‘Which is it? Past or future? It may be the first, but I incline towards the latter. We must wait till the summer solstice – perhaps then we will know more.’
‘Why the summer solstice?’
‘Because he believes it will be plain by then whether the child will speak or not. According to the Oxford doctor, that is when her muteness will either be gone or be permanent. It’s nonsense, of course, but my assailant didn’t ask for my opinion and I didn’t give him the benefit of it. I only told him what the doctor had said. Six months from the drowning – if we can call it that – takes us to the summer solstice. Whether or not she speaks by then might be the factor that will determine his actions.’
His eyes met hers in the flickering red light.
‘I would not want anything bad to happen to her,’ he said. ‘When I first saw her, I thought … I wanted …’
‘You wanted to keep her.’
‘How did you know that?’
‘It’s the same for everybody. The Vaughans want her, the Armstrongs want her, Lily White wants her. Jonathan wept when she left the Swan, and Margot was more than ready to have her. Why, even the cressmen would have taken her home and raised her if there’d been nobody else. Even I …’ Something flickered in her eyes, there and gone again. I particularly want that, he thought. ‘So of course you wanted her,’ she continued smoothly. ‘Everyone did.’
‘Let me photograph you again. There will be light enough for another one.’
He lifted the red shade and snuffed out the candle and Rita leant to open the shutters. The day outside was dank and cold and grey, and the river was iron cold.
‘You agreed to help me with my experiment.’
‘What is it you want me to do?’
‘You might change your mind once you know.’
She told him her intentions and he stared.
‘Why on earth would you want me to do that?’
‘Can’t you guess?’
Of course he could. ‘It’s her, isn’t it? Her heart slowed. You want to know how it happened.’
‘Will you help?’
The first part was easy. At her kitchen table, while water was heating over the fire, she took his wrist in one hand and held her pocket watch in the other. For sixty seconds they sat in silence and she counted his pulse. At the end of a minute she made a note with a pencil that she wore on a string around her neck.
‘Eighty beats a minute. A little high. It might be the anticipation.’
She tipped the water into a tin bath by the fire.
‘It’s not all that hot,’ he said, testing it with his finger.
‘Tepid is better. Now – are you ready? I’ll turn my back.’
He undressed to his shirt and long johns while she looked out of the window, then put his coat on. ‘Ready.’
Outside, the ground was unyielding and the cold penetrated Daunt’s bare feet. The river ahead appeared smooth, but occasional shivers gave away the presence of deeper turbulence. Rita got into her little rowing boat and pushed off a couple of yards into the water. When she had lodged the nose of the craft in the reeds to secure it, she held her thermometer in the water for a few moments to test the temperature and noted it.
‘Perfect!’ she called. ‘Ready when you are.’
‘How long will it take?’
‘Only a minute, I should think.’
On the bank, Daunt took off his coat, then his shirt. He stood in his long johns, and reflected that when in the early days of his widowhood he had contemplated the possibility of finding himself undressed in the company of a woman, this was not what he had imagined.
‘All set,’ she said, with her unaltered calm voice, her gaze fixed firmly away from him and on the pocket watch.
He entered the river.
The first touch of the water made his bones contract. He set his jaw, went three steps deeper. The freezing line rose up his limbs. He found he could not bear it to creep up to his genitals, instead he bent his knees and took the shock of immersion in a single motion. He lowered himself to the neck and gasped, surprised that his chest could expand in the water’s grip. A few strokes took him to the side of the boat.
‘Wrist,’ she instructed.
He raised his wrist. She took it in her right hand, held the watch in her left and said nothing.
He endured it for what must have been a minute. She was still looking at the watch, her eyes blinking calmly every so often. He endured it for what felt like another minute.
‘God! How much longer?’
‘If I lose count we have to start again,’ she murmured, the concentration on her face unchanging.
He endured an eternity.
He endured another.
He endured a thousand eternities – and then she let go of his wrist, took up the pencil and noted something neatly on the pad of paper, while he gasped and rose, scattering water from the river. He made for the bank, ran to the cottage, to the tin bath of tepid water they had prepared in advance, and when he was in it, she was right – the heat bloomed all over him.
When she entered the kitchen he was entirely submerged.
‘Feel all right?’ she asked.
He nodded, teeth chattering, and then his body took over from his mind for a time as it put all its vigour into recovering from the shock of the cold. When he was himself again, he looked over to the table. Rita was frowning out of the window as the light faded. The pencil was no longer round her neck, but stuck over her ear, the cord dangling on to her shoulder. I want that, he thought.
‘Well?’
‘Eighty-four.’ She lifted the paper on which she had noted the figures. ‘Your heartbeat rises in response to submersion in cold water.’
‘Rises?’
‘Yes.’
‘But the girl’s pulse fell … We found the opposite of what was meant to happen.’
‘Yes.’
‘It was for nothing, then.’
She shook her head slowly. ‘Not nothing. I’ve ruled out a hypothesis. That’s progress.’
‘What’s hypothesis two?’
She bent her head back to look at the ceiling, arm raised, elbow crooked around her head, and puffed out a long sigh of frustration. ‘I don’t know.’
Lily’s Visitor
LILY WHITE WAS not asleep and she was not awake. She was in that border territory where shadows move like waves, and illumination – faint and perplexing – comes and goes, like feeble sunshine through deep water. Then she emerged abruptly into wakefulness in her bed in Basketman’s Cottage.
What was it?
He was stealthy as a cat, opening the door without making a noise, stepping so lightly on the flags he was soundless. But she knew him by the odour of woodsmoke, sweetness and yeast that he always brought with him and that alarmed her senses so. It held its own, even against the dank riverine smell of the cottage. Then she heard him too: the grating of stone on stone. He was retrieving the money from the hiding place.
The sudden burst of a match strike. From her bed on the high ledge she saw the flare of light and the hand, with its bruises and scars, that tilted the candle wick into it. The wick caught and the circle of light grew steady.
‘What you got for me?’ he said.
‘There’s cheese there and a bit of that ham you like. There’s bread in the basket.’
‘Today’s?’
‘Yesterday’s.’
The light moved over to the side and there was the sound of rummaging.
‘Going mouldy, isn’t it. Should’ve got me some today.’