Now We Shall Be Entirely Free Read online

  “He can hear well enough,” she said, “if you speak up a little.”

  Lacroix was back in less than an hour. The housekeeper met him at the door. He had already seen the carriage. She gave him his visitor’s name, twice. He frowned. He was angry. Or not angry quite. He was irritable, ill at ease. She wondered if he was frightened.

  She went with him to the door of the drawing room and stood aside as he went through. She expected to be told to bring something in, some refreshments, but he said nothing and shut the door behind him. She looked a while at the door then stepped closer to it. It was easy enough to hear them—the visitor speaking as she had advised him to. And it was her business, she thought, to know something of theirs. Certainly there was no one to catch her at it.

  For men who had shared an onion loft, who had been in the war together, there was nothing in their voices to suggest any warmth between them, any ease of manners. Captain Wood made enquiries about Lacroix’s health. Lacroix offered his assurances, though when Wood suggested there was still some way to go before he was perfectly his old self again he did not disagree. Wood mentioned a name—Clarke?—who was quite wasted away and in appearance like a man of sixty. Another, Lieutenant Vane, had lost the use of a leg and would perhaps lose the leg itself. Lacroix said he was sorry. They were quiet a moment. Wood spoke of the trunk.

  “Is that why you’ve come?”

  “You must have been eager for it?”

  “Eager? I had given it up. All of it.”

  “Well, now it has come back to you. You would be astonished at what has come back to us. Even men. A pair from Broadhurst’s lot sauntered in a fortnight ago. Both presumed dead or at least made prisoner. I suspect they had been drinking somewhere on the coast and simply ran out of funds. The colonel, by the way, was wondering when you might return?”

  “Am I expected?”

  “Let us say they are anxious to have all serving officers”—or did he say “surviving”?—“take up their duties as soon as possible. We’re damn short-handed, Lacroix. They’ve been sending me all over the country to find people.”

  “Have you found many?”

  “Not enough to keep the old man happy. They also wish to hear all they can about the campaign. You know. Reliable accounts.”

  “Why?”

  “I imagine as we are a young regiment they are anxious to have a little history. Something to brag about.”

  “And is there talk of going back?”

  “It’s all the talk there is. Back to Lisbon. We might have our old loft again. No doubt the rats will remember us.” He laughed, though Lacroix did not join him.

  The housekeeper left to fetch glasses and a bottle of port. When she took the wine in, Captain Wood, she thought, looked relieved to see her. Lacroix poured for them both, spilling a little on the salver as he did so.

  She took a mug of cider out to the soldier. He thanked her.

  “Will he have to go?” she asked.

  “If he can still sit a horse. They’re in a funk. I had hopes of going home myself soon but home will have to do without me a while yet. Worse luck.”

  She asked him where his home was.

  “Four Ashes,” he said. “In Buckinghamshire.”

  It was as though he had spoken the name of his love.

  When they came out of the drawing room they were high-coloured from the wine. Wood ordered the soldier to carry in the trunk. Perhaps he had imagined Lacroix had a man to take the other end but Lacroix took it himself. The trunk was a tin box ribbed with wood, and large enough for someone to curl up inside. It was battered, rusted, though seemingly intact. It was held shut by a pair of broad leather straps.

  With Lacroix going first, they took it up to his room and set it on the floor by the side of the bed. Then they came down to the hall again where the officers shook hands, exchanged remarks about the road and the route.

  “So we will look for you shortly,” said Wood.

  “Yes,” said Lacroix.

  “Something in May?”

  “In what?”

  “In May. A date to keep the old man happy.”

  “I cannot say exactly when,” said the man. “There are still matters . . . outstanding.”

  “How about the 10th? He will expect me to tell him something.”

  “Yes. Very well.”

  “The 10th then. Excellent. Should give you time to find a new horse.”

  They took their leave of each other. The gig—the soldier at the reins, Captain Wood starting a cigar—turned in the courtyard, turned slowly at the gate, and was gone.

