The Polish woman had said thirty drops or thirty to start with but it was hard on a rolling boat among beasts who skittered in their dung, who danced on their blunt hooves when the boat went about, to measure the drug in any exact way. He put it directly on his tongue, a private rain, bitter despite the licorice. Then a swallow of whisky, mouthfuls of northern air, the public rain, the salt and rot of the sea.
The boat was low in the water; that was her type. You did not look down at the sea, you looked across at it, and with every second roll the foam broke in through the scuppers. To be on the boat was to be without any meaningful shelter. He was up by the bows. The crew—there were three of them—kept mostly to the stern, one on the tiller, the others doing little obvious besides sitting. They knew where to be dry. They sat. They watched whatever they watched, the weather, the birds, an island on the beam, an island ahead . . .
To Lacroix the islands were a surprise—how soon they came on them, how many there were, how close to each other, how varied. He wanted to call back to the sailors—“Which is this?”—but they seemed unsure still as to whether they had agreed among themselves he was there at all, an Englishman with a torn face eating fish from his pocket. To have called to them would have forced them to acknowledge him. It would, he thought, be indecorous.
And did he really care about the names of the islands? This was the tall one, this the sleek, this the bare, this like something made entirely from light and water. They were beautiful—more so than he had prepared himself for, and it comforted him a little that he had had the sense to find them, the world’s scattered edge, that there was in him, perhaps, some trace of a wisdom that could guide his actions.
It stayed light until very late, the dusk a thread pulled taut, blue then silver. Sitting in his place, a lashed barrel on the boat’s port side, he took out his fiddle and searched the wood with his fingertips. It had, he decided, survived its night in Glasgow better than he had. He did not even think it was much out of tune. He rubbed the hair of the bow with a nub of rosin and began a prelude by Purcell, but his fingers were cold and he stopped and slid his left hand under the long hair on the flank of the nearest cow. It was snug in there and the animal seemed not to object to his touch. When his fingers were warmed he started to play again. He could only remember the first thirty bars or so, and he played them twice, with a tempo suggested more by the sea than by Purcell. The men at the stern were figures in stone but he felt them attending to him, and for the minutes he was playing there was an enchantment he had hardly known before with music. Perhaps it was only the drug. He didn’t care. Let it be so. If so, then good. He played, he finished, he stowed the fiddle in its case, rested the case across his lap. He thought of his old music master at Wells, the room in the cathedral where history slept like a dog. (It was always wintry in there and they had started each lesson with a song to bring the blood to their cheeks, to get them breathing. “Ah, Silly Soul,” that was a favourite. So too “Awake, Sweet Love,” though pitched too high for them.) Then his thoughts moved to his father, to the songs in the books, the wild flowers, and he seemed to see him, a tiny figure, toy-like, very distant, coming down the stairs of the house, not to the hall but to the sea . . .
His father had loved him! He had no reason to doubt it. But could that love still touch him? Was love, once given, always possessed? A gift, a quality, you could scatter over your head like sacred ashes when you had need of it?
He had not wept at the funeral. He had sat in the family pew, dry-eyed, while Lucy’s nose turned red with blowing and Sarah, on the other side, dabbed with a handkerchief and sighed. Nell had cried. Even Tom for Christ’s sake (he had seen him quite plainly across the nave in the common pews). Tom who worked the fields, who was paid—what?—one and six a day at harvest, less in other seasons. He had wondered at it during the prayers, had been self-perplexed, made angry even by these displays of grief. Was it vulgar? Was it false? Might it be false? Or was it simply that he lacked something the others had? Some common response, a sense of pity? Was that what had happened in Spain? He did not know, he did not know. In his effort to understand he had worn language thin but made it no sharper. He was bitterly tired of thinking about it, thinking and a minute later beginning again with the same bare and terrible facts. That was almost the worst of it, not being able to stop the thinking. Or not until the world broke in with hunger, a fist, stars above the sea. Then, for a breath or two, he went free.
