Once Upon a River

by Diane Setterfield

  One . . . Swiftly and without allowing light into the camera he ducked down . . .

  Two . . . and out of the black cloth . . .

  Three . . . and ran around the camera . . .

  Four . . . where he took Rita in his arms . . .

  Five . . . and said, “Don’t cry, darling . . .”

  Six . . . though his own cheeks were wet too . . .

  Seven . . . and she lifted her face to him . . .

  Eight . . . and their lips found each other until . . .

  Nine . . . remembering the photograph, he ran . . .

  Ten . . . back to the camera . . .

  Eleven . . . under the black cloth, being careful of the light, and . . .

  Twelve . . . replaced the cover over the plate.

  They took the plate to Collodion and in the darkroom developed an ectoplasmic scene. They both stared somberly at the faded figure of Rita overlaid with a blur of light and shadow, a sense of transparent action and silken flurry, motion without substance.

  “Is that the worst photograph you have ever taken?” she asked.

  “It is.”

  Somehow in the red light they found themselves in each other’s arms, clutching each other as though by touch they could find consolation. They did not so much kiss as press lips hard to skin and mouth and hair; they did not caress but grasped. Then, as if it were the act of a single mind, they drew apart.

  “I can’t bear this,” she said.

  “Nor can I.”

  “Would it make it easier if we didn’t see each other?”

  He tried to match her for honesty. “I think it would. In the end.”

  “Well, then. I suppose . . .”

  “That’s what we must do.”

  Then there was nothing more to say.

  She turned to go and he opened the door. In the doorway she stopped.

  “But what about the Armstrong visit?”

  “What Armstrong visit?”

  “The photographic session at their farmhouse.”

  “Photographic session?”

  “It’s in your diary. I put it in on the day of the fair.”

  “They have the girl.”

  She nodded. “Take me with you, Daunt. Please. I’ve got to see her.”

  “What about your work?”

  “I’ll put a note on the door. If anybody needs me, they’ll have to come and find me there.”

  The girl. He’d thought he wasn’t going to see her again, and yet there was an appointment in his diary . . . The world seemed suddenly less unbearable.

  “All right. Come with me.”

  Thruppence

  “There’ll be time later to work out the terms of our arrangement,” the fortune-teller had said. “I’ll be in touch.” For six weeks there was no sign, but Vaughan knew better than to think he might be reprieved. The blow had to fall, and when at last a letter in an unfamiliar hand appeared on a tray at his place at the breakfast table, he was almost relieved. The letter summoned him to an isolated spot on the river, early one morning. When he arrived, he thought he was the first there; but as soon as he had dismounted to stand on the muddy path, a figure composed itself out of the undergrowth, a slight man in a long coat that was too wide for him. He wore a hat low over his face.

  “Good morning, Mr. Vaughan.” It was the voice of the fortune-teller.

  “What is it that you want?” Vaughan asked.

  “It’s more about what you want. You do want her, don’t you? You and Mrs. Vaughan?”

  Helena was very quiet these days. She seemed pleased about the baby, talked from time to time about plans for their lives to come, but her liveliness had gone. Future life and past losses coexisted in her, two halves of a single experience, and she bore her grief and her hope in a subdued manner.

  It wasn’t only Helena who was grieving. He missed the girl too.

  “Are you suggesting that I can get her back? Robin Armstrong has a witness,” Vaughan pointed out. “Not the best of witnesses, it’s true, given her profession, but if I were to go against him in a court of law, I dare say you would knock me down again pretty fast.”

  “He could be amenable.”

  “What are you implying? That the man might be induced to sell his own child?”

  “His own child . . . Well, she might be. Or she might not. He don’t care one way or the other.”

  Vaughan did not answer. He was more and more disconcerted by this encounter.

  “Let me spell it out for you,” the man began. “When a man’s got something he don’t give tuppence about and another man wants it enough, thruppence will usually do it.”

  “So that’s it. If I give Mr. Armstrong thruppence, along the lines of your suggestion, he will relinquish his claim. Is that what you have come to tell me?”

  “The thruppence was just by way of illustration.”

