The Luminist

2.


You have been transported from your houses in Leadenhall Street to the dominion of the richest Empire in the world, and left as if by dream in that amazing pitch of exultation and riches. Rejoice, and hold fast to our course.





Pamphleteer, to directors and stockholders of the East India Company, on their hold over India, 1836


I had the opportunity to see each step in the operation of the process. The plate, used for the purpose of stealing my likeness, the polished sur- face afterwards exposed to the action of vapor until golden in hue. The plate was, in my presence, placed in a small box and thereafter in a solution of unknown origin; by this action was my visage to be produced. Yet when the plate was removed, I was invisible. The cry went out: Failure!





Affidavit of Lord Dalhouse, on a visit to a photographer’s premises,

June 1837 (Public Record Office, ref. number C31/585 box2)





If only you could have seen it. No longer do I chase shadows as you have counseled against. My house is full of fumes and frames, cut glass and in the cottage house, the blessings of an industrious young Indian man. Where there were holes in the roof, there are now windows and black curtains, and pulleys and levers. Quite the luminist, that one. He can assert at least a bit of control over Ceylon’s capricious light.

I fail no more. In truth I cannot say where my son Hardy resides now, nor what has become of my belief in such things as Heaven. But I will never again accept the loss of a child to the distant regions of memory. I know too much now.”

Letter from Catherine Colebrook to Sir John Holland December 19,1837





Servitudes


“WHERE IS ELIGIUS, MARY?”

At the sound of her mistress’ voice, Mary came to the dining room with a fresh cup of tea. “Outside with the master.”

“Charles is outside? How could you let him outside in his condition?”

“He insisted after mistress Julia spoke with him. On Eligius’ behalf, madam.”

She finished her letter to Sir John.

Send me nothing more, dearest friend and mentor. Soon it will be my turn to send something your way. Something wondrous.

She sealed the letter and brought it with her for Eligius to post. She found him at the gate, holding a large palm frond over Charles and a bent Indian woman standing with Ault. Behind them, stretching past the road and into the trees, were men, women, children, their clothes and faces dusty from walking the dry paths that bound their lives to the colonials’ estates.

“These people come from three villages,” Charles said. “Their tale is a tragic one.”

“Please,” Eligius said. “It’s been too long that you are outside, sa’ab.”

“There is only one old woman present, boy, and she is over there.”

Eligius exchanged looks with Catherine.

“Stephen,” Charles said, “what do you say about their accounts?”

“I have seen what they’re speaking of. Their huts are being razed and their land seized under order of the governor. Since that poor devil’s body was found, there have been abuses, Charles. Beatings at the hands of the soldiers. They cite the doctrine of lapse. Does this have any meaning to you?”

“Let these people know that they have my full attention. Eligius, I wish to be in my study with papers and quills. Now, please.”

“Let me help you,” Catherine said.

“No. The boy will do it.”

Eligius led Charles to the house. He helped the old man into the chair at his writing desk and said that he would locate some paper and quills.

“I’m not yet prepared to say that I fully believe you,” Charles said. “Though it would seem your story is corroborated.”

“I thank you for listening, sa’ab.”

He left, and returned with the paper and quills. He asked Charles what would be done with them.

“Certainly I will do what I can, but I am limited in these matters.” His hand rested on the map of Ceylon. “In the Cape of Good Hope, I was given this. I was an old man with no prospects. Convalescing then and ever after, I suppose. I have never been well. This map was the terrain where my redemption was to be found. I thought I would come, make my mark on this country. Give her laws that she might care for herself. No small matter, I thought I would make a coffee fortune and return to London a valued civil servant untouched by his time away. But Ceylon has come to be a part of me in ways I never expected. I love it in the senseless manner that compels my wife in her own pursuits. To love something that eludes me is a terrible enough thing. To see it on the verge of catastrophe, to be too old and too indebted to do anything? I fear what will become of my soul if I leave it like this.”

“Then don’t leave it, sa’ab”

“You’re young yet. You cannot be expected to understand. What I begin now may end all that I care for. Yet my silence will certainly end all that I ever believed I was. It is a sorry state that I find myself.”

