His daughter’s eyes filled with tears.
Bess put her hand on her daughter’s shoulder.
‘He turned so quickly. In a flash he had your knife from its sheath on the back of the door. He took hold of Susan …’
Armstrong stiffened. The knife on the back of the door was his slaughtering knife that he never put away in its sheath without having honed it to a lethal sharpness. With fresh understanding he took in his daughter’s hunched position, her stricken face.
‘I would have got away from him,’ Susan said. ‘I could have, except …’
Robert crossed the floor, took his daughter’s hand and removed it from her neck. She was clutching a bloodstained cloth. In a curve across the tender skin was a vivid line of red. It went deep enough to break the skin, was a fraction of an inch away from severing the main vessels of life. All the breath in his body left him.
‘Mother cried out and the boys came in. Robin hesitated when he saw them – they are almost as big as he is now, and strong, and there were two of them. His grip wavered and I twisted away …’
‘Where is he now?’
‘He has gone to the old oak, downstream, near Brandy Island. He said to tell you to find him there. You are to take the money or his life is over. That was the message.’
Armstrong left the kitchen and went further into the house. They heard the door to his study open and close. He was in there for mere moments and when he returned he was buttoning his coat.
‘Please don’t go, Father!’
He placed a hand on his daughter’s head, kissed his wife’s temple and then, without a word, he left. Scarcely had the door shut on him than it opened again. He felt for his knife behind the door. The sheath was there, but it was empty.
‘He has it still,’ said Bess.
Her words met the closing door.
The torrential downpours of the day had given way now to even, persistent rainfall. Each drop of water, whether it landed on river, field or rooftop, on leaf or man, made its sound, and each sound was indistinguishable from the rest; together they made a blanket of wet noise that wrapped around Armstrong and Fleet and isolated them.
‘I know,’ the rider told his mount with a pat. ‘I’d sooner be indoors myself. But needs must.’
The path was pitted and stony and Fleet walked along attentively, picking her way between the holes and avoiding the obstacles. From time to time she raised her head to sniff the air, and her ears were alert.
Armstrong was deep in thought.
‘What can he want with so much money?’ he wondered aloud. ‘And why now?’
Where the path dipped, they splashed through sitting water.
‘His sister! His own sister!’ Armstrong exclaimed, shaking his head, and Fleet whinnied in sympathy. ‘Sometimes I think there is nothing more a man could do. A child is not an empty vessel, Fleet, to be formed in whatever way the parent thinks fit. They are born with their own hearts and they cannot be made otherwise, no matter what love a man lavishes on them.’
On they went.
‘What more could I have done? What did I miss? Eh?’
Fleet shook her head and sent drops of water flying from the reins.
‘We loved him. We did, didn’t we? I took him about with me and showed him the world. I taught him what I knew … He knew wrong from right. He had that from me, Fleet. He cannot say he did not know.’
Fleet moved forward in the dark, and Armstrong sighed.
‘You never took to him, did you? I tried not to see it. The way you put your ears back and shied when he came close. What had he done to you? I didn’t want to think ill of him, and I don’t want to now, but even a father cannot turn a blind eye for ever.’
Armstrong raised a hand and rubbed away the wetness from his eye.
‘Nothing but a bit of rain,’ he told himself, though the ache in his throat told him otherwise. ‘And then there is the girl. I should like to know what to make of that, Fleet. What has he got himself mixed up in there? No father would dally the way he did. What kind of father is it that does not recognize his own child? She was not his child, and he knew it from the start. So what was that all about? Will he tell me what the trouble is, do you think? How can I make things right if I do not know what they are? He ties my hands behind my back and then complains that I do not help him enough.’
He felt the weight in his pocket. He had filled a purse with money from the safe and it was heavy.
Fleet stopped. She trotted nervously on the spot, twitching and fretting in the harness.
Armstrong lifted his head and sought an explanation. His eyes found only darkness. The rain had washed all scent from the air, and muffled sound. His human senses told him nothing.
He leant forward in the saddle. ‘What is it, Fleet?’
She skittered again, and this time he caught the splash of water at her feet. He dismounted and the water came over the top of his boots.
‘The flood. It has come.’
It Begins and Ends at the Swan
IT HAD BEEN raining for weeks. There was enough to do securing against the flood, without reminders that they must make ready too for the river gypsies. For it was their time to come up the river and a bit of flood water wouldn’t stop them. In fact, it would only help them come closer to the properties: the houses and cottages, the outbuildings and barns and stables. Every bit of equipment and machinery must be put indoors, every door must be locked. The river gypsies would help themselves to anything that was unsecured, no matter how unlikely. A flower pot on a windowsill was not safe and woe betide the gardener who left a hoe or a rake leaning by the back door. Moreover it was the night of the winter solstice, a year to the day since the child had come. Most importantly of all, there was Helena, whose lively quickness had almost deserted her in these last days of waiting for the birth of their child. But Vaughan’s men had now done everything that was possible. He thanked them and went to find his wife.
‘I’m so tired,’ she said, ‘but come down the garden with us before you take your coat off. We want to see the river.’
‘The water is already twenty yards up the garden. It’s hardly safe for a child, in the dark.’
‘I’ve told her the river might come into the garden and she is so excited. She’s longing to see it.’
‘All right. Where is she?’
‘I fell asleep on the sofa – she’s probably wandered down to the kitchen to see Cook.’
They went to the kitchen, but she wasn’t there.
‘I thought she was with you,’ Cook said.
Vaughan’s eyes met Helena’s in sudden alarm.
‘She will have gone to look at the river – we’ll find her there, ahead of us.’ Although the words she spoke were certain, there was a quiver in Helena’s voice that revealed her doubt.
‘You stay here – I’ll be quicker alone,’ her husband said, and went running out of the room, but Helena followed.
She made slow going. The lawns were mud, the gravel paths washed away by the torrential rain of the last weeks. Her mackintosh did not fasten over her belly now, and as the cold rain soaked her dress she wondered whether she had overestimated her strength. After a pause to rest she went on again. She pictured what she was going to see: the child, standing spellbound at the water’s edge, fascinated by the rising river.
Coming to the gap in the hedge where the river was visible, she stopped. There was her husband, shaking his head, speaking urgently and gesticulating with the gardener and two of the other men, who nodded, serious-faced, and ran hastily away to do his bidding.