Once Upon a River

The Story Begins …

THERE WAS ONCE an inn that sat peacefully on the bank of the Thames at Radcot, a long day’s walk from the source. There were a great many inns along the upper reaches of the Thames at the time of this story and you could get drunk in all of them, but beyond the usual ale and cider, each one had some particular pleasure to offer. The Red Lion at Kelmscott was musical: bargemen played their fiddles in the evening and cheesemakers sang plaintively of lost love. Inglesham had the Green Dragon, a tobacco-scented haven of contemplation. If you were a gambling man, the Stag at Eaton Hastings was the place for you, and if you preferred brawling, there was nowhere better than the Plough just outside Buscot. The Swan at Radcot had its own specialism. It was where you went for storytelling.

The Swan was a very ancient inn, perhaps the most ancient of them all. It had been constructed in three parts: one was old, one was very old and one was older still. These different elements had been harmonized by the thatch that roofed them, the lichen that grew on the old stones and the ivy that scrambled up the walls. In summertime day-trippers came out from the towns on the new railway, to hire a punt or a skiff at the Swan and spend an afternoon on the river with a bottle of ale and a picnic, but in winter the drinkers were all locals, and they congregated in the winter room. It was a plain room in the oldest part of the inn, with a single window pierced through the thick stone wall. In daylight this window showed you Radcot Bridge and the river flowing through its three serene arches. By night (and this story begins at night) the bridge was drowned black, and it was only when your ears noticed the low and borderless sound of great quantities of moving water that you could make out the stretch of liquid blackness that flowed outside the window, shifting and undulating, darkly illuminated by some energy of its own making.

Nobody really knows how the tradition of storytelling started at the Swan, but it might have something to do with the Battle of Radcot Bridge. In 1387, five hundred years before the night this story began, two great armies met at Radcot Bridge. The who and the why of it are too long to tell, but the outcome was that three men died in battle – a knight, a varlet and a boy – and eight hundred souls were lost, drowned in the marshes, attempting to flee. Yes, that’s right. Eight hundred souls. That’s a lot of story. Their bones lie under what are now watercress fields. Around Radcot they grow the watercress, harvest it, crate it up and send it to the towns on barges, but they don’t eat it. It’s bitter, they complain; so bitter it bites you back, and besides, who wants to eat leaves nourished by ghosts? When a battle like that happens on your doorstep and the dead poison your drinking water, it’s only natural that you would tell of it, over and over again. By force of repetition you would become adept at the telling. And then, when the crisis was over and you turned your attention to other things, what is more natural than that this newly acquired expertise would come to be applied to other tales?

The landlady of the Swan was Margot Ockwell. There had been Ockwells at the Swan for as long as anyone could remember, and quite likely for as long as the Swan had existed. In law her name was Margot Bliss, for she was married, but law was a thing for the towns and cities; here at the Swan she remained an Ockwell. Margot was a handsome woman in her late fifties. She could lift barrels without help and had legs so sturdy she never felt the need to sit down. It was rumoured she even slept on her feet, but she had given birth to thirteen children, so clearly she must have lain down sometimes. She was the daughter of the last landlady and her grandmother and great-grandmother had run the inn before that, and nobody thought anything of it being women in charge at the Swan at Radcot. It was just the way it was.

Margot’s husband was Joe Bliss. He had been born at Kemble, twenty-five miles upstream, a hop and a skip from where the Thames emerges from the earth in a trickle so fine that it is scarcely more than a patch of dampness in the soil. The Blisses were chesty types. They were born small and ailing and most of them were goners before they were grown. Bliss babies grew thinner and paler as they lengthened, until they expired completely, usually before they were ten and often before they were two. The survivors, including Joe, got to adulthood shorter and slighter than average. Their chests rattled in winter, their noses ran, their eyes watered. They were kind, with mild eyes and frequent playful smiles.

At eighteen, an orphan and unfit for physical labour, Joe had left Kemble, to seek his fortune doing he knew not what. From Kemble there are as many directions a man can go in as elsewhere in the world, but the river has its pull; you’d have to be mightily perverse not to follow it. He came to Radcot and, being thirsty, stopped for a drink. The frail-looking young man with his floppy black hair that contrasted with his pallor sat unnoticed, eking out his glass of ale, admiring the innkeeper’s daughter and listening to a story or two. He found it captivating to be amongst people who spoke out loud the kind of tales that had been alive inside his head since boyhood. In a quiet interval he opened his mouth and Once upon a time … came out.

Joe Bliss discovered his destiny that day. The Thames had brought him to Radcot and at Radcot he stayed. With a bit of practice he found he could turn his tongue to any kind of tale, whether it be gossip, historic, traditional, folk or fairy. His mobile face could convey surprise, trepidation, relief, doubt, and any other feeling, as well as any actor. Then there were his eyebrows. Luxuriantly black, they told as much of the story as his words did. They drew together when something momentous was coming, twitched when a detail merited close attention, and arched when a character might not be what he seemed. Watching his eyebrows, paying attention to their complex dance, you noticed all sorts of things that might otherwise have passed you by. Within a few weeks of his starting to drink at the Swan he knew how to hold the listeners spellbound. He held Margot spellbound too, and she him.

At the end of a month, Joe walked sixty miles to a place quite distant from the river, where he told a story in a competition. He won first prize, naturally, and spent the winnings on a ring. He returned to Radcot grey with fatigue, collapsed into bed for a week, and at the end of it got to his knees and proposed marriage to Margot.

‘I don’t know …’ her mother said. ‘Can he work? Can he earn a living? How will he look after a family?’

‘Look at the takings,’ Margot pointed out. ‘See how much busier we have been since Joe started telling his stories. Suppose I don’t marry him, Ma. He might go away from here. Then what?’

It was true. People came more often to the inn those days, and from further away, and they stayed longer, to hear the stories Joe told. They all bought drinks. The Swan was thriving.

‘But with all these strong, handsome young men that come in here and admire you so – wouldn’t one of those do better?’

‘It is Joe that I want,’ Margot said firmly. ‘I like the stories.’

She got her way.

That was all nearly forty years before the events of this story, and in the meantime Margot and Joe had raised a large family. In twenty years they had produced twelve robust daughters. All had Margot’s thick brown hair and sturdy legs. They grew up to be buxom young women with blithe smiles and endless cheer. All were married now. One was a little fatter and one a little thinner, one a little taller and one a little shorter, one a little darker and one a little fairer, but in every other respect they were so alike that the drinkers could not tell them apart, and when the girls returned to help out at busy times they were universally known as Little Margot. After bearing all these daughters there had been a lull in the family life of Margot and Joe, and both of them had thought her years of child-bearing were at an end, but then came the last pregnancy and Jonathan, their only son.

With his short neck and his moon face, his almond eyes with their exaggerated upward tilt, his dainty ears and nose, the tongue that seemed too big for his constantly smiling mouth, Jonathan did not look like other children. As he grew, it became clear that he was different from them in other ways too. He was fifteen now, but where other boys of his age were looking forward impatiently to manhood, Jonathan was content to believe that he would live at the inn for ever with his mother and father, and wished for nothing else.

Margot was still a strong and handsome woman, and Joe’s hair had whitened, though his eyebrows were as dark as ever. He was now sixty, which was ancient for a Bliss. People put his survival down to the endlessness of Margot’s care for him. These last few years, he was sometimes so weak that he lay in bed for two or three days at a time, eyes closed. He was not sleeping; no, it was a place beyond sleep that he visited in these periods. Margot took his sinking spells calmly. She kept the fire in to dry the air, tilted cooled broth between his lips, brushed his hair and smoothed his eyebrows. Other people fretted to see him suspended so precariously between one liquid breath and the next, but Margot took it in her stride. ‘Don’t you worry, he’ll be all right,’ she would tell you. And he was. He was a Bliss, that’s all. The river had seeped into him and made his lungs marshy.

It was solstice night, the longest night of the year. For weeks the days had been shrinking, first gradually, then precipitously, so that it was now dark by mid-afternoon. As is well known, when the moon hours lengthen, human beings come adrift from the regularity of their mechanical clocks. They nod at noon, dream in waking hours, open their eyes wide to the pitch-black night. It is a time of magic. And as the borders between night and day stretch to their thinnest, so too do the borders between worlds. Dreams and stories merge with lived experience, the dead and the living brush against each other in their comings and goings, the past and the present touch and overlap. Unexpected things can happen. Did the solstice have anything to do with the strange events at the Swan? You will have to judge for yourself.

Now you know everything you need to know, the story can begin.

The drinkers gathered in the Swan that night were the regulars. Gravel-diggers, cressmen and bargemen for the most part, but Beszant the boat-mender was there too, and so was Owen Albright, who had followed the river to the sea half a century ago and returned two decades later a wealthy man. Albright was arthritic now, and only strong ale and storytelling could reduce the pain in his bones. They had all been there since the light had drained out of the sky, emptying and refilling their glasses, tapping out their pipes and restuffing them with pungent tobacco, and telling stories.

Albright was recounting the battle of Radcot Bridge. After five hundred years any story is liable to get a bit stale, and the storytellers had found a way to enliven the telling of it. Certain parts of the tale were fixed by tradition – the armies, their meeting, the death of the knight and his varlet, the eight hundred drowned men – but the boy’s demise was not. Not a thing was known about him, except that he was a boy, was at Radcot Bridge, and died there. Out of this void came invention. At each retelling the drinkers at the Swan raised the unknown boy from the dead in order to inflict upon him a new death. He had died countless times over the years, in ways ever more outlandish and entertaining. When a story is yours to tell you are allowed to take liberties with it – though woe betide any visitor to the Swan who attempted the same thing. What the boy himself made of his regular resurrection is impossible to say, but the point is, raising the dead was a not infrequent thing at the Swan, and that’s a detail worth remembering.

At this telling, Albright conjured a young entertainer, come to distract the troops while they awaited their orders. Juggling with knives, he slipped in the mud and the knives rained down around him, landing blade-down in wet earth, all but the last one, which fell plumb into his eye and killed him instantly before the battle had even begun. The innovation elicited murmurs of appreciation, quickly dampened so the story could continue, and from then on the tale ran pretty much as it always did.

Afterwards there was a pause. It wasn’t done to jump in too quickly with a new story before the last one was properly digested.

Jonathan had been listening closely.

‘I wish I could tell a story,’ he said.

He was smiling – Jonathan was a boy who was always smiling – but he sounded wistful. He was not stupid, but school had been baffling to him, the other children had laughed at his peculiar face and strange ways, and he had given it up after a few months. He had not mastered reading or writing. The winter regulars were used to the Ockwell lad, with all his oddness.

‘Have a go,’ Albright suggested. ‘Tell one now.’

Jonathan considered it. He opened his mouth and waited, agog, to hear what emerged from it. Nothing did. His face screwed tight with laughter and his shoulders squirmed in hilarity at himself.

‘I can’t!’ he exclaimed when he had recovered himself. ‘I can’t do it!’

‘Some other night, then. You have a bit of a practice, and we’ll listen to you when you’re ready.’

‘You tell a story, Dad,’ Jonathan said. ‘Go on!’

It was Joe’s first night back in the winter room after one of his sinking spells. He was pale and had been silent all evening. Nobody expected a story from him in his frail state, but at the prompting of his son, he smiled mildly and looked up to a high corner of the room where the ceiling was darkened from years of woodsmoke and tobacco. This was the place, Jonathan supposed, where his father’s stories came from. When Joe’s eyes returned to the room, he was ready and opened his mouth to speak.

‘Once upon a—’

The door opened.

It was late for a newcomer. Whoever it was did not rush to come in. The cold draught set the candles flickering and carried the tang of the winter river into the smoky room. The drinkers looked up.

Every eye saw, yet for a long moment none reacted. They were trying to make sense of what they were seeing.

The man – if man it was – was tall and strong, but his head was monstrous and they boggled at the sight of it. Was it a monster from a folk tale? Were they sleeping and was this a nightmare? The nose was askew and flattened; beneath it was a gaping hollow, dark with blood. As sights went, it was horrifying enough, but in its arms the awful creature carried a large puppet, with waxen face and limbs and slickly painted hair.

What roused them to action was the man himself. He first roared, a great bellow as misshapen as the mouth it emerged from, then he staggered and swayed. A pair of farmhands jumped from their seats just in time to grab him under the arms and arrest his fall so that he did not smash his head on the flagstones. At the same time, Jonathan leapt forward from the fireside, arms outstretched, and into them dropped the puppet with a solid weightiness that took his joints and muscles by surprise.

Returning to their senses, they hoisted the unconscious man on to a table. A second table was dragged forward so that the man’s legs could be rested upon it. Then, when he was laid down and straightened out, they all stood around and raised their candles and lamps over him. The man’s eyes did not flicker.

‘Is he dead?’ Albright wondered.

There was a round of indistinct murmurs and much frowning.

‘Slap his face,’ someone said. ‘See if that brings him round.’

‘A tot of liquor’ll do it,’ another suggested.

Margot elbowed her way to the top of the table and studied the man. ‘Don’t you go slapping him. Not with his face in that state. Nor pouring anything down his throat. Just you wait a minute.’

She turned away to the seat by the hearth. On it was a cushion, and she picked it up and carried it back to the table. With the aid of the candlelight, she spotted a pinprick of white on the cotton. Picking at it with her fingernail, she drew out a feather. The men watched her, eyes wide with bewilderment.

‘I don’t think you’ll wake a dead man by tickling him,’ said a gravel-digger. ‘Nor a live one either, not in this state.’

‘I’m not going to tickle him,’ she replied.

Margot laid the feather on the man’s lips. All peered. For a moment there was nothing, then the soft and plumy parts of the feather shivered.

‘He breathes!’

The relief soon gave way to renewed perplexity.

‘Who is it, though?’ a bargeman asked. ‘Do anyone know him?’

There followed a few moments of general hubbub, during which they considered the question. One reckoned he knew everybody on the river from Castle Eaton to Duxford, which was some ten miles, and he was sure he didn’t know the fellow. Another had a sister in Lechlade and was certain he had never seen the man there. A third felt that he might have seen the man somewhere, but the longer he looked, the less willing he was to put money on it. A fourth wondered whether he was a river gypsy, for it was the time of year when their boats came down this stretch of the river, to be stared at with suspicion, and everybody made sure to lock their doors at night and bring inside anything that could be lifted. But with that good woollen jacket and his expensive leather boots – no. This was not a ragged gypsy man. A fifth stared and then, with triumph, remarked that the man was the very height and build of Liddiard from Whitey’s Farm, and was his hair not the same colour too? A sixth pointed out that Liddiard was here at the other end of the table, and when the fifth looked across, he could not deny it. At the end of these and further declarations, it was agreed by one, two, three, four, five, six, and all the others present that they didn’t know him – at least, they didn’t think so. But looking as he did, who could be certain?

Into the silence that followed this conclusion, a seventh spoke. ‘Whatever has befallen him?’

The man’s clothes were soaking wet, and the smell of the river, green and brown, was on him. Some accident on the water, that much was obvious. They talked of dangers on the river, of the water that played tricks on even the wisest of rivermen.

‘Is there a boat? Shall I go and see if I can spy one?’ Beszant the boat-mender offered.

Margot was washing the blood from the man’s face with deft and gentle motions. She winced as she revealed the great gash that split his upper lip and divided his skin into two flaps that gaped to show his broken teeth and bloodied gum.

‘Leave the boat,’ she instructed. ‘It is the man that matters. There is more here than I can help with. Who will run for Rita?’ She looked round and spotted one of the farmhands who was too poor to drink much. ‘Neath, you are quick on your feet. Can you run along to Rush Cottage and fetch the nurse without stumbling? One accident is quite enough for one night.’

The young man left.

Jonathan, meanwhile, had kept apart from the others. The weight of the drenched puppet was cumbersome, so he sat down and arranged it on his lap. He thought of the papier mâché dragon that the troupe of guisers had brought for a play last Christmastime. It was light and hard and had rapped with a light tat-tat-tat if you beat your fingernails against it. This puppet was not made of that. He thought of the dolls he had seen, stuffed with rice. They were weighty and soft. He had never seen one this size. He sniffed its head. There was no smell of rice – only the river. The hair was made of real hair, and he couldn’t work out how they had joined it to the head. The ear was so real they might have moulded it from a real one. He marvelled at the perfect precision of the lashes. Putting his fingertip gently to the soft, damp, tickling ends of them caused the lid to move a little. He touched the lid with the gentlest of touches and there was something behind. Slippery and globular, it was soft and firm at the same time.

Something darkly unfathomable gripped him. Behind the backs of his parents and the drinkers, he gave the figure a gentle shake. An arm slid and swung from the shoulder joint in a way a puppet’s arm ought not to swing, and he felt a rising water level, powerful and rapid, inside him.

‘It is a little girl.’

In all the discussion around the injured man, nobody heard.

Again, louder: ‘It is a little girl!’

They turned.

‘She won’t wake up.’ He held out the sodden little body so that they might see for themselves.

They moved to stand around Jonathan. A dozen pairs of stricken eyes rested on the little body.

Her skin shimmered like water. The folds of her cotton frock were plastered to the smooth lines of the limbs, and her head tilted on her neck at an angle no puppeteer could achieve. She was a little girl, and they had not seen it, not one of them, though it was obvious. What maker would go to such lengths, making a doll of such perfection, only to dress it in the cotton smock any pauper’s daughter might wear? Who would paint a face in that macabre and lifeless manner? What maker other than the good Lord had it in him to make the curve of that cheekbone, the planes of that shin, that delicate foot with five toes individually shaped and sized and detailed? Of course it was a little girl! How could they ever have thought otherwise?

In the room usually so thick with words, there was silence. The men who were fathers remembered their own children and resolved to show them nothing but love till the end of their days. Those who were old and had never known a child of their own suffered a great pang of absence, and those who were childless and still young were pierced with the longing to hold their own offspring in their arms.

At last the silence was broken.

‘Good Lord!’

‘Dead, poor mite.’

‘Drowned!’

‘Put the feather on her lips, Ma!’

‘Oh, Jonathan. It is too late for her.’

‘But it worked with the man!’

‘No, son, he was breathing already. The feather only showed us the life that was still in him.’

‘It might still be in her!’

‘It is plain she is gone, poor lass. She is not breathing, and besides, you have only to look at her colour. Who will carry the poor child to the long room? You take her, Higgs.’

‘But it’s cold there,’ Jonathan protested.

His mother patted his shoulder. ‘She won’t mind that. She is not really here any more, and it is never cold in the place she has gone to.’

‘Let me carry her.’

‘You carry the lantern, and unlock the door for Mr Higgs. She’s heavy for you, my love.’

The gravel-digger took the body from Jonathan’s failing grip and lifted her as though she weighed no more than a goose. Jonathan lit the way out and round the side to a small stone outbuilding. A thick wooden door gave on to a narrow, windowless store room. The floor was plain earth, and the walls had never been plastered or panelled or painted. In summer it was a good place to leave a plucked duck or a trout that you were not yet hungry for; on a winter night like this one it was bitter. Projecting from one wall was a stone slab, and it was here that Higgs laid the girl down. Jonathan, remembering the fragility of the papier mâché, cradled her skull – ‘So as not to hurt her’ – as it came into contact with the stone.

Higgs’s lantern cast a circle of light on to the girl’s face.

‘Ma said she’s dead,’ Jonathan said.

‘That’s right, lad.’

‘Ma says she’s in another place.’

‘She is.’

‘She looks as though she’s here, to me.’

‘Her thoughts have emptied out of her. Her soul has passed.’

‘Couldn’t she be asleep?’

‘Nay, lad. She’d’ve woke up by now.’

The lantern cast flickering shadows on to the unmoving face, the warmth of its light tried to mask the dead white of the skin, but it was no substitute for the inner illumination of life.

‘There was a girl who slept for a hundred years, once. She was woke up with a kiss.’

Higgs blinked fiercely. ‘I think that was just a story.’

The circle of light shifted from the girl’s face and illuminated Higgs’s feet as they made their way out again, but at the door he discovered that Jonathan was not beside him. Turning, he raised the lantern again in time to see him stoop and place a kiss on the child’s forehead in the darkness.

Jonathan watched the girl intently. Then his shoulders slumped and he turned away.

They locked the door behind them and came away.

The Corpse without a Story

THERE WAS A doctor two miles from Radcot, but nobody thought of sending for him. He was old and expensive and his patients mostly died, which was not encouraging. Instead they did the sensible thing: they sent for Rita.

So it was that half an hour after the man was placed on the tables, there came the sound of steps outside and the door opened on a woman. Other than Margot and her daughters, who were as much a part of the Swan as its floorboards and stone walls, women were a rare sight at the inn, and every eye was upon her as she entered the room. Rita Sunday was of middle height and her hair was neither light nor dark. In all other aspects, her looks were not average. The men evaluated her and found her lacking in almost every respect. Her cheekbones were too high and too angular; her nose was a bit too large, her jaw a bit too wide, her chin a bit too forward. Her best feature was her eyes, which did well enough for shape, though they were grey and looked at things too steadily from beneath her symmetrical brow. She was too old to be young, and other women her age had been crossed off the list of those suitable for appraisal, yet in Rita’s case, for all her plainness and three decades of virginity, she still had something about her. Was it her history? Their local nurse and midwife, she had been born in a convent, lived there till adulthood and learnt all her medicine in the convent hospital.

Rita stepped inside the winter room of the Swan. As if she were not aware of all the eyes upon her, she unbuttoned her sober woollen coat and slid her arms out of it. The dress beneath was dark and unadorned.

She went directly to where the man lay, bloodied and still unconscious on the table.

‘I have heated water for you, Rita,’ Margot told her. ‘And cloths here, all clean. What else will you want?’

‘More light, if you can manage it.’

‘Jonathan is fetching spare lanterns and candles from upstairs.’

‘And quite likely’ – having washed her hands, Rita was gently exploring the extent of the gash in the man’s lip – ‘a razor, and a man with a gentle and steady hand for shaving.’

‘Joe can do that, can’t you?’

Joe nodded.

‘And liquor. The strongest you have.’

Margot unlocked the special cupboard and took out a green bottle. She placed it next to Rita’s bag and all the drinkers eyed it. Unlabelled, it bore the signs of being illegally distilled, which meant it would be strong enough to knock a man out.

The two bargemen holding lanterns over the man’s head saw the nurse probe the hole that was his mouth. With two blood-slicked fingers she drew out a broken tooth. A moment later she had two more. Her searching fingers went next into his still-damp hair. She explored every inch of his scalp.

‘His head injuries are just to the face. It could be worse. Right, let’s first get him out of these wet things.’

The room seemed to start. An unmarried woman could not strip a man’s clothes from him without unsettling the natural order of things.

‘Margot,’ Rita suggested smoothly, ‘would you direct the men?’

She turned her back and busied herself with setting out items from her bag, while Margot instructed the men in the removal of his clothes, reminding them to go gently – ‘We don’t know where else he is injured yet – let’s not make it worse!’ – and undid buttons and ties with her maternal fingers where they were too drunk or just too clumsy to do it. His garments piled up on the floor: a navy jacket with many pockets like a bargeman’s but made of better cloth; freshly soled boots of strong leather; a proper belt, where a riverman would make do with rope; thick jersey long johns; and a knitted vest beneath his felt shirt.

‘Who is he? Do we know?’ Rita asked while she looked away.

‘Don’t know that we’ve ever set eyes on him. But it’s hard to tell, the state he’s in.’

‘Have you got his jacket off?’

‘Yes.’

‘Perhaps Jonathan might have a look in the pockets.’

When she turned to face the table again, her patient was naked and a white handkerchief had been placed to protect his modesty and Rita’s reputation.

She felt their eyes flicker to her face and away again.

‘Joe, if you would shave his upper lip as gently as you can. You won’t make a perfect job of it, but do your best. Go carefully around his nose – it’s broken.’

She began the examination. She placed her hands first upon his feet, moved up to his ankles, shins, calves … Her white hands stood out against his darker skin.

‘He is an out-of-doors man,’ a gravel-digger noted.

She palpated bone, ligament, muscle, her eyes all the while diverted from his nakedness, as though her fingertips saw better than her eyes. She worked swiftly, knowing rapidly that here, at least, all was well.

At the man’s right hip Rita’s fingers inched around the white handkerchief, and paused.

‘Light here, please.’

The patient was badly grazed all along one flank. Rita tilted liquor from the green bottle on to a cloth and applied it to the wound. The men around the table twisted their lips in little expressions of sympathy, but the patient himself did not stir.

The man’s hand lay alongside his hip. It was swollen to twice the size it ought to be, bloodied and discoloured. Rita applied the liquor here too, but certain marks did not come away, though she wiped once and again. Ink-dark blots, but not the darkness of bruising, and not dried blood. Interested, she raised the hand and peered closely at them.

‘He is a photographer,’ she said.

‘Blow me down! How do you know that?’

‘His fingers. See these marks? Silver nitrate stains. It’s what they use to develop the photographs.’

She took advantage of the surprise generated by this news to work around the white handkerchief. She pressed gently into his abdomen, found no evidence of internal injury, and worked up, up, the light following her, until the white handkerchief receded into the darkness and the men could be reassured that Rita was safely back in the realm of decorum again.

With his thick beard half gone, the man looked no less ghastly. The misshapen nose was all the more prominent, the gash that split the lip and ran up towards his cheek looked ten times worse for being visible. The eyes that usually endow a face with humanity were so swollen they were tight shut. On his forehead the skin had swollen into a bloodied lump; Rita drew splinters of what looked like dark wood from it, cleaned it, then turned her attention to the lip injury.

Margot handed her a needle and thread, both sterilized in the liquor. Rita put the point to the split and drove the needle into the skin, and as she did, the candlelight flickered.

‘Anyone who needs to, sit down now,’ she instructed. ‘One patient is enough.’

But nobody was willing to admit to the need to sit.

She made three neat stitches, drawing the thread through, and the men either looked away or watched, fascinated by the spectacle of a human face being mended as if it were a torn collar.

When it was done, there was audible relief.

Rita looked at her handiwork.

‘He do look a bit better now,’ one of the bargemen admitted. ‘Unless it’s just that we’re used to looking at him.’

‘Hmm,’ said Rita, as if she half agreed.

She reached to the middle of his face, gripped his nose between thumb and index finger and gave it a firm twist. There was a distinct sound of gristle and bone moving – a crunch that was also a squelch – and the candlelight quivered violently.

‘Catch him, quick!’ Rita exclaimed, and for the second time that night the farmhands took the weight of a fellow man collapsing in their arms as the gravel-digger’s knees gave way. In doing so, all three men’s candles fell to the floor, extinguishing themselves as they dropped – and the entire scene was snuffed out with them.

‘Well,’ said Margot, when the candles had been relit. ‘What a night. We had best put this poor man in the pilgrims’ room.’ In the days when Radcot Bridge was the only river crossing for miles, many travellers had broken their journey at the inn, and though it was rarely used these days there was a room at the end of the corridor that was still called the pilgrims’ room. Rita oversaw the removal of her patient and they laid him on the bed and put a blanket over him.

‘I should like to see the child before I go,’ she said.

‘You will want to say a prayer over the poor mite. Of course.’ In the minds of the locals, not only was Rita as good as a doctor, but given her time in the convent she could stand in for the parson at a push. ‘Here’s the key. Take a lantern.’

Back in her hat and coat and with a muffler wrapped around her face, Rita left the Swan and went to the outbuilding.

