Once Upon a River

Things Don’t Add Up

SITTING ON THE bottom step of the stairs, Lily pushed her right foot into a boot. She held on to the tongue so that it would not get trapped under the laces, but her stocking rucked half a dozen wrinkles at the back of her heel and wedged her foot forwards. She sighed. Her boots were always conspiring to thwart her. Nothing was ever right with them. They pressed on her bunions, they rubbed her raw, and no matter how much straw she packed them with overnight, they always kept a little bit of dampness back to chill her in the morning. She eased her foot out, straightened the stocking, tried again.

When both her boots were on, Lily buttoned up her coat and wound a scarf round her neck. She did not put on gloves, for she had none. Outside, the cold sliced through her coat without resistance and sharpened its blade against her skin, but she scarcely noticed. She was used to it.

Her morning routine never varied. First she went down to the river. Today the level was as she expected, neither high nor low. There was no angry rush and no menacing loitering. The water did not hiss particularly, nor roar, nor dart spiteful splashes at her hem. It flowed steadily, wholly engaged on some calm business of its own, and had not the slightest interest in Lily and her doings. She turned her back on it and went to feed the pigs.

Lily filled one bucket with grain and the other with swill. It released a warmly rotten aroma into the air. The gilt came to the dividing wall as was her habit. She liked to raise her head and scratch the underside of her chin on the top of the low wall. Lily scratched the spot behind the pig’s ears at the same time. The gilt grunted in pleasure and gave her a look from beneath her ginger eyelashes. Lily heaved the two buckets out and round to the feeding place, tottering under the weight. One by one, she tipped the contents of the buckets into the trough and then pulled back the planks that barred the opening. When she had done that, she took her own breakfast out of her pocket – one of the less bruised apples from the shelf – and bit into it. She didn’t mind a bit of company at breakfast time. The boar came out first – he always did, males put themselves first in everything – and lowered his snout immediately to the trough. The female came after him, her eyes still fixed on Lily, so that once more Lily wondered what the reason could be for such a stare. It was an odd look, almost human, as if the pig wanted something.

Lily finished the flesh of the apple and dropped the core into the pen, making sure it landed where the boar would not see it. The gilt gave her one last indecipherable look – regret? Disappointment? Sorrow? – then lowered her snout to the ground and the apple core disappeared.

Lily cleaned the buckets and put them back in the woodshed. A glance at the sky told her it was time to set off to work, but first, one last thing. She shifted a few logs from the pile and removed one from the third row down. From the front it looked like all the others, but at the back a hollow had been carved out of it. She tilted it and a number of coins rolled out and into her palm. She took care to replace the logs just as she had found them. Indoors she eased a loose brick from the fireplace. Though it looked no different from the others it came away easily, revealing a small cavity behind. She placed the money in the cavity and slid the brick back into place, ensuring that it was exactly level with its neighbours. She closed the door behind her and did not lock it for the simple reason that there was no lock and no key. There was nothing worth stealing at Lily White’s place, everybody knew that. Then she left.

The air was knife-cold, but between the rust and black of last year’s growth, green was returning to the riverbank. Lily walked briskly, grateful that the ground was hard and let no wetness through the holes in her boots. As she neared Buscot, she peered over the river, to the land that belonged to Buscot Lodge and the Vaughans. There was nobody there.

She will be indoors, then, by the fire, Lily thought. She pictured a hearth, a huge log basket, the fire itself dancing brightly. ‘Don’t touch, Ann,’ she whispered under her breath. ‘It’s hot.’ But they will have a fireguard, being rich people. She nodded. Yes, that’s right. She has Ann in a blue velvet dress – no, wool will be warmer, let it be wool. Lily moves in spirit around the house she has never entered. Upstairs is a little bedroom where another fire burns, taking the chill off. There is a bed, and a mattress that is made not of straw but of real lambswool. The blankets are thick and – red? Yes, red, and on the pillow is a doll with plaited hair. There is a Turkey carpet so Ann’s feet won’t get cold in the morning. Elsewhere the pantry of this house is full of hams and apples and cheese; there is a cook who makes jam and cake; a cupboard contains jar upon jar of honey and in a drawer are half a dozen sugar canes, striped in yellow and white.

Lily explored Ann’s new home in perfect contentment, and her version of the interior of Buscot Lodge faded only when she was at the door of the parsonage.

Yes, she thought, as she pushed open the kitchen door. Ann must live with the Vaughans at Buscot Lodge. She will be safe there. She might even be happy. That is where she must stay.

The parson was in his study. Lily knew she was rather late, but she could tell by touching the kettle with her fingertips that the parson had not yet made his own tea. She wrenched off her boots and eased her feet into the grey felt shoes she kept under the dresser in the parsonage kitchen. Her feet were always comfortable in them. She had worked for the parson for two months before daring to ask permission to keep a pair of indoor shoes under the kitchen dresser. ‘Out of sight, they will be, and it will save your carpets,’ she had explained, and when he had said yes, she had asked for some of the savings he kept for her, gone straight to buy them, and then brought them directly back here. Sometimes at the cottage, when she was cold and afraid of ghosts, the thought of her grey felt shoes sitting under the parson’s kitchen dresser as if they belonged there was enough to make her feel better.

She boiled water, prepared the tea tray and, when all was ready, made her way to his study and knocked.

‘Come!’

The parson was bent over his papers, which showed the bald patch on the top of his head; he was scribbling away at a speed that made her marvel. He came to the end of a sentence and looked up. ‘Ah! Mrs White!’

This greeting was one of the pleasures of her life. Never ‘Good morning!’ or ‘Good day!’ – greetings that would do for anybody – but always ‘Ah! Mrs White!’ The sound of the name White on his lips was like a blessing.

She put down the tray. ‘Shall I make some toast, Parson?’

‘Yes, well, later.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Mrs White …’ he began in another tone of voice.

Lily started and he adopted an expression of kindly perplexity that only increased her fear about what was coming.

‘What is this I hear about you and the child at the Swan?’

Her heart lurched in her chest. What to say? Why a thing so plain to know should be so hard to explain was a puzzle, and she opened and closed her mouth more than once, but no words came out.

The parson spoke again.

‘So far as I understand it, you told them at the Swan that the child was your sister?’

His voice was mild, but Lily’s lungs flooded with fear. She could scarcely breathe in or out. Then she managed a gulp of air and on the exhalation words streamed out of her. ‘I didn’t mean any harm by it, and please don’t dismiss me, Parson Habgood, and I won’t cause any trouble to anyone, I promise.’

The parson contemplated her with an air no less perplexed than before. ‘I suppose I can take it that the child is not your sister? We can put it down to a mistake, can we?’ His mouth sketched a hesitant, experimental smile, which promised to become a steady, full one when she nodded her head.

Lily did not like lying. She had been driven to it many times, but had never got used to it, had never even grown to be any good at it, but most of all, she did not like it. To lie in her own home was one thing, but here, at the parsonage, that was not quite the house of God but was the house of the parson, which was the next best thing, lying was a much graver thing. She did not want to lose her job … She dithered between a lie and the truth, and in the end, unable to measure the dangers one way and the other, it was her nature that won out.

‘She is my sister.’

She looked down. The toes of the felt shoes were showing under her skirt. Tears came to her eyes and she rubbed them away with the back of her hand. ‘She is my only sister, and her name is Ann. I know it is her, Parson Habgood.’ The tears she had rubbed away were replaced by others, too numerous to catch. They fell and made dark blotches on the toes of her felt shoes.

‘Now then, Mrs White,’ said the parson, a little flustered. ‘Why don’t you sit down?’

Lily shook her head. She had never sat down at the parsonage in her life. She worked here, on her feet and on her knees, fetching and carrying and scrubbing and washing, and that is what gave her the feeling of belonging. To sit down was to be just another parishioner in need of help. ‘No,’ she muttered. ‘No, thank you.’

‘Then I shall stand up along with you.’

The parson stood and came out from behind his desk and looked at her thoughtfully.

‘Let us think about this together, shall we? Two minds are better than one, they say. To begin with, how old are you, Mrs White?’

Lily stared in bewilderment. ‘Well, I … I can’t say as I know. There was a time I was thirty-something. That was some years ago. I – suppose I must be forty-something now.’

‘Hm. And how old would you say the little girl from the Swan is?’

‘Four.’

‘You sound very sure of that.’

‘Because that is her age.’

The parson winced. ‘Let us suppose that you are forty-four, Mrs White. We cannot be sure, but you know you are in your forties and so forty-four is likely enough. Do you agree? For the sake of the argument?’

She nodded, not seeing why it mattered.

‘The gap between four and forty-four is forty years, Mrs White.’

She frowned.

‘How old was your mother, when you were born?’

Lily flinched.

‘Is she living, your mother?’

Lily trembled.

‘Let’s try another way – when did you last see your mother? Recently? Or long ago?’

‘Long ago,’ she whispered.

The parson, divining another dead end, decided to take another route.

‘Suppose your mother had you when she was sixteen. She would have had this little girl forty years later, when she was fifty-six. A dozen years older than you are now.’

Lily blinked, trying and failing to see what all these numbers were about.

‘Do you see what I am trying to explain with these calculations, Mrs White? The little girl cannot be your sister. The chances of your mother having two daughters so far apart in age is – well, it is so unlikely as to be impossible.’

Lily stared at her shoes.

‘What about your father? How old is he?’

Lily shuddered. ‘Dead. A long time ago.’

‘Well, then. Let us see how things stand. Your mother cannot have brought this little girl into the world. She would have been too old. And your father died a long time ago, so he could not have given life to her either. Therefore she cannot be your sister.’

Lily looked at the splodges on her felt shoes.

‘She is my sister.’

The parson sighed and looked around the room for something that would inspire him. He saw only the unfinished work on his desk.

‘You know that the child has gone to Buscot Lodge to live with Mr and Mrs Vaughan?’

‘I know.’

‘It cannot help anyone to say the child is your sister, Mrs White. Least of all the girl herself. Think about that.’

Lily remembered the red blankets and the yellow-and-white-striped sugar canes. She lifted her head at last. ‘I know that. I am glad she is there. The Vaughans can look after Ann better than I can.’

‘Amelia,’ he corrected her very gently. ‘She is the daughter they lost two years ago.’

Lily blinked. ‘I don’t mind what they call her,’ she said. ‘And I won’t make any trouble. Not for them and not for her.’

‘Good,’ the parson said, still frowning. ‘Good.’

The conversation seemed to be at an end.

‘Am I to be dismissed, Parson?’

‘Dismissed? Gracious, no!’

She clasped her hands at her heart and bobbed her head, for her knees were too stiff for a curtsey. ‘Thank you, Parson. I’ll start the laundry then, shall I?’

He sat down at his desk and took up the page he had been writing.

‘Laundry? … Yes, Mrs White.’

When she had done the laundry (and ironed the sheets and made the bed and mopped the floors and beaten the rugs and scrubbed the tiles and filled the log baskets and got the soot off the hearth and polished the furniture and shaken the curtains and knocked air into the cushions and gone round all the picture and mirror frames with a feather duster and put a shine on all the taps with vinegar and cooked the parson’s dinner and set it ready on the table under a cloth, and washed up and cleaned the stove and left everything in the kitchen neat and tidy), Lily went and knocked again at the study door.

The parson counted her wages into her hand and she took some of the coins and returned the rest to him as usual. He opened his desk drawer and took out the tin in which he kept her savings, opened it and unfolded the piece of paper inside. On it he wrote numbers, which he had explained to her at the beginning: today’s date and the amount she was giving him for safekeeping, then the new total of her savings.

‘Quite a nice little sum now, Mrs White.’

She nodded and smiled a brief, nervous smile.

‘Wouldn’t you think of spending some? A pair of gloves? It is so bitter out of doors.’

She shook her head.

‘Well then, let me find you something …’ He left the room briefly and when he came back, held something out to her. ‘These still have some use in them. No point them going unused when your hands are cold. Have them.’

She took the gloves and handled them. They were knitted in thick green wool, with only very few holes. It would not be hard to mend them. She could tell from their soft touch how warm they would be on cold mornings along the riverbank.

‘Thank you, Parson. It’s very kind of you. But I should only lose them.’

She placed the gloves on a corner of his desk, bid the parson farewell and left.

The walk back along the river felt longer than usual. She had to stop at so many places to collect scraps for the pigs, and her bunions complained every step of the way. Her hands were frozen. She had had gloves when she was young. Her mother had knitted them in scarlet yarn and plaited a long string to thread through her sleeves so she couldn’t lose them. They had disappeared all the same. She hadn’t lost them – they had been taken from her.

By the time she arrived at the cottage it was getting dark, she was cold to her bone marrow and every part of her that could ache was aching. She eyed the lower post as she went by. The river was up compared to this morning. At her feet, its edge had crept a few malevolent inches closer to the house in her absence.

She fed the pigs, and she felt the ginger pig’s eye on her, but she did not return the look. She was too tired to wonder about the moods of pigs this evening. Nor did she scratch the pig behind the ears, though the creature snuffled and grunted for her attention.

The crates in the woodshed that had been empty this morning now contained a dozen bottles.

She approached the cottage nervously, opened the door and peered in, before stepping inside. There was nobody there. She checked the cavity behind the loose brick. It was empty. He had been, then. And gone.

She thought she might light a candle for company, but when she went for her candlestick, the candle was gone. So was the bit of cheese she had planned to eat, and the bread, all but the hard crust.

She sat on the steps to take her boots off. It was a struggle. She sat there in her coat and stockinged feet, looking at the damp shape on the floor where the river had dripped endlessly from the chemise of the nightmare sister, and thought.

Lily was slow at thinking; it had always been so, since she was a little thing. She was a woman who let life happen to her without troubling her mind about things more than was necessary. The events of her life, its alterations and meanders, had not been in any way the result of any decisive action on her part, but only accidents of fortune, the hand dealt by an inscrutable God, impositions by other people. She panicked at change, and submitted to it without question. Her only hope for many years had been that things would not get any worse – though generally they had. Contemplation of experience did not come naturally to her. But now that the first shock of Ann’s arrival had subsided, she sat on the steps and felt a question struggling to surface.

Ann of the nightmares was a terrifying and vengeful figure, with her raised finger and her black eyes. Ann of the Swan at Radcot – Ann as Lily now saw her at the Vaughans – was a different Ann altogether. She was quiet. She did not stare, nor point, nor dart vindictive looks. She gave no appearance of being set on harming anyone, let alone Lily. This Ann who had come back was much more like Ann as she used to be.

For two hours Lily sat on the steps with the darkness of the sky pressing at the window and the rush of the river in her ears. She thought of Ann who came from the river, dripping horror on to the floorboards. She thought of Ann by the fireplace at Buscot Lodge in her blue wool dress. By the time the watermark on the floor had merged with the general gloom, she had not organized her puzzlement into a question, and she was a long way from finding any answers. All she was left with when she rose stiffly and took her coat off to go to bed was a deep and impenetrable mystery.

A Mother’s Eyes

SOMETHING HAPPENS AND then something else happens and then all sorts of other things happen, expected and unexpected, unusual and ordinary. One of the ordinary things that happened as a result of the events at the Swan that night was that Rita came to be the friend of Mrs Vaughan. It began when she heard a knock at her door and found Mr Vaughan on the doorstep.

‘I wanted to thank you for everything you did that night. If it weren’t for you and your excellent care – well, it doesn’t bear thinking about.’ He placed an envelope on the table – ‘A token of our thanks!’ – and asked her to come to Buscot Lodge to check the child’s health again. ‘We took her to the doctor in Oxford – he told us she is none the worse for her ordeal, but still, a weekly examination will do no harm, eh? That’s what my wife wants too – it will be good for our peace of mind, if nothing else.’

Rita fixed a day and time with him and, when he had gone, opened the envelope. It contained a generous payment, large enough to reflect the Vaughans’ wealth and the significance of their daughter’s life, and small enough not to be embarrassing. It was just right.

The agreed day for Rita’s visit to Buscot Lodge was one of blustery rain that excited the surface of the river, turning it into an ever-changing ribbon of pattern and texture. She arrived at the house and was shown into a pleasant drawing room: the yellow wallpaper was bright, comfortable armchairs were arranged agreeably around a welcoming fire, and a large bay window overlooked the garden. On the hearthrug, Mrs Vaughan was lying on her stomach, turning the pages of a book for the child. She rolled over and sprang up in a single agile movement and took both Rita’s hands in hers.

‘How can we thank you? The doctor in Oxford asked all the same questions as you did and carried out all the same tests. I said to my husband, “You know what that tells us, don’t you? Rita is as good as any doctor! We must have her come once a week and check that all is as it should be.” And here you are!’

‘It is natural after everything that has happened that you don’t want to take any chances.’

Helena Vaughan had never had a female friend in her life. Her limited exposure to the company of adult women in drawing rooms had entirely failed to convince her it was a thing to be relished. Decorum and the subdued manners of a lady were lost on the girl who grew up in a boatyard, and that is why Mr Vaughan had been so taken with her – in her exuberance and robust enjoyment of outdoor life, she reminded him of the girls he had grown up with in the mining territory of New Zealand. But in Rita, Helena recognized a woman who had a purpose beyond the drawing room. There were a dozen years between them and much else to make them different, yet Helena felt inclined to like Rita, and the inclination was mutual.

The little girl, who looked rather different now in her blue dress with its white collar and her blue-and-white embroidered shoes, had looked up expectantly on hearing the door open. There was a flare of interest in her eyes that faded on seeing Rita and she returned her attention to the pages. ‘You carry on looking at the book together,’ Rita said, ‘and I’ll check her pulse while she’s distracted. Not that I really need to – it’s so obvious she is healthy.’

That was true. The girl’s hair was now gleaming. She had a faint but distinct rosy glow to her cheeks. Her limbs were sturdy and her movements purposeful and deft. She lay on her stomach, like Mrs Vaughan, propped up on her elbows, and her feet in their embroidered indoor shoes swayed in a criss-cross motion in the air above her bent knees. Without a word, but with every air of understanding, she looked at the pages as Mrs Vaughan guided her attention to this and that in the pictures.

From the nearest armchair Rita leant to take hold of the child’s wrist. The girl glanced up in surprise, then returned her attention to the book. The child’s skin was warm to the touch and her pulse was firm. Rita’s mind was occupied with counting the beats and eyeing the hands of her watch as they ticked around the face, but the undercurrents stirred with the memory of falling asleep in the armchair at the Swan, with the little girl on her lap.

‘Everything entirely as it should be,’ she said, and let the warm wrist go.

‘Don’t leave yet,’ Helena said. ‘Cook will be bringing us eggs and toast in a minute. Can’t you stay?’

Over breakfast they continued to talk about the child and her health. ‘Your husband told me she has not spoken?’

‘Not yet.’ Mrs Vaughan did not sound concerned. ‘The Oxford doctor said her voice will come back. It might take six months, but she will talk again.’

Rita knew better than most that doctors can be reluctant to admit it when they do not have the answer to a question. If no good answer presents itself, some will sooner give a bad answer than no answer at all. She did not tell Mrs Vaughan this.

‘Would you say Amelia’s speech was normal before?’

‘Oh, yes. She babbled the way two-year-olds do. Other people didn’t always understand, but we did, didn’t we, Amelia?’

Helena’s eyes were drawn constantly to the child, and every word she spoke, whatever the subject, came out of a smiling mouth, for it seemed the mere sight of the girl was enough to make her happy. She cut the child’s toast into soldiers and encouraged her to dip them into the egg yolk. The girl set about eating with grave attention. When the yolk was gone, Helena placed the spoon in the child’s hand for the white and she dabbed it ham-fistedly into the eggshell. Helena watched the girl with contented absorption, and whenever she turned to Rita, the same smile played around her mouth. The happiness that had come with the girl was one she shared profligately, but when Rita felt the radiant smile alight on her, its touch filled her with misgivings. Ordinarily it would have been a joy to see a young woman so happy, especially after lengthy sorrow, but Rita could not help feeling fearful. She had no desire to puncture Helena’s joy, but duty bound her to remind Helena that there was a degree of precariousness in the situation.

‘What of Mr Armstrong and his missing child? Is there any news?’

