‘It’s okay,’ I managed at last through clattering teeth. ‘You’re safe now.’
But she wasn’t. I had no idea how to get her home and dry, and I could feel Hawise clamouring in my mind. The wind was screaming around us, tossing the willows about, and it was so wet and cold that every breath was a struggle.
‘Come on.’ I tried to urge Sophie to her feet, but her face crumpled.
‘I have to stay.’ I could barely make out what she was saying between the wind and the rattling of her teeth, or perhaps of mine. ‘I have to be purified by the river goddess. Ash said I had to stay here until he came back for me.’
I didn’t waste time trying to argue with her. ‘He sent me to get you.’ I had to shout over the sound of the gale.
‘But he said I had to prove myself worthy of the next level.’
‘You’ve done that,’ I said.
‘He t-told me I had to be n-naked. He t-took away my clothes.’ She began to cry, curling in on herself.
The water was lapping at my ankles. ‘Sophie . . . ’ I dragged her bodily to her feet, but I could see her desperately trying to cover her nakedness. Why hadn’t I thought to bring a jacket? I dragged off my hoodie and froze as the rain splattered against my bare back.
When they push me down to pull off my shoes and my stockings, I feel strangely detached. It is hard to believe this is actually happening, that they are tugging at my netherhose, exclaiming at the colour and fingering the quality enviously. The rain has lessened to a mean drizzle and I can feel it pattering on my bare shoulders. I make myself curse and yell at them, but I have become a thing, an animal, stripped of any feelings, and they do not even look in my face as they wrestle my arm down, so that they can tie my thumb to my toe with a lace pulled from my sleeves. I struggle, but there are too many of them. Francis isn’t touching me, but he is watching, his face alight, and in a strange moment of utter clarity I glimpse him through the press of women, rubbing himself through his hose.
Nobody else notices. Intent on my utter humiliation, they don’t even notice how quickly the river is rising. It is lapping around me as I lie twisted on the ground. It must be filling their shoes and saturating their skirts, but they pay it no mind.
I was lurching backwards and forwards between times, and my mind was spinning, but I struggled desperately to fix on Sophie. I had to get her out of the river.
‘Sophie, we’ve got to go,’ I shouted in her ear as I helped her pull the hoodie over herself. It was so wet it could hardly be a comfort, but at least it covered her breasts. Awkwardly, I kicked off my shoes and wriggled out of my sodden jeans. They would be better than nothing.
I pushed them at Sophie. ‘Put them on when we get out of this,’ I yelled as I took her arm.
By then I wore only a T-shirt and knickers, but I was too frantic to get Sophie out of the river to feel the cold. She clutched the jeans in front of her and we splashed through the water.
I could feel the river dragging at me, and with a mighty push I shoved Sophie forward, out onto the grass, so that I didn’t pull her back with me.
‘Stay there,’ I shouted at her. ‘Whatever you do, Sophie, stay there!’
I could see her standing on the grass, covering herself with my jeans, her hair fattened by the rain and her eyes stark with shock and fear. ‘Grace, what’s happening? Grace!’
I tried to call out to her, but she was fading, or I was fading – I wasn’t sure which. I saw her start to splash back and reach for me.
‘No!’ I cried, stumbling backwards into the river. If she touched me, she would be lost too. ‘No! Don’t touch me!’
‘Enough.’ Agnes takes one of my stockings and calmly ties it around my mouth. ‘No more curses,’ she says as my shouts are muffled and I intensify my struggle. ‘You have done your worst. The Devil can save you,’ she says, her eyes afire.
She directs the women to lift me by the shoulders and the ankles. The river is churning, tugging at their skirts as they wade into the flooded shallows.
‘Deeper!’ Agnes cries. ‘Deeper!”
When they are up to their knees they swing me experimentally. I try and struggle, but I am twisted with my thumb tied to my toe, and my shoulder is on fire with pain. They cannot really mean to do this, I think. They have punished me enough, surely. They have made their point. I am beaten and humiliated. Now they will put me down.
But they do not put me down. One more swing, wider this time.
