Now We Shall Be Entirely Free

by Andrew Miller

  “Back to where we came from?”

  MacCuish nodded.

  “That’s no use to us,” said Calley.

  “You want to go north?” asked MacCuish.

  “We want to go where our friend has gone. Unless you know some other way to find him?” It ended there. The men did not meet each other’s eyes. MacCusk splashed drink in the glasses for a last time, then beds were made up near the fire, the visitors lay down, the lamp was extinguished.

  Four, five hours later, MacCuish and his cousin got up from the floor. An unshuttered window showed the first greys of morning.

  “You are staying?” asked MacCuish.

  “Unless you want to take us north,” said Calley.

  “No,” said MacCuish.

  “Then we’re staying.”

  The men left. There was the sound of the wooden latch, a moment of colder air, and half a minute afterwards the bark of the dog again, sharp and single.

  The woman rose next. She slid down from the cubby where the bed was and sat lacing her boots. When she saw Medina and Calley she paused as though surprised to find them still at the house. They sat out of her way while she went about her morning chores. When MacCusk came down from the bed he stood at a distance from Calley and Medina and weighed them up. Medina, without looking at Calley, knew he would have his coat unbuttoned, knew he would be returning MacCusk’s regard with perfect steadiness.

  “We will eat,” said MacCusk, not looking at the others now, “then you must find somewhere else to go. Ask in the village. Someone will go across with you.”

  “To the north,” said Calley.

  MacCusk nodded, began to tie back his hair with a piece of leather cord that dangled between his fingers. Medina stood up. Though he knew it was not entirely safe to leave Calley with MacCusk, he needed to piss. He found his way outside, scraping his head on the lintel as he went. Cold, clear air; the usual frenzy of birds. Full day was still an hour off, but he could see the beach where they had landed and half a dozen thatched houses on the heights above.

  He walked behind the house looking for somewhere he could use as a latrine. He saw the woman, a dripping bucket in one hand, coming towards him.

  “Buenos dias,” he said. She stopped. He did not think she was afraid of him. He stepped closer. “Hablas español?”

  She shrugged, or she moved the shoulder on the side that was not weighed with the bucket.

  “De donde eres?”

  “Brasilia.”

  “Una brasileña?”

  She nodded. He tried to guess how old she was. Younger, he thought, than she looked. Had she sailed from Brazil on the warship? The Achille?

  “Has cruzado el mundo,” he said.

  “Sí,” she said. “Hecho.”

  He asked her if she had seen the Englishman. She nodded again. He wanted to ask her why her husband was angry. Instead he asked simply, “Qué ha pasado aquí?”

  “Pasado?” she said.

  “Sí.” Then a moment of certainty. A thought that had not, until that instant, occurred to him at all. “Está aquí, no? Todavía aquí.” He’s still here.

  Her gaze dropped to his chest then lifted to his face again. He wondered if she had ever been a slave.

  “Sí,” she said. “Ele está aquí.” He is here.

  She walked past him, carrying the water to the house. Medina went to piss. Another treeless island. He found a rock and watched the heat of himself steam off its surface.

  When he went back into the house he heard, then saw, the woman and MacCusk in a hushed wrangling with each other. They used three languages, three at least, while Calley watched them from his chair, looking now at the husband, now at the wife. MacCusk was insisting on something, on silence perhaps, but Sara was holding her ground. They argued either side of the fire and its light lit them strangely. The copper of her face, the blue and grey of MacCusk’s; the sailor’s body like a tool worked from wood, from the roots of something, the woman in her old gown, stout and short but supple and upright. It was MacCusk who backed away. He unslung his jacket from a hook on the door and left the house.

  Calley looked at Medina.

  Medina said, “He’s here. On the island.”

  “Our man?” asked Calley.

  “Yes.”

  “Is he close?”

  “I think she knows,” said Medina.

  Calley turned to her. “Go on then,” he said.

  “This night,” she said. And to Medina, “Esta noche.”

