The Luminist (18 page)

“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.