The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch

Ygurei, the Jejut, and the Salto Oriental. The captured Brazilian steamship Marques de Olinda was re-rigged with the national flag and it all looked so fine, and so very much his own, that Stewart forgot about fumblings with this woman or that. No man's heart can resist the tug of ships and, as they pulled slowly away, Stewart flung the stupid kiss, and all kisses, after them, as you might lob a pigeon; a flurry of muscle and emotion, which soared up to drift awhile in their wake.

'Huzzah,' he shouted, and he waved his very British hat. 'Huzzah!'

And Whytehead gave him a narrow look.

So he was almost pleased when, after a few weeks in the field, the news came of the man's death. The ships had engaged in the shallows of Riachuelo and the action had failed. The Jejuiand the Salto Oriental were lost, the Paraguarilaid helpless. The commander of the fleet, Commodore Meza had, wisely, stopped off in Humaita to die of his wounds. And it was at Humaita that Stewart heard the news that, upriver, the Arsenal had lost its chief engineer and the army their free supply of materiel. And he felt whatever thread tied him to Whytehead snap.

He was curious to find that there actually was a thread somewhere, like a tendon in his chest in which the connection he had to this man had been manifest. He was surprised to feel an actual sensation of loosening. The picture of the Fates was, he thought, quite just – their big shears cutting the threads of a man's life – because what the world feels when a man dies, even at a distance, is an unravelling.

The body was found in his tobacco barn and the story circulated that Whytehead had hanged himself from a beam there. His dinner doctors, Fox and Skinner, had diagnosed self-poisoning: he had taken an infusion of nicotine they said; a pesticide he concocted against aphids. Stewart knew he would do no such thing. It would mortify his sisters. And he sat down to write and tell them so. 'Dear Misses Whytehead,' he began. Thinking that the letter would never reach them. Wondering how much of their brother's money would ever make it to the Mile End Road.

In the months that followed, Stewart's thread theory, or tendon theory, was of some comfort to him. It was as though he had a little packet of humanity stored safely in his chest, and he occasionally patted himself there, as a man might check for his pipe, while around him the cholera came and with it all other kinds, shades, varieties and types of shitting – dysentery, typhoid, and the rest. He wondered why God had not designed for mankind a convenient plug. He thought, also, that if he saw another man with his pants stinking, he might kill him, just to save time.

In October the northern army had limped down from the Cordillera and there was little enough for Stewart to do. Only the minor wounded made it back, carried over that great distance by brothers, or friends, or even strangers -who must have been put out when Lopez shot their burdens as soon as they set them down, in order to purge the shame of the surrender at Uruguiana.

The general was shot first – which was the difference between Lopez and other commanders of men. There he goes, thought Stewart. My animal Mariscal with his animal war. He walked up the lines of the wounded and stared each man in the face, checking his eyes as the band played ' La Palomita'.

The great slaughter had begun, and it was years before Stewart cared again.

Then, in June of 1867, a man came up to him and spoke a sentence so clearly that Stewart wondered at the path this news had taken – it had travelled such distances to hit with precision the side of his head, where nature had placed an ear to receive it. The Doterelhad been let through in June with a new English envoy; perhaps the news had come in a letter that Venancia opened on his behalf. Was it her voice he heard through the man's face, as he came up to him in the middle of a busy afternoon and said, ? am to tell you that Miss Steerat of Edingbur is dead.' It was news, he said, for ?1 Doctor' – who indeed had an aunt called Miss Stewart who was by now long dead in Edinburgh as opposed to any other town. Where the news had come from, or who had paid for it, Stewart did not know. When he lifted his suddenly heavy face to thank the man, he had already turned to go.

'She was a mother to me,' said Stewart, pathetically, to his back, and the man looked over his shoulder at him, very like the statue of Perseus at Albani.

And so the previous, ordinary months of siege became extraordinary months, in which he had been alive, while his dear aunt was dead. If it was possible to experience life in retrospect then that was what he was doing now – a rush of sensibility pouring through the days, a lurch in time, a doubling back – as though he had dropped her death along the path, all unawares, and was returning to collect it, now.

The heavens were open to him. There was no one between him and the wide blue sky any more. Stewart looked up, as though for the first time, and decided that there was none so peculiar a colour as blue. The woman who reared him was dead, and he had felt nothing – no intimation before the news, no emotion on its receipt. And so his thread theory of human connection itself unravelled, many miles from home.

Of course, when he last embraced her, he knew that he would never see the woman again. Which is just as we all do, he thought, because 'Farewell' with a woman is always for all time. Even the small partings. Even if she puts her bonnet on and walks as far as town, which is not very far. Farewell. Because that is what women are for. For leaving, and loving from a distance, very like the way we love the dead. And he thought of the slender angel he would like to set on her grave – he spent his time inscribing the headstone beneath with one phrase or another. Finding the right words and forgetting them, re-making them in his head. Some day the thing would be settled with a pen and paper, but in the meantime he managed and forgot sentence after sentence until the moment when his mind was stilled with some lines that Whytehead had recited to him that day in Asuncion.

But ? for the touch of a vanished hand, And the sound of a voice that is still.

And with this, a sadness filled his (already much engorged) heart, and although Stewart still, in general, liked the war, he could not remember how it started, any more.

But now that his aunt was dead, he felt a need to dress in the evenings and to look at the men about him with social eyes. Instead of a jaundice, he might see, for example, a tendency to cut corners. He applied his aunt's horse language to them: that one was a bolter, another a swerver, when faced with the great ditch of life. And, as though Eliza realised this from a distance, one morning, busy (as a man might occasionally be) with his lice, he was interrupted by a small girl with a card.

Mme Eliza Lynch

requests the pleasure of

Dr William Stewart's

company at dinner

on Saturday evening July 7^th

at half past seven o'clock.

It was this that brought him, finally, to tug at the sleeve of the woman who walked the walls. He found her ordering the wicker gabions into a high gap and he interrupted her for so long as to request a piece of paper, if it could be found. It arrived that afternoon – quite a good sheet – in return for some future life saved, or lost (she would tell him when the time came), and he rinsed his hands with dry grit before picking it up.

Humaita, July 4^th

Dr William Stewart

accepts with pleasure

the kind invitation of

Mme Eliza Lynch

for dinner

on Saturday evening July 7^th

at half past seven o'clock

Spacing one line after the next, so sweetly, filled him with a quiet elation. Just this – the