Returning to their senses, they hoisted the unconscious man on to a table. A second table was dragged forward so that the man’s legs could be rested upon it. Then, when he was laid down and straightened out, they all stood around and raised their candles and lamps over him. The man’s eyes did not flicker.
‘Is he dead?’ Albright wondered.
There was a round of indistinct murmurs and much frowning.
‘Slap his face,’ someone said. ‘See if that brings him round.’
‘A tot of liquor’ll do it,’ another suggested.
Margot elbowed her way to the top of the table and studied the man. ‘Don’t you go slapping him. Not with his face in that state. Nor pouring anything down his throat. Just you wait a minute.’
She turned away to the seat by the hearth. On it was a cushion, and she picked it up and carried it back to the table. With the aid of the candlelight, she spotted a pinprick of white on the cotton. Picking at it with her fingernail, she drew out a feather. The men watched her, eyes wide with bewilderment.
‘I don’t think you’ll wake a dead man by tickling him,’ said a gravel-digger. ‘Nor a live one either, not in this state.’
‘I’m not going to tickle him,’ she replied.
Margot laid the feather on the man’s lips. All peered. For a moment there was nothing, then the soft and plumy parts of the feather shivered.
‘He breathes!’
The relief soon gave way to renewed perplexity.
‘Who is it, though?’ a bargeman asked. ‘Do anyone know him?’
There followed a few moments of general hubbub, during which they considered the question. One reckoned he knew everybody on the river from Castle Eaton to Duxford, which was some ten miles, and he was sure he didn’t know the fellow. Another had a sister in Lechlade and was certain he had never seen the man there. A third felt that he might have seen the man somewhere, but the longer he looked, the less willing he was to put money on it. A fourth wondered whether he was a river gypsy, for it was the time of year when their boats came down this stretch of the river, to be stared at with suspicion, and everybody made sure to lock their doors at night and bring inside anything that could be lifted. But with that good woollen jacket and his expensive leather boots – no. This was not a ragged gypsy man. A fifth stared and then, with triumph, remarked that the man was the very height and build of Liddiard from Whitey’s Farm, and was his hair not the same colour too? A sixth pointed out that Liddiard was here at the other end of the table, and when the fifth looked across, he could not deny it. At the end of these and further declarations, it was agreed by one, two, three, four, five, six, and all the others present that they didn’t know him – at least, they didn’t think so. But looking as he did, who could be certain?
Into the silence that followed this conclusion, a seventh spoke. ‘Whatever has befallen him?’
The man’s clothes were soaking wet, and the smell of the river, green and brown, was on him. Some accident on the water, that much was obvious. They talked of dangers on the river, of the water that played tricks on even the wisest of rivermen.
‘Is there a boat? Shall I go and see if I can spy one?’ Beszant the boat-mender offered.
Margot was washing the blood from the man’s face with deft and gentle motions. She winced as she revealed the great gash that split his upper lip and divided his skin into two flaps that gaped to show his broken teeth and bloodied gum.
‘Leave the boat,’ she instructed. ‘It is the man that matters. There is more here than I can help with. Who will run for Rita?’ She looked round and spotted one of the farmhands who was too poor to drink much. ‘Neath, you are quick on your feet. Can you run along to Rush Cottage and fetch the nurse without stumbling? One accident is quite enough for one night.’
The young man left.
Jonathan, meanwhile, had kept apart from the others. The weight of the drenched puppet was cumbersome, so he sat down and arranged it on his lap. He thought of the papier mâché dragon that the troupe of guisers had brought for a play last Christmastime. It was light and hard and had rapped with a light tat-tat-tat if you beat your fingernails against it. This puppet was not made of that. He thought of the dolls he had seen, stuffed with rice. They were weighty and soft. He had never seen one this size. He sniffed its head. There was no smell of rice – only the river. The hair was made of real hair, and he couldn’t work out how they had joined it to the head. The ear was so real they might have moulded it from a real one. He marvelled at the perfect precision of the lashes. Putting his fingertip gently to the soft, damp, tickling ends of them caused the lid to move a little. He touched the lid with the gentlest of touches and there was something behind. Slippery and globular, it was soft and firm at the same time.
Something darkly unfathomable gripped him. Behind the backs of his parents and the drinkers, he gave the figure a gentle shake. An arm slid and swung from the shoulder joint in a way a puppet’s arm ought not to swing, and he felt a rising water level, powerful and rapid, inside him.
‘It is a little girl.’
In all the discussion around the injured man, nobody heard.
Again, louder: ‘It is a little girl!’
They turned.
‘She won’t wake up.’ He held out the sodden little body so that they might see for themselves.
They moved to stand around Jonathan. A dozen pairs of stricken eyes rested on the little body.
Her skin shimmered like water. The folds of her cotton frock were plastered to the smooth lines of the limbs, and her head tilted on her neck at an angle no puppeteer could achieve. She was a little girl, and they had not seen it, not one of them, though it was obvious. What maker would go to such lengths, making a doll of such perfection, only to dress it in the cotton smock any pauper’s daughter might wear? Who would paint a face in that macabre and lifeless manner? What maker other than the good Lord had it in him to make the curve of that cheekbone, the planes of that shin, that delicate foot with five toes individually shaped and sized and detailed? Of course it was a little girl! How could they ever have thought otherwise?
In the room usually so thick with words, there was silence. The men who were fathers remembered their own children and resolved to show them nothing but love till the end of their days. Those who were old and had never known a child of their own suffered a great pang of absence, and those who were childless and still young were pierced with the longing to hold their own offspring in their arms.
At last the silence was broken.
‘Good Lord!’
‘Dead, poor mite.’
‘Drowned!’
‘Put the feather on her lips, Ma!’
‘Oh, Jonathan. It is too late for her.’
‘But it worked with the man!’
‘No, son, he was breathing already. The feather only showed us the life that was still in him.’
‘It might still be in her!’
‘It is plain she is gone, poor lass. She is not breathing, and besides, you have only to look at her colour. Who will carry the poor child to the long room? You take her, Higgs.’
‘But it’s cold there,’ Jonathan protested.
His mother patted his shoulder. ‘She won’t mind that. She is not really here any more, and it is never cold in the place she has gone to.’
‘Let me carry her.’