Once Upon a River

by Diane Setterfield

  He grunted. “Don’t know what you do with your money. What is it, don’t you trust me?”

  “ ’Course I do.”

  “Good. This is for your own good, you know that.”

  She nodded meekly.

  “All this”—he gestured expansively, and she didn’t know whether he meant the cottage or the liquor in the woodshed or some other thing, bigger and less visible, behind it all and including it—“all this, it’s not for me, Lil.”

  She watched him. You had to. You couldn’t afford to miss a thing, with Vic.

  “It’s for us. For the family. You wait. One day you won’t have to go skivvying for that old parson no more. You’ll live in a great white house ten times finer than that. You and me and—”

  He broke off sharply, but his thoughts didn’t. They carried him on, and she saw how his gaze softened as he gloated over the future he kept hugged to himself so privately.

  “Now this,” and he waved his closed fist so she could hear the pennies rattling, “is an investment. You’ve heard me talk about my scheme, haven’t you?”

  “This last five years, yes.” It’d been a recurring theme. Whether he was in a good mood or bad, whether the money was right or wrong, the scheme always lulled him. It made him quiet and it took the edge off the sharp look in his eyes. Sometimes when he mentioned it his thin mouth twitched in a way that, if it were some other mouth, might have resulted in a smile. But he was secretive about this scheme, as he was about everything he did, and she was as ignorant of what it was as she had been when she first heard of it.

  “It’s a lot longer than five years ago.” The nostalgia in his voice was almost musical. “That’s just when I told you about it. Twenty years ago, I reckon I started plotting it out. Longer than that, even, if you look at it one way!” He twitched in self-congratulation. “And soon the time’ll be ripe. So don’t you worry about your pennies, Lil, they’re safe with me. It’s all”—his mouth twisted—“all in the family!”

  He slid a couple of coins back into her purse and dropped it on the bed, rose, and descended the steps to the kitchen.

  “I’ve put a crate in the woodshed,” he told her in a new tone of voice. “Someone’ll come and take it away. Same as always. And there’s a couple of barrels in the usual place. You didn’t see ’em come and you won’t see ’em go.”

  “Yes, Vic.”

  Then, helping himself to her three new candles on the way, he opened the door and was gone.

  She lay in bed thinking about his scheme. Not work at the parsonage anymore? Live in a great white house with Vic? She frowned. This cottage was cold and damp, but at least she had her days at the parsonage and was often alone at night. And—who else would be there? The words sounded again in her head. “You and me and—”

  And who?

  Did he mean Ann? For the family, he’d said. He must mean Ann. After all, he was the one who had come to her in the night with instructions to cross the river to the Swan at first light to fetch back the child who’d died and lived again.

  She thought of her sister with Mr. and Mrs. Vaughan, in her bedroom with red blankets and the log basket piled high, and pictures on the wall.

  No, she decided. He must not have her.

  Gone! Or, Mr. Armstrong Goes to Bampton

  “What can I do?” Armstrong asked for the hundredth time as he paced in front of the fireplace in his own drawing room. Bess sat knitting by the fire. For the hundredth time she shook her head and admitted that she didn’t know.

  “I’ll go to Oxford. I’ll have it out with him.”

  She sighed. “He won’t thank you for it. It’ll only make things worse.”

  “But I have to do something. There are the Vaughans, living with the girl and getting more attached to her with every day that passes, and Robin does nothing! Why doesn’t he make his mind up? What’s the cause of the delay?”

  Bess looked up doubtfully from her work. “He won’t tell you anything until he’s ready. And even then, perhaps not.”

  “This is different. This is a child.”

  She sighed. “Alice. Our first granddaughter.” She looked wistful but then shook her head. “It will end badly if you have it out with him. You know what he’s like.”

  “Then I shall go back to Bampton.”

  She looked up. Her husband’s face was set, determined.

  “What will you do there?”

  “Find someone who knew Alice. Bring them to Buscot. Put them in front of the child and find out once and for all who she is.”

