The Luminist (31 page)

“My servant,” the woman said. “My driver.”

“Stay here. You need clothes.”

She embraced her babies against her breasts. They burrowed into her as if seeking away back.

He returned to the field. The maid was still. “I'm sorry,” he whispered. Gently, he pulled her frock from her shoulders and down her torso. It was stained with blood but whole. At least the young mother would be covered.

The dress snagged under the maid's body. He pulled harder, not wishing to touch the ruin of her. His efforts caused her head to loll lazily over, revealing a smooth, clean cheek.

He took a step back as the world spun away from him. A voice rose in his head, bitter from a life of work that never received its adequate due. What does a servant do?
You carry on and you don't see what's plainly there. Kutha.

He pulled Mary 's dress free and brought it to the young mother. While she slipped it over her head, dislodging her children only for the instant it took to let the dress fall across her nudity, he asked her where her home was. Near the port, she responded.

“Near Dimbola,” he told her. “Near the Colebrooks.”

“You're their servant. The one who helps Catherine with her portraits.”

He helped her climb out of the clump of tree roots. They walked through the grass to the road. “She served us well,” the
woman said when they cleared the field. Her children clung to her maid's dress. The little girl pressed herself against the fabric, leaving a swipe of red on her forehead.

The spot where Mary lay could no longer be discerned from the expanse of grass.

He crossed the road and found a machete. “We stay in the jungle. It's not safe to be seen.”

“We should wait for the soldiers to come back,” the woman said.

“There are more of us than them, memsa'ab. We're alone. Can you walk?”

She nodded.

“We have far to go. If your children tire, we will carry them.”

“Mary told me of you. She said you were good.”

“She said nothing of the kind.”

The children stood in the shade of a tree canopy, waiting for someone to do something. Were he to leave their mother and take them by the hand, he felt certain they would go willingly. Such was their state of shock.

“Why are you doing this?” the woman asked. “We're nothing to you.”

A strong wind blew up around them. One of the dead men lay not far from them. His clothes rippled in the unceasing air.

The noise roused the woman. “My name is Margaret. My baby cannot be born here. My husband won't hear of it.”

“It's not long off by the look of you.”

“Don't speak to me that way.” She was breathing too fast. Shock overtook her. “Help me,” she pleaded. “That my children should see me like this.” She held Mary's bloody garment away from her skin.

They hewed tightly to the trees as they walked. The children began to cry and he sang Gita's lullaby. In a while it was all he could hear.

Outside Chilaw they found an estate that appeared intact. Margaret broke clear of him and her children and tottered as
far as the estate's lush field of coffee before Eligius grabbed her. He clasped his hand over her mouth and pulled her behind the weathered timber of the estate's fence line. “I have been traveling for a day and a night,” he whispered, “and I have learned to listen.”

She stopped struggling as the sounds of breaking glass reached them. A band of men emerged from the house, their arms full of tapestries, silver, anything that could be pulled from the house and from each other.

Eligius dragged her back behind a stand of areca without being seen. There, in front of her children, he slapped her hard enough to draw tears. “If you leave again, I will let you. I will take your children. They will be raised by someone with more sense.”

She hung her head and cried, but did not try to seek help from her kind again. There was none to be found. All the colonials were gone, from Negombo to Weligama.

Under his urging, the children managed to coax another hour from their swollen feet before crumpling to the ground and sobbing. “I know a place where we can rest,” he told them. “It's a magical place I know you'll like.”

The boy shook his head; what little pride he'd found in protecting his sister had wilted in the face of his maid's death and a day of trudging through terrifying landscapes. But the little girl stood up and brushed leaves from her dress, a yellow frock he suspected she wore to high tea. She looked like a sunflower after a storm. “What kind of magic?” she asked warily.

“The kind that will get you home.”

He brought them to the elephant temple on the last droplets of their endurance. The boy curled up against the top step and fell into a troubled sleep. His limbs jerked violently, warding off phantoms.

Margaret sat next to him and stroked his hair. Eligius constructed a hasty lean-to, shading her from the sun and the wind. She would not look at him.

Exhaustion lapped at him. He found the gold plaque and
sat beneath it, the machete lying across his thighs. A radiating warmth drizzled his scalp and neck; reflected light from the plaque, bent upon him. The sensation filled him with dread at returning to Dimbola with no word of Charles. What words could he use, to say such a thing?

The trees across from the temple rustled. He saw the glint of a rifle, its barrel aimed at him. “I'll kill you.” English. A young Britisher emerged. His weapon quivered wildly. Blonde stubble dotted his young chin. Sixteen, if that. So like the soldier that day. All the ones who fought the colonials' battles, did they all have to be boys?

Eligius let the machete fall to the ground. “I'm not one of them. I 'm traveling with a young memsa'ab and her children. We are making our way back to Port Colombo.”

“Lies. How have you survived out here with children and a woman?”

“I know this land.”

The boy's rifle lowered. He sniffled. “Tell me it's true.”

“It is.”

“I'm lost. I was running with my family – ”

“The governor and most of the Court live in Colombo. I expect your family is there.”

“Show me the woman and children. I want to see them for myself.”

He led the boy up the first steps. In the center of the temple, Margaret dozed with her son. The girl was making a leafy lean-to, a tiny version of her mother 's. She smiled when she saw Eligius.

Eligius woke Margaret. “ We have a guest. He will be walking with us.”

“Where are you from?” she asked the boy.

“My family's in Tangalla.”

“Not here. From home.”

“Isle of Wight, ma'am.”

Eligius left them to speak of England. He knelt next to the girl. “What's your name?”

She spread her leaves carefully. “Alexandra.”

“Alexandra, I promised you magic.”

