Once Upon a River

by Diane Setterfield

  “She is not Amelia Vaughan! She is Ann!”

  “You drowned your sister?”

  Lily nodded. “I drowned her! And she will not let me rest till I have confessed.”

  “I see,” said the parson. “Then you must confess. Tell me what happened.”

  Now that it had actually come to it, Lily was calm. Her tears dried, her muddled notions cleared. With her hair come adrift from her hairpins, and her eyes wide and blue in her thin face, she looked younger than her years as she told the story by candlelight in the kitchen of the parsonage.

  “I was twelve, I think. I might have been thirteen. I lived with my mother in Oxford and with us my stepfather and stepbrother. I had a little sister, Ann. We had piglets in the backyard, that we were to fatten to sell, but my stepfather did not look after them properly and they ailed. My sister was not strong. She was small and though she was loved, by me and by my mother, my stepfather was disappointed in her. He had wanted another boy. Sons were what mattered in his eyes. He resented the food that I ate and the food my sister ate, and we were in fear of him—my mother too—and I tried to eat less so my sister, who was so frail, could have more. But she didn’t thrive. One day, when my sister was sick in bed, my mother put me in charge while she went out to buy some medicine for her. I was to get the meal prepared and listen out in case my sister had a coughing fit. My stepfather would have been angry at her buying medicine, for it was very expensive and girls were really not worth it. I was very nervous and so was Mother. While Mother was out, my stepbrother came into the kitchen with a bundle. It was a sack, tied tight with string. One of the piglets had died, he told me. I was under orders from my stepfather to take it to the river and drop it in, to save the trouble of digging a hole and burying it. I told my brother I had to prepare the dinner and he should take the piglet to the river, but he told me my stepfather would beat the living daylights out of me if I didn’t do as I was told. So I went. The bundle was heavy. When I got to the river, I put the bundle down on the bank where the drop was steep and pushed it in. Then I went home. When I came to our street, all the neighbors were out of doors and there was a great hubbub. My mother came running up to me. “Where is Ann?” she said, “Where’s your sister?”

  “In our bedroom,” I replied, and she cried out and wept, and asked again, “Where is Ann? Why weren’t you here and where has she gone?”

  One of the neighbors had seen me go by before, with the heavy burden in my arms, and she said, “What was in that sack?”

  “A piglet that died,” I said. But when they started to question me about where I had taken it and what I had done, I could not answer but was tongue-tied in confusion.

  Some of the neighbors ran down to the river then. I wanted to stay close by my mother, but she was so angry with me for not watching over my sister that she was no comfort, and in the end I went to hide.

  My stepbrother was a watchful one. He knew the places I used to hide in when my stepfather was in a temper. He found me out. “You know what was in that sack, don’t you?”

  “It was a piglet,” I said, for I believed it was.

  And then he told me what I had really done. “It was Ann in that sack. You have drowned her.”

  I ran away, and I have never told anybody the truth about my sister from that day to this.”

  Rita suggested and the parson agreed, that Lily should stay the night in the guest room at the parsonage. Like a small child, Lily acquiesced.

  When the bed was made and Lily was about to go upstairs to get into it, and Rita was making her farewells to the parson, Armstrong cleared his voice and spoke for the first time.

  “I wonder—before we depart . . .”

  They all looked at him.

  “It has been a long night and for Mrs. White a very exhausting one, but if I could ask just one question before we go?”

  The parson nodded.

  “Lily, how did my pig Maud come to be at Basketman’s Cottage?”

  Having confessed her one great crime, Lily’s other secrets were no longer anchored down. “Victor brought her.”

  “Victor?”

  “My stepbrother.”

  “What is his surname, your stepbrother?”

  “His name is Victor Nash.”

  At that name, Armstrong started as though he had sliced through his own finger with his slaughtering knife.

