Once Upon a River

The Knife

THE CHICKENS WERE flustered, the cat evaded his stroking hand to slink away unhappily along the wall, and the pigs stared with a gaze that told of something ominous. Armstrong frowned. What was it? He had only been away two hours, seeing some cows for sale.

His middle daughter came flying from the house and as she flung her arms around him he could be in no doubt that something bad had happened. She was too breathless to speak.

‘Robin?’ he asked.

She nodded.

‘Where’s your mother?’

She pointed towards the kitchen door.

All was in upheaval. Soup bubbled unwatched on the stove; pastry was abandoned on the marble. Bess stood behind the rocking chair, gripping its rail, a fierce, protective air about her. In the rocking chair sat his eldest daughter, Susan, hunched and pale-faced. Her arms were crossed oddly over her chest, her hands up by her neck. Around her were clustered the three littlest ones, who plucked at her skirt in concern.

Bess’s fingers released their grip on the chair with relief as he came in, and she turned a troubled eye upon him. With a gesture she warned him not to say anything.

‘Here,’ she said to the little ones who were clinging to their sister, ‘take this to the pigs.’ She swept the peelings into a bowl and handed them to the biggest child; after a final consoling pat on their sister’s knee, they did as they were told.

‘What did he want?’ he asked, as soon as the door had closed.

‘The usual.’

‘How much this time?’

She told him the sum and Robert stiffened. It went far beyond the amounts Robin had had from them before.

‘What sort of trouble is he in to want that kind of money?’

She made a dismissive gesture. ‘You know what he is. One lie after another. A good investment, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a loan till next week … I’m not beguiled, he knows that. His smooth ways haven’t worked on me for a long, long while.’ She frowned. ‘But nobody would have been taken in, not today. He was out of breath. Couldn’t keep still; desperate for money and to get away again. He kept going to the window, all on edge. Wanted to send his brother to the gate to keep a lookout, but I wouldn’t let him go. Before long he gave up lying and started shouting, “Just give me the money, I’m telling you! Or it’ll be the death of me!” He was banging his fists on the table, saying it’s all our fault and if we hadn’t given the girl back to the Vaughans he wouldn’t be in such a corner. There was a quiver in his voice. Something’s frightened him.

‘“What on earth is it has put you in this state?” I asked him and he said somebody was after him. Somebody who would stop at nothing to get what he wanted.’

‘His life was in danger, he said,’ added Susan from the rocking chair. ‘“If you don’t give me the money, I’m a dead man.”’

Armstrong rubbed his forehead. ‘Susan, this isn’t a conversation for you. Go and sit in the drawing room while I talk about this with your mother.’

His daughter turned her eyes to her mother. ‘Tell him, Mother,’ she said.

‘I refused him the money. He spoke angrily to me.’

‘He said she had always been against him. He called her unnatural. He said things about her from before she married you—’

‘Susan overheard it all. She came in.’

‘I was going to tell him not to be so angry with Mother. I was going to—’

His daughter’s eyes filled with tears.

Bess put her hand on her daughter’s shoulder.

‘He turned so quickly. In a flash he had your knife from its sheath on the back of the door. He took hold of Susan …’

Armstrong stiffened. The knife on the back of the door was his slaughtering knife that he never put away in its sheath without having honed it to a lethal sharpness. With fresh understanding he took in his daughter’s hunched position, her stricken face.

‘I would have got away from him,’ Susan said. ‘I could have, except …’

Robert crossed the floor, took his daughter’s hand and removed it from her neck. She was clutching a bloodstained cloth. In a curve across the tender skin was a vivid line of red. It went deep enough to break the skin, was a fraction of an inch away from severing the main vessels of life. All the breath in his body left him.

‘Mother cried out and the boys came in. Robin hesitated when he saw them – they are almost as big as he is now, and strong, and there were two of them. His grip wavered and I twisted away …’

‘Where is he now?’

‘He has gone to the old oak, downstream, near Brandy Island. He said to tell you to find him there. You are to take the money or his life is over. That was the message.’

Armstrong left the kitchen and went further into the house. They heard the door to his study open and close. He was in there for mere moments and when he returned he was buttoning his coat.

‘Please don’t go, Father!’

He placed a hand on his daughter’s head, kissed his wife’s temple and then, without a word, he left. Scarcely had the door shut on him than it opened again. He felt for his knife behind the door. The sheath was there, but it was empty.

‘He has it still,’ said Bess.

Her words met the closing door.

The torrential downpours of the day had given way now to even, persistent rainfall. Each drop of water, whether it landed on river, field or rooftop, on leaf or man, made its sound, and each sound was indistinguishable from the rest; together they made a blanket of wet noise that wrapped around Armstrong and Fleet and isolated them.

‘I know,’ the rider told his mount with a pat. ‘I’d sooner be indoors myself. But needs must.’

The path was pitted and stony and Fleet walked along attentively, picking her way between the holes and avoiding the obstacles. From time to time she raised her head to sniff the air, and her ears were alert.

Armstrong was deep in thought.

‘What can he want with so much money?’ he wondered aloud. ‘And why now?’

Where the path dipped, they splashed through sitting water.

‘His sister! His own sister!’ Armstrong exclaimed, shaking his head, and Fleet whinnied in sympathy. ‘Sometimes I think there is nothing more a man could do. A child is not an empty vessel, Fleet, to be formed in whatever way the parent thinks fit. They are born with their own hearts and they cannot be made otherwise, no matter what love a man lavishes on them.’

On they went.

‘What more could I have done? What did I miss? Eh?’

Fleet shook her head and sent drops of water flying from the reins.

‘We loved him. We did, didn’t we? I took him about with me and showed him the world. I taught him what I knew … He knew wrong from right. He had that from me, Fleet. He cannot say he did not know.’

Fleet moved forward in the dark, and Armstrong sighed.

‘You never took to him, did you? I tried not to see it. The way you put your ears back and shied when he came close. What had he done to you? I didn’t want to think ill of him, and I don’t want to now, but even a father cannot turn a blind eye for ever.’

Armstrong raised a hand and rubbed away the wetness from his eye.

‘Nothing but a bit of rain,’ he told himself, though the ache in his throat told him otherwise. ‘And then there is the girl. I should like to know what to make of that, Fleet. What has he got himself mixed up in there? No father would dally the way he did. What kind of father is it that does not recognize his own child? She was not his child, and he knew it from the start. So what was that all about? Will he tell me what the trouble is, do you think? How can I make things right if I do not know what they are? He ties my hands behind my back and then complains that I do not help him enough.’

He felt the weight in his pocket. He had filled a purse with money from the safe and it was heavy.

Fleet stopped. She trotted nervously on the spot, twitching and fretting in the harness.

Armstrong lifted his head and sought an explanation. His eyes found only darkness. The rain had washed all scent from the air, and muffled sound. His human senses told him nothing.

He leant forward in the saddle. ‘What is it, Fleet?’

She skittered again, and this time he caught the splash of water at her feet. He dismounted and the water came over the top of his boots.

‘The flood. It has come.’

It Begins and Ends at the Swan

IT HAD BEEN raining for weeks. There was enough to do securing against the flood, without reminders that they must make ready too for the river gypsies. For it was their time to come up the river and a bit of flood water wouldn’t stop them. In fact, it would only help them come closer to the properties: the houses and cottages, the outbuildings and barns and stables. Every bit of equipment and machinery must be put indoors, every door must be locked. The river gypsies would help themselves to anything that was unsecured, no matter how unlikely. A flower pot on a windowsill was not safe and woe betide the gardener who left a hoe or a rake leaning by the back door. Moreover it was the night of the winter solstice, a year to the day since the child had come. Most importantly of all, there was Helena, whose lively quickness had almost deserted her in these last days of waiting for the birth of their child. But Vaughan’s men had now done everything that was possible. He thanked them and went to find his wife.

‘I’m so tired,’ she said, ‘but come down the garden with us before you take your coat off. We want to see the river.’

‘The water is already twenty yards up the garden. It’s hardly safe for a child, in the dark.’

‘I’ve told her the river might come into the garden and she is so excited. She’s longing to see it.’

‘All right. Where is she?’

‘I fell asleep on the sofa – she’s probably wandered down to the kitchen to see Cook.’

They went to the kitchen, but she wasn’t there.

‘I thought she was with you,’ Cook said.

Vaughan’s eyes met Helena’s in sudden alarm.

‘She will have gone to look at the river – we’ll find her there, ahead of us.’ Although the words she spoke were certain, there was a quiver in Helena’s voice that revealed her doubt.

‘You stay here – I’ll be quicker alone,’ her husband said, and went running out of the room, but Helena followed.

She made slow going. The lawns were mud, the gravel paths washed away by the torrential rain of the last weeks. Her mackintosh did not fasten over her belly now, and as the cold rain soaked her dress she wondered whether she had overestimated her strength. After a pause to rest she went on again. She pictured what she was going to see: the child, standing spellbound at the water’s edge, fascinated by the rising river.

Coming to the gap in the hedge where the river was visible, she stopped. There was her husband, shaking his head, speaking urgently and gesticulating with the gardener and two of the other men, who nodded, serious-faced, and ran hastily away to do his bidding.

Heat broke out all over her body and her heart pounded. She broke into an ungainly run, calling Vaughan’s name as she went. He turned to see her eyes widen as she lost her footing in the mud, and though he got there in time to break her fall, she gave a great cry of pain.

