* * *
MOREOVER
* * *
IN PRIVATE AUDIENCE SHE WILL
REVEAL THE FUTURE
* * *
INCLUDING
* * *
SUCCESSES FINANCIAL
AND MATRIMONIAL
“It is the pig from the fair!”
“ ‘Sapient’? Whatever is that?”
“ ’Tis a clever word meaning wise. Which is a thing you would know if you was sapient yourself.’’
“Spells better than I do myself, that pig do!”
“I wish it didn’t play so well at cards. I lost thruppence to it.”
“Seventy-three that pig said I was! I was that cross!”
“I left before she started discovering the thoughts. I couldn’t bear to have a pig rummaging in my thoughts, never, never, never!”
“Shilling a time, they was wanting for a private audience. Daft! Who’s got a shilling round ’ere to spend on an audience with a pig?”
The mechanical noise comes again; the advertisement makes way for the pig herself. In fact it is not Maud but her daughter Mabel, who looks exactly the same to everyone but Armstrong. Seated opposite the pig is a young woman they all recognize.
“Ruby!”
The hum of conversation fades abruptly.
In the image, Ruby proffers a shilling, and a dark-sleeved arm reaches down to take it from her. At the same time she gazes into the eyes of the pig.
Now a voice breaks into the darkness—and it is the voice of Ruby herself.
“Tell me my fortune, Stella. Who will I marry? Where will I meet the one who is to win my hand?”
The audience gasps, and there is shifting in seats as people turn their heads to look in the direction of the voice; but nobody can see anything in the dark, and in any case, from another side of the room, voiced by one of the little Margots, the pig replies: “Go to St. John’s Lock at midnight on winter solstice night and look in the water. There you will see the face of he who is to win your hand.”
Click. A clock face gleams in the darkness: it is midnight!
Click. St. John’s Lock: everybody knows it. And here is Ruby again, on hands and knees, staring intently into the river.
“Well, I’m blowed,” somebody says, and “Shhhh!” says everybody else.
A click, and we are back at St. John’s Lock. Ruby is standing, hands on hips, in an attitude of vexation.
“Nothing!” comes the voice of Ruby again, “Nothing at all! It’s a mean trick!”
This time nobody stares at the source of the sound. They are all too absorbed in the story that is unfolding before their eyes in the magical darkness.
Click. Buscot Lodge again.
Click. The interior of a child’s room. A small child’s form under the blanket.
Click. The same room, but a dark-clad figure leans over the bed with his back to the audience.
Not a foot shuffles, not a hand fidgets. The Swan holds its breath.
Click. The same room where the bed is now empty. The window is open to the sky.
The Swan flinches.
Click. An exterior view of the house from the side. A ladder reaches to the open window.
The Swan shakes its many heads in disapproval.
Click. Two people from behind. His arm is around her shoulders. Their heads are bowed towards each other in grief. There is no doubt who they are. It is Mr. and Mrs. Vaughan.
Click. A piece of paper, once crumpled but smoothed out:
Mr. Vaughan,
£1,000 ensures the safe return of your daughter.
The Swan lets out a gasp of outrage.
“Hush!”
Click. A desk on which is a money bag, bursting at the seams.
Click. The same money bag; this time it is positioned at the far side of Radcot Bridge, only a very little way from where they are all seated now.
Murmurs of consternation.
Click. Mr. and Mrs. Vaughan wait by the fireside. The clock visible between them says six o’clock.
Click. The same photograph, except that it is now eight o’clock.
Click. Eleven o’clock. Mrs. Vaughan’s head is on her husband’s shoulder in an attitude of despair.
The Swan swoons and sobs in sympathy.
Click. A gasp! The foot of Radcot Bridge again—but the money is gone!
Click. From behind, Mr. and Mrs. Vaughan are seen collapsed in each other’s arms.
