Once Upon a River

by Diane Setterfield

  His father smiled and ruffled his hair. “I know you did. But she doesn’t belong here.”

  Jonathan turned to fetch a second load of logs but, when he got to the door, turned back, unconsoled.

  “Is it finished, Dad?”

  “Finished?”

  Jonathan watched his father put his head on one side and gaze up to the dark corner where the stories came from. Then his eyes came back to Jonathan and he shook his head.

  “This is just the beginning, son. There’s a long way still to go.”

  Things Don’t Add Up

  Sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, Lily pushed her right foot into a boot. She held on to the tongue so that it would not get trapped under the laces, but her stocking then rucked half a dozen wrinkles at the back of her heel and wedged her foot forwards. She sighed. Her boots were always conspiring to thwart her. Nothing was ever right with them. They pressed on her bunions, they rubbed her raw, and no matter how much straw she packed them with overnight, they always kept a little bit of dampness back to chill her in the morning. She eased her foot out, straightened the stocking, tried again.

  When both her boots were on, Lily buttoned up her coat and wound a scarf round her neck. She did not put on gloves, for she had none. Outside, the cold sliced through her coat without resistance and sharpened its blade against her skin, but she scarcely noticed. She was used to it.

  Her morning routine never varied. First she went down to the river. Today the level was as she expected, neither high nor low. There was no angry rush and no menacing loitering. The water did not hiss particularly, nor roar, nor dart spiteful splashes at her hem. It flowed steadily, wholly engaged on some calm business of its own, and had not the slightest interest in Lily or her doings. She turned her back on it and went to feed the pigs.

  Lily filled one bucket with grain and the other with swill. It released a warmly rotten aroma into the air. The gilt came to the dividing wall, as was her habit. She liked to raise her head and scratch the underside of her chin on the top of the low wall. Lily scratched the place behind the pig’s ears at the same time. The gilt grunted in pleasure and gave her a look from beneath her ginger eyelashes. Lily heaved the two buckets out and round to the feeding place, tottering under the weight. One by one she tipped the contents of the buckets into the trough and then pulled back the planks that barred the opening. When she had done that she took her own breakfast out of her pocket—one of the less bruised apples from the shelf—and nibbled at it. She didn’t mind a bit of company at breakfast time. The boar came out first—he always did: males put themselves first in everything—and lowered his snout immediately to the trough. The female came after him, her eyes still fixed on Lily, so that once more Lily wondered what the reason could be for such a stare. It was an odd look, almost human, as if she wanted something.

  Lily finished the flesh of the apple and dropped the core into the pen, making sure it landed where the boar would not see it. The gilt gave her one last indecipherable look—regret? disappointment? sorrow?—then lowered her snout to the ground and the apple core disappeared.

  Lily cleaned the buckets and put them back in the woodshed. A glance at the sky told her it was time to set off to work, but first, one last thing. She shifted a few logs from the pile and removed one from the third row down. From the front it looked like all the others, but at the back a hollow had been carved out of it. She tilted it and a shower of coins fell into her palm. She took care to replace the logs just as she had found them. Indoors she eased a loose brick from the fireplace. Though it looked no different from the others, it came away easily, revealing a small cavity behind. She placed the money in the cavity and slid the brick back into place, ensuring that it was exactly level with its neighbors. She closed the door behind her and did not lock it for the simple reason that there was no lock and no key. There was nothing worth stealing at Lily White’s place; everybody knew that. Then she left.

  The air was knife-cold, but, between the rust and black of last year’s growth, green was returning to the riverbank. Lily walked briskly, grateful that the ground was hard and let no wetness in the holes in her boots. As she neared Buscot, she peered over the river, to the land that belonged to Buscot Lodge and the Vaughans. There was nobody there.

