Once Upon a River

by Diane Setterfield

  “So who are you, eh?” Mrs. Eavis’s voice continued, now with a note of calculation in it. And although it seemed unlikely, she was hopeful enough to suggest, “Family?”

  She received no answer. The man put out a hand and drew down the lids of the dead girl, then bowed his head for a minute in prayer.

  Mrs. Eavis waited testily. She did not join him at “Amen” but, as soon as his prayer was done, picked up where she had left off.

  “It’s just that, if you are family, you’ll be liable. For the debt.”

  With a wince, Armstrong reached into the folds of his cloak and took out a leather purse. He counted the coins into her palm, then “Three weeks it is!” she added as he was about to put the purse away. He gave her the additional coins with a sense of distaste and her fingers closed around them.

  The visitor turned to look again at the face of the dead girl in the bed.

  Her teeth looked too large for her and her cheekbones jutted in a way that suggested, whatever Mrs. Eavis said, that the young woman hadn’t benefited greatly from the landlady’s meals.

  “I suppose she must have been pretty?” he asked the landlady sadly.

  The question took Mrs. Eavis by surprise. The man was of an age to be the young woman’s father, yet given the fairness of the girl and the blackness of the man that was most unlikely. Something told her he was not her lover either. But if he was neither—if he had never seen her before—why pay her rent? Not that it mattered.

  She shrugged. “Pretty is as pretty does. She was fair. Too skinny.”

  Mrs. Eavis stepped out onto the landing. Armstrong heaved a sigh and, with a final sorrowful glance at the cadaver on the bed, followed her out.

  “Where is the child?” he asked.

  “Drowned it, I expect.” She gave a callous shrug that didn’t interrupt her progress down the stairs. “You’ll have only the one funeral to pay for,” she added maliciously. “That’s one blessing, anyhow.”

  Drowned? Armstrong stopped dead on the top stair. He turned and reopened the door. He looked up and down, left and right, as if somewhere, in the gap between the floorboards, behind the useless wisp of curtain—in the chilly air itself—a piece of life might be somewhere concealed. He pulled back the sheet, in case a small second body—dead? alive?—might be hidden in its flimsy folds. There were only the mother’s bones, too big for the flesh that contained them.

  Outside, Ben was stroking the mane of his new friend, Fleet. When Fleet’s owner came out of the house, he was different. Greyer. Older.

  “Thank you,” he said distractedly as he took the reins.

  It occurred to the boy that he might not find out what all this had been in aid of: the arrival of the interesting stranger in the street, the victory that had won him the blazing marble, the mysterious visit to Mrs. Armstrong in Mrs. Eavis’s bad house.

  With one foot in the stirrup, the man halted, and things took a more hopeful turn. “Do you know the little girl from this house?”

  “Alice? They don’t come out much, and Alice follows behind her mother, half hiding, for she is the timid sort and pulls her mother’s skirt over her face if she thinks somebody might be looking at her, but I have seen her peeking out once or twice.”

  “How old would you say she was?”

  “About four.”

  Armstrong nodded and frowned sadly. Ben felt the presence of something importantly complicated in the air, something beyond his understanding.

  “When did you last see her?”

  “Yesterday at the end of the afternoon.”

  “Where was that?”

  “Up by Mr. Gregory’s shop, she came out with her mother and they went up the lane.”

  “What kind of shop is Mr. Gregory’s?”

  “The apothecary’s.”

  “Was she carrying something in her hand?”

  Ben reflected. “Something wrapped up.”

  “What kind of size?”

  He gestured to indicate and Armstrong understood it was something the size of the bottle he had picked up in the room and now had in his pocket.

  “And the lane. Where does it go?”

  “Nowhere, really.”

  “It must go somewhere.”

  “Nowhere ’cept the river.”

  Armstrong said nothing. He pictured the poor young woman entering the apothecary’s to buy the bottle of poison, then taking the lane that led to the river.

  “Did you see them return?”

  “No.”

