The child shifted in his lap and he looked down. A bead of water had appeared on her hand. She raised it to her mouth and licked it, then looked up at him with casual curiosity.
He was weeping.
“Silly Dada,” he said, and bent to kiss her head, but she squirmed free. She crossed the room to the door, where she stopped and turned and extended a hand towards him. He followed, put his hand in hers, and allowed himself to be led out of the house, into the garden, and down the shallow gravel slope to the river.
“What’s this in aid of?” he wondered aloud. “Is this supposed to make me feel better?”
She stared up the river and down, and, when there was nothing to see, looked around for a good stick to prod and poke with at the water’s edge. When she had done with that, she passed the stick to Vaughan to continue while she selected some large stones from the slope to take and wash in the water. The washing seemed without purpose, and out of nowhere Vaughan was struck by the notion that he had stood here once before and watched Amelia wash stones. Did he not remember a time, some years ago, when the two of them had been at the river’s edge, just like this, rinsing stones for no reason and prodding at the soft mud in the shallows? He raised his head to work out whether the memory was genuine or whether it was some curious reverse echo by which the present seems to duplicate itself in the past.
The girl had stopped her labor with the stones. On all fours, she bent close to the water’s surface as if it were a mirror. Looking back at her was another girl, one he knew.
“Amelia!”
He grasped for her, but at his touch she was gone and his fingers were wet.
The girl sat up and turned her ever-changing eyes on him in an attitude of mild concern.
“Who are you? I know you’re not her—but if you are . . . if you are—am I going mad?”
She handed him the stick and indicated with a vigorous motion that he should dig a channel with it. She lined it with her stones. She was exacting in her expectations, and it took some time before she was satisfied. Then he understood: they were to watch it. They saw how the water trickled in, and how it silted up, and how rapidly the work of the river undid the work of a man and a child.
In the end they carried the coffee outdoors and down to the boathouse. It was generally agreed that a riverside setting would be more interesting than an indoor photograph, so they must make the most of the dry weather while it lasted.
Once they’d got the camera in position, Daunt went to prepare the first plate. “While I’m gone, here are the other exposures. From last time.”
Helena unfastened the hinged lid of the wooden box. The interior was lined with felt. It contained, each in its slot, two glass plates.
“Oh!” Helena said, when she was holding the first up to the light. “How strange!”
“It takes you aback, doesn’t it?” Rita said. “Light and shade are reversed.” She peered at the same plate. “I fear Mr. Daunt was right and you already have the best ones. This one is rather blurred.”
“What do you think, darling?” Helena asked, passing the plate to Vaughan.
He glanced at the plate, saw a smudge of a child, and looked away again.
“Are you all right?” Rita asked.
He nodded. “Too much coffee.”
Helena removed the second plate from the box and studied it. “They are blurred, it’s true, but not so much that you can’t see the thing that matters. It is Amelia. That’s perfectly plain.” Her voice contained no unsettling intensity, no rising note of hysteria. It was measured—mild, even. “This question in Mr. Armstrong’s mind will never come to anything, but the lawyer thinks we should be ready, just in case.”
“Mr. Armstrong’s visits continue?”
Helena’s nod was unperturbed. “They do.”
Rita caught Vaughan’s face as it flinched at the sound of the other man’s name.
But then Daunt was there. Helena slid the plates back into the box and swung the child into her arms with a wide smile. “Where do you want us for the new photographs?”
Daunt looked to the sky to gauge the sun, then pointed. “Just there.”
The girl fidgeted and struggled, turned her head and shuffled her feet, and one expensive plate after another had to be abandoned, as it was not worth developing.
Just as they were on the point of becoming dispirited, Rita made a suggestion.
“Put her in a boat. She’ll settle on the water, and the river is steady.”
Daunt eyed the river to see how much motion there was in it. The current was untroubled. He shrugged and nodded. It was worth a try.
They carried the camera to the bank. Helena brought the little rowing boat from the days of her girlhood out to the jetty and secured it.
The river pulled at the boat with even energy, tautening the mooring rope. The girl stepped into it. There was no rocking, no need to get her balance. She stood, poised on the shifting water.
Daunt opened his mouth to ask her to sit down, but there then came one of those moments that mean everything to a photographer, and he thought better of it. The wind chased the heavy cloud from the sun and put in its place a scant white veil that softened the light and blurred shadows. In response, the water lightened to a pearlized finish at the very moment the girl turned to gaze upriver in just the direction the camera needed. Perfection.
Daunt whipped away the lens cover and all fell silent, willing the sun, the wind, and the river to hold. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen.
Success!
“Ever seen developing in process?” Daunt asked Vaughan as he lightproofed the plate and extracted it from the camera. “No? Come and watch. You’ll see the darkroom and how I’ve kitted it out.”
“That cloud is heading back,” Helena said, craning her neck to look skywards as the men disappeared into the darkroom. “What do you reckon?”
