She took the photograph from his hand and looked fondly at it. ‘Anthony, please don’t worry. All the evidence we need is here.’ She smiled up at him. She was turning it in her hands so as to replace it on the table when a sudden exclamation broke from her lips.
‘What is it?’
‘This!’
He looked where she was pointing at the reverse of the frame. ‘Good Lord! Henry Daunt of Oxford, portraits, landscapes, city and country scenes,’ he read aloud from the label. ‘It’s him! The man who found her!’
‘We would hardly have recognized him, bruised and swollen as he was. How strange … Let’s get him back. He made more exposures, do you remember? We only took the two best ones, but there were two others. He might still have them.’
‘If they were any good we’d have them already, surely.’
‘Not necessarily.’ She replaced the photograph on the table. ‘The best photograph overall might not be the best of her face. Perhaps I was the one who wriggled’ (she danced an exaggerated demonstration on the spot) ‘or you were pulling a face’ (her fingers moulded his lips into a lopsided grimace). He made an effort to respond with the kind of laugh her playfulness deserved. ‘There,’ she finished with satisfaction. ‘You’re smiling again. So, it would be better to have them all, wouldn’t it? Just in case. I’m sure your Mr Montgomery would think so.’
He nodded.
She put an arm loosely around him and spread her fingers below his shoulder blade. Through his jacket he could feel each finger separately and the pad at the base of her thumb. He was not yet used to her touch; even through layers of tweed and poplin it sent a thrill through him.
‘And while he is here, we can have him take new ones.’
She raised her other hand to the back of his neck; he felt a thumb stray to the inch of skin between the top of his collar and his hairline.
He kissed her and her mouth was soft and slightly open.
‘I’m so glad,’ she murmured as she leant into his body. ‘It’s the one thing I’ve been waiting for. Now we are really together again.’
He delivered a sound, a little moan, into her hair.
‘Our little girl is fast asleep,’ she whispered. ‘I thought I might have an early night too.’
He buried his nose in her neck and inhaled. ‘Yes,’ he said. And again, ‘Yes.’
The Story Flourishes
IN THE WEEKS after the mystery girl was pulled from the Thames, first dead and then alive, the Swan had done excellent business. The story had spread via marketplaces and street corners. It was recounted in family letters from mother to daughter, from cousin to cousin. It was passed freely to strangers met on station platforms, and wanderers encountered it by chance at crossroads. Everybody who heard it was sure to tell it wherever he went, until eventually there was nobody in three counties who did not know one version of it or another. A great many of these people were not satisfied until they had visited the inn where the extraordinary events had taken place and seen for themselves the riverbank where the girl was found and the long room where she was placed.
Margot made the decision to open up the summer room. She organized her daughters to come in pairs to help with the extra work, and the regulars got used to having the Little Margots present. Jonathan badgered his mother and sisters to listen to him practise his storytelling, but they were rarely able to stop and listen, for the calls on their time and attention were unending. ‘I’ll never get any better,’ he sighed, and his lips moved as he rehearsed aloud to himself, but he got more and more muddled, putting the end at the beginning and the beginning at the end, and the middle – well, the middle hardly featured at all.
Joe lit the fire at eleven in the morning and it was kept in till midnight, when at last the crush of drinkers in the room began to thin.
The regulars scarcely bought a drink for themselves for weeks on end, as visitors stood rounds in payment for the story. They learnt in time to save their voices, for had the visitors had their way, every man who had witnessed the events that night would have been in the summer room going round the tables, talking constantly. But, as an elderly cressman pointed out very appositely, that would leave no drinking time. So they worked out a rota that saw the regulars go two by two into the summer room for an hour of telling, and then return to their stools in the winter room to quench their thirst and be replaced by two more.
Fred Heavins had crafted a good comic tale out of his side of it, which ended with the punchline, ‘“Nay!” said the horse.’ A slantwise version like his went down well after ten o’clock, when the facts of the story had been told a dozen times over and the audience was drunk. It earnt him a great many hangovers and he was so often late for work that he was threatened with dismissal.
Newman, the Vaughans’ gardener, previously a regular at the Red Lion where every Friday night he sang till he was hoarse, had now switched allegiance to the Swan and was trying his tongue at storytelling. He practised on the regulars before trying his luck with the visitors in the summer room, and made the most of that aspect of the story only he had witnessed: the departure of Mrs Vaughan from Buscot Lodge on hearing the news of the rescue of the child.
‘I saw her myself, I did. She ran down to the boathouse quick as could be, and when she come out in her rowing boat – the little old one of hers – off she went, haring up the river … I never seen a boat move like it.’
‘Haring up the river?’ asked a farmhand.
‘Aye, and just a little slip of a girl too! You wouldn’t think a woman could row so fast.’
‘But … haring, you say?’
‘That’s right. Quick as a hare, it means.’
‘I know what it means, all right. But you can’t say she was haring up the river.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘Have you ever seen a hare rowing a boat?’
There was a burst of laughter that bewildered the gardener and made him flustered. ‘A hare in a boat? Don’t be daft!’
‘That’s why you can’t say she went haring up the river. If a hare can’t hare up a river, how can Mrs Vaughan? Think about it.’
‘I never knew that. What am I meant to say, then?’
‘You have to think of some creature that do go swiftly up a river, and say that instead. Don’t he?’
There was a round of nodding.
‘What about an otter?’ suggested a young bargeman. ‘They don’t hang about.’
Newman pulled a dubious face. ‘Mrs Vaughan went ottering up the river …’
The farmhand shook his head. ‘It sounds no better.’
‘In fact it sounds a bit worse …’
‘Well, what am I supposed to say, then? If I can’t say haring and I can’t say ottering? I’ve got to say something.’
‘True,’ said the bargeman, and a trio of gravel-diggers nodded. ‘The man has to say something.’
They turned to Owen Albright, who shared his wisdom. ‘I reckon you have to find another way altogether. You could say, “She rowed up the river, quick as could be …”’
‘But he have already said that,’ protested the farmhand. ‘She ran down to the boathouse quick as could be. She can’t run quick as can be down to the boathouse and row quick as can be upriver.’
‘She did, though,’ corrected Newman.