  “Or . . . perhaps Mrs. Armstrong returned alone?”

  “I had gone in by then to eat the profits.”

  Ben was perplexed. He had the feeling that an event of significance was taking place, but he did not know what it could be. He looked at Armstrong to see whether he had been useful to him or not. Whatever it was that was happening, he felt he would like to be part of it, alongside this man who fed apples to his handsome horse and kept marbles in his pocket and looked almost frightening but had a voice full of kindness. But the dark man with the fine horse did not look at all happy and Ben felt disappointed.

  “Perhaps you would show me the way to the apothecary’s, Ben?”

  “I will.” As they walked, the man seemed lost in thought, and Ben, though he didn’t realize he was doing it, must have been thinking too, for something in the man’s somber face told him the drama they were involved in was a bleak one.

  They came to a small and low building made of brick, with a small, dingy window above which someone had painted the word “Apothecary,” but so long ago that it was now faded. They entered and the man at the counter looked up. He was slightly built, with a wispy beard. He registered the newcomer with alarm, then saw Ben and decided to be reassured.

  “How can I help you?”

  “It’s about this.”

  The man barely glanced at it. “A refill, is it?”

  “I don’t want more of it. It would be better for everyone if there had been rather less.”

  The apothecary cast a rapid and uncertain glance at Armstrong but did not respond to his implication.

  Armstrong removed the stopper and held it under the man’s nose. There was something under a quarter of a bottle left. Enough to give off an aroma that rose aggressively from the back of the nostrils into the brain. You didn’t need to know what it was to be wary. The smell told you beware.

  The apothecary now looked ill at ease.

  “You remember selling it?”

  “I sell all sorts. People want this”—he nodded at the bottle that Armstrong has placed on the table—“for all kinds of reasons.”

  “Such as?”

  The man shrugged. “Greenfly . . .”

  “Greenfly? In December?”

  He turned falsely innocent eyes on Armstrong. “You didn’t say December.”

  “Of course I mean December. You sold this to a young woman yesterday.”

  The apothecary’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. “You are a friend of this young woman, are you? Not that I remember any young woman. Not in particular. Young women come and go. They want all kinds of things. For all kinds of reasons. You are not her father, I think . . .” He paused and, when Armstrong failed to answer, went on with sly emphasis. “Her protector, then?”

  Armstrong was the gentlest of men, but he knew how to seem otherwise when it served him. He turned a certain look on the apothecary and the man suddenly quailed.

  “What is it you want?”

  “Information.”

  “Ask away.”

  “Was the child with her?”

  “The little girl?” He seemed surprised. “Yes.”

  “Where did they go when they left you?”

  He gestured.

  “Towards the river?”

  The man shrugged. “How am I to know where they were going?”

  Armstrong’s voice was mild, but there was no mistaking the menace in it. “A defenseless young mother comes to you bringing her small child with her, buys poison, and yo
u don’t think to ask yourself where she is going next? What she plans to do? Do you never consider the result of your making a miserable few pence on such a purchase?”

  “Sir, if an unknown woman is in trouble, whose job is it to get her out of it? Mine? Or the one who got her into it in the first place? If she is something to you, Mr. . . . Mr. whoever-you-are, that’s where you should address your questions. Go to the one that ruined her and abandoned her. That’s where you’ll find the responsibility lies for what happened next! Not that I know what happened. I’m nothing but a man who must make a living, and that’s what I do.”

  “Selling poison so that girls with no one to help them in the world can kill the greenfly on their December roses?”

  The apothecary had the grace to look discomfited, but whether it was guilt or just the fear that Armstrong was out to make trouble for him was hard to tell.

  “There is no law requiring me to know the seasons of horticultural pests.”

  “Where next, sir?” Ben asked hopefully when they were outside again.

  “I think I’m done here. For today, anyway. Let’s go up to the river.”

  As they went, Ben’s stride grew slow and he began to waver on his feet. Coming to the river, Armstrong glanced to see where he had got to, and saw him leaning against a tree trunk, his face green.

