Once Upon a River

by Diane Setterfield

  “I attended her funeral. My own father with me. He arranged that we would slip in quietly at the back and be gone before the other mourners turned to leave.”

  Here Armstrong paused. A cat had emerged from the barn, and on seeing the farmer it trotted over, paused a yard and a half from the man to crouch on its haunches, and then leapt like a jack out of the box, to land on the man’s shoulder.

  “What a spectacle,” said Rita as the cat settled and rubbed its cheek against the man’s jaw.

  “She is a quaint and affectionate creature.” Armstrong smiled as they walked on, the cat balanced like a pirate’s parrot on her owner’s shoulder.

  “I did not belong, you see, Miss Sunday. In neither place. In neither heart. There we have it. I know what it is like to be on the outside. Don’t misunderstand me: this is not a complaint but an explanation, though I have been very prolix before getting to the point. Forgive me, these are things a man speaks of very infrequently, and there is a certain—I don’t know quite what to call it . . . pleasure? Relief at any rate—in unburdening oneself.”

  Rita met his look and nodded.

  “My parents were good people, in their hearts, Miss Sunday. Both of them, I feel sure, loved me so far as they were permitted. The fact is they were not free to love me as they would have wished. My wealth separated me from my maternal siblings and my skin separated me from my brothers and sisters on the other side. I was no doubt a difficulty and an embarrassment to my stepmother and stepfather alike. Nonetheless, I am and have always been extraordinarily aware of my good fortune. Why, even before Bess I knew I was lucky.

  “You see, I know what it is not to belong, and when Robin was born, I saw myself in him. More in him, if truth be told, than in any of the others, strange as it may seem. The others are mine in the sense that the world understands. They are my flesh and blood and I love them. I love my boys and girls more than life itself. Seeing them together, I see my mother’s children, the pleasure they take in each other and in their parents. It gives me joy to know I have been able to make this life for them. But when I see Robin—who is not my own, not in the same way, and that is my good Bess’s misfortune and not her fault—well, I see a child on the edge of things. I see a child who could so easily have fallen between the cracks in families. Who could have been lost. And I determined—not on the day he was born, no, long before that—to hold him dear in my heart. To cherish him as a child needs to be cherished. To love him as every child deserves to be loved. My wish was always to ensure that he would always know he belonged in my heart. For if there is one thing I cannot bear, it is the suffering of a child.”

  Armstrong fell silent, and when Rita glanced at his face, she saw that the man’s cheeks were glazed with tears.

  “Such feelings do you credit,” said Rita. “You are the best of fathers. What I have seen of your family today tells me that.”

  Armstrong looked into the distance. “A hundred times that boy has broken my heart. And he will do it a hundred times more before my days are done.”

  They had come to the pigpens. Armstrong fished into a pocket and took out a few acorns. The young pigs came to him with friendly grunts and snuffles and he dealt out acorns and patted flanks and scratched behind ears.

  Now Daunt hailed them. He was returning from Collodion with the finished and framed photograph of the Armstrong family. He showed it to Armstrong, who nodded and thanked him.

  “But, Mr. Daunt, there is another of your photographs I must speak to you about.”

  From his pocket he drew out a small frame and turned it to show Rita and Daunt.

  “The fortune-telling pig! You brought it on the day of the fair.”

  “So I did, Miss Sunday.” Armstrong looked grave. “You will remember too that on seeing this pig I was overcome with emotion. Mr. Daunt, I know that pig. Her name is Maud. She was my pig. This pig here”—he indicated the sow daintily eating acorns—“is her daughter Mabel, and that little one there her granddaughter Matilda. Three years or so ago, without a sound, she was taken from this very pen, and from that day I never saw her again until Mr. Daunt’s photograph came to my attention.”

  “She was stolen?”

  “Stolen . . . kidnapped . . . whatever word you will.”

  “Is it an easy thing, to steal a pig? I wouldn’t want to try and move one.”

  “I don’t know why she didn’t complain. A pig can make a squeal to wake the whole house if she wants to. There were red stains between here and the road; at first I feared it was blood, but in fact it was raspberry stains. She had a great fondness for raspberries. I suppose that is how they enticed her away.”

  He sighed heavily, pointed to a corner of the picture.

  “Now, what do you see here? I believe I see a shadow. I have looked and looked and it seems possible to me that this shadow belongs to a person, and that this person was standing to the side, out of the way, while the photograph was being exposed.”

  Daunt nodded.

  “This photograph is three years old, and I understand that it might not be possible after such a long time to remember who that person was. And perhaps it was not even the person who had charge of Maud at all, but some other person. But I have been thinking that if you were a remembering sort of man, you might be able to tell me something about the owner of this shadow.”

  As he spoke, Armstrong looked at Daunt with an expression that had more expectation of disappointment in it than hope.

  Daunt closed his eyes. He consulted the images he had stored in his mind. The photograph had primed his memory.

  “A small man. Shorter than Miss Sunday here by eight inches. Slim build. The most striking thing about him was his coat. It was oversized, both too long for him and too broad across the shoulders. I wondered at the time why he wore it on a bright summer day when everyone else was in shirtsleeves. I fancied he might be ashamed of his stature, and had hopes the largeness of his garment might convince the eye that there was a matching man inside it.”

