Once Upon a River

by Diane Setterfield

  They sat on the bank. It was better to tell such stories close to the river than in a drawing room. Words accumulate indoors, trapped by walls and ceilings. The weight of what has been said can lie heavily on what might yet be said and suffocate it. By the river the air carries the story on a journey: one sentence drifts away and makes room for the next.

  The child pulled her shoes off and stood in the shallows, directing the river and carrying on her usual business with sticks and stones, pausing every once in a while to glance up- and downriver, while Vaughan told Daunt and Rita what he had told Helena and, before her, Mrs. Constantine.

  When he fell silent, having told all, Helena said, “I knew she was dead. The night he came home without her, I knew. It was on his face. But I could not bear to know it, and he did not say it, and between us we pretended it was not so. We colluded. We made a falsehood together. And it almost destroyed us. Without the truth we could not grieve. Without the truth we could not console each other. In the end, I was so tormented by the deceitful hope I clung to, I was ready to drown myself. Then the girl came, and I recognized her.”

  “We were happy. Or rather, Helena was happy and I was happy that she was happy.”

  “Poor Anthony’s lie was the greater, but it was not so enduring as my own. I feasted on the sight of the girl. I buried all the painful truth and saw only her.”

  “And then Mrs. Eavis said, ‘Hello, Alice!’ ”

  “It was not Mrs. Eavis that changed things. It was you, Rita.”

  “Me?”

  “You told me there was going to be another baby.”

  Rita remembered the moment. “You said, ‘Oh,’ and then you said, ‘Oh’ again.”

  “One ‘oh’ for the new baby. The other for the knowledge that came with it: That this little girl had never stirred in my womb. I knew then that she was not Amelia, though I missed her quite as much as if she had been. She brought me back to life, and brought me back to Anthony, and I can’t help but love her, our little mystery child, whoever she is.

  “She changed us. We have wept for Amelia and we will weep again. There are oceans of tears waiting to be shed. But we will love this little girl like a daughter, and she will be a sister to the baby that is to come.”

  They walked back to the house, the Vaughans ahead with the child who was neither Amelia nor Alice between them. She seemed to have accepted her return to Buscot Lodge as she had accepted her departure from it.

  Rita and Daunt fell behind as they followed.

  “She can’t be Lily’s sister,” Daunt said in a low voice. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Then whose is she?”

  “She’s no one’s child. So why shouldn’t the Vaughans have her? They love her. She can have a good life with them.” There was a note in his voice that Rita recognized, for the same regret and longing rested in her own breast. She remembered the night she had fallen asleep in a chair at the Swan with the sound of Daunt’s breathing in the room and the child sleeping on her lap, her rib cage rising and falling in harmony with her own. I could keep her had been the thought that had drifted into her then and never left. But it was no good. She was an unmarried woman with a job. The Vaughans were much better placed to care for her. She must content herself with loving the child from a distance.

  Rita took a short breath, expelled it, and with determination turned her mind to other things. She considered the implications of what Vaughan had just told them and shared her thoughts with Daunt in a murmur. “Whoever it was that kidnapped Amelia . . . ,” she started.

  “Also killed her,” finished Daunt in the same undertone.

  “They can’t be allowed to get away with it. Someone must know something.”

  “Someone always knows something. But who? And what do they know? And do they even know the significance of what they know?”

  Struck by an idea, Daunt stopped. “There might be a way . . .” He scratched his head, doubtfully.

  They caught up with the Vaughans and Daunt set out his idea.

  “But . . . will it work?” Helena asked.

  “There’s no way of knowing.”

  “Unless we try it,” Vaughan said.

  The four of them stood in front of the house. The housekeeper who had heard them coming opened the door and then, when nobody moved, closed it again.

  “Shall we?” Rita asked.

  “I can’t think of any other way,” Helena said.

  “Well, then,” Vaughan said, turning to Daunt. “How would you begin?”

