Now We Shall Be Entirely Free

by Andrew Miller

  Rizzo leaned down to speak in her ear. When he was done he stood back from the bed, conferred in a low voice with his assistant, saw Lacroix, crossed to him, led him to a quiet place by the curtain and said, “You are unhappy. You think it was too soon.”

  “Another few days,” said Lacroix, less sure now of exactly what he did think. “A week perhaps.”

  “Then you will allow me please to explain my reasoning.” He joined his hands, raised both his large, glossy eyebrows. He is, thought Lacroix, still high from the work.

  “Half of those who are admitted to this hospital, more than half, more all the time, are fever patients. A healthy man or woman, if they are careful, may hope to continue well, but a patient who has undergone an operation is less strong, less able to resist. And so I try to do all things quickly. Safely but quickly. First the operation. Then, as soon as is practical, I send the patient away, send her home where, I hope, there is no contagion. Miss Frend this morning was rested. Her left eye was, and is, healing to my satisfaction. Had you been here no doubt she would have discussed it with you. But now it is done. Pflück die Rose wenn sie blüht, Schmiede, wenn das Eisen glüht.”

  “May I speak with her?”

  “Of course. But briefly please. Even a short operation is hard. A few words of reassurance. No more.”

  Lacroix went over to the bed, looked down at her, sat on the chair, reached over and stilled her hands with one of his own.

  “John?” she whispered. He saw it more than heard it.

  “It is over,” he said. “It is finished.”

  “John?”

  “You are safe, Emily. And Rizzo wants us gone as soon as possible. Think on that. We shall go back to the island. Soon. Both of us.”

  She smiled. There was a streak of dried blood in her hair, just at the side where her hair had been pulled back tightly across her temple.

  “And the money came,” he said, thinking at once of how crass it was to speak of money at such a time. He watched her mouth. There were no eyes to distract him. What was she saying? He turned his head, brought it closer.

  “The baby,” she said. “Jane’s. Can you imagine it?”

  “The baby?” He sat back. “I can imagine a baby. I am not certain I can imagine that baby.”

  Her smile broadened—then something, something going on under the bandage, the dressings, made her face suddenly stiffen. He glanced round for Rizzo, saw him, standing at a respectful distance. The surgeon raised a hand, palm out. It meant, perhaps, do not be alarmed. And when he looked back he saw that the pain had passed.

  He stayed another minute. He was deep in concentration. Some animal resource for holding another’s suffering, for surrounding it. Then, at a nod from Rizzo, he stood and went out to the corridor. There were tears on his cheeks. He hoped the doorkeeper, this woman whose name he had failed to learn, might notice them.

  He came back in the early afternoon and again a little before six. Both times he stood at the end of the bed watching her shallow, uneasy sleep. She was, beneath the bandages, in the well of those hurt eyes, contending with things. With pain, of course, but not just with pain. Was her father present, railing at her child self, demanding dreams of her?

  He went back to the inn, supped alone, went up to his room. He thought he might read something or write something. He thought he might go back down to the parlour and drink brandy until his chest burned. And while he thought these things he lay fully dressed on the bed, turning the silver thistles through his fingers.

  The next morning she looked worse, the skin flushed at her neck, all the bones of her face showing their edges. Around her right eye, what he could see of it, she looked as if she had been struck. The red-haired woman said she had called in the night for Jane. Was Jane her sister? And there had been a second name. A name she had not been able to clearly hear.

  “Thorpe,” said another woman, two beds down, her sewing gear in her lap. “It was Thorpe.”

  “Are you Thorpe?” asked the red-haired woman.

  He shook his head. He asked if Rizzo had seen her. The woman said he had, that he had been behind the screen with her.

  “I like an old-fashioned doctor,” said the woman with the sewing. “I like them to have white whiskers.”

  Lacroix went in search of Rizzo. He was not in his room, not in the male ward. He looked in the wards below, enquired of the men the other side of the hatch, gave up, came back and found the surgeon standing, arms crossed, head down, at the end of Emily’s bed.