Rita Sunday was not afraid of corpses. She was used to them from childhood, had even been born from one. This is how it had happened: thirty-five years ago, heavily pregnant and in despair, a woman had thrown herself into the river. By the time a bargeman spotted her and pulled her out, she was three-quarters drowned. He took her to the nuns at Godstow, who nursed the poor and needy at the convent hospital. She survived long enough for labour to commence. The shock of almost drowning having weakened her, she had no strength left to give birth and died when her belly rippled with the strong contractions. Sister Grace had rolled up her sleeves, taken a scalpel, sliced a shallow red curve into the dead woman’s abdomen and removed from it a living baby. Nobody knew her mother’s name, and they would not have given it to the child anyway – the deceased had been triply sinful, by fornication, the act of self-murder and the attempt at killing her baby, and it would have been ungodly to encourage the child to remember her. They named the baby Margareta, after Saint Margaret, and she came to be called Rita for short. As for her surname, in the absence of a flesh-and-blood begetter she was called Sunday, for the day of the heavenly Father, just like all the other orphans at the nunnery.

The young Rita did well at her lessons, showed an interest in the hospital, and was encouraged to help. There were tasks even a child could do: at eight she was making beds and cleaning the bloodied sheets and cloths; at twelve she carried buckets of hot water and helped lay out the dead. By the time Rita was fifteen she was cleaning wounds, splinting fractures, stitching skin, and by seventeen there was little in the way of nursing that she could not do, including delivering a baby all by herself. She might easily have stayed in the convent, becoming a nun and devoting her life to God and the sick, were it not for the fact that one day, collecting herbs on the riverbank, it occurred to her that there was no life beyond this one. It was a wicked thought according to everything she had been taught, but instead of feeling guilty, she was overwhelmed with relief. If there was no heaven, there was no hell, and if there was no hell then her unknown mother was not enduring the agonies of eternal torment, but simply gone, absent, untouched by suffering. She told the nuns of her change of heart, and before they had recovered from their consternation, she had rolled a nightdress and a pair of bloomers together and left without even a hairbrush.

‘But your duty!’ Sister Grace had called after her. ‘To God and the sick!’

‘The sick are everywhere,’ she had cried back, and Sister Grace had replied, ‘So is God,’ but she said it quietly and Rita did not hear.

The young nurse had worked first at an Oxford hospital, then, when her talent was noticed, as general nurse and assistant to an enlightened medical man in London. ‘You’ll be a great loss to me and the profession when you marry,’ he said to her more than once, when it was plain a patient had taken a shine to her.

‘Marry? Not me,’ she told him every time.

‘Why ever not?’ he pressed, when he had heard the same answer half a dozen times.

‘I’m more use to the world as a nurse than as a wife and mother.’

It was only half an answer.

He got the other half a few days later. They were attending a young mother, the same age as Rita. It was her third pregnancy. Everything had gone smoothly before, and there was no particular reason to fear the worst. The baby was not awkwardly positioned, the labour was not unduly prolonged, the forceps were not necessary, the placenta followed cleanly. It was just that they could not stop the bleeding. She bled and she bled and she bled until she died.

The doctor spoke to the husband outside the room while Rita gathered up the bloodstained sheets with efficient expertise. She had lost count of the dead mothers long ago.

When the doctor came in, she had everything ready for their departure. They stepped out of the house and into the street in silence. After a few steps she said, ‘I don’t want to die like that.’

‘I don’t blame you,’ he said.

The doctor had a friend, a certain gentleman, who called frequently at dinner time and did not leave till the next morning. Rita never spoke of it, yet the doctor realized she was aware of the love he felt for this man. She appeared to be unperturbed by it, and was entirely discreet. After thinking things over for a few months, he made a surprising suggestion.

‘Why don’t you marry me?’ he asked her one day between patients. ‘There would be no … you know. But it would be convenient for me, and it might be advantageous for you. The patients would like it.’

She thought about it and agreed. They became engaged, but before they could marry he fell ill with pneumonia and died, too young. In the last days of his life he called his lawyer to alter his will. In it he left his house and furniture to the gentleman, and to Rita a significant sum of money, enough to give her modest independence. He also left her his library. She sold the volumes that were not medical or scientific, and had the rest packed and taken upriver. When the boat came to Godstow, she looked at the convent as she passed and felt a surprising pang that called to mind her lost God.

‘Here?’ the boatman asked, mistaking the nature of the intensity on her face.

‘Keep going,’ she told him.

On they went, another day, another night, till they came to Radcot. She liked the look of the place.

‘Here,’ she told the bargeman. ‘This will do.’

She bought a cottage, placed her books on the shelves, and let it be known among the better households of the area that she had a letter of recommendation from one of the best medical men in London. Once she had treated a few patients and delivered half a dozen babies, she was established. The wealthier families in the area wanted only Rita for their arrivals in the world and departures from it, and for all the medical crises in between. This was well-paid work and provided an adequate income to round out her inheritance. Among these patients were a number who could afford to be hypochondriacs; she tolerated their self-indulgence, for it enabled her to work at very low rates – or for nothing at all, for those who could not afford to pay. When she was not working, she lived frugally, read her way methodically through the doctor’s library (she neither thought of him nor referred to him as her fiancé) and made medicines.

Rita had been at Radcot for nearly ten years now. Death did not frighten her. In those years she had tended the dying, witnessed their demise and laid out the dead. Death by sickness, death in childbirth, death by accident. Death by malice, once or twice. Death as the welcome visitor to great age. Godstow’s hospital was on the river, so naturally she was familiar with the bodies of the drowned.

It was death by drowning that was on Rita’s mind as she made her way briskly through the cold night air to the outbuilding. Drowning is easy. Every year the river helps herself to a few lives. One drink too many, one hasty step, one second’s lapse of attention is all it takes. Rita’s first drowning was a boy of twelve, only a year younger than herself at the time, who slipped as he sang and larked about on the lock. Later was the summer reveller who mistook his step from a boat, received a blow to the temple on the way down, and his friends were too drunk to come effectively to his aid. A student showing off jumped from the apex of Wolvercote Bridge on a golden autumnal day, only to be surprised by the depth and the current. A river is a river, whatever the season. There were young women, like her own mother, poor souls unable to face a future of shame and poverty, abandoned by lover and family, who turned to the river to put an end to it all. And then there were the babies, unwanted morsels of flesh, little beginnings of life, drowned before they had a chance to live. She’d seen it all.

At the door to the long room, Rita turned the key in the lock. The air seemed even colder inside than out. It outlined a vivid map of passages and cavities behind her nostrils and up into her forehead. The chill carried the tang of earth, stone and, overwhelmingly, river. Her mind sprang instantly to attention.

The feeble light from the lantern faltered long before it reached the corners of the stone room, yet the little corpse was illuminated, shimmering with a glaucous gleam. It was a peculiar effect, caused by the extreme paleness of the body, but a fanciful person might have thought the light emanated from the small limbs themselves.

Aware of the unusual alertness that stirred in her, Rita approached. She judged the child to be about four years of age. Her skin was white. She was dressed in the simplest of shifts that left her arms and ankles bare, and the fabric, still damp, lay in ripples around her.

Rita automatically initiated the convent-hospital routine. She checked for breathing. She placed two fingers against the child’s neck to feel for a pulse. She peeled back the petal of an eyelid to examine the pupil. As she did all this, she heard in her mind the echo of the prayer that would have accompanied the examination in a chorus of calm, female voices: Our Father, which art in heaven … She heard it, but her lips did not move in time.

No breathing. No pulse. Full dilation of the pupils.

The uncommon vigilance was alive in her still. She stood over the little body and wondered what it was that had set her mind on edge. Perhaps it was nothing but the cold air.

You can read a dead body if you have seen enough of them, and Rita had seen it all. The when and the how and the why of it were all there if you knew how to look. She began an examination of the corpse so complete and so thorough that she entirely forgot about the cold. In the flickering light of the lantern, she peered and squinted at every inch of the child’s skin. She lifted arms and legs, felt the smooth movement of joints. She looked into ear and nostril. She explored the cavity of the mouth. She studied every finger- and toenail. At the end of it all, she stood back and frowned.

Something wasn’t right.

Head on one side, mouth twisted in perplexity, Rita went through everything she knew. She knew how the drowned wrinkle, swell and bloat. She knew how their skin, hair and nails loosen. None of this was present here, but that meant only that this child had not been in the water very long. Then there was the matter of mucus. Drowning leaves foam at the edges of the mouth and nostrils, but there was none on the face of this corpse. That too had its explanation. The girl was already dead when she went into the water. So far, so good. It was the rest that disturbed her. If the child had not drowned, what had happened to her? The skull was intact; the limbs unbeaten. There was no bruising to the neck. No bones were broken. There was no evidence of injury to the internal organs. Rita was aware how far human wickedness could go: she had checked the girl’s genitals and knew she had not been the victim of unnatural interference.

Was it possible that the child had died naturally? Yet there were no visible signs of illness. In fact, to judge from her weight, skin and hair, she had been exceptionally healthy.

All this was disconcerting enough, but there was more. Even supposing the child had died of natural causes and – for reasons impossible to imagine – been disposed of in the river, there should be injuries to the flesh made after death. Sand and grit abrade skin, stones graze, the detritus on the river’s bed will cut flesh. Water can break a man’s bones; a bridge will smash his skull. Wherever you looked at her, this child was unmarked, unbruised, ungrazed, uncut. The little body was immaculate. ‘Like a doll,’ Jonathan had told her when he described the girl falling into his arms, and she understood why he had thought so. Rita had run her fingertips over the soles of the girl’s feet, around the outer edge of her big toe, and they were so perfect you would think she had never put foot to earth. Her nails were as fine and as pearlized as those of a newborn. That death had made no mark on her was strange enough, but nor had life, and that, in Rita’s experience, was unique.

A body always tells a story – but this child’s corpse was a blank page.

Rita reached for the lantern on its hook. She trained its light on the child’s face, but found it as inexpressive as the rest of her. It was impossible to tell whether, in life, these blunt and unfinished features had borne the imprint of prettiness, timid watchfulness or sly mischief. If there had once been curiosity or placidity or impatience here, life had not had time to etch it into permanence.

Only a very short time ago – two hours or not much more – the body and soul of this little girl had still been securely united. At this thought, and despite all her training, all her experience, Rita found herself suddenly in the grip of a storm of feeling. Not for the first time since they had parted company, she wished for God. God who, in her childhood years, had seen all, known all, understood all. How simple it had been when, ignorant and confused, she could nonetheless put her faith in a Father who enjoyed perfect understanding of all things. She had been able to bear not knowing a thing when she could be sure that God knew. But now …

She took the child’s hand – the perfect hand with its five perfect fingers and their perfect fingernails – laid it in her open palm and closed her other hand over it.

This is wrong! All wrong! It should not be so!

And that is when it happened.

The Miracle

BEFORE MARGOT PLUNGED the injured man’s clothes into the bucket of fresh water, Jonathan went through his pockets. They gave up:

One purse swollen with water, containing a sum of money that would cover all kinds of expenses and still stand them all a drink when he was feeling better.

One handkerchief, sodden.

One pipe, unbroken, and a tin of tobacco. They prised open the lid and found the contents to be dry. ‘He’ll be glad of that, at least,’ they noted.

One ring, to which were linked a number of dainty tools and implements over which they puzzled – was he a clock-mender? they wondered. A locksmith? A burglar? – until the next item was drawn out.

One photograph. And then they remembered the dark stains on the man’s fingers and Rita’s idea that he might be a photographer, and this seemed to lend weight to it. The tools must be something to do with the man’s profession.

Joe took the photograph from his son and dabbed it gently with his woollen cuff to dry it.

It showed a corner of a field, an ash tree, and not a lot else.

‘I’ve seen prettier pictures,’ someone said.

‘It wants a church spire or a thatched cottage,’ said another.

‘It don’t seem to be a photograph of anything exactly,’ a third said, scratching his head in perplexity.

‘Trewsbury Mead,’ said Joe, the only one to recognize it.

They didn’t know what to say, so they shrugged and put the photograph on the mantel to dry and went on to the next and last item to come out of the man’s pockets, which was:

One tin box, in which was a wad of small cards. They peeled off the top one and handed it to Owen, the best reader of them all, who raised a candle and read aloud:

Henry Daunt of Oxford

Portraits, landscapes, city and country scenes

Also: postcards, guide books, picture frames

Thames scenes a speciality

‘She was right,’ they exclaimed. ‘She said he were a photographer, and here’s the proof of it.’

Then Owen read out an address on Oxford’s High Street.

‘Who will be going to Oxford tomorrow?’ Margot asked. ‘Anybody know?’

‘My sister’s husband runs the cheese barge,’ a gravel-digger suggested. ‘I don’t mind going to her house tonight and asking him.’

‘Barge’ll take two days, won’t it?’

‘Can’t leave his family worrying about him for two days.’

‘Surely he won’t be going tomorrow, your sister’s husband? If he did, he wouldn’t be back in time for Christmas.’

‘The railway, then.’

It was decided that Martins would go. He was not wanted at the farm tomorrow, and he had a sister living five minutes from the station at Lechlade. He would go to her house now, to be on hand for the early train. Margot gave him the fare, he repeated the address till he knew it, and set off, with a shilling in his pocket and a brand-new story on his tongue. He had six miles of riverbank along which to rehearse his tale, and by the time he got to his sister’s house he would have it to perfection.

The other drinkers lingered. Storytelling of the usual kind was over for the night – who would stop to tell a story when one was actually happening? – and so they refilled their tankards and glasses, relit their pipes and settled on their stools. Joe put his shaving things away and returned to his chair, where from time to time he discreetly coughed. From his stool by the window, Jonathan kept an eye on the logs in the fire and surveyed the level of the candles. Margot prodded the river-wet clothes into a bucket with an old paddle and gave them a good swirl, then she put the pan of spiced beer back over the stove. The fragrance of nutmeg and allspice mingled with tobacco and burning logs, and the smell of the river receded.

The drinkers began to talk, finding words to turn the night’s events into a story.

‘When I saw him in the doorway there, I was astonished. No, astounded. That’s what I was. Astounded!’

‘I was stunned, I was.’

‘And me. I was stunned and astounded. What about you?’

They were collectors of words, the same way so many of the gravel-diggers were collectors of fossils. They kept an ear constantly alert for them, the rare, the unusual, the unique.

‘I reckon I was dumbfounded.’

They tried it out for flavour, weighing it on their tongues. It was good. They gave their colleague admiring nods.

One was new to the Swan, new to storytelling. He was still finding his feet. ‘How about flabbergasted? Could I say that?’

‘Why not?’ they encouraged. ‘Say flabbergasted, if you like.’

Beszant the boat-mender came back in. A boat could tell a story too and he’d been to see what it had to say. Everybody in the inn looked up to hear.

‘She’s there,’ he reported. ‘All bashed in along the saxboard. Graunched something terrible and taking in water. She were half under. I’ve left her upturned on the bank, but nothing can be done. ’Tis all over for her now.’

‘What do you suppose happened? Was it the wharf that he went into?’

He shook his head with authority. ‘Something came smashing down on the boat. From above.’ He brought one hand down powerfully through the air and crashed one palm against the other to demonstrate. ‘Wharf, no – boat’d be bashed in from the side.’

The drinkers now talked themselves up- and downstream, furlong by furlong, bridge by bridge, setting the damage to man and boat against every danger. All were rivermen of one kind or another – if not by profession then by long association – and every man had his say as they tried to work out what had happened. In their minds they smashed the little boat into every jetty and every wharf, every bridge and every millwheel, upstream and down, but none was right. Then they came to Devil’s Weir.

The weir had great uprights of solid ash at regular intervals across the river, and between them were wide expanses of wood, like walls, that could be raised or lowered according to the flow. It was customary to get out of your boat and drag it up the slope that was made for the purpose, in order to go around the weir and then re-enter the water on the other side. There was an inn on the bank, so most of the time you could count on finding someone to give you a hand in exchange for the price of a drink. But sometimes – when the boards were up and the boat was nimble, when the river was calm and the boatman very experienced – then a man might save himself a bit of time and steer through. He would have to align his boat carefully, not take it askew, then he would need to pull in his blades so as not to break them against the great uprights, and – if the river was high – he would need to duck or else throw himself flat on his back in the boat to avoid knocking his head on the weir-beam.

They measured all this against the man. They measured it against the boat.

‘So is that it?’ asked Joe. ‘It was at Devil’s Weir he came to grief?’

Beszant picked up a fragment of wood, matchstick-sized, from a little pile. Black and firm, it was the largest of the splinters Rita had extracted from the forehead of the injured man. He tested it against his fingertip, felt the residual firmness of the wood despite the long contact with water. Most likely ash, and the weir was built of ash.

‘I reckon so.’

‘I’ve taken Devil’s Weir myself more than once,’ a farmhand said. ‘You too, I reckon?’

The boat-mender nodded. ‘If the river’s in the mood to let me, yes.’

‘Would you attempt it at night?’

‘Risk my life to save a few seconds? I’m not such a fool.’

There was a sense of satisfaction at having settled at least one aspect of the night’s events.

‘And yet,’ Joe wondered, after a pause, ‘if it was at Devil’s Weir he came to grief, how did he get from there to here?’

Now half a dozen small conversations broke out as theory after theory was proposed, tested and found wanting. Suppose he had rowed all the way after the accident … With those injuries? No! Then suppose he drifted, lying in the boat between life and death, until at Radcot he came to his senses and … Drifted? A boat in that cock-eyed state? Negotiating obstacles in the dark all by itself and letting in water all the while? No!

Round and round they went, finding explanations that fitted one half of the facts or the other half, that supplied a what but not a how, or a where but not a why, until all imagination came to an end and they were no nearer an answer. How had the man not drowned?

For a while the only voice to be heard was that of the river, and then Joe coughed lightly and gathered his breath to speak.

‘It must be Quietly’s doing.’

Everybody glanced towards the window and those near enough looked out, into the soft, flat night in which a span of swiftly moving blackness shone with a liquid gleam. Quietly the ferryman. All knew of him. From time to time he featured in stories they told, and some swore they’d met him. He appeared when you were in trouble on the water, a gaunt and elongated figure, manipulating his pole so masterfully that his punt seemed to glide as if powered by an otherworldly force. He spoke never a word, but guided you safely to the bank so you would live another day. But if you were out of luck – so they said – it was another shore altogether that he would take you to, and those poor souls did not return to the Swan to lift their pint of ale and tell of their encounter.

Quietly. Now that would turn it into another kind of story altogether.

Margot, whose mother and grandmother had spoken of Quietly in the months before they died, frowned and changed the subject.

‘It’ll be a sorry awakening for that poor man. To lose a child – there is no heartbreak like it.’

There was a murmur of agreement and she went on: ‘Why would a father take a child out on the river at this time of night, anyway? In winter too! Even if he were alone it was foolish, but with a child …’

The fathers in the room nodded, and added rashness to the character of the man who lay senseless in the next room.

Joe coughed and said, ‘She were a droll-looking little maid.’

‘Strange.’

‘Peculiar.’

‘Odd,’ came a trio of voices.

‘I didn’t even know it was a child,’ a voice said wonderingly.

‘You weren’t the only one.’

Margot had been pondering this all the while the men had been talking of boats and weirs. She thought of her twelve daughters and her granddaughters and admonished herself. A child was a child, dead or alive.

‘How did we not see it?’ she asked, in a voice that made them all ashamed.

They turned their eyes to the dark corners and consulted their memories. They conjured the injured man to stand again in the doorway. They reinhabited their shock, considered what there had not been time to consider as it happened. It had been like a dream, they thought, or a nightmare. The man had appeared to them like something from a folk tale: a monster or a ghoul. They had taken the child for a puppet or a doll.

The door opened, as it had opened before.

The drinkers blinked away their memory of the man and saw this:

Rita.

She stood in the doorway, where the man had stood.

The dead girl was in her arms.

Again? Was it time’s error? Were they drunk? Had they lost their wits? Too much had happened and their brains were full. They waited for the world to right itself.

The corpse opened its eyes.

The girl’s head swivelled.

Her gaze sent a wave through the room so strong that every eye felt its ripple, every soul was rocked on its mooring.

Time went unmeasured, and when the silence was at last broken it was Rita who spoke.

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

It was an answer to the questions they were too stunned to ask, an answer to the questions she could scarcely form herself.

When they found that their tongues were still in their mouths and still working, Margot said, ‘Let me wrap her in my shawl.’

Rita put out a warning hand. ‘Let her not be warmed too quickly. She has come this far in the cold. Perhaps she should grow warm by slow degrees.’

The women laid the child on the window seat. Her pallor was deathly. She was unmoving; all but her eyes, which blinked and looked.

The rivermen and the cressmen and the gravel-diggers, young men and old, with hard hands and reddened fingers, grimy necks and rough chins, sat forward in their seats and gazed with soft yearning at the little child.

‘Her eyes are closing!’

‘Is she dying again?’

‘See her chest rise?’

‘Ah! I see it. And now it falls.’

‘And rises again.’

‘She is falling asleep.’

‘Hush!’

They spoke in whispers.

‘Are we keeping her awake?’

‘Shuffle aside, will you? I cannot see her breathe!’

‘Now do you see her?’

‘She breathes in.’

‘And out.’

‘In.’

‘Out.’

They stood on tiptoe to lean forwards, peer over shoulders, squint into the circle of light from the candle that Rita held over the sleeping girl. Their eyes followed her every breath and, without knowing it, their breathing fell in time with hers, as if their many chests might make a great pair of bellows to inflate her little lungs. The room itself expanded and contracted with her respiration.

‘It must be a fine thing to have a little child to look after.’ It was a bony cressman with red ears who spoke, in a longing half-tone.

‘Nothing finer,’ his friends admitted wistfully.

Jonathan had not taken his eyes off the girl. He edged across the floor until he stood beside her. He extended a hand uncertainly and at Rita’s nod laid it gently on a strand of the girl’s hair.

‘How did you do it?’ he asked.

‘I didn’t.’

‘Then what made her come alive again?’

She shook her head.

‘Was it me? I kissed her. To wake her, like the prince in the story.’ And he brought his lips to her hair to show Rita.

‘It doesn’t happen like that in real life.’

‘Is it a miracle?’

Rita frowned, unable to answer.

‘Don’t go thinking about it now,’ his mother said. ‘There’s a great many things hard to fathom in darkness that set themselves straight in the light of day. The little mite needs to sleep, not have you fidgeting around her. Come away, I’ve got a job for you.’

She unlocked the cupboard again and took out another bottle, set a dozen tiny glasses on a tray, poured an inch of liquor into each.

Jonathan handed one to everybody present.

‘Give one to your father.’ Joe didn’t usually drink in winter and when his lungs were bad. ‘What about you, Rita?’

‘I will, thank you.’

As one, they raised the glasses to their lips and swallowed in a single gulp.

Was it a miracle? It was as if they had dreamt of a pot of gold and woken to find it on their pillow. As if they had told a tale of a fairy princess and finished it only to find her sitting in a corner of the room listening.

For close on an hour they sat in silence and watched the sleeping child and wondered at it. Could there be any place in the country more interesting tonight than the Swan at Radcot? And they would be able to say, I was there.

In the end, it was Margot who sent them all home. ‘It’s been a long night, and nothing will do us more good now than a bit of sleep.’

The dregs in tankards were drained and slowly the drinkers reached for their coats and hats. They rose on legs unsteady with drink and magic, and shuffled over the floor towards the door. There was a round of goodnights, the door was opened and one by one, with many a backward glance, the drinkers disappeared into the night.

The Story Travels

MARGOT AND RITA lifted the sleeping child and worked her sleeveless shift over her head. They wrung out a cloth in warm water and wiped the river smell away, though it still lingered in her hair. The child made a vague sound of contentment at the touch of the water, but did not wake.

‘Funny little thing,’ Margot murmured. ‘What are you dreaming of?’

She had fetched a nightdress she kept for visiting granddaughters, and together the women fed small hands and arms through the sleeves. The girl did not wake.

Meanwhile, Jonathan washed and dried the tankards, while Joe concealed the night’s takings in the regular place and swept the floor. From a corner he dislodged the cat that had slipped in unnoticed earlier in the evening. Offended, it stalked out of the shadows and made for the hearth, where the embers were still glowing.

‘Don’t go thinking you can settle here,’ Margot told the animal, but her husband intervened.

‘It’s deathly out. Let the creature stay, the once.’

Rita settled the child on the bed in the pilgrims’ room next to the sleeping man. ‘I’ll stay here for the night to keep an eye on them,’ she said, and when Margot proposed bringing in a truckle bed, ‘The chair will be all right. I’m used to it.’

The house settled.

‘It makes you think,’ Margot murmured, her head at long last on the pillow, and Joe muttered, ‘It does, that’s for sure.’ They shared their thoughts in whispered voices. Where had they come from, these unknown people? And why here, to their own inn, the Swan? And what precisely was it that had happened tonight? Miracle was the word Jonathan had pronounced, and they tested it on their own tongues. They were used to it in the Bible, where it meant impossible things that happened an impossibly long time ago in places so far away from here that they might as well not exist. Here in the inn, it applied to the laughably improbable chance that Beszant the boat-mender would ever pay his slate in full: now that would be a miracle all right. But tonight, at winter solstice in the Swan at Radcot, the word had a different weight.

‘I shan’t get a wink of sleep for puzzling over it,’ Joe said. But miracle or no, they were tired and so, with the long night more than half over already, they blew out the candle. The night closed over them and almost immediately wonderment came to an end.

Downstairs, in the pilgrims’ room where her patients, man and child, were asleep side by side on the bed, Rita sat awake in the armchair. The man’s breath was slow and noisy. The air entering and leaving his lungs had to make its way past swollen membranes, through passages filled with drying blood whose paths had been altered and reset in the past hours. It was no wonder it made a sound like the teeth of a saw on wood. In the silences where his breath tipped from in to out, she could hear the insubstantial flutter of the child’s breath. Behind them both, in the background, the breath of the river, an endless exhalation.

She ought to sleep, but had been waiting to be alone to think. Methodically, dispassionately, she went over it all again. She watched herself perform the routine checks, noted all the signs she had been trained to look for. Where was her mistake? Once, twice, three times she went through it all in close detail. She found no error.

What then?

Since her learning was of no use, she looked to her experience for elucidation. Had there ever been an instance when she had been unsure whether a patient was dead or alive? It was commonplace to say that a person was at death’s door, as if there were some real line between life and death and a person might stand upon it for a time. But she had never in such circumstances had any difficulty in discerning which side of the line the patient was on. No matter how far illness had progressed, no matter how great the weakness, a patient was alive until the moment of death. There was no hovering. No in-between.

Margot had sent them all to bed with the encouraging thought that enlightenment would come naturally with the dawn, a sentiment Rita shared with regard to other kinds of trouble, but this was different. The questions in her mind related to the body, and the body was governed by laws. Everything she knew told her that what she had experienced could not happen. Dead children do not come back to life. There were two possibilities: either the child was not alive – she listened: there it was, the delicate breath – or she had not been dead. She considered again all the indications of death that she had checked. Waxy white skin. Absence of breathing. Absence of pulse. Pupil dilation. She revisited the long room in memory and knew she had checked each of these things. Every indication of death had been present. The fault was not in her. Where was it, then?

Rita closed her eyes the better to focus. She had decades of nursing experience, but her knowledge did not end there. She had spent long evenings studying books intended for the use of surgeons, had memorized anatomy, had mastered the science of the apothecary. Her practical experience had developed these pools of knowledge into a deep reservoir of understanding. She now permitted the evening’s experience to be placed alongside what she knew. She did not chase after explanations or make effortful attempts to connect thoughts. She simply waited, with a growing thrill of trepidation and exhilaration, until the conclusion that had been carefully preparing itself in the depths came to the surface.

The laws of life and death, as she had learnt them, were incomplete. There was more to life, more to death, than medical science had known.

A door opened, beckoning her towards new knowledge.

Again she missed God. She had shared everything with Him. From childhood she had gone to Him with every question, doubt, delight and triumph. He had accompanied every advance in her thinking, in action He had been her daily collaborator. But God was gone. This was something she was going to have to work out by herself.