  The housekeeper and Lacroix stood on the steps to the house. She looked at him, the side of his face. She meant to ask him whether he would eat now—he had not had any dinner—but asked instead if Captain Wood was a friend.

  “Eh?”

  “A friend.”

  “Wood?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not of mine,” he said, and went back into the house.

  * * *

  That night he stayed up in the room on his own. Two candles burning—one on the mantelpiece, one by the bed. It was a clear night, the temperature dropping sharply. The fire, lit late, did little to take the chill from the air.

  He was drinking brandy, pouring double mouthfuls into a glass that had somehow survived from his grandfather’s time, the glass tinged green and bubbled with the air of the old century. He had gone on drinking since the bottle of port with Wood (who, in Salamanca, fell backwards off his horse after a mess dinner) but instead of the brandy dispersing him, giving him some lightness, it had concentrated him, mind and body, like an iron peg hammered into dry earth. Now and then he spoke to the air, sentences beginning “I . . . ” But they did not progress beyond a word or two.

  The trunk was where they had set it down, next to the bed. He had not touched it. There was nothing in it he thought he wished to see again. He tried to remember when he had lost contact with it. Lugo? Bembibre? It had been with the baggage train but the baggage train was God knows where. Ahead of them, behind them. It had become a common sight to see wagons pushed on to the side of the road and set alight. Nothing could be allowed to hold up the retreat. Yet out of this—out of the chaos of it—his trunk had returned!

  He looked at it, looked away, glanced back. Then, as though the effort of ignoring it was greater than any shock it might produce, he emptied his glass, placed it carefully on the mantelpiece, took the candle that was burning there, went to the trunk and began to tug at the straps. The steel catch was bent outwards—you could see where someone had slid a bar behind it, some manner of jemmy—and he assumed that anything of any value would have been taken, but when he swung up the lid the trunk looked full, quite as full as he remembered it.

  On top was his blue pelisse. The spare one, the good one. He thought for a moment one of the sleeves was damaged, watermarked—then he moved and saw it was only his own shadow and that the cloth, the fur collar, the silver braiding, were almost as new. He could wear it in front of the colonel tomorrow. A light brushing perhaps, nothing more.

  He started to dig. Under the pelisse was a boat cloak (that, God knows, he could have used) and beneath the cloak a pair of grey overalls, a flannel waistcoat, two of Nell’s shirts. He found a mirror (broken), a pair of bronze spurs, a bar of Windsor soap still in its wrapping. He found the painted fans he had bought in Lisbon for his sisters, views of the Tagus. Then his fingers caught on a solid edge, a smooth right-angle of wood, and he took hold of it and dragged it out as if through the weeds of a pond. This, he had forgotten and he sat on the bed with it, a wooden box the size of a backgammon set, the lid and base bound with blue Russian leather. It was the writing case he had bought at the auction of a dead officer’s effects (when they still had the luxury of such occasions). Two brass hooks kept the box closed. He slid them back and lifted the lid. A silver i
nk bottle, two patent pens, two quills, a dozen sheets of common notepaper. Also, folded flat, a pair of green solar glasses put there at the end of the summer for safe keeping, though one of the lenses had shaken loose and would need to be fitted again.

  On the inside of the lid, in gothic lettering, was the dead officer’s name. Osbert George Lovall.

  Lovall!

  He had died of frenzy fever before they even left Portugal. Sick one day, worse the next, dead the third. Twenty-two or -three, pale features. His father had made a fortune in brewing. The writing case might have been a farewell gift. He could not remember what he had paid for it at the auction; more, he thought, than it was worth. Lieutenant Ward bought Lovall’s saddle for a very low price and it had to be explained to him later that finding bargains was not the intention of such auctions.

