“And when Rizzo changes the dressings,” he said, “are you able to see anything?”
“Something. But through a glass, very darkly. My hearing however is uncommonly sharp. I hear every drunkard in Glasgow singing his way home at night.”
“They might not all be drunk,” he said.
There was no relapse, though Lacroix was braced for it. She found her appetite. He bought her shrimps from the shrimp girl, bought her cinnamon bread, bought her an orange and watched her break its skin with untrimmed nails. Catching Rizzo on the stairs—“I’m writing it all up,” said Rizzo. “I will send my drawings to Paris!”—he asked how much longer Emily would need to stay in the hospital. Rizzo shrugged, touched his beard. “Three days. Three or four.”
“So soon?”
“Why not? You already know my thinking on this.”
“And her dressings?”
“No, we will have finished with them. You must buy a fine silk scarf for her. She will wear it for a week, then wear it only when the light is most brilliant. Then it is over, and we will know. I expect a letter from you. This is very important. How she is, what she sees. What she sees exactly.”
“I will do it, of course,” said Lacroix. “And I may include drawings of my own.”
“Wie Sie wollen, mein Freund!” called Rizzo, running up the stairs, taking the steps two at a go. Lacroix followed more cautiously but thought that he would, back on the island, do some running himself. Go down to the beach, take off his boots, drop his coat in the sand . . .
The red-haired woman left the hospital. She was better or she could not be helped. She made her farewells around the ward. She had a stick Lacroix had not seen her use before and her street clothes looked too large for her. He did not ask if anyone was coming for her, did not ask what she was going on to. He was afraid of her answers.
On the following day they went for a walk. Emily wanted to be outside. She said she needed to be outside. Lacroix, as nervous as though he had charge of a new-born, was over-solicitous.
“It does not help me,” she said. “All I need is your arm and that you should warn me if I am about to step over a precipice.”
All the same, they went slowly. To reach the front door was the work of half an hour but the effect on her of being outside—immediate, unmistakable—rewarded all effort. He led her about the garden. It was a place the season was making untidy in lovely ways. He lifted her hand to the honeysuckle, to the silk edges of tulips, to cornflowers whose colour she would not allow to be simply “blue.”
“Like the sky,” he said, though the sky overhead was white and grey.
But this too she sent back. The morning sky? The sky at midday? The sky at sea?
“Blue like your coat,” he said, unsure if air and movement were making her excitable or if she were merely recovering her old intensity. “Like Jane’s coat.”
This she accepted and they moved on to small white roses and the not-quite-open spikes of foxgloves, to poppies he thought no gardener had sown, and a great thriving bush of rosemary where they stood a while, crushing the needles and smelling their fingertips.
When he got her back to the third floor she climbed into her bed, a blind, awkward creature too long out of its element. He asked her whether she had enjoyed her walk. He did not hear her answer and inside ten minutes she was asleep. When Rizzo came through Lacroix confessed to the outing and wondered aloud if they had been reckless. Rizzo looked at the sleeping woman—a regard that seemed both rigorous and tender—then turned back to Lacroix.
“Very soon,” he said, “I will give her into your care, Lovall. I have no uneasiness.”
The next morning the city was caught in the skirts of a storm. The islands out west were taking a battering, or you could guess it so. It was weather to lose your hat in but Lacroix had not brought a hat to Glasgow—a hat was on the list of items he hoped to purchase (though he wanted something particular, probably of straw, straw and green silk, the kind of article no military man would ever wear)—and he arrived at the hospital with his hair dripping, his face slick, the taste of the rain in his mouth. He sat by Emily’s bed drying himself with his handkerchief. Emily was eating toast. There were a great many crumbs, not all of which could be collected with propriety. Three beds along a new patient had been admitted, a new woman. Her hair on one side had been shaved away and there was a remarkable scar, red as lips along the white of her scalp. Like a sword-blow. He was glad Emily could not see it.
He told her about the weather. She said she had listened to it, had listened as you might listen to music, should listen.
“Rizzo likes Haydn,” he said.
“We could go to the basement and look at the people they call the unfortunates. Or you could look at them. There’s a man down there teaching them to sing.”
“I know a place we can go,” he said. “Though it may not be as exciting as the basement.”
He waited in the corridor while the doorkeeper helped Emily put on stockings and shoes and one of the brown woollen robes, then they went through the heavier air of the male ward, down a flight of stairs, down the next, and turned towards the gallery and the armchairs where he had slept off the brandy. He tried to recall if he’d been happy that day. He thought he had, but his emotions of the last week seemed to have altered by the hour, to be packed like strata in rock, like one of Hutton’s “angular unconformities,” and he was thinking he might try that out on Emily, the geology of feeling, of sentiment, and what she might say of it, if she would think it clever, when a voice called out his name—barked it—and the world he had been walking in was a world no more.
“You! Lacroix! Aye, sir. Lacroix, Lovall, or whatever you call yourself now.”