  “What is it, Ben?”

  Ben wept. “Sir, I’m sorry, sir, I ate some of the green apple you gave me for Fleet, sir, and now my belly’s aching and churning . . .”

  “They’re sour, those apples. No wonder. What have you eaten today?”

  “Nothing, sir.”

  “No breakfast?”

  The boy shook his head. Armstrong felt a surge of anger at the butcher who failed to feed his children.

  “It’s the acid on an empty stomach.” Armstrong unscrewed his hip flask. “Drink this.”

  The boy drank and pulled a face. “That is truly horrible, sir, it’s making me feel worse.”

  “That’s the idea. It’s nothing more sinister than cold tea. Finish it up.”

  Ben tipped the flask and with a grimace swallowed the last of the tea. Then he was violently sick in the grass.

  “Good. Any more? Yes? Good. Keep it coming.”

  While Ben gasped and groaned on the riverbank, watched by Fleet, Armstrong doubled back to the high street, where he bought three buns at the bakery. He returned and gave two to Ben—“Go on, fill your stomach”—and ate the third himself.

  The pair sat on the bank, and while Ben ate, Armstrong watched the river flow powerfully by. The river was quieter like this than when it dawdled. There was no idle splashing on the way, only the purposeful surge forwards, and behind the high-pitched ringing of water on shingle at the river’s edge was a kind of hum, the sort you would expect to hear inside your ears after a bell has been struck by a hammer and the audible ringing has died away. It had the shape of noise but lacked the sound, a sketch without color. Armstrong listened to it and his mind flowed with the river.

  There was a bridge, a simple one, constructed in wood. Beneath it the river was high and fast, sweeping away anything that might be dropped into it. He saw the young woman here with her child, in the evening, in the dark and the cold. He spared himself the picture of her dropping her child into the water, but he imagined her distress, felt his own heart leap in horror and grief. Armstrong looked up and down river distractedly. He didn’t know what he was expecting to see. Not a small child, he knew that—not now.

  When he returned to himself he noticed how harsh the winter felt compared to only a few hours before. His body had less resistance to the chill, and inside his woolen overcoat and layers beneath he felt the coldness of his skin. There was dankness in the undergrowth. The browns and dark golds of autumn were long gone and the softening of spring was months ahead. The branches were at their blackest. It seemed that only by some miracle could life ever return to dress the stark treetops with the haze of new foliage. Seeing it today, one would sooner think that life was gone for good.

  He tried to distract himself from his sad thoughts. Turning to Ben, he found the boy was looking more like his old self.

  “Will you join your father in the butcher’s shop when you are older?”

  Ben shook his head. “I shall run away.”

  “Is that a good plan?”

  “It is the family tradition, done first by my second eldest brother and then by my third eldest brother, and it will be my turn next, for Father only has need of one of us, so being as how the rest of us is not needed, I shall run away before too long—when the good weather comes, I reckon—and make my fortune.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I shall find that out once I am doing it, I suppose.”

  “When the time is right for running away, Ben, I hope you will come to me. I have a farm at Kelmscott, and there is always a job for honest boys who are not afraid of working. Just make your way to Kelmscott and ask for Armstrong.”

  Stunned by this unexpected stroke of good fortune, Ben took a deep breath and said a good many times over, “Thank you, sir! Thank you, sir! Thank you!”

  The new friends shook hands to seal their agreement, and then they parted.

  Ben took his first steps home, his thoughts in upheaval. It was not yet ten o’clock, but it had been an adventurous day like no other. Suddenly the significance of Armstrong’s sadness broke into his young mind.

  “Sir?” he said, running back to Armstrong, who was already in the saddle.

  “Yes?”

  “Alice—is she dead, sir?”

  Armstrong looked at the river, at its directionless surface motion.

  Was she dead?

  He held the reins loosely in his hands and settled his feet in the stirrups.

  “I don’t know, Ben. I wish I did. Her mother is dead.”

