Once Upon a River

by Diane Setterfield

  “He has healed but there’s still a scar underneath his beard. It’s Mr. Armstrong, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right.”

  Armstrong studied the prints for sale: river scenes, boating teams, local churches, and picturesque places. He expressed an interest in having a family photograph taken.

  “You could have your photograph taken today if you would like. I’ll add you to the list and tell you what time to come back for it.”

  He gave a regretful shake of the head. “My eldest isn’t here yet, and I would like a photograph of us all at home, at the farm.”

  “Then Mr. Daunt can visit you, and then he would have the time to take a series of photographs indoors and out. Let me look at his diary and see what day would suit you.”

  As she spoke, Armstrong ran his eye over the panel of prints showing scenes from previous fairs. Morris dancers, teams of rowers, hawkers of goods, tug-of-war giants . . .

  They began to talk about dates, but Armstrong cut himself off so abruptly—Oh!—that it made Rita look up sharply.

  Armstrong was staring at one photograph in particular with an air of great shock.

  “Are you all right, Mr. Armstrong?”

  He was deaf to her words.

  “Mr. Armstrong?”

  She sat him down in her seat and pressed a glass of water into his hand.

  “I’m all right! I’m all right! Where was that photograph taken? How long ago?”

  Rita checked the index number and looked it up in Daunt’s log.

  “It’s the fair at Lechlade, three years ago.”

  “Who took this photograph? Was it Mr. Daunt himself?”

  “It was.”

  “I must consult him.”

  “He is in the darkroom at the moment. He cannot be disturbed: the light would destroy the photograph he is developing.”

  “Then let me buy this photograph and I will come back and speak to him later.”

  He pressed the coins into Rita’s hand, did not wait to have his purchase wrapped, and hurried away, clutching it in both hands.

  Armstrong was unable to take his eyes from the photograph, but after nearly tripping on the guy rope to one of the tents, he realized he must put it away and make a concerted effort to find his wife and children. He put the frame away, took a deep breath, and set to looking about him. Then came the second surprise of the day.

  Turning out of a tent where he had hoped to spot Bess, it was not his wife but Mrs. Eavis, the landlady from the “bad house” where Robin’s wife had ended her days, who surged into view. He saw her first in profile: her blade of a nose was unmistakable. She was back from her holiday! He could have sworn she’d seen him too, for her face turned in his direction and he thought he detected a flicker of her eye. But apparently not, for though he called her name, she turned and walked purposefully away.

  Armstrong dodged the wandering fairgoers that were in his way, and stepped swiftly after her. For a little while he made steady gains through the crowds. He was near enough almost to put his hand on her shoulder at one point, but a concertina expanded with a wheeze, and when he had successfully got around it, she had disappeared from view. He looked left and right at every opportunity, between the stalls and tables, and was surprised how quickly he found her again. Coming to a crossroads in the fair, he saw her standing still, looking around her as if waiting for someone. He raised an arm to hail her, and the minute her eyes turned in his direction, off she went again.

  He was on the point of giving up when suddenly ahead of him a great stillness fell. Nobody moved. Then a cry rent the air—a woman’s voice, in panic—“Get away! Away with you!”

  Armstrong ran.

  Vaughan arrived at the place where the crowd thickened and had to shove his way through. When he reached the heart of it, he found Helena on her knees on the ground, her skirt stained with the mud of so many tramping feet. She was weeping wildly. Over her stood a tall, dark-haired woman with a long, brittle nose and wide, pale lips who had contrived to be standing between Helena and the child, while Helena made frantic attempts in the slippery mud to reach around her wide skirts and lay her hands on the little girl.

  “I don’t know,” the woman was explaining, to nobody in particular. “All I did was say hello. Whatever’s wrong with that? Awful fuss to make when all I said was ‘Hello, Alice.’ ” Her voice was loud—a fraction louder, perhaps, than was necessary. She noted the arrival of Vaughan; then, turning to the crowd, she addressed them as one. “You heard me, didn’t you? You saw?” There were a few nods. “Saying hello to the daughter of my former lodger I haven’t seen in a long while—what could be more natural than that?”

