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Eligius.
    â€œMy son.”
    â€œAnd me.” Chandrak stepped forward. “A servant of no great importance.”

    After conferring with his superior, the guard opened a door in the gate and ushered them swiftly through.
    A brick flew past Eligius’ ears. “Tell the Britishers to pack their things and leave,” a man’s voice cried. This stirred the mob up, and they began to surge towards the gate. The man who’d screamed was at the front of the crowd. There was a long stick in his hand. A thick cord of braided horsehair sliced the air with an audible hum as he turned it upon himself.
    The crowd began to chant in time to his self punishment. He smiled as his back grew slick with sweat and blood. “I am Ceylon,” he said, his teeth grinding against the pain. “I am Ceylon. Tell them.”
    The guards pressed themselves against the gate, bracing it. More fusillades launched from the crowd. Mangoes and kavas burst against the bars, raining pulp across the tended grass of the Court garden.
    Eligius turned his back on their anger. Brushing bits of fruit from his shirt, he felt as if his trembling heart were visible to the world.
    The court building itself looked much like a plantation, with its columns, its walls the color of ripe coconut meat, its polished glass. The Rees flag billowed on sea winds. The sculpted grounds made a mockery of the anger he’d come through. Even the breeze gentled once past the gates.
    A parade of strutting peacocks scampered aside as they approached the carved ebony doors of the Court’s entryway. Before knocking, Swaran drew palmfuls of water from a stone basin. Lotus blossoms floated aimlessly, cut from their roots.
    A Sikh doorman regarded Swaran’s petition without expression. His chubby face had cracked from the sun. Rivulets of perspiration crept down the folds of his neck, slipping beneath the banded collar of his uniform. “It is more today than yesterday,” he said, opening the door wide. “Every day they get louder. When this door closes, you won’t hear them at all.”
    The room beyond was marvelous to behold. All of Matara
could have fit inside its ellipse. Its walls were covered with clean white paper embossed with raised images of acacia. Windows opened wide onto an expanse of tall sugar cane fields and the stone edifice of the Galle Face church. The windows were bordered with enough cloth to stock a bazaar. Gathered in loose folds with links of golden cord, the cloth breathed with each gust of sea air.
    On any other day Eligius might have run from wall to wall like a child delighting in his flight. He might race along the room’s perimeter and imagine running across the sea to strange places.
    Across the expanse from them, a Hindu servant struggled to remain upright as the boy riding atop his shoulders bobbed up and down, his small red head snapping with the jerkiness of his mount’s gait. “Horse!” the young boy screamed. “Lift me up! Up!”
    The servant obeyed. He hefted the boy high in his arms and paraded him past windows. When the boy tired of this, he demanded his horse once again. In an instant the servant was hopscotching in a mad circle.
    â€œNo.” A woman’s voice.
    Ewen halted his exultant flight. He began to cry at his mother’s tone.
    Something else disturbed Catherine’s view of the proscenium, the marble, the frescoes and the light suffusing the Court’s expanse in descending sparks of dust. An instant before the Indian boy, the contraption’s keyhole was making dervishes of the strolling men. Cups and saucers lost their mundane structure and became the obelisks of London, the surrounding dust like that city’s silverwashed fog. Faces came undone from the men and women who possessed them. Faces were geometry.
    The contraption, with its mirrors and polished glass, brought resolution to the world like nothing else in life. It isolated the possible.