‘Poor Mr Armstrong.’ Helena’s pretty face fell into a frown. ‘I feel for him. There is no news, none at all.’ She sighed in a way that made plain how heartfelt her sympathy was, yet at the same time it seemed to Rita that she made no connection between Mr Armstrong’s pain and her own joy. ‘Do you think a father feels it as a mother does? The loss, I mean? And the not-knowing?’

‘It depends on the father, I should think. And the mother.’

‘I expect you’re right. My father would have been devastated to lose me. And Mr Armstrong seemed a very …’ She stopped and thought. ‘A very feeling sort of man. Wouldn’t you say?’

Rita remembered the pulse reading. ‘It’s hard to tell on a first meeting. Perhaps none of us were entirely ourselves. Have you seen anything of him?’

‘He came for another visit. To see her again, with a more settled mind.’

There was a note of something unresolved in her voice.

‘And did it work? Was he able to reach a fixed conclusion?’

‘I can’t say that he did,’ Helena answered thoughtfully, and then she flashed a sudden look at Rita and leant to speak in an undertone: ‘His wife drowned the child, you know. And then took poison. That is what they are saying.’ She sighed heavily. ‘They will find the body. That’s what I tell Anthony – they are bound to find it and Mr Armstrong will be certain then.’

‘It’s been quite a while. Do you think they are likely to find her now?’

‘They must. Until they do, the poor man will be in a sort of limbo. It’s hardly likely she’ll be found alive now, after all. How many weeks is it? Four?’ She totted up the weeks on her fingers like a child. ‘Nearly five. You’d think they’d have found something … My own idea – shall I tell you?’

Rita nodded.

‘My idea is that he cannot bear the knowledge that Alice is drowned and so he clings to the notion that Amelia might be Alice to spare himself the agony. Oh, the poor man.’

‘And you have seen no more of him since?’

‘We have seen him twice more. He returned ten days later, and again ten days after that.’

Rita waited expectantly and, as she had hoped, Helena went on.

‘It was unexpected, and it was just not possible to turn him away. I mean – how could we? He came in again and took a glass of port with Anthony and we talked about one thing and another, nothing much, and he didn’t mention Amelia, but when she came in he couldn’t take his eyes off her … But he didn’t say that is why he came. He arrived as if he just happened to be passing, and as we were acquainted … what could we do but invite him in?’

‘I see.’

‘And so now, I suppose, we are acquainted, and – well, that is just how it is.’

‘And he doesn’t talk about Amelia? Or Alice?’

‘He talks about farming and horses and the weather. It drives Anthony to distraction – he cannot bear small talk – yet what can we do? We can hardly turn him away when he is in such low spirits.’

Rita wondered. ‘It seems a bit strange to me.’

‘It is all a bit strange,’ Helena agreed, and with that, her smile returned and she turned again to the girl and wiped crumbs from her mouth. ‘What next?’ she asked. ‘A walk?’

‘I ought to go home. If anybody should be ill and come for me …’

‘Then we will walk you part of the way. It’s along the river, and we like the river, don’t we, Amelia?’

At the mention of the river, the child, who had sat lax in her chair since finishing her food, her eyes dreamy and far away, was filled with purpose. She gathered her attention from wherever it had wandered to and clambered down from her chair.

As they walked down the garden slope to the riverbank, the girl ran on ahead.

‘She loves the river,’ Helena explained. ‘I was just the same. My father too. I see a lot of him in her. Every day we come down here and she is always the same, racing ahead.’

‘She’s not afraid, then? After the accident?’

‘Not in the least. She lives for it. You’ll see.’

Indeed, when they came to the river, the girl was on the very edge of the bank, perfectly balanced and rooted, but as close as it was possible to be to the racing water. Rita could not quell the instinct to reach out and place a hand on the child’s collar, to hold her should she tip over. Helena laughed. ‘She is born to it. She is in her element.’

Indeed, the girl was intent on the river. She looked upriver, eyebrows slightly raised, mouth open, with an air that Rita tried to read. Was it expectation? The girl swivelled her head the other way and scanned the horizon downriver. Whatever it was she was hoping for wasn’t there. An expression of weary disappointment came over her, but she rapidly gathered herself and dashed ahead on her little legs towards the turn in the river.

Mrs Vaughan’s eyes never left the child. Whether she spoke of her husband or her father or anything else, her eyes stayed on the girl, and her gaze never altered. It was a flood of love, tender and joyful, and on those occasions when she lifted her eyes to look at Rita, the fleeting glances still brimmed with that love, it washed over Rita and everything it saw. The experience reminded Rita of looking into the eyes of a person to whom she had given a particularly strong draught to counter pain, or a man who had taken to drinking the cheap, unlabelled alcohol that was so easily available lately.

They started walking in the direction of Rita’s cottage. The child ran ahead and when she was out of earshot, Helena spoke.

‘This story they are telling at the Swan … that she was dead and then lived again …’

‘What of it?’

‘Anthony says they are a fanciful lot at the Swan, that they’ll take anything a little out of the ordinary and embroider it. He says it will all die down and be forgotten. But I don’t like it. What do you make of it?’

Rita thought for a little while. What was the point of worrying a woman already anxious about her child? On the other hand, she had never been the kind to practise glib lies in the reassurance of her patients. Her way was to find a means of telling the truth in a manner that allowed the patient to take in as much or as little as he or she wanted. The person might ask further questions or they might not. It was up to them. Now she adopted the same strategy. She disguised her thinking time by pretending to pay attention to the hem of her skirt as they walked through a particularly muddy patch. When she was ready she delivered her scrupulously truthful answer in her most objective fashion.

‘There were some unusual circumstances attached to her rescue from the river. They thought she was dead. She was waxen white. Her pupils were dilated – that means the black part in the centre of the iris was wide. She had no discernible pulse. There was no detectable sign of breath. When I got there, that is what I saw too. I didn’t at first locate a pulse, but later I did. She was alive.’

Rita watched Helena, guessing at what she might be making of this deliberately brief account. There were gaps in it that a person might or might not notice, fill in in any number of different ways, gaps that might arouse any number of additional questions. What kind of breath is it that is not detectable? was one. What kind of pulse is undiscernible? And the word later that she had used, the bland little cousin of the more expressive eventually: I couldn’t find a pulse, but later I did. If it implies a few seconds, the word is innocuous. But a minute? What is one to make of that?

Helena was not Rita, and she filled the gaps differently. Rita watched her forming her conclusions as she strode alongside her, her eyes on the girl a few yards ahead. The child walked sturdily, careless of the wind and the bursts of rain that stopped and started at random. Her aliveness was a fact all its own; Rita could see how it might easily overshadow all the others.

‘So they thought Amelia was dead, but she wasn’t. It was a mistake. And they made a story out of it.’

Helena did not seem to need confirmation. Rita did not give it.

‘To think she was so close to death. To think she was found and so nearly lost again.’ She drew her eyes from the girl for a brief second, spared a glance for Rita. ‘Thank heavens you were there!’

They were nearing Rita’s cottage. ‘We mustn’t be too late,’ Helena said. ‘The man is coming this afternoon to put locks on the windows.’

‘On the windows?’

‘I have the feeling someone is watching her. Better safe than sorry.’

‘There is a lot of curiosity about her … That is inevitable. It will die down in time.’

‘I don’t mean in public places. I mean in the garden and on the river. A spy.’

‘Have you seen anyone?’

‘No. But I can tell someone is there.’

‘There is nothing new about the kidnap, I suppose? Her return hasn’t loosened tongues?’

Helena shook her head.

‘Is there anything to give you an idea where she has been these last two years? There was talk about the involvement of the river gypsies, wasn’t there? The police searched their boats at one time, I think?’

‘They did, when they caught up with them. Nothing was found.’

‘And she appeared the night the gypsies were on the river again …’

‘To see her use a knife and fork, you might well think she’d been living with gypsies these last two years. But honestly, I cannot bear to think about it.’

The windblown waves cast a mixture of spume and droplets up into the air, from where it fell again, laying its own complicated pattern over the choppy texture of the water. While she watched the random alterations of the water, Rita puzzled over what reasons the river gypsies would have for stealing a child and returning it to the same place, apparently dead, two years later. She found no answer.

Helena had been pursuing thoughts of her own. ‘If I could, I would make those years disappear altogether. Sometimes I wonder whether I have imagined her … Or whether it is my longing that has – somehow – brought her back from whatever dark place she has been in. In all that pain, I would have sold my soul, given my life, to have her back again. All that agony … And now I sometimes wonder, what if I have? What if she is not altogether real?’

She turned to Rita and for a fleeting moment Rita caught a horrific glimpse of what the last two years had been. The desperation was so shocking that she flinched.

‘But then I only have to look!’ The young mother blinked and sought the child with her eyes. Her gaze was once again love-blind. ‘It’s Amelia. It’s her.’ Helena took a deep, happy breath before saying, ‘Time to go home. We must say goodbye, Rita, but you’ll come again? Next week?’

‘If you want me to. She is well, though. There is no need for you to be concerned.’

‘Come anyway. We like you, don’t we, Amelia?’

She smiled at Rita, who felt once again the tail end of that sweep of mother’s love, enchanting and radiant and more than a little troubling.

Continuing homewards, Rita came to the spot where a mass of hawthorn growing at a curve in the path made it hard to see ahead. An unexpected smell – fruit? Yeast? – roused her from her thoughts, and by the time her mind had interpreted the dark shadow in the undergrowth as a person concealed, it was too late. She had gone past, he had leapt out, her arms were gripped behind her back and a knife was at her throat.

‘I have a brooch – you can have it. The money is in my purse,’ she told him quietly, not moving. The brooch was only tin and glass, but he might not know that. And if he did, the money would console him.

But that wasn’t what he was after.

‘Do she talk?’ She could smell it more strongly now he was so close.

‘Who do you mean?’

‘The girl. Do she talk?’

He gave her a shake; Rita felt something jut into her back, just below the nape of her neck.

‘The Vaughan child? No, she doesn’t speak.’

‘Is there medicine can make her speak again?’

‘No.’

‘So she won’t ever talk no more? Is that what the doctor says?’

‘She might recover her speech naturally. The doctor says it will happen in the first six months or not at all.’

She waited for more questions, but none came.

‘Drop your purse on the ground.’

With shaking hands she took the cloth pouch from her pocket – it contained the money the Vaughans had given her – and dropped it, and the next moment a great blow from behind sent her flying and she landed heavily on the rough ground with gravel digging into her palms.

I’m not hurt though, she reassured herself, but by the time she’d gathered herself and got to her feet, the man and her purse were gone.

She hurried home, thinking hard.

Which Father?

ANTHONY VAUGHAN LEANT towards his looking glass, applied the blade to the soap suds on his cheek and scraped. Meeting his eye in the glass, he made one more effort to untangle his thoughts. He began where he always began: the child was not Amelia. That ought to have been the beginning and end of the question, but it wasn’t. One single certainty led not to the next stepping stone but into a quagmire, no matter what direction he took. The knowledge wavered and faltered, it grew feebler and harder to maintain with every day that passed. It was Helena who undermined what he knew. Every smile on his wife’s face, every burst of laughter, every joyful word she pronounced, was reason to put his knowledge aside. She had grown prettier every day in the two months the child had been with them, had regained the weight she had lost, recovered the gloss in her hair and the colour in her cheeks. Her face was alive with love, not only for the child, but for him too.

But it was not only Helena, was it? It was the girl too.

Incessantly Vaughan’s eyes were drawn to the little girl’s face. At breakfast, as he spooned marmalade into her mouth, he traced the jut of her jaw; at noon it was the dip in her hairline at the front that obsessed him; when he came home from Brandy Island after work, he was incapable of dragging his eyes away from the coiled architecture of her ear. He knew these features better than he knew his wife’s or his own. He was tormented by something in them – in her – that seemed to mean something to him, if only he could work out what it was. Even in her absence, he saw her. In the train, watching the landscape speed by, her face was superimposed on the fields and sky. In the office, her features were like a watermark in the paper on which he set out his lists of figures. She even haunted his dreams. All sorts of characters bore the child’s face. Once he had dreamt of Amelia – his Amelia, the real one – and even she wore the child’s face. He had woken weeping.

His ceaseless tracing of her features, which began as an effort to find out who she was, gradually shifted focus and became an attempt to explain his own fascination. It seemed to him that her face was the model from which all human faces were derived, even his own. The endlessness of his staring had worn her face so smooth it was as if he saw his own reflection in it, and looking at her turned him back always to himself. This was something he could not tell Helena. She would hear only the thing he didn’t mean: that he saw himself in his daughter.

Was there in fact something familiar about the child? He tried to tell himself that the sense of recognition her face aroused in him was nothing but the natural echo of that first time he had seen her. His own intensity of looking was enough, surely, to explain the sense of familiarity she aroused in him? She looked quite simply like herself and that is why he knew her. Yet honesty told him it was not at all so straightforward. The notion of memory failed to adequately capture the sensation. It was as if the child evoked in him something that had the size and shape of memory, but inversed or turned inside out. Something akin to memory – its twin, perhaps, or its opposite.

Helena knew that he did not believe the girl to be their daughter. She knew because he had told her so on the first day, as soon as they were alone after putting the child to bed. She had met the news with surprise, but was apparently untroubled by it.

‘Two years is a long time in the face of any little girl,’ she’d told him gently. ‘You will have to be patient. Time will teach your heart to know her again.’ She had put a hand on his arm, and it was the first time in two years that his wife had touched him in their drawing room and looked lovingly at him. ‘Until then, put your faith in me. I know her.’

Now, when the issue arose, she treated his lack of faith with bemused tolerance: it was trivial, inconsequential, just her own dear, silly husband slow to catch up with events. She did little to try to persuade him. ‘She still likes honey!’ she noted once at the breakfast table, and ‘Well, that hasn’t changed!’ when the girl pushed the hairbrush away. But for the most part, she just put blithe confidence in the likelihood that time would bring him to his senses. His doubts were lightweight, her manner implied, and sure to be swept away with the next strong current. He did not raise the matter himself. It wasn’t that he was afraid of worrying her, but the contrary: You see, she would say, if he told her. You do know her really. It is all coming back to you now.

It was the kind of tangle that you could easily make worse in your efforts to straighten things out, and more than once Vaughan found himself considering a very simple solution. Why not decide to believe it? With her coming, the girl had broken a curse, returned them to the enchanted days of happiness. The years of pain, when they were encased in misery and comfortless to each other, were gone. The child brought straightforward joy to Helena, and to him something more complicated that he treasured, though he did not know what to call it. In a very short time it had come about that he minded when the girl ate less than usual, fretted when she cried at night, rejoiced when she reached her hand for his.

Amelia was gone, and this girl had come. His wife believed her to be Amelia. She bore some resemblance to Amelia. Life, which had been unendurable before she came, was now pleasurable again. She had returned Helena to him and, more than that, she herself had found a place in his heart. It wasn’t going too far to say that he loved her. Did he want her to be Amelia? Yes. On the one side: love, comfort, happiness. On the other: every chance of a return to the way things had been … Well, then. What reason was there to cling so doggedly to his certainty when the current was pulling so hard in the other direction?

There was only one reason. Robin Armstrong.

‘They will find the body,’ Helena insisted. ‘His wife drowned the child, everybody knows it, and when they find the body he will know.’

But it had been two months and no body had been found.

Vaughan had put off doing anything so far. He was a good man. Fair and decent. And he meant to be fair and decent now. There was himself, and there was Robin Armstrong, but there were also Helena and the girl. It was important that the best outcome should be found for all concerned. The situation could not go on as it was indefinitely – that did nobody any good. A solution must be found, and he was taking the first step today.

He rinsed briskly, towelled his face dry and got ready. He had a train to catch.

Although generally known as Monty and Mitch, any suspicion that this was the name of a provincial travelling circus fell away at the sight of the brass plaque attached next to the door of the sober Georgian Oxford townhouse: Montgomery & Mitchell, Legal and Commercial. The Thames was quite invisible from its windows, and yet its presence was felt in every room. Not only every room, but every drawer and cupboard of every room, for this was the firm of solicitors used by anyone who had business interests relating to the river, from Oxford all the way upstream for many a mile. Mr Montgomery himself was not a boating man, nor a fisherman, nor a painter of watery landscapes; in fact, he went from one year’s end to the next without setting eyes on the river, yet still it could be said without a word of a lie that he lived and breathed it. The way Mr Montgomery pictured the Thames, it was not a current of water at all, but an income stream, dry and papery, and he diverted a share of its bounty every year into his own ledgers and bank accounts and was very grateful to it. He spent his days contentedly drafting bills of carriage and negotiating the wording of letters of credit, and when a rare and valuable dispute involving force majeure came his way, which it sometimes did, his heart swelled with delight.

On the steps, Vaughan had his hand to the bell though he did not yet pull it. He was muttering to himself.

‘Amelia,’ he said, a little hesitantly. Then, with perhaps too much energy, ‘Amelia!’

It was a name he had constantly to practise, for it never came without having to leap over an obstacle, and the effort made it sound somewhat forced, even to his own ears.

‘Amelia,’ he said a third time and, hoping that that was good enough, he rang the bell.

Vaughan had written and was expected. The boy who answered the door and dealt with his coat was the same one who had been there on the day more than two years ago when Vaughan had come to deal with matters relating to the kidnapping of his daughter. The boy had been even younger then and quite at a loss to know how to behave faced with the wild sorrow and anguish that the visitor had displayed. Despite his strong feelings, Vaughan had wanted to reassure the boy, tell him that it was not his fault if he did not know how to look with calm deference into the eye of a madman who had lost his only child. Today the boy – for he was still a boy, if a bigger one – maintained his calm politeness as he took the coat and suspended it from a hook, but in turning back to Vaughan could no longer contain himself.

‘Oh, good news, Sir! What a turn-up for the books! You must be overjoyed, you and Mrs Vaughan, Sir!’

Handshaking was not quite the done thing between a client of Monty and Mitch’s and the boy who took the coats, but such was the momentousness of the day – so far as the boy was concerned anyway – that Vaughan allowed his hand to be taken and subjected to a vigorous pumping.

‘Thank you,’ he murmured, and if there was any shortcoming in his acceptance of these hearty congratulations, the boy was too young to perceive it and only beamed as he showed Mr Vaughan into the office of Mr Montgomery himself.

Mr Montgomery stretched out a professionally jovial hand. ‘How good to see you again, Mr Vaughan. You look well, I must say.’

‘Thank you. You’ve had my letter?’

‘Indeed I have. Pull up a chair and tell me all about it. First, though, a glass of port?’

‘Thank you.’

Vaughan saw the letter on Montgomery’s desk. It said little, really; the least he could get away with saying. But now, seeing it broken open and lying there, thoroughly perused, he wondered whether it was the kind of little that gave away more than it meant to. Vaughan’s hand was the open, fluent kind that anyone can read upside down and, as Montgomery busied himself with the glasses, some of the phrases he had written yesterday caught his eye. ‘The child having been discovered … girl being now in our custody … may be necessary to retain your services in matters relating …’ These were not, he now felt, the expressions of a man overjoyed at the return of his only child.

A glass was placed before him. He took a sip. The two men discussed the port, as men of business must. Montgomery would not raise the matter first, Vaughan knew, but he did create a pause, which plainly he expected Vaughan to fill.

‘I realize that in my letter yesterday I set out recent events without clarifying the respects in which I may need your assistance,’ he began. ‘Some things are better discussed in person.’

‘Quite right.’

‘The fact of the matter is, there is a chance – scarcely likely, I should say, yet worth attending to – that another party might make a claim to the child.’

Montgomery nodded, as unsurprised as if he had been expecting this very eventuality. Although Mr Montgomery must have been sixty, he had the unlined face of an infant. After forty years of practising a poker face in the office, the muscles that twitch and tauten in response to doubt, worry or suspicion had atrophied to such a degree that it was now impossible to read any kind of expression in his face other than a general and permanent bonhomie.

‘There is a young man living in Oxford who claims – at least, I think he may claim – that he is the father of the child. His estranged wife died at Bampton and his own child’s whereabouts are unknown. His daughter, Alice, was just the same age, and she disappeared at more or less the same time as’ – Vaughan saw the hurdle coming and was ready for it – ‘Amelia was found. An unfortunate coincidence that has permitted uncertainty to arise …’

‘Uncertainty …?’

