Once Upon a River

The Longest Day

IN SUMMERTIME, THE Swan at Radcot was as sweet a spot as you could imagine. The grassy banks sloped down from the inn, and the river lent itself contentedly to the leisure and delight of mankind. There were skiffs and sculling boats for hire, punts for fishing and pleasure too. Margot carried the tables outdoors in the morning sun, and if it should get too hot in the middle of the day, picnic blankets could be spread in the generous shade of the trees. She called on her daughters, three at a time, and the Swan proliferated with Little Margots working in the kitchen, pouring drinks, and running in and out with trays of food, lemonade and cider. With smiles for all, they never tired. You could say, with truth, that there were few spots more idyllic than the Swan in summer.

This year was different. It was the weather. The spring rain had been regular and moderate in quantity, pleasing the farmers, who looked forward to a good harvest. As the weeks drew on to summer and hopes grew for sunshine, the rain continued, increasing in frequency and duration. The leisure boaters set off optimistically in light drizzle, counting on it clearing up later in the day, but when the rain set in in earnest, as it always did, they packed up early and went home. Four or five times, Margot had looked at the sky and put the tables out, but rare was the day she didn’t have to go out and bring them in again, and the summer room stood empty. ‘It’s a good thing we had such a good winter,’ she concluded, recalling the crowds that packed the room to hear the story of the drowned girl who came to life again. ‘We’d be struggling if it wasn’t for that.’ Two of the Little Margots were sent back to their husbands and children, and she and a single daughter managed the workload with Jonathan to help.

Joe was poorly, his chest not improved by the summer mists that hung with clammy warmth over the riverbank. This was the time of year when he’d usually been able to count on his lungs drying out, but the change of season helped him little this time and he’d continued to sink into his spells as frequently as in wintertime, and he sat quiet and pale by the hearth while the regulars drank and talked around him.

‘Don’t worry about me,’ he said in response to any enquiry. ‘I’m all right. I’m working up a story.’

‘It will get better at solstice time, I expect,’ Margot said.

The summer solstice was traditionally the day of the summer fair, and this year it was also to be the wedding day of Owen Albright and his housekeeper, Bertha. What with the wedding breakfast in the morning, and the fair-goers who would doubtless want to quench their thirst in the afternoon, Margot was expecting it to be a busy day. For a while her optimism seemed like wishful thinking, but then, in the third week of June, things did in fact pick up. First people wondered whether the rain showers were sparser, and then they actually were. Patches of blue appeared in the grey and lingered, and twice in a row the afternoons were dry. There came to be a sense of expectation as the longest day drew near.

Solstice day dawned – and the sun shone.

‘In fact,’ thought Henry Daunt as he set up his camera outside the church for the wedding photograph, ‘it’s too bright. I’ll have to take it here, sheltered from the glare.’

The celebrants came out of the church. The parson was his summer self: this morning he had opened his window and stood naked to the waist, feeling the sun on his white chest and his pale face, saying, ‘Glory, glory, glory!’ Only he knew this, but everyone saw his lively smile and enjoyed his vigorous shake of the hand as they came down the steps.

Daunt positioned Owen and his new wife at the spot that was just right and arranged Mrs Albright’s hand through Mr Albright’s arm. Owen, who was struggling to remember to call his wife Bertha and not Mrs O’Connor, knew what it was to have his portrait taken; he had done it once before, some years ago. Bertha had seen a great number of photographs, so she too knew what to do. The pair held themselves stiffly upright and turned grave, proud faces towards the camera. Even the teasing from Owen’s drinking pals at the Swan could not crack their solemn faces, and their newly married dignity was transferred by sunlight on to glass, where it would outlive them for a long, long time.

When it was done, the wedding party gathered itself for the walk along the riverbank. ‘What a day!’ they said as they went, looking up to the clear blue sky. ‘What a splendid day!’ And they came, a joyful procession, to the Swan at Radcot, where Margot had put flowers on the tables on the riverbank and the Little Margots were waiting with pitchers of cool drinks covered with beaded cloths.

The events of six months ago seemed very distant now, for on a summer’s day winter always feels like something you have dreamt or heard spoken of, and not a thing you have lived. The unexpected sun made their skin tingle, they felt sweat at the backs of their necks, and a goosebump was suddenly a thing impossible to imagine. Yet the longest day of summer is the reversed twin of winter’s long night, and, this being so, one solstice inevitably recalls the other; and if there were some who did not connect the two days, Owen himself reminded them.

‘Six months ago,’ he told the wedding party, ‘I decided to make Bertha my wife. Inspired by the miracle that happened here at the Swan that you all know of – the rescue of little Amelia Vaughan, who was found dead and came to life again – I felt like a new man, and requested the hand in marriage of my housekeeper, and Bertha did me the honour of accepting …’

After the speeches, talk of the girl was renewed. Events that had taken place on this very riverbank, in the dark and in the cold, were retold under an azure sky, and perhaps it was an effect of the sunshine, but the darker elements of the tale were swept away and a simpler, happier narrative came to the fore. A little girl who had been kidnapped was returned to her parents, making her and the Vaughans and the whole community very happy. A wrong was righted, a family restored. The great-aunt of one of the gravel-diggers tried to say that she had seen the child on the riverbank and that the girl had no reflection, but she was hushed; no one wanted a ghostly tale today. The cider cups were refilled, the Little Margots came one after the other and indistinguishably with plates of ham and cheese and radishes, and the wedding party had enough joy to drown out all doubt, all darkness. Six months ago, a miraculous story had burst wildly and messily into the Swan; today it was neatened, pressed, and put away without a crease in it.

Mr Albright kissed Mrs Albright, who blushed red as the radishes, and at noon precisely the party rose as one to continue their celebrations by joining the fair.

Between Radcot’s neatly hedged fields was an awkwardly shaped piece of land that had fallen to common use. Today it contained stalls of all kinds and all sizes. Some of them were professional-looking affairs with awnings to protect the goods from the sun; others were no more than a tarpaulin spread upon the ground with wares set out upon it. There was stuff that a person might actually need – pitchers and bowls and beakers; cloth; knives and tools; skins – but there was just as much frippery designed to incite cravings. There were ribbons, sweet delicacies, kittens, trinkets of all sorts. Some of the traders carried goods in baskets. These wandered here and there, and each and every one declaimed the authenticity of his own wares and warned against the other crooks whose goods were counterfeit, expensive, and would break the minute the charlatan had packed up and gone. There were pipers and drummers and a one-man band, and as the fair-goers walked, they wandered into and out of the range of love songs, drinking songs and sentimental songs of loss and hardship. Sometimes they could hear two at once and the notes bumped into and fell over each other in their ear.

Mr and Mrs Vaughan walked along the river from Buscot Lodge to the field where the day’s festivities were to take place. They held one hand each of the child who swung between them. Helena was faintly irritable – she was disappointed, Vaughan thought, that the doctor’s prediction about the return of the girl’s speech had not turned out as she hoped – yet it was less her mood than his own that was casting a shadow over the day.

‘Are you sure about this?’ Anthony Vaughan asked his wife.

‘Why ever not?’

‘Will she be safe?’

‘Now we know it was only Lily White watching us – a poor, harmless creature – what is there to worry about?’

Vaughan frowned. ‘But that fellow who accosted Rita …’

‘That was months ago. Whoever he was, he can hardly try anything when we are surrounded by so many people who know us. Our own farmers and servants are here. Everyone from the Swan. They wouldn’t let anyone harm so much as a hair on her head.’

‘Do you really want to expose her to the pointing and the gossip?’

‘Dearest, we can’t keep her from the world for ever. There is so much to amuse a child here. She will adore the boat races. It would be cruelty to keep her away.’

