He went out walking very early. It was barely light. From the kitchen she heard his boots on the stairs and a single joyous bark from the dog. By the time she had put on a cap and slippers and reached the hall he was already out on the drive. Through the narrow window beside the door she saw the dog dancing around him as he tightened his scarf and settled the brim of his hat. He had a stick with him, one of the ten or twelve that leaned against the panels in a corner of the hall, blackthorns and ash. She tapped on the glass—she would give him some breakfast to take with him—but though the dog heard her the man did not and walked out of her sight towards the gate at the side of the house that would lead him through the garden and then to the fields.
He had been gone more than two hours when Tom arrived, snow on his shoulders. He had spent the night with the hens waiting for a fox that did not come. She heated cider for him and gave him the last of the pheasant pie. She told him about the man, his setting off without a bite in his pockets, his first time out of the house. And now snow!
“But what can befall him?” said Tom. She made a face and he said it again. “What can befall him, Nell? He knows his way.”
He drank his cider, ate the pie. It was good to see him take such pleasure in the things she gave. He was her friend, unmarried, more or less her own age. There was a time—a season—a few years back, when they might have made more of each other but the moment had passed. Or perhaps it had not, not quite. She liked to think a sensible woman became more valuable with the passage of time. And she felt strong.
“What is he going to do with himself now he’s here?” asked Tom.
“He must make his life again,” she said. It was a phrase that had come to her the previous night or the night before. Those moments when words seep out of silence. “There’s the house. The land . . . ”
“What’s left of it,” said Tom. He had made his views plain to her before on the matter of selling land to buy a commission and pay mess bills.
“He might find a wife,” she said.
“A wife?”
“Why not? He is not old.”
“There’s Widow Simpson,” said Tom.
“She’s near sixty!”
“There’s Widow Coombes.”
“It does not have to be a widow, Tom.”
He nodded. On a forefinger he collected the crumbs from the pie. The snow was heavier but fell unhurried, brushing the kitchen window, settling on the tops of the stone pillars, on the boughs of the ash trees across the lane.
“Has he said any more about the battle?”
“What battle?” she asked.
“Where the general was killed.”
“I do not even know he was in the battle.”
“No?”
“It’s more than I know.”
“Must have done something.”
“Says you,” she said. She looked at him, one-eyed, as a blackbird looks at a worm. They grinned at each other.
“What does he say then?”
She shrugged. “He asked if I had eaten a fig.”
“And have you?”
“I have not,” she said.
“Have you even seen one, Nell?”
“What? A fig?”
“Yes.”
“Why should I want to see a fig?” She was laughing now, light-headed.
“Well, I have seen one,” said Tom. “But I didn’t eat it.”
“Who did then?”
“I think it was Briffit.”
“Briffit!” For a moment she let herself imagine it, Briffit the pig-killer eating a fig! Ugly-face Briffit! Her eyes were tight shut. Tears of laughter spilled down her cheeks. He could kiss me now, she thought and be done with it. Then she sobered and opened her eyes. She looked to the window.
“You would go and look for him, Tom, if he was not back in an hour?”
“I will go if you wish me to.”
“He has the dog with him.”
“That’s good.”
“He said the war was very hard on horses.”
“On horses? Yes. I believe it.”
He came back before anyone needed to search for him. He came in trailing the cold, his face very white. He was shaking slightly. When she said she would bring him up some hot milk and brandy he nodded, went up the stairs, paused halfway, then went on, as if with the last of his strength. She made his drink so quickly she scalded her hand. In the room he was sitting in the armchair with his eyes shut. The dog looked pleased with itself. There was mud in its fur. It smelled of the river.
She woke him and made him take a mouthful of the drink. Then she got his gaiters off and his boots, stoked the fire and left him to sleep. She went outside and pressed her scalded hand in the snow. The fall was very light now. A few flakes settled on her shoulders, the linen of her cap. She thought of the widows Tom had mentioned, and in particular the Widow Coombes who had an interest in a quarry, and only one child, a girl of ten or thereabouts who hardly spoke a word. If they married—and there was nothing unpleasant about Widow Coombes, nothing at all—the house could come to life again. She would cook for a family, and the widow’s money could buy back the fields. There would be visitors, lights in the windows. They would go to church on a Sunday, sit in the old box pew. The front of the box still had the Lacroix arms on it, though so faint now the griffin might almost be anything—a fox, a hare, a hare on its hind legs. But a man could paint it back in a day—a dab of blue, a dab of gold. It only needed the giving of an order. All any of it needed was a little attention, a stirring-up.
But would the widow like him? And did he have any interest in a wife? She did not believe he had had much to do with women in the past. She could only remember one or two whose names had been mentioned to her. An Amelia somebody in Blandford when he rode with the hunt there. A Miss Catherine in Bath he went to the concerts with. Though surely there had been others she knew nothing about. He had, after all, been a soldier, and all the songs could not be wrong.
She straightened herself, examined her hand, the pink half-moon of the burn. Then she stood a while in the odd grey light of the snow, looking at the soft confusion of footprints by the door of the house.
