Once Upon a River

by Diane Setterfield

  He set up the camera and returned to Collodion to prepare the plate, while Rita lingered by the well, drawing up a pail of water and testing it for temperature. It was as the legend said: the water was biting cold.

  When Daunt returned, he inserted the plate in the camera.

  Daunt had not photographed Rita for some time, and she thought she knew the reason. Their photographic sessions had been intimate. How many times had he taken her head in his hands to find the pose, tilting it one way and the other, watching the fall of the light on her skin as it pooled and flooded according to the contours of her bones? She had slackened the muscles of her neck, allowed him to move her this way and that, and from time to time their eyes had met and wordlessly admitted feelings that they did not speak. And when the plate was exposed, and he was hidden beneath the black curtain—when all was silence and stillness—she nevertheless felt an intensity of communication, as everything she did not say to him overspilled into her gaze. Of course he had stopped taking her photograph. It was necessary.

  Today’s photograph was a sudden shift, which was puzzling. Perhaps it meant that he had succeeded in freeing his heart and could now behave with her in an ordinary way. She could not help being dismayed that he might have achieved this so easily, when the current of her own feelings still ran dangerously high.

  “Where shall I stand?” she asked uncertainly.

  “Right behind the camera,” he said, pointing to the dark curtain.

  “You want me to take the photograph?”

  “You’ve seen me lift the cover of the plate and take off the lens cap. Don’t let the light in under the curtain. Count to fifteen seconds and put the cover back. Don’t start till I’ve raised the water and gone under.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You plunge your face into the water and it’s supposed to show you the fulfillment of your wish.”

  From under the black cloth, through the glass, Rita watched Daunt dip his fingertips in, then shake off the icy drops with a shudder. It put her in mind of the day at the river when he had stripped almost naked to plunge in to the neck and help her in the experiment that had demonstrated the very opposite of what she had hoped. His blanched face had been rigid with cold that day, but he had not complained and remained submerged to his Adam’s apple while she counted to sixty.

  “What are you going to wish for?” she called.

  “Doesn’t it break the magic if you tell?”

  “Quite likely.”

  “Well, then, I’m not telling.”

  She had so many wishes, she wouldn’t know where to start. To see Amelia’s kidnappers punished for their crime. To care for the girl and keep her from harm always. To find a way out of this eternal to-ing and fro-ing between loving Daunt and fearing pregnancy. To understand what happened to the girl’s heartbeat on winter solstice night.

  “I’m ready.” Daunt took a breath and plunged his face into the ice-cold water.

  At one, Rita raised the cover of the plate and removed the lens cap.

  At two, she became aware of a thought rising from the depths of her mind.

  At three, the thought surfaced and she knew instantly and beyond all doubt that it was significant.

  At four, her brain working faster than she could keep up with, she had abandoned the camera, not caring what light got in under the hastily thrown up curtain, and was running to the well, taking her watch from her pocket at the same time.

  At five, she was at the well and had taken Daunt’s wrist between her thumb and fingertips to take his pulse while opening the cover of her watch.

  Six was completely forgotten: she was counting other numbers now.

  His pulse beat under her fingertip and the second hand of her watch turned around the clock face and her brain was empty of everything except the two sets of numbers and the relation between them. And what a relation it was. Even when the shock came, her mind did not jump but narrowed its attention even further, so that her counting did not falter. Time and space were nothing, she was nothing, Daunt was nothing, and the universe was reduced to the pumping of this heart in the present minute and her own mind counting and knowing.

  After eighteen seconds, Daunt reared up from the water, frozen-faced and colorless. His features a rigid mask, he looked more like a corpse than a living man, except that he gasped for breath, staggered, and sat down.

  Rita kept hold of his wrist, did not even glance up, maintained her count.

  After a minute she put her watch away. She took paper from her pocket and a pencil, dashed down the figures with trembling fingers, and laughed a brief, startled laugh before turning to him, wide-eyed, and shaking her head at the extraordinariness of it all.

  “What is it?” he said. “Are you all right?”

  “Am I all right? Daunt—are you all right?”

  “My face is cold. I think I’m going to—”

  To her alarm he leant away, as if nauseous, but after a moment turned back to her. “No. It’s settled.”

  She took his hands in hers and scrutinized him intently. “Yes, but—Daunt—how do you feel?”

  He returned her intensely puzzled stare with a mild version of the same thing.

  “I feel a bit peculiar, actually. Must be the chill. But I’m all right.”

  She raised the piece of paper.

  “Your heart stopped.”

  “What?”

  She looked down at her notes. “I got here at—let’s call it six seconds after immersion. It was about that. Your heartbeat was at its normal rate then: seventy beats per minute. At eleven seconds it stopped altogether for three whole seconds. When it restarted, it was at a rate of thirty beats per minute. Once you were out of the water, it remained at that rate for seven seconds. Thereafter it rose rapidly.”

  She took his hand and felt for his pulse again. Counted. “It’s back to normal. Seventy beats a minute.”

  Daunt felt his heart beating and paid attention to it as he had never done before. He slid a hand inside his jacket and felt the power of the pump in his chest against his hand.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Are you sure?”