  Bess frowned. “And you think the Vaughans will allow that?”

  Armstrong opened his mouth and closed it again. “You’re right,” he admitted, with a gesture of helplessness. Yet he could not let the matter drop. “Still, at least if I go, I can find someone who would know; and once I’ve done that, I can talk to Robin and see whether he wants to speak to the Vaughans and—oh! I don’t know. The thing is, Bess, what else is there? I can’t do nothing.”

  She looked at him fondly. “No. You were never any good at that.”

  The lodging house in Bampton was no more respectable-looking than before, but it had a merrier air than the last time he had seen it. Through an open upper window he heard the tune of a fiddle and the arrhythmic wooden tapping sound that you hear when inebriated people dance on bare floorboards, having rolled the carpets back. Bursts of female laughter were interspersed with clapping, and the noise was so boisterous that he had to ring twice before he was heard.

  “Come in, my duck!” exclaimed the woman who answered the door, shoeless and red-faced with exertion or liquor, and without waiting she withdrew upstairs, beckoning him to follow. He climbed the stairs, and he remembered climbing the last time, when the poor dead woman in the room at the top was still just a letter writer to him, and Alice a mere name. The woman led him to the first floor, where a number of men and women were hopping about in country style while the fiddler tried to catch them out by playing faster and faster. She pressed a glass of crystal clear liquor into his hand and, when he demurred, invited him to dance.

  “No, thank you all the same! In fact, I’m here to see Mrs. Eavis.”

  “She’s not ’ere, thank the Lord. You’ll have a lot more fun without ’er, lovey!”—and she took his hands and tried again to get him to dance, though her efforts were compromised by her intermittent difficulties in remaining upright.

  “I won’t keep you from your friends any longer, then, Miss, but perhaps you could tell me where to find her?”

  “She’s gone away.”

  “But where?”

  She pulled a face indicative of great mystification. “Nobody knows.” Then, clapping her hands for attention, she shouted over the music. “The gentleman wants Mrs. Eavis!”

  “Gone away!” cried two or three dancers in unison, with much laughter, and they seemed to dance all the merrier for her absence.

  “When did this happen?” He took his purse and clasped it so that she could see it clearly as he asked the question. The sight of it sobered her and she answered as fully as she possibly could. “Six or seven weeks ago, I should say. A fellow came to see her—so I hear—and she let him into her drawing room and they was there all evening long and when he went away she went about all puffed up with a secret for a few days and soon after a trap come to the door and took her cases and off she went.”

  “Were you here before Christmas? I wonder. There was a Mrs. Armstrong lived here with her little girl, Alice.”

  “The one that died?” She shook her head. “We’re all new since then. Nobody stayed long when Mrs. Eavis was here, ’cause nobody liked her, and when she went, them that owed her money scarpered.”

  “What do you know of Mrs. Armstrong?”

  “She was not the right sort for this place. That’s what I heard. Did the cooking and the cleaning here. She was pretty in a skinny sort of way—and there’s some that likes that; takes all sorts—and once the customers had seen her, there was some that wante
d a bit. But she wouldn’t. That set old Eavis against her. Said she wasn’t having no silly girl give herself airs and gave the key to her room to one of the gentlemen to teach her a lesson. The day after that, she did what she did.”

  “She had a lover, I think. Who abandoned her?”

  “Husband is what I heard. Mind you, lovers, husbands, it’s all the same, isn’t it? A girl’s better off on her own. Give them what they want, then take the money and bye-bye. Not her, though. She was the wrong sort.”

  Armstrong frowned. “When will Mrs. Eavis be back?”

  “Nobody knows, and I hope it’ll be a good long time. I’ll be off as soon as she comes back, that’s for sure.”

  “So where has she gone?”

  The woman shook her head. “She’d come into some money and she was going away. That’s all I heard.”

