His daughter turned her eyes to her mother.
“Tell him, Mother,” she said.
“I refused him the money. He spoke angrily to me.”
“He said she had always been against him. He called her unnatural. He said things about her from before she married you—”
“Susan overheard it all. She came in.”
“I was going to tell him not to be so angry with Mother. I was going to—”
His daughter’s eyes filled with tears.
Bess put her hand on her daughter’s shoulder.
“He turned so quickly. In a flash he had your knife from your sheath on the back of the door. He took hold of Susan . . .”
Armstrong stiffened. The knife in his sheath on the back of the door was his slaughtering knife that he never put away without having honed it to a lethal sharpness. Looked again at his daughter and with fresh understanding perceived her hunched position, her stricken face.
“I would have got away from him,” Susan said. “I could have, except . . .”
Robert crossed the floor, took his daughter’s hand, and removed it from her neck. She was clutching a bloodstained cloth. In a curving line across the tender skin was a vivid line of red. It went deep enough to graze the skin, was a fraction of an inch away from severing the main vessels of life. All the breath in his body left him.
“Mother cried out and the boys came in. He hesitated when he saw them—they are as big as he is now, and strong, and there were two of them. His grip wavered and I twisted away . . .”
“Where is he now?”
“He has gone to the old oak, downstream, near Brandy Island. He said to tell you to find him there,” Bess told him with a frown.
Susan clung to his hand, trembling. “You are to take the money or his life is over. That was the message.”
Armstrong left the kitchen and went further into the house. They heard the door to his study open and close. He was in there for mere moments, and when he returned he was buttoning his coat.
“Please don’t go, Father!”
He placed a hand on his daughter’s head, kissed his wife’s temple, and then, without a word, he left. Scarcely had that door closed on him than it opened again. He felt for his knife behind the door. The sheath was there but it was empty.
“He has it still,” said Bess.
Her words met the closing door.
The torrential downpours of the day had given way now to even, persistent rainfall. Each drop of water, whether it landed on river, field, or rooftop, on leaf or man, made its sound, and each sound was indistinguishable from the rest. Together they made a blanket of wet noise that wrapped around Armstrong and Fleet and isolated them.
“I know,” the rider told his mount with a pat. “I’d sooner be indoors myself. But needs must.”
The paths were pitted and stony and Fleet made her way attentively, picking her way between the holes and avoiding the obstacles. From time to time she raised her head to sniff the air, and her ears were alert.
Armstrong was deep in thought.
“What can he want with so much money?” he wondered aloud. “And why now?”
Where the path dipped, they splashed through sitting water.
“His sister! His own sister!” Armstrong exclaimed, shaking his head, and Fleet whinnied in sympathy. “Sometimes I think there is nothing more a man can do. A child is not an empty vessel, Fleet, to be formed in whatever way the parent thinks fit. They are born with their own hearts and they cannot be made otherwise, no matter what love a man lavishes on them.”
On they went.
“What more could I have done? What did I miss? Eh?”
Fleet shook her head and sent drops of water flying from the reins.
“We loved him. We did, didn’t we? I took him about with me and showed him the world. I taught him what I knew . . . He knew wrong from right. He had that from me, Fleet. He cannot say he did not know.”
Fleet moved forward in the dark, and Armstrong sighed.
“You never took to him, did you? I tried not to see it. The way you put your ears back and shied when he came close. What had he done to you? I didn’t want to think ill of him, and I don’t want to now, but even a father cannot turn a blind eye forever.”
Armstrong raised a hand and rubbed away the wetness from his eye.
“Nothing but a bit of rain,” he told himself, though the ache in his throat told him otherwise. “And then there is the girl. I should like to know what to make of that, Fleet. What has he got himself mixed up in there? No father would dally the way he did. What kind of father is it that does not recognize his own child? She was not his child, and he knew it from the start. So what was it all about? Will he tell me what the trouble is, do you think? How can I make things right if I do not know what they are? He ties my hand behind my back and then complains that I do not help him enough.”
He felt the weight in his pocket. He had filled a purse with money from the safe and it was heavy.
Fleet stopped. She trotted nervously on the spot, twitched, and fretted in the harness.
Armstrong lifted his head and sought an explanation. His eyes found only darkness. The rain had washed all scent from the air, and muffled sound. His human senses told him nothing.
He leant forwards in the saddle. “What is it, Fleet?”
She skittered again, and this time he caught the splash of water at her feet. He dismounted and the water came over the tops of his boots.
“The flood. It has come.”
It Begins and Ends at the Swan
It had been raining for weeks. There was enough to do securing against the flood without reminders that they must make ready too for the river gypsies. For it was their time to come up the river, and a bit of floodwater wouldn’t stop them. In fact, it would only help them come closer to the properties, the houses and cottages, the outbuildings and barns and stables. Every bit of equipment and machinery must be put indoors, every door must be locked. They would help themselves to anything that was unsecured, no matter how unlikely. A flower pot on a windowsill was not safe, and woe betide the gardener who left a hoe or a rake leaning by the back door. Moreover, it was the night of the winter solstice, a year to the day since the child had come. Most importantly of all, there was Helena, whose lively quickness had almost deserted her in these last days of waiting for the birth of their child. But Vaughan’s men had now done everything that was possible. He thanked them and went to find his wife.