  “I see. Something rather more than thruppence, then. What’s your master’s price?”

  The man’s voice instantly altered. “Master? Ha! He’s not my master.” Beneath the brim of the hat, the meager mouth twitched as if he found something privately comic in the turn the conversation had taken.

  “But you are doing him a service in carrying this message for him.”

  The man gave the smallest possible indication of a shrug. “You might see it as a service to yourself.”

  “Hmm. You’ll be taking a percentage, I presume?”

  “I stand to benefit from the arrangement—as is only natural.”

  “Tell him I’ll give him fifty pounds if he gives up his claim.” Vaughan was fed up with it and turned to walk away.

  The hand that came down on his shoulder was like a vise. It gripped him and spun him round. Again he stumbled and this time, rising, caught a glimpse of the man’s face: an unfinished-looking nose and lips, his eyes two slits that narrowed as soon as they knew they’d been seen.

  “I hardly think that’s going to do it,” the man said. “If you want my advice, I would say something in the region of a thousand pounds might be more in order. Think it over. Think of the little girl that Mrs. Vaughan misses so much! Think of new life to come—you have no secrets, Mr. Vaughan, not from me! Information swims to my ears like fish to the net—and let us pray that Mrs. Vaughan keeps well and suffers no sad shocks. Think of your family! For there’s some things you can’t put a price on, Mr. Vaughan, and the most important is family. Think on that.”

  The man turned sharply and headed away. When Vaughan peered to see beyond the curve in the path, the way ahead was empty. He had turned in somewhere across the field.

  A thousand pounds. Exactly what he had paid in ransom money. He ran through the value of the house and land and the other property and figured out how it could be achieved. To purchase a lie. A lie that was still a lie and that might be uncovered at any time. A lie that might be purchased by installments and this only the down payment.

  His thoughts eddied, too fast to grab hold of, conclusions always out of reach.

  Vaughan took the other direction to walk home. When he came to his own jetty, he walked out on it and stood at the far end.

  Once he might have been able to see his way through all this, taken action to arrive at a clean solution, when he was himself, when he was a better man, when he was a father. But now he was no more able to direct the current of his life than a piece of debris can control the stream that carries it.

  Vaughan stared into the water, and the old yarns about Quietly came to mind. The ferryman who takes you to the other side of the river when it is your time to go, and, when it is not, returns you safely to the bank. How long, he wondered, did it take to drown?

  Beyond and below the water surged, black and endless, without thought and without feeling. He remembered the formless face that came to precision in Daunt’s darkroom, liquid running over it, and in the black mirror of the water he saw Amelia.

  Vaughan crouched at the edge of the jetty, rocking forwards and back on his feet as he wept.

&nbs
p; Amelia.

  Amelia.

  Amelia.

  With every repetition of her name he rocked more violently. Is this how it ends? he wondered. Calibrating the forward and backward motion of his body, he knew he was always in control. With every forward motion he could be certain the return was coming. But there was momentum. It was building. If he did nothing, the degree of oscillation would be reached where the return would be outside his control. Why not? he thought. I don’t have to do anything except allow it. Forward and back. Forward and back. Forward and back. Edging nearer the point where the body is given to gravity. But not yet. A few more to go. Forward and back. Forward—nearly there now, a fraction of an inch away—and back. Forward—

  The void took him, and as he tipped into it, in his head a voice: You can’t go on like this.

  Hearing it, his arm shot out. His body was claimed by gravity, but his hand shot out for something—anything!—and closed on the rope tied to the jetty post. He fell, with a jolt to the heart and a wrench to the shoulder. Swinging one-handed, feeling the rope flay his palm as he slipped, his free hand swooped to grasp it while his legs flailed wildly in search of a toehold. Agonizingly, hand over hand, he heaved the weight of his body—his desperate living body—onto the jetty and, when he arrived, collapsed onto it and lay there, gasping for breath while pain radiated from his shoulder.

  You can’t go on like this, Mrs. Constantine had said. She was right.

