The Luminist (26 page)

Smoke from the candles made ripples in the air. Inside the camera, a process moved like the carrying sea. She could almost hear the rustling of Eligius' light as it burned this silent, remembering girl into a sculpture.

Julia was looking away. It was too late to change her.

“Willful child,” Sir John muttered.

Under the cloak, Catherine let go. She lost the touch of the
wooden box. The partition of glass at her eye ceased its separation and became simply her sight.

She studied her daughter's frank beauty. The turn of her head. The casual clasp of hands in her lap. The serenity on her face; no longer did the muscles of her mouth or the aperture of her eye speak of youth in perpetual search of adolescent outrage at perceived slights. When had she become a woman? When had so much of the child departed?

There was in Julia's repose something terrible and powerful. Only death was as still as this.

This thing I do, she thought. May it tie a bit of light to we who come into the world already on the path to departing it. Just a bit of light, so we can be seen a little while after we're gone.

“Now,” she said.

They coated the glass with sodium hyposulfite, then bathed it. She felt the burning sink through her skin, running into her blood like groundwater.

Positioning the plate inside the warren, she lit more candles and put a mirror next to the light, intensifying it. Julia's image came in a thin cumulus. Haze from the smoking candles came with her, wrapping her glassed face in a gray fog. Her eyes glistened with silver and steel.

Her image did not leave. The boy next to her could have breathed and breathed. The glass held her.

“My lord,” Sir John muttered. “Catherine, my lord. Look at it. The first.”

“Let me see.” Julia came no closer than the edge of the candle circle. She held out her hand for the portrait.

“The first triumph is of you,” Sir John said.

“How odd, that it should happen to be this moment and no other. There is a tyranny of happenstance to it.”

She knelt and blew the candles out, then slipped over them carelessly. A few tumbled in the wake of her dress, spilling droplets of wax that swiftly hardened on the floor. “You are to
be congratulated, mother. Perhaps later, I can see it again in a different light.”

She returned to the gazebo. There, George motioned for her writing pad. He sat across from her, studying her and making swift strokes across the paper with a quill.

“Such indulgence,” Sir John said. “Really, Catherine. Your eldest gives free reign to her every emotional whim.”

He considered the image. “This cloud, Eligius, is this from the smoke? An interesting effect and not at all unpleasant. Catherine, you can re-create this at will. Now, what to call it? Catherine, are you listening?”

Hardy, so still at her side. The light in the bungalow at the moment he came and did not breathe. The ride to the Maclears'. The lichen blooms along the sea path. All of it had slipped between her fingers long ago. All of it, now too far away to bring back.

What she'd prayed for, she held. The stilled moment told her that prayer meant nothing.

This was something else. Prayers were dead words elevated to divinity by finite men. But this.

Outside in the gazebo, George stood over Julia. She kept her gaze to the ground. The distance and the somber gauze of threatened rain veiled her. To those in Holland House who saw her, she was as marble-gray as her photograph.

 

SUDARMAASKED TO be locked in early that night, after the last dish was cleared and fruit set aside to ripen for the morning meal. Gita was crying again, only this time Eligius could not find the diya to calm her. Ewen had taken it for a plaything, he concluded. A servant had little right to object.

Julia remained in the gazebo after the Wynfields departed. The wind took up loose sheets from her writing pad and made scattering leaves of them.

After seeing to his mother, he gathered the papers.
George had sketched intersecting ovals and circles, different studies of the same subject: her.

Her face was all that he had detailed. Her mouth. Her castoff eyes.

“I want to be alone,” she said when he presented the gathered papers to her.

He held up his hands. “See the black skin. Can you see yourself? I think it will last a long time.”

She didn't answer. He waited. He counted breaths and hoped something would surface in her eyes. “I'll leave you to your thoughts,” he finally said.

When he'd almost reached the main house, she called to him. “Name my photograph. Before my mother does. It should be yours to name. It was your light.”