In the morning he saw they were closing on an island. Were they going to land? On the shore a small fire showed a meeting place, a welcome party. The sailors worked the boat to within parleying distance, then, in a minute of swift activity, the sails were dropped and an anchor thrown clear. The boat swung and was still. The party on the shore—men and women—walked down to the sea. There were no houses in view, no nearby village. One of the sailors climbed on to the bows and called across in their own language. When he was answered he came down again, took Lacroix by the arm, picked up the fiddle and led him back along the boat, out of the way. He said nothing to him but there was no unkindness in his actions. Then he went among the cattle with the other sailors. They drew one of the animals to the shore side of the boat, and with a sudden movement—a thing they must have done together countless times—they launched it into the sea. Its panic was comical. Whatever it had expected of life it had not expected this. It bellowed. Its eyes were wild. Then, having floundered a while, it discovered itself to be a creature that could survive in this new element and began to swim for the beach. A second animal soon followed, until there were five of them, swimming like dogs, necks straining, heads held clear of the water. At the surf they were met, and, even at a distance, there was something beyond the merely practical in the way they were surrounded and touched, then led towards the dunes.
Another delivery took place towards evening, a neighbouring island. Four animals this time. The people on the shore shouted out to them. The animals struggled through, stumbling out of the sea, hides glistening, streaming. Lacroix thought they might shake themselves as dogs do but they simply stood, patient, good-natured, perhaps already forgetting the sea.
They did not sleep at anchor but spent another night in open water. Lacroix, on his barrel, thought he saw all of it, for the laudanum brought him repose rather than sleep. At some hour, very late or very early, when even the western sky was dark, he fancied himself on picquet duty—the outlying picquet, that uneasy station, tensed between armies, listening for alarms. Later, he saw things etched on the sea. A woman in a white dress turning like a star, then a whale, immense and silent, its black skin slack as a coat. A whale imagined by a man who had never seen one . . .
But he must have slept eventually, for he was woken—or startled into some new sense of himself—by one of the sailors offering him a bannock. He was grateful for it; there was no more fish in his pockets. He washed it down with whisky then studied the land ahead of them, a long island faint as a cloud, or else several islands, like stepping stones, north to south. They sailed towards them for hours. They lost the sun then had it back again. The boat nosed her way through the swell, the prow sometimes shattering a slab of green water so that the spray flew back almost to the feet of the helmsman. The cows ate damp hay. When they looked up, chewing, they were the most resigned creatures on earth.
Late in the day the boat crossed an invisible line and the land at last showed itself for what it was. There was no harbour, no bay, no beach, nothing but walls of streaked rock with white birds rising and drifting like chaff. They were closing on it fast now. Lacroix waited for a change of course but it didn’t come. Soon, even he could hear the birds, their incessant calling, could see, with perfect clarity, the sea in a smother around the base of the walls. He looked back at the man on the tiller, at the crew, all of whom gazed ahead as though there were miles of empty ocean before them. Had they gone blind in the night? Mad? Should he warn them? Or were these quiet men, who perhaps he had come upon all too conveniently, not what they seemed at all, but servants of the Furies carrying him to where he could settle his debts in the surf? Then a fold in the wall became a gap in the wall and they were carried through on a surge of current, the way so narrow he could have spun coins from his pockets and bounced them from the rocks on either side.
It was a river, a loch, and no wider at first than its entrance. Then, as they passed a boulder on which a seal was basking, the creature’s grey and the rock’s almost identical, the banks fell back and they were in a body of water calmer than the sea, the land on both sides low and bare.
The boat glided forward, trailing the faint silk of her shadow. The animals, the few that were left, scented the new air. Lacroix began to see houses, all of them small, all built of the same stone they stood on, some with a scrap of worked ground beside them. The sailors dropped the canvas and swung the anchor over. The boat was lying off a shelf of foreshore, a place strewn with smooth stones and weed. Some score of the island’s inhabitants stood there, dun-brown figures, silently waiting. There was a cart and a pony. Also a collie dog that seemed to watch the boat with the same rapt attention as the people.
The sailors gathered at the stern, talking, and though Lacroix could hear only the stone-tap and stray music of their voices (and would not have known their words had he heard them perfectly) he understood they were speaking about him and that his journey was over. One of them came forward, the same he had spoken with at the waterside in Glasgow. Lacroix stood up. “I’ll go ashore here,” he said, “if you will show me how.”