Life had been so much better since the arrival of the child. Helena’s happiness had come as such a relief to him that it had brought a surge of joy to his own heart. Their renewed love was so like the first years of their marriage that it was possible to forget that the long chill of despair had ever been. They had buried the past to live in pleasure and delight. Yet now that the novelty of their new-found marital happiness had worn off, he was unable to pretend to himself that it rested on secure foundations. The child swinging between them, with her mute inscrutability, her colourless hair and her ever-changing eyes, was at once the cause of their happiness and a threat to it.

During the day, Vaughan was occupied and better able to distract himself from his endless and circular preoccupations, but at night his insomnia had returned. He suffered repeatedly from variations on the same dream. In it, he walked in a landscape – a wood, a beach, a field, a cave, the terrain was different every time – searching for something. Then, coming to a clearing, or rounding a tree, or arriving at an archway, there she was, his daughter, waiting for him, as if she had been there all along, just waiting for her papa to come and find her. She raised her arms to him, crying Daddy!, and he ran to grasp her and lift her into his arms, his heart overflowing with gratitude and love – and woke to the leaden realization that it was not Amelia. It had been the girl. The changeling had reached into his dreams and attached her face to the memory of his own lost daughter.

Helena herself was ignorant of the fragility of their bliss; the strain of worry fell on him alone. This created a distance between himself and his wife, which she was as yet unaware of. In her belief that the child was Amelia and that he too was persuaded of it, she had constructed a sense of security as impressive as a moated castle. He alone knew how flimsy it really was.

When his own dreams showed him how easy it was to place this child’s face on Amelia’s shoulders, he was tempted to join Helena in her certainty. Sometimes it seemed so obvious, so simple a thing to do, that he felt guilty at his own stubbornness in resisting. Already he called the girl Amelia in front of his wife. He was more than halfway there. But then, always, the other thing. The knowledge. Underneath it all, a little girl whose face he could not even remember, but whom he could not – would not – forget.

There was something else besides. When he lay in his bed at night, whether awake or asleep, searching endlessly for his daughter in imaginary landscapes and finding, time after time, the little interloper, sometimes another face altogether swam into view and oppressed his heart. Robin Armstrong. For it was all very well to toy with the idea of succumbing to happiness and allowing the girl to replace his daughter in his heart and his mind, as she had replaced her in his home, but to do so was to deprive another man of his child. Vaughan wanted Helena to be happy, but what if her happiness came at the price of condemning another man to the agony of loss they had only just left behind? As much as the girl, as much as Amelia, it was Robin Armstrong who haunted Vaughan’s nights and turned him to stone in his bed.

As they arrived at the edge of the fair, they met the crowds. He noticed several people glance at them, look again, whisper and point. Farmers’ wives pressed flowers into the child’s hand, she was patted on the head, little children ran up and kissed her.

‘I’m not convinced this is for the best,’ Vaughan said mildly, when a burly gravel-digger knelt at her feet and played her a short air on his fiddle before placing a forefinger gravely on her cheek.

Helena let out a short, exasperated breath, quite unlike her usual equable self. ‘It’s that silly story. They think she can work miracles – give them protection or something. It’s just silly superstition and it’ll pass, given time. Anyway, the boat races start at two o’clock. There is no need for you to stay if you don’t want to. We are going to watch,’ she told him firmly. Then, to the child, ‘Come on.’

He felt the little hand detach from his. When Helena turned away, his own legs did not instantly follow, and in that moment of hesitation one of his farmers stopped to speak to him. By the time he was free again, his wife and the girl were out of sight.

Vaughan turned off the wide central axis where the going was slow. He made his way between the awnings and covered stalls, searching. Everywhere he went, he ignored the calls of the tradespeople. He did not want ruby rings for his sweetheart. He waved away macaroons, remedies for gout and digestive ailments, pocket knives (stolen most likely), charms to give a man irresistible appeal, and pencils. The pencils looked decent enough, and he might have bought some another day, but his head was starting to ache and he felt thirsty. He could stop at one of the places that sold drinks, but there were queues, and he’d sooner find his wife and the girl first. He pressed on through the crowd, making slow progress. Why should the sun come out so hot on this of all days, when so many were congregated together? The throng thickened to stagnation and he was obliged to stop altogether, then he found a sluggish current and inched forward again. He felt the sweat on his brow. His eyes began to sting with salt. Where the hell were they?

With the sun in his eyes, he felt dizzy. It only lasted a moment, but before he could gather his senses, a hand fell on his arm.

‘Fortune, Sir? This way.’

He attempted to shake the hand away, but his movements had the effortful and vague feeling of swimming underwater. ‘No,’ he said, but perhaps he only meant to say it, for he never heard it spoken. Instead a drape was pulled invisibly aside and the hand that he felt but scarcely saw tugged him inside. He stumbled heavy-footed into darkness.

‘Sit you down.’ The fabric of the fortune-teller’s dress was so like the gaudy interior of the tent that it receded into it, and her face was veiled.

A chair was placed behind him, knocking the backs of his knees so that he had no option but to sit. He turned to see who had put it there. There was no one, but a bulge distorting the drape of one length of tawdry silk was the size and shape of a shoulder. Someone was concealed there, ready to prevent the customers from making a quick getaway without paying for their handsome strangers and journeys overseas.

All he wanted was a glass of something cold.

‘Look here,’ he said, rising. But he bumped his head on the low cross-brace of the tent, and as he saw stars, he felt the woman grasp his wrist with more power than you would think possible of such a small hand, and from behind, pressure on both his shoulders forced him firmly back into his seat.

‘Let me read your hand,’ said the woman. Her voice, reedy and ill-educated, had an odd note to it that he registered but did not immediately pay attention to.

He gave in. It was probably quicker to go through with it than to negotiate his way out.

‘You have had a lucky start in life,’ she began. ‘Good luck and talent were your godparents. And you have done well since. I see a woman.’ She peered into his palm. ‘A woman …’

Mrs Constantine came to mind. How much better she’d have done this! He remembered her jasmine-scented room, her calm, still face, her sombre dress and pristine collar, her purring cat. He longed for that room. But he was here.

‘Fair or dark?’ he asked, with false joviality.

The fortune-teller ignored his comment. ‘A happy woman. Who was lately unhappy. And also a child.’

He exclaimed in exasperation. ‘I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that you know who I am,’ he told her testily. ‘This is in very bad taste. Look, I’ll give you something for your time and let’s bring this to an end.’ He tried to free his hand from hers to reach for his purse.

The fortune-teller only tightened her grip and he marvelled that a woman could be so strong. ‘I see a child,’ she said, ‘who is not your child.’

Vaughan froze.

‘There. You’re not going anywhere now, are you?’ She released her hold and dropped the pretence of reading his palm. Her voice had a triumphant note in it, and the significance of the oddness of her voice and the strength of her grip suddenly occurred to him. It wasn’t a woman at all.

‘Got your attention now, haven’t I? The child in your house – the one that has made your lady wife so happy – is not your child.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘That’s my business. The thing is, I could ask you the very same question: how do you know it? But notice that I don’t ask you. And why don’t I ask you? For the very simple reason that I don’t need to. Because I know the answer already.’

Vaughan felt himself come adrift, knew there was nothing to hold on to and gave in to the tug of a cold undercurrent.

‘What do you want?’ His voice was feeble and he heard it from a great distance.

‘For the fortune-telling? Nothing. I’m too honest to charge for telling a man what he already knows. But what about your wife? Would she like her fortune told?’

‘No!’ Vaughan burst out.

‘I thought not.’

‘What do you want? How much?’

‘My, you are in a rush. Do you do all your business at this speed? No, let’s take our time to consider. Understand what are the things that really matter. Events later this afternoon, for instance …’

‘What events?’