‘It’s all right, I’ve put word out – they are looking for her. We’ll find her.’

Breathless, she nodded. Her face was white.

‘What is it? Your ankle?’

She shook her head. ‘It’s the baby.’

Anthony cast his eye up the garden, cursing himself for having sent all the men out to search for the child. He calculated the distance to the house, the slippery paths, the darkness, and set all that against the dark pain in his wife’s eyes. Could he do it? There was no other way. He felt her full weight in his arms and readied himself to start.

‘Hoy!’ he heard. And again, louder: ‘Hoy there!’

Collodion came floating tranquilly over the vast water.

When they had got Helena on board and were moving again, Daunt told him, ‘Rita is at the Swan. I’ll take Helena there, then we can go back out in Collodion and look for the girl.’

‘Is Rita’s cottage flooded?’

‘Yes, but it’s more than that … It’s Joe.’

There were few drinkers in the Swan. Winter solstice it might be, but a flood was a flood and all the young men were needed elsewhere, boarding up doors, moving furniture upstairs, herding cattle to higher ground … The only men in the inn were those unfit to limit the river’s damage: the old and the infirm, and the ones already drunk when the flood came. They did not tell stories. Joe the storyteller was dying.

In his bed, in the little room that was as far from the river as it was possible to get and still be in the Swan, Joe was drowning. Between spells of gasping for breath, he muttered sounds. His lips moved ceaselessly, but the underwater noises did not resolve themselves into words anyone could understand. His face grimaced and his eyebrows twitched expressively. It was a gripping story, but one that no one but he could hear.

Joe’s daughters came and went between the sickbed and the winter room. The Little Margots had today put aside their blithe smiles and wore the same grave sorrow as their mother, who sat beside the bed, Joe’s hand in hers.

There was a moment when Joe seemed to surface momentarily. He half opened his eyes and delivered a few syllables before sinking again.

‘What did he say?’ Jonathan asked, bewildered.

‘He called for Quietly,’ his mother replied calmly, and her daughters nodded. They had heard it too.

‘Shall I go and fetch him?’

‘No, Jonathan, it’s not necessary,’ Margot said. ‘He’s on his way.’

All this was heard by Rita as she stood by the window, looking out at the great lake that lay all around the Swan like a blank page, that came within a few feet of its walls, isolating the inn and making an island of it.

She saw Collodion come into view. In deep water she saw Daunt launch the row boat. He helped Helena into it – she was a dark silhouette – and rowed towards the entrance of the Swan. By his solicitude, Rita understood the significance of Helena’s sudden arrival.

‘Margot – Mrs Vaughan is here. It looks as if it is her time.’

‘It’s a good thing there are plenty of us here, then. My girls will be able to help.’

In the busyness of Helena’s arrival, Daunt drew Rita aside for a moment.

‘The girl is missing.’

‘No!’ She clutched her belly, felt a shrinking there.

‘Rita – are you all right?’

She made an effort, gathered herself. A man was dying. A baby was about to be born.

‘How long? Where was she last seen?’

Daunt told her what little he knew.

One of the Little Margots called to Rita, wanting instructions.

Rita’s face was white. It held a look so full of dread that for once Daunt had no desire to photograph it.

‘I have to go. Joe and Helena need me. But Daunt—’ He turned back into the room to catch her last, ferocious words: ‘Find her!’

Thereafter the hours were very long, and very short. While the water lay unperturbed and indifferent all around, the women at the Swan were engaged with the human pursuits of dying and being born. On one side of the wall, Helena struggled to deliver her baby into this world. On the other side, Joe struggled to depart it. The Little Margots got on with everything that needed to be done so that life could begin and end. They carried water and clean cloths, filled log baskets and stoked fires, lit candles, made plates of food that nobody had an appetite for but ate anyway out of good sense, and all the while they also wept and soothed and calmed and comforted.

Rita went to and fro between the two rooms, doing whatever was needed. Between the two rooms, in the corridor, was Jonathan, unsettled and fretful.

‘Have they found her, Rita? Where is she?’ he wanted to know every time she left Helena.

‘We won’t know anything till they come back and tell us,’ she told him, letting herself back into Joe’s room.

They gave themselves over to time. There were hours that might have been minutes, and then Rita heard Margot say, ‘Quietly is coming, Joe. Goodbye, my love.’

Rita remembered what she had heard in the Swan a year ago: You have only to look in a man’s eyes to tell if he is dead or not. It’s the seeing that goes out of them. She saw the seeing go out of Joe.

‘Pray for us, Rita, would you?’ Margot asked.

Rita prayed, and when she had finished, Margot loosened her hand from Joe’s. She joined his hands together, then placed her own hands in her lap. She allowed two tears to escape, one from each eye.

‘Never mind me,’ she said to Rita. ‘You get on.’

On the other side of the wall, there were minutes that might have been hours, then a contraction at last delivered a baby. In a slick rush it dropped into Rita’s hands.

‘Ah!’ whispered the Little Margots in shocked delight. ‘What is it?’

Rita blinked in surprise.

‘I’ve heard of this. I’ve never seen it. The sac usually bursts before the baby emerges. That’s the water breaking. This one didn’t break.’

The perfect infant was in an underwater world. Eyes fast shut, with liquid movements, little fists dreamily opening and closing, it was sleep-swimming inside a transparent, water-filled membrane.

Rita touched the pearly sac with the tip of a knife, and a great split ran around it.

Water splashed.

The baby boy, opening his eyes and mouth at the same time, discovered to his great astonishment air and the world.

Fathers and Sons

FLEET’S HOOVES SPLASHED through the water. In the dimness of the night, there was a flat sheen like pewter all around, disturbed only by their own movements. Armstrong thought of all the small land creatures, mice and voles and weasels, and hoped that they had found safety. He thought of the birds, the night hunters, thrown from their normal feeding ground. He thought of the fish that strayed without knowing it from the main current and now found themselves swimming through grass a few inches above the ground, sharing territory with him and with his horse. He hoped Fleet would not tread on any creature lost in this landscape that no longer belonged clearly to earth or water. He hoped they would all be well.

They came to the oak, near Brandy Island.

He heard a sound. As he turned, a silhouette separated itself from the darkness of the tree trunk.

‘Robin!’

‘You took your time!’

Armstrong dismounted. In the semi-darkness his son hunched against the cold and shivered in his thin jacket. His words had been spoken abruptly with a man’s swagger, but a quiver cut into his voice and left the boldness in tatters.

Compassion flared instinctively in Armstrong, but he remembered the curved line of red on his daughter’s neck. ‘Your own sister,’ he said in a dark voice, and shook his head. ‘It is beyond belief …’

‘It’s Mother’s fault,’ Robin said. ‘If she’d only done what I said, it need never have happened.’

‘You blame your mother?’

‘I blame her for many things, and yes, that is one.’

‘How can you try to make this her fault? Your mother is the best woman in the world. Whose hand held the knife to Susan’s throat? Whose hand has the knife still?’

There was silence. Then:

‘Have you brought the money?’

‘There will be time to talk of money later. There are other things we must speak of first.’

‘There is no time. Give me the money now and let me go. There is not a minute to lose.’

‘Why the rush, Robin? Who is after you? What have you done?’

‘Debts.’

‘Work your way out of debt. Come home to the farm and work like your brothers.’

‘The farm? It’s one thing for you to get up at five every morning to feed the pigs in the cold and the dark. I am made for a better life.’

‘You’ll have to come to some arrangement with whoever made you the loan. I can’t pay it all. It’s too much.’

‘This isn’t some gentlemanly loan I’m talking about. This is not a banker, ready to renegotiate terms.’ There came a sound that was a sob or a laugh. ‘Give me the money – or you send me to the gallows. Hush!’

Their ears strained in the darkness. Nothing.

‘The money! If I do not get away tonight—’

‘To go where?’

‘Away. Anywhere. Where nobody knows me.’

‘And leave so many questions behind you?’

‘There’s no time!’

‘Tell me the truth about your wife, Robin. Tell me the truth about Alice.’

‘What does it matter? They’re dead! Finished. Gone.’

‘Not one word of sorrow? Remorse?’

‘I thought she was bringing money with her! She said her parents would come round. Set us up in life. Instead she was a millstone round my neck. She’s dead, and she drowned the child, and good riddance to the pair of them.’

‘How can you speak so?’

The slim, shaking silhouette stiffened suddenly.

‘Did you hear something?’ Robin asked in a low murmur.

‘Nothing.’

His son listened intently for a few moments, then returned his attention to Armstrong. ‘If he’s not here yet, he soon will be. Give me the money and let me go.’

‘What about the child from the Swan? The one you neither claimed nor relinquished. That charade at the summer fair. Tell me about that.’

‘The same thing as always! Don’t you know me by now? The same thing that is hanging from your belt in the leather pouch.’

‘You expected to make money out of her?’

‘From the Vaughans. It was plain from the minute I walked into the Swan that night that Vaughan knew the girl wasn’t his. She couldn’t have been. I knew it, and he knew it. I knew there was money to be made if I only had the time to think it through – I fainted, or they thought I did, and worked it all out there and then, flat out on the floorboards. They wanted the girl and had money. I wanted money and could claim the girl.’

‘You meant to pretend a claim and then sell it?’

‘Vaughan was on the brink of paying up, but once Mother had sent the girl back, he had no need. I was in debt, thanks to her.’

‘Do not speak ill of your mother. She taught you right from wrong. If you had listened better to her you might be a better man today.’

