“He does not need to search them all,” she said. She stood, her hands in front of her, open, steadying herself. “Take me upstairs, John. I will dress while you find Mr. Rizzo.” She turned to where she thought the master was but missing him addressed the window, the world in its mist of rain. “I am sorry for what you have suffered,” she said.
“Likewise,” said the master.
“And I,” said Lacroix, who knew he must now make an offer, that the offer would be futile, would be refused. “Is there some way, any way, I might assist you?”
“You mean money, I think, but unless you have an eye in your pocket you are of no use to me. I do not know what kind of man you are. Nor do I know what else there is to this story. In truth I do not feel I understand much more than I did. But for this lady’s sake I’ll give you some counsel. Should you meet with Henderson, here, on the islands, anywhere at all, you must not hesitate. I remember what you carried with you on the Jenny and I do not mean the fiddle. I suggest you keep it with you and keep it ready. You will have one chance. If you fail to take it . . . ”
“I understand,” said Lacroix.
“Yes,” said the master, who seemed suddenly to have lost his powers, to have fallen in on himself and some sharp dream of trouble, “but I wonder if you do.”
FIVE
18
The weather had come up on them. The air had thickened, the sea and sky were colourless reflections of each other, the wind small, the afternoon sun a lustreless silver. The sailors—two men of savage appearance, distinguishable only by one being slightly shorter, slightly more savage-looking than the other—no longer sang or spoke as they had at setting out. They were silent. They nosed the air like hounds.
Before leaving Mingulay, Calley had made clear to Medina, several times, how little he liked these men (were they brothers?), how little he trusted them. But he had grown weary of sitting on the shore watching an empty sea, and the sailors, having brought their boat from somewhere else, having crossed open water and made landfall, must be assumed to know their business. They spoke only a few words of English and Medina’s Gaelic, scraps and feathers of language, served only to deepen the confusion. It was money, the grubby King Georges in Calley’s palm, that kept the sailors from walking away entirely, but they had withdrawn to a sand dune of their own and conferred there, smoking their pipes, nodding their heads like beam engines, occasionally drawing in the sand.
No specific island was mentioned—or if it was, not in a shared tongue. Calley and Medina pointed north along the beach, repeating the word—north! north!—while the sailors looked on like men addressed by gannets, moon-fish. But away from Mingulay, rocking in a slow green swell, they did indeed seem to be headed north. That was good enough, that would do, and there was at least one island at no great distance from them, and beyond that the suggestion of others, perhaps a chain of them stretching up to latitudes belonging more to the imagination than any sensible geography. An hour passed, a second hour. Then came the smoke, coiling over the water from the west and making everything into the shadow of a shadow.
The sailors altered course. A third hour began in which they passed the spectre of land, passed one island and, conceivably, a second. Or was it the same one? It was hard to be sure. It was impossible. Calley and Medina exchanged meaningful glances, then gave that up and looked past each other at the mercury-coloured sea that now and then slopped over the gunwales to swirl, bubbling, around their boots.
Another change of course and the boat slid round a point of land—low, treeless—and entered a bay where the beach was a silver line that shone brighter than the smoke-coloured sea or the smoke-coloured air above it. One of the sailors, the short one, made gestures, briefly spoke. This, it seemed, was arrival. A minute later the boat snubbed her keel on the sand and the brown sail shivered. The sailors were in a hurry now and their language needed no translation. Calley and Medina took off their coats, rolled them tight then slithered over the sides of the boat, standing up to their thighs in the water as the sailors dug their oars into the sand and pushed the boat away from them. At sea, everything is slow until, without much warning, it’s quick as a wing-beat. The brown sail became a grey sail then just an uncertain line, like a flaw in the lens of the eye.
The soldiers turned in the water and waded ashore. They were relieved to find it real enough, the sand steady under the sodden leather of their boots. They put on their coats, they faced the land, looked, listened.
“Where have those cunts brought us?” said Calley, and at the sound of his voice something thirty yards to their left dragged itself from the beach into the sea. A heavy thing in a panic. The men stared (at nothing) then started searching for a path. On their journey together they had developed a deep faith in the ubiquity of paths, that places seemingly untouched, as emptied of life as an upturned box, were always on the way to somewhere. They walked, paused, walked the whole length of the shining beach in their sopping clothes, found no paths, grew weary of the search, and set off over rocks and heather, stumbling, seeing things in the weird bled whiteness of the air, their ears full of the sound of their own breathing. In a hollow they came across a tree, a wind-stunted pine. It cast no shadow, was not much taller than Medina. Should they feel encouraged by it? They moved on, followed the twistings of a gully, Calley in the lead, Medina six strides behind him. Then Medina veered off—some small rebellion against having for his view the back of another man. He started climbing one of the sides of the gully, scrabbled up over loose stones, went on all fours for the last yards, and stood up in clearer air (air like water in which the sediment has settled). On the brow of the neighbouring hill he could see two houses, side by side, both of them ruins.
