The Luminist by David Rocklin

parted. It seems that the servant boy has met your expectations, eh?”
    â€œHe is a spirited boy,” she said, “and not without competence. Indeed, I find I have more uses of him than there are days. Such is the life of a director ’s family.”
    â€œHow true.”
    â€œI wish for the boy to remain here during the week. He may return to see his family on Sundays. It is a holy day for us, though I don’t expect him to understand that. Please do inform his family of the new arrangement. If there is a problem, I should like to know of it now, so I can find a suitable replacement.”
    â€œI will tell them.” Ault turned to Eligius. “ I hear no objections.”
    She watched him. And waited.
    Eligius’ mind made shameful short work of it. Forces in his life now were beyond his understanding. He needed to find a far place such as this Dimbola from which to make sense of them all. “ When you are there, please see about Gita. How she is feeling. Tell her and my mother I stay to earn as much as I can for them.”
    He unloaded the cart. Ault bid his goodbyes and left him behind. It was that easy. The shift to Dimbola as the place he would see most often was done.
    Catherine surprised him by lifting one of the barrels her - self and carrying it to the house. He took one and followed her.

    They passed through the front door into a dark foyer. A stairway at the rear, next to an arterial corridor, wound up to a second story marked with a dwarfed brown chest on which a series of grotesque figurine candlesticks stood. Their charred tapers had wilted from overuse. Above him, a black iron candelabra hung precariously from a cobwebbed chain. Dust motes rolled in the breeze ribboning the house, up against the wainscoting and across the stone floors like earthbound clouds.
    The visible rooms were crowded with ill-fitting odds and ends. There was a study, its interior dim with old cigar smoke. Despite the gloom he could make out the ivory of a stuffed owl under a glass conical, and next to it a humidor and a pinccone cachepot.
    The room across from the study was a riot of flowery brocades and impractically soft settees that bore the imprint of recent occupation. A tea service sat on a low round table littered with balled pieces of paper.
    He understood none of what he saw, only that the Colebrook estate bore its once opulent clutter like fruit left on the vine to rot.
    Mary took up a corner of the area rug, a faded expanse of brown and white obelisks woven in heavy woolen thread. “ How do I move this with your bloody dead weight on it?”
    He stepped off, shifting the cask in his aching arms. She pulled the rug out of the foyer and down the hall.
    â€œThis way!” Catherine’s voice bellowed. Ewen and Julia stopped what they were doing to wander after her.
    Eligius followed the sound of Catherine’s passage and found himself in a corridor of paintings. They were as vivid as the textured cover of her stage tragedy, only rendered in oils of gold, green and black. There were girls and women, and wiselooking men of learning held in place by scalloped wood frames. The characters in these paintings all stared past him at some point of reverie in the middle distance.
    Catherine set her cask down at the end of the hall, beneath
a painting of a child with wings as white and stilled as the owl in the study. “ Did the same hand render all these paintings?” Eligius asked.
    â€œ Bravo,” Julia said. “ How did you know?”
    â€œThey just seemed related. And the light looks the same. As if they were all painted at the same hour.”
    â€œAn acquaintance of our family. He fancies himself a por - traitist of religious awakenings and wealthy colonials. They ’re called gouaches.”
    â€œ May we proceed?” Catherine snapped. It angered her to spend time on George’s work, such as it was. “Are we quite done educating the boy on our