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Authors: David Rocklin

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He counted his rupees. Added to the others, it was finally enough. Some would pay for the post. The rest for the return of the
Royal Captain
, due into the John port four months hence.
He counted them a second time while passing the Galle Face's lamps. It was late, and Gita was no doubt asleep. She'd still be asleep when he returned.
The Colebrooks' old horse wobbled drunkenly by the time he arrived back at Dimbola. The animal had never recovered from the night Dimbola was attacked. He hadn't been badly injured. Just a few surface wounds that healed like engorged blood worms at the horse's haunches and across the bunched muscles of his shoulders. But something had broken in the beast that night. Now his nostrils flared at the least bit of work. He sought the darkness of his stall at every opportunity.
“Not too much further,” Eligius told him as he dismounted the carriage.
When the time came, he'd take only a few things. Nothing of value to anyone. Some clothes; he had nothing warm and wondered whether a servant's attire would see him very far. He would take Sir John's telescope, the camera, glass plates, paper, a cask of chemical. There would be room for Julia's painting. He would insist upon it.
He'd wrap them carefully and place them next to the faded slip of paper Mrs. Pike had given the memsa'ab once. A gallery, where her photographs might be seen by the wider world.
Before leaving, he took a last look around the house. Ceylon had begun to reclaim it. Creeping flowers crossed the broken threshold into the sa'ab's bedroom. The house smelled of rain and rot. He didn't like it inside and never stayed longer than necessary. Holland House was far preferable. Their moments still lived inside its walls. He felt them each time he entered.
It was there that he took the photograph he'd made, wrapped it in cloth, marked the gallery 's address across it and below, her name.
There were still months yet before the ship came. But today felt like the beginning of his leaving. He sat down to write his note to the vicar.
I thank you for all you have done for us and for watching over my sister as I know you will. I will send for her when I've raised enough money for her passage. I hope that will be soon, but I can't be sure of what I will find. Tell her I love her. I've never been certain that she knows. Teach her to be a Christian, if that pleases you. She won't oppose you.
When it was time, he would rub the paper with a bit of tamarind. Gita loved the scent and would take some comfort in being thought of that way.
That will be the last thing I do at Dimbola, he thought. Already, it was slipping away.
He closed the door to Holland House and walked to the carriage.
 
