When he woke up it was still very cold, his forehead cold as a tombstone. There was no rain, but the rush roof let out its nightful of water little by little and groaned like an animal. The door had come open. The night was visible, smoke-blue, very still and sharp in the doorway, still as a farm-dog, as if it had never gone away.
A tall man in a big Holland hat and a caped overcoat was stooping just inside the door, whispering, ‘Corporal Halloran.’ One at least of the Privates was stirring.
Halloran struggled with his waistcoated legs and trousered arms, to shed his blankets.
‘Here!’ he said.
‘It’s Blythe, the Commissary. Come with me please, Halloran!’
He was still so much asleep that the man in the large hat brought him that broad sense of dread that is peculiar to dreams.
‘I beg your pardon, sir.’
‘I said, come with me!’
So he got ready. He thought, And that’s that. I am a dead man, he thought, getting his legs free of the waistcoat.
‘Hurry up!’ Blythe said.
‘Anything the matter, sir?’
‘Ann.’
‘Ann is sick?’
‘Hurry up!’
Halloran found himself with his breeches on. He wondered who had done it, and decided it could have been himself alone. He found too that he was taking care to do up his gaiters, and snorted and got up in a rush, following Blythe outside. How blood-warm the waistcoat was as he put it on, and even the coat was warm.
‘Ann, sir?’ he said.
As soon as his hands were free the cold pounced on them and hung on the fingers like weights.
The Commissary wouldn’t answer.
‘Sir, you mentioned Ann.’
Blythe had his right hand tucked into his double-breasted coat and resting on the second button. He took it out. In it was a horse-pistol, just too large for Blythe’s hand as it would have been for Halloran’s. Halloran, in his boyhood, had noticed these slung in front of the saddle on the mounts of officers of militia, and had always felt that he was predestined not to have a hand large enough to handle such manly things adequately. Neither had most of the officers of militia, but they seemed never worried by this and wore them nonetheless, because they looked gallant. This one in Blythe’s hand didn’t look gallant to Halloran.
‘It’s that our work now is to save her, Halloran.’
The pistol was all that threatened. The Commissary himself spoke confidentially as they went off. He stopped when they were at the edge of the claypits. A half-uprooted peppermint leant over them and was in the secret. ‘Captain Allen has a warrant on its way to the Provost-Marshal’s. Ann and yourself are on it. Perhaps we can combine to save her.’
‘Ann? How could Ann be on a warrant?’
Blythe’s jaws shuddered. The man was, in fact, gargling anger in his throat.
‘Get on!’ he said. He could barely say it.
On downhill, Halloran saw Venus unambiguous as alabaster, seas away, above the bay, above China; and reeled in confusion.
‘Ann,’ he said. ‘It isn’t possible.’
‘Get on,’ said Blythe.
On Collett’s Brook, the little bridge rang clear as a mallet when they crossed. Blythe pushed him along the back road by His Excellency’s fruitless farms. Behind a sapling fence, the furrows were silver with frost or spider webs this still night. Harvest for the wheat would be October, the far side of the perils of the equinox. It was unbelievable that he, like the soft grain, was not likely to see October.
‘Sir . . .’ he said, stopping.
The Commissary steadied the pistol-stock with his left hand and pointed the weighty thing at Halloran’s side. Behind the stillness of their bodies, a frog bleated himself to a late sleep. There was some light and a few black birds wheeling, giving off rusty calls. Then Blythe and Halloran heard a cat-call and the tops of male voices and the clumping of the bridge.
‘It’s your brothers-in-arms,’ said Blythe, ‘under some corporal who can’t control them. They’re taking the warrant back to the hutments. When they find the others and don’t find you, they’ll be at my house for Ann.’
‘But Ann? Ann’s safe.’
‘Is she?’
‘Yes!’
‘Get on!’
‘How did they find out?’
‘Byrne told them.’
‘God help him.’
‘Get on!’