‘Let her sink or swim, and may the Devil take her,’ shouts Agnes and, with a mighty heave and a grunt of effort, the women send me up, up into the air and out over the water.
The river swirled around me, knocking me off my feet, and I fell into its cold, cruel grip. My mouth and nose were full of bitter brown water and I surfaced, choking and spluttering, as my feet scrabbled for purchase. The river wasn’t deep – only up to my waist – but it was very strong and the current pushed me along.
On the grass Sophie was screaming. She was safe as long as she stayed there. I fixed my mind on that as the river wrenched me along and I lost my footing again and the water closed over my head.
The river closes over my head and I am tossed and tumbled around in it. The lace tying my thumb to my toe has snapped and I fail my arms around, but I don’t know where the air is. My lungs are screaming for air. I must have air. Blackness pounds at me, but at the very last moment – just as I am about to give in to it – my head breaks out of the water.
I hauled in a choking breath, thrashing my arms in a desperate attempt to stop myself being swept away. A detached part of my mind was telling me that the situation was absurd. I couldn’t drown in waist-deep water. I couldn’t have survived the tsunami to drown in a shallow river.
But I was back in my nightmares, back in the tsunami, helpless against the relentless surge. My heels dragged along what was usually the top of the bank and I grabbed at a trailing willow branch, but the current shoved me on, so that it ripped through my hands. I staggered, slipped, sank under the water once more, and there was nothing but the roar of the river in my ears, its rank taste in my mouth, and the paralysing fear that hammered in my head. This time I really was going to die.
I am going to die. I realize it at last as my heavy skirts drag me down. I will never see Bess again. Never again will I rest my hand on her sleeping body to feel her breathing, never again trace the miraculous curve of her cheek with my knuckle.
I said I would go back and read from the book. I didn’t know it would be the last time I saw her, the last time I tucked her hair back under her cap. I didn’t know this morning that it would be the last time I ever woke up in the great bed with the red silk hangings that Ned had made for me. The last time I would push open the shutters and look up at the sky.
She will be waiting for me. Why did I go and see Agnes? What was I thinking of? Because of me, my daughter will be alone. Francis and Agnes will take her and defile her, and it is all my fault. The anguish of it hurts more than the screaming pain in my ears, the agony in my lungs. I will die knowing that I have failed her, and as the water fills my throat, all I can do is try and beg her forgiveness.
Bess . . .
I was swirling in the river, swirling in the pain and the grief, but when the current pushed me into a tree, I grabbed instinctively at the thrashing greenery, choking and gagging on the taste of the river and rotten apples. I was out of my depth and my strength was ebbing. I couldn’t hold on for long. Already I could feel my fingers loosening, and I clamped them back around the fragile branch.
‘Grace! Grace, take my hand!’
I could hardly see through the rain, but incredibly he was there, one arm anchored around a sturdy branch, the other reaching out to me.
‘Ned?’
‘Let go, Grace. The current will bring you towards me and I’ll catch you.’
Let go? I heard the words, but they didn’t make sense. I couldn’t let go. If I let go, the water would take me, the way it had taken Lucas, who had died becaus
e of me. I had let him down, the way I had let Bess down. I deserved to drown.
‘Grace, look at me!’ He inched closer, and I blinked the rain from my eyes.
‘Drew?’
‘I’m here,’ he said calmly. ‘All you have to do is take my hand.’
‘I . . . can’t.’
‘You can,’ he said.
‘I can’t!’ I could barely speak. ‘I can’t. I’m afraid.’
‘I know you are,’ said Drew. ‘But I’m here. I’ll catch you. You have to let go first, though. I can’t reach you.’
The river was grabbing at me. It wanted me to let go too, so that it could devour me. It would drag me off and I would drown, the way I should have drowned when the wave crashed through the palm trees that day.
I could see Drew edging closer. If he came any further he would have to let go of his branch and the river would take him too.
‘No!’ I cried desperately. ‘Sophie . . . ’
Sophie needs you, I meant to say, but Drew kept on coming. ‘Sophie’s safe,’ he shouted back over the water. ‘You found her. Now you can let go.’