  The tall woman placed her hands on the girl’s shoulders.

  Murmurs arose from the crowd. They were reluctant, indistinct, confused, but they confirmed that, yes, it was as she said. Satisfied, the woman nodded to herself.

  Vaughan crouched to put an arm protectively around his wife while she stared in mute, wide-eyed shock, gesturing for him to take hold of the girl.

  The crowd parted with a murmur and out of it emerged someone else they knew.

  Robin Armstrong.

  Seeing him, a light of satisfaction, as at some scheme brought successfully to fruition, animated the tall woman’s face and was instantly suppressed; then, with a violent swiftness that took everyone by surprise, she gripped the child and raised her up. “Look, Alice!” she pronounced, “it’s Daddy.”

  Helena’s cry of pain was accompanied by the gasp that came as a single sound from the crowd and then silence fell, shocked and confused, as the woman delivered the child into Robin Armstrong’s arms.

  Before anyone could gather themselves to react, she had turned and launched herself into the throng. In the face of her sharp-nosed velocity, the crowd parted, then closed behind her, and she was lost to sight.

  Vaughan stood and looked at Robin Armstrong.

  Robin looked at the child and in a broken voice spoke words into her hair.

  “What did he say?” the crowd asked, and word was rapidly passed from mouth to ear. “He said, ‘Oh, my darling! Oh, my child! Alice, my love!’ ”

  The onlookers waited as at the theater for the scene to continue. Mrs. Vaughan had fainted, it seemed, and Mr. Vaughan was turned to stone, while Robin Armstrong had eyes only for the child, and his father, Mr. Armstrong, stared as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. Something had to happen next, but there was uncertainty in the air. The actors had forgotten their lines, and each one waited for the other to pick up the story. The moment seemed destined to be without end, and murmurs were rising from the audience, when a voice rose above the confusion.

  “May I help?”

  It was Rita. She stepped into the circle and knelt beside Helena.

  “We have to get her home,” she said, but she looked quizzically at Vaughan as she said it. Vaughan, his eyes locked on to the girl in Robin Armstrong’s arms, seemed incapable of action.

  “What are you going to do?” she said in an urgent mutter.

  Now Newman, the Vaughans’ gardener, appeared with another of the manservants from the household. Between them they lifted Helena from the ground.

  “Well?” Rita said, and she took hold of Vaughan’s arm to rouse him out of his inertia, but all he was capable of was a minimal shake of the head before he turned his back and, with a nod, instructed the servants to begin the task of carrying Helena’s senseless body back to Buscot Lodge.

  All eyes were on the Vaughans’ departure, and then as one the crowd looked back to the remaining players. The little one opened her mouth, and everybody waited for the wail that was certain to come. But she only yawned, closed her eyes, and rested her head heavily on Robin Armstrong’s shoulder. The slackness of her little body said she had fallen instantly asleep. The young man gazed with an expression of infinite tenderness at the face of the sleeping child.

  There was a shifting in the crowd and voices were heard.

  “What’s happenin
g, Mother?”

  And: “Why is everybody so quiet?”

  Bess, with her swaying gait and a ribboned eye patch, emerged, leading a procession of children, all come too late to witness the events.

  “Look, there’s Papa!” one cried, spotting Armstrong.

  “And Robin!” came another little voice.

  “Who is that little girl?” the smallest of the family asked.

  “Yes,” echoed Armstrong’s deep voice, and it was grave, though it spoke quietly so as not to be heard by the crowd. “Who is that little girl, Robin?”

  Robin put his finger to his lip. “Hush!” he said to his brothers and sisters. “Your niece is sleeping.”

  The children crowded around their half brother, their bright young faces turned to the child, who was now invisible to the crowd.

  “It’s raining!” someone said.

  Suddenly, from being a few drops of water, it became a downpour. Faces ran with water, skirts were flattened against legs, hair was slicked to the scalp. With the rain came the realization that they had been staring not at a piece of theater but at other people’s misfortunes. Embarrassed, they remembered themselves and ran for cover. Some made for the trees, some for the refreshment tent—and a good number ran to the Swan.

