Now We Shall Be Entirely Free

by Andrew Miller

  He tapped powder into the pan, closed the frizzen, tipped the remaining powder into the barrel, dropped in the ball, pushed in the cartridge paper with his thumb. He could not get the ramrod loose. He let it alone, breathed, tried again, freed it. He thrust paper and ball down into the breech, swung the rod back to its place beneath the barrel. Prised the hammer to full cock.

  Emily had raised her left hand. She was pointing to the wall dividing the room they were in from the big room. He watched her. For two or three seconds he had no idea what she was doing, then he understood. Slowly, her finger moved in the direction of the door, stopped, and moved back towards the stairs. Then up, up, until she was pointing to the ceiling. Lacroix thought he heard the complaint of a board in the corridor but it was Emily’s finger he trusted in now. When she drew it back along the ceiling to the top of the stairs he got to his feet, went to her and, as gently as he could, raised her off the chair. As she stood, her shoulder knocked the guittar and it gave out a small, sighing echo of its strings, a ghost chord. He walked her to the centre of the room. For a moment her hands hung idle—she had lost him—then she raised her right hand and traced a line back down the stairs.

  “Captain Lacroix, sir? I think you are hereabouts somewhere, sir. I have a message for you. It won’t take long. A military matter. From the top. Very pressing.”

  He was, according to Emily’s finger, speaking from near the bottom of the stairs, somewhere between the stairs and Cornelius’s room.

  “You don’t want to go worrying about that business on the retreat, sir. That’s all forgotten now. No one even remembers the name of the place. It’s all forgotten. The war’s moved on, sir. No need for you to be uneasy. Same for the lady who’s here. Nothing for her to worry about.”

  Emily’s finger began to shift to the right, away from the stairs. There was a tapping on the wood of the wall that even Lacroix heard, though Emily’s finger pointed eighteen inches further to the right from where he would have placed the sound.

  He has looked in the window, thought Lacroix. He knows there is another room, a room unaccounted for. He has only to find the door.

  “I’ve come a long way, sir. Had a weary old time of it, I have. Even lost my mucker on the road. My friend. No one to blame, sir, not really. Though I won’t pretend it has not made me sorry.”

  More sounds. He was . . . dragging something. The ottoman? Lacroix edged half an inch closer to Emily. He settled his left hand on her shoulder, very lightly. Through her shoulder he could feel the pulsing of a heart but could not easily have said if it was his or hers. Her finger moved right, stopped, moved back, stopped, moved right again until she was pointing at the wall directly ahead of them. Could Calley see them? Was there some fine crack in the panelling he could see them through? Was his eye pressed to it even now? Her finger was steady as a compass needle. It was a truth of sorts. Lacroix reached out with the pistol, its barrel as close as he dared to the side of her hand. You will have one chance, said the master, one only. Hesitate and you are lost.

  The trigger—he seemed to crush it in his fist. He saw the hammer go, saw sparks in a dance, but felt no strong push-back, no arm-shove. A misfire? If so, he was dead, they both were. Then a curl of blue smoke cleared from in front of his face, parted like blue yarn, and he realised he was looking through a jagged star of shattered wood into the big room, and through the width of that room to the window and out to the land beyond. He walked to the wall, looked through the hole, looked down. The ottoman was at right angles to the wall and pulled a short way back from it. A man’s leg—his boot—was lying on the silk, the rest of him in the deep shadows of the floor. He watched the leg on the ottoman for a while, how it seemed to be resting there. When he was satisfied he turned back to Emily. She was still pointing, her arm rigid. He touched her hand and very slowly lowered it.

  22

  He spent most of the night by Ranald’s side, had carried up water for him and a cloth wrung out at the spring to cool his swollen face. Three or four times in the dark, Ranald addressed him, or some figure from his dreams, in Gaelic, and each time Lacroix replied, “Orra bhuinneagan, a ghaoil, Orra bhuinneagan, a ghràidh . . . ” It was from a song about potatoes and it was, on his tour of the north, all the music he had managed to collect. He hoped the sounds would be comforting.