‘Suppose there was to be an event … My advice to you – I offer it freely, Mr Vaughan – would be to stay well out of things. Not involve yourself.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Me?’ The voice was one of injured innocence. ‘I shan’t do a thing, Mr Vaughan. And nor will you, if you want your wife kept out of our little secret.’

The tent was suddenly airless.

‘There’ll be time later to work out the terms of our arrangement,’ the man in the veil said, with an air of finality. ‘I’ll be in touch.’

Vaughan rose, desperate for air, and this time met with no obstacles as he made his way outside.

Back in the open air, Vaughan walked in agitation, without knowing where he was going. Such was the churn of his thoughts that he was incapable of putting two ideas in a row, let alone coming to any kind of conclusion. He perceived the crowds around him only dimly. But then the musicians and the hawkers fell silent. Conversations fell away. Even Vaughan in his disturbed state became aware that something was happening. Reopening his eyes to the outer world, he realized that everybody had stopped their aimless milling and come to a standstill. All were looking in the same direction.

A woman’s voice screamed in panic. ‘Get away! Away with you!’

It was Helena.

Vaughan sprinted.

Meanwhile, the Armstrong family had also decided to come to the fair. Robert Armstrong was looking unusually ebullient, as he walked with Bess at his side and six of his seven children around them. He had a letter from Robin in his pocket. The letter was contrite. In it, Robin begged forgiveness. He apologized a dozen times for attempting to strike his father. He promised to make amends. He expressed every desire to live a better life, to give up the gambling and the drink and his ne’er-do-well friends at the Dragon. He would come and meet them at the fair, and show his father how sincere was his remorse.

‘He does not mention Alice,’ Bess had said, reading over his shoulder and frowning.

‘With everything else he intends to put right, the question of the child must surely be resolved too,’ her husband had replied.

From his great height, Armstrong scanned the crowd for his eldest son. They had not found him yet, but he was probably here, looking for them in the crowd; they would be bound to come across him sooner or later.

Armstrong bought knives for his middle boys, hair ribbons and brooches for the bigger girls, and for the little ones, figurines of animals carved in oak: a cow, a sheep and a pig. They ate hot pork patties, and although the meat wasn’t anywhere near as good as Armstrong’s own, it still had a good flavour from being cooked in the open air.

Armstrong left his wife and children clapping their hands in time to the music played by the one-man band, and wandered on to the photographer’s stand, where he found Rita. She always attended the solstice fair. There would be insect bites, heatstroke and alcohol-induced stupors to deal with, but while waiting to be needed, she generally helped out at one of the most popular stands to allow as many people as possible to see her and know where to find her in need. She was helping organize the queue of customers for booth portraits today and taking appointments in Daunt’s diary for future sittings.

‘That is Mr Henry Daunt, I think?’ he asked her. ‘He looks better than the last time I saw him.’

‘He has healed, but there’s still a scar underneath his beard. It’s Mr Armstrong, isn’t it?’

‘That’s right.’

Armstrong studied the prints for sale: river scenes, boating teams, local churches and picturesque places. He expressed an interest in having a family photograph taken.

‘You could have your photograph taken today, if you would like. I’ll add you to the list and tell you what time to come back for it.’

He gave a regretful shake of the head. ‘My eldest isn’t here yet, and I would like a photograph of us all at home, at the farm.’

‘Then Mr Daunt can visit you, and then he would have the time to take a series of photographs, indoors and out. Let me look at his diary and see what day would suit you.’

As she spoke, Armstrong ran his eye over the panel of prints showing scenes from previous fairs. Morris dancers, teams of rowers, hawkers of goods, tug-o’-war giants …

They began to talk about dates, but Armstrong abruptly cut himself off with an ‘Oh!’ that made Rita look up sharply.

He was staring at one photograph in particular with an air of great shock.

‘Are you all right, Mr Armstrong?’

He was deaf to her words.

‘Mr Armstrong?’

She sat him down in her seat, and pressed a glass of water into his hand.

‘I’m all right! I’m all right! Where was that photograph taken? How long ago?’

Rita checked the index number and looked it up in Daunt’s log.

‘It’s the fair at Lechlade, three years ago.’

‘Who took this photograph? Was it Mr Daunt himself?’

‘It was.’

‘I must consult him.’

‘He is in the darkroom on his boat at the moment. He cannot be disturbed – the light would destroy the photograph he is developing.’

‘Then let me buy this photograph and I will come back and speak to him later.’

He pressed the coins into Rita’s hand, did not wait to have his purchase wrapped, and hurried away, clutching it in both hands.

Armstrong was unable to take his eyes from the photograph, but after nearly tripping on the guy rope to one of the tents, he realized he must put it away and make a concerted effort to find his wife and children. He put the frame away, took a deep breath and set to looking about him. Then came the second surprise of the day.

Turning out of a tent where he had hoped to spot Bess, it was not his wife but Mrs Eavis, the landlady from the ‘bad house’ where Robin’s wife had ended her days, who surged into view. He saw her first in profile: her blade of a nose was unmistakeable. She was back from her holiday! He could have sworn she’d seen him too, for her face turned in his direction and he thought he detected a flicker of her eye. But apparently not, for though he called her name, she turned and walked purposefully away.

Armstrong dodged the wandering fair-goers who were in his way, and stepped swiftly after her. For a little while he made steady gains through the crowd. He was almost near enough to put his hand on her shoulder at one point, but a concertina expanded with a wheeze and when he had successfully got around it she had disappeared from view. He looked left and right at every opportunity, between the stalls and tables, and was surprised how quickly he found her again. Coming to a crossroads in the fair, he saw her standing still, looking around her as if waiting for someone. He raised an arm to hail her, but the minute her eyes turned in his direction off she went again.

He was on the point of giving up when suddenly ahead of him a great stillness fell. Nobody moved. Then a cry rent the air – a woman’s voice, in panic: ‘Get away! Away with you!’

Armstrong ran.

Vaughan arrived at the place where the crowd thickened and had to shove his way through. When he reached the heart of it, he found Helena on her knees on the ground, her skirt stained with the mud of so many tramping feet. She was weeping wildly. Over her stood a tall, dark-haired woman with a long, sharp nose and wide pale lips, who had contrived to be standing between Helena and the child, while Helena made frantic attempts in the slippery mud to reach around her wide skirts and lay her hands on the little girl.

‘I don’t know,’ the woman was explaining, to nobody in particular. ‘I was only being friendly. Whatever’s wrong with that? Awful fuss to make when all I did was say, “Hello, Alice.”’ Her voice was loud – a fraction louder perhaps than was necessary. She noted the arrival of Vaughan, then, turning to the crowd, addressed them as one. ‘You heard me, didn’t you? You saw?’ There were a few nods. ‘Saying hello to the daughter of my former lodger I haven’t seen in a long while – what could be more natural than that?’

The tall woman placed her hands on the girl’s shoulders.

Murmurs arose from the crowd. They were reluctant, indistinct, confused, but they confirmed that yes, it was as she said. Satisfied, the woman nodded to herself.

Vaughan crouched to put an arm protectively around his wife, while she stared in mute, wide-eyed shock, gesturing for him to take hold of the girl.

The crowd parted with a murmur and out of it emerged someone else they recognized.

Robin Armstrong.

Seeing him, a light of satisfaction, as at some scheme brought successfully to fruition, animated the tall woman’s face and was instantly suppressed, then with a violent swiftness that took everyone by surprise, she gripped the child and raised her up. ‘Look, Alice!’ she pronounced. ‘It’s Daddy!’

Helena’s cry of pain was accompanied by the gasp that came as a single sound from the crowd, and then silence fell, shocked and confused, as the woman delivered the child into Robin Armstrong’s arms.

