They were on a hill above the sea. The hill was shaped like a sugar-loaf and had a trench, fifteen feet long, cut into the sea-facing slope. It was mid-morning and the day was already hot, the sun beating a scent out of the land. Pine? But it could not be pine. There were no pine trees, few trees of any kind, none at all on the hill. Lacroix wondered if he was remembering Portugal, that month after they landed, when he began to understand what the south and southern heat might mean. He had not expected to meet it again on the islands.
“Now tell me squarely,” said Cornelius, rising, trowel in hand, from the bottom of the trench, “are you with Buffon? On the age of the world, I mean. And putting aside for the time being the whole question of his being French.”
The wind on the hill was a muddle. Warm gusts blew one way and then the other. It made hearing difficult, though Lacroix believed his hat helped him a little, a broad-brimmed hat, a reaper’s hat, dog-coloured and borrowed from among the collection in the hallway. Those words that found their way under the brim stayed with him. As for the rest.
“Remind me,” he asked. “What does Buffon say?”
“Seventy-five thousand years,” said Cornelius. “Thorpe says it might be even more. He believes it is. Intuitively. Ranald won’t venture an opinion, on religious grounds, I think. My sisters just make up numbers. The bigger the number the better they like it.”
“Well,” said Lacroix, “I will go with Buffon. If we have set aside the question of his nationality.”
“I would ask your opinion of Hutton,” said Cornelius, “but I am afraid you will not have heard of him. He is too new!”
The two of them ducked down into the trench again and began to scrape and probe with their trowels. It was peat mostly, a few stones. They worked one behind the other, turning the ground and stooping to investigate anything that made the trowel blade chime. The next time they surfaced, Jane and Emily were walking over the brow of the hill. They were carrying a bag between them, one handle each. Jane wore her white muslin (was it the same or were there several?). Emily had on something cool with green stripes. Both had hats of straw tied with ribbon.
“Have you found anything?” asked Emily.
“A crown?” asked Jane. “Or a chariot?”
“Ha ha,” said Cornelius. “Très amusant. I hope you have brought something nice for us and have not just come to talk nonsense.”
Emily unpacked the bag. It had bottles in it—old wine bottles stoppered with paper and filled with water stirred through with oatmeal, the water still mostly cold from the spring behind the house. Lacroix and Cornelius had been at the trench two hours. They had not done much work, not real work, but enough for a sharp thirst. Lacroix drank most of a bottle, apologising if he had taken more than his share.
“Where’s Ranald?” asked Emily.
“Ranald?” said Lacroix. “He is with that party below.” He pointed to where, some fifty yards further down, a group of men and women were digging for peat.
Emily nodded, though he was not sure she could see them.
“The peat will dry well in this weather,” she said. “It is the hottest day we ever had here.”
“Yesterday was hotter,” said Jane.
“It only seemed so to you,” said Emily, “because you did not leave your room.”
“It has been hot since Lovall arrived,” said Cornelius. “The flames lick at his feet.”
“It is summer,” said Jane. “It is June. We should not be astonished if the sun shines.”
Lacroix grinned and kept his peace. He was, after nine days, becoming familiar with the way the Frends spoke to each other. Sometimes they drew him in; sometimes they seemed to perform for him. As always, with other people’s family, there was a deep story he had not the slightest hope of untangling. He did not doubt they loved each other yet he wondered if each to the other represented that which they longed to distance themselves from. The old life, the old tyrant. Their freakish days in Shoreditch. Without Thorpe and the community, would they have gone their separate ways long since? He knew he liked them though. Cornelius’s chatter, the spirited company of the sisters, the music at night in the untidy, comfortable house. His secret room at the back. And he had grown stronger—real progress at last—so that he was now a very long way from the man who lay on old Jesse Campbell’s floor staring at the sky through a smoke-hole. He should, he supposed, be more pleased about it. To be healthy, to be strong again. Wasn’t that what he had strived for ever since opening his eyes to find Nell spooning brandy and milk into his mouth? But what when it was done? When he no longer had the luxury of considering himself an invalid? The world would sidle up to him again. There would be demands he could not simply faint away from. Sometimes, his face pressed against the onrush of time (as against a film, something ectoplasmic and lucent, like the skin of an egg), he thought he could almost see it, a moment, a reckoning, a decisive moment, when everything would depend on some virtue of character he no longer believed himself to possess. One clean cut, one sweep of the blade, as in those sword drills out of Le Marchant’s Rules and Regs he never really mastered . . .
The women had settled on the grass below the trench. They had taken off their hats. Emily, kneeling behind Jane, had both her hands in her sister’s hair as though buried in sand. She was drawing the hair out, squeezing it, holding it in a fist while the other hand shuttled back to collect, to smooth. Then she lifted it all and wound around the blonde stem a fine chain the colour of red coral. When it was done, the hair sleek and orderly, Jane reached up and pulled strands free, corn-coloured helixes to hang down the sides of her face, finishing the work by undoing it a little, a careful spoiling. Then each took the other’s place and it was Jane’s turn, opening the wings of her sister’s hair—shorter, darker hair—collecting it with drowsy rollings of her wrists, with sudden sharp tugs that made Emily wince. Then the lifting, the piling up, the cunning one-handed tying of a ribbon. She was quicker than her sister, more careless, more skilful.
“I would sell you one of them,” said Cornelius, emerging almost under Lacroix’s arm, “if I thought you had any money. Though I suppose Jane is not really in a condition to be sold.”
“No,” said Lacroix, “that would not do.”