‘In his eyes.’

‘In his eyes. Yes. Good.’

Montgomery listened, his face a picture of bland goodwill.

‘The young man – his name is Armstrong – had not seen his wife or child in recent times. Hence his inability to be immediately certain as to the identity of this child.’

‘Whereas you, on the other hand, are entirely certain of’ – his level gaze was quite unaltered – ‘the child’s identity?’

Vaughan swallowed. ‘Indeed.’

Montgomery smiled benignly. He was far too well mannered to press a client on a doubtful statement. ‘The child is your daughter, then.’ It sounded for all the world like a declaration, but Vaughan’s uncertainty heard the question in it.

‘It is …’ (the hurdle again) ‘Amelia.’

Montgomery continued smiling.

‘There is no shadow of a doubt,’ Vaughan added.

The smile persisted.

Vaughan felt the need to throw something in to make weight. ‘A mother’s instinct is a powerful thing,’ he concluded.

‘A mother’s instinct!’ exclaimed Montgomery encouragingly. ‘What could be plainer than that? Of course,’ – there was no fall in his face – ‘it is fathers to whom the custodial right to a child belongs, but still, a mother’s instinct! Nothing finer!’

Vaughan swallowed. He took the plunge. ‘It is Amelia,’ he said. ‘I know.’

Montgomery looked up, round of cheek and smooth of forehead. ‘Excellent.’ He nodded contentedly. ‘Excellent. Now, I have a good deal of experience in assessing competing claims to certain cargoes that occasionally go astray for one reason or another. Do not be offended if I use my experience – for the parallel is a useful one – to test the strength of this Armstrong’s case against you.’

‘It is not yet a case against us. It is not yet a case at all. For two months we have had her now, and the fellow comes every so often to see us. He comes and he watches her and he neither claims her to be his nor relinquishes his claim. Every time he turns up I am ready for him to state his mind one way or the other, but he remains silent on the issue. I am reluctant to press him on the matter – the last thing I want is to precipitate a claim, and all the while he does not say, “She is mine,” it is clearly an open possibility in his own mind that she is not. I prefer not to provoke him, but in the meantime it is unsettling. My wife …’

‘Your wife?’

‘My wife believed at the outset that the situation would last only so long as his own daughter was not found. We expected every day to hear report of a child, a body perhaps, found in the river, but we waited in vain and no such news has come. We are starting to feel unsettled by the fact that the matter remains unresolved after so long, but Helena is sorry for him, knowing all too well how heartbreaking the loss of a child is. She tolerates his continuing visits to our home, even though it has gone beyond the point where he can expect to reach any sense of certainty. His own child has vanished into the blue and I fear that in the desperation of his grief it might not be beyond the machinations of his own mind to persuade him that Amelia’ (the hurdle successfully jumped – he was getting better at this!) ‘– that Amelia is in fact his child. Grief is a powerful force, and who knows to what a man might be driven when his child is lost to him. A man is liable to imagine all manner of things rather than think his child – his only child – lost for ever.’

‘You have a very acute understanding of his mind and his situation, Mr Vaughan. Then we must test the facts of the matter, for facts are what matter in law, and see what is the power of his case in principle, in case he should think to make his claim, so as to be ready when the time comes. Incidentally, what does the child herself have to say about the matter?’

‘Nothing. She has not spoken.’

Mr Montgomery nodded serenely, as if nothing could have been more natural.

‘And before she was taken from your care, she had the power of speech?’

Vaughan nodded.

‘And Mr Armstrong’s daughter – did she have the power of speech?’

‘She did.’

‘I see. Now do not be offended, remember, if I appear to treat the little Amelia as if she were a cargo gone astray and returned to sight, it is the way my experience goes. What I know is this: much weight is given to the last sighting of the cargo before it disappeared and the first sighting when it reappeared. That is what will tell us as much as can be known about the cargo while it was out of sight. Taken together with as complete a description as possible of the cargo as it was before and as it was afterwards, it will generally be enough to cast a decent enough light into the muddle to ascertain ownership within the law.’

He proceeded to ask a number of questions. He asked about Amelia before the kidnap. He asked about the circumstances in which Alice Armstrong was lost. He asked about the circumstances in which the cargo – ‘Amelia,’ he said, more than once, with emphasis – was found. He noted all and nodded.

‘Armstrong’s daughter has, to all extents and purposes, disappeared into the blue. These things happen. Yours has returned out of the blue. Which is more unusual. Where has she been? Why is it now that she has returned – or been returned? These are unanswered questions. It would be better to have an answer, but if there is no answer to be had, then instead we must rely on other evidence. Do you have photographs of Amelia from before?’

‘We do.’

‘And she resembles those photographs, now?’

Vaughan shrugged. ‘I suppose so … In the way little girls of four resemble their own selves aged two.’

‘Which is to say …?’

‘A mother’s eye can see it is the same child.’

‘But another? A more judicial eye?’

Vaughan paused, and Montgomery, as if he had not registered the pause, sailed blithely on. ‘I take your point entirely about children. They change. A cargo of cheese lost on Wednesday does not transform into an equivalent weight of tobacco when it reappears on Saturday, but a child – ah! another matter entirely. I take your point. Still, to be ready, keep the photographs safe, and keep note of everything – every little detail – that tells you that this Amelia and that Amelia from two years ago are one and the same child. It is as well to be prepared.’

He took in Vaughan’s glum face and smiled cheerily at him. ‘Beyond that, Mr Vaughan, my counsel to you is this: worry not about young Mr Armstrong. And tell Mrs Vaughan she is not to worry either. Montgomery and Mitchell are here to do the worrying for you. We will look after everything for you – and for Amelia. For there is one thing, one very great thing, that stands in your favour.’

‘And what is that?’

‘If it comes to court, this case will be very long, and it will be very slow. Have you ever heard of the great Thames case between the Crown and the Corporation of London?’

‘I can’t say I have.’

‘It is a dispute over which of them owns the Thames. The Crown says that the Queen travels upon it and it is essential for the defence of the nation, hence the river is in its possession. The Corporation of London argues that it exercises jurisdiction over the comings and goings of all goods upstream and down, and that therefore it must own the Thames.’

‘And what was the outcome? Who owns the Thames?’

‘Why, they have been arguing it for a dozen years and they have at least a dozen years of argument to go! What is a river? It is water. And what is water? Essentially it is rain. And what is rain? Why, weather! And who owns the weather? That cloud that passes overhead now, this very minute, where is it to fall? On the one bank, or on the other, or into the river itself? Clouds are blown by the wind, which is owned by nobody, and they float over borders without letters of passage. The rain in that cloud might fall in Oxfordshire or in Berkshire; it might cross the sea and fall upon the demoiselles in Paris, for all we know. And the rain that does fall into the Thames, why it might have travelled from anywhere! From Spain, or Russia, or … or Zanzibar! If they have clouds in Zanzibar. No, rain cannot be said to belong to anybody, whether it be the Queen of England or the Corporation of London, any more than lightning can be captured and put in a bank vault, but that won’t stop them trying!’

On Montgomery’s face there was the faintest hint of glee. It was the closest Vaughan had ever seen to an expression.

‘The reason I tell you this is to illustrate how slow the dealings of the law can be. When this Armstrong makes up his mind to claim the girl – if he does – avoid going to court. Pay him whatever he wants to resolve the matter. It will be cheaper by far. And if he won’t be paid off, then take comfort in the Crown vs. the Corporation of London. The case will last, if not an eternity, then at least until the child is grown. The cargo we have been speaking of, little Amelia, will be the property of her husband long before the law decides which father is her rightful owner. Take comfort!’

At Oxford station, Vaughan stood on the platform waiting for his train. As Montgomery faded from his thoughts, he was put in mind of the last occasion he had stood waiting for a train on the very same spot. He had been to town to meet a potential buyer for the narrow-gauge railway he had used for the transportation of sugar beet from field to distillery, and afterwards he had gone to locate the house of Mrs Constantine. He had found it. He had gone inside. He wondered at himself. It was such a short time ago – only two months – and so much had happened since. What was it she had said to him? You can’t go on like this. That was it. And he had felt it too; felt in his bone marrow that she was right. Would he have gone back, as she suggested? Surely not. And yet … As things turned out, he hadn’t needed to. Left by themselves, things had sorted themselves out, unexpectedly, miraculously even, and happily. For two years he had been miserably unhappy and now – so long as Armstrong could be managed – he did not need to be. Take comfort! Montgomery had said. And he would.

Just as he resolved to forget Mrs Constantine, he remembered her face suddenly. Her eyes that seemed to swim against the current of his words and enter his mind, his very thoughts … I see, she had said, and it was as if she saw not only what he said, but what he didn’t say.

Remembering it now, he felt a touch of significance at the nape of his neck and turned, expecting to see her behind him on the platform.

There was nobody there.

‘Mrs Vaughan is putting Amelia to bed,’ he was told when he arrived home.

He let himself into the yellow drawing room, where the curtains were closed and the fire was burning brightly in the hearth. Lately the two photographs of Amelia had reappeared on the small desk that stood in the bay. In the first days after her disappearance, she had continued to stare from her containment behind the glass. Her ghost-like gaze, overlaid with the shimmer of the glass, had appalled him and finally, able to bear it no longer, he had lain the portraits face down in a drawer and tried to forget them. Later he became aware that the photographs were no longer there and supposed that Helena had taken them to her room. By this time he no longer visited Helena’s room. Nocturnal grieving was a thing they did separately, each in their own way, and it was plain to him that nothing good would come from entering her room for any other purpose. Now that the girl had come, the photographs were back in their original place.

He had allowed his eyes to glide over them without seeing a thing.

From across the room they were mere shapes: a standard portrait of Amelia seated, and a family portrait, he standing and Helena seated with Amelia on her lap. He approached. He took the standard portrait in his hands, eyes closed, preparing himself to look at it.

The door opened. ‘You’re home! Darling? Is something the matter?’

He righted his face. ‘What? Oh, no, nothing. I saw Montgomery today. While I was there I mentioned – in passing – the situation with Mr Armstrong.’

She looked at him blankly.

‘We spoke about the possibility – the remote possibility – that he might make a claim in law.’

‘Surely not! When they find—’

‘The body? Helena, when will you give up this notion? It’s been two months! If nobody has found it yet, what reason is there to think they are going to find it?’

‘But a little girl has drowned! The body of a child doesn’t just disappear!’

Vaughan’s chest rose with a sharp intake of breath. His lungs held on to it. This wasn’t how he wanted the conversation to go. He must stay calm. Slowly he exhaled.

‘Yet no body has been found. We must face that fact. And it is likely – even you must admit the possibility – that no body will be found.’ He could hear the testiness in his own voice, made further efforts to curb it. ‘Look – darling – all I mean to say is that it’s as well to be prepared. Just in case.’

She looked at him thoughtfully. It was unlike him to be sharp with her. ‘You can’t bear the thought of losing her, can you?’ She crossed the room, placed her hand over his heart and smiled tenderly. ‘You can’t bear the thought of losing her again. Oh, Anthony!’ Tears rose in her eyes and spilt. ‘You know. At last you have recognized her.’

He made to put the photograph down to take her in his arms; the movement drew her attention to what he was holding and she stopped him.

She took the photograph from his hand and looked fondly at it. ‘Anthony, please don’t worry. All the evidence we need is here.’ She smiled up at him. She was turning it in her hands so as to replace it on the table when a sudden exclamation broke from her lips.

‘What is it?’

‘This!’

He looked where she was pointing at the reverse of the frame. ‘Good Lord! Henry Daunt of Oxford, portraits, landscapes, city and country scenes,’ he read aloud from the label. ‘It’s him! The man who found her!’

‘We would hardly have recognized him, bruised and swollen as he was. How strange … Let’s get him back. He made more exposures, do you remember? We only took the two best ones, but there were two others. He might still have them.’

‘If they were any good we’d have them already, surely.’

‘Not necessarily.’ She replaced the photograph on the table. ‘The best photograph overall might not be the best of her face. Perhaps I was the one who wriggled’ (she danced an exaggerated demonstration on the spot) ‘or you were pulling a face’ (her fingers moulded his lips into a lopsided grimace). He made an effort to respond with the kind of laugh her playfulness deserved. ‘There,’ she finished with satisfaction. ‘You’re smiling again. So, it would be better to have them all, wouldn’t it? Just in case. I’m sure your Mr Montgomery would think so.’

He nodded.

She put an arm loosely around him and spread her fingers below his shoulder blade. Through his jacket he could feel each finger separately and the pad at the base of her thumb. He was not yet used to her touch; even through layers of tweed and poplin it sent a thrill through him.

‘And while he is here, we can have him take new ones.’

She raised her other hand to the back of his neck; he felt a thumb stray to the inch of skin between the top of his collar and his hairline.

He kissed her and her mouth was soft and slightly open.

‘I’m so glad,’ she murmured as she leant into his body. ‘It’s the one thing I’ve been waiting for. Now we are really together again.’

He delivered a sound, a little moan, into her hair.

‘Our little girl is fast asleep,’ she whispered. ‘I thought I might have an early night too.’

He buried his nose in her neck and inhaled. ‘Yes,’ he said. And again, ‘Yes.’

The Story Flourishes

IN THE WEEKS after the mystery girl was pulled from the Thames, first dead and then alive, the Swan had done excellent business. The story had spread via marketplaces and street corners. It was recounted in family letters from mother to daughter, from cousin to cousin. It was passed freely to strangers met on station platforms, and wanderers encountered it by chance at crossroads. Everybody who heard it was sure to tell it wherever he went, until eventually there was nobody in three counties who did not know one version of it or another. A great many of these people were not satisfied until they had visited the inn where the extraordinary events had taken place and seen for themselves the riverbank where the girl was found and the long room where she was placed.

Margot made the decision to open up the summer room. She organized her daughters to come in pairs to help with the extra work, and the regulars got used to having the Little Margots present. Jonathan badgered his mother and sisters to listen to him practise his storytelling, but they were rarely able to stop and listen, for the calls on their time and attention were unending. ‘I’ll never get any better,’ he sighed, and his lips moved as he rehearsed aloud to himself, but he got more and more muddled, putting the end at the beginning and the beginning at the end, and the middle – well, the middle hardly featured at all.

Joe lit the fire at eleven in the morning and it was kept in till midnight, when at last the crush of drinkers in the room began to thin.

The regulars scarcely bought a drink for themselves for weeks on end, as visitors stood rounds in payment for the story. They learnt in time to save their voices, for had the visitors had their way, every man who had witnessed the events that night would have been in the summer room going round the tables, talking constantly. But, as an elderly cressman pointed out very appositely, that would leave no drinking time. So they worked out a rota that saw the regulars go two by two into the summer room for an hour of telling, and then return to their stools in the winter room to quench their thirst and be replaced by two more.

Fred Heavins had crafted a good comic tale out of his side of it, which ended with the punchline, ‘“Nay!” said the horse.’ A slantwise version like his went down well after ten o’clock, when the facts of the story had been told a dozen times over and the audience was drunk. It earnt him a great many hangovers and he was so often late for work that he was threatened with dismissal.

Newman, the Vaughans’ gardener, previously a regular at the Red Lion where every Friday night he sang till he was hoarse, had now switched allegiance to the Swan and was trying his tongue at storytelling. He practised on the regulars before trying his luck with the visitors in the summer room, and made the most of that aspect of the story only he had witnessed: the departure of Mrs Vaughan from Buscot Lodge on hearing the news of the rescue of the child.

‘I saw her myself, I did. She ran down to the boathouse quick as could be, and when she come out in her rowing boat – the little old one of hers – off she went, haring up the river … I never seen a boat move like it.’

‘Haring up the river?’ asked a farmhand.

‘Aye, and just a little slip of a girl too! You wouldn’t think a woman could row so fast.’

‘But … haring, you say?’

‘That’s right. Quick as a hare, it means.’

‘I know what it means, all right. But you can’t say she was haring up the river.’

‘Why ever not?’

‘Have you ever seen a hare rowing a boat?’

There was a burst of laughter that bewildered the gardener and made him flustered. ‘A hare in a boat? Don’t be daft!’

‘That’s why you can’t say she went haring up the river. If a hare can’t hare up a river, how can Mrs Vaughan? Think about it.’

‘I never knew that. What am I meant to say, then?’

‘You have to think of some creature that do go swiftly up a river, and say that instead. Don’t he?’

There was a round of nodding.

‘What about an otter?’ suggested a young bargeman. ‘They don’t hang about.’

Newman pulled a dubious face. ‘Mrs Vaughan went ottering up the river …’

The farmhand shook his head. ‘It sounds no better.’

‘In fact it sounds a bit worse …’

‘Well, what am I supposed to say, then? If I can’t say haring and I can’t say ottering? I’ve got to say something.’

‘True,’ said the bargeman, and a trio of gravel-diggers nodded. ‘The man has to say something.’

They turned to Owen Albright, who shared his wisdom. ‘I reckon you have to find another way altogether. You could say, “She rowed up the river, quick as could be …”’

‘But he have already said that,’ protested the farmhand. ‘She ran down to the boathouse quick as could be. She can’t run quick as can be down to the boathouse and row quick as can be upriver.’

‘She did, though,’ corrected Newman.

‘No!’

‘She did! I was there! I saw her with my own eyes!’

‘Aye, so it might have happened, but you can’t tell it thus.’

‘Can’t tell it how it was? How d’you make that out? I’m starting to wish I’d not told it at all, now. Telling a thing’s harder than I ever knew.’

‘There’s an art to it,’ Albright soothed. ‘You’ll get the hang of it.’

‘I’ve got to the age of thirty-seven just opening my mouth and letting the words out, and never had any trouble so far. Not till I came and sat down here. I don’t know as I wants the hang of it. No, I shall go on by the old way, my words shall come as they like and if I has her haring up the river, well hare she must. Else I shan’t say anything at all.’

There was an exchange of anxious looks across the table, and one of the gravel-diggers spoke for them all: ‘Let the man speak. He was there.’

And Newman was allowed to continue, in words of his own devising, his account of Mrs Vaughan’s departure from the house.

It was not only Newman and Heavins who practised and refined their stories. All told their versions over and over, to each other and the visitors, and new details came to light. Memories were compared, adjudication made. There were splinter groups. Some remembered ‘for a fact’ that the feather had been placed on the lips of the child before she was taken to the long room, others were adamant that only the man’s breath had been tested thus. Diverse and lengthy hypotheses were proposed to explain how Henry Daunt managed to get from Devil’s Weir to Radcot whilst out cold and in a damaged boat. They refined and polished the tale, identified moments where a well-placed gesture would bring tears to the eye, introduced pauses that held the audience on the edge of their seats. But they never found an ending to the story. They came to a point – the child left the Swan with Mr and Mrs Vaughan – where the story simply tailed off. ‘Is she Amelia Vaughan, or is she the other one?’ someone would ask. And ‘How come she was first dead and then alive again?’

There were no answers.

Regarding the first question – who was the girl? – opinion by and large was in favour of the girl belonging to the Vaughans. The return of a child missing for the past two years, a child they had all seen, was a distinctly more satisfying story than the return of a child nobody knew and who had gone missing only the day before. The more recent mystery resuscitated the first, and the kidnap was recounted as though it were only yesterday.

‘Where has she been, then, this last – how long is it? – two years?’

‘She will have to get her voice back and start telling, won’t she?’

‘And then there’ll be trouble for whoever it was that took her.’

‘It were that nursery maid, I’d put a week’s wages on it. Remember her?’

‘The girl Ruby that went out in the night?’

‘That’s what she says. Walking by the river at midnight. I ask you! What kind of a girl goes wandering by the river in the middle of the night? At solstice time too.’

‘And solstice time is when the river gypsies are about. They cooked it up with her, that’s how it was. Ruby and the gypsies, mark my words. When that little lass starts to talk, there’ll be trouble for someone …’

The story of the kidnapped girl and the story of the found girl both had trailing ends, but if some of those trailing ends could be woven together, then that seemed to bring both stories closer to completion, which was a good thing.

As for the second question, that gave rise to longer and drunker debates.

