Coronach, page 58
“Don’t concern yourself too much over this business of Charlotte, will you? She’s perfectly well, or was so when I left her— in fact, a damned sight bonnier than you.”
Later he stood in the darkened hall, offering me a packet of Charlotte’s letters and holding my hand again, talking inconsequentially above the sound of the rain to delay me, as though, despite the hard new maturity in his face, he were still that golden child, and no candle lit his night.
I remember the terror of that blowing darkness, where the wind, which had slammed me against a wall at Ardsian, became my living enemy, and tried to throw me from the horse, and blinded me with rain. I fought him, forcing him to go on while he shied at the noise and the tearing trees and the narrowness of the track: I was alone in the rain and darkness, and then I was not alone. Malcolm was waiting for me. A moment later I recognized it for the coincidence it was, but the pain and terror of my memories had not diminished, and I could not control my irrational panic. Nor could I move, except to pull a rain-soaked fold across my face; I shut my eyes against the rain and the force of the wind, willing him to leave me. When I opened them he was still there, motionless, blurring in the dimness, then slowly he withdrew, giving me the right of way.
I passed him, seeing nothing of him: he saw nothing of me but my eyes. There was nothing, nothing in my path, only blindness and darkness, the malevolence of the wind, a thrashing violence in the trees.
“Jesus Christ, how many more years must I suffer?”
Even the anger and profanity, even the bitterness, even, when it came, his hand closing on my rein and my own inability to prevent it: all so familiar. So inevitable.
His knee was almost touching mine, although I thought afterwards that he had taken some care to prevent it; the rain streaming from his boot in the stirrup and the sleeve of the old caped greatcoat, the ungloved hand controlling the rein... that much I saw of him, nothing more. The rain was blowing into my eyes, and I refused to look at him.
His hand was uninsistent, no more than a token detention which a word or gesture on my part would have ended: it neither touched nor attempted to touch mine. He said, very quietly, “How many years must this go on? How much punishment is enough?” and in the silence a roaring gust passed overhead. The horse, shying beneath me, dragged away, breaking the contact, and back again, throwing my knee against his. “Margaret, look at me. I have been in hell—” and I stared up into the blowing rain, into his eyes.
“How much was enough for you? How did you determine the degree of my punishment— until it gave you satisfaction?”
Nothing changed in his face; nothing had changed, in the nineteen months since we had been lovers, in the year which had so ravaged me, leaving him untouched. But he was still vulnerable: something in the light, impassive eyes told me I had hurt him.
“I hope this gives you an equal measure.” There was a brief, final silence, torn by the wind. “And if you have no consideration for your own neck, at least get your horse to shelter. There’s worse than this coming, and soon.”
There is nothing worse than this.
He had kneed the stallion away as if to conclude our conversation. He came up beside me again.
“What did you say to me?”
“I said, there is nothing worse than this. Can you imagine anything worse?”
He answered but it was thrown away by the wind, and his left hand came out to take my bridle; my gelding jibbed and flung up his head and I brought him under control with difficulty. He spoke again, more urgently, and I knew that what he had been saying was, “Come with me.” I said, “No,” and he shouted at me over the wind, then something crashed down near us and I followed him.
Remembered slates, streaming rain, remembered stones underfoot, the gate, kicked open from the saddle, blowing wide to receive me; I dismounted without his assistance, nor did he offer it to me. The door was on the latch, the fire banked, the silence, after the tumult outside, profound. I stood waiting for him a long time, or so it seemed, knocked breathless by the wind and dripping rain onto the polished floor. The room was unchanged: the same brass candlesticks, the pot of paper spills, the oiled fowling piece, the absence of any ornament or personal possession, as though he were merely a tenant here, uncertain of his lease. And my own brief sojourn, expressed only in a blue and white jug filled with flowers on my visits and kept between those candlesticks, might never have been.