  Philosophy at the Swan

  The story that had been told with an air of conclusiveness at the wedding breakfast was now reconsidered, and all agreed it had taken a distinctly new direction. They rehearsed the events of the afternoon over and over, recalling every detail: the sharp-nosed woman, Helena Vaughan’s dramatic faint, Mr. Vaughan’s frozen stare, and Robin Armstrong’s tenderness. When they had remembered everything there was to remember, the alcohol encouraged them to recall things they only half remembered and even to invent things they did not remember at all. They fell to questions: What would the Vaughans do now? How would Mrs. Vaughan bear it? Might Vaughan yet persuade Robin Armstrong to give the child up? Why had it not come to blows? Might it yet, tomorrow or the day after?

  The drinkers fell into factions, some insisting that the girl was Amelia Vaughan, pointing to Mrs. Vaughan’s certainty, others shaking their heads and pointing out that the child’s fine hair was more like the soft waves they remembered on Robin Armstrong’s head. They went back, reconsidered every element of the story in the light of these recent revelations, weighed the evidence this way and that. The night of the kidnap suddenly came to the surface, for if this child was indeed Alice Armstrong, then what on earth had happened to Amelia Vaughan? They had put the story of her disappearance away following her reappearance, but now they revisited it and plumbed its depths again.

  Henry Daunt, taking a break from the lengthy processes that come at the end of a long day’s photography, was sitting in the corner of the winter room, eating a plate of ham and potato with watercress.

  “It was that nursemaid,” the cressman leaning at the window insisted. “I always said she had something to do with it. What keeps a girl out at that time of night if it isn’t mischief?”

  “Ah, but there’s mischief and mischief . . . It might not be kidnap mischief she were out for, but the other kind,” his fellow drinker suggested.

  The cressman shook his head. “I’d have got into mischief with her if she’d have had me, but she wouldn’t. She wasn’t the type. Did you ever hear of her getting into mischief with anybody?” They kept a very accurate record of which girls were liable to get into mischief and which not, so the information was close to hand. No. She was not the type.

  “What happened to her afterwards?” Daunt asked them.

  They consulted with each other. “Couldn’t get another job. Nobody wanted her looking after their children. She went to Cricklade, where her grandmother lives.”

  “Cricklade? Dragon country.” Cricklade was a quaint town a few miles away, renowned for its intermittent infestations of dragons. He had thought of taking some photographs there for his book.

  Daunt tucked into his meal, listening, as events of two years ago were disinterred, rediscussed, and loose threads were picked out of the old story and today’s events, and efforts made to knit it all together and make of the two things a single story. But the threads left gaps too wide to be darned.

  One of the little Margots brought Daunt a dish of apple pie and poured thick cream over it. Jonathan lit a new candle at his table and lingered.

  “Can I tell you a story?”

  “I’m all ears. Tell me a tale.”

  Jonathan looked into the dark corner where the stories came from, and his eyes betrayed a very great act of concentration. When he was ready, he opened his mouth and the words came out in a great flood:

  “Once upon a time, there was a man drove his horse and cart into the river—and he weren’t never seen again! Oh, no!” His face twisted and he flapped his hand in frustration. “That’s not right!” he cried with good-natured annoyance at himself. “I missed the middle bit!”

  Jonathan went to practice on someone else, and Daunt ate Margot’s pastry and listened to one conversation and then another. Robin Armstrong’s tragic tale, the likeness of his hair to that of the child, the river gypsies, the instincts of a mother . . .

  Beszant the boat mender sat while others picked the story apart and put it back together again in a hundred different ways. Whether the child looked like the Vaughans or the Armstrongs, how she had been first dead, then alive—these were mysteries he shook his head at, comfortable in his own ignorance. But where he did have knowledge, he applied it. “She ain’t Alice Armstrong,” he said, firmly.

  They pressed him for explanations.

