Heat broke out all over her body and her heart pounded. She broke into an ungainly run, calling Vaughan’s name as she went. He turned to see her eyes widen as she lost her footing in the mud, and though he got there in time to break her fall, she gave a great cry of pain.
‘It’s all right, I’ve put word out – they are looking for her. We’ll find her.’
Breathless, she nodded. Her face was white.
‘What is it? Your ankle?’
She shook her head. ‘It’s the baby.’
Anthony cast his eye up the garden, cursing himself for having sent all the men out to search for the child. He calculated the distance to the house, the slippery paths, the darkness, and set all that against the dark pain in his wife’s eyes. Could he do it? There was no other way. He felt her full weight in his arms and readied himself to start.
‘Hoy!’ he heard. And again, louder: ‘Hoy there!’
Collodion came floating tranquilly over the vast water.
When they had got Helena on board and were moving again, Daunt told him, ‘Rita is at the Swan. I’ll take Helena there, then we can go back out in Collodion and look for the girl.’
‘Is Rita’s cottage flooded?’
‘Yes, but it’s more than that … It’s Joe.’
There were few drinkers in the Swan. Winter solstice it might be, but a flood was a flood and all the young men were needed elsewhere, boarding up doors, moving furniture upstairs, herding cattle to higher ground … The only men in the inn were those unfit to limit the river’s damage: the old and the infirm, and the ones already drunk when the flood came. They did not tell stories. Joe the storyteller was dying.
In his bed, in the little room that was as far from the river as it was possible to get and still be in the Swan, Joe was drowning. Between spells of gasping for breath, he muttered sounds. His lips moved ceaselessly, but the underwater noises did not resolve themselves into words anyone could understand. His face grimaced and his eyebrows twitched expressively. It was a gripping story, but one that no one but he could hear.
Joe’s daughters came and went between the sickbed and the winter room. The Little Margots had today put aside their blithe smiles and wore the same grave sorrow as their mother, who sat beside the bed, Joe’s hand in hers.
There was a moment when Joe seemed to surface momentarily. He half opened his eyes and delivered a few syllables before sinking again.
‘What did he say?’ Jonathan asked, bewildered.
‘He called for Quietly,’ his mother replied calmly, and her daughters nodded. They had heard it too.
‘Shall I go and fetch him?’
‘No, Jonathan, it’s not necessary,’ Margot said. ‘He’s on his way.’
All this was heard by Rita as she stood by the window, looking out at the great lake that lay all around the Swan like a blank page, that came within a few feet of its walls, isolating the inn and making an island of it.
She saw Collodion come into view. In deep water she saw Daunt launch the row boat. He helped Helena into it – she was a dark silhouette – and rowed towards the entrance of the Swan. By his solicitude, Rita understood the significance of Helena’s sudden arrival.
‘Margot – Mrs Vaughan is here. It looks as if it is her time.’
‘It’s a good thing there are plenty of us here, then. My girls will be able to help.’
In the busyness of Helena’s arrival, Daunt drew Rita aside for a moment.
‘The girl is missing.’
‘No!’ She clutched her belly, felt a shrinking there.
‘Rita – are you all right?’
She made an effort, gathered herself. A man was dying. A baby was about to be born.
‘How long? Where was she last seen?’
Daunt told her what little he knew.
One of the Little Margots called to Rita, wanting instructions.
Rita’s face was white. It held a look so full of dread that for once Daunt had no desire to photograph it.
‘I have to go. Joe and Helena need me. But Daunt—’ He turned back into the room to catch her last, ferocious words: ‘Find her!’
Thereafter the hours were very long, and very short. While the water lay unperturbed and indifferent all around, the women at the Swan were engaged with the human pursuits of dying and being born. On one side of the wall, Helena struggled to deliver her baby into this world. On the other side, Joe struggled to depart it. The Little Margots got on with everything that needed to be done so that life could begin and end. They carried water and clean cloths, filled log baskets and stoked fires, lit candles, made plates of food that nobody had an appetite for but ate anyway out of good sense, and all the while they also wept and soothed and calmed and comforted.
Rita went to and fro between the two rooms, doing whatever was needed. Between the two rooms, in the corridor, was Jonathan, unsettled and fretful.
‘Have they found her, Rita? Where is she?’ he wanted to know every time she left Helena.
‘We won’t know anything till they come back and tell us,’ she told him, letting herself back into Joe’s room.
They gave themselves over to time. There were hours that might have been minutes, and then Rita heard Margot say, ‘Quietly is coming, Joe. Goodbye, my love.’
Rita remembered what she had heard in the Swan a year ago: You have only to look in a man’s eyes to tell if he is dead or not. It’s the seeing that goes out of them. She saw the seeing go out of Joe.
‘Pray for us, Rita, would you?’ Margot asked.
Rita prayed, and when she had finished, Margot loosened her hand from Joe’s. She joined his hands together, then placed her own hands in her lap. She allowed two tears to escape, one from each eye.
‘Never mind me,’ she said to Rita. ‘You get on.’
On the other side of the wall, there were minutes that might have been hours, then a contraction at last delivered a baby. In a slick rush it dropped into Rita’s hands.
‘Ah!’ whispered the Little Margots in shocked delight. ‘What is it?’
Rita blinked in surprise.
‘I’ve heard of this. I’ve never seen it. The sac usually bursts before the baby emerges. That’s the water breaking. This one didn’t break.’
The perfect infant was in an underwater world. Eyes fast shut, with liquid movements, little fists dreamily opening and closing, it was sleep-swimming inside a transparent, water-filled membrane.
Rita touched the pearly sac with the tip of a knife, and a great split ran around it.
Water splashed.
The baby boy, opening his eyes and mouth at the same time, discovered to his great astonishment air and the world.
Fathers and Sons
FLEET’S HOOVES SPLASHED through the water. In the dimness of the night, there was a flat sheen like pewter all around, disturbed only by their own movements. Armstrong thought of all the small land creatures, mice and voles and weasels, and hoped that they had found safety. He thought of the birds, the night hunters, thrown from their normal feeding ground. He thought of the fish that strayed without knowing it from the main current and now found themselves swimming through grass a few inches above the ground, sharing territory with him and with his horse. He hoped Fleet would not tread on any creature lost in this landscape that no longer belonged clearly to earth or water. He hoped they would all be well.