“We do.”
“And she resembles those photographs now?”
Vaughan shrugged. “I suppose so . . . in the way little girls of four resemble their own selves aged two.”
“Which is to say . . . ?”
“A mother’s eye can see it is the same child.”
“But another? A more judicial eye?”
Vaughan paused, and Montgomery, as if he had not registered the pause, sailed blithely on. “I take your point entirely about children. They change. A cargo of cheese lost on Wednesday does not transform into an equivalent weight of tobacco when it reappears on Saturday, but a child, ah!—another matter entirely. I take your point. Still, to be ready, keep the photographs safe, and keep note of everything—every little detail—that tells you that this Amelia and that Amelia from two years ago are one and the same child. It is as well to be prepared.”
He took in Vaughan’s glum face and smiled cheerily at him. “Beyond that, Mr. Vaughan, my counsel to you is this: Worry not about young Mr. Armstrong. And tell Mrs. Vaughan she is not to worry either. Montgomery and Mitchell are here to do the worrying for you. We will look after everything for you—and for Amelia. For there is one thing, one very great thing, that stands in your favor.”
“And what is that?”
“If it comes to court, this case will be very long, and it will be very slow. Have you ever heard of the great Thames case between the Crown and the Corporation of London?”
“I can’t say I have.”
“It is a dispute over which of them owns the Thames. The Crown says that the Queen travels upon it and it is essential for the defense of the nation, hence the river is in its possession. The Corporation of London argues that it exercises jurisdiction over the comings and goings of all goods upstream and down, and that therefore it must own the Thames.”
“And what was the outcome? Who owns the Thames?”
“Why, they have been arguing it for a dozen years, and they have at least a dozen years of argument to go! What is a river? It is water. And what is water? Essentially it is rain. And what is rain? Why, weather! And who owns the weather? That cloud that passes overhead now, this very minute, where is it to fall? On the one bank, or on the other, or into the river itself? Clouds are blown by the wind, which is owned by nobody, and they float over borders without letters of passage. The rain in that cloud might fall in Oxfordshire or in Berkshire; it might cross the sea and fall upon the demoiselles in Paris, for all we know. And the rain that does fall into the Thames, why, it might have traveled from anywhere! From Spain, or Russia, or . . . or Zanzibar! If they have clouds in Zanzibar. No, rain cannot be said to belong to anybody, whether it be the Queen of England or the Corporation of London, any more than lightning can be captured and put in a bank vault, but that won’t stop them trying!”
On Montgomery’s face there was the faintest hint of glee. It was the closest Vaughan had ever seen to an expression.
“The reason I tell you this is to illustrate how slow the dealings of the law can be. When this Armstrong makes up his mind to claim the girl—if he does—avoid going to court. Pay him whatever he wants to resolve the matter. It will be cheaper by far. And if he won’t be paid off, then take comfort in Regina v. Corporation of London. The case will last, if not an eternity, then at least until the child is grown. The cargo we have been speaking of, little Amelia, will be the property of her husband long before the law decides which father is her rightful owner. Take comfort!”
At Oxford Station, Vaughan stood on the platform waiting for his train. As Montgomery faded from his mind, he was put in mind of the last occasion he had stood waiting for a train on the very same spot. He had been to town to meet a potential buyer for the narrow-gauge railway he had used for the transportation of sugar beet from field to distillery, and afterwards he had gone to locate the house of Mrs. Constantine. He had found it. He had gone inside. He wondered at himself. It was such a short time ago—two months—and so much had happened since. What was it she had said to him? You can’t go on like this. That was it. And he had felt it too—felt in his bone marrow that she was right. Would he have gone back, as she suggested? Surely not. And yet . . . As things turned out he hadn’t needed to. Left by themselves, things had sorted themselves out unexpectedly—miraculously, even—and happily. For two years he had been miserably unhappy, and now—so long as Armstrong could be managed—he did not need to be. “Take comfort!” Montgomery had said. And he would.
Just as he resolved to forget Mrs. Constantine, he remembered her face suddenly. Her eyes that seemed to swim against the current of his words and enter his mind, his very thoughts . . . I see, she had said, and it was as if she saw not only what he said but what he didn’t say.
Remembering it now, he felt a touch of significance at the nape of his neck and turned, expecting to see her behind him, on the platform.
There was nobody there.
“Mrs. Vaughan is putting Amelia to bed,” he was told when he arrived home.
He let himself into the yellow drawing room, where the curtains were closed and the fire was burning brightly in the hearth. Lately the two photographs of Amelia had reappeared on the small desk that stood in the bay. In the first days after her disappearance, she had continued to stare from her containment behind the glass. Her ghost-like gaze overlaid with the shimmer of the glass had appalled him, and finally, able to bear it no longer, he had laid the portraits facedown in a drawer and tried to forget it. Later he became aware that the photographs were no longer there and supposed that Helena had taken them to her room. By this time he no longer visited Helena’s room. Nocturnal grieving was a thing they did separately, each in their own way, and it was plain to him that nothing good would come from entering her room for any other purpose. Now that the girl had come, the photographs were back in their original place.
