In the early evening, when she was most busy, he might find himself following Venancia, for no reason, from room to room until she shooed him away with both hands flapping, and this always amused him, as though, together, they had done something quite witty.
This was the woman he had longed for, from San Fernando to the Cerro Corá. She stood in front of him
– a woman who had the same name as the woman in his head. This, he finally thought, was love. And, indeed, when she moved close to him there was sometimes a fluidity; a looseness that was like the looseness of a man's tongue in a woman's mouth, or the shifting play of remembrance, or the sense of flesh giving way.
Stewart came up to Edinburgh one autumn day to tend to his legal affairs and meet with his pregnant daughter and walk her down the Royal Mile. She looked quite Scottish
– so, though she had missed her mother's good looks, at least she had Stewart's breeding, and he was desperately proud of the contents of her belly, which had something, and nothing, to do with him. It was like throwing your voice, he thought. Or catching a fish by letting go the line.
So their progress was quite stately and domestic and gorgeous, as Stewart doffed his hat to this acquaintance or another, while his daughter panted gently by his side. Such respectable reproduction on the Royal Mile – it was very like a vista: the future opening ahead of him, even as he felt his own life close.
As they passed St Giles, however, the street suffered a subtle alteration and Stewart looked around to see who was watching them. It was a servant in livery – as negligible a presence as it was proper for a servant to be. Perhaps that was the thing: he was too absent. It was as though he surrounded himself with stillness, and in that stillness Stewart suddenly remembered trees. Not plane trees, or elm or even oak. But trees that ticked in a man's eye as he passed; trees that were each, if you stopped to look at them, a madness of variation and character. 'If you die here,' they seemed to whisper, Ί will eat your bones. But very slowly.'
It was the darkie, Milton. A little cleaner than when he saw him last, but still the same Indian who, from San Fernando to the bank of the Aquidabánmi, ate clean grain while Stewart ate mouldy; who leaned forward one night and whispered in Stewart's ear, 'Water, Chambertin, Latour, champagne,' like he was putting his tongue in there, and not words.
Stewart felt a little violated by his eyes on his daughter. Or perhaps blessed. Because the man smiled at them – and it was such an open, friendly thing, that was the mystery of it. It was the smile the girl gave him as she held on to his stirrup, high in the Amambai mountains. Deliberate and yet free: it was a gift. It was always so much more than he deserved, Stewart thought – wherever these people got it from.
Then he looked around, in a panic, for Eliza Lynch.
She had passed in front of him. She had crossed the pavement not two feet away and was walking up to a door on the Royal Mile. How could he have missed it? There was something quivering about her, as though the street was her stage, the very stones rapt. A hood of fox fur played with the idea of falling back from her gold hair as she waited at the door. He could not see her face, then she turned slightly, and brushed her cheek with the back of a gloved hand. The glove was russet-brown, and the sleeve of her dress red – an autumnal theme: she was the season itself, all aflame with a rich decay and gloriously sad. She was also an old tart. Perhaps it would pass in Paris, but that gold hair was quite scandalously bright under an Edinburgh sky.
It would not do to greet her; even so, it thrilled him to see her so close. Eliza Lynch: changed – old perhaps – but the woman herself, in whatever flesh. The door closed behind her and Milton turned to the carriage from which she had just lit; a fine little cabriolet, with a little dog on the seat. The dog – or could Stewart be imagining it? – was dyed the same colour as its mistress's hair.
Stewart's heart was pounding as though he had escaped some terrific danger, a bullet, or a mud-slide – but the street looked just the same. As he walked on, a heat gathered between his shoulder-blades that might have been Milton 's stare. Or, more like, the urge to turn back and stroll past, at just the right time. He was almost resolved. Oh, to face her again, eye-to-eye. The pleasure of it. He would pay good money to have the advantage of surprise: to let her know, by a coldness, a slight smile, an inclination of the head, that no, he did not forgive her. He did not forgive her anything. Not the war, not the money. He did not forgive her his entire life.
'Are you all right, Papa?'
The last time he had seen her, she was in chains.
She must have spoken to the Brazilian general, Camarrá. Eliza was thirty-five when Lopez was killed, too old to play the innocent, too recently bereaved to play the whore. Stewart could imagine the high, hurt tone she adopted with him, but she would have to offer something other than her body. Money, certainly – there was no doubt that money would, in such a situation, change hands. But a lot of people had money. She would have to offer something else – that indefinable thing she had. Her fame. The shift a woman makes when she says Ί am beautiful' that a man is helpless to, whether or not it is strictly true.
Or he might just have liked her, as men tended to do.
Or, 'Save me,' she could have said – and indeed the Lopez women would have killed her with their bare teeth, given half an hour.
Whether Camarrá was a decent man or a politic one, Stewart saw her, at any rate, climb into a gunboat at Concepción. Never mind the chains, she was followed by her trunks – every last one of them – also by her younger boys, her retinue, and the widow Diaz.
She was getting away.
So Stewart and the other prisoners trudged down the river path, while from his horse General Camarrá saluted, with greatest pleasure, the most reviled woman from here to Buenos Aires, and the boat found the current and floated towards Asuncion.
Stewart did not wonder what she was doing, so many years later, in his own home town: she was paying a visit to her lawyers, just as he was doing. They were due in court in three days' time, because this is how it ends, he thought, not in death but in litigation; a matter of fifty thousand pounds lodged in the Royal Bank of Scotland under his name, a promissory note that Eliza claimed to hold. This was a woman who had taken the gold combs from out of the prostitutes' hair, a woman who had bled the country dry. She had written to him personally. Quite a diatribe -she made free use of the word 'disloyalty'.
'Disloyalty.' Stewart closed his eyes. He laughed. And yet, he did feel disloyal. For no reason at all, he felt disloyal, too.
Eliza Lynch claimed that the money was duty on the export of yerba maté, lodged abroad for the use of the Dictator's children. Let her say what she liked. Lopez never married her. And if the money was hers, why then it belonged to one Xavier Quatrefages, her lawful husband. Ά very minor beast,' as she called him one night by the graveyard at La Recoleta. 'But a beast, all the same.'