Now We Shall Be Entirely Free

by Andrew Miller

  12

  They crossed the River Mercy and arrived at Liverpool in the rain. The horses needed new shoes and something more to eat than wayside grass. The men were in similar wise—saddle-sore, creak-kneed, in want of stillness, settled air. They worked their way into the quarters of the poor, found a stable in Comus Street and, in the street adjoining, a public house called the Lamb and Fox. They rented a room above the bar, two beds (narrow as those the dead are laid on), a stand with a basin on it, a piss pot under the bed by the door. Hanging from a nail on the wall between the beds was a print in a frame. Medina studied it and after a while decided that it showed Christ’s entry into Jerusalem.

  Though it was the first night in many they had a roof and a bed, neither man could sleep. Perhaps they missed the speech of trees, the scent of damp earth. Medina lay on his back listening to dogs fight in the street, to the drinkers in the bar below, their attempts at singing. He heard Calley go out. When he came back he brought with him the sour air of the bar, tripped over the end of Medina’s bed, cursed. Tempting to ask if they served tea in the bar—tempting but unwise. Medina opened his eyes a little, just enough to peep at the ceiling where points of light coming up between the floorboards made a kind of constellation. He could not see Calley but heard him lie down, and then—the sounds almost lost amid the tireless raging of the dogs—heard him mutter and sigh. Half-words, gasps, hisses. Was Calley starting to feel as he did? That they were fools on a fool’s errand? Men who, far from being engaged upon an urgent mission, had been cut loose? He could ask him, whisper across in the dark, invite a confidence. But that too would be unwise. And more likely Calley was simply rehearsing some complaint Medina would hear in the morning, or finishing an argument begun in the bar or some quarrel started years before, the antagonist forgotten but the theme remembered. One of those endless rebuttals that become a man’s protest at what he has been given . . .

  In some sliver of the night—too late and too early to be easily explained—they heard horses on the street and sharpened at the sound of them, suspended breath. But the horses did not stop and the men settled again, scratched at their skin, picked at their blankets, each man a small wave that broke on the other’s shore, each the other’s burden, perhaps his comfort. Below them, the last of the drinkers had perfected himself and swum away into the summer night. One by one, the landlady’s breath put out the stars.

  In the morning they moved on as soon as there was light. The city gave way to brickfields and then to farms, but they could not leave it behind entirely. In every valley they rode through they found the chimneys of mills, or if not a chimney then some building, big as a barracks, where work was going on, the new work that was the labour of crowds.

  At one place—a day’s ride north—they looked down from their camp in the early morning to see men and women hurrying through the gates of a mill, five storeys of raw brick that straddled the shining wire of a stream in the crease of the valley. Behind the adults came the children, and behind these, one on his own, a boy. Calley pointed to him, followed his progress with a finger as though with the barrel of a gun.

  “That one is me,” he said.

  “You were here?” asked Medina, amazed.

  “Not here,” said Calley. “Not this one.”

  He said nothing else but when they rode on, picking their way along a sheep track over the ridge of the valley, he began to speak of it. At eight he had been sent out of London in a haulier’s wagon loaded with boys and girls much like himself. High summer on the Old North Road. They saw what they had not seen before—open fields and great woods, haycocks and hedgerows mad with birds. They saw rabbits under the briars, and at dusk the soundless running of deer. They saw distance, the haze of far hills, the sun setting right to the flat of the earth. Country folk stood up from their work to watch the wagon pass. They knew where it was headed. It was not the first they had seen come up that road loaded with pale children. After a week they arrived at the mill. By moonlight it looked like Newgate prison, and though the children were all familiar with buildings that pinch the soul, they were frightened. They followed a man with a lamp to the apprentice hall, a stone house behind a stone wall, one door in and out, kept locked. They followed him up the stairs and at the top the boys were sent to the right, the girls to the left, filing into dormitories to find space for themselves by touching strangers, other children so dead asleep they could have been tumbled on to the floor without fear of waking them. In the morning—or was it night still?—the man came back with a bell and took them into the mill.

