Once Upon a River

by Diane Setterfield

  The man—if man it was—was tall and strong, but his head was monstrous and they boggled at the sight of it. Was it a monster from a folktale? Were they sleeping and this a nightmare? The nose was askew and flattened, and beneath it was a gaping hollow dark with blood. As sights went, it was horrifying enough, but in its arms the awful creature carried a large puppet, with waxen face and limbs and slickly painted hair.

  What roused them to action was the man himself. He first roared, a great bellow as misshapen as the mouth it emerged from, then he staggered and swayed. A pair of farmhands jumped from their seats just in time to grab him under the arms and arrest his fall so that he did not smash his head on the flagstones. At the same time Jonathan Ockwell leapt forward from the fireside, arms outstretched, and into them dropped the puppet with a solid weightiness that took his joints and muscles by surprise.

  Returning to their senses, they hoisted the unconscious man onto a table. A second table was dragged so that the man’s legs could be rested upon it. Then when he was laid down and straightened out, they all stood around and raised their candles and lamps over him. The man’s eyes did not flicker.

  “Is he dead?” Albright wondered.

  There was a round of indistinct murmurs and much frowning.

  “Slap his face,” someone suggested. “See if that brings him round.”

  “A tot of liquor’ll do it,” another suggested.

  Margot elbowed her way to the top of the table and studied the man. “Don’t you go slapping him. Not with his face in that state. Nor pouring anything down his throat. Just you wait a minute.”

  Margot turned away to the seat by the hearth. On it was a cushion, and she picked it up and carried it back to the light. With the aid of the candles she spotted a pinprick of white on the cotton. Picking at it with her fingernail, she drew out a feather. The men’s faces watched her, eyes wide with bewilderment.

  “I don’t think you’ll wake a dead man by tickling him,” said a gravel digger. “Nor a live one either, not in this state.”

  “I’m not going to tickle him,” she replied.

  Margot laid the feather on the man’s lips. All peered. For a moment there was nothing, then the soft and plumy parts of the feather shivered.

  “He breathes!”

  The relief soon gave way to renewed perplexity.

  “Who is it, though?” a bargeman asked. “Do anyone know him?”

  There followed a few moments of general hubbub, during which they considered the question. One reckoned he knew everybody on the river from Castle Eaton to Duxford, which was some ten miles, and he was sure he didn’t know the fellow. Another had a sister in Lechlade and was certain he had never seen the man there. A third felt that he might have seen the man somewhere, but the longer he looked, the less willing he was to put money on it. A fourth wondered whether he was a river gypsy, for it was the time of year when their boats came down this stretch of the river, to be stared at with suspicion, and everybody made sure to lock their doors at night and bring inside anything that could be lifted. But with that good woolen jacket and his expensive leather boots—no. This was not a ragged gypsy man. A fifth stared and then, with triumph, remarked that the man was the very height and build of Liddiard from Whitey’s Farm, and was his hair not the same color too? A sixth pointed out that Liddiard was here at the other end of the table, and when the fifth looked across, he could not deny it. At the end of these and further discussions, it was agreed by one, two, three, four, five, six, and all the others present that they didn’t know him—at least they didn’t think so—but, looking as he did, who could be certain?

  Into the silence that followed this conclusion, a seventh man spoke. “Whatever has befallen him?”

  The man’s clothes were soaking wet, and the smell of the river, green and brown, was on him. Some accident on the water, that much was obvious. They talked of dangers on the river, of the water that played tricks on even the wisest of rivermen.

  “Is there a boat? Shall I go and see if I can spy one?” Beszant the boat mender offered.

  Margot was washing the blood from the man’s face with firm and gentle motions. She winced as she revealed the great gash that split his upper lip and divided his skin into two flaps that gaped to show his broken teeth and bloodied gum.

  “Leave the boat,” she instructed. “It is the man that matters. There is more here than I can help with. Who will run for Rita?” She looked round and spotted one of the farmhands who was too poor to drink much. “Neath, you are quick on your feet. Can you run along to Rush Cottage and fetch the nurse without stumbling? One accident is quite enough for one night.”

