Now We Shall Be Entirely Free Read online

  There was one gown—she knew exactly where it was, could go and lay her hand on it now—made of red damask that had faded to the colour of berries stirred through cream. That one she would have for herself. She would sit in it—you certainly could not work in such a dress—drinking coffee and chocolate with Tom until they were dizzy. And Tom could wear one of old Lacroix’s long waistcoats that had so much gold thread in the front they stood up on their own. And they would keep some of the good glasses to drink some of the good port. And they would keep (the thought a hushed thought even in her privacy) the bed from the great bedroom, its columns carved from some black wood she could only guess at, a tree that had grown in no English forest.

  She laughed at herself. The dog observed her, then came closer and pressed his head against her knees.

  “You are a mournful creature,” she said. “You should have gone with your master. He should have taken you with him.”

  She went to the meat-safe in the pantry. There was a beef bone in there she had been meaning to make a jelly with but it had been there a while and she wanted to give pleasure to something, if only to a dog. She took the bone from the safe, went out through the kitchen door into the courtyard garden where they grew herbs and where the well was. She held the bone out to the dog. He accepted it very gently and carried it to a corner of the courtyard, a flagstone sheltered by the bough of an apple tree growing on the other side of the wall.

  She watched him for a minute then came in, closed the kitchen door and opened the door to the scullery. On the brick floor and leaning against the whitewashed walls were all her brushes and pails, including the chimney brushes. But the chimneys did not need cleaning because there were no fires to fill them with soot. The beds were all stripped, the linen clean, folded, put away in the dark of the cupboards. She lifted the carpet beater from the wall. Dust fell even in an empty house; sunlight excited it. She would carry cushions and rugs outside, some spot that caught the breeze, and she would thrash them. She held up the beater, swished it through the air, much as she had seen John Lacroix swish his sword (a book of drill in his other hand), then she quit the scullery, passed through the kitchen and had stepped into the hall when she saw, through the narrow window beside the front door, a man’s narrow face, very close to the glass, staring in at her. She stopped dead. Stood under the clock with the beater in her hand.

  The face disappeared. There was a knock at the door, quite soft. It was a knock intended only for her and she suffered a moment of confusion, as if some outrageous knowledge had moved through her, but so swiftly she could not recognise it or say what it had been. She leaned the beater beside the clock, smoothed her apron and went to the door. When she opened it she saw that there were two of them, both in coats and hats, coats too long and heavy for a day like this. The one at the front was shorter, paler. The other hung back.

  “Hello, Auntie,” said the shorter man. He stepped past her into the hall.

  She did not think to say anything, not even when, with the three of them inside, he glanced towards the lane then shut the door. For a moment they all stood in silence. She had the impression the men were listening. Then the shorter one asked her where the kitchen was.

  “Why?” she said.

  “Why not?” he said, and though his answer answered nothing she led them there. She might have refused but she didn’t. It was like a game in which only they made moves.

  In the kitchen the shorter man told her to sit down by the fire. Then he asked the other man to leave them alone and have a wander about the house. She didn’t want the other man to go. She fixed her eyes on him, concentrated on him, and at first it seemed he might not go. But the shorter man repeated himself—“Have a wander about”—and after a shrug, the taller one left.

  Perhaps he wasn’t taller. Just different. If the shorter man’s legs were straighter would he be as tall as the other? She wasted whole seconds on this.

  “I didn’t want him along,” said the man. “And he didn’t want it either. You can see that. But we do as we’re told, eh?”

  She started to get up but he waggled a finger and she sat back.

  “Your master,” he said. “I know he’s not here because I’ve been watching the house.” He paused, as if waiting for her to deny it. “He’s free to come and go. He’s got money, horses. All this. What have you got? You haven’t even got a husband, have you? I can see you don’t.”

  He sniffed, dabbed his nose with the back of his hand. “Slept out last night,” he said. “Saw a fox. A big one.”

  It was warm in the kitchen and he unbuttoned his coat. When he saw she had noticed what he had there he opened that side of his coat like a wing to show it more plainly. “Don’t worry about that, Auntie,” he said. “We’re not using that today.”

  She nodded. She touched her knees. She had a story cooked up about somebody coming to mend the roof—coming very soon. She would say that when she heard the knocking she had thought it was them, the workmen. But it was like her tongue had gone to sleep in her mouth. Like she was suddenly a hundred years old. She watched him move about the kitchen, picking things up and putting them down, looking for the thing that was in his mind. She turned away to the window. She pictured the dog in the yard happy with his bone in the shade of the tree. Then she thought of Tom, and imagined him crossing a field, the taste of coffee still in his mouth.

  Later, when they could move freely in the house, they studied a painting near the top of the stairs. A cavalry officer with a fox-coloured moustache. He had a scroll in his hand. God knows.

  “It is him?” asked Medina.

  “It’s him all right,” said Calley.

  “You are sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  “Yet you saw him only once. In the dark. And not close.”

  “It’s him,” said Calley. “Can’t you see murder in those eyes?”

  “There is nothing in his eyes,” said Medina. “It is not even a good painting.”

