Once Upon a River

by Diane Setterfield

  “You can’t sell it to him, not that foreign fellow,” people said. But all the other potential buyers tried to beat Mr. May down on price, and played one trick after another to get some advantage, and the black fellow offered the asking price and stuck to it, and what was more, Mr. May had been with him as he walked round the farm, had seen that he appreciated the straightness of his plow lines, had seen how he was with the sheep and the cows, and before long he had forgotten the color of Mr. Armstrong’s skin and understood that if he was to do the best thing for his land and his livestock, then Mr. Armstrong was the man.

  “What about the men that have worked for me so long?” asked Mr. May.

  “Those that want to stay shall stay, and if they work well over time they shall see their wages go up, and if they do not work well, then they must go after the first harvest,” said Armstrong, and so it was agreed.

  A handful of laborers refused to work for a Negro, but the rest stayed, though they muttered at first. Over time, as they got to know the new boss, they discovered that he was a man like any other, and even a bit better. A handful of the men—young like himself—clung to their contempt, sniggered to his face, and made gestures behind his back. They used their scorn for him as a reason to be slack in their work—why should they labor for a man such as he?—but they still took their pay on a Friday, and when they spent it in the inns around Kelmscott they spoke ill of him. He appeared not to notice, but in reality he was keeping a close eye on them while he waited to see whether or not they would settle.

  In the meantime, Robert Armstrong had to make friends. The man he knew best was the man he had bought the farm from, and he took to calling once a week on Mr. May in the cottage not very far from the farmhouse. There he sat for an hour talking about farming to a man who was happy to reminisce about the work that had been his life and that he had grown too frail to do. Mrs. May sat knitting in the corner, and the more she heard their visitor’s voice, which was better educated than most, and the more she heard his laughter, which was generous and rolling and made her husband laugh in turn, the more she liked him. From time to time their daughter came in, bringing tea or cakes.

  Bessie May had fallen ill as a small child, and the lasting result was that she swayed from side to side in her gait. As she walked, there was a distinct sinking as she stepped onto the left foot. It drew stares from strangers, and even people who knew her and knew the family said that she ought to be kept in instead of going about “like that.” If it had only been the gait, they might have frowned less than they did, but there was also the eye. She wore a patch over her right eye—not the same one all the time, but a different one, depending on the color of her dress. She had, it seemed, as many patches as dresses, sometimes made from offcuts of the same fabric, with ribbon ties that went around her head and disappeared into her pretty fair hair. She had an air of neatness about her, a care for her appearance that people found troubling. It was as if she thought she was the same as any other girl, as if she expected the same prospects. She ought, according to public opinion, to have retreated into the family home, to have made plain that she knew what everybody else knew: that she was unmarriageable, that she was destined for spinsterhood. Instead she hobbled into the heart of the church to take her place in the middle pews when she might have slipped in at the back and sat quite unnoticed. In good weather she limped to the bench on the green and sat with a book or a piece of embroidery; in winter she wore gloves and walked wherever the ground was level enough; when it was freezing she cast envious glances at those whose legs permitted them to risk the ice. Behind her back malicious boys—the same ones, in fact, who made jeering gestures behind Robert Armstrong’s back—imitated her swaying, drooping way of walking. People who knew her from childhood, before she wore the patch, remembered the way her eye showed too much white, while the pupil veered up and away. You couldn’t tell where she was looking or what she was seeing, they said. There had been a time when Bessie May had friends, a little coterie of girls who walked to and from school together, called at each other’s houses, took each other’s arms when they walked. But as the girls became little women, these friendships fell away. The other girls were afraid, perhaps, that Bessie’s deformities might be contagious, or that the men would keep their distance from any girl with Bessie at their side. By the time Robert Armstrong bought the farm, Bessie was lonely. She walked with her head high, smiling, and outwardly there was no alteration in her manner to the world, but she knew that the world had altered in its manner to her.

