The Luminist

The Windowed World


QUEEN AND CHATHAM STREETS WERE EMPTY. COILS OF voices led him to the St. John Company and its dock. It seemed all of colonial Ceylon had come to greet the ships. Over the heads of the murmuring crowd, great conicals rose like volcanoes stolen from his mother’s mythic bedtime stories, to be machinestamped in British metal.

The crowd was oddly cheered by the sight of the vessels. Every hint of activity aboard sent a thrill through them, especially the men; they cheered as if at a cricket match.

The vicar of the Galle Face sat aboard his carriage near the lip of the dock. The carriage door was open to allow the public their glimpse of this reposed creature in white flowing robes. Two boys were in the carriage as well, sitting awkwardly at the vicar’s feet. Dressed in lucent pearl robes of their own, the boys pulled at the ruffled collars mercilessly binding their necks.

Gangplanks rolled down from the great ships’ bellies. The first men showed themselves above the deck railings, and Eligius understood why all these people had come to holler and preen.

One after another, the soldiers stepped down the planks of both ships, rifles atop their shoulders, bayonets fixed, their uniforms vivid against the dull gray hulls. They made their way through the crowd to cries of “give them hell all!” and strewn orchids in their path. The grim set of their jaws did nothing to detract from their youth. More boys.

Eligius stood atop his cart. The rest of the soldiers disembarked, the crowd thinned, and on the first ship, a series of crates emerged from the hold in the hands of unsteady porters. An elderly man with an unkempt silver shock of hair that shuddered in the shore breeze moved to the gangplank on distrusting, seaworn legs. His arm was held by a younger man with curly tresses arranged perfectly on the padded shoulders of his brown jacket. The younger man gazed across the dock with pursed lips. He spat into a kerchief, which he let fall to the ground.

Eligius tied his cart horse to a sapling and made his way to the dock. “Holland sa’ab? I am sent by Colebrook memsa’ab to meet you.”

The older man smiled. Close, he was as old as Charles, but thinner. His eyes blazed with intelligence.

It was Wynfield’s boy who spoke. “Our things,” George said dismissively. “ We will ride with the vicar. I trust that you know your way back.”

Eligius waved to the porters, who trundled down the gangplank onto the dock. He led them to his cart, where they made a small mountain of trunks and crates. While he tied the crates down, the vicar welcomed both men with a proffered hand and a nod towards the road. They all turned and looked at him.

The vicar’s altar boys stepped out of the carriage. They listened as the vicar spoke, then walked towards his cart while behind them, Holland and Wynfield stepped into the Galle Face carriage. “There’s no room for us,” one of the boys told Eligius. “We ride with you.”

They climbed atop his cart. The bigger boy took up the reins and whippered them ineffectually. Eligius stepped up. The vicar’s boy relinquished the reins and under Eligius’ knowing hand, the horse trundled forward.

He guided his overburdened cart alongside the vicar’s grand carriage. Inside, the men raised snifters to their lips.

The journey bled everything out: the air of any comfort, the sky of any cover, the boys of any semblance of civility. Despite his demonstrable understanding of their language, they spoke of the soldiers and what they had in store for Ceylon’s troublemakers. “Back to the dirt that made them,” said the bigger boy. “Vicar prayed it from the pulpit and here they are, come to push the kuthas into the sea.”

The small one was younger by a good five years. He asked the boy to say it, say how the soldiers would proceed. “Will they march one by one or two by two? Will they march straight through the forest to the drums? Will they make a route of it?”

“They’ll march straight down the heathens’ throats. Then the fires will go out and it’ll be a different cry goes up.”

“I hear the Indians don’t use guns.”

“The sepoys can’t abide that there’s tallow in the cartridges, how’s that for you?”

Eligius tried to block them out. His mind grasped for the first thing he could hold that wouldn’t break, and it found Julia in Holland House, her hair lit by candles.