  Calley shook his head. “By esta noche he might have flown away. He does that.” He moved one hand. A wing.

  “No,” she said.

  “No?”

  “Vocês são seus amigos?” she said.

  Medina nodded.

  She paused. “Ele está morto,” she said.

  “Morto?” said Medina. “Muerte?”

  “Sí, muerte.”

  “What’s this?” said Calley. “Is she saying what I think she’s saying?”

  “She says he’s dead,” says Medina. He laughed. The woman gaped at him. “No,” he said. “Es . . . triste.” But he almost laughed a second time. It was over. This lunatic crawling after a man who vanished before them like a trick of the light.

  “Where?” said Calley. “How?”

  “Dead,” she said.

  “I’m asking how,” said Calley. “How dead? How?”

  She raised a hand to her neck, then drew the tips of her fingers across her skin. The meaning was plain though it looked more like a caress.

  “His throat?” said Calley. “Someone kill him? Your husband?”

  “No,” she answered, “no one.”

  “Se mato?” asked Medina.

  “Sí,” she said.

  “In English if you please,” said Calley.

  “He killed himself,” said Medina.

  “Done it himself?” said Calley. “Stuck himself?”

  For several seconds they were silent. Out of sight somewhere, a clock ticked erratically.

  “Well, I didn’t see that coming,” said Calley. “Did you?”

  “No,” said Medina.

  “Course you fucking didn’t,” said Calley.

  “His guilt,” said Medina. “His . . . shame.”

  “We’ll need to see him of course,” said Calley.

  “See him?”

  “I assume that’s where she was taking us tonight. His grave. I mean I assume they didn’t just leave him for the birds.”

  The woman was following this, or trying to. “Seu túmulo?” she asked.

  Medina nodded.

  “Tonight,” she said.

  “What’s wrong with now?” asked Calley. “Porque no ahora?”

  “A suicide,” said Medina. “In such a place. You . . . hide it. You never speak of it.”

  Calley looked at him and for a moment he seemed to be thinking about it. A community of thirty, forty souls, life’s fabric rent by a stranger. The need to forget, to look away. Then he stood up and buttoned his coat. “Bollocks,” he said, “we’ll go now. And we’ll need a spade.” He looked at the woman. “To dig?” he said, and lifting one boot he mimed for her the driving of a blade into the earth.

  The grave of the Englishman was as far from the cove, the house, the settlement, as such a small island would allow. They walked, the three of them, less than a mile across the place’s humped stone back. The woman, head covered, her jacket a sailor’s jacket, walked at the front. Then came Medina, then Calley carrying a peat spade on his shoulder like a musket. They walked from sea to sea, then out on to a promontory, the island’s last extension. A short-legged horse—a thing still as the land it stood on—watched them come. The mind of an animal up here. The mind of a person. How much sky can one life bear?

  “Here,” said the woman
, pointing to what they were all already looking at, the shallow heaping of stones between her boot caps and the cliff-edge.

  “You’d think,” said Calley, “they would just have heaved him over the edge. Still, lucky for us I suppose.”

  The woman lingered long enough to see him lifting away the first stones, to see him stare at Medina until Medina joined him. Take a stone, lift it, set it down. Take another. Then she left them.

  “Adios,” said Calley. “Hasta la vista!”

  Under the stones were squares of peat, then smaller pieces the size of your fist, then smaller still, a black rubble mixed with roots and pebbles. It was not a deep grave, nor did they need the spade. Calley knelt one side, Medina the other. The wind tousled their hair, played with the hems of their coats. They came to a layer of stone again and underneath it a sheet of canvas, something spared from a sail, brown with tallow. Calley took off his coat, lay on his belly and stretched down. When he tugged free a corner of the canvas they saw a man’s black hair. He tugged again and they had the whole head. The weight of the stones had done something to the shape of his face, and the peat or the tallow or both had begun to colour his skin, but he was not, it seemed, much altered by his stay in the ground and would, presumably, be recognised by those who had known him in life. The wound to the neck had been bandaged with the man’s stock, the linen still white in places though most of it brown-red like iron in a rock.

