The Luminist

4.


Dimbola is dark now.Its feverish life and bustle are stilled as are the lights which shined there. Servants, scientists, disciples, painters, astronomers and divines, all those who came to her in hopes of burning themselves into memory are gone. Silence is the only tenant left. But I have seen their faces across this land and others, and I say they live.





SIR GEORGE WYNFIELD

Portraitist to the Royal Family, on his memories of Ceylon, 1902





Departing


ELIGIUS PICKED DEAD PETALS FROM THE TAMARIND growing near the broken wall. He’d planted it in an effort to pretty up what remained of their hut, but it had gone to pulp in only a few days, a victim of the unrelenting rains. He rolled the petals into his palm, using his thumb as a mortar until a fine rust smear remained.

Gita’s laughter at this distraction filled the bones of Matara. Four years and as many monsoon seasons had passed over his old village since the soldiers felled it. Little remained to mark the place. Yet this burial ground was where she chose for her reading each day.

It was the colonials’ June, in their year of 1842. His sister no longer remembered her own mother ’s face.

It had taken him many days of scavenging before he’d found Sudarma at the rear of the house. She had fallen in the memsa’ab’s sacred room; he found her lying on the floor, covered in the smoke and ash she’d breathed until no air was left in her.

He could see the neglect tattering away at Gita’s memory of her mother and he let it happen. Let her fill the void with a woman of her own fashioning. A perfect union of doll parts. Sustainer, beauty, angel, ghost.

Gita no longer cried in outrage that her brother’s hands tucked her in for the night. Yet something in her yearned for her old home and he had long since given up fighting with her about her desire to sit outside the hut she’d been born in and hear of Gretel slipping beneath the waves.

Gita began kicking through the mud. Her four -year old’s attention span had reached its limit. “ Very good today,” he said. “ Your pronunciation is much better.”

She shrugged. Progress in the colonials’ language mattered little to her.

“ Let’s start back.” He picked up the book. “ I ’ll make you rice with curd.”

“ Stay.”

She took such joy in chasing her shadow among the banyans. When she was ready, she smiled and then ran without waiting for him, down the rain-carved road towards the jungle. It was the long way back. But it was the only route she tolerated. She loved the sea.

He gave in, as he always did. He’d come to perceive unexpected things in her childish tantrums. He needed to give her everything she wanted. Safety and certainty above all, because in her outcries he heard his own death, and the void after him, and how she would fill it with memories of him.

Let them be worth keeping, he thought. I can give her so little else.

The wind was with them. The journey was not so daunting to her little legs. They found the road and followed it back to Dimbola, where they saw a carriage waiting at the gate. Its doors bore the ornate crest of the Galle Face.

Gita’s face darkened. When the vicar ’s messenger stepped out, she dropped her eyes as she always did around others. Even ones she saw often enough to know, soldiers and colonials and this boy. She refused to make eye contact at his awkward pleasantries.

Her poor eyes, Eligius thought. Always expecting to see the worst.

“ We need to speak,” the vicar’s oldest altar boy said.

Eligius told his sister to mind the church’s horse. He led the boy to the main house. The boy – he never did see fit to give Eligius his name, and Eligius never asked – seemed more comfortable there. The colonials liked their formalities.

“There is a family.”

There always is, Eligius thought.

The boy covered familiar terrain. Address, societal position. None of it mattered much. Eligius knew his role, and what it was worth. “ My fee.”

“They will pay you when you arrive. You may meet the ser - vant’s gaze only. The master of the house will not have it.”

Again, he thought, familiar terrain. “A favor, of the vicar. May Gita stay at the church until I am finished?”

Starchy indignation crept into the boy ’s eyes. “ It’s harder for her when she’s alone.” He paused, letting the lie settle against his tongue. “She finds peace at the church.”

“ Very well. But you should go before the light fades.”

“ I make my own.”

“ It is not so much to light a candle,” the boy said haughtily. “ We light hundreds each evening in the church and we are not prideful. It’s unseemly for anyone, let alone such as you.”

“Then you should have no trouble finding someone else to attend to this family’s needs.”

There were but a few others in Ceylon who had taken up the art. He’d heard of them. Colonials who came to shore in the months following the violence to stake claims on the abandoned estates. They brought a new crop of tea that they hoped might circumvent the blight that had taken such a toll on the coffee plantations, and another garrison of soldiers who kept troublemakers at bay. They brought as well new cameras that were smaller than his, with lenses like prisms, and new ways of coating the glass plates. But they were prisoners of their new world and its capricious light. None knew its ways like he did. None were willing to bathe in poisons like he was. Hobbyists, that was all they were. Effete portrayers of fox hunts and christenings. No one save he went to the families needing their darkest moments arrested. Only him.

Sometimes he wondered if those families were behind the odd peace he’d come to know in Ceylon. Perhaps they kept Matara’s roaming boys from the one who made death a portrait sitter.