He came in. The silence was so intense that I knew he had stood a moment, as I had done, with the rain streaming from his clothing; then he removed his greatcoat.
I said, “What have you done with the jug?”
A click, and the sound of some heavy object being placed gently on the table, followed by an identical pair of sounds: his pistols, taken off the half cock.
“I broke it. Accidentally, as it happens.”
“I daresay that, too, gave you a certain satisfaction.”
Another, sharper sound: the knife he carried in his boot, less gently discarded and now also on the kitchen table.
“If I’d wanted such a childish diversion I would have broken it deliberately.” Then, “Will you do me the honour of sitting, or is that too much to ask?”
I sat on the seise and listened to his movements and the clink of glass; it came within the periphery of my vision and waited to be acknowledged. His hand was so close that its scars would have been clearly visible had I focused my eyes upon it: the old white scar of the knife across his knuckles, the razor’s scar from fingertip to wrist. I could not touch him, and I could not bear his touch.
He said, “Don’t be a damned fool. What do you take me for?” and the glass came into my hand; his withdrew, and he walked away to the other side of the fireplace and stood there.
“I don’t know what to take you for. The devil sometimes, I think.”
Silence, and in that silence, which I had thought unchanged, a new intrusion. In this house where time, the enemy of lovers, had had no measure, a clock was ticking: time was, and lovers were no more. There was only this oppressive silence, divided into endless seconds and minutes of hopelessness.
He said, still with that gentleness I had always thought unnatural, “I must come and see to the fire. If you will permit me.”
I sensed the faintest hesitation, as though the movement caused him pain: only my eyes would have recognized it once, and recognized it still. He remained there, crouched, with the firelight burnishing that hard, hawkish profile, then he turned his head and caught my eyes on him. The force of his gaze was physically shocking.
“Will you not take off that wet thing and let me dry it?”
“I shall not be here much longer. I will not presume upon your hospitality.”
“Abuse me if you must, but for Christ’s sake don’t insult me.”
“What do you want of me, Malcolm?” and something, perhaps my use of his name, brought his eyes to mine again, not with hope or surprise or gratitude or suspicion, only an impenetrable calm.
“Peace. I don’t ask for your forgiveness, I never expected it. But I thought that— if we met— if we could speak once, like this, I would be at peace. I can never close my eyes without seeing your face.” Then he said with the old scorpion’s sting of sarcasm, “Which is no more than I deserve,” and rose, this time with effort.
He sat opposite me and straightened the offending knee, an habitual gesture. The leg was encased in doeskin, the boot of polished Spanish leather, the coat unlaced, of some blackish material with black buttons. The clothes, like the boots, were old and expensive and functional, and well remembered: I had never seen him wear anything new. His hair needed cutting badly, something he did himself; and the firelight, thrown across that face I had thought unaltered by the last, lost year, had shown me strands of white.
He said, quite without humour, “Do you see that I am harmless?”
“You are anything but that.”
He smiled, and youth came briefly to his face, and with it something indefinable, which I had loved.
“You remind me of the first night you came here, all eyes and uncertainty.” The smile was gone, and the illusion of youth. “Oh, take it off. Is that what you think of me?”
I unfastened the clasp and chain and laid my cloak on the seise: my habit was damp, and the unmoving air seemed cold.
“You are very thin, Margaret.”
“I have been ill.”
“And are you well recovered now?”
“Yes. Thank you.” Another silence: his eyes were disconcerting, disturbing. “I see that your knee has not improved.”
If this venture upon familiarity surprised him he gave no sign; he accepted it, as though it were a polite progression in the conversation of people of long acquaintance, once friends, but lately strangers.
“I ignore it. That usually serves.”
“Does your business prosper?”
“Nothing prospers with me of late, as I am sure James will have told you— you saw James, I take it?”
“Yes.”
“My dear, there’s no need to look so troubled. The opportunity presents itself... that makes it convenient all round.”