  “Mother were last seen at Bampton, heading to the river, the little mite with her. ’Tis so, I believe?”

  They nodded.

  “Well, now, in all my life, and I’m seventy-seven, I ain’t never seen a body—or a barrel or as much as a lost cap—float upstream. Have you? Anyone?”

  They shook their heads, every one.

  “Ah, then.” He delivered his words with an air of finality, and for a fleeting, fragile moment it seemed that one thing at least was securely tethered in this story that slipped through your fingers like water. But then the cressman opened his mouth.

  “And before last solstice night, did you ever expect to see a girl what’s drowned come to life again?”

  “No,” said Beszant, “I can’t say as I did.”

  “Well, then,” the cressman concluded sagely, “just ’cause a thing’s impossible don’t mean it can’t happen.”

  The philosophers of the Swan fell to thinking and very quickly to disputing. Does the occurrence of one impossible thing increase the likelihood of a second? It was a greater conundrum than they had ever known, and they went at it with great thoroughness, leaving no stone unturned. Many bottles of ale were consumed and many headaches born out of their efforts to elucidate the matter. They drank and they pondered and they drank and they discussed and they drank and they argued. Their thoughts eddied round, discovered currents within currents, met countercurrents, and at times they felt tantalizingly close to a breakthrough, yet for all the intensity of their debate, at the end of it they were none the wiser.

  Partway through, Daunt, who had remained sober, rose and slipped unnoticed out of the inn and back to Collodion, moored a few yards upstream by the old willow. He still had work to do.

  The Shortest Night

  At Buscot Lodge the servants had carried their mistress upstairs to her bedroom and left her to the care of Rita and the housekeeper. Helena seemed unaware of the hands that undressed her and pulled a nightdress over her incessantly shaking body. Her skin was bloodless, her eyes stared at nothing, and though her lips twitched, she neither spoke nor responded to speech. They lay her in her bed, but she did not sleep, instead rearing up at frequent intervals, reaching out as she had for the girl as though the scene at the fair were being repeated here in her own room, over and over. Then there came great spasms of tears that racked her body, and she cried out, wordless howls of ho
rror and pain, that reverberated through the house.

  At last Rita managed to get her to take a sleeping draft, but it was mild and slow to take effect.

  “Can’t you give her something stronger? Distressed as she is . . .”

  “No,” said Rita with a frown. “I can’t.”

  At last the concoction won out against Helena’s overstimulated mind, and she began to quieten. Even then, in the final moments before sleep overtook her, she made a motion as if to rise from her bed. “Where . . . ?” she mumbled as she blinked dazedly, and another word: “Amelia . . .” But at last her head was on the pillow and her eyes closed and the devastation of the day was erased from her features.

  “I’ll go and tell Mr. Vaughan she is sleeping,” the housekeeper said, but Rita detained her for a few minutes first with some questions about Helena’s health in recent times.

  When Helena woke, it was to the painful remembrance of what had gone before, with no lessening of the sorrow or the agitation.

  “Where is she?” she wept in anguish. “Where is she? Has Anthony gone to fetch her home? I must go myself. Who has her? Where is she?” But the body was too exhausted to put her desperate desires into action, she had not the strength to push away the blankets and stand unsupported. To have taken a boat and rowed to Kelmscott or taken the train to Oxford was utterly beyond her.

  The enormity of her grief was so great, it wore her out, and when weariness took over, she lay wordless on the pillow, her limbs unmoving, her eyes unseeing.

  During one of these interludes Rita took her hand and said, “Helena, are you aware that you are expecting a baby?”

  Helena’s eyes slowly turned to hers, uncomprehendingly.

  “When we brought you home and put you in your nightdress I couldn’t help noticing you are putting on weight again. And your housekeeper tells me you have been eating so many radishes, it has made you feel sick and she has been making you ginger tea. But it is not the radishes that are making you feel unwell. It is your pregnancy.”

  “It is impossible,” said Helena, shaking her head. “My monthly signs came to an end when we lost Amelia. They have never restarted. So it cannot be as you say.”