Now We Shall Be Entirely Free Read online

  ALSO BY

  ANDREW MILLER

  Ingenious Pain

  Casanova

  Oxygen

  The Optimists

  One Morning Like a Bird

  Pure

  The Crossing

  Europa Editions

  214 West 29th St.

  New York NY 10001

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  www.europaeditions.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2018 by Andrew Miller

  First publication 2019 by Europa Editions

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco

  www.mekkanografici.com

  Cover photo: Tony Marturano / Adobe Stock

  ISBN 9781609455446

  Andrew Miller

  NOW WE SHALL BE

  ENTIRELY FREE

  NOW WE SHALL BE

  ENTIRELY FREE

  ONE

  1

  It came through lanes crazy with rain, its sides slabbed with mud, its wheels throwing arcs of mud behind it. There were two horses rigged in tandem and on the left-hand horse the postilion, a man of fifty, peered from under the brim of his hat at the outline of high hedges, arching trees. Somewhere there was a moon but you would do well to say where. The lantern on the cab had guttered out a mile back. The last light he had seen was a candle at a farmhouse window, some farmer up late at his accounts or prayers.

  He called to his horses, “Steady, steady . . . ” The mud was liquid clay. More than once the animals had lost their footing in it. If he were to be thrown here! Thrown and bones cracked! Then he and the poor wretch in the cab would be discovered in the morning by milkmaid or tinker, dead as if they’d met the devil on the road.

  Or was his passenger already dead? At the Swans he’d been carried out in the arms of servants, eyes shut and shadowed, head lolling, the landlord looking on like a man well pleased to be rid of what troubled him.

  He reined in the horses, brought them to a halt. Here the road turned and descended—he could sense it more than see it—and he sat, pushed at by the rain, trying to think of what was best to do. He climbed down, stood in his stiff postilion’s boots, took the collar of the horse he had been riding and began to walk.

  Did he know this hill? He would know it in daylight but now, creeping forward, muttering to the horse, the cab swaying on its axle, he could not rid himself of the feeling he was walking down into the sea and would soon feel the surf break against his boots. Nonsense of course. There was no sea for a hundred miles, but somehow even a Somerset postilion carried with him a sea in his imagination.

  For a span of seconds the moon came free of clouds and he saw the hill’s character, saw moonlight on the yardarm bough of a big tree he thought he recognised. The rain was easing. He shook the drops from his hat, went on descending (long enough to begin to doubt this could be the hill he had believed it was), then, stretching out with his hand, he grazed a stone pillar that marked the edge of an open gateway. He led the horses through on to the drive—or not a drive but a courtyard, small stones underfoot, and beyond it the blackness and slate-shine of a large, square house. He left the horses and went up the three low steps to the front door. He felt around for a knocker or bell-pull, found none and beat against the door with the sodden leather of his gloved palm. Almost immediately, a dog began to bark. Another dog, down in the village, answered it. He waited. A voice, a woman’s, called the dog to silence. When the dog was hushed she said, “Who is it? What do you want here?”

  He told her, and told her his business. He was still not certain he had come to the right place, that this was the address he carried tucked inside his glove.

  “Wait,” she said, her voice made a little strange by the door between them. When she returned she had a light that he saw as a bloom of yellow through the narrow window at the side of the door. He stood back to show himself. The light shifted, bolts were drawn and the door, swollen from the rain perhaps—raining off and on for days—opened with a scraping sound. The woman stood there holding up her lamp. Not young, not old. She had a blanket around her shoulders and was holding the edges with her free hand against her chest.

  “Where is he?” she asked, looking either side of the postilion.

  “He’s in the cab.”

  “Why does he not come?”

  “He will need to be lifted. He was lifted in.”

  She took this in for a moment, then said, “There is only me here.”

  “I can manage him,” he said. “I believe I can.”

  He turned from her and walked to the cab. He tapped for politeness’ sake on the sliding window, then opened the door, got on to the step and leaned inside. It did not smell good in there, nor was it obvious at first that the man was still breathing.

  “I’ll be gentle as I can,” he said. He pulled the man forward, just enough to slide an arm around his back. His other arm went under the man’s knees. With a grunt he lifted him, stepped down backwards on to the courtyard stones and carried him quickly into the house. The woman shut the door. “Sweet heaven,” she said. “Can you bring him up the stairs?”

  “If you don’t mind my boots,” he said.

  The woman went first, the lamplight washing over paintings of horses, men, land. Behind the postilion came a dog, a hunting animal of some type, with a long snout and slender legs. He didn’t hear it, it came so quietly.

  At the top of the stairs he paused to find his breath, then followed the woman down a panelled corridor to a panelled door and past the door into a bedchamber, the chill of a room that had passed all winter unvisited and fireless.

  “On there,” she said, nodding to the bed. Then, more to herself, added, “If I had known. If I had been told. If I had been told something . . . ”

  By the light of the lamp they both looked down, silently, at the man on the bed. The woman moved the lamp down the length of his body. “Those aren’t his clothes,” she said.