‘But she did not do right, did she? She only talked of doing so! I’d have been a better man if she’d been a better woman. I place the responsibility at her door.’

‘Watch what you say, Robin.’

‘Look at the three of us! She so white and you so black! And look at me! I know you are not my father. I have known from a child that I was not your son.’

Armstrong took a moment to find his words.

‘I have loved you as a father loves his child.’

‘She tricked you, didn’t she? She was with child by another man and desperate for someone to marry her, but who’d want a lame and boss-eyed woman for a wife? Not the baby’s father, that’s for sure. But then you came along. The black farmer. And she set her cap at you, didn’t she? What a trade that was. A white bride for a black farmer – and me, eight months later.’

‘You are wrong.’

‘You are not my father! I have always known it. And I know who my true father is.’

Armstrong flinched. ‘You know?’

‘You remember when I forced the bureau drawer and stole that money?’

‘I would prefer to forget it.’

‘That is when I saw the letter.’

Armstrong was puzzled, and then his confusion cleared. ‘The letter from Lord Embury?’

‘The letter from my father. That says what is to come to his natural son. Money that you and my mother have kept from me and that I have taken from you by stealth.’

‘Your father …?’

‘That’s right. I know Lord Embury is my father. I have known it since I was eight.’

Armstrong shook his head. ‘He is not your father.’

‘I have read the letter.’

Armstrong shook his head again. ‘He is not your father.’

‘I have got the letter!’

Armstrong shook his head a third time and opened his mouth to repeat himself again. The words sounded in the wet air – ‘He is not your father!’ – but it was not his own voice that spoke them.

The voice struck Robert Armstrong as being distantly familiar.

Robin’s face twisted in despair.

‘He’s here!’ he moaned under his breath.

Armstrong turned and looked all around, but his eyes could not penetrate the darkness. Every tree trunk and every shrub might conceal a figure, and a throng of phantoms hovered mistily in the black dampness. At last, by dint of staring, his eyes made out a shape. Half-water, half-night, it waded towards them, a stunted form whose wide garment trailed in the water and whose hat sat low and concealed its features.

Splash by splash it came closer to Robin.

The young man took a step back. He could not draw his fearful eyes from the approaching figure, but at the same time he shrank from it.

When the man – for man it was – came to a spot five feet from Robin, he stopped and the moonlight suddenly illuminated his face.

‘I am your father.’

Robin shook his head.

‘Do you not know me, son?’

‘I know you.’ Robin’s voice shook. ‘I know you are a low-born villain, a base man who lives by the knife and by crime. I know you are a charlatan and a thief and a liar, and worse besides.’

The man’s face creased into a proud smile.

‘He knows me!’ he said to Armstrong. ‘And I see you know me too.’

‘Victor Nash,’ said Armstrong heavily. ‘I had hoped never to see you again after I threw you off my farm so long ago. Like the bad penny you are, you came back, and I wasn’t sorry to think you’d drowned off Brandy Island.’

Victor bowed. ‘Drowned? It was not my time. I live to claim what’s mine. I owe you thanks, Armstrong, for raising my son and educating him. Don’t he speak fine, after all his teaching? Listen to what comes out of his mouth – why sometimes I can hardly understand him, when he gets going with his Latin and his Greek and his long words nobody knows. And he can write so nice. See him with a pen and watch how quick he takes the notions from your tongue and sets them down in ink, and never a blot! All curls and twiddles and it looks a picture, it does. And his manners! Nobody can say a word against his manners – he is like the finest lord of the land. I am proud of my son, truly I am. For in him the best of me – all my cunning and all my guile – is mixed with the best of your missus – ain’t he fair, with his soft hair and his white skin? And you have played your part, Armstrong. You have polished him over with the best of you too.’

Robin shuddered.

‘It’s not true!’ he told Victor and, turning to Armstrong, ‘It’s not true, is it? Tell him! Tell him who my father is!’

Victor sniggered.

‘It is true,’ Armstrong told Robin. ‘This man is your father.’

Robin stared. ‘But Lord Embury!’

‘Lord Embury!’ echoed the man, with a snigger. ‘Lord Embury! He be somebody’s father all right, eh, Armstrong? Why don’t you tell him?’

‘Lord Embury is my father, Robin. He fell in love with my mother when he was a very young man and she a servant girl. That is what the letter in the bureau referred to. It is the agreement he made to assure my financial future before he died. I am the Robert Armstrong mentioned in the letter.’

Robin looked, stricken, into Armstrong’s face.

‘Then my mother …’

‘Her innocence was taken advantage of in the vilest manner by this scoundrel, and I did my utmost to make things right for her. And to make things right for you.’

‘Yes, well, enough of that. I have come to claim him. It is time to give him up to me. You have had him for twenty-three years and now he must come to his true father. Mustn’t you, Rob?’

‘Come to you? You think I will come to you?’ Robin laughed. ‘You’re mad.’

‘Ah, but you must, boy. Family is family. We are kin, you and me. With my base plotting and your fine looks, with my low knowledge and your high manners, think what we can do! We have only just begun! We must continue what we have started! Together, my boy, we can work wonders! After all the waiting, our time has come!’

‘I’ll have nothing to do with you!’ Robin snarled. ‘I tell you now, leave me alone! I’ll not have it said that I’m your son. If you tell a soul of this, I’ll … I’ll …’

‘What will you, Robin, my boy? What, eh?’

Robin panted.

‘What is it I know, Robin? Tell me that. What is it I know about you that nobody else knows?’

Robin froze. ‘Whatever you say brings you down with me!’

Victor nodded slowly. ‘So be it.’

‘You would not incriminate yourself.’

Victor looked at the water. ‘Who’s to say what a man would or wouldn’t do when his own son denies him? It’s about family, my boy. I lost my mother in the days before I can remember. My father taught me everything I know, but he was hanged before I was grown to manhood. I had a sister once – at least, I called her sister – but even she betrayed me. You are all I have, my Robin with the soft hair and the silky words and the lordly ways … You are all the world to me, and if I cannot have you, then what is the purpose of my life? No, our future is one, Robin, and it is up to you which way you will have it. We can go into business together, as we have before, or you can deny me and I’ll denounce you, and we will be chained together in the cells and will go to the gallows, father and son together, as is the natural way of things.’

Robin wept.

‘What is the hold this man has over you?’ Armstrong asked. ‘What conspiracy is it that binds you to him?’

‘Shall I tell him?’ Victor asked.

‘No!’

‘I think I will. This is one refuge I will close and when it is gone the only succour left will be at my side.’ He turned to Armstrong. ‘I knew this fine young man liked to drink in a place on the edge of Oxford and I got to know him there, slow and gradual. I sowed a plot in his mind and let him think it was his own invention. He thought I was following behind his every step, when in fact the route was all mine. We stole your pig together, Armstrong – that was the first thing! How I laughed in my sleeve that night, thinking that you had told me twenty-three years before to stay away and not come within twelve miles of you and your Bess, and there I was, being let into your yard to steal your favourite pig, and it was my own son unlatching the gate and tempting her with raspberries to help me do it! He ran off with me and we had a good little business for a while. I knew how to set it up, the trickery of a fortune-telling pig. The fairs brought us in some good money – we was well off, for low-down types, only your son wasn’t satisfied. He wanted more. So we used what we had – the pig and the fair – and we leapt to greater things. Didn’t we, Rob, my son?’

Robin shuddered.

‘The Vaughan child …’ Armstrong murmured, aghast. ‘The kidnap …’

‘Well done! Rob used all his inveigling words to draw that foolish girl Ruby into parting with a shilling. Your ginger pig looked with soft eyes into that girl’s silly round ones, and from behind a curtain Robin here in his sweetest piggy voice told her where to go to see the face of her one true love in the night river. Didn’t you, my son?’

Robin put his face in his hands and turned to Armstrong, but Armstrong took him by the wrists and forced him to look him in the eye.

‘Is this true?’

Robin cringed and his face crumpled.

‘And there is more, isn’t there, Rob, my lad?’

‘Don’t listen to him!’ Robin wailed.

‘Yes, for that was only the beginning. Whose idea was it, Rob, at the start? Whose idea to take the little girl from the Vaughans, and how to do it?’

‘That was your idea!’

‘Aye, it was too, but whose idea did you think it was, at the outset?’

Robin turned his face away.

‘Who was it who crowed at his own cleverness? Who was it who gave orders to the men in the boat, who wrote out the ransom note, who set each man his hiding place? Who was it who strutted about on the night itself, checking each man had his instructions clear? I was proud of you then! When I saw you, only a stripling, yet sure of yourself and your villainy. He’s my boy, I thought. He’s got my blood in his veins and my wickedness in his heart, and there’s nothing Armstrong can do to clean it out. He’s mine, body and soul.’

‘Give him the money,’ Robin whispered into Armstrong’s ear, but not quietly enough, for the words carried over the rising water and the man laughed. ‘The money? Yes, we’ll take the money all right, won’t we, son? Share and share alike. I’ll share it with you, Rob, my boy, fifty–fifty!’

The water had risen to reach the knees of the three, and the rain soaked into their hats and ran down their necks and into their shirts, and before long their top halves were as wet as their bottom halves and it made no difference whether they were in or out of the water.

‘And the rest, Rob,’ Victor went on. ‘The rest!’

‘Don’t …’ Robin moaned, but his voice scarcely sounded above the rain that fell torrentially on the water.