  Armstrong gave the woman some money, and again she offered him a drink, or a dance, or “anything you like, my duck.” He refused politely and took his leave.

  Come into some money? It wasn’t impossible, he supposed on his way down the stairs, but after the bad taste left by his first visit to the house, he felt inclined to doubt everything about Mrs. Eavis.

  Back in the street he regretted the journey, for it had wasted his time and his horse; but since he was there, another idea rose to the surface that he had already thought of and discounted. Now that he considered it again, it seemed to him that it was a better idea than Mrs. Eavis in any case. He would find Ben, the butcher’s boy. He remembered Alice and would know at a glance whether the child at the Vaughans was her or not. The word of a child would weigh very little in deciding the matter in law, but that hardly mattered: it was not the law he was thinking of. It seemed to him that his own certainty one way or the other would be a very valuable thing in its own right. If Ben recognized the child as Alice, he would have solid reason to pursue things further with his son. And if he did not, he would share that information with the Vaughans, and so give them the certainty that Robin was unable to offer of his own accord.

  Armstrong walked up the high street, half expecting to find Ben by just bumping into him as he had before. But Ben was not on the grassy mound where they had played marbles and he was not visible in his father’s shop and he was not loitering in the street. When he had peered into every side alley and shop window without result, he stopped a passing boy of about Ben’s age to ask his whereabouts.

  “He’s run away,” the boy told him.

  Armstrong was perplexed. “When was this?”

  “Few weeks ago. His dad give him a right beating till he were black-and-blue. Next thing, he were gone.”

  “Do you know where he went?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “Was there anywhere he talked of going?”

  “Some farm over Kelmscott way. A grand fellow over there was going to give him a job, he said. There’d be bread and honey and a mattress to sleep on and paid on the dot every Friday.” The boy sounded wistful for such a place. “I never believed in it, though.”

  Armstrong gave him a coin and went to the butcher’s shop. A young man was at the block with a weighty knife, dark with blood. He was chopping a loin into chops. At the sound of the bell, he looked up. His features were strikingly like Ben’s, though the sullen expression was entirely his own.

  “What do you want?”

  Armstrong was used to hostility and could assess with accuracy how deep it went in a person. As often as not, people reserved their curtness for people who were, like him, unfamiliar. Difference was upsetting, and people armed themselves in aggression when they met it. With kindness in his voice he could usually disarm them. Though their eyes told them to fear him, their ears reassured. But some people went about in their armor every day and showed the blades of their swords to all. The whole world was the enemy. That kind of antipathy he could do nothing about, and that was what he met here. He made no attempt to please, just said, “I’m looking for your brother, Ben. Where is he?”

  “Why? What’s he done?”

  “Nothing that I know of. I’ve got a job for him.”

  From an archway at the back of the shop an older voice emerged. “No good for anything but eating the profits, that lad.” The words sounded as though they came from a mouth stuffed with food.

  Armstrong leant to look through the archway into the room beyond. A man of about his own age sat in a stained armchair. On a table at his side was a loaf of bread and a large ham, with several slices cut from it. The butcher’s cheeks were as pink and fatly gleaming as the meat. A pipe rested in the ashtray. A glass was half full of something and the bottle it came from rested in the man’s lap, against his round belly, unstoppered.

  “Any idea where he might have gone?” Armstrong asked.

  The man shook his head. “Don’t care. Lazy blighter.” He speared another slice of ham with his fork and crammed it whole into his mouth.

  Armstrong turned away, but before he could leave a small, shrunken woman shuffled into the back room carrying a broom. He stood back to let her through into the shop, where she started to sweep the sawdust. She hung her head so that he could not see her face.

  “Excuse me, ma’am—”

  She turned. She was younger than he expected from the slowness of her movements, and her eyes were nervous.

  “I’m looking for Ben. Your son?”

  There was no light in her eye.

  “Do you have any idea where he might be?”

  She gave a listless shake of the head, unable, it seemed, to rouse the energy for speech.