What to do about it?

She listened. The breathing of the girl. The breathing of the man. The breath of the river.

The river … She would start there.

Rita laced up her boots and buttoned herself into her coat. In her bag she groped for something – it was a slim tin box – and dropped it into her pocket before creeping quietly outside. Around her lantern flame the chill darkness expanded vastly, but she could make out the edges of the path. She stepped off it and on to the grass. As much by feel as by sight, she made her way to the riverbank. The cold air sidled through her buttonholes and the stitches of her muffler. She walked through the warm steam of her own exhalation, felt it lay itself as wetness on her face.

Here was the boat, upturned on the grass. She pulled off a glove, and her cautious fingers found jagged edges of wood, but then a solid part; she placed her lantern there.

She took the box from her pocket and held it for a moment between her teeth while – ignoring the cold – she gathered the folds of her skirt and tucked a bunch of hem into the same pocket so that she could crouch without getting her dress wet. Before her was the dark shimmer of the river. She reached forward and down till she felt it nip viciously at the flesh of her fingers. Good. Opening the tin, she removed from it a glass-and-metal vial with complications impossible to see in the dark. By feel, she immersed the tube in the freezing water and counted. Then she rose and, with all the care her numb fingers could muster, closed the tube in its case for protection, and without bothering to straighten her dress made her way as swiftly as she could back to the inn.

In the pilgrims’ room she held the tube as close to the lantern as was necessary to read the gauge, then took a notebook and a pencil out of her bag. She wrote down the temperature of the water.

It wasn’t much. But it was a start.

She eased the child off the bed and settled her gently on her lap, in the chair. The little head nodded to rest against her chest. I won’t sleep now, she thought as she arranged the blankets to cover herself and the child. Not after all this. Not in this chair.

As she prepared herself to sit out the night, with scratchy eyes and an aching back, her namesake came to mind. Saint Margaret who consecrated her virginity to God and was so determined not to marry that she bore the pain of torture sooner than become a wife. She was the patron saint of pregnant women and childbirth. In her early days at the convent, washing the filthy, bloodied sheets, laying out the bodies of the women who had died in childbirth, Rita had been rather relieved that her own future was as God’s bride. She would never be sundered by a child emerging from her belly. God had left her, but her commitment to virginity had never wavered.

Rita closed her eyes. Her arms folded around the child, whose sleeping weight rested heavily against her. She felt the rise and fall of the girl’s breathing, and measured her own inhalations so that as her chest fell, the child’s expanded; as the child’s fell, her own filled the space. An obscure pleasure took hold of her; she sought drowsily to identify it, name it, and couldn’t.

An idea came floating towards her in the dark.

If she doesn’t belong to this man. If nobody wants her. She could be mine …

But before she had time to register her own thinking, the sound of the river, endless and low, filled her mind. It nudged her from the solidity of wakefulness, carried her on to the current of the night where, without awareness of what was happening, she drifted … drifted … into the dark sea of sleep.

All were not sleeping, though. The drinkers and the storytellers had some way to walk before they found their beds for the night. One of them turned away from the river on leaving the Swan and skirted the fields to find his way to the barn two miles off where he slept with the horses. He regretted that he had nobody waiting for him, nobody he could shake awake and say, ‘You won’t believe what’s just happened!’ He pictured himself telling the horses what he had witnessed that night, saw their large unbelieving eyes. Nay, they will say, he thought, and That’s a good joke, I’ll remember that. But it wasn’t horses he wanted to tell; the story was too fine to be squandered on animal ears. He turned off the direct path and made a detour to the cottages by Gartin’s fields where his cousin lived.

He knocked.

No one answered, so the story made him knock again, a full-fisted hammering.

In the adjoining cottage, a window was flung up and a woman put her head out in her nightcap to remonstrate with him.

‘Wait!’ he said. ‘Hold your scolding till you know what I have come to tell you!’

‘Is that you, Fred Heavins?’ She peered in the direction the voice was coming from. ‘Drunken stories, I shouldn’t wonder!’ she grumbled. ‘As if I haven’t heard enough of those to last me a lifetime!’

‘I’m not drunk,’ he said, offended. ‘Look! I can walk in a straight line, see?’ He placed foot in front of foot with elaborate ease.

‘As if that proves anything!’ she laughed into the night. ‘When there is no light to see by, any drunk can walk in a straight line!’

The argument was interrupted by the opening of his cousin’s door. ‘Frederick? What on earth is it?’

Simply, with no embellishments, Fred told what had happened at the Swan.

Leaning out of the window, the neighbour was drawn in, at first unwillingly, to the story, then she called to someone behind her.

‘Come, Wilfred. Listen to this!’

Before long, Fred’s cousin’s children were shaken out of their beds in their nightgowns, and the neighbours on all sides were roused too.

‘What is she like, then, this girl?’

He described her skin, as white as the glazed jug on his grandmother’s kitchen windowsill; he told of her hair, that hung in a dead straight curtain and was the same colour dry as wet.

‘What colour are her eyes?’

‘Blue … Blueish, at any rate. Or grey.’

‘How old is she?’

He shrugged. How was he to know? ‘If she was by my side she’d come up to … about here.’ He indicated with his hand.

‘About four, then? What do you reckon?’

The women discussed it and agreed. About four.

‘And what’s ’er name, this girl?’

Again he was stumped. Who would have thought a story needed all this detail, things he had never considered while it was happening?

‘I dunno. Nobody asked her.’

‘Nobody asked her name!’ The women were scandalized.

‘She was drowsy, like. Margot and Rita said to let her sleep. But her father’s name is Daunt. Henry Daunt. We found it in his pocket. He’s a photographer.’

‘So he’s her father, is he?’

‘I’d’ve thought so … Wouldn’t you? It was him brought her in. They arrived together.’

‘Perhaps he was only taking her photograph?’

‘And they both half drowned, taking a photograph? How do you make that out?’

There was a general hubbub of conversation between the windows, as the story was discussed, its missing pieces identified, attempts made to fill them in … Fred began to feel left out of his own tale, sensed it slipping from his grasp and altering in ways he hadn’t anticipated. It was like a living thing that he had caught but not trained; now it had slipped the leash and was anybody’s.

He became aware of a persistent, urgent whisper. ‘Fred!’

A woman was beckoning him to a lower-floor window at the next-door house. As he approached she leant forwards, candle in hand, yellow hair escaping from her nightcap.

‘What does she look like?’

He started again with the white skin and the nondescript hair, but she shook her head. ‘I mean, who does she look like? Does she look like the fellow?’

‘The state he’s in, I’d say there ain’t nobody on earth looks like him.’

‘Has he got the same hair? Limp and mousy?’

‘His is dark and wiry.’

‘Ah!’ She nodded meaningfully and left a dramatic pause while she gazed at him. ‘Did she remind you of anyone?’

‘It’s funny you should ask … I had the feeling she reminded me of someone, but I can’t think who.’

‘Is it …?’ She beckoned him closer and whispered a name in his ear.

When he stood back from her, his mouth was open and his eyes wide.

‘Oh!’ he said.

She gave him a look. ‘She would be about four now, wouldn’t she?’

‘Yes, but …’

‘Keep it under your hat,’ she said. ‘I work up there. I’ll let them know in the morning.’

Fred was called then by the others. How did the man, the girl and a camera fit in a boat small enough to go under Devil’s Weir? He explained there was no camera in the boat. So how did they make the fellow out to be a photographer if he had no camera? Because of what was in his pockets. What was in his pockets, again?

He gave in to demand, telling the story once and again, and the second time he put more detail in, and the third time he anticipated the questions before they arose, and by the fourth time he had it just so. He left out the idea planted by the neighbour with the yellow hair. Finally, an hour after he arrived and frozen to the core, Frederick took his leave.

In the barn he told the story once more, in a mutter, to the horses. They opened their eyes and listened unsurprised to the beginning of the story. By the time he was halfway through they had returned to sleep, and before the end, so had he.

Back at his cousin’s cottage was an outbuilding, partly concealed by shrubs. Behind it, a pile of old rags with a hat on top organized itself into a man, albeit a scruffy one, and struggled to its feet. He waited to be sure that Frederick Heavins was out of the way, and then set off himself. Towards the river.

As Owen Albright followed the river downstream to reach the comfortable house he had bought in Kelmscott when he returned from his lucrative adventures on the sea, he didn’t feel the cold. Usually the walk home from the Swan was a time for regret – regret that his joints ached so badly, that he had drunk too much, that the best of life had passed him by and he had only aches and pains ahead of him now, a gradual decline till at the end he would sink into the grave. But having witnessed one miracle, he now saw miracles everywhere: the dark night sky his old eyes had ignored thousands of times before tonight unfolded itself above his head with the vastness of eternal mystery. He stopped to stare up and marvel. The river was splashing and chiming like silver on glass; the sound spilt into his ear, resonated in chambers of his mind he’d never known existed. He lowered his head to look at the water. For the first time in a lifetime by the river, he noticed – really noticed – that under a moonless sky the river makes its own mercurial light. Light that is also darkness; darkness that is also light.

A few things came home to him then – things he had always known but that had been buried under the days of his life. That he missed his father, who had died more than sixty years ago when Owen was still a boy. That he had been lucky in life and had much to be thankful for. That the woman waiting for him at home in bed was a kind and loving soul. And more: his knees didn’t hurt as much as usual, and there was an expansiveness in his chest that reminded him of how it had been to be young.

At home, he shook Mrs Connor’s shoulder before he had even undressed.

‘Don’t go thinking what you’re thinking,’ she grumbled. ‘And don’t bring the cold in with you either.’

‘Listen!’ he told her. ‘Just listen to this!’ And the story spilt out of him, the girl and the stranger, dead and alive.

‘What you been drinking?’ Mrs Connor wanted to know.

‘Hardly a thing.’ And he told her the story all over again, because she hadn’t grasped it.

She half sat up to see him properly, and there he was, the man she had worked for for thirty years and shared a bed with for twenty-nine, and he was still dressed, upright, a torrent of words pouring from him. She couldn’t make sense of it. Even when he had finished speaking, he stood there as if under a spell.

She got out of bed to help him off with his clothes. It wasn’t unknown for him to have such a skinful that he couldn’t manage his buttons alone. He wasn’t staggering though, nor did he lean on her, and when she unbuttoned his breeches she discovered him full of the kind of vigour that a drunk man is unlikely to sustain.

‘Look at you,’ she half chided him, and he embraced her with a kiss the like of which they had not shared since the early years of their time together. They rolled and tumbled in the bed for a little while, and when they were done, instead of turning over and going to sleep, Owen Albright kept her in his arms and kissed her hair.

‘Marry me, Mrs Connor.’

She laughed. ‘Whatever’s got into you, Mr Albright?’

He kissed her cheek, and she felt his smile in the kiss.

She was nearly asleep when he spoke again. ‘I saw it with my own eyes. It was me that held the candle. Dead, she was. That was one minute. And the next – alive!’

She could smell the breath from him. He wasn’t drunk. Mad, perhaps.

They slept.

Jonathan, still dressed, waited till he heard silence in the Swan. He let himself out of the upstairs room and came down the external staircase. He was underdressed for the weather, but he didn’t care. He was warmed by the story he held in his heart. He took the opposite direction from Owen Albright, turned upstream and walked against the river. His head was alive with ideas and he walked rapidly to deposit them with the person who would surely want to know all about it.

Arriving at the parsonage at Buscot, he rapped loudly at the door. There being no answer, he rapped again, and again, until he was knocking without cease, with no regard to the lateness of the hour.

The door opened.

‘The parson!’ Jonathan burst out. ‘I must speak to the parson!’

‘But Jonathan,’ said the door-opener, a figure clad in a dressing gown and nightcap, who was rubbing his eyes, ‘It is I.’ The man took off his nightcap, displaying an untidy mass of greying hair.

‘Oh. Now I know you.’

‘Is someone dying, Jonathan? Is it your father? Have you come to fetch me?’

‘No!’ And Jonathan, who wanted to explain that his reason for coming was the very opposite of that, fell over his words in his rush to tell, and all the parson could understand was that nobody was dead.

Sleepily, he interrupted. ‘You cannot rouse people from their sleep for no reason, Jonathan. This is no night for a boy to be out – too cold by far. You should be in bed yourself. Go home and sleep.’

‘But Parson, it is the same story! All over again! Just like Jesus!’

The parson saw that his visitor’s face was white with cold. His upslanting eyes were running and the tears were freezing on his flat cheeks. His entire face was illuminated with the pleasure of seeing the parson, and his tongue, always too big for his mouth so that it sometimes got in the way of his speech, was resting on his lower lip. Seeing him, the parson was reminded that Jonathan, for all his goodness, was incapable of taking care of himself. He opened the door wide and ushered the boy in.

In the kitchen, the parson heated milk in a pan and placed bread in front of his guest. Jonathan ate and drank – no miracle would get in the way of that – and then told his story again. The child that was dead and came to life again.

The parson listened. He asked a few questions: ‘When you thought to come here, were you in your bed and had been sleeping there? … No? … Well, then, was it your father or Mr Albright that told the story of this child in the inn tonight?’ When he had ascertained that the event – extraordinary and impossible, as Jonathan described it – had some basis in something that had actually happened, and was not the boy’s dream or a tall tale told by some drinker, he nodded. ‘So, in fact, the little girl was not dead at all. But everyone thought she was.’

Jonathan shook his head vehemently. ‘I caught her. I held her. I touched her eye.’ He mimed the catching of a heavy bundle, the holding of it, then the gentle fingertip.

‘A person might seem dead after something terrible has happened. That is possible. To appear to be dead, but in fact only be in a – a kind of sleep.’

‘Like Snow White? I kissed her. Was it that that woke her up?’

‘That is just a story, Jonathan.’

Jonathan considered. ‘Like Jesus, then.’

The parson frowned and was lost for words.

‘She was dead,’ Jonathan added. ‘Rita thought so.’

That was a surprise. Rita was the most reliable person the parson knew.

Jonathan gathered up the breadcrumbs and chewed them.

The parson rose. It was more than he could take in.

‘It’s cold and it’s late. Sleep here for what remains of the night, eh? Here’s a blanket, look, on this chair. You’re worn out.’

Jonathan wanted something else. ‘I’m right, aren’t I, Parson? It’s like Jesus, all over again?’

The parson thought if he was lucky his bed would still have a parson-shaped bit of warmth in it. He nodded. ‘The way you have put it before me, yes, Jonathan. The parallels are inescapable. But let’s not cudgel our brains tonight.’

Jonathan grinned. ‘I’m the one that brought you the story.’

‘I won’t forget that. I heard it from you first.’

Jonathan settled down happily in the kitchen chair and his eyes began to close.

The parson climbed the stairs wearily back to his room. In summer he was a different man, sprightly and alert, and people took him for a man a decade younger than his years, but in winter he sank as the skies darkened, and by December he was always tired. When he went to bed he drowned in sleep; when he was wakened from it, dragged from the bleak depths, he was somehow always unrefreshed.

He didn’t know what it was, but something strange had happened tonight at the Swan at Radcot. He would go over there tomorrow. He climbed into his bed, aware that in June it would be getting light already at this time. Yet there were hours of this winter darkness ahead.

‘Let the child – if there is a child – be all right,’ he prayed. ‘And let it soon be spring.’

And then he was asleep.

Clutching his ragged coat to him as if he believed it might afford some protection against the weather, the tramp followed the path to the river. The story he had heard had the smell of money to him – and he knew who might want to buy it. It was not a good path: rocks jutted out of the soil to trick the boots of even a sober man, and where the going was flat it was slippery. When he stumbled, as he did now and again, he flung his arms out for balance and by a miracle found it. Perhaps there were spirits in the darkness that gripped his frozen hands and held him safe. It was a ticklish thought and it made him chuckle. He stumbled on for a bit, and the going was thirsty work. His tongue was furred and stinking like a three-day-dead mouse, so he stopped for a drink from the bottle in his pocket, and then stumbled on a bit more.

When he came to the river, he turned upstream. There were no landmarks in the dark, but at about the time he thought he must surely be level with Brandy Island, he came to a spot he knew.

The name Brandy Island was a new one. In the old days it was just The Island and nobody needed another name for it because nobody ever went there and there was nothing to see. But when the new people came to Radcot Lodge – Mr Vaughan at first and later his young wife – one of the changes they made was the construction on this river-bound sliver of land of the big distillery and vitriol works, and that was what gave the island its name. Acres of fields belonging to Mr Vaughan were turned over to sugar beet, and a light railway was installed to transport the beet on to the island and bring the brandy back. There were jobs a-plenty making liquor on Brandy Island. Or there had been. Something had happened. The brandy was no good or the distillery was inefficient or Mr Vaughan lost interest … But the name had stuck. The buildings were still there, though the machinery lay silent, and the rail tracks still ran to the river’s edge, but the crossing had been dismantled and any crates of ghostly brandy that came rattling along the rails now would end up at the bottom of the river …

What to do? He had thought he might stand on the bank and holler, but now he was here he realized the futility of such a thing. Then – fancy that! – he noticed a small rowing boat moored at the river’s edge – a little one such as a woman might row, left there by chance at just the moment he needed it. He congratulated himself on his luck – the gods were on his side tonight.

He lowered himself into the boat, and though it rocked alarmingly beneath him, he was too drunk to panic and too much a child of the river to topple in. He settled himself and old habit rowed for him, till he felt the nudge of the island’s bank. It was not the landing place, but no matter. Out he clambered, getting wet up to his knees. He climbed up the slope and made his way. The distillery loomed three storeys high in the centre of the island. To the east, the vitriol works. Behind that, the store house. He was as quiet as he could be, but not quiet enough – when his boot tangled with something and he stumbled, a hand came from nowhere and tightened on the back of his neck, keeping him down. A thumb and four fingers pressed painfully into the tendons.

‘It’s me,’ he gasped, winded. ‘It’s only me!’

The fingers loosened. Not a word was uttered, but he followed the man by sound until they came to the store house.

It was a windowless space, and the air was densely fragrant. Yeast and fruit and heady sweetness with a bitter edge, so thick you could hardly inhale it but almost needed to swallow to get it down. The brazier illuminated bottles, copper vessels and barrels, all haphazardly put together. It was nothing like the modern, industrial-scale equipment that had once existed in the factory, though it had been fabricated from pieces stolen from there and with the same aim in mind: the production of liquor.

The man did not so much as glance at his visitor, but settled himself on a stool, where his slim, slight frame was darkly silhouetted against the orange light from the brazier. Without turning, he concentrated on relighting his pipe beneath the low brim of his hat. When it was done, he sucked on it. Only when he had exhaled and added a note of cheap tobacco to the odour did he speak.

‘Who saw you come?’

‘Nobody.’

Silence.

‘No one’s about. Too cold,’ the tramp insisted.

The man nodded. ‘Tell.’

‘A girl,’ the tramp told him. ‘At the Swan at Radcot.’

‘What about her?’

‘Someone have pulled her out the river tonight. Dead, they say.’

There was a pause.

‘What of it?’

‘She is alive.’

At this the man’s face turned, but was no more visible than before. ‘Alive? Or dead? She must be one or the other.’

‘She was dead. Now she is alive.’

There was a slow shaking of the head and the man spoke flatly. ‘You have been dreaming. That or you’ve drunk one too many.’

‘It is what they are saying. I only came to tell you what they are saying. Dead they took her from the river and now she lives again. At the Swan.’

The man stared back into the brazier. The messenger waited to see if there was any further response, but after a minute saw there would be none.

‘A little gesture … For the trouble I’ve took. It’s a cold night.’

The man grunted. He rose, casting a dark and flickering shadow on to the wall, and reached into the darkness. From it his hand extracted a small, corked bottle. He passed it to the tramp, who pocketed it, touched the brim of his hat and retreated.

Back at the Swan, the cat was asleep, curled against the chimney breast that still exhaled a gentle warmth. Its eyelids flickered with the images of cat dreams that would be even more perplexing to us than the stories our human brains concoct nocturnally. Its ear twitched and the dream faded instantly. A sound – almost nothing, the sound of grass crushed underfoot – and the cat was already on all fours. It crossed the room swiftly and silently and sprang to the window ledge. Feline vision pierced the night with ease.

Appearing by stealth from the back of the inn, a slight figure in an overlong coat, hat pulled down low, slipped along the wall, passing the window, and stopped at the door. There was a gentle rattle as he surreptitiously tested the handle. The latch was secured. Other places might be unlocked, but an inn, with its many barrels of temptation, must be locked at night. Now the man returned to the window. Unaware he was being watched, his fingers worked their way by feel around the window frame. Thwarted. Margot was no fool. Hers was the kind of mind that remembered not only to lock the door at closing time, but also to renew the putty in the windows every summer, to maintain the paintwork so the frames could not rot, to replace broken panes. A puff of exasperation emerged from beneath the low brim of the hat. The man paused and a gleam of thought passed across his eyes. But not for long. It was too cold to hang about. He turned and strode smartly away. He knew exactly where to put his feet in the dark, avoided furrows, dodged boulders, found the bridge, crossed it, and on the other side diverged from the path into the trees.

Long after the intruder had disappeared from sight, the cat followed him by ear. The drag of twigs across the woollen grain of a coat, the contact of heels on stone-cold earth, the stir of woodland creatures disturbed … until, eventually, nothing.

The cat dropped to the floorboards and returned to the hearth, where it pressed itself against the warm stone again and went back to sleep.

So it was that after the impossible event, and the hour of the first puzzling and wondering, came the various departures from the Swan and the first of the tellings. But finally, while the night was still dark, everybody at last was in bed and the story settled like sediment in the minds of them all, witnesses, tellers, listeners. The only sleepless one was the child herself, who, at the heart of the tale, breathed the seconds lightly in and lightly out, as she gazed into the darkness and listened to the sound of the river as it rushed by.

Tributaries

A RIVER ON a map is a simple thing. Our river starts at Trewsbury Mead, and follows a course of some two hundred and thirty-six miles to reach the sea at Shoeburyness. But anyone who takes the trouble to follow its route, whether by boat or on foot, cannot help being aware that, furlong by furlong, singleness of direction is not its most obvious feature. En route the river does not seem particularly intent on reaching its destination. Instead it winds its way in time-wasting loops and diversions. Its changes of direction are frequently teasing: on its journey it heads at different times north, south and west, as though it has forgotten its easterly destination – or put it aside for the while. At Ashton Keynes it splits into so many rivulets that every house in the village must have a bridge to its own front door; later, around Oxford, it takes a great unhurried detour around the city. It has other capricious tricks up its sleeve: in places it slows to drift lazily in wide pools before recovering its urgency and speeding on again. At Buscot it splits into twin streams to maroon a lengthy piece of territory, then regathers its water into a single channel.

If this is hard to understand from a map, the rest is harder. For one thing, the river that flows ever onwards is also seeping sideways, irrigating the fields and land to one side and the other. It finds its way into wells and is drawn up to launder petticoats and be boiled for tea. It is absorbed into root membranes, travels up cell by cell to the surface, is held in the leaves of watercress that find themselves in the soup bowls and on the cheeseboards of the county’s diners. From teapot or soup dish, it passes into mouths, irrigates complex internal biological networks that are worlds in themselves, before returning eventually to the earth, via a chamber pot. Elsewhere the river water clings to the leaves of the willows that droop to touch its surface, and then when the sun comes up a droplet appears to vanish into the air, where it travels invisibly and might join a cloud, a vast floating lake, until it falls again as rain. This is the unmappable journey of the Thames.

And there is more. What we see on a map is only the half of it. A river no more begins at its source than a story begins with the first page. Take Trewsbury Mead, for instance. That photograph, do you remember? The one they were so quick to dismiss, because it wasn’t picturesque? An ordinary ash in an ordinary field, they said, and so it appears, but look more closely. See this indentation in the ground, at the foot of the tree? See how it is the beginning of a furrow, shallow, narrow and unremarkable, that runs away from the tree and out of the picture altogether? See here, in the dip, where something catches the light and shows as a few ragged patches of silver in the grey shades of muddy soil? Those bright marks are water, seeing sunlight for the first time in what might be a very long time. It comes from underground, where in all the spaces beneath our feet, in the fractures and voids in the rock, in caverns and fissures and channels, there are waterways as numerous, as meandering, as circuitous as anything above ground. The beginning of the Thames is not the beginning – or rather it is only to us that it seems like a beginning.

In fact, Trewsbury Mead might not be the beginning in any case. There are those who say it’s the wrong place. The not-even-the-beginning is not here but elsewhere, at a place called Seven Springs, which is the source of the Churn, a river that joins the Thames at Cricklade. And who is to say? The Thames that goes north, south, east and west to finally go east, that seeps to one side and the other as it moves forwards, that goes slow as it goes fast, that evaporates into the sky whilst meandering to the sea, is more about motion than about beginnings. If it has a beginning, it is located in a dark, inaccessible place. Better study where it goes than where it comes from.

Ah, tributaries! That’s what I was meaning to come to. The Churn, the Key, the Ray, the Coln, the Leach and the Cole: in the upper reaches of the Thames, these are the streams and rivulets that come from elsewhere to add their own volume and momentum. And tributaries are about to join this story. We might, in this quiet hour before dawn, leave this river and this long night and trace the tributaries back, to see not their beginnings – mysterious, unknowable things – but, more simply, what they were doing yesterday.

What Do You Make of It?

THE DAY BEFORE the coming of the child, at half past three in the afternoon, at a farmhouse in Kelmscott, a woman stepped out of the kitchen door and in some haste crossed the yard to the barn. Her fair curls were tucked neatly into her bonnet, and her blue dress was simple, as befits a busy farmer’s wife, but she endowed it with a prettiness that suggested she was still young at heart. She had a swaying gait; with every second step she stooped to the left, with every step in between she rose again. It did not slow her. Nor was she hindered by the patch that covered her right eye. It was made of the same blue fabric as her dress and a white ribbon held it in place.

She came to the barn. It smelt of blood and iron. Inside was a man who stood with his back to her. He was powerfully made, unusually tall, with a broad back and wiry black hair. As she put her hand on the door frame, he tossed a crimson-stained cloth to the ground and reached for his whetstone. She heard a ringing rise in the air as he started to sharpen the blade. Beyond him lay a row of corpses, neatly arranged snout to tail; the blood ran from them and found the shallows in the ground.

‘Dearest …’

He turned. The darkness of his face was not the hale brown achieved by a lifetime’s work out of doors under an English sun, but the kind that originated in another continent altogether. His nose was broad and his lips thick. At the sight of his wife, his brown eyes lit up and he smiled.

‘Watch your hem, Bess.’ A rivulet of blood was trickling towards her. ‘You’re in your good shoes too. I’m nearly done here, I’ll be indoors in a little while.’

Then he saw the look on her face and the duet of knife and stone came to an end.

‘What is it?’

For all the differences between the two faces, a single emotion animated their expressions.

‘One of the children?’ he asked.

She nodded. ‘Robin.’

The first-born. His face fell. ‘What is it this time?’

‘This letter …’

His gaze fell to her hand. She held not a folded piece of paper, but a pile of ripped pieces.

‘Susie found it. Robin brought her a jacket to mend last time he came to visit. You know how dainty she is with her needle, though she is only twelve. A very fine jacket too, I dread to think what it cost. There was a great gash in the sleeve, she says, though you wouldn’t know it now. She had to unstitch the pocket seam to get some thread the right colour, and while she was about it, she found this letter, torn to pieces. I came across her in the drawing room puzzling it out like some kind of a game.’

‘Show me,’ he suggested, and he took a handful of her skirt to keep it out of the blood as they stepped towards the ledge that ran along one inner wall. She laid out the fragments.