There were some for whom the world was such a tricky thing that they marvelled at it without feeling any need to puzzle it out. Bafflement in their eyes was fundamental to existence. Higgs the gravel-digger was one such. His pay, which was enough on Friday night to last the week, was generally gone by the end of Tuesday; he always owed for more pints of ale at the Swan than he remembered consuming; the wife he only beat on Saturday night – and not always then – ran off for no reason at all to live with the cousin of the cheesemonger; the face he saw reflected in the river when he sat glumly staring into it with no bread in his belly, no ale to dull the hunger and no wife to warm him, was not his own but his father’s. The whole of life was a mystery, if you delved even a little way under the surface, and causes and effects not infrequently came adrift from each other. On top of these daily bewilderments, the story of the girl who died and lived again was one he drew consolation from as he marvelled at it, for it demonstrated conclusively that life was fundamentally inexplicable, and there was no point trying to understand anything.

Certain tellers, fanciful or just unscrupulous, invented details to provide a more satisfactory answer to this question. One bargeman had a brother who’d been off with a woman the night of the great event. At first disappointed by what he’d missed, he later turned it to his advantage and developed his own version that made the most of his absence from the inn and contained the comfort of rational explanation. ‘She were never dead at all! If I’d have seen her, I’d have told ’em. It’s all in the eyes. You have only to look in a man’s eyes to tell if he is dead or not. It is the seeing, you see, that goes out of ’em.’

Ears snapped open on hearing this and heads lifted sharply. It was the obvious way to sooth the strain of it, if you were one of those that can’t stand a glaring gap in a tale, an implausibility, reality gone wrong. One or two storytellers were attracted to the security of it and their own versions began to drift in that direction. ‘She was brought into the inn scarcely breathing,’ someone said experimentally, but it gave rise to such disapproving glances and twists of the mouth that the teller was taken aside and given a talking-to. There were standards at the Swan; storytelling was one thing, lying quite another, and they had all been there. They knew.

After months of telling and retelling there was no sense of the story settling down. On the contrary, the tale of the drowned girl who lived again was puzzling, unfinished, out of kilter with what a story ought to be. At the Swan they talked about the Vaughans, they talked about the Armstrongs, they talked about death and they talked about life. They examined the strengths and weaknesses of every claim and every claimant. They turned the story this way and that, they turned it upside down and then righted it again, and at the end were no further forward than they had been at the beginning.

‘It is like bone soup,’ said Beszant one night. ‘A smell to make your mouth water and all the flavour of the marrow, but there be nowt to chew on and though you take seven bowls of it you will be just as hungry at the end as when you sat down to the table.’

They might have let it drop. They might have given it up as one of those tales that comes from nowhere and has nowhere to go. But at the end of sentences and between words, when voices tailed off and conversations halted, in the profound lull that lies behind all storytelling, there floated the girl herself. In this room, in this inn, they had seen her dead and seen her alive. Unknowable, ungraspable, inexplicable, still one thing was plain: she was their story.

Counting

TWENTY-FIVE MILES DOWNRIVER, at Oxford’s best-known boatyard, the boatbuilder himself scrawled an inky squiggle in receipt of payment of the final invoice and with a nod slid a set of shiny brass keys over the counter. Henry Daunt’s hand closed over them.

On his return to the city after his eventful solstice experiences, Daunt had set things in motion. He had leased the house he’d lived in with his wife and moved into the attic room over his shop on Broad Street. There he enjoyed a spartan, bachelor existence, having a bed, a chamber pot, a table with a pitcher and basin to his name. He ate his meals at the chop house at the corner. He invested the total of the lease money and every penny of his savings into the boat. For Daunt had a plan.

In the period of unconsciousness between the shortest day and the day after, his mind had been made new, and in the bed at the Swan a new and brilliant idea had occurred to him. An idea that would combine in a single project his two great loves: photography and the river. He would make a book of photographs that would take the reader on a journey from the source of the Thames all the way to the estuary. Or perhaps just to London. Though in fact, it might have to be in several volumes and the first might go only from Trewsbury Mead to Oxford. The essence was to start. To do it, he needed two things: transport and a darkroom. The two things could be one. While his face was still shades of green and black and purple with a scarlet thread running down his lip, he’d made his first visit to the boatbuilder to explain what he needed. As it happened, there had been a boat in the yard, almost completed, whose buyer had been unable to make the final payment. It was just what Daunt wanted, and needed only finishing and fitting out to meet his requirements. Today, nearly three months later, his skin was its usual hale colour and the scar a pink line with pairs of almost invisible dots where the stitches had been – and he had the keys to his investment in his hand.

All the way upriver, Daunt and his boat met with curiosity. Her smart navy-and-white paintwork and her brass-and-cherry fittings were reason enough, but there were originalities to this boat that had never been seen before.

‘Collodion?’ asked those who could read. ‘What kind of a name is that?’

He pointed to the yellow-orange of the decorative flourishes that framed his name and profession painted on the side of the boat. ‘This is the colour of collodion. It’s lethal. I’ve known it burst into flames, explode even, with no warning at all. And if you inhale too much of it, woe betide you! But apply it to glass, expose it to light and then – ah! then – you have magic! Collodion is the ingredient that unlocks all my art and all my science. Without it, there can be no such thing as a photograph.’

‘And what’s all that, then?’ people called across the water, gesturing to the brackets and boxes attached so neatly to the cabin walls, and he explained that this was his photographic equipment.

‘And that contraption?’ they wanted to know. Secured to the cabin roof was a quadricycle, painted to match the boat.

‘For getting around inland. And this box here doubles as a trailer, so that I can get my kit to wherever I want to be by road.’

The sharp-eyed noticed that there were internal shutters as well as curtains.

‘It’s a darkroom,’ he explained, ‘for a single ray of light is enough to destroy a photograph in the making.’

He stopped so often for conversations of this sort, handed out so many business cards and made so many appointments in his diary, that by the time he got upriver as far as Buscot and Radcot, he thought Collodion was well on the way to paying for herself already. But he had debts to repay before he could start this new phase of his business: he had come to thank the people to whom he owed his life. He had come to the Swan, and before that, this place.

It was a quiet spot on the river where a small, neat cottage stood. The garden was tidy, the front door painted green, and smoke was rising from its chimney. There was suitable mooring some twenty yards on. He tied up, came back, slapping his gloved hands together to keep them warm, and knocked.

The door opened to reveal a symmetrical brow over a strong, straight nose, flanked by distinctive angles that formed a jaw, cheeks and temples.

‘Miss Sunday?’ He hadn’t envisaged this … He shifted slightly to the side, curious to see how the light fell differently with the change of position, saw shadow flood the plain of her cheek. He felt a stir of excitement.

‘Mr Daunt!’

Rita stepped forward and lifted her face to his with an intentness in her expression, almost as if she were going to embrace him, but she only trained an assessing squint on his scar. Next she placed a fingertip to his skin and traced the scar to check how raised it was. She nodded. ‘Good,’ she said firmly, and stepped back.

His mind was preoccupied with visual matters, but he finally found his tongue.

‘I’ve come to say thank you.’

‘You have already done that.’

It was true. He had sent money in payment, thanked her in a letter for her care, and asked for information about the girl who had died and lived again. She had written in return a letter of model clarity, thanking him for the money and telling him what she knew of the child’s progress. That might have been the end of it, but his mind was unsettled by this woman who was still a visual mystery to him, for one of his assistants had come to collect him and take him home while his eyes were still swollen shut. It had occurred to him that the people at the Swan might appreciate a free photograph as a thank-you for their hospitality and that it would be entirely natural to call on the nurse at the same time.

‘I thought you might like a photograph,’ he said. ‘A thank-you gift.’

‘You’ve chosen a bad day to come,’ she told him, in the calm voice he remembered. ‘I’m busy.’

He noticed the pool of shade at the side of her nose, had to repress the urge to darken it by taking her head between his hands and turning it fractionally. ‘The light is too good to waste.’

‘But I’ve been waiting for the right temperature,’ she said. ‘Today’s the day. I can’t afford to miss it.’

‘What is it you need to do?’

‘An experiment.’

‘How long will it take?’

‘Sixty seconds.’

‘I need fifteen. Surely we can find seventy-five seconds in the day if we look hard?’

‘Presumably your fifteen seconds is exposure time. What about your setting-up? And the developing?’

‘You help me and I’ll help you. It’ll go quicker with two.’

She put her head on one side and gave him an appraising look. ‘You’re offering to help with my experiment?’

‘I am. In return for a photograph.’ The photograph that had first been conceived as a gift to her had become something he now wanted for himself.

‘It’s possible. Even preferable. But whether you’d want to …’

‘I do.’

She eyed him and a subtle alteration in the planes of her face told him that she was suppressing a smile. ‘So you will be the subject of my experiment if I agree to be the subject of your photograph – is that right?’

‘It is.’

‘You’re a brave and foolish man, Mr Daunt. It’s a deal. We’ll start with the photograph, shall we? The light will fluctuate, whereas if the temperature does it won’t be by much.’

Rita’s sitting room was a white-painted box with many bookshelves and a blue armchair. By the window, a simple wooden table held more piles of books and sheafs of paper densely covered with swift, fluent script. She helped carry boxes from Collodion, and watched with interest as Daunt set up. When all was ready, he seated Rita at this table, with a featureless piece of wall behind her.

‘Lean towards me … Try with your chin on your fist. Yes, that’s it.’

There were none of the dainty accoutrements his paying clients would have wanted: no silver brooch to catch the light, no white collar, no lace cuff. What little you saw of her dress was dark and plain. There was no embellishment of any kind and none was needed. There was only the symmetry of the line where her temples met her hairline, the strong arc of her brow, the shade that pooled in her orbit, and the depth of her thinking eyes.

‘Don’t move while I’m counting.’

For fifteen seconds she sat motionless and he watched her through the lens.

His best portraits – the most lifelike – were of people whose characters were by nature placid, slow to move from one state to the next. Lively souls were frequently reduced by the camera: their essence escaped the lens and all that was captured was a wax dummy, all outward resemblance with none of the quicksilver.

With Rita there was none of the goggle-eyed staring or nervous blinking that novices often displayed. Instead she opened her eyes to the camera with perfect composure. From under his cover, he saw one swell of living thought succeed another in an endless shifting movement, while all the time the muscles of her face remained unaltered. This was not one photograph, he knew by the end of the fifteen seconds. This was a thousand.

‘Come,’ he said, as he removed the plate, still enclosed in its case against the light. ‘I want to show you how it works.’

They made their way swiftly to Collodion. He was holding the plate carefully, and she did not need help climbing aboard. In the cabin, the shutters already blocked out the day. He lit a candle and placed a red glass shade over it, then closed the door. A red glow illuminated the small space. They stood side by side, hemmed in by the developing table that he had extended and the bench on which he could sleep when he spent nights aboard. The planks of the ceiling were only inches above their heads, and beneath their feet was the lulling rock of the river. Daunt tried not to be aware of the size and shape of the space between their two bodies, the places where the jut of her hip narrowed it, the curve of her waist broadened it, her elbow almost closed it.

He mixed liquids from three glass bottles in a tiny vessel only an inch high and the smell of apple vinegar and old nails filled the air.

‘Ferrous sulphate?’ she wondered, sniffing the air.

‘With acetic acid and water. It actually is red, it’s not just the light that makes it look that way.’

He slid the plate from its case. Holding it carefully in his left hand, he tipped a minute quantity of the light-red liquid on to the plate so that the acid mix flowed across the entire surface. It was a graceful motion, fluid and economical.

‘Watch. The image starts to form almost instantly – the lighter things first, but they show as dark lines … This line here is your cheekbone, highlighted from the window … Now the rest appears, blurrily at first, but then …’

His voice faded as they watched her face appear on the glass. They stood close in the red light, watching the shadows and lines on the glass coalesce, and Daunt felt a falling sensation in his stomach. A great dive. It resembled the feeling he’d had when, as a boy, he had let himself drop from the apex of a bridge into the river. He had met his wife while skating on the frozen Thames, one wintertime. With her he had glided into love – if it was love, and not some lesser cousin – unknowingly. This time he plummeted – and it was unmistakeable.

Then she was fully present on the glass. Her face delineated by light and darkness, the orbits shadowed and the pupils full of enigma. He felt that it would take very little to bring him to tears. It might be the best portrait he had ever taken.

‘I must photograph you again,’ he said as he rinsed the plate.

‘What’s wrong with this one?’

Nothing. He wanted her at every angle, in every possible light, in all moods and all positions. He wanted her with her hair loose around her face and pulled right back, concealed under a hat; he wanted her in a white chemise open at the neck and draped in folds of dark cloth; he wanted her in water and against tree trunks and on grass … There were a thousand photographs waiting to be taken. He had to have all of them.

‘Nothing’s wrong. That’s why I need more.’

He slid the plate into a tray of potassium cyanide. ‘This will get rid of the blue tint. See? It turns black and white and will be permanent now.’

Next to him, Rita in the red light looked with interest at the alteration, while through the clear viscosity of the liquid her eyes on glass continued to gaze thoughtfully, as they would now do for the life of the plate.

‘What were you thinking about?’

She cast a quick, assessing glance in his direction – (I want that look) – and weighed something up rapidly (and that one too).

‘You were there at the beginning,’ she began. ‘I suppose she would not be here at all if it were not for you, so …’ and she recounted in calm detail the encounter she’d had with the man on the river path a few weeks before.

Daunt paid close attention. He discovered that he did not like the thought of Rita being accosted by a ruffian one bit, and his instinct was to offer reassurance, but Rita’s account was so crisp, her manner so entirely unperturbed, that such chivalry would have been out of place. Yet he could not hear of the assault without some protective gesture.

‘Did he hurt you?’

‘There was bruising to my upper arm and grazing to my hands. Very minor.’

‘You’ve made it known locally that there is a ruffian about?’

‘I told them at the Swan and I let the Vaughans know of his interest in the child. They were already considering putting locks on the windows and that decided them.’

Given so little opportunity to display gallantry, he allowed Rita to lead him into analysis instead.

‘Yeast and fruit …’ she said.

‘A baker-cum-thief? That’s not very likely. Distilling, perhaps?’

‘Yes, I wondered about that.’

‘Who does distilling round here?’

She smiled. ‘That’s a question you won’t easily get an answer to. Everybody and nobody, I should think.’

‘Is there a lot of illicit liquor?’

She nodded. ‘More than there used to be, according to Margot. But nobody knows where it comes from. Or nobody is willing to let on.’

‘And you caught no glimpse of him.’ Daunt, for whom vision was everything, frowned.

‘He has unusually small hands and is a head shorter than I am.’

He eyed her quizzically.

‘The bruises where his fingertips dug into my arms were smaller than expected, his voice came from a spot lower than my ear, and I felt the brim of his hat dig into me here.’ She indicated where.

‘That is small for a man.’

‘And he’s strong.’

‘What do you make of his questions?’

Rita peered at the photograph of her thoughtful self. ‘That is what I was considering here. If he wants to know whether the child will speak, that suggests he is concerned at what she might say. He might be frightened by what she could tell, which would imply that he has something to hide regarding the child. Perhaps he is responsible for her being in the river.’

There was a sense of something unfinished in her voice. Daunt waited. She went on, speaking slowly and carefully, as if she were still weighing it up in her own mind. ‘But he was also particularly interested in knowing when she will speak again. Which might suggest his interest is less in something that has already happened and more in something to come. Perhaps he has some plan. Some notion that depends on her continuing silence.’

He waited while she organized her train of thought.

‘Which is it? Past or future? It may be the first, but I incline towards the latter. We must wait till the summer solstice – perhaps then we will know more.’

‘Why the summer solstice?’

‘Because he believes it will be plain by then whether the child will speak or not. According to the Oxford doctor, that is when her muteness will either be gone or be permanent. It’s nonsense, of course, but my assailant didn’t ask for my opinion and I didn’t give him the benefit of it. I only told him what the doctor had said. Six months from the drowning – if we can call it that – takes us to the summer solstice. Whether or not she speaks by then might be the factor that will determine his actions.’

His eyes met hers in the flickering red light.

‘I would not want anything bad to happen to her,’ he said. ‘When I first saw her, I thought … I wanted …’

‘You wanted to keep her.’

‘How did you know that?’

‘It’s the same for everybody. The Vaughans want her, the Armstrongs want her, Lily White wants her. Jonathan wept when she left the Swan, and Margot was more than ready to have her. Why, even the cressmen would have taken her home and raised her if there’d been nobody else. Even I …’ Something flickered in her eyes, there and gone again. I particularly want that, he thought. ‘So of course you wanted her,’ she continued smoothly. ‘Everyone did.’

‘Let me photograph you again. There will be light enough for another one.’

He lifted the red shade and snuffed out the candle and Rita leant to open the shutters. The day outside was dank and cold and grey, and the river was iron cold.

‘You agreed to help me with my experiment.’

‘What is it you want me to do?’

‘You might change your mind once you know.’

She told him her intentions and he stared.

‘Why on earth would you want me to do that?’

‘Can’t you guess?’

Of course he could. ‘It’s her, isn’t it? Her heart slowed. You want to know how it happened.’

‘Will you help?’

The first part was easy. At her kitchen table, while water was heating over the fire, she took his wrist in one hand and held her pocket watch in the other. For sixty seconds they sat in silence and she counted his pulse. At the end of a minute she made a note with a pencil that she wore on a string around her neck.

‘Eighty beats a minute. A little high. It might be the anticipation.’

She tipped the water into a tin bath by the fire.

‘It’s not all that hot,’ he said, testing it with his finger.

‘Tepid is better. Now – are you ready? I’ll turn my back.’

He undressed to his shirt and long johns while she looked out of the window, then put his coat on. ‘Ready.’

Outside, the ground was unyielding and the cold penetrated Daunt’s bare feet. The river ahead appeared smooth, but occasional shivers gave away the presence of deeper turbulence. Rita got into her little rowing boat and pushed off a couple of yards into the water. When she had lodged the nose of the craft in the reeds to secure it, she held her thermometer in the water for a few moments to test the temperature and noted it.

‘Perfect!’ she called. ‘Ready when you are.’

‘How long will it take?’

‘Only a minute, I should think.’

On the bank, Daunt took off his coat, then his shirt. He stood in his long johns, and reflected that when in the early days of his widowhood he had contemplated the possibility of finding himself undressed in the company of a woman, this was not what he had imagined.

‘All set,’ she said, with her unaltered calm voice, her gaze fixed firmly away from him and on the pocket watch.

He entered the river.

The first touch of the water made his bones contract. He set his jaw, went three steps deeper. The freezing line rose up his limbs. He found he could not bear it to creep up to his genitals, instead he bent his knees and took the shock of immersion in a single motion. He lowered himself to the neck and gasped, surprised that his chest could expand in the water’s grip. A few strokes took him to the side of the boat.

‘Wrist,’ she instructed.

He raised his wrist. She took it in her right hand, held the watch in her left and said nothing.

He endured it for what must have been a minute. She was still looking at the watch, her eyes blinking calmly every so often. He endured it for what felt like another minute.

‘God! How much longer?’

‘If I lose count we have to start again,’ she murmured, the concentration on her face unchanging.

He endured an eternity.

He endured another.

He endured a thousand eternities – and then she let go of his wrist, took up the pencil and noted something neatly on the pad of paper, while he gasped and rose, scattering water from the river. He made for the bank, ran to the cottage, to the tin bath of tepid water they had prepared in advance, and when he was in it, she was right – the heat bloomed all over him.

When she entered the kitchen he was entirely submerged.

‘Feel all right?’ she asked.

He nodded, teeth chattering, and then his body took over from his mind for a time as it put all its vigour into recovering from the shock of the cold. When he was himself again, he looked over to the table. Rita was frowning out of the window as the light faded. The pencil was no longer round her neck, but stuck over her ear, the cord dangling on to her shoulder. I want that, he thought.

‘Well?’

‘Eighty-four.’ She lifted the paper on which she had noted the figures. ‘Your heartbeat rises in response to submersion in cold water.’

‘Rises?’

‘Yes.’

‘But the girl’s pulse fell … We found the opposite of what was meant to happen.’

‘Yes.’

‘It was for nothing, then.’

She shook her head slowly. ‘Not nothing. I’ve ruled out a hypothesis. That’s progress.’

‘What’s hypothesis two?’

