Once Upon a River

by Diane Setterfield

  The celebrants came out of the church. The parson was his summer self: this morning he had opened his window and stood naked to the waist, feeling the sun on his white chest and his pale face, saying, glory, glory, glory! Only he knew this, but everyone saw his lively smile and enjoyed his vigorous shake of the hand as they came down the steps.

  Daunt placed Owen and Bertha at the spot that was just right. He arranged Mrs. Albright’s hand through Mr. Albright’s arm. Owen knew what it was to have his portrait taken; he had done it once before some years ago, and Bertha had seen a great number of photographs, so they both knew what to do: they held themselves stiffly upright and turned grave, proud faces towards the camera. Even the teasing from Owen’s drinking pals at the Swan could not crack their solemn faces, and their newly married dignity was transferred by sunlight onto glass, where it would outlive them for a long, long time.

  When it was done, the wedding party gathered itself for the walk along the riverbank. “What a day!” they said as they went, looking up to the clear blue sky. “What a splendid day!” And they came, a joyful procession, to the Swan at Radcot, where Margot had put flowers on the tables on the riverbank and the little Margots were waiting with pitchers of cool drinks covered with beaded cloths.

  The events of six months ago seemed very distant now, for on a summer day winter always seems like something you have dreamt or heard spoken of and not a thing you have lived. The unexpected sun made their skin tingle, they felt sweat at the backs of their necks, and a goose bump was suddenly a thing impossible to imagine. Yet the longest day of summer is the reversed twin of winter’s long night, and this being so, one solstice inevitably recalls the other—and if there were some that did not connect the two days, Owen himself reminded them.

  “Six months ago,” he told the wedding party, “I decided to make Bertha my wife. Inspired by the miracle that happened here at the Swan that you all know of—the rescue of little Amelia Vaughan, who was found dead and came to life again—I felt like a new man, and requested the hand in marriage of my housekeeper, and Bertha did me the honor of accepting . . .”

  After the speeches, talk of the girl was renewed. Events that had taken place on this very riverbank, in the dark and in the cold, were retold under an azure sky; and perhaps it was an effect of the sunshine, but the darker elements of the tale were swept away and a simpler, happier narrative came to the fore. A little girl who had been kidnapped was returned to her parents, making her and the Vaughans and the whole community very happy. A wrong was righted, a family restored. The great-aunt of one of the gravel diggers tried to say that she had seen the child on the riverbank and that the girl had no reflection, but she was hushed; no one wanted a ghostly tale today. The cider cups were refilled, the little Margots came one after the other and indistinguishably with plates of ham and cheese and radishes, and the wedding party had enough joy to drown out all doubt, all darkness. Six months ago a miraculous story had burst wildly and messily into the Swan; today it was neatened, pressed, and put away without a crease in it.

  Mr. Albright kissed Mrs. Albright, who blushed red as the radishes, and at noon precisely the party rose as one to continue their celebrations by joining the fair.

  Between Radcot’s neatly hedged fields was an awkwardly shaped piece of land that had fallen to common use. Today it contained stalls of all kinds and all sizes. Some of them were professional-looking affairs with awnings to protect the goods from the sun; others were no more than a tarpaulin spread upon the ground with wares set out upon it. There was stuff that a person might actually need—pitchers and bowls and beakers; cloth; knives and tools; skins—but there was just as much frippery designed to incite cravings. There were ribbons, sweet delicacies, kittens, trinkets of all sorts. Some of the traders carried goods in baskets. These wandered here and there, and each and every one declaimed the authenticity of his own wares and warned against the other crooks whose goods were counterfeit and expensive, and would break the minute the charlatan had packed up and gone. There were pipers and drummers and a one-man band, and as the fairgoers walked they wandered into and out of the range of love songs, drinking songs, and sentimental songs of loss and hardship. Sometimes they could hear two at once, and the notes bumped into and fell over each other in their ears.

