Now We Shall Be Entirely Free

by Andrew Miller

  “After that . . . well, after that nothing matters very much. The last forty-eight hours into Corunna I walked. My horse had gone lame and the ball I should have put through the corporal I put through the animal’s head. I did not take part in the battle where General Moore was killed. I was already in the transports in the bay, delirious. Two weeks later, having failed to die, I was at Plymouth. Some time after that, though I have no recollection of it, I was delivered to my house in Somerset where our servant, Nell, tended me with a devotion entirely at odds with what I merited. I recovered. I could not quite keep myself from it—from life, from living. The name I assumed, Lovall, belonged to a blameless young officer who died of a fever on the road out of Portugal. I hope to God I have not disgraced that name, though I suppose I have. I must have. Even more, I fear I have disgraced you and your family. By association, I mean. Certainly I seem to have put you all in danger, though who he is, this Henderson, what he wants of me, why he has pursued me here, that I still do not understand. It is to do with Morales of course, it cannot be otherwise. Some sort of reckoning. Anyway, I have a scheme of sorts. I was piecing it together on the coach today. I will find the means to make my presence known to him. I will advertise myself and draw him away. Away from you, your family, from everyone. He will have no reason to trouble you then. And you will be free of me, Emily. Your life, I think, was a good life before I—”

  She stopped him, mid-sentence, with a touch. He had not heard her cross the room. She was standing directly behind him, had walked up the sound of his voice and found him. She had her fingers on his shoulders, then she leaned her head against his back, her forehead pressing between his shoulder blades. When she spoke her voice was a trembling in his chest. What he heard, and he heard it clearly—the connective power of bones and blood—was like the speaking of his own heart.

  “I do not know how to judge any of this. It is not for me to judge it. I suppose you must go on living with it somehow. But I do not feel disgraced by knowing you. Nor do I wish to be free of you. I began to love you as John Lovall. I shall love you still as John Lacroix.”

  He guided her to the bed. She sat and he unlaced her boots, took them off, took off his own. They lay on the bed together holding hands. He tried to think back to the day’s beginnings; it was like trying to think back to his own infancy. On the ceiling the light moved like water, was restless as water. He heard her say he could kiss her if he wished to. Or that he should? He propped himself up, looked at her, could not quite shake the feeling she looked back at him through the silk. Her lips were dry at first and tight, as were his own. Kissing was a strange thing to do, awkward. Then his hand found one of her breasts, seemed to stumble over it, and through the cloth, through layers of cloth, he felt the hard, impersonal life of her. After that it was easy. A mutual falling, the grief of appetite. And in between the touching, the tender manoeuvres, the new knowledge, he had calm thoughts, grammatical, useful, and remembered even when it was over. One was, what I have done in Spain I cannot make good, and telling it changes nothing. Another was, she does not especially mind what I have done, is not, perhaps, particularly interested. It is what she expects of soldiers. A third—she knows more about this thing we are doing than I.

  He must have cried out at the end. There was a shattering of china. The cat had been on the table drinking the dregs of the negus and had been startled into a clumsy jump.

  “He’ll want letting out,” said Emily.

  “Want what?”

  “Letting out, John. The cat.”

  He got off the bed and crossed the boards to the door. He was wearing only his shirt and a single woollen stocking, ravelled round an ankle. As soon as the door was open the cat darted past him. The stairs were dark, the hotel silent. He waited there, hanging on with some sense of offering himself as a target to whatever—whoever—might be standing in the throat of the stairs. But it was only a game; he had no intention of sacrificing himself. He shut the door, worked home the little bolt, snuffed the candle and went back to her.

  20

  He was on a beach at the island’s northern tip. Facing him was another island, so much like the one he was standing upon—the beach, the bay, the rocks, the pelt of brown and green, the absence of trees—it was like a mirror, though a mirror that did not, of course, include him, the one who looked, who stood alone and gazed out.

  The distance was not great. He gauged it at half a pistol shot, probably less, and a man who knew how to swim might be tempted to try it. That man would not arrive. An entire ocean pushed its wild green arm between the islands. Ten strokes out and you’d look up with a gasp to find yourself somewhere else entirely. Human strength would mean nothing out there. Even in a boat it was hard to see how you’d do it. Not, he thought, in a straight line.

  He walked away from the sea, sat in the sand between tall spikes of dune grass. All day, scrambling around the island, he had waited for himself to come right but he hadn’t. Not right as rain, not the old Calley. There was the sense of a misstep. The sense of being given the kind of lesson he would not recover from.

  He picked a piece of grass, picked another, started winding them together. I’ll make a rope, he thought, but what would he do with it? There was no one to take the other end. There was not even a tree he could hang himself from. That little pine tree, you’d have to be a midget to hang yourself from that.

  Anyway.

  The point is.

  What I’m saying.

  He spoke to Medina. It had taken hours to find the right voice and he had settled on something that drew on their better times together, like when Medina brought him the soup those clowns in Wales brewed instead of tea. Or that night after they found the tattooed sailor and thought they were closing in on Lacroix. Or sitting on the harbour wall at Mull. Or eating mussels, last night.

