‘No!’
‘She did! I was there! I saw her with my own eyes!’
‘Aye, so it might have happened, but you can’t tell it thus.’
‘Can’t tell it how it was? How d’you make that out? I’m starting to wish I’d not told it at all, now. Telling a thing’s harder than I ever knew.’
‘There’s an art to it,’ Albright soothed. ‘You’ll get the hang of it.’
‘I’ve got to the age of thirty-seven just opening my mouth and letting the words out, and never had any trouble so far. Not till I came and sat down here. I don’t know as I wants the hang of it. No, I shall go on by the old way, my words shall come as they like and if I has her haring up the river, well hare she must. Else I shan’t say anything at all.’
There was an exchange of anxious looks across the table, and one of the gravel-diggers spoke for them alclass="underline" ‘Let the man speak. He was there.’
And Newman was allowed to continue, in words of his own devising, his account of Mrs Vaughan’s departure from the house.
It was not only Newman and Heavins who practised and refined their stories. All told their versions over and over, to each other and the visitors, and new details came to light. Memories were compared, adjudication made. There were splinter groups. Some remembered ‘for a fact’ that the feather had been placed on the lips of the child before she was taken to the long room, others were adamant that only the man’s breath had been tested thus. Diverse and lengthy hypotheses were proposed to explain how Henry Daunt managed to get from Devil’s Weir to Radcot whilst out cold and in a damaged boat. They refined and polished the tale, identified moments where a well-placed gesture would bring tears to the eye, introduced pauses that held the audience on the edge of their seats. But they never found an ending to the story. They came to a point – the child left the Swan with Mr and Mrs Vaughan – where the story simply tailed off. ‘Is she Amelia Vaughan, or is she the other one?’ someone would ask. And ‘How come she was first dead and then alive again?’
There were no answers.
Regarding the first question – who was the girl? – opinion by and large was in favour of the girl belonging to the Vaughans. The return of a child missing for the past two years, a child they had all seen, was a distinctly more satisfying story than the return of a child nobody knew and who had gone missing only the day before. The more recent mystery resuscitated the first, and the kidnap was recounted as though it were only yesterday.
‘Where has she been, then, this last – how long is it? – two years?’
‘She will have to get her voice back and start telling, won’t she?’
‘And then there’ll be trouble for whoever it was that took her.’
‘It were that nursery maid, I’d put a week’s wages on it. Remember her?’
‘The girl Ruby that went out in the night?’
‘That’s what she says. Walking by the river at midnight. I ask you! What kind of a girl goes wandering by the river in the middle of the night? At solstice time too.’
‘And solstice time is when the river gypsies are about. They cooked it up with her, that’s how it was. Ruby and the gypsies, mark my words. When that little lass starts to talk, there’ll be trouble for someone …’
The story of the kidnapped girl and the story of the found girl both had trailing ends, but if some of those trailing ends could be woven together, then that seemed to bring both stories closer to completion, which was a good thing.
As for the second question, that gave rise to longer and drunker debates.
There were some for whom the world was such a tricky thing that they marvelled at it without feeling any need to puzzle it out. Bafflement in their eyes was fundamental to existence. Higgs the gravel-digger was one such. His pay, which was enough on Friday night to last the week, was generally gone by the end of Tuesday; he always owed for more pints of ale at the Swan than he remembered consuming; the wife he only beat on Saturday night – and not always then – ran off for no reason at all to live with the cousin of the cheesemonger; the face he saw reflected in the river when he sat glumly staring into it with no bread in his belly, no ale to dull the hunger and no wife to warm him, was not his own but his father’s. The whole of life was a mystery, if you delved even a little way under the surface, and causes and effects not infrequently came adrift from each other. On top of these daily bewilderments, the story of the girl who died and lived again was one he drew consolation from as he marvelled at it, for it demonstrated conclusively that life was fundamentally inexplicable, and there was no point trying to understand anything.
Certain tellers, fanciful or just unscrupulous, invented details to provide a more satisfactory answer to this question. One bargeman had a brother who’d been off with a woman the night of the great event. At first disappointed by what he’d missed, he later turned it to his advantage and developed his own version that made the most of his absence from the inn and contained the comfort of rational explanation. ‘She were never dead at all! If I’d have seen her, I’d have told ’em. It’s all in the eyes. You have only to look in a man’s eyes to tell if he is dead or not. It is the seeing, you see, that goes out of ’em.’
Ears snapped open on hearing this and heads lifted sharply. It was the obvious way to sooth the strain of it, if you were one of those that can’t stand a glaring gap in a tale, an implausibility, reality gone wrong. One or two storytellers were attracted to the security of it and their own versions began to drift in that direction. ‘She was brought into the inn scarcely breathing,’ someone said experimentally, but it gave rise to such disapproving glances and twists of the mouth that the teller was taken aside and given a talking-to. There were standards at the Swan; storytelling was one thing, lying quite another, and they had all been there. They knew.
After months of telling and retelling there was no sense of the story settling down. On the contrary, the tale of the drowned girl who lived again was puzzling, unfinished, out of kilter with what a story ought to be. At the Swan they talked about the Vaughans, they talked about the Armstrongs, they talked about death and they talked about life. They examined the strengths and weaknesses of every claim and every claimant. They turned the story this way and that, they turned it upside down and then righted it again, and at the end were no further forward than they had been at the beginning.
‘It is like bone soup,’ said Beszant one night. ‘A smell to make your mouth water and all the flavour of the marrow, but there be nowt to chew on and though you take seven bowls of it you will be just as hungry at the end as when you sat down to the table.’
They might have let it drop. They might have given it up as one of those tales that comes from nowhere and has nowhere to go. But at the end of sentences and between words, when voices tailed off and conversations halted, in the profound lull that lies behind all storytelling, there floated the girl herself. In this room, in this inn, they had seen her dead and seen her alive. Unknowable, ungraspable, inexplicable, still one thing was plain: she was their story.
Counting
TWENTY-FIVE MILES DOWNRIVER, at Oxford’s best-known boatyard, the boatbuilder himself scrawled an inky squiggle in receipt of payment of the final invoice and with a nod slid a set of shiny brass keys over the counter. Henry Daunt’s hand closed over them.
On his return to the city after his eventful solstice experiences, Daunt had set things in motion. He had leased the house he’d lived in with his wife and moved into the attic room over his shop on Broad Street. There he enjoyed a spartan, bachelor existence, having a bed, a chamber pot, a table with a pitcher and basin to his name. He ate his meals at the chop house at the corner. He invested the total of the lease money and every penny of his savings into the boat. For Daunt had a plan.