He patted the map. “I sent this away once, with a prayer that it and my wife would return to me. Know this, Eligius. There is no worse thing you could have considered taking from me.”





AFTER CHARLES’ MEETINGS with the villagers became public knowledge, an even more pronounced scarcity of company took hold in Dimbola. When Eligius walked the grounds at night he heard the lilt of colonial voices carrying over from festive parties the Colebrooks were not asked to attend.

The Britishers are not so different, he thought. They had their own castes.

As Sir John Holland’s arrival neared, Catherine planned a feast. Eligius delivered invitations to colonial households in Port Colombo. He erected a tent in front of the cottage house. Tables and place settings were readied. Catherine prepared a menu calling for lamb and pheasant, a whole roast pig, seer fish, pastries and a sheet of marzipan for the children, wine and beer. She gave him the task of placing the order at the market and told him what to say to the butchers and bakers who would surely resist when they heard which family the food was meant for. “Have them speak to the governor of Ceylon,” she told him, “if they doubt my word.”

“Shall Mary accompany me?”

“Mary ministers to my husband. Sir John’s arrival is ours to prepare for.”

He understood. Mary was her master’s maid now. Openly disdainful of Catherine even on his first day in the rain five months before, Mary now perceived Catherine as aligned with the Indian kutha.

An invisible line bisected the house. The dining room was neutral ground, the study and kitchen hostile, the trees, the sky and Holland House, theirs.

If it had to be this way, he thought, at least their territory was worth having.

He saw the other servants at the market. Without Mary to intimidate them with her haughtiness, they surrounded him and peppered him with questions about the feast, this man Holland, about his memsa’ab’s storied incursions to realms she had no business dallying with.

“Will there be another of her horrid plays?” asked one redhaired girl, her face a riot of blotches. She struck a vainglorious pose.

He laughed in spite of himself. “She has been working on something, though it isn’t a play. I’m as disappointed as you.”

The girls laughed and offered him a sip of rum from a battered metal flask they passed between themselves. He declined.

“How you must suffer at her beck and call,” another said. She twisted her black braids with a hand shorn of two fingers.

“ Who?” the redhead interjected. “Mary or the mistress?”

“Pick your poison’s, what I say.”

He handed his list to the butcher who had rebuffed Mary on his first trip to the market. “Two days from now,” he told the man. “The memsa’ab said the governor’s representative had spoken to you.”

“He has. Something about her displaying his life’s work, and her own.”

“I’ve heard of this.”

An elder maid came forward. Her hands clasped in front of her, she moved with the quiet humility of the pious. She was in her forties, it seemed, with deep creases under her eyes and around her mouth, as if pebbles had broken the surface of her skin and rippled outward. “She spoke with my master about it. Inappropriate of her, I thought, but when has she been a decorous woman? She said she had found a way to put a frame around God’s hand. Her words.”

The servants confided with each other in hushed tones.

The list trembled in the butcher’s hands. “Blasphemous.”

“A lie,” the elder maid said.

“I watched her do it,” Eligius said. “It was something I cannot describe. I cannot imagine it was anything to make your god upset. It is because of him that she tries. It is prayer. Now what of this list?”

His eyes darting from face to face, the butcher set the paper down on his cutting table in a dry place. “Tomorrow. This will be all across the market by then. Me, selling good meat for prayers.” He shook his head.

Eligius made his way to the baker’s modest clay oven, where fumes of browning bread made the low sky shimmer. The elder maid followed him. “Your mistress invited my master to come see her triumph.”

“When the day comes, you should accompany him. I will make you some tea and you can watch. It is like a dream to see a face come out of nothing. I do not understand it.”

Her brow furrowed. “Perhaps. But is it wrong?”

“I am a heathen, I think you would say. But her daughter Julia is a Christian, and she was the memsa’ab’s first.”

“I wish I could see. Then my mind might rest on this.”

She stepped aside to let him pass. “You know they all speak of you, too. The Indian who chose us over his own.”

“I do not wish to be spoken of.”