DAWN WAS STILL some hours away. There was only one priest in the Galle Face sanctuary, making his preparations for services.
He found Gita's room. She slept peacefully in a loose cinch of covers. Her window opened onto the stone garden. He crossed the room quietly and peered out.
There were many stones now. Charles' was among them. The church had commissioned the port's finest mason to craft an elegant marker with dates, the names of Charles' family, and a
place where his role on the court was remembered. A few nights after Charles' remains were interred, he'd slipped in and buried the sa'ab's beloved map next to him.
But only that one; the map of Wynfield's handiwork rested in his rucksack between glass plates. Perhaps he'd have need of it.
Gita turned in her sleep. He kissed her forehead. She made a face and curled her fists against her cheeks but didn't wake. She rose early, most days. Sleep was too filled.
He left. Outside, the air grew cooler despite the coming morning. Clouds blocked the hint of light at the far horizon. They were fat, cottony, and so weighted with water that they threatened to pull the sky down.
He sat on the hardwood and took out one more sheet of paper, to compose his letter. Together with the parcel, it would find the gallery first and go from there.
He tried to imagine its path through London, to her. Around him, the air took on a sheen of green gray from the coming storm. Another monsoon, on them so quickly.
At the horizon line where the water and the sky met, he saw a light. He counted breaths and watched it grow like a diya returning home. The postal ship would be here soon. Then it would turn around again not long after. It would take his parcel away from here.
He envisioned how the sea would look from the ship's rail, sweeping into the great hull and back again. Months from now, when they were close enough, he'd use Sir John's telescope to see the lights of an unimaginable city.
He spared a look for the clock on Chatham and the lush jungle beyond, and found that they were difficult to watch for very long. The ship's mournful whistle roughened the air. When it blew a second time, it was much closer.
The memsa'ab would say, photograph all this so it won't be lost. No one possesses anything for all its life, she would say.
Yet we persist, he thought. We pin time down by the wings. Our patrons ask only that we make them better than they
were in the living moment before, but all the while, memsa'ab, we are after something else. We always have been. We have requests of the world, and reasons.
He began to write.
The Luminist
“REALLY, CATHERINE. IT'S ENOUGH THAT I'M MADE TO sit stock still for these interminable hours, robed like a dirty monk. Must I stare at that photograph, of all the images I might behold? It's not appropriate and should be put away, out of proper sight.”
Catherine smiled at the familiar lament. Lord Tennyson was far from the first to complain at the discomfort caused by the photograph hanging on the cottage wall. Sin made permanent, he'd dubbed it upon seeing it for the first time, bringing his considerable poetic gifts to bear. Others had been less graceful in their remarks. Abomination, Carlyle had said. Against God's plan, the Archbishop had declared as he departed. Almost all who made the journey from the great cities to her cottage at Freshwater, Isle of Wight had something damning to say on encountering the photograph.
Lady Wynfield had surprised her with the delicacy of her condemnation. Andrew had broken his minor promise and had sent his wife in his stead to be the first portrait sitter. She and Lady Wynfield had said little to each other during the exposure time. As Lady Wynfield was leaving, she'd looked at the photograph. “Sad,” she'd said. “ Unnecessarily so.”
When Catherine had delivered Lady Wynfield's portrait to their estate across the Isle, a maid took it without a word. No thanks ever came by card or visit. Only more portrait sitters, money in hand.
Lord Tennyson was one such patron. A great man, among London's eminent. Yet he was no different in his sensibility regarding the photograph on the wall, and deserved no different response from that which she always gave.
Touching the image of Eligius and Julia, she said, “this moment shall never be made a secret.”
“Very well. But must I sit much longer?”
“Not long.”
Her attention drifted past the cottage doors, past the sweep of January 's falling rain, past Julia playing with Ewen as if no drop touched them, and Sir John making his notes under the safety of a gazebo. The gazebo had been the only architectural addition she'd requested after seeing the property she would receive pursuant to Charles' final compensation from the John Company. All these things that composed the simple drift of her life.
At the fence, she saw the postal carrier step off of his cart. He held a shabby parasol over the parcel in his hand. He opened the gate and walked to her.
Behind her, a great man burned in glass and light.
She went to the cottage doorway. The rain moved across the visible landscape.
The postal carrier greeted her. He brought her the expected letters from Reijlander and Talbott, then lay the parcel in her hands. “ I brought it fast as I could, madam. You can see it went to a gallery in London first. I guess they had your address. See how far it's come? At sea for seven months, since Ceylon.”
“Catherine,” Lord Tennyson complained. “ Please – ”
His words fell away with the parcel's threadbare cloth. There was a letter, and a photograph.
Outside, Sir John and Julia, and even Ewen, who was young yet but understood that the simple act of a post had changed the shape of the day, all came to her, to see.
Ceylon was the world now.
She gave in to the onrush of moments. The liturgic
breathing wind through its jungle. The painterly light. Dimbola. The boy, counting breaths.
She opened the letter.
I am not of Ceylon anymore. Gita will never know me, for all my promises. I don't have a trade and could never serve another colonial. I have no home and only enough money to starve on a different shore. I've had too many faces on my hands to remember them all. My own kind thinks of me as a monster. Maybe I am, but one with the power to burn dreams onto the world.
So I bring the camera and some ideas for cutting lenses that will make true portrait sitters of the stars.
I'm leaving everything I know for you, and for Julia. I do what I must. Cross oceans. Live amongst the Wynfields of that city. The light and the love I want are only with you. And if not with you, if I'm wrong, then surround my head with strange flowers and open the Christian book over my chest. I will not live where I can't be seen.
Memsa'ab, the
Royal Captain
will be herefor me soon. They say we will sail by storms. Such a thing, to pass a storm at sea as if it were just another traveler making its way.
I've learned. I've become your disciple in tying light to the departing. It is the 22nd day of yo ur June, here at six degrees latitude, eighty degrees longitude. The stars are the same everywhere.
I have found the way to you. I am coming.
Her heart came wondrously undone.
She studied the photograph. He was in Holland House. In the chair, in the open doorway. There were candles all around him, and behind him there was the cloudless night sky, and there were more stars than lay atop the sea at the holiday he once spoke of, when burning lights made a celestial map of the black waters. This was the moment he'd kept safe, until he found the way to send it across oceans and years to her.
The rain diminished. The veiled day emerged. She held the photograph up, into the returning light.
Copyright ©2011 David Rocklin
 
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storageand-retrieval systems, without prior permission in writing from the Publisher, except for brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
 
 
Rocklin, David, 1961 –
The luminist : a novel / David Rocklin. p.cm.
eISBN : 978-0-983-47751-8
(alk. paper)
1. Single women – Fiction.
2. British – Sri Lanka – Fiction.
3. Social classes – Sri Lanka – Fiction.
4. Sri Lanka – History – 19th century – Fiction.
I. Title
PS3618.O354465L57 2011
813'.6 – DC22
2011004506
Hawthorne Books
& Literary Arts
 
 
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BOOK: The Luminist
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