  One of the alterations was in the way that the young men of the village behaved. At sixteen, with her fair curls and her pretty smile and her neat waist, she was not without attraction. If you saw her seated, when the patch was away from you, you would think her one of the loveliest girls in the village. This was not lost on the young men who began to eye her in a vulgar way. When lust and scorn live alongside one another in the same heart, they make devilry. If they came upon her in an empty lane, the young men leered at Bessie, rushed at her, knowing she could not easily hop sideways to avoid their outstretched hands. More than once Bessie arrived home from an errand with a muddied skirt and grazed hands, having “tripped.”

  Robert Armstrong knew what the gang of young men on the farm thought of him. In his discreet scrutiny of them, he had also understood how they thought of Bessie May. One evening, when he arrived for one of his regular visits to the May household, Mr. May shook his head. “Not tonight, Armstrong.” His friend’s trembling hands and tearful eyes told him of some crisis. Watching the young men on the farm, hearing a snatch of laughing conversation in which Bessie’s name was mentioned boastfully by one of the lads, accompanied by a vulgar gesture, he feared he knew what the crisis was.

  In the next few days he did not see Bessie. She was not at church and she was not on the bench by the green. She did not run errands to the village and she did not tend the garden. When she reappeared, something had changed in her. She was neat and active as before but the simplicity and naturalness of her interest in the world had been exchanged for something grimmer. A determination not to be beaten.

  Armstrong thought about it. He made his decision, and then he slept, and when he woke the decision still seemed to be a good one. He intercepted Bessie on her way to take her father’s lunch to him, on the riverbank where the hawthorn gave way to the hazel. He saw her start and take fright when she realized there was nobody else in sight. He put his hands behind his back and looked at his feet as he spoke her name. “Miss May. We have spoken little before, but you know who I am. You know I am a friend of your father’s and the owner of this farm. You know I pay my debts on time. I have few friends but I am nobody’s enemy. If you should ever need anyone on your side, I beg that you would come to me. There is nothing I should like more than to ease your life. Whether that be as a friend or as a husband is a decision that is yours to make. Please know that I am at your service.” He raised his head to meet her astonished eye, gave her a brief bow, and departed.

  The following day he came to the same place at the same time and she was already there. “Mr. Armstrong,” she began, “I don’t know how to talk the way you talk. You have finer words than me. Before I can say anything to you about what you said yesterday, there is something I must do. I will do it now, and when I have done it you might feel different about it all.”

  He nodded.

  She lowered her head, raised her fingers to her patch, tugged it over the bridge of her nose until it covered her good eye and her other eye was revealed. Then she turned her eye on him.

  Armstrong examined Bessie’s eye. It seemed to quiver with a life of its own. The iris, off-center, was on the surface the same blue as its twin but contained undercurrents of a darker shade beneath. The pupil, such a familiar thing, that one saw in every familiar face, every day, was made strange in Bess’s face by its skew. Suddenly he was distracted from his staring by the realization that he was the one being examined. He felt himself dissected, naked under
her gaze. Exposed to its focus, he suddenly remembered incidents of boyish shame. Moments came back to him when he had behaved less honorably than he wished. He remembered instances of neglect and ingratitude. He felt the pang of remorse and resolved not to do the same again. He also felt relief that these small acts of neglect were all he had to regret in his life.

  The moment did not last long. When it was done, Bessie lowered her head and adjusted the patch. She turned her everyday face back to him, and it was altered. There was surprise in it, and something else that warmed him and made his heart thrill. Her good eye softened, contained dawning affection—admiration, even. It was the kind of sentiment that one day—could he bring himself to believe it?—might lead to love.

  “There is something you should know about me, Mr. Armstrong.” She spoke low and her voice was unsteady.

  “I know it.”

  “I don’t mean this.” She indicated her patch.

  “Nor do I. Nor your limp either.”

  She stared at him. “How do you know?”

  “I guessed.”

  “And you still wish to marry me?”

  “I do.”

  “But what if . . . ?”

