The Luminist Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Part 1.

  The End of This

  Aipassi

  Dimbola

  From Life

  After the Rain

  To the Gates of Empire

  The Night, Moving

  Mother and Child

  Canvases

  Mendhi

  A Boy Who Remains

  The Canals and the Sea

  Thirty Breaths

  Part 2.

  Servitudes

  Pillars of Smoke

  The Windowed World

  The End of the Sky

  Topographies

  A Map of Ceylon

  Part 3.

  God’s Language

  The Lion’s Mouth

  Remembrance

  The Madness of Farewells

  Life Stood Still, Here

  Part 4.

  Departing

  The Luminist

  Copyright Page

  THE LUMINIST IS a warm dazzle of a first novel – a profoundly human story of shadow and light fixed in the searing simplicity of David Rocklin’s diamondbright prose.

  SUSAN TAYLOR CHEHAK, author of Apocalypse Tonight

  NOT SINCE TINKERS have I read a book which, in its sheer beauty and mystery, has carried me off the way The Luminist has. Every sentence is a small miracle; every character glows with a complex elegance, as if seen by candlelight. David Rocklin’s lush rendering of raw, unstable, colonial Ceylon will be etched in my memory for a long, long time. Superb.

  MYLÈNE DRESSLER, author of The Deadwood Beetle

  IN THIS EXTRAORDINARY debut, David Rocklin takes us to the heart of photography’s unlikely origins through language that shimmers like the art of light itself. As creative obsession fuses with political crisis in colonial Ceylon, the result is one unforgettable story. The Luminist is a gorgeous evocation of era, place, and human passion.

  AIMEE LIU, author of Flash House and Cloud Mountain

  THIS BOOK IS one of those few in which an author’s specific sensibilities nour - ish the text, as Abraham Verghese’s multi-geographic heritage and his physician’s life inform Cutting For Stone and Andrea Barrett’s fiction, from Ship Fever to Servants of the Map, owes its density and savor to the botanic and historiographic facts that beguile her. David Rocklin’s The Luminist is a weave of legend and history, science and art, politics and domesticity that are symphonic themes in the main title, the story of an enduring and forbidden friendship.

  JACQUELYN MITCHARD, author of The Deep End of the Ocean

  CEYLON OF THE 19th century is more than the setting for David Rocklin’s richly imagined and deeply moving novel. It is the central character, a world no less alienated and scarred than the people who inhabit it. That Rocklin chooses to capture the rawness of those lives through the nascent lens of photography is even more impressive, lending the novel a lyricism that comes as both a shock and a comfort.

  JONATHAN RABB, author of Shadow and Light, and The Second Son

  For Nina, Ariel and Kavanna, always and forever.

  Acknowledgements

  I AM DEEPLY GRATEFUL TO RHONDA HUGHES, KATE SAGE, Adam O’Connor Rodriguez, and Liz Crain of Hawthorne Books; and agents extraordinaire Christy Fletcher and Melissa Chinchillo of Fletcher & Co. You willed this book to be better, to be sold, and to be seen. Thank you for making the dream real.

  A heartfelt thank you to Susan Taylor Chehak. Without your mentoring and your friendship, this book would not have made its way into the world.

  To Dr. Nadeem Hasnain, for his graciousness in reviewing the manuscript in its nascent stages.

  To Julian Cox, for his assistance with the Getty Museum’s photographic collection, and for directing me to the kindly staff at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

  To Gloria Luxenberg, who told a twelve-year old boy he could write.

  To my family and friends, too numerous to mention. Thanks for understanding whenever I seemed to be far away.

  To Starbucks, for the perfect blend of writing space and chai tea.

  The Luminist was initially inspired by an installation of Victorian-era photography at the Getty Museum in Southern California. The character of Catherine Colebrook is very loosely suggested by the life and work of Julia Margaret Cameron, one of the first photographic pioneers. Her pictures of children were especially haunting, at once warmly immediate and bittersweet; those lives are, after all, lost to us now. What followed – research into colonial life in Ceylon, the traditions of Victorian photography, a plunge (inadequate, I’m certain) into the religions, cultures and customs of India – really began there, with photographic relics and writerly imaginings about the woman who made them. Though the novel deals with matters of history and the origins of photography, I have taken broad liberties with each. My apologies for tampering with these worlds in the interests of fiction.

  Introduction

  Jacquelyn Mitchard

  PHOTOGRAPHY IN ITS INFANCY WAS A DANGEROUS GAME.

  As they do now, practitioners of the mysterious art, named from root words that literally mean “drawing with light,” went into the darkness to do it. But in the 19th century darkroom, they worked by candlelight, coating glass plates with flammable substances, breathing ether, mercury, and ammonia, because the necessary absence of light also meant a lack of ventilation. They got stains on their hands from silver nitrate, and to remove them, used the even more toxic potassium chloride. Matthew Brady, who made the images most of us call to mind when we picture the battlefields of the Civil War, had to kneel or lie down in his field tent to do his processing. Sweat streamed, eyes smarted and muscles ached from hauling water, chemicals and the camera and plates, which were both bulky and heartbreakingly fragile. Such was the potency of this infatuation that we modern-day purists, who bristle when we pass a smoker’s miasma in a parking lot, have to wonder how much these pioneers understood, or cared, about the damage that they inflicted on themselves. We ask ourselves if the majesty of the experience was so great that, like Marie Curie’s fatal obsession with radiation, they went forth, no matter what.