‘rent,’ she read aloud, lightly touching one of the pieces. Her hand was a working one, she wore no rings except her wedding band and her nails were short and neat.

‘Love,’ he read; he did not touch the paper he read from, for there was blood under his nails and on his fingers.

‘at an end … What is at an end, do you suppose, Robert?’

‘I don’t know … How did it come to be torn into pieces like this?’

‘Did he tear it up? Is it a letter he received and didn’t like?’

‘Try putting that piece with this,’ he suggested. But no, the two did not fit together. ‘It is a woman’s hand.’

‘A good hand too. My letters are not so well formed as these.’

‘You do well enough, my dear.’

‘But look how straight she writes. Not a single blot. It is nearly as good a hand as yours, with all your years of schooling. What do you make of it, Robert?’

He peered silently for a while. ‘There is no point trying to reconstitute the whole. What we have is only a fraction. Let’s try something else …’

They moved the pieces round, her deft hand operating according to his instruction, and arrived at an organization of the fragments into three sections. The first was of pieces too small to be meaningful: halves of words, ‘the’s and ‘of’s and bits of margin. They put them aside.

The second set contained phrases which they read now aloud.

‘Love’

‘entirely without’

‘child will soon entirely’

‘help from no quarter but you’

‘rent’

‘wait no longer’

‘father of my’

‘at an end’

The final group was a set of fragments all containing the same word:

‘Alice’

‘Alice’

‘Alice’

Robert Armstrong turned to his wife and she turned her face to him. Her blue gaze fretted anxiously and his own was grave.

‘Tell me, my love,’ he said, ‘what do you make of it?’

‘It is this Alice. I thought at first it was her name, the letter-writer. But a person writing a letter does not say their name so many times. They say, I. This Alice is someone else.’

‘Yes.’

‘Child,’ she repeated wonderingly. ‘Father …’

‘Yes.’

‘I can’t make it out … Does Robin have a child, Robert? Do we have a grandchild? Why has he not told us? Who is this woman? What trouble is it that has made her write a letter like this? And for the letter to be torn like this. I fear …’

‘Do not fear, Bess. What good can fear do? Suppose there is a child? Suppose there is a woman? There are worse mistakes a young man can make than falling in love, and if a child has come from it, we will be the first to welcome it. Our hearts are strong enough, aren’t they?’

‘But why is the letter half destroyed?’

‘Supposing there is some trouble … There are few things that cannot be put right by love and there is no shortage of that here. Where love fails, money will usually do the trick.’

He looked steadily into her left eye. It was a good blue eye, and he waited until he saw the worry ebb from it and confidence return.

‘You are right. What shall we do, then? Will you talk to him?’

‘No. Not yet, anyhow.’ He turned back to the pieces of paper. From the group of unreadable fragments he pointed at one. ‘What do you make of this?’

She shook her head. A rip had gone horizontally right through the middle of the word, slicing top from bottom.

‘I think this says, Bampton.’

‘Bampton? Why, that’s only four miles away!’

Armstrong consulted his watch. ‘It’s too late to go now. There is cleaning-up to do and these carcasses to be dealt with. If I don’t press on it will be too dark to see what I’m doing by the time I feed the pigs. I shall get up early, and go to Bampton first thing.’

‘All right, Robert.’

She turned to go.

‘Watch your hem!’

In the house, Bess Armstrong went to her bureau. The key turned in the lock only awkwardly. It had been so ever since it was mended. She remembered a day when Robin was eight. She’d come home and found the bureau forced open. Papers were everywhere, money and documents missing, and Robin had taken her by the hand to say, ‘I disturbed the thief, a rough-looking fellow, and look, Mother, here is the open window where I saw him make his escape.’ Her husband had immediately gone out looking for the man, but she had not followed him. Instead she had put her hands to her eye patch, and slid it round so that it covered her good eye and revealed the one that looked sideways and Saw things an ordinary eye didn’t. She took her son by the shoulders, and trained her Seeing eye on him. When Armstrong had come home, having found no trace of the rough-looking thief, she said, ‘No, I don’t suppose you did, for there was no such man. The thief was Robin.’

‘No!’ Armstrong protested.

‘It was Robin. He was too pleased with the story he told. It was Robin.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

They had not been able to reach an agreement, and it was one of the things that had been buried under the weight of the days since. But every time she turned the key of the lock, she remembered.

She folded a piece of paper into the shape of an envelope. She slid all the unreadable bits of the letter into it, then gathered the set of phrases and put them in too. With the final three pieces of paper between her fingers, she hesitated, uncertain, reluctant to let them go. At last she dropped them into the envelope, with a murmur for each one, like a spell:

‘Alice’

‘Alice’

‘Alice’

She pulled open the bureau drawer, but before she could put the pleat of paper away, an instinct halted her. Not the letter. Not the old story of the bureau and the forced lock. Something else. The sensation of a current rippling transparently through the air.

She tried to catch the tail end of the feeling and name it. Almost too late, yet she did catch it, fleetingly, for she heard the words her tongue pronounced in the empty room:

‘Something is going to happen.’

Outside, Robert Armstrong finished sharpening his knife. He called his second and third sons, and together they hoisted the carcasses on to hooks to bleed them over the gulleys. They rinsed their hands in a pail of rainwater and emptied the water over the floor to wash the worst of the blood away from the slaughter area. When he had set the boys to mopping, he went out to feed the pigs. They usually worked together, but on days when he had something on his mind he preferred to feed the pigs alone.

Effortlessly, Armstrong heaved sacks and spilt the grain into the troughs. He scratched one sow behind her ear, rubbed another on her flank, according to their individual liking. Pigs are remarkable creatures and, though most men are too blind to see it, have intelligence that shows in their eyes. Armstrong was persuaded that every pig had its own character, its own talents, and when he selected a female piglet for breeding he looked not only for physical qualities but for intelligence, foresight, good sense: the qualities that make a good mother. He was in the habit of talking to his pigs as he fed them and today, as usual, he had something to say to each and every one. ‘What have you got to be so grumpy about, Dora?’ and ‘Feeling your age, are you, Poll?’ His gilts, the breeding sows, all had names. The pigs he was growing for the table he did not name, but called them all Piglet. When he chose a new gilt, it was his practice to give her a name starting with the same letter of the alphabet as her mother; it made it easy to trace the breeding line.

He came to Martha in the last sty. She was in pig, would deliver in four days’ time. He filled her trough with grain and her sink with water. She lifted herself from her straw bed and waddled heavily towards the trough at the gate, where she did not immediately eat or drink, but rested her chin on the horizontal bar of the fence and scratched. Armstrong rubbed the top of her head between the ears and she snorted contentedly.

‘Alice,’ he said thoughtfully. The letter had not left his mind the entire time. ‘What do you make of it, Martha?’

The sow looked at him with eyes full of thought.

‘I don’t know what to think, myself,’ he admitted. ‘A first grandchild – is that it? And Robin … What is going on with Robin?’ He sighed heavily.

Martha pondered his boots in the mud for a moment, and when she gazed back up at him it was with a rather pointed look.

He nodded. ‘Quite right. Maud would know. But Maud’s not here, is she?’

Martha’s mother, Maud, had been the best sow he had ever known. She had produced numerous litters of many piglets, never lost one by accident or neglect, but more than that, she had listened to him as no other sow had ever listened. Patient and gentle, she had let him speak his mind; when he shared his joys about the children her eyes lit up with pleasure, and when he told her of his worries – Robin, it was nearly always Robin – her eyes were full of wisdom and sympathy, and he never came away without feeling somehow better about things. Her quiet and kindly listening had made it possible to speak his thoughts aloud, and sometimes it was only when he spoke his thoughts that he knew he had them. It was surprising how a man’s mind might remain half in shadow until the right confidante appeared, and Maud had been that confidante. Without her, he might never have known certain things about himself, about his son. On this spot, some years ago, he had shared the disagreement between himself and his wife about Robin and the theft from the bureau. As he retold the sorry tale to Maud, he saw it anew and noticed what he had registered but not paid attention to at the time. I saw a man, Robin had said. I saw his boot disappearing out of the window. It was instinctive in Armstrong to see the best in people, and his faith in the boy was spontaneous. But then, prompted by Maud’s quizzical gaze, he’d remembered the watchful wait that followed the boy’s story, known then in his heart what it meant: that Robin was watching to see whether he’d got away with it. It hurt Armstrong to accept it, but on this occasion Bess was right.

When they had married, Robin was already on the way, put into her womb by another man. Robert had chosen to put this fact aside. This was not difficult, for he loved the boy with all his heart. He had determined to build a family with Bess, not fragmented and splintered, but whole and entire, and he would permit no member of it to be left on the outside. There was love enough for all. Love would hold them together. But when he realized the thief who had left the bureau splintered and its contents ransacked was his own Robin, he wept. Maud had eyed him quizzically. What now? And he had found the answer. Loving the boy even more would put things right. From that day on he had defended Robin even more vigorously than before.

Maud had looked at him again. Oh, really? she’d seemed to say.

The thought of Maud brought tears suddenly to his eyes. One of them fell on to Martha’s thick neck, clung momentarily to the ginger hair that sprouted from it, then rolled into the mud.

Armstrong brought his cuff to his face and wiped the wetness away. ‘This is foolishness,’ he chided himself.

Martha looked steadily at him from between her ginger lashes.

‘But you miss her too, don’t you?’

He thought he saw a mistiness in her eye.

‘How long is it, now?’ He totted up the months in his head. ‘Two years and three months. A long time. Who took her, eh? You were there, Martha. Why didn’t you squeal when they came and stole your mother?’

Martha gave him a long and intent look. He studied her expression, tried to decipher it, and for once failed.

He was giving Martha a final scratch when she lifted her chin from the fence and turned in the direction of the river.

‘What is it?’

He looked that way himself. There was nothing to see, and he had heard nothing either. Still, there must be something … He and the pig exchanged a look. He had never seen that look in her eyes before, yet he had only to compare it with his own sensations to know what it meant.

‘I think you’re right, Martha. Something is going to happen.’

Mrs Vaughan and the River Goblins

A PEARL OF water formed in the corner of an eye. The eye belonged to a young woman who was lying in the bottom of a boat. The bead of liquid rested in the place where the pink inner of the eyelid swells into the dainty complication of a tear duct. It shivered with the rocking motion of the boat but, supported by the lashes that sprouted beneath and above it, did not break or fall.

‘Mrs Vaughan?’

The young woman had rowed across the river, then drawn the blades in and allowed the little boat to drift into the reed bed which now held it. By the time the words from the bank reached her, the thick white river mist had rinsed the urgency out of them. The words drifted into her ear, washed out and waterlogged, and sounded scarcely louder than the thoughts in her own head.

Mrs Vaughan … that’s me, Helena thought. It sounded like the name of another person altogether. She could imagine a Mrs Vaughan and it would be nothing like herself. Someone old. About thirty, probably, with a face like the portraits that hung in the hallway of her husband’s house. It was odd to think that only a few years ago she had been Helena Greville. It seemed a lot longer. When she thought about that girl now, it was as if she were thinking about someone she used to know, and know quite well, but would never see again. Helena Greville was gone for good.

‘It’s too cold to be out, Mrs Vaughan.’

Cold, yes. Helena Vaughan counted the coldnesses. There was the cold of being coatless, hatless, gloveless. The cold of the air that dampened her dress to her skin and raised goosebumps on her chest and arms and legs. There was the cold of the air as it entered her, stinging her nostrils and making her lungs quiver. After all those came the coldness of the river. It was the slowest, taking its time to reach her through the thick planks of the boat, but when it did it burnt the points of her shoulder blades, the back of her skull, her ribcage, the base of her spine, all the places where her body lay hard against the curve of the wood. The river came nudging at the boat, draining her of warmth with its lulling, rocking motion. She closed her eyes.

‘Are you there? Oh, answer me, for heaven’s sake!’

Answer … The word dredged up a memory from a few years ago. Aunt Eliza had talked about an answer. ‘Think before you answer,’ she had said, ‘because opportunities like this don’t come every day.’

Aunt Eliza was the little sister of Helena’s father. Widowed in her forties and childless, she had come to live with her brother and the child of his late marriage, to disrupt and upset them, as Helena saw it. Helena’s mother had died when the child was an infant, and it was Eliza’s view that her niece needed a maternal figure to take her in hand. Eliza’s brother was an eccentric who had neglected to instil proper discipline and the girl was barely educated. Eliza had tried, but she had failed to have much influence. Helena had complained in the early days to her father about Aunt Eliza, and he had told her with a wink, ‘She has nowhere else to go, Pirate. Just nod and say yes to whatever she says, and afterwards do just as you like. That’s what I always do.’ The strategy had worked. Father and daughter had continued to live together in great friendship, and neither one permitted Eliza to interfere with their days on the river and in the boatyard.

In the garden, between exhortations to slow down, Aunt Eliza had told Helena a great many things she already knew perfectly well, since they were about herself. She reminded Helena (as though she might have forgotten) that she was motherless. She alluded to her father’s great age and poor health. While Helena half listened, she had drawn Aunt Eliza in a certain direction and, absorbed in what she was saying, Aunt Eliza had allowed herself to be led. They came to the river and walked along the bank. Helena breathed in the thrill of the cold, bright air, watched the ducks bobbing in the lively water. Her shoulders twitched at the thought of oars. In her stomach she felt the anticipation of that first pull out into the water, that meeting of the boat with the current … ‘Upstream or down?’ her father always said. ‘If it’s not the one it has to be the other – and it’ll be an adventure either way!’

Aunt Eliza was reminding Helena of the state of her father’s finances, which were even more precarious than his health, and then – Helena’s thoughts had been drifting with the river, she might have missed something – Eliza was talking about a Mr Vaughan, his kindness and decency, and the fact that his business was thriving. ‘Though if you do not wish it, your father instructs me to tell you that you have only to say so and the whole thing will be put aside and not a word more said about it,’ Aunt Eliza concluded. This was initially mystifying to Helena, and then suddenly perfectly clear.

‘Which one is this Mr Vaughan?’ she wanted to know.

Aunt Eliza was nonplussed. ‘You have met him several times … Why don’t you pay more attention?’ But to Helena, her father’s friends and associates were versions of the same figure: male, old, dull. None of them were remotely as interesting as her father, and she was surprised he spent any time with them at all.

‘Is Mr Vaughan with Father now?’

She darted off, ignoring Aunt Eliza’s protests and running back towards the house. In the garden, she took a leap over the ferns and sidled up to the study window. By clambering on to the plinth of a large urn and clinging to the window ledge, she could just see into the room, where her father was smoking in the company of another gentleman.

Mr Vaughan was not one of the red-nosed or grizzled ones. She recognized him now as the smiling younger man with whom her father sat up late, over a cigar and a drink. When she went to bed, she could hear them laughing together. She was glad her father had somebody to cheer him up in the evenings. Mr Vaughan had brown hair, brown eyes and a brown beard. Beyond that, the one thing that set him apart was his voice. Most of the time he spoke just like any other Englishman, but once in a while something slipped out of his mouth that had an unfamiliar ring to it. She had been interested in listening out for these odd sounds and had asked him about it.

‘I grew up in New Zealand,’ he had told her. ‘My family has mines there.’

She considered the ordinary man through the window and felt no strong objection to him.

Helena edged her heels from the urn’s plinth and hung, swaying pleasantly from the window ledge, enjoying the stretch in her arms and shoulders. When she heard Aunt Eliza approach she let herself drop.

‘I’ll have to leave home, I suppose, if I marry Mr Vaughan?’

‘You will be leaving home anyway, one day soon. Your father has been so unwell. Your future is uncertain. Naturally he is anxious to see you settled in life. If you were to marry Mr Vaughan, you would go to live with him at Buscot Lodge, whereas if you don’t—’

‘Buscot Lodge?’ Helena came to a halt. She knew Buscot Lodge – a large house on a thrilling reach of the river. It had a long, broad stretch where the water was smooth and even, and a place where the river divided to flow around an island, and just before that, a spot where the water seemed to forget it was a river at all and idled, just like a little lake. There was a millwheel and St John’s Bridge and a boathouse … She had once rowed up close to the boathouse and, standing precariously in her one-man boat, peered in. There was plenty of room in it.

‘Would I be allowed to take my boat?’

‘Helena, this is a serious business. Marriage has nothing to do with boats and the river. It is a binding contract, both in law and in the eyes of God—’

But Helena was off, running at full tilt over the lawn to the door of the house.

When Helena burst into the study, her father’s eyes lit up at the sight of her. ‘What do you think of this daft notion, eh? If it’s a load of nonsense to you, just say the word. On the other hand, a load of nonsense can be just the thing if the fancy takes you … Upstream or down, Pirate? What do you say?’

Mr Vaughan had risen from his chair.

‘Can I bring my boat?’ she asked him. ‘Can I go on the river every day?’

Mr Vaughan, bemused, did not answer immediately.

‘That boat is at the end of its days,’ her father said.

‘It’s not very bad,’ she argued.

‘Holes in it last time I looked.’

She shrugged. ‘I bail.’

‘Like a sieve. Surprised you get so far in it.’

‘When it gets too low in the water, I come back to the bank and upturn it and then set out again,’ she conceded.

They discussed the boat like two immortals for whom drowning was impossible.

Mr Vaughan turned from father to daughter during this exchange. He began to perceive the importance of boats in the matter at hand.

‘I could get it mended for you,’ he suggested. ‘Or get you a new one, if you like.’

She thought. She nodded. ‘All right.’

Aunt Eliza, who had come late to the discussion, glanced sharply at Helena. Something appeared to be concluded, but what? Mr Vaughan took pity and enlightened her.

‘Miss Greville has agreed to allow me to buy her a new boat. With that business out of the way, we can now negotiate the lesser matters. Miss Greville, will you do me the honour of becoming my wife?’

Adventure either way …

‘It’s a deal.’ She nodded firmly.

Aunt Eliza felt that this was all falling far short of what a marriage proposal and acceptance ought to be, and opened her mouth to address Helena, but Helena got in first.

‘I know. Marriage is an important contract in the eyes of God and of the law,’ she parroted. She had seen people conclude important contracts before. Knowing how it was done, she held out her hand for Mr Vaughan to shake.

Mr Vaughan took her hand, turned it, and bowed to plant a kiss upon it. Suddenly it was Helena’s turn to be nonplussed.

Helena’s fiancé was as good as his word. A new boat was ordered and the old one mended ‘for the time being’. Before long she had two boats, a boathouse to put them in, a stretch of river to call her own – and a new name. A little later, her father died. Aunt Eliza went to live with her younger brother in Wallingford. And then a lot of other things happened and Helena Greville was swept clean away on the current and even Mrs Vaughan forgot about her.

Lately it was the old boat – Helena Greville’s – that she chose to take out. She did not go far. Upstream or down? No. She was not in search of adventure. She merely rowed to the far side and let the boat drift into the reeds.

‘Oh, this mist! Whatever will Mr Vaughan say?’ came the watery voice again.

Helena opened her eyes. The air was so full of water it was opaque and she looked at it through the liquid that pooled in the corner of her own eye. She could see nothing of the world – no sky, no trees; even the reeds that surrounded the boat were invisible. She rocked and bobbed with the river, inhaled wetness with the air, watched the mist that moved sluggishly like the current of a semi-stagnant sidestream, like the rivers she knew in her dreams. The whole world was drowned, leaving only her cold self and Helena Greville’s boat – and the river that shifted and pressed beneath her like a thing alive.

She blinked. The tear grew swollen, pooled and flattened, but held to itself in its invisible skin.

What a fearless girl Helena Greville had been. A pirate, her father had called her, and pirate she was. Aunt Eliza had despaired at her.

‘There is another side to the river,’ Eliza used to tell her. ‘Once upon a time there was a naughty little girl who played too close to the bank. One day, while she wasn’t looking, a goblin rose out of the water. He grasped the little girl by the hair and took her back, kicking and splashing, to his own goblin realm under the river. And if you don’t believe me …’ Had she believed her? It was hard to know, now. ‘If you don’t believe me, you have only to listen. Go on, listen now. Do you hear the water splashing?’

Helena had nodded. This was all wonderful to know. Goblins living under the river in their own goblin world. How marvellous!

‘Listen to the sounds between the splashes. Do you hear? There are bubbles, very, very small ones that rise to the surface and pop. Those are the bubbles that carry messages from all the lost children. If your ears are sharp enough you will hear the cries of that little girl and all the other homesick children who are weeping for their mothers and fathers.’

She had listened. Had she heard? She couldn’t remember now. But if the goblins had taken her away down into the water, her father would simply have come and got her back. It was so obvious that Helena Greville felt rather scornful of her aunt for not realizing it herself.

For years and years Helena Greville had forgotten the story about the goblins and their world on the other, deathly side of the river. But now Helena Vaughan remembered it. She came out in her old boat to remember it every day. The sound of the water was a semi-regular, uninsistent lapping, as the river licked and sucked at the boat. She listened to the sound and she listened to the spaces between the sound. It was not difficult to hear the lost children. She could hear them with perfect clarity.

‘Mrs Vaughan! You’ll catch your death! Do come in, Mrs Vaughan!’

The river lapped and the boat rose and fell, and a far-off little voice called without cease for its parents from the depths of the goblin world.

‘It’s all right!’ she whispered, white-lipped. She tensed her cold muscles, readied her trembling limbs to rise. ‘Mummy’s coming!’

She leant out of the boat and, as the vessel tilted, the teardrop spilt from her eye and dropped into the greater wetness of the river. Before she could shift her weight sufficiently to follow it, something righted the boat and she felt herself fall back into it. When she looked up, an indistinct grey figure was bending over the bow of her boat, gripping the cleat. The shadow in the mist then straightened and she saw it elongate like a man standing in a punt. It raised an arm in a motion that resembled the dropping of a pole to find the riverbed, and she then felt a powerful dragging sensation. The speed of progress through the water seemed oddly disconnected from the shadow’s ease of movement. The river loosened its grip and she was towed back towards the bank with a rapidity that surprised her.

A final propulsion brought the grey shape of the jetty into sight.

Mrs Clare the housekeeper was waiting and the gardener was by her side. He reached for the rope and secured the boat. Helena rose and, with Mrs Clare’s hand to steady her, climbed out.

‘You are frozen to the bone! Whatever possessed you, dear?’

Helena turned back towards the water. ‘He’s gone …’

‘Who’s gone?’

‘The ferryman … He towed me back.’

Mrs Clare looked into Helena’s dazed face in perplexity.

‘Did you see anybody?’ she asked the gardener in an undertone.

He shook his head. ‘Unless – do you suppose it were Quietly?’

Mrs Clare frowned and shook her head at him. ‘Don’t go putting fancies in her head. As if things weren’t bad enough already.’

Helena gave a sudden, violent shiver. Mrs Clare shrugged off her coat and wrapped it around her mistress’s shoulders. ‘You worry us all half to death,’ she scolded. ‘Come on in.’

Mrs Clare took one arm firmly, and the gardener took the other, and they made their way without stopping through the garden and back to the house.

On the threshold of the house, Helena halted confusedly and looked back over her shoulder to the garden and the river beyond. It was that time of the afternoon when the light drains rapidly from the sky and the mist was darkening.

‘What is it?’ she murmured, half to herself.

‘What’s what? Did you hear something?’

Mrs Vaughan shook her head. ‘I didn’t hear it. No.’

‘What, then?’

Helena put her head on one side and a new focus came into her eyes as if she were extending the range of her perceptions. The housekeeper sought it too, and the gardener also cocked his head and wondered. The feeling – expectation, or something rather like it – came upon all three of them and they spoke in unison: ‘Something is going to happen.’

A Well-Practised Tale

IT WAS HERE. Mr Vaughan came to a hesitant halt in the street of Oxford townhouses. He looked left and right, but the curtains in the windows of the respectable-looking houses were too thick to tell whether anybody was standing looking out. Still, wearing his hat and with the light wateriness of the air, nobody would recognize him. In any case, it wasn’t as if he were going to go in. He fidgeted for a moment with the handle of his case, to give himself a plausible reason to have stopped, and looked from under his brim at Number 17.

The house shared the trim, correct air of its neighbours. That was the first surprise. He had thought there would be something to set it apart. Every house in the street was a little different from its neighbours, of course, for the builder had taken the trouble to make it so. The one he had stopped in front of had a particularly attractive light set over the front door. But that wasn’t the kind of difference he meant. He had expected a gaudy colour to the front door, perhaps, or something faintly theatrical in the drape of the curtains. But there was nothing of the kind. They are not fools, these people, he thought. Of course they will want to make it look respectable.

The fellow who had mentioned the place to Vaughan was a mere acquaintance and it was something he himself had heard from a friend of a friend. From what Vaughan could remember of the third-hand tale, some man’s wife had been so distraught following the death of her mother that she became a shadow of her former self, barely sleeping, unable to eat, deaf to the loving voices of her husband and children. Doctors were powerless to arrest her decline and at last, dubious yet having exhausted all other possibilities, her husband took her to see a Mrs Constantine. After a couple of meetings with this mysterious person, the wife in question had been restored to health and returned to her domestic and marital responsibilities with all her old vigour. The story as Vaughan had heard it was at so many removes it probably bore only the most tangential relation to the truth. It sounded like a lot of mumbo-jumbo to Vaughan, and he had no belief in psychics, but – so he remembered the acquaintance telling him – whatever it was this Mrs Constantine did, it worked, ‘whether you believed in it or not’.

The house was impeccable in its correctness. The gate and the path and the door were neatness itself. There was no peeling paintwork, no tarnished doorknob, no dirty footprints on the step. Those who called here, he supposed, were to find nothing to encourage them in any reluctance, nothing to cause them to hesitate or draw back. All was spick and span, there was nowhere for doubt to take root. The place was neither too grand for the ordinary man, nor too humble for the wealthy. Why, you have to admire them, he concluded. They have it all just so.

He put his fingertips on the gate and leant to read the name on the brass plaque next to the door: Professor Constantine.

He couldn’t help but smile. Fancy passing herself off as the wife of a university man!

Vaughan was about to lift his fingers from the gate, but hadn’t quite done so – in fact, his intention to turn and depart was mysteriously slow to take effect – when the door to Number 17 opened. In the doorway there appeared a maid, carrying a basket. She was a neat, clean and ordinary maid, exactly the kind he would employ in his own house, and she spoke to him in a neat, clean and ordinary sort of voice.

‘Good morning, Sir. Is it Mrs Constantine you are looking for?’

No, no, he said – except that the words failed to sound in his ears and he realized it was because they had not reached his lips. His efforts to explain away his appearance were confounded by his own hand that opened the latch on the gate, and his legs that stepped up the path to the front door. The maid put down her shopping basket and he watched himself hand her his case and his hat, which she placed on the hall table. He smelt beeswax, noticed the gleam of the staircase spindles, felt the warmth of the house envelope him – and all the while marvelled that he was not where he ought to be, striding away down the street, after a chance pause outside the gate to check the fastening of his case.

‘Would you like to wait for Mrs Constantine in here, Sir?’ the maid said, indicating a doorway. Through the doorway he saw a fire blazing, a tapestry cushion on a leather armchair, a Persian rug. He stepped into the room and was overwhelmed with the desire to stay. He sat at one end of the large sofa and felt the deep cushions mould themselves around him. The other end of the sofa was occupied by a large ginger cat that roused itself from sleep and began to purr. Mr Vaughan put out a hand to stroke it.

‘Good afternoon.’

The voice was calm and musical. Decorous. He turned to see a woman in her middle years, with greying hair pulled back from a wide, even forehead. Her dress was dark blue, which made her grey eyes almost blue, and her collar was white and quite plain. Mr Vaughan was pierced by a sudden memory of his mother, which took him by surprise, for this woman was not at all like her. His mother, when she died, had been taller, slimmer, younger, of a darker complexion and never so plainly neat.

