Read Online The Luminist by David Rocklin - Free Book Online Page B

salvaged.
    The light was wrong. The wrong shape in the eye, the wrong density, the wrong compound of tear and flame. She’d done her best to relate to George what she recalled and he had missed everything.
    â€œ Perhaps you can hang this in that shack out there,” Lady Wynfield suggested.

    Catherine thought about it. Failures resided in the cottage now, but hope did as well.
    She saw, through the window, figures standing at her gate. Oddly, one – tall, lanky, perhaps that missionary? – held an umbrella above his own head while the smaller one stood in the rain, as if the deluge were home.
    Something in the space between the figures and here, the house and its quiet, felt familiar.
    She placed the angel on the floor, next to Julia’s portrait. “It belongs in here,” she said.
    Â 
    ASCENDING THE PLANKS, Eligius crossed the Colebrooks’ frontage, passing the gray whiskered monkeys that squalled on the banks of the flooded yard. At the canopy, he was met by a young English woman. Her clothes were as simple and workmanlike as her harried, unkempt appearance. “ You’re the servant?” she asked in clipped Tamil. “ From Ault?”
    He nodded.
    My mistress sent me to see who you were.” She turned, then stopped to see if he was following. “What are you waiting on? The rain’s ready to blow the sheet out to sea! Is that how you want your memsahib to meet you?”
    â€œ No,” he answered in Tamil. “ But I have letters. I was told to present them to Colebrook memsa’ab.”
    â€œThere’s time enough for that.” She climbed up onto the veranda and bade him to follow. Her face was creased and puffy, her hair a nest of knots. “ Take hold of this pole and stretch the canopy taut. I ’ll have the other.”
    She walked towards the corner opposite him. Her gait was that of a shuffling elder, stooped and fussy, as if forever racing the rain.
    Together they pulled the poles to opposite ends of the veranda. The canopy was little more than a series of old sheets hastily sewn together. It stretched at the gapping seams but did
not tear when the wind pushed up and under it, threatening to yank the poles from their hands.
    He glanced at the audience that had gathered to fill the seats. Thirty, he reckoned, maybe more. To a one they looked none too pleased that a maid and a local stood between them and a drenching. He recognized some of the men from the Court. Their jowls and mutton chops, starched collars and dour expressions, seemed cut from the same cloth. The women were dressed in their finest, yet appeared morose over having to hide their resplendence beneath umbrellas and shawls.
    The girl he’d seen in the Court foyer, the spinner of light, sat in the front row. She wore a dark dress buttoned to her neck. Her hair flew freely in the wind. Stray strands clung to the moisture on her cheeks. The men all stole glances at her when their wives weren’t looking. From her secret smile, Eligius wondered if she didn’t know precisely her effect.
    One of the men seated behind her tapped her shoulder, then whispered something. She smiled. “ Who should open the play?” she said quite loudly, drawing the attention of those under the sheet. “ Why, that would be my luckless self.”
    She was staring at the veranda. At him. “ Does he know his role, Mary?”
    The maid holding the other pole shook her head. “ I haven’t given him the playbill to hold, Miss Julia, for fear he’d drop it in this ocean.”
    â€œHe looks capable enough.”
    The girl ascended to the veranda. She selected from a stack of bound papers on a small table. “ Tell him to hold it just so.” She opened the playbill and pointed the text to the center of the veranda. “ Make sure my mother can see the pages. Should she forget a line, he must be there, but not obviously. She is not to be seen as needing, which is not