He peered down into the gully where Calley was peering up at him. He did not have to see the corporal’s face clearly to know the expression on it. He beckoned to him, and watched as he toiled upwards, a mad and dangerous beetle he would one day tell his friends in the south about, and while they laughed at the thought of such a small, ferocious man, he would explain how this Englishman was exactly as he had been made, a blank sheet formed of rags on which the world had printed some outrageous truth, something like—You will not be loved. Something like that. And then, of course, the laughter would have to stop.
In both houses the roofs had tumbled in but one had kept a little of its thatch—the straw more garden now than roof—and this they choose for their camp. They looked out through an empty doorway, crossed over to look from a shutterless window. Perhaps they were at the tip of a large island and further on there would be villages, towns even. But that wasn’t the sense. That wasn’t what they felt.
They gathered the materials for a fire and built it under the shelter of the thatch.
“You see anything to eat?” asked Calley.
Medina shrugged. “There will be something. There is always something.”
“We’ll have to eat that tree,” said Calley.
Medina worked his way back to the beach. The fog was breaking up, drifting through. At the end of the beach he began to clamber over likely, sea-touched rocks until he found what he was looking for, a tilted block, slippery and cluttered with black shells. He began to pick them off, leaning over the sea and filling both of the large side pockets of his coat. He was singing, “La Gallina Que se Perdió,” and wondered who was the last who had sung on the island and if anyone had ever sung there in Spanish. (Hadn’t the armada of Rey Felipe’s time come down this coast? Might they have stopped here? Taken on water? He thought of the portrait he had seen in the ayuntamiento in Cordoba of the armada’s general, the Duque de Medina Sidonia, whose sallow face had seemed so well fitted to defeat. As Spain herself, perhaps, was well fitted to defeat.)
On his way back he was guided by the firelight above the walls of the house and when he reached the house Calley was crouched by the flames, tidying and poking. Without looking round he asked Medina what he had found.
“Mejillones,” said Medina.
“You what?” said Calley. He stood and turned. Medina took one of the shells from his pocket, held it up.
“One oyster,” said Calley. “That’s fucking brilliant. What are we then? Voles?”
“Not an oyster,” said Medina. “Mejillones. And many of them. You will not sleep hungry.”
He tried to tempt Calley with eating them raw but the Englishman shook his head and Medina fetched water from the hollow of a stone, rainwater in which he glimpsed the rising moon and his own dark face. They cooked the mussels in their mess tins, threw the shells into the shadows.
While they ate, Calley explained what he would do to the savage sailors should he ever find them again. It involved fire and rocks, firearms, a rope. “And they wouldn’t even complain,” he said, “because they know what they’ve done. Sticking us here like Robin what-the-fuck.”
On the fire they burned the house’s own roof beams. As the end of a beam charred and fell away they pushed it along and gave fresh wood to the flames. Medina searched his pockets for more mussels. The moon had climbed above the walls of the house. Other than the smoke from their fire the air was perfectly clear now. Stars opened like flowers.
“When you were small,” said Medina. “A boy. Who was your friend?”
Calley made a noise, something connected to laughter but not laughter. Medina was familiar with the sound, knew it was intended to express astonishment that such a frivolous question should be asked, the kind of question that marked you out as a fool. He also knew that Calley liked to hear such questions, that he found a pleasure in them he would never admit to.
“There were other boys,” he said, “in the yard. I can’t remember our games. It was the time before we were fit for work. When our hands were not yet strong enough for the picking.”
“The yard?”
“The spike. The grubber. The workhouse on Saffron Hill.”
“Azafrán!” said Medina, into whose mind had come an image of the child Calley at play in fields of crocuses. “They grew saffron there?”
“They grew thieves there,” said Calley. “Did they grow saffron! Where do you think it is? Eh? Saffron Hill? It’s the middle of fucking London.”
“But once,” said Medina. “A long time ago.”
“There was a Vine Street too,” said Calley. “And a Field Lane. But there weren’t any vines or fields.”
Medina nodded. There was a long pause. Calley prodded the fire with his boot. Medina was playing a mussel shell like an almost silent castanet. Each man’s face was a thing of fire and shadow.
“What about you?” said Calley. “You must have been a soft boy.”
“Soft?”
“Had friends.”
“Yes, I had friends. And some of those I played with as a boy are my friends still. Some are in the army with me. If I am still in the army.”
“The famous Spanish cavalry,” said Calley.
“Yes. The famous Spanish cavalry.”
“With no horses.”
“With no horses.”
“I once saw a whole field of horses,” said Calley, “left behind by the French. They’d all had the strings cut in their back legs. So they couldn’t be used by us.”
“The war,” said Medina, “is very hard for horses.”
“I’m not saying they did wrong, mind. We did the same on the way to Corunna. What couldn’t be moved had to be tossed. Rules of war. Horses, cannon, wagons. All sorts. I saw a pair of commissary clerks throwing bags of money down a ravine. Spanish dollars. Swinging big bags of it down the ravine. I mean they were drunk as fuck but they were doing what had to be done. And I’ll tell you what, if they’d tried giving it away no one would have touched it. No one wanted money.”
“The retreat,” said Medina.
“Your lot were useless,” said Calley. “Worse than useless.”