“You must take off your boots,” said the sailor. He spoke softly. If he had just given an order it had been given in a way that was hard to object to.
Lacroix sat and took them off. The big toes of both feet poked through the filthy wool of his stockings. The man took the boots from him. He made loops of rope about them both, then threaded the rope through the handle of the bag and the handle of the fiddle case. The other sailors came forward now. There were only four of the cattle remaining in the boat. Three of these they put in the water, watched them begin their swim to the shore.
“And this is for you,” said the sailor who had roped Lacroix’s things. He tapped the back of the last animal.
“For me?” said Lacroix. He had misheard; or no, he had not misheard. He shook his head, began his protest, but the men were about their business and not interested in what he had to say.
They put a tether round the animal’s neck, tied the end to a cleat and heaved the animal over the side. “Quick now,” said the man.
They lifted him—he must have been light enough after the cows—swept him clear of the gunwales and settled him on the cow’s back, his legs in the water to the tops of his thighs. It was cold! The shock of it almost sobered him, it certainly silenced him. Someone hung his gear around his neck, then the tether was freed, the end given to Lacroix as a type of rein, and the cow prodded away from the boat with the point of a boathook. He had, out hunting or on manoeuvres, forded half a dozen English rivers. In Spain he had crossed the Esla on Boxing Day, the French vanguard an hour’s ride behind him. But that was on a cavalry mount, on Ruffian, and the horse’s hooves had never left the river bed. This was a cow! This was swimming! He gripped the rope, gripped the wide back with his thighs. The possibility of simply sliding off and being dragged down by his own possessions seemed very real and for the first half-minute he was frightened. He urged her on as he would a horse. Behind him, the skirts of his green coat drifted like weed. He heard the rattle of the bottles in his pockets.
On the shore the people were calling encouragement, though more, he thought, to the cow than to him. When she touched the ground she lost her footing a moment, staggered, and seemed she would tip him between her horns, but she recovered herself and step by step lifted them both clear of the water. The collie was delirious. A group of men came down to meet them. Shy, stern, leather-faced men dressed in homespun. They would not look at him directly. He slithered from the animal’s back and stood on trembling legs while they led her away. He waited for instructions, for someone to tell him where he should go, where he could go, but no one did. He was too strange perhaps, too unexpected. He thought they might not be able to see him in the way they could see the cows, that they would have to go away for a while and imagine him.
He trudged up the landing place on to the track at the top of the bank, turned to wave to the boat (had he paid them anything? He did not think he had), then sat on a patch of yellowish grass looking at his wet legs, his bare toes. He wrung out the tails of his coat, examined the bottles and found them undamaged. He shook some laudanum on to his tongue, took a swallow of whisky. Everything tasted of salt.
The party on the shore were dispersing now. He opened his bag. The leather was damp but the contents dry enough. He wanted something dry for his legs and after a little digging found, rolled tight like a loaf of bread, his nankeen trousers. This was good; he had not been quite sure they were there. He held them, thinking of home, of Nell, the comforts of home, then stood, stiffly, and carried the trousers away looking for somewhere private to change, somewhere out of view of the cottages. One thing to come ashore on the back of a cow, another entirely to make a show of his bruised legs to people he suspected did not, for reasons both moral and practical, do much undressing.
He followed the track. No trees, no convenient rock, the low places all boggy. He kept going. The track handed him forward, curved sinuously to follow the line of the water. The sun was sometimes in his face, sometimes at his left shoulder. He saw no one, no solitary reaper, and the only house he came across was a ruin, its stones scattered, and marks of burning on the timber above the empty doorway. The sight of it disturbed him. He picked up his pace to leave it behind, was relieved when a turning of the track hid it from him.
Now the water narrowed again—gradually, then abruptly—until it was only a stream that he crossed with the help of a stepping stone that lay between two twists of clear water. On the other side he lay down on his belly to taste the water. It was fresh, or mostly so, and he scooped up handful after handful. When had he last drunk anything but whisky and laudanum?
