Now We Shall Be Entirely Free

by Andrew Miller

  He had these thoughts then let them go. It was hot and they did not lead anywhere, or nowhere he felt able to follow them. It was like Christ’s teaching of living the life of the spirit. You heard it at the service then went home for your dinner. You weren’t changed.

  “Have you found anything?” he asked.

  “Only this,” said Ranald, touching with one of his hooks a small curved shape in the grass above the trench. Lacroix picked it up and wiped it with a thumb. It was clay. A two-inch-wide section of something shattered perhaps a thousand years ago. It had a pattern of lines, a slanting design grooved into the clay, lines that brought to mind a tool, a hand.

  “You have done better than the rest of us,” he said, settling the pottery on to the grass again.

  “Cornelius will think it a prize.”

  “It is what is left,” said Ranald.

  “Yes,” said Lacroix. “It is what is left.”

  Hard to know if they were speaking of the same thing.

  All day they kept the sun and the heat. When they sat for their evening meal the windows of the long room were as wide as they would go. The inside world and the outside world were smudged a little. They watched the sky work through its tints. A few clouds in the west floating like toys. It was a little mysterious.

  They ate fish—saithe—and gritty bread and the first leaves from Emily’s garden (Emily’s as she was the only one who worked in it). Lacroix found he did not miss eating meat. Occasionally he thought of the meat pies and collops of beef Nell used to cook for him but he was content to eat simply, reckoned a light regimen did him good. It also made him feel less awkward about accepting their hospitality.

  When the meal was over they pushed back their chairs. They talked. The poetry of John Clare. The paws of otters. Napoleon’s wife. The heat. Cornelius consulted his watch. It was ten already, or it was probably ten. It was a long time since he had been able to set his watch by anything larger and more reliable. There had been many small adjustments, some guesswork when he forgot to wind it.

  “It might be midnight,” he said, and laughed excitedly.

  “I want to sleep outside tonight,” said Jane. “My room will be unbearable.”

  “And what if it rains?” asked Emily. “We are all outside with our bedding and it starts to rain? You know very well how the weather can change here.”

  Jane shrugged. “There will be air. I will be able to breathe. It is not the same for you.”

  “It is an exquisite idea,” said Cornelius. “And I believe Lovall knows all about sleeping in the open. He will build a type of igloo. Or something like an owl’s nest. Anyway, it will be lined with moss. Don’t you wish to see that, dear Basemath? Don’t you? Lovall’s ingenious nest?”

  They carried their bedding outside, walking through the shadowy house with armfuls of sheets and blankets. Jane’s mattress was the largest and it was not thought practical to bring it down. She would have Cornelius’s mattress and he would have a bed made up from the cushions of the ottoman.

  They built their camp on the level ground at the front of the house. Lacroix, unsure of the etiquette, placed his own bed at a distance from the others that he thought replicated the distance he slept from them inside the house.

  “Why are you there?” asked Emily.

  He dragged his bed closer. Now it lay at the outer edge of the camp, slightly nearer to Cornelius’s bed than to that of either sister. The whole camp was confusing. It was not even clear which end of the mattresses people intended to have their heads.

  Jane went into the house and came out in her night clothes. They were not very different to what she had been wearing in the day but her hair was down and she had a dark-coloured shawl around her shoulders. Emily went next. When she reappeared, also with a shawl, there was a softness to her movements, a fluidity, that may have been a trick of the moonlight or else the absence of those garments that disciplined a woman’s body and could not, even on a hot day, be set aside. Certainly neither of his own sisters did. Or Nell. Or any of the women he knew.

  For himself, he had got no further than taking off his boots. He did not have a nightshirt and hoped no one suggested he borrow one of Thorpe’s.

  Cornelius, in the hieroglyphic robe, busied himself fetching what they might want, or what he might want. His bag of bang, a whisky bottle, a candle, two books. He held the books up. “King Lear or Gulliver’s Travels?”