The Swan is roused. There is open weeping, a good many exclamations of outrage and horror. Threats are made against the perpetrators: one would wring their necks, another would hang them, a third wants to tie them in sacks and drop them off the bridge.
Click. WHO KIDNAPPED LITTLE AMELIA?
The Swan falls silent.
Click. The image of the pig reappears. Daunt takes a stick and uses it in the current of light to delineate what the Swan failed to notice before. There is a shadow.
There is a hushed “Oh!”
Click. It seems to be the same scene, Mabel again, standing in for her mother. This time the picture is cropped, so that only the pig’s tail is visible, and at the center of the image is the bottom of a long coat, a few inches of trouser leg, and a pair of boot toe caps.
There are gasps of shock. “It was not the pig that tricked Ruby! It was him!”
Someone stands, pointing, and shouts. “So it were him that took Amelia!”
Understanding floods the Swan, which now speaks in a hundred voices.
“He were a short fellow!”
“Skinny as a broomstick!”
“There weren’t nothing to him!”
“That coat—too wide across the shoulders.”
“And long on him.”
“Always in that hat, he were.”
“Never took it off!”
They remember him, all right. Everybody remembers him. But nobody is capable of giving any description beyond the coat and the hat and the size of the man.
And when did anyone last see him?
“Two year ago.”
“Two year? Close to three if it’s a day!”
“Aye, getting on for three.”
Consensus is reached. The man with the pig was an undersized man in an oversized coat with a low hat and nobody has seen him for nearly three years.
Daunt and Rita confer. They have been all ears, but there is nothing to indicate that anybody here is about to divulge information beyond what is already known.
He leans and murmurs in her ear. “I think I’ve wasted everyone’s time.”
“It’s not over yet. Come on. Part two.”
While outrage fills the room with noise, Daunt and Rita slip behind a curtain. Rita goes over the instructions again with the little Margot and her child, while Daunt checks over devices concealed elsewhere whose purpose are not evident from their appearance but would be familiar to any theatrical effects manager or spiritualist. “I’ll nod when I’m ready for you to draw back that curtain, all right?”
At the back of the room in her dark corner, Lily has never seen anything like these huge images on the wall, so lifelike and so impossible. When they said it was going to be a story told in pictures, she had in mind the illustrated children’s Bible whose pages she used to turn while her mother read. She didn’t know it would be reality in black-and-white, flattened like pressed flowers, and laid tall and broad on the wall that would touch on the reality of her own life. Her hand clutches at her throat, and she stares, all pulse and sweat and tremble, and there is nowhere in her terrified brain for thought to find a foothold. She has fallen into a waking nightmare.
A fork chiming on glass makes her jump. It sets the air ringing and quietens the audience. They settle in their seats: there is more to come.
Instead of a click comes the swooshing sound of a curtain being drawn back to one side. Those closest to the velvet drapes are aware of movement. The arch into the winter room is now exposed, and there is sudden light.
Heads turn, discon
certed.
There is a tense, shocked silence.
In the winter room there is a child. But it is no ordinary child. And it is no photograph. The girl’s hair moves as if lifted by a wave, her white chemise floats gauzily, and—strangest of all—her feet do not touch the floor. Her form shifts and shimmers, is at once there and absent. Her face bears the faintest trace of features, the hint of a nose, eyes that stare in faded fashion, a mouth too washed out to speak from. The white folds of her gown float around her as if the air were water, and she drifts insubstantially.
“Child,” comes Ruby’s voice. “Do you know me?”
The girl nods.
“You know me to be Ruby, your old nurse who loved you and took good care of you?”
Another nod.
Nobody moves. It is either fear or the fear of missing something that keeps them in their seats.
“Was it me who took you from your bed?”
The child shakes her head.
“It was another, then?”
The child nods, slowly, as though the questions are arriving only distantly into the other realm where she is now.
“Who was it? Who took you to the river and drowned you?”
“Yes, tell us!” someone calls from the audience. “Tell us who!”