  “She is having to fight,” said Rizzo.

  “To what?” asked Lacroix.

  “She has a reaction,” said Rizzo. “It is troublesome but not, I think, severe.”

  “You will treat her for it? You will need to bleed her perhaps.”

  “I assure you,” said Rizzo, a sudden testiness in his voice, “bleeding is the last thing she needs. The very last.”

  “Then what do you intend?” asked Lacroix. His own voice was sharp now.

  “I will support her.”

  “How?”

  “By letting her rest. By keeping the wound clean. By giving her nourishment when she can take it. By leaving her alone.”

  “Alone?”

  “The patient must cure herself. The physician must know his limits.”

  They turned to each other, confronted each other.

  “She is fighting,” said Rizzo. “But she is strong. I mean her wish for life. She will not give up. And neither will we.”

  Lacroix spent the day coming and going. He could not bear simply to sit there. Twice, when he was present, she turned her head, sensing him. He wanted to say, “You asked for Thorpe!” It had pricked him. It still stung. Instead, he whispered her name, and had she asked him to he would have gone in search of Thorpe—hard to believe such a man would be difficult to uncover—and brought him to her. Perhaps Thorpe could heal her. He would lay on hands, would kiss her unchastely, sing psalms or recite the Odyssey in thumping Greek, his shirt blowing around his shoulders in a holy wind . . .

  She asked for water. He held the cup to her lips, his right hand under her head. Her head, at least, was reassuringly weighty. At the evening bell Rizzo came through and said he was free to stay if he wished and that, before he left, he might like to join him in his room for a simple supper. So he stayed—another hour, most of the next. The women on the ward settled; the light thinned. A man—Lacroix had not seen him before, the night-attendant presumably—placed a lamp on the shelf above the door. A cat came in, slunk past the curtain and began its silent patrolling of the ward. Was its presence official? Did it wash its paws in soap and water? But he was glad to see it and hoped it might settle on Emily’s bed, place a purring head by her feet.

  Someone—he thought it was the new woman at the far end—let out a cry that sounded closer to grief than pain. He had been starting to drowse and it startled him. The attendant leaned in but the place was quiet again and he did not enter.

  He listened for the cathedral bells. He thought of his old watch, the DuBois and Wheeler, stolen out of his trunk, thought of Wood waiting for him in the drawing room (They’ve been sending me all over the country to find people), thought of Nell ghosting the corridors of the house, the dog at her heels. In the window beside the bed he saw a piece of the lamplight and his own head, a blot of ink on the vague blue vastness of the night beyond. He yawned, shuddered with it, hovered his fingers above Emily’s mouth to catch the curl of her breath, decided she was easy enough, drew a quick cross in the air above her head and crept out of the ward.

  In Rizzo’s room two candles burned on the desk either side of the book he was reading. Also on the desk was a parcel wrapped in brown paper, the paper spotted with grease. The surgeon gave Lacroix the room’s only chair, the chair Emily had sat on for her examination. (Why could there not be another chair? Could the hospital governors not afford a s
econd chair? Would chairs encourage people to stay? Slow down the machine?) He asked Lacroix how Emily was. Lacroix said he thought she was easier, that she was sleeping deeply.

  “It is as I hoped,” said Rizzo. He unwrapped the parcel. Bread, cheese, meat of some kind.

  “When we have eaten, you will go to your inn. I will remain here, in this room. The night-attendant has most strict instructions to fetch me the instant there is any cause for concern.”

  “He is reliable?”

  “He would not be here otherwise.”

  There was a knife. Rizzo, with a quick brush of his thumb across the blade’s grain, began to slice the meat. Lacroix looked away and found himself confronted again by the wall of eyes. Candlelight did not make them easier to bear.

  For their meal together Rizzo perched on the edge of the desk. They took the food they wanted out of the brown paper. They talked. Rizzo knew about Cornelius’s digging on the island, the blackened ear that had kept him from coming to have his teeth pulled.