The question of Jane’s condition, the facts of it, had been settled some days earlier, a supper-time conversation, an aside from Jane herself, no blushing or awkwardness. She was five months with child and the father was Thorpe. The other two had nodded and smiled as though between them was an agreement that the facts were pleasing ones, or certainly not troubling ones. Lacroix hoped his own expression had been something similar. He did not think she was disgraced, not at all, but the word had been in his head. That, and other words that belonged to the world of the barracks.
He climbed out of the trench (it would make a fine defensive position, a line of muskets, artillery on the hill behind, cavalry waiting on the far side) and stretched himself out on the heather, tipped the hat over his eyes and carried the blonde and the dark hair into sleep with him.
He woke, stifled by the hat. He brushed it from his face and sat up, slightly giddy. He was looking seawards, and though there had been nothing out there when he lay down, now, at the centre of his view, less than a mile from the shore, was a ship. She looked, he thought, like a military vessel. She looked, in fact, exactly like the ship that had stopped the Jenny and boarded her. Was it? You are going the wrong way, Mr. Lovall, if you hope to meet with the French. He had not, of course—the pockmarked lieutenant—believed a word of his story. Collecting rents! And now they were here, and he, Lacroix/Lovall, was perched on a hill on a treeless island, his face floating in the eyepieces of their telescopes.
Launch a boat, row a boat. They could be on the beach in twenty minutes.
“It is the emigration ship,” said Ranald. “For Canada.” He was standing up to his chest in the trench and must have come up while Lacroix was sleeping. On each stumped wrist he wore his false hands, two sheaths of buckled leather ending in blocks of wood and a pair of right-angled hooks, iron. There was no sign of the Frends.
“A navy ship?” asked Lacroix.
Ranald shook his head. “It is a private man who owns her though she was a navy ship once. She is called the Nessus.”
“The what?”
“The Nessus.”
“Ah, like the centaur?”
“I do not know the centaur.”
“A sort of Sphinx, but Greek. Will she stop here?”
“Here? No. Here the chiefs do not want the people to leave. They are wanted for the burning. The kelp.”
“But she is headed south, I think.”
“South to Ireland. She will take on more there. Then to Cape Breton.”
“Perhaps they will have a better life in Canada.”
“That may be,” said Ranald. “But they would stay if they knew how.”
For several minutes they watched the ship in silence, the white specks of seabirds hovering over her wake. No naval frigate, then, but an emigration ship. Lacroix was relieved—deeply—but when he glanced at Ranald and watched him watching, he thought he saw in that face the dry-eyed grief of an entire race. They might, the two of them, both be soldiers—ex-soldiers—but they were not the same. He came from among the victors, the owners. If he was not collecting rents in Scotland, rents were being collected in his name elsewhere. Things were due to him and backed by law. And it was Ranald and countless like him who were put into the line to defend it. And did so. Gave their hands to a class of men who would later see them ruined and packed off to Canada . . .
He had these thoughts then let them go. It was hot and they did not lead anywhere, or nowhere he felt able to follow them. It was like Christ’s teaching of living the life of the spirit. You heard it at the service then went home for your dinner. You weren’t changed.
“Have you found anything?” he asked.
“Only this,” said Ranald, touching with one of his hooks a small curved shape in the grass above the trench. Lacroix picked it up and wiped it with a thumb. It was clay. A two-inch-wide section of something shattered perhaps a thousand years ago. It had a pattern of lines, a slanting design grooved into the clay, lines that brought to mind a tool, a hand.
“You have done better than the rest of us,” he said, settling the pottery on to the grass again.
“Cornelius will think it a prize.”
“It is what is left,” said Ranald.
“Yes,” said Lacroix. “It is what is left.”
Hard to know if they were speaking of the same thing.
All day they kept the sun and the heat. When they sat for their evening meal the windows of the long room were as wide as they would go. The inside world and the outside world were smudged a little. They watched the sky work through its tints. A few clouds in the west floating like toys. It was a little mysterious.
They ate fish—saithe—and gritty bread and the first leaves from Emily’s garden (Emily’s as she was the only one who worked in it). Lacroix found he did not miss eating meat. Occasionally he thought of the meat pies and collops of beef Nell used to cook for him but he was content to eat simply, reckoned a light regimen did him good. It also made him feel less awkward about accepting their hospitality.
When the meal was over they pushed back their chairs. They talked. The poetry of John Clare. The paws of otters. Napoleon’s wife. The heat. Cornelius consulted his watch. It was ten already, or it was probably ten. It was a long time since he had been able to set his watch by anything larger and more reliable. There had been many small adjustments, some guesswork when he forgot to wind it.
“It might be midnight,” he said, and laughed excitedly.
“I want to sleep outside tonight,” said Jane. “My room will be unbearable.”
“And what if it rains?” asked Emily. “We are all outside with our bedding and it starts to rain? You know very well how the weather can change here.”
Jane shrugged. “There will be air. I will be able to breathe. It is not the same for you.”
“It is an exquisite idea,” said Cornelius. “And I believe Lovall knows all about sleeping in the open. He will build a type of igloo. Or something like an owl’s nest. Anyway, it will be lined with moss. Don’t you wish to see that, dear Basemath? Don’t you? Lovall’s ingenious nest?”
They carried their bedding outside, walking through the shadowy house with armfuls of sheets and blankets. Jane’s mattress was the largest and it was not thought practical to bring it down. She would have Cornelius’s mattress and he would have a bed made up from the cushions of the ottoman.
They built their camp on the level ground at the front of the house. Lacroix, unsure of the etiquette, placed his own bed at a distance from the others that he thought replicated the distance he slept from them inside the house.
“Why are you there?” asked Emily.
He dragged his bed closer. Now it lay at the outer edge of the camp, slightly nearer to Cornelius’s bed than to that of either sister. The whole camp was confusing. It was not even clear which end of the mattresses people intended to have their heads.