  “If there is a baby?”

  She nodded, reddened, and looked down in embarrassment.

  “Do not blush, Bess. No shame attaches to you in this. The shame lies on another’s shoulders. And if there is a child, then you and I will raise it and love it just as we will raise and love our own children.”

  She lifted her face and met his steady gaze. “Then yes, Mr. Armstrong. Yes, I will be your wife.”

  They did not kiss and they did not touch. He simply asked her to let her father know that he would call on him later that day.

  “I will tell him.”

  Armstrong visited Mr. May and the marriage was agreed.

  When the young man who had been troublesome at the farm and worse than troublesome to Bessie arrived at work the next morning, with his usual swagger, Armstrong was waiting. He gave him the wages he was owed and dismissed him. “If I ever hear of you within twelve miles of this place, it will be the worse for you,” he told him, and his tone was so mild that the young man looked up with astonishment to see whether he had heard right. But the look in Armstrong’s eye told him that every word was meant, and instead of the insolent answer he had in his mind to deliver, he was silent as he left, and his curses were under his breath.

  The engagement was announced and the wedding followed soon after. People talked. People always do. The church was filled with the curious on the wedding day of the swarthy farmer and his deformed pale bride. There was money there—oh, she had done well, in that respect—and with her blue eyes and blond hair and trim figure he had, in that at least, done better than he could ever have expected. Yet the congratulations were tinged with the color of pity, and nobody envied them. There was a general feeling that it made sense for the two unmarriageables to have found each other, and every unmarried guest present felt a pang of relief: Thank goodness they would not be obliged to make such devastating compromises in their own choices. Better a poor laborer than a landowner with a Negro mother; rather a rough laundry maid than a farmer’s daughter cross-eyed and with a limp.

  When Bessie’s stomach began to swell a few months after the marriage, it was a scandal. What kind of a child would it be? A monster, surely. After children called out cruel names to Bessie in the street, she stopped going out beyond the extent of the farm. She waited her time nervously but Armstrong talked soothingly to her. The sound of his voice comforted her, and when he placed his hands on her growing belly and said, “All will be well,” she could not help but think it would.

  The midwife who delivered the child went directly to her friends on leaving, and they passed the news rapidly to all others. What monster was it that had emerged from between the legs of squinting Bessie, put there by her dark husband? Those that expected three eyes, woolly hair, and shriveled limbs were disappointed. The baby was normal. And not only that. “Beautiful!” she rhapsodized. “Who’d have thought it? The loveliest baby I ever did see.” And before long the rest saw it too. Armstrong went on horseback here and there and on his knee they all saw the child: light curls, a bonny complexion, and a smile so charming you could not help but smile back.

  “Let us call him Robert,” Armstrong said, “like me.” And so he was christened, but because he was little, they called him Robin, and as he grew they continued with Robin, for it was a way of telling father and the son apart. And in time there were other children too, girls and boys and all of them hale and happy children. Some were dark and some less dark and some were almost fair, though none so fair as Robin.

  Armstrong and Bessie were happy. They had made a happy family.

  Photographing Amelia

  Towards the beginning of the last week of March came the day of the spring equinox. Light equaled dark; day and night were perfectly poised; even human affairs enjoyed a moment of balance. The river was high; it is the way of the river to be high at the equinoxes.

  Vaughan woke first. It was late, they had slept through the birdsong, through the fading of the darkness, and light was waiting behind the curtains.

  Next to him, Helena was still asleep, one arm flung above her head on the pillow. He kissed the tender flesh on the inside of her arm. Without opening her eyes, she smiled and shifted closer to his warmth. She was still naked from last night. These days they slipped from pleasure into sleep and from sleep into pleasure again. Under the bedclothes his hand found her rib cage, traveled the smooth curve to her waist, her hip. Her toes came to nudge his.