  “With the dragons of Cricklade.”

  “Dragons?” Vaughan looked confused, but Helena knew what Daunt was referring to. “Ruby’s grandmother!” she exclaimed. “And Ruby.”

  The Dragons of Cricklade

  Cricklade is a town stuffed full of stories. As they passed the church on the quadricycle, Daunt explained some of them to Rita.

  “According to legend,” he said as they made their way through the town, the quadricycle laden with all the photographic equipment, “if a person is unlucky enough to fall from the tower, his friends and family will be diverted from their grief by the spectacle of a stone effigy of their loved one springing naturally from the ground where he fell. I rather regret I have so slim a chance of photographing that.”

  They did not stop at the church but headed north and, on the road leading out of the village towards Down Ampney, kept a look out for a thatched cottage with beehives.

  You must go, please, Helena had begged Rita. Daunt will never get anything out of Ruby by himself. She’ll trust you. Everybody does.

  So here she was, sitting behind Daunt among the boxes as they bumped and jolted along the country roads, keeping her eyes peeled. “There.” She pointed, spotting the distinctive tops of beehives behind a hedge.

  A white-haired woman was in the garden, making her way on tottering legs towards the hives. At the sound of Rita’s greeting she turned transparent eyes in their direction. “Who’s that? Do I know you?”

  “My name is Rita Sunday and I’ve come to buy honey. You must be Mrs. Wheeler. I have Mr. Daunt here, a photographer. He would like to talk to you about dragons for his book.”

  “A book? I don’t know about that . . . But I don’t mind telling you about the dragons. I might be ninety but I can remember it as if it was yesterday. Come and sit here, and we’ll have bread and honey while you ask your questions.”

  They sat on a bench in a sheltered corner, and the woman went to the door and spoke briefly to someone inside. When she returned, she told them about the dragons. She was a child of three or four when the dragons had come to this very cottage. It was the first time they’d been seen in Cricklade for nearly a hundred years, and nobody had seen them again since. She was the only living person in Cricklade today who had seen them. She had woken with a cough, heat in her throat, and seen flames in the hole in the ceiling where there ought to have been only thatch. “I got out of bed and went to the door, but I could hear the dragon roaring outside on the landing, so I didn’t dare open it. I went to the window instead and there was my father looking in: he had climbed up into the branches of the tree outside, despite that the branches themselves were smoldering and ready to burst into flame at any minute, and he smashed the glass with his foot and reached in and lifted me out. It was a scramble getting down to the ground, and when we got there, the neighbors took me out of his arms and laid me on the ground and rolled me over and over. I couldn’t think what they were doing! But my nightdress was on fire, you see, though I didn’t know it at the time, and they rolled me to smother the flames.”

  The woman delivered her story tranquilly, as though it was so long ago it belonged to another person altogether. From time to time, when they asked a question, her pale, candid eyes turned benevolently in the direction of whoever spoke to her, though it was plain she could not see. A thin girl with a pinched look brought a tray to the table and set out slices of bread, a dish of butter, and a jar of honey with a spoon. She gave an unsmiling nod t
o the visitors and went back to the house without raising her eyes.

  “Shall I butter the bread?” Rita offered, and Granny Wheeler thanked her.

  “My grandmother kept her honey in there,” she said, nodding at the stone outbuilding, “in a great big canister as big as a bath, and she took the top off and dropped me in it, stark naked, and that’s where I stayed for the rest of the night. There was no honey to sell that year, for nobody wanted to eat it after I had sat in it up to my neck.”

  “And did you see the dragon? The ones you heard from behind the door? What I would give to have a photograph of a dragon—a rich man I’d be!”