Jane went into the house and came out in her night clothes. They were not very different to what she had been wearing in the day but her hair was down and she had a dark-coloured shawl around her shoulders. Emily went next. When she reappeared, also with a shawl, there was a softness to her movements, a fluidity, that may have been a trick of the moonlight or else the absence of those garments that disciplined a woman’s body and could not, even on a hot day, be set aside. Certainly neither of his own sisters did. Or Nell. Or any of the women he knew.
For himself, he had got no further than taking off his boots. He did not have a nightshirt and hoped no one suggested he borrow one of Thorpe’s.
Cornelius, in the hieroglyphic robe, busied himself fetching what they might want, or what he might want. His bag of bang, a whisky bottle, a candle, two books. He held the books up. “King Lear or Gulliver’s Travels?”
They chose Gulliver, unanimously, and Cornelius, holding up the candle, began to read to them. (My father had a small estate in Nottinghamshire; I was the third of five sons . . . )
When he had read two or three pages he passed the book and candle to Jane, who passed them to Emily, who passed them to Lacroix.
“As you don’t appear to be going to bed,” she said.
He took the book and read to them. They were all lying down now, all but him. Cornelius smoked on his back, flicking embers, curls of fiery bang, from his cushions. The sisters lay on their sides. He noticed that they held hands for a while, held each other’s fingertips, as perhaps they had done as children. He noticed Jane pull a pillow under the covers and wedge it between her knees or thighs.
I am reading to the baby too, thought Lacroix. To Thorpe’s homunculus.
He read. The wax thickened on his fingertips. When the moon had sunk below the boathouse gable he shut the book, paused, then blew out the candle. He fancied they were all asleep now. They lay very still, dark forms sunk in lighter air. It made him uneasy that he could not hear their breathing, though he knew it was just his deafness.
He took off his waistcoat, got beneath the covers and lay on his back staring up at the faintness of stars. The novelty of it! Not the novelty of sleeping out—Cornelius was right of course, he knew all about that, had bivouacked across the Peninsula in tents that kept out neither rain nor cold, had slept many nights in the open with nothing but his greatcoat (his legs thrust through the sleeves). But to lie out as a kind of game, with all their bedding. Men and women muddled together! Was this how the community behaved? The Thorpians, the Phyrronists? It would be something to tell Lucy about. Something to scandalise her husband with. Or did Wesleyans not trouble themselves with such things? He was not entirely sure what they believed, other than they were more likely to pass through the eye of a needle than Unitarians or Anabaptists.
It was deep night when he woke and for a moment or two he was utterly lost. Then he realised he must have turned in his sleep. He had been facing outwards but now could see the uncertain coastline of another sleeper. The rumpled blanket, a pillow, a head. Cornelius? No, not Cornelius. Emily. He tried to get her into focus. The moon was gone but there was a residue of light in the air, enough to establish a nose, a hand up by her chin, her brow. She was closer to him than he could easily explain, as if the mattresses were moored like boats in a pool and had swung on their lines. Her face was like folded cloth; then, a moment later, it was a mask in which, free from detail, from all animation, he could plainly recognise the family face: spare, handsome, inward. The father’s face? The mad saint of Shoreditch? He gazed at her, his regard, he thought, that of a philosopher more than anything . . . warmer. He gazed, was lost in gazing, seemed hardly to know any more who was gazing, when it occurred to him that the gleam at the centre of her face was, in fact, the gleam of her eyes.
She was looking at him. She must be. Or else she was sleeping with her eyes open. And who does that?
He shut his own eyes, opened them again. He wanted to be sure. He looked, pushed the dark aside with his looking. He was sure. His heart thudded. He was close to laughter. He had done, quite innocently, what he would never have dared do knowingly. And what did she think of it? This man, this newcomer, lying within reaching distance, staring at her? And because it was night, deep night, and everything had softened, all shapes and truths on the cusp of being other shapes and other truths, he began, with no effort of conscious invention, to imagine things that pleased him. It began with a vision of touching—his ghost arm stretching out, his ghost hand, the feel of her face, the shock of her breath on his fingertips. Then outwards, onwards, rushing ahead (it was the work of seconds) to a tableau in which he stood with her in the drawing room of the house in Somerset receiving callers. May I introduce Miss Emily Frend of Shoreditch? In his picture of them they looked young, unmarked by life. Themselves, but themselves made good. There was nothing wrong with her eyes, nothing amiss with his hearing. Then being served at table by Nell. And Tom fitted out as a kind of footman. Tom in a powdered wig and buckled shoes! The dining room would need redecorating of course. Fifty years since anything was done there. The bedroom too? Something from Bath, something modern. Plain? Stripes? Was green a good colour for a bedroom wall?
Then all of it was rubbed out. He shut his eyes and turned, as if in pain, first on to his back and from there on to his other shoulder. What was he thinking of? Had he forgotten everything? He might make love to a Glasgow orange girl—and no doubt he had been justly served there—but to Emily Frend? He had a moment of rage so sharp and sudden he thought he would shout out, wake them all like one in a fit. No. Not this. Not ever. Tomorrow he must leave them. He would make his excuses (anything would do), ask Ranald to guide him to a ferry crossing. There were islands to the north of this one—he knew that from Captain Browne’s charts. He would get clear. He would keep moving. Or he would go back? Take the Jenny or some other ship back to Bristol, then the London mail. Walk across the parade ground to the colonel’s office and present him with a history of the retreat. His history.
He mouthed to the dark, “They could shoot me.” And he almost revelled in it, the rightness and bitterness of such an ending, the quick slide of last thoughts as he waited for someone (Wood?) to give the command. There was a wall behind the guardhouse in Croydon that had been used for such things in the past. A brick wall splashed with whitewash . . .