  Retelling the Story

  He turned into the road with a kind of relief. The turbulence in his head that had plagued him for so long narrowed to a single objective. It was not a plan nor a thought that brought him here. It was scarcely his own volition, for he had given up decision-making and abandoned will, too exhausted to do anything but obey the inevitable. He was here because of something more fundamental than that. Vaughan was not a man to bandy about words like “fate” and “destiny,” but he would not have denied that it was something of that kind that drew him to the gate, the front path, and the pristinely painted front door of Mrs. Constantine.

  “You said I could come back. You said you could help.”

  “Yes,” she said, glancing at his bandaged hand.

  A vase of roses now scented the room where the jasmine had been, but the cat was in the same place. When they were seated, Vaughan began.

  “They found a drowned child in the river,” he began. “At solstice time. She lived with us for half a year. You might have heard of it.”

  Mrs. Constantine made a noncommittal face. “Tell me,” she said.

  He told. Riding to the Swan after his wife, finding her there with the child, Helena’s certainty, his own equal but opposite certainty. The other claimants. Taking the child home. The passage of time and with it the gradual erosion of his certainty.

  “So you started to believe she was your child after all?”

  He frowned. “Almost . . . Yes . . . I’m not sure. When I came to see you before, I mentioned that I couldn’t remember Amelia’s face.”

  “You did, yes.”

  “When I tried to remember her, it was this child that I saw. She doesn’t live with us anymore. She lives with another family. A woman turned up at the summer fair who said she was not Amelia. She said she was Alice Armstrong. That is what people seem to believe now.”

  She waited in a way that invited him to say more.

  His eyes held on to hers. “They are right. I know they are.”

  He was here now. He had come at last to the place he had avoided for so long. But Mrs. Constantine was there with him. He took a mouthful of water and spoke.

  The words came in a smooth stream. The story slipped evenly from his lips. It began much as it had the first time, with drowsy slumber shattered by his wife’s cry in the night, but his words were no longer the dusty containers of desiccated meaning they had been before. They were freshly forged things, alive with meaning, and they carried him back in time to the night it began, to the night of the kidnap. The haste to reach his daughter’s room, the shock of the open window and the empty bed. Rousing the household, the search through the night. He told of the message that came at dawn. He told of the slow hours till the appointed time.

  He took another sip of water and it barely stopped the flow of words.

  “I rode to the place alone. It was not an easy journey: there was not a star in the sky to light my way, and the road was rough and pitted. At times I got off and walked alongside my horse. I was not always sure where I was, for the landmarks I was familiar with in daylight were lost in the night. I had to judge by my sense of the time that had elapsed and by the feel of the terrain beneath my feet—and by the river, of course. The river has its own light, even at night. I was familiar with its contours and every so often I recognized a certain bend or angle that told me where I was. When I saw that the night shimmer of the water was crossed by a darker band, I knew I was at the bridge.

  “I dismounted. I could see nothing and no one—though there might have been a dozen men standing motionless a few yards away and I would not have known it.

  “I called out, ‘Hoy there!’

  “There was no answer.

  “Then I called ‘Amelia!’ I thought it would reassure her, to know I was near. I hoped they had told her I was coming, that she was going home.

  “I listened hard for an answer or, if not an answer, a sound: a step or a shifting or breathing. There was only the lapping of the river and, underneath it, that other sound of the river, that low, deep noise that you don’t usually notice.

  “I stepped onto the bridge. I crossed. At the other side I placed the ransom money in its bag by the pier stone according to the note’s instructions. As I rose I thought I heard something. Not voices, and not steps—something less distinct than that. My horse heard it too, for he gave a whinny. I stood for a moment wondering what was to happen next, and realized that I should move away from the pier stone to give them a chance to take the money. Presumably they would want to have it in their hands, feel the weight of it, before releasing Amelia. I stepped back onto the bridge. I picked up speed, ran over—and the next thing I knew, I was flat on my face in the dark.”

  The account that emerged from Vaughan’s mouth came all by itself. He called on no stock phrases, no rehearsed words. His telling had its own energy and speed, and with them it brought the past into the room, its dark and its chill. He shivered, and his eyes took on the glazed look of those who are seeing the vision of memory.