They got on through the edge of the woods, woods known to Halloran, woods of love, poor as they were. They came to Blythe’s place from the side. Even in this area where his colleagues lived, Blythe held up the pistol high, peculiarly unabashed. He opened the front door and the weapon tilted in his hand. It was far too heavy to carry for a mile with the necessary deft belligerence. Nevertheless, the Commissary was very much master as he pointed the way into the front parlour. From Ann’s stories, one would not have expected him to be master, to seem independent. Perhaps he had grown tired now of waiting for the potteries’ fortune, and dreamt of blatantly controlling his own house, to his own taste.
He turned the key on Halloran, and Halloran was locked in with lumpy mahogany shapes, bureaus and chests of drawers. Across the room, a stub of candle burned in a candle-stick on a walnut table with friable greyhounds’ legs and shells on the knees. The single poor light kindled the bosses on a copper shield, product of Rio, hung from the top of the wall.
Before Halloran moved, the door opened again. Blythe brought Ann in by the elbow. This morning her skin was grey, nothing Spanish about it at all.
‘He tells me you’re safe, Ann,’ said Blythe, nodding at Halloran. ‘Terry Byrne tells us all differently. Who’s right, eh?’
Halloran put his arms around her as Mr Blythe went to the curtains to let in the dawn. While he worked there, he held the pistol tucked under his left arm.
‘Let in some light,’ he muttered. ‘That’s my function. Let in some light.’
When he turned back from the window, there was adequate grey light in the room. He stared at Halloran holding the girl, at the two pale, profitless hands straining on her back. His eyes were full of a bleak, level rapacity; they were cannibal’s eyes, an embarrassment to ardour.
Halloran let down his hands and faced the Commissary.
‘Let me tell you something,’ said Blythe. While he spoke, he laid that vainglorious pistol on the sideboard by the candle and kneaded his small hand. He told them that Byrne had turned King’s evidence. The Provost-Marshal had got at all the truth there was in Terry, even what concerned Ann.
‘So you are a dead man, Halloran,’ he said at the end, reaching out to kill the candle-flame with his fingers. ‘And the only question is how to save my servant.’
Not aware of trespassing, Ann sat herself in Mrs Blythe’s chair.
‘Is it true?’ Halloran asked her.
She lowered her head.
‘That Judas bastard Byrne,’ he said.
In that same subdued manner he had used to be angry with Halloran earlier in the day, Blythe began to shiver.
‘There’s no use in calling him that Judas bastard,’ he observed. ‘For one thing, it isn’t true.’
‘Oh no, Mr Blythe? I know Terry Byrne, thank you.’
Blythe attempted to hitch up the long Garrick coat he still wore. It seemed that he was looking for the strong-box key, which he would wave above their heads as a hell of a sign of contradiction. Not able to locate it, he shrugged and allowed the folds of his coat to subside around his knees.
‘Could you find it in you to believe,’ he asked Halloran, ‘that Byrne visited a lady in a hut along the Brook last night? Seeking a hero’s diversion. You understand?’
‘I could guess if I didn’t understand.’
‘He gave the lady two ounces
of meat. So she denounced him. Could you blame her? Two ounces are an insult, while four are a meal. In this town anyhow. So there you are, Corporal. That is where he killed you. By two ounces of pickled meat, you’re dead. Imagine.’
Halloran shook his head to clear it. He looked up especially appalled, as all sufferers are, by the dispassionateness of things, Blythe’s unconcern, the sobriety and detachment of furniture. He turned to the chair but found that Ann had walked away into the corner.
‘I won’t have you gloating,’ he told Blythe.
‘Don’t tell me what you won’t have.’ Blythe stood side-on to Halloran, back to the window gone gently saffron. ‘You’ve had your revenge already on the three of us. On Byrne and that clerk. And on me. Did you know that they beat Terry Byrne with green wands according to a method used by the Spaniards? They didn’t rush. They had all night. Even so, Byrne endured for three hours. He brought out your names only with the greatest anguish. It’s cost him something indeed to give evidence for the King. As for Hearn, they’d have him over the side by now.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Halloran. But he knew that Hearn would live to nag them in France. Because who could imagine Hearn drowning, or Hearn’s bard’s head broken in?