  “Fourteen hours a day we laboured there. Sixteen when business was brisk. Well, we thought we knew what work was, had all of us been picking oakum for years, but this was different. Cotton yarn will snap in the cold so they keep the machine room hot enough to grow lemons. And the air is thick with fly, little bits of cotton that get up your nose, get in your throat, wad up your lungs. As for the noise in there, I did not hear the equal of it until I stood in my first battle.”

  Medina listened closely, in part because he was interested, in part because he knew Calley wished him to, that he was saying more perhaps than he had said before to anyone. Many of the words were new to him—the strange language of the work—but he let them go, not wanting to interrupt. The creeler, the gaffer, the carding room. The winding stroke. Doffing and piecing. As they rode under the broken green roof of a larch coppice, Calley stopped his horse to sketch in the air the wheels and pulleys of the frames. He was angry when Medina said he understood. He began again. “Here are the bobbins, here are the spindles. When it does this it’s called drawing out. When it does this it’s called putting up.”

  They went on, bare hills now, and to the left of them, the distant crystal bloom of sea light.

  “My first employment,” said Calley, “was as a piecer. I would mend broken threads . . . ” He raised a hand to show Medina how it was done, the quick twist between thumb and finger. “A piecer must also serve the machine by cleaning it and this is the most dangerous work. You run in low under the yarn, never letting it touch your back. Miss your timing you lose your fingers, or worse. There was a girl called Lizzie Bentley from the spike in Southwark. It pleased her to call me her brother though I was no more her brother than I am yours. She had ginger hair for a start. Anyway, the dozy cow slipped when she was under the machine and the belt caught her hand and took off her arm at the shoulder. She was nine. The blood was like water spun from a twirl mop . . . ”

  “But she lived?” asked Medina.

  “She lived. They gave her a job running messages, one arm being enough to carry a piece of paper with.”

  He was quiet then. Medina dozed in the saddle, was roused by rain on his cheek. Ahead of them the road ran down into another valley—a church, a bridge and five tall chimneys, their smoke slightly paler than the sky. Calley started to talk again—or perhaps he had been talking all the while. His theme now was discipline.

  “In the last hours of the day the overlookers beat us without pause. They beat us to keep us awake for we would, in truth, have slept on the floor, in the grease there. Sometimes they used a bobbin, sometimes a strap like those that drove the machines. One, name of Ramsden, had a knob-stick he called ‘father.’ Thy lids are drooping, lad. Shall I fetch out fadder? I will tell you this, I have known mill boys in the army, a good number of them. They think it cushy to get ten licks of the cat for coming on parade with dirty boots. What others boast of they don’t even fucking mention.”

  The rain, in the stealthy way of dusk rain, had grown heavier. It shone like thread against air the colour of gritstone. They turned up the collars of their coats. Medina asked about the girls, if they were also beaten. Calley shook his head. “They had other things for the girls.”

  “And what were those things?” asked Medina, though it seemed to him suddenly that he already knew.

  “They were made to stand on a chair,” said Calley, “where al
l could see them. Then the overlooker took a knife or shears and he cut off their hair. Their hair was what they were proud of. It was what they had.”

  He glanced back at Medina. It was hard to say what his expression was. Did he think he had been careless? That he had said too much, this most deliberate of men? For ten yards of fading road they held each other’s gaze, the rain dripping from the brims of their hats. Then Calley straightened himself in the saddle, and with a twitch of the reins, steered his horse into a lane that led them away from the houses.

  13

  They were on a hill above the sea. The hill was shaped like a sugar-loaf and had a trench, fifteen feet long, cut into the sea-facing slope. It was mid-morning and the day was already hot, the sun beating a scent out of the land. Pine? But it could not be pine. There were no pine trees, few trees of any kind, none at all on the hill. Lacroix wondered if he was remembering Portugal, that month after they landed, when he began to understand what the south and southern heat might mean. He had not expected to meet it again on the islands.

