Once Upon a River

What Happened Next

TWO DAYS AFTER the summer fair Daunt returned to Oxford, where he found himself distracted from his regular work by the oddity of the dramatic change in circumstances of the child. He was uneasy about it for several reasons, and one, he realized, was that he missed her. It was ludicrous – all the while she had been at the Vaughans’ he had seen her only once, for the photographs. Yet there had been a connection between them: Daunt’s role in saving the girl had forged a link between himself and the family, created a door that he could knock at and count on being opened at any time. He had photographed the girl with the Vaughans and found himself more than halfway to friendship with the family. For a short time he had enjoyed the expectation of seeing the child he had rescued grow up, had imagined he would see her change from a little girl to a bigger one and then to adulthood. Now all that was gone and he felt bereft. He was reminded in his sorrow of that moment of violent recognition at the Swan when he had so unwisely and painfully pulled his swollen eyelids apart to see her. He remembered how powerful had been the urge to claim her. His rational mind had since got the better of him, but reason was no balm for this loss.

When he was not thinking about the girl, he thought about Rita, and that was no better. If the girl had done one thing, it was to bring home to him how much he wanted a child. His wife had been the disappointed one when their marriage had not resulted in children; his own longing had been late in coming, but he felt it now.

On the wall of his room over the shop he kept a collection of his favourite photographs. They were not framed, but simply tacked up. He gazed at them now in painful perplexity. Were there ways of avoiding pregnancy? He had a notion that there were, but that they might not be altogether reliable. And in any case, since he wanted children … Rita couldn’t have made her feelings about the matter plainer, and though he had been surprised – he had seen her tenderness towards the girl, assumed too much – he knew he would be doing her an injustice to try to make her change her mind. Her knowledge of her own mind was what he admired about her. To expect her to bend to his wishes would be to expect her to be other than herself. No, she would not change, so he must.

One by one he took the photographs down, indexed them according to his system and filed them in the drawers in the shop. He would not forget her easily – he had exposed his gaze to her face for too long, and time had fixed it. It would not even be possible to avoid her in person – he could not disentangle himself from the story of the girl, in which Rita was also involved. But he could at least refrain from seeking to spend time alone with her. He resolved that there would be no more photographs. He would have to teach himself not to love her.

The consequence of this wise resolution was that the very next morning he left his assistant in charge, went upriver in Collodion with his camera and knocked at her door.

She met him with a weak smile. ‘Do you have news of her?’

‘No. Have you heard anything?’

‘No.’

She was pale and there were shadows under her eyes. He set up a standard three-quarter-profile seated portrait, then went to prepare the plate. When he returned, a quick assessment of the light told him it would want twelve seconds. Rita settled herself in position and offered her face to the camera. In her usual direct fashion, she hid nothing. Her gaze brimmed with grief. It would be a magnificent portrait, a portrait of her feelings that would be at the same time a portrait of his own feelings, but he felt none of his usual pleasurable anticipation.

‘I can’t bear seeing you so unhappy,’ he said, as he inserted the plate holder.

‘You are feeling no better than I am,’ she said.

He arranged the drape over himself, exposed the glass and whipped the lens cap away, having never felt more miserable behind a camera in his life.

One – Swiftly and without allowing light into the camera he ducked down …

Two – and out of the black cloth …

Three – and ran around the camera …

Four – where he took Rita in his arms …

Five – and said, ‘Don’t cry, darling …’

Six – though his own cheeks were wet too …

Seven – and she lifted her face to him …

Eight – and their lips found each other, until …

Nine – remembering the photograph, he ran …

Ten – back to the camera …

Eleven – under the black cloth, being careful of the light, and …

Twelve – replaced the cover over the plate.

They took the plate to Collodion and in the darkroom developed an ectoplasmic scene. They both stared sombrely at the faded figure of Rita overlaid with a blur of light and shadow, a sense of transparent action and silken flurry, motion without substance.

‘Is that the worst photograph you have ever taken?’ she asked.

‘It is.’

Somehow, in the red light they found themselves in each other’s arms. They did not so much kiss as press lips hard to skin and mouth and hair; they did not caress, but grasped. Then, as if it were the act of a single mind, they drew apart.

‘I can’t bear this,’ she said.

‘Nor can I.’

‘Would it make it easier if we didn’t see each other?’

He tried to match her for honesty. ‘I think it would. In the end.’

‘Well, then. I suppose …’

‘… that’s what we must do.’

Then there was nothing more to say.

She turned to go and he opened the door. In the doorway she stopped.

‘What about the Armstrong visit?’

‘What Armstrong visit?’

‘The photographic session at their farmhouse. It’s in your diary. I booked it on the day of the fair.’

‘The girl is there.’

She nodded. ‘Take me with you, Daunt. Please. I’ve got to see her.’

‘What about your work?’

‘I’ll put a note on the door. If anybody needs me, they’ll have to come and find me there.’

The girl. He’d thought he wasn’t going to see her again, and yet there was an appointment in his diary … The world seemed suddenly less unbearable.

‘All right. Come with me.’

Thruppence

‘THERE’LL BE TIME later to work out the terms of our arrangement,’ the fortune-teller had said. ‘I’ll be in touch.’ For six weeks there was no sign, but Vaughan knew better than to think he might be reprieved. The blow had to fall, and when at last a letter in an unfamiliar hand appeared on a tray at his place at the breakfast table, he was almost relieved. The letter summoned him to an isolated spot on the river, early one morning. When he arrived, he thought he was the first there, but as soon as he had dismounted to stand on the muddy path, a figure emerged from the undergrowth, a slight man in a long coat that was too wide for him. He wore a hat low over his face.

‘Good morning, Mr Vaughan.’

His voice gave him away: it was the fortune-teller.

‘State what it is that you want,’ Vaughan said.

‘It’s more about what you want. You do want her, don’t you? You and Mrs Vaughan?’

Helena was very quiet these days. She seemed pleased about the baby, talked from time to time about plans for their lives to come, but her liveliness had gone. Future life and past losses coexisted in her, two halves of a single experience, and she bore her grief and her hope in a subdued manner.

It wasn’t only Helena who was grieving. He missed the girl too.

‘Are you suggesting I can get her back? Robin Armstrong has a witness,’ Vaughan pointed out. ‘Not the best of witnesses, it’s true, given her profession, but if I were to go against him in a court of law, I dare say you would knock me down again pretty fast.’

‘He could be amenable.’

‘What are you implying? That the man might be induced to sell his own child?’

‘His own child … Well, she might be. Or she might not. He don’t care one way or the other.’

Vaughan did not answer. He was more and more disconcerted by this encounter.

‘Let me spell it out for you,’ the man began. ‘When a man’s got something he don’t give tuppence about and another man wants it enough, thruppence will usually do it.’

‘So that’s it. If I give Mr Armstrong thruppence, along the lines of your suggestion, he will relinquish his claim. Is that what you have come to tell me?’

‘The thruppence was just by way of illustration.’

‘I see. Something rather more than thruppence, then. What’s your master’s price?’

The man’s voice instantly altered. ‘Master? Ha! He’s not my master.’ Beneath the brim of the hat the meagre mouth twitched as if he found something privately comic in the turn the conversation had taken.

‘But you are doing him a service in carrying this message for him.’

The man gave the smallest possible indication of a shrug. ‘You might see it as a service to yourself.’

‘Hmm. You’ll be taking a percentage, I presume?’

‘I stand to benefit from the arrangement – as is only natural.’

‘Tell him I’ll give him fifty pounds if he gives up his claim.’ Vaughan was fed up with the whole business and turned to walk away.

The hand that came down on his shoulder was like a vice. It gripped him and spun him round. Again he stumbled and this time, rising, caught a glimpse of the man’s face: an unfinished-looking nose and lips, his eyes two slits that narrowed as soon as they knew they’d been seen.

‘I hardly think that’s going to do it,’ the man said. ‘If you want my advice, I would say something in the region of a thousand pounds might be more in order. Think it over. Think of the little girl that Mrs Vaughan misses so much! Think of new life to come – you have no secrets, Mr Vaughan, not from me! Information swims to my ears like fish to the net – and let us pray that Mrs Vaughan keeps well and suffers no sad shocks. Think of your family! For there’s some things you can’t put a price on, Mr Vaughan, and the most important is family. Think on that.’

The man turned sharply and headed away. When Vaughan peered to see beyond the curve in the path, the way ahead was empty. He had turned in somewhere across the field.

A thousand pounds. Exactly what he had paid in ransom money. He ran through the value of the house and land and the other property and figured out how it could be achieved. To purchase a lie. A lie that was still a lie and might be uncovered at any time. A lie that might be purchased by instalments, with this only the down payment.

His thoughts eddied, too fast to grab hold of, conclusions always out of reach.

Vaughan took the other direction to walk home. When he came to his own jetty he walked out on it, and sat down with his feet dangling over the edge. He put his head in his hands.

Once he might have been able to see his way through all this, taken action to arrive at a clean solution, when he was himself, when he was a better man, when he was a father. But now, he was no more able to direct the current of his life than a piece of debris can control the stream that carries it.

Vaughan stared into the water and the old yarns about Quietly came to mind. The ferryman who takes you to the other side of the river, when it is your time to go, and when it is not, returns you safely to the bank. How long, he wondered, did it take to drown?

He looked at his feet, so close to the jetty edge. Beyond and below, the water surged, black and endless, without thought and without feeling. He sought his own reflection in the water, but it gave him no mirror in the darkness and his own mind saw a face in the water. Not his own, but his lost daughter’s. He remembered the formless face that had come to precision in Daunt’s darkroom, liquid running over it, and in the black mirror of the water he saw Amelia.

Vaughan crouched over the edge of the jetty, rocking forwards and back on his feet as he wept.

‘Amelia.’

‘Amelia.’

‘Amelia.’

With every repetition of her name he rocked more violently. Is this how it ends? he wondered. Calibrating the forward and backward motion of his body, he knew he was always in control. With every forward motion he could be certain the return was coming. But there was momentum. It was building. If he did nothing, the degree of oscillation would be reached where the return would be outside his control. Why not? he thought. I don’t have to do anything except allow it. Forward and back. Forward and back. Forward and back. Edging nearer to where it would be forward and – down – to the point where the laws of physics would take over and the body surrender to gravity. But not yet. A few more to go. Forward and back. Forward – nearly there now, a fraction of an inch away – and back. Forward—

The void took him, and as he tipped into it, in his head a voice said, You can’t go on like this.

Hearing it, his arm shot out. His body was claimed by gravity, but his hand shot out for something – anything! – and closed on the rope tied to the jetty post. He fell, with a jolt to the heart and a wrench to the shoulder. Swinging one-handed, feeling the rope flay his palm as he slipped, his free hand swooped to grasp it while his legs flailed wildly in search of a toehold. Agonizingly, hand over hand, he heaved the weight of his body – his desperate, living body – on to the jetty, and when he arrived, collapsed on to it and lay there, gasping for breath while pain radiated from his shoulder.

You can’t go on like this, Mrs Constantine had said. She was right.

Retelling the Story

HE TURNED INTO the road with a kind of relief. The turbulence in his head that had plagued him for so long narrowed to a single objective. It was not a plan, nor a thought that brought him here. It was scarcely his own volition, for he had given up decision-making and abandoned will, too exhausted to do anything but succumb to the inevitable. He was here because of something more fundamental than that. Vaughan was not a man to bandy about words like fate and destiny, but he would not have denied that it was something of that kind that drew him to the gate, the front path and the pristinely painted front door of Mrs Constantine.

‘You said I could come back. You said you could help.’

‘Yes,’ she said, glancing at his bandaged hand.

A vase of roses now scented the room where the jasmine had been, but the cat was in the same place. When they were seated, Vaughan began.

‘They found a drowned child in the river,’ he began. ‘At winter solstice time. She lived with us for half a year. You might have heard of it.’

Mrs Constantine made a non-committal face. ‘Tell me,’ she said.

He told. Riding to the Swan after his wife, finding her there with the child, Helena’s certainty, his own equal but opposing certainty. The other claimants. Taking the child home. The passage of time, and with it the gradual erosion of his certainty.

‘So you started to believe she was your child, after all?’

He frowned. ‘Almost … Yes … I’m not sure. When I came to see you before, I mentioned that I couldn’t remember Amelia’s face.’

‘You did, yes.’

‘When I tried to remember her, it was this child that I saw. She doesn’t live with us any more. She lives with another family. A woman turned up at the summer fair who said she was not Amelia. She said she was Alice Armstrong. That is what people seem to believe now.’

She waited in a way that invited him to say more.

His eyes held on to hers. ‘They are right. I know they are.’

He was here now. He had come at last to the place he had avoided for so long. But Mrs Constantine was there.

His words came in a smooth stream. The story slipped evenly from his lips. It began much as it had the first time, with drowsy slumber shattered by his wife’s cry in the night, but his words were no longer the dusty containers of desiccated meaning they had been before. They were freshly forged things, alive with significance, and they carried him back in time to the night it began, to the night of the kidnap. The haste to reach his daughter’s room, the shock of the open window and the empty bed. Rousing the household, the search through the night. He told of the message that came at dawn. He told of the slow hours till the appointed time.

He took another sip of water and it barely stopped the flow of words.