‘And then me,’ Blythe began.
‘I don’t want any revenge on you,’ Halloran told him.
‘Thank you indeed.’
‘We’ll lie. You lie!’
‘I beg your pardon.’
‘About Ann.’
Blythe considered this with one eye shut, the pistol tilted at the ground like a cannon abandoned in battle.
‘There’s no chance for lies,’ he said. ‘The court has a belly fed on short navy rations like every other belly in the town. You have threatened it. Even Ann has in her way. Lies will be treated without mercy. Believe me.’
Between Mrs Blythe’s brown drapes, the odious sunlight began to be profuse. Halloran eyed it and raked the hair on his forehead.
‘You’ve got something in mind,’ he was suddenly certain. ‘What is it?’
But Blythe coughed judicially. He chose not to rush the matter.
‘There’s a pleading that girl can make,’ he said slowly. He grimaced, just like a specious lawyer. ‘It would save her life. Almost certainly.’
‘Yes?’ asked Halloran, Ann remaining dazed and leisurely in the corner.
‘She could plead she was with child.’
Ann turned round.
‘No,’ she said softly, appalled to softness.
But Blythe drew his head in between his shoulders, gave it a small shake with all the eagerness of a mouse. How could the court prove she was not with child? In such a case, they must wait and see, and while they waited to see, the matter would solve itself. Three thousand tons of shipping, mainly storeships, were expected any day. When they came in, there would be what is called by decree ‘general jubilation’, and as a mark of it the girl would be pardoned.
‘You’ll see,’ he said.
‘I can’t imagine it happening that way,’ said Halloran. But they were simply words to say and showed that he was devoid of purpose.
‘Am I a milch cow?’ a voice asked. It had such quiet, stinging edge that although it could only be Ann’s they looked around to make sure a fourth person hadn’t dropped into the room.
‘No one says so, Ann,’ Blythe said.
‘It’s my fate. I have the say on it.’
Halloran suggested, ‘Ann, if it’s your one chance . . .’
‘There aren’t any chances,’ she decided, and then, without believing in what she said, ‘and it’s too early of a morning to be afraid of dying.’
She took Halloran’s slack forearm in both hands and shook it and moved it back and forth.
‘Don’t leave me in this town,’ she said.
‘Do you know what it is to hang, Ann?’ Blythe called to her.
‘It’s not something that takes beforehand knowledge, is it?’ she said. ‘There have been dozens of men hanged with complete success the first time they tried it.’
‘I mean, the indecency of a crowd at a hanging,’ amended Blythe. ‘How they sweat to see a woman strangle pop-eyed. You know that.’
They knew. Ann hid her face against Halloran’s shoulder, while he composed himself to give her all his futile tenderness. She had pulled away by the time he was ready, and gone to the window. He could see her outlined by the winter’s morning and thought that no one could consider making Ann so alien to it as to hang her. On the surface, practically speaking, he was frantic.
‘I can only say the bastard’s right,’ he said.
‘Don’t leave me in this town,’ Ann told him.
‘There’s no decent town of death,’ announced Blythe.
‘They’re really coming to get us,’ Halloran called out. Awareness kept recurring in his throat. On the other hand, there were the moments when his mind took hold of what was certain, that they were neither evil nor tragic, that the gallows dealt only in the evil and the tragic.
‘They really are,’ Blythe nodded.
‘What am I going to do, Ann? Tell me, for God’s sake. He’s got all the truth with him.’
‘Don’t leave me in this town,’ said Ann.
‘You won’t say that when the day comes,’ Blythe advised genially. He had, in the past half-hour, achieved a brand of cricket-in-a-tomb gaiety. It had become by now a chronic condition of his eyes and cheeks, this slow, indecent levity which sapped Halloran’s reason, such as it was.