A figure had risen, shot-like, from one of the armchairs. A man in a seaman’s short black coat, his head and shoulders framed by a window, a rolled cap in his hand. His right eye was covered with a patch strung on black ribbon. The other eye was trained on Lacroix like a weapon.
“It is you. I know it is. I can still see well enough for that.”
“John?” said Emily. “Who is it? He has mistaken you, I think.”
“No mistake, madam. I brought him up with me from Bristol, sat with him at my table—”
“Captain Browne?” Lacroix stepped closer. He drew Emily with him, though he hardly knew she was there.
“You did not think to come across me again, eh?” said the master. “Had washed your hands of me.”
“But . . . why are you here? You have been hurt?”
“Hurt? Oh I’d say I had been hurt. Yes. I’d say that much. Is this lady in your care?”
“She is.”
“Then I hope you were not the cause of her troubles.”
“Far from it,” said Emily. “Very far. Who is this person, John?”
Lacroix would have told her, had opened his mouth to do so, but the master reached out for him, caught hold of his free arm between elbow and wrist. Forty years of pulling rope in that grip.
“You knew?”
“Knew?”
“That he was after you, damn you! That he would come for me!”
“Who? Who are you speaking of?”
“Your friend from Spain, Lacroix. The one who calls himself Henderson.”
Lacroix shook his head.
The master went on. “Bandy legs. London voice. Face like a choirboy who’s sold himself to the devil.”
“Called Henderson?”
“Well, we know how easily a man makes up a new name for himself. Said he was in the army with you. In Spain.”
Lacroix shook his head again. “There were many of us in Spain.”
“That is not an answer.” The grip tightened.
“I do not know any Henderson, sir. In Spain or anywhere else.”
“No?”
“No.”
“You�
�ll swear to it?”
“On my life.”
For three, four seconds more, the master’s single eye continued to search Lacroix’s face. Then the grip softened and broke. The blood crept back into Lacroix’s fingers. The master let out a long sigh.
“Well, he knew you. And seemed most anxious to renew the acquaintance.”
“John,” said Emily, “what is going on? Why does he call you Lacroix?”
“Oh ho,” said the master softly.
“I will take you back to the ward,” said Lacroix.
“Why? I do not wish to go back to the ward.”
“I need to speak with Captain Browne. It would be best if—”
“Best if I do not hear your business? No, John. No. I have respected your privacy. I have not pried. But if there are things to be said now, if there are truths to come out, then I wish to hear them. We have come too far for it to be otherwise.”
“Emily . . . ”
“If you take me back to the ward it will be the last you see of me. Do you understand? If you will not trust me then I cannot trust you. We will have nothing.”
It was the master who spoke first. He had been looking at Emily; now he looked at Lacroix. “I’d say you were run to ground,” he said.
“I am what?”
“We can talk over there,” said the master. “The lady . . . ”
“My name is Emily Frend.”
“Miss Frend may sit between us and hear what there is to hear. Though I should warn her my part of the story has nothing pleasant in it.”
They moved to the wall, to the window, a chair facing the window. Lacroix lowered Emily on to the seat, then he and the master took their places either side of her at the chair’s wings. In the gallery a pair of old men, turtles stripped of their shells, made their way, arm in arm, towards the stairs. The master glanced at them, then turned back to Lacroix.
“Nine days ago, ten if I count today, I was at my house in Dumbarton making ready to retire for the night. I have lived there alone since my wife died. I have no children. Anyway, I did as I always do. I carried the cat out into the street and stood a minute to view the sky. It was a quiet night with a piece moon. I saw no one and heard no one, but as I walked back inside a man walked with me and so tight to me and so silent I swear I took him at first for my own shadow. As I have said, he was not a large man. A runtish, bandy-legged devil. But he carried a gun with him, a carbine of some type, and though everything was strange to me at that moment, I did not doubt that he would use it. He shut the door, bolted it, never took his eyes off me. We went into the parlour. There was a lamp in there. He stood me by the lamp, stood himself in the shadows. He said he had urgent business with John Lacroix, an officer of hussars, with whom he had lately been in Spain. Well, I knew Lacroix was your name. William Swann had told me that much. Your giving a false name to our visitor from the frigate was, I assumed, some matter I did not need to enquire into. And when you kept your mouth shut about my sailor I was grateful to you. Grateful enough to let the pretence continue.”
“And this man,” said Lacroix, afraid his hearing would deepen the confusion, that this story, wild enough already, would grow wilder through his failing to hear it. “He gave his name as Henderson?”
“He did.”
“And he had some business with me? What business?”
“Is that not for you to tell me? He had followed you from Spain to Scotland, man! You ask me to believe you have no notion of the reason for it?”
“I was in Spain,” said Lacroix. “I was on the campaign with General Moore, was evacuated from Corunna with what remained of the army. All that is true. Then, when I reached home . . . I was . . . ”
“Are you still in the army?” asked the master.
“What?”
“In the army. Are you still one of theirs?”
“I have not . . . formally . . . ”
“So that is why you did not give Crawley up. You are in the same scrape! But I’d say this Henderson has other things on his mind. Unless they send such creatures after all who jump ship, in which case they would need a great many.”