  She will be indoors, then, by the fire, Lily thought. She pictured a hearth, a huge log basket, the fire itself dancing brightly. “Don’t touch, Ann,” she whispered under her breath. “It’s hot.” But they will have a fireguard, being rich people. She nodded. Yes, that’s right. She has Ann in a blue velvet dress—no, wool will be warmer, let it be wool. Lily moves in spirit around the house she has never entered. Upstairs is a little bedroom where another fire burns, taking the chill off. There is a bed, and a mattress that is made not of straw but of real lambswool. The blankets are thick and—red? Yes, red—and on the pillow is a doll with plaited hair. There is a Turkey carpet so Ann’s feet won’t get cold in the morning. Elsewhere the pantry of this house is full of hams and apples and cheese; there is a cook who makes jam and cake; a cupboard contains jar upon jar of honey, and in a drawer are half a dozen sugar canes, striped in yellow and white.

  Lily explored Ann’s new home in perfect contentment, and her version of the interior of Buscot Lodge only faded when she was at the door of the parsonage.

  Yes, she thought as she pushed open the kitchen door. Ann must live with the Vaughans at Buscot Lodge. She will be safe there. She might even be happy. That is where she must stay.

  The parson was in his study. Lily knew she was rather late, but she could tell by touching the kettle with her fingertips that the parson had not yet made his own tea. She wrenched off her boots and eased her feet into the grey felt shoes she kept under the dresser in the parsonage kitchen. Her feet were always comfortable in them. She had worked for the parson for two months before daring to ask permission to keep a pair of indoor shoes under the kitchen dresser. “Out of sight, they will be, and it will save your carpets,” she had explained, and when he had said yes, she had asked for some of the savings he kept for her, gone straight to buy them, and then brought them directly back here. Sometimes at the cottage, when she was cold and afraid of ghosts, the thought of her grey felt shoes sitting under the parson’s kitchen dresser as if they belonged there was enough to make her feel better.

  She boiled water, prepared the tea tray, and, when all was ready, made her way to his study and knocked.

  “Come!”

  The parson was bent over his papers, which showed the bald patch on the top of his head; he was scribbling away at a speed that made her marvel. He came to the end of a sentence and looked up. “Ah! Mrs. White!”

  This greeting was one of the pleasures of her life. Never “Good morning!” or “Good day!”—greetings that would do for anybody—but always: “Ah! Mrs. White!” The sound of the name White on his lips was like a blessing.

  She put down the tray. “Shall I make some toast, Parson?”

  “Yes, well, later.” He cleared his throat. “Mrs. White—” he began in another tone of voice.

  Lily started and he adopted an expression of kindly perplexity that only increased her fear about what was coming.

  “What is this I hear about you and the child at the Swan?”

  Her heart lurched in her chest. What to say? Why a thing so plain to know should be so hard to explain was a puzzle, and she opened and closed her mouth more than once, but no words came out.

  The parson spoke again.

  “So far as I understand it, you told them at the Swan that the child was your sister?”

  His voice was mild, but Lily’s lungs flooded with fear. She could scarcely breathe in or out. Then she managed a gulp of air, and on the exhalation words streamed out of her. “I didn’t mean any harm by it, and please don’t dismiss me, Parson Habgood, and I won’t cause any trouble to anyone, I promise.”

  The parson contemplated her with an air no less perplexed than before. “I suppose I can take it that the child
is not your sister? We can put it down to a mistake, can we?” His mouth sketched a hesitant, experimental smile, one that would become a steady, full one when she nodded her head.

  Lily did not like lying. She had been driven to it many times but had never got used to it, had never even grown to be any good at it, but most of all she did not like it. To lie in her own home was one thing, but here, at the parsonage—that was not quite the house of God but was the house of the parson, which was the next best thing—lying was a much graver thing. She did not want to lose her job . . . She dithered between a lie and the truth and in the end, unable to measure the dangers one way and the other, it was her nature that won out.

  “She is my sister.”

  She looked down. The toes of the felt shoes were showing under her skirt. Tears came to her eyes and she rubbed them away with the back of her hand. “She is my only sister, and her name is Ann. I know it is her, Parson Habgood.” The tears she had rubbed away were replaced by others, too numerous to catch. They fell and made dark blotches on the toes of her felt shoes.