Once he had taken his fill he looked up again—water dripping from his chin, his three-day beard—and saw a hill of russet and purple, a thing on its own rising out of the flat country, conical, steep-sided. He made for it; the old human instinct to be above. The track took him close to the lower slopes, then he set off through young bracken and past the bracken on to brown heather that crackled under his boots. Quick little birds broke from cover. High in the east, something much bigger made lazy, inward-leaning circuits of the cloudless sky. He climbed, listening to the rasp of his breathing. Here and there, standing in the heather, were stones as tall as he was, shaped, he thought, placed there with some intent, their faces blue with the blue of evening.
At the top he found the wind. At first it refreshed him, then it began to burrow into his head. He crossed over and found a place under the brow of the hill, a dent, a ledge, where he could sit and have some shelter. Below him was a view made up as much of water as of land. To the north was another hill, isolated like the one he was on, though much higher. The rest was like a shattered plate with shards of land connected by narrow isthmuses, land that struck him as being more frail than the water, as if it stood only by the water’s consent and would, at a time of the water’s choosing, be covered again.
He touched his legs, the damp cloth, the cold cloth, then looked, like a lunatic, at his own bare hands. Where were his nankeen trousers? He felt about himself, looked back at the hill above him, hurried up there hoping for something pale lying on the dark of the heather. There was nothing. He had dropped them. Or he had put them down when he drank from the stream and had forgotten to pick them up again. He went back to the ledge, sat and held his head. He passionately wanted his nankeen trousers and their loss seemed the loss of his ability to maintain purpose, to act purposefully in the world. He pressed the skin of his face, ground at it with the heels of his palms. For three or four seconds he did not know what he was, and when things returned to him—his true name, his assumed name, his rank, his family, his crime—they came without their old solidity as if, one by one, they were being offered to him in the form of questions. He groaned—though it seemed already the moment for such an expression had passed. He let his hands drop. Below him, the moon was rising, the moon at its first quarter, still very low, one horn resting on the earth, then, as he watched, lifting free. He hoped for poetry, something noble and remembered, but managed only to repeat “moon,” wonderingly, until the word lay on his tongue like a silver penny. But he was calm now, packed away by the drug, by fatigue. Even the realisation that he had left the bag and the fiddle down by the landing place did not enter deeply. The fiddle he had been holding on to like his father’s hand; he would do better without it. As for the rest, the pistol, the writing case, somebody would want them.
He rolled on to his side and threw up. Water, whisky. The tincture too, presumably. He waited, trembling, then shoved himself away from the ground, first to his knees, finally to his feet. He was suddenly quite certain that if he tried to spend the night on the hill he would die on it. He would be found up there with a crow on his chest, be buried in an unmarked grave. Or with the name Lovall above him.
He started down. There were people on this island somewhere. He would not ask them for much. Some shelter, a bite of bread. And if they would not open their doors to him (oh, the savages!) he would find a byre and sleep with the cows again . . .
He was halfway down when he saw a point of light, fragile in a fold of dark just beyond the base of the hill. He stared at it, fixed his gaze like a compass needle, then went on more swiftly, more carelessly, sprawling several times full-length in the heather, getting up, finding the light again and keeping going. He stumbled through the ring of bracken, through the roots of things, through shallow water. He smelled smoke, and a minute later he came to a house, the light spilling from a window imperfectly shuttered, and at either end of the thatched roof a chimney, one of them sending its smoke across the face of the moon. And there was . . . yes! . . . singing! He went close, pressed himself against the wall. A voice, unaccompanied. Their own language of course. A wavering voice, husky, wonderfully foreign . . .
He felt his way to the door, groped for a latch, found one, raised it, and walked into the low confusing light of the interior.
There were six or seven of them, sitting in a semicircle by the fire. On stools, on chairs; two, side by side, on a chest. The song broke off. An old dog, blind, white-snouted, growled at him out of its belly. Someone called it back. They looked at him. They were watchful but not, it seemed, much startled. He made a bow to them, which ended unsteadily. For a man who had been out in the air for hours, he felt surprisingly drunk. A chair was fetched. The others shifted back a little to accommodate him. He sat. He did not know if he was in a private house or a tavern of some kind. Certain objects made their presence felt. A great black kettle, a spinning wheel, a storm lantern. In the fire the peat had furred itself in grey and the smell of the house was the smell of the fire.