“He knew,” asked Lacroix, “that I had come with you on the Jenny?”
“He did.”
“How would he know that?”
“How did the navy know we had Crawley on board? Every dockside in the world is full of men who make a living selling what they see there. I’d say you were noticed.”
“Might he have spoken to William Swann?”
“He might. Though he did not say so. Nor do I believe he would have done in a fine house in Bristol what he felt safe doing with me. I don’t think he would have risked it.”
“And with you?”
“Eh?”
“With you . . . what?”
The master nodded. His eye, the living eye, turned its light inwards. “Well, we stood in the parlour together. It’s a damned odd thing to be in a place you know like your own face and have a man, a stranger, aim a gun at your belly. He wanted me to tell him where you’d gone when you left the Jenny. I told him Glasgow, for I remembered you had not intended to stay in the city long so there could be no harm in his knowing. But he was ahead of me. He spoke of the islands. I said you had not mentioned any islands to me. Well, that was my first lie and he did not like it. He struck me with the gun and put me down as easily as I might throw Wee Davey down, had I a mind to it. He stood over me and asked again. I said you had not known yourself what island you might visit, that we had spoken of the islands only in a general way and you had not mentioned any in particular. But he had caught me out once and now I suppose everything I said had for him the savour of a deceit. He did not warn me, did not offer me the chance to change my story. He was, I imagine, in a hurry to be gone. He caught me with the barrel of the gun, a most careful and deliberate blow, and I knew immediately the damage it had done. There was a minute after that I don’t much care to recall. Once I was able to speak again I told him everything about you I could bring to mind. Every conversation, our last in particular, word for word or near enough. Had I known where you were, had you been hiding in my cellar, I would have given you up to him then. Men will sail with a one-eyed captain. They will not sail with a blind one.”
“He is insane,” said Lacroix. “Some lunatic got into your house.”
“A lunatic? He may have been. But a purposeful one and in perfect command of himself. He told me he was the war. He said the law could not touch him. And something else, something I did not consider much at the time, I had not the leisure to, but have thought of a great deal since. He told me he had been sent by one whose word could not be gainsaid. I don’t know what you make of that. One whose word could not be gainsaid. It was strange language for such a man.”
“He meant Christ perhaps,” said Emily.
“With respect,” said the master, “I think he spoke of a living man. Living as you and I do. And could even a lunatic conjure up a Christ who would have him do as he did to me?”
“Men have done worse,” she said, “with that name on their lips.”
“It was some fantasy,” said Lacroix. “It was to justify his violence to you.”
“Not that either,” said the master. “No. Someone had impressed him. Had put ideas in his head.”
“He left then?”
“He did. He knew I had no more to tell him. He even tidied me up a little, handed me my own neckcloth to hold over my eye. Then he explained, very patiently and thoroughly, what would become of me if I blabbed of him. I gave him my word I would not, and I have not, until now. He hung about a while longer, studying me from beside the door. I believe he was debating with himself the wisdom of leaving me with breath in my body. Then he was gone, lit out swift and quiet as he’d come. Well, I sat there a good half-hour on the floorboards before making my way to the house of my late wife’s cousin. You’ll
remember him. He asks no questions. The next day he brought me up the water. Brought me here.”
“Your eye?” asked Lacroix. The master shook his head.
“But surely . . . ”
“Nothing.”
Lacroix nodded. His thoughts were full of oddments, glimpses. A tune ran through his head, something a pair of beggar children had been singing outside the inn, yesterday or the day before. This was not how he had imagined it, the truth-telling time. It was as if his secrets had altered in the keeping, had grown like living things, so that he did not quite know them any more. Or that they were not entirely his, not the private stash or black treasure he had imagined. And once more it came to him, the thought that had touched him several times since coming back from Spain, that we are not private beings and cannot hide things inside ourselves. Everything is present, everything in view for those who know how to look.
“Captain Browne,” said Emily. “Where is he now?”
“Henderson? If he is still searching for Lacroix here I’d say he was out in the islands.”
“The islands?”
“Unless he has given it up. Which I doubt.”
“John,” said Emily. “John?”
He touched her shoulder and she twisted round to him.
“John. You heard him? You heard what he said?”
“I did.”
“Then we must go. Today. We must leave. Immediately.”
“She is right enough there,” said the master. “Run south. Put as many miles as you can between yourselves and this man.”
“She does not mean that,” said Lacroix. “Her brother and sister are out there.”
“Where? The islands? Well do not, in God’s name, tell me which one. I want to know nothing of where you are headed. Go for them if you must, but you would be wise not to spend a single night in any house where he might have good reason to look for you. Not till you hear they’ve strung him up in the Grassmarket.”
“He has already had ten days,” said Emily.
The master heard the catch in her voice; he moved to comfort her. “He would need to find a boat first,” he said. “And this weather will slow him down. And there are many islands to search.”
Now We Shall Be Entirely Free Page 30