  “No?”

  A brown civilian coat that had once belonged to a bigger man. A waistcoat that looked to have been cut from a blanket. Grey trousers patched with all sorts, with squares of leather and brown fustian and a dark material—red?—that might be oilcloth. Both his feet were wound with strips of cloth.

  “Where are his boots?” she asked.

  “He is as I had him from the Swans. No boots and no hat.”

  “No bags?”

  “One. A small one. Down in the cab.”

  She looked at the postilion, took proper notice of him for the first time. He wasn’t from the village or the next village or the next, though she might have seen him somewhere, going about his work. A thin face touched by weather and the strong drink all men in his trade needed and relished. But there was a keenness there, a kindness too, that put her in mind of the preacher she had seen riding past the house the end of last year’s apple picking, one of the new sort who spoke in the open air to miners and field labourers and servants. Even in Radstock.

  “The landlord,” said the postilion, “told me he had come up from the coast the day before. From Portsmouth.”

  “Portsmouth?”

  “That’s what he said. And that there were soldiers back from Spain, some without eyes or legs, just lying in the streets.”

  “Sweet mercy,” she said. “But not the officers, surely?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Well, those are not his clothes,” she said. �
�I know all his clothes.”

  “You keep house here, I suppose.”

  “I do,” she said. “An empty house.”

  She took the blanket off her shoulders and folded it over the man. She had on a gown of faded blue stuff and under that the white of her shift. The postilion had to be paid and she went down to the scullery where she had a locked box behind the brewing tubs. She took the coins out to him. He thanked her and went out to the cab to fetch the man’s bag, a knapsack.

  “Nothing more?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  They stood at the door. The night now was breezy but dry, and where the clouds had broken there was a washed sky busy with stars. He wished her luck. She nodded and closed the door, put the bolts over. He went to his horses, rubbed their foreheads and led them to the gate and on to the road.

  “Odd,” he said, speaking into the ear of the nearest horse. “An odd night. Carrying some dying soldier back to an empty house.”

  * * *

  The tall-case clock in the hall said just past two in the morning and showed, on the tip of a strip of bent metal, the face of a dreaming moon. She looked up the stairs (the postilion’s mud still wet on the carpet), then went through to the kitchen. The fire there was easy enough to excite. She swung the kettle over it, then carried a scuttle of glowing coals up to the room where the man lay in utter darkness. The room would take hours to become properly warm but the fire’s glow encouraged her and she hurried down to the kitchen again. The water in the kettle was hot and she half filled an earthenware mug with it, added a good measure of brandy, put a horn spoon in her apron pocket. The dog was with her, had followed her on each journey, up and down.

  She sat on the edge of the bed. She needed to catch up with herself, to breathe, to understand what the night had brought her and might bring her yet. She tugged the pillow down towards the man’s shoulders so that his head would be raised a little, filled the horn spoon with brandy and water, tasted it herself to know the heat of it, and carefully tipped a little between his lips. Most of it spilled down his chin but some went in, a few drops. Almost immediately he opened his eyes. He stared at her in a way that made her grateful when he closed them again. “It’s Nell,” she said. She had no idea if he had known her or not, if he had been truly awake. “You are in your own bed,” she said. “You are home now.”

  She fed him more of the mixture until it seemed to her he scowled and she put the spoon back in her pocket. She spent a few minutes working with the fire, then went back to the kitchen to fill a basin with warm water. She would have to wash him. He stank. Sickroom smells, yet it seemed more than that, as if he had brought with him a gust from the workhouse. He would have lice on him, that was certain. She would need a good razor because a sharp blade was the surest way to be rid of lice. She wondered if he might have his own razor in the knapsack but it had seemed to contain so little. She would look for one of his father’s. There would be one in a drawer somewhere, in the old room. Can an unused razor lose its edge? She did not think so.

  She unwrapped his feet. Much of the skin from the soles seemed to have gone. She had to peel away the cloth with infinite care to keep herself from removing what was left. She washed them, patted them dry, then fetched her sewing scissors and cut up the legs of his trousers. She smoothed and sopped, cleaned the very white skin of his thighs, cleaned between his legs, dabbed the slightly darker skin of his cock (thought how it had, poor piece, a stunned look to it, like something—a glove—flung down and forgotten).

  The shirt, she decided, was his, the only thing of all. She imagined she recognised the stitching—her own—but it was stained beyond any scrubbing and she cut it off too, dropping strips of material by her feet, a pile of rags she would burn on the kitchen fire until they were ashes and then nothing.

  She washed his chest. He had lost a stone in weight or more than that, but it was still a soldier’s chest and when she flattened her palm over his heart she could feel the heat of it and for the first time since he was carried into the house she did not fear for his life.

