The Commandant

by Jessica Anderson

  ‘Am I really so—so—’

  But before she could formulate the question she heard Robert’s glad hallooing give way abruptly to a startled cry, and immediately afterwards Lucy’s voice rose to a shriek of terror. The grassy bank was still hidden from her sight by a deep shrubbery. She took the path around it at a run.

  Robert was sitting on the ground holding his right leg in both hands and watching with curiosity or horror the blood running from a deep jagged gash across the inner side of his calf. Lucy, no longer shrieking, but sobbing wildly, stood beside him, while Elizabeth, trying to run, was approaching the pair at a jerky waddle.

  Frances, on their other side, reached them while the old woman was still yards away. Robert raised a pale but stoically composed face. ‘Will I bleed to death?’

  ‘No.’ She knelt and looked at the wound. ‘I am sure none of the big veins are cut. Lucy, be silent.’

  Elizabeth came up, out of breath. ‘Oh, oh, however did he do it?’

  ‘That doesn’t matter now. Pray send one—’

  ‘On that!’ cried Lucy. ‘He did it on that.’

  But Frances gave the broken ring of rusty iron, an old handcuff or leg iron, hardly a glance. ‘Elizabeth, tell Gilligan or one of the others to run for Mr Murray.’

  ‘Then I am bleeding to death.’

  ‘Robert, you are not.’

  ‘Oh, miss, miss, Gilligan and the rest have all went five minutes back to the potato field.’

  The potato field was the farthest in the commandant’s fourteen acres. ‘I will send Annie,’ said Frances.

  ‘Annie is back at the factory.’

  ‘Then Madge may go.’

  As Frances rose to her feet she felt a passing pride in her quick and unflustered management of the situation. It helped to compensate her for yesterday’s shameful hysteria, and was the more commendable because the wound alarmed her. It looked deep and dangerous, and her calm voice belied her quickened heartbeats.

  ‘Lie down, Robert. Elizabeth, take his leg on your lap and raise it slightly. It’s no great matter, but Mr Murray must look at it. Stay with your brother, Lucy. I shall be back in a minute or two.’

  But as soon as the shrubbery hid her from their view she broke into a run, for she carried in her vision the swelling and empurpled edges of the cut, and the blood running out so steadily between. Madge Noakes’s room was one of three in a wing at a right angle to the house. Madge was as likely to be in the house, but since the room was nearer, Frances thought it best to look there first. She entered and knocked at the same time.

  Madge, naked except for a cap, sat in a wooden tub so small that her buttocks and feet were jammed together on its base and her raised calves and legs pressed against either side of her body like the legs of a frog. Twisting her head and washing with a cloth behind her ears, she regarded Frances without much surprise. Frances saw that the scar completely encircled her neck in front, and from her many previous glimpses of it knew that the jagged circle was completed at the back. She looked at the floor beside the tub and spoke very fast.

  ‘I beg your pardon, but Master Robert has cut his leg. Badly. Perhaps very badly. I came to ask you to fetch Mr Murray, but it can’t wait till you dress. I shall run to the road and find someone else to go. Dress at once, take the coldest water you can find to the bank behind the big shrubbery, and lay a cold compress on the wound.’

  Madge had risen from the tub as Frances was speaking. ‘You is not let go out alone, miss.’

  ‘I must go. Do as I say.’

  She left without shutting the door. The winding ascending paths of the garden were an impediment. She pulled her skirts above her knees and held them bundled in one hand, leaving the other free to lever or steady herself while she scrambled up the bank in the short cut to the road.

  No one was in sight on the road, no soldier or overseer she could send. The hospital lay half a mile along the river bank, at the other end of the road. She let her skirts down, then plucked them up on either side to leave her ankles unencumbered. She ran. She would find a messenger at Captain Clunie’s cottage, which was at only a furlong’s distance; she would rouse one of his servants.

