the colonials. He could become a water carrier, a messenger, a door opener. He could cut grass, make bricks, sweep children’s rooms clear of scorpions. He could build his own hut, plant cotton and become a village unto himself. Or he could sneak back into Dimbola and steal to his heart’s content. Maybe he would find other men and throw the Colebrooks’ home open to them. What would it require, to ascend in the eyes of his own? A blade, he guessed, plunged into the soft skin of colonials whose names and voices and wants he had come to know.

Around him, the light folded. He waited to see if the shadows of the trees might become permanent on the jungle floor or on his skin. But they kept shifting into each other until the sharp demarcations of the leaves and the broken hut walls melted away. There were no feathers in the world outside the memsa’ab’s camera. Nothing was held, in the dark or the light.

The young soldier’s cries would not leave him.

He reached into his tunic. The memsa’ab’s correspondence to Holland still lay against his skin, where he’d folded it for safekeeping. Her precious, starry paper from across the sea, wasted on such a sad letter.

He let it slip from his fingers, and his glass with it.





HE AWOKE IN a beam of morning sun. His skin felt agreeably warm. The glass shard broke the light into pillars that touched everything within his bleary sight.

Rising stiffly, he squinted as the light’s reflection on the glass burst brilliantly before him. He put his hand over his eyes, letting bubbles of color fill and fade back into the dusk of his palm.

The memsa’ab’s letter lay on the ground, under the glass. Bits of leaves and dew drops were trapped between them like insects in amber. He lifted the glass to brush them off, but something of them remained. The letter was dotted with discolorations in the shape and location of the leaves. They were on the glass as well, in the same configuration.

He held the glass into the sun. Faint as dissipating mist, their images spattered the shard’s surface, unmistakable in shape, down to the perforations and hushed tracings of veins.

Something stirred his mind. He wiped some dew from fallen leaves and slickened the memsa’ab’s paper. Finding a larger leaf, he laid it atop the paper and pressed it into the light.

The last of the bauble was rapidly departing his skin. Days in the jungle had all but scoured it from his hand.

The bauble had been in Julia’s hand, that day in Holland House. It made a halo of sun on her skin. Nothing else of her survived the journey through the camera to the memsa’ab’s paper, nothing but its image.

There. A dream of the leaf began. Faint tracings of veins, threading from the silver salt to the glass. As he breathed, they darkened ever so slowly. The light moved with the sun’s rise and he moved with it, keeping the paper and glass bathed. Over countless minutes the leaf filled in. He withdrew it from the sun. It held, like the feather. Like Julia, but only that part of her touched by the bauble’s bent, concentrated light.

He left Devampiya’s ruins behind.





MARY OPENED THE front door. He raced past her without a word. She gave chase but he moved as if devils sped after him.

Catherine was in the study, composing at a small table set up by Charles’ chair. Charles’ color had not improved. He stared vacantly out the window.

“Madam, I’m sorry.”

Catherine and Charles looked up at Mary’s voice. Eligius stood in the doorway, heaving with the effort to take breaths. His hair and face were slickened with sweat. Catherine despised the thought rising from the tumult in her. He looks as if he’s just been born.

Eligius raised the glass. She saw the image imprinted there. A stain bearing the unmistakable marks. The veins were as frail as thread. The leaves bore scalloped edges. The faint permeable light of it told her that he had somehow brought it forth from life.

Charles and Mary, their stares of indignation; the both of them could join hands and stroll to hell. Look at it.

“I need a hammer,” Eligius said.

“Mary,” Catherine said, “get him a hammer.”

“What? I will not – ”

“Now.”

In the yard, Eligius found the ladder and ascended to Holland House’s roof. His entry had roused Julia and Ewen. While Catherine set up the camera, they gathered at the foot of the structure to watch him pull his crude wooden patches loose and toss them to the ground. The shadowy interior of Holland House filled with sunlight. When the strongest light found the chair, he went inside, where he took out the window panes with a gentle tap of the hammer.

“How?” Catherine held up the leaf.

“The light. The light was on Julia’s arm. It was the only part of her that came. And the feather sat atop your paper in the sun before I patched the roof. If we concentrate more light on the work, it will stay longer. I know it. We’ll use glass to make the light stronger.”

He wielded the hammer to fashion rough, cracked squares from the window panes. Catherine brought silver salt. Somewhere, she thought, Sir John is smiling at the woman who longed to possess shadows, who now finds the missing light.

