Now We Shall Be Entirely Free

by Andrew Miller

  He lengthened his stride. The lantern swung, the candle flame flying within the glass like a terrified bird. All the voices in his head fell silent. He had neither name nor history. He was a shadow. A ghost fleeing before the dawn. He was the done-with, the uninvented. A freedom of sorts? Then his heel glided on something slick and glabrous and he went down heavily with a grunt, lay a moment in the water, stunned, feeling the water shove at him. The candle was out. He got to his feet, threw away the lantern and ran.

  21

  The boat that took them was called Halcyon. Two days earlier she had delivered four families bound for the emigration ship. Now, loaded with timber and a hundred blades for sickles and scythes, a bolt of pink-striped cotton for a customer in Tarbert, the boat was ready to depart. The crew untied from the quay as the church rang ten. Spinkey himself came down to wave them off.

  “I appeal,” said Emily, “to his Russian sense of the tragic.”

  “That may be,” said Lacroix, “but he has played a part now in the lives of both sisters.”

  She nodded, blushed a little. Lacroix liked her blush but wondered if he had been indelicate. Hard to know what was permitted, what could be spoken of, what merely known. They were as new to this as the day was new. Ten o’clock marked the entire history of their . . . whatever it was. Was it an engagement? Was it? What did she think it was?

  “He is still waving,” he said.

  “Are you waving back?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said. And waved.

  *

  The day was breezy but the breezes fitful. High cloud, slow-moving, no swell to speak of, the colour of the sea a rich impenetrable green. Emily and Lacroix were the only passengers. They moved freely around the deck, Emily’s arm wound tightly through Lacroix’s. After the hospital, the long cooping-up of the carriage ride, she declared herself relieved to be out in the air. He told her she should have tried travelling on the roof of the coach, that he had felt himself inflating like one of Montgolfier’s balloons.

  “I would rather have been up there,” she said. “I would have been with you and you would have held on to me.”

  “Yesterday,” he said, “we were still simply friends. Travelling companions.”

  “Nonsense,” she said.

  “Hmm?”

  “You know it’s nonsense, John. Do you not remember our walk on the beach?”

  “I remember every moment of it,” he said. “I remember you being very angry with me.”

  “That part you may forget,” she said. “And I wasn’t angry with you. I was angry with how little men understand the lives of women. And not because they cannot understand but because they will not trouble to. They will go to the greatest lengths to understand rocks or the smelting of iron. They will speculate endlessly on the nature of the divine and how we should say our prayers. Women they only pretend to give their attention to.”

  “Is that true of Thorpe?” asked Lacroix.

  “You should not think of Thorpe any longer,” she said. “He was never your rival.”

  “You knew him first.”

  “Yes. And liked him. As you will like him, perhaps.”

  “I hope I will,” he said, “for Jane’s sake.”

  “My rival,” said Emily, “was my own sister.”

  He denied it, as vehemently as he dared.

  They crossed the firth, entered the sound between Mull and the headland. The day was half warm, half cool. When the bows raised spray the water wore a crown of coloured light. Out of earshot—they knew there were English speakers on the boat—they set themselves to be practical, to try, in to and fro, to sift what they knew from what they didn’t, what they could guess from what they could not. Emily started with the master. Were not all seamen notorious for their yarns? The simplest explanation for the strangeness of his story, its character of the incredible, was that it was, in part or in entirety, made up. Lacroix shook his head, said that could not be. Everything he had seen of the master, and he had seen a good deal of him on the journey up from Bristol, convinced him of his honesty. A scrupulous man, a plain speaker. And what of his injury? That was no invention.

  This brought them to his assailant.

  “When I think of him,” said Lacroix, “when I picture him . . . ” He faltered. She heard him shrug.

  “What?” she asked. “You know him after all? You have guessed him?”

  “I do not know him,” he said. “I have sworn to you and to Captain Browne. I do not know him.”

  “But something,” she said. “When you picture him you see . . . who?”

  Lacroix was silent a while, however long it takes the unvoiced to thicken into language. “The master,” he began, “told us Henderson had bow legs. Bandy. The corporal in Morales, the one who cut off the girl’s hair, he had them also.”

  “So have a great many,” she said. “My father’s friend Smith looked like a pair of egg tongs.”

  “But the way he was in the master’s house,” said Lacroix. “The coolness of it.”

  “You mean the cunning of it.”

  “The what of it?”

  “A cunning man. A shameless one.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But you cannot remember the soldier’s name?”

  “No.”

  “Or you never knew it at all?”

  “That is possible. Likely even.”

  “In which case—”

  “In which case,” interrupted Lacroix, “there is nothing to say he was not Henderson. But if it is the same man, suppose for a moment that it is, why pursue me? An officer who barely knew him, who did him far less harm than he might have . . . ”

  “You saw him in his crime.”

  “He saw me in mine.”

  “They are not the same, John! Not at all!”

  “I suppose,” said Lacroix, “if they wished to have me brought before a court he would not be the worst they could send. A man who could recognise me . . . ”

  “That cannot be right,” said Emily.