  The road, though rough, was straight. The sound of her pounding feet, her swishing, billowing clothes, and her panting breath, all increased her sense of urgency. She saw how the blood streaming down Robert’s leg rippled slightly as it passed over minute golden hairs. She saw Letty’s face; Letty was leaning out of her chair; her mouth was moving. ‘You know how it is with women—their lives wushing out in their blood. Oh, it can happen so fast . . .’ But how much faster a child’s life would rush out; a child’s body held such a small quantity of blood. And had she been right in ordering that the leg be raised? Could the blood perhaps return on itself, and clot inside the vein? The thought made her give a gasp of fear. Urgency passed into panic. She had reached Captain Clunie’s cottage, but the delay made possible by servants absent, engaged, or even only slow-witted, now seemed intolerable. She ran on.

  The shining blue ribbons of her bonnet strings parted at the bow beneath her chin and streamed behind her on either side. Below them the two blue tails of her sash leapt in and out of billowing muslin. Robert’s face, as he lay down, had showed awe at his own condition. Lucy had moved in a frightened way to take his hand, and the blood had already begun to soak into Elizabeth’s white apron. She had reached the military barracks. There must be a guard somewhere, for two shinglers were working on the roof. They stopped to watch her. But by now the hospital was as close, perhaps closer, than those guards would be. She was glad she had come herself, glad she had not sent Madge, for Madge moved heavily. In her relief at having arrived she allowed her mind to wander for a moment from her mission and to observe in retrospect that Madge’s belly as she rose from the tub was as froglike as her legs, but that her skin from shoulders to knees, though of a repulsive soapy sallowness, was marvellously soft and unwrinkled.

  But now the hospital struck her as so unnaturally quiet that in her sudden wild fear that help was not at hand after all, the image of Madge vanished and she saw again Robert’s tender skin marred by the crude and bloody gash. She had entered and was on her way down a long corridor.

  ‘Mr Murray.’

  But she was so out of breath that what she had intended for a shout emerged only as a few gasped syllables. She passed room after room, all giving on to the corridor. The doors all stood open and men on pallets turned amazed eyes upon her. One abruptly sat up.

  ‘Mr Murray.’

  It was no louder than before, but out of the room she was approaching came a man in grey slops, his face as amazed as the others, and made as if to bar her way. But when she ignored him—indeed she hardly comprehended his intention—he stepped back as if afraid of her, and let her pass. In the next room James Murray stood in quarter profile to her on the other side of a table on which lay a small thin body covered in blood from neck to heels. A man in grey was holding the ankles with one hand and sponging blood from the buttocks with the other. On the floor by his side stood a wooden pail. James Murray was intent on pouring something from a bottle into a dish. The attendant in grey bent to dip his cloth in the pail, and the legs, released from his grip, flailed aimlessly, and Martin’s voice, deep, parched, and croaking, went out into the room.

  ‘Do this to a man—can they? Of course not!’

  James Murray turned with his filled basin and across Martin’s body saw Frances. Now that the attendant had washed the blood from the buttocks they rose from the rest of that body, from the stringy blood-stained legs and the raw bloody shredded mess of the back, as round and fresh as the buttocks of a child.

  ‘Of course not!’ croaked Martin in anguish. He flailed with his legs and beat with his fists on the table before him, while across his body James Murray stared at Frances, his eyes pleading and tragic in his pale face,
and Frances looked back into his eyes, and spoke as if talking in her sleep.

  ‘Robert has cut his leg.’

  Murray gave the dish to the attendant. ‘Knowles, you know what to do.’

  Martin saw or heard none of this. He rolled his head about as if it would never again learn to rest.

  ‘Can they? Of course not!’

  Murray had reached the door. He took Frances’s arm, drew her into the corridor, and shut the door. A little colour had come back into his face.

  ‘Miss O’Beirne, is it bad?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Much blood?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, swaying, ‘yes.’

  ‘You ran here. Can you stand?’

  She straightened herself. ‘Of course.’

  ‘It may need sutures.’

  They returned down the long corridor, Murray hastening ahead but half turning all the time to check Frances’s progress. The office was near the front entrance. By the time Frances reached it, Murray had entered it, collected his bag, and had reached the door again.

  ‘Are you revived, Miss O’Beirne? Can you hurry back?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  He stood in confusion, looking anxiously up the road and then back at her.

  ‘Pray go ahead,’ she said.

