‘She will if I am with her.’
Fleet was brought into the courtyard and saddled up. Daunt kept a close eye on the sky. Armstrong mounted.
‘What about that little cat?’ Rita wondered aloud. ‘Where has she got to?’
The cat was found and brought and lifted to sit purring on her master’s shoulder.
At this Armstrong’s children, understanding the nature of the photograph, went to fetch the dog. The elderly dog amiably allowed herself to be led to a spot beside Fleet’s forelegs, where she sat upright and looked directly at the camera like the most obedient subject. And then, when all was in place, Armstrong started.
‘Matilda!’ he exclaimed. ‘We cannot leave Matilda out!’
His middle son swivelled and set off at great speed.
The cloud that had hovered immobile in the sky began to drift slowly. Daunt watched its gradual movement and looked anxiously over to the corner where the boy had disappeared. As the cloud picked up speed in its passage across the sky, he opened his mouth to speak: ‘I think we’ll have to—’
Back the boy came, at a run, with something under his arm.
The cloud drifted faster.
The boy passed a wriggling bundle of pink flesh up to his father.
Daunt pulled a face. ‘We can’t have movement.’
‘She’ll not move,’ said Armstrong. ‘Not if I tell her.’ He lifted the piglet and murmured something into her ear while the cat eavesdropped, her head on one side. He tucked the piglet into the crook of his arm with her rear tucked under his elbow, and the entire tableau – man, steed, dog, cat and piglet – fell into an attitude of perfect stillness for fifteen perfect seconds.
Rita waited with Bess in the kitchen while the Armstrong boys helped Daunt carry the kit back to Collodion. Bess’s eye kept returning to the photographs, and Rita looked over her shoulder. The child sat on the lap of one of the older Armstrong girls. Around them the other five children had been unable to repress their smiles and beamed steadily at the camera. The newcomer to the family stared at the lens. Her eyes, which in life were so perplexing with their indefinable and evershifting green-blue-muddy-greyness, were simplified here by the absence of colour, and Rita was troubled, as she had been troubled by the photograph of Amelia in the boat. The child had a resigned, withdrawn air in the photograph that was less visible in person.
‘Is she happy, Bess?’ she asked doubtfully. ‘You’re a mother. What do you think?’
‘Well, she plays all right, and runs about. She has a healthy appetite. She likes going down to the river and the big ones take her for a walk every day so she can look around and splash about.’ Bess’s words said one thing, her tone implied another. ‘But later in the day she gets so tired. Much more tired than she ought to be, as if everything is twice as tiring for her as for another child. The light goes out of her, she gets so weary, the little dear, and instead of sleeping, all she can do is cry. There’s nothing I can do to console her.’
Bess fidgeted with her eye patch.
‘What is your eye condition? Is it something I could help with? I’m a nurse – I’d be happy to take a look.’
‘Thank you, Rita, but no. I put my eye away a long time ago. It doesn’t trouble me so long as I don’t look at people with it.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘Sometimes I don’t like what I see with it.’
‘What do you see?’
‘What people are really like. When I was a girl I thought that everybody could see into the heart of other people. I didn’t realize that what I could see was hidden to everybody else. People don’t like it, having their true selves known, and it got me into trouble more than once. I learnt to keep what I saw to myself. I only understood what a person of my age could understand, mind, and that was some protection, I suppose, but as I grew I liked it less and less. Too much knowledge is a burden. When I was fifteen I sewed my first patch and I’ve worn one ever since. Of course, everybody thinks I’m ashamed of my eye. They think I am concealing my ugliness from them, when in truth it is their ugliness I am hiding.’
‘What an extraordinary ability,’ said Rita. ‘I am intrigued. Have you ever taken your patch off and tried it since those days?’
‘Twice. But I have thought of it often since we had this addition to the family. I have thought of taking off my patch to See her.’
‘To find out who she is?’
‘It won’t tell me that. It will only tell me what it feels like to be her.’
‘It would tell you whether she is happy?’
‘It would.’ Bess looked at Rita in uncertainty. ‘Shall I?’
They looked out of the window where the girls were playing with the cat. The Armstrong girls were laughing and smiling as they pulled a piece of twine for the cat to leap at. The child eyed their antics listlessly. Every so often she tried a smile, but it seemed to wear her out, and she rubbed her eyes.
‘Yes,’ said Rita.
Bess stepped into the yard, and returned with the child. Rita took the girl on her lap and Bess sat down opposite her. She slid her eye patch over so that it covered her good eye, keeping her face fully averted from the girl until she was ready. Then she tilted her head and fixed the girl in the line of sight of her far-seeing eye.
Bess’s hand flew to her mouth and she gasped in dismay.
‘No! The poor little girl is so lost! She wants to go home to her daddy. Oh, the poor child!’ Bess seized the little girl and rocked her, pouring out all the comfort she was capable of. Over her head, she spoke to Rita. ‘She does not belong with us. You must take her back to the Vaughans. Take her home today!’
Truth, Lies and the River
‘WHAT DOES YOUR medical science make of Mrs Armstrong’s Seeing eye?’ Daunt asked from the helm.
‘You are the optical scientist. What do you say?’
‘There is no eye, human or mechanical, that sees the souls of children.’
‘Yet here we are, taking this little girl back to the Vaughans on the basis of Bess’s reaction. Because we trust her.’
‘Why do we trust a thing neither of us believes?’
‘I didn’t say I don’t believe it.’
‘Rita!’
‘Perhaps it is this way: Bess was ill as a child; her limp and her eye set her apart from the other children. She had more opportunities to observe – and more time to consider what she observed. She became an outstandingly good judge of character, and learnt what it is to live alongside other human beings and to know more about them than they do themselves. But understanding other people’s sorrows and wishes and feelings and intentions as closely as she does must be wearing. She found her gift uncomfortable, persuaded herself that it was her eye that had the talent and drew a veil over it.
‘She was already more than half aware that the child wasn’t happy. I suspected as much myself. So did you, I think?’
He nodded.
‘She is very experienced with children. When she took her patch off, she allowed herself to see what she already knew.’
‘And we trust her judgement, which is why we are taking the child back to Buscot Lodge.’
The girl was on the deck, holding the hand rail and watching the water. At every bend in the river she looked ahead. When she had scanned every vessel in sight, her eyes returned to the water. She seemed to look not so much at the surface, rendered opaque by the motion of the water displaced by Collodion’s passage, but through it and beyond.