Guests were arriving as he pulled his cart to Dimbola’s gate. The women gathered under the tarp while their men stood smoking in groups. The vicar’s boys half-fell to the ground. Their rowdy energy knew no bounds. Behind them, the vicar’s carriage pulled to a stop. Others followed aboard finely constructed vehicles piloted by top-hatted men dressed for another land and climate, who climbed down and held the hands of dainty, cautious women as they stepped out.

Governor Wynfield put his arm around his son’s shoulders. Lady Wynfield rose from her table and kissed him tenderly.

“Keep that crate out of the sun!” the young Wynfield said. “The canvases will be ruined.”

“I am well aware of the light’s effects,” Eligius said.

He carried a crate into Holland House. Setting it down, he found that a corner of the lid had been split open. Carefully, he lifted it up enough to peer inside. There he saw a painting of dense blackness. It was woven with swirls of luminous, random shapes made all the more vivid by the void around them.

He opened the lid further, revealing more of the designs, until he understood what he was looking at.

Outside, the young Wynfield stood among a group of colonial women. “Tell us of London, George,” one of the older dowagers said between sips of tea. “I suspect our new contrivances are years in the routine for you.”

“You forget,” George said, “I too have been away these many years now, with Sir John. I pine for civility, though perhaps not as much as you.”

“But what must our old home think of us?” the woman said. As Eligius passed on his way to retrieve another crate, he saw her hands tremble. “Our unrest. These thugs.”

“Thuggees,” a younger woman, pretty in pale orchid lace, corrected her. “They attack defenseless women on the street and take what they want!”

“I myself was offered a civil service post, like my father.” George snapped his fingers at Sudarma. She went to retrieve a cup. “But the call of art was too strong. My blood boils at what I heard on the journey here. We docked at Calcutta at my father’s direction, to pick up the garrison. Those soldiers spoke of terrible injustices these people have perpetrated on us, and after all we’ve done. We build rails for them, and now? We use them to ferry our children from their violence and sickness.”

“Would that we could ferry ourselves from boredom and ennui,” the younger woman said. “Well, I for one have been awaiting your arrival. It’s high time I was portrayed by a legitimate English-bred artist, not these street painters. I insist you schedule me immediately.”

Eligius finished carrying the crates into Holland House while the colonial wives accosted George for his painter’s hand. Each had a thought as to how she should be depicted. George offered flattering words and promises of great beauty as his parents looked on approvingly.

In another hour, he had unpacked his cart and put everything in the cottage. By then all the guests had arrived; more than Dimbola had ever seen. The vicar occupied a seat of honor next to Sir John at a front table.

And then Catherine emerged from the house, and everyone paused to look at her. Sir John stepped past George as if he were a low branch in his path. He held out his hands and Catherine came. She let him embrace her.

They exchanged soft words and as they began to walk together, Catherine felt the want within herself. She longed to give herself over to the sort of benign gaiety she saw in other women. Seeing Sir John again, with her now, she possessed only her struggles. So much had gone past since she’d pressed her letter into his hands and hoped that in the unseeable future, he would be within her sphere, speaking to her of science and loss. Now he was here, come halfway around the span of the world, and all she could think of was what she had lived, with no one to speak to. The qualities of the rain in the cottage. Its sound against the glass Eligius had installed. The smell of the jungle at dusk, strong despite the raw flame in her nostrils from the chemicals. Lustrous light in the emulsions she’d learned to apply from his letters. How his letters were prayer for her now.

She felt Charles’ eyes, Julia’s, the wives. She stared at the ground and listened to the padding feet moving towards her. Eligius.

Odd, she thought. To know the sounds of this boy more readily than anyone else’s.

“It’s almost time,” Eligius said. “I have a suggestion.”

She excused herself and followed him to the cottage, where he’d set up the camera and prepared solutions of collodion and water to bathe the plate. He fit the frame and operated the pulleys that swathed the roof glass in muslin, trapping the sun in the front of the room.

Last, he showed her the painting in the crate and told her of his thoughts. “If we can steal a moment out of the air,” he told her, “can we also build one of our own?”

“Painters make a life of such stagecraft. An interesting thought. Can you direct the light?”

“I know I can.”

“Then let us give Sir John an eyeful.”