  He put the case on the bed and went back to the trunk. Dress gloves, a barrel sash, a forage cap, a copy of Sime’s Military Guide for Young Officers, the margins of many pages busy with his own handwriting. At the very bottom of the trunk, the fragrant dust of a cigar. As far as he could tell the only items missing were an embroidered sword belt, his DuBois and Wheeler watch (which had, anyway, ceased to work), and the spyglass with its leather case. So, a discerning thief or a careless one. Certainly a thief in a hurry.

  For a few minutes he stood over the open trunk. A drop of wax spilled from his candle and splashed on to the sleeve of the pelisse. At one time, not very long ago, he would have cursed himself for such carelessness; now he simply watched it cool and whiten. Then he swung down the lid, blew out the candle and went to the window, leaned his forehead against the cold glass, shut his eyes.

  That night he dreamed again of the Polish lancers in the snow, the dozen or so on the slope beneath the crown of the hill where they had fallen charging a Spanish artillery position. Dead horses too, their corpses mounted by crows that would not scare. Mountains soft as lace in the white light of the dusk. The crows lifting like cinders, hovering, then settling again . . .

  He had had this dream five or six times since his return. It had no variation, no narrative beyond the barest, was nothing but a picture of nothing, of absence, nullity. But something else must have come to him in his sleep that night, something more useful, for when he woke, an hour or so after dawn, it seemed to him he knew exactly what he was about to do, and by the time Nell came up with his breakfast, he had, using the paper and ink in Lovall’s case, almost finished a letter to his sister Lucy. It was his third attempt, the first saying things he had no right to burden her with, the next brief to the point of oddness. Finally, having burned the others, he wrote:

  Dearest Lucy,

  You must forgive me for not having written to you sooner and so, I fear, been the cause of unnecessary anxiety. I returned from Spain in February. You will have read by now something of what happened there. I was fit for nothing when I got home and do not know how I would have managed without Nell to nurse me. I am over the worst of it now but have decided, for the sake of my health, to make a small journey—a convalescent’s tour—and have settled upon the Scottish islands, believing their remoteness, the grandeur of their scenery, will work a good change in me and make me ready for the world again. I have had thoughts on music too, and mean to try to collect some of the old songs of the islands and so make a little coda or addendum to Father’s books. That, at least, is my scheme. I hope you will not think it a bad or an idle one. I hoped you might ask William if he has any ship on his books bound for northern ports. Glasgow? Aberdeen? (I cannot find a good map in the house but William will know what is best.) I will need very little in the way of comforts and am anxious to start as soon as is practicable.

  Are the twins well? And you?

  Ever affectionately,

  John

  He read it through then read it through again. The difficulty of knowing if you are behaving correctly. The difficulty of knowing how what you say and do will appear to the others, if perhaps you have lost some common, invisible thread of sense.

  He folded, sealed and addressed the letter, handed it to Nell who passed it to Tom who took it to the toll house where it would be forwarded to the Cross Keys and loaded on to the Bristol mail. The reply came in three days. Nell carried it up with his lunch. She had recognised the hand and said how nice it was to have a letter from Lucy. She said she hoped it might mean a visit would soon follow.

  He broke the seal and moved to the window. There were some lines about her relief in hearing from him at last, a gentle admonishment at his leaving them all so long without knowledge of him. Some news of their sister Sarah (pregnant with her fifth), some matter about the twins (childhood illnesses). Then, near the bottom of the page, the information he was looking for. A ship (William is making me copy this most precisely for he does not entirely believe a woman can be relied upon to be accurate in a matter of business . . . ) was leaving Bristol on the 29th, bound for Glasgow. Was the 29th too soon? She was called the Jenny, and William undertook to speak to her master about a cabin. It was, however, likely to be a very small cabin as the Jenny was in no way a large or luxurious vessel!

  The 29th. He looked at Nell. “What day is it?” he asked.

  “The day?”

  “The date.”

  She thought a moment. “The 24th,” she said. “Or it may be the 25th.”

  He nodded. “Nell,” he said, “I shall be away a while. You will have the place to yourself again.”

  “You are going back to the regiment? To the war?”