And the girl, whose face is transparent enough to be any child’s, raises a hand, and her finger points . . . not at the screen but into the room, at the audience themselves.
Pandemonium. There are shrieks and confused cries. In their shock people rise to their feet and chairs are knocked over. In the reflected light they turn and stare, here and there, anywhere the shifting, shimmering finger might be pointing, and everywhere are faces like their own: appalled, stunned, tearstained. Someone faints; someone wails; someone moans.
“I didn’t mean to do it!” whispers Lily, her words unheard in all the commotion. With shaking hands and streaming eyes she opens the door and flees, as if the optical illusion is at her heels.
When everybody had gone, the Ockwells and the Armstrong children set about restoring the inn to order. The little ghost, robust in her everyday appearance as Margot’s youngest granddaughter, yawned as they pulled the flimsy white garment over her head and she stomped around the room in her clogs. The great mirror was packed into its huge rectangular case and heaved away with care and much grunting. The velvet curtain was taken down and folded and the gauze voile rippled and shivered as it was dropped into a bag. The gaslight was dismantled. Element by element the illusion of the ghost was dismantled, packed away, and removed, and when it was gone and they looked at each other in the interior of the Swan as it appeared on a normal evening, they saw that their hope was gone too.
Robert Armstrong’s shoulders slumped, and Margot was unusually quiet. Daunt came and went between the inn and Collodion with boxes, so low in spirits that nobody dared speak to him. Rita went to see Joe, who was in bed. He raised his eyes to her in expectation, and when she shook her head, he blinked sorrowfully.
Only Jonathan was his usual merry self, untouched by the general mood. “I nearly thought it was real,” he repeated. “Even though I knew about the mirror and the gauze and the gaslight. Even though I knew it was Polly. I nearly believed it!”
With the others he was replacing the chairs in their original places. Then, in the corner, making for the final few stools at the back, he exclaimed.
“Well, I never! Who left you behind?”
A puppy cowered in the corner of the room, under the last stool.
Robert Armstrong came to see. He bent down and lifted the animal in his large hand. “You are too small to be out in the world by yourself,” he told the puppy, and it sniffed his skin and scrambled to be held closer.
“It belongs to the woman who came in at the end,” said Daunt. He consulted his memory and listed every detail of her appearance.
“Lily White,” said Margot. “She lives at Basketman’s Cottage. I didn’t even know she was here.”
Armstrong nodded. “I’ll take this little fellow home. It’s not far, and my boys are not ready yet in any case.”
Margot turned to her granddaughter. “Now, little miss. I reckon we’ve had enough haunting for one day, eh? Time for bed!” And the little girl was whisked away.
“Just an illusion,” said Daunt. “And it hasn’t achieved much.” He turned to Ruby, who was sitting on a box in the corner, trying not to cry. “I’m sorry. I hoped for more. I’ve let you down.”
“You tried,” she told him, but the tears spilled all the same. “It’s the Vaughans who will feel it hardest.”
Of Pigs and Puppies
Armstrong tucked the puppy inside his coat to keep it warm, leaving a button undone so it could put its nose out and sniff the night air. It squirmed comfortably against him and settled.
“I had better come with you,” Rita said. “Mrs. White might be alarmed at the arrival of a stranger so late and after such an unsettling end to the evening.”
They headed up to the bridge in silence, each considering their disappointment in the evening that had cost so much in time and effort and come to nothing. They crossed over a river full of stars and on the other side came before too long to the place where the bank had collapsed and the river expanded into new breadths. They had to concentrate to get over the gnarled roots and ropes of ivy in the dark. Through the dark ringing of the river, they heard a voice.
“She knows it was me! I never meant to do ill! I swear! I wouldn’t have hurt a hair on her head! She is so cross that I took her and I drowned her—she raised her finger! She pointed me out! She knows it was me that did it.”
