Ah, tributaries! That’s what I was meaning to come to. The Churn, the Key, the Ray, the Coln, the Leach and the Cole: in the upper reaches of the Thames, these are the streams and rivulets that come from elsewhere to add their own volume and momentum. And tributaries are about to join this story. We might, in this quiet hour before dawn, leave this river and this long night and trace the tributaries back, to see not their beginnings – mysterious, unknowable things – but, more simply, what they were doing yesterday.
What Do You Make of It?
THE DAY BEFORE the coming of the child, at half past three in the afternoon, at a farmhouse in Kelmscott, a woman stepped out of the kitchen door and in some haste crossed the yard to the barn. Her fair curls were tucked neatly into her bonnet, and her blue dress was simple, as befits a busy farmer’s wife, but she endowed it with a prettiness that suggested she was still young at heart. She had a swaying gait; with every second step she stooped to the left, with every step in between she rose again. It did not slow her. Nor was she hindered by the patch that covered her right eye. It was made of the same blue fabric as her dress and a white ribbon held it in place.
She came to the barn. It smelt of blood and iron. Inside was a man who stood with his back to her. He was powerfully made, unusually tall, with a broad back and wiry black hair. As she put her hand on the door frame, he tossed a crimson-stained cloth to the ground and reached for his whetstone. She heard a ringing rise in the air as he started to sharpen the blade. Beyond him lay a row of corpses, neatly arranged snout to tail; the blood ran from them and found the shallows in the ground.
‘Dearest …’
He turned. The darkness of his face was not the hale brown achieved by a lifetime’s work out of doors under an English sun, but the kind that originated in another continent altogether. His nose was broad and his lips thick. At the sight of his wife, his brown eyes lit up and he smiled.
‘Watch your hem, Bess.’ A rivulet of blood was trickling towards her. ‘You’re in your good shoes too. I’m nearly done here, I’ll be indoors in a little while.’
Then he saw the look on her face and the duet of knife and stone came to an end.
‘What is it?’
For all the differences between the two faces, a single emotion animated their expressions.
‘One of the children?’ he asked.
She nodded. ‘Robin.’
The first-born. His face fell. ‘What is it this time?’
‘This letter …’
His gaze fell to her hand. She held not a folded piece of paper, but a pile of ripped pieces.
‘Susie found it. Robin brought her a jacket to mend last time he came to visit. You know how dainty she is with her needle, though she is only twelve. A very fine jacket too, I dread to think what it cost. There was a great gash in the sleeve, she says, though you wouldn’t know it now. She had to unstitch the pocket seam to get some thread the right colour, and while she was about it, she found this letter, torn to pieces. I came across her in the drawing room puzzling it out like some kind of a game.’
‘Show me,’ he suggested, and he took a handful of her skirt to keep it out of the blood as they stepped towards the ledge that ran along one inner wall. She laid out the fragments.
‘rent,’ she read aloud, lightly touching one of the pieces. Her hand was a working one, she wore no rings except her wedding band and her nails were short and neat.
‘Love,’ he read; he did not touch the paper he read from, for there was blood under his nails and on his fingers.
‘at an end … What is at an end, do you suppose, Robert?’
‘I don’t know … How did it come to be torn into pieces like this?’
‘Did he tear it up? Is it a letter he received and didn’t like?’
‘Try putting that piece with this,’ he suggested. But no, the two did not fit together. ‘It is a woman’s hand.’
‘A good hand too. My letters are not so well formed as these.’
‘You do well enough, my dear.’
‘But look how straight she writes. Not a single blot. It is nearly as good a hand as yours, with all your years of schooling. What do you make of it, Robert?’
He peered silently for a while. ‘There is no point trying to reconstitute the whole. What we have is only a fraction. Let’s try something else …’
They moved the pieces round, her deft hand operating according to his instruction, and arrived at an organization of the fragments into three sections. The first was of pieces too small to be meaningfuclass="underline" halves of words, ‘the’s and ‘of’s and bits of margin. They put them aside.
The second set contained phrases which they read now aloud.
‘Love’
‘entirely without’
‘child will soon entirely’
‘help from no quarter but you’
‘rent’
‘wait no longer’
‘father of my’
‘at an end’
The final group was a set of fragments all containing the same word:
‘Alice’
‘Alice’
‘Alice’
Robert Armstrong turned to his wife and she turned her face to him. Her blue gaze fretted anxiously and his own was grave.
‘Tell me, my love,’ he said, ‘what do you make of it?’
‘It is this Alice. I thought at first it was her name, the letter-writer. But a person writing a letter does not say their name so many times. They say, I. This Alice is someone else.’
‘Yes.’
‘Child,’ she repeated wonderingly. ‘Father …’
‘Yes.’
‘I can’t make it out … Does Robin have a child, Robert? Do we have a grandchild? Why has he not told us? Who is this woman? What trouble is it that has made her write a letter like this? And for the letter to be torn like this. I fear …’
‘Do not fear, Bess. What good can fear do? Suppose there is a child? Suppose there is a woman? There are worse mistakes a young man can make than falling in love, and if a child has come from it, we will be the first to welcome it. Our hearts are strong enough, aren’t they?’
‘But why is the letter half destroyed?’
‘Supposing there is some trouble … There are few things that cannot be put right by love and there is no shortage of that here. Where love fails, money will usually do the trick.’
He looked steadily into her left eye. It was a good blue eye, and he waited until he saw the worry ebb from it and confidence return.
‘You are right. What shall we do, then? Will you talk to him?’
‘No. Not yet, anyhow.’ He turned back to the pieces of paper. From the group of unreadable fragments he pointed at one. ‘What do you make of this?’
She shook her head. A rip had gone horizontally right through the middle of the word, slicing top from bottom.
‘I think this says, Bampton.’
‘Bampton? Why, that’s only four miles away!’
Armstrong consulted his watch. ‘It’s too late to go now. There is cleaning-up to do and these carcasses to be dealt with. If I don’t press on it will be too dark to see what I’m doing by the time I feed the pigs. I shall get up early, and go to Bampton first thing.’