  Ben watched to see whether Armstrong was going to say anything else, but he didn’t, so he turned and made his way home. Mr. Armstrong, the farmer at Kelmscott. When the time was right he would run away—and be part of the story.

  Armstrong nudged Fleet forwards. They moved at a gentle trot and Armstrong wept as they went, grieving for the loss of the grandchild he had never known.

  It was always painful to Armstrong to know of a creature that was suffering. He would not allow his animals to suffer, and that was why he slaughtered them himself instead of giving the job to one of his men. His made sure his knife was sharp, he soothed the pigs with words, distracted them with acorns, then one swift and expert twist of the knife was enough. No fear and no pain. The drowning of a child? He could not contemplate it without tears. There were farmers who got rid of sick animals that way, and it was a common thing to drown unwanted kittens and puppies in a sack, but he had never done it. Death might be a necessity in farming, but suffering? Never.

  Armstrong wept, and he discovered as he went that one loss brings back others. The thought of his favorite pig, the most intelligent and kindly pig he had known in thirty years of farming, suddenly afflicted him afresh with the poignancy he had felt that first morning over two years ago when he had discovered her missing. “What happened to Maud, Fleet? I cannot reconcile myself to not knowing. Someone took her, Fleet, but who could have got her away so noiselessly? You know what she was like. She would have squealed if some stranger had tried to take her. And why steal a gilt? A pig for the table, that I can understand—people get hungry—but a breeding pig, her meat would be tough and bitter: Wouldn’t they know that? It makes no sense. Why steal a pig the size of Maud when there were table pigs in the very next pen?”

  His heart contracted in pain at the most unbearable thought of all: anyone ignorant enough to take the biggest pig instead of a sweet-tasting small one was bound to be clumsy with the slaughterer’s knife.

  Armstrong was a man fully aware of his good fortune: he had health, strength, and intelligence; the unorthodoxy of his birth—his father was an earl, his mother a black servant girl—had brought difficulties but advanta
ges too. Though his childhood had been lonely, he had received a fine education; and when he chose his path in life, he had been given a generous sum to get started. He owned fertile land; he had won the love of Bess, and together they had created a large and mostly happy family. He was a man who counted his blessings and rejoiced in them, but he was also one who felt losses most keenly, and now his mind was in torment.

  A child struggling in the river . . . Maud struggling against a dull blade, wielded by an inexpert slaughterman . . .

  Dark images tore at him. Yes, one grief unleashes another, and another, and having torn open the wound left by the loss of Maud, his mind turned to the most painful loss of all, and the tears ran more abundantly on his face.

  “Oh, Robin. Where did I go wrong, Fleet? Oh, Robin, my son.”

  A great distance now separated him from his first child, and a massive weight of sorrow sat on his heart and oppressed him. Twenty-two years of love, and now? For four years his son had not consented to live at the farm but lived in Oxford, apart from his brothers and sister. They didn’t see him for months at a time, and then only when he wanted something. “I tried, Fleet—did I try hard enough? What is it I should have done? Is it too late?”

  And thinking about Robin brought him back to the child—Robin’s child—and he started the cycle all over again.

  After some time of this, an elderly man came into view, leaning on a stick. Armstrong wiped his face on his sleeve and, as they came close, stopped to speak to him.

  “There is a little girl gone missing from Bampton,” he said. “Four years of age. Will you put the word out? I’m Armstrong, my farm is at Kelmscott . . .”

  From his first words he saw the man’s face change.

  “Then I have sorry news for you, Mr. Armstrong. I heard it told last night, at the cockfighting. Fellow on his way to Lechlade for the morning train told it to all o’ us. A little girl plucked out o’ the river, drowned.”

  So she was gone. It was only to be expected.

  “Where was this?”

  “The Swan, at Radcot.”

  The fellow was not without kindness. Seeing Armstrong’s grief, he added: “I don’t say as it’s the child you are looking for. Chances are it’s a different girl altogether.”