Before anyone could gather themselves to react, she had turned and launched herself into the throng. In the face of her sharp-nosed velocity the crowd parted, then closed behind her and she was lost to sight.

Vaughan stood and looked at Armstrong.

Armstrong looked at the child and in a broken voice spoke words into her hair.

‘What did he say?’ the crowd asked, and word was passed from mouth to ear in a Chinese whisper. ‘He said, “Oh my darling! Oh my child! Alice, my love!”’

The onlookers waited, as at the theatre, for the scene to continue. Mrs Vaughan had fainted, it seemed, and Mr Vaughan was turned to stone, while Robin Armstrong had eyes only for the child, and his father, Mr Armstrong, stared as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. Something had to happen next, but there was uncertainty in the air. The actors had forgotten their lines and each one waited for the other to pick up the story. The moment seemed destined to be without end, and murmurs were rising from the audience when a voice rose above the confusion.

‘May I help?’

It was Rita. She stepped into the circle and knelt beside Helena.

‘We have to get her home,’ she said, but she looked quizzically at Vaughan as she said it. Vaughan, his eyes locked on the girl in Robin Armstrong’s arms, seemed incapable of action.

‘What are you going to do?’ Rita said in an urgent mutter.

Now Newman, the Vaughans’ gardener, appeared, with another of the manservants from the household. Between them, they lifted Helena from the ground.

‘Well?’ Rita said, and she took hold of Vaughan’s arm to rouse him out of his inertia, but all he was capable of was a minimal shake of the head before he turned his back and, with a nod, instructed the servants to begin the task of carrying Helena’s senseless body back to Buscot Lodge.

All eyes were on the Vaughans’ departure, and then, as one, the crowd looked back to the remaining players. The little one opened her mouth, and everybody waited for the wail that was certain to come. But she only yawned, closed her eyes and rested her head heavily on Robin Armstrong’s shoulder. The slackness of her small body said she had fallen instantly asleep. The young man gazed with an expression of infinite tenderness at the face of the sleeping child.

There was a shifting in the crowd and voices were heard.

‘What’s happening, Mother?’

And: ‘Why is everybody so quiet?’

Bess, with her swaying gait and a ribboned eye patch, emerged, leading a procession of children, all come too late to witness the events.

‘Look, there’s Papa!’ one cried, spotting Armstrong.

‘And Robin!’ came another little voice.

‘Who is that little girl?’ the smallest of the family asked.

‘Yes,’ echoed Armstrong’s deep voice, and it was grave, though it spoke quietly so as not to be heard by the crowd. ‘Who is that little girl, Robin?’

Robin put his finger to his lip. ‘Hush!’ he said to his brothers and sisters. ‘Your niece is sleeping.’

The children crowded around their half-brother, their bright young faces turned to the child, who was now invisible to the crowd.

‘It’s raining!’ someone said.

Suddenly, from being a few drops of water it became a downpour. Faces ran with water, skirts were flattened against legs, hair was slicked to the scalp. With the rain came the realization that they had been staring not at a piece of theatre but at other people’s misfortunes. Embarrassed, they remembered themselves, and ran for cover. Some made for the trees, some for the refreshment tent – and a good number ran to the Swan.

Philosophy at the Swan

THE STORY THAT had been told with an air of conclusiveness at the wedding breakfast was now taken up again, and all agreed it had taken a distinctly new turn. They repeated the events of the afternoon over and over, recalling every detail: the sharp-nosed woman, Helena Vaughan’s dramatic faint, Mr Vaughan’s frozen stare and Robin Armstrong’s tenderness. When they had remembered everything there was to remember, the alcohol encouraged them to recall things they only half remembered and even to invent things they did not remember at all. They fell to questions: What would the Vaughans do now? How would Mrs Vaughan bear it? Might Vaughan yet persuade Robin Armstrong to give the child up? Why had they not come to blows? Might they yet, tomorrow or the day after?

The drinkers fell into factions, some insisting that the girl was Amelia Vaughan, pointing to Mrs Vaughan’s certainty, others shaking their heads and pointing out that the child’s fine hair was more like the soft waves they remembered on Robin Armstrong’s head. They went back, reconsidered every element of the story in the light of these recent revelations, weighed the evidence this way and that. The night of the kidnap suddenly came to the surface, for if this child was indeed Alice Armstrong, then what on earth had happened to Amelia Vaughan? They had put the story of her disappearance away following her reappearance, but now they revisited it and plumbed its depths again.

Henry Daunt, taking a break at the end of a long day’s photography, was sitting in the corner of the winter room eating a plate of ham and potato with watercress.

‘It was that nursemaid,’ the cressman leaning at the window insisted. ‘I always said she had something to do with it. What keeps a girl out at that time of night if it isn’t mischief?’

‘Ah, but there’s mischief and mischief … It might not be kidnap mischief she were out for, but the other kind,’ his fellow drinker suggested.

The cressman shook his head. ‘I’d have got into mischief with her if she’d have had me, but she wouldn’t. She wasn’t the type. Did you ever hear of her getting into mischief with anybody?’ They kept a very accurate record of which girls were liable to get into mischief and which were not, so the information was close to hand. No. She was not the type.

‘What happened to her afterwards?’ Daunt asked them.

They consulted with each other. ‘Couldn’t get another job. Nobody wanted her looking after their children. She went to Cricklade, where her grandmother lives.’

‘Cricklade? Dragon country.’ Cricklade was a quaint town a few miles away, renowned for its intermittent infestations of dragons. He had thought of taking some photographs there for his book.

Daunt tucked into his meal, listening as the events of two years ago were disinterred, rediscussed, loose threads were picked out of the old story and today’s events, and efforts made to knit it all together and make of the two things a single tale. But the threads left gaps too wide to be darned.

One of the Little Margots brought Daunt a dish of apple pie and poured thick cream over it. Jonathan lit a new candle at his table and lingered.

‘Can I tell you a story?’

‘I’m all ears. Tell me a tale.’

Jonathan looked into the dark corner where the stories came from, and his eyes betrayed a very great act of concentration. When he was ready, he opened his mouth and the words came out in a great flood:

‘Once upon a time, there was a man drove his horse and cart into the river – and he weren’t never seen again! – Oh, no!’ His face twisted and he flapped his hand in frustration. ‘That’s not right!’ he cried with good-natured annoyance at himself. ‘I missed the middle bit!’

Jonathan went to practise on someone else and Daunt ate Margot’s pastry and listened to one conversation and then another. Robin Armstrong’s tragic tale, the likeness of his hair to that of the child, the river gypsies, the instincts of a mother …

Beszant the boat-mender sat while others picked the story apart and put it back together again in a hundred different ways. Whether the child looked like the Vaughans or the Armstrongs, how she had been first dead then alive, these were mysteries he shook his head at, comfortable in his own ignorance. But where he did have knowledge, he applied it. ‘She ain’t Alice Armstrong,’ he said firmly.

They pressed him for an explanation.

‘Mother were last seen at Bampton, heading to the river, the little mite with her. ’Tis so, I believe?’

They nodded.

‘Well now, in all my life, and I’m seventy-seven, I ain’t never seen a body – or a barrel or as much as a lost cap – float upstream. Have you? Anyone?’

They shook their heads, every one.

‘Ah, then.’ He delivered his words with an air of finality, and for a fleeting, fragile moment, it seemed that one thing at least was securely tethered in this story that slipped through your fingers like water. But then one of the cressmen opened his mouth.

‘But before last solstice night, did you ever expect to see a girl what’s drowned come to life again?’

‘No,’ said Beszant, ‘I can’t say as I did.’

‘Well then,’ the cressman concluded sagely, ‘just ’cause a thing’s impossible, don’t mean it can’t happen.’