  Afterwards he said, “You go back to sleep for another hour if you want. I’ll give her breakfast.” She nodded, smiling, and closed her eyes. They were both capable now of sleeping lengthily, nine or ten hours at a stretch sometimes, making up for the years of insomnia. It was the child’s doing. She had mended their nights. She had mended their marriage too.

  In the breakfast room he and the child sat in companionable silence. When Helena was present, she chatted constantly to the girl, but he did not attempt to talk to her or to gain her attention by any deliberate means. Instead he buttered her toast, spread the marmalade, and sliced it into soldiers while she watched, absorbed. She ate with concentration, in a self-contained reverie, until an overgenerous blob of marmalade fell from the edge of the toast onto the tablecloth, and she glanced up to see whether he had seen it. Her eyes—that Helena called green and he called blue and that were gravely fathomless—met his, and he smiled at her, a small, kindly, undemanding smile. There came a slight, fleeting twitch of her mouth in return, and though it had happened a dozen times before, he still felt his heart lurch at it.

  He felt the same leap in the chest when she turned to him for reassurance. Though she was fearless on the river, she was nervous of all sorts of other things—the approach of horses on cobblestones, doors that slammed, overfamiliar strangers who reached down to tweak her nose, the beating of rugs with brooms—and it was him she looked to when she was startled. In unfamiliar situations it was his hand she reached for, he to whom she lifted her arms to be lifted out of some perceived danger. He was touched by her selection of him as her protector. Two years ago he had failed to protect Amelia; this felt like a second chance. With every danger averted, he felt his faith in himself returning.

  The child still did not speak; she was often absent, sometimes indifferent; yet her presence gladdened him. A hundred times a day his mind made the journey from Amelia to this child and from this child back to Amelia. The path between the two of them was now so well traveled that it was impossible to think of one without the other. They had become aspects of the same thought.

  The maid came to clear the breakfast things.

  “The photographer is coming at half past ten,” he reminded her. “I expect we’ll have coffee first.”

  “It’s the day the nurse comes: Will she have coffee too?”

  “Yes, coffee for everyone.�
�

  The maid looked anxiously at the child’s hair that was still tangled from sleep.

  “Should I try and brush Miss Amelia’s hair for the photographs?” she offered, eyeing the tangle with a doubtful expression.

  “Let Mrs. Vaughan do it when she’s up.”

  The maid looked relieved.

  There was something Vaughan needed to do to prepare himself before Daunt arrived.

  “Come on, little one,” he said.

  He lifted the child and carried her into the drawing room. He sat at the desk and placed the girl sideways on his lap so she could see into the garden.

  He reached for the photograph of Amelia.

  With the coming of the girl, his fear of memory, so powerful that he had sought to bury his daughter’s face entirely, had lessened. He had had the sense—irrational, he knew—that Amelia herself was looking for him, and that he owed it to her to meet her gaze. Across that awful divide. Now that the moment had come, with the girl on his lap, he found that the task did not seem so difficult as he had feared.

  He turned the image to face him and looked at it through the haze of the child’s unbrushed hair.

  It was a traditional family pose. Helena was seated with Amelia on her knees. Behind them, Vaughan himself. Knowing that the slightest quiver of emotion might end in a disastrous waste of time, money, and effort, he had stared too fiercely, and as a result looked intimidating to those that didn’t know him and comic to those that did. Helena had been entirely unable to suppress her smile, but delivered it so steadily to the camera that her beauty was crisp in every detail. On her knees: Amelia.

  On a photograph three inches by five, his daughter’s face was small, smaller even than the thumbnail of the child on his lap. At two she retained that undefined quality in her face that lingered from her baby years. Moreover, she had been unable to keep entirely still. The indistinct features had something universal about them: they lent themselves as easily to the face of the little girl on his lap as to the daughter he had tried so hard to lock away out of sight and out of mind. Her feet must have moved too, for they were a blur, spectral, boneless, the kind a ghost might hover on. Around her small body was a froth of petticoat and skirt that dissolved into transparency at its edges. The hands were lost in its spume.