Now We Shall Be Entirely Free

by Andrew Miller

  Upstairs had its own atmosphere. Less polish, less show, fewer people. All along the corridor shelves ran floor to ceiling. A boy on a ladder was handing down papers to two others, documents that might be older than the boys themselves.

  “Mr. Drummond?”

  “In there, sir,” said the boy up the ladder.

  The door was open. Lacroix tapped and went in. Drummond was eating something. Seeing he had a visitor he opened a drawer in his desk and placed the food inside. He listened to Lacroix, tapped the tips of his fingers together.

  “Lacroix, you say?”

  “That’s right,” said Lacroix, who had been within a heartbeat of naming himself as Lovall.

  A book was consulted. Lists of names, some with figures against them, others without.

  “No,” said Drummond. “Nothing. Not today.”

  “I’ll come tomorrow then,” said Lacroix.

  “Aye,” said Drummond. He closed the ledger. Lacroix could see now what he had put in the drawer. A slab of cheese with the ragged half-moon indent of a man’s bite.

  He walked back to the hospital, half his thoughts on Emily, half on the need for ready cash. If it came to it, he could pawn the few clothes he had brought with him. Pawn the bag itself, why not? But would it raise much? He had no idea. He had never been inside a pawnshop, though he had seen their signs in several of the streets he had walked through in Glasgow and knew some of the men in the regiment resorted to them when they had need.

  When he reached the ward she was still sleeping. He fetched a chair from the other end of the room and sat beside her. The woman with the red hair offered him something to read. It was a religious tract, Calvinist, an essay on the Fall, innate sinfulness, hell. He read the first two pages for the sake of politeness (he thought she might be watching him) and marvelled at how unattractive it was, how sad a branch to clutch at as you were swept down the river, how little there was in it of love or even kindness. When he glanced up, the woman was indeed watching him. She smiled encouragement; he read another page, knowing it for the despair it was. He had had such voices in his own head for months. They were as familiar to him as the folds and creases of a sick-bed. He was listening for something else now. A different voice, a different message. Or just the silence that might precede such a message. He would settle for that. A cessation, a hush.

  Other visitors came to see other women. Each arrival was a moment of interest and the curtain lent a certain theatricality. Hawkers came up. A milkmaid, a woman selling thread and yarn, then a girl with a tray of prawns and periwinkles.

  Lacroix decided he would leave again—an hour by the bed of someone sleeping is a long hour. He would take a turn in the town, make enquiries about the mail coach from the south, its schedule, but as he stood she woke, her right eye flickering open, her hands travelling up to the covered eye, the dressing, the bandage.

  “No, no,” he said, taking her hands and settling them back on the blanket. “You must not touch.”

  “John?” she said. She rolled her head on the pillow. He sat down, shifted the chair to make it easier for her to see him.

  “John? I was afraid you would not come.”

  “Not come?” He was grinning at her, leaning in to hear her. “Why should I not come?”

  She did not answer him. She looked past him into the ward, then shut her eye, lay back, sighed, opened the eye again to look at him. In some curious way one eye seemed more expressive than two.

  “Rizzo is pleased,” he said.

  “Pleased with himself,” she said.

  “That’s true,” said Lacroix.

  “When he did it,” she said, “he was as white as paper. I was afraid his hand would tremble. Do you know how he prepares? By threading needles. He told me so. He threads a needle ten times. And John, there is a glass roof and before I lay down we all looked out. Rizzo and Mr. Crisp, his assistant. I could see very little of course but I imagined a great deal. I thought I could see Jane and Cornelius and even Ranald.”

  “On the island? What were they doing?”

  “Oh, just standing. But with encouraging looks on their faces.”

  “You must be their constant thought,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “There are ears and babies. And I do not want to be in anyone’s thoughts constantly.”

  She shut her eye, was quiet a moment, then said, “The imagined is not the contrary of the real, John.” And after a longer pause, “I can smell the sea.”