No intention, then, of obeying the rules of this social game: no intentions toward me that were good, were safe, were predictable. Only this: sarcasm and innuendo, as before; everything as before.
I said, “Charlotte is ill. Did you know?” and the sardonic little smile left his face.
“How ill?”
“Her heart is diseased. James fears for her life.”
His opinion of Charlotte was unknown to me, but he had never spoken of her with the contempt he reserved for James; and her acknowledgment of him as my lover had been deferential, even nervous. At length he said, “This bloody place is cursed— and my bloody tongue.”
“I had to tell you.” He said nothing, staring into the fire. “I could have told you anything once. I wanted to tell you this.”
“Have you been so much alone, poor Margaret? Did you find no other comfort?”
“No. Although I know you did.”
“Yes, that’s only fair. You owe me an injury, don’t you?”
“More than one, I think.”
“Will you speak of it? Or must it always remain vile and unmentionable, like all my other little sins?”
“You said everything imaginable on that occasion, and some things I could not have imagined.”
“And I remember what you said. I thought you’d learned your language from your other lover, when he took my place.”
“There was no one else.”
“I was told otherwise.”
“It was a lie.”
“Was it?”
“Yes.” It had been, then.
“I believed it. I was sick. I was drunk. I went mad.”
There was a long pause, which he seemed to find as intolerable as I did; I heard him rise and sensed him standing in front of the fire. When he spoke again it was with the same dispassion: perhaps it was indifference.
“Nothing in this life could have taken you from me— because I think you loved me then. Only myself— only I, myself. And the pity of it is that I have always loved you. I love you still.”
It seemed very dark; it seemed we had always been here in these shadows, insubstantial and unreal; it seemed he could never stop setting one cold word upon another, like a weight of stones: intolerable, intolerable.
“I have led a hard life, and many things have been done in it, cruel things— to me, and by me— but nothing in my life has ever wounded me so much as the loss of you. Now nothing can hurt me. There is nothing more.”
“My love,” and he looked at me, without surprise, without suspicion, without any discernible emotion.
“It’s too late for that, for you as well as me.”
“What remains, then?”
He said, staring into the flames, “Nothing. We say good-bye, like civilized people. It was all I wanted.”
It was darker, darker: there was nothing to say. The sound of dark spring rain, as cold as winter. Darkness and light, peace and hell: an afternoon, a lifetime. There was nothing more. I had only to go.
“Let it end, Margaret.” I had only to leave him. “You would never forgive me, and if I hurt you again you would turn it on me like a weapon, and we would kill everything between us. You loved me once. Let me remember it, but not like this.”
It was he who touched me, my hair, my lips, my fingers, and held them: they did not resist him.
He said, “Don’t do this. You trusted me. It was not for this.”
“I love you.”
“For God’s sake, if you play with me—”
“I love you. There is nothing else.”
Only the kiss, the end and the beginning. Only the shadows of rain on the glass, the cold, remembered room, the shadowed bed. At the last, he hesitated, and there was pain, and I feared it and flinched from it, and it did not leave me, but he lifted me above it, moving deeply and slowly within me until my very womb convulsed for joy. His love possessed me and filled me and lifted me, as with great wings, into ecstasy. I was Leda, ravished by joy; I was his— and his— and his— forever; I was not myself, but him.
XI
On the morning of Friday September thirteenth, 1771, the packet Worthy out of Falmouth and carrying passengers, stores and mail from England and from English Harbour, Antigua, stood off to await the dawn before entering the anchorage at Barbados. With the sun and on a negligible tide she anchored, and was immediately attacked by ravenous lighters and bumboats poling out from shore and hawking rum, fresh fish and fruit and bags of coarse brown sugar.