  Photography comprises the bright, tensile thread in the sweep of David Rocklin’s novel, The Luminist, drawing tight a narrative that shifts between the prejudices and passions of Victorian England and those of colonial Ceylon. It binds the destinies of Catherine Colebrook, the proper wife of a fading diplomat, who rebels against every convention to chase the romance of science through her lens, and Eligius, an Indian teenager thrust into servitude after his father is killed demanding native rights.

  Thus, this book is one of those few in which an author’s specific sensibilities nourish the text, as Abraham Verghese’s multi-geographic heritage and his physician’s life inform Cutting For Stone and Andrea Barrett’s fiction, from Ship Fever to Servants of the Map, owes its density and savor to the botanic and historiographic facts that beguile her. David Rocklin’s The Luminist is a weave of legend and history, science and art, politics and domesticity that are symphonic themes in the main title, the story of an enduring and forbidden friendship. Catherine and Eligius must each struggle with internal forces that inspire them and societal pressures that command them. Uprooted to Ceylon with her adolescent daughter and her newborn son, a twin who survived his brother, Catherine is expected to do good works and host luncheon parties to further her husband’s career. All the while, her turbulent soul, in part informed by the loss of her child and her inability to keep his likeness, embraces photography with the fervor of alchemy. Eligius, named for the patron saint of metalworkers, is trapped by the strictures of his class. Hired as a laborer by British gentry, he is shamed and ex
cited by finding the intellectual fulfillment he aspires to in the Colebrook home, not his own.

  So different, Catherine and Eligius are twinned in torment. She loves her old and failing husband, her moody daughter, and her lonely young son, yet all of them impede her obsession. Eligius is duty-bound to his widowed mother and ailing baby sister; his father’s comrades urge him to rob his employers, the usurpers of his nation.

  Still, his relationship with the Colebrooks deepens, and the bigotry of the oppressed cannot survive. Catherine’s beautiful daughter, Julia, becomes Eligius’ confidant. He sees that Catherine’s husband, “the old lion,” despite his upbringing, brings on his own ruin trying to do the right thing. The British matron, raised to a famous reserve, invests photography with a holy power. The separate peace, however, has a price. Catherine is an outcast, Eligius a traitor. Yet their photographs draw more attention, and attract more and more patrons, when, at virtually the same moment, the tide of armed revolution breaks over Ceylon.

  Rocklin’s is a bold landscape, against which an intimate drama is poignantly played out. The Luminist recalls Out of Africa, and Karen Blixen’s bond with her house manager, Farah, from whom she learns how little she can control, but their relationship is not in vain. It comprises a doom made glorious, a failure in the midst of grandeur, a loss imbued with hope.

  Just in this way, our minds recall in every detail the photo snapped at the moment of pain, while all the lovely scenes seem to run together.

  1.

  Ceylon, from whatever direction it may be approached, unfolds a scene of loveliness and grandeur unsurpassed, if it be rivaled, by any land. The Brahmans designated it by the epithet of Lanka, the resplendent, and in their dreamy rhapsodies extolled it as the region of mystery.

  SIR JAMES EMERSON TENNANT

  Ceylon: An Account of the Island, Vol. I, 1859

  Must we always object to science, that it leads its servants to doubt the immortal soul? No, this is my prayer: enlighten my mind so that I may be enabled to see more clearly the illuminations of mortal Man, and behind it, the immortal Light.

  SIR JOHN HOLLAND

  Preliminary Discourse on a New Mechanism of Portraiture, 1835

  Imagine, arresting beauty at the very moment beauty comes into being and passes out of the world. Imagine if life could be held still.

  Letter from Catherine Colebrook to Sir John Holland

  February 22, 1836

  The End of This

  THE NOISES OUTSIDE HER WINDOW WERE OF WIND AND the near sea, of clay chimes kilned to crystalline tones. Natives not opposed to Britishers had strung them at odd heights from the thatching of her bungalow roof to ward off demons during her pregnancy. Their sound filled her sleep and informed her dreams.

  Ewen and Hardy nestled against her still-swollen midsection. Before, when the pains of labor had ruled her, this would have filled her heart.

  She took her babies into her arms and bundled them. Folding the letter carefully, she brought them to the carriage and placed them next to her. At the flick of her reins, the old bay stumbled into motion.

  She gazed at her newly-arrived sons and tried not to think of the future.

  THE RIDETO the Maclears’ home in Table Bay was not ritual, yet her passage through the Cape of Good Hope’s sifting littorals possessed equal weight and hollowness. She struggled to think of the right word for this, her second foray along the sea path to the lonely Dutch outpost of stone imposing itself on the African sky.

  Her sons jostled alongside her. She wanted simply to place the letter in Sir John Holland’s hand and leave, and be whoever it was that she would be tomorrow.

