The Maker of Swans

by Paraic O’Donnell

  Later, while she waits for his father to return, the boy is sent to his small cot by the range. He lies awake for as long as he can, and together they listen to the sounds that remain. There is the thin song, now and then, of the sandpipers on the marshes. There is the slow disturbance of the fragrant water, and beneath that always the deeper labouring of the river.

  If it is late and his father is not yet home, she sings to him sometimes to send him to sleep. Her voice is not strong, but it is pure and warm. It has a way of filling the air without disturbing it. He turns to face the wall and pulls the blankets over himself, closing his eyes so that the world recedes from him. There is a softening of all he knows and remembers. Things come unfast from their proper places and come to seem other than they are. He may see the boys from his school, but perched in the willow tree. They call him names and tell him to go home to the mermaids. His father catches them with his fishing rod, and tosses them one by one into the near-black river.

  He and his father drift home on the skiff, floating into the house through the open window. They find a well in the middle of the kitchen that his father says should not be there. It must be knocked down, he says, and goes to fetch his tools. While he is gone, the boy leans over the lip of the well and looks in. On the surface of the water, far below, are rose petals and crushed herbs. His mother’s voice rises from the deep, swirling in the dark, scented air. Before he knows what he is doing, he has climbed over the lip of the well and finds that he is held by nothing, that he is falling. It is a strange, slow kind of falling and the boy is not frightened. He falls and falls, the song rising about him, and he is not afraid of reaching the bottom. He waits for the emptying shock of cold, for the dark water to close over his skin.

  One evening in August, the boy goes out with his father after supper. He is older now, and the way his father talks to him has changed. There is something he wants the boy to see. He follows him along the shore to the ferry house, struggling at times to keep up. His father is in high spirits and strides eagerly ahead.

  On the slip before the ferry house is a new boat, much larger than the old skiff. His father has been putting money by, he explains, though he expected to bide his time a year or two longer. It was no more than luck that he came by this one. A passenger he carried one morning had been in the same trade, a Company waterman thirty years on the Thames. A palsy had afflicted him that put him off the river. He was dissatisfied with his pension, and bore a grudge against the guildsmen. He wished to see the boat go to a man from out of the city, a man who was beholden to no Company and paid his own way. He did him no favours with the price, but that was no crime in one whose living was gone. He did enough in letting the boat go out of town.

  His father moves around the dark hull as he talks. He hauls away tarpaulins and brushes at flakes of creosote. He will have room enough for eight passengers, he says, or for two men and their horses. Even the farmers bringing their animals to market will come to him now, unless they are fond of the eight miles they must drive the cattle to the bridge. This boat will establish them, his father says, no matter who in the town might begrudge it. It will put him in the way of handsome money too. They will live in a better style than they have put up with until now. On Saturdays, the boy will have sixpence of his own to do with as he pleases. He will have the price of a silk ribbon for his sweetheart.

  As his father talks, the sun sinks beyond the reeds. The water is sluggish and glazed with amber. Midges throng the unmoving air. It comes to him that he will not be going back to school, that this is what his father is telling him. He touches the boat himself, twisting a fine splinter from the stern. His father lays a hand on his wrist, for a moment only, and the warmth of it is coarse and sure.

  The news causes him no particular sadness. He will not miss the schoolroom, or the children of the town. He is a stranger among them still. When the day’s lessons are over, they disperse in twos and threes to fish for dab or flounder. They hunt for birds’ eggs in the hour of liberty before they are wanted at home. He no longer asks if he may go along.

  His mother makes him practise his letters still. She gives him verses to learn, on scraps of paper that she wraps up with his bread and cheese. He is helping his father for as long as he is needed, she says, but he must not think it is to be his life. The boy does his best, but they no longer have the time for lessons that they once did. It is Eleanor who occupies his mother’s evenings now, for she has long outgrown her crib. She is a sweet-natured and curious child, always chattering somewhere in her mother’s wake. She sleeps now in the small cot by the range that was once his, and there is no hour of the day or night when the house is entirely quiet.