  Armstrong sighed. “Well . . . thank you.”

  He was glad to be outdoors again.

  Armstrong found water for Fleet and then he and the horse made for the river. This stretch was broad and straight and at times the water appeared so still, you might take it for a solid mass till you threw something in—a twig or an apple core—and saw with what powerful rapidity it was carried away. On a felled trunk not far from the bridge, he unwrapped his own lunch and took a mouthful. The meat was good, and so was the bread, but the sight of the butcher’s greed had cut his appetite. He broke the bread into small crumbs and strewed them around, for the little birds that came pecking; then he sat very still, looking into the water. Surrounded by robins and thrushes, he reflected on the disappointments of his day.

  The failure of his visit to Mrs. Eavis was bad enough, but the discovery that Ben was missing had lowered his spirits still further. He remembered the boy’s care for Fleet. He pictured the way he had eaten so ravenously when Armstrong offered him buns. He reflected on the boy’s cheerful spirit. He thought of the dismal air in the butcher’s shop, the monstrous father, the browbeaten mother, and the first son, dead at heart, and marveled at Ben’s optimism. Where was the boy now? If, as the grocer’s boy had said, he was making for Kelmscott, for Armstrong and the farm, why had he not arrived? It was no more than six miles—why, a boy ought to cover that distance in only a couple of hours. What had become of him?

  And there was the girl. What could he do to further matters there? His heart sank at the thought of a child caught between two families, the impossibility of making sure she was in the right place. And from the child his thoughts turned to Robin, and then his heart almost broke. He remembered the first time he had held him. The infant had been so small and light, yet the whole of life was present in the tentative movement of his arms and legs. During Bess’s pregnancy Armstrong had looked forward to loving and caring for this child—had awaited the day with excitement and impatience—yet still when the moment came he was overwhelmed by the strength of the feeling that swept over him. The infant in his arms obliterated all else, and he had vowed that this child would never feel hungry or lonely or be placed in danger. He would love and protect this child who would grow up a stranger to sorrow and loneliness. The same feeling rose in his chest now.

  Armstrong wiped his eyes. The sudden movement made the robins and thrushes fly up and away. He got to his feet and an
swered Fleet’s greeting with a rub and a pat.

  “Come on. We’re too old to ride to Oxford together, and in any case I haven’t the time. But let’s go to Lechlade. I’ll leave you near the station and take the train. The boys will feed the pigs when they see I’m not back.”

  Fleet harrumphed softly.

  “Foolish?” he answered. He hesitated, one foot in the stirrup. “Quite possibly. But what else is there? I can’t do nothing.” He swung into the saddle and they turned upstream.

  Armstrong asked for his son’s lodgings. He made his way to a part of town where the streets were broader, the houses larger and well maintained. When he came to the street to which he had been sending letters these last two years, he slowed, uneasy, and when he came to number 8—large and grand and painted white—he halted at the gate and frowned. This was all too expensive by a long way. His own home, the farmhouse, was not inexpensive—he did not hesitate to spend on the comfort and well-being of his family—but this grandeur was on another level altogether. Armstrong was not a stranger to fine villas—the accident of his birth meant that several grand households had opened their doors to him in his early years—and he was unintimidated by this display of wealth, yet he was troubled at the thought of his son residing in such a place. Where would he get the money for it? But might it be that he lodged in a single room in the attic? Or—was it possible?—perhaps there was another street in another part of town that bore the same name?

  Armstrong entered by the second, smaller gate that led by a narrow path to the back of the house and knocked at the kitchen door. It was answered by a girl of eleven or twelve with a lank plait and a cowed air, who shook her head at his suggestion of there being two streets with the same name.

  “In that case, is there a Mr. Robin Armstrong here?”

  The girl hesitated. She seemed at once to shrink into herself and to stare more intently at him, in close scrutiny. The name was plainly known to her, and Armstrong was about to encourage her to speak, when a woman of about thirty appeared behind her.