Henry Daunt, taking a break at the end of a long day’s photography, was sitting in the corner of the winter room eating a plate of ham and potato with watercress.
‘It was that nursemaid,’ the cressman leaning at the window insisted. ‘I always said she had something to do with it. What keeps a girl out at that time of night if it isn’t mischief?’
‘Ah, but there’s mischief and mischief … It might not be kidnap mischief she were out for, but the other kind,’ his fellow drinker suggested.
The cressman shook his head. ‘I’d have got into mischief with her if she’d have had me, but she wouldn’t. She wasn’t the type. Did you ever hear of her getting into mischief with anybody?’ They kept a very accurate record of which girls were liable to get into mischief and which were not, so the information was close to hand. No. She was not the type.
‘What happened to her afterwards?’ Daunt asked them.
They consulted with each other. ‘Couldn’t get another job. Nobody wanted her looking after their children. She went to Cricklade, where her grandmother lives.’
‘Cricklade? Dragon country.’ Cricklade was a quaint town a few miles away, renowned for its intermittent infestations of dragons. He had thought of taking some photographs there for his book.
Daunt tucked into his meal, listening as the events of two years ago were disinterred, rediscussed, loose threads were picked out of the old story and today’s events, and efforts made to knit it all together and make of the two things a single tale. But the threads left gaps too wide to be darned.
One of the Little Margots brought Daunt a dish of apple pie and poured thick cream over it. Jonathan lit a new candle at his table and lingered.
‘Can I tell you a story?’
‘I’m all ears. Tell me a tale.’
Jonathan looked into the dark corner where the stories came from, and his eyes betrayed a very great act of concentration. When he was ready, he opened his mouth and the words came out in a great flood:
‘Once upon a time, there was a man drove his horse and cart into the river – and he weren’t never seen again! – Oh, no!’ His face twisted and he flapped his hand in frustration. ‘That’s not right!’ he cried with good-natured annoyance at himself. ‘I missed the middle bit!’
Jonathan went to practise on someone else and Daunt ate Margot’s pastry and listened to one conversation and then another. Robin Armstrong’s tragic tale, the likeness of his hair to that of the child, the river gypsies, the instincts of a mother …
Beszant the boat-mender sat while others picked the story apart and put it back together again in a hundred different ways. Whether the child looked like the Vaughans or the Armstrongs, how she had been first dead then alive, these were mysteries he shook his head at, comfortable in his own ignorance. But where he did have knowledge, he applied it. ‘She ain’t Alice Armstrong,’ he said firmly.
They pressed him for an explanation.
‘Mother were last seen at Bampton, heading to the river, the little mite with her. ’Tis so, I believe?’
They nodded.
‘Well now, in all my life, and I’m seventy-seven, I ain’t never seen a body – or a barrel or as much as a lost cap – float upstream. Have you? Anyone?’
They shook their heads, every one.
‘Ah, then.’ He delivered his words with an air of finality, and for a fleeting, fragile moment, it seemed that one thing at least was securely tethered in this story that slipped through your fingers like water. But then one of the cressmen opened his mouth.
‘But before last solstice night, did you ever expect to see a girl what’s drowned come to life again?’
‘No,’ said Beszant, ‘I can’t say as I did.’
‘Well then,’ the cressman concluded sagely, ‘just ’cause a thing’s impossible, don’t mean it can’t happen.’
The philosophers of the Swan fell to thinking and very quickly to disputing. Does the occurrence of one impossible thing increase the likelihood of a second? It was a greater conundrum than they had ever known and they went at it with great thoroughness, leaving no stone unturned. Many bottles of ale were consumed and many headaches borne out of their efforts to elucidate the matter. They drank and they pondered and they drank and they discussed and they drank and they argued. Their thoughts eddied round, discovered currents within currents, met countercurrents, and at times they felt tantalizingly close to a breakthrough, yet for all the intensity of their debate, at the end of it they were none the wiser.
Partway through, Daunt, who had remained sober, rose and slipped unnoticed out of the inn and back to Collodion, moored a few yards upstream by the old willow. He still had work to do.
The Shortest Night
AT BUSCOT LODGE, the servants had carried their mistress upstairs to her bedroom and left her to the care of Rita and the housekeeper. Helena seemed unaware of the hands that undressed her and pulled a nightdress over her incessantly shaking body. Her skin was bloodless, her eyes stared at nothing, and though her lips twitched she neither spoke nor responded to speech. They lay her in her bed, but she did not sleep; instead she reared up at frequent intervals, reaching out as she had for the girl, as though the scene at the fair were being repeated here in her own house, over and over. Then there came great spasms of tears that racked her body and she cried out, wordless howls of horror and pain that reverberated through the house.
At last Rita managed to get her to take a sleeping draught, but it was mild and slow to take effect.
‘Can’t you give her something stronger? Distressed as she is …’
‘No,’ said Rita, with a frown. ‘I can’t.’
At last the concoction won out against Helena’s overstimulated mind, and she began to quieten. Even then, in the final moments before sleep overtook her, she made a motion as if to rise from her bed. ‘Where …?’ she mumbled as she blinked dazedly, and another word, ‘Amelia …’ But eventually her head was on the pillow and her eyes closed and the devastation of the day was erased from her features.
‘I’ll go and tell Mr Vaughan she is sleeping,’ Mrs Clare the housekeeper said, but Rita detained her for a few minutes first with some questions about Helena’s health in recent times.
When Helena woke, it was to painful remembrance of what had gone before, with no lessening of the pain or the agitation.
‘Where is she?’ she wept, in anguish. ‘Where is she? Has Anthony gone to fetch her home? I must go myself. Who has her? Where is she?’ But the body was too exhausted to put her desperate desires into action, she had not the strength to push away the blankets and stand unsupported; to have taken a boat and rowed to Kelmscott or taken the train to Oxford was utterly beyond her.
The enormity of her grief was so great it wore her out, and when weariness took over, she lay wordless on the pillow, her limbs unmoving, her eyes unseeing.
During one of these interludes, Rita took her hand and said, ‘Helena, are you aware that you are expecting a baby?’
Helena’s eyes slowly turned to hers, uncomprehendingly.