The philosophers of the Swan fell to thinking and very quickly to disputing. Does the occurrence of one impossible thing increase the likelihood of a second? It was a greater conundrum than they had ever known and they went at it with great thoroughness, leaving no stone unturned. Many bottles of ale were consumed and many headaches borne out of their efforts to elucidate the matter. They drank and they pondered and they drank and they discussed and they drank and they argued. Their thoughts eddied round, discovered currents within currents, met countercurrents, and at times they felt tantalizingly close to a breakthrough, yet for all the intensity of their debate, at the end of it they were none the wiser.

Partway through, Daunt, who had remained sober, rose and slipped unnoticed out of the inn and back to Collodion, moored a few yards upstream by the old willow. He still had work to do.

The Shortest Night

AT BUSCOT LODGE, the servants had carried their mistress upstairs to her bedroom and left her to the care of Rita and the housekeeper. Helena seemed unaware of the hands that undressed her and pulled a nightdress over her incessantly shaking body. Her skin was bloodless, her eyes stared at nothing, and though her lips twitched she neither spoke nor responded to speech. They lay her in her bed, but she did not sleep; instead she reared up at frequent intervals, reaching out as she had for the girl, as though the scene at the fair were being repeated here in her own house, over and over. Then there came great spasms of tears that racked her body and she cried out, wordless howls of horror and pain that reverberated through the house.

At last Rita managed to get her to take a sleeping draught, but it was mild and slow to take effect.

‘Can’t you give her something stronger? Distressed as she is …’

‘No,’ said Rita, with a frown. ‘I can’t.’

At last the concoction won out against Helena’s overstimulated mind, and she began to quieten. Even then, in the final moments before sleep overtook her, she made a motion as if to rise from her bed. ‘Where …?’ she mumbled as she blinked dazedly, and another word, ‘Amelia …’ But eventually her head was on the pillow and her eyes closed and the devastation of the day was erased from her features.

‘I’ll go and tell Mr Vaughan she is sleeping,’ Mrs Clare the housekeeper said, but Rita detained her for a few minutes first with some questions about Helena’s health in recent times.

When Helena woke, it was to painful remembrance of what had gone before, with no lessening of the pain or the agitation.

‘Where is she?’ she wept, in anguish. ‘Where is she? Has Anthony gone to fetch her home? I must go myself. Who has her? Where is she?’ But the body was too exhausted to put her desperate desires into action, she had not the strength to push away the blankets and stand unsupported; to have taken a boat and rowed to Kelmscott or taken the train to Oxford was utterly beyond her.

The enormity of her grief was so great it wore her out, and when weariness took over, she lay wordless on the pillow, her limbs unmoving, her eyes unseeing.

During one of these interludes, Rita took her hand and said, ‘Helena, are you aware that you are expecting a baby?’

Helena’s eyes slowly turned to hers, uncomprehendingly.

‘When we brought you home and put you in your nightdress, I couldn’t help noticing you are putting on weight again. And Mrs Clare tells me you have been eating so many radishes it has made you feel sick and she has been making you ginger tea. But it is not the radishes that are making you feel unwell. It is your pregnancy.’

‘It is impossible,’ said Helena, shaking her head. ‘My monthly signs came to an end when we lost Amelia. They have never restarted. So it cannot be as you say.’

‘It is not with the first bleeding that your readiness to conceive commences, but in the few weeks before. If in that time a baby starts, the signs will not have a chance to begin again. This is what has happened in your case. In about half a year you will be a mother again.’

Helena blinked. It took time for the information to sink in to a mind made turbulent with grief, but it finally happened, and then she exclaimed, ‘Oh!’ very gently and brought her hand to her belly and placed it there. A small smile pulled feebly at her lips, and the tear she shed was not the same kind of tear that had wetted her pillow before.

A faint frown crossed her face, and she said, ‘Oh!’ a second time, in puzzlement, as though, following her initial surprise, enlightenment had been shed on some dark and distant aspect of her mind.

With that she closed her eyes and fell into a deep and natural sleep.

Downstairs, Vaughan was standing in the dimness of his study, looking out of the window. He had not lit the lamps. He had not taken his jacket off. He had not moved, it seemed, for hours.

When Rita knocked and came in, she found Vaughan glazed, more than half absent, a man too enmeshed in his previous thoughts to attend to the present. ‘Yes,’ he told her in a hollow voice, when she said Helena was sleeping, and ‘No,’ when she asked whether he himself needed a draught to help him sleep. ‘Yes,’ he said, when she stressed that Helena must be preserved from any further shocks.

‘It’s particularly important,’ she emphasized, ‘now that there is a new baby on the way.’

‘Right,’ he said dully, leaving her uncertain whether he had actually taken the news in. Plainly he believed the conversation to be at an end, for he turned back to the window and returned to whatever it was that held his mind hostage.

Rita let herself out into the garden, by the doors whose new locks were now redundant, and went down to the river. The summer rain burst slackly on her shoulders in fat, warm drops, which seemed to contain double their weight of water. Though it was evening it was not yet dark, and the light fell on wet leaves and puddled paths, casting everything in glinting silver. The river’s gleam was lent a hammered finish by the incessant raindrops.

Rita felt a swell in her own throat. For hours she had been preoccupied with medical matters, had taken refuge in the demands and challenges of her work. Now that she was alone, sorrow welled up in her, and she allowed tears to join the raindrops on her face.

She had never once visited Buscot Lodge without seeing the girl. At every visit she had taken the child on her knee, or thrown pebbles with her into the river, or watched ducks and swans sail by, reflected in the water. When that little hand had reached for hers, she had pretended to herself that her pleasure in this gesture of trust was a small and unimportant thing. But when she had seen the tall woman with the spike for a nose swing the child away from the Vaughans and into the arms of Robin Armstrong, the instinct that had caused Helena to reach out imploringly to the girl had found an echo in her own breast.

Sobbing in a way that she scarcely recognized, Rita attempted to gather herself. ‘You are being very foolish,’ she addressed herself. ‘This is not like you.’ The stern words had no impact. ‘It’s not as if she were your child,’ she continued, but at these words her tears only redoubled.

Leaning against a tree trunk, Rita gave way to her feelings, but after ten minutes of bitter weeping there was no end in sight to her sorrow. She remembered the solace God had once brought her in the days when she had faith. ‘You see why I don’t believe in You?’ she addressed him. ‘Because at times like this I’m on my own. I know I am.’

Her self-pity did not last long. ‘This is no good,’ she exhorted herself. ‘Whatever’s the matter with you?’ She rubbed her eyes with violent energy, cursing the rain in language that would have scandalized the nuns, and picked up her pace, throwing herself into a headlong dash along the path, till the breathlessness of exertion replaced the heaving of emotion in her chest.

As she neared the Swan, the din of voices filled the air. The farmhands and the cressmen and the gravel-diggers were exhilarated by the day of festivity in a long season of hard work, and intoxicated too. The endlessness of the daylight gave rise to all sorts of excess, and regulars and visitors alike were making the most of it. Despite the rain, some were outside on the riverbank. Soaked to the skin, they imbibed, not minding – not even noticing – the rain that diluted the liquor, as they told each other rambling versions of the afternoon’s events.

Rita had no wish to be drawn into the throng. People had seen her leave the fair with the Vaughans, and if they saw her now, they would inevitably stop her and want the story. She had no intention of telling anyone what was the Vaughans’ private business, but getting that across to a crowd of curious drunks would be no easy matter. She turned up the collar of her cape, trying not to mind the rivulets of water it sent down her neck, and dipped her head so that her face was hidden. For the rest she would have to count on speed and the drunkenness of the crowd to get past unnoticed.