‘I rode to the place alone. It was not an easy journey – there was not a star in the sky to light my way and the road was rough and pitted. At times I got off and walked alongside my horse. I was not always sure where I was, for the landmarks I was familiar with in daylight were lost in the night. I had to judge by my sense of the time that had elapsed and by the feel of the terrain beneath my feet – and by the river, of course. The river has its own light, even at night. I was familiar with its contours and every so often I recognized a certain bend or angle that told me where I was. When I saw that the night shimmer of the water was crossed by a darker band, I knew I was at the bridge.

‘I dismounted. I could see nothing and no one – though there might have been a dozen men standing motionless a few yards away and I would not have known it.

‘I called out, “Hoy there!”

‘There was no answer.

‘Then I called, “Amelia!” I thought it would reassure her, to know I was near. I hoped they had told her I was coming, that she was going home.

‘I listened hard for an answer or, if not an answer, a sound: a step or a shifting or breathing. There was only the lapping of the river, and underneath it that other sound of the river, that low, deep noise that you don’t usually notice.

‘I stepped on to the bridge. I crossed. At the other side, I placed the ransom money in its bag by the pier stone, according to the note’s instructions. As I rose, I thought I heard something. Not voices, and not steps, something less distinct than that. My horse heard it too, for he gave a whinny. I stood for a moment, wondering what was to happen next, and realized that I should move away from the pier stone to give them a chance to take the money. Presumably they would want to have it in their hands, feel the weight of it, before releasing Amelia. I stepped back on to the bridge. I picked up speed, ran over – and the next thing I knew, I was flat on my face in the dark.’

The account that emerged from Vaughan’s mouth came all by itself. He called on no stock phrases, no rehearsed words. His telling had its own energy and speed, and with them it brought the past into the room, its dark and its chill. He shivered, and his eyes took on the glazed look of those who are seeing the vision of memory.

‘The aftershock of the fall left me dazed. It was a moment before I got my breath back. I shifted to see whether I was injured, wondered whether someone had been lying in wait to cosh me. I got to my knees, expecting another blow to dash me down again, but none came and I knew then I had merely fallen. I tried to collect myself. Waited for the world to settle. It was only a little while later that I gathered myself to stand, and as I did so my leg brushed against something. I realized straight away that this soft but solid bundle was the thing that had tripped me up. I groped to get some sense of what it was, but in my gloves I could not tell. I took off my gloves and felt again. Something wet. Cold. Dense.

‘I was afraid. Even then, before I struck the match, I feared what it could be.

‘When I had a bit of light, I found that she was not looking at me. That was a relief. Her face was angled away, and she was staring fixedly towards the river. It was the strangest thing, for her eyes had the shape of Amelia’s eyes. She was dressed in Amelia’s clothes and her feet were in Amelia’s shoes. Her features were like Amelia’s too. Amazingly like. And yet it seemed to me, quite plainly, both then and for some time afterwards, that she was not Amelia. Not my child. How could she be? I knew my child. I knew how her eyes alighted on me, how her feet danced and shuffled, how her hands reached and fidgeted and grasped. I took this child’s hand in mine and it did not tighten around my fingers the way Amelia’s would have. Something glinted. Amelia’s necklace with the silver anchor was round her neck.

‘I picked her up, this child who could not – must not – be Amelia. I found a place where the bank was not too steep and scrambled down to the water’s edge. I carried her into the water and when I was waist deep I laid her down. I felt the river take her from me.’

Vaughan paused.

‘It was a nightmare, and that was the only way I could think of to end it. My daughter, my Amelia, was alive. You do see, don’t you?’

‘I do.’ Mrs Constantine’s eyes, sad and unfaltering, held his.

‘But what I know now – what I have known for a long time – is that it was Amelia. My poor child was dead.’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Constantine.

Now the banks of the river burst and Vaughan felt the water stream from his eyes. His shoulders shook and he rocked forward and back and his weeping seemed endless. The tears slipped from his eyes on to his cheeks, they ran down his face, they trickled from his jaw to his neck and seeped into his collar, they dripped from his chin and dampened his knees. He raised his hands to his face and the tears wetted his fingers, then his wrists and cuffs. He wept and wept until he was drained.

Mrs Constantine was there with her vast and kind gaze that had accompanied him all the while.

‘When the girl from the river came home with us, I had strange thoughts. Sometimes I wondered …’ he shook his head in embarrassment, but a man could tell Mrs Constantine anything without fear of being found ridiculous. ‘Sometimes I wondered, what if she wasn’t dead? What if I put her in the river and she floated away and came to her senses? What if she drifted somewhere – to someone – and they kept her for two years and then – I don’t know how – or why – was found floating in the river again, and so came back to us? It’s quite impossible, of course, but thoughts like that … When one wants an explanation …’

‘Tell me about Amelia,’ she said, after a pause. ‘What was she like in life?’

‘What kind of thing do you want to know?’

‘Anything.’

He thought. ‘She was never still. Even before she was born she was a wriggler, that’s what the midwife said, and when she arrived and was put in her cot, her arms and legs made waving motions – as if she would swim into the air and was surprised she couldn’t. She used to clench and stretch her little hand and when she saw her fist turn into a palm with fingers there would be a look of sheer amazement on her face. She was quick to crawl, my wife said, and it made her legs strong. She liked to cling to my fingers and I raised her up, feet on the floor so that she could feel the ground supporting her. We couldn’t always be holding her hand while she tottered about. One day I had some papers to go through in the drawing room and she came patting my ankles for attention, wanting to be lifted to her feet, and I was too busy. And then, suddenly, a little hand pulled at my sleeve and there she was, upright at my side. All by herself she had pulled herself up using the chair leg and her face was all pleasure and surprise! Oh, you should have seen her! A thousand times she toppled over, but never cried, just upped and tried again. And once she’d found her feet she was never satisfied to sit again.’

He felt himself smiling at the memory.

‘Can you see her now?’ Mrs Constantine’s voice was so low and soft that it barely rippled the air.

Vaughan saw Amelia. He saw the strand of hair that went the wrong way, the indistinct colour of her lashes and their perfect curl, the speck of sleep dust in the corner of her eye, the precise curve of her cheek and the flush of the skin over it, the padded swell of her lower lip, the stubby fingers and their fine nails. He saw her not here in this room and not now in this hour, but in the infinity of memory. She was lost to life, but in his memory she existed, was present, and he looked at her and her eyes met his and she smiled. He met her eyes again, felt the meeting of their gaze, father and daughter. He knew that she was dead, knew that she was gone, but here, now, he saw her, and knew that this far – and this far only – she was restored to him.

‘I see her,’ he said, nodding, smiling through tears.

His lungs were his own again; the weight of his head no longer made his shoulders ache. The beat of his heart in his chest was steady. He did not know what the future held, but he knew it existed. He felt a stirring of interest in it.

‘There is to be a new baby,’ he told Mrs Constantine. ‘At the end of the year.’

‘Congratulations! That is good news.’ He felt the pleasure of it all over again in her response.

He took a great, deliberate lungful of air, and when he had expelled it, put his hands on his knees and made ready to rise.

‘Oh,’ exclaimed Mrs Constantine mildly. ‘Have we finished?’

Vaughan arrested the movement and wondered. Was there something else? It all came back to him. How could he have forgotten?

He told her about the fortune-teller at the fair, the opportunity to buy Robin Armstrong’s interest in the child, the implied threat that his knowledge of Amelia’s death might be shared with his wife.

She listened closely. When he came to an end, she nodded. ‘That isn’t what I was expecting when I asked whether we were finished. I was remembering that when you first came to me there was a particular difficulty you wanted to resolve …’

He thought back to their first meeting. It was such a long time ago. What had prompted him to come then?

‘Relating to your wife …’ she went on.

‘I asked you to tell Helena that Amelia was dead.’

‘That’s right. You invited me to name my price, I seem to remember. And now you are considering paying a stranger a very large sum of money indeed to stop him telling Helena the very same thing.’

Oh. He sat back in his chair. He hadn’t thought of it in that light.

‘What I am wondering, Mr Vaughan, is how much it would cost if you were to tell your wife what happened that night?’

Later, when he had drunk the clear liquid that tasted of cucumber and rinsed his face in the water that was neither too hot nor too cold, and dried it again, he said farewell to Mrs Constantine. ‘This is what you do, isn’t it? I understand now. I thought it was smoke-and-mirrors stuff. Trickery. You do bring back the dead, but not in that way.’

She shrugged. ‘Death and memory are meant to work together. Sometimes something gets stuck and then people need a guide or a companion in grief. My husband and I studied together in America. There is a new science over there: it can be explained in complicated ways, but you won’t go far wrong in thinking of it as the science of human emotion. He got a job here in Oxford, at the university, and I apply my learning in the field. I help where I can.’

He left her remittance on the hall table.

On leaving the house, Vaughan felt an unexpected coolness about his knees and collar. It was apparent too at his wrists. His clothing was damp still where his tears had trickled into his cuffs and on to his collar and dripped on to his knees. It’s amazing, he thought. Whoever would think a human body could have so much water in it?

Photographing Alice

COLLODION CARRIED RITA and Daunt downriver to the farmhouse at Kelmscott, and on the way their conversation – about the Vaughans, the Armstrongs, but mostly about the child herself – effectively masked their constraint in dealing with one another. But when each one knew the other was looking elsewhere, when they were sure of not being seen, they cast quick glances of love and sorrow, bailing out the excess feeling that threatened otherwise to capsize them.

At Kelmscott, the younger children were waiting for them on the bank. They waved as soon as they saw the smart navy-and-white houseboat decorated with its vivid yellow-orange flourishes. Rita looking out avidly, was quick to spot the girl. She was with them, waving; then another child, a boy, the youngest one and closest to her in age, took her hand and they ran together back to the farmhouse.

‘Where has she gone to?’ Daunt asked, distracted by her absence as he tried to concentrate on mooring.

‘Back to the house,’ Rita said anxiously, but then, ‘Here she is! They just went to fetch the older ones.’

All the Armstrong children made themselves useful in sensible ways, from the big boys who listened carefully to Daunt before lifting the heavy equipment, to the little ones who were all given something light and unbreakable by Rita, which they then carried with a great sense of self-importance over the field and to the house. The unloading was completed in record time.

Rita was always conscious of the girl. Whatever she was doing she had one eye on her, noticing how the other children treated her affectionately, how the older ones were patient with her and the smaller ones went slowly in order not to leave her behind. It occurred to her to wonder whether the little girl had lacked the companionship of other children at the Vaughans’, and couldn’t help feeling that the kindness of these children must be good for her.

Bess showed them into the dining room, and there was more busyness as Armstrong and his big sons moved the table and arranged chairs according to Daunt’s instructions.

‘We don’t want a photograph of me,’ Bess said. ‘Why, I’m here all the time, if anybody needs to know what I look like!’

But Armstrong insisted and the children backed him up, and soon the photographs were all set up: the first was to be of Armstrong and Bess; they would take the whole family portrait later.

‘Where is Robin?’ fretted Armstrong. ‘Half an hour ago he should have been here.’

‘You know what young men are. I told you not to count on him,’ murmured his wife.

Robin’s contrition, which had so affected her husband, had not removed her own doubts about her son. ‘He was always better in words than in acts,’ she reminded him, but when Armstrong chose to forgive – as he always did – she did not press the matter. Then, seeing her eldest son with the child in his arms at the fair, she discovered to her own surprise that hope had rooted faintly in her heart. She kept an eye on it, with the painful curiosity of a gardener who watches the frail progress of a plant that cannot possibly thrive. The absence of her son’s visits to the child did not pass unnoticed. Armstrong had written to let Robin know the day and time of the photography session, as though his presence were a thing he could now take for granted, but there had been no answer, and she for one was not unsurprised at his absence.

‘We’ll take you and Mrs Armstrong first,’ said Daunt. ‘That will give him plenty of time, if something has held him up.’

He seated Bess on the chair and placed Armstrong behind her, then slid the plate into position while he explained again the need to keep still. When all was ready, he ducked under the dark cloth and removed the cover as Rita stood behind the camera and encouraged the pair of sitters to look consistently in the one direction. In ten seconds the Armstrongs had time to feel all the things that people felt when they were having their photograph taken for the first time: abashed, stiff, nervous, significant, and rather foolish. But half an hour later, when they were looking at the finished article, developed and washed and dried and framed, they saw themselves as they had never seen themselves before: eternal.

‘Well …’ said Bess wonderingly, and it seemed that she was going to complete the sentence, but she fell into silence instead, while her eyes flickered all over the photograph of a neat middle-aged woman wearing an eye patch and a dark, stern man behind her with one hand on her shoulder.

Meanwhile Armstrong looked over her shoulder at the photograph and told her how beautiful she looked in it, but his eyes returned time and time again to his own grave face. His mood seemed to turn sombre as he looked at himself.

The interest in the photograph had distracted them all, but eventually it was time to prepare for the second group and Robin had still not come. No horse had been heard on the cobbles, no door opening in the hall. Armstrong went to find the maid anyway, to see whether he might have come in quietly at the back, but no. He was not there.

‘Come now,’ Bess said firmly. ‘If he’s not here, he’s not here, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Living in Oxford as he does, he can go to Mr Daunt’s studio any time and have his photograph taken. It will be a hundred times easier for him.’

‘But it would have been such a thing to have all the children together! And there is Alice!’

