She thought about it and agreed. They became engaged, but before they could marry he fell ill with pneumonia and died, too young. In the last days of his life he called his lawyer to alter his will. In it he left his house and furniture to the gentleman, and to Rita a significant sum of money, enough to give her modest independence. He also left her his library. She sold the volumes that were not medical or scientific, and had the rest packed and taken upriver. When the boat came to Godstow, she looked at the convent as she passed and felt a surprising pang that called to mind her lost God.
‘Here?’ the boatman asked, mistaking the nature of the intensity on her face.
‘Keep going,’ she told him.
On they went, another day, another night, till they came to Radcot. She liked the look of the place.
‘Here,’ she told the bargeman. ‘This will do.’
She bought a cottage, placed her books on the shelves, and let it be known among the better households of the area that she had a letter of recommendation from one of the best medical men in London. Once she had treated a few patients and delivered half a dozen babies, she was established. The wealthier families in the area wanted only Rita for their arrivals in the world and departures from it, and for all the medical crises in between. This was well-paid work and provided an adequate income to round out her inheritance. Among these patients were a number who could afford to be hypochondriacs; she tolerated their self-indulgence, for it enabled her to work at very low rates – or for nothing at all, for those who could not afford to pay. When she was not working, she lived frugally, read her way methodically through the doctor’s library (she neither thought of him nor referred to him as her fiancé) and made medicines.
Rita had been at Radcot for nearly ten years now. Death did not frighten her. In those years she had tended the dying, witnessed their demise and laid out the dead. Death by sickness, death in childbirth, death by accident. Death by malice, once or twice. Death as the welcome visitor to great age. Godstow’s hospital was on the river, so naturally she was familiar with the bodies of the drowned.
It was death by drowning that was on Rita’s mind as she made her way briskly through the cold night air to the outbuilding. Drowning is easy. Every year the river helps herself to a few lives. One drink too many, one hasty step, one second’s lapse of attention is all it takes. Rita’s first drowning was a boy of twelve, only a year younger than herself at the time, who slipped as he sang and larked about on the lock. Later was the summer reveller who mistook his step from a boat, received a blow to the temple on the way down, and his friends were too drunk to come effectively to his aid. A student showing off jumped from the apex of Wolvercote Bridge on a golden autumnal day, only to be surprised by the depth and the current. A river is a river, whatever the season. There were young women, like her own mother, poor souls unable to face a future of shame and poverty, abandoned by lover and family, who turned to the river to put an end to it all. And then there were the babies, unwanted morsels of flesh, little beginnings of life, drowned before they had a chance to live. She’d seen it all.
At the door to the long room, Rita turned the key in the lock. The air seemed even colder inside than out. It outlined a vivid map of passages and cavities behind her nostrils and up into her forehead. The chill carried the tang of earth, stone and, overwhelmingly, river. Her mind sprang instantly to attention.
The feeble light from the lantern faltered long before it reached the corners of the stone room, yet the little corpse was illuminated, shimmering with a glaucous gleam. It was a peculiar effect, caused by the extreme paleness of the body, but a fanciful person might have thought the light emanated from the small limbs themselves.
Aware of the unusual alertness that stirred in her, Rita approached. She judged the child to be about four years of age. Her skin was white. She was dressed in the simplest of shifts that left her arms and ankles bare, and the fabric, still damp, lay in ripples around her.
Rita automatically initiated the convent-hospital routine. She checked for breathing. She placed two fingers against the child’s neck to feel for a pulse. She peeled back the petal of an eyelid to examine the pupil. As she did all this, she heard in her mind the echo of the prayer that would have accompanied the examination in a chorus of calm, female voices: Our Father, which art in heaven … She heard it, but her lips did not move in time.
No breathing. No pulse. Full dilation of the pupils.
The uncommon vigilance was alive in her still. She stood over the little body and wondered what it was that had set her mind on edge. Perhaps it was nothing but the cold air.
You can read a dead body if you have seen enough of them, and Rita had seen it all. The when and the how and the why of it were all there if you knew how to look. She began an examination of the corpse so complete and so thorough that she entirely forgot about the cold. In the flickering light of the lantern, she peered and squinted at every inch of the child’s skin. She lifted arms and legs, felt the smooth movement of joints. She looked into ear and nostril. She explored the cavity of the mouth. She studied every finger- and toenail. At the end of it all, she stood back and frowned.
Something wasn’t right.
Head on one side, mouth twisted in perplexity, Rita went through everything she knew. She knew how the drowned wrinkle, swell and bloat. She knew how their skin, hair and nails loosen. None of this was present here, but that meant only that this child had not been in the water very long. Then there was the matter of mucus. Drowning leaves foam at the edges of the mouth and nostrils, but there was none on the face of this corpse. That too had its explanation. The girl was already dead when she went into the water. So far, so good. It was the rest that disturbed her. If the child had not drowned, what had happened to her? The skull was intact; the limbs unbeaten. There was no bruising to the neck. No bones were broken. There was no evidence of injury to the internal organs. Rita was aware how far human wickedness could go: she had checked the girl’s genitals and knew she had not been the victim of unnatural interference.
Was it possible that the child had died naturally? Yet there were no visible signs of illness. In fact, to judge from her weight, skin and hair, she had been exceptionally healthy.
All this was disconcerting enough, but there was more. Even supposing the child had died of natural causes and – for reasons impossible to imagine – been disposed of in the river, there should be injuries to the flesh made after death. Sand and grit abrade skin, stones graze, the detritus on the river’s bed will cut flesh. Water can break a man’s bones; a bridge will smash his skull. Wherever you looked at her, this child was unmarked, unbruised, ungrazed, uncut. The little body was immaculate. ‘Like a doll,’ Jonathan had told her when he described the girl falling into his arms, and she understood why he had thought so. Rita had run her fingertips over the soles of the girl’s feet, around the outer edge of her big toe, and they were so perfect you would think she had never put foot to earth. Her nails were as fine and as pearlized as those of a newborn. That death had made no mark on her was strange enough, but nor had life, and that, in Rita’s experience, was unique.
A body always tells a story – but this child’s corpse was a blank page.
Rita reached for the lantern on its hook. She trained its light on the child’s face, but found it as inexpressive as the rest of her. It was impossible to tell whether, in life, these blunt and unfinished features had borne the imprint of prettiness, timid watchfulness or sly mischief. If there had once been curiosity or placidity or impatience here, life had not had time to etch it into permanence.