  “The aftershock of the fall left me dazed. It was a moment before I got my breath back. I shifted to see whether I was injured, wondered whether someone had been lying in wait to cosh me. I got up as far as my knees, expecting another blow to dash me down again, but nothing came and I knew then I had merely fallen. I tried to collect myself. Waited for the world to settle. It was only a little while later that I gathered myself to stand, and as I did so my leg brushed against something. I realized straightaway that this soft but solid bundle was the thing that had tripped me up. I groped to get some sense of what it was, but in my gloves I could not tell. I took off my gloves and felt again. Something wet. Cold. Dense.

  “I was afraid. Even then, before I struck the match, I feared what it could be.

  “When I had a bit of light, I found that she was not looking at me. That was a relief. Her face was angled away, and she was staring fixedly towards the river. It was the strangest thing, for her eyes had the shape of Amelia’s eyes. She was dressed in Amelia’s clothes and her feet were in Amelia’s shoes. Her features were like Amelia’s too. Amazingly like. And yet it seemed to me, quite plainly, both then and for some time afterwards, that she was not Amelia. Not my child. How could she be? I knew my child. I knew how her eyes alighted on me, how her feet danced and shuffled, how her hands reached and fidgeted and grasped. I took this child’s hand in mine and it did not tighten around my fingers the way Amelia’s would have. Something glinted. Amelia’s necklace with the silver anchor was round her neck.

 
; “I picked her up, this child who could not—must not—be Amelia. I found a place where the bank was not too steep and scrambled down to the water’s edge. I carried her into the water and when I was waist-deep I laid her down. I felt the river take her from me.”

  Vaughan paused.

  “It was a nightmare and that was the only way I could think of to end it. My daughter, my Amelia, was alive. You do see, don’t you?”

  “I do.” Mrs. Constantine’s eyes, sad and unfaltering, held his.

  “But what I know now—what I have known for a long time—is that it was Amelia. My poor child was dead.”

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Constantine.

  Now the banks of the river burst and Vaughan felt the water stream from his eyes. His shoulders shook and he rocked forward and back and his weeping seemed endless. The tears slipped from his eyes onto his cheeks, they ran down his face, they trickled from his jaw to his neck and seeped into his collar, they dripped from his chin and dampened his knees. He raised his hands to his face and the tears wetted his fingers, then his wrists and cuffs. He wept and wept until he was drained.

  Mrs. Constantine was there with her vast and kind gaze that had accompanied him all the while.

  “When the girl from the river came home with us, I had strange thoughts. Sometimes I wondered”—he shook his head in embarrassment, but a man could tell Mrs. Constantine anything without fear of being found ridiculous—“sometimes I wondered: What if she wasn’t dead? What if I put her in the river and she floated away and came to her senses? What if she drifted somewhere—to someone—and they kept her for two years and then—I don’t know how—or why—was found floating in the river again, and so came back to us? It’s quite impossible, of course, but thoughts like that . . . When one wants an explanation . . .”

  “Tell me about Amelia,” she said after a pause. “What was she like in life?”

  “What kind of thing do you want to know?”

  “Anything.”

  He thought. “She was never still. Even before she was born, she was a wriggler—that’s what the midwife said—and when she arrived and was put in her cot, her arms and legs made waving motions, as if she would swim into the air and was surprised she couldn’t. She used to clench and stretch her little hand, and when she saw her fist turn into a palm with fingers, there would be a look of sheer amazement on her face at seeing the motion. She was quick to crawl, my wife said, and it made her legs strong. She liked to cling to my fingers and I raised her up, feet on the ground so that she could feel the ground supporting her. We couldn’t always be supporting her while she tottered about. One day I had some papers to go through in the drawing room and she came patting my ankles for attention, wanting to be lifted to her feet, and I was too busy. And then, suddenly, a little hand pulled at my sleeve and there she was, upright at my side. All by herself she had pulled herself up using the chair leg and her face was all pleasure and surprise! Oh, you should have seen her! A thousand times she toppled over, but never cried, just upped and tried again. And once she’d found her feet, she was never satisfied to sit again.”