  Mr. and Mrs. Vaughan walked along the river from Buscot Lodge to the field where the day’s festivities were to take place. They held one hand each of the child who swung between them. Helena was faintly irritable—she was disappointed, Vaughan thought, that the doctor’s prediction about the return of the child’s speech had not turned out as she hoped—yet it was less her mood than his own that was casting a shadow over the day.

  “Are you sure about this?” Anthony Vaughan asked his wife.

  “Whyever not?”

  “Will she be safe?”

  “Now we know it was only Lily White watching us—a poor, harmless creature. What is there to worry about?”

  Vaughan frowned. “But that fellow who accosted Rita . . .”

  “That was months ago. Whoever he was, he can hardly try anything when we are surrounded by so many people who know us. Our own farmers and servants are here. Everyone from the Swan. They wouldn’t let anyone harm so much as a hair on her head.”

  “Do you really want to expose her to the pointing and the gossip?”

  “Dearest, we can’t keep her from the world forever. There is so much to amuse a child here. She will adore the boat races. It would be cruelty to keep her away.”

  Life had been so much better since the coming of the child. Helena’s happiness had come as such a relief to him that it had brought a surge of joy to his own heart. Their renewed love was so like the first years of their marriage that it was possible to forget that the long chill of despair had ever been. They had buried the past to live in pleasure and delight. Yet, now that the novelty of their newfound marital happiness life had worn off, he was unable to pretend to himself that it rested on secure foundations. The child swinging between them, with her mute inscrutability, her colorless hair, and her ever-changing eyes, was at once the cause of their happiness and the danger to it.

  During the day, Vaughan was occupied and better able to distract himself from his endless and circular preoccupations, but at night his insomnia had returned. He suffered repeatedly from variations on the same dream. In it he walked in a landscape—a wood, a beach, a field, a cave; the terrain was different every time—searching for something. Then, coming to a clearing or rounding a tree or arriving at an archway, there she was, his daughter, waiting for him as if she had been there all along, just waiting for her papa to come and find her. She raised her arms to him, crying “Daddy!” and he lifted her into his arms, his heart overflowing—then woke to the leaden realization that it was not Amelia. It had been the girl. The changeling had reached into his dreams and attached her face to the memory of his own lost daughter.

  Helena herself was ignorant of the fragility of their bliss; the strain of worry fell on him alone. This created a distance between himself and Helena, one which she was as yet unaware of. In her belief that the child was Amelia and that he too was persuaded of it, she had constructed a sense of security as impressive as a moated castle. He alone knew how flimsy it really was.

  When his own dreams showed him how easy it was to place this child’s face on Amelia’s shoulders, he was tempted to join Helena in her certainty. Sometimes it seemed so obvious, so simple a thing to do, that he felt guilty at his own stubbornness in resisting. Already he called the girl Amelia in front of his wife. He was more than halfway there. But then, always, the other thing. The knowledge. Underneath it all, a little girl whose face he could not even remember, but whom he could not—would not—forget.

  There was something else besides. When he lay in his bed at night, whether awake or asleep, searching endlessly for his daughter in imaginary landscapes and finding time after time the little interloper, sometimes another face altogether swam into view and oppressed his
heart. Robin Armstrong. For it was all very well to toy with the idea of succumbing to happiness and allowing the girl to replace his daughter in his heart and his mind as she had replaced her in his home, but to do so was to deprive another man of his child. Vaughan wanted Helena to be happy, but what if her happiness came at the price of condemning another man to the agony of loss they had only just left behind? As much as the girl, as much as Amelia, it was Robin Armstrong who haunted Vaughan’s nights and turned him to stone in his bed.

  As they arrived at the edge of the fair they met the crowds. He noticed several people glance at them, look again, whisper, and point. Farmers’ wives pressed flowers into the child’s hand, she was patted on the head; little children ran up and kissed her.

