Rita had not touched her wine, but she took the glass now and drank the contents in a single draught. As she did this, lids lowered, Daunt noticed the swelling and pinkness around her eyes.
‘You would make a good father, Henry Daunt. You will make a good father one day. They won’t tell you about the blood. You’ll be sent away, out of sight, out of hearing. By the time you are allowed back they’ll have cleared it all away. Your wife will look pale and you’ll think it’s because she’s tired. You won’t know her blood is being wrung out of the sheets and into your drains. The housekeeper will scrub away at the stains in the bedsheets till they look as innocuous as if someone spilt a cup of breakfast tea in bed about five years ago. There’ll be cloves and orange peel in the room so you won’t notice the smell of iron. If there is a doctor, he might advise you man to man not to attempt marital intimacy for a time, but he won’t go into detail, so you won’t know about the tears and the stitches. You won’t know about the blood. Your wife will know. If she survives. But she won’t tell you.’
He refilled her glass. She drank it.
Daunt said nothing.
He drained his own glass.
‘I know now,’ he said carefully. ‘Now that you’ve told me.’
‘Give me another, would you?’ she asked.
Instead of refilling the glass that she held out to him, he placed it on the table and took her hand in his. ‘This is why you don’t have children? Why you don’t want to have children? Darling—’
‘Don’t!’ She took a handkerchief from her pocket and blew her nose. ‘When your wife has her baby, send for me. I’m named after Saint Margaret, the patron saint of childbirth, remember. I’ll do my best for her. For the baby. And for you.’
She refilled her glass herself, and this time she did not drink it in a single gulp but took a little sip, and when she looked at him again the fury had gone out of her and she had gathered herself.
‘Helena Vaughan is pregnant,’ she told him.
‘Ah,’ he said nervously. And, ‘Ah,’ again.
‘That’s more or less what she said. “Oh,” and “Oh.”’
‘Are they … pleased?’
‘Pleased? I don’t know.’ She frowned at the table. ‘What’s going on, Daunt? What really happened this afternoon?’
She looked at him for an answer.
‘It didn’t seem real,’ he said.
She nodded. ‘The way Mrs Eavis delivered her lines. It sounded – rehearsed.’
‘And she made sure everyone heard.’
‘Robin Armstrong turning up at exactly the moment he did … Not a second earlier or later, just in time for her to grab the girl and pass her to him.’
‘Did you see the look she gave him, when he first arrived?’
‘Yes – as if she was expecting to see him—’
‘– but was relieved he was there—’
‘– a just-in-the-nick-of-time look—’
‘– but gone again before anyone could really pay attention to it.’
‘It was like something at the theatre.’
‘Orchestrated.’
‘Planned. Right up to Mrs Eavis’s departure, with her transport waiting for her in the lane.’
‘After you left in pursuit of Mrs Eavis, Robin Armstrong made a great show of emotion. Overwhelmed by tender feelings – “Alice, oh Alice,” too quietly to be heard by anyone other than the nearest onlookers.’
Daunt pondered. ‘You think it wasn’t genuine? Yet if it was said quietly, and not declaimed like Mrs Eavis’s speeches …?’
‘It made him more plausible, and he could count on it being overheard and broadcast. He’s a much more talented actor than Mrs Eavis.’
‘I heard what everyone else was saying about him. They were all convinced.’
‘They weren’t there when he pretended to faint when he first saw the girl.’
‘You read his pulse …’
‘It was as steady and unflustered as any pulse I’ve ever taken.’
‘But why pretend then?’
‘Buying himself thinking time?’
Daunt puzzled over it, but came to no conclusion. ‘What about Vaughan? Why didn’t he do something?’
Rita frowned and shook her head. ‘He’s in a peculiar state. It’s as if he’s absent from himself. I told him Helena is pregnant and he barely replied. He seemed unable to take it in. I wonder whether we’re wrong about it, Daunt. Perhaps he does believe the girl is Amelia, after all. He seems defeated.’
They sat in silence, and the river rocked beneath them, and the noise from the Swan carried raucous and unruly in the air.
‘We might as well finish this, eh?’ said Daunt.
Rita nodded, yawning. It was dark now. The day had stretched her thin, to the point where she felt the boundary of herself, her skin, dissolving into the atmosphere. Another glass and she might lose herself altogether. How she longed for the girl. She felt bereft. Daunt’s couch was there; she suddenly pictured herself stretched out upon it. Where would Daunt be in this fantasy? Before her imagination could answer the question, as Daunt uncorked the bottle for a last refill and was about to pour, Collodion dipped and tilted.
Rita and Daunt stared at each other in surprise. Someone had come aboard.
A knock at the cabin door. A woman’s voice, ‘Hello?’
It was one of the Little Margots.
Daunt opened the door.
‘I need to speak to Miss Sunday,’ she said. ‘I spotted you coming here, and then when Dad was took bad I thought … Sorry, Mr Daunt.’
Daunt turned back into the cabin, while behind him Little Margot ostentatiously looked in the other direction. Rita rose.
On her way out, she gave him a weary smile. “I’m sorry. About what I told you. It’s women’s business.’
He took her hand, might have raised it to his lips, but instead gave it a comradely squeeze and she was gone.
All knew that Joe was unwell, and nobody tried to delay Rita as she followed Little Margot up the bank and through the public rooms to Joe and Margot’s private quarters. The innkeeper lay on the hastily improvised bed in the room that was furthest from the river. His chest rose and fell in an unmusical struggle, but his gaze was calm, so calm that the noisy effort of his lungs might have belonged to another person altogether. His limbs lay in patient stillness. With a twitch of the eyebrow he communicated that his daughter could rejoin her mother at work, then, when they were alone, smiled his mild smile at Rita.
‘How many – more times – can I – do this?’ he asked between gasps for breath.
She didn’t answer straight away. It wasn’t a real question anyway. She put her ear to his chest and listened. She measured his pulse, assessed his pallor.
Then she sat down. She didn’t say, There’s nothing I can do, because this was Joe. He’d been keeping one step ahead of death for half a century. There was nothing about dying he didn’t know.
‘I reckon – a few – more months,’ he wheezed. He paused to concentrate on the job of siphoning oxygen out of the swampy air. ‘Half a year – maybe.’
‘Something like that.’
Rita did not look away. Part of her job was to help people face what was coming. Dying could be lonely. A nurse was often an easier person to talk to than family. She held his gaze with hers.