Now We Shall Be Entirely Free Read online

  All night and all day the fire smouldered. Kneeling, the old man broke the squares of peat into smaller pieces, placed them carefully in the embers, leaned his face down, his skin like sacking, to blow the embers into brightness.

  He brought oatmeal, black bread and pieces of fish. He brought once an egg that Lacroix woke to find settled in his right hand, the shell a perfect fit for the curve of his palm. It was like the evidence of something, a proof out of theology. Also just an egg that he cracked on his front teeth, letting the yolk roll on to his tongue.

  When he needed to go outside it was a long stagger. The outer world dissolved him. He did his business (wondering if he had the flux again) then hurried back to the dark of the house, lay down on the straw, dragged the blanket over himself. Somewhere down there, ten thousand miles below, a drum was beating. He could feel it through the bones of his back. The drum of the world.

  He blabbed to the old man things he had not spoken of to anyone. The lancers in the snow. The man who crawled out of the forest with most of his face slashed off and who lay by their fire with his shirt over his head and was dead by morning. He told him about the killing of the horses at Corunna, the troopers ordered to execute their own mounts. A first order to shoot them, a second order to cut their throats. Both botched.

  Did he listen? Could he make any sense of it? Ravings in a foreign tongue? About the rest of it he said nothing. He had no story yet with which to speak about that.

  On the fourth or fifth day—the sixth?—he was woken by rain falling through the smoke-hole. It was not heavy and he lay still, letting it put its fingers through his hair. A cold rain with a clear marine smell. When he opened his eyes he saw first the marbled grey of the sky above the thatch, then, turning his head, he saw, close beside him, a pair of narrow boots—laces, eyelets and hooks, the black leather spotted with mud. Above the boots the hem of a dress, a coat. He looked up. A blonde face with ringlets of blonde or even golden hair, was hanging over him. She watched him a while, without much expression. Then her face lifted, the boots turned, and there was nothing but the suggestion of a scent that had not been there before and did not belong to the old man or the fire or the dogs or the rain. He was puzzling over it when another pair of feet came into view, a pair of metal pattens, buckled around shoes. He rolled his head. A darker, plainer face looked down at him, a pinched gaze, a frown. She spoke. He shook his head and she spoke more loudly.

  “My sister thought you might be Thorpe,” she said. “But you’re not.”

  She moved away from him. He saw Ranald in conversation with the old man. The old man had stopped his singing and seemed suddenly quite ordinary. Then Ranald came and squatted on the ground beside Lacroix.

  “Are you fit to ride?” he asked.

  There was a pony outside. It looked wily and bad-tempered. With Ranald’s help, his stumped wrists, his hooks, Lacroix climbed into the saddle. The two women were there, the blonde one in a blue cloak, the other in a brown coat like a man’s coat. It may, indeed, have been a man’s coat. Ranald had said they were the Misses something, sisters who lived on the west side of the island. The one who had spoken to him had certainly not sounded local. A southern voice. A city voice? Not, he thought, a gentleman’s daughter. Not quite. Even in a reduced condition one recognised such things. Could not avoid recognising them.

  They set off. He twisted in the saddle hoping to see the old man, to bow to him, but only a dog remained by the door to watch him leave. He turned back and gave himself up to the journey. Ranald walked by the pony’s head. The women, both brisk walkers, stayed several paces to the fore. There was nothing so obvious as a road or even a track but to the women, to Ranald, to the pony itself, no doubt, the way was clear enough.

  It was the same bare land he had seen from the hilltop the day he arrived, a heathland of coarse grass and heather, though less broken, less riddled by water. The rain stopped. The wet grass shone. No one spoke to Lacroix and he was grateful for it. He dozed on the pony’s back, woke, dozed, and waking a second time saw, through a haze like a heat-haze, the dark blue line of the sea.

  As they came closer he caught on the breezes the smell of smoke. It grew stronger and more bitter.

  “It’s the weed,” said Ranald. “They are burning the weed.”