He took the whisky bottle from his pocket. There was only a mouthful left. He offered the bottle to the man on his left. The man gravely took it, and after pausing a moment, touched the neck to his lips, drank nothing, and passed it back. A square of black bread was put into Lacroix’s hand. He dropped it, picked it up. The singing returned or it had never stopped.
He tried to mark time with the bread but only succeeded in dropping it again. The blind dog, he thought, will come for it eventually. It will swim out like an eel.
Did they know who he was? He felt sure that they did, that even if they had not seen for themselves his arrival on the cow they had heard of it. So be it. He was in no condition to pretend, to present himself as anything other than what they saw. Show up like this in an English village and they’d take you to the lockup, or better still, march you to the parish boundary and put a boot in your arse. Here, presumably, the parish boundary was the sea.
They took it in turns to sing. He wondered if he would have to sing too, if he should, if that would be the correct thing to do. What could he remember? “As I Walked Forth”? “Black-eyed Susan”? He was hunting about for words when there was a shifting on the stool beside him and looking over he saw there was a new man there, a man in a red jacket. Lacroix sat up. The man nodded to him. Sandy hair, pale eyes. Twenty-five—no, thirty-five, at least, the skin around his eyes pinched with crow’s feet. The jacket had a tartan patch on the elbow (tartan at last!). Yellow collar and yellow cuffs. At the ends of the cuffs there were no hands. The man turned away to the fire. Still looking there he said something, but too softly.
“I cannot hear you,” said Lacroix. “My ears . . . ”
The man spoke again, this time with his face to Lacroix and leaning towards him a little.
“Have you come far?”
Such a simple question yet he did not know how to answer it. He did not answer.
“My name is Ranald,” said the man. “I live on the island. I am from the island. Do you have a place to sleep?”
“You were a soldier,” said Lacroix.
“I was. From a boy.”
“And your hands?”
“In Egypt.”
A new song began. The singer was one of the women on the meal chest. She appeared elderly, someone’s grandmother, but her voice piped like a girl’s.
“I have lost my fiddle,” said Lacroix. “My bag. My trousers . . . ”
“They are all safe,” said Ranald. “Can you walk a little?” He stood and moved to the door. Lacroix followed him. After the light in the house he felt blind outside. He took the other’s arm and let himself be guided. They walked a mile. Perhaps it only felt like a mile. Other than their own footsteps it was just the night birds and the now-and-then sound of running water, like the playing of small glass bells. They came to a house. It was on its own and loomed out of nowhere. Ranald tapped at the door with his elbow but went in without waiting for an answer. The door was very low. Even men of modest stature—and neither Highland infantry nor light cavalry were tall—could brain themselves going in in a hurry in the dark. Lacroix thought of the grave barrows he had explored as a boy with his father on the Wiltshire Downs. His father’s bent back, the dance of the candlelight. It was well known that wild men sometimes slept out in the barrows. Fugitives, curled in the burial chambers . . .
“Through here!”
A passage, a second door. Ranald was kneeling by the side of a fire that burned dully in the middle of the room. He put his face near the ground and blew on the embers until two or three small blue flames appeared.
“The house belongs to an old man you will see in the morning,” he said. “He is called Jesse. You can stay here. He will not trouble you.”
“In Lisbon,” said Lacroix, “I slept in an onion loft.”
Ranald nodded. He was spreading straw on the ground. He seemed to manage well enough without hands. He made a bed beside the smouldering peat. The smoke-hole was not directly above the fire-pit and the smoke gathered in lazy wreaths under the roof.
“Here,” said Ranald. “It is good to rest now.”
Lacroix sat on the straw. Ranald held out a tin cup to him that Lacroix assumed would have whisky in it but it turned out to be water. He drank then lay on the straw. Ranald draped a blanket over him. Like a mother, like a sister. Lacroix spoke for a while though he did not know if Ranald was still there, if anyone was. He shifted himself, writhed worm-like, until he had his face under the smoke-hole and could see through to the sky, a single blue star. The music of the old woman’s song went through him like the blood-memory of the sea. He was being handed down, deeper and deeper. For a while he did not dare to shut his eyes, to lose sight of the star. Then he could not fight it any longer and he let himself go.