She bent her head back to look at the ceiling, arm raised, elbow crooked around her head, and puffed out a long sigh of frustration. ‘I don’t know.’

Lily’s Visitor

LILY WHITE WAS not asleep and she was not awake. She was in that border territory where shadows move like waves, and illumination – faint and perplexing – comes and goes, like feeble sunshine through deep water. Then she emerged abruptly into wakefulness in her bed in Basketman’s Cottage.

What was it?

He was stealthy as a cat, opening the door without making a noise, stepping so lightly on the flags he was soundless. But she knew him by the odour of woodsmoke, sweetness and yeast that he always brought with him and that alarmed her senses so. It held its own, even against the dank riverine smell of the cottage. Then she heard him too: the grating of stone on stone. He was retrieving the money from the hiding place.

The sudden burst of a match strike. From her bed on the high ledge she saw the flare of light and the hand, with its bruises and scars, that tilted the candle wick into it. The wick caught and the circle of light grew steady.

‘What you got for me?’ he said.

‘There’s cheese there and a bit of that ham you like. There’s bread in the basket.’

‘Today’s?’

‘Yesterday’s.’

The light moved over to the side and there was the sound of rummaging.

‘Going mouldy, isn’t it. Should’ve got me some today.’

‘I didn’t know you was coming.’

The circle of light floated back to the table, where it was set down, and for a little while the only sound was of ravenous eating, mouthfuls barely chewed, famished gulps. Lily lay in the dark, silent and unmoving, her heart trembling.

‘What else is there?’

‘Apples, if you want.’

‘Apples! What do I want with apples?’

The glow of light rose again and hovered along one bare shelf and then the other. It crossed to the cupboard, examined the emptiness within, it reached into the back corners of a drawer and still found nothing.

‘What do he pay you, that parson of yours?’

‘Not enough. You told me that before.’

She tried not to think of her savings, safe in the parson’s desk drawer, for fear the hovering light would reveal them to him.

A click of exasperation came out of the darkness.

‘Why haven’t you got me a bit of something sweet? What do you do for him, up at that parsonage? Apple pie? Bread pudding with damson jam? All sorts, I bet.’

‘I will, next time.’

‘Don’t you forget.’

‘I won’t.’

Now that her eyes had adjusted, she could make out his shape in the dark. He sat at the table, his back to her, the shoulders of his coat sticking out wider than the frame beneath them; he was still in his wide-brimmed hat. By the sound of it, he was counting the money. She held her breath.

When the money wasn’t right, it was she who got the blame for it. What had she taken? Where had she hidden it? What selfish plan was she brewing with it? What kind of loyalty did she call that? There were no answers to these questions that would satisfy him. Whatever she said, her answers were always met with his fists. The truth was, she had never once taken his money – she might be stupid, but she wasn’t that stupid. The money did puzzle her though. She had questions of her own she’d have liked to ask, but didn’t dare. She had pieced together where it came from well enough. Overnight and coinciding with his visits, those bottles and barrels full of a potent and illegal brew appeared in her woodshed. There they remained through daylight hours, and with the next darkness they disappeared, taken by his distributors and replaced by money for the next delivery. But what happened to the money after he’d got it? In a single night he took more money from the hiding place here than she earnt in a month at the parsonage, and she was sure he had other places that worked the same way too. He was hiding out in some place where there was no rent to pay, didn’t gamble and never paid for a woman. He didn’t touch drink either – never had, only encouraged others to ruin and emptied their purses in exchange. She’d tried to add it up, the money he had from here in a year, doubled or trebled, or multiplied seven-fold, but the numbers set her head spinning. Even without coming to the end of her sums she knew it was enough to make him rich, yet he turned up here, once a week or twice, in his ancient coat smelling of the distillery, all skin and bone, and famished. He ate her food and helped himself to her candles. She didn’t dare keep a single nice thing in the cottage, because whatever it was he would take it, sell it, and the money would disappear. Even a pair of green woollen gloves with holes in the fingers would disappear into his pockets. There was a mystery in Vic’s life that sucked all his money into it, and all hers too. Except what she had the parson keep back for her. It didn’t make sense.

He gave a grunt of satisfaction and she breathed again. The money was right. With that done, he now leant back in the chair and took a breath. He always relaxed once he’d counted the money. She didn’t.

‘I always done all right by you, didn’t I, Lil?’

‘Always,’ she responded, and before she answered she made a silent apology to God for lying. God understood that there were times a person just couldn’t tell the truth.

‘Looked after you better than your old ma ever did, eh?’

‘You did, yes.’

He made a sound of contentment in the back of his throat.

‘So what do you want to go calling yourself Lily White for?’

Lily’s throat tightened. ‘You said not to use your name when I come here. Nothing to connect us, you said, so …’

‘Didn’t have to be White, though, did it? Could’ve chose any name under the sun. That Whitey, he was no husband to you anyway. Not in the eyes of the Lord. Do he know that, your parson?’

‘No.’

‘No,’ he repeated with satisfaction. ‘I didn’t think so.’ He let the implied threat hang in the air before going on, ‘I’m no fool, Lil. I knows why you chose that name. Shall I tell you?’

‘Tell me.’

‘You cling to that name like you never clung to the man himself. Lily White. Innocent and blameless, like the lilies of the field. That’s what you like, isn’t it?’

She swallowed.

‘Speak up, Lil! Can’t hardly hear you. But naming a thing don’t make it so. You cling to that name like it’ll wash you clean, same way as you scour this table, same way as you clean for that parson. Like it’ll redeem you … Aren’t I right, Lil?’

He took her agreement for granted.

‘See, I know you, Lily. But what’s done is done. There’s no getting round it, some things can’t never be scrubbed away.’

It was all she could do to keep her tears silent, but then even that was too much: her throat quivered and the next spasm of tears sounded loud in the room.

‘Don’t go upsetting yourself,’ he said calmly. ‘Things could be worse. You got me, haven’t you?’

She nodded.

‘Eh?’

‘Yes, Vic.’

‘I wonders whether you deserves me, sometimes. You’ve let me down at times, Lil.’

‘I’m sorry, Vic.’

‘So you say. More than once I’ve been disappointed in you. Running off with Whitey. Years it took me to find you then. Any other man would’ve given up on you, but I didn’t.’

‘Thank you, Vic.’

‘But are you grateful, Lil?’

‘’Course I am!’

‘Really?’

‘Truly!’

‘So why’d you go letting me down again? That girl at the Swan …’

‘They wouldn’t let me take her, Vic. I tried, I tried my best, but there were two of them and—’

He wasn’t listening. ‘Could’ve made a fortune round the fairs with that. The Dead Girl That Lived Again. Imagine the queues. You could’ve given up skivvying for the parson, and with your honest face the queue to see her would’ve been a mile long. ’Stead of that she’s gone up to the Vaughans’ place, I hear.’

She nodded. He brooded, and she thought, Perhaps that will be it. Perhaps he’s gone to that dreaming place he goes to when he’s had something to eat and got some money in his pocket, the place where he makes his secret plans. But then he spoke again.

‘We stick together, you and me, don’t we?’

‘Yes, Vic.’

‘It’s like there’s a thread that joins us together. No matter how far you go or how long you’re gone, that thread is always there. You know it is, ’cause sometimes there’s a tug on it … You know that feeling, don’t you, Lil? Except it’s more than a tug, it’s more like a boxer’s fist in your chest that gives your heart a great wallop.’

She knew the feeling. She’d felt it many a time. ‘Yes, Vic.’

‘And we know what it is, don’t we?’

‘Yes, Vic.’

‘Family!’ He let out a profound sigh of satisfaction.

Now he stood and brought the circle of light across the floor and up the steps to her bed. The candle came close to her face. She squinted. Behind the glow was Victor, but, dazzled, she could not make out his expression. She felt the blanket being tugged away, and the light played for a little while on the folds of her nightgown over her breasts.

‘I gets it in mind you’re still that girl you used to be. You’ve let yourself go. All skin and bone. Used to be a pretty thing, you did. Back then. Before you run off.’ He stretched out on the mattress; she inched away, he inched into the space and put an arm around her. The arm was slim in the coat sleeve, but she knew the strength in it.

His breathing deepened and he began to snore. She was reprieved – for now, at least – but still she could not stop the racing in her chest.

Lily did not move. She lay awake in the dark, breathing as gently as she could for fear of waking him.

After a scant hour, the candle had burnt out and a faint light seeped into the room. He didn’t shift and stretch like most people did when they woke up. He didn’t move an inch, just opened his eyes and asked, ‘What money you got from that parson?’

‘Not a lot.’ She made her voice as meek as she could.

He reached for the purse she kept under her pillow and, standing, tipped the contents into his palm.

‘I had to get the cheese for you. And the ham,’ she explained. ‘Leave me something, will you? Just a bit?’

He grunted. ‘Don’t know what you do with your money. What is it – don’t you trust me?’

‘’Course I do.’

‘Good. This is for your own good, you know that.’

She nodded meekly.

‘All this,’ he gestured expansively, and she didn’t know whether he meant the cottage or the liquor in the woodshed or some other thing, bigger and less visible, behind it all and including it. ‘All this, it’s not for me, Lil.’

She watched him. You had to. You couldn’t afford to miss a thing, with Vic.

‘It’s for us. For the family. You wait. One day you won’t have to go skivvying for that old parson no more. You’ll live in a great, white house ten times finer than that. You and me and—’

He broke off sharply, but his thoughts didn’t. They carried him on, and she saw how his gaze softened as he gloated over the future he kept hugged to himself so privately.

‘Now this’ – and he waved his closed fist so she could hear the pennies rattling – ‘is an investment. You’ve heard me talk about my scheme, haven’t you?’

‘This last five years, yes.’ It’d been a recurring theme. Whether he was in a good mood or bad, whether the money was right or wrong, the scheme always lulled him. It made him quiet and it took the edge off the sharp look in his eyes. Sometimes when he mentioned it, his thin mouth twitched in a way that, if it were some other mouth, might have resulted in a smile. But he was as secretive about this scheme as about everything he did, and she was as ignorant of what it was as she had been when she first heard of it.

‘It’s a lot longer than five years.’ The nostalgia in his voice was almost musical. ‘That’s just when I told you about it. Twenty years ago, I reckon I started plotting it out. Longer than that, even, if you look at it one way!’ He twitched in self-congratulation. ‘And soon the time’ll be ripe. So don’t you worry about your pennies, Lil, they’re safe with me. It’s all’ – his mouth twisted – ‘all in the family!’

He slid a couple of coins back into her purse and dropped it on the bed, rose and descended the steps to the kitchen.

‘I’ve put a crate in the woodshed,’ he told her in a new tone of voice. ‘Someone’ll come and take it away. Same as always. And there’s a couple of barrels in the usual place. You didn’t see ’em come and you won’t see ’em go.’

‘Yes, Vic.’

Then, helping himself to her three new candles on the way, he opened the door and was gone.

She lay in bed, thinking about his scheme. Not work at the parsonage any more? Live in a great, white house with Vic? She frowned. This cottage was cold and damp, but at least she had her days at the parsonage and was often alone at night. And – who else would be there? The words sounded again in her head. You and me and—

And who?

Did he mean Ann? For the family, he’d said. He must mean Ann. After all, he was the one who had come to her in the night with instructions to cross the river to the Swan at first light to fetch back the child who’d died and lived again.

She thought of her sister with Mr and Mrs Vaughan, in her bedroom with red blankets and the log basket piled high, and pictures on the wall.

No, she decided. He must not have her.

Gone! Or, Mr Armstrong Goes to Bampton

‘WHAT CAN I do?’ Armstrong asked for the hundredth time, as he paced in front of the fireplace in his own drawing room. Bess sat knitting by the fire. For the hundredth time, she shook her head and admitted that she didn’t know.

‘I’ll go to Oxford. I’ll have it out with him.’

She sighed. ‘He won’t thank you for it. It’ll only make things worse.’

‘But I have to do something. There are the Vaughans, living with the girl and getting more attached to her with every day that passes, and Robin does nothing! Why doesn’t he make his mind up? What’s the cause of the delay?’

Bess looked up doubtfully from her work. ‘He won’t tell you anything until he’s ready. And even then, perhaps not.’

‘This is different. This is a child.’

She sighed. ‘Alice. Our first granddaughter.’ She looked wistful, but then shook her head. ‘If she is. It will end badly if you have it out with him. You know what he’s like.’

‘Then I shall go back to Bampton.’

She looked up. Her husband’s face was set, determined.

‘What will you do there?’

‘Find someone who knew Alice. Bring them to Buscot. Put them in front of the child, and find out once and for all who she is.’

Bess frowned. ‘And you think the Vaughans will allow that?’

Armstrong opened his mouth and closed it again. ‘You’re right,’ he admitted, with a gesture of helplessness. Yet he could not let the matter drop. ‘Still, at least if I go, I can find someone who would know, and once I’ve done that I can talk to Robin and see whether he wants to speak to the Vaughans, and – oh! I don’t know. The thing is, Bess, what else is there? I can’t do nothing.’

She looked at him fondly. ‘No. You were never any good at that.’

The lodging house in Bampton was no more respectable-looking than before, but it had a merrier air than the last time he had seen it. Through an open upper window he heard the tune of a fiddle and the arhythmic wooden tapping that you hear when inebriated people dance on bare floorboards, having rolled the carpets back. Bursts of female laughter were interspersed with clapping, and the noise was so boisterous that he had to ring twice before he was heard.

‘Come in, my duck!’ exclaimed the woman who answered the door, shoeless and red-faced with exertion or liquor, and without waiting she withdrew upstairs, beckoning him to follow. He climbed the stairs, and he remembered climbing them the last time, when the poor dead woman in the room at the top was still just a letter-writer to him, and Alice a mere name. The woman led him to the first floor, where a number of men and women were hopping about in country style while the fiddler tried to catch them out by playing faster and faster. She pressed a glass of crystal-clear liquor into his hand, and when he demurred, invited him to dance.

‘No, thank you all the same! In fact, I’m here to see Mrs Eavis.’

‘She’s not ’ere, thank the Lord. You’ll have a lot more fun without ’er, lovey!’ and she took his hands and tried again to get him to dance, though her efforts were compromised by her intermittent difficulties in remaining upright.

‘I won’t keep you from your friends any longer then, Miss, but perhaps you could tell me where to find her?’

‘She’s gone away.’

‘But where?’

She pulled a face indicative of great mystification. ‘Nobody knows.’ Then, clapping her hands for attention, she shouted over the music, ‘The gentleman wants Mrs Eavis!’

‘Gone away!’ cried two or three dancers in unison, with much laughter, and they seemed to dance all the merrier for her absence.

‘When did this happen?’ He took his purse and clasped it so that she could see it clearly as he asked the question. The sight of it sobered her and she answered as fully as she possibly could. ‘Six or seven weeks ago, I should say. A fellow came to see her – so I hear – and she let him into her drawing room and they was there all evening long, and when he went away she went about all puffed up with a secret for a few days, and soon after a trap come to the door and took her cases and off she went.’

‘Were you here before Christmas? I wonder. There was a Mrs Armstrong lived here with her little girl, Alice?’

‘The one that died?’ She shook her head. ‘We’re all new since then. Nobody stayed long when Mrs Eavis was here, ’cause nobody liked her, and when she went, them that owed her money scarpered.’

‘What do you know of Mrs Armstrong?’

‘She was not the right sort for this place. That’s what I heard. Did the cooking and the cleaning here. She was pretty in a skinny sort of way – and there’s some that likes that, takes all sorts – and once the customers had seen her, there was some that wanted a bit. But she wouldn’t. That set old Eavis against her. Said she wasn’t having no silly girl giving herself airs, and gave the key to her room to one of the gentlemen to teach her a lesson. The day after that, she did what she did.’

‘She had a lover, I think? Who abandoned her?’

‘Husband, is what I heard. Mind you, lovers, husbands, it’s all the same, isn’t it? A girl’s better off on her own. Give them what they want, then take the money and bye-bye. Not her, though. She was the wrong sort for this life.’

Armstrong frowned. ‘When will Mrs Eavis be back?’

‘Nobody knows, and I hope it’ll be a good long time. I’ll be off as soon as she comes back, that’s for sure.’

‘So where has she gone?’

The woman shook her head. ‘She’d come into some money, and she was going away. That’s all I heard.’

Armstrong gave the woman some coins, and again she offered him a drink, or a dance, or ‘anything you like, my duck’. He refused politely and took his leave.

Come into some money? It wasn’t impossible, he supposed on his way down the stairs, but after the bad taste left by his first visit to the house, he felt inclined to doubt everything about Mrs Eavis.

Back in the street he regretted the journey, for it had wasted his time and his horse, but since he was there, another idea resurfaced that he had already thought of and discounted. Now that he considered it again, it seemed to him that it was a better idea than Mrs Eavis, in any case. He would find Ben, the butcher’s boy. He remembered Alice, and would know at a glance whether the child at the Vaughans’ was her or not. The word of a child would weigh very little in deciding the matter in law, but that hardly mattered – it was not the law he was thinking of. It seemed to him that his own certainty one way or the other would be a very valuable thing in its own right. If Ben recognized the child as Alice, Armstrong would have solid reason to pursue things further with his son. And if the boy did not, he would share that information with the Vaughans, and so give them the certainty they craved and that Robin was unable to offer of his own accord.

Armstrong walked up the high street, half expecting to see Ben by just bumping into him as he had before. But Ben was not on the grassy mound where they had played marbles and he was not visible in his father’s shop and he was not loitering in the street. When he had peered into every side alley and shop window without result, he stopped a passing grocer’s boy of about Ben’s age to ask his whereabouts.

‘He’s run away,’ the boy told him.

Armstrong was perplexed. ‘When was this?’

‘Few weeks ago. His dad give him a right beating till he were black and blue. Next thing, he were gone.’

‘Do you know where he went?’

The boy shook his head.

‘Was there anywhere he talked of going?’

‘Some farm over Kelmscott way. A grand fellow over there was going to give him a job, he said. There’d be bread and honey and a mattress to sleep on and paid on the dot every Friday.’ The boy sounded wistful for such a place. ‘I never believed in it, though.’

Armstrong gave him a coin and went to the butcher’s shop. A young man was at the block, with a weighty knife, dark with blood. He was chopping a loin into chops. At the sound of the bell, he looked up. His features were strikingly like Ben’s, though the sullen expression was entirely his own.

‘What do you want?’

Armstrong was used to hostility and could assess with accuracy how deep it went in a person. As often as not, people reserved their curtness for those who were, like him, unfamiliar. Difference was upsetting, and people armed themselves with aggression when they met it. With kindness in his voice, he could usually disarm them. Though their eyes told them to fear him, their ears were reassured. But some men went about in their armour every day and showed the blades of their swords to all. The whole world was the enemy. That kind of antipathy he could do nothing about, and that was what he met here. He made no attempt to please, just said, ‘I’m looking for your brother Ben. Where is he?’

‘Why? What’s he done?’

‘Nothing that I know of. I’ve got a job for him.’

From an archway at the back of the shop, an older voice emerged. ‘No good for anything but eating the profits, that lad.’ The words sounded as though they came from a mouth stuffed with food.

Armstrong leant to look through the archway into the room beyond. A man of about his own age sat in a stained armchair. On a table at his side was a loaf of bread and a large ham, with several slices cut from it. The butcher’s cheeks were as pink and fatly gleaming as the meat. A pipe rested in the ashtray. A glass was half full of something and the bottle it came from rested in the man’s lap, against his round belly, unstoppered.

‘Any idea where he might have gone?’ Armstrong asked.

The man shook his head. ‘Don’t care. Lazy blighter.’ He speared another slice of ham with his fork and crammed it whole into his mouth.

Armstrong turned away, but before he could leave, a small, shrunken woman shuffled into the back room carrying a broom. He stood back to let her through into the shop, where she started to sweep the sawdust. She hung her head so that he could not see her face.

‘Excuse me, Ma’am …’

She turned. She was younger than he had expected from the slowness of her movements, and her eyes were nervous.

‘I’m looking for Ben. Your son?’

There was no light in her eyes.

‘Do you have any idea where he might be?’

She gave a listless shake of the head, unable, it seemed, to rouse the energy for speech.

Armstrong sighed. ‘Well … thank you.’