He chose not to belabor the point. There was no need. On the church’s behalf, the boy had performed this minuet many times. Never did these people feel closer to their God than when they unleashed their contempt.

“I am grateful to you and to the vicar for thinking of me,” Eligius said, “and for taking Gita. Of course I will go shortly.”

The boy left Eligius for his carriage. Gita was dutifully petting the horse. Eligius gave her the book. Its page was bent to Gretel’s tale. “ Practice your words one more time before you go to bed,” he told her.

“ I don’t want to go.”

He hushed her. “They are always nice to you. They cook good food and keep you in a warm room. There is nothing to object to. I will look in on you tonight, when I am done.” The church carriage propelled forward with a sharp jerk. Her face appeared in the window, quietly disconsolate. She had grown to be obedient. Too much so. He could put her in anyone’s hands and upon his word, she would do whatever was asked of her. Hers was a life too easily ruled.

She thrust her hand out of the carriage window and waved.

She had four years of memories, and he’d done what he could to make something tolerable of them. Will you have room for one more, Gita? Just one, just a goodbye. And from it, I hope you will make something like forgiveness.

He waved back.





THE INDIAN GIRL who answered his knocking was young, with luminous eyes and smooth skin. Eligius touched his camera. “I have been sent for.”

She stepped aside for him. He brought the camera in and leaned it against the wall. Slipping his rucksack off, he checked to make sure the glass plates survived the journey. Giggles drew his attention to a doorway across the tiled foyer. Three small boys covered their mouths and jostled each other. Maybe Gita’s age or younger.

The servant girl rushed up the curved stairs to the master of the house waiting at the top. He whispered to her and walked away, letting a small velvet satchel fall from his fingers to the floor just outside an open door. The girl came to the banister and waved. Eligius brought his tools upstairs. “Close the door,” he told her. She obeyed.

He set down his camera and spread its legs before considering the room. The curtains were open in the mistaken belief that every available drop of light was required. He asked the girl to close them, careful to keep his voice low and his gaze averted from the master standing in the corner, mumbling words into the silence. She did as he asked. The room sank into a murky haze.

Eligius lit the first candle. He dipped a taper into the bobbing light and brought it to the others.

“Are there enough?” the girl asked him.

It was always good to hear something like his own language in these places. “ Yes. You did very well.”

The room was oddly shaped. Like an oval, but with one end smaller than the portion with the bed. That end would require more light. He brought candles to surround the bed and gazed upon his subject for the first time. I remember you, memsa’ab Pike.

Her family had surrounded her with pieces of themselves. A tiger figurine fashioned from the husks of coconuts rested in the crook of her arm. Satin cloth embroidered with her family crest made a cloak around her head. A garland of hyacinth crowned her dry hair. A crucifix hung on the wall above her. The Bible – there was always this book, he thought, closer at hand than it likely ever was in life – lay open across her midsection.

She was to be remembered for her children, he saw, and for flowers, and piety. Her once-spoken dream of a song that could bring tears was nowhere in the room. Nor was his memsa’ab’s photograph. Perhaps her husband could not look at the sculpture of his wife’s secret life. Maybe he’d never known of it. Here then was the spouse and mother they would rather remember. The other would simply be buried.

He surrounded Mrs. Pike with candles until her loose flesh radiated something like sleep. Positioning the camera, he treated the plate, readied the paper, and slipped under the cloak. There you are.

While the image developed in his light box, he accepted a mug of spiced black tea from the maid. In a small, sweet voice, she told him her name. Navneet. Punjabi. She was fourteen. Her family came south before she was born. The master ’s boys called her Nan. Her village, Tutakoreen, was one of the first to fall. She remembered the sounds of hammers against her walls, but little else. Two nights before her memsa’ab died, she heard the woman’s moaning and the doctor saying that her stomach had burst. Later, the sa’ab left his wife’s side, came to her room and raped her. She knew it would happen again.

Eligius glanced at the master. He was reading from his own Bible. Occasionally he looked up at his dead wife as if she were a slumbering child drifting away on a story.

He wanted to tell Navneet to leave, but life wasn’t like that. Only the fighting had gone away. Everything else had remained, with new faces manning the old ramparts. “ Take kunch or suarnalata,” he told the girl. “It will end any baby that begins from him.”

She smiled.

He put the imprint into a simple frame fashioned from detritus Dimbola wood. Setting it next to the body, he took his rupees and left. The plate, with Mrs. Pike’s image seared into it, bounced at his side as he walked to the carriage. Later, he could use the glass to make photographic copies of her to sell at the bazaar. The colonials never went there and didn’t know how highly pictures of dead Britishers were valued. He’d taken many of the dead and sold them twice, to the grieving and to the pleased. Soldiers who’d died of their wounds, or old sa’abs whose cholera came with the droughts, those were the easiest to sell. He’d even sold Charles’ photo to the colonials. It touched them, the new directors especially. How they went on about the inspiration this old patriarch had kindled, compelling an Indian boy to such a Christian display of bedside mourning, like an angel at the Nativity.

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.