She left him to his work on the roof, gauging the sun. It pleased him to see the vigor in her step as she returned to her guests.

“Have you been prying into my belongings?”

He hadn’t even heard anyone approaching the cottage. George Wynfield stood in the doorway below. Julia was with him.

“The crate has been pried open,” George said. “The wood has been split. I saw for myself its condition before we left the ship.”

Eligius climbed down. “I looked at the painting. I am at fault and I apologize. I’ve seen your paintings in the house, and I get lost when I look. I just wanted to see more.”

He hoped that flattery would cool any anger and spare the memsa’ab from further gossip. It was enough that colonial Ceylon considered her ill-fitting.

George touched his finger to a cold smile. “Are you what they call … what was that phrase I heard in Calcutta, marvelously evocative … untouchable?”

“No.”

“What does it mean? That no one would have anything to do with you, isn’t that it? Doesn’t that make you one?”

“There are some who would have something to do with me, sa’ab.”

“I would suggest that you think very carefully on how you address me. Perhaps Madame Colebrook tolerates your insolence in the name of cheap labor, but I have no need. A word from me and you will be begging in the street, or in prison.”

“I beg only your forgiveness.”

Julia’s presence behind him boiled the blood in his stomach to steam.

“Is something wrong?” Sir John and Catherine came to the doorway. Behind them, Eligius saw the elder Wynfield holding court. Among them were some directors he’d seen with Charles. They were listening to the governor speak and nodding gravely.

“It seems that this servant couldn’t wait for a look at my work,” George said. “Strange that he appears to be the only servant in this household. One would expect him to be too busy for prying, Lady Colebrook.”

“I offer my own apologies for my servant,” Catherine said. “I’m sure he meant no harm.”

“No, I suppose he didn’t. But that’s hardly the point, is it? I shall mention this to my father.”

“I’m sure there’s no need,” Sir John said. “Certainly there’s no harm that I can see, and no one of consequence has seen it. I think we can put it to rest, George.”

“I defer as always to your tolerance. Tell me, boy, did you even understand what you saw?”

“It’s a map, sa’ab.”

“How could you possibly know that?” George’s anger rose.

“Perhaps his betters told him,” Sir John said. “Young man, come here.”

Eligius approached the crate. “You’ve seen maps before?” Sir John asked.

“Yes.”

“But how could you see this as a map? Do you not see mere points of light?”

“Only up close. But if I make my sight wide, I see shapes.”

“Make your sight wide?”

“I learned to do it when I was little. There’s a place where I go to see the sky, and I can see small or wide. One star or all.”

“I would like to see this place.”

“I will take you, sa’ab. From there, maybe you will see a map.”

Sir John laughed, a warm chime that made Eligius smile. “From there, I will see the untied end of the tapestry I have been weaving for many years. Science brings me from one end of the earth to the other so that I can map the whole of the heavens. George here is painting my map according to my notations. He takes excellent direction.”

“Thank you,” George said quietly.

“And now I hear I’m to see yet another advance in science, isn’t that right, Catherine? What of this portraiture of yours? Tell me you’ve found a way forward, out of the mire.”

George lifted the camera cloak and peered beneath it. “I should hardly equate portraits with what our host dabbles in, this fad of phantoms on glass.”

“Nor would I equate it,” Catherine said, “with your paintings or anything else. It is but an inquiry. Certainly nothing to seize the mind, as with your remarkable journey.”

“Memsa’ab, the sun is just right.”

“Gentlemen, I beg you to excuse us. Please enjoy the feast, and I’ll rejoin you shortly.”

George let the camera cloak drop. “Julia, shall we leave your mother to her contraption and spend some time reacquainting ourselves?”

“I need her,” Catherine said. “I ask for your patience.”

“Of course. Sir John, I shall have to settle for your quite familiar face.”

“Might I stay?” Sir John asked Catherine. “I’d like to see the process.”

“Indulge me just this one time, so that I might startle your eyes. After that, you may both grind these images down with analysis.”

“Then I shall set a seat aside for you, if your husband won’t mind.”

“I’ll find you.”