“Wait,” she said. “In one of the letters I received, Sir John enclosed cotton. He spoke of life and death.”

She gave him her key to the locked room.

“All of your most precious things are in there,” he said.

“Go. Bring his letter to me. I think there may be a way to hold these images still.”

He ran. His heart ran ahead of him. In her room, he found Sir John’s letter, the guncotton and a tin. Life and death, Sir John had written, in eternal stalemate.

In Holland House Catherine opened the tin of collodion and dipped one of Julia’s quills into it. Afoul, heady stench filled the air. “Sir John said it had the power to hold the guncotton still. Why not this?”

She brushed collodion onto the glass. Tilting it this way and that, she directed the crawling tide across the surface until it was coated with a second skin that bent the colors from the light.

Eligius slipped it inside the camera.

“Mother.”

Julia sat in the chair, wrapped in a brocade shawl. Her head tilted up, a girl of great privilege and station.

He arranged the glass around her. Sunlight sparkled from one pane to the next, bathing her in gold.

“Is it right?” Eligius asked. He held up the cloak for Catherine.

“Let us see.” Slipping under, she captured Julia through the lens. The light made baubles of her daughter’s eyes.

Julia let her shawl slip from her shoulders. Her lips parted. Her gaze wandered from the eye of the camera to Eligius.

Great swaths of daylight passed as they waited; so many breaths passed before she pulled the plate from the camera and bathed it, and prayed that they would make the glass live this time.

It came in tides of shape and shadow. Julia’s folded hands, her arms, the soft lace of her dress, her thin neck and her hair cascading over her shoulders, unfastened to catch the wind. Her face came and stayed, longer and more vividly than ever before.

“Bring your father,” Catherine said. “Hurry.”

Julia ran for the house and returned with Charles.

“Watch me,” Catherine said to her husband. “This once.”

She bathed the plate with water while Eligius held it. The collodion writhed beneath her fingers. Her flesh buzzed with chemical.

Later, Eligius thought, I may see her on me.

Charles drew close to it. His hand flickered, then came back to rest atop the golden buttons of his overcoat. Catherine leaned to be near him. Together they gazed at the dripping frame, the remains of their eldest child washing away. Everything around them stilled; the cold world he lived in, and the world that she knew, made of lost children and the lights that illuminated the way back to them.

She examined their faces. Eligius, Charles, Julia. They know. For them, for me, this will remain.

In that held moment, Eligius saw what it was that bound these two strangers together for all their remaining days. He’d seen betrothal, and obligation, and the silent suffering of wives following their husbands from fallen huts to dirt roads. But he’d never before seen how small, how easily missed, how impregnable love could be until the memsa’ab had added her solutions to his light, and burned it into glass.

Soon she was lost to her work. She studied the light of it and let the world fall. She saw only what came after Julia’s arrested moment. It glinted through the coated glass and the liquid fog that was her child’s face. There was a beauty in its leaving.

Eligius approached Charles and spoke quietly. “There is a man, Chandrak. He is from my village. He was the other man shot on that day, when my father died.”

“I remember. What of him?”

“He is the one stealing. He and others. Men follow him. They’re trying to get guns. He wanted me to steal from you.”

“This doesn’t excuse what you did. I’ve no trust in you.”

“He killed a soldier.”

Julia stared at him. Charles took his face in his hands. Tremors passed from the old lion’s fingers into the hollows of Eligius’ cheeks.

Tears fell from Eligius’ eyes. He told Charles of the clearing. “He was little more than a boy and he’s dead because of me.”

“And you swear to me, this is the truth? You had no hand in this?”

“I ran away. I ran to you.”

“I believe him.” Catherine stood beside Eligius. “He puts himself at terrible risk, coming to you.”

“Will you testify to this?” Charles demanded.

“Yes.”

“For the present,” Charles said, “I will keep you here under my protection while this matter is looked into. The governor will need to be informed. No doubt he’ll send soldiers after this man, and then to the gallows with him. But Eligius, I pity you if I learn other than what you’ve told me. You have no country, boy.”

“You’re right,” Catherine said. “And now you will listen to me, husband. He came to you for the same reason his father did. Do something to be worthy of it. Give him another reason to remember you.”

She took the glass plate outside and held it up to the sky. As its collodion skin peeled away in drops of silver rain, she wept. The last tattered flecks of Julia fell away to the ground.

No matter, she thought, that the picture washes away. We will hold it eventually. One day it will be nothing of consequence, to be stilled.