‘What did you See?’
‘No more and no less than you saw tonight. That he was a liar and a cheat. That he had not one jot of care for any person in this world other than himself. That his first and last thought in life would be for his own comfort and his own ease, and that he would hurt anybody, whether it be his own brothers and sisters or his own father, if it brought some small advantage to himself.’
‘And so none of this has ever surprised you.’
‘No.’
‘You said there is no telling if things would have been better or worse … Nothing could be worse than this.’
‘I did not like you following him tonight. Knowing he had the knife. After what he did to Susan, I was afraid of what he might do to you – and though he was my own flesh and blood, and though I was bound to love him no matter what, I tell you the truth when I say, losing you would have been worse.’
They sat then for a while in silence. Each pursued their own thoughts, and their thoughts were not so very different.
There then came a faint noise, a light tap some distance away. Lost in their own reflections, they at first ignored it, but it came again.
Bess looked up at her husband. ‘Was that the door?’
He shrugged. ‘Nobody would come knocking at this time of night.’
They returned to their ruminations, but then it came again, no louder, but lasting longer.
‘It is the door,’ he said, rising. ‘What a night for it. I shall send them away, whoever they are.’
He took the candle, crossed the hall to the great oak door and slid back the bolts. Opening the door a fraction, he looked out. There was nobody there, and he was just about to close the door again when a small voice stopped him.
‘Please, Mr Armstrong …’
He looked down. There at waist height was a pair of boys.
‘Not tonight, children,’ he began. ‘This is a house of mourning …’ And then he looked closer. He raised his candle and peered at the larger of the two boys. He was dressed in rags, shivering and thin, but he knew him. ‘Ben? Is it Ben, the butcher’s boy?’
‘Yes, Sir.’
‘Come in.’ He opened the door wide. ‘It is not the best of nights for visitors, but come, I cannot have you out of doors when it is so cold.’
Ben carefully ushered in the second child ahead of him, and as the smaller boy passed into the candlelight, Armstrong’s breath caught in his chest.
‘Robin!’ he exclaimed.
He bent and held the candle so that its light fell on the boy’s face. It was a fine-boned face, made thin by hunger; it had Robin’s slenderness; the nostrils had Robin’s delicate flare.
‘Robin?’ Armstrong’s voice trembled.
How many times impossible was it? Robin was a grown man. Robin had died tonight, this very night, and he had seen it happen. This child could not be Robin, and yet …
The eyes blinked, and Armstrong saw that the child looking out of Robin’s face was not Robin, but some other boy. His eyes were gentle and timid – and grey. In the midst of his astonishment, Armstrong heard a half-murmur from Ben and turned to see him falter and sway. He caught Ben as he fell, and called out for Bessie.
‘It is the butcher’s boy who went missing from Bampton,’ he explained. ‘He’s overcome by the warmth after being out so long.’
‘And he has gone short of food lately, by the look of him,’ Bessie said, kneeling to support the child, who was returning to his senses after his faint.
Armstrong stood aside so that his wife could see Ben’s companion and gestured with his hand. ‘He has brought this little fellow with him.’
‘Robin! But—’ Bessie stared at the child. She could hardly drag her eyes away, but when she did, it was to turn to her husband. ‘How …?’
‘It is not Robin.’ Ben’s voice was feeble, but had not lost its habit of delivering words all in a rush with no pauses. ‘Sir, it is the little child you were looking for, it is Alice, and I cut her hair – forgive me, I didn’t want to do it but we were on the road so long and it seemed safer to be two brothers than to be a boy and a girl and if I did wrong I’m sorry.’
Armstrong stared. Robin’s features rearranged themselves in his eyes. He reached out a hand and laid it trembling on the child’s shorn head.
‘Alice,’ he breathed.
Bessie came to stand beside him. ‘Alice?’
The child looked at Ben. He nodded. ‘It’s all right here. You can be Alice again.’
She turned her face to the Armstrongs. Halfway into a smile, her mouth stretched instead into a large exhausted yawn. Her grandfather gathered her into his arms.
Later, after a midnight feast of soup and cheese and apple pie, they sat in the kitchen. Alice slept in her grandmother’s arms, while her aunts and uncles, roused from their beds by the excitement in the house, clustered in their nightgowns around the kitchen hearth, and they all listened to Ben’s account of how he found the child.
