Once Upon a River

by Diane Setterfield

  “I reckon I was dumbfounded.”

  They tried it out for flavor, weighing it on their tongues. It was good. They gave their colleague admiring nods.

  One was new to the Swan, new to storytelling. He was still finding his feet. “How about ‘flabbergasted’? Could I say that?”

  “Why not?” they encouraged. “Say ‘flabbergasted,’ if you like.”

  The boat mender came back in. A boat could tell a story too, and he’d been to see what it had to say. Everybody in the inn looked up to hear.

  “She’s there,” he reported. “All bashed in along the saxboard. Graunched something terrible and taking in water. She were half under. I’ve left her upturned on the bank, but nothing can be done. ’Tis all over for her now.”

  “What do you suppose happened? Was it the wharf that he went into?”

  The boat mender shook his head with authority. “Something came smashing down on the boat. From above.” He brought one hand down powerfully through the air and crashed one palm against the other to demonstrate. “Wharf, no: boat’d be bashed in from the side.”

  The drinkers now talked themselves up- and downstream, furlong by furlong, bridge by bridge, setting the damage to man and boat against every danger. All were river men of one kind or another, if not by profession, then by long association, and every man had his say as they tried to work out what had happened. In their minds they smashed the little boat into every jetty and every wharf, every bridge and every millwheel, upstream and down, but none was right. Then they came to Devil’s Weir.

  The weir had great uprights of solid ash at regular intervals across the river, and between them were wide expanses of wood, like walls, that could be raised or lowered according to the flow. It was customary to get out of your boat and drag it up the slope that was made for the purpose, in order to go around the weir and then reenter the water on the other side. There was an inn on the bank, so most of the time you could count on finding someone to give you a hand in exchange for the price of a drink. But sometimes—when the boards were up and the boat was nimble, when the river was calm and the boatman very experienced—then a man might save himself a bit of time and steer through. He would have to align his boat carefully, not take it askew; then he would need to pull in his blades so as not to break them against the great uprights; and if the river was high, he would need to duck or else throw himself flat on his back in the boat to avoid knocking his head on the weir beam.

  They measured all this against the man. They measured it against the boat.

  “So is that it?” asked Joe. “It was at Devil’s Weir he came to grief?”

  The boat mender picked up a fragment of wood, matchstick-sized, from a little pile. Black and firm, it was the largest of the splinters Rita had extracted from the forehead of the injured man. He tested it against his fingertip, felt the residual firmness of the wood despite the long contact with water. Most likely ash, and the weir was built of ash.

  “I reckon so.”

  “I’ve taken Devil’s Weir myself more than once,” a farmhand said. “You too, I reckon?”

  The boat mender nodded. “If the river’s in the mood to let me, yes.”

  “Would you attempt it at night?”

  “Risk my life to save a few seconds? I’m not such a fool.”

  There was a sense of satisfaction at having settled at least one aspect of the night’s events.

  “And yet,” Joe wondered, after a pause, “if it was at Devil’s Weir he came to grief, how did he get from there to here?”

  Now half a dozen small conversations broke out as theory after theory was proposed, tested, and found wanting. Suppose he had rowed all the way after the accident . . . With those injuries? No! Then suppose he drifted, lying in the boat between life and death until at Radcot he came to his sense and . . . Drifted? A boat in that state? Negotiating obstacles in the dark all by itself though cock-eyed and letting in water all the while? No!

  Round and round they went, finding explanations that fitted one half of the facts or the other half, that supplied a what but not a how, or a where but not a why, until all imagination came to an end and they were no nearer an answer. How had the man not drowned?

  For a while the only voice to be heard was that of the river, and then Joe coughed lightly and gathered his breath to speak.

  “It must be Quietly’s doing.”

  Everybody glanced towards the window, and those near enough looked out into the soft, flat night, in which a span of swiftly moving blackness shone with a liquid gleam. Quietly, the ferryman. All knew of him. From time to time he featured in stories they told and some swore they’d met him. He appeared when you were in trouble on the water, a gaunt and elongated figure, manipulating his pole so masterfully that his punt seemed to glide as if powered by an otherworldly force. He spoke never a word, but guided you safely to the bank so you would live another day. But if you were out of luck—so they said—it was another shore altogether that he would take you to, and those poor souls did not return to the Swan to lift their pint of ale and tell of their encounter.

  Quietly. Now, that would turn it into another kind of story altogether.

  Margot, whose mother and grandmother had spoken of Quietly in the months before they died, frowned and changed the subject.

  “It’ll be a sorry awakening for that poor man. To lose a child—there is no heartbreak like it.”

  There was a murmur of agreement and she went on:

  “Why would a father take a child out on the river at this time of night, anyway? In winter too! Even if he were alone it was foolish, but with a child . . .”

  The fathers in the room nodded, and added rashness to the character of the man who lay senseless in the next room.

  Joe coughed and said, “She were a droll-looking little maid.”

  “Strange.”

  “Peculiar.”

  “Odd,” came a trio of voices.