Indeed, there was Alice.

Bess sighed and took her husband’s arm encouragingly. ‘Robin is a man now, and not a child to do as his parents tell him. Come, let us make the best of it. Here are the others, all six of them, eager and happy to take their place alongside us and Alice. Come.’

She coaxed Armstrong into taking his place in the grouping. All the children shuffled a little to the left or right to fill the space left for their missing brother.

‘All set?’ Daunt asked, and Mr Armstrong gave one last glance in the direction of the window, just in case.

‘All set,’ he answered with a sigh.

For ten seconds Armstrong, his wife and their six younger children stared into the eye of the camera, of time, of the future, and cast themselves into immortality. Rita, watching from the corner of the room, noticed that the one they called Alice fixed her gaze on a point still further off, beyond the camera, beyond the walls, beyond Kelmscott, somewhere so far-flung it might be beyond eternity.

While Daunt was developing the photograph, Mrs Armstrong and her daughters prepared the table for tea, and the boys changed into their work clothes to feed the animals. Rita found herself alone with Armstrong just as the sun came out and the rain stopped.

‘Would you like to see the farm?’ he invited.

‘I would.’

He picked up the little girl and hardly seemed to feel her weight on his arm as they went outside.

‘How is she?’ Rita asked. ‘Do you find her well?’

‘I’m not sure I can tell you. Ordinarily I am pretty good at knowing living creatures, whether they be human or animal. It’s a matter of observation. With chickens you can see restlessness in their feathers. A cat can tell you a lot by the way it breathes. Horses – well, they’re a bit of everything. Pigs look their meaning at you. This little one is hard to know. A mystery, aren’t you, piglet?’ He gave her hair a fond stroke as he looked tenderly at her.

The girl glanced at him, then at Rita, not with any particular sign of recognition, but as though she had never seen her before. Rita reminded herself that this had always been the case, even at the Vaughans’ where she had been a regular visitor.

As they walked, Armstrong pointed out things that might interest Rita or the child, and the girl looked where she was bid and in between times rested her head on the man’s broad shoulder and drew in her gaze, to contain herself in her own inner world again. Rita sensed that behind the farmer’s talk of the farm, his mind was turning over some private unhappiness, and took it to be the absence of his son. She did not make idle conversation, but walked along beside him until her quiet presence encouraged him to unburden himself.

‘A man like me gets used to recognizing himself from the inside. The inside is what I am familiar with. Nor am I much given to studying my outward appearance in the looking glass. It is a curious thing, to see oneself in a photograph. It is a meeting with the outer man.’

‘True enough.’

When Armstrong spoke again, it was to ask a question: ‘You do not have children, I think?’

‘I’m not married.’

‘May it come to you. I have known no happiness to compare with my wife and my children. Nothing means so much to me as my family. You will have guessed something, I suppose, of my story?’

‘I don’t like guessing. But I know what they say at the Swan, that your parents were a prince and a slave girl.’

‘That is fanciful, but there is a little truth in it. My father was a rich man, my mother a black servant. They lived in the same household when they were very young, not much more than children, and I was conceived out of love and ignorance. I suppose you could say I was lucky, my mother too. Most families would have thrown her out, but my father owned his part in it. He wanted, I believe, to marry her. Such a thing was impossible, of course. But the family was a compassionate one, and they did their best. My mother was cared for until I was born and weaned, then she was moved to another town and suitable work was found so that she could meet her needs respectably until she married – which a few years later she did, to a man of her kind. I was placed in a home for children who, for one reason or another, could not live with their families but had some money behind them, and later sent to school. A rather good one. Thus I was raised on the edge of two families, one rich and one poor, one black and one white, and was never at the heart of either. I grew up largely outside of family life. Most of my early memories are of school, but I knew both my parents. Twice a year my father would come and take me out of school for a day. Once I remember climbing up into the carriage where he was waiting for me and being very surprised to find another boy, rather smaller than me, already there. ‘What do you make of this little chap, then, Robert?’ my father said to me. ‘Shake hands with your brother!’ What a day that was! I remember a place – I have no idea where it was, to be honest – with grass lawns. I threw a ball endlessly to my brother and eventually he managed to catch it once or twice and how he danced for joy at that. I shall never forget it. Later on, while my father stood below to catch us if we should chance to fall, I showed him where to put his feet to get up into a tree. It was not a very big tree, but then he was not a very big boy. We were both of us too young to know what difference lay between us, but I started to realize it when we returned to school and I climbed down from the carriage and the two of them went off – together – to a place called home. I don’t know what happened after that. I never saw that boy again, though I know his name and that there were other brothers and sisters who followed him. Perhaps my father was not supposed to encourage us to know one another and was found out. Perhaps he just thought better of it. Whatever the reason, I never saw my brother again. I don’t suppose he even remembers me. I cannot even be sure he knows of my existence. So much for my father’s family.

‘I was not altogether a stranger in my mother’s house. I was allowed sometimes to make brief visits in the holidays. I have good memories of those times. Her home was full of talk and movement, laughter and love. She was as good a mother to me as she dared to be; more than once she put her arms around me and told me she loved me, though I was so unused to such treatment that my tongue tied in knots and I scarcely knew how to embrace her in return. Her husband was not an unkind man, either, though he was always telling my brothers and sisters to mind what they said in my presence. “Robert’s not used to your scallywaggery,” he used to say whenever the chatter grew too boisterous. I never wanted to come away from that house. I always thought that the next time I went would be the time I would be allowed to stay, and every departure was a disappointment. Eventually I noticed that with every visit I was less and less like my brothers and sisters, not more. There came a time when these holiday visits – already infrequent – stopped altogether. It was not a sudden end. There was no word to say it would not happen again. Just several holidays in a row when the visit didn’t happen and the dawning knowledge that it was over. The borderline between myself and my brothers and sisters had become a solid wall.

‘When I was seventeen my mother sent a message asking for me. She was dying. I went back to the house. It was much smaller than I remembered. I entered her bedchamber and the room was full of people. My brothers and sisters were already there, of course, sitting at the bedside, kneeling on the floor to be close to her. I could have asked to stand beside her and hold her hand for a moment, and if she had been in possession of her senses and known my presence I’m sure I would have, but it was too late for that. I stood just inside the door, while my siblings sat and knelt at the bedside, and when she had breathed her last one of my sisters remembered me and said that perhaps Robert would read – “for he do read so beautiful,” she said – so I read some verses from the Bible in my white man’s voice, and once that was done there seemed to be no reason to remain. I asked my stepfather on my way out whether I could help in any way and he said, “I can look after my children, thank you, Mr Armstrong.” He had always called me Robert before, but I suppose I was a man now, and he gave me that name instead, the name that came from nowhere, plucked from the blue, belonging to neither of my parents, but mine alone.

‘I attended her funeral. My own father came with me. He arranged that we would slip in quietly at the back and be gone before the other mourners turned to leave.’

Here Armstrong paused. A cat had emerged from the barn, and on seeing the farmer it trotted over, paused a yard and a half from the man to crouch on its haunches, and then leapt like a jack-out-of-the-box to land on his shoulder.

‘What a spectacle,’ said Rita, as the cat settled and rubbed its cheek against his jaw.

‘She is a quaint and affectionate creature,’ Armstrong said with a smile as they walked on, the cat balanced like a pirate’s parrot on her owner’s shoulder.

‘I did not belong, you see, Miss Sunday. In neither place. In neither heart. There we have it. I know what it is like to be on the outside. Don’t misunderstand me, this is not a complaint but an explanation, though I have been very prolix before getting to the point. Forgive me, these are things a man speaks of very infrequently and there is a certain – I don’t know quite what to call it … pleasure? Relief, at any rate, in unburdening oneself.’

Rita met his look and nodded.

‘My parents were good people, in their hearts, Miss Sunday. Both of them, I feel sure, loved me so far as they were permitted to. The fact is, they were not free to love me as they would have wished. My wealth separated me from my maternal siblings and my skin separated me from my brothers and sisters on the other side. I was no doubt a difficulty and an embarrassment to my stepmother and stepfather alike. Nonetheless, I am and have always been extraordinarily aware of my good fortune. Why, even before Bess I knew I was lucky.

‘You see, I know what it is not to belong, and when Robin was born, I saw myself in him. More in him, if truth be told, than in any of the others, strange as it may seem. The others are mine in the sense that the world understands. They are my flesh and blood and I love them. I love my boys and girls more than life itself. Seeing them together, I see my mother’s children, the pleasure they take in each other and in their parents. It gives me joy to know I have been able to make this life for them. But when I see Robin – who is not my own, not in the same way, and that is my good Bess’s misfortune and not her fault – well, I see a child on the edge of things. I see a child who could so easily have fallen between the cracks in families. Who could have been lost. And I determined – not on the day he was born; no, long before that – to hold him dear in my heart. To cherish him as a child needs to be cherished. To love him as every child deserves to be loved. My wish was always to ensure that he would always know he belonged in my heart. For if there is one thing I cannot bear, it is the suffering of a child.’

Armstrong fell silent, and when Rita glanced at his face, she saw that the man’s cheeks were glazed with tears.

‘Such feelings do you credit,’ she said. ‘You are the best of fathers. What I have seen of your family today tells me that.’

Armstrong looked into the distance. ‘A hundred times that boy has broken my heart. And he will do it a hundred times more before my days are done.’

They had come to the pig pens. Armstrong fished into a pocket and took out a few acorns. The young pigs came to him with friendly grunts and snuffles and he dealt out acorns and patted flanks and scratched behind ears.

Now Daunt hailed them. He was returning from Collodion with the finished and framed photograph of the Armstrong family. He showed it to Armstrong, who nodded and thanked him.

‘But Mr Daunt, there is another of your photographs I must speak to you about.’

From his pocket he drew out a small frame and turned it to show Rita and Daunt.

‘The fortune-telling pig! You brought it on the day of the fair.’

‘So I did, Miss Sunday.’ Armstrong looked grave. ‘You will remember too that on seeing this pig I was overcome with emotion. Mr Daunt, I know that pig. Her name is Maud. She was my pig. This pig here’ – he indicated the sow daintily eating acorns – ‘is her daughter Mabel, and that little one there, her granddaughter Matilda. Three years or so ago, without a sound, she was taken from this very pen, and from that day I never saw her again until your photograph came to my attention.’

‘She was stolen?’

‘Stolen … Kidnapped … Whatever word you will.’

‘Is it an easy thing, to steal a pig? I wouldn’t want to try and move one.’

‘I don’t know why she didn’t complain. A pig can squeal to wake the whole house if she wants to. There were red stains between here and the road – at first I feared it was blood, but in fact it was raspberry stains. She had a great fondness for raspberries. I suppose that is how they enticed her away.’

He sighed heavily, pointed to a corner of the picture.

‘Now, what do you see here? I believe I see a shadow. I have looked and looked, and it seems to me that it is possible that this shadow belongs to a person, and that this person was standing to the side, out of the way, while the photograph was being exposed.’

Daunt nodded.

‘This photograph is nearly three years old, and I understand that it might not be possible after such a long time to remember who that person was. And perhaps it was not even the person who had charge of Maud at all, but some other person. But I have been thinking that if you were a remembering sort of man, you might be able to tell me something about the owner of this shadow.’

As he spoke, Armstrong looked at Daunt with an expression that had more expectation of disappointment in it than hope.

Daunt closed his eyes. He consulted the images he had stored in his mind. The photograph had primed his memory.

‘A small man. Shorter than Miss Sunday here by eight inches. Slim build. The most striking thing about him was his coat. It was oversized, both too long for him and too broad across the shoulders. I wondered at the time why he wore it on a bright summer day when everyone else was in shirtsleeves. I fancied he might be ashamed of his stature and had hopes the largeness of his garment might convince the eye that there was a matching man inside it.’

‘But what did he look like? Was he old or young? Fair or dark? Bearded or clean-shaven?’

‘Clean-shaven, and his chin was narrow. More than that I cannot say, for he wore his hat so low over his face that he was close to being invisible.’

Armstrong peered at the photograph, as if by dint of staring he could see beyond the edges of the frame and find the short-statured stranger.

‘And he was accompanying the pig?’

‘He was. There is only one other thing I can tell you about him that might be at all significant. I asked him whether he would stand by the pig for the photograph, and he would not. I asked him again, and still he said no. In light of what you have told us today about the theft of your pig, it is telling, is it not, that the man was so adamant he would not be photographed?’

The littlest of the Armstrong girls now came running behind them and called out that tea was ready. She asked for her niece to be put down, and Armstrong put the girl on to her two feet on the ground. Hand in hand, niece and diminutive aunt ran ahead indoors, the older child moderating her speed for the little one.

‘Excuse the informality,’ said Armstrong, ‘but we have tea in the kitchen. It saves time and we can all eat in our work clothes.’

Indoors a large table was set with bread and meat and there were different kinds of cake, and a wonderful smell of baking in the air. The big children put butter on bread for the little ones, and the littlest of all was sat on the knee of her biggest uncle-brother and allowed to have the best of everything. Armstrong himself was intent on making sure that everybody, child and guest, had everything they needed, and in passing plates here and there across the table, was in the end the only one with an empty plate.

‘Serve yourself, my dear,’ prompted Mrs Armstrong.

