The tall, lean figure thrust the pole up to the heavens and let it fall through his fingers till it bit the riverbed, and then, with what grace, with what remarkable power, the punt sped through the dark water. Victor felt the drag of it as he smiled. Safety …
Half of the men stayed on the island, positioned at points where they would see if he tried to land. The others returned to the boats and went out on the water, searching.
‘It’s damn cold,’ Daunt muttered.
Armstrong put a hand in the water and pulled it out quickly.
‘Are we looking for a living man or a corpse?’ he asked.
‘He can’t survive long,’ Vaughan said grimly.
They rowed around the island, once, twice, three times.
‘He’s had it,’ pronounced one of Vaughan’s men.
The others nodded.
The hunt was over.
The row boats made their way back to the jetty and to Buscot Lodge.
The parson wrote to the vicar of the parish in which Lily had lived with her mother and stepfather. He received a prompt reply. One of the members of that congregation had a keen memory of the events from thirty years ago. There had been a great hue and cry when Ann was first found to be missing. A rumour started that the older girl had drowned her sister in the river out of jealousy. Neighbours had rushed to the river, but the sack had not immediately been found. While her mother joined the search party, her first-born ran away.
Some hours later, the child was found, alive and well. At some distance from the house, and further than she could have walked unaided. She had a raging fever. No medicine could save her and a few days later she died.
The sack was also found. It contained a dead piglet.
Lily was never found. Her heartbroken mother died a few years later. The stepfather was hanged for crimes unrelated to this one that finally caught up with him, and the stepbrother was a bad lot who couldn’t hold down a job for long, and who had not been heard of for years.
‘You are not to blame,’ the parson told Lily.
Rita put an arm around the confused woman. ‘Your stepbrother was the one who tricked you, out of jealousy and because he has a destructive soul. He knew you were innocent, but has encouraged you to believe you are guilty ever since. You did not drown your sister.’
‘So when Ann came out of the river to the Swan, what did she want?’
‘It wasn’t Ann. Ann is dead. She is not angry with you and she is at peace.’
Rita told her, ‘What you saw at Basketman’s Cottage were nightmares, and then, in the Swan, an illusion. Smoke and mirrors.’
‘And now that your stepbrother is drowned,’ the parson told Lily, ‘he can’t frighten you any more. You can keep your own money, and give up Basketman’s Cottage and come and live in the warmth here, at the parsonage.’
But Lily knew more about rivers than anyone, knew that drowning was a more complicated thing than other people suspected. Victor drowned was no less terrible to her mind than Victor alive – in fact, it was more terrible. He would be angry at her for having given him away; she dare not make him angrier by leaving the place where he knew he could find her. She had only to remember what had happened when she’d run away with Mr White. He had been found dead, and the beating she’d got from Victor – she was surprised she hadn’t been found dead too. No, she didn’t dare anger him.
‘I think I will carry on at Basketman’s Cottage,’ she said. The parson tried to persuade her, and Rita tried to persuade her, but with the insistence of the meek she got her way.
When Armstrong went to collect Maud from Basketman’s Cottage, he found that she was in pig.
He did not like to move her in her delicate state. She was being well looked after, he could see that.
‘Would you take care of her, Mrs White, till her litter arrives?’
‘I don’t mind. What about Maud? Does she mind staying?’
Maud did not mind, and so it was agreed.
‘And when I take her home with me, I will give you a piglet in exchange.’
Part 5
The Knife
THE CHICKENS WERE flustered, the cat evaded his stroking hand to slink away unhappily along the wall, and the pigs stared with a gaze that told of something ominous. Armstrong frowned. What was it? He had only been away two hours, seeing some cows for sale.
His middle daughter came flying from the house and as she flung her arms around him he could be in no doubt that something bad had happened. She was too breathless to speak.
‘Robin?’ he asked.
She nodded.
‘Where’s your mother?’
She pointed towards the kitchen door.
All was in upheaval. Soup bubbled unwatched on the stove; pastry was abandoned on the marble. Bess stood behind the rocking chair, gripping its rail, a fierce, protective air about her. In the rocking chair sat his eldest daughter, Susan, hunched and pale-faced. Her arms were crossed oddly over her chest, her hands up by her neck. Around her were clustered the three littlest ones, who plucked at her skirt in concern.
Bess’s fingers released their grip on the chair with relief as he came in, and she turned a troubled eye upon him. With a gesture she warned him not to say anything.
‘Here,’ she said to the little ones who were clinging to their sister, ‘take this to the pigs.’ She swept the peelings into a bowl and handed them to the biggest child; after a final consoling pat on their sister’s knee, they did as they were told.
‘What did he want?’ he asked, as soon as the door had closed.
‘The usual.’
‘How much this time?’
She told him the sum and Robert stiffened. It went far beyond the amounts Robin had had from them before.
‘What sort of trouble is he in to want that kind of money?’
She made a dismissive gesture. ‘You know what he is. One lie after another. A good investment, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a loan till next week … I’m not beguiled, he knows that. His smooth ways haven’t worked on me for a long, long while.’ She frowned. ‘But nobody would have been taken in, not today. He was out of breath. Couldn’t keep still; desperate for money and to get away again. He kept going to the window, all on edge. Wanted to send his brother to the gate to keep a lookout, but I wouldn’t let him go. Before long he gave up lying and started shouting, “Just give me the money, I’m telling you! Or it’ll be the death of me!” He was banging his fists on the table, saying it’s all our fault and if we hadn’t given the girl back to the Vaughans he wouldn’t be in such a corner. There was a quiver in his voice. Something’s frightened him.
‘“What on earth is it has put you in this state?” I asked him and he said somebody was after him. Somebody who would stop at nothing to get what he wanted.’
‘His life was in danger, he said,’ added Susan from the rocking chair. ‘“If you don’t give me the money, I’m a dead man.”’
Armstrong rubbed his forehead. ‘Susan, this isn’t a conversation for you. Go and sit in the drawing room while I talk about this with your mother.’
His daughter turned her eyes to her mother. ‘Tell him, Mother,’ she said.
‘I refused him the money. He spoke angrily to me.’
‘He said she had always been against him. He called her unnatural. He said things about her from before she married you—’
‘Susan overheard it all. She came in.’
‘I was going to tell him not to be so angry with Mother. I was going to—’