  He is put to light work at first. The luggage is too heavy for him still, and he must find his river legs before he can be taught to pole the boat. At dawn, when the river is streaked with lavender and steel, he and his father make their way along the bank to the ferry house. There is a sanctity in this first quiet passage of the day; neither of them speaking needlessly, each still half sunk in the secrecy of sleep.

  While his father checks the caulking and readies the strongbox for the takings, the boy sets to scrubbing the decks and thwarts. There can be no muck or bird soil in any place where a passenger might sit or lay a hand. Elsewhere, to keep it from taking in water, he rubs the wood with pine tar and turpentine. The mixture has a smell unlike anything he has known. There is a fierce, resinous sweetness to it, and beneath that a dingy musk that makes him think of railway yards and sawmills, of tanneries and quayside inns. It is the smell of rough work, of the places where only men gather.

  It stays close to him for days, banishing all other scents. He can no longer tell, in the evenings, when his mother has been making her rosewater. The boy’s bed now is in the small lobby between the kitchen and the garden. Eleanor has taken to sleepwalking, and at night he props his bed against the garden door to keep her from wandering from the house. Even here, with the roses beneath the open window, he can smell nothing but the coarse odours that cling to him from his work.

  He learns to tie up the boat, to jump to the pier as his father brings the stern around, looping the lines swiftly around the pilings so that the boat will not be brought up too hard. When they are moored, he sees the passengers ashore, then guides those waiting aboard. If a lady is nervous, he will hold the line taut to close the gap. He will offer her his forearm to steady her as she climbs down. The gesture is less familiar than putting out his hand, which is seldom entirely clean. Some ladies will refuse his assistance no matter how it is offered, but most take it gratefully enough. Some tell him he is a fine young man, and whisper to their husbands that he must have a penny for himself on the far bank.

  One morning, Alderman Swaine is crossing with his wife and two nieces. Swaine is harshly spoken and contemptuous, and it is said that he has put more than one man in the churchyard in coming by his wealth. Still, his is one of the town’s handful of fine families, and Lucy and Eliza are spoken of as great beauties who will marry well beyond this place. They are travelling to London, a journey few in the town have the means or reason to undertake, and are outfitted with great elegance. The coach that awaits them on the other side is Swaine’s own, sent ahead of them by the longer road that they themselves would be spared.

  When they have been settled and their bags and boxes stowed, the boy frees the lines from the pier. He takes his place in the bow with an easy leap as his father pushes off. His task, for most of the crossing, is to watch the water ahead. This stretch of river is restless and shallow. The currents shift ceaselessly, stirring new masses up from the bed and gouging channels where before there were none. In the mornings, especially, it is common for them to find a new spit of sand, lying across a course they plotted through clear water the evening before.

  His eyes must be unresting, skimming every part of the surface, reading it for signs of what is hidden beneath. Where it is freely running, there is an ease and delicacy to the forms it makes, the water cours
ing in supple ribbons, gathering in gentle braids and pleats. What he looks for are deeper disturbances, where the current meets some hindrance and builds in slow and unseen coils. In such places, the surface bears other marks – flexing rucks, deep and knife-bright creases – or is pulled as taut and innocent as kidskin.

  The boy has learned vigilance, and does not forget himself. Still, he cannot keep from looking back at the passengers. Alderman Swaine and his wife have seated themselves so as to face the stern, but Lucy and Eliza are side by side on an opposite thwart, talking in low but excited voices. They are sixteen or seventeen, he guesses – older than him by some years – and have the appearance of creatures no closer to his own kind than mermaids.

  They are dressed, beneath their travelling cloaks, in richer fabrics than even his mother can have seen, in gauzes and silks as exotic as the bodies of dragonflies. About their wrists and at the margins of their skin are intricate adornments of lace, and these in turn are constellated with tiny pearls. It is not only their clothes that captivate him. They themselves seem fashioned with a delicacy that is not ordinary.