  What’s your name?

  Andrew.

  And when Medina repeated it he got it a bit wrong, said Andrew with an s. Andrews. That didn’t matter though. He didn’t mind. It was funny because Medina didn’t make mistakes as a rule, could speak the king’s better than a lot of men Calley had served with. So it hadn’t mattered, he didn’t mind. And that was what he’d been trying to say, how much he hadn’t minded things and hadn’t even minded that thing with the flowers, not really, and if you’d stopped at two, well, you dozy cunt, we’d be sitting here on the beach together having a chinwag.

  He tossed the grass away, his little rope. The shadows were long now. On the water the light was a slowly deepening gold. An hour of light left; half an hour of good light, of useful light.

  He dug deep in one of his many pockets, pulled out the brass case, fiddled with the catch, opened it. The blonde curl, the woman’s eye, the two grey tears. He was not sure if Medina had seen him palm it. “Did you?” he asked, his voice part of the night breeze through the marram. “Did you see me, you sly dog?” And he grinned and thought, I’d give it to him now, if he was here, if he wanted it.

  He wound himself down into the sand. It wasn’t cold, or not especially so. He held the brass case in his hand. The painting was of some dead man’s squeeze, the woman dead herself no doubt, hence grief, hence the cutting of the neck, hence a grave at the edge of nowhere. But she looked on him with a kindness he relished and he gazed back until, fading with the fading light, the eye seemed to close. He pulled his coat up around his cheeks and closed his own eyes. He readied himself for a dream of his mother—not his actual mother, about whom he knew nothing at all, but one of that troupe of dream women who, once or twice a year, stood over him in sleep. Tonight, perhaps, she would walk out of the sea. She would cross the beach and find her son sleeping in the open without as much shelter as a dog. She would bring him something, a gift, he didn’t know what, a suit of magic armour perhaps, leave it heaped on the sand beside his head. He readied himself, he thought he was probably lost enough, that he’d earned it, the apparition, the ghost mother
with her ghost love. Instead, he dreamed, briefly and powerfully, of Ernesto Medina stretched out on the grass and through his white shirt, the skin of his face, two dozen crimson flowers coming into bloom.

  When he woke he lay in a perfection of readiness, eyes wide, breath slow. With finger and thumb he tested the darkness like a cloth. Not quite night, not quite day. The edge of both.

  He listened, leaned himself against the door of the world, heard all the subtle graduations of nothing. Then he heard again the voice that had woken him. The rising and dipping of a song. Some man flying his voice like a kite.

  Where was he? Measure distances, Calley. Be certain.

  He shifted in the sand, raised his head so that he could turn it—a little this way, a little that. The voice was not behind him, where he might have expected it, nor was it on the beach in front of him.

  He sat up. Glimmer of sand. Late stars. A breeze in which he seemed to smell the salty fish-head muck the world was made of, half Billingsgate, half sex. Out in the channel was a small light. It was hard to say at first which way it was headed or if it was headed anywhere, if, perhaps, it was merely floating out there. But after watching a minute, unblinking, the light grew brighter, the song clearer, and there could be no more doubt.

  Whatever was coming it would touch the beach no more than thirty yards from where he sat. He undid his coat. The carbine, faithful dog, fell under his touch, but as his fingers slid towards the lock, the hammer, he realised he had not loaded it again, not since. And this was remiss and strange, some foolish symptom of the previous day’s confusion. Anyway, the look of it was usually enough. The look of himself. Usually.

  The singing stopped. You might imagine the world’s turning stopped with it. Then the light was raised and Calley saw the form and figure of a man, though one so encumbered with what he carried—a great shadow on his back—he was more a type of beetle than a man. A beetle that crossed water without the need of a boat.

  He let go of the carbine and buttoned his coat again. Anyone who could cross a torrent in his boots, singing, was not to be frightened off with a gun. He walked down to the shore and stood there waiting as the light came closer. Another stop, another raising of the lantern. They were only ten yards apart now.

  “Good morning to you, brother,” said the voice in what might have almost been a continuation of the song. “You are a man and not a spirit, I suppose?”

  “Flesh and blood,” said Calley. “Though I do not yet know what you are.”

  “One who would come ashore if you have no objection.”

  “I have none,” said Calley.

  “The crossing time is short,” said the man, walking again, walking where, when Calley lay down to sleep, the sea had been.

  A minute later and they stood together on the beach. The beetle was plain enough now, a man about Calley’s own build, and on his back a frame to which a vast number of objects were attached. He had a stick in one hand, the lantern in the other.

  “You’re a pedlar,” said Calley.

  “The pedlar,” said the man, “or so I like to think of myself though there are one or two others who walk the islands. May I raise my lamp, brother, and see you more clearly?”

  He raised it, looked, nodded, lowered it again. “I did not know we had soldiers here,” he said.

  “Are you alone?” asked Calley.

  “I am,” said the man, “for the moment. And you, brother?”

  “Yes,” said Calley.

  There was a pause. The man came a step closer. When he moved you could hear the creak of the frame, the soft shifting of the things attached to it. He wore his boots around his neck. His feet were bare.