‘Soon after I last saw Mr Armstrong, my father took a strap to me and beat me so long and so hard that the world went black and when I came round again I was sure I must be in heaven, but no, I was on the floor of the kitchen and I hurt to my bones and my mother crept to me and said she wondered I wasn’t dead and surely I would be next time, and I decided it was time to follow my plan of running away, which I had worked out a long time since, thinking it best to be prepared, and I did everything accordingly, which was to go to the bridge and climb on to the parapet and wait there for a boat, though in the dark a boat is not always easy to spot but you can always hear it, and so there I stood and never sat for fear of falling asleep, and I shook because a beating like that always sets up a trembling in a body, and at last there came a boat downstream in the darkness, and I clambered on top of the parapet and I lowered myself over it, dangling from my fingertips, and my shoulders and arms that were black and blue from the beating were aching terrible bad and I thought I might fall in the water, but I didn’t, for I clung on till the boat was right under me and then I let myself fall and hoped to fall on to something soft like fleeces and not on to something hard like barrels of liquor, and in the end it was neither so good nor so bad as it might have been for I fell on to cheeses, which are between soft and hard, but still they jolted my bones and hurt me where I was already hurting, but I didn’t cry out for fear of giving away that I had stowed away, but instead cried quietly and hid as best I could and tried not to fall asleep, but fall asleep I did and woke up, being roughly shaken, and a boatman standing over me was in a fury and he cried out over and over the same words, “Orphanage! Who do they take me for? I’m not a bloody orphanage!” and at first I couldn’t understand what he was saying, being so dull with sleep, but then his words came clear as a bell into my ears and from there into my thinking where they met up with some other words already there about Alice who disappeared into the river and I asked the man, was it a little girl who dropped into his boat last time and what happened to her, and he was too furious to answer me or to listen to my questions and threatened to drop me overboard and let me swim for my life and I thought, Is that what happened to Alice? and I asked him and he went on being furious for some while yet and then all of a sudden he got hungry and opened a cheese and ate some, but he didn’t give any to me, and when he had eaten he was quiet and I asked him all over again and this time he told me that yes, last time it was a little girl, and no, he didn’t make her swim for her life, but when he got to London he left her in the care of some orphanage where they take the unwanted children, so I said, “What is the name of this place?” and he didn’t know, but he told me the part of town where it was and I stayed with him and I helped him with the unloading and the loading and he gave me cheese for the help, but not much, and when we got to London I scarpered from his boat and asked directions from a dozen people who sent me here and there and in all directions and eventually I came to the place and asked for Alice and they said they had no Alice and besides orphans weren’t there to be taken by anybody, and in the end they closed the door on me, so the next day at a different time I knocked again and it was a different person answered the door and I told them I was hungry and homeless and had no mother and no father and they took me in and set me to work, and all the time I kept my eye out for Alice and asked all the other boys, but the boys were kept separate from the girls so I never saw her until one day I was sent to paint the office of the director of the orphanage, and from the window I saw over the wall into the girls’ courtyard and that’s when I saw her and knew I was in the right place, and was glad it hadn’t all been a waste of time, not so far anyway, and I thought and thought how to get to her and in the end it was as simple as pie because a fine lady took a fancy for doing something good for the orphans and she sent in a great hamper of food to be shared out, and it was, but only the director and his fellows tasted it, and we never got none, but afterwards we was all taken to church to give thanks for the great goodness that was done to us, and when we had sat and stood and sat again and prayed for the virtuous lady, we was all marched out again, the girls from the pews on their side and we boys on the other, and there she was, Alice, right by my side, and I whispered to her, “Do you remember me?” and she nodded, and so I said, “When I say run, run, all right?” and I took her hand and when I ran she ran with me, but not for long for we hid behind a statue and nobody noticed then that we was gone, and after everybody had passed out of the church we set off on our own, walking every day, following the river, and I did a bit of loading and unloading when I could and we ate what we could get, and I cut her hair when a bad lady tried to steal her away from me, thinking to be two boys together was safer, and it took a long time to get here because the boatmen wouldn’t take the two of us aboard because only I was big enough to work but the two of us would want feeding, so our feet were sore and we got hungry sometimes and cold others and sometimes hungry and cold together, and now …’