  He did not dare to sleep. He watched the starless sky, smelled the ground, curled and uncurled his fingers, and in his head made passionate speeches to uniformed men in a large room he did not recognise. The men looked on impatiently. They had heard it all before, many times.

  At first light he lifted Ranald on to the horse’s back. He did not look into the small trench, did not tell Ranald who was in there. He led the horse to Jesse Campbell’s house, kept his distance from the kelpers, found the old man milking his fettered cow. Together they carried Ranald inside and laid him on the bed where, immediately, the old man began to tend to him, to tend and to sing. The hook Lacroix had found in the grass he left on a table where it weighed down three of the blue Glasgow notes, money he hoped would be of use to them, feared would not.

  Then back to the hill for Calley, who lay in the trench, rigid and boy-small, his pack at his feet, the sawn-down carbine across his chest. There was a black rose between the second and third buttons of his coat, something much bigger than that on the other side. At the house, while the body was still warm, that hour of perfect strangeness that followed the firing of the gun, he had searched Calley’s pack and pockets, hoping for something that would explain him, but all he had found beyond the ordinary, the predictable, was a piece of paper with a list of islands on it, their names strangely mixed in with Spanish names, and in a brass case in one of the coat’s many pockets, a lover’s eye with two grey tears at the crease and certainly stolen . . .

  Now—no words, everything businesslike, orderly, frantic—he put on top of Calley all that was piled at the side of the trench, shoved it in with his hands hoping to fill the trench completely, but some of the peat must have been taken away, perhaps to be examined by Cornelius’s trowel, and he fetched more from beside the other new trench and made the ground level by stamping on it. Then he stood, staring at the earth between his boots, panting and wiping the dirt from his hands. He wept. It came on him like a shift in the weather, a vertigo, moved through his chest, his throat, convulsed his face. Who was it for? He hoped it was for the girl on the chair in Morales but feared it was only for himself. As for the man he had just buried, who would shed tears for Corporal Calley? Would anyone miss him? Did he have family? A sweetheart? A friend? Had he not, at the end, boasted of a friend?

  For a dozen terrible seconds Lacroix thought he was crossing into madness. He could not understand how he had done so much with so little intention. As if his life were not his own, as if he lacked the will, the discipline to make it so. Where to begin? Where to begin now? Voices mocked him, his own among them. He wondered suddenly if his father had been mad, if that was what the doctor’s calls had been about. Were the music books, the dried flowers, simples against madness? He gripped the sides of his head, squeezed it in a way he knew must have looked comical to anyone who had been there to see it. And it was then—lost to a degree he had not imagined possible—that he looked up and saw, right at the edge of what sight could bite down and faint as brushstrokes, the mast-tips and royals of a ship, something big, broaching the northern horizon. He was stunned. It was as if the world had agreed to look back at him, had met his gaze. He waited, breath stilled, life stilled, until he was sure he was not seeing clouds or sea-smoke, that it was not a vision, something he himself had placed there. He watched it rise, waited until the hull rode over the horizon, until sunlight touched some bright thing on it and made it signal, faintly, its existence. Then he broke away, seemed to fall into the air behind him, called to old Tom (what had they not been through together, these last twenty hours?) and led him, as swiftly as the horse’s bulk would allow, back to the house
on the shore.

  He found Emily in the kitchen. She was sitting at the table facing the door to the outside. She had dressed herself in clothes and colours he did not think were meant to live together. She had misbuttoned the neck of her dress. Once she knew it was him, that he was alone and not accompanied by some official propelled on to the island by news of a stranger, a gunshot, she wanted to know about Ranald. He told her. “Oh Ranald,” she said. It was her turn to weep. He watched her with the openness that had become habitual, the way her tears darkened the silk. When she was easier he told her what he had seen from the hill. He said he thought it was the emigration ship, the Chiron, and that she would pass the island as the other had, a mile or so from the shore. The timing was right, the heading. What else could it be? She nodded—a slow, blind, feeling-out of his voice.