Mr Vaughan rose and began to make his apologies. ‘You must think me an awful fool,’ he began. ‘Awfully embarrassing, and the worst of it is, I hardly know how to begin to explain it. I was outside, you see, and I had no intention of coming in – not today, at any rate, I have a train to catch … Well, what I’m not explaining very well is that I cannot abide a railway waiting room, and having some time to kill, it seemed I might as well just come and see where you were, for another time, that was my intention, except that your maid happened to open the door at that very moment and naturally she thought – I don’t blame her in the least, bad timing, that’s all, easy mistake to make …’ On and on he went. He snatched at reasons, grasped for logic, and sentence by sentence it all evaded him; he felt that with every word he was talking himself further and further away from what he meant to say.

While he spoke, her grey eyes rested patiently on his face, and though she was not smiling, he felt gentle encouragement in the lines that surrounded her eyes so expressively. At last he ran out of words.

‘I see,’ she said, nodding. ‘You didn’t mean to disturb me today, you were just passing and wanted to check the address …’

‘That’s right!’ Relieved to be so easily let off, he waited for her to initiate a farewell. Already he saw himself reclaiming his hat and case from the hall and taking his leave. He saw his feet on the chequered path to the house. He saw his hand reach for the latch on the painted gate. But then he saw the steadiness of the tranquil grey eyes.

‘Yet after all that, here you are,’ she said.

Here he was. Yes. He suddenly felt his hereness very acutely. In fact, the room seemed to pulse with it, and so did he.

‘Why don’t you sit down, Mr …?’

‘Vaughan,’ he said, and her eyes did not give away whether or not they recognized the name, but only continued their easy watchfulness. He sat.

Mrs Constantine poured some clear liquid from an etched decanter into a glass and placed it by his side; then she too sat down, in an armchair placed at an angle to the sofa. She smiled expectantly.

‘I need your help,’ he admitted. ‘It’s my wife.’

Her face softened into sad sympathy. ‘I am sorry. May I offer you my condolences?’

‘No! I don’t mean that!’

He sounded irritated. He was irritated.

‘Forgive me, Mr Vaughan. But when a stranger appears at my door, it is usually because somebody has died.’ Her expression did not change; it remained steady and was not unfriendly, in fact it was distinctly kind, but she waited with a firmness of purpose for him to come to the point.

He sighed. ‘We have lost a child, you see.’

‘Lost?’

‘She was taken.’

‘Forgive me, Mr Vaughan, but we use so many euphemisms in English when we speak of the dead. Lost, taken … These are words that have more than one meaning. I have already misunderstood you once, regarding your wife, and I should not like to do so again.’

Mr Vaughan swallowed and looked at his hand, which was resting on the arm of the green velvet sofa. He drew a nail along the fabric, raising a line in the pile. ‘You will probably know the story. I expect you read the newspapers, and even if you don’t, it was the talk of the county. Two years ago. At Buscot.’

Her eyes detached from him and looked into the middle distance while she consulted her memory. He ran a fingertip along the velvet, smoothing the pile flat again so that the line disappeared. He waited for her to acknowledge that she knew.

Her gaze returned to him. ‘It would be better if you told me in your own words, I think.’

Vaughan’s shoulders stiffened. ‘I can tell you no more than is known.’

‘Mmm.’ The sound was neither here nor there. It did not agree with him exactly, but nor did it disagree with him. It indicated that it was still his turn.

Vaughan had expected that the story would not need retelling. After two years, he assumed that everybody knew. It was the kind of story that spread far abroad in a surprisingly short space of time. On numerous occasions he had walked into a room – a business meeting, an interview for a new groom, a social occasion with neighbouring farmers, or a grander event in Oxford or London – and seen in the glances from people he had never met that they not only knew him, but knew the story. He now expected it – though he had never grown used to it. ‘Dreadful thing,’ some stranger would mutter over a handshake, and he had learnt a way of acknowledging it that also indicated, ‘Let no more be said about it.’

In the early days, he had had to give endless accounts of the events. The very first time, rousing the male servants, he had told them first in wild flurries of sound, fast and furious, as if the words themselves were on horseback, racing after the intruders and his missing daughter. He had told it to the neighbours who came to join the search in panting phrases, his chest contracting painfully. He told it over and over again, to every man, woman and child he met in the next hours, as he rode the country roads: ‘My daughter has been taken! Have you seen strangers, anyone, making their way in haste, with a small girl of two?’ The following day he told it to his banker when he went urgently to raise the ransom money, and again to the policeman who came out from Cricklade. This was where the order of events had been set down properly. They were still in the grip of things then, and this time Helena was doing the telling too. They had paced and sat down and then risen to pace again, talking one at a time or, often, at the same time, and sometimes they both lapsed into silence and stared at each other, lost for words. There was one moment that he made a particular effort to forget. Helena, describing the moment the discovery was made: ‘I opened the door and went in, and she wasn’t there. She wasn’t there! She wasn’t there!’ Wonderingly, she repeated the words ‘She wasn’t there,’ and as her head turned this way and that, her eyes sought the upper corners of the room as though their daughter might be concealed in the joint of the cornicing, or beyond it, perched in the angle of a roof joist, but the absence went on and on. It had seemed then that her daughter’s absence had flooded Helena, flooded them both, and that with their words they were trying to bail themselves out. But the words were eggcups and what they were describing was an ocean of absence, too vast to be contained in such modest vessels. She bailed and she bailed, but no matter how often she repeated the effort, she could not get to the end of it. ‘She wasn’t there,’ repeated endlessly in a voice he had not known a human being to be capable of, as she drowned in her loss, and he remained in a sort of paralysis, unable to do or say anything to save her. Thank God for the policeman. It had been he who threw her a line she could grab hold of, he who hauled her in with his next question.

‘The bed had been slept in, though?’

The noise of his words reached her. Dazed, she seemed to come to herself, and nodded. In a voice that was her own again, though weak with exhaustion, she said, ‘Ruby put her to bed. Our nursery maid.’

Then she had lapsed into silence and Vaughan had taken over the narrative.

‘Slow down, Sir, if you don’t mind,’ the fellow had said, as he bent over his notebook, pencil in hand, copying it all down like a zealous schoolboy. ‘Start that bit again, would you?’ Every so often he stopped them, read back what he had down, and they corrected him, remembered details they had left out, discovered discrepancies in what they both knew, compared notes to get it right. Any detail might be the one to bring her back. Hours it had taken, to get down the events of a few minutes.

He had written to his father in New Zealand.

‘No, don’t,’ Helena had protested. ‘What’s the point in upsetting him, when she’ll be home tomorrow, or the day after?’

But he wrote the letter. He remembered the account they had given to the policeman and based his explanation on that. He wrote it out carefully. The letter contained all the facts of the disappearance. Unknown villains came in the night, the letter said. They put up a ladder and entered the house by the nursery window; they left, taking the child with them. New paragraph: Though a ransom demand was received early the following morning and the ransom was paid, our daughter has not been returned to us. We are looking. Everyone is doing their utmost and we will not rest until she is found. The police are pursuing the river gypsies and will search their boats. I shall send further news as soon as there is some.

There was none of the breathlessness. No painful gasps for breath. The horror of it was quite excised. At his desk, less than forty-eight hours after it had happened, he had made his account: the letters arranged themselves into words, regularly aligned, to make sentences and then paragraphs, in which the loss of his daughter was contained. In two informative pages it was done.

When Anthony Vaughan finished the letter, he read it through. Did it say everything that needed to be said? It said everything that could be said. When he was satisfied that it could say no more, he sealed it and rang for the maid, who took it for the post.

That brief and dry account, which he had reused countless times for the benefit of his business associates and other semi-strangers, was the one he brought out now. Though he had not used it for months, he found that he still had it word for word. It took less than a minute to lay the matter before the woman with the grey eyes.

He came to the end of the story and took a mouthful of water from the glass beside him. It had the unexpected and very refreshing taste of cucumber.

Mrs Constantine looked at him with her unwavering, kind look. Something seemed suddenly wrong to him. There was usually stunned shock, a clumsy attempt to console, to say the right thing, or else embarrassed silence that he filled with some remark to redirect the conversation. None of this happened.

‘I see,’ she said. And then – nodding, as if she really did see, but what was there to see? Nothing, surely – ‘Yes. And what about your wife?’

‘My wife?’

‘When you first arrived you told me you had come to seek my help about your wife.’

‘Ah. So I did.’

He felt that he needed to trace a long path back to arriving at the house, that first exchange of words with Mrs Constantine, though it could not have been much more than a quarter of an hour ago. He worked backwards through various obstacles of time and memory, rubbing his eyes, and found what it was he was here for.

‘It’s like this, you see. My wife is – quite naturally – inconsolable. Understandable in the circumstances. She thinks of nothing except our daughter’s return. Her state of mind is lamentable. She will see no one. She permits no diversion from her distress. Her appetite is poor and in her sleep she is pursued by the most appalling nightmares, so she prefers to stay awake. Her behaviour has grown more and more strange, to the point where she is now a danger to herself. To give you just one example: she has taken to going out on the river in a rowing boat, quite alone and without any thought to her comfort and safety. She stays out for hours, in all weathers, in garments that offer her no protection. She cannot say why she does it, and it can do no good at all. It can only harm her. I have suggested taking her away, thinking that travel might restore her. I am even ready to sell up, lock, stock and barrel, and start again in some entirely new place, untainted by our sorrow.’

‘And her response?’

‘She says it is a very good idea and when our daughter comes home that is exactly what we will do. Do you see? If nothing changes, I foresee that she will only go from bad to worse. It is not grief that afflicts her, you must realize, but something far worse. I fear for her. I fear that with no change, her life will end in some awful accident or else in an asylum, and I would do anything – anything at all – to prevent that.’

The grey eyes remained upon him, and he was aware of all the observation going on behind the kindness. This time he made clear that he was not going to say any more and that it was her turn to speak (had he ever met a woman who said so little?), and she opened her mouth at last. ‘That must be very lonely for you,’ she said.

Anthony Vaughan could barely conceal his disappointment. ‘That is beside the point. What I want you to do is to talk to her.’

‘To what end?’

‘Tell her that the child is dead. I believe it is what she needs.’

Mrs Constantine blinked twice. In another person this would be almost nothing, but in a woman of her unperturbability this counted as surprise.

‘Let me explain.’

‘I think you had better.’

‘I want you to tell my wife that our daughter is dead. Tell her that the child is happy. Tell her she is with angels. Do messages, voices. Do the thing with the smoke and mirrors, if you are set up for it.’ He glanced around the room again as he said this. It seemed unlikely that this decorous drawing room could double for service with the contraptions and curtains that he supposed were necessary for such performances, but perhaps it was another room she used for all that. ‘Look, I’m not presuming to tell you your own business. You know what works. I can tell you things that will make Helena believe you. Things only she and I know. And then …’

‘Then?’

‘Then we can be sad and sorry and weep and say our prayers, and then—’

‘And then, when your wife has mourned, she will find her way back to life – to you – again?’

‘Exactly!’ Anthony Vaughan was full of gratitude at having been so perfectly understood.

Mrs Constantine tipped her head very slightly to one side. She smiled at him. Kindly. With understanding. ‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible,’ she said.

Anthony Vaughan started. ‘Why ever not?’

She shook her head. ‘For one thing, you have misunderstood – or been misled, perhaps, about what it is that happens here. It is an understandable mistake. Furthermore, what you suggest would do no good.’

‘I will pay you the going rate. I will pay you double if you ask it.’

‘It is not a question of money.’

‘I don’t understand! It is a simple enough transaction! Tell me how much you want and I will pay it!’

‘I am profoundly sorry for your suffering, Mr Vaughan. To lose a child is one of the hardest burdens a human being can bear.’ She frowned faintly. ‘But what about you, Mr Vaughan? Do you believe your daughter to be dead?’

‘She must be,’ he said.

The grey eyes looked at him. He had the sudden impression that she could see right into his soul, that she could see aspects of his being that were in darkness even to him. He felt his heart start to beat uncomfortably.

‘You didn’t tell me her name.’

‘Helena.’

‘Not your wife’s name. Your daughter’s.’

Amelia. The name rose in him and he choked it down. There was a spasm in Vaughan’s chest. He coughed, gasped, reached for the water again and drank half the glass of it. He took an experimental breath to see if his chest was free.

‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Why won’t you help me?’

‘I would like to help you. You are in need of help. You cannot go on much longer like this. But what you have asked me today, besides being impossible, would do no good.’

He got to his feet, made an exasperated gesture with his arm. For a ridiculous moment he wondered whether he was about to raise his palms to his eyes and weep. He shook his head.

‘I’ll go, then.’

She rose too. ‘If you ever wish to come back, please do. You will be welcome.’

‘Why should I come back? You can do nothing for me. You have made that perfectly plain.’

‘That’s not quite what I said. Do refresh yourself, if you would like to. There is water and a clean towel on the side there.’

When she had gone, he splashed water on to his face, buried his face in the soft cotton towel, and felt marginally better for it. He took out his watch. There was a train on the half-hour and he had just time to be on it.

In the street, as he hurried, Anthony Vaughan chided himself for his foolishness. Suppose the woman had jumped at his idea? Suppose he had taken Helena there and word had got out? It might have done something for the wife of the man in the story, but Helena … Helena was not like other men’s wives.

On the platform a number of other passengers were waiting for the train. He stood a little away from them. He did not like to be spotted. Small talk with people you were only distantly acquainted with was something he avoided whenever he could, and the curiosity of strangers, who sometimes knew his face when he did not know theirs, was even worse.

According to the station clock, the train would be approaching in a minute or two, and while he waited he congratulated himself on a narrow escape. What her game was in refusing his money he couldn’t tell, but no doubt she’d intended to get a pound of flesh from him one way or another.

He was so absorbed in thoughts of his recent encounter that it took a little while for him to become aware of the sensation that tugged quietly at his mind. Then he did notice it but, still befuddled by the strangeness of the events at Number 17, it took a moment to separate this new feeling from the oddness of a little while ago. When he did, he recognized it: anticipation. He shook his head to dispel his weariness. It had been a long day. He was waiting for a train and the train was about to come. That was all.

The train arrived; he mounted, found an empty first-class carriage and sat by the window. The sense of anticipation that had begun on the platform was reluctant to fade. In fact, as the train left Oxford and he looked through the darkening mist towards the place where the river lay invisible in the gloom, the presentiment increased. The rhythm of the train on the tracks suggested words to his overtired brain and he heard them as clearly as if an unseen person had pronounced them: Something is going to happen.

Lily’s Nightmare

ON THE OTHER side of the river from the Vaughans’ grand house and half a mile downstream, there was a patch of land that was too wet even for watercress. Set back from the river, three oak trees grew there, and their roots drank thirstily from the wet soil, but any acorn that fell on the river side of its parent rotted before it could germinate. It was a godforsaken place, good only for drowning dogs, but the river must have been more biddable in the past because at one time somebody had built a cottage there, between the oaks and the water.

The little dwelling was a squat box of lichened stone containing two rooms, two windows and a door. There was no bedroom, but in the kitchen steps led up to a platform just wide enough for a straw mattress. At one end this sleeping ledge adjoined the chimney, so if the fire had been lit the sleeper’s head or feet might be warm for the first hours of the night. It was an impoverished place and was empty as often as it was tenanted, for it was so cold and damp that only the desperate were willing to inhabit it. It was almost too small to have a name, so it comes as a surprise to learn that in fact it had two. Officially it was called Marsh Cottage, but it had been known for as long as anyone could remember as Basketman’s Cottage. A long time ago, the basketman had been a tenant there for a dozen years or thirty, depending on whom you talked to. He collected reeds all summer long and made baskets all winter, and everybody who needed a basket bought it from him, for his goods were well made and he did not ask too much for them. He had no children to disappoint him, no wife to nag him and no other woman to break his heart. He was quiet without being morose, said good morning very pleasantly to all, and quarrelled with no one. He lived without debts. He had no sins anyone knew of or could guess at. One morning he walked into the river, his pockets full of stones. When his body knocked into one of the barges waiting to be loaded at the wharf, they went to his cottage and found potatoes in a stone jar and cheese on the side. There was cider in a flagon, and on the mantelpiece was a tobacco tin, half full. There was consternation at his demise. He had work, food and pleasure – what more could a man want? It was a mystery, and overnight Marsh Cottage became Basketman’s Cottage.

Since the time of the basketman, the river had undercut the bank by washing away layers of gravel. This created dangerous overhangs that looked solid but would not hold a man’s weight. When they collapsed, all that was left to contain the river was a shallow slope where the frail roots of loosestrife, meadowsweet and willowherb attempted to knit the soil together and were washed away with every high water. At equinoxes and after heavy rain, and after moderate rain that followed baking sun, and in times of snow melt, and at other times for no reason other than the random malice of nature, the river flooded on to this shallow slope. Halfway up this slope someone had driven a post into the ground. Though it was silvered by time and cracked by repeated submersion, the carved lines that marked the water level were visible still, and you could make out dates that told you when the flooding had taken place. The flood marks were numerous at the bottom of the post, and almost as numerous in the middle and in the upper section. Further up the slope a second post had sprouted, more recent. Evidently there had been floods that had entirely swallowed up the first post. This newer one had two lines in it, from eight years ago and five.

Today a woman stood next to the lower post, looking at the river. She clutched her coat to her with gloveless hands that were chapped and red with cold. Strands of hair had worked loose from her too few hairpins and hung about her face, moving with the breeze. They were so fair that the silver that had started to appear was almost invisible. If her hair was younger than her forty-odd years, the same could not be said of her face. Trouble had marked her, and permanent creases of anxiety were scored into her forehead.

The river was a good yard from the post. There would be no flood today, nor tomorrow either, yet still the woman’s eyes were fearful. The water, bright and cold and fast-running, hissed as it passed. At irregular intervals it spat; when a spot of river water landed near her boot, she jumped and edged back a few inches.

As she stood there, she remembered the story of the basketman, and shuddered at his bravery, walking into the river like that with his pockets full of stones. She thought of the dead souls that are said to live in the river and wondered which ones were racing past her now, spitting at her. She thought – again – that she would ask the parson one day about the dead souls in the river. It wasn’t in the Bible – at least, not so far as she knew – but that didn’t mean anything. There must be a great many true things that weren’t in the Bible. It was a big book, but still, it couldn’t have every true thing in it, could it?

She turned and walked up the slope towards the cottage. The working day was no shorter in winter than in summer, and by the time she got home it was almost dark. She still had to see to the animals.

Lily had come to live in the cottage four years ago. She had introduced herself as Mrs White, a widow, and was thought at first to be slippery because she gave evasive answers to any question that touched on her past life and nervously rebuffed all friendly interest. But she appeared at church every Sunday without fail and counted out the scant coins from her purse for every modest purchase without once asking for credit, and over time suspicion faded. It wasn’t long before she started work at the parsonage, first doing the laundry and then, because she was unstinting in her efforts and quick, gradually doing more and more. Since the retirement two years ago of the parson’s housekeeper, Lily had taken on entire responsibility for the domestic comfort of the parsonage. There were two pleasant rooms reserved there for the use of the housekeeper, but Lily continued to live in Basketman’s Cottage – because of the animals, she said. People were used to her now, but it was still held locally that there was something not quite right about Lily White. Was she really a widow? Why was she so nervy when anyone spoke to her unexpectedly? And what sensible woman would choose to live in damp isolation at Basketman’s Cottage when she could enjoy the wallpapered comfort of the parsonage, all for the sake of a goat and a couple of pigs? Yet familiarity and her connection with the parson worked together to reduce suspicion, and she was now regarded with something closer to pity. Excellent housekeeper she might be, but still, it was whispered that Lily White was a bit soft in the head.

There was some truth in what people imagined about Lily White. In law and in the eyes of God, she was no missus at all. There had been for some years a Mr White, and she had performed for him all those duties a wife customarily performs for a husband: she had cooked his meals, scrubbed his floors, laundered his shirts, emptied his chamber pot and warmed his bed. He in return had performed the normal duties of a husband: he kept her short of money, drank her share of the ale, stayed out all night when he felt like it, and beat her. It was like a marriage in every detail in Lily’s eyes and so, when he had disappeared five years ago in circumstances that she tried not to think about, she had not hesitated. With all his thieving and drinking and other bad ways, White had been a better name than he’d deserved. It was a better name than she deserved too, she knew that, yet out of all the names she could have had, this was the one she most wanted. So she took it. She had left that place, followed the river and come, by chance, to Buscot. ‘Lily White,’ she had muttered under her breath all the way. ‘I am Lily White.’ She tried to live up to it.

Lily gave the yellow goat some rotten potatoes, then went to feed the pigs. The pigs lived in the old woodshed. It was a stone building, halfway between the cottage and the river, with a tall, narrow opening on the cottage side for a person to go in and out, and a low opening on the other, so that the pigs might come and go between their enclosure and their mud patch. Within, a low wall separated the two ends. At Lily’s end, chopped wood was stacked against the wall, next to a sack of grain and an old tin bath half full of swill. There were a couple of buckets, and on a shelf apples were slowly mouldering.

Lily lifted the buckets and carried them out and round to the pigs’ outdoor mud patch. She tipped a bucketful of half-rotten cabbages and other vegetable matter too brown to identify over the fence and into the trough, then filled the old sink with water. The boar came out of the straw-lined woodshed and, without a glance at Lily, lowered his head to eat. Behind him came the sow.

The female rubbed her flank against the fence, as was her way, and when Lily scratched behind her ears, the sow blinked at her. Beneath her ginger lashes the sow’s eyes were still half full of sleep. Do pigs dream? Lily wondered. If they do, it is about something better than real life, by the look of things. The sow came into full wakefulness and she fixed Lily with a peculiarly poignant gaze. Pigs were funny creatures. You could almost think they were human, the way they looked at you sometimes. Or was the pig remembering something? Yes, Lily realized, that was it. The pig looked exactly as if she were recollecting some happiness now lost, so that joy remembered was overlaid with present sorrow.

Lily had been happy once, though it was painful to recall it. Her father had died before she could remember, and until she was eleven she and her mother had lived quietly together, just the two of them. There had been little money and food was scant, but they scraped by, and after their soup in the evening they would lean close together with a blanket round them to save the fire, and at her mother’s nod Lily would turn the pages of the children’s Bible while her mother read aloud. Lily was no great reader. She could not tell b from d and the words quivered on the page as soon as they felt the brush of her gaze, but when her mother read aloud in her gentle voice, the words grew still and Lily found she could follow the thread after all, mouthing the words silently in time. Sometimes her mother told her about her father – how he had loved his baby daughter, watched her endlessly and, as his own health faded, said, Here is the best of me, Rose. It lives on in this child we made together. In time, Jesus and her father came to seem like different faces of the same man, a presence that surrounded Lily and protected her and was no less real for being invisible. That blanket, and that book, and her mother’s voice and Jesus and her father who had loved her so – these happy memories only sharpened the hardship of her existence since. She could not think of those golden days without despair, came close to wishing she had never lived them. That hopeless longing for lost happiness in the eye of the pig must be how she herself looked when she remembered the past. The only God that watched over Lily now was a severe and angry one, and if her father were to look down from heaven on to his grown daughter, he would turn his face away in an agony of disappointment.

The sow continued to stare at Lily. She pushed its snout roughly away and muttered, ‘Stupid sow,’ as she walked up the slope to the cottage.

Inside she got the fire going and ate a bit of cheese and an apple. She eyed the candle, a short stub melded by its own wax to a scrap of broken tile, and decided to do without it for a bit longer. Next to the fire was a sagging chair, the upholstery much mended with patches of unmatching wool, and she sat wearily in it. She was tired, but nerves kept her alert. Was it one of those nights when he was going to come? She had seen him yesterday, so perhaps not, but you could never tell. For an hour she sat, on the alert for footsteps, and then gradually Lily’s eyelids closed, her head began to nod and she fell into sleep.

The river now exhaled a complicated fragrance and blew it through the gap under the door of the little cottage. Lily’s nose suddenly twitched. The odour had an earthy base with live notes of grasses, reeds and sedges. It contained the mineral quality of stone. And something darker, browner and more decomposed.

With its next breath, the river exhaled a child. She floated into the cottage, glaucous and cold.

Lily frowned in her sleep and her breathing grew troubled.

The girl’s colourless hair clung slickly to her scalp and shoulders; her garment was the colour of the dirty scum that collects at the river’s edge. Water ran off her; from her hair it dripped into her cloak, from the cloak it dripped to the floor. It did not drip itself out.

Fear put a choking whimper in Lily’s throat.

Drip, drip, drip … There was no end to the water: it would drip for an eternity, it would drip until the river ran dry. The hovering child turned a malevolent gaze on the sleeper in the chair and slowly – slowly – raised a hazy hand to point at her.

Lily woke with a sudden start—

The river child evaporated.

For a few moments, Lily stared in alarm at the spot in the air where the girl had been.

‘Oh!’ she gasped. ‘Oh! Oh!’ She brought her hands to her face as if to hide the image, but also peeped between her fingers to reassure herself that the girl was gone.

All this time and it never got any easier. The girl was still furious. If only she would stay a little bit longer so that Lily could talk to her. Tell her she was sorry. Tell her she would pay any price demanded, give up anything, do anything … But by the time Lily got the use of her tongue, the girl had gone.

Lily leant forward, still in fear, to stare at the floorboards where the river child had hovered. There were dark marks there, she could just make them out in the fading light. She heaved herself from the chair and shuffled reluctantly across the floor. She extended her hand, placed outstretched fingers against the darkness.

The floor was wet.

Lily brought her hands together in prayer. ‘Take me out of the mire, that I sink not: O let me be delivered out of the deep waters. Let not the flood drown me, neither let the deep swallow me up.’ Rapidly she repeated the words until her breathing was regular, and then she got painfully to her feet and said, ‘Amen.’

She felt troubled and it wasn’t just the aftermath of the visitation. Was the river on the rise? She went to the window. Its dark gleam was no nearer the cottage than before.

Him, then. Was he coming? She looked for movement outdoors, strained her ears for the sound of his approach. Nothing.

It was neither of these things.

What, then?

The answer when it came was spoken in a voice so like her mother’s it took her aback, till she realized it was her own: ‘Something is going to happen.’

Mr Armstrong at Bampton

SOMETHING IS GOING to happen, they all thought. And soon after, at the Swan at Radcot, it did.

Now what?

On the first morning following the longest night, the clatter of hooves on cobbles announced a visitor to the village of Bampton. The few who happened to be outside at this early hour frowned and looked up. What fool was this, riding at full tilt into their narrow street? When horse and rider came into view, they grew curious. Instead of it being one of their own immature lads, the rider was an outsider, and more than that: he was a black man. His face was grave and the clouds of vapour he exhaled this cold morning lent him an air of fury. When he slowed, they took one look at him and hopped promptly into doorways, shutting their doors firmly behind them.

Robert Armstrong was used to the effect he had on strangers. His fellow humans had always been wary of him at first sight. The blackness of his skin made him the outsider, and his height and strength, which would have been an advantage to any white man, only made people more wary. In fact, as other living creatures understood very well, he was the gentlest of souls. Take Fleet, for instance. She had been called too wild to tame, and that was why he got her for a song, yet once he was in the saddle, the two of them were the best of friends within half an hour. And the cat. A skinny thing with an ear missing, which appeared in his barn one winter’s morning, spitting curses and darting evil glances at all and sundry – why, now she came running up to him in the yard, tail up, mewing to be scratched under her chin. Even the ladybirds that alighted on a man’s hair in summer and crawled over his face knew that Armstrong would do no more than wrinkle his nose to dislodge them if they tickled excessively. No animal of field or farmyard feared him, no; but people – ah! That was another matter entirely.