  “I’m not convinced this is for the best,” Vaughan said mildly when a burly gravel digger knelt at her feet and played her a short air on his fiddle before placing a forefinger gravely on her cheek.

  Helena let out a short, exasperated breath, quite unlike her usual equable self. “It’s that silly story. They think she can work miracles—give them protection or something. It’s nothing but superstition and it’ll pass, given time. Anyway, the boat races start at two o’clock. There is no need for you to stay if you don’t want to. We are going to watch,” she told him firmly. Then, to the child: “Come on.”

  He felt the little hand detach from his. When Helena turned away, his own legs did not instantly follow, and in that moment of hesitation one of his farmers stopped to speak to him. By the time he was free again, his wife and the girl were out of sight.

  Vaughan turned off the wide central axis where the going was slow. He made his way between the awnings and covered stalls, searching. Everywhere he went, he ignored the calls of the tradespeople. He did not want ruby rings for his sweetheart. He waved away macaroons, remedies for gout and digestive ailments, pocketknives (stolen, most likely), charms to give a man irresistible appeal, and pencils. The pencils looked decent enough, and he might have bought some another day, but his head was starting to ache and he felt thirsty. He could stop at one of the places that sold drinks, but there were queues, and he’d sooner find his wife and the girl first. He pressed on through the crowds, making poor progress. Why should the sun come out so hot on this of all days, when so many were congregated together? The throng thickened to stagnation and he was obliged to stop altogether, then he found a sluggish current and inched forward again. He felt the sweat on his brow. His eyes began to sting with salt. Where the hell were they?

  With the sun in his eyes he felt dizzy. It only lasted a moment, but before he could gather his senses, a hand fell on his arm.

  “Fortune, sir? This way.”

  He attempted to shake the hand away, but his movements had the effortful and vague feeling of swimming underwater. “No,” he said, but perhaps he only meant to say it, for he never heard it spoken. Instead a drape was pulled invisibly aside and the hand that he felt but scarcely saw tugged him inside. He stumbled, heavy-footed, into darkness.

  “Sit you down.” The fabric of the fortune-teller’s dress was so like the gaudy interior of the tent that it receded into it and her face was veiled.

  A chair was placed behind him, knocking the backs of his knees so that he had no option but to sit. He turned to see who had put it there. There was no one, but a bulge distorting the drape of one length of tawdry silk was the size and shape of a shoulder. Someone was concealed there, ready to prevent the customers from making a quick getaway without paying for their handsome strangers and journeys overseas.

  All he wanted was a glass of something cold.

  “Look here,” he said, rising. But he bumped his head on the low cross brace of the tent, and as he saw stars, he felt the woman grasp his wrist more powerfully than you would think possible of such a small hand, and from behind, pressure on both his shoulders forced him firmly back into his seat.

  “Let me read your hand,” said the woman. Her voice, reedy and ill-educated, had an odd note to it that he registered but did not immediately pay attention to.

  He gave in. It was probably quicker to go through with it than to negotiate his way out.

  “You have had a lucky start in life,” she began. “Good luck and talent were your godparents. And you have done well since. I see a woman.” She peered into his palm. “A woman . . .”

  Mrs. Constantine came to mind. How much better she’d have done this! He remembered her jasmine-scented room, her calm, still face, her somber dress and pristine collar, her purring cat. He longed for that room. But he was here.

  “Fair or dark?” he asked, with false joviality.

  The fortune-teller ignored his comment. “A happy woman. Who was lately unhappy. And also a child.”

  He exclaimed in exasperation. “I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that you know who I am,” he told her testily. “This is in very bad taste. Look, I’ll give you something for your time and let’s bring this to an end.” He tried to free his hand from hers to reach for his purse.

  The fortune-teller only tightened her grip, and he marveled that a woman could be so strong. “I see a child,” she said, “who is not your child.”

  Vaughan froze.