‘Yes, the rest … We had the little lass, didn’t we, Rob? We had her in our grip. Out the window and down the ladder and sprinting down the garden to the river, where our boat was waiting.’

He turned to Armstrong. ‘Canny he was! Did he trespass in the garden? Did he climb the ladder? Did he break an entry? Not he! Others did all that dangerous work. He waited in the boat. Too great an organizational mind to be risked in action, you see. Got a head on his shoulders, eh?’ He turned back to Robin. ‘So down the garden we came and the child with us, chloroformed, in a sack. I had her, for though I am slight my strength is formidable, and I tossed her like a bag of cress into the arms of Rob here.’

Robin sobbed.

‘I chucked her over the water to my son, waiting in the boat. And what happened, Rob?’

Robin shook his head while his shoulders shook.

‘No!’ exclaimed Armstrong.

‘Yes!’ said Victor. ‘Yes! The boat tilted and he half dropped her. There was a crack against the side of the boat and in his grasping to clutch her back again he lost his grip again, and in she went. Down like a sack of stones she sunk. He set the men to prodding with their oars, and how we did it I don’t know, but we found her at last. How long was it, Robin? Five minutes? Ten?’

Robin, a white face in the dark, did not answer.

‘We found her, anyway. And off we went. Back to Brandy Island. There we set her down and opened up the sack, didn’t we, Rob, son? All might have been lost,’ he said with gravity and a sombre shaking of the head. ‘It could have been the end of everything. But Rob here, with his clear head, saved the day. “It matters not whether she be alive or dead,” said he, “for the Vaughans won’t know it till the money is passed over!” And he wrote out the note – a prettier note I never did see – and it was sent, and though we had not the goods, not in a fit state anyhow, we sent the invoice all the same. And why not, he said, for we had had the labour and the risk of it, eh Rob? I knew he was my son then too.’

Armstrong all the while had edged up the slope and away from the swirling water, but Robin stood still. The water eddied around him, and he seemed not to feel it.

‘So we had the ransom from Vaughan. We had it, and we gave him back his girl too, didn’t we, though he made out we hadn’t. Lasted a good long while, that money. Lovely house, Rob got. I’ve seen it. Didn’t my heart swell with pride, a son of mine in a fine white house in the city of Oxford. Mind you, he has never invited me there. Not once. After everything we had gone through together. Pig rustling and fairground trickery and kidnap and murder – you might think as they was pastimes would bind one man to another in comradeship, mightn’t you? That pained me, that did, Rob. And when the money ran out – he is a gambler, Armstrong, this child of ours, did you know that? I’ve warned him, but he won’t listen – yes, after that money ran out, I’ve been the one to keep him afloat. Every penny I’ve got has gone into his pocket. I’ve worked myself to the bone to keep him in his finery, my boy, so that now, you might say as he belongs to me.

‘Now that you know I’m your father, you wouldn’t be so unkind again, would you? With all those IOUs, that fine white house is my house now, but there is nothing of mine I will not share with you, my son.’

Rob looked at the man. His eyes were dark and quiet and his shivering had ceased.

‘Look at him,’ Victor sighed. ‘See how fine a figure he cuts, that’s my lad. Come, we’ll take the money, Armstrong, and be on our way. Are you ready to go, Rob?’

He stepped towards Robin, hand outstretched. Robin sliced the air with his hand, and Victor took an awkward step back, stumbling. He held his hand up to stare at it in surprise and saw that it was running with dark liquid.

‘Son?’ he said uncertainly.

Robin took a step towards him. He raised his hand again and this time the light caught the blade of Armstrong’s slaughter knife.

‘No!’ came Armstrong’s roar, but again Robin’s hand came down, a swift line in the air, and Victor stepped back again. This time the ground was not where he expected it to be. He teetered on the brink, clasped the coat of his son, who slashed at him – one, two, three – with the knife. They were on the very edge of the riverbank and it was into the running river that they fell – together.

‘Father!’ Robin cried as he fell, and in the moment before the river swept him away, he reached a desperate arm towards Armstrong, and cried out once again: ‘Save me, Father!’

‘Robin!’ Armstrong waded to the point where he had seen his son enter the water. He felt the current tug at his legs. He saw Robin go under, scanned the water frantically to see him re-emerge, and when he saw the flailing limbs was shocked at how far the current had already carried his boy downstream. He had been readying himself to launch into the wild stream but, recognizing his own powerlessness, refrained.

A punt appeared from out of the rain. A tall figure raised a pole towards the sky, and when it descended and found the riverbed, the long narrow vessel moved with remarkable force through the water, slicing through it with effortless grace. The ferryman reached into the water and with thin, bare arms and easy strength drew out the body of a man in a long sodden coat. He laid the body in the bottom of the punt.

‘My son!’ cried Armstrong. ‘For God’s sake, where is my son?’

The ferryman reached in again, and with the same ease he pulled a second body from the water. As he hauled it in, Armstrong caught a glimpse of Robin’s face, still and lifeless and like – so very like – the other man’s.

He cried out, a painful cry, and knew what it was to feel your heart break.

The ferryman launched his pole into the air and let it fall through his fingers.

‘Quietly!’ called Armstrong, after him. ‘Give him back to me! Please!’

The ferryman did not appear to hear him. The punt disappeared swiftly into the rain.

Armstrong did not mount Fleet but they walked, man and beast, out of the water through the torrential rain towards the shelter of the Swan. They went their way in silence for the most part, Armstrong weighed down by the intolerable weight of his grief. But from time to time, he spoke a few words to Fleet, and Fleet softly whinnied a reply.

‘Who would have thought it?’ he murmured. ‘I know the stories about Quietly, but I have never believed them. To think the human mind is capable of producing visions like that. It seemed real at the time. Didn’t you think so?’

And later: ‘There must be more to stories than you think.’

And much later, when they were nearly there: ‘I could swear I also saw … In the punt – behind the ferryman … Am I mad? What did you see, Fleet?’

Fleet whinnied, an unsettled and nervous sound.

‘Impossible!’ Armstrong shook his head to dispel the image. ‘My mind is playing tricks on me. These visions must be the ravings of despair.’

Lily and the River

COLD. IT WAS cold. And if Lily knew she was cold then she was awake. Darkness was ebbing from the room, dawn was coming and – surely – something else too. She opened her eyes to the sting of cold on her eyeballs. What wasn’t right?

Was it him? Returned from the river?

‘Victor?’

No reply.

That left one thing. Her throat tightened.

This afternoon she had noticed that one of the floor tiles in the kitchen was sticking up. Tile edges had always protruded here and there. She was used to them shifting a little when she walked about. But this tile had seemed more uneven than before. She had nudged the high edge with her toe to straighten it; as it sank, a silvery line of water appeared round its edges. Prising up the tile, Lily had seen water underneath. She had hurried to forget it. Now she remembered.

Lily raised herself on one elbow and peered down to the kitchen.

In the weak light, her first impression was that everything had shrunk. The table was shorter than it ought to be and the sink was nearer the floor. The chair was stunted. Then she caught a movement: the tin bath rocked gently, like a cradle. The dull terracotta floor tiles had disappeared and over them lay a broad flatness that shifted and shimmered like a thing making up its mind.

Though she could not see it grow, it was growing: at first it was inches from the bottom rung of the ladder, then it reached it, and then it swallowed it altogether. It crept slowly but persistently up the walls and pressed against the door.

It occurred to Lily that the thing was perhaps not looking for her, after all. ‘It wants the way out,’ she thought. When it was nearing the second rung, her fear of action was overtaken by her fear of inaction.

‘It’ll be no different from standing in a bath tub,’ she told herself as she descended the ladder, ‘only colder, that’s all.’

Three-quarters of the way down, she gathered up her chemise into a bundle and tucked it in her armpit. Another step and then, with the next one – in!

It came above her knees and, as she waded, resisted her. She pressed on, and her movement roused it into swirls and eddies around her body.

The door was reluctant to open. The wood swelled in the wet, it warped the door and made it stick in the jamb. She put all her weight on it, but nothing happened. In a panic she rammed it with her shoulder; it loosened from the frame to stand ajar, but still was stiff. Lily let go of her chemise, which trailed in the water, and gave the door a great double-handed shove. Against resistance she pushed it wide open – on to a new world.

The sky had fallen into Lily’s yard. Its dawn-grey had come to earth and lain itself over grass, rocks, paths and weeds. Clouds floated at knee height. Lily stared in bewilderment. Where was the basketman’s flood post? Where was the new flood post? She lifted her gaze automatically to the river, but it was gone. A flat silver stillness lay over everything. Here and there a tree emerged out of it and was reflected in its polished finish along with the sky. Every dip and crevice in the landscape was flattened out, every detail concealed, every incline erased. All was simple and bare and flat, and the air was luminous.

Lily swallowed. Tears welled in her. She hadn’t thought it would be like this. She had expected heaving masses of water, violent currents and murderous waves, not this serenity without end. Motionless, she stood in her doorway, staring at the fearful loveliness. It barely moved, just shimmered at times, peacefully alive. A swan came gliding across the water; the trail it left in the clouds settled into flatness.

Were there fish? she wondered.

She stepped carefully out from her cottage, trying to disturb the water as little as possible. Her nightdress hem was already sodden; now the water crept up, plastering it to her legs.

She took two more steps down the slope and the water rose to her thighs.

Onwards. The water came to her waist.