In the morning they all seemed to wake at once, sitting up in their beds, a gloss of dew on their faces, their expressions sombre from the strangeness and beauty of the night. They exchanged their dreams. Cornelius had been riding a crocodile. “Was it Father?” asked Jane. Cornelius said it had been, undoubtedly. Jane’s own dream was of Thorpe striding in a river, though whether an English river or a Scottish one she couldn’t say. Emily had dreamed her bed was on the sea and that she had looked back at the island and seen the house.
“Were you alone?” asked Cornelius.
After the briefest pause she said she had been.
“Liar,” said Jane. She looked at Lacroix.
“I didn’t dream,” he said. “I often don’t.”
Cornelius begged for coffee. Emily swung her legs out of bed, stood carefully, and went into the house. After a minute Lacroix also got up, pulled on his boots, buttoned his waistcoat and followed her inside. He went to his room, closed the door and crouched on the floor by his bag. He still had his resolve from the night before, though in daylight it did not feel quite the same, as if it had been made in a language exclusive to the night that now, translated, was less emphatic.
He took out the writing case, freed the brass hook that kept it shut and examined the green solar glasses. He fiddled with the lens that had come out of its frame, finally got it to snap back in. He polished both lenses on his sleeve, straightened one of the wire wings. Then he went to where his coat was hanging on a peg by the door. He searched in the pockets for the remaining tincture bottle, drew it out, shook it, and held it to the light. It was still two-thirds full and the sight of it, the pink tint, tempted him for a moment. But what would it be to take his leave of them under the influence of laudanum? He would end up slack in front of a window, muttering to himself. He would see whales, dead fathers. He owed them something better than that.
It bothered him he had nothing for Jane. He considered giving her the writing case but could not picture her with it and, anyway, wanted it himself. His copy of Pilgrim’s Progress? Absurd. How about a part-used bar of Windsor soap? A cavalry pistol? He would, he decided, if it was possible, send her something later, a gift for the new child, a christening bracelet perhaps, though christening might well be something the community frowned upon.
He went to the kitchen. Emily was pouring boiling water from a pan into a coffee pot. Some of the water was already pooled around the base of the pot. “Put it down,” he said. “Emily. I will pour it.”
“You are very masterful this morning,” she said. She set the pan down and looked at him. He could not read her expression.
“You spoke in your sleep,” she said.
He cocked his head. “I did what?”
“You spoke in your sleep, John. Unhappily.”
“Ah. I am sorry for it.”
“Why? You were asleep. It was your true self that spoke.”
He nodded, then held out the solar glasses. “I have a present for you.”
She came closer. It was odd, like tempting a cat with a titbit. She took the glasses from him, turned them in her hands.
“Against the sun,” he said. “Do you think they will help?”
“Yes,” she said. “Thank you. I think they will.”
“Good.”
“Is green best against the sun?”
“I believe it is.”
“It will be like looking from the inside of a bottle,” she said, laughing. “Perhaps you should give them to Cornelius.”
“No,” he said, suddenly laughing too. “They are for you. I have something else for Cornelius.”
She thanked him again. She looked so pleased, as though the gift were much greater than it was. He wanted to ask her if she had been looking at him in the night, if she had seen him look at her, but he had no idea of the tone or phrasing of such a question. He walked to the stove, lifted the pan and began to fill the coffee pot. By the time the pot was full he knew he was not going anywhere. Not today.
They carried the bedding inside. The morning was already warm and promising to be much warmer. The big hats were out again. Ranald came up. He had put on his old regimental kilt, the first kilt Lacroix had seen since crossing into Scotland. Had he gone ashore at Aboukir in it? Had he been wearing it when he saw the Sphinx? He told them that the mainland boat would be in tomorrow. Emily sat with him at the table in the big room to write out a list of provisions. Coffee, wine, rice, sugar. Six yards of undyed linen for sewing sheets. Wheat flour, oats, salt. Turpentine, candles. A box of assorted buttons. Writing paper. Newspapers, any. The list was long. She wrote with a slate pencil, her nose three inches above the paper.
The money to pay for it all—the community’s economic basis, certainly the economic basis of the Frends—came from a man with half a dozen copperworks near Swansea, a man who, as a child, had enjoyed visions of Christ and Socrates, had larked with them on the banks of the Tawe, but now had eight hundred souls labouring under him and needed others to do the dream work. The money was routed through Thorpe, though it seemed the benefactor might be having doubts, had perhaps found dreamers more convenient to Swansea. There wasn’t much money in the house. There had not—according to Cornelius, who had complained of it to Lacroix more than once—been any fresh funds since Thorpe’s last visit in the winter, and little enough then. Lacroix watched Emily pick the necessary out of a purse of crumpled blue satin then went to his coat, teased a water-stained—a sea-stained—pound note from the slit pocket (there was one more inside, perhaps two) and tried to make her take it. She wouldn’t. She was polite but firm. “You are our guest,” she said. “We invited you here.”
He was still trying to talk her round when Cornelius came out of his room. He had already taken some of the tincture, had swallowed it with his coffee immediately Lacroix had given him the bottle, and minutes afterwards had stripped off his clothes and gone to bathe in the water beyond the boathouse, talking incessantly—in and out of the water—and boasting that today he would simply bite his way through the earth and pick treasures like raspberry pips from between his teeth. Now, however, as the three men set off for the excavation, the drug shifted its mood and Cornelius walked in silence under the shade of a tasselled umbrella. On the hill he sat staring at the empty sea (the islanders would rather grow potatoes than catch fish), then climbed into the trench, stretched himself out on the earth and fell asleep. Ranald and Lacroix looked down at him. The likeness to a corpse in a grave was strong but neither man mentioned it.
