Now We Shall Be Entirely Free

by Andrew Miller

  “It is Donald Mackinnon and his sons Donald and Duncan. And the woman is Peggy Mackinnon and the other man is Robert Flynn. The child is Wee Annie.”

  The child moved in loops around the adults, small arms whirling. She had nothing on her head and the light shone off her black hair.

  “I had better go down to help them,” said Ranald, getting to his feet. “If he wakes and wishes to start the work I can come up again.”

  He set off, descending the hill at the kind of steady pace good infantry advanced at in the line. After Egypt the Highland regiments had become famous. When they paraded through London people leaned from their windows to see them pass, though there was some surprise at their not being larger men.

  When the child saw Ranald she ran up the slope to meet him. She spoke with him, then looked past him to where Lacroix was still sitting by the trench. She waved; he waved back, delighted to be saluted by a child who did not need to wave to anyone, certainly not to him. And how intrigued she must be, Wee Annie, with Ranald’s hooks! She would remember them all her life, tell her children, her grandchildren. Say she was six or seven now (he knew he was not very good at guessing children’s ages) then she might, conceivably, live to see the year 1870! See a world he would not see. See what? Gas, steam ships. Electrical this and that. A sky full of air balloons. Balloons driven by steam? Why not? Sightseers would fly to the islands from London, drop anchor in a spot like this, swarm around with their sketch books, then up the ladder again and off to God knows. Iceland. Greenland. America? What if one day wee Annie emigrated in a balloon?

  He was deep in this—the imagined departure for the New World by air balloon—when he heard himself addressed. He thought Cornelius must have woken but when he turned he saw it was Emily. She was wearing the solar glasses. She laughed self-consciously as he took her in.

  “I look like an insect,” she said. “Do I?”

  “No,” he said. “Not at all.”

  “I don’t mind,” she said. “Jane takes care of beauty. I am here for other things.”

  He nearly asked, what things? But corrected himself to say, “She does not have it all.”

  He could not see her eyes clearly behind the glass, nor could he decide if she coloured a little or if it was just the sun on her cheeks, the heat. She looked down, took the glasses off and peered into the trench.

  “Is that Cornelius?”

  “It is. He is sleeping. The laudanum, I suppose. I hope I did right to give it to him.”

  “I am glad you did,” she said. “It will help him until we go to Glasgow.”

  He nodded at this. He was getting into the bad habit of pretending to have heard what he had not, but she guessed it and repeated herself.

  “So you have settled on a time, then,” he said.

  “I have written to Mr. Rizzo this morning. I do not know what inspired me but I am glad. I have told him he must expect me within the month. And I have asked him to assist in finding a reputable tooth surgeon for Cornelius. We need something better than a mere puller. Such people must exist.”

  He saw now that she had a square of paper in her hand, a little package.

  “Is Ranald not with you?” she asked.

  “He went down to the peat diggers.”

  “The Mackinnons.”

  “Yes,” he said. “And here is the child coming up to us.”

  Half a minute later and she was there, wee Annie. A tangle of black hair, eyes as black as a gypsy child. She had carried something up with her. She glanced at Lacroix but held it out to Emily. Emily took it, spoke to the girl, and gave her the letter. The child ran down the hill with it. She tumbled twice—perhaps for the joy of it—then reached Ranald, held up the letter and put it in the bag he carried over his shoulder.

  “Safely delivered,” said Lacroix. “What was it she gave to you?”

  Emily was holding it up to her face. She shrugged and passed it over the trench to Lacroix.

  “Flint,” he said. “And definitely shaped. You can see where the edge has been worked. A tool of some kind . . . A dagger? It could be. Your brother will be cock-a-hoop. Or will he be piqued that others found it?”

  She reached out a hand for it and he gave it back to her. For a few seconds she explored it with her fingertips—the chipped and rippled edge—then dropped it into the trench half a yard from Cornelius’s sleeping head.

  “We will let him find it,” she said. “When he wakes.”

  Lacroix laughed quietly. He was looking up at her from under the brim of his hat. She had arranged her face into an expression he had not seen there before. What was it? It seemed to challenge him, or challenge her brother, or challenge them all. “Were you speaking to the child in Gaelic?” he asked.

  “I was,” she said. “Ranald has taught me some and we have a grammar at the house. One must find something to do on winter evenings. You cannot forever be playing spillikins.”

  “Or music,” he said.

  “In the winter,” she said, “my fingers were raw with the cold. They bled.”

  He grimaced to show his sympathy—a fellow string player—though it was impossible to imagine the cold on such a day, to imagine it feelingly. What came instead was a scene from last winter, the high passes around Nogales, men like scarecrows huddled over smouldering fires of green wood. When she spoke again he missed it entirely. He raised his chin and she repeated it.

  “A bheil thu ’g iarraidh a dhanns?”

  “Ah,” he said. “You are trying it out on me.”

  “I am asking if you would like to walk.”

  “With you?”

  “I do not think it would cause a scandal.”

  “And how,” he asked, “do I accept?”