‘I will in a minute, only there is Pip, who cannot reach the plums …’

‘He would sooner starve than see his children go without,’ she told Rita as she pushed the plums nearer to her son and with the other hand placed bread and cheese on her husband’s plate, though he was now outside the kitchen door pouring milk into a saucer for the cat.

One of the Armstrong girls interrogated Rita on the topic of medicine and ailments and was so quick to follow and understand that Rita turned to the girl’s mother and said, ‘You have a nurse in the making here.’ At the other end of the table, the children were full of questions for Daunt about photography and boating and the quadricycle.

When only crumbs were left, Daunt noticed a lightening in the room and put his head out of the door.

‘Is the darkroom still set up?’

Rita nodded.

‘Could we make the most of the light, do you think? Mr Armstrong, a photograph of the farmer at work, perhaps? Will your horse stand still for ten seconds?’

‘She will if I am with her.’

Fleet was brought into the courtyard and saddled up. Daunt kept a close eye on the sky. Armstrong mounted.

‘What about that little cat?’ Rita wondered aloud. ‘Where has she got to?’

The cat was found and brought and lifted to sit purring on her master’s shoulder.

At this Armstrong’s children, understanding the nature of the photograph, went to fetch the dog. The elderly dog amiably allowed herself to be led to a spot beside Fleet’s forelegs, where she sat upright and looked directly at the camera like the most obedient subject. And then, when all was in place, Armstrong started.

‘Matilda!’ he exclaimed. ‘We cannot leave Matilda out!’

His middle son swivelled and set off at great speed.

The cloud that had hovered immobile in the sky began to drift slowly. Daunt watched its gradual movement and looked anxiously over to the corner where the boy had disappeared. As the cloud picked up speed in its passage across the sky, he opened his mouth to speak: ‘I think we’ll have to—’

Back the boy came, at a run, with something under his arm.

The cloud drifted faster.

The boy passed a wriggling bundle of pink flesh up to his father.

Daunt pulled a face. ‘We can’t have movement.’

‘She’ll not move,’ said Armstrong. ‘Not if I tell her.’ He lifted the piglet and murmured something into her ear while the cat eavesdropped, her head on one side. He tucked the piglet into the crook of his arm with her rear tucked under his elbow, and the entire tableau – man, steed, dog, cat and piglet – fell into an attitude of perfect stillness for fifteen perfect seconds.

Rita waited with Bess in the kitchen while the Armstrong boys helped Daunt carry the kit back to Collodion. Bess’s eye kept returning to the photographs, and Rita looked over her shoulder. The child sat on the lap of one of the older Armstrong girls. Around them the other five children had been unable to repress their smiles and beamed steadily at the camera. The newcomer to the family stared at the lens. Her eyes, which in life were so perplexing with their indefinable and evershifting green-blue-muddy-greyness, were simplified here by the absence of colour, and Rita was troubled, as she had been troubled by the photograph of Amelia in the boat. The child had a resigned, withdrawn air in the photograph that was less visible in person.

‘Is she happy, Bess?’ she asked doubtfully. ‘You’re a mother. What do you think?’

‘Well, she plays all right, and runs about. She has a healthy appetite. She likes going down to the river and the big ones take her for a walk every day so she can look around and splash about.’ Bess’s words said one thing, her tone implied another. ‘But later in the day she gets so tired. Much more tired than she ought to be, as if everything is twice as tiring for her as for another child. The light goes out of her, she gets so weary, the little dear, and instead of sleeping, all she can do is cry. There’s nothing I can do to console her.’

Bess fidgeted with her eye patch.

‘What is your eye condition? Is it something I could help with? I’m a nurse – I’d be happy to take a look.’

‘Thank you, Rita, but no. I put my eye away a long time ago. It doesn’t trouble me so long as I don’t look at people with it.’

‘Why ever not?’

‘Sometimes I don’t like what I see with it.’

‘What do you see?’

‘What people are really like. When I was a girl I thought that everybody could see into the heart of other people. I didn’t realize that what I could see was hidden to everybody else. People don’t like it, having their true selves known, and it got me into trouble more than once. I learnt to keep what I saw to myself. I only understood what a person of my age could understand, mind, and that was some protection, I suppose, but as I grew I liked it less and less. Too much knowledge is a burden. When I was fifteen I sewed my first patch and I’ve worn one ever since. Of course, everybody thinks I’m ashamed of my eye. They think I am concealing my ugliness from them, when in truth it is their ugliness I am hiding.’

‘What an extraordinary ability,’ said Rita. ‘I am intrigued. Have you ever taken your patch off and tried it since those days?’

‘Twice. But I have thought of it often since we had this addition to the family. I have thought of taking off my patch to See her.’

‘To find out who she is?’

‘It won’t tell me that. It will only tell me what it feels like to be her.’

‘It would tell you whether she is happy?’

‘It would.’ Bess looked at Rita in uncertainty. ‘Shall I?’

They looked out of the window where the girls were playing with the cat. The Armstrong girls were laughing and smiling as they pulled a piece of twine for the cat to leap at. The child eyed their antics listlessly. Every so often she tried a smile, but it seemed to wear her out, and she rubbed her eyes.

‘Yes,’ said Rita.

Bess stepped into the yard, and returned with the child. Rita took the girl on her lap and Bess sat down opposite her. She slid her eye patch over so that it covered her good eye, keeping her face fully averted from the girl until she was ready. Then she tilted her head and fixed the girl in the line of sight of her far-seeing eye.

Bess’s hand flew to her mouth and she gasped in dismay.

‘No! The poor little girl is so lost! She wants to go home to her daddy. Oh, the poor child!’ Bess seized the little girl and rocked her, pouring out all the comfort she was capable of. Over her head, she spoke to Rita. ‘She does not belong with us. You must take her back to the Vaughans. Take her home today!’

Truth, Lies and the River

‘WHAT DOES YOUR medical science make of Mrs Armstrong’s Seeing eye?’ Daunt asked from the helm.

‘You are the optical scientist. What do you say?’

‘There is no eye, human or mechanical, that sees the souls of children.’

‘Yet here we are, taking this little girl back to the Vaughans on the basis of Bess’s reaction. Because we trust her.’

‘Why do we trust a thing neither of us believes?’

‘I didn’t say I don’t believe it.’

‘Rita!’

‘Perhaps it is this way: Bess was ill as a child; her limp and her eye set her apart from the other children. She had more opportunities to observe – and more time to consider what she observed. She became an outstandingly good judge of character, and learnt what it is to live alongside other human beings and to know more about them than they do themselves. But understanding other people’s sorrows and wishes and feelings and intentions as closely as she does must be wearing. She found her gift uncomfortable, persuaded herself that it was her eye that had the talent and drew a veil over it.

‘She was already more than half aware that the child wasn’t happy. I suspected as much myself. So did you, I think?’

He nodded.

‘She is very experienced with children. When she took her patch off, she allowed herself to see what she already knew.’

‘And we trust her judgement, which is why we are taking the child back to Buscot Lodge.’

The girl was on the deck, holding the hand rail and watching the water. At every bend in the river she looked ahead. When she had scanned every vessel in sight, her eyes returned to the water. She seemed to look not so much at the surface, rendered opaque by the motion of the water displaced by Collodion’s passage, but through it and beyond.

They came to the boathouse at Buscot and moored. Daunt lifted the child down; without hurry and without surprise, she recognized the way back to the house and led them there.

The maid gasped with surprise and rushed them straight to the drawing room.

When they entered, the Vaughans were sitting close together on the sofa, his hand on her belly. At the intrusion, they looked up. The aftermath of powerful feeling was still present in Vaughan’s tear-stained face, Helena’s wide-eyed pallor. Rita and Daunt had felt themselves to be at the heart of a great event as they brought the child back to Buscot Lodge in Collodion, and to come into the house and know that something momentous had been happening here too was disconcerting. But it was true: something vast had come and gone in this room, so grave that the very air vibrated with the knowledge that nothing would ever be the same again.

But now, seeing the child, Vaughan rose to his feet. He took a step, and another, and then ran to the door to sweep the girl into his arms. He held her at arm’s length as though he could scarcely believe she was there, then placed her on his wife’s lap. Helena placed a hundred kisses on the little girl’s head, called her ‘darling’ a thousand times, and the pair, man and wife, laughed and cried at once.

Daunt answered the question that the Vaughans were too overcome to ask. ‘We’ve been photographing the Armstrongs this afternoon. They are certain she’s not Alice. She belongs here, after all.’

Vaughan and Helena exchanged a glance in which they agreed something silently together. When they turned back to Daunt and Rita, they spoke as one:

‘She is not Amelia.’

They sat on the bank. It was better to tell such stories close to the river than in a drawing room. Words accumulate indoors, trapped by walls and ceilings. The weight of what has been said can lie heavily on what might yet be said and suffocate it. By the river, the air carries the story on a journey, one sentence drifts away and makes room for the next.

The child pulled her shoes off and stood in the shallows, carrying on her usual business with sticks and stones, pausing every once in a while to glance up- and downriver, while Vaughan told Daunt and Rita what he had told Helena, and before her, Mrs Constantine.

When he fell silent, having told all, Helena said, ‘I knew she was dead. The night he came home without her, I knew. It was on his face. But I could not bear to know it, and he did not say it, and between us we pretended it was not so. We colluded. We made a falsehood together. And it almost destroyed us. Without the truth, we could not grieve. Without the truth, we could not console each other. In the end, I was so tormented by the deceitful hope I clung to, I was ready to drown myself. Then the girl came, and I recognized her.’

‘We were happy,’ said Vaughan. ‘Or rather, Helena was happy, and I was happy that she was happy.’

‘Poor Anthony’s lie was the greater, but it was not so enduring as my own. I feasted on the sight of the girl. I buried all the painful truth and saw only her.’

‘And then Mrs Eavis said, “Hello, Alice!”’

‘It was not Mrs Eavis who changed things. It was you, Rita.’

‘Me?’

‘You told me there was going to be another baby.’

Rita remembered the moment. ‘You said, “Oh,” and then you said, “Oh,” again.’

‘One “oh” for the new baby. The other for the knowledge that came with it, that this little girl had never stirred in my womb. I knew then that she was not Amelia. Though I missed her quite as much as if she had been. She brought me back to life, and brought me back to Anthony, and I can’t help but love her, our little mystery child, whoever she is.

‘She changed us. We have wept for Amelia and we will weep again. There are rivers of tears waiting to be shed. But we will love this little girl like a daughter, and she will be a sister to the baby that is to come.’

They walked back to the house, the Vaughans ahead with the child who was neither Amelia nor Alice between them. She seemed to have accepted her return to Buscot Lodge, as she had accepted her departure from it.

Rita and Daunt fell behind as they followed.

‘She can’t be Lily’s sister,’ Daunt said in a low voice. ‘That still doesn’t make sense.’

‘Then whose is she?’

‘She’s no one’s child. So why shouldn’t the Vaughans have her? They love her. She can have a good life with them.’ There was a note in his voice that Rita recognized, for the same regret and longing rested in her own breast. She remembered the night she had fallen asleep in a chair at the Swan with the sound of Daunt’s breathing in the room and the child sleeping on her lap, her ribcage rising and falling in harmony with her own. I could keep her, had been the thought that had drifted into her then and never left. But it was no good. She was an unmarried woman with a job. The Vaughans were much better placed to care for the child. She must content herself with loving her from a distance.

Rita took a short breath, expelled it, and with determination turned her mind to other things. She considered the implications of what Vaughan had just told them and shared her thoughts with Daunt in a murmur. ‘Whoever it was that kidnapped Amelia …’ she started.

‘… also killed her,’ finished Daunt in the same undertone.

‘They can’t be allowed to get away with it. Someone must know something.’

‘Someone always knows something. But who? And what do they know? And do they even know the significance of what they know?’

Struck by an idea, Daunt stopped. ‘There might be a way …’ He scratched his head doubtfully.

They caught up with the Vaughans and Daunt set out his idea.

‘But will it work?’ Helena asked.

‘There’s no way of knowing.’

‘Unless we try it,’ Vaughan said.

The four of them stood in front of the house. Mrs Clare the housekeeper, who had heard them coming, opened the door, then, when nobody moved, closed it again.

‘Shall we?’ Rita asked.

‘I can’t think of any other way,’ Helena said.

‘Well, then,’ Vaughan said, turning to Daunt. ‘How would you begin?’

‘With the dragons of Cricklade.’

‘Dragons?’ Vaughan looked confused, but Helena knew what Daunt was referring to.

‘Ruby’s grandmother!’ she exclaimed. ‘And Ruby.’

The Dragons of Cricklade

CRICKLADE IS A town stuffed full of stories. As they passed the church on the quadricycle, Daunt explained some of them to Rita.

‘According to legend,’ he said as they made their way through the town, laden with all the photographic equipment, ‘if a person is unlucky enough to fall from the tower, his friends and family will be diverted from their grief by the spectacle of a stone effigy of their loved one springing naturally from the ground where he fell. I rather regret I have so slim a chance of photographing that.’

They did not stop at the church but headed north, and on the road leading out of the village towards Down Ampney kept a lookout for a thatched cottage with beehives.

‘You must go, please,’ Helena had begged Rita. ‘Daunt will never get anything out of Ruby by himself. She’ll trust you. Everybody does.’