  ‘But there is none but prisoners here. Who will escort you?’

  ‘Nobody. Pray hurry.’

  ‘And you—’

  ‘Will come after. And fetch my sister from Mrs Bulwer’s on the way.’

  ‘Yes, I see. And you will not go—’

  He glanced uneasily at the door of the hospital; she looked at him with amazement.

  ‘Back there?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said in relief. ‘You do not mean to do that, do you?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, her amazement growing almost into laughter. ‘Oh, how do you think I would dare?’

  ‘No,’ he said, giving a little bow. ‘Of course not. Well, I will obey. I will hurry.’

  He turned and went off, taking the first few yards at a jog trot but then settling to a fast run, leaping in a practised manner from the points of his toes. He was tall and strong, and as fleet, she supposed, as Mercury. She watched him until he had passed the barracks. The shinglers had left the roof. Lagging, she set off down the road, but soon, thinking of Letty, forced herself to a brisker pace. She reached the path to the Bulwers’ house and unsteadily descended, holding her body backwards against the incline. Banana trees grew on either side of the path, and their last emergent growth, big flat leaves of the freshest possible green, met above her head. She felt their cool shade on her hot face, and fancied she could feel, as well as see, their green light. ‘Once there was a garden,’ she thought, ‘and people walked about naked, and their skins were as fresh as new fruit.’ James Murray’s cheek, in quarter profile to her as he poured lotion into his dish, had been very pale. He had been pale even before he saw her, even greyish, even the colour of Madge Noakes’s belly; and yet, there he had stood, in his sky-blue coat, pouring his lotion. Frances walked in among the sappy trunks of the banana trees and leaned over to let out her vomit, a lumpy yellow stream on either side of which hung a shining blue ribbon.

  Robert’s wound, though not as dangerous as Frances had feared while racing past Captain Clunie’s cottage, was large enough to need stitching. When Murray arrived he found the bleeding had almost stopped. He sent Elizabeth to change her bloody garments, sent Lucy away in Madge’s charge, and carried Robert into the house and laid him on the scullery table. Letty and Frances arrived at the house with Amelia. Amelia, who had sent one of her servants to fetch the commandant, waited in the drawing room while Letty and Frances, informed by Madge Noakes, hurried to the scullery.

  By this time the child’s pale silent bravery had given way to a high-strung hilarity, for Murray had given him brandy to make the coming pain endurable. Robert laughed and said in a high voice that he hardly felt the needle; he said it was only like the prick of a thorn; but as he said this he fainted.

  ‘He has,’ murmured Murray, engrossed in his work and speaking in snatches, ‘lost a great deal—’ he thrust the needle into the flesh again—‘of blood. Don’t look, dear madam.’

  Letty had already withdrawn her gaze from the ugly wound. She wiped her son’s forehead and looked only at his pallid and heavily sweating face, which she thought strangely reduced in size.

  ‘Where is Fwances?’ she asked in a low voice.

  Murray seemed too intent on his work to reply.

  ‘She bwought the water,’ said Letty, ‘and then went away.’

  ‘Eight sutures. This is the last.’

  ‘Dear little son,’ whispered Letty to the unconscious but groaning boy, ‘this is the last. I think Fwances is still sick,’ she said to Murray. ‘She a’wived sick at Amelia’s.’

  ‘There. That is all.’ Murray tied the last suture. ‘Miss O’Beirne,’ he said, ‘ran all the way to the hospital to fetch me.’

  ‘Yes. Poor girl. And back with Amelia and me. In the heat.’

  ‘The bandage, if you please.’

  The commandant came in. Hurrying forward with his light step, he put a finger to his lips to forestall their explanations. ‘Mrs Bulwer told me,’ he whispered.

  He and Letty watched James Murray bandage the wound, then all three withdrew and stood at a distance from the table.

  ‘Eight sutures,’ Murray told the commandant.

  ‘He will be so pwoud,’ said Letty on a laugh that turned to a sob.

  The commandant put his arms about her, and she pressed her face into his jacket, and laughed and cried. He spoke to James Murray over her head. ‘There is no danger?’