  “What the fuck do you know about painting?”

  “And now he is in Bristol?”

  “At his sister’s place.”

  “And you know how we find it? The sister’s house?”

  “I do.”

  “Then we should leave,” said Medina.

  Calley nodded. “In your España,” he said, “a house like this would belong to a duke. Here it’s nothing special.”

  “Where is the woman?” asked Medina. “The servant?”

  “She’s all right.”

  “Yes?”

  “She’s having a lie down.”

  “Have you taken anything?”

  “You what?”

  “Have you taken anything?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “We are not . . . ” For a second, in the strangeness of it all, the effortless way he had stepped into a circumstance he could not really grasp, Medina’s English deserted him. “Not ladrones.”

  Calley started on the stairs. “Ladrones,” he said. “I actually know what that means.”

  At the bottom of the stairs he paused to look at the carpet beater beside the clock. It bothered him; it was out of place. He carried it to the kitchen door, opened the door a little, and tossed it inside. Then he buttoned his coat.

  7

  On the morning of the tenth day they could see the mountains of Arran and in light winds ran towards the mouth of the Clyde. There were more ships now, headed both ways. Many of them the master seemed to know, and though they were often at a distance and far beyond hailing, he nodded to them, as you might to an acquaintance in the street.

  At supper that night he came below with a mood of satisfaction on him and drank more of Lacroix’s brandy than his usual mouthful. He said, “Unless we meet with something untoward you will have solid ground under your boots tomorrow. I dare say that will please you.”

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p; Lacroix agreed; he thought it would, but after dinner, alone in his usual place under the shadow of the staysail, looking ahead across a not-quite-perfectly dark sea, he was less sure. He had become used to the Jenny, her incurious crew, his bed barely big enough for a child. Life on board was orderly, slightly boring, like life in a barracks. He had become a student of weather, watching rain arrive from miles off. He had played chess with Erikson, had spent entire hours gazing down at the skirt of weed at the water line, noting how soon the movement of the sea escaped the language he had to describe it with.

  So the days had propped him up—and even the nights had been tolerable, had not opened beneath him like a trapdoor, as he had been afraid they would. One dream in which he hid like Crawley among the glass in the hold, hearing (a series of shatterings) the lieutenant from the frigate closing in on him; one dream of the Polish lancers—snow, birds, silence. But these were dreams he could bear. Those things he most feared to find himself in the presence of, they had not found him and he was grateful. It was a respite. A chance to gather strength.

  Their tenth night was their last. In the early morning, going on deck to empty his pot he saw they were in the river and near enough to the right bank to see the windows of lime-washed cottages, to see washing on a line. Other vessels were closer now and a wave was answered with a wave. Up river, the sky was smudged with smoke but behind them, in the west, the air shone like spring water.

  At two in the afternoon, towed behind a pair of tenders, they came into the harbour at Dumbarton. They threw mooring ropes to men on the shore, men known by name and who bantered with the crew as they drew the Jenny tight to the splintered wooden lip of the wharf. Sails were rolled, lashed. For an hour the master became a tyrant. Nothing could be done well enough or quickly enough. Then it was over; the master rubbed his face, pressed it hard as though to squeeze from it all fatigue, all care, then turned down the collar of his jacket and went ashore.

  Lacroix descended through the forward hatch. He fetched hot water from the galley and shaved in his cabin. He felt unsteady in this new stillness and nicked the skin on his upper lip, bled a little. He thought of his old moustache and whiskers that someone had shaved off in Portsmouth when he was too sick to complain or care. Had they ever suited him? He had been pleased enough when they were first grown, though his moustache was never as bushy as Broadhurst’s nor as glossy as Vane’s. The colonel, of course, had the best of all. It was, conceivably, why he was appointed colonel—that and the reputed thousand guineas he paid to the Duke of York’s mistress. Poor Lagan couldn’t grow one at all and transferred to the artillery. Lovall’s, as he remembered it, had been very blond, white blond and patchy.

  He wiped his face then packed his things, the larger bag, the smaller. He brushed his hat with his sleeve, put on his green coat, took a last look around the cabin, that damp, snug space whose air would carry some faint print of him for a while, an hour or two.

  On deck it seemed he had the ship to himself, then noticed Wee Davey and the cat sitting side by side on a gaff, the boy’s feet dangling in the air. When the boy saw Lacroix he pointed to one of the houses on the shore, made the drinking gesture. Lacroix nodded, smiled, lifted an arm in farewell. He had settled his accounts, he was free to go, and though sorry not to part more formally from people he had come to have a regard for, he did not wish to make an appearance in the tavern, the conspicuous stranger, the man about whom—it may already have been said—there was some doubt as to his true identity. He walked to the rail. There was no gangway in place and he was looking for where he might best swing himself over when he saw the master crossing the quay back towards the ship. He came aboard at the ratlines and crossed the deck to Lacroix. He had a high colour but seemed sober. Sober enough.

  “You want to get on to the city, I suppose.”

  “If I can. Might I walk the distance?”

  The master frowned. “You are still not thinking like a seaman. No, no. We will find someone to take you up the water. There is a cousin of my late wife’s who will do it for a shilling or two.”