‘I can’t kill you with silence,’ Halloran was deciding in Ann’s direction. ‘How do you know you’re not in fact with child?’
‘How indeed?’ said Blythe.
Ann said, ‘If I scream and pull back, still don’t leave me in this town.’
‘Curse that Judas –’ said Halloran.
‘Yes,’ said Blythe. ‘But the question is of saving Ann.’
There came a liverish rat-tat-tatting on the door.
‘Hello!’ came Mrs Blythe’s voice.
Blythe waited for some time, staring flippantly at the mid-distance. His rakish pistol still pointed at the floor and looked, far from something militant, like a personal deformity. When he wanted to, he sang,
‘Hello, hello!’
This was too, too succulent by his standards, to have the young locked in and the lady locked out. Now he became frankly buoyant, now he was spry.
‘You, Mr Blythe?’ the lady asked.
‘Yes, Mrs Blythe.’ As if at the end of an interview, he said, ‘Good morning!’
‘Why is this door locked?’
‘Christ have mercy!’ said Halloran.
‘Hello,’ persisted Mrs Blythe. ‘Why is this door locked?’
‘Don’t leave me in this town,’ Ann kept saying.
‘You’ll never believe me,’ said the Commissary, ‘but to keep you out, Mrs B.’
‘Let me in!’
‘No chance of that.’
‘I can’t think,’ said Halloran, hitting his temples.
‘I’ll wait till my legs crack,’ Mrs Blythe announced.
‘Legs like yours don’t crack, Mrs B., they fall away into lard, that’s all.’
Mr Blythe gave himself up to a long, gargling laugh.
Halloran was affronted by this poor farce that had degraded their disaster, his and Ann’s disaster, as death is degraded by bottflies.
‘Oh my God, I can’t think,’ he said.
‘Who is it in there, Mr Blythe?’
‘I am interviewing two felons, Mrs B. concerning Government Stores. Now, Madam, however great a resemblance your complexion might bear to pressed beef, Government stores are beyond the boundaries of your bailiwick.’
‘Is Ann Rush one of the felons?’
r /> ‘Yes. And a young man called Halloran. He was a Corporal of Marines, but I believe his discharge papers are already being made out. So I call him a felon.’
‘Ann?’ called Mrs Blythe.
But Ann had gone to Halloran, who had not been well lately and stood shivering with his fingers pressed hard into hair at the back of his neck.
‘Sit down,’ she said, helping him by the elbows.
When he had sat and still shivered, she told him,
‘You can see, there’s no one to leave me to.’
‘Aren’t you afraid?’ he said bitterly, as if she had betrayed him. ‘You will be.’
‘I know,’ she said.
Mrs Blythe walloped the door. Her voice was rich with outrage.
‘Ann, why don’t you answer me?’
‘They want you to run along, Mrs Blythe. They can’t think for the noise.’
‘Oh, my dear Lord!’ said Mrs Blythe hushedly. And she began to recite at top voice one of the psalms, whose symbols fitted the three, the hollow master, the false servant, the perjuror in the locked front parlour.
‘She can be saved,’ Mr Blythe said simply and beyond the door Mrs Blythe’s husky contralto loosened a pack of measured curses against unjust men. ‘In any case, she can hardly be said to have benefited. I suppose they take account of these things.’
‘Keep quiet,’ Ann said.
‘You think they might treat her with mercy?’ Halloran asked the Commissary.
‘Well, she scarcely benefited. Not in any large sense.’
‘You know everything,’ Ann told the man.
‘Well, of course you didn’t benefit,’ Blythe said.
‘Suppose I told you Terry Byrne came along here solemn as Patrick Sarsfield, made a small speech and gave me a whole pound of meat.’
‘I wouldn’t believe that.’
‘Is it true?’ Halloran asked her.
His eyes cringed from the possibility. She saw this and said nothing. Halloran jumped up.
‘Where is it?’ he said.
She caressed his arm, a girl of infinite ease.
‘Darling Halloran,’ she said.