  “You are wondering,” he said, “how I did that. How I walked across. You are wondering if it was some enchantment.”

  “Where has the water gone?” said Calley.

  “The moon has it in her pockets,” said the pedlar.

  “How’s that?” asked Calley.

  “Tides, brother. On certain nights there is an hour at the ebb when you can cross. A bare hour, mind. You have to know what you’re about. When the water starts to come back you could not outrun it on a horse.”

  “How much of the hour is left?”

  “Tonight?”

  “Tonight.”

  “I’d say half. A little more, a little less.”

  “And how long does it take to cross?”

  “Half an hour. More or less.”

  “And when does it come again?”

  “Like this? Two weeks, I’d say. Depending on her Lunar Majesty. She has her moods.”

  Calley stepped away, got himself apart from the man’s light and stared out into the channel. He chewed his lip, made calculations that had little to do with time and distance and much to do with luck. How much he might have used, how much remained.

  “I’ll go,” he said.

  “I believe you will,” said the pedlar.

  “I need a light.”

  “Well now,” said the pedlar, “it so happens I am in a position to meet your needs.” He shrugged off his frame. He did it well, seemed to dance it down on to the sand. Then a moment of search, of rummage. “One like this?” he said.

  “Yes,” said Calley.

  “And you’ll need a candle. Do you have a candle?”

  “A candle too,” said Calley. “You got any food?”

  “Now food is a thing they do not really need me for. I have tobacco, a little brandy. I have fifteen different clocks. Recently the islanders have become interested in time.”

  “I don’t want a clock,” said Calley.

  “You might pick up a lobster on your way over,” said the pedlar. “Listen out for them. Clack, clack, clack.”

  “Light the candle for me,” said Calley.

  “You have something for me I hope?”

  “I have money.”

  “Money is good,” said the pedlar, lighting the candle from his own and placing it inside the lantern, shutting the little door. “Though sometimes I prefer items of value I can trade in. You have some trinket on you? A watch? A watch would get you the lantern and candle, a pipe and tobacco.”

  “I have no watch,” said Calley. He reached into his pockets. His right hand touched the brass case, the little painting; his left skimmed one of the items he had taken from Medina’s coat before making the coat into a shroud, weighting it with stones and rolling the Spaniard into the sea. He took the item out and showed it. It was Medina’s uniform collar badge, a sabre crossed with a palm branch, brass. Medina must have carried it to prove what he was in the event they were taken. To prove he was a soldier. As if that would have helped.

  “Now that’s a curious piece,” said the pedlar. “It could almost be a lady’s brooch. I know a man clever with his hands who could put a pin on the back of it. Pin and clasp. Very well. This and five shillings gets you the candle and lantern.”

  “That’s fucking steep,” said Calley.

  “You could always go to the other fella,” said the pedlar. “See what he’ll offer you.”

  Calley paid. Five shillings left him with only two but there was no time to haggle. No time even to thrash the man.

  “You should take off your boots,” said the pedlar.

  “Don’t worry about my boots,” said Calley. “Point the way with your stick.”

  The pedlar raised the stick, held it out. “Halfway across,” he said, “you’ll begin to see where you’re going to. But don’t stop, don’t change your course even if you hear the water. Keep going, straight as an arrow.”

  Calley put his knapsack on his back, picked up his new lantern. “Why did you come here?” he said. “There’s no one here.”

  “You were here,” said the pedlar.

  Calley began to walk. Dry sand, damp sand. Then sand and weed and pools of water, not deep. For
the first few minutes he knew he would be able to run back to the beach. After that he would be a man committed. The air was cooler out here, colder. It was like walking into a cave. Then he stopped. He turned a careful one hundred and eighty degrees until he was facing the path he had just walked.

  “You are doing grand,” called the pedlar. “But it’s not wise to stop out there.”

  “I’m looking for someone,” said Calley. “On the islands somewhere. English. Army officer. Lovall or Lacroix. Plays a fiddle. You know him?”

  “English? The only English I know are in a house two days’ walking from where you’re stood. Two sisters and a brother. But now that I think of it they may have a man staying with them. A visitor. Came to the island on the back of a cow, they say. Might he be your officer?”

  By the light of his lamp, Calley saw the water riddling round his boots, felt, even through the leather, some small shifting of its force. “Two days’ walk?” he said.

  “The family, name of Frend,” called the pedlar. “A white house near the western shore. A place on its own. You can ask for Ranald if you want to find them.”

  “Ranald?”

  “Has hooks for hands. Everyone knows Ranald. But if you stand there much longer you’ll have to look for him in America.” Calley shut his eyes and turned back the same careful half circle. “Advance in line,” he said softly, “by the left . . . ”

  He went as quickly as he dared, stone and slither under his feet, sucking-mud, black-shine. He imagined finding Medina, his body washed around into the channel, imagined stumbling over him, his white face, his hair plaited with ribbons of weed. How wide the channel was! Wide and cold! And why could he still not see the far shore? Had he curved away? Fallen into the foolish error of following his own light as though it led him?