  “It’s him,” said Medina.

  Calley looked across the grave. “You what?”

  “It’s him. The man I saw in the painting at the house. The man responsible for the massacre. In the ground. Finished.”

  “It doesn’t look anything like him,” said Calley.

  “No. It’s him. I will swear it.”

  “Fuck off,” said Calley. “Look at him.”

  “I have looked.”

  “Look at him again. I’ve seen the man. Remember? I’ve seen him. This is not even close.”

  Medina shrugged. “I disagree.”

  “You can disagree all you like. This is not the cunt we’re looking for. And you know it. So stop pissing around.”

  He dragged the canvas lower. The man’s hands had been arranged on his belly. One hand open, one closed. Calley turned the closed hand over and peeled back the fingers. Something bright slid from the palm and lodged itself between the man’s body and his arm. Calley, lowering himself a little further into the grave, rummaged in the folds of the man’s coat and came up holding a circle of bright metal, a polished brass case like the case of a small watch.

  “What is it?” asked Medina.

  Calley shook his head. He was working at the catch. Was there a lock? Then it opened and he stared at it, baffled at first, then grinning. He held it up for Medina though did not let him touch it. Medina squatted, one hand on the earth to steady himself. Inside the case, on what might be a piece of ivory, was a painting of an eye. It was clearly a woman’s eye, a single blue eye with a curl of blonde hair above it. At the eye’s inner crease, painted perhaps by a different hand, perhaps later, were two grey tears.

  “His Lucy,” said Medina.

  Calley nodded. “How do they make it so small?”

  “A brush with two hairs,” said Medina. “One hair . . . ”

  For almost a minute, under the raving of the birds who rode the currents at the cliff’s edge, they studied it, the woman’s eye staring back at them as though through a keyhole. Then Calley snapped the case shut, a small sound that somehow, in all that emptiness, held its own.

  “You must give it back to him,” said Medina. “We are not tomb thieves.”

  “Don’t you worry about that,” said Calley. “Tomb thieves! What the fuck!” He laughed, though not unkindly, and getting on to his belly again, he reached back down to the man’s hands. Closed one, left one open. Pulled up the canvas.

  17

  To reach the women’s ward you passed through the room where the boy with the tumorous neck had his bed, then through the corridor, past Rizzo’s consulting room, the steps to the theatre, and on to where a curtained doorway was guarded by a female doorkeeper, a type of nun perhaps, sitting on a stool. Lacroix said who he had come for. The woman stood, drew back the curtain and pointed.

  It was the first bed on the left-hand side. Beyond it were ten or twelve more, the same on the other side where the morning light was slightly stronger. All the beds were occupied. Some of the women were sitting up in their gowns. One, whose bed was opposite Emily’s, dragged a brush through long red hair.

  What is gallantry on a women’s ward? He smiled, bowed. Some of the women smiled back. The woman with the red hair went on with her brushing.

  There was no chair by Emily’s bed so he stood at its side looking down at her. She was sleeping, lying on her back, deeply absent. They would have given her something, of course. He hoped they had. A draught, a calmative. Grains of opium. Her left eye was covered with a dressing held in place by a bandage that wound diagonally around her head. She looked neither better nor worse than he had imagined her. She looked . . . different, as if the shock of what had taken place the previous day was in her still. As though, stretched out on the table under the glass roof (someone stepping forward, apologetically, purposefully, to keep her head from moving), she had clenched around her fear and not yet let go.

  He bent to her. He wanted to whisper her name but was afraid of waking her to pain. He wanted to touch her shoulder or her hand but was aware he was still being watched. So he stood there, a messenger from the outer world who had, apparently, forgotten his message. He looked round. The red-haired woman was speaking to him. He thought she said “peaceful,” or “piece-meal.” He thanked her (for what?) and was preparing to leave when Rizzo swept aside the curtain and entered the ward with a cry of “Good morning, ladies!” He smiled at Lacroix, came to stand next to him.