  It was a ridiculous question. It was Rita. She didn’t make mistakes about things like that. “What made you think of it?” he asked.

  “The cold water made me remember the first experiment at the river. And I was suddenly struck by the fact that that day you weren’t completely submerged, only up to the neck, so that today the part of you in icy water was the only part that wasn’t before. And I suppose I must have connected that with the head injuries I’ve treated in the past, and the knowledge that so much of what makes us human is contained there . . . Everything came together and I just left the camera and ran . . .”

  It was a discovery. Joy surged through her. Instinct made her reach for Daunt’s hand, but she did not take it, for it was plain her jubilation was not shared. He rose from the grass, looking tired and drawn. “I’d better retrieve this overexposed plate,” he said flatly as he made for the camera.

  They dismantled and packed up in strained silence, and when everything was stowed away, Daunt stood still.

  “I didn’t wish for anything,” he told her abruptly. “I don’t believe in wishing wells. Though you seem to have been granted your wish. If I had been the wishing type, I might have wished for you and a child. Both things. Together. But I don’t know if I could bring myself to wish for a thing you don’t want. I have imagined it, Rita. The two of us allowing our feelings to run away with us, nature taking its course, realizing a child is on the way . . . What’s the value of happiness that can only come at the price of another person’s despair?”

  Grimly he turned away from her and took up his place at the helm. Collodion took them upriver to Rita’s cottage, slicing the river, creating a churn of noise and splash and leaving a long trail of turbulence in its wake. They went in silence. When they came to Rita’s cottage, they murmured a stiff good night, and he went on to the Swan.

  Letting
herself into the cottage, Rita put her notebook on the table she used as a desk and turned to the page of today’s annotations. A secondary exhilaration caused a little leap of the heart. What a discovery! It was followed by a sinking. What kind of a wishing well was it that gave you one of the things you most wanted, without even wishing for it, and made you at the same time so painfully conscious of everything else you could not have?

  The Magic Lantern Show

  At the Swan, summer turned to autumn and the rain did not cease. There were no more frowning conversations about the danger of a poor harvest, for it was now a certainty. No amount of sunshine could change anything. The crops sat stunted and blackening in the fields, and how could you harvest them anyway, with the ground so waterlogged? The laid-off farmhands tried to get jobs at the gravel works and elsewhere, and although all went to the Swan for respite from their worries, a mood of worry hung over the winter room.

  In this atmosphere word got round that the child had come back from the Armstrongs and was living with the Vaughans again. What to make of it? They supposed she was not Alice after all. They supposed she was Amelia again. This deviation of the story was not met with enthusiasm. A story ought to go clearly in one direction and then, after a distinct moment of crisis, change to go in another. This slipping back on the quiet to the original lacked the requisite drama. Later it was said that the Vaughans had been heard calling the child Milly. Whether this was an unorthodox abbreviation of Amelia or another name altogether was the source of some debate, but it didn’t match up to the early arguments over the color of her eyes, and when measured against the passionate debate about whether or not the fact of being impossible means a thing can’t happen, it was distinctly lackluster. The relentlessness of the rain dampened their enthusiasm too. In fact, stories began to grow as weak as the crops in the field. Sometimes the tellers even found themselves drinking in silence. When Jonathan tried to tell his tale about the farmer who drove his horse and cart into the lake and then something or other that he couldn’t altogether remember—and ending with “and he was never seen again!”—he was met with little encouragement.

  Joe ailed too. More and more often he lay sinking in the room at the back; when he appeared infrequently in the winter room, he was frailer and paler than ever. Though he struggled for breath, he told a story or two, strange ones, brief in the telling, and stirring to hear; in their endings they seemed to open onto infinity, and nobody could explain or retell them afterwards.

  Against this background, and nourished by the uncertainty of the child’s identity, a seed that had been sown some months ago and given rise to nothing at the time saw a belated germination. The great-aunt of one of the gravel diggers had reckoned she’d seen the child had no reflection when she looked in the river. Now the second cousin of a cressman said that was all wrong. He’d seen the child staring in the river and had witnessed this mystifying thing: the child had two reflections, each one resembling the other in every detail. Spurred by this, other stories began to circulate. That the girl had no shadow, that her shadow had the form of an old crone, that if you looked too long into those peculiar eyes of hers she would benefit from your distracted state to slice your shadow from the soles of your feet and eat it.

  “It’s happened to me!” an elderly widow with ailments both real and imaginary told Rita, staring at her feet and pointing. “The witch’s child has eaten my shadow!”

  “Look up instead,” Rita encouraged her. “Where is the sun?”

  The widow searched the sky. “Drowned. Quite drowned.”

  “Yes. There is no sun today, and that is why you have no shadow. There is nothing more to it than that.”

  She seemed reassured but it didn’t last. The next thing Rita heard from a patient was that the girl had eaten the sun and brought the rain to wreck the harvest.

  In the Swan they heard this and shrugged. Did it make sense? They recalled that she was dead and then alive again, which no ordinary human could do, but a witch’s child? They pondered but refrained from endorsing the theory.