  “Now tell me squarely,” said Cornelius, rising, trowel in hand, from the bottom of the trench, “are you with Buffon? On the age of the world, I mean. And putting aside for the time being the whole question of his being French.”

  The wind on the hill was a muddle. Warm gusts blew one way and then the other. It made hearing difficult, though Lacroix believed his hat helped him a little, a broad-brimmed hat, a reaper’s hat, dog-coloured and borrowed from among the collection in the hallway. Those words that found their way under the brim stayed with him. As for the rest.

  “Remind me,” he asked. “What does Buffon say?”

  “Seventy-five thousand years,” said Cornelius. “Thorpe says it might be even more. He believes it is. Intuitively. Ranald won’t venture an opinion, on religious grounds, I think. My sisters just make up numbers. The bigger the number the better they like it.”

  “Well,” said Lacroix, “I will go with Buffon. If we have set aside the question of his nationality.”

  “I would ask your opinion of Hutton,” said Cornelius, “but I am afraid you will not have heard of him. He is too new!”

  The two of them ducked down into the trench again and began to scrape and probe with their trowels. It was peat mostly, a few stones. They worked one behind the other, turning the ground and stooping to investigate anything that made the trowel blade chime. The next time they surfaced, Jane and Emily were walking over the brow of the hill. They were carrying a bag between them, one handle each. Jane wore her white muslin (was it the same or were there several?). Emily had on something cool with green stripes. Both had hats of straw tied with ribbon.

  “Have you found anything?” asked Emily.

  “A crown?” asked Jane. “Or a chariot?”

  “Ha ha,” said Cornelius. “Très amusant. I hope you have brought something nice for us and have not just come to talk nonsense.”

  Emily unpacked the bag. It had bottles in it—old wine bottles stoppered with paper and filled with water stirred through with oatmeal, the water still mostly cold from the spring behind the house. Lacroix and Cornelius had been at the trench two hours. They had not done much work, not real work, but enough for a sharp thirst. Lacroix drank most of a bottle, apologising if he had taken more than his share.

  “Where’s Ranald?” asked Emily.

  “Ranald?” said Lacroix. “He is with that party below.” He pointed to where, some fifty yards further down, a group of men and women were digging for peat.

  Emily nodded, though he was not sure she could see them.

  “The peat will dry well in this weather,” she said. “It is the hottest day we ever had here.”

  “Yesterday was hotter,” said Jane.

  “It only seemed so to you,” said Emily, “because you did not leave your room.”

  “It has been hot since Lovall arrived,” said Cornelius. “The flames lick at his feet.”

  “It is summer,” said Jane. “It is June. We should not be astonished if the sun shines.”

  Lacroix grinned and kept his peace. He was, after nine days, becoming familiar with the way the Frends spoke to each other. Sometimes they drew him in; sometimes they seemed to perform for him. As always, with other people’s family, there was a deep story he had not the slightest hope of untangling. He did not doubt they loved each other yet he wondered if each to the other represented that which they longed to distance themselves from. The old life, the old tyrant. Their freakish days in Shoreditch. Without Thorpe and the community, would they have gone their separate ways long since? He knew he liked them though. Cornelius’s chatter, the spirited company of the sisters, the music at night in the untidy, comfortable house. His secret room at the back. And he had grown stronger—real progress at last—so that he was now a very long way from the man who lay on old Jesse Campbell’s floor staring at the sky through a smoke-hole. He should, he supposed, be more pleased about it. To be healthy, to be strong again. Wasn’t that what he had strived for ever since opening his eyes to find Nell spooning brandy and milk into his mouth? But what when it was done? When he no longer had the luxury of considering himself an invalid? The world would sidle up to him again. There would be demands he could not simply faint away from. Sometimes, his face pressed against the onrush of time (as against a film, something ectoplasmic and lucent, like the skin of an egg), he thought he could almost see it, a moment, a reckoning, a decisive moment, when everything would depend on some virtue of character he no longer believed himself to possess. One clean cut, one sweep of the blade, as in those sword drills out of Le Marchant’s Rules and Regs he never really mastered . . .