  It is to Lucy, though, that his gaze returns most often. He has never seen such tender skin. It is like the tissue of a new blossom, something that has been kept safe even from the light. His urge to look at her is like nothing he has felt before. When he tries to summon a need that matches it, he can think only of thirst, of ice in muslin pressed against fevered skin. But it is not like either of these things, not truly. They come to him only because she is as bright and perfect as water.

  She glances up, and he looks quickly away. Her face, in the instant before he turns back to the river, is not disdainful or mocking. There is a puzzlement, perhaps, in the press of her lips, but her eyes are merely alert, even amused. At the edge of his vision, he sees her lean towards Eliza and speak to her behind her sleeve. They whisper intimately, coming together in a glistening confluence of laughter. Alderman Swaine and his wife shift in their seats to look for its cause. The boy fixes his eyes on the far bank, the heat climbing in his cheeks.

  Their amusement passes soon enough, and the passengers fall silent. The boy’s attention is drawn by something in the water ahead. He motions to his father to slow their progress. He keeps still as they approach it, saying nothing until he is sure, then calls back for a change in their course. It is a mound of slag, dumped onto a sandbar by a coal boat. Her crew were obliged to take it on, he guesses, by some foreman at a forge or a shipyard. They cursed him, most likely, and kept it aboard only until they were out of sight. There is no telling how much more is piled beneath the waterline, or in which direction the spill lies. To be sure of clearing it, they must go downstream, following a channel alongside the bank until they reach deeper water and can push back to their favoured course.

  In this more open water, they are alert and hushed. It is further downstream than they like to cross, and the poles must be driven deeper to find purchase. They feel the breeze more keenly here, and must work harder against it to right the boat. The boy and his father are quiet and watchful, only sparse words of warning or guidance passing between them. When they can, they signal changes in speed and bearing with their hands. It is quicker and surer, and does not alarm the passengers.

  It is some minutes before they round the downstream end of the sandbank. The Swaines too have fallen silent, noticing the change in course or sensing that there is some unspoken concern. He wonders if Lucy is watching him at his work. It is very far beneath her own occupations, no doubt, but he is showing himself capable. He is keeping her safe.

  Behind him there is a soft exclamation of distress. He snaps around in time to see Lucy’s pale blue hat scud clear of the starboard side and settle on the water. He watches it to see what the current will do. If it has come down on fast water, it will be gone in moments. Lucy rises from her seat, her eyes wide with alarm. The breeze prises a gap beneath its brim, and the hat tumbles a little further away, but the water beneath it seems still enough. It is a pool, most likely, in the lee of a wide spit.

  The boy raises a hand and the boat slows to a halt. His father would not normally think of stopping for such slight cause, but for the Swaines he must show willing. ‘It may be lost, miss,’ his father says. ‘We’ve no pole long enough to fish it back.’

  Lucy raises her fingertips to her throat. ‘It is my very best hat,’ she says. ‘Even the flowers are silk. What shall I wear to Covent Garden?’

  ‘Such empty-headed nonsense,’ says Alderman Swaine. ‘Did I not say that you had no business wearing such things while travelling? If it had not come off here, it would have come off on the road and been trampled by the horses.’

  Lucy sinks to her seat. A blush has risen on her neck, and in her anxiety she pushes out her lip, exposing a lush sliver of its inner surface. The boy stares at her for a long moment, and the impulse that comes to him cannot be governed. He stands on the gunwale, tenses himself and dives. He hears his father shout something, but it is cut off as he breaks the surface. The water is brutally cold, but he is swimming before it grips him. He judged the current rightly, and the going is not hard. It could have been otherwise, he knows, and his father will have something to say about his foolishness.

  He reaches the pool in thirty strokes or so. On the way back, his progress is slower because he makes do with one arm. With the other, he keeps the hat awkwardly aloft, unsure of how such a thing should be held. He feels strangely apologetic, though he has gone to such trouble to rescue it, as if in touching such a precious and intimate possession, he has trespassed so far that no effort or kindness can redeem him.