So here she was, sitting behind Daunt among the boxes as they bumped and jolted along the country roads, keeping her eyes peeled. ‘There,’ she pointed, spotting the distinctive tops of beehives behind a hedge.

A white-haired woman was in the garden, making her way on tottering legs towards the hives. At the sound of Rita’s greeting she turned transparent eyes in their direction. ‘Who’s that? Do I know you?’

‘My name is Rita Sunday and I’ve come to buy honey. You must be Mrs Wheeler. I have Mr Daunt here, a photographer. He would like to talk to you about dragons for his book.’

‘A book? I don’t know about that … But I don’t mind telling you about the dragons. I might be ninety but I can remember it as if it was yesterday. Come and sit here, and we’ll have bread and honey while you ask your questions.’

They sat on a bench in a sheltered corner and the woman went to the door and spoke briefly to someone inside. When she returned, she told them about the dragons. She was a child of three or four when the dragons had come to this very cottage. It was the first time they’d been seen in Cricklade for nearly a hundred years, and nobody had seen them again since. She was the only living person in Cricklade today who had seen them. She had woken with a cough, heat in her throat, and seen flames in the hole in the ceiling where there ought to have been only thatch. ‘I got out of bed and went to the door, but I could hear the dragons roaring outside on the landing so I didn’t dare open it. I went to the window instead, and there was my father looking in – he had climbed up into the branches of the tree outside, despite them smouldering and being ready to burst into flame at any minute, and he smashed the glass with his foot and reached in and lifted me out. It was a scramble getting down to the ground, and when we got there, the neighbours took me out of his arms and laid me on the ground and rolled me over and over. I couldn’t think what they were doing! But my nightdress was on fire, you see, though I didn’t know it at the time, and they rolled me to smother the flames.’

The woman delivered her story tranquilly, as though it had happened so long ago it belonged to another person altogether. From time to time, when they asked a question, her pale, candid eyes turned benevolently in the direction of whoever spoke to her, though it was plain she could not see. A thin girl with a pinched look brought a tray to the table and set out slices of bread, a dish of butter and a jar of honey with a spoon. She gave an unsmiling nod to the visitors and went back to the house without raising her eyes.

‘Shall I butter the bread?’ Rita offered, and Granny Wheeler said, ‘Thank you, dear.’

‘My grandmother kept her honey in there,’ she nodded at the stone outbuilding, ‘in a great big canister as big as a bath, and she took the top off and dropped me in it, stark naked, and that’s where I stayed for the rest of the night. There was no honey to sell that year, for nobody wanted to eat it after I had sat in it up to my neck.’

‘And did you see the dragons? The ones you heard behind the door? What I would give to have a photograph of a dragon – a rich man I’d be!’

She laughed. ‘You’d have better things to do than stand about taking photographs if you saw them! Yes, I saw them. I was sitting in the honey when I saw them fly away. Hundreds of them, there were.’ She looked up as if she could still see them now. ‘Great flying eels, picture that and you will have it about right in your mind’s eye. No ears and no eyes, that I could see. No scales, nor even any wings to speak of. Not a bit like any dragon I ever saw in a picture. Just long and dark and sleek and quick. They were twisting and writhing and the sky was so full of them that to look up at them all was like staring into a pan of boiling ink. Now how do you like my honey?’

They finished eating and the old woman reminisced some more about the night of the dragons.

‘Look up there!’ She pointed to the roof. ‘I can’t see it no more, my eyes aren’t good enough, but you can see it. The dark marks over the window.’

It was true, there were scorch marks just beneath the level of the thatch.

‘That would make a fine detail in the photograph,’ Daunt suggested. ‘Yourself just here, next to the hives, and the place where the fire was in the background. There will be sky in the picture too – where the dragons were.’

With very little reluctance Granny Wheeler was cajoled into appearing in the photograph, and while Daunt set up, Rita continued talking to her.

‘You must have been badly burnt?’

Granny Wheeler rolled up her sleeve and showed her arm. ‘That’s what I’m like all down my back, from my neck to my waist.’ A large area of skin was discoloured, taut and unlined.

‘This is most unusual,’ Rita said. ‘Such a large area to be burnt. You haven’t had any trouble with it since?’

‘Oh, no.’

‘Because of the honey? I use honey when my patients are burnt too.’

‘Are you a nurse?’

‘Yes, and a midwife. I work a few miles downstream. At Buscot.’

The woman started. ‘Buscot?’

There was a pause. Rita swallowed a piece of bread and honey and waited until, tentatively, the old woman went on.

‘You might know something about the child that went missing there two years ago …’

‘Amelia Vaughan?’

‘That’s the one. They said she came back – but now I’ve heard it might not be her after all. What do they say about it now? Is it Amelia or not?’

‘A woman did come forward who appeared to recognize the child as another little girl, but the other family came to think she was not theirs, so she is back with the Vaughans again. Nobody knows who she is really, but she is not Amelia.’

‘Not Amelia! I did so hope … For the sake of the Vaughans, but also for the good of my own family. My granddaughter was nursemaid to the Vaughans. She has had no end of trouble since that little child was took. All manner of things have been said about her. Nobody who knows her believes a word of it, but there are so many who hear the story first and see her in the light of it. All she wanted in life was a nice young man and a family of her own, but there aren’t many men prepared to take on a wife mixed up in something like that! She fretted herself sick with it all. Couldn’t sleep and hardly ate a thing. Wouldn’t go out in case anybody spoke harshly to her, wouldn’t hardly come out of her room, some days. I didn’t hear her laugh for months on end … And then word came that the girl was back! Returned by the river, they said. Them that had gossiped about Ruby had to bite their tongues then. The tide started to turn. Ruby came out of her shell a bit. She even got work, helping out at the school she used to go to. She got a bit of her colour back, started to take an interest in life again. Sometimes in the evenings she went with the other young ladies from the school for a turn around the streets, and who was I to say no, after all the hardship she’d suffered? Why shouldn’t she have a bit of fun like the other young ones do? She met Ernest. They got engaged. They was going to get married in July. But just after solstice time a jealous girl took her aside and whispered that the child they found at Buscot was not Amelia after all, that the lost girl was still lost. The talk started up again. Ruby was still under suspicion. She called off the wedding the very next day. “How can I marry and have children with everybody whispering these things about me? I will not be trusted with my own babies! It’s not fair on Ernest. He deserves better than me.” That was the gist of it. Ernest did his best to talk her out of it. He won’t listen to the gossips. He says the wedding is only postponed and the engagement stands, but she won’t see him, though he comes asking after her every day. The school said she had better leave and she never goes beyond the garden walls now.’

The blind woman sighed. ‘I was hoping for better news, but you have only confirmed what I knew already.’ She made to stand up slowly on her ancient bones. ‘I may as well fetch you that honey while we’re waiting.’

‘Sit down a little longer,’ said Rita. ‘I know the Vaughans. They trust Ruby. They know she did no harm.’

‘That is something,’ the woman acknowledged, settling back into her seat. ‘They were good people. They never said anything harsh about her.’

‘Mr and Mrs Vaughan would like nothing better than to get to the bottom of this business of the kidnap. Because if your granddaughter had nothing to do with it, somebody else did – and that person must be caught and brought to justice. If that could be brought about it would be a great help to Ruby, in her position.’

The dragon-seer shook her head. ‘They looked into it at the time and found nothing. I suppose it were the river gypsies, and they won’t never be caught now.’

‘But supposing something new were to be tried?’

The old woman looked up and her transparent eyes peered at Rita in perplexity.

‘I believe everything you have told me about Ruby and how good she is, because I have heard it all before, from the Vaughans themselves. It is not fair that she should not marry. It is not fair that she should not have the children she wants and would be such a good mother to. Tell me now, if there was a way of bringing the truth to the surface, of exposing the true culprits and clearing Ruby’s name, would she help? Would she play a part in it?’

The woman’s eyes wavered.

The door to the house opened and the scrawny young woman who had served the bread and honey stepped out.

‘What would I have to do?’

While Daunt positioned Granny Wheeler alongside her hives and beneath the lintel stained by dragon flames, Rita sat with Ruby, their two heads together, explaining the plan.

When she had finished, the girl stared at her. ‘But that’s magic!’

‘It isn’t, but it will seem so.’

‘And it will make people tell the truth?’

‘It might. If somebody knows something they haven’t told yet. Something they didn’t know was important, perhaps. If that person is there, and if we are lucky, yes.’

Ruby lowered her eyes again, to the white-knuckled hands with bitten nails that she clasped tightly in her lap. Rita said no more to persuade her, but left her to her thoughts. The hands fidgeted and twisted and at last came to stillness.

‘What do you need me to do, though? I can’t do magic like that.’

‘You won’t have to do magic. All you need to do is tell me who persuaded you to leave Buscot Lodge that night.’

A feeble light of hope had come into Ruby’s eyes. Now her lip trembled and the hope died. She dropped her head into her hands.

‘Nobody! I’ve said it over and over again and they don’t believe me! Nobody!’

Rita took the girl’s hands and drew them gently away. She kept them clasped in her own and turned to look fully into her tearful face.

‘Then why did you go out?’

‘You wouldn’t believe me! No one would. They would call me a silly liar.’

‘Ruby, I know you are an honest girl. If there is something unbelievable at the bottom of all this, I am the person to tell. Perhaps with two minds we will be able to work it out.’

The years since the kidnap had worn Ruby down to the bone. She was wan-faced and dark circles were carved under her eyes. It was hard to believe she was not yet twenty. The future that had appeared possible when Amelia seemed to be found and she got engaged had been dashed again. She gave no sign that she had faith in Rita’s ability to help her. Unconvinced that the revelation could do her any good, she had nevertheless reached a point where she was simply too exhausted to maintain her position any longer. So, shoulders slumped, her voice flat and at the end of her strength, Ruby told.

The Wishing Well

THERE WAS A wishing well at Kelmscott. The well was reputed to have a great many magic powers, including the ability to cure physical ills of all the well-known kinds, in addition to aiding in the resolution of all sorts of marital and familial dilemmas. Faith in the powers of the well was strengthened by one verifiable and unique feature: whatever the weather, and whatever the season, water from the well at Kelmscott was always ice cold.

With its simple stonework and wooden canopy the well was picturesque and Daunt had photographed it more than once. In spring the froth of hawthorn flower made a good backdrop. Climbing roses scrambled up the posts in summer. He had taken a third picture of it looking starkly beautiful in a wintry cap of snow. He lacked an autumn photograph to complete the quartet.

‘Let’s stop,’ he suggested, pointing at the well, which was wreathed with evergreen foliage into which the villagers had tied ribbons and straw decorations. ‘We have the light.’

He set up the camera and returned to Collodion to prepare the plate, while Rita lingered by the well, drawing up a pail of water and testing its temperature. It was as the legend said: the water was biting cold.

When Daunt returned, he inserted the plate in the camera.

Daunt had not photographed Rita for some time, and she knew the reason. Their photographic sessions had been intimate. To find the pose he would take her head in his hands and tilt it one way and the other, while she observed his face as he watched the light pool and flood according to the contours of her bones. When he found the right position their eyes would meet wordlessly, before he let go of her to return to the camera. And when the plate was exposed, and he was hidden beneath the black curtain, when all was silence and stillness, she nevertheless felt an intensity of communication, as everything she did not say to him in words overspilt into her gaze. Of course he had stopped taking her photograph. It was necessary.

Today’s photograph was a sudden shift, which was puzzling. Perhaps it meant that he had succeeded in freeing his heart, and could now behave with her in an ordinary way. She could not help being dismayed that he might have achieved this so easily, when the current of her own feelings still ran high.

‘Where shall I stand?’ she asked uncertainly.

‘Right behind the camera,’ he said, pointing to the dark curtain.

‘You want me to take the photograph?’

‘You’ve seen me lift the cover of the plate and take off the lens cap. Don’t let the light in under the curtain. Count to fifteen seconds and put the cover back. Don’t start counting till I’ve raised the water and gone under.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You plunge your face into the water and it’s supposed to show you the fulfilment of your wish.’

From under the black cloth, through the glass, Rita watched Daunt dip his fingertips in, then shake off the icy drops with a shudder. It put her in mind of the day at the river when he had stripped almost naked to plunge in up to the neck and help her in the experiment that had demonstrated the very opposite of what she had hoped. His blanched face had been rigid with cold that day, but he had not complained and had remained submerged to his Adam’s apple while she counted to sixty.

‘What are you going to wish for?’ she called.

‘Doesn’t it break the magic if you tell?’

‘Quite likely.’

‘Well then, I’m not telling.’

She had so many wishes she wouldn’t know where to start. To see Amelia’s kidnappers punished for their crime. To care for the girl and keep her from harm always. To find a way out of this eternal to-ing and fro-ing between loving Daunt and fearing pregnancy. To understand what happened to the girl’s heartbeat on winter solstice night.

‘I’m ready.’ Daunt took a breath, and plunged his face into the ice-cold water.

At one, Rita raised the cover of the plate and removed the lens cap.

At two, she became aware of a thought rising from the depths of her mind.

At three, the thought surfaced and she knew instantly and beyond all doubt that it was significant.

At four, her brain working faster than she could keep up with, she had abandoned the camera, not caring what light got in under the hastily thrown-up curtain, and was running to the well, taking her watch from her pocket at the same time.

At five, she was at the well and had taken Daunt’s wrist between her thumb and fingertips to take his pulse, while opening the cover of her watch.