He was glad to be outdoors again.

Armstrong found water for Fleet and then he and the horse made for the river. This stretch was broad and straight and at times the water appeared so still you might take it for a solid mass, till you threw something in – a twig or an apple core – and saw with what powerful rapidity it was carried away. On a felled trunk not far from the bridge, he unwrapped his own lunch and took a mouthful. The meat was good, and so was the bread, but the sight of the butcher’s greed had cut his appetite. He broke the bread into small crumbs and strewed them around for the little birds that came pecking, then he sat very still, looking into the water. Surrounded by robins and thrushes, he reflected on the disappointments of his day.

The failure of his visit to Mrs Eavis was bad enough, but the discovery that Ben was missing had lowered his spirits still further. He remembered the boy’s care in looking after Fleet. He pictured the way he had eaten so ravenously when Armstrong offered him buns. He reflected on the boy’s cheerful spirit. He thought of the dismal air in the butcher’s shop, the monstrous father, the browbeaten mother and the first son, dead at heart, and marvelled at Ben’s optimism. Where was the boy now? If, as the grocer’s boy had said, he was making for Kelmscott – for Armstrong and the farm – why had he not arrived? It was no more than six miles – why, a boy ought to cover that distance in only a couple of hours. What had become of him?

And there was the girl. What could he do to further matters there? His heart sank at the thought of a child caught between two families, the impossibility of making sure she was in the right place. And from the child, his thoughts turned to Robin, and then his heart almost broke. He remembered the first time he had held him. The infant had been so small and light, yet the whole of life was present in the tentative movement of his arms and legs. During Bess’s pregnancy, Armstrong had looked forward to loving and caring for this child, had awaited the day with excitement and impatience, yet still when the moment came he was overwhelmed by the strength of the feeling that swept over him. The infant in his arms obliterated all else, and he had vowed that this baby would never feel hungry or lonely or be placed in danger. He would love and protect this child, who would grow up a stranger to sorrow and loneliness. The same feeling rose in his chest now.

Armstrong wiped his eyes. The sudden movement made the robins and thrushes fly up and away. He got to his feet and answered Fleet’s greeting with a rub and a pat.

‘Come on. We’re too old to ride to Oxford together, and in any case I haven’t the time. But let’s go to Lechlade. I’ll leave you near the station and take the train. The boys will feed the pigs when they see I’m not back.’

Fleet harrumphed softly.

‘Foolish?’ he answered. He hesitated, one foot in the stirrup. ‘Quite possibly. But what else is there? I can’t do nothing.’ He swung into the saddle and they turned upstream.

Armstrong asked for his son’s lodgings. He made his way to a part of town where the streets were broader, the houses larger and well maintained. When he came to the street to which he had been sending letters these last two years, he slowed, uneasy, and when he came to Number 8 – large and grand and painted white – he halted at the gate and frowned. This was all too expensive by a long way. His own home, the farmhouse, was not overly modest, he did not hesitate to spend on the comfort and well-being of his family, but this grandeur was on another level altogether. Armstrong was not a stranger to fine villas – the accident of his birth meant that several grand households had opened their doors to him in his early years – and he was unintimidated by this display of wealth, yet he was troubled at the thought of his son residing in such a place. Where would he get the money for it? But might it be that he lodged in a single room in the attic? Or – was it possible? – perhaps there was another street in another part of town that bore the same name?

Armstrong entered by the second, smaller gate that lead by a narrow path to the back of the house and knocked at the kitchen door. It was answered by a girl of eleven or twelve with a lank plait and a downtrodden air, who shook her head at his suggestion of there being two streets with the same name.

‘In that case, is there a Mr Robin Armstrong here?’

The girl hesitated. She seemed at once to shrink into herself and to scrutinize him more intently. The name was plainly known to her, and Armstrong was about to encourage her to speak when a woman of about thirty appeared behind her.

‘What do you want?’ Her voice was hard-edged. She stood rigidly upright, arms folded across her chest, her face the kind that didn’t know how to smile. Then something in her altered. A subtle alteration in the set of her shoulders, something brazen in her eyes. Her lips remained set but gave the impression that if he played his cards right they had it in them to soften. Most people when they saw Mr Armstrong were so surprised at the colour of his skin that they saw nothing else, but some – women mostly – noticed that his face was very handsomely put together.

Armstrong did not smile and he put no note of coaxing cajolery in his voice. He carried apples for horses and marbles for small boys, but for women such as this one, he was careful to offer nothing at all.

‘Are you the lady of the house?’

‘Hardly.’

‘The housekeeper?’

A brief nod.

‘I’m looking for a Mr Armstrong,’ he said neutrally.

She gave him a challenging look, waiting to see whether the good-looking stranger was going to make any effort to please her, and when he met her gaze with a steadily indifferent look of his own, shrugged.

‘There is no Mr Armstrong here.’

She shut the door.

It was not an easy matter to linger in a smart Oxford street for any length of time, so, unwilling to draw attention to himself, Armstrong paced the streets that ran parallel. At every intersection of the path, he looked left and right, knowing he ran the risk of missing his object altogether, but when the hands of his watch had gone all the way round one hour and were halfway round the next one, he caught a glimpse of a slight figure with a long plait down her back. He pressed his pace to catch up with her.

‘Miss! Excuse me, Miss!’

The girl stopped and swung round. ‘Oh! It’s you.’

She seemed smaller and even more miserable in the open air than she had in the doorway.

‘Don’t let me hold you up,’ he said, seeing her shiver. ‘Come along. I’ll walk with you.’

‘I don’t know why she didn’t tell you,’ the girl offered before he had even asked the question. ‘Is it you that writes the letters?’

‘Yes, I write to him here.’

‘But he don’t live here.’

‘Doesn’t he?’

Now Armstrong was really puzzled. He had received answers to his correspondence. Brief and short – requests for money, mostly – but containing references to his own letters. He must be receiving them. Armstrong frowned.

The girl sniffed in the cold and turned a corner. She walked at a fast pace for such a small person.

‘Mr Fisher says “Never mind the letters” and puts them in his pocket,’ she adds.

‘Ah.’ That was something, anyway. Did he dare go back and ring that gleaming bell at the front step and ask for Mr Fisher?

As if she could read his thoughts, the girl told him, ‘Mr Fisher won’t be in for hours. Don’t hardly get out of bed till midday, he keeps such late hours at the Green Dragon.’

He nodded. ‘And who is this Mr Fisher?’

‘A rotten man. He hasn’t paid me for seven weeks. What do you want with him, anyway? Does he owe you money? You won’t get it.’

‘I have never met Mr Fisher. I am the father of Mr Armstrong. Presumably the two of them are associates.’

The look she gave him then told him everything he needed to know about Mr Fisher and his associates. Then he saw something start to dawn in the eyes of the child. If she had no liking for Mr Fisher and his associates, what was she to make of the father of one of those men?

‘The thing is,’ he reassured her, ‘I fear that my boy might have fallen in with Mr Fisher. I’d like to get him out of harm’s way, if I can. Have you seen a friend of Mr Fisher who is a young man of twenty-four, with light-brown hair that curls where it meets his collar, and sometimes wears a blue jacket?’

The girl stopped. Armstrong came to a halt a pace or two later, turned back and saw her face. If it were possible, she was whiter than before.

‘You said you was Mr Armstrong’s father!’ she hissed.

‘And so I am. He does not resemble me, it is true.’

‘But that man … you just described him …’

‘Yes?’

‘It is Mr Fisher!’ She spat the words at him, with a childish fury at being fooled. Then her face altered suddenly from outrage to fear. ‘Don’t tell him I told you! I never said a word! I never said nothing!’ There was a plea in her voice, and tears in her eyes.

Seeing she was about to flee, Armstrong put his hand in his pocket and drew out coins. She suppressed the instinct to run and eyed the money. ‘How much does he owe you?’ he asked gently. ‘Does this cover it?’

Several times her gaze shifted between the coins and him. She was wary, as though he were some kind of monster and the money most likely a trick. When it came, the snatch of her fingers was unexpected. In a flash the money was gone and she with it, apron strings and plait flying behind her as far as the first side street, where she turned and disappeared.

Armstrong got himself away from the moneyed part of town, and when he came to a busy street of shops and workplaces, entered the first public house he came to. He bought himself a drink, and one for the blind man who sat by the fireside. It was easy enough to lead the conversation from this public house to drinking places in general, and then to the Green Dragon in particular.

‘It’s decent enough between May and September,’ the man told him. ‘They put wooden tables outside and get some girls to serve the drinks. They water the beer and they overcharge, but folk put up with it for the roses they has clambering all over everywhere.’

‘And in winter?’

‘It’s a bad sort of place. Damp in the timbers. Thatch wanted renewing when I could see, and that was twenty year ago. They say the windows are so cracked it’s only the dirt what holds them together.’

‘And the people?’

‘Bad ’uns. You can buy and sell anything you wants at the Green Dragon – rubies, women, souls. If you have a difficulty in your life, go to the Green Dragon between the beginning of September and the middle of April and you’ll find someone to remove it for you. For the right money. That’s what they say, and it’s true enough.’

‘What do you do if you have a difficulty in spring or summer?’

‘You ’ave to wait. Or do it yourself.’

‘And where is it, this place?’ Armstrong asked as he reached the bottom of his glass.

‘You don’t want to be going there. You’re not the kind. I might not see very much, but I can hear your voice. It’s not a place for a gentleman such as yourself.’

‘I must. There is someone there and I must find him.’

‘Do he want to be found?’

‘Not by me.’

‘Does he owe you money? It’s not worth it.’

‘It’s not money. It’s – family.’

‘Family?’ The man looked wistful.

‘My son. I fear he’s got in with the wrong sort.’

The blind man reached out a hand, and when Armstrong took it, he felt the man’s other hand grip his forearm, measuring the size and power of it.

‘I’d say you’re a man that can look after yourself.’

‘If I have to.’

‘Then I’ll tell you where to find the Dragon. For your son’s sake.’

The directions Armstrong received took him right across town once more and out the other side. As he walked, it began to rain. He came to a meadow as the sky was turning shades of pink and apricot. On the other side of it was the river. He crossed a bridge and turned upstream. The path was edged with brambles and willows that dripped rainwater on to his hat, and the knuckles of ancient tree roots protruded from the ground beneath his feet. The light grew dimmer, as did his thoughts, and then he perceived through thickets of yew and holly and elder the outline of a building, and squares of dull light that were its windows. He knew he was in the right place, for it had the unmistakeable air of having been adopted by people who like to keep their doings out of sight and in the dark. Armstrong paused at the window and peered through the thick glass.

Inside was a low room, made lower still where the ceiling bulged in the middle. A pillar of oak, thick as three men standing together, had been placed as a support to hold it up. Gas lamps struggled to make an impact on the shadows, and were scarcely aided by the candles on the tables. It was only the end of the afternoon, but the place had the feeling of night. A few solitary drinkers sat in the shadows along the walls, but the best illumination came from the fire that was blazing in the hearth, and near it was a table, around which five men were seated. Four of the five men had their heads bent over a card game, but one sat up, his chair tilted on its back legs and leaning against the wall. His eyes were almost shut, but Armstrong guessed from the angle of his head that the appearance was a ruse. Between the narrow slits of his eyes, his son – for it was Robin – was casting about for a glance of the other men’s cards.

Armstrong passed the window and opened the door. As he stepped inside, all five players turned in his direction, but the air was thick with smoke and he was half concealed behind the pillar – he was not yet recognized. Robin lowered his chair to the floor and signalled to someone in a dark corner, as he squinted blindly through the fug to where Armstrong stood.

A second later, Armstrong felt his arms gripped by an unseen person from behind. His assailant was smaller than he was by a head and a half, and his arms were slim, yet they gripped him like wire rope. The sensation of being held against his will was unfamiliar to Armstrong. He was not certain of being able to free himself, for all that the man was so small that the brim of his hat jutted between Armstrong’s shoulder blades. A second fellow, with a single black brow that sat low over his eyes, came close and scrutinized him.

‘Peculiar-looking fellow. Don’t know ’im,’ he announced.

‘Get rid of him, then,’ Robin said.

The men tried to turn him back to the door, but he resisted.

‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ he said, knowing that his voice alone would be enough to perturb things. He felt surprise in the hold of the wire-rope man, but the grip did not loosen. The monobrow peered at him again and, uncertain, turned back to the table, too late to see what Armstrong had seen: the flash of surprise on Robin’s face, instantly suppressed.

‘I think you’ll find your Mr Fisher will see me,’ Armstrong said.

Robin rose. He nodded to his guards, and Armstrong felt his arms released.

The two men returned to the shadows and Robin approached. He wore the same expression that Armstrong had seen a thousand times before, from early childhood to dawning manhood. It was the petulant fury of a child whose parent stood in his way. Armstrong was surprised to see how intimidating it looked on the face of a grown man. Had he not been Robin’s father, had he been a less powerfully built man, he might well have been afraid.

‘Outside,’ Robin muttered. They stepped out of the inn and stood a yard apart, in semi-darkness, on a bank of gravel between the river and the inn.

‘Is this where your money goes? Gambling? Or is it the house you’re always in need of funds for? You are living beyond your means.’

A puff of disdain emerged from Robin’s nostrils. ‘How did you find me?’ he asked dully.

Armstrong couldn’t help being surprised by his son. Always he expected something better.

‘Have you no better greeting than that for your father?’

‘What do you want?’

‘And your mother – you don’t ask after her?’

‘You’d tell me, I suppose, if anything was wrong.’

‘Something is wrong. But it is not your mother.’

‘It’s raining. Say what you have come to say, so I can go back inside.’

‘What are your intentions regarding the child?’

‘Ha! Is that all?’

‘All? Robin, this is a child we are talking about. The happiness of two families is at stake here. These are not things to make light of. Why the delay?’

In the fast-dying light, he thought he saw his son’s lip give a cynical twist.

‘Is she yours? If she is, what do you mean to do about it? And if not—’

‘It’s none of your business.’

Armstrong sighed. He shook his head and took another direction. ‘I went to Bampton.’

Robin looked at his father more intently, but said nothing.

‘I went back to the house where your wife lodged. Where she died.’

Robin still said nothing, and the intensity of his hostility did not waver.

‘This lover your wife took – they know nothing of such a man.’

Still nothing.

‘Who have you told this to?’ There was menace in Robin’s voice.

‘I meant to bring the landlady to Buscot to see the child, but she—’

‘How dare you? This is my business – mine alone. I’m warning you – keep out of my affairs.’

It took Armstrong a moment to recover. ‘Your business? Robin, there is a child’s future at stake here. If she is your child, then she is my grandchild. If she is not your child, she is the Vaughans’ child. In neither instance can it be said that it is your business. One way or the other, it is family business.’

‘Family!’ Robin spat out the word like a curse.

‘Who is her father, Robin? A child needs a father.’

‘I’ve done all right without one.’

Robin swivelled, scattering the gravel under his heels, and was starting back to the Green Dragon when Armstrong gripped his shoulder. Armstrong was only half surprised when his son swung round violently and a fist came towards him. Instinct brought his arm up to protect himself, but before the wildly thrown fist could make contact, his own fist met flesh and teeth, and Robin cursed.

‘Forgive me,’ Armstrong said. ‘Robin – I’m sorry. Are you hurt?’

But Robin continued directing kicks and punches towards his father in an awkward scuffle, while Armstrong gripped his shoulders to hold him at a distance, so that fists and feet landed their blows at the far extent of their reach, when most of the power was gone out of them. He had held Robin off like this numerous times when he was a child and a juvenile; then his only concern had been to stop Robin hurting himself in his fury. Now his son’s blows were more expert, and there was greater strength behind them, but they were still no match for his own greater height and power. Gravel flew, and curses, and Armstrong was aware that the noise would almost certainly bring observers to the windows.

What ended the affray was the sound of the inn door opening.

‘All right?’ came a voice through the rain.

Abruptly Robin abandoned the fight. ‘All right,’ he answered.

The inn door remained open; presumably someone continued to watch from the doorway.

His son turned to go without a handshake.

‘Robin!’ Armstrong called in a low voice after him. And lower still: ‘Son!’

A few yards away, Robin turned. He spoke low too, barely audible above the rain, but his words reached their target and hurt as his fists could never have done: ‘You are not my father, and I am not your son!’

He reached the door, exchanged a word with his companion there, and they went inside, closing the door without looking back.

Armstrong walked back along the river. He blundered into willow, half tripped on one of the gnarled roots that lurked in the dark, and rainwater ran down his neck. His knuckle was stinging. The damage he’d barely felt at the time was now intensely painful. He had caught Robin’s lip and teeth. Raising his hand to his mouth, he tasted blood. His own or his son’s?

The river ran past, agitated by the rain and its own rush, and Armstrong stood silent and still in the rain, lost in his own reflections. You are not my father, and I am not your son. He would give anything to take that moment back. What could he have done differently? What could he have said to make it better? He had blundered, and perhaps that blundering had severed ties that might otherwise – in a few weeks or months or years – have been stimulated to warmth and affection again. What had just happened felt like the end of everything. He had lost his son and, with him, the world.

The rainwater ran with his tears, and the words sounded again and again in his thoughts. You are not my father, and I am not your son.

At last, wet and cold, he shook his head. ‘Robin,’ he answered, in words only the river heard, ‘you may not want to be my son, but I cannot help but be your father.’

He turned downstream and began the long journey home.

Some Stories Are Not for Telling

THERE ARE STORIES that may be told aloud, and stories that must be told in whispers, and there are stories that are never told at all. The story of the marriage of Mr and Mrs Armstrong was one of these latter ones, known only to the two parties to whom it belonged and the river. But as secret visitors to this world, as border-crossers between one world and another, there is nothing to prevent us sitting by the river and opening our ears; then we will know it too.

When Robert Armstrong turned twenty-one, his father offered to buy him a farm. A land agent suggested a number of properties and Robert went to visit them all. The one that matched his hopes and expectations the best was that belonging to a man called Frederick May. Mr May had been a good farmer, but he had had only daughters and those daughters had married men with land enough of their own, all except one who was crippled and unmarried and stayed at home. Now that Mr May was old, he and his wife had decided to sell up all but the patch of land around the small cottage that they also owned, not far from the farmhouse. They would live in the cottage and grow vegetables and flowers and let someone else have the trouble of the land and the big house. With the proceeds of the farm they would be well off, and if the prospect of a good dowry was not enough to marry off their youngest child, well, at least the money would be a safeguard for her when they had passed away.

Robert Armstrong looked over the land and saw that it was irrigated by the river. He saw that the banks were firm and the waterway free from weeds and rubbish. He noticed how well maintained were the hedgerows, and that the cattle were gleaming and the fields ploughed straight. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ll have it.’

‘You can’t sell it to him, not that foreign fellow,’ people said. But all the other potential buyers tried to beat Mr May down on price, and played one trick after another to get some advantage, and the black fellow offered the asking price and stuck to it, and what is more, Mr May had been with him as he walked round the farm, had seen that he appreciated the straightness of his plough lines, had seen how he was with the sheep and the cows, and before long he had forgotten the colour of Mr Armstrong’s skin and understood that if he was to do the best thing for his land and his livestock, then Mr Armstrong was the man.

‘What about the men who have worked for me so long?’ asked Mr May.

‘Those that want to stay shall stay, and if they work well over time they shall see their wages go up, and if they do not work well, then they must go after the first harvest,’ said Armstrong, and so it was agreed.

A handful of labourers refused to work for a Negro, but the rest stayed, though they muttered at first. Over time, as they got to know the new boss, they discovered that his blackness was only superficial and that underneath it all he was a man like any other, and even a bit better. A handful of the men – young like himself – clung on to their contempt, sniggered to his face and made gestures behind his back. They used their scorn for him as a reason to be slack in their work – why should they labour for a man such as he? – but they still took their pay on a Friday, and when they spent it in the inns around Kelmscott they spoke ill of him. He appeared not to notice, but in reality he was keeping a close eye on them while he waited to see whether or not they would settle.