  He nodded. He remembered William saying something about it, the ash, the residue, sent south and used for industry. Glassmaking. Other things too, he thought. A high value on it.

  At a hundred yards it began to make his eyes itch. They mounted the grassed back of the dunes and near the top moved between two trenches where the kelp was burning. On either side of the trenches men and women poked the fires with iron poles. Ranald called a greeting to one who, standing in the bitter smoke, answered him briefly through the cloth over his mouth and nose.

  The party descended to the beach. The sand was firm and the onshore wind kept the smoke from their faces. They moved by the edge of the sea, northwards, the pony sometimes choosing to walk in the surf, Ranald, slipping off his brogues, barefoot in the water beside it. The women watched him, then glanced at the sea as if alone or in different company they might have stripped off shoes and stockings and gone in themselves, worn the Atlantic round their ankles like bracelets.

  Once or twice Lacroix thought to ask where they were headed but knew he would see it soon enough and that once they were there they would be back in the social world, asking questions, answering them. He supposed he would tell more lies, or more half-truths. He found himself hoping—or not hoping, imagining—they would catch him out, or that on this empty strand they would pass some man who would come close, peer up, and say, are you not Captain Lacroix of the — Hussars? Do you not know your regiment is even now preparing to embark for the Peninsula? That you are looked for at every hour?

  And he would reply? I was Lacroix of the Hussars. I cannot say, sir, with any certainty, what I am now . . .

  “I heard wolves in Spain,” he said to Ranald.

  “In Egypt,” said Ranald, “I saw the Sphinx.”

  They passed from beach to beach, climbing the spurs of land between them and descending past boulders and rock-pools, the dark-haired woman taking her sister’s arm where the path was steepest. The loudest noises were from the birds. They all sounded angry. And beneath this screeching, the growl of the sea, an old lion licking its paws.

  Then it was heathland again, green, brown and yellow. Sheep observed them mildly. Stout lambs butted at their mother’s teats. There was no sign of the shepherd, and now they had left the weed burners behind the landscape’s only human mark was a white house half a mile off, close to the sea. The pony became purposeful, picked up its pace. The house grew bigger, showed green shutters, a green front door. It was not like the other houses he had seen on the island. It had, for a start, an upper floor and did not have a roof weighted down with stones or a curved end-wall to lean into the wind. It stood almost casually on the bare land, unsheltered from the sea and what it might bring. A place waiting for some once-in-a-century storm to erase all sign of it.

  He rode to the green door. Ranald helped him to dismount. As soon as his feet were on the ground he had a violent cramp in his bowels. He gasped, gripped hold of the stirrup. He was afraid he would foul himself, shoot hot crap down his legs, shoot it over the women, over the house, the entire island. He gritted his teeth, swallowed, waited for it to pass, then drew himself up. The women were watching him. He made a remark about the view. How pleasant it was. He had noticed before how men can say quite mild things, even while dying.

  But I am not dying, he thought. I have not earned that yet.

  Beyond the green door was a small hall, just big enough for coats and boots and hats. Through a second door they entered a larger room. It appeared to run most of the length of the house, had a door at either end, a flight of steep, narrow stairs by the right-hand wall.

  Sitting at a table by the window was
a man with a thin moustache. He was wearing a bed gown decorated with hieroglyphics, the sleeves rolled back to the elbows. He had a bowl of water and was washing something in it. He looked up and smiled. A pale, intelligent face.

  “Not Thorpe then,” he said.

  “No,” said the dark-haired sister.

  “Cornelius Frend,” said the man. “At your service.”

  “Friend?” said Lacroix.

  “Our brother,” said the woman.

  “Ah,” said Lacroix. “Lovall. John Lovall. My apologies for this . . . intrusion.”

  “But this is excellent,” said the man. “We are Frends and you are Lovall!” A look of childish excitement came over his face. He held up what he had been washing. “Do you want to see what I’ve got here? Amber beads. We found them yesterday. Ranald and I. Where do you think they come from? Eh? Amber is derived from the resin of trees. There are no trees on the island. None to speak of.”