  Then, after a pause during which the cat sauntered between them, hopeful perhaps that normal life was about to be resumed, its old paradise of spills and splashes, he told her he did not believe any more that Calley was merely some deranged, solitary assassin. Calley had followed orders; that was what men like him did. It didn’t matter whose orders. He would not be the last to come, he would not be the end of it. Then he told her what he intended to do. He gave to it the character of a revelation, knowing she was used from childhood to the authority of such moments (and had it not, in its suddenness, its completeness, been very like a revelation?). But for several seconds she was silent and he began to think she could not have understood him. He was about to repeat himself when she said, “And me?”

  “You?”

  “Yes.”

  He said he could not ask her. That he had no right to.

  “No right even to offer me the choice?”

  “But your sister. The child. Thorpe!”

  “Thorpe is the last person I wish to see. Do you not know that?”

  He shook his head. He did not.

  “John,” she said. “Ask me. Ask me.”

  So he asked and she answered. There was no delay in it. Nor did he fail to hear it, or mishear it or imagine he had. She stood from the table. He reached across to touch her cheek, her hair, then they went together to the stairs and up the stairs to her room where she sat on the bed telling him what to pack. For his own things he borrowed a bag out of Cornelius’s room, the initials O.T. painted on the side. (He decided not to inquire if Thorpe was an Osbert, an Oliver.) When both bags were ready they sat at the table downstairs and she dictated to him a letter for her brother and sister, which he wrote with pen and paper from Lovall’s writing case. It explained what there was time to explain, offered love, promised a return. At the bottom of the letter he added: For God’s sake do not dig in the small trench. Leave it be!

  He then scratched five lines to his sister. He hoped she was well and the children and William. He might soon be in Ireland. He might be in Canada. He would write again when he could. She did not, he said, need to keep a lamp in the window any more.

  He addressed the letter and left them both on the table in the big room, propped against a shape of grooved and bluish pottery, a fragment as beautiful as it was broken.

  Since seeing the ship from the hill he reckoned a bare hour had passed, no more.

  They went down to the boathouse. It was early afternoon, the day was mild and clear—though less mild and less clear than it had been. Lacroix carried the bags and his fiddle case. Emily clutched the sleeve of his green coat with one hand, carried her guittar with the other. At the boathouse he put down the bags and opened the door with a series of shoves. He had imagined something flying out—or running—but nothing came out and he looked through to where the boat floated on its bed of silky water. He left Emily sitting on one of the bags and went inside. Odd acoustics in there. He crouched to examine the interior of the boat. There was water, two inches or so over the keel-line. It could, he thought, be rainwater. He looked for something to bail with and found a wine glass sitting on its own on the wooden walkway by the bows. He sniffed at it. Dregs, ancient lees. Had someone poured a libation to the gods here? An offering in hope of a safe crossing, a successful fishing trip? Or did Cornelius sometimes come in here to hide from his sisters?

  He knelt and used the glass to empty out some of the water, then gave it up. He had killed a man the night before. Why worry about damp feet? He went out to collect the bags and the instruments, loaded them into the stern where the wood was drier. Then he picked at the rope that secured the boat to its post, loosened it, undid it, looped it around the post again and went to fetch Emily.

