‘My name is Rita Sunday and I’ve come to buy honey. You must be Mrs Wheeler. I have Mr Daunt here, a photographer. He would like to talk to you about dragons for his book.’
‘A book? I don’t know about that … But I don’t mind telling you about the dragons. I might be ninety but I can remember it as if it was yesterday. Come and sit here, and we’ll have bread and honey while you ask your questions.’
They sat on a bench in a sheltered corner and the woman went to the door and spoke briefly to someone inside. When she returned, she told them about the dragons. She was a child of three or four when the dragons had come to this very cottage. It was the first time they’d been seen in Cricklade for nearly a hundred years, and nobody had seen them again since. She was the only living person in Cricklade today who had seen them. She had woken with a cough, heat in her throat, and seen flames in the hole in the ceiling where there ought to have been only thatch. ‘I got out of bed and went to the door, but I could hear the dragons roaring outside on the landing so I didn’t dare open it. I went to the window instead, and there was my father looking in – he had climbed up into the branches of the tree outside, despite them smouldering and being ready to burst into flame at any minute, and he smashed the glass with his foot and reached in and lifted me out. It was a scramble getting down to the ground, and when we got there, the neighbours took me out of his arms and laid me on the ground and rolled me over and over. I couldn’t think what they were doing! But my nightdress was on fire, you see, though I didn’t know it at the time, and they rolled me to smother the flames.’
The woman delivered her story tranquilly, as though it had happened so long ago it belonged to another person altogether. From time to time, when they asked a question, her pale, candid eyes turned benevolently in the direction of whoever spoke to her, though it was plain she could not see. A thin girl with a pinched look brought a tray to the table and set out slices of bread, a dish of butter and a jar of honey with a spoon. She gave an unsmiling nod to the visitors and went back to the house without raising her eyes.
‘Shall I butter the bread?’ Rita offered, and Granny Wheeler said, ‘Thank you, dear.’
‘My grandmother kept her honey in there,’ she nodded at the stone outbuilding, ‘in a great big canister as big as a bath, and she took the top off and dropped me in it, stark naked, and that’s where I stayed for the rest of the night. There was no honey to sell that year, for nobody wanted to eat it after I had sat in it up to my neck.’
‘And did you see the dragons? The ones you heard behind the door? What I would give to have a photograph of a dragon – a rich man I’d be!’
She laughed. ‘You’d have better things to do than stand about taking photographs if you saw them! Yes, I saw them. I was sitting in the honey when I saw them fly away. Hundreds of them, there were.’ She looked up as if she could still see them now. ‘Great flying eels, picture that and you will have it about right in your mind’s eye. No ears and no eyes, that I could see. No scales, nor even any wings to speak of. Not a bit like any dragon I ever saw in a picture. Just long and dark and sleek and quick. They were twisting and writhing and the sky was so full of them that to look up at them all was like staring into a pan of boiling ink. Now how do you like my honey?’
They finished eating and the old woman reminisced some more about the night of the dragons.
‘Look up there!’ She pointed to the roof. ‘I can’t see it no more, my eyes aren’t good enough, but you can see it. The dark marks over the window.’
It was true, there were scorch marks just beneath the level of the thatch.
‘That would make a fine detail in the photograph,’ Daunt suggested. ‘Yourself just here, next to the hives, and the place where the fire was in the background. There will be sky in the picture too – where the dragons were.’
With very little reluctance Granny Wheeler was cajoled into appearing in the photograph, and while Daunt set up, Rita continued talking to her.
‘You must have been badly burnt?’
Granny Wheeler rolled up her sleeve and showed her arm. ‘That’s what I’m like all down my back, from my neck to my waist.’ A large area of skin was discoloured, taut and unlined.
‘This is most unusual,’ Rita said. ‘Such a large area to be burnt. You haven’t had any trouble with it since?’
‘Oh, no.’
‘Because of the honey? I use honey when my patients are burnt too.’
‘Are you a nurse?’
‘Yes, and a midwife. I work a few miles downstream. At Buscot.’
The woman started. ‘Buscot?’
There was a pause. Rita swallowed a piece of bread and honey and waited until, tentatively, the old woman went on.
‘You might know something about the child that went missing there two years ago …’
‘Amelia Vaughan?’
‘That’s the one. They said she came back – but now I’ve heard it might not be her after all. What do they say about it now? Is it Amelia or not?’
‘A woman did come forward who appeared to recognize the child as another little girl, but the other family came to think she was not theirs, so she is back with the Vaughans again. Nobody knows who she is really, but she is not Amelia.’
‘Not Amelia! I did so hope … For the sake of the Vaughans, but also for the good of my own family. My granddaughter was nursemaid to the Vaughans. She has had no end of trouble since that little child was took. All manner of things have been said about her. Nobody who knows her believes a word of it, but there are so many who hear the story first and see her in the light of it. All she wanted in life was a nice young man and a family of her own, but there aren’t many men prepared to take on a wife mixed up in something like that! She fretted herself sick with it all. Couldn’t sleep and hardly ate a thing. Wouldn’t go out in case anybody spoke harshly to her, wouldn’t hardly come out of her room, some days. I didn’t hear her laugh for months on end … And then word came that the girl was back! Returned by the river, they said. Them that had gossiped about Ruby had to bite their tongues then. The tide started to turn. Ruby came out of her shell a bit. She even got work, helping out at the school she used to go to. She got a bit of her colour back, started to take an interest in life again. Sometimes in the evenings she went with the other young ladies from the school for a turn around the streets, and who was I to say no, after all the hardship she’d suffered? Why shouldn’t she have a bit of fun like the other young ones do? She met Ernest. They got engaged. They was going to get married in July. But just after solstice time a jealous girl took her aside and whispered that the child they found at Buscot was not Amelia after all, that the lost girl was still lost. The talk started up again. Ruby was still under suspicion. She called off the wedding the very next day. “How can I marry and have children with everybody whispering these things about me? I will not be trusted with my own babies! It’s not fair on Ernest. He deserves better than me.” That was the gist of it. Ernest did his best to talk her out of it. He won’t listen to the gossips. He says the wedding is only postponed and the engagement stands, but she won’t see him, though he comes asking after her every day. The school said she had better leave and she never goes beyond the garden walls now.’
The blind woman sighed. ‘I was hoping for better news, but you have only confirmed what I knew already.’ She made to stand up slowly on her ancient bones. ‘I may as well fetch you that honey while we’re waiting.’