  The woman said, “Mr. Lovall is not well, Cornelius. He needs rest.”

  Cornelius wrinkled his nose. “Emily will look after you,” he said. “It was your coming ashore on a cow that made us think you might be Thorpe. It’s the sort of thing he would have done.”

  Lacroix nodded. He looked to the woman, the dark-haired sister. (Where had the other gone?) He expected her to lead him through one of the doors at either end of the room, or perhaps up the stairs. Instead, she went to the tongue-and-groove wall at the back of the room, pushed at it and swung open a piece of the wall the width of five or six planks. There had been nothing to suggest the presence of a door. No handle, no visible hinges. Cornelius laughed. “It was what decided us on the place. Who does not wish for a secret room?”

  Inside, it was ordinary enough. No grotto, no workshop of filthy creation. It was narrow, ran parallel to the large room, had a window looking over the land at the back of the house.

  He sat on a chair. The woman came and went. Linen, cushions. A chamber pot! There was a couch under the window that was changed, with some small effort of dismantling, into a truckle bed. She made it up. He watched her, her briskness, her slight clumsiness. Then he pointed to the instrument hanging from a peg at the far end of the room. “Who plays that?” he asked.

  “I do,” she said, tucking in the blanket at the bottom of the bed.

  It was not quite a lute or a cittern, not a Spanish guitar, but something like them all. There had been one, all unstrung and in poor repair, in the corner of his music master’s room at Wells.

  “It’s an English guittar,” he said. “Or is it a Scottish guittar up here?”

  She answered him but spoke to the bed. He could not make out the words. When she was finished she stood back from the bed, pushed a lock of hair behind one ear, turned to him. He noticed again the redness of her eyes. It was the smoke from the weed-burning perhaps.

  “There are no curtains or shutters,” she said. “Can you sleep in the light?”

  He nodded. For the first time he felt conscious of how he must look. And God knows how he must stink. He wanted to apologise. He would shave, he would wash. Which bag had the soap been in, the Windsor soap?

  “We will not disturb you,” she said.

  He thanked her. He could not remember her name, then it came to him. “Emily,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. And for the first time she smiled at him.

  * * *

  He slept for a long time and woke to the uncertain light of an hour he could only guess at. He knelt up on the bed, elbows on the window sill. Evening or dawn? He tried to work out which way the window faced, could work out nothing, but slowly the light deepened and he knew it was morning. He felt hollow, bare as the hills. But also rested, easy, without any sharp complaint from the body. He had taken none of the tincture the day before; not much the day before that. He was sober, factual, inescapably present. He was not sure how much he liked it.

  He scratched at himself then got off the bed and went to where the instrument hung from its peg on the narrow end wall. An English guittar, a Scottish guittar, the body shaped like an almond, an intricate brass rose over the sound-hole. Ten wire strings. What was the wood? He wasn’t sure, though there was tortoiseshell and ivory on the neck. Curious tuning mechanism at the top: no pegs but a brass box with a key like the key to a secret drawer in a desk. Softly, he ran his fingers over the strings, then, his ear almost against the sound-hole, he brushed them again and smiled. The guittar was tuned to play an open chord of C major. Just to touch it was to make something sweet with it.

  He had slept in his shirt. Now he pulled on his trousers—the same he had lain in on the old man’s straw, that he had come ashore in—pulled on the rags of his stockings, his boots. The door, hidden on the far side, was plain enough on this, the planks painted with a scene of two men on horseback riding on a lane under the shade of trees. The style was loose, amateurish, but also vivid and pleasing, and with a sort of charm to it. He imagined the artist was one of the sisters though he could not decide which of them was the more likely.

