Now We Shall Be Entirely Free Page 2

  The doctor came in the afternoon. In places the mud on the road was a foot deep. The horse’s black haunches were starred with it, and there were splashes right up to the waist of the doctor’s horse-coat. At least the rain had held off; he would not have to shift about for half a day in damp clothes. This last winter he had noted the stiffening of his joints, pain at times in both knees, in the deep places of his hips. His wife rubbed him with embrocation, the same stuff they used on the horses, until the pair of them stank like stable hands. But a doctor who would not ride had better have a fancy practice in Bath or the Hotwells. Out here he would starve.

  He came to the ridge above the village and looked down into the vale where the fields were bright with standing water. From here you could see for miles: farmland, woods, a glimpse of the river, brown between vivid green banks. And now that he could spy the roof of the church (grey and mossy green, like a stepping stone you might use to cross this waterlogged land) he turned his thoughts to his patient, to young Lacroix, back from the war.

  He had treated his father for years—for rheumatics, lockjaw, gout. Mostly for melancholy. The boy and his sisters he had seen or heard without taking much notice of them, though he remembered looking in at the younger girl when she had scarlatina. As for the mother, he had not met her, did not think she had got much beyond her twenty-fifth year. His business had been with Lacroix (old Lacroix he should perhaps call him now), and once medical matters were out the way they had liked to sit together talking farming or philosophy but mostly speaking of their collections, for they were both among that portion of mankind who gather and hoard the things that delight them. Moths and beetles for the doctor; village music and village songs for Lacroix. Sometimes he would bring his patient a beetle to look at, something jewelled, the size of a fingernail, carried in an old snuff box. In return, Lacroix would open one of his books, tall like ledgers, where he wrote down what the old men and women of the parish sang for him. His own singing voice was only middling but the doctor encouraged him, if only because a man cannot die of much while he is singing, and even if he sheds tears it is better to have them out and riding on music than he should sit staring dryly at the floor.

  And now he would see the son and perhaps hear something about the war, news the papers didn’t have and wouldn’t have for weeks. The whole country feeding on rumour! Half the people wild for a fight, half wanting peace at almost any price. Militias made up of clerks and apprentices and commanded by whoever was willing to purchase the uniforms. The notion that the heroes of Shepton Mallet might stop the army that crushed the Austrians and Russians at Austerlitz had long since ceased to be entirely funny. There were reports of hunger in the cities, the kind that had not been known in a generation. And from the north country came stories of men who dressed as women and burned down the very places where they were employed . . .

  He tapped the horse with the heels of his boots. “Go on, Ben,” he said. “Let us go down and have our guinea.”

  Until he was halfway up the stairs he could not remember the housekeeper’s name, then it came to him and he said, “It must have given you quite a shock, Nelly, woken out of your sleep like that. He has spoken to you at all?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “He has barely opened his eyes. If he was sitting up and talking I should not have sent for you.”

  The room she led him to was not one he had seen before. Plain, comfortable, square like the house itself, a door at the far side to what was presumably a dressing room. One large window looking south. The doctor stood with the housekeeper at the side of the bed.

  “He is John, is he not?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “John? John? It is Dr Forbes. I have come on a visit to see you . . . Hmm. Nihil dicit. Well, he is dormant. He is deeply asleep. A little flushed. Some fever. A low fever. I shall listen to his heart, Nelly.”

  That morning, with Tom’s help, the housekeeper had got him into a nightshirt and under the covers. The doctor now drew down the covers and undid the ties at the neck of the shirt. From his bag he took a short listening trumpet. It was made of tin and he had had it for many years.

  He listened for nearly half a minute then stood straight again, wincing and touching his back. “I thought at first I heard something. Some obstruction. But no, I believe it is strong enough. What is his age?”

  “He turned thirty-one the week before he went.”

  “And that was?”

  “Last June.”

  “And he has been in Spain or Portugal all this while?”

  “He went first to his sister’s in Bristol.”

  “I thought she married a farmer in Devonshire. Or was it Dorset?”

  “I mean his younger sister. Mrs. Lucy Swann. Her husband is something with the ships.”

  “He is at sea?”

  “No. But he has business with them. The ships and the captains.”

  “It’s a pretty name, Lucy Swann.” The doctor had moved to the bottom of the bed. He found himself a chair and sat down to examine the man’s feet. “She has children?”

  “She has the twins. They are five now though I have not seen them in more than a year.”

  “And John here was with our cavalry?”

  “He was. He is, I suppose.” She told the doctor the regiment. She could, had she wished, have told him many interesting things about the regiment. The name of the colonel. The name of the colonel’s horse.

  “It would appear,” said the doctor, touching Lacroix’s feet with a little wooden stick he had suddenly in his hand, “that our cavalry were walking too. You do not get such wounds on the back of a horse. Do you have brimstone in the house? I will send you some. Make a solution with warm water and wash his feet with it three times a day. Has he opened his bowels?”

  She shook her head.

  “I will also send you canella bark. Have him sit up as soon as he is able. I do not like a patient to lie prone longer than is necessary.” He began to feel around Lacroix’s neck and throat.