  ‘Let us anticipate none.’ Murray looked over his shoulder at the child. His look became a stare. ‘He is of strong body.’ He spoke with detachment, almost coldly. ‘And in splendid health, and can count on the most loving of care.’

  Letty raised her head to speak to her husband. ‘My love, Fwances was so calm, and showed such good sense, and managed the matter so well. But now she is sick.’

  ‘You will look at her, Murray?’

  ‘Well, sir, perhaps Cowper—’

  ‘No, sir! You, if you please.’

  ‘Sir, I should like Cowper to come in any case, to look at Robert. In wounds and such matters he is more practised than I. I wish with all my heart he had not gone to the Eagle Farm today.’

  ‘We are well satisfied, Murray.’

  Murray bowed. ‘Then pray show it by following me in this. Let Cowper see Robert and Miss O’Beirne.’

  ‘Well, he may see Robert. And my sister if you still consider it necessary after you have attended her. My dear,’ said the commandant to Letty, ‘go and tell Frances that Murray will attend her.’

  ‘Mama!’

  This sent them all hurrying back to Robert. Murray took him by the shoulders and pressed him gently back on the table. ‘You must not sit up, Robert.’

  ‘Mama, my leg hurts.’

  ‘Wobert, my love—’ Letty leaned over him and made her face glad—‘you have had eight sutures.’

  He echoed her gladness. ‘Eight sutures! Oh, papa!’

  ‘Yes, my boy. Lie still.’

  ‘Papa, I took it like a pebble.’

  Letty laughed. But the commandant frowned at this old convict boast, and Murray set his lips. ‘Hush, my son,’ said the commandant. ‘Murray, have you something to make him sleep?’

  ‘He will sleep in any case. Only get him to bed. Look, he is going back to sleep already.’

  ‘I will make his bed weady. Amelia will help me. And then James and I will go to Fwances.’

  After she had left the room the commandant said, ‘Is there anything in this matter—’ he nod
ded his head towards the drowsy child—‘to make me put off my journey?’

  ‘I think not, sir. But ask Cowper.’

  ‘I will see him when he comes to attend Robert. I leave in the morning and have still a hundred things to do. Will you stay with the boy till his mother returns?’

  ‘Gladly, sir.’

  Letty had not expected to find Frances in such a strange state. She had been vomiting again, and when Letty and James Murray entered was lying as if unconscious of the mess on her chin and neck, and on the pillow and counterpane beneath her head. Then came that curious exchange between her and James Murray: no words, but a galvanic intimate anguished stare. It suggested to Letty the complicity of secret physical passion, but had yet another element that shocked Letty even as it eluded her.

  She advanced quickly, so disconcerted that she hardly knew what she was saying.

  ‘My love, all is well with Wobert . . .’

  But Frances turned her head away and vomited on to the pillow again. It was so incredible that she had not even bothered to procure a basin that Letty almost could have suspected her of acting, or of indulging in some perverse whim. She said uncertainly to James Murray, ‘First I shall clean her?’

  ‘No.’

  Letty saw the young man take a conscious resolve before he stepped forward and put two fingers on the pulse in Frances’s wrist. Frances gave no sign of knowing that he was there. Her vomiting over, she lay unmoving, her face still averted, while Murray, his head turned in the opposite direction, seemed to muse and count and consider. Letty went to the washstand and was relieved to find the ewer full. Amelia had gone home; Robert, watched by Madge Noakes, was asleep; Lucy was in the charge of Elizabeth. The house was very quiet except for knockings and bumpings from the kitchen. Annie, sent for in this emergency, was getting ready to cook the dinner. After all, they would not have the dinner that Frances had been so delighted to order.

  Murray released Frances’s wrist and gave her upturned hand a professional pat. Without turning her head, she curled her fingers into the palm in a spasmodic crippled gesture. He turned abruptly away, his face showing such misery that Letty thought again of passion, and of the sloughs in that terrain. She wondered if he had come to the house during her absence at Amelia’s, and if he and Frances had found themselves engaged in one of those accidental sexual encounters, had been lovers for an hour. But even as she wondered, she guessed that they had not.