  He went out into the larger room. It was chilly, cluttered, somewhat shabbier than he recalled it. He saw things he had failed to notice the day before: an old ottoman against the wall, blue silk, frayed in places, worn through; three Turkey rugs on the wooden floor; a branch of antlers nailed above the fireplace. On the table were dishes from a meal the family must have taken while he was sleeping. He chewed on a corner of dry bread then took the stopper from the decanter, sniffed the contents, replaced the stopper.

  Which way now? Which door should he choose? He went to the one by the stairs, opened it quietly. On the other side was a small room with a piece of thin cloth tacked over the window. A muddle of boxes, books, clothes. On the bed, most of him buried under blankets, was Cornelius. He was deeply asleep, his mouth slightly open beneath the not-quite-successful moustache. Something like grief in that face. A child in need of comforting.

  Lacroix stepped back, drew the door shut, crossed to the opposite door and walked into the kitchen. Here too was the disorder that seemed to characterise these people. Did they have no servants? The table was piled with unwashed pots, and on the brick floor there was enough flour for a cat to have left a trail of paw prints. The cat was still there, drinking the milk that lay in a generous splash beside one of the table legs. It traded glances with him then went on with its lapping.

  The door to the outside was open. He stood on the stone step and looked down to the water. A hen appeared, stopped, turned its head a little to study him, now one eye, now the other. Then Emily came, walking from around the side of the house, a clutch of fresh eggs in the curve of her apron.

  “It’s you,” she said, breaking her step, getting him in focus, much as the hen had done.

  “Yes,” he said.

  He moved out of her way and she came into the house.

  “You have slept a long while,” she said. “I hope it has done you good.”

  He stood, somewhat awkwardly, watching her unload the eggs from her apron on to the tabletop. When she had taken out all but one she let her apron drop, then looked down with a pursed mouth at the broken egg on the floor. The cat shifted from the milk to the egg, floated its face over the mess of it, then dipped its tongue into the yolk.

  Emily asked if he was hungry. He said he was.

  “There is no need to stand,” she said.

  He sat on one of the ladder-back chairs at the table. He watched her take oatmeal from a metal bin, watched her add water to the pot, carry the pot to the range. Then he watched her back, her narrow waist, the flatness of the upper back, the movements of her shoulder blades as she stirred the porridge. Her hair was lifted off her neck and held in place by a painted comb.

  He became aware that she was speaking to him, though the only word he heard from her was “dream.” He said it back to her.

  “We talk of our dreams,” she said, t
urning to look at him over her shoulder. “Thorpe always insists on it. I dreamed of you. You were dead and then somehow you were alive again.”

  “I did not dream,” he said, though even as he spoke he remembered a dream of a frankly amorous character involving . . . who? The squint-eyed girl from the drinking house in Glasgow? Something to do with the way she had tucked his money under her apron . . .

  When the porridge was ready, she carried over two bowls, set one down in front of him, kept the other for herself. “Jane and Cornelius sleep in,” she said. “Jane needs to and Cornelius chooses to.”

  “Who is Thorpe?” he asked.

  “Thorpe,” she said, blowing on a spoonful of porridge, “is a man and no more.”

  He ate some of his own porridge. Perhaps he didn’t care who Thorpe was.

  “There is a community,” she said. “We are a part of it. The vanguard. Thorpe and the others are on their way to join us. We believe they are. We had intended to go to America but there wasn’t enough money so we have come here. Thorpe thinks it is better than America and perhaps it is. Are you staring at me?”

  “I am watching your mouth,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “It helps me to understand you.”

  She paused then nodded. “This is our second summer here. The winter was difficult. Cornelius had a cold from December until March.”

  “I suppose the community has rules?”

  “We do not eat meat,” she said. “We do not attend church or chapel. We try to love people, though Cornelius and Jane do that better than I.”

  “How is that?” asked Lacroix.

  “They know less about people,” she said.

  He finished his porridge. He was deeply grateful for it and looked hopefully towards the pot on its tile beside the fire.

  “Your bag,” she said, “and your fiddle. They are in the hall here. Ranald brought them.”