“We’ll be all right for a bit.”
They returned the little old rowing boat to the boathouse and took out the larger one, more suitable for two women and a child. Rita set it rocking as she got in and had to find her balance again. Helena stepped in deftly, barely altering the equilibrium of the boat in the water, and before she could turn to lift the child, there she was, by her side, having stepped from land to water as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
They seated themselves, the child on the passenger seat, then Helena, with Rita behind. From the minute the boat drew out into the current, Rita felt the power of the other woman’s stroke.
“Amelia! Sit down!” Helena cried with a laugh. “She does insist on standing. We shall have to get her a punt or a gondola if she keeps on!”
The little girl’s back stiffened as she raised her head to look intently ahead, but the river was empty—theirs was the only vessel out in the bad weather—and when she slumped, Rita felt the poignancy of her disappointment. “What is it she looks for?” she wondered aloud.
Helena shrugged. “She is always interested in the river. She’d spend all day here if she could. I was just the same at her age. It’s in the blood.”
It was not an answer to her question, but nor was it a deliberate evasion. For all the intensity and constancy of Helena’s gazing at the child, Rita had the impression that in certain ways she failed to actually see her. She saw Amelia—her Amelia—for that was what she needed to see. But there was more to this child than that. She, Rita, could not see the child without the urge to lift her into her arms and comfort her. It was an instinct that perplexed her, and she tried to bury it in questions.
“Still no notion about where she was before?”
“She’s back. That’s all that matters now.”
Rita tried another tack. “No news about the kidnappers?”
“Not a thing.”
“And the window locks—do you feel secure now?”
“I still get the feeling that someone is watching.”
“You r
emember the man I told you about? The one who asked me whether she was speaking and what the doctor had said?”
“You haven’t seen him again?”
“No. But his interest in the six months it might take for her voice to return does make me wonder whether that is the time to look out for him.”
“The summer solstice.”
“That’s right. Tell me about the nursery maid Amelia had in the old days . . . What became of her?”
“It is good news for Ruby that Amelia is back. She struggled to find work afterwards. There was so much malicious gossip.”
“People thought that Ruby had something to do with it at the time, didn’t they? Because she was absent from the house?”
“Yes, but—” Helena stopped rowing. Rita was getting out of breath from the exertion, so they allowed the river to carry them back, Helena doing just enough to keep them straight. “Ruby was the best of girls. She came to us at sixteen. Had lots of younger brothers and sisters, so she was experienced with little ones. And she loved Amelia. You only had to see them together.”
“So why wasn’t she at home the night it happened?”
“She couldn’t explain. That’s why people thought she had something to do with it, but more fool them. I know she wouldn’t have harmed Amelia.”
“Did she have an admirer?”
“Not yet. She had the same dreams as most girls that age. Meeting a nice young man, courtship, marriage, a family of her own. But that was all still in the future. She wanted it, was putting money aside for the future, like a sensible girl, but it hadn’t happened yet.”
“Might there have been a secret admirer? Some charming rogue she wouldn’t have wanted you to know about?”
“She wasn’t the type.”
“Tell me how it happened.”
Rita listened to Helena recount the night of the kidnap. Her voice grew taut as she remembered the events; every so often she paused—to look at the child, Rita guessed—and when her voice took up again, it was softer, reassured by the presence of the child who had returned so unexpectedly from nowhere.
When she got to the part where Ruby returned, Rita interrupted.
“So she arrived back from the garden? And what did she say to explain herself?”
“That she had gone for a walk. The policemen took her into Anthony’s study and kept her for hours. Why go for a walk in the cold? Why go at night? Why go when the river gypsies were about? They badgered and bullied her. She wept and they shouted, but still she gave no other answer. She’d been for a walk. That’s all she would say. She went for a walk for no reason.”
“And you believed her?”
“Don’t we all do unexpected things from time to time? Don’t we all break habits and entertain the thought of something novel? At sixteen we are too young to know what we are—and if a girl suddenly wants to go for a walk though it is dark, why should she not? I was out on the river at all hours at that age, winter and summer alike. There was nothing ill in it. It might be different if Ruby was a sly or devilish girl, but there is no malice in her. If I am Amelia’s mother and I say so, why will others not believe it?”
Because it needs an explanation, thought Rita.
“Once the police got it into their heads that it was the river gypsies, they forgot all about Ruby and her nocturne. I wish everybody else had too. Poor girl.”
A spattering of raindrops broke the surface of the river, and both women looked up. The rain clouds were regrouping.
“Had we better turn back?”
They hesitated, but another heavier burst of rain pocked the water around them and they turned the boat.
It was hard going against the current. Before long the rain was falling not in experimental squalls but with steady purpose, and Rita felt her shoulders soaked. The rain dripped from her hair and into her eyes. Her wet hands felt sore and she concentrated hard to match the pace.