“Bring the servant with you,” Sir John said. “I would like to hear more about the southern skies from someone who lives beneath them.”

After they left to rejoin the feast, Eligius drew the curtain closed.

“I’m only glad father isn’t here,” Julia said. “It’s enough that he draws into himself at the thought of hard earned money paying your posts to another man. Must you be so obvious on his property?”

Catherine busied herself with the camera lens. “I’ll not hear of this. Not now. I have been waiting a long time to show Sir John what I can do with the science he helped bring into the world.” She opened the aperture. “Do you think I simply want to seduce him? Is that as far as you can see? Outside there is an arrogant boy, and if you think no more of yourself than what men think of you, he will own you too. Now sit still and follow my instructions.”

Julia turned away. She raised a hand to her pale eyes to shield them from the sun.

Eligius put the bauble in her hand. Points of light danced across the wall. He turned it until one jewel came to her fingertips.

“There,” Catherine said. “Yes, Julia.” She opened the camera shutter.

He let out his breath as Julia’s face burned into glass. In time, he tipped a clay pot and washed the glass plate. Catherine retreated with it to a shaded corner. She cradled it in her arms. In a moment, she lifted her head. “Go. I can see it.”

Eligius ran from the cottage. He saw Gita sitting on the grass near the edge of the Colebrooks’ land, watching the other children make their mad dashes around her. It amazed him that she didn’t cry at the chaos. Already, she had seen so much.

He found Sir John at Charles’ table. “The memsa’ab asks that you come now.”

“I can see excitement in your eyes,” Sir John said. Behind them, George and his father also rose. Eligius thought of protesting, but held his tongue.

“My boy,” Sir John said. “Your hand.”

His palms and the tips of his fingers were black, save the pinprick of light glinting from the spread flesh between his thumb and forefinger. “Sometimes, sa’ab, her portraits live on more than glass.”

He brought Sir John to the cottage door. Catherine held the plate up like a mirror to Sir John. “My God,” he whispered. “Catherine, tell me how.”

Watching the astonishment rain across this wizened old man’s face, she thought that most lives, if lived long enough, came to make rational sense. Once per year happenings that filled a letter, matters of no consequence that moved each minute to the next; these made good sense. She believed this. Her life made no sense at all, or else she would not feel what she felt. She would not feel that this was worth losing everything for, to arrest a scientific heart. Such a life could not make sense to anyone.

She told him of the cotton and collodion, the amber for her arrested paintings of light and time. “Still, they escape.”

“But the glass. Such a thing hasn’t occurred before. I will write a paper on this. We shall pierce the mystery.”

He drew closer, touching the plate’s wooden shell. Julia’s image had risen so much more. Turned away from the camera, she sat before utter darkness. The bauble’s refracted light rained white jewels on the curtain behind her. They scattered meaninglessly around her, all save one – the one he directed to rest just above her outstretched hand. That one was enough to make a bedtime story of her. The girl who cradled a star.

“Before it is lost,” Catherine told Sir John, “do me the honor of giving it a name.”

“ Why does one bother putting a name to something that won’t last?” Governor Wynfield stood in the doorway with his son. Behind them, guests gravitated to the cottage, drawn by the proclaimed interest of their most distinguished guest. “Paintings deserve names,” he said. “I can’t say the same for this. We should hardly remember it beyond now.”

“There are many things that come to us that don’t stay,” Catherine said. “You and I differ on their worthiness of memory.”

“For myself,” Sir John said, “I won’t forget the moment this young woman came into the world a second time.”

Julia’s face was becoming dissolute. “It will be lost in moments,” Catherine said resignedly. “I cannot fix the image long.”

“Nor can Reijlander or Talbott, your peers in Europe.”

“Peers,” George snorted.

“Bring it to the door,” Sir John said. “Quickly now.”

Catherine did as he asked. With Julia at her side, she held the fading image out for her guests to see. Sir John joined her. “A marriage of the mortal and the divine!” he announced.

The guests passed the plate. The men took first glance and raised questions of chemicals and time frames. They were analytical and practical, their comments limited to materials and labor.