  “Well, you have seen for yourself,” he said.

  “Seen?”

  “Miss Frend.”

  “I have. Yes.”

  The procedure, explained Rizzo, speaking in a clear though confidential voice close to Lacroix’s right ear, had been without any alarming incident. True, it had lasted somewhat longer than he had hoped—longer, certainly, than Miss Frend would have hoped. But at the end she had been able to stand and come down the ward with no assistance but his own arm. The dressing had been changed this morning. The eye looked as he would wish it to. There was some fever in the night but that had passed off. He was, in conclusion, very pleased.

  “This is excellent news,” said Lacroix. He felt slightly nauseous. He had drunk a lot of brandy the night before and going up the stairs to his room had tripped on the top step, gone down on the boards like one struck. A servant, a girl with a club foot, had seen him and grinned. He thought she might have said something saucy to him.

  “I am glad she is sleeping,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Rizzo. “Yes. We will let her sleep. Then a little nourishment. Then more sleep. Come back this afternoon. It may be she will be ready for a short conversation.”

  “You will tell her I was here?”

  “I will.”

  “And that I am coming back?”

  “Also that.”

  “Good. Thank you. I cannot say how . . . relieved I am.”

  “Ah, but you have,” said the surgeon.

  Lacroix left the hospital—or he set out to leave but having descended two rather than three flights of stairs he turned at the volute, was led by it, its wooden flourish, and walked some twenty paces before waking to the fact he was not where he had expected to be. He was in a gallery at the rear of the building, a part of the hospital he had not seen before. There were large windows with long views, and on the opposite wall life-sized portraits of men who looked like hanging judges but who were no doubt donors or hospital governors—tobacco merchants making a lunge for heaven
. Halfway down the gallery a collection of armchairs and a pair of leathery aspidistras made a kind of public drawing room. Two of the chairs were occupied by men dressed in the hospital uniform of brown woollen robes, those for the men indistinguishable from those worn by the women. They were playing chess, were engrossed, and did not look up at Lacroix. He settled himself in the chair nearest the window, stared out a while then let his eyes close. He felt subtly poisoned by the brandy, perhaps more unwell than the chess players. Would he object if someone came and wrapped him in a brown robe? He thought he would not. Yet he also felt perfectly at ease, languorous, cheerful. Tempting to call it happiness.

  On the way up from the inn—though he had not allowed the words to sound in his head—he had come close to convincing himself that Emily Frend was dead. He would meet a grim-faced Rizzo, be given a parcel of her clothes and be taken to a room to view her corpse. But she was alive still! They had cut her and she had stood on her own feet, had descended a flight of stairs with no more help than the surgeon’s arm! O Shoreditch! What daughters you have!

  He slept for an hour—deep rest, deep contentment—and on waking (the chess players both gone) he went down the last flight of stairs and out into the day just as the cathedral bells were sounding midday. Already he felt a familiarity with the town, or at least with the streets and buildings between the inn and the hospital. That shop, that stall, that nailed door, that beggar. The Ship Bank was on the Trongate. He had spotted it the previous afternoon, though it had already closed for the day. Now its doors stood open and a man in livery tipped his hat as Lacroix passed inside. It was, after the hospital, a reassuring place to be. Mirrors, marble heads, large, polished tables. It smelled, he thought, of the slight bitterness of ink, but there was nothing in the air to remind him of bodies and the troubles of bodies. Ahead of him, behind a high counter, sat a row of clerks, their faces seen through wooden rails. Shorter men, approaching the counter, made use of one of the scuffed wooden boxes provided for the purpose. Lacroix did not need a box, but only just. He stretched up; the clerk heard him out, answered, saw his answer went unheard and pointed to the stairs. “Drummond!” he said. “Mr. Drummond . . . ”