He finished his errands, bid farewell to the maids and walked from the market. Away from the colors and braying voices, Queen Street teemed with colonial families shadowed by sunbaked Tamil and Malay, waiting for carts to pass with pallets destined for the John Company. Medicines, cured meats, vegetables, wood and unpolished stone, flowers and exotic birds, the blood and bone of their country departed in wagons and carts on the way to sea. The poor kept watch over the ground, waiting for a bit of waste. When the carts were gone, they scurried onto the cracked dirt to pick up the horses’ defecation with the flat side of rubber leaves. Setting it out to dry, they would sell it later for fuel to their fellow villagers in their own approximations of the colonials’ marketplace.

Further down the road, children played in clouds of dust raised by the carts while their mothers worked. One small cough, speckled with wetness despite the dry season, rose above the din of their voices.

Eligius saw Sudarma leave her pile in the road and go to Gita. Behind her, the other women jostled for the abandoned manure. Sudarma raised Gita up and turned her so she might cough her lungs clear.

In each discrete movement he saw where the light was, where he might direct it, what of his mother and Gita might find the way to glass, what of them would be lost.

The sight of them made him shiver. It was like the careless finding of a raw wound, the way Sudarma looked up from Gita to see her son so far from her.





CHARLES WAS ON the verge of collapse, yet over the days he pressed on with his writing. His papers were filled with elegant lines. Some drowned in small seas of ink. Others he scratched into oblivion.

Eligius wanted to ask where the answer to his people’s problems might be found in those pages. But an illness of distrust still permeated the study, its epicenter the map Charles kept close to his work.

He approached Mary in the scullery one evening while she was pouring goat’s milk through a cloth to strain it for cheese. “Do you think the Colebrooks would let my mother come work for them?”

Mary sighed wearily, then kept pouring.

“She would have to bring my sister Gita. But she’s a baby and would be no trouble. My mother could clean and wash. She would do as you asked.”

Mary held the cloth above a plate. She scraped it with a flat knife. Crumblings of clotted milk fell away.

“I fear the sa’ab won’t be able to stop what is happening. I don’t want my family to starve.”

Mary let the cloth fall to the floor, then kicked it towards him. “What’s a servant’s place?”

He picked the cloth up.

“How’d it get there?” she asked.

“It was my fault,” he said.

“I always knew you were a sly one. I knew it the moment I laid eyes on you in the rain, listening to every word the mistress said. You’re watchful and you’re quiet. Why, I’ll wager when you kill them in their beds, they won’t even wake.”

“I would never – ”

“What does a maid do, kutha?”

He seethed. Her words were strips of banyan across his back. “Cooks. Cleans. Tends to the children. Brings dishes and takes them away. Waits to see when the sa’ab’s tobacco is low. Bargains. Never tells them they don’t have enough money to buy what others have. Makes a little go farther. Never says they smell or spilled. Goes quietly about it all.”

“Sly one, is what you are. Should your mother starve, it would only be one less of you.”

“Your god should damn you.”

“You’re quiet and you listen, but you can be provoked. My God will certainly damn me, but for nothing I say to a filthy beggar who pulled the wool over a foolish family’s eyes. No, I’ll pay for letting a blasphemous woman fritter away what remains of her husband’s self-respect. And now she has you to help her. A murderer, I’ll wager. Tell me, if she burns the rest of her own home down to raise her dead child, who will you steal from then? Who will you cut open?”

“You think you know me. But I know you. You’re white like them, but low like me. You think they forget what you are because you put their children to bed. You may lift Ewen when he reaches for you, but that doesn’t make you one of them. You’re just something to be ridden. And now there’s me.”

Her eyes gleamed with wetness and anger. She would make a good painting of light, he thought.

Scraping the milk fat into a mold, she spread it with the knife until it was smooth, then placed it in a shaded corner, out of the coming high heat of the day. She stepped by him without a word.

In the morning, she was gone.





Pillars of Smoke


EWEN CRIED AS IF FOR A DEATH. JULIA SAID NOTHING; it was only a maid. Charles rose and hobbled into his study, closing the door behind him. An English girl had chosen leaving over remaining. No doubt she would find placement in another colonial household. Certainly she lacked means to return home. But what would she say of them?