  The women had settled on the grass below the trench. They had taken off their hats. Emily, kneeling behind Jane, had both her hands in her sister’s hair as though buried in sand. She was drawing the hair out, squeezing it, holding it in a fist while the other hand shuttled back to collect, to smooth. Then she lifted it all and wound around the blonde stem a fine chain the colour of red coral. When it was done, the hair sleek and orderly, Jane reached up and pulled strands free, corn-coloured helixes to hang down the sides of her face, finishing the work by undoing it a little, a careful spoiling. Then each took the other’s place and it was Jane’s turn, opening the wings of her sister’s hair—shorter, darker hair—collecting it with drowsy rollings of her wrists, with sudden sharp tugs that made Emily wince. Then the lifting, the piling up, the cunning one-handed tying of a ribbon. She was quicker than her sister, more careless, more skilful.

  “I would sell you one of them,” said Cornelius, emerging almost under Lacroix’s arm, “if I thought you had any money. Though I suppose Jane is not really in a condition to be sold.”

  “No,” said Lacroix, “that would not do.”

  The question of Jane’s condition, the facts of it, had been settled some days earlier, a supper-time conversation, an aside from Jane herself, no blushing or awkwardness. She was five months with child and the father was Thorpe. The other two had nodded and smiled as though between them was an agreement that the facts were pleasing ones, or certainly not troubling ones. Lacroix hoped his own expression had been something similar. He did not think she was disgraced, not at all, but the word had been in his head. That, and other words that belonged to the world of the barracks.

  He climbed out of the trench (it would make a fine defensive position, a line of muskets, artillery on the hill behind, cavalry waiting on the far side) and stretched himself out on the heather, tipped the hat over his eyes and carried the blonde and the dark hair into sleep with him.

  He woke, stifled by the hat. He brushed it from his face and sat up, slightly giddy. He was looking seawards, and though there had been nothing out there when he lay down, now, at the centre of his view, less than a mile from the shore, was a ship. She looked, he thought, like a military vessel. She looked, in fact, exactly like the ship that had stopped the Jenny
and boarded her. Was it? You are going the wrong way, Mr. Lovall, if you hope to meet with the French. He had not, of course—the pockmarked lieutenant—believed a word of his story. Collecting rents! And now they were here, and he, Lacroix/Lovall, was perched on a hill on a treeless island, his face floating in the eyepieces of their telescopes.

  Launch a boat, row a boat. They could be on the beach in twenty minutes.

  “It is the emigration ship,” said Ranald. “For Canada.” He was standing up to his chest in the trench and must have come up while Lacroix was sleeping. On each stumped wrist he wore his false hands, two sheaths of buckled leather ending in blocks of wood and a pair of right-angled hooks, iron. There was no sign of the Frends.

  “A navy ship?” asked Lacroix.

  Ranald shook his head. “It is a private man who owns her though she was a navy ship once. She is called the Nessus.”

  “The what?”

  “The Nessus.”

  “Ah, like the centaur?”

  “I do not know the centaur.”

  “A sort of Sphinx, but Greek. Will she stop here?”

  “Here? No. Here the chiefs do not want the people to leave. They are wanted for the burning. The kelp.”

  “But she is headed south, I think.”

  “South to Ireland. She will take on more there. Then to Cape Breton.”

  “Perhaps they will have a better life in Canada.”

  “That may be,” said Ranald. “But they would stay if they knew how.”

  For several minutes they watched the ship in silence, the white specks of seabirds hovering over her wake. No naval frigate, then, but an emigration ship. Lacroix was relieved—deeply—but when he glanced at Ranald and watched him watching, he thought he saw in that face the dry-eyed grief of an entire race. They might, the two of them, both be soldiers—ex-soldiers—but they were not the same. He came from among the victors, the owners. If he was not collecting rents in Scotland, rents were being collected in his name elsewhere. Things were due to him and backed by law. And it was Ranald and countless like him who were put into the line to defend it. And did so. Gave their hands to a class of men who would later see them ruined and packed off to Canada . . .