You could see shapes down there, flickering movements of things alive under the surface. Once your eye had worked out what to look for, you saw the slivers of motion everywhere, and with a thrill Lily felt it too in her own veins. Another step. Another. She came to a place and thought, This is where the old post is. You could just see it, under the water. How strangely marvellous to be here on the bank, with the water higher than it had ever been in the entire lifetime of the old post. Was this fear? She was in the grip of a great feeling, something many times vaster than fear – but she was not afraid.

How odd I must look, she thought. A chest and a head above water, reflected upside down beneath my own chin.

Grass and plants waved dreamily in their new world beneath the surface. Ahead of her the silver gave way to a darker, shadowy place. This was where the bank fell away more steeply. This was where the current would be, still there, under the surface. I won’t go any further, she thought. I’ll stop here.

There were lots more fish here, and also – Oh! – something larger, pinkly fleshy. It floated slowly and heavily in the water, was coming her way, but just out of reach.

Lily stretched out an arm for the body. If she could just catch a limb with one hand and draw it to her …

Was it too far? The little body drifted closer. In a moment it would be at its nearest point, but still out of reach.

Without thought, without fear, Lily launched forwards.

Her fingers closed on the pink limb.

There was nothing beneath her feet but water.

Jonathan Tells a Story

‘MY OWN SON!’ Armstrong groaned, with a distraught shake of the head, when he had finished his story.

‘Not your son, though,’ Margot reminded him. ‘He had his true father in him, I’m sad to say.’

‘I must make amends. How it can be done I do not know, but I must find a way. And before that, there is a task I dread but must not put off. I must tell the Vaughans what happened to their daughter, and my son’s part in it.’

‘It is not the time to tell Mrs Vaughan about it now,’ Rita told him gently. ‘When Mr Vaughan returns, we will tell them together.’

‘Why is he not here?’

‘He is out with the other men, searching for the child. She is missing.’

‘Missing? Then I must search with them.’

Seeing his dazed face and his trembling hands, the women tried to dissuade him, but he would not be stopped. ‘At this moment it is the only thing I can do to help them, so I must do it.’

Rita returned to Helena, who was nursing her baby.

‘Is there any news?’ she asked.

‘Nothing yet. Mr Armstrong has joined the search. Try not to worry, Helena.’

The young mother looked down at her newborn and some of the worry melted from her face as she lay her smallest finger against his cheek and stroked it. She smiled. ‘I can see my own dear father in him, Rita! Isn’t that a gift!’

When no answer came, Helena glanced up. ‘Rita! Whatever’s the matter?’

‘I don’t know what my father looked like. Nor my mother, even.’

‘Don’t cry! Rita, dearest!’

Rita sat down next to her friend on the bed.

‘You can’t bear that she’s gone, can you?’

‘No. Before you came to claim her – that night a year ago – and before Armstrong turned up – and before Lily White – during that long night, when Daunt was unconscious in this very bed and I was in that chair, over there – I took her on my lap. We fell asleep together. I thought then that if it turned out she wasn’t Daunt’s, and if she had nobody in the world, that I …’

‘I know.’

‘You know? How?’

‘I saw you with her. You felt the same way we all did. Daunt feels it too.’

‘Does he? I just want to know where she is. I can’t bear her not being here.’

‘Nor can I. But it’s harder for you.’

‘Harder for me? But you—’

‘I thought I was her mother? I also thought I’d invented her. Do you remember I told you I sometimes wondered whether she was real?’

‘I do. Why do you think it’s harder for me?’

‘Because I have him.’ Helena nodded at her baby. ‘My own real baby. Here. Hold him.’

Rita put out her arms and Helena placed the baby into them.

‘Not like that. Not like a nurse. Hold him like I do. Like a mother.’

Rita settled the infant in her arms. He fell asleep.

‘There,’ whispered Helena after a silence. ‘How does that feel now?’

The flood water lapped around the Swan. It came to the very door, but no further.

When Collodion returned, and Armstrong soon after, the men shook their heads, grim-faced. Vaughan went directly to see his wife and the baby. Both were asleep. He found Rita there.

‘Anything?’ she whispered.

He shook his head.

When he had gazed long enough in careful silence so as not to wake his son, and kissed his wife’s sleeping head, he went with Rita to the winter room. Wet boots had been prised off, feet were stretched towards the fire and socks steamed. The Little Margots had put more logs on the fire and brought hot drinks for everyone.

‘Joe?’ Vaughan asked, though he could guess the answer.

‘Gone,’ one of his daughters said.

Then nobody spoke, and they breathed the minutes in and out till they made an hour.

The door opened.

Whoever it was did not rush to come in. The cold air made the candles flicker and brought the tang of the river more powerfully into the room. All looked up.

Every eye saw, yet none reacted. They were trying to understand what it was they were seeing, framed by the open doorway.

‘Lily!’ Rita exclaimed. She was a figure from a dream. Her white nightgown ran with water, her hair was flat to her scalp, her eyes were wide with shock. In her arms she clutched a body.

All those who had been there at solstice night a year ago were struck by the sight of her. First Daunt had arrived at that door with a corpse in his arms. Later that same night it was Rita who came in, clutching the girl in her arms. Now for a third time the scene replayed itself.

Lily swayed on the threshold and her eyelids flickered. This time it was Daunt and Vaughan who leapt up to catch the new arrival as she fell, and it was Armstrong who stretched out his arms and received into them the wriggling body of a half-drowned piglet.

‘Good Lord!’ Armstrong exclaimed. ‘It’s Maisie!’

And so it was – the sweetest piglet from Maud’s litter, the one he had given to Lily, according to his promise, when he’d come to fetch Maud and take her back to the farm.

The Little Margots took kind charge of Lily, helping her into dry clothes and making hot drinks to stop the shivers, and when she came back to the winter room, Armstrong complimented her on her courage in rescuing the little pig from the flood water.

On Armstrong’s lap the piglet warmed up, and when it had recovered its good spirits, it squealed and squirmed in lively fashion.

The noisy surprise brought Jonathan out of the room where he had been keeping watch over the body of his father. Yawning, one of his sisters followed him.

‘You haven’t found her?’ the Little Margot asked.

Daunt shook his head.

‘Found who?’ Jonathan wondered.

‘The little girl who is lost,’ Rita reminded him. It is late, she thought, he is too tired to remember, we must get him to sleep.

‘But she has been found,’ he said, surprised. ‘Didn’t you know?’

‘Found?’ They looked at each other quizzically. ‘No, Jonathan, we don’t think so.’

‘Yes.’ He gave a nod that was quite certain. ‘I saw her.’

They stared.

‘She came just now.’

‘Here?’

‘Outside the window.’

Rita sprang up and ran to the room he had just come from, and she looked in agitation from the window, this way and that. ‘Where, Jonathan? Where was she?’

‘In the punt. That came for Father.’

‘Oh, Jonathan.’ Despondently she led him back to the winter room. ‘Tell us just what you thought you saw, in order, from the start.’

‘Well, Father died and he was waiting for Quietly, and Quietly came. Like Mother said he would. He came right up to the window, in his punt, to take Father to the other side of the river, and when I looked out, there she was. In the punt. I said, “Everybody’s out looking for you,” and she said, “Tell them my father came to fetch me.” And then they went away. He’s very powerful, her father. I’ve never seen a punt go so fast.’

There was a lengthy pause.

‘The child doesn’t speak, Jonathan. Do you remember that?’ Daunt asked kindly.

‘She does now,’ Jonathan said. ‘As they were leaving, I said, “Don’t go yet,” and she said, “I’ll come back, Jonathan. Not for a long time, but I’ll come back, and I’ll see you then.” And they went.’

‘I think you might have fallen asleep … Perhaps you were dreaming?’

He thought about it hard for a moment, then firmly shook his head. ‘She was sleeping,’ – indicating his sister. ‘I wasn’t.’

‘This is too serious a thing for a boy to be telling stories about,’ suggested Vaughan.

Everybody present opened their mouths and spoke as one: ‘But Jonathan can’t tell stories.’

In the corner, Armstrong shook his head in quiet wonderment. He’d seen her too. Sitting behind her ferryman father as he propelled the punt so powerfully between the worlds of the living and the dead, between reality and a story.

A Tale of Two Children

AT KELMSCOTT FARMHOUSE the flames burnt bright in the hearth, yet nothing they did could warm the pair of sitters, each in an armchair, one each side of the fireplace.

They had dried their eyes and now gazed into the flames with gravest sorrow.

‘You tried,’ Bess said. ‘You could have done no more.’

‘At the river, do you mean? Or his whole life?’

‘Both.’

He stared where she was staring, into the flames. ‘Would it have been different if I had been harsher with him at the beginning? Should I have whipped him when he stole for the first time?’

‘Things might have been different. Or they might not. You can never know. And if they were different, there is no telling whether they would have been better or worse.’

‘How could things be worse?’

She turned towards him the face that had been hidden in shadow.

‘I Saw him, you know.’

He looked up from the fire, wondering.

‘After the time with the bureau. I know we agreed I wouldn’t, but I couldn’t help it. I’d had the other boys by then, and I knew what kind of children they were by just looking at them with my ordinary eye. Their baby faces were open; it was plain who they were. But Robin was different. He was not like the other babies. He always kept himself concealed. He was not kind to the little ones. You remember how he pinched and bullied them? There were always tears when Robin was there, but without him they played as good as gold. So I often thought of it, but I had said I would not use my eye, and I thought it better to abide by that. Until the day of the bureau. I knew he had done it – he was not such a good liar then as he is now. As he became later, I should say – and I did not believe him when he said he’d seen a fellow running off down the lane and found the bureau forced open. So I took off my patch and I held him by the shoulders and I Saw him.’