  “I am going to see Lucy. Then I may . . . travel a while.”

  “Travel?”

  “You are disappointed in me, Nell.”

  “I had hoped you would stay longer.”

  “I will come back.”

  “Are you in trouble?” she asked.

  “What’s that?”

  “In trouble.”

  He smiled at her, and for a moment rested a hand on her shoulder.

  He would take only what he could carry himself. In that, at least, he would be a good soldier. He looked for a suitable bag, something stout, not too large, and found, in his father’s dressing room, a leather holdall about the size of a hollowed dog-fox. Then, in the cupboard behind the steps to the attic, he pulled out another bag, slightly smaller, that had his mother’s initials on it, and inside, in the empty leathery whiff of it, a copy of Pilgrim’s Progress.

  He took the bags to his room, opened them wide—two old mouths, gaping—then sat on the bed trying to picture the islands and what he might need there. He was a man of the south country. He had never been further north than Gloucester. The islands, he assumed, were places where “north” achieved a sort of purity, a meaning it could never quite have in Somerset. But he knew something of them, of what they might be, had read in papers and quarterlies the reports of travellers, men made poetical by mountains and cataracts and such. Tours in the north had become quite the thing. Albion’s own savage back room, its last true wilderness. And, more usefully, he had spent a week in column with the 71st on the way to Salamanca. He had heard their language, heard some of their songs. He had liked the look of them. They had seemed to him like men who might be trusted.

  First into the larger bag went his boat cloak, then two plain shirts from the trunk, a pair of blue slops, some buckskin breeches. He packed two waistcoats and two white neckerchiefs. He packed Lovall’s writing case in the smaller bag together with some nankeen trousers, his razor and strop, the Windsor soap, some smallclothes.

  The fiddle had its own case, and the case a leather strap he could wear across his shoulder.

  What else?

  One of his father’s books of music? But they were too large and too fragile. He would not be able to forgive himself if one was lost or destroyed.

  He looked around the room, thought of things, rejected them. Then his gaze settled on the linen press by the window. Nell
had told him what she put in there, what had remained there, untouched, for all the weeks he had been back. He raised the lid, reached down and lifted the pack, recoiling a little at the smell of it. There was only one thing he needed from it and he tugged the straps through the buckles, drew out the oilskin package and sat with it on top of the press, unwinding the oilskin until the pistol was in plain view. He moved his fingers about it in a kind of ghosting of the actions necessary for making it ready. Then he wrapped it in the cloth again and packed it in the smaller of the bags, next to Lovall’s writing case. The day now was well advanced, the room swimming with late-afternoon light, and warm—warm for the first time without a fire. He sat on the bed. After a minute he lay back and stretched himself out. He did not dare to question what he was doing. Start to question it and he might find himself gazing through a tear in the skin of the world. There was no other plan. He shut his eyes, opened them. He stared up at the blue shadow of the ceiling, longing for his own boyhood until the longing shamed him.

  2

  Earlier, when the witnesses arrived, there had been a commotion. The gate of the courtyard unbarred, the witnesses—two men and a woman carrying a child—prodded towards a bench that was in the partial shade of a creeper that had grown thickly up the wall and was studded with blue flowers. Then the gate was closed and barred again, shutting out the ragged, curious children and returning the courtyard to its former stillness.

  As always in this city, it was sun or shade, each as intense as the other. In one, your whole skull was packed with light, in the other you seemed only half born, a spirit or ghost whose real form was uncertain.

  Close to where the witnesses were sitting—close enough to share the flies—four horses were tethered to rings in the wall. Three were English horses with docked tails; the fourth, a palomino, was smaller and fatter, and looked as if its main work in life was carrying its master out to supper and back. The horse that interested Calley was one of the English horses, a stallion of obvious beauty and strength, tethered where the shade was deepest. He was no horseman himself, did not care for the way horses looked at men and seemed to know them, but the stallion was something remarkable and he knew you would not find more than two or three such horses in the whole of the British army.