The pair of eavesdroppers stared into the darkness as though they might hear the better for it, waiting for the voice of the person she was speaking to, but no voice came. Rita made to step forward, but Armstrong put out a hand to halt her. Another sound had reached his ears. A muffled snuffling. It was an animal sound. It was a pig sound.
His brain began to stir.
When the sound of the pig fell still, Lily’s voice sounded again. “She will never forgive me. What am I to do? Wickedness like mine is so terrible, I can never be forgiven. God himself has sent her to punish me. I must do as the basket maker did, though I am so afraid. Oh! But I must do it and suffer the eternal torments, for I do not deserve to live a day longer in this world . . .”
The voice disintegrated into choked tears.
Armstrong strained his ears to listen to the animal snuffling that replied to Lily’s words. Was it . . . ? Surely not. And yet . . .
The puppy yapped. Their presence revealed, they stepped from the concealment of the poplars and started to walk up the slope.
“Just friends, Mrs. White,” Rita called ahead. “Returning the puppy to you. You left him behind after the magic lantern show.” Lily’s distress was visible now. “He’s come to no harm. We’ve taken care of him.”
But as Rita was approaching Lily, speaking soothingly all the while, Armstrong ran in a powerful dash up the slope. He ran towards Lily and beyond her, and all the way to the pigsty, where he fell to his knees in the mud, put his hands through the bars of the fence, and cried, “Maud!”
Armstrong gazed with love and disbelief at the face he had thought never to see again. Though she was older and weary, thinner and with an air of sadness—though her skin had lost its rosy gleam and her hair its bright copper shine—he knew her. Nor did the pig take her eyes off him. And if there had been any shadow of a doubt, her own welcome of him would have dispersed it, for she got instantly to her feet, agitated her trotters in an excited dance, and put her snout to the fence so that he could caress her ear and rub her bristly cheek. She pressed at the fence as though she would knock it down to reach her old, dear friend. As Maud’s eyes softened with the emotion of the reunion, Armstrong felt his throat ache with tears.
“Whatever has happened to you, my love? How did you come to be here?”
He took acorns from his pocket, and Maud kissed them gently from th
e palm of his hand, as so few pigs ever learned how to do, and his heart filled with joy.
Lily meanwhile continued to rub her eyes and to repeat, “I didn’t mean it. I didn’t know!”
Rita looked from Lily to Armstrong and the pig and back to Lily again. Where to begin?
“Lily, what were you saying, when we arrived? What was it you didn’t mean to do?”
As if she hadn’t heard, Lily repeated, “I didn’t know!” and only after several more efforts from Rita did she at last understand the question.
“I have told it all to the pig,” she sniffed. “She says now I must confess to the parson.”
Of Sisters and Piglets
The parson in his nightshirt and dressing gown invited his nocturnal visitors to sit. Armstrong took a chair against the wall, and Rita sat on the sofa.
“I have never once sat down at the parsonage,” Lily said. “But I have come to confess and after today I will never come here again, so I suppose I will sit.” She sat nervously next to Rita.
“Now, what’s this about confession?” the parson asked, with a glance at Rita.
“I did it,” Lily said. She had sobbed all the way along the riverbank, but now she was in the parsonage, her voice was drained. “It was me. She comes out of the river and points her finger at me. She knows it was me.”
“Who points her finger?”
Rita explained to the parson about the illusion at the Swan, and what they had meant to achieve by it, then turned to Lily. “It was not real, Lily. It wasn’t meant to frighten you.”
“She used to come to Basketman’s Cottage. She came out of the river and pointed her finger at me—she was real, I know it was: she dripped onto the floorboards and left them damp. When I didn’t confess but kept my wickedness secret, she came to the Swan and now she points her finger at me there. She knows it was me.”
“What is it that you did, Lily?” Rita crouched in front of Lily, holding her two hands in hers. “Tell us plainly.”
“I drowned her!”
“You drowned Amelia Vaughan?”
Once Upon a River Page 36