“Other than time,” Governor Wynfield said loudly, “what is gained by this over a painting? It is vague and offers no more to the eye than can be seen by the average man. There is nothing divine here.”

“Nevertheless, we must find a way to fix it,” Sir John said. “Your post enables you to import from London at will, does it not?”

“It does.”

“I’ll prepare a list of chemicals. Might I expedite receipt?”

The Governor’s eyes narrowed. “I trust you won’t be abandoning your project with my son for this. Not after so much time and money has been invested.”

“There will be due time for both.”

Sir John carried the frame into the yard. Their processional wound between the tables, and with each step they gained a following of guests. “Hurry,” Sir John said, “for those of you who wish to see. This beauty, so like a woman, is fickle!”

“Tell me,” Lady Wynfield asked Catherine when the image came to her for viewing. “How would you portray me? Or any of my friends? Would you have us grasping at stars? Would we stand interminably in your hut?”

“I would simply capture you. What the glass reveals of you is up to the beholder. I would dare say, we might all see something quite different in you.”

“Really, madam. Do you hope to open a portraiture? Hang a shingle, as it were?”

“ Why not? Why not a new manner of portrait, and why not by my hand? While we ponder, I ask, why not more than portraiture?”

“I believe a painter’s eye and a gifted brush will always speak to the soul.” Lady Wynfield tapped the glass plate with a reckless fingernail. All of Julia that remained was her shining iris.

A woman emerged from the guests to touch the frame. She was in her twilight, Catherine thought, but there had been a beauty once. “My husband arranged for me to pose for a painter in Florence. I cannot argue that his work was lovely. But should I not see it daily where it now hangs, I would not remember it at all because its details are not mine. I’m festooned with flowers I did not grow, in a room with a window view I ’d never seen before. He made a dutiful, obedient wife of me. I understand that is what every woman should be. But there was another me. If your contraption finds her, I’ll happily sit in front of it. And if it finds me beautiful, so much the better.”

“Really, Jane,” Lady Wynfield said. “My son is quite capable of rendering you in any manner you see fit to be immortalized.”

“It is difficult to understand, I suppose.”

“For me, it would be a café window in Paris.”

The women stirred at Catherine’s voice. Outsider. Flouter of their lives.

“On the eve of my trip abroad, my mother spoke to me. She said, ‘A good mother should tell you to study, to regard art, to learn to speak of literature and verse.’ But she didn’t. Rather, she told me to learn to drink sherry and watch the world pass from the panes of cafes. She said I would feel wicked and unbridled and unique. I would watch the women walking alongside important men, tethered by the hands to their children. Women looking neither this way nor that. She told me I was young and arrogant, and that surely I would be certain that they never sat where I sat at the moment of their passing. They never saw what I saw. But one day I would understand why such women could not bring themselves to look around. For fear that they might see the likes of me in the window, and in me the girl they once imagined themselves to be.’

“I thought it sad to hear my mother say such things. I was fifteen. I was terrified that before I or my sisters ever came to the world, before she met my father, there had been another woman who lived in the full bloom of expectation for an altogether different life. She could not take refuge from that memory, even fifteen, twenty years later.”

“You speak eloquently of yourself,” Lady Wynfield said.

“If I don’t, madam, I am confident no one else will. I bear no slight to your son’s esteemed talents. But there is in every moment something to startle the eye and the heart. There must be. A painting seeks to make a summary of those moments. This that I do, it is the moment. I point the camera and I wait, and I trust that I might see it. I shall endeavor to improve the process. When I do, may I portray you and make a gift of it, Jane?”

“You’ve had a moment to call your own,” Lady Wynfield said. “That moment, like your piece of glass, has ended.” She walked to her son’s table. Her friends followed.

Let it all come down, Catherine thought. She’d placed herself among the wives however briefly and moved in the appropriately deferential manner. She’d been loyal to a man, and to a sensible marriage built on respect and civility, and love, after a fashion. These were not matters to be lightly set aside because of the tyranny of her desire to lay open time. Yet listening to the chatter of these women only underscored how far away she now was, from the girl who journaled in a café at the heart of the world.