He took her to the temple wall and let her run her hands along its carvings. “They 're cousins to the clouds,” he said.

She pursed her lips. “They don't look like clouds.”

“Nor do you and your brother look alike.”

“Elephants don't fly.”

“That's why sometimes you see clouds near the ground. They 're visiting.”

“That's nice of them.”

“Say goodbye to the elephants. We have to go.”

“I'm very tired.”

“I'll carry you.”

He lifted her onto his shoulders. Margaret stirred her son and the boy, who'd fallen asleep with his rifle in his arms. Eligius gave the boy his machete. The jungle wasn't as thick from here, he explained, and were they to come upon any soldiers this close to port, he did not wish to be seen with a weapon.

“Another hour,” he told Alexandra. “ Hold on to me.”

She bounced atop him. She let her head fall back and stared up through the trees. Her hair tickled his neck. “ I saw you make the man fall down,” she said. “ In the grass, with Mary.”

“Yes.”

“Is the man in heaven now?”

“I don't know such things, Alexandra.”

“Mama says that none of you get to go. And Mary gets to go, and I don't want the man to go and keep hitting her.”

He felt one of her hands leave him. When he looked, she was tracing the sky with a dirty finger. Looking for elephants, he thought.

“Don't fall,” she told him.

 

AVERY DIFFERENT pall of smoke hung over Port Colombo's harbor. Steam, from an immense ship bearing the East India Company 's branding. The port's dock was crowded with well-todo
families, their belongings stacked like a child's blocks near a crane and pulley. From the size of the ship and the quantity of the colonials' lives on display – their furnishings, clothes, even bales of their last good crop – these families were sailing to England. Standing with their children clutched in their protective arms, they grew gray and dissolute as the ship belched clouds that the wind bent to the ground.

He led his band of stragglers to the post at the foot of a warehouse. There he found soldiers seated at a tiny table, carefully enscripting names on a tablet that reminded him of Julia's beloved pad. He could not speak for himself when the armed men's suspicious gazes landed on his bloody clothes. “He saved us,” Margaret said before doubling over. The baby was close. She trailed tears down her leg.

They asked him where he served. They told him that the families in Ceylon's southern province remained in their homes. For how long, they could not guess. “So much depends on the behavior of your lot,” one of them said.

He parted ways with Margaret and her children, leaving them in the Galle Face with a priest and a nurse. The boy was walking from pew to pew, searching the faces of the families. In the first row, the nurse lay Margaret down and began to erect a makeshift curtain of burlap. Soon there would be another life.

He wondered if that one would stay long.

Alexandra amused herself at the church door by tossing a pebble against the wood. For her, he pulled blades of fragrant lemongrass and arrayed them in a blessing near her.

He only turned once on his way to Dimbola, to see the port. By then he was up high; his trail had climbed along a sloping hill. The doorway to the great church was empty, but he did not despair. There was a small shape with a golden crown of hair standing on the docks. She was waving goodbye to the clouds leaving the ship's stack for their long journey up to the sky.

THE WORDS CAME easier now, like a second childbirth after a wrenching first. My husband is dead.

It was surely true. The widow season was upon her. Everywhere was proof of it. Charles' absence. Eligius' absence. Dimbola's encircling quiet.

The waiting life came at her relentlessly. What to say to Julia and Ewen – to Julia, were there words to repay the debt her daughter had assessed? – how to live alone, how to stay in Ceylon. How to leave. How to hold on to what she'd done.

For now, a light needed tying to a departing man.

She was in the bedroom, arranging the first of Charles' possessions, when the knocking came.

 

DIMBOLA WAS QUIET. The porch and gazebo were empty. No one waited for him or for Charles.

He knocked at the door. For a moment, dread encased him. What if they 're on board that ship? What if I am alone?

Then Sir John let him in with a tousle of his hair, a fatherly gesture that Eligius needed more than he realized. “ I could not find him.”

Sir John put a hushing hand up. “ No one could expect so much from you. Rest now. I'll tell her.”

“ It is for me to do.”

“She's in her room. No one has come to be portrayed. She despairs of her art even in the midst of all this chaos.”

“Aren't you afraid of what's happening? What of your map? You'll be forced to leave before you' ve finished.”

Sir John tapped his pipe against the dining room table, dislodging a small coalstone of ash. “ I don't believe the stars are going anywhere, even if we do. I 'll pick up a different corner of the sky and come round again. It's as I told you. They 're the same forever, in all places. They 're the only constants I know.”

Eligius found the memsa'ab's bedroom door open. She'd rearranged things in ways he couldn't understand. Curtains had
been pulled from other rooms and arrayed behind the bed in velvet folds. Palm fronds leaned against the wall. Their tips had begun to curl. Some thick tomes from the study sat on the nightstand next to the headboard. One he recognized as the sa'ab's indispensable volume of English law, the one he turned to while creating the paper stack he'd locked away in his cabinet.

Catherine stood from her vanity when she saw him. “ You' ve returned safe. I am so very glad.”

“ I couldn't find him, memsa'ab.”

She'd placed the camera against the far wall. Its eye fixed on the bed.

“There is more. Mary. I saw her die. I could not help her.”

Catherine straightened one of the palm fronds.

“ Is there to be a portrait, memsa'ab?”

She pulled the bedcovers back. “Come here, Eligius. Lie down for me.”

He didn't want to. A colonial's bed, and all his grime and blood! But her voice barely lived and her eyes were windows onto the sorrow inside her. He did as she asked.

She pulled the covers up to his chin, then stepped back. Tilting her head, she examined him from every angle. The worst came when she instructed him to close his eyes and hold his breath. Then he understood the portrait she wanted to make.