  “Now, then, Mrs. White,” said the parson, a little flustered. “Why don’t you sit down?”

  Lily shook her head. She had never sat down at the parsonage in her life. She worked here, on her feet and on her knees, fetching and carrying and scrubbing and washing, and that is what gave her the feeling of belonging. To sit down was to be just another parishioner in need of help. “No,” she muttered. “No, thank you.”

  “Then I shall stand up along with you.”

  The parson stood and came out from behind his desk and looked at her thoughtfully.

  “Let us think about this together, shall we? Two minds are better than one, they say. To begin with, how old are you, Mrs. White?”

  Lily stared in bewilderment. “Well, I . . . I can’t say as I know. There was a time I was thirty-something. That was some years ago. I . . . suppose I must be forty-something now.”

  “Hm. And how old would you say the little girl from the Swan is?”

  “Four.”

  “You sound very sure of that.”

  “Because that is her age.”

  The parson winced. “Let us suppose that you are forty-four, Mrs. White. We cannot be sure, but you know you are in your forties, and so forty-four is likely enough. Do you agree? For the sake of the argument?”

  She nodded, not seeing why it mattered.

  “The gap between four and forty-four is forty years, Mrs. White.”

  She frowned.

  “How old was your mother when you were born?”

  Lily flinched.

  “Is she living, your mother?”

  Lily trembled.

  “Let’s try another way: When did you last see your mother? Recently? Or long ago?”

  “Long ago,” she whispered.

  The parson, divining another dead end, decided to take another route.

  “Suppose your mother had you when she was sixteen. She would have had this little girl forty years later, when she was fifty-six. A dozen years older than you are now.”

  Lily blinked, trying and failing to see what all these numbers were about.

  “Do you see what I am trying to explain with these calculations, Mrs. White? The little girl cannot be your sister. The chances of your mother having two daughters so far apart in age is—well, it is so unlikely as to be impossible.”

  Lily stared at her shoes.

  “What about your father? How old is he?”

  Lily shuddered. “Dead. A long time ago.”

  “Well, then. Let us see how things stand. Your mother cannot have brought this little girl into the world. She would have been too old. And your father died a long time ago, so he could not have given life to her either. Therefore she cannot be your sister.”

  Lily looked at the splodges on her felt shoes.

  “She is my sister.”

  The parson sighed and looked around the room for something that would inspire him. He saw only the unfinished work on his desk.

  “You know that the child has gone to Buscot Lodge to live with Mr. and Mrs. Vaughan?”

  “I know.”

  “It cannot help anyone to say the child is your sister, Mrs. White. Least of all the girl herself. Think about that.”

  Lily remembered the red blankets and the yellow and white-striped sugar canes. She lifted her head at last. “I know that. I am glad she is there. The Vaughans can look after Ann better than I can.”

  “Amelia,” he corrected her very gently. “She is the daughter they lost two years ago.”

  Lily blinked. “I don’t mind what they call her,” she said. “And I won’t make any trouble. Not for them and not for her.”

  “Good,” the parson said, still frowning. “Good.”

  The conversation seemed to be at an end.

  “Am I to be dismissed, Parson?”

  “Dismissed? Gracious, no!”

  She clasped her hands at her heart and bobbed her head, for her knees were too stiff for a curtsey. “Thank you, Parson. I’ll start the laundry, then, shall I?”

  He sat down at his desk and took up the page he had been writing.

  “Laundry . . . Yes, Mrs. White.”

  When she had done the laundry—and ironed the sheets and made the bed and mopped the floors and beaten the rugs and scrubbed the tiles and filled the log baskets and got the soot off the hearth and polished the furniture and shaken the curtains and knocked air into the cushions and gone round all the picture and mirror frames with a feather duster and put a shine on all the taps with vinegar and cooked the parson’s meal and set it ready on the table under a cloth, and washed up and cleaned the stove and left everything in the kitchen neat and tidy—Lily went and knocked again at the study door.