  He didn’t hear her; the breeze scattered her words. She leaned in closer. “He has not come to arrest you,” she said. “A man who behaves as he has done does not act for any court. And did he not say to Captain Browne he was outside the law?”

  “He also said he was sent by one whose word could not be gainsaid.”

  “And you answered it was a fantasy to justify his violence.”

  “I did.”

  “But now you think differently?”

  “I do not know what to think. I start to make a path, to see one. Then I lose it, or it was no path at all.”

  “Well,” she said. “If we do not know all we know enough. We have been warned. That is what counts. We will fetch Jane and Cornelius and then all of us will go where this man, whoever he is, can never find us.”

  “And where is that?” asked Lacroix. “Shoreditch?”

  For the moment there seemed no more to be said. They were caught in the space between two stories, between the sweetness of what they had, (their half-night at the hotel, souls and bodies bared), and what still lay at a distance, the outer world that signalled to them but whose message would not harden into sense. They stopped their parading of the deck and settled themselves, hip to hip, in the lee of a cord of timber. The smell of forests settled on them. She said it reminded her of her father’s workshop. “By ten,” she said, “I knew wood well. I could tell you the difference between rosewood and maple. Oak and sycamore.”

  “You helped him with his work?”

  “I remember,” she said, “Jane and Cornelius and myself squatting like Chinamen lining hatboxes with scale.”

  “Is that a happy memory?” he asked.

  “It is today,” she said. She shifted at the side of him, felt for his face and kissed him. A sailor, tying off a halyard to a pin, glanced at them and
looked away, as if he were the world’s observer and had towards them some duty of tenderness.

  They crept up the sound. On the water the cloud-shadows were almost stationary. Another hour and a town of brightly painted houses showed on the port side; an hour later and it was still in view. Lacroix spoke with the captain. “When we come out of the lee of the island,” said the captain, “we may find the wind again.” But they came out and the wind was less than before. They were carried north on the current, cleared the headland at Ardnamurchan under the shadow of its cliffs, the crew fretting the sails to pick up whatever scraps of wind might give them sea room. It was already late afternoon. Ahead of them was a small island with a curving high ride of bare rock along its back. This, Lacroix and Emily were informed, was where the Halcyon would spend the night. In the morning they might have better luck.

  They closed on the island, drifted into a bay. The anchor was let go and the Halcyon found her angle and was still. The captain asked if they cared to go ashore. They went, rowed over by a straw-haired sailor who told them he had once, on the beach they were rowing towards, found a coconut shell that must have been washed all the way from the Indies.

  “Where are you from?” asked Lacroix.

  “Friesland,” said the sailor. “Or an island near the coast. Ameland.”

  “Is it like this?”

  The sailor shook his head. “We have no mountain in Ameland. There you are born with your feet in the sea and you can never make them dry again.” He laughed, shipped the oars, stepped out of the boat and drew them on to the beach. He and Lacroix—one elbow each—lifted Emily down to the sand.

  “I will wait for you here,” said the sailor. “I will smoke my pipe.”

  They walked the curve of the bay. Lacroix described what he could see. He said he thought reading Hutton had made him into a better observer, more exact.

  “I cannot stop thinking,” she said, “of where he is. I seem to see him sometimes.”

  “I assume you mean Henderson rather than Hutton.”

  “When I see him he is running.”

  “He cannot run over the sea.”

  “What if he does not need to?”

  “These are imaginings, Emily. He may be a hundred miles away. He has returned to England perhaps. For all that we know he is back in the Peninsula.”

  “I do not believe it,” she said. “And neither do you.”

  He looked at her. With her eyes covered was she developing other ways of seeing? He thought not, told himself not (apart from anything else soldiers generally did not run unless they were ordered to). Still, it unnerved him. Emily was also Basemath, daughter of Solomon, dreamer of dreams. As Emily, she was for the moment almost helpless. As Basemath he did not know what powers she might yet have, what her limits were.

  He sat her on a rock and settled beside her. They were in the shadow of the ridge but ahead of them the ship floated in a light so pure and perfectly clear he could fancy he saw, across three hundred yards, the glint of a gold ring in a sailor’s ear. A woman approached them. She was young, sturdy, carried a basket and addressed them in Gaelic. She showed Lacroix what was in her basket. Eggs, oatcakes, a ball of red wool, some combs and spoons carved from horn. She could not keep her gaze from Emily, and when she looked at Lacroix her expression was part fierce, part fearful, as if she wondered what manner of man travelled with a woman like this, her eyes bound. By tomorrow, thought Lacroix, Emily will be a story. Over time she might be folded into song. He bought two eggs from her, two of the oatcakes, then, for its redness, and because the woman’s appearance felt like part of the theatre and fate of these days, that he was in the presence of not one but two creatures touched by the uncanny, he took the skein of wool. He had no idea what the price of these things might be and if she was telling him she may as well have saved her breath. He held coins on his palm and she picked among them. The deep, deep seriousness of her! She spoke once more—a blessing, he hoped—then walked on down the beach towards the sailor.