  “You are married?”

  “My late wife.”

  “Ah. I am sorry.”

  “And you?”

  “A wife? No.”

  The master nodded. It was already more than they had disclosed to each other throughout the entire journey. “Well,” he said, “if you do not have a wife you cannot lose one. Will you stay long in Glasgow?”

  “My hope is to get out to the islands,” said Lacroix.

  “You know the islands?”

  “Only what I have read.”

  “It would seem the English have a taste for them now.”

  “I want to hear the music. Songs.”

  “You have your fiddle with you.”

  “I have . . . ?”

  “The fiddle.”

  “Yes. It was my father’s once.”

  “Then I don’t doubt you will take good care of it.” The master was looking past Lacroix to where Wee Davey and the cat were sitting on the gaff. “Have you ever noticed,” he said, “how like owls they are?”

  “Boys?”

  “Cats.”

  “Yes,” said Lacroix, who hadn’t. Even the most sensible people, he thought, have an edge of lunacy to them, like fat on a cutlet. They shook hands.

  “There are plenty of boats out to the islands from Glasgow,” said the master. “Go down to the Broomielaw. You may mention my name. Some will know me.”

  The cousin of the dead wife was as lean and silent as a pin. Once he had been paid and Lacroix was sitting on a thwart by the bows, bags at his feet, the man said nothing until the waterway had entered the city and they were almost in the shadow of the Broomielaw bridge. He spoke then, asking a question which, repeated, turned out to be an enquiry as to where Lacroix wished to be set ashore. As they were closer to one bank than the other—the south—Lacroix pointed to some steps there and the man put the tiller over.

  From Dumbarton they had sailed the narrowing river through the fading light of late afternoon. Now, on the bridge, the lamplighters were at work—half the bridge already lit, half to go. The tide was on the ebb. They slipped past the stern of a larger boat whose keel was already wedged in the mud, and came, gently, alongside the steps. Lacroix clambered out, a little nervous of upending himself on the weed and slick stone. The man passed over his bags, his fiddle, then—wordlessly—pushed the boat back with the blade of an oar and let it glide out into the channel.

  At the top of the steps, beside a heaped pyramid of coal, a watchman was busy lighting his stove (he would not want for fuel). No one, it seemed, had noticed the arrival of a stranger, a figure in green, bags in hand, walking up from the stink and complications of the river, though for Lacroix himself the change was everything. For ten days he had been carried. Now he must carry himself. He had been at sea and hidden, like Crawley. Now he was among people again, out in the open.

  He walked to the bridge, reaching the roadway just as a troop of cavalry approached, thirty men or so in blue jackets, the horses coming on at a smart walk. He stepped back, watching them from beside the coal. They were dragoons—militia, not regulars—but well turned out, on good mounts. A gang of boys ran beside them and he felt some envy of the men, guessed at the pleasure they took in crossing the bridge, the lamplight rippling off buttons and scabbards. At the same time it was unsettling to come across them so short a time after stepping ashore, as though the whole of Britain had become a barracks. It would be difficult soon to be of serviceable age and walk about out of uniform without being challenged.

  He waited until the woollen comb of the last trooper’s helmet was over the brow of the bridge, then slowly followed them. The city ahead was as unknown to him as Lisbon had been. He saw the masts of shipping, the silhouettes of spires, industrial chimneys. Beside the last lamp on the bridge he stopped to look at the houses along the northe
rn quays for a place he might stay. He did not want to find himself in some sailors’ rest home or the sort of lodgings where the rooms were had by the hour. The better places, the more genteel, would, he decided, be tucked away, withdrawn a little from the bustle of the waterside. A clean room in a quiet house! Clean bedding, a view of the sky, a bed he could stretch out in. That would do. And when he found such a place he might stay for a week—why not?—come to know the city, write sane and comforting letters to Lucy. (My Dearest Sister, I have found Lodgings very much to my taste, not at all expensive, and spend my mornings in leisurely strolls during which I discover much that is both charming and instructive . . . )

  He turned into the street immediately behind the quay, walked a hundred yards one way, a hundred the other, tried the next street, then a third. He began to remember how cities can be: places both open and completely shut; places you can move about in freely but cannot always enter. He tried a fourth street. He was growing tired of carrying his bags; he was also very hungry. He paused at a junction thinking he should pick out one of his fellow pedestrians and ask advice, directions, then saw, near the corner of the street diagonally opposite him, an open door between a pair of well-lit windows. A man came out, put on his hat, adjusted it with a vast amount of care, then tottered away, smiling. Lacroix crossed the street behind a nightman’s wagon (careful to hold his breath as he did so) and peered in through one of the windows. A smoky room. People sitting companionably at tables. Bottles, dominoes, pipes. There was even the drift of music, though the singer was not in view.

  He went in, moving through a maze of jutting knees and drowsing dogs, until he found a place for himself at the end of a bench at the back of the room. He nodded to his neighbour, a man with a pitted, gingery face who, glancing at the fiddle case, made movements with his fingers as if plying a tiny bow across a tiny instrument.