“It may have been wiser not to have given it to him,” said Lacroix. He had told Ranald about the drug, had told him too how he came by it. Glasgow. Blue orange. The new police.
The two of them sat on the grass. The kilt had a nice way of settling around Ranald’s knees. Lacroix wondered if an Englishman might ever be allowed to wear one. He thought not. “May I ask,” he said, “if your hands ever hurt you now? Or your wrists, I mean. Of course.”
“It is ten years,” said Ranald. His hooks were crossed in his lap like cutlery. “In the winter the cold goes into the bone. But I am used to it now.”
“You were with General Abercrombie?”
“I was. And you with General Moore, I think.”
“Yes. Though we might have preferred Abercrombie.”
Ranald nodded. They sat in silence. They had compared their generals. Would they now compare regiments? If he asks me, thought Lacroix, I will tell him plainly. Regiment, squadron. I do not know this man but I trust him as I would trust him in a battle.
He waited but nothing came.
Below them the peat diggers were at their work again. Lacroix had learned the name of the spade they used—a troighsgear. He asked Ranald who the people were.
“It is Donald Mackinnon and his sons Donald and Duncan. And the woman is Peggy Mackinnon and the other man is Robert Flynn. The child is Wee Annie.”
The child moved in loops around the adults, small arms whirling. She had nothing on her head and the light shone off her black hair.
“I had better go down to help them,” said Ranald, getting to his feet. “If he wakes and wishes to start the work I can come up again.”
He set off, descending the hill at the kind of steady pace good infantry advanced at in the line. After Egypt the Highland regiments had become famous. When they paraded through London people leaned from their windows to see them pass, though there was some surprise at their not being larger men.
When the child saw Ranald she ran up the slope to meet him. She spoke with him, then looked past him to where Lacroix was still sitting by the trench. She waved; he waved back, delighted to be saluted by a child who did not need to wave to anyone, certainly not to him. And how intrigued she must be, Wee Annie, with Ranald’s hooks! She would remember them all her life, tell her children, her grandchildren. Say she was six or seven now (he knew he was not very good at guessing children’s ages) then she might, conceivably, live to see the year 1870! See a world he would not see. See what? Gas, steam ships. Electrical this and that. A sky full of air balloons. Balloons driven by steam? Why not? Sightseers would fly to the islands from London, drop anchor in a spot like this, swarm around with their sketch books, then up the ladder again and off to God knows. Iceland. Greenland. America? What if one day wee Annie emigrated in a balloon?
He was deep in this—the imagined departure for the New World by air balloon—when he heard himself addressed. He thought Cornelius must have woken but when he turned he saw it was Emily. She was wearing the solar glasses. She laughed self-consciously as he took her in.
“I look like an insect,” she said. “Do I?”
“No,” he said. “Not at all.”
“I don’t mind,” she said. “Jane takes care of beauty. I am here for other things.”
He nearly asked, what things? But corrected himself to say, “She does not have it all.”
He could not see her eyes clearly behind the glass, nor could he decide if she coloured a little or if it was just the sun on her cheeks, the heat. She looked down, took the glasses off and peered into the trench.
“Is that Cornelius?”
“It is. He is sleeping. The laudanum, I suppose. I hope I did right to give it to him.”
“I am glad you did,” she said. “It will help him until we go to Glasgow.”
He nodded at this. He was getting into the bad habit of pretending to have heard what he had not, but she guessed it and repeated herself.
“So you have settled on a time, then,” he said.
“I have written to Mr. Rizzo this morning. I do not know what inspired me but I am glad. I have told him he must expect me within the month. And I have asked him to assist in finding a reputable tooth surgeon for Cornelius. We need something better than a mere puller. Such people must exist.”
He saw now that she had a square of paper in her hand, a little package.
“Is Ranald not with you?” she asked.
“He went down to the peat diggers.”
“The Mackinnons.”
“Yes,” he said. “And here is the child coming up to us.”
Half a minute later and she was there, wee Annie. A tangle of black hair, eyes as black as a gypsy child. She had carried something up with her. She glanced at Lacroix but held it out to Emily. Emily took it, spoke to the girl, and gave her the letter. The child ran down the hill with it. She tumbled twice—perhaps for the joy of it—then reached Ranald, held up the letter and put it in the bag he carried over his shoulder.
“Safely delivered,” said Lacroix. “What was it she gave to you?”
Emily was holding it up to her face. She shrugged and passed it over the trench to Lacroix.
“Flint,” he said. “And definitely shaped. You can see where the edge has been worked. A tool of some kind . . . A dagger? It could be. Your brother will be cock-a-hoop. Or will he be piqued that others found it?”
She reached out a hand for it and he gave it back to her. For a few seconds she explored it with her fingertips—the chipped and rippled edge—then dropped it into the trench half a yard from Cornelius’s sleeping head.
“We will let him find it,” she said. “When he wakes.”
Lacroix laughed quietly. He was looking up at her from under the brim of his hat. She had arranged her face into an expression he had not seen there before. What was it? It seemed to challenge him, or challenge her brother, or challenge them all. “Were you speaking to the child in Gaelic?” he asked.
“I was,” she said. “Ranald has taught me some and we have a grammar at the house. One must find something to do on winter evenings. You cannot forever be playing spillikins.”
“Or music,” he said.
“In the winter,” she said, “my fingers were raw with the cold. They bled.”
He grimaced to show his sympathy—a fellow string player—though it was impossible to imagine the cold on such a day, to imagine it feelingly. What came instead was a scene from last winter, the high passes around Nogales, men like scarecrows huddled over smouldering fires of green wood. When she spoke again he missed it entirely. He raised his chin and she repeated it.