  “Will he find the rest?” he asked.

  “If there is any more,” said Lacroix. “And if finding it does not involve too much effort.”

  He had also learned something about their music. Emily’s guittar, Lacroix’s fiddle.

  “At least she does not need to see in order to play,” said Rizzo.

  “But she will see?” asked Lacroix. “You are still hopeful of that?”

  “Of course,” said the surgeon. “I did not mean . . . ” He smiled. The tension between them of the afternoon—Lacroix’s doubt about Rizzo’s judgement, Rizzo’s own doubts, perhaps—was gone entirely. In two small glasses that did not match at all, Rizzo poured them each two mouthfuls of wine. It was ruby red—a thin, light wine you could see the candle flame through. Rizzo said he liked Haydn. Il Mondo della Luna had enchanted him. Lacroix said he thought he had heard some Haydn, a concert in Bath, years ago.

  “You knew he had died?” asked Rizzo.

  “Haydn?”

  “In May, I think. In Vienna.”

  They did not ask questions about each other’s family. They did not ask about the past at all, or if they did they did so glancingly. This was tact, or weariness, or the pleasant way two men can find to treat each other’s history with indifference, to meet in what is public and impersonal, as though passing between them certain interesting artefacts from the museum that is the world: a dead composer, French wine, coffee houses, newspapers. Somehow they came to the war, or they came to it inevitably—it was the conclusion of so many conversations—but after general remarks about the blockade, about the military use of balloons and the army’s insatiable need for horses, Rizzo steered them away. Had he heard something in the other’s voice? A reluctance, a restlessness? Then a gun went off in the streets or gardens below. The men grinned uneasily.

  “The end of a fox,” said Lacroix.

  “Or I will have a new patient in the morning,” said Rizzo.

  Lacroix turned his glass in his hands then set it down on the table next to the brown paper and stood. “You know where I am on the Trongate,” he said. “I could be here in a quarter of an hour.”

  They took their leave of each other. They shook hands. Lacroix moved through the hospital, descended the stairs with their rivers of shadow, nodded to various watchmen, waited for one to draw the bars on the front door, then stepped out into the hospital garden where night had released the scent of some flower he could not see. He turned towards the cathedral. There was a man standing by the west door with a lantern and as Lacroix crossed the close he saw it was one of the new police, though he could not see enough of him to tell if he was one of the pair who had found him, sprawled and bootless, on the cobbles. He was up there, presumably, on account of the gunshot. Lacroix muttered a goodnight to him and went on down the moon-splashed street, a dozen bars of music in his head, conceivably by Haydn.

  In the morning he walked back through the day’s first spread of light and arrived at the hospital before the doors were unlocked. He knocked, and the man who had let him out the night before let him back in. Lacroix gave him a sixpence, which he looked surprised at, amused by. On the ward most of the women were still asleep. Certainly Emily was. He stood over her, watched for several minutes the rhythms of her breathing. If she was not obviously better than the night before then she appeared no worse. He tapped on Rizzo’s door, found him with a pair of scissors in one hand, in the other a mirror that looked too small to be really useful. He was bright-eyed for a man who must have slept . . . where? Had he slept at all?

  “I have seen her,” said Lacroix.

  “And she was resting?”

  “She was.”

  “She woke twice in the night. I was called both times. The first time I was frightened. I confess it. The second time less so. This morning . . . ”—he frowned into the mirror, snipped a fine black curl just under his nose—“I am looking forward to my coffee.”