  They chose Gulliver, unanimously, and Cornelius, holding up the candle, began to read to them. (My father had a small estate in Nottinghamshire; I was the third of five sons . . . )

  When he had read two or three pages he passed the book and candle to Jane, who passed them to Emily, who passed them to Lacroix.

  “As you don’t appear to be going to bed,” she said.

  He took the book and read to them. They were all lying down now, all but him. Cornelius smoked on his back, flicking embers, curls of fiery bang, from his cushions. The sisters lay on their sides. He noticed that they held hands for a while, held each other’s fingertips, as perhaps they had done as children. He noticed Jane pull a pillow under the covers and wedge it between her knees or thighs.

  I am reading to the baby too, thought Lacroix. To Thorpe’s homunculus.

  He read. The wax thickened on his fingertips. When the moon had sunk below the boathouse gable he shut the book, paused, then blew out the candle. He fancied they were all asleep now. They lay very still, dark forms sunk in lighter air. It made him uneasy that he could not hear their breathing, though he knew it was just his deafness.

  He took off his waistcoat, got beneath the covers and lay on his back staring up at the faintness of stars. The novelty of it! Not the novelty of sleeping out—Cornelius was right of course, he knew all about that, had bivouacked across the Peninsula in tents that kept out neither rain nor cold, had slept many nights in the open with nothing but his greatcoat (his legs thrust through the sleeves). But to lie out as a kind of game, with all their bedding. Men and women muddled together! Was this how the community behaved? The Thorpians, the Phyrronists? It would be something to tell Lucy about. Something to scandalise her husband with. Or did Wesleyans not trouble themselves with such things? He was not entirely sure what they believed, other than they were more likely to pass through the eye of a needle than Unitarians or Anabaptists.

  It was deep night when he woke and for a moment or two he was utterly lost. Then he realised he must have turned in his sleep. He had been facing outwards but now could see the uncertain coastline of another sleeper. The rumpled blanket, a pillow, a head. Cornelius? No, not Cornelius. Emily. He tried to get her into focus. The moon was gone but there was a residue of light in the air, enough to establish a nose, a hand up by her chin, her brow. She was closer to him than he could easily explain, as if the mattresses were moored like boats in a pool and had swung on their lines. Her face was like folded cloth; then, a moment later, it was a mask in which, free from detail, from all animation, he could plainly recognise the family face: spare, handsome, inward. The father’s face? The mad saint of Shoreditch? He gazed at her, his regard, he thought, that of a philosopher more than anything . . . warmer. He gazed, was lost in gazing, seemed hardly to know any more who was gazing, when it occurred to him that the gleam at the centre of her face was, in fact, the gleam of her eyes.

  She was looking at him. She must be. Or else she was sleeping with her eyes open. And who does that?

  He shut his own eyes, opened them again. He wanted to be sure. He looked, pushed the dark aside with his looking. He was sure. His heart thudded. He was close to laughter. He had done, quite innocently, what he would never have dared do knowingly. And what did she think of it? This man, this newcomer, lying within reaching distance, staring at her? And because it was night, deep night, and everything had softened, all shapes and truths on the cusp of being other shapes and other truths, he began, with no effort of con
scious invention, to imagine things that pleased him. It began with a vision of touching—his ghost arm stretching out, his ghost hand, the feel of her face, the shock of her breath on his fingertips. Then outwards, onwards, rushing ahead (it was the work of seconds) to a tableau in which he stood with her in the drawing room of the house in Somerset receiving callers. May I introduce Miss Emily Frend of Shoreditch? In his picture of them they looked young, unmarked by life. Themselves, but themselves made good. There was nothing wrong with her eyes, nothing amiss with his hearing. Then being served at table by Nell. And Tom fitted out as a kind of footman. Tom in a powdered wig and buckled shoes! The dining room would need redecorating of course. Fifty years since anything was done there. The bedroom too? Something from Bath, something modern. Plain? Stripes? Was green a good colour for a bedroom wall?