  The Other Side of the River

  “He can’t be in the factory,” Vaughan said. “I’ve been selling off the contents and people have been coming and going for months. If anyone was hiding out in there, he’d have been spotted. And the vitriol works have high windows: the light would be visible for miles. No, the only place big enough for a distillery and hideout that’s concealed and undisturbed is the old storehouse.”

  His forefinger jabbed at the place on the plan of Brandy Island.

  “Where’s the landing spot?” asked Daunt.

  “Here’s where he’ll be expecting anyone to come in. If he keeps an eye out, this is where he’ll be watching. But it’s possible to land on the island from the far side, away from the factory and the other buildings. Take him by surprise.”

  “How many men will we be?” Armstrong asked.

  “I can provide eight men from the household and farms. I could raise more, but we’d need more rowboats, and that might rouse suspicion.”

  “I could take a greater number on Collodion, but it would be noisy and too visible. Fewer of us in rowboats is the only way.”

  “Eight others, plus we three . . .” They looked at each other and nodded. Eleven. It would be enough.

  “When?” said Vaughan.

  At dead of night, a small flotilla of rowboats left the jetty at Buscot Lodge. Nobody spoke. Blades barely disturbed the ink-black water as they dipped in and out of it. Oars creaked and water lapped against the sides of the vessels, but these sounds were lost in the low grumble of the river. Invisibly the rowers slipped from land over water to land again.

  At the far side of Brandy Island, they hauled their boats out of the river and up the steep slope to conceal them under the hanging branches of the willow. They knew each other by silhouette; nods were all that were needed for communication, for every man had his instructions.

  They separated into pairs and spread out along the bank, to make diverse routes through the vegetation towards the factory. Daunt and Armstrong were the only ones unfamiliar with the island. Daunt was with Vaughan; Armstrong with Newman, one of Vaughan’s men. They pushed branches out of their way, stumbled over roots, moved blindly in the darkness. When the vegetation thinned and gave way to paths, they knew they were nearing the factory. They skirted walls, hastened across open areas with barely a sound.

  Daunt and Vaughan came to the storehouse. Hemmed in by the factory on one side and with dense trees on the other, the glow from its windows would have been invisible from both banks. In the darkness the two men exchanged a look. Daunt pointed to the other side. A hint of movement in the trees, illuminated by the faint light from the building. Others had arrived.

  Armstrong made the first move. He rushed at the door and kicked at it with his full body weight. It left the door swinging, half off its hinges. Vaughan pushed it fully open, and Daunt was right behind him as they surveyed the room. Vats and bottles and barrels. Air thick with yeast and sugar. A small brazier, recently tended. A chair, empty. Daunt pressed his hand to the cushion.

  “It’s warm.”

  “Damn!” exclaimed Vaughan.

  A sound. Outside. From the trees.

  “That way!” came a cry. Daunt, Vaughan, and Armstrong joined the others. There was a great scramble through the undergrowth as men rushed to give chase, following the direction of the sound. They crashed through branches, broke twigs underfoot, exclaimed when they stumbled, until they did not know whether the sounds they were following were those of the quarry or the hunters themselves.

  They regrouped. Though they were dispirited, they had not given up. They quartered the
terrain, covered every yard of the island. They delved into every bush, peered up into the branches of every tree, searched every room and every corridor of every building. Two of Vaughan’s men approached a tangle of thorny branches and began to beat it methodically with heavy sticks. On the far side, movement: a figure, bent low, suddenly leapt and with a splash disappeared.

  “Hoy!” they shouted to alert the others. “He’s gone in!”

  Before long the others had joined them.

  “He’s out there somewhere. We flushed him out of hiding and heard the splash.”

  The hunters peered out across the dark river. The water shimmered and glinted, but with no sign of their quarry.