  He started to tell her about the prawn seller, who had indeed left both the scent and somehow the image of the sea behind her, but Emily was asleep before he had finished. He crossed the ward and returned the tract to the woman with the red hair.

  “I have been among the worst,” she said, accepting the book from him.

  “I too,” he said, and for three or four seconds they stood regarding each other as if the secret marks of the fire were on them.

  There was one more visit before the day was out. Rizzo was changing Emily’s dressing. Lacroix waited for them just inside the ward. At the end of Emily’s bed was a screen of wood and white linen and through the linen he saw Rizzo’s outline, leaning and rising like a living watermark. After a few minutes the surgeon appeared around the side of the screen carrying a tin dish with the old dressing in it. They greeted each other. Lacroix kept his eyes off the dish, the pinkish linen. Rizzo said he would order tea and toast for them all. In the meantime Miss Frend was now in a condition to receive visitors.

  She was pushing herself up into a sitting position. She did not need his help, thank you, though she allowed him to rearrange her pillows, then focused on his face, frowned and said, “I do not care how I look,” which made him laugh.

  Rizzo rejoined them (smells of soap), and when the tea tray arrived in the arms of a man who looked winded by his climb from the kitchens, the surgeon poured for them all. The screen gave them privacy. Emily drank her tea, had a second cup and finished that also. They spoke about the hospital, about Glasgow, about the islands, the white house by the sea.

  “Mr. Lovall,” she said, “arrived on a cow.”

  Rizzo nodded. Perhaps he thought her mind was straying, touched still by whatever he had given her from his pharmacopoeia. But the conversation—polite, aimless—was evidence of something. At the very least there was nothing to evoke the room above them, what had taken place there, would take place there again. When the pot was empty and they had eaten the last of the cold toast, a bell was swung somewhere down in the belly of the hospital.

  Rizzo took out his watch. “Visiting time,” he said, “has come to an end. You must forgive us but we were in our early days much used by those who had nowhere to go at night. Many times on my morning rounds I saw a man’s feet beneath a patient’s bed. Well, it is not a way to run a hospital. Not that I suspect you, Mr. Lovall, of having such . . . designs.”

  Lacroix rose. There was a moment of awkwardness with Emily, a sudden lapse into strangerhood. He did not know where to put his hands. He undid then refastened the bottom button of his waistcoat. He wished her a peaceful night. Someone, not Rizzo, folded the screen and took it away.

  He had his supper at a chop house. It was cheaper than eating at the inn—a shilling for a plate of brawn and cabbage, a glass of something called claret—his fellow diners mostly men alone, men without the convenience of wives or, like Lacroix, momentarily or chronically without funds. It was not brotherly but it was easy and the man who presided, who came and went from a back kitchen, empty plates one way, plates loaded the other, calmed them, their solitary condition, like a sergeant moving among recruits (the enemy not at hand but not distant either).

  When he had eaten he climbed to the street again, saw the evening star in the gap between two tenements, greeted it, and walked back to the inn. There he made a point of showing himself to the landlord, of treating him to the kind of nod a gent
leman whose pocket book is well stocked with large, painterly banknotes, bestows on an innkeeper. He took a small glass of brandy standing by the fire, then went up to his room hoping to find no one there but finding the club-footed maid who had seen him stumble on the stairs the night before. He did not think she was stealing anything. She had, perhaps, just made up the bed. The room was dim, and as she came towards him, her face shadowed but her eyes carrying points of light, he wondered if she would hold out an orange and ask if he wished to buy it. Instead she asked him if he wanted a candle brought up. He said he didn’t.

  At the Ship Bank, half an hour after he had seen the mail coach come down the Trongate through morning air and morning dust, he went up the stairs to see Drummond. Drummond wasn’t there. Lacroix sat on a bench outside the door, its wood polished almost to blackness by the backsides of those who had waited before him. He watched the coming and going of the boys, the youngest of them children dressed as men, wrists and necks raw from the rub of their clothes. In Spain the child soldiers died alongside veterans, boys of ten or eleven with men who wore their hair in a grey queue. Bury one, bury the other. Harder of course to ride past a boy who is crying for help. He hoped he had not done that. He could not remember. He hoped he had not. Had he?