  “Tha,” she said.

  “Tha.”

  “Tha.”

  He accepted.

  They walked down the hill towards the sea. As they passed the diggers, Ranald raised a hand, a hook.

  “He will take your letter to the boat?” asked Lacroix.

  “It will be in Glasgow in two days. If anything can sail in this weather. I suppose they must row when there is no wind.”

  As they reached the marram grass above the beach, they turned to walk parallel with the coast. The sun was overhead. Emily wore her hat of Italian straw (it was not in perfect condition but had survived from before the embargo and was Italian in truth rather than merely in style). She wore the green glasses and a dress with sleeves that ended in little frills or flounces above her elbows. They walked between two fields of green oats and came out on to the untilled machair. Moon daisies, buttercups, purple vetch. There were black cattle grazing here, lashing their tails and moving heavily over pools of flowers.

  “Do you recognise your old mount?” asked Emily.

  “My what?”

  “The cow you rode ashore on.”

  “Oh no. She was much grander. Horns set with topaz. Emeralds.”

  She laughed, then said, “She should not be hard to find again. If you wished to leave.”

  The ground was flat or almost flat yet she walked beside him as if picking her way across a marsh. Was fear of blindness her constant thought? And would this Rizzo be able to help her? A surgeon! A sawbones! It was bad enough to have them do your hands like poor Ranald, but to have them come at your eyes!

  They walked a quarter-mile in silence. Two boys sitting up on the blackland waved to them and Lacroix waved back.

  “Who is it?” she asked.

  He told her. “Do you think they will know you?”

  “I am sure they do,” she said. “And you also.”

  “And when Thorpe arrives,” he said. “What will they make of him?”

  “Of Thorpe? They will sit on his hand like sparrows.”

  “He has no enemies, then? This marvellous Thorpe.”

  “I did
not say that.”

  “And will there be a happy day with your sister?”

  “You mean a wedding?”

  “I suppose they must wish it.”

  “Why? Because she is carrying his child? We are here, in part, to escape such conventions.”

  Lacroix frowned at the flowers. He approved. He disapproved. He had not come across it before, not among polite people.

  “Are you such a great believer in marriage, John?”

  “Some people must find it pleasant. And society must depend on it in some way.”

  “We are born into a world not of our own making,” she said. “We are told we must accept it. But why should we?”

  “Would there not be anarchy?” he asked, hoping he had heard her correctly through the noise of the birds. “Look at what happened in France. First revolution, then chaos, then dictatorship.”

  “The revolution was run by lawyers. Lawyers and journalists. Yes, and bad actors like Collot. We shall avoid them all. And we renounce violence. We despise it. Nothing good ever came of it.” She stopped by a break in the dunes, peered around herself. “Is this the way?” she asked. “I believe it is.”

  They turned on to a soft path between the dunes and stepped out on to an expanse of painfully white sand.

  “No weed-burning here,” said Lacroix.

  “Not yet,” she said. “And there are other places more profitable. They cut the best weed from the rocks offshore. Here there are no rocks.”

  It was true. The beach gave on to the sea and the sea to the horizon. An unbroken flow. They walked down and stood at the edge of the water. Here at last was a fluttering of air. They shut their eyes. It was what such distances demanded—to be taken in over the tongue, to have the intimacy of breath.

  “You said,” she began, still looking or not looking at the sea, “left shoulders forward.”

  “I did? When?”

  “In your sleep. Last night.”

  “It is a cavalry command. Left shoulders forward. We wheel to the right.”

  “I thought it was,” she said. “I think that I have read it in a newspaper. Or a novel.”

  “You like novels?”

  “Not as much as Jane. And now if I want more than a page I have to ask them to read to me.”

  “What else did I say?” he asked.

  “You spoke of your sweetheart.”

  They turned to look at each other.

  “Sweetheart?”

  “Lucy.”

  “Lucy is my sister! She lives in Bristol. She is married to a man called William Swann. She has two children, twins, who I cannot tell apart from each other.”

  “Then your sweetheart must have another name.”

  “I suppose she must,” he said. He smiled at her. “You have not told me the name of your beau. If Jane has Thorpe, who do you have?”

  “Perhaps I have Thorpe too,” she said. Or that is what he thought she said. He could not have heard it, of course. Thorpe too? What could that mean?

  He said, “In the community presumably spiritual love counts for more. More than the other.”

  “You may presume it,” she said, “but it was not spiritual love that got my sister with child last winter.”

  “He came to the island?”

  “Thorpe?” She shook her head.

  “Where then?”

  “What a strange question! And how interested you are in Thorpe and Jane.”

  He denied it. She grinned at him.

  “Jane took the boat to Oban. They were in a hotel there. I cannot tell you the number of the room.”

  They turned and began to walk along the sand. The tide was coming in. At each smooth wash of the surf it crept forward the breadth of a finger. She asked him if he could hear the peeping of the oystercatchers. He said he could, that he found it easier to hear birds than people.

  “You must have been very dashing in your uniform,” she said.