  When he first entered the water, he thought the cold would kill him outright. But when he surfaced and found himself not dead, nowhere near, he discovered it wasn’t so deadly after all. He’d emerged from his great dive in a place that had advantages. The river, it seemed, was his ally. Where a great branch bent low over the water, he could cling on, half out of the water, while he worked out what to do. Back onto the island was out of the question. He’d have to get across. Once in the central flow, the river would carry him downstream, and if he edged towards the bank all the time, he was bound to find a place to haul himself out. After that—

  After that he’d work things out as best he could.

  He unlocked his arms from the branch, let himself fully into the water, and kicked away.

  There came a shout from the island—he’d been spotted—and he ducked under the surface. There he was distracted by a festival of movement and light above his head. A fleet of stars went sailing by. A thousand tiny moons shimmered past him, elongated like baby fish in a shoal. He was a giant among fairies.

  It occurred to him suddenly that there was no great urgency. I’m not even shivering, he thought. It’s almost warm.

  His arms were heavy. He wasn’t sure whether he was kicking or not.

  When the cold river doesn’t feel cold, that’s when you know you’re in trouble. He’d overheard that somewhere. When? Long ago. It troubled him, and a sense of foreboding pressed down on him. In a panic he scrabbled, but his limbs would not obey him.

  He had woken the river now; its current took hold of him. Water in his mouth. Moonfish in his head. Knowledge: a mistake. He groped for the surface; his hands met trailing, floating plants. He grasped to haul himself up, but his fingers closed on gravel and mud. Flailing—twisting—the surface!—gone again. He took in more water than air, and when he cried for help—though who had ever helped him? Was he not the most betrayed of men?—when he cried for help, there were only the lips of the river pressed to his, and her fingers pinched his nostrils shut.

  All this forever . . .

  Until, when there was no resistance left in him, he felt himself grasped, lifted up and out of the water as if he weighed no more than a willow leaf, and laid down, down, to rest, in the bottom of a punt.

  Quietly? He knew the stories. The ferryman who took those whose time had come to the other side, and who took those whose time had not come to safety.

  The tall, lean figure thrust the pole up to the heavens and let it fall through his fingers till it bit the riverbed and then, with what grace, with what remarkable power, the punt sped through the dark water. Victor felt the drag of it and smiled. Safety . . .

  Half of the men stayed on the island, positioned at points where they would see if he tried to land. The others returned to the boats and went out on the water, searching.

  “It’s damn cold,” Daunt muttered.

  Armstrong put a hand in the water and pulled it out quickly.

  “Are we looking for a living man or a corpse?” he asked.

  “He can’t survive long,” Vaughan said grimly.

  They rowed around the island, once, twice, three times.

  “He’s had it,” pronounced one of Vaughan’s men.

  The others nodded.

  The hunt was over.

  The rowboats made their way back to the jetty and to Buscot Lodge.

  The parson wrote to the vicar of the parish in which Lily had lived with her mother and stepfather. He had received a prompt reply. One of the members of that congregation had a keen memory of the events from thirty years ago. There had been a great hue and cry when Ann was first found to be missing. A rumor started that the older girl had drowned her sister in the river out of jealousy. Neighbors had rushed to the river, but the sack had not immediately been found. While her mother joined the search party, her firstborn ran away.

  Some hours later the child was found, alive and well. At some distance from the house, and further than she could have walked unaided. She had a raging fever. No medicine could save her, and a few days later she died.

  The sack was also found. It contained a dead piglet.

  Lily was never found. Her heartbroken mother died a few years later. The stepfather was hanged for crimes unrelated to this one that finally caught up with him, and the stepbrother was a bad lot who couldn’t hold down a job for long, and who had not been heard of for years.

  “You are not to blame,” the parson told Lily.

  Rita put an arm around the confused woman. “Your stepbrother was the one who tricked you, out of jealousy and because he has a destructive soul. He knew you were innocent but has encouraged you to believe you are guilty ever since. You did not drown your sister.”

  “So when Ann came out of the river to the Swan, what did she want?”

  “That wasn’t Ann. Ann is dead. She is not angry with you and she is at peace.”