  Drummond arrived. He saw Lacroix and waved him into the office.

  “It was with us yesterday,” he said, “but not with me or you should have had it then. There is a progression. So many hands, so many eyes. We are entirely at the mercy of the floor below. Their systems are not ours. But there it is. We are an animal made up of its various parts. A horse with the trunk of an elephant, the feet of . . . ”

  It seemed he could not think what the feet might be. “A sort of Sphinx,” said Lacroix.

  “Aye,” said the man. He was looking along a slotted wall of docket boxes. He plucked out a folded sheet, examined it at arm’s length and passed it to Lacroix. “Captain John Lacroix,” he said. “From your bankers in Bath.”

  “I thank you.”

  “There has been a murder there,” said Drummond.

  “A what?”

  “A murder.”

  “In Bath?”

  “There or somewhere in the county. Or it was an assault perhaps. Someone’s cook. Our Mr. Montcrieff spoke of it. I believe he saw it in the Bristol paper at the coffee house across the way.”

  “I will look,” said Lacroix, checking the document in his hand, immensely cheered to have it, delighted almost to the point of laughter.

  “It is what you were expecting, I hope,” said Drummond.

  “It is. Exactly.”

  From the thoroughfare below came the beat and clatter of horses. Both men stepped to the window, gazed down. Uniforms, the morning sun on helmets and spurs.

  “Now what are they?” asked the banker. “Dragoons?”

  “I believe they are artillery men,” said Lacroix.

  “Are they? They look like dragoons. Same hats. But you would know of course.”

  Downstairs, at the high counter, the document was turned into money. Notes with blue lettering and the engraving of a ship, also blue, a picture that reminded Lacroix of the flyer at the hotel in Oban, the emigration ship. He folded his money and left the bank, determined to guard it better than the last, to keep not a single note in his boots.

  He set off for the hospital, then crossed the street with the intention of going into the coffee house for ten minutes and seeing the Bristol paper but found himself drawn to the window of a jeweller’s in the arcade by the coffee-house doors. He leaned into the glass, hands either side of his face, and peered in at the rucked velvet sheet on which the precious things lolled in a kind of nudity. Inside, the shop was no more than a small room, much of it taken up by a man in a close-fitting coat, a brass-barrelled musketoon propped against the wall behind him. In a race, thought Lacroix, might I get to it first? Cock it, fire, fill my pockets, run? He wished the man a good morning. The man returned his salutation with the barest movement of a cropped and nubbled head.

  From further off, a part of the room hidden by the guard’s shoulders, a woman’s voice said, “Did you have something particular in mind, sir?”

  She came into view, dressed in grey silk and wearing—neck, hands, ears—a good scattering of what she sold.

  “Something,” said Lacroix, “for a friend. She is in the hospital.”

  The woman came closer. She smiled at him. A respectful but confident smile. “And what does your friend like?” she asked.

  “Like? Well . . . She is thin. Or slender rather. Hair about your colour. A strong walker.” He paused. The woman’s smile had broadened a little but she continued to look up at him, the tilted head of a patient listener, her hands clasped softly in front of her dress. “She has,” he continued, “not much in the way of family. A brother who is almost no use at all. A sister who has her own affairs to think of.”

  “A woman of independent spirit?”

  “She’s pregnant,” said Lacroix.

  “Your friend?”

  “Heavens no. Her sister.”

  He realised he was talking strangely, unguardedly, and that the woman was somehow making him do it. He did not mind. It did not feel wrong. It also amused him to think of the work she was having to do, trying to guess what he had, what he would spend, what he might mean by the word “friend.”