  “The one who brought him here,” said the housekeeper, “was told there were soldiers sleeping out on the street at Portsmouth. Sleeping rough in the street. Some without eyes or legs.”

  “Yes?”

  She shrugged. “It’s what he said.”

  “Well, we must wait for John to tell us. When he is up to it. There will be news, Nelly, though I fear it will not be the sort we wish for. None of this”—he nodded to the bed—“has the look of victory.”

  He was done. He closed his bag. The housekeeper went with him into the corridor. Just before they reached the top of the stairs the doctor stopped at a painting, much newer than the others, a figure in a close blue jacket, a fur hat under one arm, the hand of his other arm holding a scroll. Brown whiskers, brown moustache. The pose (there was a pillar in the background, and foliage of the kind they must teach young artists to paint in the academies) was languorous, not really martial, almost hesitant, as if the scroll contained unwelcome news. Inevitable but unwelcome.

  “They all have them done before they go,” said the house-keeper. “Some man comes into the barracks and does five in a week. I suppose he only changes the faces.”

  They walked down the stairs together. Flat afternoon light in the hall.

  “I seem to remember,” began the doctor, into whose mind had come, quite unbidden, the image of old Lacroix’s face the last time he had seen it, his last call, the bones of his jaw fragile like the parts of a bird, grey wisps of unshaved beard, eyes shut, the lids large and dark, “that John was a music scholar at one time. Before the army. Isn’t that so, Nelly? Or have I imagined it?”

  * * *

  Each day she bathed his feet with the solution of brimstone. She also smeared the soles with honey, which she knew to be good for wounds.

  She fed him broths from the pursed china lips of a sickroom cup. When he was better able to manage she
gave him bowls of creamy milk from the half-pail Tom collected each day from the field girls. He spoke only in whispers. One time he asked her the day of the week—he had perhaps heard the cranky tolling of the church bell. Another time he said, “I do not want people to know I am here,” and not wishing to vex him she said she would keep it a secret though she supposed most in the village already knew.

  He liked the dog being with him. More than once she came into the room to find the dog standing by the bed, the man’s hand settled on the nap of its skull, the dog perfectly still, the man himself apparently sleeping.

  She did not send for the doctor again. She did not think she needed him. She considered asking Tom to shave off the man’s beard (he knew, after all, how to shear a sheep, a man should be simple) but in the end she did it herself, brown curls floating in the scum of the basin, until he was as smooth and plain-faced as in the days before he bought his commission.

  She emptied the chamber pot. She cut his nails.

  A week went by. The weather was cold and clear. Snowdrops stood in clumps beside the pillars of the gate. He was sitting up to eat now and eating solid food—eggs, bread, slices of cold pork. Finally—nine days after arriving at the house—he climbed out of bed, sat there a while, pale and breathless, then said, “I’ll need some clothes, Nell.”

  She fetched things from his dressing room. Salt-and-pepper trousers, a moleskin waistcoat, a quilted housecoat that had belonged to his father and that she had managed to keep the moths away from with little linen bags of lavender in the pockets. He dressed in front of her and tottered as he put on his trousers so that she had to steady him. She pushed the armchair closer to the fire, and later brought up a folding table, an old card table, which she spread with a cloth and served his meals on. She chattered to him, asked him harmless questions—about his health, about what he wished to eat, how he had slept, if the room was cold at night. Sometimes these questions went unanswered and she began to notice this happened most commonly when she spoke without his looking at her. She stood behind him one afternoon, behind the armchair, and spoke his name, softly at first, then louder. At the fourth attempt he turned to her, looked up. It might improve, she thought, in time. It might recover with his strength.

  As for the news the doctor had anticipated, it did not come from John Lacroix but from the brush seller, a pedlar who crisscrossed the county like some industrious insect and who had called at the house for years. He told the housekeeper (as he laid out his brushes like pieces of best porcelain along the kitchen table) that the army had been chased out of Spain, that there had been a battle at a place whose name he could not recall for the moment and that the British general had been killed by a cannonball that took off his shoulder. What was left of the army, which was little enough, the sweepings, had escaped in ships, though at least one of these had foundered in a storm, perhaps others.

  The following Sunday the parson read them pieces out of his newspaper. It was a dark morning, the church dark, and he held the paper so close to the candles in the sconce beside the pulpit it seemed certain it must catch fire, as once before—the news of Admiral Nelson’s death—it had, flying out of his hands, then swooping above the congregation, a small fiery angel that settled at last beside the font and was stamped on.

  The army, he read, had retreated over the mountains of northern Spain, the enemy in close pursuit. There was snow, ice, very little food. The Spanish, defeated in battle and themselves in great need, were unable to offer any assistance. At the coast, by the port of Corunna, the army had fought a desperate battle in which the gallant commander, Sir John Moore, was wounded and carried from the field but could not be saved. That so many had escaped onto the waiting transports was both a testament to the valour and ingenuity of British arms and an example of providence at its most benign (“By providence,” said the parson, looking up at them, “they mean to say the will of the Almighty”). There was a list of regiments—the housekeeper leaned forward in her pew, nodding when she heard the one she was listening for. There was no list of the dead, only the general himself. They prayed for the repose of his soul, for the king and his ministers. They prayed that God would not test them beyond what they could endure.