  Then all of it was rubbed out. He shut his eyes and turned, as if in pain, first on to his back and from there on to his other shoulder. What was he thinking of? Had he forgotten everything? He might make love to a Glasgow orange girl—and no doubt he had been justly served there—but to Emily Frend? He had a moment of rage so sharp and sudden he thought he would shout out, wake them all like one in a fit. No. Not this. Not ever. Tomorrow he must leave them. He would make his excuses (anything would do), ask Ranald to guide him to a ferry crossing. There were islands to the north of this one—he knew that from Captain Browne’s charts. He would get clear. He would keep moving. Or he would go back? Take the Jenny or some other ship back to Bristol, then the London mail. Walk across the parade ground to the colonel’s office and present him with a history of the retreat. His history.

  He mouthed to the dark, “They could shoot me.” And he almost revelled in it, the rightness and bitterness of such an ending, the quick slide of last thoughts as he waited for someone (Wood?) to give the command. There was a wall behind the guardhouse in Croydon that had been used for such things in the past. A brick wall splashed with whitewash . . .

  In the morning they all seemed to wake at once, sitting up in their beds, a gloss of dew on their faces, their expressions sombre from the strangeness and beauty of the night. They exchanged their dreams. Cornelius had been riding a crocodile. “Was it Father?” asked Jane. Cornelius said it had been, undoubtedly. Jane’s own dream was of Thorpe striding in a river, though whether an English river or a Scottish one she couldn’t say. Emily had dreamed her bed was on the sea and that she had looked back at the island and seen the house.

  “Were you alone?” asked Cornelius.

  After the briefest pause she said she had been.

  “Liar,” said Jane. She looked at Lacroix.

  “I didn’t dream,” he said. “I often don’t.”

  Cornelius begged for coffee. Emily swung her legs out of bed, stood carefully, and went into the house. After a minute Lacroix also got up, pulled on his boots, buttoned his waistcoat and followed her inside. He went to his room, closed the door and crouched on the floor by his bag. He still had his resolve from the night before, though in daylight it did not feel quite the same, as if it had been made in a language exclusive to the night that now, translated, was less emphatic.

  He took out the writing case, freed the brass hook that kept it shut and examined the green solar glasses. He fiddled with the lens that had come out of its frame, finally got it to snap back in. He polished both lenses on his sleeve, straightened one of the wire wings. Then he went to where his coat was hanging on a peg by the door. He searched in the pockets for the remaining tincture bottle, drew it out, shook it, and held it to the light. It was still two-thirds full and the sight of it, the pink tint, tempted him for a moment. But what would it be to take his leave of them under the influence of laudanum? He would end up slack in front of a window, muttering to himself. He would see whales, dead fathers. He owed them something better than that.

  It bothered him he had nothing for Jane. He considered giving her the writing case but could not picture her with it and, anyway, wanted it himself. His copy of Pilgrim’s Progress? Absurd. How about a part-used bar of Windsor soap? A cavalry pistol? He would, he decided, if it was possible, send her something later, a gift for the new child, a christening bracelet perhaps, though christening might well be something the community frowned upon.

  He went to the kitchen. Emily was pouring boiling water from a pan into a coffee pot. Some of the water was already pooled around the base of the pot. “Put it down,” he said. “Emily. I will pour it.”

  “You are very masterful this morning,” she said. She set the pan down and looked at him. He could not read her expression.

  “You spoke in your sleep,” she said.

  He cocked his head. “I did what?”

  “You spoke in your sleep, John. Unhappily.”

  “Ah. I am sorry for it.”

  “Why? You were asleep. It was your true self that spoke.”

  He nodded, then held out the solar glasses. “I have a present for you.”

  She came closer. It was odd, like tempting a cat with a titbit. She took the glasses from him, turned them in her hands.

  “Against the sun,” he said. “Do you think they will help?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Thank you. I think they will.”

  “Good.”

  “Is green best against the sun?”

  “I believe it is.”

