‘Nor can I. But it’s harder for you.’
‘Harder for me? But you—’
‘I thought I was her mother? I also thought I’d invented her. Do you remember I told you I sometimes wondered whether she was real?’
‘I do. Why do you think it’s harder for me?’
‘Because I have him.’ Helena nodded at her baby. ‘My own real baby. Here. Hold him.’
Rita put out her arms and Helena placed the baby into them.
‘Not like that. Not like a nurse. Hold him like I do. Like a mother.’
Rita settled the infant in her arms. He fell asleep.
‘There,’ whispered Helena after a silence. ‘How does that feel now?’
The flood water lapped around the Swan. It came to the very door, but no further.
When Collodion returned, and Armstrong soon after, the men shook their heads, grim-faced. Vaughan went directly to see his wife and the baby. Both were asleep. He found Rita there.
‘Anything?’ she whispered.
He shook his head.
When he had gazed long enough in careful silence so as not to wake his son, and kissed his wife’s sleeping head, he went with Rita to the winter room. Wet boots had been prised off, feet were stretched towards the fire and socks steamed. The Little Margots had put more logs on the fire and brought hot drinks for everyone.
‘Joe?’ Vaughan asked, though he could guess the answer.
‘Gone,’ one of his daughters said.
Then nobody spoke, and they breathed the minutes in and out till they made an hour.
The door opened.
Whoever it was did not rush to come in. The cold air made the candles flicker and brought the tang of the river more powerfully into the room. All looked up.
Every eye saw, yet none reacted. They were trying to understand what it was they were seeing, framed by the open doorway.
‘Lily!’ Rita exclaimed. She was a figure from a dream. Her white nightgown ran with water, her hair was flat to her scalp, her eyes were wide with shock. In her arms she clutched a body.
All those who had been there at solstice night a year ago were struck by the sight of her. First Daunt had arrived at that door with a corpse in his arms. Later that same night it was Rita who came in, clutching the girl in her arms. Now for a third time the scene replayed itself.
Lily swayed on the threshold and her eyelids flickered. This time it was Daunt and Vaughan who leapt up to catch the new arrival as she fell, and it was Armstrong who stretched out his arms and received into them the wriggling body of a half-drowned piglet.
‘Good Lord!’ Armstrong exclaimed. ‘It’s Maisie!’
And so it was – the sweetest piglet from Maud’s litter, the one he had given to Lily, according to his promise, when he’d come to fetch Maud and take her back to the farm.
The Little Margots took kind charge of Lily, helping her into dry clothes and making hot drinks to stop the shivers, and when she came back to the winter room, Armstrong complimented her on her courage in rescuing the little pig from the flood water.
On Armstrong’s lap the piglet warmed up, and when it had recovered its good spirits, it squealed and squirmed in lively fashion.
The noisy surprise brought Jonathan out of the room where he had been keeping watch over the body of his father. Yawning, one of his sisters followed him.
‘You haven’t found her?’ the Little Margot asked.
Daunt shook his head.
‘Found who?’ Jonathan wondered.
‘The little girl who is lost,’ Rita reminded him. It is late, she thought, he is too tired to remember, we must get him to sleep.
‘But she has been found,’ he said, surprised. ‘Didn’t you know?’
‘Found?’ They looked at each other quizzically. ‘No, Jonathan, we don’t think so.’
‘Yes.’ He gave a nod that was quite certain. ‘I saw her.’
They stared.
‘She came just now.’
‘Here?’
‘Outside the window.’
Rita sprang up and ran to the room he had just come from, and she looked in agitation from the window, this way and that. ‘Where, Jonathan? Where was she?’
‘In the punt. That came for Father.’
‘Oh, Jonathan.’ Despondently she led him back to the winter room. ‘Tell us just what you thought you saw, in order, from the start.’
‘Well, Father died and he was waiting for Quietly, and Quietly came. Like Mother said he would. He came right up to the window, in his punt, to take Father to the other side of the river, and when I looked out, there she was. In the punt. I said, “Everybody’s out looking for you,” and she said, “Tell them my father came to fetch me.” And then they went away. He’s very powerful, her father. I’ve never seen a punt go so fast.’
There was a lengthy pause.
‘The child doesn’t speak, Jonathan. Do you remember that?’ Daunt asked kindly.
‘She does now,’ Jonathan said. ‘As they were leaving, I said, “Don’t go yet,” and she said, “I’ll come back, Jonathan. Not for a long time, but I’ll come back, and I’ll see you then.” And they went.’
‘I think you might have fallen asleep … Perhaps you were dreaming?’
He thought about it hard for a moment, then firmly shook his head. ‘She was sleeping,’ – indicating his sister. ‘I wasn’t.’
‘This is too serious a thing for a boy to be telling stories about,’ suggested Vaughan.
Everybody present opened their mouths and spoke as one: ‘But Jonathan can’t tell stories.’
In the corner, Armstrong shook his head in quiet wonderment. He’d seen her too. Sitting behind her ferryman father as he propelled the punt so powerfully between the worlds of the living and the dead, between reality and a story.
A Tale of Two Children
AT KELMSCOTT FARMHOUSE the flames burnt bright in the hearth, yet nothing they did could warm the pair of sitters, each in an armchair, one each side of the fireplace.
They had dried their eyes and now gazed into the flames with gravest sorrow.
‘You tried,’ Bess said. ‘You could have done no more.’
‘At the river, do you mean? Or his whole life?’
‘Both.’
He stared where she was staring, into the flames. ‘Would it have been different if I had been harsher with him at the beginning? Should I have whipped him when he stole for the first time?’
‘Things might have been different. Or they might not. You can never know. And if they were different, there is no telling whether they would have been better or worse.’
‘How could things be worse?’
She turned towards him the face that had been hidden in shadow.
‘I Saw him, you know.’
He looked up from the fire, wondering.
‘After the time with the bureau. I know we agreed I wouldn’t, but I couldn’t help it. I’d had the other boys by then, and I knew what kind of children they were by just looking at them with my ordinary eye. Their baby faces were open; it was plain who they were. But Robin was different. He was not like the other babies. He always kept himself concealed. He was not kind to the little ones. You remember how he pinched and bullied them? There were always tears when Robin was there, but without him they played as good as gold. So I often thought of it, but I had said I would not use my eye, and I thought it better to abide by that. Until the day of the bureau. I knew he had done it – he was not such a good liar then as he is now. As he became later, I should say – and I did not believe him when he said he’d seen a fellow running off down the lane and found the bureau forced open. So I took off my patch and I held him by the shoulders and I Saw him.’