The Luminist Read Online Free Page B

feeding him, or whether he was closing himself off in a room amongst the chaos of his books and papers. But his eyes were so full of hope for her devotion that she’d kissed his hand and ignored the milling natives just outside their carriage, with their language of melody and unmapped terrain, their skin like burnt chicory. Charles needed her filial kiss. Men must feel necessary.
    She’d found nothing in Mary’s demeanor, nothing in Charles’ quiet embrace upon hearing of Hardy, nothing in the wordless mien that settled upon them during the journey from Port Colombo to Kalutara and her new home, nothing in the quiet non-intersecting circles they followed in the months after, from which assurance could be drawn that this was the life she was meant for. This was home.
    From all appearances, Charles’ life in the house he called Dimbola scarcely extended beyond the single room he’d established as his study, and in which he’d arranged his considerable library. The rest of the house felt empty and in need when she’d arrived. Sparse furnishings, a disorder to the English amalgam of rooms and functions, a lack of cultural flourishes – art, namely – by which their guests might come to know Charles’ achievements. It had not surprised her that during his long sojourn in Ceylon without her, Charles had not attended to details best left to a wife. Still, Dimbola suffered a malaise that she quickly set about dispelling. Mary kept order. She kept the children fed and occupied, allowing Catherine to reclaim her role as wife and architect of a socially presentable colonial life.
    Soon after her arrival, she’d discovered the cottage while searching for an old cachepot. The structure was nothing, and treated as such. Mary stored her mops and buckets there, alongside the remaining crates, odd chairs and tables, the items her new mistress and master had brought to Ceylon.
    In it Catherine found saris, wraps, the detritus of Indian women hanging in the gray space of an alcove. They were covered
in a patina of dust, their hues no more than suggestions of what they once were.
    Left by servants, she decided. Women long since vanished.
    By early spring, their arrival had lost the luster of the new. Charles returned to his books and laws, Mary to her grumbling and cleansing of her betters, Julia to her writerly musings and complaints about the life abroad her parents were surely withholding from her.
    Catherine returned to the cottage each day.
    It held no furniture or fixtures. It walls were bare. Its ceiling had been rent open by storms. Yet its vacancy was of a different sort than the main house. The cottage didn’t feel empty to her. It felt free. Charles’ persistent quiet, the maid’s taciturn labors, Ewen’s pronounced need; none of it reached her here. In the cottage, possibilities turned in the breeze of the near sea.
    The crate and the letter from Sir John arrived by ship’s post in September. Mary brought them to her master with no regard for Catherine’s name as intended recipient. A message from a man journeying on the largesse of her new master’s superior, to her mistress? Inappropriate was too gentle a word.
    Charles was a quiet rain after Sir John’s delivery. He punished Catherine with silence, unanswered entreaties over dinner, a closed study door.
    He didn’t understand, nor could she expect him to. She knew this. He hadn’t witnessed her in the Cape. Had he known that she’d infused a far away man with hope for the resurrection of her child’s first and last day, he would have hated her for needing such things.
    She moved the crate, unopened, into the cottage.
    Weeks passed. Colonial Ceylon invited them to dinners and a party in Andrew Wynfield’s honor, to fete the imminent completion of Ceylon’s first grand church, the Galle Face. At Charles’ direction, Mary selected a dress and provided Catherine with the hour by