What could she say that had not already been said, Catherine thought. The fashionable notion of a servant among the Directors’ wives was to let only their successful performance of tasks be noticed. The rest fell outside the sphere of appropriate women. Maids such as Mary belonged to the background of dinners, of children’s bedtimes and nursemaid needs. The event itself belonged to the proper women, the details to those with dirt under their nails and stooped postures.

Between her and Mary there had been antagonism of a puzzling sort. The girl resented all she’d seen at Dimbola. Now, this. A fête for the man she most wanted to shine before, and no one to help.

It was Friday. She came to Eligius in a panic.

“I know someone who will work hard,” he said. “But I must speak to the sa’ab. To the governor as well.”

He cleaned the house, went to market and reminded the butcher to be prompt. After, he stopped at the missionary’s pitiable pastoral and asked that word be sent to his mother in Matara.

“You can’t go there alone,” the missionary told him. “Not now. If any of your own learn you’ll be there, I fear for you.”

“I will be safe,” he said, and said no more.

The next day, he left Dimbola for his village. At the lion’s mouth, he saw two pillars of smoke. Both were days away. One was white. As it rose above the furthest horizon of the ocean, the wind sifted it into gauze. Holland’s ship, perhaps.

The other bloomed in the east, over the land. The green carpet of jungle was broken by a reef of smoke from the fire that raged below it.

He wondered what fed it, to make it grow darker as it rose.





ALL OF MATARA waited by the road as Ault slowed the cart to let Eligius disembark. “I’ll see to your mother,” Ault said. He walked down the road to Eligius’ old hut.

Eligius let the villagers gather near him. Their rage coalesced into something communal. It didn’t take long for the man he sought to come.

Chandrak walked towards the cart, a smile gathering at his lips. His rib cage filled with labored air. As the villagers stood nearby, watching intently, he coughed pink foam into his cupped palm. Starvation laced his torso. “So you’ ve come to make servants of us all. Who can blame you for leaving? We’re dying. But everyone talks about you. The boy who carved such a lofty place for himself among the colonials that the governor pays him visits. Not even his father could speak to him now.”

“It is not that way.”

“I’ll let Swaran know that I saw you. I’ll tell him the best of you died along with him.”

“Eligius!”

Ault stood at Sudarma’s hut, beckoning her to come. She emerged with Gita and climbed aboard the cart, her head bowed.

“I have to go,” Eligius said. He took up the reins. “Let my mother and Gita leave with me. If you care about them at all, you will do what’s best for them. Don’t try to stop us.”

“I remember you at the Overstone fields. You were weak even then. When you left for the colonials, I knew you’d never come back. I feared you wouldn’t find manhood, but never did I think you would turn your back like this. Remember, your back isn’t white, kutha.”

He drew close. “As for Sudarma, she makes her own choices and she has chosen you. I am a man. I don’t need a woman’s protection. In the days to come, it would be better if I don’t see you again. But I will find you. Then will you have the courage to end things between us?”

“I already have,” Eligius said.

Women brought bread tied in cloth and water for Chakran. Children drew petals at his feet with sticks. A good luck prayer. The women glared at Eligius before returning to their cooking pots. Paltry curries dusted the air but conjured nothing of his days playing in the village streets.

It was a strange thing, to wish that his childhood in this place could somehow be hurled under the cart’s turning wheels and crushed.

“ Who was that man?” Ault asked as they rolled away from the villagers. “Didn’t he accompany you on the day you first came to me?”

“He’s no one.”

Ault gave his donkey a pat on the neck. “What news from your master Charles, then? What can he make of this business with Governor Wynfield’s doctrine?”

“I don’t know.”

He guided the cart and its cargo – his silent mother and a sleeping Gita – past fallen roofs of battered thrush, past fragments and families in awe that only one stricken woman and her baby had a destination.

Ahead was a stand of intertwined neem. Eligius guided the old animal onto a path around it, towards the clearing on the other side.