  “But what did he look like? Was he old or young? Fair or dark? Bearded or clean-shaven?”

  “Clean-shaven and his chin was narrow. More than that I cannot say, for he wore his hat so low over his face that he was close to being invisible.”

  Armstrong peered at the photograph as if by dint of staring he could see beyond the edges of the frame and find the short-statured stranger.

  “And he was accompanying the pig?”

  “He was. There is only one other thing I can tell you about him that might be at all significant. I asked him whether he would stand by the pig for the photograph, and he would not. I asked him again, and still he said no. In light of what you have told us today about the theft of your pig, it is telling that the man was so adamant he would not be photographed.”

  The littlest of the Armstrong girls now came running behind them and called out that tea was ready. Niece and little aunt, hand in hand, ran ahead indoors, the older child moderating her speed for the little one.

  “Excuse the informality,” said Armstrong, “but we have tea in the kitchen. It saves time and we can all eat in our work clothes.”

  Indoors a large table was set with bread and meat, and there were different kinds of cake and a wonderful smell of baking in the air. The big children put butter on bread for the little ones and the littlest of all was sat on the knee of her biggest uncle brother and allowed to have the best of everything. Armstrong himself was intent on making sure that everybody, child and guest, had everything they needed, and, in passing plates here and there across the table, was in the end the only one with an empty plate.

  “Serve yourself, my dear,” prompted Mrs. Armstrong.

  “I will in a minute, only there is Pip, who cannot reach the plums . . .”

  “He would sooner starve than see his children go without,” she told Rita as she pushed the plums nearer to her son and with the other hand placed bread and cheese on her husband’s plate, though he was now outside the kitchen door pouring milk
into a saucer for the cat.

  One of the Armstrong girls interrogated Rita on the topic of medicine and ailments and was so quick to follow and understand that Rita turned to her mother and said, “You have a nurse in the making here.” At the other end of the table, the children were full of questions for Daunt about photography and boating and the quadricycle.

  When only crumbs were left, Daunt noticed a lightening in the room and put his head out of the door.

  “Could we make the most of the light, do you think? Mr. Armstrong, a photograph of the farmer at work, perhaps? Will your horse stand still for ten seconds?”

  “She will if I am with her.”

  Fleet was brought into the courtyard and saddled up. Daunt kept a close eye on the sky. Armstrong mounted.

  “What about that little cat?” Rita wondered aloud. “Where has she got to?”

  The cat was found and brought and lifted to sit purring on her master’s shoulder.

  At this, Armstrong’s children, understanding the nature of the photograph, went to fetch the dog. The elderly dog amiably allowed herself to be led to a spot beside Fleet’s forelegs, where she sat upright and looked directly at the camera like the most obedient subject. And then, when all was in place, Armstrong started.

  “Matilda!” he exclaimed. “We cannot leave Matilda out!”

  His middle son swiveled and set off at great speed.

  The cloud that had hovered immobile in the sky began slowly to drift. Daunt watched its slow movement and looked anxiously over to the corner where the boy had disappeared. As the cloud picked up speed in its passage across the sky, he opened his mouth to speak: “I think we’ll have to—”

  Back the boy came, at a run, with something under his arm.

  The cloud drifted faster.

  The boy passed a wriggling bundle of pink flesh up to his father.

  Daunt pulled a face. “We can’t have movement.”

  “She’ll not move,” said Armstrong. “Not if I tell her.” He lifted the piglet and murmured something into her ear while the cat eavesdropped, her head on one side. He tucked the piglet into the crook of his arm with her rear under his elbow and the entire tableau, man, steed, dog, cat, and piglet, fell into an attitude of perfect stillness that lasted precisely fifteen seconds.

  Rita waited with Bess in the kitchen while the Armstrong boys helped Daunt carry the kit back to Collodion. Bess’s eye kept returning to the photographs, and Rita looked over her shoulder. The child sat on the lap of one of the older Armstrong girls. Around her the other six children had been unable to repress their smiles and beamed steadily at the camera. The newcomer to the family stared at the lens. Her eyes that in life were so perplexing with their indefinable and ever-shifting green-blue-muddy-greyness, were simplified here by the absence of color, and Rita was troubled, as she had been troubled by the photograph of Amelia in the boat. The child had a resigned, withdrawn air in the photograph that was less visible in person.

  “Is she happy, Bess?” she asked doubtfully. “You’re a mother. What do you think?”

  “Well, she plays all right, and runs about. She has a healthy appetite. She likes going down to the river, and the big ones take her for a walk every day so she can look around and splash about.” Bess’s words said one thing; her tone implied another. “But later in the day she gets so tired. Much more tired than she ought to be, as if everything is twice as tiring for her as for another child. The light goes out of her—she gets so weary, the little dear—and instead of sleeping, all she can do is cry. There’s nothing I can do to console her.”

  Bess fidgeted with her eye patch.

  “What is your eye condition? Is it something I could help with? I’m a nurse: I’d be happy to take a look.”