He had allowed his eyes to glide over them and succeeded in doing so without seeing a thing.
From across the room they were mere shapes: a standard portrait of Amelia seated, and a family portrait, him standing and Helena seated with Amelia on her lap. He approached. He took the portrait in his hands, eyes closed, preparing himself to look at it.
The door opened. “You’re home! Darling? Is something the matter?”
He righted his face. “What? Oh, no, nothing. I saw Montgomery today. While I was there I mentioned—in passing—the situation with Mr. Armstrong.”
She looked at him blankly.
“We spoke about the possibility—the remote possibility—that he might make a claim in law.”
“Surely not! When they find—”
“The body? Helena, when will you give up this notion? It’s been two months! If nobody has found it yet, what reason is there to think they are going to find it?”
“But a little girl has drowned! The body of a child doesn’t just disappear!”
Vaughan’s chest rose with a sharp intake of breath. His lungs held on to it. This wasn’t how he wanted the conversation to go. He must stay calm. Slowly he exhaled.
“Yet no body has been found. We must face that fact. And it is likely—even you must admit, it is possible—that no body will be found.” He could hear the testiness in his own voice, made further efforts to curb it. “Look—darling—all I mean to say is that it’s as well to be prepared. Just in case.”
She looked at him thoughtfully. It was unlike him to be sharp with her. “You can’t bear the thought of losing her, can you?” She crossed the room, placed her hand over his heart, and smiled tenderly. “You can’t bear the thought of losing her again. Oh, Anthony!” Tears rose in her eyes and spilled. “You know. At last you have recognized her.”
He made a gesture to put the photograph down to take her in his arms; the movement drew her attention to what he was holding and she stopped him.
She took the photograph from his hand and looked fondly at it. “Anthony, please don’t worry. All the evidence we need is here.” She smiled up at him. She was turnin
g it in her hands so as to replace it on the table, when a sudden exclamation broke from her lips.
“What is it?”
“This!”
He looked where she was pointing at the reverse of the frame. “Good Lord! ‘Henry Daunt of Oxford, Portraits, landscapes, city, and country scenes . . . ,’ ” he read aloud from the label. “It’s him! The man who found her!”
“We would hardly have recognized him, bruised and swollen as he was. How strange . . . Let’s get him back. He made more exposures, do you remember? We only took the two best ones, but there were two others. He might still have them.”
“If they were any good, we’d have them already, surely.”
“Not necessarily.” She replaced the photograph on the table. “The best photograph overall might not the best of her face. Perhaps I was the one who wriggled”—she danced an exaggerated demonstration on the spot—“or you were pulling a face”—her fingers molded his lips into a lopsided grimace. He made an effort to return the kind of laugh her playfulness deserved. “There,” she finished with satisfaction. “You’re smiling again. So it would be better to have them all, wouldn’t it? Just in case. I’m sure your Mr. Montgomery would think so.”
He nodded.
She put an arm loosely around him and spread her fingers below his shoulder blade. Through his jacket he could feel each finger separately and the pad at the base of her thumb. He was not yet used to her touch: even through layers of tweed and poplin, it sent a thrill through him.
“And while he is here, we can have him take new ones.”
She raised her other hand to the back of his neck; he felt a thumb stray to the inch of skin between the top of his collar and his hairline.
He kissed her and her mouth was soft and slightly open.
“I’m so glad,” she murmured as she leant into his body. “It’s the one thing I’ve been waiting for. Now we are really together again.”
He delivered a sound, a little moan, into her hair.
“Our little girl is fast asleep,” she whispered. “I thought I might have an early night too.”
He buried his nose in her neck and inhaled. “Yes,” he said. And again: “Yes.”
The Story Flourishes
In the weeks after the mystery girl was pulled from the Thames, first dead and then alive, the Swan had done excellent business. The story had spread via marketplaces and street corners. It was recounted in family letters from mother to daughter, from cousin to cousin. It was passed freely to strangers met on station platforms, and wanderers encountered it by chance at crossroads. Everybody who heard it was sure to tell it wherever he went, until eventually there was nobody in three counties who did not know one version of it or another. A great many of these people were not satisfied until they had visited the inn where the extraordinary events had taken place and seen for themselves the riverbank where the girl was found and the long room where she was placed.
Margot made the decision to open up the summer room. She organized her daughters to come in pairs to help with the extra work, and the regulars got used to having the little Margots present. Jonathan badgered his mother and sisters to listen to him practice his storytelling, but they were rarely able to stop and listen, for the calls on their time and attention were unending. “I’ll never get any better,” he sighed, and his lips moved as he practiced aloud to himself, but he got more and more muddled, putting the end at the beginning and the beginning at the end, and the middle—well, the middle hardly featured at all.
Joe lit the fire at eleven in the morning and it was kept in till midnight, when at last the crush of drinkers in the room began to thin.