Ault chattered on. “I hear their maid has left them, in her first year no less. And this camera. Catherine’s sent word of it to the vicar, the lords of the court, all the great men, it seems. I wonder what her husband thinks of it.” He shook his head. “That such things should come to pass. Progress, I suppose.”

Gita began to sob in her sleep. “She doesn’t know the feel of me,” Sudarma said. “These clothes are not what she usually touches.” She pulled at her servant’s smock with a sour expression.

More neighbors gathered across the road behind them. The women brought empty baskets.

“Your bruises are almost healed,” Eligius said.

“Tell Gita about the clouds and the elephants. She’ll stop crying like you used to. Remember? You don’t believe such things anymore.”

“I’m older, amma.”

She shook her head. As if he was wrong.

There was no smoke over the trees anymore. The colonials were protective of their holdings and quick to suffocate such things.

“You’ll keep me informed of Charles’ progress,” Ault said. “Whether it’s a bill to be presented to Court or word of the next town to be levied. I wish to know.”

Eligius flicked the reins, startling the weary donkey into a faster trot.

“I’ll miss Matara very much indeed,” Ault said. “There were good people here. I’ll remember it fondly.” He put his hands over a careworn Bible. “Your father taught you to read there, outside your home. You never wanted to stay inside, he said, even in the rain. Always so restless!”

“Must we talk about what was?” Eligius said. “It’s of no use to anyone now.”

“You’ve never held your tongue with me, like I’ve seen you do with others. Curious.”

Eligius turned to watch the villagers cross the road towards their hut. Children were faster; their mothers sent them first.

“Perhaps you’re right to be bitter,” Ault said. “Sometimes it seems like there’s no kindness left anywhere. Hard men like Wynfield take what they want. Even in my line, it’s no different. As the Galle Face goes up, fewer of my countrymen need me. I’m left to the side with all of you. Another weak man crying out for fairness.”

The rest of their hut came free in shreds of fabric, some tins of tea, cooking pots, the altar. His mother’s wedding sari dragged the hard ground behind the woman carrying it away. Tiny hands grabbed at its beads, tearing them loose to roll in the dust.

Half of Matara’s dwellings had fallen to Wynfield’s soldiers. Like the craggy tops of sunken mountains, their points emerged from the dry ground.

“People pass your kind by without so much as a glance.” Ault patted Eligius’ knee. “You should be thankful.”

They reached the clearing and the contingent of soldiers waiting there. One broke ranks. He guided his horse, a sleekskinned animal, to the cart.

“Did you see the man speaking to me?” Eligius asked. “The crippled one.”

“I saw him.”

“He is the one.”

The soldiers thundered past, through the trees and into Matara’s ruins. The villagers screamed. The sound of their flight fell under the percussive wash of the soldiers.

“You succeed in surprising me,” Ault said.

The sounds he expected came from the cart. A prayer of mourning. He gathered all of it – his mother’s voice, Matara’s fall – and put it into the empty cask where his heart had been.





EWEN MET THEIR cart at Dimbola’s gate. He held an apron out to Sudarma. “Mother says to see that the baby’s quiet. She asked me to sit in the chair. Will you stay with me while I sit?”

“Yes.” Eligius could feel his mother’s eyes on him.

“I have to sit still.”

“I understand. I will be there.”

“Good.” He ran off towards the gazebo.

Sudarma handed Gita to him, then fastened the apron around her waist. “Show me where to draw water. And the pantry.”

“Mother, you understand why I had to do this. Don’t you?”

“Am I to market as well?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me what else.” Her gaze fell on a brightly tressed peacock strutting across the yard. She pointed Gita’s attention to it.

“You’ve no right to be angry,” Eligius said. “What else should I have done? Wait for the soldiers to bury you with your own walls? Wait for Chandrak to kill me?”

“I hear the colonials’ homes have fine linen on their floors, as soft as sheep’s wool.”

“I’ve told you. We move the rug with the sun to keep it from fading. We beat the dust from it.”

“This will fall to me.”

She walked ahead of him towards the house. He stopped her before she could enter the front door. “Enter in the back. So you are not seen unless called.”