A fellow had written a book lately – Armstrong had heard tell of it – in which he proposed that man was a kind of clever monkey. A lot of laughter and indignation that had produced, but Armstrong was inclined to believe it. He had found the line that separated humans from the animal kingdom to be a porous one, and all the things that people thought unique to them – intelligence, kindness, communication – he had seen in his pigs, his horse, even the rooks that hopped and strutted amongst his cows. And then there was this: the methods he used on animals generally bore fruit when applied to people too. He could usually win them round in the end.

The sudden disappearance of the people he had glimpsed only a moment or two ago made things difficult though. He did not know Bampton. Armstrong walked along for a few yards and, coming to a crossroads, saw a boy sprawled in the grassy centre by the signpost, nose almost to the ground. He was so engrossed in studying the lie of a number of marbles that he seemed not to notice the cold – nor Armstrong’s approach.

Two expressions passed across the boy’s face. The first – alarm – was fleeting. It disappeared when he saw the marble that appeared as if by magic from Armstong’s pocket. (Armstrong had his clothes made with large and reinforced pockets to store the items he kept habitually upon him for the taming and reassuring of creatures. As a rule he kept acorns for pigs, apples for horses, marbles for small boys and a flask of alcohol for older ones. For females of the human species he depended on good manners, the right words and immaculately polished shoes and buttons.) The marble that he showed to the boy was no ordinary one but contained flares of orange and yellow so like the flames of a fire that you would think you could warm yourself by it. The boy now looked interested.

The game that ensued was carried out with professional concentration by both parties. The boy had the advantage of knowing the terrain – which tufts of grass will bend as a marble passes and which have congested roots and will divert its path – and the game ended, as Armstrong had always intended, with the marble in the pocket of the boy.

‘Fair and square,’ he admitted. ‘Victory to the better man.’

The boy looked discomfited. ‘Was it your best marble?’

‘I have others at home. Now, I ought really to introduce myself. My name is Mr Armstrong and I have a farm at Kelmscott. I wonder whether you can help me with some information? I want to know the way to a house where a little girl called Alice lives.’

‘That is Mrs Eavis’s house, her mother lodges there.’

‘And her mother’s name is …?’

‘Mrs Armstrong, Sir – oh! – that is just like your name, Sir!’

Armstrong was rather relieved. If the woman was Mrs Armstrong, then Robin had married her. Things were perhaps not quite so bad as he had feared.

‘And where is Mrs Eavis’s house? Can you direct me there?’

‘I will show you, that will be best, for I know the shortcuts, it being me who delivers the meat.’

They set off on foot, Armstrong leading Fleet.

‘I have told you my name, and I will tell you that this horse is called Fleet. Now you know who we are, who are you?’

‘I am Ben and I am the son of the butcher.’

Armstrong noticed that Ben had a habit of taking a deep breath at the start of every answer and delivering his words in a single stream.

‘Ben. I suppose you are the youngest son, for that is what Benjamin means.’

‘It means the littlest and the last, and it was my father who named me, but my mother says it takes more than naming a thing to make it so, and there are three more after me and another one on the way, and that is on top of the five that came before, though all my father needs is one to help in the shop and that is my eldest brother, and all the rest of us is surplus to requirements since we do nothing but eat the profits.’

‘And what does your mother say about that?’

‘Mostly nothing, but when she do say something it is generally along the lines that eating the profits is better than drinking them, and then he gives her a bash and she don’t say nothing at all for a few days.’

While the boy was speaking, Armstrong eyed him sideways. There were ghosts of bruises on the lad’s forehead and wrists.

‘It is not a good house, Sir, Mrs Eavis’s house,’ the boy told him.

‘In what way is it not a good house?’

The boy thought hard. ‘It is a bad house, Sir.’

A few minutes later, they were there.

‘I’d better stand by and hold your horse for you, Sir.’

Armstrong passed Fleet’s reins to Ben and passed him an apple. ‘If you give this to Fleet, you’ll have a friend for life,’ he said, then he turned and knocked at the door of the large, plain house.

The door opened slightly and he caught a glimpse of a face almost as narrow as the crack it peered out of. The woman took one look at his black face and her sharp features twitched.

‘Shoo! Off with you, dirty devil! We’re not for your sort! Be on your way!’ She spoke more loudly than she needed to; slowly too, as though to a half-wit or a foreigner.

She tried to close the door but the tip of Armstrong’s boot blocked it, and whether it was the sight of the expensive polished leather or the desire to give him a piece of her mind more forcefully, she reopened the door. Before she could open her mouth to speak, Armstrong addressed her. He spoke softly and with great dignity of expression, as though she had never called him a dirty devil, as though his boot were not in her doorway.

‘Forgive my intrusion, Madam. I realize you must be very busy and I won’t detain you a minute longer than necessary.’ He saw her register the expensive education that lay behind his voice, appraise his good hat, his smart coat. He saw her draw her conclusion and felt the pressure against the toe of his shoe cease.

‘Yes?’ she said.

‘I understand you have a young woman by the name of Mrs Armstrong lodging here?’

A snidely triumphant smile pulled at the corners of her lips. ‘She works here. She’s new to it. You’ll have to pay extra.’

So that was what Ben meant by a bad house.

‘All I want is to speak with her.’

‘It is the letter, I suppose? She’s been expecting it for weeks. Quite given up hope.’

The sharp, narrow woman put out a sharp, narrow hand. Armstrong looked at it and shook his head.

‘I should very much like to see her, if you please.’

‘It is not the letter?’

‘Not the letter. Take me to her, if you will.’

She led him up one, then another flight of stairs, muttering all the while. ‘Why should I not think it is the letter, when all I have heard, twenty times a day this last month, is “Has my letter come, Mrs Eavis?” and “Mrs Eavis, is there any letter for me?”’

He said nothing but gave himself a mild and amenable countenance whenever she turned to glance at him. The stairwell, rather smart and grand at the entrance, grew shabbier and chillier the higher you got. On the way up, some of the doors were ajar. Armstrong caught glimpses of unmade beds, garments strewn on the floor. In one room, a half-dressed woman bent over to roll a stocking up over her knee. When she caught sight of him her mouth smiled, but her eyes didn’t. His heart sank. Was this what had become of Robin’s wife?

On the bare top landing where the paint was peeling, Mrs Eavis stopped and rapped sharply at a door.

There came no reply.

She rapped again. ‘Mrs Armstrong? A gentleman for you.’

There was only silence.

Mrs Eavis frowned. ‘I don’t know … She has not gone out this morning, I would have heard.’ Then, with sharp alarm, ‘Done a runner, that’s what she’s done, the little trollop!’ and in no time she had the key out of her pocket, opened the door and burst in.

Over Mrs Eavis’s shoulder, Armstrong perceived all in a flash. The stained and rumpled sheet of the iron bed and, against it, that other, awful whiteness: an outstretched arm, the fingers splayed rigid.

‘Good Lord, no!’ he exclaimed, and his hand came to his eyes as though it were not too late to unsee it. So he stood, for some seconds, eyes squeezed shut while Mrs Eavis’s complaints went on.

‘Little minx! Two weeks rent she owes me! When I get my letter, Mrs Eavis! Oh, the lying vixen! What am I to do now, eh? Eating my meals, sleeping in my linen! Thought she was too good to work for money! “I’ll have you out of here if you don’t pay up prompt,” I told her. “I don’t keep girls here for nothing! If you can’t pay, you’ll have to work.” I saw to it that she did. I won’t have it, girls who think nothing of running up a debt and too good to pay it. She stooped in the end. They always do. What am I to do now, eh? Thieving little idiot!’

When Armstrong drew his hand away from his eyes and opened them, he looked like a different person altogether. With sorrow he looked around the small, mean room. The boards were bare and draughty, a broken pane let in knife blades of cold air. The plaster was pitted and blistered. Nowhere was there any bit of colour, of warmth, of human comfort. On the stand beside the bed there was a brown apothecary bottle. Empty. He took it and sniffed. So that was it. The girl had taken her own life. He slipped the bottle into his pocket. Why let it be known? There was little enough to be done for her, he could at least conceal the manner of her passing.

‘So who are you, eh?’ Mrs Eavis continued, now with a note of calculation in her voice. And although it seemed unlikely, she was hopeful enough to suggest, ‘Family?’

She received no answer. The man put out a hand and drew down the lids of the dead girl, then bowed his head for a minute in prayer.

Mrs Eavis waited testily. She did not join him at ‘Amen,’ but as soon as his prayer was done, picked up where she had left off.

‘It’s just that if you are family, you’ll be liable. For the debt.’

With a wince, Armstrong reached into the folds of his cloak and took out a leather purse. He counted the coins into her palm, then ‘Three weeks, it is!’ she added as he was about to put the purse away. He gave her the additional coins with a sense of distaste and her fingers closed around them.

The visitor turned to look again at the face of the dead girl in the bed.

Her teeth looked too large for her and her cheekbones jutted in a way that suggested, whatever Mrs Eavis said, that the young woman hadn’t benefited greatly from the landlady’s meals.

‘I suppose she must have been pretty?’ he asked sadly.

The question took Mrs Eavis by surprise. The man was of an age to be the young woman’s father, yet given the fairness of the girl and the blackness of the man, that was most unlikely. Something told her he was not her lover either. But if he was neither, if he had never seen her before, why pay her rent? Not that it mattered.

She shrugged. ‘Pretty is as pretty does. She was fair. Too skinny.’

Mrs Eavis stepped out on to the landing. Armstrong heaved a sigh and, with a final, sorrowful glance at the cadaver on the bed, followed her out.

‘Where is the child?’ he asked.

‘Drowned it, I expect.’ She gave a callous shrug that didn’t interrupt her progress down the stairs. ‘You’ll have only the one funeral to pay for,’ she added maliciously. ‘That’s one blessing, anyhow.’

Drowned? Armstrong stopped dead on the top stair. He turned and reopened the door. He looked up and down, left and right, as if somewhere – in the gap between the floorboards, behind the useless wisp of curtain, in the chilly air itself – a piece of life might be concealed. He pulled back the sheet, in case a small second body – dead? alive? – might be hidden in its flimsy folds. There were only the mother’s bones, too big for the flesh that contained them.

Outside, Ben was stroking the mane of his new friend Fleet. When Fleet’s owner came out of the house, he was different. Greyer. Older.

‘Thank you,’ he said distractedly as he took the reins.

It occurred to the boy that he might not find out what all this had been in aid of – the arrival of the interesting stranger in the street, the victory that had won him the blazing marble, the mysterious visit to Mrs Armstrong in Mrs Eavis’s bad house.

With one foot in the stirrup, the man halted and things took a more hopeful turn. ‘Do you know the little girl from this house?’

‘Alice? They don’t come out much, and Alice follows behind her mother, half hiding, for she is the timid sort and pulls her mother’s skirt over her face if she thinks somebody might be looking at her, but I have seen her peeking out once or twice.’

‘How old would you say she was?’

‘About four.’

Armstrong nodded and frowned sadly. Ben felt the presence of something complicated in the air, something beyond his understanding.

‘When did you last see her?’

‘Yesterday, at the end of the afternoon.’

‘Where was that?’

‘Up by Mr Gregory’s shop. She came out with her mother and they went up the lane.’

‘What kind of shop is Mr Gregory’s?’

‘The apothecary’s.’

‘Was she carrying something in her hand?’

Ben reflected. ‘Something wrapped up.’

‘What kind of size?’

He gestured to indicate and Armstrong understood it was something the size of the bottle he had picked up in the room and now had in his pocket.

‘And the lane. Where does it go?’

‘Nowhere, really.’

‘It must go somewhere.’

‘Nowhere ’cept the river.’

Armstrong said nothing. He pictured the poor young woman entering the apothecary’s to buy the bottle of poison, then taking the lane that led to the river.

‘Did you see them return?’

‘No.’

‘Or – perhaps Mrs Armstrong returned alone?’

‘I had gone in by then to eat the profits.’

Ben was perplexed. He had the feeling that an event of significance was taking place, but he did not know what it could be. He looked at Armstrong to see whether he had been useful to him or not. Whatever it was that was happening, he felt he would like to be part of it, alongside this man who fed apples to his handsome horse and kept marbles in his pocket and looked almost frightening but had a voice full of kindness. But the dark man with the fine horse did not look at all happy and Ben felt disappointed.

‘Perhaps you would show me the way to the apothecary’s, Ben?’

‘I will.’

As they walked, the man seemed lost in thought and Ben, though he didn’t realize he was doing it, must have been thinking too, for something in the man’s sombre face told him the drama they were involved in was a bleak one.

They came to a small, low building, made of brick, with a small, dingy window, above which someone had painted the word Apothecary, but so long ago that it was now faded. They entered and the man at the counter looked up. He was slightly built with a wispy beard. He registered the newcomer with alarm, then saw Ben and was reassured.

‘How can I help you?’

‘It’s about this.’

The man barely glanced at the bottle. ‘A refill, is it?’

‘I don’t want more of it. It would be better for everyone if there had been rather less.’

The apothecary cast a rapid and uncertain glance at Armstrong, but did not respond to his implication.

Armstrong removed the stopper and held it under the man’s nose. There was something under a quarter of a bottle left. Enough to give off an aroma that rose aggressively from the back of the nostrils into the brain. You didn’t need to know what it was to be wary. The smell told you to beware.

The apothecary now looked ill at ease.

‘You remember selling it?’

‘I sell all sorts. People want this’ – he nodded at the bottle that Armstrong had placed on the table – ‘for all kinds of reasons.’

‘Such as?’

The man shrugged. ‘Greenfly …’

‘Greenfly? In December?’

He turned falsely innocent eyes on Armstrong. ‘You didn’t say December.’

‘Of course I mean December. You sold this to a young woman yesterday.’

The apothecary’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. ‘You are a friend of this young woman, are you? Not that I remember any young woman. Not in particular. Young women come and go. They want all kinds of things. For all kinds of reasons. You are not her father, I think …’ He paused and, when Armstrong failed to answer, went on with sly emphasis, ‘Her protector, then?’

Armstrong was the gentlest of men, but he knew how to seem otherwise when it served him. He turned a certain look on the apothecary and the man suddenly quailed.

‘What is it you want?’

‘Information.’

‘Ask away.’

‘Was the child with her?’

‘The little girl?’ He seemed surprised. ‘Yes.’

‘Where did they go when they left you?’

He gestured.

‘Towards the river?’

The man shrugged. ‘How am I to know where they were going?’

Armstrong’s voice was mild, but there was no mistaking the menace in it. ‘A defenceless young mother comes to you, bringing her small child with her, buys poison, and you don’t think to ask yourself where she is going next? What she plans to do? Do you never consider the result of your making a miserable few pence on such a purchase?’

‘Sir, if an unknown woman is in trouble, whose job is it to get her out of it? Mine? Or the one who got her into it in the first place? If she is something to you, Mr … Mr whoever-you-are, that’s where you should address your questions. Go to the one who ruined her and abandoned her. That’s where you’ll find the responsibility lies for what happened next! Not that I know what happened. I’m nothing but a man who must make a living, and that’s what I do.’

‘Selling poison so that girls with no one in the world to help them can kill the greenfly on their December roses?’

The apothecary had the grace to look discomfited, but whether it was guilt or just the fear that Armstrong was out to make trouble for him was hard to tell.

‘There is no law requiring me to know the seasons of horticultural pests.’

‘Where next, Sir?’ Ben asked hopefully, when they were outside again.

‘I think I’m done here. For today, anyway. Let’s go up to the river.’

As they went, Ben’s stride grew slow and he began to waver on his feet. Coming to the river, Armstrong glanced to see where the boy had got to and saw him leaning against a tree trunk, his face green.

‘What is it, Ben?’

Ben wept. ‘Sir, I’m sorry, Sir, I ate some of the green apple you gave me for Fleet, Sir, and now my belly’s aching and churning …’

‘They’re sour, those apples. No wonder. What have you eaten today?’

‘Nothing, Sir.’

‘No breakfast?’

The boy shook his head. Armstrong felt a surge of anger towards the butcher who failed to feed his children.

‘It’s the acid on an empty stomach.’ Armstrong unscrewed his hip flask. ‘Drink this.’

The boy drank and pulled a face. ‘That is truly horrible, Sir, it’s making me feel worse.’

‘That’s the idea. It’s nothing more sinister than cold tea. Finish it up.’

Ben tipped the flask and with a grimace swallowed the last of the tea. Then he was violently sick in the grass.

‘Good. Any more? Yes? Good. Keep it coming.’

While Ben gasped and groaned on the riverbank, watched by Fleet, Armstrong doubled back to the high street, where he bought three buns at the bakery. He returned and gave two to Ben – ‘Go on, fill your stomach’ – and ate the third himself.

The pair sat on the bank, and while Ben ate, Armstrong watched the river flow powerfully by. The river was quieter like this than when it dawdled. There was no idle splashing on the way, only the purposeful surge forwards, and behind the high-pitched ringing of water on shingle at the river edge was a kind of hum, of the kind you would expect to hear inside your ears after a bell has been struck by a hammer and the audible ringing has died away. It had the shape of noise but lacked the sound, a sketch without colour. Armstrong listened to it, and his mind flowed with the river.

There was a bridge, a simple one, constructed in wood. Beneath it the river was high and fast – it would sweep away anything that might fall into it. He saw the young woman here with her child, in the evening, in the dark and the cold. He spared himself the picture of her dropping her child into the water, but he imagined her distress, felt his own heart leap in horror and grief. Armstrong looked up- and downriver distractedly. He didn’t know what he was expecting to see. Not a small child, he knew that – not now.

When he returned to himself, he noticed how harsh the winter felt compared to only a few hours before. His body had less resistance to the chill and inside his woollen overcoat and the layers beneath he felt the coldness of his skin. There was dankness in the undergrowth. The browns and dark golds of autumn were long gone and the softening of spring was months ahead. The branches were at their blackest. It seemed that only by some miracle could life ever return to dress the stark treetops with the haze of new foliage. Seeing it today, one would think that life was gone for good.

He tried to distract himself from his sad thoughts. Turning to Ben, he found the boy was looking more like his old self.

‘Will you join your father in the butcher’s shop when you are older?’

Ben shook his head. ‘I shall run away.’

‘Is that a good plan?’

‘It is the family tradition, done first by my second-eldest brother and then by my third-eldest brother, and it will be my turn next, for Father only has need of one of us, so being as how the rest of us is not needed, I shall run away before too long – when the good weather comes, I reckon – and make my fortune.’

‘Doing what?’

‘I shall find that out once I am doing it, I suppose.’

‘When the time is right for running away, Ben, I hope you will come to me. I have a farm at Kelmscott, and there is always a job for honest boys who are not afraid of working. Just make your way to Kelmscott and ask for Armstrong.’

Stunned by this unexpected stroke of good fortune, Ben took a deep breath and said a good many times over, ‘Thank you, Sir! Thank you, Sir! Thank you!’

The new friends shook hands to seal their agreement, and then they parted.

Ben took his first steps home, his thoughts in upheaval. It was not yet ten o’clock, but it had been an adventurous day like no other. Suddenly the significance of Armstrong’s sadness broke into his young mind.

‘Sir?’ he said, running back to Armstrong, who was already in the saddle.

‘Yes?’

‘Alice – is she dead, Sir?’

Armstrong looked at the river, at its directionless surface motion.

Was she dead?

He held the reins loosely in his hands and settled his feet in the stirrups.

‘I don’t know, Ben. I wish I did. Her mother is dead.’

Ben watched to see whether he was going to say anything else, but he didn’t, so he turned and made his way home. Mr Armstrong, the farmer at Kelmscott. When the time was right he would run away – and be part of the story.

Armstrong nudged Fleet forwards. They moved at a gentle trot and Armstrong wept as they went, grieving for the loss of the grandchild he had never known.

It was always painful to him to know that a creature was suffering. He would not allow his animals to suffer, and that was why he slaughtered them himself instead of giving the job to one of his men. He made sure his knife was sharp, he soothed the pigs with calm words, distracted them with acorns, then one swift and expert twist of the knife was enough. No fear and no pain. The drowning of a child? He could not contemplate it. There were farmers who got rid of sick animals that way and it was a common thing to drown unwanted kittens and puppies in a sack, but he had never done it. Death might be a necessity in farming, but suffering – never.

Armstrong wept, and he discovered as he went that one loss brings back others. The thought of his favourite pig, the most intelligent and kindly pig he had known in thirty years of farming, suddenly afflicted him afresh as poignantly as that first morning over two years ago when he had discovered her missing. ‘What happened to Maud, Fleet? I cannot reconcile myself to not knowing. Someone took her, Fleet, but who could have got her away so noiselessly? You know what she was like. She would have squealed if some stranger had tried to take her. And why steal a gilt? A pig for the table, that I can understand, people get hungry, but a breeding pig – her meat would be tough and bitter, wouldn’t they know that? It makes no sense. Why steal a pig the size of Maud when there were table pigs in the very next pen?’

His heart contracted in pain at the most unbearable thought of all: anyone ignorant enough to take the biggest pig instead of a sweet-tasting small one was bound to be clumsy with the slaughterer’s knife.

Armstrong was a man fully aware of his good fortune: he had health, strength and intelligence; the unorthodoxy of his birth – his father was an earl, his mother a black servant girl – had brought difficulties, but advantages too. Though his childhood had been lonely, he had received a fine education, and when he chose his path in life, he had been given a generous sum to get started. He owned fertile land; he had won the love of Bess and together they had created a large and mostly happy family. He was a man who counted his blessings and rejoiced in them, but he was also one who felt losses most keenly, and now his mind was in torment.

A child struggling in the river, Maud struggling against a dull blade, wielded by an inexpert slaughterman …

Dark images tore at him. Yes, one grief unleashes another, and another, and having torn open the wound left by the loss of Maud, his mind turned to the most painful loss of all and the tears ran more abundantly down his face.

‘Oh, Robin. Where did I go wrong, Fleet? Oh, Robin, my son.’

A great distance now separated him from his first child, and a massive weight of sorrow sat on his heart and oppressed him. Twenty-two years of love, and now? For four years his son had not consented to live at the farm, but resided in Oxford, apart from his brothers and sisters. They didn’t see him for months at a time, and then only when he wanted something. ‘I tried, Fleet – but did I try hard enough? What should I have done? Is it too late?’

And thinking about Robin brought him back to the child – Robin’s child – and he started the cycle all over again.

After some time of this, an elderly man came into view, leaning on a stick. Armstrong wiped his face on his sleeve and, as they came close, stopped to speak to him.

‘There is a little girl gone missing from Bampton,’ he said. ‘Four years of age. Will you put the word out? I’m Armstrong, my farm is at Kelmscott …’

From his first words, he saw the man’s face change.

‘Then I have sorry news for you, Mr Armstrong. I heard it told last night, at the cockfighting. Fellow on his way to Lechlade for the morning train told it to all o’ us. A little girl plucked out o’ the river, drowned.’

So, she was gone. It was only to be expected.

‘Where was this?’

‘The Swan, at Radcot.’

The fellow was not without kindness. Seeing Armstrong’s grief he added, ‘I don’t say as it’s the child you are looking for. Chances are it’s a different girl altogether.’

But as Armstrong geed up Fleet to gallop to Radcot, the old man shook his head and pursed his lips. He had lost a week’s wages on the cockfighting last night, but still, there were others worse off than he.

Three Claims

THE LEACH AND the Churn and the Coln all have their separate journeys before they join the Thames to swell its waters, and in similar fashion the Vaughans and the Armstrongs and Lily White had their own stories in the years and days before they became part of this one. But join it they did, and we now come to the meeting of the waterways.

While the world was still smothered in darkness, someone was up and about on the riverbank: a stubby figure, clutching a coat about her, scurried in the direction of Radcot Bridge, panting steam.

At the bridge she stopped.

The usual place to pause on a bridge is the apex. It is so natural to pause there that most bridges – even youthful ones only a few hundred years old – are flattened at their upmost point by the feet that have lingered, loitered, wandered and waited there. That was a thing Lily could not understand. She stopped on the bank, at the pier stone, the massive piece of rock on which the rest of the construction was founded. Engineering was a bewilderment to Lily: stones, to her mind, did not reside naturally in the air, and how a bridge stayed up was another thing she could not fathom. It might be revealed at any moment for the illusion it surely was, and then, if she happened to be upon it, she would plummet through the air, plunge into the water and join the souls of the dead. She avoided bridges when she could, but sometimes crossing was a necessity. She balled the fabric of her skirt in her fists, took a deep breath and launched into a heavy-footed run.

It was Margot who woke first, roused by the banging at the door. The urgency of the hammering got her out of bed and she pulled her dressing gown around herself as she went downstairs to see who it was. As she descended, her memories of the previous night shook off their dream-like air and revealed themselves to her as surprising reality. She shook her head wonderingly – then opened the door.

‘Where is she?’ said the woman at the door. ‘Is she here? I heard she was …’

‘It’s Mrs White, isn’t it? From over the river?’ What’s wrong here? Margot thought. ‘Come in, dear. What’s the matter?’

‘Where is she?’

‘Asleep, I should think. There’s no rush, is there? Let me light a candle.’

‘There is a candle just here,’ came Rita’s voice. Roused by the hammering at the door, she was on her feet and in the doorway to the pilgrims’ room.

‘Who’s that?’ Lily asked nervously.

‘Just me – Rita Sunday. Good morning. It’s Mrs White, isn’t it? I think you work for Parson Habgood?’

As the candle flickered into life, Lily looked this way and that in the room, her feet in agitated movement beneath her. ‘The little girl …’ she began again, but uncertainty entered her expression as she looked at Margot and Rita. ‘I thought … Did I dream it? I don’t … Perhaps I should be going.’

Light footsteps sounded behind Rita. It was the child, rubbing her eyes and tottering on her feet.

‘Oh!’ exclaimed Lily with an entirely altered voice. ‘Oh!’

Even by candlelight they saw her blanch. Her hand flew to her mouth and she stared in shock at the girl’s face.

‘Ann!’ she exclaimed in a voice thick with feeling. ‘Forgive me, Ann! Say you forgive me, sister dear!’ She got to her knees and reached a shaking hand to the child, but did not dare to touch her. ‘You have come back! Thank heaven! Say you forgive me …’ She gazed with urgent longing at the child, who seemed indifferent. ‘Ann?’ she asked, and with pleading eyes waited for a response.

None came.

‘Ann?’ she whispered again, in fearful trembling.

Still the child did not answer.

Rita and Margot exchanged a look of astonishment, then, seeing that the woman was weeping, Rita placed both hands on her shaking shoulders.

‘Mrs White,’ she said soothingly.

‘What is that smell?’ Lily cried out. ‘The river, I know it is!’

‘She was found in the river last night. We haven’t washed her hair yet – she was too poorly.’

Lily turned her eyes back to the child and gazed at her with an expression that altered from love to horror and back again.

‘Let me go,’ she whispered. ‘Let me get away!’

She rose shakily but with determination and made her way out, muttering apologies as she went.

‘Well,’ Margot exclaimed with gentle bafflement. ‘I give up trying to make sense of anything. I am going to make a cup of tea. That is the best I can do.’

‘And a very good thing too.’

But Margot didn’t go to make the tea. At least, not straight away. She looked out of the window, to where Lily was kneeling in the cold, hands clasped at her chest. ‘She is still there. Praying, it looks like. Praying and staring. What do you make of it?’

Rita considered. ‘Can Mrs White have a sister so young? How old would you say she was? Forty?’

Margot nodded. ‘And our little girl is – four?’

‘About that.’

Margot used her fingers to count, the way she did the inn’s bookkeeping. ‘Thirty-six years between them. Suppose Mrs White’s mother had her at sixteen. Thirty-six years later she would be fifty-two.’ She shook her head. ‘Can’t be.’