  The parson counted her wages into her hand and she took some of the coins and returned the rest to him as usual. He opened his desk drawer and took out the tin in which he kept her savings, opened it, and unfolded the piece of paper inside. On it he wrote numbers that he had explained to her at the beginning: today’s date and the amount she was giving him for safekeeping, then the new total of her savings.

  “Quite a nice little sum now, Mrs. White.”

  She nodded and smiled a brief nervous smile.

  “Wouldn’t you think of spending some? A pair of gloves? It is so bitter out of doors.”

  She shook her head.

  “Well, then, let me find you something . . .” He left the room briefly and, when he came back, held something out to her. “These still have some use in them. No point in them going unused when your hands are cold. Have them.”

  She took the gloves and handled them. They were knitted in thick green wool, with only very few holes. It would not be hard to mend them. She could tell from their soft touch how warm they would be on cold mornings along the riverbank.

  “Thank you, Parson. It’s very kind of you. But I should only lose them.”

  She placed the gloves on a corner of his desk, bid the Parson farewell, and left.

  The walk back along the river felt longer than usual. She had to stop at so many places to collect scraps for the pigs, and her bunions complained every step of the way. Her hands were frozen. She had had gloves when she was young. Her mother had knitted them in scarlet yarn and plaited a long string to thread through her sleeves so she couldn’t lose them. They had disappeared all the same. She hadn’t lost them—they had been taken from her. By the time she arrived at the cottage it was getting dark, she was cold to her bone marrow, and every part of her that could ache was aching. She eyed the post as she went by. The river was up compared to this morning. At her feet, its edge had crept a few malevolent inches closer to the house in her absence.

  She fed the pigs, and she felt the ginger pig’s eye on her, but she did not return the look. She was too tired to wonder about the moods of pigs this evening. Nor did she scratch the pig behind the ears, though the creature snuffled and grunted for her attention.

  The crates in the wood
shed that had been empty this morning now contained a dozen bottles.

  She approached the cottage nervously, opened the door, and peered in before stepping inside. There was nobody there. She checked the cavity behind the loose brick. It was empty. He had been, then. And gone.

  She thought she might light a candle for company, but when she went for her candlestick, the candle was gone. So was the bit of cheese she had planned to eat, and the bread, all but the hard crust.

  She sat on the steps to take her boots off. It was a struggle. She sat there in her coat and stockinged feet, looking at the damp shape on the floor where the river had dripped endlessly from the chemise of the nightmare sister, and thought.

  Lily was slow at thinking; it had always been so, since she was a little thing. She was a woman who let life happen to her without troubling her mind about things more than was necessary. The events of her life, its alterations and meanders, had not been in any way the result of any decisive action on her part but only accidents of fortune, the hand dealt by an inscrutable God, impositions by other people. She panicked at change, and submitted to it without question. Her only hope for many years had been that things would not get any worse—though generally they had. Contemplation of experience did not come naturally to her. But now that the first shock of Ann’s arrival had subsided, she sat on the steps and felt a question struggling to surface.

  Ann of the nightmares was a terrifying and vengeful figure, with her raised finger and her black eyes. Ann of the Swan at Radcot, Ann as she now saw her at the Vaughans, was a different Ann altogether. She was quiet. She did not stare, nor point, nor dart vindictive looks. She gave no appearance of being set on harming anyone, let alone Lily. This Ann who had come back was much more like Ann as she used to be.

  For two hours Lily sat on the steps with the darkness of the sky pressing at the window and the rush of the river in her ears. She thought of Ann who came from the river, dripping horror onto the floorboards. She thought of Ann by the fireplace at Buscot Lodge in her blue wool dress. By the time the watermark on the floor had merged with the general gloom, she had not organized her puzzlement into a question, and she was a long way from finding any answers. All she was left with when she rose stiffly and took her coat off to go to bed was a deep and impenetrable mystery.