  When the bend in the road opened onto the sea’s turquoise at the mouth of Agulhas, she thought of Sir John’s lecture. That night at the Maclears’ he’d marveled at how the Cape marked the place where a man traveling from the equator ceases traveling southward and begins traveling eastward without ever having changed direction. The world changes without changing. Wondrous, he’d said, his shock of white hair a cloud above his face.

  The world is capable of such things, she thought.

  The road was rutted. Ewen cried out. Catherine brought her children close and told them that they traveled over the same dirt and lichens, past the same protea, as the Voortrekkers who fled the sea to escape the rampaging Xhosa, and found peaceful vistas inland where they grew their rye and gathered their wool. Boys, she thought, are fond of narrow escapes and bloodthirst. These are the sorts of things they will remember as men, when they find themselves soldiers or surgeons: once as a child, they made believe they were brave.

  She regarded Hardy’s face for the first time since the mote of light slipped from his eyes.

  They passed through the port market, a slipshod constellation of many-hued fruits, dyed cloths, hung meats, animals braying at the blades of the butchers, macaws on horsehair leads, natives porting crates to and from ships on callused feet, swearing under their breath in Capie and broken English.

  The Maclears’ home stood next to the Cape lighthouse, atop a red rock jetty. Its view of the whalers and tall mast ships was the envy of the expatriates. A line of carriages filled the road at the base of the house. Porters brought the parcels of voyage from the front door. Sir John’s departure on his star map travels was imminent.

  The Maclears’ servants fell silent at the sight of her binding her horse to the low boughs of a fig tree. She was late in her forties, but still possessed a severe, weathered beauty. She was unadorned of jewels or those impractical satchels other colonial women carried, and all the more striking for it; there was nothing else to consider but the shaded hollows of her cheeks, the quartered mango of her lips, the expanse of her slender neck. She’d pulled back her brown hair and fastened it with mother of pearl sometime in the long night, but strands had come loose to brush her skin. She was swathed in local cloth, shod in sandals, uncaring of her appearance.

  She took her babies to the front door.

  Sir John came shortly, still wet from bathing. A towel was loosely draped about his neck. His eyes were crinkled with age and recent sleep.

  Early, she realized. In another time, I would think a visit at this hour quite inappropriate.

  “My lord,” Sir John whispered when he saw Hardy.

  She hefted her babies higher against her chest. Ewen protested, but she needed a free hand to extend the letter.

  “I hope you remember me,” she said.

  Inside the house she saw the Wynfield boy, George, portraitist at seventeen and already of some renown. He would be accompanying Sir John to fashion a painted record of their travels. The sights and ports of call, the map itself.

  “You know who I am,” she called out to George. He was intent on his canvas. “Your father and my husband are allied in Ceylon.”

  “I am aware, madam. Your Julia has sat many hours watching me work. A delightful creature. I’ve spoken of her to my father.”

  “I should like to commission you to paint my children.”

  He regarded her from across the expanse. He could not see clearly. “Of course,” he said.

  Distantly, she felt herself bleed.

  “I am so glad to see you before you leave South Africa,” she said to Sir John.

  “We met some months ago, did we not? You’re Catherine Colebrook.”

  He could not look away from her boys.

  He will remember, she thought. What I ask will be tied to this moment. He will carry it with him.

  “I’m grateful that you recall. It is important that you understand, I am not mad. I am a woman. We let go of nothing.”

  She declined his offer of food and a doctor’s attention. “I have a daughter. A little younger than George Wynfield by the look of him. She’s alone and afraid.”

  “But you are not.”

  “The worst has passed.”

  In time, she returned to her cart and her home in the Cape. The shanties around the port were coming to life. A steady current of vendors made their way
along the water. They sold fish and shells, flowers and exotics fresh from the tethered boats newly arrived from places she once imagined she’d visit. Here and there she saw the other European expats, their easels, open pages of poetry, unfolded letters of distant news and regrets passed across months at sea. They sat in makeshift tents, hoping to sell their foreignness and continental birth for food and the means to remain far from home.

  She’d extracted promises from the scientist. That he would pray for her. That he would read her letter and remember her.

  Feldhausen

  Cape of Good Hope, South Africa

  February 22, 1836

  To the kind attention of Sir John Holland:

  My name is Catherine Colebrook. We were first and recently acquainted at the home of Thomas Maclear, Astronomer Royal here in the Cape. I was most fortunate to attend his party in your honor some months back. You spoke eloquently of the comet Halley and her path among the heavenly bodies, and of your curiosity at the application of Lyell’s geographic principles to mapping the celestial.Ever so briefly, you shared the first murmurings of a nascent science. The ability to arrest a moment of the world, on types of tin and copper. Crude, you called it. But the beginning, perhaps, of something wondrous.I am certain you recall how forward I was. For I was at this gathering without my husband Charles, an eminent barrister and man of letters. We are here in the Cape these thirteen months so that he might recover his fragile health – oh, stalwart man that he is! Even now he is in Ceylon at Andrew’s request and that of the John Company, attending to matters of importance to the Crown, beyond the ken of a woman like me. Soon we will be journeying to that land to join him.