In the meantime, Robert Armstrong had to make friends. The man he knew best was the man he had bought the farm from, and he took to calling once a week on Mr May in the cottage not very far from the farmhouse. There he would sit for an hour, discussing farming with this man who was happy to talk about the work that had been his life and that he had grown too frail to do. Mrs May would sit knitting in the corner, and the more she heard their visitor’s voice, which was better educated than most, and the more she heard his laughter, which was generous and rolling and made her husband laugh in turn, the more she liked him. From time to time their daughter came in, bringing tea or cakes.

Bessie May had fallen ill as a small child and the lasting result was that she swayed from side to side in her gait. As she walked, there was a distinct sinking as she stepped on to the left foot. It drew stares from strangers, and even people who knew her and knew the family said that she ought to be kept in instead of going about ‘like that’. If it had only been the gait they might have frowned less than they did, but there was also the eye. She wore a patch over her right eye – not the same one all the time, but a different one depending on the colour of her dress. She had, it seemed, as many patches as dresses, sometimes made from offcuts of the same fabric, with ribbon ties that went around her head and disappeared into her pretty fair hair. She had an air of neatness about her, a care for her appearance that people found troubling. It was as if she thought she was the same as any other girl, as if she expected the same prospects. She ought, according to public opinion, to have retreated into the family home, to have made plain that she knew what everybody else knew: that she was unmarriageable, that she was destined for spinsterhood. Instead she hobbled into the heart of the church to take her place in the middle pews when she might have slipped in at the back and sat quite unnoticed. In good weather she limped to the bench on the green and sat with a book or a piece of embroidery; in winter she wore gloves and walked wherever the ground was level enough; when it was freezing she cast envious glances at those whose legs permitted them to risk the ice. Behind her back, malicious boys – the same ones, in fact, who made jeering gestures behind Robert Armstrong’s back – imitated her swaying, drooping way of walking. People who knew her from childhood, before she wore the patch, remembered the way her eye showed too much white, while the pupil veered up and away. You couldn’t tell where she was looking or what she was seeing, they said. There had been a time when Bessie May had friends. A little coterie of girls, who walked to and from school together, called at each other’s houses, took each other’s arms when they walked. But as the girls became little women, these friendships fell away. The other girls were afraid, perhaps, that Bessie’s deformities might be contagious, or that the men would keep their distance from any girl with Bessie at her side. By the time Robert Armstrong bought the farm, Bessie was lonely. She walked with her head high, smiling, and outwardly there was no alteration in her manner to the world, but she knew that the world had altered in its manner to her.

One of the alterations was in the way that the young men of the village behaved. At sixteen, with her fair curls and her pretty smile and her neat waist, Bessie was not without attraction. If you saw her seated, when the patch was away from you, you would think her one of the loveliest girls in the village. This was not lost on the young men, who began to eye her in a vulgar way. When lust and scorn live alongside one another in the same heart, they make devilry. If they came upon her in an empty lane, the young men leered at Bessie, rushed at her, knowing she could not easily hop sideways to avoid their outstretched hands. More than once, Bessie arrived home from an errand with a muddied skirt and grazed hands, having ‘tripped’.

Robert Armstrong knew what the gang of young men on the farm thought of him. In his discreet scrutiny of them, he had also understood what they thought of Bessie May. One evening when he arrived for one of his regular visits to the May household, Mr May shook his head. ‘Not tonight, Armstrong.’ His friend’s trembling hands and tearful eyes told him of some crisis. Watching the young men on the farm, hearing a snatch of laughing conversation in which Bessie’s name was mentioned boastfully by one of the lads, accompanied by a vulgar gesture, he feared he knew what the crisis was.

In the next few days, he did not see Bessie. She was not at church and she was not on the bench by the green. She did not run errands to the village and she did not tend the garden. When she reappeared, something had changed in her. She was neat and active as before, but the simplicity and naturalness of her interest in the world had been exchanged for something grimmer. A determination not to be beaten.

Overnight, he thought about it. He made his decision and then he slept, and when he woke the decision still seemed to be a good one. He intercepted Bessie on her way to take her father’s lunch to him, on the riverbank where the hawthorn gave way to the hazel. He saw her start and take fright when she realized there was nobody else in sight. He put his hands behind his back and looked at his feet as he spoke her name. ‘Miss May. We have spoken little before, but you know who I am. You know I am a friend of your father’s and the owner of this farm. You know I pay my debts on time. I have few friends, but I am nobody’s enemy. If you should ever need anyone on your side, I beg that you would come to me. There is nothing I should like more than to ease your life. Whether that be as a friend or as a husband is a decision that is yours to make. Please know that I am at your service.’ He raised his head to meet her astonished eye, gave her a brief bow and departed.

The following day, he came to the same place at the same time and she was already there. ‘Mr Armstrong,’ she began, ‘I don’t know how to talk the way you talk. You have finer words than me. Before I can say anything to you about what you said yesterday, there is something I must do. I will do it now, and when I have done it you might feel different about it all.’

He nodded.

She lowered her head, raised her fingers to her patch, and tugged it over the bridge of her nose until it covered her good eye and her other eye was revealed. Then she turned her right eye on him.

Armstrong examined Bessie’s eye. It seemed to quiver with a life of its own. The iris, off-centre, was the same blue as its twin on the surface, but contained undercurrents of darker shades beneath. The pupil, a familiar thing that one saw in every face, every day, was made strange in Bess’s face by its skew. Suddenly he was distracted from his staring by the realization that he was the one being examined. He felt himself dissected, naked under her gaze. Exposed to her focus, he suddenly remembered incidents of boyish shame. Moments came back to him when he had behaved less honourably than he would have wished. He remembered instances of ingratitude. He felt a pang of remorse and resolved not to do the same again. He also felt relief that these small acts of neglect were all he had to regret in his life.

The moment did not last long. When she was done, Bessie lowered her head and readjusted the patch. She turned her everyday face back to him, and it was altered. There was surprise in it, and something else that warmed him and made his heart thrill. Her good eye softened, contained dawning affection, admiration even. It was the kind of sentiment that one day – could he bring himself to believe it? – might lead to love.

‘You are a good man, Mr Armstrong. I can tell. There is something you should know about me though.’ She spoke low and her voice was unsteady.

‘I know it.’

‘I don’t mean this.’ She indicated her patch.

‘Nor do I. Nor your limp either.’

She stared at him. ‘How do you know?’

‘The man works on my farm. I guessed.’

‘And you still wish to marry me?’

‘I do.’

‘But what if …?’

‘If there is a baby?’

She nodded, reddened and looked down in embarrassment.

‘Do not blush, Bess. No shame attaches to you in this. The shame lies on another’s shoulders. And if there is a child, then you and I will raise it and love it just as we will raise and love our own children.’

She lifted her face and met his steady gaze. ‘Then yes, Mr Armstrong. Yes, I will be your wife.’

They did not kiss and they did not touch. He simply asked her to let her father know that he would call on him later that day.

‘I will tell him.’

Armstrong visited Mr May and the marriage was agreed.

When the young man who had been troublesome at the farm and worse than troublesome to Bessie arrived at work the next morning with his usual swagger, Armstrong was waiting. He gave him the wages he was owed, and dismissed him. ‘If I ever hear of you within twelve miles of this place, it will be the worse for you,’ he told him, and his tone was so restrained that the young man looked up with astonishment to see whether he had heard right. But the look in Armstrong’s eye told him that every word was meant, and instead of the insolent answer he had in his mind to deliver, he was silent as he left, and his curses were under his breath.

The engagement was announced and the wedding followed soon after. People talked. They always do. The church was filled with the curious on the wedding day of the swarthy farmer and his deformed, pale bride. There was money there – oh, she had done well, in that respect – and with her blue eyes and blonde hair and trim figure he had, in that at least, done better than he could ever have expected. Yet the congratulations were tinged with the colour of pity and nobody envied the couple. There was a general feeling that it made sense for the two unmarriageables to have found each other, and every unmarried guest present felt a pang of relief: thank goodness they would not be obliged to make such devastating compromises in their own choices. Better a poor labourer than a landowner with a Negro mother; rather a rough laundry maid than a farmer’s daughter with a boss eye and a limp.

When Bessie’s stomach began to swell a few months after the marriage, it was a scandal. What kind of an infant would it be? A monster, surely. After children started calling out cruel names to Bessie in the street, she stopped going out beyond the extent of the farm. She waited her time nervously, but Armstrong talked soothingly to her. The sound of his voice comforted her, and when he placed his hands on her growing belly and said, ‘All will be well,’ she could not help but think it would.

The midwife who delivered the child went directly to her friends on leaving, and they passed the news rapidly to all others. What monster was it that had emerged from between the legs of boss-eyed Bessie, put there by her dark husband? Those who expected three eyes, woolly hair and shrivelled limbs were disappointed. The baby was normal. And not only that. ‘Beautiful!’ she rhapsodized. ‘Who’d have thought it? The loveliest baby I ever did see.’ And before long, the rest saw it too. Armstrong went on horseback here and there, and on his knee they all saw the child: light curls, a bonny complexion and a smile so charming you could not help but smile back.

‘Let us call him Robert,’ Armstrong said, ‘like me.’ And so he was christened, but because he was little they called him Robin, and as he grew they continued with Robin, for it was a way of telling father and son apart. And in time there were other children too, girls and boys, and all of them hale and happy. Some were dark and some less dark and some were almost fair, though none so fair as Robin.

Armstrong and Bessie were happy. They had made a happy family.

Photographing Amelia

TOWARDS THE BEGINNING of the last week of March came the day of the spring equinox. Light equalled dark; day and night were perfectly poised; even human affairs enjoyed a moment of balance. The river was high – it is the way of the river to be high at the equinoxes.

Vaughan woke first. It was late – they had slept through the birdsong, through the fading of the darkness – and light was waiting behind the curtains.

Next to him, Helena was still asleep, one arm flung above her head on the pillow. He kissed the tender flesh on the inside of her arm. Without opening her eyes, she smiled and shifted closer to his warmth. She was still naked from last night. These days they slipped from pleasure into sleep and from sleep into pleasure again. Under the bedclothes his hand found her ribcage, travelled the smooth curve to her waist, her hip. Her toes came to nudge his.

Afterwards, he said, ‘You go back to sleep for another hour if you want. I’ll give her breakfast.’ She nodded, smiling, and closed her eyes again. They were both capable now of sleeping lengthily, nine or ten hours at a stretch sometimes, making up for the years of insomnia. It was the child’s doing. She had mended their nights. She had mended their marriage too.

In the breakfast room, he and the child sat in companionable silence. When Helena was present she chatted constantly to the girl, but he did not attempt to talk to her or to gain her attention by any deliberate means. Instead he buttered her toast, spread the marmalade and sliced it into soldiers, while she watched, absorbed. She ate with concentration, in a self-contained reverie, until an over-generous blob of marmalade fell from the edge of the toast on to the tablecloth, and she glanced up to see whether he had seen it. Her eyes – which Helena called green and he called blue and that were gravely fathomless – met his, and he smiled at her, a small, kindly, undemanding smile. There came a slight, fleeting twitch of her mouth in return, and though it had happened a dozen times before, he still felt his heart lurch at it.

He felt the same leap in the chest when she turned to him for reassurance. Though she was fearless on the river, she was nervous of all sorts of other things: the approach of horses on cobblestones, doors that slammed, over-familiar strangers who reached down to tweak her nose, the beating of rugs with brooms, and it was him she looked to when she was startled. In unfamiliar situations, it was his hand she reached for, he to whom she raised her arms to be lifted out of some perceived danger. He was touched by her selection of him as her protector. Two years ago, he had failed to protect Amelia; this felt like a second chance. With every danger averted, he felt his faith in himself returning.

The child still did not speak, she was often absent, sometimes indifferent, yet her presence gladdened him. A hundred times a day, his mind made the journey from Amelia to this child and from this child back to Amelia. The path between the two of them was now so well travelled that it was impossible to think of one without the other. They had become aspects of the same thought.

The maid came to clear the breakfast things.

‘The photographer is coming at half past ten,’ he reminded her. ‘I expect we’ll have coffee first.’

‘It’s the day the nurse comes – will she have coffee too?’

‘Yes, coffee for everyone.’

The maid looked anxiously at the child’s hair that was still tangled from sleep.

‘Should I try and brush Miss Amelia’s hair for the photographs?’ she offered, eyeing the tangle with a doubtful expression.

‘Let Mrs Vaughan do it when she’s up.’

The maid looked relieved.

There was something Vaughan needed to do to prepare himself before Daunt arrived.

‘Come on, little one,’ he said.

He lifted the child and carried her into the drawing room. He sat at the desk and placed the girl sideways on his lap so she could see into the garden.

He reached for the photograph of Amelia with himself and Helena.

With the coming of the girl, his fear of memory, so powerful that he had sought to bury his daughter’s face entirely, had lessened. He had had the sense – irrational, he knew – that Amelia herself was looking for him, and that he owed it to her to meet her gaze. Across that awful divide. Now that the moment had come, with the girl on his lap, he found that the task did not seem so difficult as he had feared.

He turned the image to face him and looked at it through the haze of the child’s unbrushed hair.

It was a traditional family pose. Helena was seated with Amelia on her knees. Behind them stood Vaughan himself. Knowing that the slightest quiver of emotion might end in a disastrous waste of time, money and effort, he had stared too fiercely and as a result looked intimidating to those who didn’t know him and comic to those who did. Helena had been entirely unable to suppress her smile, but delivered it so steadily to the camera that her beauty was crisp in every detail. On her knees: Amelia.

On a photograph three inches by five, his daughter’s face was small – smaller even than the thumbnail of the child on his lap. At two, she retained that undefined quality in her face that lingered from her baby years. Moreover, she had been unable to keep entirely still. The indistinct features had something universal about them; they lent themselves as easily to the face of the little girl on his lap as to the daughter he had tried so hard to lock away out of sight and out of mind. Her feet must have moved too, for they were a blur, spectral, boneless, the kind a ghost might hover on. Around her small body was a froth of petticoat and skirt that dissolved into transparency at its edges. The hands were lost in its spume.

The child shifted in his lap and he looked down. A bead of water had appeared on her hand. She raised it to her mouth and licked it, then looked up at him with casual curiosity.

He was weeping.

‘Silly Dada,’ he said, and bent to kiss her head, but she squirmed free. She crossed the room to the door, where she stopped and turned and extended a hand towards him. He followed, put his hand in hers and allowed himself to be led out of the house, into the garden and down the shallow gravel slope to the river.

‘What’s this in aid of?’ he wondered aloud. ‘Is this supposed to make me feel better?’

She stared up the river and down, and when there was nothing to see, looked around for a good stick to prod and poke with at the water’s edge. When she had done with that, she passed the stick to Vaughan to continue, while she selected some large stones from the slope to take and wash in the water. The washing seemed without purpose, and out of nowhere Vaughan was struck by the notion that he had stood here once before and watched Amelia wash stones. Did he not remember a time, some years ago, when the two of them had been at the river’s edge, just like this, rinsing stones for no reason and prodding at the soft mud in the shallows? He raised his head to work out whether the memory was genuine or whether it was some curious reverse echo, by which the present seems to duplicate itself in the past.

The girl had stopped her labour with the stones. On all fours, she bent close to the water’s surface as if it were a mirror. Looking back at her was another girl – one he knew.

‘Amelia!’

He grasped for her, but at his touch she was gone and his fingers were wet.

The girl sat up and turned her ever-changing eyes on him in an attitude of mild concern.

‘Who are you? I know you’re not her – but if you are … if you are – am I going mad?’

She handed him the stick and indicated with a vigorous motion that he should dig a channel with it. She lined it with her stones. She was exacting in her expectations and it took some time before she was satisfied. Then, he understood, they were to watch it. They saw how the water trickled in, and how it silted up, and how rapidly the work of the river undid the work of a man and a child.

In the end, they carried the coffee outdoors and down to the boathouse. It was generally agreed that a riverside setting would be more interesting than an indoor photograph, so they must make the most of the dry weather while it lasted.

Once they’d got the camera in position, Daunt went to prepare the first plate. ‘While I’m gone, here are the other exposures. From last time.’

Helena unfastened the hinged lid of the wooden box. The interior was lined with felt. It contained, each in its slot, two glass plates.

‘Oh!’ Helena said, when she was holding the first up to the light. ‘How strange!’

‘It takes you aback, doesn’t it?’ Rita said. ‘Light and shade are reversed.’ She peered at the same plate. ‘I fear Mr Daunt was right and you already have the best ones. This one is rather blurred.’

‘What do you think, darling?’ Helena asked, passing the plate to Vaughan.

He glanced at the plate, saw a smudge of a child, and looked away again.

‘Are you all right?’ Rita asked.

He nodded. ‘Too much coffee.’

Helena removed the second plate from the box and studied it. ‘They are blurred, it’s true, but not so much that you can’t see the thing that matters. It is Amelia. That’s perfectly plain.’ Her voice contained no unsettling intensity, no rising note of hysteria. It was measured, mild even. ‘This question in Mr Armstrong’s mind will never come to anything, but the lawyer thinks we should be ready, just in case.’

‘Mr Armstrong’s visits continue?’

Helena’s nod was unperturbed. ‘They do.’

Rita caught Vaughan’s face as it flinched at the sound of the other man’s name.

But then Daunt was there. Helena slid the plates back into the box and swung the child into her arms with a wide smile. ‘Where do you want us for the new photographs?’

Daunt looked to the sky to gauge the sun, then pointed. ‘Just there.’

The girl fidgeted and struggled, turned her head and shuffled her feet, and one expensive plate after another had to be abandoned that was not worth developing.

Just as they were on the point of becoming dispirited, Rita made a suggestion.

‘Put her in a boat. She’ll settle on the water, and the river is steady.’

Daunt eyed the river to see how much motion there was in it. The current was untroubled. He shrugged and nodded. It was worth a try.

They carried the camera to the bank. Helena brought the little rowing boat from the days of her girlhood out to the jetty and secured it.

The river pulled at the boat with even energy, tautening the mooring rope. The girl stepped into it. There was no rocking, no need to get her balance. She stood, poised on the shifting water.

Daunt opened his mouth to ask her to sit down, but there then came one of those moments that mean everything to a photographer and he thought better of it. The wind chased the heavy cloud from the sun and put in its place a scant white veil that softened the light and blurred shadows. In response the water lightened to a pearlized finish at the very moment that the girl turned to gaze upriver in just the direction the camera needed. Perfection.

Daunt whipped away the lens cover and all fell silent, willing the sun, the wind and the river to hold. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen.

Success!

‘Ever seen developing in process?’ Daunt asked Vaughan as he light-proofed the plate and extracted it from the camera. ‘No? Come and watch. You’ll see the darkroom, and how I’ve kitted it out.’

‘That cloud is heading back,’ Helena said, craning her neck to look skywards as the men disappeared into the darkroom. ‘What do you reckon?’

‘We’ll be all right for a bit.’

They returned the little old rowing boat to the boathouse and took out the larger one, suitable for two rowers and a child. Rita set it rocking as she got in and had to find her balance again. Helena stepped in deftly, barely altering the equilibrium of the boat in the water, and before she could turn to lift the child, there she was, by her side, having stepped from land to water as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

They seated themselves, the child on the passenger seat, then Helena, Rita behind. From the minute the boat drew out into the current, Rita felt the power of the other woman’s stroke.

‘Amelia! Sit down!’ Helena cried, with a laugh. ‘She does insist on standing. We shall have to get her a punt or a gondola if she keeps on!’

The little girl’s back stiffened as she raised her head to look intently ahead, but the river was empty, theirs was the only vessel out in the bad weather, and when she slumped, Rita felt the poignancy of her disappointment. ‘What is it she looks for?’ she wondered aloud.

Helena shrugged. ‘She is always interested in the river. She’d spend all day here if she could. I was just the same at her age. It’s in the blood.’

It was not an answer to her question, but nor was it a deliberate evasion. For all the intensity and constancy of Helena’s gazing at the child, Rita had the impression that in certain ways she failed to actually see her. She saw Amelia, her Amelia, for that was what she needed to see. But there was more to this child than that. She, Rita, could not see the child without the urge to lift her into her arms and comfort her. It was an instinct that perplexed her and she tried to bury it in questions.

‘Still no notion about where she was before?’

‘She’s back. That’s all that matters now.’

Rita tried another tack. ‘No news about the kidnappers?’

‘Not a thing.’

‘And the window locks – do you feel secure now?’