He said that he would, then left her for his bed. Reaching under his mat, he withdrew the feather paper. Daylight would come soon. Until then he would try to think of a name for her stillness. Maybe he would conjure one that fit. Then his heart would murmur like the innards of the camera, and all would remain.

 

NEWS OF JULIA'S photograph gripped Ceylon that spring. It eclipsed the whispers of a rising tide among the native populace, of thuggee bands, theft, fires set against shops and even plantations. Seeking something to distract them, the Britishers found in Julia's image an ember of divinity with which to warm themselves.

By midsummer, every husband of importance had contacted Catherine. Whether for their wives or themselves, they sought her out for what she provided. Irrefutable proof of one privileged moment in their lives, to hold back what threatened to overtake them. They even braved the monsoon season to show up on Dimbola's doorstep, yearning for immortality.

Jane Pike came first. She spoke of her disappointment in the Florence portraitist, and her secret self. “I wanted to sing
in the great opera houses. In my dreams, the sound of my voice broke hearts.”

Catherine positioned the camera further back in Holland House and dressed one wall in curtains. Eligius strew orchids on the floor and put a stand to the left of a small coal line. Mrs. Pike followed instruction assiduously. She held her arms out just so and cast her eyes to the sky. She opened her mouth around the words to her favorite aria. While positioning her, Catherine told Ewen to pretend he was in the audience at a great hall. “Think of something to keep you still,” she said.

Whatever Ewen thought of brought tears to his eyes. Mrs. Pike's silently sung note became the second triumphant photograph.

Ewen appeared in many of the portraits she took that summer. Acolyte, student, muse, even a servant, which made Eligius laugh. Julia had only been in one, before George sought more of her time.

Some of the women paid for their portraits. She kept many of them for her own uses; Eligius helped her make extra prints from the glass of those she especially liked. She was less drawn to the fanciful, the princesses and the triumphant figures from the Bible so many of the women asked for. She favored sadness in its many forms and saw it in places Eligius did not. Mrs. Pike's singer, doomed to be heard only in the theater of her mind. Mrs. Greer's Juliet, dying next to her one true love.

Her favorite, and Eligius', was Mrs. Martin. Her Gretel lay atop a tule sea, waiting for God's hand to take her down.

She and Eligius developed a wordless alchemy amidst the poisons, glass and light. They knew their roles from the moment a patron entered Dimbola. The provision of tea and an improving quality of biscuits fell to him; elicitation of old dreams and some tears fell to her. The moment water met glass, light met paper, the moment to be taken, the position of the last folded cloth, the lens and the light; all this they shared.

They each, in their own way, thought of Julia as summer
gave way to fall. She was gone for long hours. At night she was too sealed within herself to appear in the gazebo. She would catch herself with her hand up near her hair, or at her lips, and she would shiver the posture away as if it was a spider nesting on her skin.

There were other moments like that. Charles had yet to emerge from his study, not truly. At dinner he ate morsels in silence. Most nights he needed help with even the simplest movement. His absence became a guest in the house.

One midnight-dark afternoon, she found Ewen standing at the front door, intent on the shears of rain sweeping the visible world away. She asked what it had been that made him cry, that day in Holland House with Mrs. Pike.

“Father is always sick.” He spied Eligius in the hall. “The soldiers killed your father. Soon none of us will have fathers.”

He walked away, nodding as if considering the worthiness of what he'd said.

She watched her son return his childish attention to the great outside world. Perhaps he was beginning to understand. Melancholy images resonated in him. Love, dreams. These were things always in the next moment, always ahead. Sadness, though, was a loyal thing. It waited.

 

MRS. PIKE RETURNED at summers's end. By then, the rains had lessened. Autumn took hold of Ceylon and made a twilight world of it. “The photograph has had such a profound effect on me,” Mrs. Pike confessed, “that I am compelled to beg of you. Share them.”