‘Don’t come any closer!’ I shrieked. My fingers were numb, the leaves sliding out of my grasp.
‘I won’t, but that means you have to come to me,’ he said steadily. ‘Trust me, Grace. Let go, and I’ll catch you. It’s only a few inches. You’re almost there.’
The river swirled and surged around me. The thought of letting go of my fragile hold was terrifying, but Drew’s voice was unwavering, and through the rain he beckoned, temptingly solid, on the other side of a chasm of water.
Only a few inches, he had said, but it might as well have been a mile.
‘Trust me,’ he said again. ‘I won’t let you go.’
The leaves slithered through my hand and I flailed towards him. It felt as if I were launching myself out over the edge of an abyss, but it was only a few heart-stopping seconds before his hand closed around my wrist and he was pulling me across the current, grabbing me with his other hand to yank me hard against him. I clung to him, spluttering, shivering, still babbling with terror, as he gathered me into him and buried his face in my wet hair.
‘Grace . . . ’ His voice was choked with fear. ‘Jesus, Grace, I thought I was going to lose you.’
On the grass Sophie was wrapped in a blanket and was watching anxiously, a police officer by her side while two others waded through the water towards us. In the distance a cluster of blue lights revolved through the rain, throwing a surreal glow over the scene.
In spite of the blessed solidity of Drew’s body, I could feel the river still sucking at me in frustration. I gulped a shuddering breath and groped for my pendant. The jade was my touchstone. It anchored me to reality, let me believe I was safe. But my fingers scraped uselessly against my skin.
‘My pendant!’ Wildly I looked over my shoulder at the black water surging past, as if I might somehow be able to find the jade in its bitter depths. But there was nothing there, unless –
I stiffened in the safety of Drew’s arms. Far out in the middle of the river I thought I had seen something. I thought I saw Hawise’s face, gleaming white and blue for a second as she surfaced, but the next moment she was swallowed up, swept on into the darkness, and she had gone.
‘Sophie called the ambulance.’ Drew held me against him and rubbed his hand comfortingly up and down my arm. I was bone-tired, but I couldn’t sleep, and when he slipped back into bed after checking on his daughter, I’d demanded that he tell me again what had happened. I’d been too shocked and confused earlier on to take any of it in.
‘How is she?’
‘Sleeping. They gave her a sedative at the hospital, but I think worse than the cold was the realization that her idol, Ash, could really leave her there.’
‘Did you talk to the police?’
He nodded. Lines of exhaustion were etched into his face. The evening had taken its toll on him too. ‘They said they would have a word with him, but Sophie went there voluntarily, and there was nothing to keep her at the river. He’ll say it was her choice to stay there, which it was.’
‘He took her clothes away!’
‘Sophie said she took them off willingly. Apparently Ash told her that the initiation rite involved her offering herself naked to the river goddess, but she thought they would come back for her after a few minutes. When they didn’t, she didn’t know what to do and hid under a bush. By the time you appeared, she was so cold and frightened she couldn’t move. She said she thought she was imagining things at first, but you coaxed her out, and then she said a terrible look came over your face and you backed into the water. She said it looked as if someone was dragging you, but there was no one else there.’
I swallowed. ‘That’s what it felt like.’
‘I’d heard your message by then and was already on my way. I’d been checking all evening, and of course the one time I switched my phone off for our discussions you’d called. I don’t think I’ve ever run so fast,’ said Drew. ‘It wasn’t just the thought of Sophie. You were rambling about Francis and Agnes in your message, and when you said you were heading for the river, I knew something was terribly wrong.
‘Sophie was hysterical when I got there, but she’d found your phone in the jeans and had called an ambulance, and they turned up with the police just after I did. You were out in the current by then, and I saw you swept away—’ He stopped, swallowed. ‘I can’t tell you how I felt then. If you hadn’t been caught up in that willow . . . ’
His arm tightened around me and I turned into him, pressing my face against his throat. My hands were torn, my throat and stomach raw, and I was bruised and battered all over, but I was warm and I was dry and I was clean. And I was with Drew.