  The young man left.

  Jonathan meanwhile had kept apart from the others. The weight of the drenched puppet was cumbersome, so he sat down and arranged it on his lap. He thought of the papier-mâché dragon that the troupe of guisers had brought for a play last Christmastime. It was light and hard and had rapped with a light tat-tat-tat if you beat your fingernails against it. This puppet was not made of that. He thought of the dolls he had seen, stuffed with rice. They were weighty and soft. He had never seen one this size. He sniffed its head. There was no smell of rice—only the river. The hair was made of real hair, and he couldn’t work out how they had joined it to the head. The ear was so real, they might have molded it from a real one. He marveled at the perfect precision of the lashes. Putting his fingertip gently to the soft, damp, tickling ends of them caused the lid to move a little. He touched the lid with the gentlest of touches, and there was something behind. Slippery and globular, it was soft and firm at the same time.

  Something darkly unfathomable gripped him. Behind the backs of his parents and the drinkers, he gave the figure a gentle shake. An arm slid and swung from the shoulder joint, in a way a puppet’s arm ought not to swing, and he felt a rising water level, powerful and rapid, inside him.

  “It is a little girl.”

  In all the discussion around the injured man, nobody heard.

  Again, louder: “It is a little girl!”

  They turned.

  “She won’t wake up.” He held out the sodden little body so that they might see for themselves.

  They turned. They moved to stand around Jonathan. A dozen pairs of stricken eyes rested on the little body.

  Her skin shimmered like water. The folds of her cotton frock were plastered to the smooth lines of the limbs, and her head tilted on her neck at an angle no puppeteer could achieve. She was a little girl, and they had not seen it, not one of them, though it was obvious. What maker would go to such lengths, making a doll of such perfection only to dress it in the cotton smock any pauper’s daughter might wear? Who would paint a face in that macabre and lifeless manner? What maker other than the good Lord had it in him to make the curve of that cheekbone, the planes of that shin, that delicate foot with five toes individually shaped and sized and detailed? Of course it was a little girl! How could they ever have thought otherwise?

  In the room usually so thick with words, there was silence. The men who were fathers thought of their own children and resolved to show them nothing but love till the end of their days. Those who were old and had never known a child of their own suffered a great pang of absence, and those who were childless and still young were pierced with the longing to hold their own offspring in their arms.

  At last the silence was broken.

  “Good Lord!”

  “Dead, poor mite.”

  “Drowned!”

  “Put the feather on her lips, Ma!”

  “Oh, Jonathan. It is too late for her.”

  “But it worked with the man!”

  “No, son, he was breathing already. The feather only showed us the life that was still in him.”

  “It might still be in her!”

  “It is plain she is gone, poor lass. She is not breathing, and besides, you have only to look at her color. Who will carry the poor child to the long room? You take her, Higgs.”

  “But it’
s cold there,” Jonathan protested.

  His mother patted his shoulder. “She won’t mind that. She is not really here anymore and it is never cold in the place she has gone to.”

  “Let me carry her.”

  “You carry the lantern, and unlock the door for Mr. Higgs. She’s heavy for you, my love.”

  The gravel digger took the body from Jonathan’s failing grip and lifted her as though she weighed no more than a goose. Jonathan lit the way out and round the side to a small stone outbuilding. A thick wooden door gave onto a narrow windowless storeroom. The floor was of plain earth, and the walls had never been plastered or paneled or painted. In summer it was a good place to leave a plucked duck or a trout that you are not yet hungry for; on a winter night like this one it was bitter. Projecting from one wall was a stone slab, and it was here that Higgs laid her down. Jonathan, remembering the fragility of the papier-mâché, cradled her skull—“So as not to hurt her”—as it came into contact with the stone.

  Higgs’s lantern cast a circle of light onto the girl’s face.

  “Ma said she’s dead,” Jonathan said.

  “That’s right, lad.”