Because her head was down, she failed to spot one of the farmhands, relieving himself into the river. He turned, buttoning up rather haphazardly, and she almost ran into him. He was drunk, but not too drunk to apologize, ‘Pardon me, Miss Sunday,’ before he staggered off to his fellow drinkers. He was bound to talk, and her chances of getting beyond the inn unaccosted were slight.

‘Rita!’ she heard, and sighed, bowing to the inevitable. ‘Rita!’ the voice came again, low and urgent, and now she realized it did not come from the tables on the bank. It was from the river. There was Collodion, moored half concealed under the willow. And there was Daunt, beckoning her aboard. She reached the ladder, climbed the first rungs. His hand reached down, she put hers into it, felt herself hauled up and was aboard.

Below deck all the last boxes, bottles and photographic plates had been stowed away. The only sign of the business of the day was the paperwork on the table, where Daunt had been logging the day’s plates and takings. There was a glass of hock beside it; he took down a second glass, filled it and placed it in front of Rita.

They had last seen each other in the crowd that gathered to witness the scene between the Vaughans and Robin Armstrong. They had parted there when Daunt, seeing the tall woman divide the mass of spectators to depart, had taken off in pursuit.

‘Did you catch up with her?’

‘The pace she was moving, I couldn’t close the distance. I was weighed down.’ He gestured to the heavy box in which he carried extra plates. ‘She spoke to nobody. Stopped to look at nothing. Made directly for the far field, and when she got to the gate someone was waiting for her with a pony and trap. She climbed up and away they went.’

‘Back to her brothel at Bampton?’

‘Presumably. Most polite people call it a lodging house. For an unmarried woman raised in a convent, you have a remarkable frankness about such a place.’

‘Daunt, I spend a large part of my working life dealing with the consequences of those activities that take place between men and women and which polite language skirts around. If you knew half of what that job involves, you would understand why a mere word has no power to shock me. Bringing a child into the world is too bloody a thing to be photographed and you will never see it, but I – I see it all the time.’

Rita had not touched her wine, but she took the glass now and drank the contents in a single draught. As she did this, lids lowered, Daunt noticed the swelling and pinkness around her eyes.

‘You would make a good father, Henry Daunt. You will make a good father one day. They won’t tell you about the blood. You’ll be sent away, out of sight, out of hearing. By the time you are allowed back they’ll have cleared it all away. Your wife will look pale and you’ll think it’s because she’s tired. You won’t know her blood is being wrung out of the sheets and into your drains. The housekeeper will scrub away at the stains in the bedsheets till they look as innocuous as if someone spilt a cup of breakfast tea in bed about five years ago. There’ll be cloves and orange peel in the room so you won’t notice the smell of iron. If there is a doctor, he might advise you man to man not to attempt marital intimacy for a time, but he won’t go into detail, so you won’t know about the tears and the stitches. You won’t know about the blood. Your wife will know. If she survives. But she won’t tell you.’

He refilled her glass. She drank it.

Daunt said nothing.

He drained his own glass.

‘I know now,’ he said carefully. ‘Now that you’ve told me.’

‘Give me another, would you?’ she asked.

Instead of refilling the glass that she held out to him, he placed it on the table and took her hand in his. ‘This is why you don’t have children? Why you don’t want to have children? Darling—’

‘Don’t!’ She took a handkerchief from her pocket and blew her nose. ‘When your wife has her baby, send for me. I’m named after Saint Margaret, the patron saint of childbirth, remember. I’ll do my best for her. For the baby. And for you.’

She refilled her glass herself, and this time she did not drink it in a single gulp but took a little sip, and when she looked at him again the fury had gone out of her and she had gathered herself.

‘Helena Vaughan is pregnant,’ she told him.

‘Ah,’ he said nervously. And, ‘Ah,’ again.

‘That’s more or less what she said. “Oh,” and “Oh.”’

‘Are they … pleased?’

‘Pleased? I don’t know.’ She frowned at the table. ‘What’s going on, Daunt? What really happened this afternoon?’

She looked at him for an answer.

‘It didn’t seem real,’ he said.

She nodded. ‘The way Mrs Eavis delivered her lines. It sounded – rehearsed.’

‘And she made sure everyone heard.’

‘Robin Armstrong turning up at exactly the moment he did … Not a second earlier or later, just in time for her to grab the girl and pass her to him.’

‘Did you see the look she gave him, when he first arrived?’

‘Yes – as if she was expecting to see him—’

‘– but was relieved he was there—’

‘– a just-in-the-nick-of-time look—’

‘– but gone again before anyone could really pay attention to it.’

‘It was like something at the theatre.’

‘Orchestrated.’

‘Planned. Right up to Mrs Eavis’s departure, with her transport waiting for her in the lane.’

‘After you left in pursuit of Mrs Eavis, Robin Armstrong made a great show of emotion. Overwhelmed by tender feelings – “Alice, oh Alice,” too quietly to be heard by anyone other than the nearest onlookers.’

Daunt pondered. ‘You think it wasn’t genuine? Yet if it was said quietly, and not declaimed like Mrs Eavis’s speeches …?’

‘It made him more plausible, and he could count on it being overheard and broadcast. He’s a much more talented actor than Mrs Eavis.’

‘I heard what everyone else was saying about him. They were all convinced.’

‘They weren’t there when he pretended to faint when he first saw the girl.’

‘You read his pulse …’

‘It was as steady and unflustered as any pulse I’ve ever taken.’

‘But why pretend then?’

‘Buying himself thinking time?’

Daunt puzzled over it, but came to no conclusion. ‘What about Vaughan? Why didn’t he do something?’

Rita frowned and shook her head. ‘He’s in a peculiar state. It’s as if he’s absent from himself. I told him Helena is pregnant and he barely replied. He seemed unable to take it in. I wonder whether we’re wrong about it, Daunt. Perhaps he does believe the girl is Amelia, after all. He seems defeated.’

They sat in silence, and the river rocked beneath them, and the noise from the Swan carried raucous and unruly in the air.

‘We might as well finish this, eh?’ said Daunt.

Rita nodded, yawning. It was dark now. The day had stretched her thin, to the point where she felt the boundary of herself, her skin, dissolving into the atmosphere. Another glass and she might lose herself altogether. How she longed for the girl. She felt bereft. Daunt’s couch was there; she suddenly pictured herself stretched out upon it. Where would Daunt be in this fantasy? Before her imagination could answer the question, as Daunt uncorked the bottle for a last refill and was about to pour, Collodion dipped and tilted.

Rita and Daunt stared at each other in surprise. Someone had come aboard.

A knock at the cabin door. A woman’s voice, ‘Hello?’

It was one of the Little Margots.

Daunt opened the door.

‘I need to speak to Miss Sunday,’ she said. ‘I spotted you coming here, and then when Dad was took bad I thought … Sorry, Mr Daunt.’

Daunt turned back into the cabin, while behind him Little Margot ostentatiously looked in the other direction. Rita rose.

On her way out, she gave him a weary smile. “I’m sorry. About what I told you. It’s women’s business.’

He took her hand, might have raised it to his lips, but instead gave it a comradely squeeze and she was gone.

All knew that Joe was unwell, and nobody tried to delay Rita as she followed Little Margot up the bank and through the public rooms to Joe and Margot’s private quarters. The innkeeper lay on the hastily improvised bed in the room that was furthest from the river. His chest rose and fell in an unmusical struggle, but his gaze was calm, so calm that the noisy effort of his lungs might have belonged to another person altogether. His limbs lay in patient stillness. With a twitch of the eyebrow he communicated that his daughter could rejoin her mother at work, then, when they were alone, smiled his mild smile at Rita.

‘How many – more times – can I – do this?’ he asked between gasps for breath.

She didn’t answer straight away. It wasn’t a real question anyway. She put her ear to his chest and listened. She measured his pulse, assessed his pallor.