In the pilgrims’ room, Rita held the wrist of the man in the bed and counted his pulse.

‘Is he going to be all right?’ Margot asked.

‘All the signs are good.’

‘And her?’

‘What about her?’

‘Will she … get better? Because she’s not right, is she? She hasn’t said a word.’ Margot turned to the child. ‘What’s your name, poppet? Who are you, eh? Say hello to your Auntie Margot!’

The child gave no response.

Margot lifted her and, with maternal coaxing, murmured encouragement into her ear. ‘Come on, my little one. A little smile? A look?’ But the child remained indifferent. ‘Can she even hear me?’

‘I have wondered that myself.’

‘Maybe she had her wits knocked out of her in the accident?’

‘No sign of a blow to the head.’

‘Simple-minded?’ Margot wondered. ‘Goodness knows, it’s not easy having a child who’s different.’ She smoothed the child’s hair tenderly. ‘Have I ever told you about when Jonathan was born?’ You couldn’t live at the Swan, have it in your blood for generations and not know how to tell a story, and though she was ordinarily too busy for such things, the unusual nature of the day jolted her out of her habits and she stopped to tell one now. ‘Do you remember Beattie Riddell, the midwife before you came?’

‘She died before I arrived.’

‘She delivered all of mine. None of the girls were any trouble, but then there was Jonathan and – I suppose I was older – it wasn’t so easy. After a dozen girls, me and Joe were still hoping for a boy, so when at long last Beattie held him up to me all I saw was his little John Thomas! Joe’ll be pleased, I thought, and so was I. I reached for him, thinking she would put him in my arms, but instead she put him down on the side and gave a sort of shudder.

‘“I know what to do,” she said. “Don’t worry, Mrs Ockwell. It is a simple thing and cannot fail. We will get him changed back in no time, don’t you fret.”

‘That’s when I saw. Those slanting eyes of his and that funny little moon face and his ears that are so curious. He was an odd little fellow, a … a dainty creature … and I thought, Is that really mine? Did that really come out of my belly? How did it get in there? I had never seen a baby like it. But Beattie knew what he was.’

All the while she told, Margot was rocking the girl as though she were no weight at all, like a much smaller child.

‘Let me guess,’ said Rita. ‘A changeling?’

Margot nodded. ‘Beattie went down to the kitchen to set a fire going. I expect you know what she was going to do – put him over the fire, and when he got a bit warm and started to squeal, his fairy folk would come and fetch him back and leave my stolen baby in return. She called up the stairs, “I shall want more kindling and a big pot.” I heard her go out the back to the wood store.

‘I couldn’t take my eyes off him, little fairy creature that he was. He gave a blink and the way his eyelid – you know what it is like, not straight like yours and mine, but set at an angle – it closed over the eye not quite like a normal baby, but nearly. I thought, What does he make of this strange world he’s come to? What does he make of me, his foster mother? He moved his arms, not altogether like my baby girls used to, but more floppy – like he was swimming. A baby frown came into his face and I thought, He will cry in a minute. He’s cold. Beattie hadn’t wrapped him up or anything. Fairy children can’t be so very different from the ones I know, I thought, because I can tell he’s getting cold. I put my fingertips against his little cheek and he was all wonder, quite astonished! When I took my finger away his little mouth opened and he mewed like a kitten to have it back. I felt my milk rise at his cry.

‘Beattie wasn’t half cross when she came back and found him suckling. Human milk!

‘“Well,” she said, “it’s too late now.”

‘And that was that.’

‘Thank goodness,’ said Rita, at the end of the story. ‘I’ve heard the stories about changelings, but that’s all they are. Jonathan is no fairy child. Some children are just born like that. Beattie might not have seen it before, but I have. There are other children in the world just the same as Jonathan, with the same slanting eyes and large tongues and loose limbs. Some doctors call them Mongol children, because they resemble people from that part of the world.’

Margot nodded. ‘He is a human child, isn’t he? I know it now. He’s mine and Joe’s. But the reason I was thinking about it now is because of this little one. She’s not like Jonathan, is she? She’s not a – what did you call it? – Mongol child? She’s different in some other way. It’s not easy raising a child who’s different. But I’ve done it. I know how to do it. So even if she can’t hear, and even if she don’t speak …’ Margot clutched the child closer in her arms, took a breath and suddenly remembered the man in the bed. ‘But I suppose she belongs to him.’

‘We’ll know soon enough. It won’t be long before he wakes.’

‘What is that Lily doing now, anyway? I shall have to go and fetch her in if she’s still there. It’s too cold for a body to be praying out of doors – she’ll be frozen stiff.’

She went to the window to peer out, the child still in her arms.

Margot felt it and Rita saw it: the child quickened. She lifted her head. Her sleepy stare was suddenly keen. She gazed one way and the other, scanning the view with lively interest.

‘What is it?’ said Rita, rising urgently and crossing the room. ‘Is it Mrs White?’

‘She’s gone,’ Margot told her. ‘There’s nothing there. Only the river.’

Rita came to stand at their side. She looked at the girl, whose stare continued as if she would drink the river dry with her eyes. ‘There wasn’t a bird? A swan? Something to catch her attention?’

Margot shook her head.

Rita sighed. ‘Perhaps it was the light that attracted her,’ she said. She stood for a moment in case she should see it – whatever it was, if it was anything at all. But Margot was right. There was only the river.

Margot dressed and roused her husband, noticed Jonathan was already up and out, and sighed – he had never been one to respect the conventional hours of sleep and wakefulness – then set to making tea and porridge. While she was stirring the pot, there came another knock at the door. It was early for drinkers, yet after last night there were bound to be curious souls dropping in. She unlocked, a greeting on her tongue, but when she opened the door she took half a step back. The man on the threshold had black skin. He was a head taller than most men and powerfully built. Should she be alarmed? She opened her mouth to call for her husband, but before the words were spoken the man took off his hat and nodded at her with grave good manners.

‘I’m sorry to trouble you so early in the day, Madam.’

Tears trembled suddenly, unavoidably, on his lashes and he raised a hand to his face to brush them away.

‘Whatever is it?’ she cried, all thought of danger gone as she drew him inside. ‘Here. Sit down.’

He put a thumb and forefinger into the corners of his eyes and pressed, then sniffed and swallowed. ‘Forgive me,’ he said, and she was struck by the way he spoke, like a gentleman – not only in the words he used, but in the way he said them. ‘I understand a child was brought in last night. A child found drowned in the river.’

‘That is true.’

He heaved a great breath. ‘I believe it might be my granddaughter. I should like to see her, if you don’t mind.’

‘She is in the other room, with her father.’

‘My son? My son is here?’ His heart leapt at the thought and he leapt up with it.

Margot was puzzled. Surely this dark man could not be the father of the man in the bed.

‘The nurse is with them,’ she offered, though it was not an answer. ‘They are both rather poorly.’

He followed her to the pilgrims’ room.

‘This is not my son,’ he said. ‘My son is not so tall, nor so broad. He is always clean-shaven. His hair is light brown and does not curl like this.’

‘Then Mr Daunt is not your son.’

‘My son is Mr Armstrong. And so am I.’

Margot said to Rita, ‘It was for the little girl that the gentleman came in. He thought she might be his grandchild.’

Rita stood to one side and for the first time Armstrong set eyes on the child.

‘Well!’ exclaimed Armstrong uncertainly. ‘What a …’

He hardly knew what to say. He had had in mind – and he realized his foolishness instantly – a brown-skinned child like his own. Of course, this child would be different. She would be Robin’s child. At first disconcerted by the uncolour of her hair and the whiteness of her skin, he was nonetheless struck by a familiarity. He could not quite place it. Her nose was not really Robin’s – unless perhaps it was, a little … And the curve of her temple … He tried to picture the face of the young woman he had seen dead so few hours earlier, but it was hard to compare that face with this. He might have been able to do it if he had seen the woman in life, but death so rapidly undoes a person and the detail of her face was hard to recall in any ordinary way. Still, he fancied there was something that linked the child to the woman, though he couldn’t put his finger on it.

Armstrong became aware that the women were waiting for a response from him.

‘The difficulty is that I have not met my grandchild before. My son’s daughter lived at Bampton with her mother, apart from my own family. It was far from what I would have wished, but it was so.’

‘Family life … It is not always easy,’ Margot murmured charitably. After her initial trepidation she discovered she had quite come round to this large, dark man.

He gave her a half-bow in gratitude. ‘I was alerted yesterday to a crisis in the household and discovered early this morning that the young woman who was her mother—’

He broke off and glanced anxiously at the child. He was used to the stares of children, but this one’s eyes drifted towards him and didn’t stop but kept on going, past, past, as if she hadn’t seen him. Perhaps it was a form of shyness. Cats also did not like to meet an unfamiliar person’s eye – they looked in your direction and then away again. He kept a length of string in his pocket to which was tied a feather; it was marvellously effective with kittens. For little girls he had a small doll made of a coat peg with a painted face and a rabbit-skin coat. He took it out now and put it in the child’s lap. She felt it placed there, and looked down. Her hand closed around the doll. Rita and Margot watched her with the same attentiveness as the man and exchanged glances.

‘You were saying, about the poor mite’s mother …’ Margot then prompted in a low voice, and while the child was occupied with the doll, Armstrong went on in a low murmur.

‘The young woman passed away yesterday evening. Nothing was known of the whereabouts of the child. I enquired of the first man I met on the towpath and he told me to apply to you here. Though he had the story entirely upside down and I arrived believing her to be drowned.’

‘She was drowned,’ said Margot. ‘Till Rita brought her in again and then she was alive.’ No matter how many times her tongue repeated it, it still sounded wrong to her ears.

Armstrong frowned and turned to Rita for clarification. Her face gave little away. ‘She appeared dead, but wasn’t,’ she said. The briefness of the formulations elided the impossibilities better than any other, and for the moment this was her version. It was laconic, but it was true. As soon as you started to put more words in, you came to unreason.

‘I see,’ said Armstrong, though he didn’t.

The three of them looked at the girl again. The doll was lying abandoned at her side and she had returned to a state of listlessness.

‘She is a droll little thing,’ Margot admitted unhappily. ‘Everybody finds her so. And yet, in a way that is hard to explain, you cannot help but take to her. Why, even the gravel-diggers last night – and they are not known for being soft-hearted – were won over. Weren’t they, Rita? If nobody had claimed her, that Higgs would have taken her home like a lost puppy. And even with all the children and grandchildren I’ve got to worry about, I’d keep her, if she had nowhere else to go. And so would you, wouldn’t you, Rita?’

Rita did not reply.

‘We did think he was the father, the man who brought her in,’ Margot said. ‘But from what you say …’

‘How is he? This Mr Daunt?’

‘He will be all right. His injuries look worse than they are. His breathing does not falter and his colour improves with every hour that passes. I think it will not be long before he awakes.’

‘I will go to Oxford and find my son, then. By dusk he will be here and by nightfall this matter will be settled.’

He put on his hat and took his leave.

Margot set about readying the winter room for the day ahead. Word would have got out and she expected to be busy. She might even have to open the large summer room. Rita moved between the child and the man asleep in the bed. Joe came in for a time. The little girl turned her eyes to him and watched his every move as he poured tea into Rita’s cup and arranged the curtain so that the light did not disturb the sleeper in the bed. When he had done these things and came to see the child herself, she stretched out her arms to him.

‘Well!’ he exclaimed. ‘What a funny little girl you are! Fancy being interested in old Joe.’

Rita stood to let him sit and placed the child on his lap. She stared up into his face.

‘What colour would you say her eyes are?’ he wondered. ‘Blue? Grey?’

‘Greeny-blue?’ Rita suggested. ‘Depends on the light.’

They were considering the matter together when there came a sudden hammering at the door for the third time that day. It made them both start.

‘Whatever next!’ they heard Margot exclaim, as her feet trotted hastily across the floor to the door. ‘Who can it be this time?’

There came the sound of the door opening. And then—

‘Oh!’ exclaimed Margot. ‘Oh!’

Daddy!

MR VAUGHAN WAS on Brandy Island, at the vitriol works, where he was making an inventory of every item that appertained to the factory in preparation for the auction. It was painstaking work and he could have delegated the job, but he liked the repetitive nature of the task. In any other circumstances the abandonment of his brandy business might have been a painful thing. He had invested so much in it: the purchase of Buscot House with its fields and its island, the planning, the research, the construction of the reservoir, the planting of acres of beet, the building of the railway and the bridge to bring the beet over on to the island, all that plus the work on the island itself: the distillery and the vitriol works … An ambitious experiment that he’d had energy for when he was single and later a newly married man and after that a new father. To tell the truth, it wasn’t really that the enterprise hadn’t worked; it was simply that he couldn’t be bothered with it any more. Amelia had disappeared and so had his zest for the work. There was profit enough in his other enterprises – the farms were doing well and his shares in his father’s mining operation made him wealthy. Why rack his brains solving one problem after another, to make a success of this, when it was so much easier to let it go? There was a peculiar satisfaction in the dismantling, auctioning off, melting down and dispersal of the world he had spent so much time and money building up. Making his meticulous lists was an opportunity to forget. He counted, measured, listed, and felt soothed in his boredom. It helped him forget Amelia.

Today he had woken grasping after the tail end of a dream, and though he could not remember it, he suspected it was the dream – too terrible to speak of – that he had suffered frequently in the first days of their loss. It left him feeling hollowed out. Later, as he crossed the yard, the wind had delivered to his ears a snatch of a child’s high-pitched voice picked up some distance away. Of course, all little children’s voices sound the same from afar. They just do. But the two things had unsettled him and put him in need of this dulling occupation.

Now, in the store room, his eye alighted on something that opened a chasm into the past and made him flinch. It was a jar of barley-sugar canes in a dusty corner. Suddenly she was there – fingers reaching into the mouth of the jar, delighted when two canes came out so tightly welded together that they could not be separated and she was allowed to eat them both. His heart beat painfully and the jar slipped through his fingers and smashed on the concrete floor. That had done it. He would not regain his peace of mind today, not now she had materialized here in the store room.

He called for a broom to sweep it all and when he heard running supposed it was his assistant, but to Vaughan’s surprise, it was a member of his domestic staff that appeared: Newman, his gardener. Though out of breath, the man began to speak; his words were so shaken about by the great gasps of breath he was obliged to take that his meaning was not easy to make out. Vaughan caught the word drowned.

‘Slow down, Newman, take your time.’

The gardener began again and this time something approximating the story of the girl who died and lived again emerged. ‘At the Swan at Radcot,’ he finished. And in a hushed voice, as though he hardly dared to say it, ‘They say she is about four.’

‘Christ in heaven!’ Vaughan’s hands rose halfway to his head, then he gathered himself. ‘Try not to let my wife hear about it, will you?’ he asked. But even before the gardener spoke again, he could see it was too late.

‘Mrs Vaughan has gone up there already, by herself. Mrs Jellicoe who does the laundry brought the news – she heard it from one of the Swan’s regulars last night. We couldn’t know what she was going to say – if we had we wouldn’t have let her near, but we thought she was going to hand in her notice. The next thing we knew, Mrs Vaughan was racing down to the boathouse and there was not a thing we could do to stop her. By the time we got there, she had took the old rowing boat and was almost out of sight.’

Vaughan ran home, where the stable boy, anticipating his need, had readied his horse. ‘You’ll have to fly to catch her,’ he warned. Vaughan mounted and took the direction of Radcot. For the first few minutes he galloped as fast as he could, then he slowed to a trot. Fly? he thought. I’ll never catch her. He had rowed with her in the early days of their marriage and she was as expert a rower as any man he knew. She was slim, which made her light, and she was strong. Thanks to her father, she had been in and out of boats since before she could walk, and her blades dipped without a splash into the water, rose out of it as cleanly as a leaping fish. Where others grew scarlet and sweated with effort, her cheeks simply took on a serene rose flush, and she gleamed with contentment, feeling the pull of the water. Some women softened with grief, but in Helena it had burnt away the little softness she was starting to develop since their daughter’s arrival, and honed her. She was all wire and muscle, fired with determination, and she had a half-hour head start. Fly and catch her? Not a chance. Helena was out of reach. She had been for a long time.

It was hope that had her always so far ahead of him. He had parted company with hope long ago. If Helena would only do the same, happiness might – he thought – eventually be restored to them. Instead of which she stoked her hope, fed it with any trifle she could lay her hands on, and when there was nothing to feed it, she nourished it with some stubborn faith of her own making. In vain he had tried to console her and comfort her, in vain offered images of other futures, different lives.

‘We could go and live abroad,’ he had suggested. They had spoken of it when they first married, it was a notion for the years ahead. ‘Why not?’ she had said then, before Amelia’s disappearance, before Amelia had existed at all. And so he had suggested it again. They might go to New Zealand for a year – two, even. And why come back? They needn’t. New Zealand was a fine place to work, to live …

Helena had been appalled. ‘And how will Amelia find us there?’

He had talked of the other children they had always expected. But future children were immaterial, mere abstractions to his wife. Only to him did they appear incarnate, in his dreams and in his waking hours. The marital intimacies that had ceased so abruptly the night their daughter disappeared had not been resumed in the two years since. Before Helena, he had lived unmarried and more or less celibate for many years. Where other men paid for women or took up with girls they could later abandon, he went to bed alone and fell back on his own devices. He had no desire to return to this mode of life now. If his wife could not love him, then nothing. The spirit faded. He no longer expected pleasure of his own body or hers. He had given up one hope after another.

She blamed him. He blamed himself. It was a father’s job to keep his children from harm, and he had failed.

Vaughan realized that he was stationary. His mount had its muzzle to the ground, exploring for something sweet among the winter bracken. ‘There’s nothing there for you. Nothing for me either.’ He was overwhelmed with a great weariness. For a moment he wondered whether he was ill, whether he could in fact go on. He remembered somebody saying something, quite recently … You can’t go on like this. Oh, it was the woman in Oxford. Mrs Constantine. What a foolish expedition that had turned out to be. But she was right about that. He couldn’t go on.

He went on.

There was an unusual number of people packed into the Swan, he thought, given the time of day and the season. They looked up at him with the curiosity of those for whom something is already underway and further interest can confidently be expected. He paid them no attention and made straight for the bar, where a woman took one look at him and said, ‘Follow me.’

She led him through a short panelled passageway to an old oak door. She opened it and stepped aside to let him enter first.

There were too many shocks: he could not separate one from another. Only afterwards was he able to tease out the many impressions that rushed upon him into separate strands and put words and an order to them. First there was the bewilderment of expecting to see his wife and failing to find her there. Second was the confusion of seeing a very familiar face that he had not seen for a long time. A young woman, scarcely more than a child really, whom he had once asked to marry him, and who had said Yes, with laughter, yes, if I can bring my boat. She turned a radiant face to him and smiled, her lips wide with easy happiness, her eyes brightly luminous with love.

Vaughan stopped dead in his tracks. Helena. His wife – bold, joyous and magnificent, as she had been. Before.

She laughed.

‘Oh, Anthony! What’s the matter with you!’

She looked down, took hold of something, speaking in a cajoling, sing-song voice that he remembered from another time. ‘Look,’ she said, though not to him. ‘Look who it is.’

The third shock.

She turned the little person to face him.

‘Daddy’s here!’

The Sleeper Wakes

MEANWHILE, A MAN with black-stained fingertips and a broken face lay sleeping in the pilgrims’ room of the Swan at Radcot. He lay on his back, his head on Margot’s feather pillow, and but for the rise and fall of his chest, he did not stir.

There are any number of ways you might imagine sleep, none of them likely to be accurate. We cannot know what entering sleep feels like, for by the time it is complete, the ability to commit it to memory is lost. But we all know the gently plummeting feeling that precedes falling asleep and gives it its name.

When he was ten, Henry Daunt saw a picture of an ash tree whose roots plunged into an underground river in which lived strange mermaids or naiads, called the Maidens of Destiny. When he thought of the descent into sleep, it was something very like this subterranean waterway that he envisaged. He had a sense of his slumber as a lengthy swimming session, in which he navigated slowly through water that was thicker than usual, with effortless pleasant movements that propelled him in one direction or another with a kind of vivid aimlessness. Sometimes the skin of the water was only a little way above his head, and his daytime world, its troubles and pleasures, was still there, pursuing him from the other side. On those occasions he would wake feeling as though he had not slept at all. Most of the time, though, he slept easily, awoke refreshed, sometimes with the happy sense that he had met friends in his sleep, or that his mother (though dead) had communicated some loving message to him in the night. He didn’t mind this at all. He did mind waking just as the last traces of some interesting nocturnal adventure were lost to the tide.

None of these things happened in the Swan at Radcot. While life was at work in him, crusting blood over gashes and doing all manner of intricate work inside the skull box that had taken such a battering at Devil’s Weir, Henry Daunt sank, sank, sank to the darkest depths of his vast underwater cavern, where nothing ebbed and nothing flowed and all was as dark and still as the grave. He remained there for an unmeasurable length of time, and at the end of it, memory awoke and the still depths shivered and came to life.

A number of experiences then drifted into his mind and out again, in no particular order.

A dull sensation that was the disappointment of his marriage.

A stinging in his fingertips that was the cold he felt yesterday at Trewsbury Mead, when he had stopped the trickle that was the Thames with his forefinger and waited for the water to build up behind it till the volume became too great and it overspilt.

A whole body swooping and gliding – skating on the frozen Thames as a young man of twenty; he had met his wife that day and the gliding had continued for many weeks, all through the rest of the winter to a day at the beginning of spring that was his wedding day.

The slack-jawed astonishment, the fisticuffs in the brain, on seeing an empty space in the skyline where the roof of the old friary gatehouse used to be – he was six, it was the first time he realized the physical world could be subject to such change.

A crash of glass; his father, the glazier, cursing in the yard.

So the contents of the skull satisfied themselves that they were in place, complete, whole.

Finally came something different from all the rest. A thing that belonged in another category altogether. It was not unfamiliar – he had dreamt it before, more often than he knew. It was always out of focus, for he had never set eyes on it in the real world, only in his imagination. It was a child. Daunt’s child. The one he had failed to make with Miriam, and not tried to make with anybody else. It was his future child. The image drifted past, there and gone again, and it roused a response in the sleeping man, who attempted to lift his leaden limbs to grasp it. It drifted out of reach, not without leaving behind the sense that there had been something more urgent about the dream image this time. Was it not more vivid? It was a little girl, wasn’t it? But the moment had passed.

Now the scene in Henry Daunt’s mind altered once again. A landscape, unfamiliar and unsettling, deeply personal. A blasted terrain. Jagged, rocky outcrops. Churned-up gashes in the land. Bulbous protuberances. There must have been – what? A war? An earthquake?

Consciousness cast a dim illumination and thought began to stir in Henry Daunt. This landscape was not something seen, but something else … These were not images, no, but pieces of information passed to his brain … by his tongue … The rocks translated themselves into the broken rubble of teeth. The mess of disrupted earth was the flesh of his mouth.

Awake.

He stiffened in alarm. Pain shot through his limbs, took him by surprise.

What has happened?

He opened his eyes – to darkness. Darkness? Or … was he blindfolded?

In panic his hands rose to his face – more pain – and where his face ought to be, his fingers met something foreign. Some padding, thicker than skin, unfeeling, stretched over his bones. He sought the edge of it, desperate to pull it off, but his fingers were thick and clumsy …

A flurry of sound. A voice – a woman:

‘Mr Daunt!’

He felt his hands gripped by other hands, hands that were surprisingly strong and that prevented him from tearing off the blindfold.

‘Don’t scrabble! You are injured. I expect you’re feeling numb. You are safe. This is the Swan at Radcot. There was an accident. Do you remember?’

A word sprang nimbly from his mind to his tongue; once there it stumbled over the rubble in his mouth and when it emerged he didn’t recognize it. He had another go, more arduously:

‘Eyes!’

‘Your eyes are swollen. You knocked your head in the accident. You will be able to see perfectly well once the swelling has gone down.’

The hands brought his own away from his face. He heard liquid being poured, but his ears couldn’t tell him what colour the liquid was or what the pitcher was made of or what size the drinking vessel was. He felt the tilt that comes when a person sits on the edge of the bed, but could not tell what manner of person it was. The world was suddenly unknowable; he was marooned in it.

‘Eyes!’

The woman took hold of his hands again. ‘It is only swelling. You will see again as soon as it subsides. Here, a drink. It will feel clumsy, I expect you will have lost sensation in your lips, but I will tip it for you.’

She was right. There was no warning, no touch of rim on lip, only the sudden sensation of sweet wetness in his mouth. He indicated with a grunt that he would swallow more, but ‘Little sips, frequently,’ she said.

‘Do you remember arriving here?’ she asked.

He thought. His memory seemed unfamiliar to him. There were images reflected in fragmentary style on the surface of it that couldn’t really belong there. He made a noise, a gesture of uncertainty.

‘The little girl you brought in – can you tell us who she is?’

A tap on wood, a door opening.

A new voice: ‘I thought I heard voices. Here she is.’

The mattress returned to the level as the woman beside him stood up.

He raised his hand to his face, and this time, knowing that the insensate padding was his skin, detected a line of spikes. The tips of his eyelashes, their length half buried in the inflamed lids. He applied clumsy pressure above and below the line and pulled apart—‘No!’ the woman cried, but it was too late. Light pierced his eye, and he gasped. It was the pain, and something else besides: on its wave the light carried an image and it was the image he had dreamt. The drifting girl, his future child, infant of his imagination.

‘Is this your little girl?’ said the newcomer.

A child whose eyes were the colour of the Thames and as inexpressive.

Yes, said his leaping heart. Yes. Yes.

‘No,’ he said.

A Tragic Tale

ALL THROUGH THE hours of daylight the drinkers had been discussing events at the Swan. Everybody knew that Mr and Mrs Vaughan were in Margot and Joe’s private sitting room at the back, where they had been reunited with Amelia. Word had also got about that a rich Negro, Robert Armstrong from Kelmscott, had been there at first light and that his son was expected later. The name Robin Armstrong was broadcast.

A curtain was drawn back in every man’s inner theatre and their storytelling minds got to work. On the stage were the same four figures: Mr Vaughan, Mrs Vaughan, Robin Armstrong and the girl. The scenes that played out in the many heads were full of striking melodrama. There were seething looks, dark glances, calculating squints. Words were delivered in hisses, with stern decorum and in shrill alarm. The child was snatched from party to party, like a doll amongst jealous children. One farmhand of a counting disposition found his mind arranging an auction of the child, while the brawlers who had temporarily deserted the Plough indulged in fantasies in which Mr Vaughan drew a weapon from his inner pocket – revolver? dagger? – and set about Mr Armstrong with a true father’s determination. One ingenious mind returned the power of speech to the child at the moment of highest tension: ‘Papa!’ she called, lifting her arms to Mr Armstrong and dashing for ever the hopes of the Vaughans, who fell weeping into each other’s embrace. The role of Mrs Vaughan in these theatricals was confined largely to weeping, which she accomplished sometimes in a chair, frequently on the floor, and ending generally in a faint. One young cressman, in a flourish he was most proud of, imagined a role for the unconscious man in the bed: coming round from his long slumber and hearing an altercation in the next room, he would rise and enter the sitting room (stage left) and there, like Solomon, declare that the child must be sliced in two and given half to the Vaughans and half to Armstrong. That would do it.

When the last of the day had drained from the sky and it was past five o’clock and the river ran glinting in the darkness, a man rode up to the Swan and dismounted. The noise of the winter room was deafening, and before anyone noticed the door opening to let the man in, he had already closed it behind him. He stood for a little while, hearing his name in the general din, before anybody remarked on his presence, and even when they did see him, they failed to realize he was the one they were expecting. Those who had an idea what the older Mr Armstrong looked like – and the story was already being circulated that he was the bastard son of a prince and a slave girl – were waiting for a tall, strong and dark-skinned fellow; no wonder they did not recognize this young man, for he was pale and slender, with light-brown hair that fell into soft curls where it touched his collar. There was something of the boy still about him: his eyes were so palely blue they seemed nothing but reflection and his skin was soft like a girl’s. Margot was the first to spot him and she was not sure whether it was her maternal or her womanly instincts that stirred at the sight of him, for whether he was youth or man, he was pleasing to the eye.

