“And Ranald,” she said.
He nodded. He thought they both might feel the comfort of Ranald’s presence.
On Queen Street again they walked up to the square, counted the sheep grazing in the middle—big, black-faced Cheviots—then came down Miller Street and along the Trongate to the coffee house. Here, in an oval room—a space the members paid twenty-five shillings a year for but which strangers, for a limited period, were permitted to enjoy free of charge—they sat near the doors at one of the few tables still unoccupied. It took ten minutes to catch the waiter’s eye and it was another ten before he stood beside them. They ordered coffee and hot chocolate and a bowl of sweet cream. Over a wooden rail along the wall newspapers hung like laundry. Lacroix asked Emily if she would object to his fetching a couple, seeing what the larger world had been up to without them. She did not object. She asked if he would read to her what was of interest. He said he would, gladly. He went and came back with a Glasgow paper and a copy of The Times. He started with the local paper, shook it out, smoothed it.
“They have built a new lighthouse,” he said.
“In Glasgow?”
“No, no. Somewhere off the east coast. They say you’ll be able to see its light from thirty-five miles away.”
She nodded. He tried to find something more interesting than a lighthouse, and came on an article—a puff—for a proposed lunatic asylum to be constructed in the form of a saltire in one of the city’s parks. The design was intended to allow a single warden to stand at the centre of the building and see into all its wings, the wings themselves to be divided according to sex, social class and degree of insanity. He read the piece out in a mildly satirical voice, though gave it up when the waiter returned, not wishing to appear to be slighting the city’s ambitions for itself. He moved on to the London paper, started with a letter about the king’s jubilee in October, then some news about Captain Barclay’s walking challenge (he seemed likely to win his bet), and finally, an editorial concerning the Duke of York’s former mistress, Mrs. Clarke, who was threatening fresh revelations about the sale of army commissions.
“Did you buy yours?” asked Emily.
“Hmm?”
“Your commission. Did you buy it?”
“Of course.”
“How much did it cost you?”
He could see, over her shoulders, a table of young officers, infantry men in high spirits, their coats still as they had come from the tailors, a red undimmed.
“It cost me the value of four good fields. That and some ready money from my inheritance.”
She nodded. She seemed satisfied with this. He hoped she would let the matter drop. The last thing he wanted was to catch the attention of the young men, to have them pull up their chairs, find himself in the role of “one who knows,” fending off good-natured enquiries with evasions, lies.
“I have something written down,” she said, “about military men. About the military. I will read it to you later.”
“As you wish,” he said. He could not tell if this was a return to her mood of the early morning, the spikiness of it, or if her question about his commission was simple curiosity. Where was she now? Was her excitement in the hospital garden all gone? Was she about to tell him she could not go through with it, not, at least, tomorrow? He studied her; she studied him back. He took up the paper again but did not read out any more from it. He turned the page, turned another and stopped at a map of Portugal. Beneath the map was an account of some fighting at Oporto (On landing we took up our position on a height where we had an uninterrupted view of the town. We could see for several miles in any direction, and distinctly observe the whole of the enemy’s cavalry retreating . . . ). He glanced to the bottom of the column and saw that the correspondent was from the 14th Light Dragoons. A Captain Hawker. Hawker? He didn’t know him, and the 14th had not been on the retreat. He read through the account carefully for any mention of his own regiment but there was none.
“Perhaps we might leave now,” said Emily. “It is very loud in here.”
“Is it?” He folded the paper and passed her her hat. The larger world be damned. His work, his interest, were here. As they left the table, one of the officers, barely old enough for the moustache he wore, inclined his head to them. A courtesy—absurd, touching.
They walked again. She could, as she had told Rizzo, walk all day without fatigue. They visited dull churches. They looked in the windows of shops and he noted how, nose to the glass, she peered in with real desire at dresses and hats, at shoes that would not last more than a day or two on the island. They went down to the river, crossed and recrossed the bridge by the Broomielaw. He pointed out the steps, almost hidden now under high water, where he had come ashore from the silent cousin’s boat. She knew the story of that visit, though there were pages of it he had removed, mostly to do with the orange seller (his thoughts, her kicks). He wondered what he would do if he saw her again. Would he know her? Would he be sure? And what would she do? Run? Laugh? Or fetch her friends and this time strip the shirt off his back, a trick he imagined them having a special, rapid method of performing. But more than the orange seller, he hoped to avoid coming upon the men who had helped him that night, the new police. He was grateful to them, of course, but thought of them as the type who would deliver you to the scaffold without rancour or any ill-will, regretfully even, because that was where their enquiries, their written records, had directed them. They were the type who remembered things. The slow, methodical men of the future.
At six they went back to the inn. They spoke to the landlord about rooms. Emily was given her room of the night before, though this time she would not need to share it.
“I cannae do so well for you, sir,” said the landlord. “We’re packed like a herring barrel on account of it being a club night. I can only offer ye a bed wi’ a foreign gentleman.”
“Foreign?”