‘What did you See?’

‘No more and no less than you saw tonight. That he was a liar and a cheat. That he had not one jot of care for any person in this world other than himself. That his first and last thought in life would be for his own comfort and his own ease, and that he would hurt anybody, whether it be his own brothers and sisters or his own father, if it brought some small advantage to himself.’

‘And so none of this has ever surprised you.’

‘No.’

‘You said there is no telling if things would have been better or worse … Nothing could be worse than this.’

‘I did not like you following him tonight. Knowing he had the knife. After what he did to Susan, I was afraid of what he might do to you – and though he was my own flesh and blood, and though I was bound to love him no matter what, I tell you the truth when I say, losing you would have been worse.’

They sat then for a while in silence. Each pursued their own thoughts, and their thoughts were not so very different.

There then came a faint noise, a light tap some distance away. Lost in their own reflections, they at first ignored it, but it came again.

Bess looked up at her husband. ‘Was that the door?’

He shrugged. ‘Nobody would come knocking at this time of night.’

They returned to their ruminations, but then it came again, no louder, but lasting longer.

‘It is the door,’ he said, rising. ‘What a night for it. I shall send them away, whoever they are.’

He took the candle, crossed the hall to the great oak door and slid back the bolts. Opening the door a fraction, he looked out. There was nobody there, and he was just about to close the door again when a small voice stopped him.

‘Please, Mr Armstrong …’

He looked down. There at waist height was a pair of boys.

‘Not tonight, children,’ he began. ‘This is a house of mourning …’ And then he looked closer. He raised his candle and peered at the larger of the two boys. He was dressed in rags, shivering and thin, but he knew him. ‘Ben? Is it Ben, the butcher’s boy?’

‘Yes, Sir.’

‘Come in.’ He opened the door wide. ‘It is not the best of nights for visitors, but come, I cannot have you out of doors when it is so cold.’

Ben carefully ushered in the second child ahead of him, and as the smaller boy passed into the candlelight, Armstrong’s breath caught in his chest.

‘Robin!’ he exclaimed.

He bent and held the candle so that its light fell on the boy’s face. It was a fine-boned face, made thin by hunger; it had Robin’s slenderness; the nostrils had Robin’s delicate flare.

‘Robin?’ Armstrong’s voice trembled.

How many times impossible was it? Robin was a grown man. Robin had died tonight, this very night, and he had seen it happen. This child could not be Robin, and yet …

The eyes blinked, and Armstrong saw that the child looking out of Robin’s face was not Robin, but some other boy. His eyes were gentle and timid – and grey. In the midst of his astonishment, Armstrong heard a half-murmur from Ben and turned to see him falter and sway. He caught Ben as he fell, and called out for Bessie.

‘It is the butcher’s boy who went missing from Bampton,’ he explained. ‘He’s overcome by the warmth after being out so long.’

‘And he has gone short of food lately, by the look of him,’ Bessie said, kneeling to support the child, who was returning to his senses after his faint.

Armstrong stood aside so that his wife could see Ben’s companion and gestured with his hand. ‘He has brought this little fellow with him.’

‘Robin! But—’ Bessie stared at the child. She could hardly drag her eyes away, but when she did, it was to turn to her husband. ‘How …?’

‘It is not Robin.’ Ben’s voice was feeble, but had not lost its habit of delivering words all in a rush with no pauses. ‘Sir, it is the little child you were looking for, it is Alice, and I cut her hair – forgive me, I didn’t want to do it but we were on the road so long and it seemed safer to be two brothers than to be a boy and a girl and if I did wrong I’m sorry.’

Armstrong stared. Robin’s features rearranged themselves in his eyes. He reached out a hand and laid it trembling on the child’s shorn head.

‘Alice,’ he breathed.

Bessie came to stand beside him. ‘Alice?’

The child looked at Ben. He nodded. ‘It’s all right here. You can be Alice again.’

She turned her face to the Armstrongs. Halfway into a smile, her mouth stretched instead into a large exhausted yawn. Her grandfather gathered her into his arms.

Later, after a midnight feast of soup and cheese and apple pie, they sat in the kitchen. Alice slept in her grandmother’s arms, while her aunts and uncles, roused from their beds by the excitement in the house, clustered in their nightgowns around the kitchen hearth, and they all listened to Ben’s account of how he found the child.

‘Soon after I last saw Mr Armstrong, my father took a strap to me and beat me so long and so hard that the world went black and when I came round again I was sure I must be in heaven, but no, I was on the floor of the kitchen and I hurt to my bones and my mother crept to me and said she wondered I wasn’t dead and surely I would be next time, and I decided it was time to follow my plan of running away, which I had worked out a long time since, thinking it best to be prepared, and I did everything accordingly, which was to go to the bridge and climb on to the parapet and wait there for a boat, though in the dark a boat is not always easy to spot but you can always hear it, and so there I stood and never sat for fear of falling asleep, and I shook because a beating like that always sets up a trembling in a body, and at last there came a boat downstream in the darkness, and I clambered on top of the parapet and I lowered myself over it, dangling from my fingertips, and my shoulders and arms that were black and blue from the beating were aching terrible bad and I thought I might fall in the water, but I didn’t, for I clung on till the boat was right under me and then I let myself fall and hoped to fall on to something soft like fleeces and not on to something hard like barrels of liquor, and in the end it was neither so good nor so bad as it might have been for I fell on to cheeses, which are between soft and hard, but still they jolted my bones and hurt me where I was already hurting, but I didn’t cry out for fear of giving away that I had stowed away, but instead cried quietly and hid as best I could and tried not to fall asleep, but fall asleep I did and woke up, being roughly shaken, and a boatman standing over me was in a fury and he cried out over and over the same words, “Orphanage! Who do they take me for? I’m not a bloody orphanage!” and at first I couldn’t understand what he was saying, being so dull with sleep, but then his words came clear as a bell into my ears and from there into my thinking where they met up with some other words already there about Alice who disappeared into the river and I asked the man, was it a little girl who dropped into his boat last time and what happened to her, and he was too furious to answer me or to listen to my questions and threatened to drop me overboard and let me swim for my life and I thought, Is that what happened to Alice? and I asked him and he went on being furious for some while yet and then all of a sudden he got hungry and opened a cheese and ate some, but he didn’t give any to me, and when he had eaten he was quiet and I asked him all over again and this time he told me that yes, last time it was a little girl, and no, he didn’t make her swim for her life, but when he got to London he left her in the care of some orphanage where they take the unwanted children, so I said, “What is the name of this place?” and he didn’t know, but he told me the part of town where it was and I stayed with him and I helped him with the unloading and the loading and he gave me cheese for the help, but not much, and when we got to London I scarpered from his boat and asked directions from a dozen people who sent me here and there and in all directions and eventually I came to the place and asked for Alice and they said they had no Alice and besides orphans weren’t there to be taken by anybody, and in the end they closed the door on me, so the next day at a different time I knocked again and it was a different person answered the door and I told them I was hungry and homeless and had no mother and no father and they took me in and set me to work, and all the time I kept my eye out for Alice and asked all the other boys, but the boys were kept separate from the girls so I never saw her until one day I was sent to paint the office of the director of the orphanage, and from the window I saw over the wall into the girls’ courtyard and that’s when I saw her and knew I was in the right place, and was glad it hadn’t all been a waste of time, not so far anyway, and I thought and thought how to get to her and in the end it was as simple as pie because a fine lady took a fancy for doing something good for the orphans and she sent in a great hamper of food to be shared out, and it was, but only the director and his fellows tasted it, and we never got none, but afterwards we was all taken to church to give thanks for the great goodness that was done to us, and when we had sat and stood and sat again and prayed for the virtuous lady, we was all marched out again, the girls from the pews on their side and we boys on the other, and there she was, Alice, right by my side, and I whispered to her, “Do you remember me?” and she nodded, and so I said, “When I say run, run, all right?” and I took her hand and when I ran she ran with me, but not for long for we hid behind a statue and nobody noticed then that we was gone, and after everybody had passed out of the church we set off on our own, walking every day, following the river, and I did a bit of loading and unloading when I could and we ate what we could get, and I cut her hair when a bad lady tried to steal her away from me, thinking to be two boys together was safer, and it took a long time to get here because the boatmen wouldn’t take the two of us aboard because only I was big enough to work but the two of us would want feeding, so our feet were sore and we got hungry sometimes and cold others and sometimes hungry and cold together, and now …’

He paused to yawn and at the end of the yawn they suddenly saw how dazed his eyes were and that he was on the verge of sleep.

Mr Armstrong wiped a tear from his eye.

‘You have done well, Ben. You couldn’t have done better.’

‘Thank you, Sir, and thank you for the soup and the cheese and the apple pie, it was most excellent.’ He slipped from his chair and saluted the family. ‘Now I had better be getting along.’

‘But where will you go?’ asked Mrs Armstrong. ‘Where is your home?’

‘I set out to run away, and run away I must.’

Robert put both hands on the table. ‘We can’t have that, Ben. You must stay here and be one of the family.’

Ben looked at the girls and boys around the hearth. ‘But you have plenty here eating your profits already, Sir. And now Alice too. Profits don’t grow on trees, you know.’