He made his way to Margot. When he told her his name in an undertone, she drew him away from the public room and into the little corridor at the back that was lit by a single candle.

‘I don’t know what to say, Mr Armstrong. And you having lost your poor lady too. You see, since your father was here this morning—’

He stopped her. ‘It’s all right. I overtook your parson on my way here. He hailed me, guessing the reason for my direction and my haste, and has …’ He paused, and in the shadows of the corridor Margot supposed he was wiping away a tear, gathering himself to go on. ‘He has explained everything. It is not Alice, after all. Another family has claimed her.’ He lowered his head. ‘I thought it better to come anyway, since I was so near and you were expecting me. But now I shall take my leave. Please tell Mr and Mrs Vaughan I am very …’ – again his voice broke – ‘very pleased for them.’

‘Oh, but you must not go without at least taking something. A glass of ale? Some hot punch? You have come a long way, sit and rest for a while. Mr and Mrs Vaughan are in the sitting room and hoping to offer you their condolences …’

She opened the door and ushered him in.

Robin Armstrong entered the room with a gauche and apologetic air. Mr Vaughan, disarmed by this, had reached out and shaken him by the hand before he realized he was going to do it.

‘I’m sorry,’ both men said at the same moment, and then ‘Very awkward,’ in chorus, so it was impossible to know which had spoken first.

Mrs Vaughan gathered herself before either of the two men seemed able to. ‘We are so sorry, Mr Armstrong, to hear of your loss.’

He turned to her—

‘What?’ she said, after a moment. ‘What is it?’

He stared at the child in her lap.

The young Mr Armstrong wavered on his feet, then sank, leaning heavily on Margot, into the chair that Vaughan had just time to place behind him before his eyes fluttered to a close and he slumped.

‘Heavens above!’ Margot exclaimed and she dashed to fetch Rita from the sleeping photographer’s room.

‘He has had a long journey,’ said Helena, as she leant in kindness over the unconscious man. ‘In such hope – and to find that she is not here … It’s the shock.’

‘Helena,’ said Mr Vaughan, a note of warning in his voice.

‘The nurse will know what to do to revive him.’

‘Helena.’

‘She is bound to have some cloves or sal volatile.’

‘Helena!’

Helena turned to her husband. ‘What is it?’

Her brow was clear, her eyes were transparent.

‘Dearest,’ he said, and his voice shook. ‘Is it not possible that there is a different reason for the young man’s collapse?’

‘What reason?’

He quailed at the innocent puzzlement on her face.

‘Suppose …’ Words failed him, and he gestured in the direction of the child, who sat sleepily indifferent in the chair. ‘Suppose that, after all …’

The door opened and Margot hurried in, followed by Rita, who with calm assurance crouched at the side of the young man and took his wrist in one hand while she held her watch in the other.

‘He’s coming round,’ Margot announced, seeing his eyelids stir. She took one of his passive hands in hers and rubbed it.

Rita cast a sharp glance at the patient’s face. ‘He’ll be all right,’ she agreed without intonation as she put her watch back in her pocket.

The young man’s eyes opened. He took a couple of light, fluttering breaths, and raised his palms to cover his dazed-looking expression. When he lowered them he was himself once more.

He looked at the child again.

‘Reason says she is not Alice.’ He spoke haltingly. ‘She is your child. The parson says so. You say so. It is so.’

Helena nodded and she blinked away tears of sympathy for the young father.

‘No doubt you are wondering why I could so easily mistake another man’s child for my own. It is nearly a year since I last saw my daughter. Presumably you do not know the circumstances in which I find myself. I owe you an explanation.

‘My marriage took place in secret. When my wife’s family first learnt of the attachment between us and our plans for a betrothal, they placed obstacles in our path. We were young and foolish. Neither of us understood what harm we did ourselves and our families by marrying in secret, but that is what we did. My wife ran away to live with me, and our child was born less than a year later. We hoped – we trusted, even – that a grandchild would soften her parents’ resistance, but that wish was in vain and they continued as unyielding as ever. Over time my wife grew fretful for the many comforts that had accompanied her life in her earlier days. She found it hard raising a child without the benefit of a household of servants to make life easy. I did all I could to maintain her good spirits and encourage her to trust in love, but in the end she became convinced that the only way forward was for me to move to Oxford, where I had friends in positions of influence, and try my fortune there, where if things went favourably for me I might earn more and we might in a year or two be able to lead the leisured life she hankered after. So with a heavy heart I left Bampton and set up in rooms in Oxford.

‘I was lucky. I found work and was soon earning more than I had before, and although I missed my wife and child a good deal, I tried to make myself believe it was all for the best. In her letters, which were not frequent, I got the impression that she was happier too. Whenever possible I came back to see them both, and so for six months we went on. Once, about a year ago, my work brought me unexpectedly upriver and I thought it would be a pleasant thing to surprise the two of them with an impromptu visit.’ He swallowed, shifted in his chair. ‘I made a discovery then that altered my relationship with my wife for ever. She was not alone. The person with her – the least said about him, the better. The child’s way with him told me that this man was a regular in the household, an intimate of the family. Harsh words were spoken and I came away.

‘A little later, and while I was still in a quandary about what to do, I received a letter from my wife in which she proposed to live with this man as his wife, and saying that she wished to have no more to do with me. I could have protested at this, of course. I could have insisted that she obey her vows. As things have turned out, I rather wish I had. It would have been better all round. But in my disarray I replied that since it was what she wished, I agreed to the arrangement, and that as soon as I had earnt what I needed to provide a proper home for her, I would come for Alice. I wrote that I expected this to be before a year was out, and from that day I threw myself into my work in order to make it so.

‘I have not seen my wife since that time, but have recently taken on the lease of a house and was making arrangements to live there with the child. I expected that one of my sisters would come and be a mother to her. This morning, on the point of realizing these plans, I received a visit from my father who came with news of my wife’s death. He told me at the same time that Alice was missing. From others I have learnt that my wife was abandoned by her lover some months ago, and that she and the child have been in need ever since. I can only presume that it was out of shame that she did not contact me.’

Through his entire account, Robin Armstrong’s gaze was drawn persistently to the child’s face. More than once he lost the thread of his tale, and had to drag his eyes away from her and concentrate to pick up where he had left off, but after a few sentences his eyes would drift back and find her again.

He sighed heavily.

‘It is a story I would not willingly have told, for not only does it expose my poor wife’s sad folly to the wider world, but it puts me in a bad light. Do not blame her, for she was young. It was I who encouraged her to a secret marriage, I whose weakness in crisis led to her downfall, her death and the loss of our daughter. It is a sad story unfit for the ears of good people like yourselves. I ought perhaps to have told it with greater delicacy. Had I my wits about me, my story would have been less blunt in the telling, but it takes a little while for a man to gather himself after a shock. So please forgive me if I have been improperly frank, and remember I have been driven to it by the need to give you a reasonable explanation for my reaction here today.

‘It is true that on seeing your daughter I felt as if I was face to face with my own beloved Alice. But it is plain that she does not know me. And though she resembles Alice – to a very striking degree – I must remind myself that I have not seen her in nearly twelve months and children are apt to change, are they not?’

He turned to Margot.

‘No doubt you have children of your own, Madam, and will be able to confirm that I am right in this?’

Margot jumped at being addressed. She wiped away the tear that Robin’s story had put in her eye, and some confusion prevented her from giving an immediate answer.

‘I am right, am I not?’ he repeated. ‘Little children are apt to change in a twelvemonth?’

‘Well … Yes, I suppose they do change …’ Margot sounded uncertain.

Robin Armstrong rose from his chair and spoke to the Vaughans.

‘It was my grief that jumped ahead of my reason to recognize your child as my own. I apologize if I have alarmed you. I did not intend any harm.’

He brought his fingers to his lips, stretched out a hand and, obtaining permission from Helena with a glance, touched a gentle kiss upon the child’s cheek. His eyes filled with tears, but before they could fall he had bowed his head to the ladies, bid them farewell and was gone.

In the silence that followed Robin Armstrong’s exit, Vaughan turned his back to stare out of the window. The elms’ branches were black against the charcoal sky and his thoughts seemed tangled in the mazy treetops.

Margot opened her mouth to speak and closed it half a dozen times, blinking in perplexity.

Helena Vaughan drew the child close and rocked her.

‘Poor, poor man,’ she said in a low voice. ‘We must pray that he finds his Alice again – as we have found our Amelia.’

Rita did not stare and nor did she blink or speak. All the while Robin had been giving his account of himself, she had sat on the stool in the corner of the room, observing and listening. Now that he was gone she continued to sit, with the air of someone doing a mildly challenging long-division calculation in her head. What kind of a man is it, she was thinking, who appears to faint, and then comes round, though all the while his pulse does not falter?

After a time she evidently arrived at the end of her reflections, for she put her thinking face away and rose to her feet.

‘I must go and see how Mr Daunt is doing,’ she said, and she let herself quietly out of the room.

The Tale of the Ferryman

HENRY DAUNT SLEPT and woke and slept again. He emerged each time a bit less bewildered, a bit more himself. It was not like the worst hangover he had ever had, but it was more akin to that than anything else he had ever experienced. He was still blinded by his own eyelids, which pressed firmly to each other and against his eyeballs.

Till he was five years old Henry Daunt had cried persistently at night. Roused by her son’s inconsolable wailing in the dark, it had taken a long time for his mother to realize it wasn’t that he was afraid of the dark, but another reason. ‘There’s nothing to see,’ he sobbed at last, heartbroken, which put an end to her misunderstanding. ‘Of course there’s nothing to see,’ she told him. ‘It’s night. Night is for sleeping.’ He would not be persuaded. His father had sighed. ‘That boy was born with his eyes open and hasn’t shut them since.’ But it was he who had found the solution. ‘Look at the patterns on the inside of your eyelids. Pretty floating shapes, you’ll see, all different colours.’ Warily, fearing a trick, Henry had closed his eyes and been entranced.

Later he’d taught himself to conjure up visions from memory with his eyes shut, and enjoy them as freely as when they were present before his daytime gaze. More freely, even. He reached an age where it was the Maidens of Destiny he conjured to entertain his night-time hours. The underground mermaids rose out of churning water, their torsos half concealed by rounded lines that might have been waves, or curling locks, but might conceivably (if you were a boy of fourteen) not have been concealment at all but the actual curves of actual breasts. This was the image he lingered over in the dark hours. A creature with streaming hair, half-woman, half-river, cavorted with him and her caresses were so intoxicating that they had the same effect on him that a real woman might. His hand curled around himself and he was solid as an oar. A few tugs were enough, he was pulled into the current, he was the current, he dissolved into bliss.

Thinking about all this, and remembering the Maidens of Destiny, it occurred to him now to wonder what the nurse Rita Sunday looked like. He knew she was there, in the room with him. There was a chair diagonally left beyond the foot of the bed, by a window. He’d worked that much out. That was where she was now, silent, motionless – believing him to be asleep, no doubt. He tried to piece together an image of her. Her grip had been firm when she tried to draw his hands from his eyes. She was strong, then. He knew she was not short, for when she was standing her voice came from a high spot in the room. There was an assurance in her footsteps and movements that told him she was neither very young nor very old. Was she fair or dark? Pretty or plain? She must be plain, he thought. Otherwise she would be married, and if she were married she would not be here nursing a strange man alone in a bedroom. She was probably reading in the chair. Or thinking. He wondered what she was thinking about. This strange business with the girl, in all likelihood. He would think about it too, if he only knew where to start.

‘What do you make of it all?’ she asked.

‘How did you know I was awake?’ he asked when he had got over the fleeting notion that she could read his mind.

‘Your breathing pattern told me. Tell me what happened last night. Start with the accident.’

How had it happened?

It is a good thing to be solo on the river. There is freedom. You are neither in one place nor the other, but always on the move, in between. You escape everything and belong to no one. Daunt remembered the feeling: there was pleasure in the way his body organized itself with and against the water, with and against the air, pleasure in that quivering, precarious poise, when the river challenges and muscles respond. That was how it had been yesterday. He had been lost to himself. His eyes had seen only the river, his mind wholly engaged with predicting her caprices, his limbs a machine that responded to her every motion. There was a moment of glory, when body, boat and river combined in a ballet of withholding and giving, tension and relaxation, resistance and flow … It was sublime – and the sublime is not to be trusted.

It’s not that he hadn’t considered Devil’s Weir in advance. How to manage it, whether there would be someone about to help haul the boat out and drag it round. He had been aware of the other possibility too. It being winter and there being scarcely any fall to think of … He knew how to do it: draw the oars in, keep them ready to steady the boat the other side, and at the same time – rapidly, in a single smooth motion – throw yourself back and lie low. Get it wrong and you’ll either take a blow to the head or crack your blade, or both. But he knew. He’d done it before.

What had gone wrong? Seduced by the river, he’d fallen into that state of transcendence – that was his error. He might have got away with it, except that then – as he remembered it now – three things had come upon him at once.

The first was that, without his noticing it, time had passed and the light faded to a dim grey.

The second was that some shape – vague, hard to pin down – caught his eye and distracted him at just the moment he most needed to concentrate.

The third was Devil’s Weir. Here. Now.

The current had taken possession of the canoe – he flung himself back – the river surged, a great liquid limb rising beneath him, thrusting him up – the underside of the weir, black-wet, solid as a tree trunk, hurtling in the direction of his nose – not even the time to exclaim Oh! before—

He tried to explain all this to the nurse. It was a lot to say when his own mouth was a foreign country and every word a new and arduous route through the alphabet. At first he was slow, his speech clumsy, and he semaphored with his hands to fill the gaps in his account. Sometimes she chipped in, anticipating intelligently what he meant to say, and he grunted to indicate, Yes, that’s right. Little by little, he found ways of approximating the sounds he needed and became more fluent.

‘And is that where you found her? At Devil’s Weir?’

‘No. Here.’

He’d come round under the night sky. Too cold to feel pain, but knowing by animal instinct he was injured. Understanding that he needed warmth and shelter if he were to survive. He had clambered out of the boat carefully for fear of collapsing in the cold, cold water. It was then that the white shape had come drifting towards him. He’d known instantly that it was the body of a child. He’d stretched out his arms and the river delivered her neatly into them.

‘And you thought she was dead.’

He grunted yes.

‘Hm.’ He heard her take a breath, put the thought aside for later. ‘But how did you get from Devil’s Weir to here? A man with your injuries in a damaged boat – you can’t have done it alone.’

He shook his head. He had no idea.

‘I wonder what it was that you saw? The thing that distracted you at Devil’s Weir.’

Daunt was a man whose memory was made of pictures. He found one: the pale moon suspended above the river; he found another: the looming weir, massive against a darkening sky. There was something else too. It hurt his face to frown as he tried to make sense of it. Like a photographic plate, his mind usually registered clear outlines, detail, tones, perspectives. This time he found only a blur. It was like a photograph where the subject has moved, dancing through the fifteen seconds of exposure that are required to give the illusion of a single moment. He would have liked to go back and live that moment again if he could, open it up and stretch it out full length to see what it was that had left this blur on his retina.

He shook his head in uncertainty; winced at the movement.

‘Was it a person? Perhaps someone saw what happened and helped you?’

Was it? Tentatively, he nodded.

‘On the bank?’

‘River.’ That he was sure of.

‘Gypsy boats? They are never far away at this time of year.’

‘A single vessel.’

‘Another rowing boat?’

‘No.’

‘A barge?’

His blur was not a barge. It was slighter, a few lines merely … ‘A punt, perhaps?’ Now that he had heard himself suggest it, the blur resolved itself a fraction. A long, low vessel navigated by a tall, lean figure … ‘Yes, I think so.’

He heard the nurse half laugh. ‘Be careful who you tell. They will have it that you have met Quietly.’

‘Who?’

‘Quietly. The ferryman. He sees to it that those who get into trouble on the river make it safely home again. Unless it is their time. In which case, he sees them to the other side of the river.’ She pronounced those last words in a tone of half-comic gravity.

He laughed, felt the pull of pain at his split lip, and drew in breath sharply.

Footsteps. The firm and gentle press of cloth at his face, and the sensation of coolness.

‘Enough talking for a little while,’ she said.

‘Your fault. You made me laugh.’

He was reluctant to let the conversation come to an end. ‘Tell me about Quietly.’

Her footsteps returned to the chair and he pictured her there, plain and tall and strong, and neither young nor old.

‘There are more than a dozen versions. I’ll just begin and see what comes.

‘Many years ago, in the days when there were fewer bridges than there are today, the Quietlys lived on the banks of the river not very far from here. They were a family with one peculiarity: the men were all mute. That is why they were called Quietly, and nobody remembers their real name. They built punts for a living and for a reasonable price would ferry you across the river from their yard and come and collect you again when you hailed them. The yard passed down from grandfather to father to son, over many generations, along with the inability to speak.

‘You might think that being unable to speak would be a difficulty in the matter of romance, but the Quietlys were dependable, kindly men and there are women who like a peaceful life. It so happened that in every generation some woman was found who was content to live without conversation and bear the next generation of punt-builders, and all the little girls could speak and none of the boys.

‘At the time of this story, the Quietly of the day had a daughter. She was the apple of his eye, and doted upon by her parents and grandparents alike. One day she went missing. They looked everywhere for the child, alerted neighbours, and till night fell the riverbank rang with the sound of her mother and other people calling her name. She was not found – not that day, nor the next. But after three days her poor drowned body was recovered from a spot a little way downstream, and they buried her.

‘Time passed. Through the rest of the winter and the spring and summer and autumn the girl’s father continued building punts as before, ferried people over the river when needed, and in the evenings sat smoking by the fireside, but his muteness altered. The silence that had once been warm, good-humoured and full of companionship grew dark and was filled with grey shadows. The year turned full circle and came to the anniversary of the day when the child had disappeared.

‘On that day, Quietly’s wife returned home from market to find a customer waiting. “If you need to cross the river, it is my husband you want. You will find him in the yard,” she told him. But the customer, whose face she now saw was pale, said, “I have already found him. He took me halfway across the river and when we were at the deepest place he handed me the pole and stepped out of the punt.”’

Rita paused to take a sip of tea.

‘And he haunts the river till this day?’ Daunt asked.

‘The story isn’t over yet. After three days, Quietly’s wife was weeping by the fireside at midnight when there came a knock at the door. She could not think of a single person likely to call on her at such a late hour. Could it be someone wishing to cross the river? She went to the door. Out of fear she did not open it, but only called, “It is too late. Wait till morning and my father-in-law will take you across.”

‘The answer came: “Mama! Let me in! It’s cold outside.”

‘With trembling hands she unlocked the door and in the porch found her own little girl, the one she had buried a year ago, alive and well. Behind the child was her husband, Quietly. She clutched the girl in her arms, wept to have her back, too overjoyed at first to wonder how such a thing had come to pass. Then she thought, It cannot be, and she held the child at arm’s length to stare at her, but it was unmistakeably the very same daughter she had lost twelve months before.

‘“Where did you come from?” she asked in wonderment, and the little girl answered, “From that place on the other side of the river. Daddy came to get me.”

‘The woman turned her eyes to her husband. Quietly stood a little way back from the child, not in the porch, but on the path.

‘“Come in, dear,” she said, and opened the door wide and gestured to the hearth, where the fire was lit and his pipe was still on the mantel. But Quietly did not step forwards. She couldn’t help but notice he was altered, though it was hard to say exactly how. Perhaps he was paler and thinner than he had been before, or perhaps it was his eyes that were a darker version of the colour they had been before.

‘“Come in!” she repeated, and Quietly shook his head.

‘She understood then that he would never be able to come inside again.

‘The good woman drew her daughter inside and closed the door, and since that day any number of people have met Quietly on the river. There was a price to be paid for the return of his daughter and he paid it. For all eternity he must watch over the river, waiting for someone to get into difficulty, and then, if it is not their time, he sees them safely to the bank, and if it is their time, he sees them safely to that other place, the one he went to in search of his child, and there they must remain.’

They gave the story the silent pause it deserved, and when it was over, Daunt spoke again.

‘So it was not my time, and Quietly towed me to Radcot.’

‘If the story is to be believed.’

‘Do you believe it?’

‘Of course not.’

‘It’s a good story, nonetheless. The devoted father rescuing his child at the price of his own life.’

‘It cost him more than that,’ Rita said. ‘It cost him his death too. There is no eternal rest for Quietly, he must exist for ever between the two states, policing its border.’

‘You don’t believe that either,’ he said. ‘Do they believe it here?’

‘Beszant the boat-mender does. He reckons he saw him, when he was a youth and slipped on the jetty. The cressmen think Quietly keeps them safe when the river rises up the fields and turns them marshy. One of the gravel-diggers was a sceptic till the day he got his ankle trapped underwater. He swears blind it was Quietly that reached down and freed him.’

The conversation put Daunt in mind of the child. ‘I thought she was dead,’ he told her. ‘She came drifting into my arms, white and cold and with her eyes closed … I would have sworn she was dead.’

‘They all thought so too.’

‘But not you.’

‘I too. I was certain of it.’ There was a thoughtful silence in the room. He thought of questions he might ask, but stilled his tongue. Something told him there might be more to come if he waited, and he was right.

‘You are a photographer, Mr Daunt, which makes you a scientist. I am a nurse, which makes me a scientist too, but I cannot explain what I witnessed last night.’ She spoke slowly and with great calm, choosing her words carefully. ‘The girl was not breathing. She had no pulse. Her pupils were dilated. The body was cold. The skin was white. According to every rule in the textbook, she was dead. I had no doubt about it. After I had checked for signs of life and found none, I might easily have come away. I don’t know why I stayed, except that I felt uneasy for reasons I could not explain to myself. For a short time – between two minutes and three in my estimation – I continued to stand by the body. Her hand was between my hands; my fingertips were touching her wrist. In that position I felt something flicker between her skin and mine. It felt like a pulse. But I knew it couldn’t be – she was dead.

‘Now, it is actually just possible to mistake your own pulse for the pulse of a patient, because there is a pulse in the fingertips. Let me show you.’ He heard the rustle of her skirts behind her footsteps as she approached the bed. She took his hand, laid it palm up on her own open palm and placed her other palm over it, so that his hand was enclosed in hers and her fingertips rested lightly at the inside of his wrist. ‘There. I can feel your pulse’ (his blood lurched at her touch) ‘and I can also feel mine. It’s a very delicate pulse, but it’s mine.’

He murmured a note of understanding in his throat and his senses jumped to attention to catch a flicker of her blood. It was too faint.

‘So to avoid all uncertainty I did this …’ Her hands slipped briskly away, his own was left abandoned on the counterpane; his swell of disappointment ebbed when her fingertips alighted on the tender spot beneath his ear.

‘This is a good pulse point. I pressed firmly, waited for another minute. There was nothing. Nothing, and nothing, and more nothing. I told myself I was mad to be standing in the dark and the bitter cold, waiting for a pulse to beat in a dead child. Then it came again.’

‘How slow can a heart beat?’

‘Children’s hearts are faster than adult hearts. A hundred beats a minute is quite ordinary. Sixty is dangerous. Forty is perilous. At forty, you expect the worst.’

On the inside of his eyelids he saw his own thoughts rise in blue, cloud-like shapes. Above them he saw her thoughts, deep maroon and green stripes, moving horizontally from left to right across his field of vision, like slow and intent lightning flashes.

‘One beat per minute … I have never known the pulse rate of a child fall to less than forty per minute. Except when it falls to zero.’

Her fingertip retained its connection with his skin. In a moment or two she would come out of her distraction and remove it. He tried to keep her in this train of thought.

‘Below forty and they die?’

‘In my experience, yes.’

‘But she wasn’t dead.’

‘She wasn’t dead.’

‘She was alive.’

‘At one beat a minute? It’s not possible.’

‘But if it was impossible for her to be living and impossible for her to be dead, what was she?’

His blue clouds of thought dissolved. The leaf-green and plum stripes swelled with intensity and moved so far to the right that they were out of range. She exhaled a lungful of frustration, withdrew her fingers from his neck, and splinters of bronze shot up in his vision as from a falling coal in the fire.

It was he who broke the silence. ‘She was like Quietly. Between the two states.’

He heard a puff of exasperation that ended in a half-laugh.

He laughed. The stretch of his skin made him cry out in pain.

‘Ow,’ he cried. ‘Ow!’

It brought her attention back to him, brought the tips of her fingers back to his skin. As she held the cooling cloth against his face, he realized that his vision of Rita Sunday had altered in the course of their conversation. She now looked not altogether unlike the maidens of destiny.

Is It Finished?

THE WINTER ROOM was alive with voices and tightly packed with drinkers, many of them standing, for there were not enough seats. Margot stepped out from the dim corridor and nudged the nearest backs, saying, ‘Step aside, please, make room.’ They shuffled out of her way and she stepped into the fray. Close behind her, Mr Vaughan appeared with the child wrapped in a blanket in his arms. Behind them came Mrs Vaughan, delivering little nods of thanks to left and right.

At the sight of the child, those first drinkers hushed. Those who were a little deeper in the room caught the sudden drop of noise behind them, found Margot prodding them out of the way, and fell quiet in turn. The girl’s head rested on Vaughan’s shoulder, her face pressed into his neck, half concealed. Her eyes were closed. The slump of her body told them she was asleep. The silence made faster progress than the Vaughans did, and before they were halfway to the door, the peace was as resounding as the din had been a few moments before. The crowd leant and rose on tiptoes and peered hungrily to secure a better view of the girl’s sleeping face, and at the back some clambered on to stools and tables to see her. Margot no longer needed to prod and nudge, for the mass of bodies parted of its own accord, and when they reached the door a bargeman stood ready to open it for them.

The Vaughans passed through the door.

Margot nodded at the bargeman to close it behind them. No one had moved. Where the crowd had parted, a curved line of floorboards was still visible. After a moment of stillness when nobody spoke, there came a shuffling of feet, the clearing of throats, and in no time the crowd remassed and the boom of voices was louder even than before.

For another hour they talked. Every detail of the day’s events was gone over, the facts were weighed and combined, quantities of surmising, eavesdropping and supposition were stirred in for flavour, and a good sprinkling of rumour added like yeast to make it rise.

There came the sense that the story had now moved on. It was no longer here, at the Swan at Radcot, but out there, in the world. The drinkers remembered the rest of the world: their wives and children, their neighbours, their friends. There were people out there who did not yet know the story of the Vaughans and young Armstrong. In ones and twos, and then in a trickle that became a steady stream, the drinkers departed. Margot organized the more sober of the lingerers to escort the most drunken along the riverbank and see that they did not fall in.

When the door closed on the last of the drinkers and the winter room was empty, Joe set to sweeping the floor. He made frequent pauses to rest on the broom and catch his breath. Jonathan carried in logs. There was an uncharacteristic air of melancholy in his angled eyes as he tipped the logs into the basket by the fire.

‘What’s the matter, son?’

The boy sighed. ‘I wanted her to stay with us.’

His father smiled and ruffled his hair. ‘I know you did. But she doesn’t belong here.’

Jonathan turned to fetch a second load of logs, but when he got to the door he turned back, unconsoled.

‘Is it finished, Dad?’

‘Finished?’

Jonathan watched his father put his head on one side and gaze up at the dark corner where the stories came from. Then his eyes came back to Jonathan and he shook his head.

‘This is just the beginning, son. There’s a long way still to go.’