  Lacroix went out for his own coffee, sat in the coffee house on the Trongate where the waiters were still sweeping the floor, scattering water, scattering sawdust. He looked for the Bristol paper, found papers from London, Dundee, Dublin, Berlin, Halifax Nova Scotia, but not from Bristol. He finished his coffee and bought warm rolls from a street seller, bit into one and put the other in his pocket for Emily or Rizzo. Then, at a bookstall outside Old College (he could not resist a bookstall) he purchased Volume One of Hutton’s Principles of Knowledge, carried the book to the hospital and sat at the side of Emily’s bed working his way through a chapter on erosion. Several times throughout the day she came towards the surface of herself but never seemed fully awake, fully present. On one occasion, late afternoon, she spoke some jumbled sentences about her mother. Neither of them had spoken much about their mothers before, perhaps because the store of what they had to say was so small. Later she seemed to speak to her mother. “Mama?” she said, as you might, standing at the door of a darkened room, call out. As a child might.

  At the inn that evening, his room, at the table by the window (on which, among the initials, the hearts and dates, someone had scratched the word Nada) he wrote to Cornelius and Jane. He said things plainly and left the letter open for further news. Then he lay down on the bed with Hutton, read three paragraphs, read them again. Sweet Christ, it was impenetrable stuff! Yet he admired it, the way it came up honestly against the difficulty of knowing, the difficulty of saying, the difficulty of being clear.

  In the night he thought he heard hailstones on the window but the morning was a beauty. He dressed, wedged the book in his pocket, discovered in the other pocket one of the rolls he’d bought the day before, breakfasted on it, washed it down with a mug of small beer in the parlour of the inn, and walked up to the hospital, filling his lungs to the brim with sun-ripened Glasgow air.

  On the ward the windows had been opened. Emily was sitting up in her bed listening to the conversation of the red-haired woman who, as she talked, laid out crumbs on the window ledge and already had a pair of sparrows feeding there (another coming down even as Lacroix looked, and another).

  “Now here is your visitor,” said the woman, standing at the second attempt and shuffling out from between the beds. “I shall take myself off and visit Mrs. Cameron.”

  Lacroix thanked her, wished her a good morning. The chair was facing the window. He set it to face the bed and sat down. “This is a damned good sight,” he said.

  “Is it?” asked Emily, sitting pert as a blade of grass. “I must look strange.”

  “No. You look well. I cannot tell you how much better. We have been . . . uneasy.”

  “I am sorry for it.” She was turned to him though her aim was inexact. She smiled, confidently, at a vacancy several inches to his left.

  “How do you look?” she asked.

  “What’s that?”

  “You told me the money had come. I remember that, I think. Have you bo
ught yourself a splendid new coat?”

  “I have bought nothing.”

  “You could tell me you were sitting there wearing a bearskin and I should have to believe you.”

  “You would touch me,” he said. “To find out.”

  “Yes,” she said, smiling, “I would.”

  “Though in truth,” he said, “I have bought something. Two things.”

  He teased her with a long pause, noting as he waited the line of small grey bruises stippling both her cheeks. They were, quite plainly, the marks of someone’s fingers.

  “A hat,” she said. “Or . . . a red velvet waistcoat. Or new boots. No. I think it is a hat. Two hats.”

  “I have bought a copy of Hutton’s Principles of Knowledge. It is to impress your brother. It includes a chapter entitled ‘Theory of Rain.’”

  “Especially for the Scottish edition,” she said.

  He laughed.

  “And what else did you buy? I am very interested.”

  He drew it from his pocket, unwrapped it from its cloth.

  “Here,” he said. “Some work for your fingers.” He touched the granite rim of the brooch against her left hand. Her hand—a creature woken to curiosity—opened to take it. A smile of pleasure, a smile of concentration.

  “A shield,” she said. “And in the centre . . . a stem, a flower . . . Two flowers. Not roses. These have a burr. Have you brought me thistles?”

  “I have,” he said. “And you have clever fingers. In the shop the woman called it a luckenbooth. I suppose that’s the Scot’s word for a brooch.”

  “A luckenbooth? I shall ask one of the ladies here what it means. Thank you, John. It is your second gift to me. You will keep it safe until I leave?”

  She held it out. He took it back. He asked about her eyes. She said they felt as though someone had blown sand into them. “The right eye especially,” she said. “But neither hurts me as it did at first.”