‘I know. But if we all work together we make extra profit, and I can see you are a hardworking boy who will pull his weight. Bess, is there a bed for the child?’

‘He will sleep with the middle boys. He looks about the same age as Joe and Nelson.’

‘There, you see? And you will help with the pigs. All right?’

And so it was settled.

Once Upon a Time, a Long Time Ago

AFTERWARDS, BUT BEFORE the flood had entirely retreated, Daunt took Rita on Collodion back to her flooded cottage. They used the little row boat to get to the door, and when Daunt stepped out of it to push the warped door with all his might, the water was up to his knees. Inside there was a line around the walls that showed the water had been three feet high here. All around the room the paint was peeling away from the walls. The receding water had left on the seat of Rita’s writing chair, as if there were some meaning in it, an arrangement of twigs, pebbles and other less identifiable matter. She had had the forethought to raise the blue armchair on boxes; its feet had been in water, but the cushions were sound. The red rug could not make up its mind whether to float or sink; every motion of the water caused it to shift with weighty indecision. A dank and unpleasant smell was everywhere.

Daunt stepped aside to let Rita see in. She waded through her front door and into the living room. He watched her face as she surveyed her home, admiring her impassivity as she contemplated the damage.

‘It will take weeks to dry out. Months, even,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Where will you go? To the Swan? Margot and Jonathan might be glad of your company when the girls go home. Or the Vaughans? They would be pleased to have you.’

She shrugged. Her thoughts were on other more fundamental matters. This devastation of her home was a trivial detail.

‘The books first,’ she said.

He waded to the bookcase and saw that the lower shelves were empty. Above the water line the upper shelves were double-stacked.

‘You were prepared.’

She shrugged. ‘When you live by the river …’

He handed her the books a few at a time; she passed them out of the window and placed them in the boat that bobbed just below the level of the sill. They worked in silence. One volume she put aside, on the cushion of the blue armchair.

When the first bookcase was empty and the boat was low in the water, Daunt rowed it back to Collodion and unloaded there. On his return to the cottage, he found Rita in the blue chair, still on its boxes. The water from her skirt was darkening the fabric.

‘I always wanted to photograph you in that chair.’

She lifted her eyes from the book. ‘They’ve called off the search, haven’t they?’

‘Yes.’

‘She’s not coming back.’

‘No.’ He knew it was true. He had the feeling that the world might easily stop turning without the girl in it. Every hour was arduous, and when it was over, you had to start again with a new one, no better. He wondered how long he would be able to keep going.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘you went to all that trouble to save the blue chair and now your dress is making it wet.’

‘It doesn’t matter. The thing is, the world seemed complete before she came. And then she was here. And now she’s gone, there’s something missing.’

‘I found her in the river. I feel as if I should be able to find her again.’

Rita nodded. ‘When I thought she was dead, I wanted so much for her to live. Instead of leaving her alone there, I stayed. I held her wrist. And she lived. I want to do the same now. I keep thinking about the story of Quietly and what he did to save his child. I understand it now. I would go anywhere, Daunt, I would suffer any pain, to have my child in my arms again.’

She sat in her wet skirt on the blue chair over the water, and he stood motionless in the water. They did not know what to do with their grief. Then wordlessly they set to packing books again.

They emptied the second bookcase, and he rowed again to Collodion to unpack.

On his return, Rita was reading the book that she had separated from the rest.

Although the sky was dismal and cast an indifferent light, the greyness was enlivened, even indoors, by the silvery shimmer of reflections from the endless water, which cast ripples of light over Rita. Daunt watched her face lighten and darken in the shifting illumination. Then he looked beyond the ever-changing surface to study the stillness of her expression beneath. He knew his camera could not capture this, that some things were only truly seen by a human eye. This was one of the images of his lifetime. He simply exposed his retina and let love burn her flickering, shimmering, absorbed face on to his soul.

Slowly Rita brought the book down to her side. She continued to stare at the place where the book had been, as if the text continued there, written on the watery light.

‘What is it?’ he said. ‘What are you thinking?’

She did not move. ‘The cressmen.’ She still stared at nothing.

He was nonplussed. He wouldn’t have thought cressmen capable of inspiring intensity like this. ‘From the Swan?’

‘Yes.’ She turned her eyes to his. ‘I remembered it the other night. The baby was born in its caul.’

‘What’s a caul?’

‘It’s a sack of fluid. The baby grows inside it for the entire pregnancy. Usually it ruptures during labour, but sometimes – rarely – it survives labour and the baby emerges with the caul intact. I cut it open last night and out he swam on a wave.’

‘But what has that to do with cressmen?’

‘Because of a strange thing I heard them say at the Swan. They were talking about Darwin and man being born of apes, and one of the cressmen reckoned he’d heard a story about men once being underwater creatures.’

‘Ridiculous.’

She shook her head, raised the book and tapped it. ‘It’s in here. Once upon a time, a long time ago, an ape became human. And once upon a time, long before that, an aquatic creature came out of the water and breathed air.’

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

‘And?’

‘And once upon a time, twelve months ago, a little girl who should have drowned, didn’t. She entered the water and seemed to die there. You pulled her out; I found she had no pulse, no breath, her pupils were dilated. Every sign told me she was dead. And then she wasn’t. How can that be? Dead people do not return to life.

Immersing the face in cold water slows the heart dramatically. Is it possible that sudden immersion in very cold water might slow the heart and constrict the blood flow so radically that a person might appear to be dead? It sounds too strange to be true. But if you remember that every one of us spent the first nine months of our existence suspended in liquid, perhaps that makes it a little less incredible. Remember next that our land-going, oxygen-breathing selves derive from underwater life – that we once lived in water as we now live in air – think of that and doesn’t the impossible start to edge closer to the conceivable?’

She tucked the book into her pocket and put out a hand for Daunt to help her down from the chair. ‘I’ll get no further, I think. I’ve come as far as I can go. Ideas, notions, theories.’

Rita packed her medicines, a bundle of clothes and linen, her Sunday shoes, and they left without attempting to close the door. They rowed to Collodion.

‘Where now?’ he said.

‘Nowhere.’ She flung herself on the bench and closed her eyes.

‘Which side of the river is that?’

‘It’s right here, Daunt. I’d like to stay here.’

Later, on Collodion’s narrow bed and with the river cradling the boat, Daunt and Rita loved each other. In the dark his hands saw what his eyes could not: the curl of her loosened hair, the curve and point of her breasts, the shallow dip at the small of her back, the outward flare of her hips. They saw the smoothness of her thighs and the complicated fleshiness between them. He touched her and she touched him and when he entered her he felt a river rise in him. For a little while he mastered the river, then it grew and he abandoned himself to it. There was only the river then, nothing but the river, and the river was everything – until the current at last surged and broke and ebbed.

Afterwards they lay together, and spoke quietly of mysterious things: they wondered how Daunt had got from Devil’s Weir to the Swan, and why everybody had thought the girl a puppet or a doll when they first saw her. They asked why her feet were so perfect it was as if they had never put foot to earth, and how a father could cross to other worlds and bring his daughter home, and they realized there are no stories of children crossing into other worlds to find their parents, and wondered why. They puzzled over what exactly Jonathan had seen from the window of the room where his father lay dead. They talked of the strange stories Joe brought back from his sinking spells and all the other stories at the Swan, and they wondered what the solstice had to do with all or any of it. More than once they came back to two questions: where had the girl come from? And where had she gone to? They came to no conclusion. They thought too about other things both inconsequential and significant. The river swelled and subsided without insistence.

All the time, Daunt’s hand lay on Rita’s belly, and she had her hand over his.

Beneath their hands, in the damp vessels of her abdomen, life was swimming urgently upstream.

Something, they both thought, is going to happen.

Happily Ever After

IN THE MONTHS that followed, Ruby Wheeler married Ernest; at the church, her grandmother took Daunt and Rita by the hands and said, ‘Bless you both. I wish you every happiness together.’

At Kelmscott farmhouse, Alice grew her hair. She began to look less like her father when he was a child and more like the little girl she was. Bess took off her patch and declared, ‘There’s not much of Robin in her at all. That girl he married must have been a good woman. This is a lovely child.’ And Armstrong said, ‘I think in some ways she takes after you, dearest.’

Basketman’s Cottage was uninhabitable after the flood and would always be so. Lily moved to the parsonage. She looked about the housekeeper’s room in awe, touched the bedhead and the night table and the mahogany chest of drawers and reminded herself that the days when she had said about even the smallest possession, ‘I shall only lose it,’ were over. The puppy slept in a basket in the kitchen and the parson grew as fond of it as Lily was. In fact, when she came to think about it, she wondered whether it hadn’t perhaps been her who was so keen on puppies as a girl – or perhaps she and her sister both were.

The water, when it eventually receded, left behind a small skeleton on the floodplain. A gold chain was around its neck and an anchor hung between the bones of its ribcage. The Vaughans buried their daughter and grieved for her, and rejoiced in their son. They went together to a house in Oxford, where Mrs Constantine listened to them talk about everything that had happened and they wept in her tranquil room and washed their faces afterwards, and soon afterwards Buscot Lodge and all its farmland and Brandy Island were put on the market. Helena and Anthony said goodbye to their friends and departed with their baby son to new rivers in New Zealand.