Some lives, she thought, were destined to make no sense.

Sir John patted her shoulder, breaking her reverie. “There will be critics at every turn. You cannot take a step in this world without hearing from them. All the more so for a woman. I’ve no doubt of your ability, Catherine, but I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you that I worry about the propriety of what you do.”

“There are those who question the propriety of mapping the heavens, John. You’ve heard the whispers. As if fixing the location of the stars negates their existence. How do you answer them? Or do you answer at all?”

“Truly, Catherine, I am coming about to this opinion. You should have been born a man.”

She took the frame from Eligius’ hands. Another baby born to the world, who failed to puzzle out the trick of staying. “Think of all I would have missed,” she said, staring at the empty glass.





The End of the Sky


THE FOLLOWING EVENING, ELIGIUS FINISHED LINING Holland House’s walls with thirty of Sir John’s maps. They spanned the length of the cottage and formed a continuous tapestry of the sky and its boundless constellations. At his direction, Eligius left room for what would come. A map of the southern hemisphere’s canopy.

After, the Colebrooks gathered on the grass. Catherine recited verses from Tennyson’s Ulysses while Charles and Sir John smoked and listened from opposite sides of the gazebo.

Eligius lay on the grass with Gita. She lifted her head and met his hand with her own. He was enjoying his sister’s alertness. Food and a roof agreed with her.

Sudarma gathered up the remains of the feast’s cakes, crushed them with a bit of anise and chutney, and shaped them into delicate squares. She served them with tea and brandy, then returned to the kitchen and filled the quiet evening with the sound of clattering earthenware and splashing well water.

Everyone paused in their conversation to listen. So familiar, so mundane, yet they huddled around the din of normalcy as if it were the first fire of winter.

Matara came to Eligius’ mind. Its own sounds were lost now. One day a child might view its ruins and hear a story of what the crumpled walls once held. A place of magic, where girls’ hands sprouted mendhi veins to mark them married, and men swam with lights at Diwali.

“I wish to offer a prayer,” Catherine said. “For our guest’s safe passage to us.” She bowed her head, as did Julia and Sir John. Ewen fidgeted at his father’s feet, but Charles did not chastise him. He gazed over the grounds.

Eligius bowed his head as well. Catherine had a quiet, calming prayer voice. The words made him think of the great hall of colored glass and stone figures. It had been a long time since she’d gone to the church. Not since its desecration. But she was no less religious. He saw her pause each day before the house’s many crosses.

He was grateful his mother was not outside to see him.

“All that I have prayed for,” Catherine intoned, “has come to be. My children thrive. My husband pursues his great work. My esteemed guest has arrived safely. I ask nothing for myself.”

I cannot pray to you, she thought. What you did cannot be undone. And if my prayers to this golem of wood and glass are answered, then it shall hold my heart. I wonder if you’ll notice the absence of one heart.

“We stand on the cusp of a new year,” she said, “and I am grateful for what has been.”

Sudarma poured brandy for her, Charles and Sir John, who was unfolding one of George’s sketches. “It’s all right. Young Wynfield isn’t here, and it’s my work, after all.”

Eligius surrounded the drawing with candles. The light found hidden hues, blue orchid in the stars and misty gray in the night sky. Despite himself, he had to admit George’s adeptness.

“See here.” Sir John gestured to the drawing’s edge with one of Julia’s quills. “The last of the visible nebulae from Cape Town, as seen from Table Mountain. That’s where Catherine and I met.”

“1836,” Catherine said. “I daresay I was at low ebb.”

“All of us who left England for other lands can be thought of as such. You, Charles, you were there, were you not?”

“Briefly. For all the good it did.”

Catherine patted her husband’s leg. “Charles had complications from malarial fever. It was terrible that year. Yet he risked all to come here. My dearest still suffers from it.”

“It astonishes me, Charles, how you overcame illness to sit on the John Company Board. And you, Catherine. How far you’ve come from that terrible day, when I saw you holding sadness itself in your hands.”

“In truth, I’m surprised you ever agreed to favor me with inclusion in your work. Why did you? Am I merely a muse?”