  “Dashing?” He saw himself—or rather he saw the portrait in the house. Had it been in reach he would immediately have lifted it down and turned it to the wall. “I fear I thought myself so.”

  “As a rule I do not like soldiers,” she said. “Though I like Ranald. Ranald has saved us more than once.”

  “I like him too,” said Lacroix.

  “Why did you join?” she asked.

  “Why . . . ?”

  “The army. Why did you join?”

  “We are at war, Emily.”

  “I know lots of men who are not in the army. Or the navy.”

  “Like Thorpe?”

  “Thorpe, for one. And Cornelius.”

  “My father had died,” he said. “I did not know what to do with myself. And I was used to horses and riding.”

  “And that was enough?”

  “Yes. It must have been.”

  “Did you think about killing men?”

  The question startled him. He shook his head vigorously. “I thought of uniforms and riding and getting away from rooms where I used to sit with my father.”

  “I do not mean to taunt you,” she said. She asked him to tell her about his father and he did so. His character, his love of village music. The tall books written out with songs, pressed flowers between the pages. She listened carefully, despite the heat. He felt her listening as a gift to him. He thanked her.

  “You have no need to thank me, John.”

  They had come near the end of the beach. They turned about and regarded their own footprints.

  “If you were to look away,” she said, “I think I would take off my shoes and stockings. Or in truth I don’t care if you look away or not as you have certainly seen a woman’s feet before.”

  She had spoken rapidly; he caught about half of it, but as soon as she bent down he understood what she was about. He stared for a moment then looked away to the dunes. When he turned back she was standing in the sea. She had her stockings and shoes in one hand. The other hand held up her dress.

  “Will you not come in too?” she said.

  He sat on the sand and began to push at a heel of a boot. She laughed. “Do you always grit your teeth so when you take off your boots?”

  He laughed too. “My ribs are still sore,” he said. “My friends in Glasgow.”

  Now he was sitting he saw that there were tiny skeletons on the sand. He had not noticed them when he was walking. This, for example, the shell and claws of a crab, perfectly dry, perfectly white, the whole carapace smaller than his thumbnail. Was the sand made of such things? Were they walking on a million bones? A million million ground small by the sea?

  He got the boots off and rolled up his trousers. Emily had already set off and was three, four yards ahead of him. He followed her, wading through shallow water that breathed and sucked between his toes. He was walking in her wake and sometimes felt the print of her feet beneath the soles of his own. She was talking; her words flew past her shoulders like scraps of paper in a paper chase. Something about hatboxes? Then her words came differently and he realised she had started to sing. He was not close enough to pick up the tune so he started his own song: “Blow the wind southerly, southerly southerly! Blow the wind southerly . . . ”

  He wished the beach was miles long, wished he could sing and walk behind her until the moon rose like a petal and he was cured by something as simple as beauty, but when she came again to the spot where they had first arrived at the edge of the sea she stopped and waited for him.

  “We shall have to dry our feet,” she said, stepping out of the water on to the sand. “Do you suppose the sand itself might dry them?”

  “If we ran about?” he asked. But it was too hot for running. He considered offering her the use of his stockings but she sat on the sand and began to dab away with her own. He sat nearby, took off his hat and wiped his brow.

 
“You are very free,” he said.

  “Free?” She stopped wiping the sand from her toes. She stared at him through the green glass that now, through some trick of the light, had become entirely opaque.

  “I mean . . . this . . . your manner . . . ”

  “Free?” It was as though there were no word he could have used that would have stung her more. “I shall tell you,” she said, “how I am free. I am an unmarried woman no longer in her first youth. I am what some people call a spinster. I have in savings something less than seven pounds. I live under the protection of my brother, which is to say—though I love him as a sister should—that I live with no effective protection whatsoever. As for the community, for all I know they will never arrive. We have not heard from them in weeks. I have not the slightest idea how we shall survive another winter here. And if that was not enough I am, day by day, losing what remains of my sight and so must, in a short time, lose whatever small independence I still enjoy. So, you will tell me please where, in all of this, you find me to be free. Is it because I take off my stockings to paddle in the sea? That I have let you see me do it? Is that my freedom?”

  She held his gaze then looked away. She was shaken by her own anger. He thought she might weep but if there were tears the green glass hid them from him. He felt as he had when he and Ranald watched the emigration ship. Side-struck. Implicated. He poked a finger into the sand, drew a shape there, then smoothed it away.

  “I was thoughtless,” he said.

  She shook her head.

  “I have offended you, Emily.”

  “No,” she said. “Though I might have offended you.”

  “Mr. Rizzo,” he said. “I feel certain he will be able to help. Did you not say he was eminent?”

  “I know almost nothing about him,” she said, though her tone now was matter-of-fact. She smiled a sad smile. “Let us not spoil the day, John. All these things. They are an old story and one I am tired of. Now, if you will give me your back I will put on my stockings. I can assure you I am very particular when it comes to questions of modesty. Thorpe calls me an old vestal. A prude.”