Six was completely forgotten – she was counting other numbers now.

Daunt’s pulse throbbed under Rita’s fingertips. The second hand of her watch turned around the clock face. Her brain was empty of everything except the two beats, clockwork and human. They ran alongside each other, each one according to its own rhythm, then – the shock. In the moment it happened, her mind did not falter. Instead it narrowed its attention even further so that she could read the action of Daunt’s heart and what it meant as clearly as if she held it in her hands. The universe was nothing but the life of this heart and her own mind counting and knowing.

After eighteen seconds, Daunt reared up from the water, frozen-faced and colourless. His features locked in a rigid mask, he looked more like a corpse than a living man, except that he gasped for breath, staggered and sat down.

Rita kept hold of his wrist, did not even glance up, maintained her count.

After a minute, she put her watch away. She took paper and a pencil from her pocket, dashed down the figures with trembling fingers and laughed a brief, startled laugh before turning to him, wide-eyed and shaking her head at the extraordinariness of it all.

‘What is it?’ he said. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Am I all right? Daunt – are you all right?’

‘My face is cold. I think I’m going to—’

To her alarm he leant away, as if nauseous, but after a moment turned back to her. ‘No. It’s settled.’

She took his hands in hers and scrutinized him intently. ‘Yes, but – Daunt – how do you feel?’

He returned her intensely puzzled stare with a mild version of the same thing.

‘I feel a bit peculiar, actually. Must be the chill. But I’m all right.’

She raised the piece of paper.

‘Your heart stopped.’

‘What?’

She looked down at her notes. ‘I got here at – let’s call it six seconds after immersion. It was about that. Your heartbeat was at its normal rate then – eighty beats per minute. At eleven seconds it stopped altogether for three whole seconds. When it restarted, it was at a rate of thirty beats per minute. Once you were out of the water it remained at that rate for seven seconds. Thereafter it rose rapidly.’

She took his hand and felt for his pulse again. Counted. ‘It’s back to normal. Eighty beats a minute.’

‘Stopped?’

‘Yes. For three seconds.’

Daunt paid attention to the beating of his heart. He realized he had never done that before. He slid a hand inside his jacket and felt the power of the pump in his chest against his hand.

‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Are you sure?’ It was a ridiculous question. This was Rita. She didn’t make mistakes about things like that. ‘What made you think of it?’

‘The cold water made me remember the first experiment at the river. And I was suddenly struck by the fact that that day you weren’t completely submerged, only up to the neck, and so today the part of you in icy water was the only part that wasn’t before. And I suppose I must have connected that with the head injuries I’ve treated in the past, and the knowledge that so much of what makes us human is contained there … Everything came together and I just left the camera and ran …’

It was a discovery. Joy surged through her. Instinct made her reach for Daunt’s hand, but she did not take it, for it was plain her jubilation was not shared. He rose from the grass, looking tired and drawn. ‘I’d better retrieve this over-exposed plate,’ he said flatly as he made for the camera.

They dismantled and packed up in strained silence, and when everything was stowed away he was still.

‘I didn’t wish for anything,’ he told her abruptly. ‘I don’t believe in wishing wells. Though you seem to have been granted your wish. If I had been the wishing type I might have wished for you and a child. Both things. Together. But I don’t know if I could bring myself to wish for a thing you don’t want. I have imagined it, Rita. The two of us allowing our feelings to run away with us, nature taking its course, realizing a child is on the way … What’s the value of happiness that can only come at the price of another person’s despair?’

Collodion took them upriver to Rita’s cottage, slicing the water, creating a churn of noise and splash and leaving a long trail of turbulence in its wake. They went in silence. When they came to Rita’s cottage they murmured a stiff goodnight, and he went on to the Swan.

Letting herself into the cottage, Rita put her notebook on the table she used as a desk and turned to the page of the day’s annotations. A secondary exhilaration caused a little leap of the heart. What a discovery! It was followed by a sinking. What kind of a wishing well was it that gave you the thing you most wanted, without even wishing for it, and made you at the same time so painfully conscious of everything else you could not have?

The Magic Lantern Show

AT THE SWAN, summer turned to autumn and the rain did not cease. There were no more frowning conversations about the danger of a poor harvest, for it was now a certainty. No amount of sunshine could change anything. The crops sat stunted and blackening in the fields, and how could you harvest them anyway, with the ground so waterlogged? The laid-off farmhands tried to get jobs at the gravel works and elsewhere, and although all went to the Swan for respite from their worries, a mood of anxiety hung over the winter room.

In this atmosphere word got round that the child had come back from the Armstrongs and was living with the Vaughans again. What to make of it? They supposed she was not Alice after all. They supposed she was Amelia again. This deviation of the story was not met with enthusiasm. A story ought to go clearly in one direction, then, after a distinct moment of crisis, change to go in another. This slipping back on the quiet to the original lacked the requisite drama. Later it was said that the Vaughans had been heard calling the child Milly. Whether this was an abbreviation of Amelia or another name altogether was the source of some debate, but it didn’t match up to the early arguments over the colour of her eyes, and when measured against the passionate debate about whether or not the fact of being impossible means a thing can’t happen, it was distinctly lacklustre. The relentlessness of the rain dampened their enthusiasm too. In fact, stories began to grow as weak as the crops in the field. Sometimes the tellers even found themselves drinking in silence. When Jonathan tried to tell his tale about the farmer who drove his horse and cart into the lake and then something or other that he couldn’t altogether remember, and ended ‘and he was never seen again!’, he was met with little encouragement.

Joe ailed too. More and more often he lay sinking in the room at the back; when he appeared infrequently in the winter room he was frailer and paler than ever. Though he struggled for breath he told a story or two – strange ones, brief in the telling and stirring to hear; in their endings they seemed to open on to infinity, and nobody could explain or retell them afterwards.

Against this background, and nourished by the continuing uncertainty about the child’s identity, a seed that had been sown some months ago and given rise to nothing at the time saw a belated germination. The great-aunt of one of the gravel-diggers reckoned she’d seen the child had no reflection when she looked in the river. Now the second cousin of a cressman said that was all wrong. He’d seen the child staring in the river and had witnessed this mystifying thing: the child had two reflections, each one resembling the other in every detail. Spurred by this, other stories began to circulate. That the girl had no shadow, that her shadow had the form of an old crone, that if you looked too long into those peculiar eyes of hers she would benefit from your distracted state to slice your shadow from the soles of your feet and eat it.

‘It’s happened to me!’ an elderly widow with ailments both real and imaginary told Rita, staring at her feet and pointing. ‘The witch’s child has eaten my shadow!’

‘Look up, instead,’ Rita encouraged her. ‘Where is the sun?’

The widow searched the sky. ‘Drowned. Quite drowned.’

‘Yes. There is no sun today, and that is why you have no shadow. There is nothing more to it than that.’

The widow seemed reassured, but it didn’t last. The next thing Rita heard from a patient was that the girl had eaten the sun and brought the rain to wreck the harvest.

In the Swan, they heard this and shrugged. Did it make sense? They recalled that she was dead and then alive again, which no ordinary human could do, but a witch’s child? They pondered, but refrained from endorsing the theory.

Then, in early September, all of this was pushed aside by a novelty. A poster appeared, pinned to one of the beams in the wall of the Swan; it announced that on the night of the autumn equinox there would be a magic lantern show. It was to be provided free by Mr Daunt of Oxford as a gesture of thanks to the people whose quick action and presence of mind had done so much to aid him when he was injured nine months ago.

‘It is a story told in pictures,’ Margot explained to Jonathan. ‘With pictures on glass, I believe, and light passed through them. I don’t know how it works, you’ll have to ask Mr Daunt.’

‘What kind of a story is it?’

But that was a secret.

On the day of the equinox the inn was closed to drinkers – even regulars – until seven o’clock in the evening. Some of the regulars had not been able to believe that this applied to them; they turned up anyway and were outraged at being denied entry. They heard constant noise from inside and saw that the door was forever being opened and closed to allow in strong young men carrying great boxes and crates. They went away, to tell others that they had not been allowed in and that there was something extraordinary going on.

Daunt had begun his preparations early. A hundred times he ran between Collodion and the inn, organizing his own assistants and Armstrong’s boys. Which containers, in which order, to which room … At one point, six men were needed to carry in a large heavy rectangle, concealed under packaging. They lifted it with grave attention and as they inched up the slope, sweating and with strained faces, Daunt did not so much as blink, so intent was his gaze. When it had been carried into the inn successfully, there was a communal sigh of relief and refreshments for all, before they got back to the more ordinary lifting and carrying. Only when Daunt and the Ockwells were alone were the blanket and packing case taken off and the mysterious shape revealed to be a great pane of glass.

‘I’ll set it up here. Nobody must come behind the curtain. The glass will be invisible in the dark. We don’t want any injuries. Now, how’s that paint drying in the main room, for the magic lantern?’

In the afternoon Rita arrived, accompanying a woman who was so draped under a shawl that it was impossible to see her face. Most of the Little Margots came to help, and one of them brought her youngest daughter with her, a little girl of three, who had her own very important role to play.

At half past six, Jonathan was given the honour of unlocking the door and holding it open to let the curious inside. They were all directed to the right, into the large summer room. The Swan was transformed. A velvet drape covered one wall, concealing the arch into the winter room, and another wall – in front of the chairs – had been repainted in fresh white. The tables had gone and instead rows of chairs were serried together, facing the white wall. Behind the seating, raised on a small platform, stood Henry Daunt, with a curious mechanical device and a box of glass plates.

A great many people came in and there was the din of many conversations at once: the farm labourers and the gravel-diggers and all the regulars and their wives and children, and countless people from the neighbouring villages who had got to hear of the show. Armstrong was there with Bess and his older children. He sat with an air of grave restlessness. He had an inkling about part of the content of the show, had indeed helped with the preparation of it. Robin had been invited but was nowhere to be seen, which surprised nobody. The Vaughans were staying away. Knowing in advance what the story was to be, both agreed it would be better not to attend. After all, there was no certainty it would come to anything. They had contributed what was necessary and their presence would in any case be felt in other ways. The Little Margots served cider to all and at precisely seven o’clock Daunt made a short speech of thanks to Joe and Margot. Joe was about to close the door when Lily White arrived, panting, holding a covered basket.

Lily had to sit on a stool at the back, for all the seats were taken. On her knees she held the basket with the red cloth cover, beneath which something was wriggling. She placed a hand to quieten the puppy she had bought that afternoon as a gift for Ann, and it settled. Where was Ann? She peered over the heads of the audience, looking for a small child’s head between two adult ones, but before she had scanned more than a few rows, the lanterns were dimmed and the room was plunged into darkness.

There was an expectant stir, the scuffing of feet on the floor, the arranging of skirts, some throat-clearing; then through all that, a crisp mechanical click was heard and—

Ooh!

Buscot Lodge materialized spectrally on the white wall. The home of the Vaughans: its pale stone facade pierced with seventeen windows arranged in such orderly fashion that nobody could imagine anything but harmony under its quiet grey roof. A few looked to see how the image had flown on to the wall from Daunt’s machine at the back, but most were too entranced to think of that.

Click. Buscot Lodge disappears and Mr and Mrs Vaughan are suddenly in their place. Between them, the wriggling blur of a child – Amelia, aged two. There is a murmur of feeling from the women in the audience.

Click. Giggles – this is not what anyone was expecting: an advertisement, writ large in the stream of light. Daunt reads aloud for the benefit of those who are not quick with their letters, and while he reads, others comment in whispers:

STELLA

The

Sapient Pig

THIS MOST EXTRAORDINARY CREATURE

Will Spell and Read, Cast Accounts,

PLAY AT CARDS,

Tell any Person what o’clock it is to a Minute

BY THEIR OWN WATCH

Also

TELL THE AGE OF ANY ONE IN COMPANY;

And what is more Astonishing, she will

Discover A Person’s Thoughts

A Thing never heard of before

Moreover

In Private Audience she will

REVEAL THE FUTURE

Including

SUCCESSES FINANCIAL AND MATRIMONIAL

‘It is the pig from the fair!’

‘Sapient? Whatever is that?’

‘’Tis a clever word meaning wise. Which is a thing you would know if you was sapient yourself.’

‘Spells better than I do myself, that pig do!’

‘I wish it didn’t play so well at cards. I lost thruppence to it.’

‘Seventy-three, that pig said I was! I was that cross!’

‘I left before she started discovering the thoughts. I couldn’t bear to have a pig rummaging in my thoughts, never, never, never!’

‘Shilling a time, they was wanting for a private audience. Daft! Who’s got a shilling round ’ere to spend on an audience with a pig?’

The mechanical noise comes again, the advertisement makes way for the pig herself. In fact it is not Maud, but her daughter Mabel, who looks exactly the same to everyone but Armstrong. Seated opposite the pig is a young woman they all recognize.

‘Ruby!’

The hum of conversation fades abruptly.

In the image, Ruby proffers a shilling, and a dark-sleeved arm reaches down to take it from her. At the same time, she gazes into the eyes of the pig.

Now a voice breaks into the darkness – and it is the voice of Ruby herself.

‘Tell me my fortune, Stella. Who will I marry? Where will I meet the one who is to win my hand?’