At last a cry from Helena told her they had arrived. When she was finally able to get a hand free to wipe the rain out of her eyes, she caught a glimpse of something on the far bank.
“We are being watched,” Rita told Helena. “Don’t look now but there is someone hiding in that scrub. Listen, this is what we’ll do.”
At the boathouse Helena lifted the child out of the boat and onto the bank and in the pouring rain the two of them made their way in a half run to the shelter of Collodion. Rita stepped back into the boat with the rope, took up her oars, and was away again, steering a course directly across the current. She was tired, and not fast, but if anyone tried to run, they would have to break cover and be seen.
There was no mooring point on the other side, only the reeds to stop the boat. Rita scrambled out and up the bank. She paid no heed to the muddying of her hem, the fact that she was wet up to her knees and her shoulders were drenched with rain, but made directly for the cluster of shrubs. As she approached, the branches shivered: whoever was there was trying to bury deeper into concealment. She looked through the maze of branches to where a sodden figure crouched with its back to her.
“Come out,” she said.
The figure didn’t move, but the hunched back shook as if the person was weeping.
“Lily, come out. It’s only me, Rita.”
Lily began to edge backwards, branches and thorns catching at her clothes and her hair. Once she had crawled out a little way, leaving some of her own hair behind in the shrubbery, Rita was able to help her by reaching in to detach the clinging spines one after another from the wet cloth of Lily’s dress.
“Dear, oh, dear . . .” Rita murmured as she smoothed Lily’s hair. The woman’s hands were crisscrossed with scratches. A bramble had caught her face; beads of blood sat along the red line like berries until they fell in crimson tears down her cheeks.
Rita took out a fresh handkerchief and pressed it very gently to Lily’s cheek. Lily’s eyes flickered nervously between Rita, the river, and the far bank where Daunt, Vaughan, and Helena were on deck, oblivious to the rain, looking back. Beside them the girl leant out over the water with her fathoms-deep stare while Vaughan held the back of her dress.
“Come across,” Rita soothed. “I’ll wash that scratch for you.”
Lily started in fear. “I can’t!”
“They won’t be cross,” she told her in her kindest voice. “They thought it was someone who wanted to hurt the little girl.”
“I won’t hurt her! I never wanted to hurt her! I never did!”
Abruptly she gathered herself and turned to hurry away.
Rita reached after her—“Lily!” —but Lily would not be held back. She reached the path and, before she had quite scurried out of earshot, called back over her shoulder to Rita on the bank: “Tell them I meant no harm! No harm!” And then she was gone.
By the time Rita had cleaned her dress and given her boots a chance to dry out, it was getting dark. Henry Daunt offered to take her home in Collodion to save another drenching. They made their way down the garden and to the jetty. Daunt offered his hand to help her where the path was uneven underfoot, but she did not take it, so he confined himself to pushing low branches out of the way. Once the two of them were on board, he navigated his way by moonlight to her cottage. It had rained on and off all afternoon, and now that they had reached her home, it suddenly drummed heavily on the roof of the boat.
“It will ease in a bit,” he said over the noise. “No point going straight in: you’ll be soaked to the skin before you reach the door.”
Daunt lit a pipe. The cabin was snug when two people were in it, because of all the photographic kit, and her proximity together with the lateness of the hour made him conscious of her wrists and hands, the hollow of her throat, that glowed palely in the candlelight. Rita tugged at her sleeves as if aware of her naked hands, and, fearing she was about to decide to go in anyway, Daunt found a question for her.
“Does Lily still believe the child is her sister?”
“I believe so. The parson has spoken to her about it
since and she was unshakable.”
“It can’t be so.”
“It’s most improbable, yes. I wish I had been able to persuade her to come across. I’d have liked to speak to her.”
“About the girl?”
“And about herself.”
The rain seemed to ease. Before she could notice it, he asked another question.
“What of that man who troubled you before? Have you seen any more of him?”
“Nothing.”
Rita tucked her muffler firmly into her lapels, concealing her throat. She was preparing to leave, but the percussion redoubled on the roof. She sighed in a way that was also an embarrassed smile, and her arms fell to her sides again.
“Do you mind this smoke? I’ll put it out if you like.”
“No, it’s all right.”
He put his pipe out anyway.
In the next silence, he became acutely aware that the bench behind them, that neither had made a move to sit on, was also his bed. It seemed suddenly to take up a huge amount of space. He lit a candle and cleared his throat.
“It’s a miracle the light we had for the exposure,” he said, in order to dispel the silence.
“A miracle?” Her eyes were teasing.
“Well, not exactly a miracle. Not by your exacting standards.”
“It’s a good photograph,” she offered.
He unstrapped the box in which he had the plate and held it not too close to the flame. The candlelight flickered it into life. Rita took half a step so that she was standing as close to him as she could without touching him, and she leant to peer at the glass.
“Where is the one from two years ago?” she asked.
Once Upon a River Page 25