  “Ma says she’s in another place.”

  “She is.”

  “She looks as though she’s here, to me.”

  “Her thoughts have emptied out of her. Her soul has passed.”

  “Couldn’t she be asleep?”

  “Nay, lad. She’d’ve woke up by now.”

  The lantern cast flickering shadows onto the unmoving face, the warmth of its light tried to mask the dead white of the skin, but it was no substitute for the inner illumination of life.

  “There was a girl who slept for a hundred years, once. She was woke up with a kiss.”

  Higgs blinked fiercely. “I think that was just a story.”

  The circle of light shifted from the girl’s face and illuminated Higgs’s feet as they made their way out again, but at the door he discovered that Jonathan was not beside him. Turning, he raised the lantern again in time to see him stoop and place a kiss on the child’s forehead in the darkness.

  Jonathan watched the girl intently. Then his shoulders slumped.

  They locked the door behind them and came away.

  The Corpse Without a Story

  There was a doctor two miles from Radcot, but nobody thought of sending for him. He was old and expensive and his patients mostly died, which was not encouraging. Instead they did the sensible thing: they sent for Rita.

  So it was that half an hour after the man was placed on the tables, there came the sound of steps outside and the door opened on a woman. Other than Margot and her daughters, who were as much a part of the Swan as its floorboards and stone walls, women were a rare sight at the inn, and every eye was upon her as she entered the room. Rita Sunday was of middle height and her hair was neither light nor dark. In all other aspects her looks were not average. The men evaluated her and found her lacking in almost every respect. Her cheekbones were too high and too angular; her nose was a bit too large, her jaw a bit too wide, her chin a bit too forward. Her best feature was her eyes, which did well enough for shape, though they were grey and looked at things too steadily from beneath her symmetrical brow. She was too old to be young and other women her age had been crossed off the list of women suitable for appraisal, yet in Rita’s case, for all her plainness and three decades of virginity, she still had something about her. Was it her history? Their local nurse and midwife had been born in a convent, lived there till adulthood, and learned all her medicine in the convent hospital.

  Rita stepped inside the winter room of the Swan. As if she was not aware of all the eyes upon her, she unbuttoned her sober woolen coat and slid her arms out of it. The dress beneath was dark and unadorned.

  She went directly to where the man lay, bloodied and still unconscious on the table.

  “I have heated water for you, Rita,” Margot told her. “And cloths here, all clean. What else will you want?”

  “More light, if you can manage it.”

  “Jonathan is fetching spare lanterns and candles from upstairs.”

  “And quite likely . . .” Having washed her hands, Rita was gently exploring the extent of the gash in the man’s lip. “. . . a razor and a man with a gentle and steady hand for shaving.”

  “Joe can do that, can’t you?”

  Joe nodded.

  “And liquor. The strongest you have.”

  Margot unlocked the special cupboard and took out a green unlabeled bottle. She placed it next to Rita’s bag and all the drinkers eyed it. Unlabeled, it bore the signs of being illegally distilled, which meant it would be strong enough to knock a man out.

  The two bargemen holding lanterns over the man’s head saw the nurse probe the hole that was the man’s mouth. With two blood-slicked fingers she drew out a broken tooth. A moment later she had two more. Her searching fingers went next into his still-damp hair. She explored every inch of his scalp.

  “His head injuries are just to the face. It could be worse. Right, let’s first get him out of these wet things.”

  The room seemed to start. An unmarried woman could not strip a man’s clothes from him without unsettling the natural order of things.

  “Margot,” Rita suggested smoothly. “Would you direct the men?”

  She turned her back and busied herself with setting out items from her bag while Margot instructed the men in removing his clothes, reminding them to go gently—“We don’t know where else he is injured yet: Let’s not make it worse!”—and undid buttons and ties with her maternal fingers where they were too drunk or just too clumsy to do it. His garments piled up on the floor: a navy jacket with many pockets like a bargeman’s but made of better cloth; freshly soled boots of strong leather; a proper belt where a riverman would make do with rope; thick jersey long johns and a knitted vest beneath his felt shirt.