“A bheil thu ’g iarraidh a dhanns?”
“Ah,” he said. “You are trying it out on me.”
“I am asking if you would like to walk.”
“With you?”
“I do not think it would cause a scandal.”
“And how,” he asked, “do I accept?”
“Tha,” she said.
“Tha.”
“Tha.”
He accepted.
They walked down the hill towards the sea. As they passed the diggers, Ranald raised a hand, a hook.
“He will take your letter to the boat?” asked Lacroix.
“It will be in Glasgow in two days. If anything can sail in this weather. I suppose they must row when there is no wind.”
As they reached the marram grass above the beach, they turned to walk parallel with the coast. The sun was overhead. Emily wore her hat of Italian straw (it was not in perfect condition but had survived from before the embargo and was Italian in truth rather than merely in style). She wore the green glasses and a dress with sleeves that ended in little frills or flounces above her elbows. They walked between two fields of green oats and came out on to the untilled machair. Moon daisies, buttercups, purple vetch. There were black cattle grazing here, lashing their tails and moving heavily over pools of flowers.
“Do you recognise your old mount?” asked Emily.
“My what?”
“The cow you rode ashore on.”
“Oh no. She was much grander. Horns set with topaz. Emeralds.”
She laughed, then said, “She should not be hard to find again. If you wished to leave.”
The ground was flat or almost flat yet she walked beside him as if picking her way across a marsh. Was fear of blindness her constant thought? And would this Rizzo be able to help her? A surgeon! A sawbones! It was bad enough to have them do your hands like poor Ranald, but to have them come at your eyes!
They walked a quarter-mile in silence. Two boys sitting up on the blackland waved to them and Lacroix waved back.
“Who is it?” she asked.
He told her. “Do you think they will know you?”
“I am sure they do,” she said. “And you also.”
“And when Thorpe arrives,” he said. “What will they make of him?”
“Of Thorpe? They will sit on his hand like sparrows.”
“He has no enemies, then? This marvellous Thorpe.”
“I did not say that.”
“And will there be a happy day with your sister?”
“You mean a wedding?”
“I suppose they must wish it.”
“Why? Because she is carrying his child? We are here, in part, to escape such conventions.”
Lacroix frowned at the flowers. He approved. He disapproved. He had not come across it before, not among polite people.
“Are you such a great believer in marriage, John?”
“Some people must find it pleasant. And society must depend on it in some way.”
“We are born into a world not of our own making,” she said. “We are told we must accept it. But why should we?”
“Would there not be anarchy?” he asked, hoping he had heard her correctly through the noise of the birds. “Look at what happened in France. First revolution, then chaos, then dictatorship.”
“The revolution was run by lawyers. Lawyers and journalists. Yes, and bad actors like Collot. We shall avoid them all. And we renounce violence. We despise it. Nothing good ever came of it.” She stopped by a break in the dunes, peered around herself. “Is this the way?” she asked. “I believe it is.”
They turned on to a soft path between the dunes and stepped out on to an expanse of painfully white sand.
“No weed-burning here,” said Lacroix.
“Not yet,” she said. “And there are other places more profitable. They cut the best weed from the rocks offshore. Here there are no rocks.”
It was true. The beach gave on to the sea and the sea to the horizon. An unbroken flow. They walked down and stood at the edge of the water. Here at last was a fluttering of air. They shut their eyes. It was what such distances demanded—to be taken in over the tongue, to have the intimacy of breath.
“You said,” she began, still looking or not looking at the sea, “left shoulders forward.”
“I did? When?”
“In your sleep. Last night.”
“It is a cavalry command. Left shoulders forward. We wheel to the right.”
“I thought it was,” she said. “I think that I have read it in a newspaper. Or a novel.”
“You like novels?”
“Not as much as Jane. And now if I want more than a page I have to ask them to read to me.”
“What else did I say?” he asked.
“You spoke of your sweetheart.”
They turned to look at each other.
“Sweetheart?”
“Lucy.”
“Lucy is my sister! She lives in Bristol. She is married to a man called William Swann. She has two children, twins, who I cannot tell apart from each other.”
“Then your sweetheart must have another name.”
“I suppose she must,” he said. He smiled at her. “You have not told me the name of your beau. If Jane has Thorpe, who do you have?”
“Perhaps I have Thorpe too,” she said. Or that is what he thought she said. He could not have heard it, of course. Thorpe too? What could that mean?
He said, “In the community presumably spiritual love counts for more. More than the other.”
“You may presume it,” she said, “but it was not spiritual love that got my sister with child last winter.”
“He came to the island?”
“Thorpe?” She shook her head.
“Where then?”
“What a strange question! And how interested you are in Thorpe and Jane.”
He denied it. She grinned at him.
“Jane took the boat to Oban. They were in a hotel there. I cannot tell you the number of the room.”
They turned and began to walk along the sand. The tide was coming in. At each smooth wash of the surf it crept forward the breadth of a finger. She asked him if he could hear the peeping of the oystercatchers. He said he could, that he found it easier to hear birds than people.
“You must have been very dashing in your uniform,” she said.
“Dashing?” He saw himself—or rather he saw the portrait in the house. Had it been in reach he would immediately have lifted it down and turned it to the wall. “I fear I thought myself so.”
“As a rule I do not like soldiers,” she said. “Though I like Ranald. Ranald has saved us more than once.”
“I like him too,” said Lacroix.
“Why did you join?” she asked.
“Why . . . ?”
“The army. Why did you join?”
“We are at war, Emily.”
“I know lots of men who are not in the army. Or the navy.”
“Like Thorpe?”
“Thorpe, for one. And Cornelius.”