  He hauls himself aboard and dries himself as well as he can with one of the flour sacks that are offered to passengers as rough cushions. Wordlessly, his father passes him his own coat. As the boy puts it on, his father shakes his head and sends a pulse of spit out across the water. When he has governed his shivering enough to hold it steady, he carries the hat to where she sits. There is silence as he approaches. Alderman Swaine watches him with bladed eyes, a thick hand clamped over his jowls. The girls’ faces are intent, disbelieving. In Lucy’s, there is gratitude, he thinks, but it is guarded and uncertain. It is as if he has accomplished a miracle that is stained somehow with disgrace.

  As the boy draws near to where they sit, Alderman Swaine holds out his cane. It is heavy and ornate, with a polished ferrule at its tip. ‘Leave it there, boy,’ he says. ‘I shall hand it to her. We don’t want you dripping all over their gowns to add to the day’s calamities.’

  The boy stops short and looks down. The tip of the cane is inches from his chest. He covers it carefully with the hat and takes a step back. Lucy regards her uncle with horror, but he passes the hat to her by the same means and she accepts it without protest. As she takes its sodden brim in her hands, she looks again at the boy. He is much closer to her now. Her eyes are like nothing he has ever seen.

  ‘For shame, Charles,’ Mrs Swaine says. ‘What will they say of us? The boy is half dead from the cold. You will be civil, Mister, and give him a shilling for his trouble.’

  ‘I’ll do no such thing,’ says Alderman Swaine. ‘For that price, we might have bought the girl a new hat altogether. I’ll not be held liable for every lunatic child that jumps into a river. He may have thruppence, and no more about it.’

  ‘Thank you, sir, ma’am.’ The boy is speaking before he had thought of doing so. The cold presses his chest. His voice is weak and constricted. ‘I am obliged to you, but your fares have been paid.’

  He glances again at Lucy. ‘Miss,’ he says, and lowers his head briefly. He takes his place again in the bow, though the cold has seized him with force and he must clamp his hands on the sides to keep himself steady. He scans the water again, straining to regather his wits. The boat drifted a small way while he was in the water, and he takes a moment to regain his bearings. He gives a deep, sodden cough and loosens his voice in his chest. He raises a hand to signal his father. ‘Ten or fifteen more as we were,’ he
calls back. ‘Then about to port.’

  There is a slight lurch as his father releases the poles bracing them in position. Then they are away again. Before him, the estuary spreads seaward, gilded in the rising morning. It widens in seams and flukes of brightness to the open water, where the light is an obliterating scatter of white gold that forces him to look away.

  It is Easter when the boy next sees her. He leaves the house early, intending at first to fetch his rod and line from the boathouse. The morning is peaceful, though, and he wanders only a little way along the river road before finding a place to sit in the shade of an ash tree.

  He watches the water for a while, but finds that he cannot do so and remain at ease. He has spent too long searching its surface for the signs of danger. Instead, he takes from his pocket the last verse his mother pressed on him. It catches something in him, this poem, and he is so absorbed in it that he hears the girls approaching only when they are almost upon him.

  They are returning from church, strolling at leisure in the company of a lady who keeps a little way behind them. He fixes his eyes on the small scrap of notepaper; his mother uses carefully quartered pages, so as not to waste whole sheets, and chooses verses that will fit. The boy stares at the lines, seeing nothing. He waits for them to pass him by. Though his Sunday clothes are scarcely different from those he wears on the boat, he has it in his head that he will not be recognised.

  ‘There, you see,’ Eliza exclaims. ‘It is him, Lucy. I am seldom wrong about faces, you know.’

  The boy looks up. Getting to his feet, he takes his cap off, as much to conceal what he is holding as to show the ladies courtesy. He ought to offer some words of greeting, but he can think of none that seem adequate.

  ‘How shy he is,’ says Eliza. ‘You must tell us your name, young man, for we never learned it, you know. Lucy and I you know already, and this is Miss Avery. She has just returned from Lausanne, where she was engaged by a very fine family, until their terrible loss. What was it, Miss Avery, that poor little Amelia died of?’