  About all this, Lacroix remained silent. He sat by the fire. He read books he collected from his father’s study, read them or glanced into them. A pile of them grew by the side of the armchair. She did not know what they were but was pleased his feet were healed enough for him to get about the house.

  He asked her one morning to eat with him. He said he did not want to eat alone. He smiled at her—the first smile she could remember seeing since his return—and at two o’clock she brought up food for both of them and they ate across the card table from each other. She found it awkward at first. She had not eaten with him since he was a boy when he and his sisters were sometimes sent to have their suppers in the kitchen, but it became easier and she started to enjoy it. During the meals he would say things, remarks broken free from some chain of private thought. He asked her one time if she had ever eaten a fig, which she had not. She knew that the duke (who owned the village) had a fig tree in a heated room in his house but she had not eaten one, nor even seen one other than in a picture.

  “We picked them from the saddle,” he said. “We leaned into the trees and picked them as we passed. Oranges too.”

  The next time they ate together he asked if she would find a newspaper for him. She had wondered when he might make such a request, when he would want to look out further than the room, the house (no spyglass now) and she knew where she would go. Not to the parson, who would make a great show of being disturbed, but to a farmer called Nicholls who had taught himself to read as a young man and now had a modest library of his own. His farm was a mile off and she walked through a wind scented with snow. When she arrived at the farm she found one of the Nichollses’ boys standing with a pail in the midst of a crowd of pigs. He pointed with his chin to the house where she found the farmer drinking tea and taking his ease at a table that once, perhaps, had been a door.

  “I am,” said the farmer, holding up a volume about the size and thickness of an eating apple, “reading the words of a man who walks all over the country.”

  “He must know things then,” said the housekeeper.

  “It could be,” said the farmer, “that a man standing still knows just as much and will have his boots less worn. The world will pass through him.”

  She asked if he had a paper and he called to his wife to ask if she had seen the Examiner, then found it himself, underneath a sleeping cat. When he gave it to the housekeeper it was still warm.

  “For John Lacroix, I suppose.”

  “It is,” she said.

  “Has he had enough of fighting?” asked the farmer.

  “I can’t say,” said the housekeeper. “He has not said one way or the other.”

  “There’s a great many young men in a great hurry to die,” said the farmer. His middle son had taken the bounty and was serving in America.

  “There’s a great many as are doing their duty,” said the housekeeper. She respected the farmer but she was not afraid of him.

  “Strange duty killing men whose names you do not know.”

  “Would it be better,” asked the housekeeper—it was, in fact, a question—“to know their names?”

  “Knights used to know each other’s names. I used to know the name of every man at market. Now I know half at best.”

  “You live in your books,” she said.

  He nodded and took up the book again, as if she had reminded him. “It may be,” he said, as she turned to leave, “he’ll go back to music. John Lacroix. I think that it suited him. Did it not? Music?”

  When she knocked at the bedroom door there was no answer. She thought he might not have heard her and she opened the door, slowly. He was lying on top of the bed, fully clothed. She was alarmed for a moment; there was
something in his pose, his face turned to the side, one arm flung out across the bed, but going closer she heard the slow tiding of his breath and was easy again. She wanted to put a blanket over him but thought even a light touch might rouse him. She left the newspaper on the table, put coal on the fire (lifting, for quiet’s sake, the nuggets from the scuttle), wiped her fingers on her apron and crept out of the room.

  She saw him next when she brought up his supper. It was a pie she had made from a pair of pheasants that had been hanging all week from a peg in the cool of the scullery. He was standing by the window. The newspaper was lying open on the rug beside the armchair.

  “I’ll go out tomorrow,” he said.

  “You feel strong enough?” she asked, then seeing he had not heard her, said, “Your feet are healed then?”

  He shrugged. He wanted to know who she had fetched the paper from and when she told him he asked what the farmer had said. He knew Farmer Nicholls and knew he would have said something.

  “He asked,” said the housekeeper, “if you had finished with fighting.”

  “With fighting?” He looked for a moment as if he might laugh. “I have lost my sword, Nell. My uniform. My boots.”

  “Yes,” she said, nodding as though it all made sense to her.

  “My horse too. Poor Ruffian. You remember him.” He turned to look out of the window. She did not think he could see anything out there. Perhaps a light in the village or the glow of a charcoal burner’s fire in the woods. Most likely he saw only the shadow of his own face in the glass. “At Corunna we did not embark more than twenty. The war was very hard on horses, Nell.”

  She waited. Now, she thought, he might be ready to speak of it all. Horses, men, ships. The mountains they had crossed. The killing of the general. All of it. She waited but he said nothing else, only went on looking out of the window, letting the silence grow between them until she was ashamed of her curiosity and wished only that he would turn back, sit with her and eat.