  Getting her into the boat was nearly the end of it all. The boat moved like a thing shocked by contact, and Emily, scrabbling at shadows, staggered and made a sound that was the echo of her gasp in the room in Oban, though it had not been fear then. He caught her hand, helped her to sit. The boat grew steady; the water ceased its slopping. He slid the oars from their place on the beams, stripped away stubborn layers of cobweb, slipped the rope from the post, got into the boat himself and sat on the middle thwart. With the blade of an oar against the boathouse wall, he pushed them backwards into open water, into the full silver of the afternoon, then moved around on his seat until he was facing Emily. He fitted the oars to the rowlocks, braced his feet either side of hers, looked over his shoulder and readied himself. He had rowed a boat before. He had, he thought, done so twice—once on the River Fal, once on the Tagus, both times for fun. His first stroke skimmed the top of the water, feathered it. The next was so deep the water was solid, a wall. He lifted the oars clear, let them shine and drip in the light, started again. After the eighth or ninth stroke he felt himself finding a rhythm. He pictured the Frieslander rowing them from the Halycon to the bay, tried to imitate what he remembered seeing, the swing and push of it, the whole of the body engaged. He took his bearings from the land behind Emily’s head. He watched the white house dwindle. He watched old Tom, who seemed to be watching him. In time the innkeeper would come for him. Until then he could eat all the sea pinks he could find.

  At what he reckoned was a good half-mile from the shore he saw that the water in the bottom of the boat was now deeper by about an inch. Perhaps two. Did it matter? If they were sinking they were sinking very slowly and would have time to row back to safety. What bothered him more was how the air was closing in. Not a mist yet, not a fret or a fog, but enough to make the distances hard to gauge. And where was the ship? Where was she? She could not have passed while they were packing, he did not believe it. Had she called in somewhere up the coast? Or would she burst out of the thickening air, gleaming, horribly real?

  He began to row again, pulling steadily for another ten minutes, pulling hard, then drawing the oars in and crossing them over his thighs. He was thirsty but they had not brought anything to drink.

  “Is she close?” asked Emily.

  “Not yet,” he said, “though she cannot be far off.” He asked her to reach into the top of his bag for the pistol. He told her to be very careful with it. The gun was loaded. “When I see her,” he said, “I will shoot to get their attention. Then they will know what we are here for.”

  “Can she stop?”

  “She will heave to,” he said. It was a term he had heard several times on the Jenny. He was fairly confident he had understood it. She twisted in her seat, felt for the bag, found it, opened it, lifted out the pistol and passed it to him, barrel first.

  “Christ, Emily!” He pushed the barrel aside and took the gun from her, though he found it almost funny, the idea of her shooting him out here, then floating around, a blind woman in a sinking boat . . .

  They had, it seemed, now entered a current, a sea-road. It carried them gently southwards, parallel to the coast. He could see strands dotted with cattle, hills like sleeping men or men at prayer. He could see the smoke of the kelpers but nothing of the kelpers themselves.

  The sea around the boat was very clear—much clearer than the air—and though
the surface was patched with shifting brilliances of copper glare, he found that between these he could peer down into a kind of spacious upper room of well-lit water. There were creatures in there! Small, with bodies like globes of purest glass, their legs trailing under them like ribbon, like soaked cotton. He did not remember seeing these before. He had been unobservant, perhaps, or had simply not been in a boat like this, so close to the water, getting closer. And once he started to watch them he could not stop. They were immensely restful (he was immensely tired), and as he followed them, saw one rising into view, another sink into obscurity, he felt the moment’s circumstance—the circumstance as you might describe it in, say, a court of law—start to loosen, to slide. The creatures, animate bubbles that fed, quite possibly, on light itself, were trying to teach him something he did not know he would be able to bear. He looked up at Emily, but before he could speak she leaned forward, startling him, finding his knees, clutching them. She had, quite unseen by him, removed the grey silk. Her eyes—pale, pale lids—were shut, and on her face was an expression of deepest joy, the same face she might have shown the congregation at her father’s house in the days before the dreams turned sour.

  “John!” she cried. “John! Now we shall be entirely free!”

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to acknowledge the generosity of Drue Heinz and the Hawthornden Foundation at Lasswade. Hard to imagine a more perfect place to work. And heartfelt thanks to Frieda and Rachel for putting up with my absences and occasional derelictions of duty. Also to Jon and Mary Pritchard, who led me, very gently, towards the playing of music.