With Joe gone, Margot decided it was time for another generation to take the helm at the Swan. Her eldest daughter moved to the inn with her husband and her children and they made a great success of it. Margot was still as present as ever in the bar, mulling her cider, though she let her son-in-law – a strong fellow – chop the logs and carry the barrels. Jonathan helped his sister, as he had helped his mother, and often told a story about the child who was taken from the river one solstice night, first drowned then alive again, who spoke not a word, until the river came up the banks to take her back, a year to the day later, and she was reunited with her father the ferryman. But if you asked him to tell any other story, he couldn’t.

Joe the storyteller was remembered at the Swan for a long, long time. And though eventually there came a time when the man himself was forgotten, his stories lived on.

Daunt finished his book of photographs and it enjoyed a modest success. He had intended to create a fine volume that would include every town and every village, every myth and every folk tale, every jetty and every water wheel, every turn and twist of the river, but inevitably the book fell short of its ambition. Still he had sold over a hundred copies already, enough to order a reprint, and the book pleased many, including Rita.

Standing at the helm as Collodion powered along, Daunt had to acknowledge that the river was too vast a thing to be contained in any book. Majestic, powerful, unknowable, it lends itself tolerantly to the doings of men until it doesn’t, and then anything can happen. One day the river helpfully turns a wheel to grind your barley, the next it drowns your crop. He watched the water slide tantalizingly past the boat, seeming in its flashes of reflected light to contain fragments of the past and of the future. It has meant many things to many people over the years – he put a little essay into the book about that.

He wondered, fancifully, whether there was a way of appeasing the spirit of the river. A way of encouraging it to be on your side and not dangerously against you. Along with the dead dogs, illegal liquor, rashly flung wedding rings and stolen goods that litter the riverbed, there are pieces of gold and silver down there. Ritualistic offerings whose meanings are hard to fathom so many centuries later. He might throw something in himself. His book? He considered it. The book was worth five shillings, and there was Rita now. There was a home to maintain, and a boat, and a business, and a nursery to be decorated. Five shillings was too much to sacrifice to appease a deity in which he didn’t really believe. He would take photographs of it. How many photographs could a man take in a lifetime? A hundred thousand? About that. A hundred thousand slivers of life – ten or fifteen seconds long – captured by light on glass. Somehow, in all that photography, he would figure out how to capture the river.

Rita grew round as the months passed and the baby inside her grew. She and Daunt discussed names for their child. Iris, they thought, like the flowers that bloomed on the riverbank.

‘What if it’s a boy?’ Margot asked.

They shook their heads. It was a girl. They knew.

Rita thought sometimes of the women who’d lost their lives giving birth and she thought often of her own mother. When she felt the baby turn in her underwater world she thought of Quietly. There were times when God, who had once disappeared, seemed not so very far away. The future was unfathomable, but with every heartbeat she carried her daughter towards it.

And the girl? What of her? Accounts emerged of sightings of her in the company of the river gypsies. She was quite at ease there, apparently. She had fallen overboard in the dark that first solstice night, it was said, and her parents hadn’t realized she was gone until the next day. They gave her up for dead, until word reached them of a child being looked after by wealthy people at Buscot. It sounded as if she’d be all right. No need to hurry back. They’d be passing that way the same time next year. She seemed happy to be back in her gypsy life, so it was said, after her year of being lost.

These stories came late in the day, from far afield, one- and two-line reports, lacking detail, without colour or interest. They were taken up briefly by the regulars at the Swan, considered and discarded. It wasn’t much of a story, they felt, but then they never liked other people’s stories as much as their own. Jonathan’s was the version they preferred by far.

There are those who see her still, on the river, in good and bad weather, when the current is treacherous or slow, when mist obscures the view and when the surface glitters. The drinkers see her when they mistake their footing, the worse for wear after one glass too many. Rash boys see her when they jump from the bridge on a fine summer’s day and discover how the serene surface stillness belies the pull of the current underneath. They see her when they find themselves out after twilight, and when they cannot bail as fast as they thought. For a time these reports were of a man and a child together in the punt. With the years the child grew until she did the punting herself, and then came the time – nobody can remember when exactly – when it was no longer the two of them, but she alone. Majestic, they say; strong as three men; insubstantial as the mist. She handles the punt with smooth grace and has all her father’s mastery over the water. If you ask where she lives, they will blow their cheeks out and shake their heads in mystification. ‘At Radcot, perhaps,’ they suggest at Buscot, but at Radcot they shrug and wonder if it’s not at Buscot.

At the Swan, if you press them, they will tell you she lives on the other side of the river, though they don’t know exactly where. But wherever she lives – if she does live anywhere, and I am inclined to doubt it – she is never far away, and when a soul is in danger she is always there. When it is not time to cross that border she will see that you keep on the right side of it. And when it is time, why, she will see you just as surely to that other destination, the one you didn’t know you were headed for, at least, not today.

And now, dear reader, the story is over. It is time for you to cross the bridge once more and return to the world you came from. This river, which is and is not the Thames, must continue flowing without you. You have haunted here long enough, and besides, surely you have rivers of your own to attend to?

Author’s Note

THE RIVER THAMES irrigates not only the landscape but also the imagination, and as it does so, it alters. At times the demands of the story have called upon me to tinker with travel times and nudge locations up- or downstream by a few furlongs. If reading my book inspires you to go on a river walk (something I wholeheartedly recommend), by all means take this book with you – but you might want to take a map or guidebook too.

The character of Henry Daunt is inspired by the magnificent real-life photographer of the Thames, Henry Taunt. Like my Henry, he had a houseboat kitted out as a darkroom. During the course of his lifetime he took some 53,000 photographs using the wet collodion process. His work came close to being destroyed when, after his death, his house was sold and his garden workshop dismantled. On learning that many thousands of the glass plates stored there had already been smashed or wiped clean for use as greenhouse glass, a local historian, Harry Paintin, alerted E. E. Skuse, the city librarian in Oxford. Skuse was able to stop the work and arrange removal of the surviving plates for safekeeping. I note their names here out of gratitude for their swift actions. It is thanks to them that I have been able to explore the Victorian Thames visually and weave this story around Taunt’s images.

Do people really drown and come to life again? Well, not really, but it can seem so. The mammalian dive reflex is triggered when a person is suddenly submerged, face and body, into very cold water. The body’s metabolism slows as the reflex redirects circulation away from the limbs and routes blood between the heart, brain and lungs only. The heart beats more slowly and oxygen is conserved for essential bodily processes, so as to maintain life for as long as possible. Once recovered from the water, the near-drowned person will appear dead. This physiological phenomenon was first written up in the medical journals in the middle of the twentieth century. The dive reflex is thought to occur in all mammals, both terrestrial and aquatic. It has been observed in adult humans, but is believed to be most dramatic in small children.

Acknowledgements

THERE ARE TIMES when friends make all the difference. Helen Potts, this book owes you an enormous debt of gratitude. Julie Summers, our writerly walks along the Thames have been invaluable. Thank you both.

Graham Diprose provided helpful pointers relating to the history of photography, and John Brewer talked me very patiently through the wet collodion process of photographic development.

Nick Reynard of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Wallingford put me right about flooding in language that proves how close science is to poetry.

Captain Cliff Colborne from the Thames Traditional Boat Society helped figure out how an accident such as Daunt’s might have happened.

Dr Susan Hawkins of Kingston University provided valuable information about nurses and their use of thermometers in the nineteenth century.

Professor Joshua Getzler and Professor Rebecca Probert made useful suggestions relating to legal claims to found children in the nineteenth century.

Simon Steele was illuminating on the subject of distilling.

Nathan Franklin knows everything a man can possibly know about pigs.

A great many people explained aspects of rowing to me; despite their best efforts, I still don’t really understand it. Simon, Will, Julie, Naomi, thank you anyway.

Thank you also to Mary and John Acton, Jo Powell Anson, Mike Anson, Margot Arendse, Jane Bailey, Gaia Banks, Alison Barrow, Toppen Bech, Emily Bestler, Kari Bolin, Valerie Borchardt, Will Bourne Taylor, Maggie Budden, Emma Burton, Erin, Fergus, Paula and Ross Catley, Mark Cocker, Emma Darwin, Jane Darwin, Philip del Nevo, Margaret Denman, Assly Elvins, Lucy Fawcett, Anna Franklin, Vivien Green, Douglas Gurr, Claudia Hammer-Hewstone, Christine Harland-Lang, Ursula Harrison, Peter Hawkins, Philip Hull, Jenny Jacobs, Maggie Ju, Mary and Robert Julier, Håkon Langballe, Eunice Martin, Gary McGibbon, Mary Muir, Kate Samano, Mandy Setterfield, Jeffrey and Pauline Setterfield, Jo Smith, Bernadete Soares de Andrade, Caroline Stüwe Lemarechal, Rachel Phipps of the Woodstock Bookshop, Chris Steele, Greg Thomas, Marianne Velmans, Sarah Whittaker, Anna Withers.

Sources Consulted

Peter Ackroyd, Thames: Sacred River

Graham Diprose and Jeff Robins, The Thames Revisited

Robert Gibbings, Sweet Thames Run Softly

Malcolm Graham, Henry Taunt of Oxford: a Victorian Photographer

Susan Read, The Thames of Henry Taunt

Henry Taunt, A New Map of the Thames

Alfred Williams, Round About the Upper Thames

There is one website I navigated a thousand times while writing this book and which was invaluable to me. It takes you on a journey through space and time, along the river. Where Thames Smooth Waters Glide (www.thames.me.uk) was created by John Eade and he maintains it with dedication. If you can’t get to the Thames itself, this website is the next best thing.