ALSO BY
ANDREW MILLER

Ingenious Pain

Casanova

Oxygen

The Optimists

One Morning Like a Bird

Pure

The Crossing

NOW WE SHALL BE
ENTIRELY FREE

ONE

1

It came through lanes crazy with rain, its sides slabbed with mud, its wheels throwing arcs of mud behind it. There were two horses rigged in tandem and on the left-hand horse the postilion, a man of fifty, peered from under the brim of his hat at the outline of high hedges, arching trees. Somewhere there was a moon but you would do well to say where. The lantern on the cab had guttered out a mile back. The last light he had seen was a candle at a farmhouse window, some farmer up late at his accounts or prayers.

He called to his horses, “Steady, steady . . . ” The mud was liquid clay. More than once the animals had lost their footing in it. If he were to be thrown here! Thrown and bones cracked! Then he and the poor wretch in the cab would be discovered in the morning by milkmaid or tinker, dead as if they’d met the devil on the road.

Or was his passenger already dead? At the Swans he’d been carried out in the arms of servants, eyes shut and shadowed, head lolling, the landlord looking on like a man well pleased to be rid of what troubled him.

He reined in the horses, brought them to a halt. Here the road turned and descended—he could sense it more than see it—and he sat, pushed at by the rain, trying to think of what was best to do. He climbed down, stood in his stiff postilion’s boots, took the collar of the horse he had been riding and began to walk.

Did he know this hill? He would know it in daylight but now, creeping forward, muttering to the horse, the cab swaying on its axle, he could not rid himself of the feeling he was walking down into the sea and would soon feel the surf break against his boots. Nonsense of course. There was no sea for a hundred miles, but somehow even a Somerset postilion carried with him a sea in his imagination.