In the hour after sunrise she was clearly visible, riding above her own reflection as though painted on the shimmering sea, and providing a source of speculation if not excitement for the garrison. Standing on its promontory outside the town, this commanded a panoramic view of beach, hillside battery, anchorage and commercial shipping: island traders, vessels carrying sugar, Barbados’ lifeblood, to Bristol from Speight’s Town farther up the coast, a litter of tiny scavengers and fishing boats, or the familiar colours, in this alien light, of passing men-of-war. Worthy had been expected: she had arrived. She would discharge her cargo and her duties and she would go, beating back across the Atlantic into English gales and winter, leaving these islands in their perpetual sun, and their inhabitants in exile.
The morning, although young, was hot. The newly risen sun, piercing jalousied shutters, struck the floor and the papers and the table as though it were glaring off metal. The ink well was hot, the glass and its astringent contents, an infusion of weak tea and lime juice, were hot... the onshore breeze which had carried Worthy through gem-clear water and under fair-weather canvas to her resting place had not yet refreshed the stale air of this room where, away from the glare of the slatted sun, the commanding officer of the Eighth was drafting orders to be read at Assembly the following day.
September 14th. It is ordered, that upon no account whatever any future indulgence be given to such of the working men as have misbehaved, contracted debts, or appeared dirty and slovenly, and they are strictly forbid to appear in a state of drunkenness, at any time of the day.
The colonel expects to see the men sober; and it is his orders that they parade without noise, and in a soldier-like manner. No man is to be seen without his regimental coat, waistcoat, and breeches, without the leave of his commanding officer.
The pen hesitated, and immediately the ink blurred as it soaked into the page. In the momentary stillness the life of the garrison intruded: voices, footsteps, the soughing sea, the smell of baking bread, the smell of the salt tide, the smell of mildew like a taint, progressive and destructive, the tang of sweat, which no amount of laundering could remove from clothes grown threadbare and sun-bleached after nine years in these latitudes.
The camp necessaries that are wanting of what was delivered to each company is to be made good, except such as the officers can certify to have been worn out in the service, the rest is to be paid for by the men that lost them.
He paused again, swallowed half the contents of the glass, which constituted his breakfast, and opened his watch. Another hour, perhaps half an hour, before Mainwaring’s arrival.
The colonel has been told that some have pretended illness to avoid ordinary exercise. Soldiers are to understand that constant and regular exercise is as necessary for their health as it is for their instruction; and that an army of men undisciplined, untaught and unused to any fatigue, is an easy prey.
At the edge of his vision there was movement— a cockroach the size of a man’s thumb scuttled across the floor and disappeared into a damp crevice. He continued to write, in the disciplined hand that had filled the order books of the Eighth regiment throughout its slow progress from England to the Havana, to St. Christophers, to Antigua, to Barbados, since 1762.
If ever the colonel hears, or is informed, that a soldier expresses himself to be dissatisfied with exercise or work, or marching, or any other duty that falls to his share, or that he drops words intending to discourage the young men, or finds fault with whatsoever is ordered or appointed, he will particularly take notice of such soldier, and will treat him as so pernicious and villainous a conduct deserves; and if any thing of that kind is ever discovered in a non-commissioned officer, he must expect no mercy or forgiveness. It is the distinguished character of a good soldier to go through every part of his duty with chearfulness, resolution, and obedience; for the good of his Majesty’s service.
The Eighth had never been cheerful, resolute, or obedient. One battalion, understrength, less than three hundred men, the second battalion having been lost to the mania of renumbering and disbanding regiments which had swept the army in 1758: its regimental character had never changed since the day Mordaunt had assumed command. It remained surly and mutinous no matter how many men died, deserted or were transferred—every recruit seemed to put on defiance like a garment with its blue facings and blue and white zigzag lace, and the days were punctuated by drill and the lash and the dreary round of work. Building, repairing, shifting materials or stores, offloading cargoes: when the Eighth worked it was sullen; when it was at rest it brawled, whored, drank and thieved; when it fought, as it had done only once under his command, it had given its courage and its blood with a brutish dedication, and he had been appalled by the depth of his gratitude and his affection for them.