  “What’s this?” said Lacroix, and touched Emily’s face with the wool. She took it from him, sniffed it, pressed it in her hand.

  “Lovely,” she said.

  “And can you tell its colour?”

  She said she could and that it was blue.

  They slept in hammocks and in the morning were woken by a chain rattling into a locker a yard from their feet.

  “The anchor,” said Lacroix, when Emily raised her head above the canvas. They waited, two risen spirits, listening to the movements of the crew overhead, the dull slap of bare feet on the wood. They waited, then felt the water tighten around the keel and the ship begin to work, to live, to make the air around them live. Something fell; someone laughed.

  “The wind,” said Emily.

  “Yes,” said Lacroix. “The wind is back.”

  He helped her down. The helping ended in an embrace. He thought how much he would like to begin every morning for the rest of his life with such a moment. Thought also that he was glad to do it once.

  The wind was a southerly. It took them towards the hills of Skye where they turned, swung west, and beat out into the Minch. Lacroix, leaving Emily eating the oatcakes he bought on the island, her back safely against the timber, went to stand beside the captain. They would, said the captain, make landfall by the middle of the afternoon. In a few hours they would have the tide with them.

  Lacroix thanked him. He scanned the sea for other boats, saw two, three. He borrowed the captain’s spyglass to look at one he fancied was on the same heading as the Halcyon. In the glass bobbed four bearded heads, and so alike they had to be brothers. They had no stranger with them.

  He went back to sit with Emily. The knowledge that they were only hours from their destination, that they could—should—be at the house by the shore long before dark, did not soothe her. Every fifteen minutes she asked him what he could see, how close they were, how soon he thought they might arrive. She was so agitated he wondered if she was in pain. He asked if her eyes were troubling her. Would she like him to examine them? She frowned at him. She was getting more accurate, did not waste many expressions on empty air.

  “It is not my eyes. Use yours.”

  “I will,” he said, “when there is something to use them on.”

  They sat without speaking, two stiff figures rolling with the rolling of the boat.

  “You are already tired of me,” she said, but he didn’t hear her. A half-minute later she felt for his hand, squeezed it. “John,” she said. “Will you do something? Will you sing? It need not be loud. The others need not hear you.”

  “Sing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sing what?”

  “Sing anything.”

  He sang her “Greensleeves.” He sang “As I Walked Forth.” He sang “Black-eyed Susan.” He sang close to her and quietly. She listened to him like a bird enchanted, a child. When he finished he asked her to take her turn. She said she could not, not now, she was too uneasy, but after a minute, without warning, she opened her mouth as though to speak and sang instead. “The Lass of Richmond Hill,” “A Sailor’s Life,” then “Fare Thee Well,” though in the last verse her throat was tight and from under the scarf, in the groove between cheek and nose, a tear came. Lacroix, wiping it with his thumb, said it was a good thing her eyes still did what eyes could do, that he was sure now she would see again, and soon. He said if he had wine in his hand he would drink to Rizzo.

  “We will do so,” she said. “All of us together.”

  This thought gave them, perhaps, ten minutes of calm, then it was back to willing the ship forward, to a kind of scratching at the interiors of their own heads. The land hung back. The sea was leisurely, indifferent, lost in a slow green dreaming of its own. He wished she would sleep. A bare six days since she had been on the table under the glass roof! What if the fever returned? Rizzo had spoken to hi
m about it in the few minutes there had been to discuss anything. The importance of keeping her eyes clean. Clean water, water that had been boiled, perhaps with a little vinegar. Plain food, rest. The avoidance of dust and smoke, the fumes of anything. The avoidance, where possible, of whatever might agitate her, physically or mentally.

  She sent him to speak to the captain again. The captain looked amused.

  “Your lady is very anxious to be ashore, sir.”

  “We are both,” said Lacroix.

  The captain took out his watch. He flipped up the lid with a thumbnail, looked at it, looked at the set of sails, at the land. “It is five minutes before four o’clock. If we are not tied up by half past five you may tell me I do not know my business.”

  Lacroix leaned at the rail. They were not, he knew, going to come in by the narrow opening the cattle boat had carried him through when he first arrived. They were going further north—were already further north—and would make their entrance through a labyrinth of islets that stood at the mouth of a loch better suited to a vessel the size of the Halcyon. It would make the land journey slightly longer but all distances on the island were small enough. They would sleep at the house, and in the morning . . . what? Leave with what they could carry? Get Ranald to borrow one of the kelper’s carts, return to the coast? If they left before it was light they might even get aboard the Halcyon again. But could so much be done so quickly? One sister pregnant, one blind or as good as. Not to mention Cornelius and the condition he might be in. And something in him jibbed at the thought of running from this Henderson. He was—unless he was already marked down on the muster roll as a deserter—still an officer in His Majesty’s Army, a regiment that thought itself among the best. He had charged French cavalry (only once, but he had done it). He had worn the uniform, the blue and the silver. Yet now he was planning to hide from a man whose idea of valour was the bullying and assault of an unarmed sailor in his house at night.