“Catherine, my enquiries are nothing more than theorizing. There is no blood in them. Questions to be answered in my corner of the ellipse, on the journey to the next question and the next. But then I saw you that day…”

His voice trailed off.

She knew where it had lost its way.

“I shan’t forget the child’s face, you see. You have tied him to this work. I’ve not experienced such a thing before. Not even in the starmap. I came to the end of the visible sky in Alexandria, now to the hemispheric expanse above Ceylon, and yet I think of the boy.”

Julia held her father’s hand tightly.

Eligius could see the old lion’s sad anger emerge. He could see as well Catherine and Sir John, lost in the memory of a child Charles never glimpsed.

“You came to the end of the sky?” he asked, hoping to shift the moment to a simple Indian who needed British guidance. “How is it possible to know?”

“I mapped all that I could and marked where I left off by the Arc of Meridian. I spent the next six years establishing an observatory to sharpen the sight we mortals can train on that great house.”

He brought Julia’s quill to a cluster of stars that resembled a crouched child. “Every night I made sketches of what I saw around that constellation. Over these many months, I hope to finish.”

“Will you pinpoint the cities of the moon?” Charles asked.

“Hasn’t Sir John suffered enough of that nonsense?” Catherine said curtly. “Please don’t display your ill temper for our guest.”

“Cities on the moon?” Julia asked.

“A hoax,” Sir John said resignedly. “Courtesy of an American journalist. He published a series of newspaper articles, all attributed to me, detailing life on the moon. The scamp went so far as suggesting my father had discovered it and bequeathed to me the continuation of his work. That truly was the insult. The rest was simply a child’s prank as far as I’m concerned. Yet I still hear of it. Those who seek introduction to me place it in their letters. ‘I’m familiar with your observation of our moon brethren.’ Imagine.”

“Did your father show you which star to start with?”

Sir John turned to regard Eligius. “A servant who asks such questions. It is truly a blessing to see our intellectual curiosity rubbing off on these people. Charles, it is a validation of all you came here to do.”

“I suppose,” Charles said quietly.

“Eligius, my father Sir William built his house of stars for a king.”

Into the night Eligius listened to Sir John’s living map: his father’s astronomy for King George, his own first survey of the skies above England and France, his career at Cambridge and election to the Royal Society, his tally of a thousand nebulae in Orion, his bearing witness to the return of a flying star the colonials called Halley’s, and his meeting Catherine in the Cape, where cholera and malaria thinned Britishers like drought thinned his people.

“Since then we have sought to perfect this process from our respective points on the globe,” Catherine said. “There are others. Reijlander has ideas.”

“And now, I have a question of our curious young Ceylonese.” Sir John relit his pipe. “Where did you learn to shape the light? Catherine told me how you helped construct that marvelous image of beauty.”

“When I was very young, I would take glass from the men of my village and play with the sun. I taught myself to make the lights dance in the trees and burn the eyes of the village boys as they played. I helped my father read.”

“Glass is precious,” Sir John said, “especially to poor people. Was your father an artisan? Did he work on the church I saw at the port?”

Catherine caught Sir John’s eyes. She shook her head.

No matter, Eligius thought. I wear your daughter on my skin and keep your shadow under me as I sleep. What trouble could it cause, to talk of difficult things in a place such as this? “My father served this house as I now do. But in my village, many men drink. They smash the bottles when they’re done. What was broken, I learned from.”

“I’m sorry, my boy.”

“Don’t pity him.” Charles gripped the arms of his chair, sending creaking shudders through the woven wood. “My father drank. He made a fool of himself and made cowards of my mother and sisters. Drink diminishes the man, but only if he allows it.”

He shook his daughter’s hand from his. She looked at him, stricken. “I don’t feel well,” he said. “I want to go inside. Eligius, see to it.”

“I will help you,” Catherine said.

“Eligius.”

Eligius took him to his study and put the ratted blanket over his legs. “A cigar and my writing implements, boy. I have work to do.”

“Perhaps you should rest. It’s late.”