  Then, in early September, all of this was pushed aside by a novelty. A poster appeared, pinned to one of the beams in the wall of the Swan; it announced that on the night of the autumn equinox there would be a magic lantern show. It was to be provided free by Mr. Daunt of Oxford as a gesture of thanks to the people whose quick action and presence of mind had done so much to aid him when he was injured nine months ago.

  “It is a story told in pictures,” Margot explained to Jonathan. “With pictures on glass, I believe, and light passed through them. I don’t know how it works; you’ll have to ask Mr. Daunt.”

  “What kind of a story is it?”

  But that was a secret.

  On the day of the equinox, the inn was closed to drinkers—even regulars—until seven o’clock in the evening. Some of the regulars had not been able to believe that this applied to them; they turned up anyway and were outraged at being denied entry. They heard constant noise from inside and saw that the door was forever being opened and closed to allow in strong young men carrying great boxes and crates. They went away, telling others that they had not been allowed in and that there was something extraordinary going on.

  Daunt had begun his preparations early. A hundred times he ran between Collodion and the inn, organizing his own assistants and Armstrong’s boys. Which containers, in which order, to which room . . . At one point, six men were needed to carry in a large heavy rectangle, concealed under packaging. They lifted it with grave attention, and as they inched up the slope sweating and with strained faces, Daunt did not so much as blink, so intent was his gaze. When it was got into the inn successfully, there was a communal sigh of relief and refreshments for all, before they got back to the more ordinary lifting and carrying. Only when Daunt and the Ockwells were alone was the blanket and the packing case taken off and the mysterious shape revealed to be a great pane of glass.

  “I’ll set it up here. Nobody must come behind the curtain. The glass will be invisible in the dark. We don’t want any injuries. Now, how’s that paint drying in the main room for the magic lantern?”

  In the afternoon Rita arrived, accompanying a woman who was so draped under a shawl that it was impossible to see her face. Most of the little Margots came to help, and one of them brought her youngest daughter with her, a little girl of three, who had her own very important role to play.

  At half past six, Jonathan was given the honor of unlocking the door and holding it open to let the curious inside. They were all directed to the right, into the large summer room. The Swan was transformed. A velvet drape covered one wall, concealing the arch into the winter room, and another wall—in front of the chairs—had been repainted in fresh white. The tables had gone and instead rows of chairs were serried together facing the white wall. Behind the seating, raised on a small platform, stood Henry Daunt with a curious mechanical device and a box of glass plates.

  A great many people came in and there was the din of many conversations at once: the farm laborers and the gravel diggers and all the regulars and their wives and their children, and countless people from the neighboring villages who had got to hear of it. Armstrong was there with Bess and his older children. He sat with an air of grave restlessness. He had an inkling about part of the content of the show—had indeed helped with the preparation of it. Robin had been invited but was nowhere to be seen, which surprised nobody. The Vaughans were staying away. Knowing in advance what the story was to be, both agreed it would be better not to attend. After all, there was no certainty it would come to anything. They had contributed what was necessary, and their presence would in any case be felt in other ways. The little Margots served cider to all, and at precisely seven o’clock Daunt made a short speech of thanks to the Ockwells. Jonathan was about to close the door, when Lily White arrived, panting, holding a covered basket.

  Lily had to sit on a stool at the back, for all the seats were taken. On her knees she held the basket with the red cloth cov
er, beneath which something was wriggling. She placed a hand to quieten the puppy she had bought that afternoon as a gift for Ann, and it settled. Where was Ann? She peered over the heads of the audience, looking for a small child’s head between two adult ones; but before she had scanned more than a few rows, the lanterns were dimmed and the room plunged into darkness.

  There was an expectant stir, the scuffing of feet on the floor, the arranging of skirts, some throat clearing; then through all that a crisp mechanical click was heard and—

  “Oh!”

  Buscot Lodge materialized spectrally on the white wall. The home of the Vaughans: its pale stone facade pierced with seventeen windows arranged in such orderly fashion that nobody could imagine anything but harmony under its quiet grey roof. A few looked to see how the image had flown onto the wall from Daunt’s machine at the back, but most were too entranced to think of it.

  Click. Buscot Lodge disappears and Mr. and Mrs. Vaughan are suddenly in their place. Between them, the wriggling blur of a child, Amelia, aged two. There is a murmur of feeling from the women in the audience.

  Click. Giggles: this is not what anyone was expecting—an advertisement, writ large in the stream of light. Daunt reads aloud for the benefit of those that are not quick with their letters, and while he reads, others comment in whispers:

  STELLA

  * * *

  THE SAPIENT PIG

  THIS MOST EXTRAORDINARY CREATURE

  WILL SPELL AND READ, CAST ACCOUNTS,

  PLAY AT CARDS,

  TELL ANY PERSON WHAT O’CLOCK IT IS TO A MINUTE

  By Their Own Watch

  * * *

  ALSO

  * * *

  TELL THE AGE OF ANY ONE IN COMPANY;

  AND WHAT IS MORE ASTONISHING, SHE WILL

  Discover A Person’s Thoughts

  A THING NEVER HEARD OF BEFORE