  “I didn’t even know it was a child,” a voice said wonderingly.

  “You weren’t the only one.”

  Margot had been pondering this all the while the men had been talking of boats and weirs. She thought of her twelve daughters and her granddaughters and admonished herself. A child was a child, dead or alive.

  “How did we not see it?” she asked, in a voice that made them all ashamed.

  They turned their eyes to the dark corners and consulted their memories. They conjured the injured man to stand again in the doorway. They reinhabited their shock, considered what there had not been time to consider as it happened. It had been like a dream, they thought, or a nightmare. The man had appeared to them like something from a folktale, a monster or a ghoul. They had taken the child for a puppet or a doll.

  The door opened, as it had opened before.

  The drinkers blinked away their memory of the man and saw this:

  Rita.

  She stood in the doorway where the man had stood.

  The dead girl was in her arms.

  Again? Was it time’s error? Were they drunk? Had they lost their wits? Too much had happened and their brains were full. They waited for the world to right itself.

  The corpse opened its eyes.

  The girl’s head swiveled.

  Her gaze sent a wave through the room so strong that every eye felt its ripple, every soul was rocked on its mooring.

  Time went unmeasured, and when the silence was at last broken, it was Rita who spoke.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  It was an answer to the questions they were too stunned to ask—an answer to the questions she could scarcely form herself.

  When they found their tongues were still in their mouths and still working, Margot said, “Let me wrap her in my shawl.”

  Rita put out a warning hand. “Let her not be warmed too quickly. She has come this far in the cold. Perhaps she should grow warm by slow degrees.”

  The women laid the child on the window seat. Her pallor was deathly. She was unmoving, all
but her eyes that blinked and looked.

  The rivermen and the cressmen and the gravel diggers, young men and old, with hard hands and reddened fingers, grimy necks and rough chins, sat forward in their seats and gazed with soft yearning at the little child.

  “Her eyes are closing!”

  “Is she dying again?”

  “See her chest rise?”

  “Ah! I see it. And now it falls.”

  “And rises again.”

  “She is falling asleep.”

  “Hush!”

  They spoke in whispers.

  “Are we keeping her awake?”

  “Shuffle aside, will you? I cannot see her breathe!”

  “Now do you see her?”

  “She breathes in.”

  “And out.”

  “In.”

  “Out.”

  They stood on tiptoe to lean forwards, peer over shoulders, squint into the circle of light from the candle that Rita held over the sleeping girl. Their eyes followed her every breath and, without knowing it, their breathing fell in time with hers, as if their many chests might make a great pair of bellows to inflate her little lungs. The room itself expanded and contracted with her respiration.

  “It must be a fine thing to have a little child to look after.” It was a bony cressman with red ears who spoke, in a longing half tone.

  “Nothing finer,” his friends admitted wistfully.

  Jonathan had not taken his eyes off the girl. He edged across the floor until he stood beside her. He extended a hand uncertainly and at Rita’s nod laid it gently on a strand of the girl’s hair.

  “How did you do it?” he asked.

  “I didn’t.”

  “Then what made her come alive again?”

  She shook her head.

  “Was it me? I kissed her. To wake her, like the prince in the story.” And he brought his lips to her hair to show Rita.

  “It doesn’t happen like that in real life.”

  “Is it a miracle?”

  Rita frowned, unable to answer.

  “Don’t go thinking about it now,” his mother said. “There’s a great many things hard to fathom in darkness that set themselves straight in the light of day. The little mite needs to sleep, not have you fidgeting around her. Come away, I’ve got a job for you.”

  She unlocked the cupboard again and took out a bottle, set a dozen tiny glasses on a tray, poured an inch of liquor into each.

  Jonathan handed one to everybody present.

  “Give one to your father.” Joe didn’t usually drink in winter and when his lungs were bad. “What about you, Rita?”

  “I will, thank you.”

  As one, they raised the glasses to their lips and swallowed in a single gulp.

  Was it a miracle? It was as if they had dreamt of a pot of gold and woken to find it on their pillow. As if they had told a tale of a fairy princess and finished it only to find her sitting in a corner of the room, listening.

  For close on an hour they sat in silence and watched the sleeping child and wondered at it. Could there be any place in the country more interesting tonight than the Swan at Radcot? And they would be able to say, I was there.

  In the end it was Margot who sent them all home. “It’s been a long night, and nothing will do us more good now than a bit of sleep.”

  The dregs in tankards were drained and slowly the drinkers reached for their coats and hats. They rose on legs unsteady with drink and magic, and shuffled over the floor towards the door. There was a round of good nights, the door was opened, and one by one, with many a backward glance, they disappeared into the night.

  The Story Travels

  Margot and Rita lifted the sleeping child and worked her sleeveless shift over her head. They wrung out a cloth in warm water and wiped the river smell away, though it still lingered in her hair. The child made a vague sound of contentment at the touch of the water, but did not wake.

  “Funny little thing,” Margot murmured. “What are you dreaming of?”

