They came to the boathouse at Buscot and moored. Daunt lifted the child down; without hurry and without surprise, she recognized the way back to the house and led them there.
The maid gasped with surprise and rushed them straight to the drawing room.
When they entered, the Vaughans were sitting close together on the sofa, his hand on her belly. At the intrusion, they looked up. The aftermath of powerful feeling was still present in Vaughan’s tear-stained face, Helena’s wide-eyed pallor. Rita and Daunt had felt themselves to be at the heart of a great event as they brought the child back to Buscot Lodge in Collodion, and to come into the house and know that something momentous had been happening here too was disconcerting. But it was true: something vast had come and gone in this room, so grave that the very air vibrated with the knowledge that nothing would ever be the same again.
But now, seeing the child, Vaughan rose to his feet. He took a step, and another, and then ran to the door to sweep the girl into his arms. He held her at arm’s length as though he could scarcely believe she was there, then placed her on his wife’s lap. Helena placed a hundred kisses on the little girl’s head, called her ‘darling’ a thousand times, and the pair, man and wife, laughed and cried at once.
Daunt answered the question that the Vaughans were too overcome to ask. ‘We’ve been photographing the Armstrongs this afternoon. They are certain she’s not Alice. She belongs here, after all.’
Vaughan and Helena exchanged a glance in which they agreed something silently together. When they turned back to Daunt and Rita, they spoke as one:
‘She is not Amelia.’
They sat on the bank. It was better to tell such stories close to the river than in a drawing room. Words accumulate indoors, trapped by walls and ceilings. The weight of what has been said can lie heavily on what might yet be said and suffocate it. By the river, the air carries the story on a journey, one sentence drifts away and makes room for the next.
The child pulled her shoes off and stood in the shallows, carrying on her usual business with sticks and stones, pausing every once in a while to glance up- and downriver, while Vaughan told Daunt and Rita what he had told Helena, and before her, Mrs Constantine.
When he fell silent, having told all, Helena said, ‘I knew she was dead. The night he came home without her, I knew. It was on his face. But I could not bear to know it, and he did not say it, and between us we pretended it was not so. We colluded. We made a falsehood together. And it almost destroyed us. Without the truth, we could not grieve. Without the truth, we could not console each other. In the end, I was so tormented by the deceitful hope I clung to, I was ready to drown myself. Then the girl came, and I recognized her.’
‘We were happy,’ said Vaughan. ‘Or rather, Helena was happy, and I was happy that she was happy.’
‘Poor Anthony’s lie was the greater, but it was not so enduring as my own. I feasted on the sight of the girl. I buried all the painful truth and saw only her.’
‘And then Mrs Eavis said, “Hello, Alice!”’
‘It was not Mrs Eavis who changed things. It was you, Rita.’
‘Me?’
‘You told me there was going to be another baby.’
Rita remembered the moment. ‘You said, “Oh,” and then you said, “Oh,” again.’
‘One “oh” for the new baby. The other for the knowledge that came with it, that this little girl had never stirred in my womb. I knew then that she was not Amelia. Though I missed her quite as much as if she had been. She brought me back to life, and brought me back to Anthony, and I can’t help but love her, our little mystery child, whoever she is.
‘She changed us. We have wept for Amelia and we will weep again. There are rivers of tears waiting to be shed. But we will love this little girl like a daughter, and she will be a sister to the baby that is to come.’
They walked back to the house, the Vaughans ahead with the child who was neither Amelia nor Alice between them. She seemed to have accepted her return to Buscot Lodge, as she had accepted her departure from it.
Rita and Daunt fell behind as they followed.
‘She can’t be Lily’s sister,’ Daunt said in a low voice. ‘That still doesn’t make sense.’
‘Then whose is she?’
‘She’s no one’s child. So why shouldn’t the Vaughans have her? They love her. She can have a good life with them.’ There was a note in his voice that Rita recognized, for the same regret and longing rested in her own breast. She remembered the night she had fallen asleep in a chair at the Swan with the sound of Daunt’s breathing in the room and the child sleeping on her lap, her ribcage rising and falling in harmony with her own. I could keep her, had been the thought that had drifted into her then and never left. But it was no good. She was an unmarried woman with a job. The Vaughans were much better placed to care for the child. She must content herself with loving her from a distance.
Rita took a short breath, expelled it, and with determination turned her mind to other things. She considered the implications of what Vaughan had just told them and shared her thoughts with Daunt in a murmur. ‘Whoever it was that kidnapped Amelia …’ she started.
‘… also killed her,’ finished Daunt in the same undertone.
‘They can’t be allowed to get away with it. Someone must know something.’
‘Someone always knows something. But who? And what do they know? And do they even know the significance of what they know?’
Struck by an idea, Daunt stopped. ‘There might be a way …’ He scratched his head doubtfully.
They caught up with the Vaughans and Daunt set out his idea.
‘But will it work?’ Helena asked.
‘There’s no way of knowing.’
‘Unless we try it,’ Vaughan said.
The four of them stood in front of the house. Mrs Clare the housekeeper, who had heard them coming, opened the door, then, when nobody moved, closed it again.
‘Shall we?’ Rita asked.
‘I can’t think of any other way,’ Helena said.
‘Well, then,’ Vaughan said, turning to Daunt. ‘How would you begin?’
‘With the dragons of Cricklade.’
‘Dragons?’ Vaughan looked confused, but Helena knew what Daunt was referring to.
‘Ruby’s grandmother!’ she exclaimed. ‘And Ruby.’
The Dragons of Cricklade
CRICKLADE IS A town stuffed full of stories. As they passed the church on the quadricycle, Daunt explained some of them to Rita.
‘According to legend,’ he said as they made their way through the town, laden with all the photographic equipment, ‘if a person is unlucky enough to fall from the tower, his friends and family will be diverted from their grief by the spectacle of a stone effigy of their loved one springing naturally from the ground where he fell. I rather regret I have so slim a chance of photographing that.’
They did not stop at the church but headed north, and on the road leading out of the village towards Down Ampney kept a lookout for a thatched cottage with beehives.
‘You must go, please,’ Helena had begged Rita. ‘Daunt will never get anything out of Ruby by himself. She’ll trust you. Everybody does.’
So here she was, sitting behind Daunt among the boxes as they bumped and jolted along the country roads, keeping her eyes peeled. ‘There,’ she pointed, spotting the distinctive tops of beehives behind a hedge.
A white-haired woman was in the garden, making her way on tottering legs towards the hives. At the sound of Rita’s greeting she turned transparent eyes in their direction. ‘Who’s that? Do I know you?’