‘I still get the feeling that someone is watching.’

‘You remember the man I told you about? The one who asked me whether she was speaking and what the doctor had said?’

‘You haven’t seen him again?’

‘No. But his interest in the six months it might take for her voice to return does make me wonder whether that is the time to look out for him.’

‘The summer solstice.’

‘That’s right. Tell me about the nursery maid Amelia had in the old days … What became of her?’

‘It is good news for Ruby that Amelia is back. She struggled to find work afterwards. There was so much malicious gossip.’

‘People thought that Ruby had something to do with it at the time, didn’t they? Because she was absent from the house?’

‘Yes, but—’ Helena stopped rowing. Rita was getting out of breath from the exertion, so they allowed the river to carry them along, Helena doing just enough to keep them straight. ‘Ruby was the best of girls. She came to us at sixteen. Had lots of little brothers and sisters, so she was experienced with little ones. And she loved Amelia. You only had to see them together.’

‘So why wasn’t she at home the night it happened?’

‘She couldn’t explain. That’s why people thought she had something to do with it, but more fool them. I know she wouldn’t have harmed Amelia.’

‘Did she have an admirer?’

‘Not yet. She had the same dreams as most girls that age. Meeting a nice young man, courtship, marriage, a family of her own. But that was all still in the future. She wanted it, was putting money aside for the future, like a sensible girl, but it hadn’t happened yet.’

‘Might there have been a secret admirer? Some charming rogue she wouldn’t have wanted you to know about?’

‘She wasn’t the type.’

‘Tell me how it happened.’

Rita listened to Helena recount the night of the kidnap. Her voice grew taut as she remembered the events; every so often she paused – to look at the child, Rita guessed – and when her voice took up again it was softer, reassured by the presence of the child who had returned so unexpectedly from nowhere.

When she got to the part where Ruby returned, Rita interrupted.

‘So she arrived back from the garden? And what did she say to explain herself?’

‘That she had gone for a walk. The policemen took her into Anthony’s study and questioned her for hours. Why go for a walk in the cold? Why go at night? Why go when the river gypsies were about? They badgered and bullied her. She wept and they shouted, but still she gave no other answer. She’d been for a walk. That’s all she would say. She went for a walk for no reason.’

‘And you believed her?’

‘Don’t we all do unexpected things from time to time? Don’t we all break habits and entertain the thought of something novel? At sixteen we are too young to know what we are – and if a girl suddenly wants to go for a walk though it is dark, why should she not? I was out on the river at all hours at that age, winter and summer alike. There was nothing ill in it. It might be different if Ruby was a sly or devilish girl, but there is no malice in her. If I am Amelia’s mother and I say so, why will others not believe it?’

Because it needs an explanation, thought Rita.

‘Once the police got it into their heads that it was the river gypsies, they forgot all about Ruby and her nocturne. I wish everybody else had too. Poor girl.’

A spattering of raindrops broke the surface of the river, and both women looked up. The rainclouds were regrouping.

‘Had we better turn back?’

They hesitated, but another heavier burst of rain pocked the water around them and they turned the boat.

It was hard going against the current. Before long the rain was falling not in experimental squalls but with steady purpose, and Rita felt her shoulders become soaked. The rain dripped from her hair and into her eyes. Her wet hands felt sore and she concentrated hard to match the pace that she knew was less than Helena would produce with a stronger mate.

At last a cry from Helena told her they had arrived. They drew close to the jetty and Rita at last had a hand free to wipe the rain out of her eyes. Able to see again, she caught a glimpse of movement in the bushes on the opposite bank.

‘We are being watched,’ Rita told Helena. ‘Don’t look now, but there is someone hiding in that scrub. Listen, this is what we’ll do …’

At the boathouse Helena lifted the child out of the boat and on to the bank, and in the pouring rain the two of them made their way in a half-run to the shelter of Collodion. Rita stepped back into the boat with the rope, took up her oars and was away again, steering a course directly across the current. She was tired, and not fast, but if anyone tried to run they would have to break cover and be seen.

There was no mooring point on the other side, only the reeds to stop the boat. Rita scrambled out and up the bank. She paid no heed to the muddying of her hem, or the fact that she was wet up to her knees and her shoulders were drenched with rain, but made directly for the cluster of shrubs. As she approached, the branches shivered – whoever was there was trying to bury deeper into concealment. She looked through the maze of branches to where a sodden figure crouched with its back to her.

‘Come out,’ she said.

The figure didn’t move, but the hunched back shook as if the person were weeping.

‘Lily, come out. It’s only me, Rita.’

Lily began to edge backwards, branches and thorns catching at her clothes and her hair. Once she had crawled out a little way, leaving some of her own hair behind in the shrubbery, Rita was able to help her by reaching in to detach the clinging spines, one after another, from the wet cloth of Lily’s dress.

‘Dear, oh dear …’ Rita murmured as she smoothed Lily’s hair. Her hands were criss-crossed with scratches. A bramble had caught her face; beads of blood sat along the red line like berries until they fell in crimson tears down her cheeks.

Rita took out a fresh handkerchief and pressed it very gently to Lily’s cheek. Lily’s eyes flickered nervously between Rita, the river and the far bank, where Daunt, Vaughan and Helena were on deck, oblivious to the rain, looking across. Beside them the girl leant out over the water with her fathoms-deep stare, while her father held the back of her dress.

‘Come across,’ Rita soothed. ‘I’ll wash that scratch for you.’

Lily started in fear. ‘I can’t!’

‘They won’t be cross,’ she told her in her kindest voice. ‘They thought it was someone who wanted to hurt the little girl.’

‘I won’t hurt her! I never wanted to hurt her! I never did!’ Abruptly she gathered herself and turned to hurry away.

Rita reached after her – ‘Lily!’ – but Lily would not be held back. She reached the path, and before she had quite scurried out of earshot called back over her shoulder to Rita on the bank: ‘Tell them I meant no harm!’ And then she was gone.

By the time Rita had cleaned her dress and given her boots a chance to dry out, it was getting dark. Henry Daunt offered to take her home in Collodion to save another drenching. They made their way down the garden to the jetty. Daunt offered his hand to help her where the path was uneven underfoot, but she did not take it, so he confined himself to pushing low branches out of the way. Once the two of them were on board, he navigated his way by moonlight to her cottage. It had rained on and off all afternoon, and now that they had reached her home it suddenly drummed heavily on the roof of the boat.

‘It will ease in a bit,’ he said, over the noise. ‘No point going straight in, you’ll be soaked to the skin before you reach the door.’

Daunt lit a pipe. The cabin was snug when two people were in it, because of all the photographic kit, and her proximity together with the lateness of the hour made him conscious of her wrists and hands, the hollow of her throat that glowed palely in the candlelight. Rita tugged at her sleeves as if aware of her naked hands and, fearing she was about to decide to go in anyway, Daunt found a question for her.

‘Does Lily still believe the child is her sister?’

‘I believe so. The parson spoke to her about it and she was unshakeable.’

‘It can’t be so.’

‘It’s most improbable, yes. I wish I had been able to persuade her to come across. I’d have liked to speak to her.’

‘About the girl?’

‘And about herself.’

The rain seemed to ease. Before she could notice it, he asked another question.

‘What of that man who troubled you before? Have you seen any more of him?’

‘Nothing.’

Rita tucked her muffler firmly into her lapels, concealing her throat. She was preparing to leave, but the percussion redoubled on the roof. She sighed in a way that was also an embarrassed smile and her arms fell to her side again.

‘Do you mind this smoke? I’ll put it out if you like.’

‘No, it’s all right.’

He put his pipe out anyway.

In the next silence, he became acutely aware that the bench behind them, which neither had made a move to sit on, was also his bed. It seemed suddenly to take up a huge amount of space. He lit a candle and cleared his throat.

‘It’s a miracle, the light we had for the exposure,’ he said in order to dispel the silence.

‘A miracle?’ Her eyes were teasing.

‘Well, not exactly a miracle. Not by your exacting standards.’

‘It’s a good photograph,’ she offered.

He unstrapped the box in which he had the plate and held it not too close to the flame. The candlelight flickered it into life. Rita took half a step so that she was standing as close to him as she could without touching him, and she leant to peer at the glass.

‘Where is the one from two years ago?’ she asked.

He took it out of the box and held it for her to see. He could see raindrops in her hair as she bent to look.

It was too dark to compare the images in detail, but the idea of making the comparison put the question in his mind and he was certain it was in hers.

‘Two years ago I photographed a child of two, and today I photographed a child of four, and I do not know whether it is the same child or a different one. Is it her, Rita? Is it Amelia?’

‘Helena believes so.’

‘And Vaughan?’

‘He is not so sure. I once thought he was convinced it was another child altogether; now he is wavering.’

‘What do you think?’

‘The child of two years ago and the child of today are like enough that it is possible, but not so alike that it is certain.’

She placed her hands on the edge of the developing table and leant against it. ‘Look at it from another perspective. Today’s photograph.’

‘Yes?’

‘How do you think she looked? I don’t mean clarity and composition, your usual judgements on your work, but the girl herself. How was she?’

He peered at the image, but the candlelight made it hard to read the expression on the little girl’s face. ‘Expectation? Not really, is it. Nor hope.’

He turned to Rita for elucidation.

‘She’s sad, Daunt.’

‘Sad?’ He looked again at the photograph while she continued speaking.

‘She stares up- and downriver, in search of something. Something she longs for. Something she has been expecting every day, and every day it doesn’t come, and still she waits and still she looks and still she yearns, but the hope dwindles with every day that passes. Now she waits hopelessly.’

He looked. What she said was true. ‘What is it she’s waiting for?’

Suddenly he knew the answer to his own question. ‘Her father,’ he said at the same time as Rita opened her mouth and said, ‘Her mother.’

‘Does she belong to Robin Armstrong, after all?’

Rita frowned. ‘According to Helena, she’s indifferent to him, but if she hasn’t seen him for a long time – and he admitted as much at the Swan – she wouldn’t remember.’

‘So she might be his.’

Rita paused, frowning.

‘Robin Armstrong is a man who’s not what he seems, Daunt.’ He saw her weighing up how much to tell him. She came to a conclusion. ‘His faint at the Swan was faked. His pulse was far too steady. The entire thing was play-acting.’

‘Why?’

Her face had the grim and hungry look it always had when her knowledge of a thing was thwarted. ‘I don’t know. But that young man is not what he seems.’

The rain had slowed. She picked up a glove, put it on, and when she reached for the other found that Daunt had it in his hands.

‘When can I photograph you again?’

‘Have you nothing better to do than take photographs of a country nurse? Surely you must have enough by now.’

‘I have nowhere near enough.’

‘My glove?’ She would not be coaxed into coquettishness, not even over a glove. Flirting got you nowhere. She refused to play with undercurrents and scorned gallantry. Directness was the only approach she recognized.

He relinquished the glove and she turned, ready to leave.

‘When I see you with the girl …’

She paused, and he saw her back stiffen.

‘What I wonder is, haven’t you ever wanted …’

‘A child?’ Something in her voice opened the door to hope.

She turned and looked him full in the face. ‘I’m thirty-five. Far too old for all that.’

It was a clear rebuff.

In the silence that followed, it became obvious that at some point the rain must have stopped, because they heard it start up again, a gentle patter.

Rita exclaimed and refolded her muffler. He shuffled round her elaborately to open the door; it was a dance in which they both leant exaggeratedly away from each other.

‘Shall I see you to your door?’

‘It’s only a few yards. Stay in the dry.’

And she was gone.

Thirty-five, he was thinking. It was young enough. Had there been something unresolved in her voice? His memory played the exchange again, trying to catch every inflexion, but his auditory memory was no match for his visual one and he did not want to expose himself to false hope and wishful thinking.

He closed the door behind her and leant against it. It was natural for women to want children, wasn’t it? His sisters had them and Marion, his wife, had been disappointed not to become a mother.

He picked up the cases for the glass plates, and before sliding them in, took another look at today’s exposure. The child gazed out of the glass, upriver, longingly. Looking for her father? Yes, he could believe that. For a long moment he gazed longingly back, then he closed the glass into its box, and pressed his knuckles into his closed eyes to rub the yearning away.

The Genie in the Teapot

THE WATER LEVEL was nearing the top of the first post, as Lily expected after all the rain. Every year it was like this, for a day or a few days or a week. It made her wary. Still, there was no angry rush and no menacing loitering either. The water did not hiss or roar or dart spiteful splashes at her hem. It flowed steadily, wholly engaged on some calm business of its own, and had not the slightest interest in Lily and her doings.

What would the parson say? Lily emptied the feed into the trough, and when she put the bucket on the ground, thought she might as well sink down with it. It wasn’t so very long ago she had feared he might dismiss her because she missed a day’s work when Ann came back. Then there’d been the awful day when he wanted to know how old she was and when she last saw her mother. After that she had gone round the skirtings behind the heavy furniture, beaten the dust out of the curtains in the spare bedroom that was never used, washed down the walls of the privy, cleaned the underside of the kitchen table where spiders liked to nest in the corners, but nothing settled her nerves, and for several Thursdays in a row it was a relief not to be given her notice at the same time as her wages. Now it was worse. Would word of her concealment in the shrubs opposite the Vaughans’ boathouse have reached the parson?

‘What to do?’ she sighed aloud as she put the bucket down and the boar started to root around for the best bits. ‘I don’t know.’

The sow tautened her ears. Even in her worried state, Lily half smiled.

‘Droll creature – you look for all the world as if you are listening to me!’

A quiver ran through the pig. It began with the trembling of her nostrils, and then every ginger hair of her body shivered as in response to a breeze, rippling down her spine and twitching the curl of her tail. When the wave had completed its journey, the sow stood to attention, poised in readiness for something.

Lily stared. She noticed that the dullness that had clouded the sow’s eye for so long had lifted. The small eyes with their large pupils were now filled with light.

Then something happened to Lily too. She felt her gaze shift from looking at the sow’s eye to looking into it. And there she saw—

‘Oh!’ she cried, and her heart burst into a flurry of beating, for it is a startling sensation to look at something and find that inside it is another living soul looking back. Lily would have been no less astonished to be addressed by a genie from inside her teapot, or have the lampshade bow its head to her.

‘Well I never!’ she exclaimed, and she took a few gasping breaths.

The sow shifted her trotters restlessly and made a breathing noise that also signified agitation.

‘Whatever is it? What do you want?’

The sow became still and did not shift her gaze from Lily’s, but stared with an air of divine delight.

‘Do you want me to talk to you? Is that what it is?’

She scratched the sow’s ear, and the sow grunted softly in a way that Lily understood to be satisfaction.

‘You’ve been lonely, have you? Is it sadness made your eyes so dull? I don’t suppose he’s much company for you. Nasty brute. They’re no good, men. Not Mr White, and certainly not Victor who brought you here, and not his father before him. None of ’em. Well, the parson’s all right …’

She chatted to the pig about the parson, about his kindness and his goodness, and as she did, her own problems returned to her thoughts.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ she admitted softly. ‘One of them’s bound to have told him. Not that photographer fellow, I haven’t never seen him in church, but the Vaughans or the nurse. I wasn’t doing anything bad, yet it looks bad … And if they haven’t said anything yet, it’ll come before long. What am I to do? If I have to leave the parsonage …’

A tear dropped from her eye and she left off scratching the sow to wipe it away.

The sow blinked sympathetically.

‘Tell him myself? Well, perhaps … I suppose it would be better if he heard it from me first. I could explain. Tell him I meant no harm by it. Yes, I’ll do that.’

Was it foolish, talking to a pig? Of course it was – but nobody was there to hear, and besides, it was a good idea of the pig’s, that she should tell the parson herself. Lily rubbed her face dry on her sleeve.

She stood scratching the sow’s ear a little longer, then told her, ‘Go on, eat something. He’ll leave none for you, otherwise.’

She waited to see that the sow had her snout in the trough, then put the bucket away, transferred Victor’s money from the log to its hiding place in the cottage, and set off for work.

She walked upstream and, in her new confidence born of the idea that had come to her thanks to the sow, took her eyes off the water and noticed the brightness of the day. She did not linger when she passed the Vaughans’ garden, merely glanced briefly over the river and saw that nobody was there. Seeing the clump of elders and bramble where she had hidden caused her spirits to flag, but she rallied them by visiting Ann in her mind. Over there, in the safety of the Vaughans’ house, her sister lived a life that Lily had never known. It was one of comfort and wealth, things Lily could only guess at. She saw a fire burning in a large hearth, a well-stocked basket of logs, a table with several dishes of hot food, enough for everyone and something left over. In another room there was a bed, a real one, with a soft mattress and two warm blankets. For months she had been embellishing her notion of Ann’s life at Buscot Lodge, but now, with the spring freshness starting to show, a new idea occurred to her. Had the Vaughans thought to give Ann a puppy?

A beagle would be patient and gentle with her. But spaniels had beautiful silky ears. Ann would like stroking the ears of a spaniel, she was sure. Or a terrier? A little terrier puppy would be full of fun. She lined up the puppies, and in the end it was the tail that swayed her: surely a terrier had the very best tail for wagging. A terrier it was. She added the puppy to Ann’s blankets and log basket and fur-lined boots and rejoiced at the new detail. A cheerful little companion, yapping with pleasure as he chased and returned the red ball Ann threw, and later fell asleep on her lap. And Lily herself haunted these fantasies, an invisible figure who diverted wasps from the flowers that Ann bent to smell, who removed thorny brambles from the bushes where the red ball landed, damped the sparks that leapt from the fire on to the hearthrug. She averted all dangers, managed all risks, protected from all harm. Nothing could hurt Ann while she lived in the Vaughans’ house and while Lily watched over her from afar: the child’s life was nothing but comfort, safety and delight.

‘Come! Ah! Mrs White!’

Her name was like a blessing in his voice, and it gave her courage. She placed the tea tray on his desk. ‘Shall I pour a cup for you?’

‘No,’ he murmured distractedly, without lifting his head. ‘I’ll do it.’

‘Parson …’

He touched the paper with his pen and added another few words in the margin, and she marvelled again at his quickness with ink.

‘Yes, what is it?’

He looked up. She felt her throat tighten.

‘Yesterday, when I was walking home along the river … I happened to stop. It was just opposite where the garden of Buscot Lodge comes down to the bank. Mrs Vaughan was out on the river with Ann.’

The parson frowned. ‘Mrs White—’

‘I never meant to do no harm,’ she went on, in a rush, ‘but they saw I was looking – the nurse rowed over to where I was, after Ann and Mrs Vaughan had got out—’

‘Have you been injured, Mrs White?’

‘No! That’s to say, it’s just a scratch, it was the brambles on the riverbank, that’s all …’

She fidgeted with her hair as if she might still veil the evidence.

‘I never meant to go,’ she said again. ‘I happened to be passing that way because it’s the way home, I didn’t go particular or anything – and it don’t seem wrong to look. I never touched her, I never went near, I was on the other bank altogether, she never even saw me.’

‘If anyone has come to harm, Mrs White, it seems to be you. I will tell the Vaughans that you meant no harm when you were looking at Amelia yesterday. Her name is Amelia, Mrs White. You know that, don’t you? You said Ann just then.’

Lily gave no answer.

The parson went on with great kindness in his voice and in his expression, ‘I’m sure nobody is afraid that you mean to hurt her. But think of the Vaughans. Think of what they have been through. They have lost her once already. It might be distressing for them to have the child watched so closely by someone outside the family. Even if she does – perhaps – resemble a sister of yours whose name is Ann.’

Again she did not answer.

‘Well, Mrs White. Perhaps we have finished with that topic for today.’

The interview was over for now. She crept towards the door. On the threshold she turned, timidly.

The parson had returned to his papers, his teacup halfway to his lips.

‘Parson?’ Her voice was little more than a whisper, like a child who thinks by speaking quietly she can avoid interrupting an adult engaged on some important task.

‘Yes?’

‘Do she have a puppy?’

He looked bewildered.

‘The little girl at the Vaughan’s – the one they call Amelia. Do she have a little dog to play with?’

‘I don’t know. I have no idea.’

‘Only, I think she would like one. A little terrier. When you see Mr Vaughan, when you tell him that I won’t stare across the river no more, perhaps you could ask him?’

The parson was lost for words.