She tried to live up to the name.
Lily gave the yellow goat some rotten potatoes, then went to feed the pigs. The pigs lived in the old wood store. It was a stone building, halfway between the cottage and the river, with a tall, narrow opening on the cottage side for a person to go in and out, and a low opening on the other so that the pigs might come and go between their enclosure and their mud yard. Within, a low wall separated the two ends. At Lily’s end, chopped wood was stacked against the wall, next to a sack of grain and an old tin bath half full of swill. There were a couple of buckets and, on a shelf, apples were slowly moldering.
Lily lifted the buckets and carried them out and round to the pigs’ outdoor mud patch on the side. She tipped a bucketful of half-rotten cabbages and other vegetable matter too brown to identify over the fence and into the trough, then filled the old sink with water. The boar came out of the straw-lined woodshed and, without a glance at Lily, lowered his head to eat. Behind him, the sow.
The female rubbed her flank against the fence, as was her way, and when Lily scratched behind her ears, the sow blinked at her. Beneath her ginger lashes the sow’s eyes were still half full of sleep. Do pigs dream? Lily wondered. If they do, it is about something better than real life, by the look of things. The sow came into wakefulness and she fixed Lily with a peculiarly poignant gaze. Pigs were funny creatures. You could almost think they were human the way they looked at you sometimes. Or was the pig remembering something? Yes, she realized, that was it. The pig looked exactly as if she were recollecting some happiness now lost, so that joy remembered was overlaid with present sorrow.
Lily had been happy once, though it was painful to recollect it. Her father had died before she could remember, and until she was eleven she and her mother had lived quietly together, just the two of them. There had been little money and food was scant, but they scraped by, and after their soup in the evening they would lean close together with a blanket round them to save the fire, and at her mother’s nod Lily would turn the pages of the children’s Bible while her mother read aloud. Lily was no great reader. She could not tell b from d and all the letters quivered on the page as soon as they felt the brush of her gaze; but when her mother read aloud in her gentle voice, the lines settled and she found she could follow the thread after all, mouthing the words silently in time. Sometimes her mother told her about her father—how he had loved his baby daughter, watched her endlessly, and, as his own health faded, said, “Here is the best of me, Rose. It lives on in this child we made together.” In time, Jesus and her father came to seem like different faces of the same man, a presence that surrounded her and protected her and was no less real for being invisible. That blanket, and that book, and her mother’s voice and Jesus and her father who had loved her so—these happy memories were the type that only sharpened the hardship of her existence since. She could not think of those golden days without despair, and came close to wishing she had never lived them. That hopeless longing for lost happiness in the eye of the pig must be how she herself looked when she remembered the past. The only God that watched over Lily now was a severe and angry one, and if her father looked down from heaven onto his grown daughter, he would turn his face away in an agony of disappointment.
The sow continued to stare at Lily. She pushed its snout roughly away, muttering “Stupid sow” as she walked up the slope to the cottage.
Inside, she got the fire going and ate a bit of cheese and an apple. She eyed the candle, a short stub attached by its own wax to a bit of broken tile, and decided to do without it for a bit longer. Next to the fire was a sagging chair, the upholstery much mended with patches of unmatching wool, and she sat wearily in it. She was tired, but nerves kept her alert. Was it one of those nights when he was going to come? She had seen him yesterday, so perhaps not; but you could never tell. For an hour she sat, on the alert for footsteps, and then gradually Lily’s eyelids closed, her head began to nod, and she fell into sleep.
The river now exhaled a complicated fragrance and blew it through the gap under the door of the little cottage. Lily’s nose suddenly twitched. The odor had an earthy base with the live notes of grasses, reeds, and sedges. It contained the mineral quality of stone. And something darker, browner, and more decomposed.
With its next breath, the river exhaled a child. She floated into the cottage, glaucous and cold.
Lily frowned in her sleep and her breathing grew troubled.