  Rita told her, “What you saw at Basketman’s Cottage were nightmares and then, in the Swan, an illusion. Gauze and mirrors.”

  “And now that your stepbrother is drowned,” the parson told Lily, “he can’t frighten you anymore. You can keep your own money and give up Basketman’s Cottage and come and live in the warmth here, at the parsonage.”

  But Lily knew more about rivers than anyone—knew that drowning was a more complicated thing than other people suspected. Victor drowned was no less terrible to her mind than Victor alive; in fact, it was more terrible. He would be angry at her having given him away, and she dare not make him angrier by leaving the place where he knew where to find her. She had only to remember when Victor found her with Mr. White and the things that had happened then. Mr. White had been found dead, and the beating she’d got—she was surprised she hadn’t been found dead too. No, she didn’t dare anger him.

  “I think I will carry on at Basketman’s Cottage,” she said. The parson tried to persuade her, and Rita tried to persuade her, but with the insistence of the meek she got her way.

  When Armstrong went to collect Maud from Basketman’s Cottage, he found that she was in pig.

  He did not like to move her in her delicate state. She was being well looked after, he could see that.

  “Would you take care of her, Mrs. White, till her litter arrives?”

  “I don’t mind. What about Maud? Does she mind staying?”

  Maud did not mind, and so it was agreed.

  “And when I take her home with me, I will give you a piglet in exchange.”

  The Knife

  The chickens were flustered, the cat evaded his stroking hand to slink away unhappily along the wall, and the pigs stared with a gaze that told of something ominous. Armstrong frowned. What was it? He had been away only two hours, seeing some cows for sale.

  His middle daughter came flying from the house, and as she flung her arms around him, he could be in no doubt that something bad had happened. She was too breathless to speak. “Robin?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “Where’s your mother?”

  She pointed towards the kitchen door.

  All was in upheaval. Soup bubbled unwatched on the stove; pastry was abandoned on the marble. Bess stood behind the rocking chair, gripping its rail, a fierce, protective air about her. In the rocking chair sat his eldest daughter, hunched and pale-faced. Her arms were crossed
oddly over her chest, her hands up by her neck. Around her were clustered the three littlest ones; they plucked at her skirt in concern.

  Bess’s fingers released their grip on the chair with relief as he came in, and turned a troubled eye upon him. With a gesture she warned him not to say anything.

  “Here,” she said to the little ones that were clinging to their sister. “Take this to the pigs.” She swept the peelings into a bowl and handed them to the biggest child; after a final consoling pat at their sister’s knee, they did as they were told.

  “What did he want?” he asked as soon as the door had closed.

  “The usual.”

  “How much this time?”

  She told him the sum and Robert stiffened. It went far beyond the amounts he had had from them before.

  “What sort of trouble is he in to want that kind of money?”

  She made a dismissive gesture. “You know what he is. One lie after another. A good investment, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a loan till next week . . . I’m not beguiled, he knows that. His smooth ways haven’t worked on me for a long, long while.” She frowned. “But nobody would have been taken in, not today. He was out of breath. Couldn’t keep still: desperate for money and to get away again. He kept going to the window, all on edge. Wanted to send his brother to the gate to keep a lookout but I wouldn’t let him go. Before long he gave up lying and started shouting. ‘Just give me the money, I’m telling you! Or it’ll be the death of me!’ He was banging his fists on the table, saying it’s all our fault, and if we hadn’t given the girl back to the Vaughans, he wouldn’t be in such a corner. There was a quiver in his voice. Something’s frightened him.

  “ ‘What on earth is it has put you in this state?’ I asked him, and he said somebody was after him. Somebody who would stop at nothing to get what he wanted.”

  “His life was in danger, he said,” added Susan from the rocking chair. “ ‘If you don’t give me the money, I’m a dead man.’ ”

  Armstrong rubbed his forehead. “Susan, this isn’t conversation for you. Go and sit in the drawing room while I talk about this with your mother.”