“My father had died,” he said. “I did not know what to do with myself. And I was used to horses and riding.”
“And that was enough?”
“Yes. It must have been.”
“Did you think about killing men?”
The question startled him. He shook his head vigorously. “I thought of uniforms and riding and getting away from rooms where I used to sit with my father.”
“I do not mean to taunt you,” she said. She asked him to tell her about his father and he did so. His character, his love of village music. The tall books written out with songs, pressed flowers between the pages. She listened carefully, despite the heat. He felt her listening as a gift to him. He thanked her.
“You have no need to thank me, John.”
They had come near the end of the beach. They turned about and regarded their own footprints.
“If you were to look away,” she said, “I think I would take off my shoes and stockings. Or in truth I don’t care if you look away or not as you have certainly seen a woman’s feet before.”
She had spoken rapidly; he caught about half of it, but as soon as she bent down he understood what she was about. He stared for a moment then looked away to the dunes. When he turned back she was standing in the sea. She had her stockings and shoes in one hand. The other hand held up her dress.
“Will you not come in too?” she said.
He sat on the sand and began to push at a heel of a boot. She laughed. “Do you always grit your teeth so when you take off your boots?”
He laughed too. “My ribs are still sore,” he said. “My friends in Glasgow.”
Now he was sitting he saw that there were tiny skeletons on the sand. He had not noticed them when he was walking. This, for example, the shell and claws of a crab, perfectly dry, perfectly white, the whole carapace smaller than his thumbnail. Was the sand made of such things? Were they walking on a million bones? A million million ground small by the sea?
He got the boots off and rolled up his trousers. Emily had already set off and was three, four yards ahead of him. He followed her, wading through shallow water that breathed and sucked between his toes. He was walking in her wake and sometimes felt the print of her feet beneath the soles of his own. She was talking; her words flew past her shoulders like scraps of paper in a paper chase. Something about hatboxes? Then her words came differently and he realised she had started to sing. He was not close enough to pick up the tune so he started his own song: “Blow the wind southerly, southerly southerly! Blow the wind southerly . . . ”
He wished the beach was miles long, wished he could sing and walk behind her until the moon rose like a petal and he was cured by something as simple as beauty, but when she came again to the spot where they had first arrived at the edge of the sea she stopped and waited for him.
“We shall have to dry our feet,” she said, stepping out of the water on to the sand. “Do you suppose the sand itself might dry them?”
“If we ran about?” he asked. But it was too hot for running. He considered offering her the use of his stockings but she sat on the sand and began to dab away with her own. He sat nearby, took off his hat and wiped his brow.
“You are very free,” he said.
“Free?” She stopped wiping the sand from her toes. She stared at him through the green glass that now, through some trick of the light, had become entirely opaque.
“I mean . . . this . . . your manner . . . ”
“Free?” It was as though there were no word he could have used that would have stung her more. “I shall tell you,” she said, “how I am free. I am an unmarried woman no longer in her first youth. I am what some people call a spinster. I have in savings something less than seven pounds. I live under the protection of my brother, which is to say—though I love him as a sister should—that I live with no effective protection whatsoever. As for the community, for all I know they will never arrive. We have not heard from them in weeks. I have not the slightest idea how we shall survive another winter here. And if that was not enough I am, day by day, losing what remains of my sight and so must, in a short time, lose whatever small independence I still enjoy. So, you will tell me please where, in all of this, you find me to be free. Is it because I take off my stockings to paddle in the sea? That I have let you see me do it? Is that my freedom?”
She held his gaze then looked away. She was shaken by her own anger. He thought she might weep but if there were tears the green glass hid them from him. He felt as he had when he and Ranald watched the emigration ship. Side-struck. Implicated. He poked a finger into the sand, drew a shape there, then smoothed it away.
“I was thoughtless,” he said.
She shook her head.
“I have offended you, Emily.”
“No,” she said. “Though I might have offended you.”
“Mr. Rizzo,” he said. “I feel certain he will be able to help. Did you not say he was eminent?”
“I know almost nothing about him,” she said, though her tone now was matter-of-fact. She smiled a sad smile. “Let us not spoil the day, John. All these things. They are an old story and one I am tired of. Now, if you will give me your back I will put on my stockings. I can assure you I am very particular when it comes to questions of modesty. Thorpe calls me an old vestal. A prude.”
He gave her his back, looked down the glittering white length of the beach. “It may be,” he said, “I will not like this Thorpe after all.”
They did not walk back to the excavation but went directly to the house. There was no sign of the others. They went to the kitchen. A half-dozen wine bottles filled from the spring were standing on the floor in the shade under the window. They drank a bottle between them, dabbed their lips.
“I will do some work in the garden,” she said.
“Why not rest?” he said. “Sit somewhere cool for a while.”
“Like an invalid? No. I will do things while I can. And you can help me later. I will need to water the vegetables.”
He promised he would. They parted. Lacroix went to his room (once again pressing the wall rather than the door and having to stand back and guess again). He sat on the unmade bed, got out the writing case and settled it on his lap. The ink in the silver pot had dried to a gum. He spat into it, spat again and mixed it with the steel nib of one of the patent pens. He had the urge to write poetry. Lines Composed in the Western Isles by Capt . . . whoever he was. The walk on the beach would be at the centre of it. Emily as a Nereid, himself a shipwrecked sailor. Or the spirit of one? And if he liked the piece why not set it to music? Something slow but not mournful. An air to the air! He dipped the pen, paused with the glistening nib above the paper, then began a letter to his bank in Bath. He requested that they send, as a matter of urgency, a draft for twenty-five pounds to the Ship Bank in Glasgow and that the draft might be collected and cashed by Miss Emily Frend (he did not want Cornelius getting hold of such an amount). He had not seen the Ship Bank himself when in Glasgow—what had he seen?—but William had mentioned it and the name was not difficult to remember. Emily would bring the money back with her and they would, for a time, not have to depend on the satin purse or Thorpe or the whim of a visionary turned factory master.