“I’m so tired,” she said, “but come down to the garden with us before you take your coat off. We want to see the river.”
“It’s already twenty yards up the garden. It’s hardly safe for a child, in the dark.”
“I’ve told her the river might come into the garden and she is so excited. She’s longing to see it.”
“All right. Where is she?”
“I fell asleep on the sofa. She’s probably wandered down to the kitchen to see Cook.”
They went to the kitchen but she wasn’t there.
“I thought she was with you,” Cook said.
Vaughan’s eyes met Helena’s in sudden alarm.
“She will have gone to look at the river; we’ll find her there, ahead of us.” Although the words she spoke were certain, there was a tremor in Helena’s voice that revealed her doubt.
“You stay here: I’ll be quicker alone,” her husband said, and went running out of the room, but Helena followed.
She made slow going of it. The lawns were mud, the gravel paths washed away by the torrential rain of the last weeks. Her mackintosh did not fasten over her belly now, and as the cold rain soaked her dress, she wondered whether she had overestimated her strength. After a pause to rest she went on again. She pictured what she was going to see: the child, standing spellbound at the water’s edge, fascinated by the rising river. Coming to the gap in the hedge where the river was visible, she stopped. There was her husband, shaking his head, speaking urgently and gesticulating with the garde
ner and two of the other men, who nodded, serious-faced, and ran hastily away to do his bidding.
Heat broke out all over her body and her heart pounded. She broke into an ungainly run, calling his name as she went. He turned to see her eyes widen as she lost her footing in the mud, and though he got there in time to break the worst of her fall, she gave a great cry of pain.
“It’s all right, I’ve put word out. They are looking for her. We’ll find her.”
Breathless, she nodded. Her face was white.
“What is it? Your ankle?”
She shook her head. “It’s the baby.”
Vaughan cast his eye up the garden, cursing himself for having sent all the manservants out to search for the child. He measured the distance to the house, the slippery paths, the darkness. Could he do it? There was no other way. He took her full weight in his arms and readied himself to start.
“Hoy!” he heard. And again, louder: “Hoy there!”
Collodion came floating tranquilly over the vast water.
When they had got Helena on board and were moving again, Daunt told him, “Rita is at the Swan. I’ll take Helena there, then we can go back out in Collodion and look for the girl.”
“Is Rita’s cottage flooded?”
“Yes, but it’s more than that . . . It’s Joe.”
There were few drinkers in the Swan. Winter solstice it might have been, but a flood was a flood, and all the young men were needed: boarding up doors, making fast, moving furniture upstairs, herding cattle to higher ground . . . The only men in the inn were those unfit to limit the river’s damage: the old and the infirm, and the ones already drunk when the flood came. They did not tell stories. Joe the storyteller was dying.
In his bed, in the little room that was as far from the river as it was possible to get and still be in the Swan, Joe was drowning. Between spells of gasping for breath, he muttered sounds. His lips moved ceaselessly, but the underwater noises did not resolve themselves into words anyone could understand. His face grimaced and his eyebrows twitched expressively. It was a gripping story, but one that no one but he could hear.
Joe’s daughters came and went between the sickbed and the winter room. The little Margots had today put aside their blithe smiles and wore the same grave sorrow as their mother, who sat beside the bed, Joe’s hand in hers.
There was a moment when Joe seemed to surface momentarily. He half opened his eyes, and delivered a few syllables before sinking again.
“What did he say?” Jonathan asked, bewildered.
“He called for Quietly,” his mother replied calmly, and her daughters nodded. They had heard it too.
“Shall I go and fetch him?”
“No, Jonathan, it’s not necessary,” Margot said. “He’s on his way.”
All this was heard by Rita as she stood by the window, looking out at the great lake that lay all around the Swan like a blank page, that came within a few feet of its walls, isolating the inn and making an island of it.
She saw Collodion come into view. In deep water she saw Daunt launch the rowboat. He helped Helena into it—she was a dark silhouette—and rowed towards the entrance of the Swan. By the solicitude of his care for her, Rita understood the significance of Helena’s sudden arrival.
“Margot—Mrs. Vaughan is here. It looks like it is her time.”
“It’s a good thing there are plenty of us here, then. My girls are mothers. They’ll be able to help.”
In the busyness of Helena’s arrival, Daunt drew Rita aside for a moment.
“The girl is missing.”
“No!” She clutched her belly, at the powerful vacuum she felt there.
“Rita—are you all right?”
She made an effort, gathered herself. A man was dying. A baby was about to be born.
“How long? Where was she last seen?”
Daunt told her what little he knew.
One of the little Margots, wanting instructions, called to Rita.
Rita’s face was white. It was a look so full of dread that for once he had no desire to photograph it.
“I have to go. Joe and Helena need me. But, Daunt—” He turned back into the room to catch her last, ferocious words: “Find her!”