  “There. You’re not going anywhere now, are you.” She released her hold and dropped the pretense of reading his palm. Her voice had a triumphant note in it, and the significance of the oddness to her voice and the strength in her grip suddenly occurred to him. It wasn’t a woman at all.

  “Got your attention now, haven’t I? The child in your house—the one that has made your lady wife so happy—is not your child.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “That’s my business. The thing is, I could ask you the very same question: How do you know it? But notice that I don’t ask you. And why don’t I ask you? For the very simple reason that I don’t need to. Because I know the answer already.”

  Vaughan felt himself come adrift, knew there was nothing to hold on to, and gave in to the tug of a cold undercurrent.

  “What do you want?” His voice was feeble and he heard it from a great distance.

  “For the fortune-telling? Nothing. I’m too honest to charge for telling a man what he already knows. But what about your wife? Would she like her fortune told?”

  “No!” Vaughan burst out.

  “I thought not.”

  “What do you want? How much?”

  “My, you are in a rush. Do you do all your business at this speed? No, let’s take our time to consider. Understand what are the things that really matter. Events later this afternoon, for instance . . .”

  “What events?”

  “Suppose there was to be an event . . . My advice to you—I offer it freely, Mr. Vaughan—would be to stay well out of things. Not involve yourself.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Me?” The voice was of injured innocence. “I shalln’t do a thing, Mr. Vaughan. And nor will you, if you want your wife kept out of our little secret.”

  The tent was suddenly airless.

  “There’ll be time later to work out the terms of our arrangement,” the man in the veil said, with an air of finality. “I’ll be in touch.”

  Vaughan rose, desperate for air, and this time found no obstacles as he made his way outside.

  In the open air Vaughan walked in agitation without knowing where he was going. Such was the churn in his mind that he was incapable of putting two thoughts in a row, let alone coming to any kind of conclusion. He perceived the crowds around him only dimly. But then the musicians and the hawkers fell silent. Conversations fell away. Even Vaughan in his disturbed state became aware that something was happening. Reopening his eyes on the outer world, he realized that everybody had stopped their aimless milling and come to a standstill. All were looking in the same direction.

  A woman’s voice screamed in panic. “Get away! Away with you!”

  It was Helena.

  Vaughan sprinted.

  Meanwhile the Armstrong fami
ly had also decided to come to the fair. Robert Armstrong was looking unusually ebullient as he walked with Bess at his side and six of his seven children around them. He had a letter from Robin, their firstborn, in his pocket. The letter was contrite. In it Robin begged forgiveness. He apologized a dozen times for attempting to strike his father. He promised to make amends. He expressed every desire to live a better life, to give up the gambling and the drink, and his ne’er-do-well friends at the Dragon. He would come and meet them at the fair, and show his father how sincere was his remorse.

  “He does not mention Alice,” Bess had said, reading over his shoulder and frowning.

  “With everything else he intends to put right, the question of the child must surely be resolved too,” her husband had replied.

  From his great height, Armstrong scanned the crowd for his son. They had not found him yet, but he was probably here, looking for them in the crowd; they would be bound to come across him sooner or later.

  Armstrong bought knives for his middle boys, hair ribbons and brooches for the bigger girls, and, for the little ones, figurines of animals carved in oak: a cow, a sheep, and a pig. They ate hot pork patties and the meat wasn’t anywhere near as good as Armstrong’s own, but still, it had a good flavor from being cooked in the open air.

  Armstrong left his wife and children clapping their hands in time to the music played by the one-man band, and wandered on to the photographer’s stand, where he found Rita. She always attended the solstice fair. There would be insect bites, heatstroke, and alcohol-induced stupors to attend, but while waiting to be needed, she generally helped out at one of the most popular stands to allow as many people as possible to see her and know where to find her when in need. She was helping organize the queue of customers for booth portraits today and taking appointments in Daunt’s diary for future sittings.

  “That is Mr. Henry Daunt, I think?” he asked her. “He looks better than the last time I saw him.”