The Luminist (12 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The other servants hushed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He shook his head.

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

“ I know what it means to starve.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A terrible heat gripped Eligius' heart.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Canvases

SHRIKES FOUGHT IN THE MORNING SKY. THEY PLUNGED towards Holland House, then pinwheeled impossibly upwards on drafts of agitated air.

Amma would call it a portent, Eligius thought as he opened the cottage door to continue his repairs. Perhaps it was. Perhaps there were those who could perceive life's most obscure operations where he could not.

He opened the cottage door to continue his repairs. Julia stood inside, as if she'd been waiting for him to find her. Next to her was a table she had pulled to the center of the room, with paper and quills fanned over its surface. A painting leaned against it, facing the door. It depicted her, but younger, maybe twelve or thirteen. In it she was dressed in a simple frock of rose, sashed at the waist. A child's amused defiance played across her lips. Something pleased her. The corners of her mouth curved impishly out. Her right hand brushed her cheek. Her left clutched at a necklace of beads dangling down to her belly.

“ I take it out from time to time,” she said. “ It was painted almost three years ago, on the eve of Sir John Holland's travels to map the skies. His son George joined the voyage as a cartographer and portraitist. Before they departed, all George did was paint. I sat in his studio at the Maclear residence in the Cape. The scientist was taken with the skies, the painter with me, and others. You' ve seen his work in our halls.”

He endured her recitation of strange places and privileged
pursuits. These colonials were always dangling bait, relishing the opportunity to sigh their sighs and explain things.

She brushed a bit of dirt from the heavy frame. “ I watched him paint during the day. At night everyone debated God and man. There was the man of science, this man my mother had only just become acquainted with while my father was off with his laws. Here, actually. Sir John saw the stars as real and fixed, and my mother listened to him as if he knew. She wanted certainty, I suppose. She spoke of God, in the way she should have spoken of my father. As someone she hoped would come back. None of it matters. The world, the parts I could and could not see, had come to me in the Cape. I couldn't be this girl in the painting anymore.”

“ Please,” Eligius said. “ I should not see this, or hear of these things.”

“ Why should any of this bother you?”

He didn't answer. The version of her in the painting could remain a girl, touching young skin that would never wrinkle, never bleed, and she would never not smile, never not be beautiful ; she would deny time. He resented the girl before him. She would never know what it was, to be changed in an instant. She bemoaned trifles and conversation; no gunshots would ever fold her life onto itself.

“This is why you work on this cottage.” Julia draped a cloth over the painting. “The scientist and young master George Wynfield are crossing the ocean, back to Ceylon. Sir John is to reside here until he completes his star map insofar as these skies are captured. And George, I expect, will not be a stranger. Maybe then there will be some life in Dimbola. Perhaps he will paint me again and show me around the world. He writes to me and tells me lovely things. I know he wants to take me away with him. My father and the governor have spoken of our marriage as if it is certainty itself. Perhaps I 'll allow it. I should like at least something of me to leave here and become more than I am.”

“ If you wished to go elsewhere, would you be allowed to?”

She was quiet for a time and he waited. He could not hear the birds anymore. Perhaps they had settled their matter as animals did, and one of them had fallen to earth.

“I've seen what the departure of a child does,” she said. “The madness of farewells. That's what my mother calls it. No, I could never ask it of her.”

Outside, a carriage with curtained windows and brass trim pulled to the gate. A man in a suit and fine tall hat climbed down to open the carriage doors. Governor Wynfield stepped out, followed by his wife. Catherine and Charles met them at the gate. They began to walk together, toward Holland House.