Then she sat down. She didn’t say, There’s nothing I can do, because this was Joe. He’d been keeping one step ahead of death for half a century. There was nothing about dying he didn’t know.

‘I reckon – a few – more months,’ he wheezed. He paused to concentrate on the job of siphoning oxygen out of the swampy air. ‘Half a year – maybe.’

‘Something like that.’

Rita did not look away. Part of her job was to help people face what was coming. Dying could be lonely. A nurse was often an easier person to talk to than family. She held his gaze with hers.

‘I’d have liked,’ – another inadequate breath – ‘a better summer.’

‘I know.’

‘I shall miss – Margot. The family. This world has – marvellous things – I shall miss –’

‘The river?’

‘There will – always be – the river.’

He closed his eyes, and she watched the arduous heaving of his frail chest, planning the draughts she could make and bring to Margot tomorrow to aid his suffering without weakening him further. He fell into a slumber animated by presences visible only to him. Once or twice he uttered words, mostly indecipherable, but she thought she heard river … Quietly … story.

After a time he opened his eyes, blinking as he surfaced.

‘Have you spoken to Margot?’ she asked.

His eyebrows told her no.

‘Wouldn’t it be better? Give her a bit of warning?’

The eyebrows indicated yes.

He closed his eyes, slipped back into sleep. She thought he might sleep longer this time, but as she was about to get up and slip out of the room, he opened his eyes again. He had the look he had when he was sinking.

‘There are stories you have never heard on the other side of the river … I can only half remember them when I am this side … Such stories …’

‘He’s very poorly,’ she told Margot. ‘I’ll bring you something tomorrow that will make him more comfortable.’

‘It’s this rain. He won’t pick up till the weather improves.’

A customer called for cider and she didn’t need to answer. When Margot came back, she said to Rita, ‘You look worn out yourself. The night is almost over and I bet you haven’t had a bite to eat since lunchtime. Sit here, where nobody can see you, and have a plate of something. You won’t be bothered and you can slip out the back afterwards.’

Gratefully Rita sat down to bread and cheese. The door was ajar. There was a great din of conversation and in it she heard Vaughan and Armstrong mentioned many times. She couldn’t think about it any more. Thank goodness for the gravel-diggers.

‘There is this fellow,’ she heard one say, ‘and he reckons – he reckons, I’m telling you – that humans, like you and me, are a kind of monkey!’ He explained Darwin as best he could, to the hilarity of his mates.

‘And I have heard another thing like that!’ cried another. ‘That men once had tails and fins and lived beneath the water!’

‘What? Under the river? I never heard such a thing!’

They disputed the matter back and forth, and the one who said it insisted that he had heard it in an inn ten miles upstream, and the other insisted he had made it up.

‘It can’t be,’ said another. ‘You’d ask Margot to fill your glass and all that’d come out’d be …’ he completed his sentence with an impression of underwater speech that tickled the others so much they all tried it. Very ingeniously, they then found the trick of blowing bubbles through the liquor left in their glasses. There was great laughter, much spluttering, and finally the sound of someone enjoying himself so much he fell off his chair, and floundered like a landed fish on the stone flags.

Rita passed her plate to the Little Margot in the kitchen, let herself out the back door and crept away. It was nearly morning. She might sleep for an hour.

Great Lakes Underground

LILY HAD SEEN the events of the afternoon from the back of the crowd, her view so obscured by the broad shoulders of working men and the summer hats of their companions that she had been able to make it out only with the help of her neighbours. The taller spectators broadcast what they had heard and the sharp-eared echoed what they had heard, but poor Lily, once she had struggled against the departing throng to the place where the encounter had taken place, found rain falling on an empty arena.

She went to the parsonage and burst into the parson’s office in a great flurry of words and tears.

‘Take your time, Mrs White,’ he counselled, but she would not, and eventually he made out the gist of the story, and eventually she fell silent and breathed again.

‘So the child has been recognized by the deceased Mrs Armstrong’s landlady, is that it? And she is with young Mr Armstrong now?’ He shook his head, frowning. ‘If what you say is true … I don’t know how poor Mrs Vaughan will take it. Are you quite certain of this, Mrs White?’

‘As sure as day is day! I saw it. I heard it. Or as good as. But tell me, Parson, how can a young man like that have the care of a little girl? He won’t know. Suppose he don’t know how to sing her a lullaby when she wakes in the night? And does he have a guard on the fireplace? A lot of young men don’t, you know. What about her doll? Did she take that with her?’

The parson did his best, but it was an anxiety no mortal could soothe, and Lily was still distressed as she left the parsonage. Walking back along the riverbank she was prey to the very worst thoughts and memories. All the while Ann had been with the Vaughans, Lily had been able to take refuge in thinking of the child’s well-being whenever she felt afraid, for the child was with Mrs Vaughan, but that comfort was lost to her now. Ann had been placed into the arms of a young man – a widower, without a wife – so who would take care of her now? Mothers could be trusted, but … The past came back to her with all the more force for having been held at bay for six months. She remembered the very beginning of it all.

‘Do you find it lonely living without a father?’ her mother had asked one day. ‘Do you think it would be nice to have a father again?’ Sometimes when adults asked questions they already knew the answer they wanted you to give, and Lily liked to give the answer that made her mother smile. Her mother was smiling on the front of her face as she asked the question, but Lily could see the worry behind. Lily felt her mother’s scrutiny as she thought about her answer.

‘I don’t know,’ she’d said. ‘It’s nice, isn’t it, just us?’

Her mother had seemed relieved. But some time later the question had returned, so Lily thought she must have got it wrong the first time. She watched her mother’s face, wanting only to please her, and tried again. ‘Yes, I would like a daddy.’

The look on her mother’s face then was one that was kept mostly on the inside, and Lily was no closer to knowing if it was the right answer.

Soon after that a man came to their rooms. ‘So, you are little Lily,’ he’d said, looming over her. His teeth seemed to slope backwards into his mouth, and after the first glance she knew she did not like looking at his eyes.

‘This is Mr Nash,’ her mother explained nervously. In response to a glance from the man, she rushed on, ‘He is going to be your new father.’ She looked to him for approval and he nodded, without smiling.

The new father stood aside.

‘This,’ he said, ‘is Victor.’

Revealed behind him was a boy, shorter than Lily but older. His nose was stunted, his lips so meagre they were all but invisible. His eyebrows were as pale as his skin and his eyes were slits.

A hole opened in the boy’s face. He is going to eat me, was Lily’s first thought.

‘Smile at your new brother,’ her mother’s voice prompted.

Hearing a note of fear, she glanced up, caught a complicated to-and-fro of glances between her mother and the new father. It seemed to enmesh her mother in a tangle she was unable to escape from. Is it my fault? Lily wondered. What did I do wrong? She didn’t want to get things wrong. She wanted to make her mother happy.

Lily turned to Victor and smiled.

When Lily arrived back at Basketman’s Cottage, she knew before she even opened the door. The river smell was never so strong it could cover the fruity, yeasty odour, nor could the rain wash it away.

‘I had to go to the parsonage,’ she began, but before she could get her excuse out, the first blow landed on her upper arm. The next found the softness of her belly, and as she turned away from his fists, it was her back and shoulders that took the attack. Mr White had battered her too, but he was a drinker, and though he was big he had not had the expertise of Victor nor half his strength. His blows had been weighty, but in comparison to this, lax, flabby. She’d been able to dodge Old Whitey’s poorly launched punches, deflect his knuckles, and when he did land a blow home, the bruises had faded in a week. Victor, though, had been beating her for nearly thirty years. He knew every one of her tiny repertoire of feints and ruses, teased her into moving one way so he could land a blow the other; he went about it with cold concentration, unmoved by pleas or tears. All she could do was let him.