He despised her quiet gait. It was as if a feeble woman had donned a sari fashioned from his mother’s skin.

He took her inside and showed her everything he’d ever seen Mary do. It surprised him how versed he’d become in the Colebrooks’ expectations. There was the rug, the gas lamps and hearth fires, the brandy and tobacco and the time to bear them into the study on a tray, with a blanket for the sa’ab’s swollen legs. He instructed her not to regard the sa’ab too closely. The old man was vain to the blood roses blooming along his shins.

He showed her what to clear, and when, and with what utensil. He brought her to the well and the pantry, where she set to work on a dinner of lamb belly and boiled root vegetables. He showed her how to bake bread, though he didn’t know what Mary used to make it swell the way it did.

Through it all, she said nothing. She served dinner and took the plates away. When he passed through with freshwater for the night’s laundering, he found the Colebrooks staring at their plates while his mother ministered to them as if she’d always been there. Charles leaned a little when she departed them, to see where she went.

“I put Gita in my room and gave her a plume to play with,” Eligius told her at the end of her first evening. “She’s been quiet.”

“I will have her back now.”

“I want to show you something before you retire.”

“It’s been enough for one day.”

“Let me show you what I’ve done. Surely you’ve heard talk of the camera.”

“I don’t know of such things.”

“Isn’t that reason enough to come see?”

“I don’t want to.”

Hefting Gita in his arms, he walked to the servant’s door. She followed, only pausing to consider the paintings before continuing out to the yard, and to the door of Holland House. “The roof was as open as ours,” he said. “I put glass in the holes. I showed the memsa’ab where to find the sun in here. I made curtains and a lever.” He pulled on a dangling cord, opening the curtains across the ceiling to reveal stars pressed against the glass.

He turned to show her the camera. “I thought it was a beast, but it’s wondrous.”

She was already through the cottage door. Gita sat high in her arms, watching him as they returned to the main house.

He fought the urge to chase after them. The notion struck him as distasteful. Things were different now.

Julia sat in the gazebo, regarding Sudarma and Gita as they passed. “I require ink,” she called to him. “And some paper, and a way to hold them still in this wind.”

“I will get them.”

“See to your mother first. Then come out, Eligius. Bring something for me to write about, up close. Holland House will be the backdrop, but I need something of my own to gaze upon. Something right here.”

He went inside the main house. The night was deepening around him. The smoldering gas lamps in the house pierced only as far as the edge of the porch.

He took his mother to Mary’s quarters, then brought her the maid’s thin, stiff linen to fit over her straw mat. It was in all respects a marked improvement over their hut’s meager shelter, yet Sudarma looked around with a bitter, disapproving expression. She placed the sheet atop her bed and sat upon it. Gita crawled through the dirt on the floor, flecking her hair with it.

“Do you require anything else?” he asked.

“You are called. The mistress outside.”

“In the morning, I’ll come wake you. I’ll show you where everything is to make breakfast. The food for the feast will arrive at dawn, and you’ll start cooking immediately. Some of it is being roasted by the butcher in a pit. There will be much to see to. I’ll help you as best I can.”

“I know you will. I know all you’ve done is for us.” She was a storm of discontent. “I don’t want to die here. I don’t know these walls. Their stares are worse than I ever thought. I would never have sent you if I’d known what it was like to be looked at this way. Better the fields. I want to see my home.”

“And him? You were lonely. It wasn’t like it was with appa.”

She was silent.

“He took a life and life has to be made whole. It’s done. Make a home of it here, mother. As I did. As I was asked to do. Our village is gone, don’t you know that? We are in their house now, and we have to make of these small corners something like a life. That’s all. Nothing else.” She nodded.

Later, he thought, he might reflect on her in this moment. It was just a little nod of her head. A simple enough thing. But after a lifetime supporting unbearable burdens, the words that finally sank her to her knees were his.

“If you go to your window,” he said, “you and Gita can see me. I’m not far away.” His eyes wandered. “May I take that?”

“Go.” She went to the window.

He took the battered diya and ran outside gratefully. There was wind, and the trees to give it voice.