  She laughed. “You’d have better things to do than stand about taking photographs if you saw them! Yes, I saw them. I was sitting in the honey when I saw them fly away. Hundreds of them, there were.” She looked up as if she could still see them now. “Great flying eels—picture that and you will have it about right in your mind’s eye. No ears and no eyes that I could see. No scales, nor even any wings to speak of. Not a bit like any dragon I ever saw in a picture. Just long and dark and sleek and quick. They were twisting and writhing, and the sky was so full of them that to look up at them all was like staring into a pan of boiling ink. Now, how do you like my honey?”

  They finished eating and the old woman reminisced some more about her memories of the night of the dragons.

  “Look up there!” She pointed to the roof. “I can’t see it no more—my eyes aren’t good enough—but you can see it. The dark marks over the window.”

  It was true, there was fire staining just beneath the level of the thatch.

  “That would make a fine detail in the photograph,” Daunt suggested. “Yourself just here, next to the hives, and the place where the fire was in the background. There will be sky in the picture too—where the dragons were.”

  With very little reluctance Granny Wheeler was cajoled into appearing in the photograph, and while Daunt set up, Rita continued talking to her.

  “You must have been badly burned?”

  Granny Wheeler rolled up her sleeve and showed her arm. “That’s what I’m like all down my back from my neck to my waist.” A large area of skin was discolored, taut, and unlined.

  “This is most unusual,” Rita said. “Such a large area to be burnt. You haven’t had any trouble with it since?”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Because of the honey? I use honey when my patients are burned too.”

  “Are you a nurse?”

  “Yes, and a midwife. I work a few miles downstream. At Buscot.”

  The woman started. “Buscot?”

  There was a pause. Rita swallowed a piece of bread and honey and waited until, tentatively, the old woman went on.

  “You might know something about the child that went missing there two years ago . . .”

  “Amelia Vaughan?”

  “That’s the one. They said she came back—but I’ve heard it might not be her after all . . . What do they say about it now? Is it Amelia or not?”

  “A woman did come forward who appeared to recognize the child as another little girl, but the other family came to think she was not theirs, so she is back with the Vaughans again. Nobody knows who she is, really, but she is not Amelia.”

  “Not Amelia! I did so hope . . . For the sake of the Vaughans, but also for the good of my own family. My granddaughter was nursemaid to the Vaughans. She has had no end of trouble since that little child was took. All manner of things have been said about her. Nobody who knows her believes a word of it, but there are so many who hear the story first and see her in the light of it. All she wanted in life was a nice young man and a family of her own, but there aren’t many men prepared to take on a wife mixed up in something like that! She fretted herself sick with it all. Couldn’t sleep and hardly ate a thing. Wouldn’t go out in case anybody spoke harshly to her—wouldn’t hardly come out of her room, some days. I didn’t hear her laugh for months on end . . . And then word came that the girl was back! Returned by the river, they said. Them that had gossiped about Ruby had to bite their tongues then. The tide started to turn. Ruby came out of her shell. She even got work, helping out at the school she used to go to. She got a bit of her color back, started to take an interest in life again. Sometimes in the evenings she went with the other young ladies from the school for a turn around the streets, and who was I to say no, after all the hardship she’d suffered? Why shouldn’t she have a bit of fun like the other young ones do? She met Ernest. They got engaged. They was going to get married in July. But just at solstice time a jealous girl took her aside and whispered that the child they found at Buscot was not Amelia after all—that the lost girl was still lost. The talk started up again. Ruby was still under suspicion. She called off the wedding the very next day. ‘How can I marry and have children with everybody whispering these things about me? I will not be trusted with my own babies! It’s not fair on Ernest. He deserves better than me.’ That was the gist of it. Ernest did his best to talk her out of it. He won’t listen to the gossips. He says the wedding is only postponed and the engagement stands, but she won’t see him though he comes asking after her every day. The school said she had better leave and she never goes beyond the garden walls now.”

  The blind woman sighed. “I was hoping for better news, but you have only confirmed what I knew already.” She made to stand up slowly on her ancient bones. “I may as well fetch you that honey while we’re waiting.”

  “Sit down a little longer,” said Rita. “I know the Vaughans. They trust Ruby. They know she did no harm.”