  His face she washed last of all. The lugs of his ears, the tender skin around the closed eyes, his brow, his lips. The whiskers and moustaches he wore when he left (Lord, the trimming, the rubbing-in of ointments!) had, at some point, been removed, but he had a week’s growth of beard on him, the hair on his chin looking younger than the hair on his head, no threads of grey in it. She leaned back from him hoping to see the boy’s face in the man’s, the face she had seen when she first came into service with the family, but she could not, and knew that whatever had happened to him between the June day last summer when he left and this February night, it had taken with it the last of his youth.

  She fetched a second blanket to lay over him. The warmth of the fire was creeping closer to the bed but had not yet reached it. The dog was sprawled on the rug, belly to the flames. She held her hand by his mouth, felt the come and go of his breath. Was he easier, quieter? It seemed to her his breath came more slowly and she could not decide if this was good or not. As soon as Tom came up with the milk she would send him for the doctor. She could not have the responsibility just on herself. And doctors were not entirely useless, not all of them, always. They had their tricks.

  She fussed, adjusted his blankets, his pillows, then told herself to cease, to have done. How could he sleep unless she let him be? She stepped away and crossed to the old linen press opposite the end of the bed. She had set down the knapsack there and now, for the first time, she thought to examine it. Like the clothes he had arrived in, the pack was not his own. Officers did not have packs like this. This was to be worn on a private soldier’s back. She had seen such packs often enough when the recruiting parties came through, though this one had the look of something raked out of a fire. Scorched, filthy. Black with tar or grease, the world’s filth. And this was what he had come back with? This and nothing besides?

  She had in her head a picture—vivid, detailed—of all his kit spread over the bed, over half the floor. Such things! And the expense! The boots alone were more than twenty pounds. She had found the receipt under the bed once he’d gone—George Hoby, Bootmaker of Piccadilly. Six shirts she had sewn herself. Six black neckties, twelve pairs of worsted half-stockings, two sets of overalls, four white waistcoats. A blue pelisse—blue as you might dream of blue—with a fur-lined collar he told her was from the pelt of a wolf. And then the rest—the pocket handkerchiefs, pillowcases, spare cuffs, spare collars, spare buttons. Not that all of it was new. He had been with the regiment three years already, bought his commission the autumn after his father died, but he had not been on campaign before and had been free with money he perhaps did not have. The spyglass! The spyglass was new. He was pleased with it and had taken it from its leather case and said come over here, Nell, come to the window, and he had held it to her eye and after some fiddling with the lens she had seen, large as life, a farmer (she knew him) swaying down Water Lane on his mare, babbling to himself and scratching his hindquarters and not the least idea he was watched. It had made her laugh but made her uneasy too. Was that how God watched us? And if so, what must He think of us, seeing everything?

  She moved the pack on to the floor and sat in its place on the press. She undid the straps, pulled them through the buckles, laid back the flap. She paused, then reached inside. The first thing she pulled out was a tin mug, dented and smoke-blackened as though used as a little saucepan. She set it on the floor next to the pack. Next out was two inches of tallow candle, then a curry comb, a clasp knife with a broken blade, and a lump of something the size of a walnut and hard as a walnut which, examined more closely, she decided was bread, very old bread. The dog had drifted over to her. She held the lump to his nose. He sniffed it, touched it with the tip of his tongue, looked up at her. “Yes,” she said. “And we’ll burn this too.”

  Last of all was the object that gave the pack what weight it had. A parcel wra
pped in the same dull red oilskin that had been used to patch his trousers. She set it on her lap and carefully unwound the oilskin until it hung in red pleats down to her slippers. She guessed what it was before she saw it. Smooth wood, steel, a fold of scratched brass at the base of the handle. This alone, it seemed, had returned much as it had gone, the wood gleaming like the wood of the tables downstairs she circled beeswax into (did so still, despite no one ever sitting at them). Was it the oil in the cloth? Was that why he had chosen it? An oily swaddling that would feed what it held?

  On the mechanism, below the hammer, was the stamp of a crown, and below the crown a G and another letter she was less sure of. There was no flint in the jaws of the hammer. She turned it, this way and that. She raised it. It weighed in her hand like a skillet. She had never fired a gun in her life and had only touched them to tidy them away, those mornings they came back from duck shooting mad for their breakfasts and propped the fowling pieces in the hall like walking sticks. But this was not a hunting gun. Its character was entirely different.

  She saw then—a little thrill of horror—that she was pointing the pistol at the bed, at the man in the bed, and she quickly lowered it and laid it across her knees again, shook her head. What would it be to shoot this at someone? To put a ball the size of a quail’s egg through another man’s chest or head? Was that what the beautiful clothes were for? The boots, the fur collars? And she found herself hoping that he had not done it. That he had ridden and drilled and paraded with his men but had never shattered some poor stranger with this thing.

  She wrapped it again in the cloth, settled it in the bottom of the pack, put back the mug and the comb and the candle, then stood, opened the lid of the press and settled the pack inside. One darkness swallowing another.

  * * *