It snowed off and on for a week, froze for a few days then began to thaw. Where the snow melted there were vivid green shoots below. The ruts in the road softened to mud again.
Lacroix left his room more frequently and would startle her, sometimes appearing in parts of the house where she was not expecting him, passages that never saw more than a glimmer of daylight, his mother’s former dressing room (bitter cold in there), the steps up to the attic. From the attic, if you chose, you could get on to the roof, sit between chimney pots and see for miles.
He walked out most days with the dog, always—so far as she knew—keeping to the cross-country paths where he might meet a herdsman or a woodsman or a pedlar but no one else, no one of any standing.
Sometimes, outside his door with a tray in her hands, she heard him speak to himself. His deafness made him speak louder and what she heard frightened her. It was as if he had a secret visitor, some old intimate whose company was no longer welcome, who troubled him and seemed, with silences, to get the better of him.
Once when she came in she thought he had been weeping. He kept his face away from her and she said nothing. It was not her place to comfort him, not directly.
In body, however, he was much recovered. The body has its own rules. His old clothes began to fit him again; his hair had grown to the tops of his shoulders; most of the shadow had gone from around his eyes. When she saw him set out on his walks his stride was what she remembered it being in the days before, or near enough.
A letter came. To Captain John Lacroix Esq. She carried it up. Later she thought she saw part of it—a charred corner with a sweep of ink—at the edge of the fire. He did not mention it. She did not ask. Somethi
ng, she thought, needs to happen. We cannot go on like this. If she herself could write she might send a note to one of his sisters, to Lucy, who had the more tender conscience when it came to family matters. But she could not write, could not read above ten or fifteen words. And what would she say? Your brother has returned from the war but in truth has not returned at all. He is home but he is lost. It would be like a letter from a madwoman.
The second week of April. It took, it seemed, a single morning to see off what was left of the winter, of pure winter. Perhaps it took no more than an hour. The housekeeper opened windows in rooms that had spent six months in stunned inward concentration, rooms where in January there were frost flowers on the inside of the glass. With the windows up on their sashes the world rolled in—cool air tipped with warmth, the noise of the rooks. A fly sunned itself at the edge of a mirror. A humble bee settled, exhausted, on a window sill.
She started heating water on the kitchen range for a wash day. She would soak things today, scrub and rinse tonight and hang in the morning. She went upstairs to collect his sheets. He was kneeling on the floor, on the rug. All around him were the old books of music that had belonged to his father. He looked up at her and for a moment his face was bright as a boy’s.
“You’ve got them out then,” she said. The air in the room was stale. She noticed it after airing the other rooms. She went to the window and braced the heels of her palms against the bar, pushed until it shifted.
“I had a dream of them,” he said. “Last night. And this morning I went to find them.”
“It was a spring dream,” she said. She was a countrywoman and knew perfectly well the importance of dreams.
“And look at this,” he said, holding up to her a pressed flower—a ragged purple head, a stem that had darkened from green to grey. He held it very gently. It looked as if, blown upon, it would scatter to dust.
“It’s devil’s-bit,” she said. “The herbals use it.”
“I had forgotten he put flowers in the books. I have found campion, cuckoo flower, ox-eyes. But this one escapes me.”
“Devil’s-bit,” she repeated, more loudly.
He nodded. “Yes,” he said, “but it has another name too, I think.”
She stripped the bed and took the linen down. An hour later she came back with a tray of lunch for them both and found him still on his knees with the books. He left them open on the floor and sat at the table with her. Lunch was a broth with the last of the chimney bacon. She served him. He cleared his plate and immediately spooned on more, pushed squabs of bread into the juice. The books have changed him, she thought. The music in the books, the memory of his father. She said it was good to see him eat so well.
“And drink,” he said, filling both their cups with cider. She had made the cider herself the previous autumn, the old press in the outhouse, wasps crawling over the pommy.
“It’s all soldiers think about,” he said. “Eating and drinking. Beef and beer.”
“And what did you eat,” she asked, “when you were away?”
“Everything with garlic and oil. In Lisbon they live on fried fish. The city stinks of it.”
“They have bacon?” she asked.
“Bacon? Yes.” He paused.
She waited. She had not thought there could be anything difficult in asking about bacon.
“I saw one time,” he said, “soldiers attack a herd of swine they found in the woods. They were so in a rage from hunger they cut pieces from them while they still lived then cooked the meat on kettle lids, though I think most barely singed it before they started to eat.”
“Mercy,” she said. “And were they sick after?”
“I don’t know. They were infantry. We were riding through. I stopped to watch them. It was amusing at first.”
“Well,” she said, “I hope the French were just as hungry.”
“Who?”
“The French. That they were hungry also.”
“The French we thought were better served. The men believed it at least. They were always hopeful of finding something in a Frenchman’s pack.”
“And how would they have Frenchmen’s packs?” she asked, but understood the answer before the question was out of her mouth.