The ink—powder and spit—dried to an uncertain purple, as if he had written the letter with wine lees. It would do. He folded the paper, wrote the address. He didn’t have anything to melt wax for a seal but he could do that later. He would give the letter to Ranald this evening. It would go to Glasgow with the list of provisions and Emily’s letter for Rizzo.
He cleaned the nib, closed the case, pushed off his boots and lay down. Poor Lovall. The face came to him more clearly than it had in many weeks. How quickly they had put him aside! A little grave in Castelo Branco, then the auction of his effects—a jacket, a pair of overalls, a saddle, spurs, the writing case . . .
He shut his eyes. He would have a short sleep now. He needed one; the heat had drained him. And when he woke he would see if it was time to carry water to the garden, a job he was already relishing the prospect of (light slopping in the mouth of a pail). But when he did wake—the usual confusion following upon a sleep in the day—he heard Cornelius, his voice shrill, angry it seemed, and he sat up on the bed, braced, uneasy. He strained to hear but the only word he could be sure of was “How?”—spoken twice, the second at a higher pitch than the first. Clearly all soporific effects of the drug had worn off. Then he remembered the piece of flint the child had brought up and that Emily had tossed into the trench. It had been found of course! Cornelius was not angry but excited. And if it was Emily he was speaking to she must be struggling to keep a straight face.
He peeled off his stockings, shook out the sand, put them on again, pulled on his boots. He was tugging on the second boot when he paused once more to listen. Another voice now, a woman’s. Words close-packed, words in flurries. Then Cornelius again, as if trying to bat the words away. Then silence.
Was it silence?
He did not want to intrude on a family spat but he was curious. Why should the finding of the flint occasion a row? He went to the door. If he was in the way, if his presence was awkward, he would nod to them, cross the room and leave the house, make himself scarce for an hour.
He opened the door and went in. They were all there: Cornelius, Jane, Emily, Ranald. Cornelius was standing at one side of the table. He had the appearance of a man falsely accused, a raggedy, half-size Danton. On the other side of the table was Emily, her cheeks shining with tears (no green glasses to hide them now). Jane was in the shadows by the bottom of the stairs, arms folded beneath her breasts. Ranald was beside the hall door, his gaze on the floor, the old rugs. On the table, and somehow the centre of everything, was a parcel of black earth, of freshly cut peat, about the size of a family Bible.
Then several things happened at once. Jane began to speak; Emily turned and made for the kitchen door; Cornelius slumped on to a chair by the table. Only Ranald kept his former pose.
“Cornelius,” said Jane, “has found something, or the Mackinnons have, and now he will not go to Glasgow with Emily and Emily is in a rage with him.”
“I appeal to you,” said Cornelius. “A fellow man. A rational being. How can I go now? It is . . . ”
“What have you found?” asked Lacroix.
Cornelius looked at the table, the slab of peat there. “They dug it up where they were digging their peat,” said Cornelius. “They sent the child to fetch me. At least they had that much sense.”
Lacroix leaned over it. The peat was moist, dense, sticky black. And bedded into its surface was something else. Fibrous, whorled. He would have touched it but Cornelius stayed his hand.
“It seems to be an ear,” said Lacroix. “Is it an ear?”
“It is!” said Cornelius. “The ear of a Caledonian Achilles.”
“Achilles?”
“I mean it is ancient, Lovall. It is an ancient human ear. It heard the sea when the sea was new!”
Lacroix bent lower. Now he knew it was there it was unmistakable. An ear! For love of Christ. Black. Black leather. Black exactly as the peat but unmistakably human.
“And the rest?” he asked. “The head? The body?”
“Nothing,” said Cornelius. “It is an ear on its own. But the rest must be there, somewhere. I have persuaded the Mackinnons to suspend their digging. They are horribly reluctant but you can imagine the damage they could do with their spades. Damn it, Lovall, there is some man or woman in the ground and I must find them. I feel they are depending on me.”
“It is certainly a remarkable thing,” said Lacroix.
“Of course! Of course! And now you understand why I cannot go on a jaunt to Glasgow. The moment I’m gone the Mackinnons will dig again.”
“But your teeth?”
“I have the tincture. I do not need a surgeon now. Perhaps next year.”
“And what of Emily?”
“Yes,” said Cornelius. “That is unfortunate. I would ask Ranald to go but he will have duties here.”
“Then I will take her,” said Lacroix. He thought he heard Jane laugh. He looked at her; she wasn’t laughing. “I will take her,” he said, “if I have the family’s consent to it.”
“And if he operates?” said Cornelius. “This . . . ”
“Rizzo,” said Jane.
“You will stay with her until she can travel?”
“I will,” said Lacroix. He did not know how any of this sounded. He had been acquainted with the Frends less than a fortnight. A man who arrives on the back of a cow, who does not speak about his past. But Cornelius reached forward and seized his hands. He gabbled, was dewy-eyed, though it struck Lacroix that his offer was exactly what they had expected of him, that he had walked in on a piece of theatre and known his line.
“You had best go and tell her,” said Jane, cutting in above her brother.
“Do what?”
“Emily,” she said, and pointed with her chin to the kitchen door.
He nodded, freed himself from Cornelius’s grasp and went through to the kitchen. The cat was on the table lapping at a dish of melted butter. There was no sign of Emily. He went to touch the cat’s head, to stroke it, but the instant it saw his raised hand it twisted about and fled.