He never touched her face.

When it was over, she lay on the floor until she heard him pull up a chair and sit down.

She got to her feet, straightened her dress.

‘Are you hungry?’ She tried to make her voice as ordinary as possible. He didn’t like a fuss afterwards.

‘I’ve eaten.’

That meant he’d have left nothing for her.

At the kitchen table, he exhaled with an air of satisfaction she recognized.

‘Have you had a good day, Victor?’ she asked timidly.

‘A good day? A good day? I should say so.’ He nodded with a secret air. ‘Things are coming on nicely.’ She hovered on her feet. She would not sit down unless he told her to, but there being no food she could not occupy herself with preparing a meal.

He glanced towards the window.

Will he go now? she hoped.

But it was summer solstice night. Even in this rain, people would be about at all hours. Would he want to stay there all night?

‘River’s up. Scaring you silly, I expect. Giving you nightmares, is it?’

In fact, the nightmares had ceased since Ann had arrived at the Swan. Her sister couldn’t be in two places at once, she supposed. But she needn’t tell Victor that. It would give him satisfaction to think she was still suffering from the visitations that had tormented her for so long. She nodded.

‘Fancy being afraid of water. It’s everywhere. Places you can see it. Places you can’t. Places you know about it and places you don’t. Funny thing, water.’

Victor was a man who liked knowing. One of the best ways of avoiding his torments was to be ignorant about something and let him put you straight. Now he was enjoying his expertise and wanted to explain at length.

‘There’s as much water hidden underground as there is above,’ he told her. ‘Enormous caverns of it, deep underground, vast as cathedrals. Think of that, Lily. Think of that church you like so much, full right up of water, deep and dark and still. Imagine that amount of water but underground, like a lake. All kinds of water down there, there is.’

She stared. It couldn’t be true! Water underground? Whoever heard of such a thing?

‘Fountains and springs and wells,’ he went on, watching her sharply through his narrow eyes. She felt her heart pounding. Her throat was dry. ‘Ponds too. Brooks and rivers and marshes.’ She felt her knees weaken. ‘And lagoons. Bet you never even heard of lagoons, have you, Lily?’ She shook her head, pictured awful creatures, made of water, like dragons that spewed water instead of fire.

‘It’s a marvellous fact of nature, Lily. There we go about our business on the surface of the earth, but beneath our feet, down there,’ – with a gesture to his feet – ‘there are great lakes underground.’

‘Where, exactly?’ Her voice was full of fear and she was trembling.

‘Why, anywhere. Here, maybe. Right under your cottage.’

She quivered in horror.

His eye travelled up and down her body.

It might not be over yet, she thought. He might want the other thing too.

He did.

Two Strange Things

AND HOW DID the night end over in Kelmscott, at the Armstrong farm? They sat up late, later than the children had ever stayed up before. There were candles on the table and all were in their nightgowns except Armstrong, but no one had any thought of going to bed. The girl sat on the lap of the eldest daughter, and the other children gathered round smiling to pet her and offer their favourite toys as Armstrong and Bess looked on. The boys and girls were enchanted, exclaiming at her every movement, every blink of her tired eyes. The youngest, only a couple of years older than the girl herself, offered his new wooden toy bought that day at the fair, and when she grasped it in her little fingers, exclaimed joyfully, ‘She likes it!’ The older girls had brushed her hair and plaited it, washed her face and hands, and dressed her in one of their outgrown nightdresses.

‘Is she staying?’ they asked a dozen times. ‘Is she going to live with us now?’

‘Is Robin coming home to be her daddy?’ another little voice piped up, but with a note of worry about such a thing.

‘We’ll see,’ said Armstrong, and his wife cast a sidelong glance at him.

Coming away from the fair, as soon as they had put some distance between themselves and the crowds, Robin had put the child into his mother’s arms and gone his own way back to Oxford, giving no clear account of his intentions or when they might expect to see him at the farm again. There had not yet been a chance for Armstrong and Bess to consult each other about the events of the day out of the hearing of the children.

The child’s eyes began to close and the children hushed around her. On the brink of sleep, her fingers loosened their grip on the little toy and it fell to the floor with a bump that woke her again. Looking dazedly around her, her face pulled into a weary frown, and before she could open her mouth to cry, Bess lifted her away and said, ‘Come on. Bed, all of you!’

There was some arguing over the child, all wanting to have her sleep in their room, but Bess was firm: ‘She’ll sleep with me tonight. If you have her with you, nobody will close their eyes.’

She set the older girls to making sure the little ones got to bed, and took the child to her own bedroom. Bess sang softly to her as she laid her down and tucked her in, and in moments the girl’s eyes fluttered and she inched into the shallows of sleep.

Bess lingered over the bed, searching for a hint of her own features in the child’s. She sought Robin in the sleeping face. She looked for echoes of her other children there. She would not think of him, the one who had fathered Robin before Armstrong had married her. She had buried his face years ago, and would not disinter it now.

She remembered the letter that had started it all, the torn fragments in Robin’s pocket that she and Armstrong had pieced so unsuccessfully together. ‘Alice, Alice, Alice,’ she had repeated then. The name was on the tip of her tongue tonight, but she hesitated to pronounce it.

When the child’s light breathing told her she was deeply asleep, Bess crept away.

Armstrong was in the armchair by the unlit hearth. There was an air of unreality about the scene, she in her nightclothes, he in his outdoor jacket, candles in the dark but no fire, and the muggy softness of the day still lingering. Her husband looked grave as he turned the little wooden figurine in his hands abstractedly.

She waited, but he did not speak, lost in his own thoughts.

‘Is it her?’ she asked, after a time. ‘Is she Alice?’

‘I thought you might know. A woman’s instinct, or your Seeing eye.’

She shrugged, touched the patch over her eye. ‘I’d like it to be her. She’s a dear little thing. They have taken to her.’

‘They have. But what about Robin? Is he up to something?’

‘If I know Robin, yes, more than likely. But you are usually his champion – what makes you think so?’

‘That woman. Mrs Eavis. She led me there, to that spot, Bess. I’m as sure as it is possible to be. She deliberately let me see her, then she led me on a mad chase all around the fair, till she came upon the Vaughans, and so timed it that I arrived just right to have the whole scene played out before me.’

He fell to pondering, and Bess waited, knowing he would share his thoughts with her when he had them ordered.

‘What did she have to gain by acting as she did? It is nothing to her whose child it is. Money is what governs that woman, so somebody, somewhere is paying her. Somebody paid for her to go away on her mysterious travels, so she was unavailable to identify the child one way or the other, and somebody has produced her now.’

‘And you think that person is Robin? But … I thought you said he didn’t care about the child?’

He shook his head in confusion. ‘I did say so. It is what I thought.’

‘And now?’

‘Now I don’t know what to think.’

He brooded for a long minute and Bess was about to say it was late and they should get at least a few hours’ sleep, when he spoke again. ‘There was another strange thing happened today.’

He was staring at Freddy’s wooden toy, a carved figurine of a pig.

‘I went to see that photography stand at the fair. I thought we might have a photograph taken, all of us together, here at the farm. I was looking at the photographs for sale there – some were of fairs in recent times – and look what I found.’

He reached into his capacious farmer’s pocket, took out the small photograph in the frame and handed it to Bess.

‘A pig! Well, I never. And it can tell the time!’ She squinted to make out the lettering on the placard beside the animal. ‘And it knows what age you are! Fancy that.’

‘Look closer. Look at the pig.’

‘A Tamworth. Like ours.’

‘Don’t you recognize her?’

She looked again. Bess was familiar with the pigs, but still, to her one pig was very like another. She knew her husband though.

‘It’s not …? Can it be …?’

‘It is,’ he said. ‘It’s Maud.’