The audience gasps and there is shifting in seats as people turn their heads to look in the direction of the voice, but nobody can see anything in the dark, and in any case, from another side of the room, voiced by one of the Little Margots, the pig replies, ‘Go to St John’s Lock at midnight on winter solstice night, and look in the water. There you will see the face of he who is to win your hand.’

Click. A clock face gleams in the darkness: it is midnight!

Click. St John’s Lock: everybody knows it. And here is Ruby again, on hands and knees, staring intently into the river.

‘Well I’m blowed,’ somebody says, and ‘Shhhh!’ says everybody else.

A click, St John’s Lock again. Ruby is standing, hands on hips in an attitude of vexation.

‘Nothing!’ comes the voice of Ruby again. ‘Nothing at all! It’s a mean trick!’

This time nobody stares at the source of the sound. They are all too absorbed in the story that is unfolding before their eyes in the magical darkness.

Click. Buscot Lodge again.

Click. The interior of a child’s room. A small child’s form under the blanket.

Click. The same room, but a dark-clad figure leans over the bed with his back to the audience.

Not a foot shuffles, not a hand fidgets. The Swan holds its breath.

Click. The same room, where the bed is now empty. The window is open to the sky.

The Swan flinches.

Click. An exterior view of the house from the side. A ladder reaches to the open window.

The Swan shakes its many heads in disapproval.

Click. Two people from behind. His arm is around her shoulders. Their heads are bowed towards each other in grief. There is no doubt who they are. It is Mr and Mrs Vaughan.

Click. A piece of paper, once crumpled but smoothed out:

The Swan lets out a gasp of outrage.

‘Hush!’

Click. A desk on which lies a money bag, bursting at the seams.

Click. The same money bag, this time positioned at the far side of Radcot Bridge, only a very little way from where they are all seated now.

Murmurs of consternation.

Click. Mr and Mrs Vaughan wait by the fireside. The clock visible between them says six o’clock.

Click. The same photograph, except that it is now eight o’clock.

Click. Eleven o’clock. Mrs Vaughan’s head is on her husband’s shoulder in an attitude of despair.

The Swan swoons and sobs in sympathy.

Click. A gasp! The foot of Radcot Bridge again – but the money is gone!

Click. From behind, Mr and Mrs Vaughan are seen collapsed in each other’s arms.

The Swan is roused. There is open weeping, a good many exclamations of outrage and horror, threats are made against the perpetrators: one would wring their necks, another would hang them, a third wants to tie them in sacks and drop them off the bridge.

Click. WHO KIDNAPPED LITTLE AMELIA?

The Swan falls silent.

Click. The image of the pig reappears. Daunt takes a stick and uses it in the current of light to delineate what the Swan failed to notice before. There is a shadow.

There is a hushed ‘Oh!’

Click. It seems to be the same scene, though in fact it is Mabel again, standing in for her mother. This time the picture is cropped so that only the pig’s tail is visible – and at the centre of the image is the bottom of a long coat, a few inches of trouser leg and a pair of boot toecaps.

There are gasps of shock. ‘It was not the pig that tricked Ruby! It was him!’

Someone stands, pointing, and shouts, ‘So it were him that took Amelia!’

Understanding floods the Swan, which now speaks in a hundred voices:

‘He were a short fellow!’

‘Skinny as a broomstick!’

‘There weren’t nothing to him!’

‘That coat – too wide across the shoulders.’

‘And long on him.’

‘Always in that hat, he were.’

‘Never took it off!’

They remember him, all right. Everybody remembers him. But nobody is capable of giving any description beyond the coat and the hat and the size of the man.

And when did anyone last see him?

‘Two year ago.’

‘Two year? Close to three if it’s a day!’

‘Aye, getting on for three.’

Consensus is reached. The man with the pig was an undersized man in an oversized coat with a low hat and nobody has seen him for nearly three years.

Daunt and Rita confer. They have been all ears, but there is nothing to indicate that anybody here is about to divulge information beyond what is already known.

He leans and murmurs in her ear, ‘I think I’ve wasted everyone’s time.’

‘It’s not over yet. Come on. Part two.’

While outrage fills the room, Daunt and Rita slip behind a curtain. Rita goes over the instructions again with the Little Margot and her child, while Daunt checks devices concealed elsewhere whose purpose is not evident from their appearance but would be familiar to any theatrical-effects manager or spiritualist. ‘I’ll nod when I’m ready for you to draw back that curtain, all right?’

At the back of the room in her dark corner, Lily has never seen anything like these huge images on the wall, so lifelike and so impossible. When they said it was going to be a story told in pictures she’d had in mind the illustrated children’s Bible whose pages she used to turn while her mother read. She didn’t know it would be reality in black and white, flattened like pressed flowers and laid tall and broad on the wall. She didn’t know it would touch on her own life. Her hand clutches at her throat, and she stares, all pulse and sweat and tremble, and there is nowhere in her terrified brain for thought to find a foothold. She has fallen into a waking nightmare.

A fork chiming on glass makes her jump. It sets the air ringing and quietens the audience. They settle in their seats: there is more to come.

Instead of a click comes the swooshing sound of a curtain being drawn to one side. Those closest to the velvet drape are aware of movement. The arch into the winter room is now exposed and there is sudden light.

Heads turn, disconcerted.

There is a tense, shocked silence.

In the winter room there is a child. But it is no ordinary child. And it is no photograph. The girl’s hair moves as if lifted by a wave, her white chemise floats gauzily, and – strangest of all – her feet do not touch the floor. Her form shifts and shimmers, is at once there and absent. Her face bears the faintest trace of features: the hint of a nose, eyes that stare in faded fashion, a mouth too washed out to speak from. The white folds of her gown float around her as if the air were water, and she drifts insubstantially.

‘Child,’ comes Ruby’s voice, ‘do you know me?’

The girl nods.

‘You know me to be Ruby, your old nurse who loved you and took good care of you?’

Another nod.

Nobody moves. It is either fear or the fear of missing something that keeps them in their seats.

‘Was it me who took you from your bed?’

The child shakes her head.

‘It was another, then?’

The child nods, slowly, as though the questions are arriving only distantly into the other realm where she is now.

‘Who was it? Who took you to the river and drowned you?’

‘Yes, tell us!’ someone calls from the audience. ‘Tell us who!’

And the girl, whose face is transparent enough to be any child’s, raises a hand, and her finger points … not at the screen but into the room, at the audience themselves.

Pandemonium. There are shrieks and confused cries. In their shock, people rise to their feet and chairs are knocked over. In the reflected light they turn and stare, here and there, anywhere the shifting, shimmering finger might be pointing, and everywhere are faces like their own: appalled, stunned, tear-stained. Someone faints; someone wails; someone moans.

‘I didn’t mean to do it!’ whispers Lily, her words unheard in all the commotion. With shaking hands and streaming eyes she opens the door and flees, as if the optical illusion is at her heels.

When everybody had gone, the Little Margots and the Armstrong children set about restoring the inn to order. The little ghost, robust in her everyday appearance as Margot’s youngest granddaughter, yawned as they pulled the flimsy white garment over her head and she stomped around the room in her clogs. The great mirror was packed into its huge rectangular case and heaved away with care and much grunting. The velvet curtain was taken down and folded, and the gauze voile rippled and shivered as it was dropped into a bag. The gas light was dismantled. Element by element, the illusion of the ghost was dismantled, packed away and removed, and when it was gone and they all looked at each other in the interior of the Swan as it appeared on a normal evening, they saw that their hope was gone too.

Robert Armstrong’s shoulders slumped, and Margot was unusually quiet. Daunt came and went between the inn and Collodion with boxes, so low in spirits that nobody dared speak to him. Rita went to see Joe, who was in bed. He raised his eyes to her in expectation, and when she shook her head, he blinked sorrowfully.

Only Jonathan was his usual merry self, untouched by the general mood. ‘I nearly thought it was real,’ he repeated. ‘Even though I knew about the mirror and the gauze and the gas light. Even though I knew it was Polly. I nearly believed it!’

With the others, he was replacing the chairs in their original places. Then as he made for the final few stools at the back, he exclaimed, ‘Well I never! Who left you behind?’

A puppy cowered in the corner of the room, under the last stool.

Robert Armstrong came to see. He bent down and lifted the animal in his large hand. ‘You are too small to be out in the world by yourself,’ he told the puppy, and it sniffed his skin and scrambled to be held closer.

‘It belongs to the woman who came in at the end,’ said Daunt. He consulted his memory and listed every detail of her appearance.

‘Lily White,’ said Margot. ‘She lives at Basketman’s Cottage. I didn’t even know she was here.’

Armstrong nodded. ‘I’ll take this little fellow home. It’s not far, and my boys are not ready yet in any case.’

Margot turned to her granddaughter. ‘Now, little Miss, I reckon we’ve had enough haunting for one day, eh? Time for bed!’ and the little girl was whisked away.

‘Just an illusion,’ said Daunt. ‘And it hasn’t achieved much.’ He turned to Ruby, who was sitting on a box in the corner, trying not to cry. ‘I’m sorry. I hoped for more. I’ve let you down.’

‘You tried,’ she told him, but the tears spilt all the same. ‘It’s the Vaughans who will feel it hardest.’

Of Pigs and Puppies

ARMSTRONG TUCKED THE puppy inside his coat to keep it warm, leaving a button undone so it could put its nose out and sniff the night air. It squirmed comfortably against him and settled.

‘I had better come with you,’ Rita said. ‘Mrs White might be alarmed at the arrival of a stranger so late and after such an unsettling end to the evening.’

They headed up to the bridge in silence, each considering their disappointment in an evening that had cost so much in time and effort and come to nothing. They crossed over a river full of stars and on the other side came before too long to the place where the bank had collapsed and the river expanded into new breadths. They had to concentrate to get over the gnarled roots and ropes of ivy in the dark. Through the ringing of the river, they heard a voice.

‘She knows it was me! I never meant to do ill! I swear! I wouldn’t have hurt a hair on her head! She is so cross that I took her and I drowned her – she raised her finger! She pointed me out! She knows it was me that did it.’

The pair of eavesdroppers stared into the darkness as though they might hear the better for it, waiting for the reply of the person she was speaking to, but no voice came. Rita made to step forward, but Armstrong put out a hand to halt her. Another sound had reached his ears. A muffled snuffling. It was an animal sound. It was a pig sound.

His brain began to stir.

When the sound of the pig fell still, Lily’s voice sounded again. ‘She will never forgive me. What am I to do? Wickedness like mine is so terrible I can never be forgiven. God Himself has sent her to punish me. I must do as the basket-maker did, though I am so afraid. Oh! But I must do it and suffer the eternal torments, for I do not deserve to live a day longer in this world …’

The voice disintegrated into choked tears.

Armstrong strained his ears to listen to the animal snuffling that replied to Lily’s words. Was it …? Surely not. And yet …

The puppy yapped. Their presence revealed, they stepped from the concealment of the poplars and started to walk up the slope.

‘Just friends, Mrs White,’ Rita called ahead. ‘Returning the puppy to you. You left him behind after the magic lantern show.’ Lily’s distress was visible now. ‘He’s come to no harm. We’ve taken care of him.’

But as Rita was approaching Lily, speaking soothingly all the while, Armstrong ran in a powerful dash up the slope. He ran straight past Lily and all the way to the pigsty, where he fell to his knees in the mud, put his hands through the bars of the fence, and cried, ‘Maud!’

Armstrong gazed with love and disbelief at the face he had thought never to see again. Though she was older and thinner, weary and with an air of sadness, though her skin had lost its rosy gleam and her hair its bright copper shine, he knew her. Nor did the pig take her eyes off him. And if there had been any shadow of a doubt, her own welcome would have dispersed it, for she got up instantly, agitated her trotters in an excited dance and put her snout to the fence so that he could caress her ear and rub her bristly cheek. She pressed at the fence as though she would knock it down to reach her old, dear friend. As Maud’s eyes softened with the emotion of the reunion, Armstrong felt his throat ache with tears.

‘Whatever has happened to you, my love? How did you come to be here?’

He took acorns from his pocket, and Maud kissed them gently from the palm of his hand, as so few pigs ever learnt how to do, and his heart filled with joy.

Lily, meanwhile, continued to rub her eyes and to repeat, ‘I didn’t mean it. I didn’t know!’

Rita looked from Lily to Armstrong and the pig and back to Lily again.

Where to begin?

‘Lily, what were you saying when we arrived? What was it you didn’t mean to do?’

As if she hadn’t heard, Lily repeated, ‘I didn’t know! I didn’t know!’

At last, after several more efforts from Rita, she seemed to hear the question.

‘I have told it all to the pig,’ she sniffed. ‘She says now I must confess to the parson.’

Of Sisters and Piglets

THE PARSON IN his nightshirt and dressing gown invited his nocturnal visitors to sit. Armstrong took a chair against the wall, and Rita sat on the sofa.

‘I have never once sat down at the parsonage,’ Lily said. ‘But I have come to confess and after today I will never come here again, so I suppose I will sit.’ She sat nervously next to Rita.

‘Now, what’s this about confession?’ the parson asked, with a glance at Rita.

‘I did it,’ Lily said. She had sobbed all the way along the riverbank, but now she was in the parsonage her voice was drained. ‘It was me. She comes out of the river and points her finger at me. She knows it was me.’

‘Who points her finger?’

