‘I see no reason why not,’ he said, and Starling loved him even more. ‘But not today. Today, we picnic.’ He reached into the saddlebag, and drew out a large pork pie wrapped in a handkerchief, and a bottle of beer.
After they’d eaten, they lay side by side in the grass. The sunlight was strong, dazzling; it cast a brilliant halo around everything, so that their faces were too bright to make out, and expressions had to be guessed from laughter and words, from the silhouette of a smile. They were at a place where the river curled in a long, lazy arc through the meadow, and a shallow shelving beach of muddy pebbles had formed, the water eddying gently past. Starling lay on her back and blew dandelion clocks, watching the weightless seeds drift away into the blue. Alice and Jonathan were taking it in turns to read sonnets, back and forth. Their voices were hushed and private, carrying messages only they could unravel; the rhythm of the words lulled Starling quiet for a time. When silence fell she rolled her head to one side and watched Jonathan. He was staring away into the distance, lost in thought. A trickle of sweat wound through the hairline at her temple, and she rubbed at the tickle.
‘Can I paddle, Alice? I’m boiling. Please?’ she said, sitting up and squinting at her.
‘If you’re careful, and don’t go out into the current.’ Starling grinned as she wriggled out of her dress and boots. ‘What were you thinking about, just then?’ Alice asked Jonathan. He shrugged.
‘Nothing. Everything,’ he said, and then smiled. ‘Sometimes my thoughts run away with me, and I get caught in the twists and turns of them.’ He cocked his head at the river. ‘How about it?’
‘You can’t mean…’
‘I’m roasting as well, and you must be too.’ He grinned.
‘I haven’t been into the river since I was thirteen! It’s not… suitable,’ Alice protested, smiling.
‘There’s nobody around to see. I know how modest you are, Alice Beckwith. A swim won’t alter that.’
‘Hurray!’ Starling cheered, as they both got to their feet and began to shed their shoes and stockings. Alice lowered her face as she unlaced her dress, looking up at Jonathan through her eyelashes. The air between them seemed to thrum. As the girls waded into the water their white petticoats billowed up around them, swelling with air. ‘We look like dandelion seeds,’ said Starling.
The river’s cold stole their breath. Alice took the longest time to submerge herself. She stayed in the shallows, smiling uncertainly and exclaiming at the feel of mud between her toes. Shadows marked the ribs at the top of her chest, and the thin ridges of her collarbones. Wisps of pale hair hung around her neck, and water droplets sat like jewels on her skin. Starling took all this in, admiringly, and when she looked at Jonathan he was staring too, with an expression of complete surrender.
‘I bet I can swim to the other side and back,’ he said, paddling his arms beneath the surface.
‘No! You mustn’t!’ Alice’s voice was wrought with alarm at once. ‘You mustn’t try! The current is very strong, even in the summer. Jonathan, don’t!’ she cried, when he cast a speculative look across the water. She sounded close to panic.
‘All right, I won’t,’ he said, calmly enough. He waded closer to the bank, then pulled up a handful of green weeds and came after Starling with them, grinning like a fiend; she squealed and tried to flee through the dragging water. Alice laughed, and the moment of her fear was forgotten.
Before long a small wooden boat came along, carrying two men; a younger one pulling the oars and an older one tending to their nets and lines and eel traps.
‘Do you know them?’ Jonathan asked, as the boat approached. Alice looked anxious for a second, then relaxed and shook her head.
‘No. I never saw them before. Did you, Starling?’ Starling shook her head.
‘Then we should play the simple country hobnails, and say that we know no better,’ Jonathan declared. ‘Well, Starling, can you manage it? Can you talk like a hobnail from the village?’ He smiled at her.
‘Aye, sir,’ Starling replied, in her best Bathampton accent. Alice grimaced. Soon the dip of the oars brought the boat alongside them, and they halloed the fishermen quite cheerfully. The younger man grinned bashfully at Alice, and waved to them, but the older man tutted and darkened his face.
‘Have you no shame, young ’uns?’ he muttered. ‘’Taint decent, baring yourselves for all to see.’
‘We b’ain’t bare naked, sir,’ Starling replied. ‘Why, these ’un drawers o’ mine reach fairly down past the knee bone, see.’ She lay back in the water and waved her feet at the river men, and Jonathan dissolved into laughter. He had a low, pleasing laugh; it bounced along, like a ball dropped onto a hard surface.
‘Hoggish wench,’ the older fisherman muttered, and resolutely turned his face away as the boat passed them by.
Starling was giggling when she felt Alice’s hands grasp her around her ribs.
‘These ’un drawers o’ mine?’ Alice echoed. ‘Where on earth did you learn to talk like that?’ The question hung for a moment in the summer air, and both were reminded of the first lost seven years of Starling’s life, before she’d found Alice.
‘You were quite brilliant, Starling,’ Jonathan declared, still laughing. ‘The finest hoggish wench I ever heard.’ They stood close together, the water up to their waists and the reflections of it dancing in their eyes and under their chins. Starling glowed with Jonathan’s praise, and had a feeling inside as though her heart was swelling up to bursting. They stayed that way for a moment, and when Starling looked down she saw that Jonathan was holding Alice’s hand with fierce resolve beneath the water’s surface; their fingers woven together tighter than the reeds on the riverbank. They gave each other a long look, and Starling noticed how fast the rise and fall of Alice’s chest had become. Embarrassed, pleasantly scandalised, she flung herself backwards into the water again, sending up a huge plume of water to soak them.
When Alice and Starling returned to the farmhouse later that afternoon, hand in hand, Bridget took one look at their bedraggled hair and the wet patches on their clothes, and widened her eyes in outrage.
‘You’ve never been in the river, Alice!’ she gasped. Alice chuckled.
‘But it was the perfect day for it, Bridget. You should come with us, next time.’
‘You’ll not catch me submerging myself like that – it’s not wise, miss, not wise at all. What if you’ve taken a chill? And look at the grubshite you’ve made of your clothes!’
‘Bridget!’
‘Pardon my language, miss, but, really!’ Bridget’s admonishments followed them into the house, and continued as she filled the washtub to rinse the river from them; but the invectives soon lost their heat, met with the girls’ indefatigable good cheer. Starling was careful not to wash too well because she liked the mineral smell of the river on her skin, and in bed she cupped her hands to her face to breathe it in, feeling a wonderful echo of that swelling feeling she’d had, lulling her to sleep.
The short time Starling had spent astride Suleiman that day turned out to be her first and last riding lesson. After that, Jonathan was away with the army, training and preparing, assembling his kit, then away to Portugal, in the summer of 1808. The times that he did come to the farmhouse without his grandfather he wanted to spend with Alice, not teaching Starling to ride. She had never paused to think about what happened to Suleiman, not when Alice had vanished and everything got turned upside down and destroyed. I cannot bear to relate to you the manner of his death. Starling swallowed, and every time she read or thought of the words Jonathan had written she felt a tug of deep sorrow, of angry outrage, that the world had turned out to be so ugly, and so cruel, when Alice had taught her to think it was fair and lovely. It was a cold and heavy feeling.