  “Who is he? Do we know?” Rita asked while she looked away.

  “Don’t know that we’ve ever set eyes on him. But it’s hard to tell, the state he’s in.”

  “Have you got his jacket off?”

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps Jonathan might have a look in the pockets.”

  When she turned to face the table again, her patient was naked, and a white handkerchief had been placed to protect his modesty and Rita’s reputation.

  She felt their eyes flicker to her face and away again.

  “Joe, if you would shave his upper lip as gently as you can. You won’t make a perfect job of it, but do your best. Go carefully around his nose—it’s broken.”

  She began the examination. She placed her hands first upon his feet, moved up to his ankles, shins, calves . . . Her white hands stood out against his darker skin.

  “He is an out-of-doors man,” a gravel digger noted.

  She palpated bone, ligament, muscle, her eyes all the while diverted from his nakedness, as though her fingertips saw better than her eyes. She worked swiftly, knowing rapidly that here at least all was well.

  At the man’s right hip, Rita’s fingers inched around the white handkerchief and paused.

  “Light here, please.”

  The patient was badly grazed all along one flank. Rita tilted the green bottle of liquor onto a cloth and applied it to the wound. The men around the table twisted their lips in little expressions of sympathy, but the patient himself did not stir.

  The man’s hand lay alongside his hip. It was swollen to twice the size it ought to be, bloodied and discolored. She applied the liquor here too, but certain marks did not come away though she wiped once and again. Ink-dark blots, but not the darkness of bruising, and not dried blood. Interested, she raised the hand and peered closely at them.

  “He is a photographer,” she said.

  “Blow me down! How do you know that?”

  “His fingers. See these marks? Silver nitrate stains. It’s what they use to develop the photographs.”

  She took advantage of the surprise generated b
y this news to work around the white handkerchief. She pressed gently into his abdomen, found no evidence of internal injury, and worked up, up, the light following her, until the white handkerchief receded into the darkness and the men could be reassured Rita was safely back in the realm of decorum again.

  With his thick beard half gone, the man looked no less ghastly. The misshapen nose was all the more prominent, the gash that split the lip and ran up towards his cheek looked ten times worse for being visible. The eyes were so swollen, they were tight shut. On his forehead the skin had risen into a bloodied lump; she extracted from it splinters of what looked like dark wood, cleaned it, then turned her attention to the lip injury.

  Margot handed her the needles and thread, both sterilized in the liquor. Rita put the point to the place and drove it into the skin, and as she did, the candlelight flickered.

  “Anyone who needs to, sit down now,” she instructed. “One patient is enough.”

  But nobody was willing to admit to the need to sit.

  She made three neat stitches, drawing the thread through, and the men either looked away or watched, fascinated by the spectacle of a human face being mended as if it were a torn collar.

  When it was done, there was audible relief.

  Rita looked at her handiwork.

  “He do look a bit better, now,” one of the bargemen admitted. “Unless it’s just that we’re used to looking at him.”

  “Hmm,” said Rita, as if she half agreed.

  She reached to the middle of his face and, gripping his nose between thumb and index finger, gave it a firm twist. There was a distinct sound of gristle and bone moving—a crunch that was also a squelch—and the candlelight quivered violently.

  “Catch him, quick!” Rita exclaimed, and for the second time that night the farmhands took the weight of a fellow man collapsing in their arms as the gravel digger’s knees gave way. In doing so, all three men’s candles fell to the floor, putting themselves out as they dropped, and the entire scene was snuffed out with them.

  “Well,” said Margot when the candles had been relit. “What a night. We had best put this poor man in the pilgrims’ room.” In the days when Radcot Bridge was the only river crossing for miles, many travelers had broken their journey at the inn, and though it was rarely used these days, there was a room at the end of the corridor that was still called the pilgrims’ room. Rita oversaw the removal of her patient and they laid him on the bed and put a blanket over him.