  “Thank you, Rita, but no. I put my eye away a long time ago. It doesn’t trouble me so long as I don’t look at people with it.”

  “Whyever not?”

  “Sometimes I don’t like what I see with it.”

  “What do you see?”

  “What people are really like. When I was a girl I thought that everybody could see into the heart of other people. I didn’t realize that what I could see was hidden to everybody else. People don’t like it, having their true selves known, and it got me into trouble more than once. I learned to keep what I saw to myself. I only understood of it what a person of my age could understand, mind, and that was some protection, I suppose, but as I grew I liked it less and less. Too much knowledge is a burden. When I was fifteen I sewed my first patch and I’ve worn one ever since. Of course everybody thinks I’m ashamed of my eye. They think I am concealing my ugliness from them, when in truth it is their ugliness I am hiding.”

  “What an extraordinary ability,” said Rita. “I am intrigued. Have you ever taken it off and tried it since those days?”

  “Twice. But I have thought of it often since we had this addition to the family. I have thought of taking off my patch to See her.”

  “To find out who she is?”

  “It won’t tell me that. It will only tell me what it feels like to be her.”

  “It would tell you whether she is happy?”

  “It would.” Bess looked at Rita in uncertainty. “Shall I?”

  They looked out of the window where the girls were playing with the cat. The Armstrong girls were laughing and smiling as they pulled a piece of twine for the cat to leap at. The child eyed the antics listlessly. Every so often she tried a smile, but it seemed to wear her out, and she rubbed her eyes.

  “Yes,” said Rita.

  Bess stepped into the yard and returned with the child. Rita took the girl on her lap and Bess sat down opposite her. She slid her eye patch so that it covered her good eye, keeping her face fully averted from the girl until she was ready. Then she tilted her head and fixed the girl in the line of sight of her far-seeing eye.

  Bess’s hand flew to her mouth and she gasped in dismay.

  “No! The poor little girl is so lost! She wants to go home to her daddy. Oh, the poor child!” Bess seized the little girl and rocked her, pouring out all the comfort she was capable of. Over her head she spoke to Rita. “She does not belong with us. You must take her back to the Vaughans. Take her home today!”

  Truth, Lies, and the River

  “What does your medical science make of Mrs. Armstrong’s Seeing eye?” Daunt asked from the helm.

  “You are the optical scientist. What do you say?”

  “There is no eye, human or mechanical, that sees the souls of children.”

  “Yet here we are, taking this little girl back to the Vaughans on the basis of Bess’s reaction. Because we trust her.”

  “Why do we trust a thing neither of us believes?”

  “I didn’t say I don’t believe it.”

  “Rita!”

  “Perhaps it is this way: Bess was ill as a child; her limp and her eye set her apart from the other children. She had more opportunities to observe—and more time to consider what she observed. She became an outstandingly good judge of character, and learned what it is to live alongside other human beings and to know more about them than they do themselves. But understanding other people’s sorrows and wishes and feelings and intentions as closely as she does must be wearing. She found her gift uncomfortable, persuaded herself that it was her eye that had the talent, and drew a veil over it.

  “She was already more than half-aware that the child wasn’t happy. I suspected as much myself. So did you, I think?”

  Daunt nodded.

  “She is very experienced with children. When she took her patch off, she allowed herself to see what she already knew.”

  “And we trust her judgment,” he concluded, “which is why we are taking her back to Buscot Lodge.”

  The girl was on the deck, holding the handrail and watching the water. At every bend in the river she looked ahead. When she had scanned every vessel in sight, her eyes returned to the water. She seemed to look not so much at the surface, rendered opaque by the mot
ion of the water displaced by Collodion’s passage, but through it and beyond.

  They came to the boathouse at Buscot and moored. Daunt lifted the child down; without hurry and without surprise, she recognized the way back to the house and led them there.

  The maid gasped and rushed them straight to the drawing room.

  When they entered, the Vaughans were sitting close together on the sofa, his hand on her belly. At the intrusion they looked up. The aftermath of powerful feeling was still present in Vaughan’s tearstained face, Helena’s wide-eyed pallor. Rita and Daunt had felt themselves to be at the heart of a great event as they brought the child back to Buscot Lodge in Collodion, and to come into the house and know that something else momentous had been happening here too was disconcerting. But it was true: something vast had come and gone in this room, so grave that the air vibrated with the knowledge that nothing would ever be the same again.

  Seeing the child, Vaughan rose to his feet. He took a step, and another, and then ran to the door to sweep the girl into his arms. He held her at arm’s length as though he could scarcely believe she was there, then placed her on his wife’s lap. Helena pressed a hundred kisses on the little girl’s head, called her “darling” a thousand times, and the pair, man and wife, laughed and cried at once.

  Daunt answered the question that the Vaughans were too overcome to ask. “We’ve been photographing the Armstrongs this afternoon. They are certain she’s not Alice. She belongs here after all.”

  Vaughan and Helena exchanged a glance in which they agreed something silently together. When they turned back to Daunt and Rita, they spoke as one:

  “She is not Amelia.”