All afternoon there was a picture in her head of men in red coats running at swine and hacking at them. She had watched Briffit cut out a pig many times, knew the noise of it, knew how the blood ran. But the men in the woods . . . the sheer wildness of it! And it surprised her a little that she could imagine it at all, as though she, a woman of forty-three, neat in her dress, knew more about such things—wildness, savagery—than she could have guessed. As if, perhaps, everyone did.
She was worried that the new mood had been spoiled, but that night, drowsing on the chair in the kitchen, she woke to hear music in the house. It was so faint she was not sure at first what side of sleep it came from. She put on her slippers and went out into the hall. The dog followed her and stood with her at the bottom of the stairs. Anything? Nothing. So, she had merely dreamed it. But after half a minute it started again, a little reel played stop-start, phrase by phrase, like a poem once had by heart but not, for long years, brought to mind.
He would, of course, have known where to find the fiddle. It was where he himself had left it, under the writing table in the study. His father’s fiddle. His fiddle when he was mad for music and had a master in Wells, those days when the young men called at the house with instruments under their arms and disappeared for hours, not eating much, drinking a great deal, always playing. They even played on the roof when the mood was on them and it was a miracle none broke his neck in a fall. (A year after they came down for the last time, Tom, fixing slates, found a wine bottle full of rain.)
The fiddle would have needed tuning, and she was not sure, listening from the bottom of the stairs, if he had made all the strings as they should be, if his hearing, his damaged ears, had made it hard for him to do. She supposed it must have, but she had listened to enough village players in her time who did not trouble themselves with anything beyond the loudness of their playing and keeping the dancers’ feet in time. A little sharp, a little flat, it was all music.
Then silence, a hush filled by the tick of the clock, her own breath, the dog’s. Then it was back, and more confident now, freer. His fingers were warmed, he was remembering the old tricks. The tune was as familiar to her as her own face, and in the hall, where moonlight hung like a luminous dust, she moved one slippered foot, toe down, then heel down, toe then heel.
Through the week that followed he would play for an hour or two in the day, and at night, when she had settled herself in the kitchen, he would often play for another hour. She became used to hearing him as she went about her business. Tom came into the house, smiling, and said he had heard it as he crossed the back field and it had come on him like a memory, if she knew what he meant. She said she did.
“Are we as we were, then?” he asked. He had new gaiters on, red ones, in honour of the new season.
“It would seem we are,” she said, though she did not believe it. She had been too much in the man’s company to believe in any simple restoration of easier times. She would not drop her guard and knew Lacroix had not dropped his, music or no. They were waiting for something, for the moon to crash through the tiles of the roof, for old Lacroix to shoulder his way out of his grave, for the French to show up on the ridge with their plumes and whatnots. Her sleeping thinned out to scraps. She listened to owls, to spring rain that seemed to fall inside the house. She began to imagine her blood was not quite right, that she was spoiling for something (she who had been ill, properly ill, twice in her adult life). It was, then, not so much a surprising thing as a necessary one when a gig pulled by a pair of grey horses swung into the yard and she answered the door to a stranger, a man who, while not in uniform, she immediately recognised as a soldier.
He smiled a
t her, wished her a good morning. “Captain Wood,” he said, “to see Captain Lacroix.”
He was about the same age as Lacroix or a little younger, spoke with a big-house voice, had the side whiskers and moustache the regiment favoured and perhaps demanded. Another man stood by the heads of the horses. This, she assumed, was his servant.
“We have brought his trunk,” said the captain. “From Spain. Now the dust has settled things have been finding their way back to us. Though I dare say he’ll be surprised to see it.”
“He’s out,” she said.
“Oh?”
“He took the dog out. I can’t say when he’ll be back.”
“But he will not walk all day, I hope?”
“No,” she said. “No. He’ll be back before dinner.”
She led him through to the drawing room. The morning sun had been coming in the window for the last two hours and the air was warm, the room scented with the soft smell of itself—wood, old fabrics, the coal-breath of the fireplace.
“We were in the Peninsula together,” he said. “Shared billets in Lisbon. An onion loft, believe it or not.”
She nodded, her hands clasped in front of her apron.
“I wasn’t with him on the road to Corunna, worse luck. Broke my arm in Salamanca and found myself back in Lisbon again. I suppose he has told you all this. Old campaigners are fond of their stories.”
“He has not been well,” she said. “He was very bad when he came.”
“Yes?” he said. “Well, it is not to be wondered at. I wrote to him here but heard nothing back. Perhaps he was not well enough to write.”
“I expect not,” she said.
“But he is walking now. That must be a good sign.”
“It is,” she said.
“Yet I sense you would not declare him perfectly recovered. Not yet.”
“He cannot hear quite well,” said the housekeeper. “When he comes in you will need to speak clearly and let him see your face.”
“I wonder what that could have been,” said the captain. “The cause of it. He has been attended by an able doctor? We have a very good fellow at the depot. Luff. Looks after the colonel’s wife. She’s often indisposed.”
Now We Shall Be Entirely Free Page 3