At the back of the room in her dark corner, Lily has never seen anything like these huge images on the wall, so lifelike and so impossible. When they said it was going to be a story told in pictures she’d had in mind the illustrated children’s Bible whose pages she used to turn while her mother read. She didn’t know it would be reality in black and white, flattened like pressed flowers and laid tall and broad on the wall. She didn’t know it would touch on her own life. Her hand clutches at her throat, and she stares, all pulse and sweat and tremble, and there is nowhere in her terrified brain for thought to find a foothold. She has fallen into a waking nightmare.
A fork chiming on glass makes her jump. It sets the air ringing and quietens the audience. They settle in their seats: there is more to come.
Instead of a click comes the swooshing sound of a curtain being drawn to one side. Those closest to the velvet drape are aware of movement. The arch into the winter room is now exposed and there is sudden light.
Heads turn, disconcerted.
There is a tense, shocked silence.
In the winter room there is a child. But it is no ordinary child. And it is no photograph. The girl’s hair moves as if lifted by a wave, her white chemise floats gauzily, and – strangest of all – her feet do not touch the floor. Her form shifts and shimmers, is at once there and absent. Her face bears the faintest trace of features: the hint of a nose, eyes that stare in faded fashion, a mouth too washed out to speak from. The white folds of her gown float around her as if the air were water, and she drifts insubstantially.
‘Child,’ comes Ruby’s voice, ‘do you know me?’
The girl nods.
‘You know me to be Ruby, your old nurse who loved you and took good care of you?’
Another nod.
Nobody moves. It is either fear or the fear of missing something that keeps them in their seats.
‘Was it me who took you from your bed?’
The child shakes her head.
‘It was another, then?’
The child nods, slowly, as though the questions are arriving only distantly into the other realm where she is now.
‘Who was it? Who took you to the river and drowned you?’
‘Yes, tell us!’ someone calls from the audience. ‘Tell us who!’
And the girl, whose face is transparent enough to be any child’s, raises a hand, and her finger points … not at the screen but into the room, at the audience themselves.
Pandemonium. There are shrieks and confused cries. In their shock, people rise to their feet and chairs are knocked over. In the reflected light they turn and stare, here and there, anywhere the shifting, shimmering finger might be pointing, and everywhere are faces like their own: appalled, stunned, tear-stained. Someone faints; someone wails; someone moans.
‘I didn’t mean to do it!’ whispers Lily, her words unheard in all the commotion. With shaking hands and streaming eyes she opens the door and flees, as if the optical illusion is at her heels.
When everybody had gone, the Little Margots and the Armstrong children set about restoring the inn to order. The little ghost, robust in her everyday appearance as Margot’s youngest granddaughter, yawned as they pulled the flimsy white garment over her head and she stomped around the room in her clogs. The great mirror was packed into its huge rectangular case and heaved away with care and much grunting. The velvet curtain was taken down and folded, and the gauze voile rippled and shivered as it was dropped into a bag. The gas light was dismantled. Element by element, the illusion of the ghost was dismantled, packed away and removed, and when it was gone and they all looked at each other in the interior of the Swan as it appeared on a normal evening, they saw that their hope was gone too.
Robert Armstrong’s shoulders slumped, and Margot was unusually quiet. Daunt came and went between the inn and Collodion with boxes, so low in spirits that nobody dared speak to him. Rita went to see Joe, who was in bed. He raised his eyes to her in expectation, and when she shook her head, he blinked sorrowfully.
Only Jonathan was his usual merry self, untouched by the general mood. ‘I nearly thought it was real,’ he repeated. ‘Even though I knew about the mirror and the gauze and the gas light. Even though I knew it was Polly. I nearly believed it!’
With the others, he was replacing the chairs in their original places. Then as he made for the final few stools at the back, he exclaimed, ‘Well I never! Who left you behind?’
A puppy cowered in the corner of the room, under the last stool.
Robert Armstrong came to see. He bent down and lifted the animal in his large hand. ‘You are too small to be out in the world by yourself,’ he told the puppy, and it sniffed his skin and scrambled to be held closer.
‘It belongs to the woman who came in at the end,’ said Daunt. He consulted his memory and listed every detail of her appearance.
‘Lily White,’ said Margot. ‘She lives at Basketman’s Cottage. I didn’t even know she was here.’
Armstrong nodded. ‘I’ll take this little fellow home. It’s not far, and my boys are not ready yet in any case.’
Margot turned to her granddaughter. ‘Now, little Miss, I reckon we’ve had enough haunting for one day, eh? Time for bed!’ and the little girl was whisked away.
‘Just an illusion,’ said Daunt. ‘And it hasn’t achieved much.’ He turned to Ruby, who was sitting on a box in the corner, trying not to cry. ‘I’m sorry. I hoped for more. I’ve let you down.’
‘You tried,’ she told him, but the tears spilt all the same. ‘It’s the Vaughans who will feel it hardest.’
Of Pigs and Puppies
ARMSTRONG TUCKED THE puppy inside his coat to keep it warm, leaving a button undone so it could put its nose out and sniff the night air. It squirmed comfortably against him and settled.
‘I had better come with you,’ Rita said. ‘Mrs White might be alarmed at the arrival of a stranger so late and after such an unsettling end to the evening.’
They headed up to the bridge in silence, each considering their disappointment in an evening that had cost so much in time and effort and come to nothing. They crossed over a river full of stars and on the other side came before too long to the place where the bank had collapsed and the river expanded into new breadths. They had to concentrate to get over the gnarled roots and ropes of ivy in the dark. Through the ringing of the river, they heard a voice.
‘She knows it was me! I never meant to do ill! I swear! I wouldn’t have hurt a hair on her head! She is so cross that I took her and I drowned her – she raised her finger! She pointed me out! She knows it was me that did it.’
The pair of eavesdroppers stared into the darkness as though they might hear the better for it, waiting for the reply of the person she was speaking to, but no voice came. Rita made to step forward, but Armstrong put out a hand to halt her. Another sound had reached his ears. A muffled snuffling. It was an animal sound. It was a pig sound.
His brain began to stir.
When the sound of the pig fell still, Lily’s voice sounded again. ‘She will never forgive me. What am I to do? Wickedness like mine is so terrible I can never be forgiven. God Himself has sent her to punish me. I must do as the basket-maker did, though I am so afraid. Oh! But I must do it and suffer the eternal torments, for I do not deserve to live a day longer in this world …’