She brought forth a small velvet sack. In it were more rupees than Eligius had seen in one place before, and a slip of paper.

Catherine turned the paper over in her hand. “This is an address in London.”

“My brother manages a gallery there. I would be pleased to send him some of your portraits.”

“I'm honored, but I am not a worthy enough artist.”

“Let others be the judge of that. All I know is that I cannot stop thinking of the photograph. Each time I look at it, I find something I didn't notice before.”

Catherine spoke to Sir John of the invitation. He favored the idea. “Make a collection of these portraits, Catherine. An album. Important men, perhaps, that will make the appropriate impression in London or Paris. If others see how posterity favors them, there will be a line of society members from the door to the gate. You've already done a world of good distracting your neighbors from Ceylon's troubles. That is no mere trifle.”

Seeing her room aglow late into the night, Eligius brewed some tea and brought it to her. He set the cup and saucer down on her desk, next to Julia's photograph and a glass with a dry film of brandy. “ Will you send Julia's to London?” he asked.

“ No. Not that one.”

He was glad.

“ Have you noticed this before?” She gestured to a bright glow in Julia's left eye. A reflection of a candle, imprecise and pale as milk.

“ I see it, memsa'ab.”

“It was chance that I caught it. The life in her eyes. I've nothing to do with it. Why do I chase this? I can only fail.”

Brandy and a photo had reduced her to a child. The chemical fumes had burned her cheeks and made a butcher's table of her hands but she could not stop nor imagine stopping, not at Julia or Mrs. Murphy or Mrs. Pike, or at an album of Ceylon's most important people.

“When my father died,” Eligius told her, “I saw myself in his eyes, and the soldiers behind me. I will never see it again. It left with him. I don't know what you hope for. But I can tell you that while I don't remember any particular leaf, I know the one we made will remain. Maybe that is enough.”

“Stay with me a while.”

They looked at the images they 'd created. They spoke of
Sir John's ideas for grinding new breeds of glass lenses. Eligius promised her. “ I will make such a lens one day that will make portrait sitters of the stars.”

She promised him. “ We will burn dreams onto glass. We will carve memory in light.”

“Perhaps we say the same thing. These promises.”

“Perhaps we are saying that we will always be together, doing this. Or perhaps we are just hopeless romantics, you and I.”

He smiled at the notion, and pored over the images while time let them be. Finally he glanced up and saw that she'd fallen asleep with her head resting atop her arm, and the images displayed before her.

He left her. His thoughts drifted on a sea of doubts and questions. He wondered if she would dream at all. If she would spend the night making maps of the light in her loved ones' eyes. The topography of the way from here to there.

A Map of Ceylon

IN THE MORNING, SHE ASKED CHARLES FOR HIS PERMISSION to be photographed. “ No false settings. No candled clouds. Just you, my husband.”

She reached over his desk to take a sliver of mango from his plate. He hadn't touched any of the breakfast Sudarma had prepared. Coffee, tea when Sudarma brought it from market, some biscuits Sir John had secreted in his luggage, brandy and an evening smoke – this was what he had been subsisting on for weeks.

That and his work, she thought as she sat in the study with him. An edifice of paper grew six inches from his desk.

“You worry so,” Charles told her. “You think me on the brink.”

“It's not that.”

“Catherine, your devotion to this pursuit is trivial. There is too much happening in Ceylon right now. Oh, I've wounded you.”

“It is no matter. You' ve not been yourself. I scarcely see you.”

“So this portrait shall serve in my place, then.”

“You're terribly skilled with words, Charles. I just wish they were mine you heard, when I tell you I want to do this for you. Instead, you seem to listen for what you can cut yourself on.”

“ Eligius, open that cabinet. The one with the key in the lock.”

Charles gave Eligius his papers and told him to place them inside the cabinet. Eligius locked them in and brought Charles the key, which the old man secreted in the pocket of his woolen coat.