The girl’s colorless hair clung slickly to her scalp and shoulders; her garment was the color of the dirty scum that collects at the river’s edge. Water ran off her: from her hair it dripped into her cloak, from the cloak it dripped to the floor. It did not drip itself out.
Fear put a choking whimper in Lily’s throat.
Drip, drip, drip . . . There was no end to the water: it would drip for an eternity; it would drip until the river ran dry. The hovering child turned a malevolent gaze on the sleeper in the chair and slowly, slowly, raised a hazy hand to point at her.
Lily woke with a sudden start—
The river child evaporated.
For a few moments Lily stared in alarm at the spot in the air where the girl had been.
“Oh!” she gasped. “Oh! Oh!” She brought her hands to her face as if to hide the image, but also looked between her fingers to reassure herself that the girl was gone.
All this time and it never got any easier. The little girl was still furious. If only she would stay a bit longer so that Lily could talk to her. Tell her she was sorry. Tell her she would pay any price demanded, give up anything, do anything . . . But by the time Lily got the use of her tongue, she had always gone.
Lily leant forward, still in fear, to stare at the floorboards where the river child had hovered. There were dark marks there; she could just make them out in the fading light. She heaved herself from the chair and shuffled reluctantly across the floor. She extended her hand, placed outstretched fingers against the darkness.
The floor was wet.
Lily brought her hands together in prayer. “Take me out of the mire, that I sink not: O let me be delivered out of the deep waters. Let not the flood drown me, neither let the deep swallow me up.” Rapidly she repeated the words until her breathing was regular, and then she got painfully to her feet and said, “Amen.”
She felt troubled, and it wasn’t just the aftermath of the visitation. Was the river on the rise? She went to the window. Its dark gleam was no nearer the cottage than before.
Him, then. Was he coming? She looked for movement outdoors, strained her ears for the sound of his approach. Nothing.
It was neither of these things.
What, then?
The answer when it came was spoken in a voice so like her mother’s, it took her aback till she realized it was her own: Something is going to happen.
Mr. Armstrong at Bampton
Something is going to happen, they all thought. And soon after, at the Swan at Radcot, it did.
Now what?
On the first morning following the longest night, the clatter of hooves on cobbles announced a visitor to the village of Bampton. The few who happened to be outside at this early hour frowned and looked up. What fool was this, riding at full tilt into their narrow street? When horse and rider came into view, they grew curious. Instead of it being one of their own immature lads, the rider was an outsider, and more than that: he was a black man. His face was grave and the clouds of vapor he exhaled this cold morning lent him an air of fury. When he slowed, they took one look at him and hopped promptly into doorways, shutting their doors firmly behind them.
Robert Armstrong was used to the effect he had on strangers. His fellow humans had always been wary of him at first sight. The blackness of his skin made him the outsider, and his height and strength that would have been an advantage to any white man only made people more wary. In fact, as other living creatures understood very well, he was the gentlest of souls. Take Fleet, for instance. She had been called too wild to tame, an
d that was why he got her for a song; yet, once he was in the saddle, the two of them were the best of friends within half an hour. And the cat, a skinny thing with an ear missing that appeared in his barn one winter’s morning, spitting curses and darting evil glances at all and sundry. Why, now she came running up to him in the yard, tail up, mewing to be scratched under her chin. Even the ladybirds that alighted on a man’s hair in summer and crawled over his face knew that he would do no more than wrinkle his nose to dislodge them if they tickled excessively. No animal of field or farmyard feared him, no, but people—ah! That was another matter entirely.
A fellow had written a book lately—Armstrong had heard tell of it—in which he proposed that man was a kind of clever monkey. A lot of laughter and indignation that had produced, but Armstrong was inclined to believe it. He had found the line that separated humans from the animal kingdom to be a porous one, and all the things that people thought unique to them—intelligence, kindness, communication—he had seen in his pigs, his horse, even the rooks that hopped and strutted among his cows. And then there was this: the methods he used on animals generally bore fruit when applied to people too. He could usually win them round in the end.