‘I would have died,’ I said. ‘The way poor Lucy died. There was no one there for her.’ I shivered. ‘She had to go through that on her own.’
‘We don’t know that’s what happened to her,’ said Drew.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I just can’t prove it. Hawise tried to live again through Lucy, just the way she did with me. It’s as if she’s driven to live her life again and again, and every time she hopes she won’t make the same mistakes, but of course she always does.’
‘We can’t change the past,’ said Drew. ‘We can only accept it.’
I stroked the base of my throat. I was still getting used to the feel of it without my pendant. ‘Sometimes you can’t stop yourself wishing that you could go back and do things differently. You think “If only I hadn’t”, or “If only I had”. You make a tiny choice – will I go on or will I go back? will I turn left or will I turn right? – and the rest of your life turns on it.’
‘We can’t afford to think about the implications of every little choice we make,’ Drew said. ‘We’d never get out of bed in the morning. The possibilities are too overwhelming. We’d be stuck, unable to move in any direction.’
‘That’s what I think has happened to Hawise,’ I said. ‘I think she’s desperate to live it over again, to do it differently. She wants to walk through that market again and not smile at Francis. She wants to say no when he asks her to meet him. She wants to take Bess and Jane and Rob to London, instead of going to see Agnes. But she can’t. It’s always the same story, and it always will be.’
I shook my head.
‘She’s gone for now, but she won’t rest. Maybe it won’t be me next time, but she’ll try and live her story again through someone else. I think Lucy’s experiments gave Hawise a connection to the present, and now she won’t stop until she can forgive herself for abandoning Bess.’
‘She didn’t abandon her. From what you’ve told me, there was nothing she could do.’
‘But that’s the whole point. She’s tortured by the idea that she could have done something and, because she didn’t, her daughter suffered. How do you come to terms with failing your own child?’
‘When you’re a parent you have to face that possibility all the time,’ said Drew.
‘Is it my fault that Sophie fell for the pseudo-religious nonsense Ash spouted?’
‘No . . . At least, don’t you feel a bit responsible?’
‘Grace, I didn’t force Sophie out there tonight. All we can do as adults is give our children the tools to make their own decisions. I can’t control Sophie. She’s not a little girl that I can pick up and hold safe any more. I wish she were!’ he said. ‘I’ve made lots of mistakes, and I’ll go on making them, but all we can do is our best.’
I said nothing. Drew pulled me deliberately round to face him. ‘None of us can do any more than try our best,’ he said. ‘It’s not your fault Lucas died in the tsunami, Grace. It was a tragedy, but it wasn’t your responsibility. You did your best. You tried to hold onto him, but you couldn’t. You have to forgive yourself for that now.’
I couldn’t meet his eyes. ‘I can’t,’ I managed.
‘That’s what you said in the river,’ he reminded me. ‘But you could. You saved yourself, Grace. Let go,’ he said, just as he had when the current dragged and pummelled me.
My chest constricted as the dread and the guilt surged back, suffocating me. I couldn’t breathe, lying so close to Drew, and I rolled away from him to suck in some air.
Ignoring my protests, Drew pulled me firmly back against him. ‘Let go,’ he said again and, just like that, something inside me unlocked and it all came spewing out. I wept and I wept, howling out the grief and the guilt I had dreaded for so long, and it felt just as bad as I had thought it would.
Drew didn’t say anything. He just held me, and when it was over, I tested my raw emotions. I felt empty and ravaged, but Drew was still there. The guilt and the grief were still there too, but I wasn’t as afraid of them now as I had been before. I had come apart, but now I knew I could put myself back together again.
I put my arm over Drew and laid my cheek against his chest, listening to the slow, steady beat of his heart. He was almost asleep, I could tell. ‘Thank you,’ I murmured, and he stirred, rubbing a hand over his face as he yawned.
‘Do you want to go back to your own bed now?’ he asked, but I pressed closer into him.
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