  She had fetched a nightdress she kept for visiting granddaughters, and together the women fed small hands and arms through the sleeves. The girl did not wake.

  Meanwhile, Jonathan washed and dried the tankards while Joe concealed the night’s takings in the regular place and swept the floor. From a corner he dislodged the cat that had slipped in unnoticed earlier in the evening. Offended, it stalked out of the shadows and made for the hearth, where the embers were still glowing.

  “Don’t go thinking you can settle here,” Margot told the animal, but her husband intervened.

  “It’s deathly out. Let the creature stay, the once.”

  Rita settled the child on the bed next to the sleeping man. “I’ll sleep the night here to keep an eye on them,” she said, and when Margot proposed bringing in a truckle bed, “The chair will be all right. I’m used to it.”

  The house settled.

  “It makes you think,” Margot murmured, her head at long last on the pillow, and Joe muttered, “It does, that’s for sure.” They shared their thoughts in whispered voices. Where had they come from, these unknown people? And why here, to their own inn, the Swan? And what, precisely, was it that had happened tonight? “Miracle” was the word Jonathan had pronounced, and they tested it on their own tongues. They were used to it in the Bible, where it meant impossible things that happened an impossibly long time ago in places so far away from here that they might as well not exist. Here in the inn it applied to the laughably improbable chance that the boat mender would ever pay his slate in full: now that would be a miracle all right. But tonight, at winter solstice in the Swan at Radcot, the word had a different weight.

  “I shan’t get a wink of sleep for puzzling over it,” Joe said. But, miracle or no, they were tired; and so, with the long night more than half over already, they blew out the candle. The night closed over them and almost immediately wonderment came to an end.

  Downstairs, in the pilgrims’ room, where her patients, man and child, were asleep side by side on the bed, Rita sat awake in the armchair. The man’s breath was slow and noisy. The air entering and leaving his lungs had to make its way past swollen membranes, through passages filled with drying blood whose paths had been altered and reset in the past hours. It was no wonder it made a sound like the teeth of a saw on wood. In the silences where his breath tipped from in to out, she could hear the insubstantial flutter of the child’s respiration. Behind them both, in the background, the endless exhalation of the river.

  She ought to sleep but had been waiting to be alone to think. Methodically, dispassionately, she went over it all again. She watched herself perform the routine checks, noted all the signs she had been trained to look for. Where was her mistake? Once, twice, three times, she went through it all in close detail. She found no error.

  What, then?

  Since her learning was of no use, she looked to her experience for elucidation. Had there ever been an instance when, for however little a time, she had been unsure whether a patient was dead or alive? It was commonplace to say that a person was at death’s door, as if there was some real line between life and death and a person might stand upon it for a time. But she had never in such circumstances had any difficulty discerning which side of the line the patient was. No matter how far illness had progressed, no matter how great the weakness, a patient was alive until the moment of death. There was no hovering. No in-between.

  Margot had sent them all to bed with the encouraging thought that enlightenment would come naturally with the dawn, a sentiment Rita shared with regard to other kinds of trouble, but this was different. The questions in her mind related to the body, and the body was governed by laws. Everything she knew told her that what she had experienced could not happen. Dead children do not come back to life. There were two possibilities: either the child was not alive—she listened: there it was, the delicate breath—or she had not been dead. She considered again all the indications of death that she had checked. Waxy white skin. Ab
sence of breathing. Absence of pulse. Pupil dilation. She revisited the long room in memory and knew she had checked each of these things. Every indication of death was present. The fault was not in her. Where was it, then?

  Rita closed her eyes, the better to focus. She had decades of nursing experience but her knowledge did not end there. She had spent long evenings studying books intended for the use of surgeons, had memorized anatomy, had mastered the science of the apothecary. Her practical experience had developed these pools of knowledge into a deep reservoir of understanding. She now permitted the evening’s experience to be placed alongside what she knew. She did not chase after explanations or make effortful attempts to connect thoughts. She simply waited, with a growing thrill of trepidation and exhilaration, until the conclusion that had been carefully preparing itself in the depths came to the surface.

  The laws of life and death, as she had learned them, were incomplete. There was more to life, more to death, than medical science had known.

  A door opened, beckoning her towards new knowledge.

  Again she missed God. She had shared everything with him. From childhood she had gone to him with every question, doubt, delight, and triumph. He had accompanied every advance in her thinking; in action he had been her daily collaborator. But God was gone. This was something she was going to have to work out by herself.

  What to do about it?

  She listened. The breathing of the girl. The breathing of the man. The breath of the river.

  The river . . . She would start there.

  Rita relaced her boots and buttoned herself into her coat. In her bag she groped for something—it was a slim tin box—and dropped it into her pocket before creeping quietly outside. Around her candle flame the chill darkness expanded vastly, but she could make out the edges of the path. She stepped off it and onto the grass. As much by feel as by sight, she made her way to the riverbank. The cold air sidled through her buttonholes and the stitches of her muffler. She walked through the warm steam of her own exhalations, felt it lay itself as wetness on her face.