“I’m no expert but I have him down as a gentleman of Spain. Came in wi’ an Englishman I took to be his manservant, but then the way he spoke to him I’m no sure I could say any more who is servant and who master. Anyway, seems they prefer to be apart for the night so I put the Englishman in the attic.”
“Then the Spaniard is the master,” said Lacroix. “If the other is in the attic.”
“Not necessarily. For the Spanish gentleman had the room on the understanding he would gi’ up one half of the bed. If there was a need for it.”
“Yes,” said Lacroix, perplexed, irritated. “Whatever is most convenient.”
He and Emily took a table in the dining room and ordered supper. They had the room to themselves for a while, then the members of the club began to arrive and the place grew rowdy. He hoped she would eat but was not surprised to see her leave most of her food on the plate. He ate little enough himself, and after they had drunk a glass each of wine and had whatever entertainment was to be found in watching the club empty their punch bowls and begin on speeches, they went up to her room. The room overlooked the stable yard and the noise from the dining room was no louder than the sound of the sea heard from the house on the island. She took off her shawl and sat on the end of the bed. He thought of how she must long for her sister, or even for Cornelius. Of how, instead of family, she had him.
“You said there was something you wanted to read to me, Emily. About military men.”
“Did I?”
“In the coffee house. When I was reading that piece on Mrs. Clarke and the Duke of York. Do you remember?”
“It does not matter any more, John.”
“Does not . . . ?”
“I was petulant. It does not matter now.”
“Even so, I am curious. What would Emily Frend write down about military men?”
She shrugged, went to her bag, lifted it on to the bed, unfastened the buckles and sank her hands inside. After a few moments she drew out a book bound with green cloth.
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“Your diary?” he asked.
“More like a drawer,” she said, “where I keep the things that interest me. Or did so when I saw them first.” She carried the book to the window. There was still an hour of light left in the sky. In the yard the groom held a horse’s leg between his knees and was picking the hoof.
“The military,” she began, “the military is . . . is but a . . . dastardly carcass . . . of . . . of . . . ”
She held the book out to him. He reached across the bed to take it from her. The writing slanted down the page. Letters were missing, no t was crossed. The sort of writing that would earn a schoolboy a thrashing. He moved his finger, line to line, until he found the place.
“Of corruption, full of sottishness and selfishness, preying upon the hard labour of honest men.”
“I copied it from a pamphlet,” she said.
He smiled, hoping to show he had taken no offence. “I think there is some truth in it. A dastardly carcass of corruption. I wonder if the writer was a military man himself.”
As he held the book a dozen pages fanned across his thumb and when he glanced down he immediately saw his own name. Today John and I . . . He closed the book and placed it on the end of the bed.
“I know,” she said, “what I am going to wear tomorrow. I decided on it before we left the island.”
He nodded and looked down at the floor, at the knots in the boards that were, he thought, the tree’s hidden flowers. He had, during the last hours, been marshalling a short but compelling argument against the coming day. He had been waiting for the right moment to deliver it, but now the moment had come he felt no conviction.
“Emily,” he began. “Emily . . . ”
“No,” she answered. “You mean it well but it does not help me. Do you remember what I spoke to you of when we sat beside the sea that day? I am going tomorrow because I mean to keep hold of whatever independence I still possess. I intend to fight for it, my liberty. For that I will do anything at all. I will undergo anything. Can you understand that?”
He could. He thought he could.
“John?” she said.
“Yes?”
“Do you think I will bleed much?”
“No,” he said. He turned from her, found himself in the mirror, the not-entirely-plausible reflection. Then saw the smudges on the glass—the city drawn by a woman’s finger in the morning.
His own room was on the floor above and for the moment at least he had it to himself. The foreigner, the Spanish gentleman, had not yet retired, though there was a pack on the chair, and spread on one side of the bed, a horse-coat that looked to have seen a good deal of hard use.
On the near side, the door side of the bed, was his own bag, carried up by the landlord or one of the servants. There was not much in it. He had brought only what was essential—no writing case or pistol. Once his draft arrived at the Ship Bank—and please God it would, and soon, for he did not know how else they would manage—he intended to fill the bag with new things. Shirts, a new waistcoat, perhaps a pair of walking boots like the ones Cornelius had, with oil-silk cuffs above the ankles and sturdy back-straps for pulling them on.
He took out his toothbrush (it was one he had found in the house in Somerset and that he thought had probably belonged to one of his sisters; his own, tortoiseshell and badger bristle, was somewhere in old Castile). He poured water from the pitcher into the basin, splashed his face, rubbed away at his teeth, then carried the basin to the window, opened it, and emptied its contents over the roof tiles below.
In the bed he lay gazing at the outline of a beam above his head. He had no candle with him and the beam gradually lost its edges, dissolving into an obscurity from which it seemed, occasionally, to reappear before sinking again, more completely. Now that he was motionless he realised he was exhausted. It was like an echo of his fever days at Jesse Campbell’s house. He drifted, his thoughts moving over the remembered day in a series of touchings that seemed both predictable and random, like a bee’s progress across a garden. He saw the cherubs in the theatre, the moustache of the young officer in the coffee house. From there it was Rizzo, the feel of his face, his shut eyes, the feel of Emily’s, her breath on his wrist . . .