  She had keys in a hidden pocket. She opened cabinets, fetched pieces from the window display, laid rings out on a square of plush spread on the counter, turned a bracelet under the lamp. She watched what he touched and how he touched it. She was not afraid to look into his face, to show how she was leading him. With a flick from the side of her hand she tidied the rings away by covering them with a fold of the cloth then set down three brooches in a line. He liked the brooches. He picked up the middle one. It was formed like a little shield, had two silver thistles at the centre, a small crown on top.

  “A luckenbooth,” said the woman. “And here”—touching the edge of the brooch with her little finger—“are two types of Scottish granite, cut thin as skin.”

  He weighed the brooch in his palm. “Her eyes are bad,” he said, “but I think she would feel it out. The thistles. I think she would guess them.”

  “I am sure of it,” said the woman.

  There was a long moment of silence between them, the silence itself like something laid out on the plush, offered.

  “I am . . . ” he began.

  “Yes?”

  “You called it a luckenbooth.”

  “A luckenbooth. Exactly.”

  “I think it will do very well,” he said. “Do you think so?”

  “I do,” she said. She paused, then gently, with cool fingertips, took the brooch from his palm and went behind the counter with it.

  Lacroix slid notes from his fold, blue ships. She could, they both knew, have sold him a more expensive piece, but she had sold him the right one and they were content. He glanced at the guard. Surely he was an old soldier, and one who had found something better than a street corner for himself and a hat set out for coppers. Tempting, in this mood of spending, to ask him where he’d served. Tempting to do and say more than was wise.

  On his way up to the hospital he chided himself—five minutes with money in his pocket and he was inside a jeweller’s shop!—but before he reached the cathedral he had lost interest in such arguments and swept through the doors of the hospital, a man with silver thistles in his pocket on his way to a woman who would be glad to have them.

  On the third floor, walking between the beds (he had already greeted several patients on his way up), he stopped by the foot of the boy’s bed. He had forgotten his name, then remembered it. “Robert! How are you today?”

  “I am very well, thank you,” said the boy. He held Lacroix’s gaze with a steadiness that soon became difficult to match. The perfect brown of his eyes, the
hint of a smile. The egg in his neck.

  “I have come to see Miss Frend,” said Lacroix, wondering if he might show the boy the brooch. “Emily.”

  “Oh, she’s gone,” said the boy.

  “What’s that?”

  “She’s gone.” He pointed to the ceiling.

  “What are you talking about? Gone where?”

  He did not wait for an answer. He hurried through the corridor, ignored whatever the doorkeeper was trying to say, swept aside the curtain and stared in at Emily’s empty bed. From across the ward the red-haired woman, immediately on seeing him, also pointed to the ceiling. Three or four of the others joined her.

  “She has gone to theatre,” said the doorkeeper, tugging him around and speaking to his face.

  “Theatre? The operating theatre?”

  “Half an hour ago.”

  “With Rizzo?”

  “Of course. With Mr. Rizzo. The other eye.”

  “But she had barely recovered from the first!”

  “Mr. Rizzo believed she was ready. She believed so herself. I heard her say it.”

  That again! Her readiness, Rizzo’s. His utter lack of the same. He was silent a moment. He wondered how he must have looked coming in like that, bursting past the curtain like the cuckolded husband in a farce. “I should have come earlier,” he said. “I had meant to. I only . . . ”

  The doorkeeper held up a hand. She was listening, but not to him. She busied him away from the door, went into the corridor, came back and held the curtain clear. Out of the corridor’s throat came a huddle of human forms, Emily at the centre, dressed in one of the brown robes, Rizzo on her right, and on her left an older man in shirtsleeves, presumably the assistant, Crisp.

  Both her eyes were covered now, a single bandage, so that she had the appearance of a poor queen led to the scaffold by her confessors. They came very slowly. When they reached the bed the doorkeeper helped remove the gown, then all three eased her backwards to the pillows. She let out a sigh—loud enough for Lacroix to hear it. Then she lay, soundless and still, or still but for her hands that moved, it seemed, in a blindness of their own.