The regulars scarcely bought a drink for themselves for weeks on end, as visitors stood rounds in payment for the story. They learned in time to save their voices, for had the visitors had their way, every man who had witnessed the events that night would have been in the summer room going round the tables, talking constantly. But, as an elderly cressman pointed out very appositely, that would leave no drinking time. So they worked out a rota that saw the regulars go two by two into the summer room for an hour of telling, and then return to their stools in the winter room to quench their thirst and be replaced by two more.
Fred Heavins had crafted a good comic tale out of his side of it, which ended with the punch line, “ ‘Nay!’ said the horse.” A slantwise version like his went down well after ten o’clock, when the facts of the story had been told a dozen times over and the audience was drunk. It earned him a great many hangovers, and he was so often late for work that he was threatened with dismissal.
Newman, the Vaughans’ gardener—previously a regular at the Red Lion, where every Friday night he sang till he was hoarse—had now switched allegiance to the Swan and was trying his tongue at storytelling. He practiced on the regulars before trying his luck with the visitors in the summer room, and made the most of that aspect of the story only he had witnessed: the departure of Mrs. Vaughan from Buscot Lodge on hearing the news of the rescue of the child.
“I saw her myself, I did. She ran down to the boathouse quick as could be, and when she come out in her rowing boat, the little old one of hers, off she went, haring up the river . . . I never seen a boat move like it.”
“ ‘Haring up the river’?”asked a farmhand.
“Aye, and just a little slip of a girl too! You wouldn’t think a woman could row so fast.”
“But . . . ‘haring,’ you say?”
“That’s right. Quick as a hare, it means.”
“I know what it means, all right. But you can’t say she was ‘haring up the river.’ ”
“Whyever not?”
“Have you ever seen a hare rowing a boat?”
There was a burst of laughter that bewildered the gardener and made him flustered. “A hare in a boat? Don’t be daft!”
“That’s why you can’t say ‘she went haring up the river.’ If a hare can’t hare up a river, how can Mrs. Vaughan? Think about it.”
“What am I meant to say, then?”
“You have to think of some creature that do go swiftly up a river, and say that instead. Don’t he?”
There was a round of nodding.
“What about an otter?” suggested a young bargeman. “They don’t hang about.”
Newman pulled a dubious face. “Mrs. Vaughan went ottering up the river . . .”
The farmhand shook his head. “It sounds no better.”
“In fact, it sounds a bit worse . . .”
“Well, what am I supposed to say, then? If I can’t say ‘haring’ and I can’t say ‘ottering’ . . . ? I’ve got to say something.”
“True,” said the bargeman, and a trio of gravel diggers nodded. “The man has to say something.”
They turned to Owen Albright, who shared his wisdom. “I reckon you have to find another way altogether. You could say, ‘She rowed up the river, quick as could be . . .’ ”
“But he have already said that,” protested the farm hand. “She ran down to the boathouse as quick as could be. She can’t run quick as can be down to the boathouse and row quick as can be upriver.”
“She did, though,” corrected Newman.
“No!”
“She did! I was there! I saw her with my own eyes!”
“Aye, so it might have happened, but you can’t tell it thus.”
“Can’t tell it how it was? How d’you make that out? I’m starting to wish I’d not told it at all now. Telling a thing’s harder than I ever knew.”
“There’s an art to it.” Albright soothed. “You’ll get the hang of it.”
“I’ve got to the age of thirty-seven just opening my mouth and letting the words out, and never had any trouble so far. Not till I came and sat down here. I don’t know as I wants the hang of it. No, I shall go on by the old way: my words shall come as they like, and if I has her haring up the river, well, hare she must. Else I shan’t say anything at all.”
There was an exchange of anxious loo
ks across the table, and one of the gravel diggers spoke for them all: “Let the man speak. He was there.”
And Newman was allowed to continue, in words of his own devising, his account of Mrs. Vaughan’s departure from the house.
It was not only Newman and Heavins that practiced and refined their stories. All told their versions over and over, to each other and the visitors, and new details came to light. Memories were compared, adjudication made. There were splinter groups. Some remembered “for a fact” that the feather had been placed on the lips of the child before she was taken to the long room; others were adamant that only the man’s breath had been tested thus. Diverse and lengthy hypotheses were proposed to explain how Henry Daunt managed to get from Devil’s Weir to Radcot while out cold and in a damaged boat. They refined and polished the tale, identified moments where a well-placed gesture would bring tears to the eye, introduced pauses that held the audience on the edges of their seats. But they never found an ending to the story. They came to a point—the child left the Swan with Mr. and Mrs. Vaughan—where the story simply tailed off. “Is she Amelia Vaughan or is she the other one?” someone would ask. And: “How come she was first dead and then alive again?”
There were no answers.
Regarding the first question—who was the girl?—opinion by and large was in favor of the girl belonging to the Vaughans. The return of a child missing for the past two years, a child they had all seen, was a distinctly more satisfying story than the return of a child nobody knew and who had only gone missing the day before. The more recent mystery resuscitated the first, and the kidnap was recounted as though it were only yesterday.
“Where has she been, then, this last—how long is it?—two years?”
“She will have to get her voice back and start telling, won’t she?”
Once Upon a River Page 19