Rita explained to the parson about the illusion at the Swan, and what they had meant to achieve by it, then turned to Lily. ‘It was not real, Lily. It wasn’t meant to frighten you.’

‘She used to come to Basketman’s Cottage. She came out of the river and pointed her finger at me – she was real, I know she was, she dripped on to the floorboards and left them damp. When I didn’t confess but kept my wickedness secret, she came to the Swan, and now she points her finger at me there. She knows it was me.’

‘What is it that you did, Lily?’ Rita crouched in front of Lily, holding her two hands in hers. ‘Tell us plainly.’

‘I drowned her!’

‘You drowned Amelia Vaughan?’

‘She is not Amelia Vaughan! She is Ann!’

‘You drowned your sister?’

Lily nodded. ‘I drowned her! And she will not let me rest till I have confessed.’

‘I see,’ said the parson. ‘Then you must confess. Tell me what happened.’

Now that it had actually come to it, Lily was calm. Her tears dried, her muddled notions cleared. With her hair come adrift from her hairpins, and her eyes wide and blue in her thin face, she looked younger than her years as she told the story by candlelight in the parsonage.

‘I was twelve, I think. I might have been thirteen. I lived with my mother in Oxford and with us my stepfather and stepbrother. I had a little sister, Ann. We had piglets in the back yard that we were to fatten to sell, but my stepfather did not look after them properly and they ailed. My sister was not strong. She was small, and though she was loved by me and by my mother, my stepfather was disappointed in her. He had wanted another boy. Sons were what mattered, in his eyes. He resented the food that I ate and the food my sister ate, and we were in fear of him – my mother too – and I tried to eat less so my sister, who was so frail, could have more. But she didn’t thrive. One day, when my sister was sick in bed, my mother put me in charge while she went out to buy some medicine for her. I was to get the meal prepared, and listen out in case my sister had a coughing fit. My stepfather would have been angry at her buying medicine, for it was very expensive and girls were really not worth it. I was very nervous and so was Mother. While Mother was out, my stepbrother came into the kitchen with a bundle. It was a sack, tied tight with string. One of the piglets had died, he told me. I was under orders from my stepfather to take it to the river and drop it in, to save the trouble of digging a hole and burying it. I told my brother I had to prepare the dinner and he should take the piglet to the river, but he told me my stepfather would beat the living daylights out of me if I didn’t do as I was told. So I went. The bundle was heavy. When I got to the river, I put the bundle down on the bank where the drop was steep and pushed it in. Then I went home. When I came to our street, all the neighbours were out of doors and there was a great hubbub. My mother came running up to me. “Where is Ann?” she said. “Where’s your sister?”

‘“In our bedroom,” I replied, and she cried out and wept, and asked again, “Where is Ann? Why weren’t you here and where has she gone?”

‘One of the neighbours had seen me go by before, with the heavy burden in my arms, and she said, “What was in that sack?”

‘“A piglet that died,” I said. But when they started to question me about where I had taken it and what I had done, I could not answer but was tongue-tied in confusion.

‘Some of the neighbours ran down to the river then. I wanted to stay close by my mother, but she was so angry with me for not watching over my sister that she was no comfort and in the end I went to hide.

‘My stepbrother was a watchful one. He knew the places I used to hide in when my stepfather was in a temper. He found me out. “You know what was in that sack, don’t you?”

‘“It was a piglet,” I said, for I believed it was.

‘And then he told me what I had really done. “It was Ann in that sack. You have drowned her.”

‘I ran away, and I have never told anybody the truth about my sister from that day to this.’

Later, Rita suggested and the parson agreed that Lily should stay the night in the guest room at the parsonage. Like a small child, Lily acquiesced.

When the bed was made and Lily was about to go upstairs to get into it, and Rita was making her farewells to the parson, Armstrong cleared his voice and spoke for the first time.

‘I wonder – before we depart …’

They all looked at him.

‘It has been a long night and for Mrs White a very exhausting one, but if I could ask just one question before we go?’

The parson nodded.

‘Lily, how did my pig Maud come to be at Basketman’s Cottage?’

Having confessed her one great crime, Lily’s other secrets were no longer anchored down. ‘Victor brought her.’

‘Victor?’

‘My stepbrother.’

‘What is his surname, your stepbrother?’

‘His name is Victor Nash.’

At that name, Armstrong started as though he had sliced through his own finger with his slaughtering knife.

The Other Side of the River

‘HE CAN’T BE in the factory,’ Vaughan said. ‘I’ve been selling off the contents and people have been coming and going for months. If anyone was hiding out in there, he’d have been spotted. And the vitriol works have high windows – the light would be visible for miles. No, the only place big enough for a distillery and hideout that’s concealed and undisturbed is the old store house.’

His forefinger jabbed at the place on the plan of Brandy Island.

‘Where’s the landing spot?’ asked Daunt.

‘Here’s where he’ll be expecting anyone to come in. If he keeps an eye out, this is where he’ll be watching. But it’s possible to land on the island from the far side. Away from the factory and the other buildings. Take him by surprise.’

‘How many men will we be?’ Armstrong asked.

‘I can provide eight men from the household and farms. I could raise more, but we’d need more row boats and that might rouse suspicion.’

‘I could take a greater number on Collodion, but it would be noisy and too visible. Fewer of us in row boats is the only way.’

‘Eight men, plus we three …’ They looked at each other and nodded. Eleven. It would be enough.

‘When?’ said Vaughan.

At dead of night, a small flotilla of row boats left the jetty at Buscot Lodge. Nobody spoke. Blades barely disturbed the ink-blank water as they dipped in and out of it. Oars creaked and water lapped against the sides of the vessels, but these sounds were lost in the low grumble of the river. Invisibly the rowers slipped from land over water to land again.

At the far side of Brandy Island, they hauled their boats out of the river and up the steep slope to conceal them under the hanging branches of the willow. They knew each other by silhouette, nods were all that were needed for communication, for every man had his instructions.

They separated into pairs and spread out along the bank, to make diverse routes through the vegetation towards the factory. Daunt and Armstrong were the only ones unfamiliar with the island. Daunt was with Vaughan, Armstrong with Newman, one of Vaughan’s men. They pushed branches out of their way, stumbled over roots, moved blind in the darkness. When the vegetation thinned and gave way to paths, they knew they were nearing the factory. They skirted walls, hastened across open areas with barely a sound.

Daunt and Vaughan came to the store house. Hemmed in by the factory on one side and dense trees on the other, the glow from its windows would have been invisible from both banks. In the darkness, the two men exchanged a look. Daunt pointed to the other side. A hint of movement stirred in the trees, illuminated by the faint light from the building. Others had arrived.

Armstrong made the first move. He rushed at the door, and kicked at it with his full bodyweight. It left the door swinging, half off its hinges. Vaughan pushed it fully open, and Daunt was right behind him as they surveyed the room. Vats and bottles and barrels. Air thick with yeast and sugar. A small brazier, recently tended. A chair, empty. Daunt pressed his hand to the cushion. It was warm.

He had been there, but he was gone.

Vaughan allowed a curse to escape his lips.

A sound. Outside. From the trees.

‘That way!’ came a cry. Daunt, Vaughan and Armstrong joined the others. There was a great scramble through the undergrowth as men rushed to give chase, following the direction of the sound. They crashed through branches, broke twigs underfoot, exclaimed when they stumbled, until they did not know whether the sounds they were following were those of the quarry or the hunters themselves.

They regrouped. Though they were dispirited, they had not given up. They quartered the terrain, covered every yard of the island. They delved into every bush, peered up into the branches of every tree, searched every room and every corridor of every building. Two of Vaughans’ men approached a tangle of thorny branches and began to beat it methodically with heavy sticks. On the far side, movement: a figure, bent low, suddenly leapt and with a splash disappeared.

‘Hoy!’ they shouted to alert the others. ‘He’s gone in!’

Before long the others had joined them.

‘He’s out there somewhere. We flushed him out of hiding and heard the splash.’

The hunters peered out across the dark river. The water shimmered and glinted, but there was no sign of their quarry.

When he first entered the water he thought the cold would kill him outright. But when he surfaced and found himself not dead, nowhere near, he discovered it wasn’t so deadly after all. He’d emerged from his great dive in a place that had advantages. The river, it seemed, was his ally. Where a great branch bent low over the river, he could cling on, half out of the water, while he worked out what to do. Returning to the island was out of the question. He’d have to get across. Once in the central flow, the river would carry him downstream, and if he edged towards the bank all the time, he was bound to find a place to haul himself out. After that …

After that he’d work things out as best he could.

He unlocked his arms from the branch, let himself fully into the water and kicked away.

There came a shout from the island – he’d been spotted – and he ducked under the surface. There, he was distracted by a festival of movement and light above his head. A fleet of stars went sailing by. A thousand tiny moons shimmered past him, elongated like baby fish in a shoal. He was a giant among fairies.

It occurred to him suddenly that there was no great urgency. I’m not even shivering, he thought. It’s almost warm.

His arms were heavy. He wasn’t sure whether he was kicking or not.

When the cold river doesn’t feel cold, that’s when you know you’re in trouble. He’d overheard that somewhere. When? Long ago. It troubled him and a sense of foreboding pressed down on him. In a panic he scrabbled, but his limbs would not obey him.

He had woken the river now; its current took hold of him. Water in his mouth. Moonfish in his head. Knowledge: a mistake. He groped for the surface; his hands met trailing, floating plants. He grasped to haul himself up, but his fingers closed on gravel and mud. Flailing – twisting – the surface! – gone again. He took in more water than air, and when he cried for help – though who had ever helped him, was he not the most betrayed of men? – when he cried for help, there were only the lips of the river pressed to his, and her fingers pinched his nostrils shut.

All this for ever …

Until, when there was no resistance left in him, he felt himself grasped, lifted up and out of the water as if he weighed no more than a willow leaf, and lain down, down to rest, in the bottom of a punt.

Quietly? He knew the stories. The ferryman who took those whose time had come to the other side, and who took those whose time had not come to safety. He’d never believed the tale, but here he was.

The tall, lean figure thrust the pole up to the heavens and let it fall through his fingers till it bit the riverbed, and then, with what grace, with what remarkable power, the punt sped through the dark water. Victor felt the drag of it as he smiled. Safety …

Half of the men stayed on the island, positioned at points where they would see if he tried to land. The others returned to the boats and went out on the water, searching.

‘It’s damn cold,’ Daunt muttered.

Armstrong put a hand in the water and pulled it out quickly.

‘Are we looking for a living man or a corpse?’ he asked.

‘He can’t survive long,’ Vaughan said grimly.

They rowed around the island, once, twice, three times.

‘He’s had it,’ pronounced one of Vaughan’s men.

The others nodded.

The hunt was over.

The row boats made their way back to the jetty and to Buscot Lodge.

The parson wrote to the vicar of the parish in which Lily had lived with her mother and stepfather. He received a prompt reply. One of the members of that congregation had a keen memory of the events from thirty years ago. There had been a great hue and cry when Ann was first found to be missing. A rumour started that the older girl had drowned her sister in the river out of jealousy. Neighbours had rushed to the river, but the sack had not immediately been found. While her mother joined the search party, her first-born ran away.

Some hours later, the child was found, alive and well. At some distance from the house, and further than she could have walked unaided. She had a raging fever. No medicine could save her and a few days later she died.

The sack was also found. It contained a dead piglet.

Lily was never found. Her heartbroken mother died a few years later. The stepfather was hanged for crimes unrelated to this one that finally caught up with him, and the stepbrother was a bad lot who couldn’t hold down a job for long, and who had not been heard of for years.

‘You are not to blame,’ the parson told Lily.

Rita put an arm around the confused woman. ‘Your stepbrother was the one who tricked you, out of jealousy and because he has a destructive soul. He knew you were innocent, but has encouraged you to believe you are guilty ever since. You did not drown your sister.’

‘So when Ann came out of the river to the Swan, what did she want?’

‘It wasn’t Ann. Ann is dead. She is not angry with you and she is at peace.’

Rita told her, ‘What you saw at Basketman’s Cottage were nightmares, and then, in the Swan, an illusion. Smoke and mirrors.’

‘And now that your stepbrother is drowned,’ the parson told Lily, ‘he can’t frighten you any more. You can keep your own money, and give up Basketman’s Cottage and come and live in the warmth here, at the parsonage.’

But Lily knew more about rivers than anyone, knew that drowning was a more complicated thing than other people suspected. Victor drowned was no less terrible to her mind than Victor alive – in fact, it was more terrible. He would be angry at her for having given him away; she dare not make him angrier by leaving the place where he knew he could find her. She had only to remember what had happened when she’d run away with Mr White. He had been found dead, and the beating she’d got from Victor – she was surprised she hadn’t been found dead too. No, she didn’t dare anger him.

‘I think I will carry on at Basketman’s Cottage,’ she said. The parson tried to persuade her, and Rita tried to persuade her, but with the insistence of the meek she got her way.

When Armstrong went to collect Maud from Basketman’s Cottage, he found that she was in pig.

He did not like to move her in her delicate state. She was being well looked after, he could see that.

‘Would you take care of her, Mrs White, till her litter arrives?’

‘I don’t mind. What about Maud? Does she mind staying?’

Maud did not mind, and so it was agreed.

‘And when I take her home with me, I will give you a piglet in exchange.’