The sudden disappearance of the people he had glimpsed only a moment or two ago made things difficult, though. He did not know Bampton. Armstrong walked along for a few yards and, coming to a crossroads, saw a boy sprawled in the grassy center by the signpost, nose almost to the ground. He was so engrossed in studying the lie of a number of marbles that he seemed not to notice the cold—or Armstrong’s approach.
“Good day.”
Two expressions passed across the boy’s face. The first, alarm, was fleeting. It disappeared when he saw the marble that appeared as if by magic from Armstrong’s pocket. (Armstrong had his clothes made with large and reinforced pockets to store the items he habitually kept on him for the taming and reassuring of creatures. As a rule he kept acorns for pigs, apples for horses, marbles for small boys, and a flask of alcohol for older ones. For females of the human species he depended on good manners, the right words, and immaculately polished shoes and buttons.) The marble that he showed to the boy was no ordinary one but contained flares of orange and yellow so like the flames of a fire that you would think you could warm yourself by it. The boy now looked interested.
The game that ensued was carried out with professional concentration by both parties. The boy had the advantage of knowing the terrain—which tufts of grass will bend as a marble passes and which have congested roots and will divert its path—and the game ended, as Armstrong had always intended, with the marble in the pocket of the boy.
“Fair and square,” he admitted. “Victory to the better man.”
The boy looked discomfited. “Was it your best marble?”
“I have others, at home. Now I ought really to introduce myself. My name is Mr. Armstrong and I have a farm at Kelmscott. I wonder whether you can help me with some information? I want to know the way to a house where a little girl called Alice lives.”
“That is Mrs. Eavis’s house, her mother lodges there.”
“And her mother’s name is . . .”
“Mrs. Armstrong, sir—oh!—that is just like your name, sir!”
Armstrong was rather relieved. If the woman was Mrs. Armstrong, then Robin had married her. Things were perhaps not quite so bad as he had feared.
“And where is Mrs. Eavis’s house? Can you direct me there?”
“I will show you: that will be best, for I know the shortcuts, it being me who delivers the meat.”
They set off on foot, Armstrong leading Fleet.
“I have told you my name, and I will tell you that this horse is called Fleet. Now you know who we are, who are you?”
“I am Ben and I am the son of the butcher.”
Armstrong noticed that Ben had a habit of taking a deep breath at the start of every answer and delivering his words in a single stream.
“Ben. I suppose you are the youngest son, for that is what Benjamin means.”
“It means the littlest and the last, and it was my father who named me, but my mother says it takes more than naming a thing to make it so, and there are three more after me and another one on the way, and that is on top of the five that came before, though all my father needs is one to help in the shop and that is my eldest brother, and all the rest of us is surplus to requirements, since we do nothing but eat the profits.”
“And what does your mother say about that?”
“Mostly nothing, but when she do say something, it is generally along the lines that eating the profits is better than drinking them, and then he gives her a bash and she don’t say nothing at all for a few days.”
While the boy was speaking, Armstrong eyed him sideways. There were ghosts of bruises on the boy’s forehead and wrists.
“It is not a good house, sir, Mrs. Eavis’s house,” the boy told him.
“In what way is it not a good house?”
The boy thought hard. “It is a bad house, sir.”
A few minutes later they were there.
“I’d better stand by and hold your horse for you, sir.”
Armstrong passed Fleet’s reins to the boy, and an apple as well: “If you give this to Fleet, you’ll have a friend for life,” he said, then he turned and knocked at the door of the large, plain house.
The door opened slightly and he caught a glimpse of a face almost as narrow as the crack it peered out of. She took one look at his black face and her sharp features twitched.
“Shoo! Off with you, dirty devil! We’re not for your sort! Be on your way!” She spoke more loudly than she needed to, slowly too, as though to a half-wit or a foreigner.