That evening, his mother sat at her new room’s window, facing the side of the yard and the jungle beyond. Her body was cut from candlelight. He couldn’t see her features but felt certain she was watching him.

Julia wrote of Holland House as being much more proximate to the gazebo than it was in fact. When she began to shape the diya with her words, he told her it sounded so real that he wanted to pick it up from her paper and see the two of them reflected in its dimpled brass hide. She smiled.

It was awhile before he glanced at the house again. By then it was late, and his mother was gone from the window.





BEFORE DAWN, HE stoked afire in the oven and surrounded it with porous stones as Mary had done, to radiate heat to the ends of the oven’s crevices. It would stay piping for hours, and keep the meat and breads warm without burning.

He slipped through the still house. The brisk air pulled his skin into a million tingling little knots. Outside, he surveyed the grounds, envisioning the throngs that would descend on Dimbola in anticipation of Sir John Holland’s arrival. By then he would have staked torchiers along the path they would walk, to be lit when the humidity drew the insects.

The smells of roasted pig, charred lamb and game hen filled the air long before the butcher’s cart sidled into view. Together they unloaded the cart and stacked the meats in the ovens. “I’ll wager you’ve never seen such food in this house,” the butcher said. “Nor will you again, unless your mistress charms her way to another suitor.”

“Suitor?”

“It’s what’s being said, boy. She cares little for her husband’s reputation or else she wouldn’t race the devil to outdo it. You wouldn’t know such things, but she’s a shame in polite society. Bringing her conquest over the ocean, no less.”

“The man who comes is a teacher and friend. He comes for his own work. She has said.”

“What would a servant know? My customers are her betters. I put my faith in them. Ah, I see I’ve troubled you.”

“It is no business of mine.”

“Do you know that my best customer now employs the Colebrooks’ girl, Mary? She asked me to send word to you. They are in need of a boy for their horses.”

A servant who only performed one task? he thought.

“Come to the market.” The butcher stepped up to his cart and took up the reins. “Ask for Seward. That’s me. I’ll get you to a paying house.”

“What does it matter to Mary, what happens to me?”

“I can tell you for a fact it doesn’t. But they’ll put an extra shilling in her pocket for locating a boy. And she’ll take care of me in turn.” He grinned. “I’ll be looking for you.”

Eligius returned to the house. His mother was in the kitchen, staring at the ovens. “Baste them regularly,” he told her.

“Our master and mistress were arguing.” She kept a hand on Gita, who crawled over the cutting block. “The master is upset at the cost of all this.”

“He didn’t pay. It’s of no matter to us. It’s for you to cook this as if it were always here.”

“How you’ve learned.”

“Yes. I’ve picked up quite a bit. I’ve much to do this morning. I’ll check back on you in a while. Make sure all the tables are set with linen and silver. You remember. I showed you.”

“Yes.”

“Take your sari off, mother. We are not in Matara.”

Outside, he climbed to the top of Holland House, the better to see the ship bearing his memsa’ab’s mystery man, Wynfield’s son and their possessions. By the time of their expected arrival, and taking into account the journey from the port to Dimbola, there would be precious little time left to show Holland her work.

He scanned the sea and found the ship easily. A second ship trailed it. Its shadow cut open the waves like a maid’s mending shears.

He turned to yell at the house, then paused. Catherine was seated on the porch, awaiting all her guests. There was Ewen, as usual chasing peacocks, but every now and again he slowed a little, his attention wandering away from childish pursuits. There was Sudarma, polishing the last of the plates in the sun. Gita sat at her feet, fascinated with Ewen’s games. And there was Julia, paper and quills at her side, turning the bracelets adorning her wrists like a self-conscious bride feeling the foreign weight of her ring.

He climbed down and adjusted the curtain over the roof window before walking to the porch. “Two ships in the harbor, memsa’ab. They’re close.”

“Hurry, then. Guests will be arriving shortly.”

“I will. I’ll return soon.” He glanced at his mother.

“I will see that she does all that is required,” Catherine said.

He nodded and left the porch. He heard his memsa’ab’s voice, louder than usual. “How odd our little family has become. Yet we persevere, eh?”