He slept, uneasily, some residual sense of self hanging like dross in an expanse that was neither entirely silent nor entirely dark. He began a dream in which the cleaning woman in the glass dome was his sister Lucy, and that she knelt in a black slick of blood, scrubbing brush in hand, talking calmly to him about her Comforter. Then something cut across it all and he came awake in a series of swoops, confused, frightened, some primal fear on him.
“What?” he said. “What?”
“Tran-quillo,” came a voice, a mouth that could not be more than a few inches from his ear.
“Ah . . . The Spanish gentleman . . . ”
“Yes,” said the voice. “The Spanish gentleman.”
Lacroix shifted towards his own side of the bed. He felt the other settling. He was not sorry to have company, someone to dispel the vile, senseless dream. “Madrid?” he asked.
“Cordoba.”
“Cordoba. The south.”
“You know Spain?” asked the voice. “Usted habla español?”
“Habla? Pequeño. Su pais . . . es muy interesante.”
“Gracias. Muy amable.”
“You are going home now? To Cordoba?”
“Not yet,” said the voice. “But one day . . . ”
“Mmm,” said Lacroix, circling towards sleep again. “For me also. Home, but not yet . . . ”
He turned away. They slept back to back through the depths of the night, on each face a frown of concentration sleep softened but could not erase. In the morning, when Lacroix woke, the man had already gone. The man, his pack, his heavy coat.
They ran the last yards to the cathedral, hurrying in from a rainburst, Emily clutching Lacroix’s elbow as they came through the door into a space of high, even light. It was a few minutes past eleven thirty. They stood by the door catching their breath and brushing raindrops from their faces.
They walked to the choir screen, passed through and sat at the back, a pew close to a window, somewhere they could see from and be seen. They had talked in practical terms on the way up from the inn. When he would come to the hospital, what of her things he should bring with him. She had asked if he had given Rizzo any money. He said he had not. In truth he had none to give until the draft came. “I’ll pay for my own eyes,” she had said, “though I trust it will not be more than seven pounds.”
Now they rested in the hush of the place. There had, presumably, been a matins, and there would, presumably, be something later, but for the moment the place was an unlit theatre and the few figures who came down from the nave were casual and hardly bothered to glance at them.
On the ceiling, the wooden ribs were studded with carved stone bosses. Lacroix described them for her, what he could see of them under their veilings of shadow. Bishops, saints, a white hart, a white rose. A thistle. She said she liked thistles.
“Better than roses?” he asked.
She didn’t reply. She had shut her eyes and appeared to have withdrawn completely, though when the window beside them suddenly brightened—the end of the rain shower—she was aware of it, the swell of coloured light, and she smiled.
“I don’t object to religion,” she said, “when it’s human.”
“Yes,” he said, unsure if he had heard her rightly but sufficiently used to her flights to suspect that he had. He looked at her, the settled profile of her face, and thought of the inn where now all rooms were surely free, all beds. It was not too late—and Rizzo might be relieved. Next to the horror of having a knife in your eye must be the horror of being the one who wielded it. They would walk back to the Trongate, they would take a room, they would lie down together. After all, you did not need eyes for any of t
hat. And when they were done they would rise up like the king and queen of the day. He called to her, silently, told himself that if his calling woke her, if she were suddenly to look at him . . .
Then he saw, beyond her, standing in the side aisle just at the edge of the wash of window light, the figure of a man. It was Rizzo. He had come in person. He was holding a furled umbrella to his chest, the umbrella black like his coat. Each man made a small gesture of recognition. Lacroix touched Emily’s hand. She opened her eyes, read in his own what she needed to, and turned towards Rizzo. The surgeon made a bow. She stood, shuffled sideways along the pew. Lacroix was still sitting. He watched them exchange a few whispered words. He felt entirely unable to move. As in Morales. As in Morales. Then both of them glanced at him, smiled, and set off for the choir screen. He twisted round in time to see her take the surgeon’s arm. Then they passed through the door to the nave—sank through it, it seemed—and he was alone.
FOUR
16
The plan was to pose as engineers though it seemed they must be close to the time they would not need to pose as anyone but themselves. Calley asked Medina to draw up a list of the islands. Asked him, told him. Medina wrote the list by candlelight in the room he shared with the stranger in Glasgow, the inn a place he himself had chosen when they came back from Dumbarton, for if he was still taking the corporal’s orders he was also, of late, experimenting with insistence and finding it sometimes worked.
On the list—ink, pen and paper supplied by the management (that’s what you get in a decent place)—he wrote down, as best he could, the names of islands as he had learned them from the various men and women he had entered into conversation with. He included, of course, the names Calley had been given by the sea captain, or that he reported being given, for he had gone alone into the house while he, Medina, stood watch in the street, the moon flickering behind clouds, a black cat observing him from a wall and seeming to hear from inside the house things he could not hear. Gracias a Dios.
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