  “It will be like looking from the inside of a bottle,” she said, laughing. “Perhaps you should give them to Cornelius.”

  “No,” he said, suddenly laughing too. “They are for you. I have something else for Cornelius.”

  She thanked him again. She looked so pleased, as though the gift were much greater than it was. He wanted to ask her if she had been looking at him in the night, if she had seen him look at her, but he had no idea of the tone or phrasing of such a question. He walked to the stove, lifted the pan and began to fill the coffee pot. By the time the pot was full he knew he was not going anywhere. Not today.

  They carried the bedding inside. The morning was already warm and promising to be much warmer. The big hats were out again. Ranald came up. He had put on his old regimental kilt, the first kilt Lacroix had seen since crossing into Scotland. Had he gone ashore at Aboukir in it? Had he been wearing it when he saw the Sphinx? He told them that the mainland boat would be in tomorrow. Emily sat with him at the table in the big room to write out a list of provisions. Coffee, wine, rice, sugar. Six yards of undyed linen for sewing sheets. Wheat flour, oats, salt. Turpentine, candles. A box of assorted buttons. Writing paper. Newspapers, any. The list was long. She wrote with a slate pencil, her nose three inches above the paper.

  The money to pay for it all—the community’s economic basis, certainly the economic basis of the Frends—came from a man with half a dozen copperworks near Swansea, a man who, as a child, had enjoyed visions of Christ and Socrates, had larked with them on the banks of the Tawe, but now had eight hundred souls labouring under him and needed others to do the dream work. The money was routed through Thorpe, though it seemed the benefactor might be having doubts, had perhaps found dreamers more convenient to Swansea. There wasn’t much money in the house. There had not—according to Cornelius, who had complained of it to Lacroix more than once—been any fresh funds since Thorpe’s last visit in the winter, and little enough then. Lacroix watched Emily pick the necessary out of a purse of crumpled blue satin then went to his coat, teased a water-stained—a sea-stained—pound note from the slit pocket (there was one more inside, perhaps two) and tried to make her take it. She wouldn’t. She was polite but firm. “You are our guest,” she said. “We invited you here.”

  He was still trying to talk her round when Cornelius came out of his room. He had already taken some of the tincture, had swallowed it with his coffee immediately Lacroix had given him the bottle, and minutes afterwards had stripped off his clothes and gone to bathe in the water beyond the boathouse, talking incessantly—in a
nd out of the water—and boasting that today he would simply bite his way through the earth and pick treasures like raspberry pips from between his teeth. Now, however, as the three men set off for the excavation, the drug shifted its mood and Cornelius walked in silence under the shade of a tasselled umbrella. On the hill he sat staring at the empty sea (the islanders would rather grow potatoes than catch fish), then climbed into the trench, stretched himself out on the earth and fell asleep. Ranald and Lacroix looked down at him. The likeness to a corpse in a grave was strong but neither man mentioned it.

  “It may have been wiser not to have given it to him,” said Lacroix. He had told Ranald about the drug, had told him too how he came by it. Glasgow. Blue orange. The new police.

  The two of them sat on the grass. The kilt had a nice way of settling around Ranald’s knees. Lacroix wondered if an Englishman might ever be allowed to wear one. He thought not. “May I ask,” he said, “if your hands ever hurt you now? Or your wrists, I mean. Of course.”

  “It is ten years,” said Ranald. His hooks were crossed in his lap like cutlery. “In the winter the cold goes into the bone. But I am used to it now.”

  “You were with General Abercrombie?”

  “I was. And you with General Moore, I think.”

  “Yes. Though we might have preferred Abercrombie.”

  Ranald nodded. They sat in silence. They had compared their generals. Would they now compare regiments? If he asks me, thought Lacroix, I will tell him plainly. Regiment, squadron. I do not know this man but I trust him as I would trust him in a battle.

  He waited but nothing came.

  Below them the peat diggers were at their work again. Lacroix had learned the name of the spade they used—a troighsgear. He asked Ranald who the people were.