Thereafter the hours were very long, and very short. While the water lay unperturbed and indifferent all around, the women at the Swan were engaged on the human pursuits of dying and being born. On one side of the wall Helena struggled to deliver her baby into life. On the other side, Joe struggled to depart it. The little Margots got on with everything that needed to be done so that life could be begun and so that it could be ended. They carried water and clean cloths, filled log baskets and stoked fires, lit candles, made plates of food that nobody had an appetite for but ate anyway out of good sense, and all the while they did these things they also wept and soothed and calmed and comforted.
Rita went to and fro, doing what was needed. Between the two rooms, in the corridor, was Jonathan, unsettled and fretful.
“Have they found her, Rita? Where is she?” he wanted to know every time she left Helena.
“We won’t know anything till they come back and tell us,” she told him, letting herself back into Joe’s room.
They gave themselves over to time. There were hours that might have been minutes and then Rita heard Margot say, “Quietly is coming, Joe. Good-bye, my love.”
Rita remembered what she had heard in the Swan nearly a year ago: “I have only to look in a man’s eyes to see the seeing go out of them.” She saw the seeing go out of Joe.
“Pray for us, Rita, would you?” Margot asked.
Rita prayed, and when she had finished, Margot loosened her hand from Joe’s. She joined his hands together, then placed her own hands together in her own lap. She allowed two tears to escape, one from each eye.
“Never mind me,” she said to Rita. “You get on.”
There were minutes that might have been hours there on the other side of the wall, then a contraction at last delivered a baby. In a slick rush it dropped into Rita’s hands.
“Ah!” whispered the little Margots in shocked delight. “What is it?”
Rita blinked in surprise.
“I’ve heard of this. I’ve never seen it. The sac usually bursts before the baby emerges. That’s the water breaking. This one didn’t break.”
The perfect infant was in an underwater world. Eyes fast shut, with liquid movements, little fists dreamily opening and closing, it was sleep-swimming inside a transparent water-filled membrane.
Rita touched the pearly sac with the tip of a knife, and a great split ran around it. Water splashed.
The baby boy, opening his eyes and mouth at the same time, was astonished to discover air and the world.
Fathers and Sons
Fleet’s hooves splashed through the water. In the dimness of the night, there was a flat sheen like pewter all around, disturbed only by their own movements. Armstrong thought of all the small land creatures, mice and voles and weasels, and hoped that they had all found safety. He thought of the birds, the night hunters, thrown from their normal feeding ground. He thought of the fish that strayed without knowing it from the main current and now found themselves swimming through grass a few inches above the ground, sharing territory with him and with his horse. He hoped not to tread on any creature lost in this landscape that no longer belonged clearly to earth or water. He hoped they would all be well.
They came to the oak, near Brandy Island.
He heard a sound. As he turned, a silhouette separated itself from the darkness of the tree trunk.
“Robin!”
“You took your time!”
Armstrong dismounted.
In the semidarkness his son hunched against the cold and shivered in his narrow jacket. His words had been spoken abruptly, with a man’s swagger, but a quiver cut into his voice and left the boldness in tatters.
Compassion flared instinctively in Armstrong but he remembered the curved line of red on his daughter’
s neck. “Your own sister,” he said in a dark voice, and he shook his head. “It is beyond belief . . .”
“It’s Mother’s fault,” Robin said. “If she’d only done what I said, it need never have happened.”
“You blame your mother?”
“I blame her for many things, and, yes, that is one.”
“How can you try to make this her fault? Your mother is the best woman in the world. Whose hand held the knife to Susan’s throat? Whose hand has the knife still?”
There was silence. Then:
“Have you brought the money?”
“There will be time to talk of money later. There are other things we must speak of first.”
“There is no time. Give me the money now and let me go. There is not a minute to lose.”
“Why the rush, Robin? Who is after you? What have you done?”
“Debts.”
“Work your way out of debt. Come home to the farm and work like your brothers.”
“The farm? It’s one thing for you to get up at five every morning to feed the pigs in the cold and the dark. I am made for a better life.”
“You’ll have to come to some arrangement with whoever made you the loan. I can’t pay it all. It’s too much.”
“This isn’t some gentlemanly loan I’m talking about. This is not a banker, ready to renegotiate terms.” There came a sound that was a sob or a laugh. “He’s been loaning me money for months, and if I don’t pay him tonight, he can send me to the gallows. Hush!”
Their ears strained in the darkness. Nothing.
“The money! If I do not get away tonight—”
“To go where?”
“Away. Anywhere. Where nobody knows me.”
“And leave so many questions behind you?”
“There’s no time!”
“Tell me the truth about your wife, Robin. Tell me the truth about Alice.”
“What does it matter? They’re dead! Finished. Gone.”
“Not one word of sorrow? Remorse?”
“I thought she was bringing money with her! She said her parents would come round. Set us up in life. Instead she was a millstone round my neck. She’s dead, and drowned the child, and good riddance to the pair of them.”
Once Upon a River Page 38