“We had difficulties of our own,” said Medina. “The Army of the Left, the Army of the Centre . . . ” He shrugged.
“Your irregulars were more trouble to us than the French. Savages.”
“I fear we might say the same of the British army.”
“People closed their doors on us,” said Calley.
“So you broke down their doors and hanged the men from a tree. As for the women—”
“Fuck off.”
“We were both at the inquiry,” said Medina. “Or have you forgotten that is the reason we are here?”
Calley said nothing. Neither man was particularly excited or angry. There was nothing important to be settled between them.
“In the morning,” said Medina, “we will find a boat.”
“You know where to look, do you?”
“It is an island. There will be a boat. It is the law of islands.”
“Bollocks,” said Calley.
“Even so,” said Medina. “I believe we will find one. We will be lucky.”
They cleared spaces for themselves either side of the fire, lay under their coats with their heads on their packs watching sparks lift into the night’s velvet.
“What are you called?” asked Medina. “Your Christian name? You cannot be just Calley.”
He waited. There was no answer. He had not been heard; it didn’t matter. Then, tossed over the fire as earlier they had tossed away their shells: “Andrew.”
Medina pushed himself on to an elbow. “Andrews?”
“Andrew,” said Calley. “There’s no fucking s. If it was Andrews there’d be two of me.”
Medina tried the name again.
“They called us after the parishes where we were found,” said Calley. “George for St. George’s. Giles for St. Giles. Girls called Agatha, Mary. We even had a Barnabas, a little red-haired cunt they ’prenticed to the sweeps. No way he’s still living.”
“I am Ernesto,” said Medina.
“You what?”
“Ernesto. Also, of course, a saint.”
Somewhere in the last of the night Medina rose and stood by the embers of the fire. He had got up quietly but knew Calley would be aware of him.
“Nothing,” he said. “It is nothing.”
He went out, bowing under the stone lintel, and though he had slept in a roofless house under the dragged light of the moon, he felt at once a new sense of space, the vast suggestiveness of the coming day. He walked down to where he had collected water for their supper, found the water with his fingers, cupped his hands, drew the water to his mouth and drank (it tasted of liquid stone). He was trying to reassemble his dreams but they slipped away like the water between his fingers. Friendship had been part of it. Had he not glimpsed the faces of his friends? But he had not been able to address them, to touch them, either because they were ghosts and he still living or they still living and himself a ghost. And now, he thought, my only friend is Corporal Calley, a lunatic from where they grow thieves like saffron. He grinned, then finding a grin was not enough he leaned back his head and laughed, silently.
After that, in the stillness that followed, two truths arrived with equal force. The first was that he wanted, very much, to smoke a cigar (though he had none and had not smoked since Glasgow). The second was that today would be his last with Calley. They could leave the island together, he had no objection to that, but then their ways must part. There would be some fuss, some name-calling. He would be reproached. But he would remain calm; he would be immovable. They might even shake hands, nothing warm of course, but a recognition of what they had shared, the strangeness of their journey, the fate that had thrown them together. And after that, well, Calley could do as he wished, could find the English officer and carry his head back to Lisbon in his knapsack, a thing he was, in fact, quite likely to do. As for his own path, he had no money and was unlikely to be offered any, but it was harvest time and with so many men at the war help would
be needed in fields and barns. He would work his way, farm by farm, back down the road they had come. And somewhere on that road he might hear of Phyrro, of the men he had swum with in the river, the women with their sunburned arms and dusty boots . . .
To this—the vision of his figure on the road, free as a boy—he gave a single vigorous nod of assent, then set off for the beach, seeing, as he worked his way down, the rim of the rising sun a finger’s width above the horizon, already too fierce to be stared at.
When he reached the shore he sat on the sand, took off his boots, peeled off the frayed mess of his stockings and walked into the sea, standing with the surf around his calves until his feet throbbed with the cold. He came out, picked up his boots and walked—sauntered—to the western end of the beach, stepping from sand on to stones shaped like giant turtles, then up on to the plateau where, after losing his bearings (distracted by the setting moon) he came again to the rock with the mussels on it. He squatted, picking off a dozen of the smaller shells and eating them where he was, dropping the shells into the water. Further off, the sea seemed hardly to move at all. He saw other islands, small ones, inhabited, surely, only by birds. No fire smoke, no black speck of a boat.
He span away the last shell and turned his back to the sea. The sun was rising swiftly and he saw that he was standing at the edge of a meadow, the grasses growing from sand, and in the grass myriad small flowers he had not been aware of when he came the first time, that must have been closed against the weather, the chill of evening. Now, discovered by the sun, they ignited, one by one. The yellow and the white, the gold and the red, so that he seemed to be looking across a field of small lights afloat on the shallow water of morning shadow. Under his bare feet the ground was fibrous with a structure of endless soft branchings. It was odd to take in the world through his feet, the soles as sensitive, as inquisitive as a tongue. It was like that game children and lovers play, sketching words on each other’s back with a finger, half caress, half riddle. His movement woke a bee, sent it zagging, almost too heavy for flight, over the tips of the flowers. He apologised, out loud, in high Castilian.
Now We Shall Be Entirely Free Page 31