She tried to close the door but the tip of Armstrong’s boot blocked it, and whether it was the sight of the expensive polished leather or the desire to give him a piece of her mind more forcefully, she reopened the door. Before she could open her mouth to speak, Armstrong addressed her. He spoke softly and with great dignity of expression, as though she had never called him a dirty devil, as though his boot were not in her doorway.
“Forgive my intrusion, madam. I realize you must be very busy and I won’t detain you a minute longer than necessary.” He saw her register the expensive education that lay behind his voice, appraise his good hat, his smart coat. He saw her draw her conclusion and felt the pressure against the toe of his shoe cease.
“Yes?” she said.
“I understand you have a young woman by the name of Mrs. Armstrong lodging here?”
A snidely triumphant smile pulled at the corners of her lips.
“She works here. She’s new to it. You’ll have to pay extra.”
So that was what Ben meant by a bad house.
“All I want is to speak with her.”
“It is the letter, I suppose? She’s been expecting it for weeks. Quite given up hope.”
The sharp, narrow woman put out a sharp, narrow hand. Armstrong looked at it and shook his head.
“I should very much like to see her, if you please.”
“It is not the letter?”
“Not the letter. Take me to her, if you will.”
She led him up one and then another flight of stairs, muttering all the while. “Why should I not think it is the letter, when all I have heard, twenty times a day this last month is ‘Has my letter come, Mrs. Eavis?’ and ‘Mrs. Eavis, is there any letter for me?’ ”
He said nothing but gave himself a mild and amenable countenance whenever she turned to glance at him. The stairwell, rather smart and grand at the entrance, grew shabbier and chillier the higher you got. On the way up, some of the doors were ajar. Armstrong caught glimpses of unmade beds, garments strewn on the floor. In one room, a half-dressed female figure bent over to roll a stocking up over her knee. When she caught sight of him her mouth smiled but her eyes didn’t. His heart sank. Was this what had become of Robin’s wife?
On the bare top landing where the paint was peeling, Mr
s. Eavis stopped and rapped sharply at a door.
There came no reply.
She rapped again. “Mrs. Armstrong? A gentleman for you.”
There was only silence.
Mrs. Eavis frowned. “I don’t know . . . She has not gone out this morning, I would have heard.” Then, with sharp alarm, “Done a runner, that’s what she’s done, the little trollop!” and in no time she had the key out of her pocket, opened the door, and burst in.
Over Mrs. Eavis’s shoulder Armstrong perceived all in a flash. The stained and rumpled sheet of the iron bed and against it that other, awful whiteness: an outstretched arm, the fingers splayed rigid.
“Good Lord, no!” he exclaimed, and his hand came to his eyes as though it were not too late to unsee it. So he stood for some seconds, eyes squeezed shut, while Mrs. Eavis’s complaint went on.
“Little minx! Two weeks rent she owes me! ‘When I get my letter, Mrs. Eavis!’ Oh, the lying vixen! What am I to do now, eh? Eating my meals, sleeping in my linen! Thought she was too good to work for money! ‘I’ll have you out of here if you don’t pay up prompt,’ I told her. ‘I don’t keep girls here for nothing! If you can’t pay, you’ll have to work.’ I saw to it that she did. I won’t have it, girls who think nothing of running up a debt and too good to pay it. She stooped in the end. They always do. What am I to do now, eh? Thieving little idiot!”
When Armstrong drew his hand away from his eyes and opened them, he looked like a different person altogether. With sorrow he looked around the small, mean room. The boards were bare and drafty; a broken pane let in knife blades of cold air. The plaster was pitted and blistered. Nowhere was there any bit of color, of warmth, of human comfort. On the stand beside the bed there was a brown apothecary bottle. Empty. He took it and sniffed. So that was it. The girl had taken her own life. He slipped the bottle into his pocket. Why let it be known? There was little enough to be done for her; he could at least conceal the manner of her passing.
Once Upon a River Page 10