“Someone must do this and I don’t see anyone to help. Do you?”

He was angry. It was better to give him what he asked for.

When he finished ministering to Charles, he went outside. Gita was asleep next to Ewen on the grass. He picked her up and put her to bed, and only then did the quiet of the house strike him. His mother’s tell-tale sounds had fallen to nothing.

The kitchen was dark. His mother’s quarters were empty, but the window was open. He heard branches and leaves being swept aside. She was in the jungle, moving fast.

He followed her trail through the accumulated growth of centuries, a thick stitching of shrubs, vines and branches that reassembled themselves in his wake. Beyond a copse of breadfruit he saw the boxed roof of a familiar plantation and realized that his mother’s path paralleled the one he took back to Matara. But this one was covered, a secret to British eyes.

He saw his mother ahead, moving towards a small clearing amongst the trees. She didn’t walk like a woman visiting her once-home. She seemed to punish the land beneath her; the food in her arms made soft colliding sounds, like a sari over grass. She came to a stop at the clearing edge, plates in hand. Waiting.

He whispered her name. She waved him off without looking at him. “You shouldn’t be here,” she said.

He could hear the sounds of approaching – dry limbs cracking, murmuring voices – and wanted to run. He would leave her where she stood, because she had chosen to be here over the safety he had delivered to her.

No, his father would say. Stay and receive what comes. You are not a man who leaves. There is no name for such a man.

He left the cover of the trees. “Amma, we have to go back before they accuse you of stealing food.”

Hari and two other boys appeared. They crossed the clearing to take the food from her plate. He watched them, feeling sick with the sight of them. They were emaciated and in the plain expansion of their protruding ribs, he could see that they would do anything to eat, to get what they did not have. They would kill.

Hari lay his banyan limb on the ground. “The men in the fields and the Britishers’ houses all talk of the fine things you’ve learned. Then they sing in mourning for Chandrak. They do this every day since the soldiers hung him on your word.”

Hari’s face was no longer that of the boy struggling with the colonials’ words. His haunted expression was no different than that of Chandrak by the fire, bottle in hand.

“Bring the machine to us,” Hari said. “It has parts of glass and wood. It sounds very rare and valuable. It will fetch a high price.”

“No.”

Other feral boys emerged at the far side of the clearing. Sudarma moved toward them. Eligius held her back by the arm.

“Remember how afraid you were in the field, with the soldier?” Hari asked. “You cried. You ran. Now you’re more afraid to be a man and stand against these people. Forget what you think we will do to you. Do you understand what they do? How they take our land and push us all into the sea?”

“The only beatings I have ever taken,” Eligius said, “are from a man like you will become. I will not steal. Chandrak was a murderer. So are you.”

Hari’s club came down with enough force to drive both Eligius and Sudarma to the ground. She absorbed the brunt. Her palms split open where Hari had brought the club to bear on his intended target, the top of Eligius’ head.

“You shame us all!” Hari screamed. “You are worth nothing!”

He raised the club again. Eligius closed his eyes.

“Don’t.”

Catherine and Julia stood at the edge of the razor grass, with Sir John. Sir John’s pistol was level, its hammer cocked. The barrel pointed at Hari.

“Careful, old man,” Hari said warily.

“I am old, true enough. But I assure you, the gun is quite new.”

“Leave this place!” Catherine stepped in front of her daughter. “I will call the authorities!”

“You be assured, we will be back.” Hari slipped into the far trees. “Dimbola will not be safe. There are so many of us and so few of you.”

Julia came to Eligius’ side. “I heard you call in the jungle.”

“Is my mother all right?”

“Her hands need attention,” Sir John said. “We must get her back.”

“They wanted me to steal the camera. I told him no – ”

“I heard you.” Catherine took his hand. She and Julia helped him rise. “Every word.”

Her eyes glowed softly in the starlight. Something about the long road that light traveled, from the southern skies to her, to him, made him terribly sad. He fell sobbing into her arms. Julia’s hand alighted on his back and remained.

Sudarma walked ahead, with Sir John. At the sound of her son’s cries, her shoulders fell a little, but she never turned.