  “That is something,” the woman acknowledged, settling back into her seat. “They were good people. They never said anything harsh about her.”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Vaughan would like nothing better than to get to the bottom of this business of the kidnap. Because if your granddaughter had nothing to do with it, somebody else did—and that person must be caught and brought to justice. If that could be brought about, it would be a great help to Ruby, in her position.”

  The dragon seer shook her head. “They looked into it at the time and found nothing. I suppose it were the river gypsies, and they won’t never be caught now.”

  “But supposing something new were to be tried . . . ?”

  The old woman looked up and her transparent eyes peered at Rita in perplexity.

  “I believe everything you have told me about Ruby and how good she is, because I have heard it all before, from the Vaughans themselves. It is not fair that she should not marry. It is not fair that she should not have the children she wants and would be such a good mother to. Tell me now: If there was a way of bringing the truth to the surface, of exposing the true culprits and clearing Ruby’s name, would she help? Would she play a part in it?”

  The woman’s eyes wavered.

  The door to the house opened and the scrawny young woman who had served the bread and honey stepped out.

  “What would I have to do?”

  While Daunt positioned Granny Wheeler alongside her hives and beneath the lintel stained by dragon flames, Rita sat with Ruby, their two heads together, explaining the plan.

  When she had finished, the girl stared at her. “But that’s magic!”

  “It isn’t, but it will seem so.”

  “And it will make people tell the truth?”

  “It might. If somebody knows something they haven’t told yet. Something they didn’t know was important, perhaps. If that person is there, and if we are lucky, yes.”

  Ruby turned her eyes down again, to the white-knuckled hands with bitten nails that she clasped tightly in her lap. Rita said no more to persuade her but left her to her thoughts. The hands fidgeted and twisted and at last came to stillness.

  “What do you need me to do, though? I can’t do magic like that.”

  “You won’t have to do magic. All you need to do is tell me who persuaded you to leave Buscot Lodge that night.”

  A feeble light of hope had come into Ruby’s eyes. N
ow her lip trembled and the hope died. She dropped her head into her hands.

  “Nobody! I’ve said it over and over again and they don’t believe me! Nobody!”

  Rita took the girl’s hands and drew them gently from her face. She kept them clasped in her own and turned to look fully into her tearful face.

  “Then why did you go out?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me! No one would. They would call me a silly liar.”

  “Ruby, I know you are an honest girl. If there is something unbelievable at the bottom of all this, I am the person to tell. Perhaps with two minds we will be able to work it out.”

  The years since the kidnap had worn Ruby down to the bone. She was wan-faced, and dark circles were carved under her eyes. It was hard to believe she was not yet twenty. The future that had appeared possible when Amelia seemed to be found and Ruby got engaged had been dashed again. She gave no sign that she had faith in Rita’s ability to help her. Unconvinced that the revelation could do her any good, she had nevertheless reached a point where she was simply too exhausted to maintain the silence any longer. So, shoulders slumped, her voice flat and at the end of her strength, Ruby told.

  The Wishing Well

  There was a wishing well at Kelmscott. The well was reputed to have a great many magic powers, including the ability to cure physical ills of all the well-known kinds, in addition to aiding in the resolution of all sorts of marital and familial dilemmas. Faith in the powers of the well was strengthened by one verifiable and unique feature: whatever the weather, and whatever the season, water from the well at Kelmscott was always ice-cold.

  With its simple stonework and wooden canopy, the well was picturesque, and Daunt had photographed it more than once. In spring the froth of hawthorn flower made a good backdrop. Climbing roses scrambled up the posts in summer. He had taken a third picture of it looking starkly beautiful in a wintry cap of snow. He lacked an autumn photograph to complete the quartet.

  “Let’s stop,” he suggested, pointing at the well, which was wreathed with evergreen foliage into which the villagers had tied ribbons and straw decorations. “We have the light.”