Once Upon a River

by Diane Setterfield

  “And then there’ll be trouble for whoever it was that took her.”

  “It were that nursery maid, I’d put a week’s wages on it. Remember her?”

  “The girl Ruby that went out in the night?”

  “That’s what she says. Walking by the river at midnight. I ask you! What kind of a girl goes wandering by the river in the middle of the night? At solstice time too.”

  “And solstice time is when the river gypsies are about. They cooked it up with her, that’s how it was. Ruby and the gypsies, mark my words. When that little lass starts to talk, there’ll be trouble for someone . . .”

  The story of the kidnapped girl and the story of the found girl both had trailing ends, but if some of those trailing ends could be woven together, then that seemed to bring both stories closer to completion, which was a good thing.

  As for the second question, that gave rise to longer and drunker debates.

  There were some for whom the world was such a tricky thing that they marveled at it without feeling any need to puzzle it out. Bafflement in their eyes was fundamental to existence. Higgs the gravel digger was one such. His pay that was enough on Friday night to last the week was generally gone by the end of Tuesday; he always owed for more pints of ale at the Swan than he remembered consuming; the wife he only beat on Saturday night—and not always then—ran off for no reason at all to live with the cousin of the cheesemonger; the face he saw reflected in the river when he sat glumly staring into it with no bread in his belly, no ale to dull the hunger, and no wife to warm him was not his own but his father’s. The whole of life was a mystery, if you delved even a little way under the surface, and causes and effects not infrequently came adrift from each other. On top of these daily bewilderments, the story of the girl who died and lived again was one he drew consolation from as he marveled at it, for it demonstrated conclusively that life was fundamentally inexplicable, and there was no point trying to understand anything.

  Certain tellers, fanciful or just unscrupulous, invented details to provide a more satisfactory answer to this question. One bargeman had a brother who’d been off with a woman the night of the great event. At first disappointed by what he’d missed, he later turned it to his advantage and developed his own version that made the most of his absence from the inn and contained the comfort of rational explanation. “She were never dead at all! If I’d have seen her, I’d have told ’em. It’s all in the eyes. You have only to look in a man’s eyes to tell if he is dead or not. It is the seeing, you see, that goes out of ’em.”

  Ears snapped open on hearing this, and heads lifted sharply. It was the obvious way to sooth the strain of it, if you were one of those that can’t stand a glaring gap in a tale, an implausibility, reality gone wrong. One or two storytellers were attracted to the security of it, and their own versions began to drift in that direction. “She was brought into the inn scarcely breathing,” someone said experimentally, but it gave rise to such disapproving glances and twists of the mouth that the teller was taken aside and given a talking to. There were standards at the Swan; storytelling was one thing, lying quite another, and they had all been there. They knew.

  After months of telling and retelling, there was no sense of the story settling down. On the contrary, the tale of the drowned girl who lived again was puzzling, unfinished, out of kilter with what a story ought to be. At the Swan they talked about the Vaughans, they talked about the Armstrongs, they talked about death, and they talked about life. They examined the strengths and weaknesses of every claim and every claimant. They turned the story this way and that, they turned it upside down and then righted it again, and at the end were no further forward than they had been at the beginning.

  “It is like bone soup,” said Beszant one night. “A smell to make your mouth water and all the flavor of the marrow, but there be nowt to chew on, and though you take seven bowls of it you will be just as hungry at the end as when you sat down to the table.”

  They might have let it drop. They might have given it up as one of those tales that comes from nowhere and has nowhere to go. But at the end of sentences and between words, when voices tailed off and conversations halted, in the profound lull that lies behind all storytelling, there floated the girl herself. In this room, in this inn, they had seen her dead and seen her alive. Unknowable, ungraspable, inexplicable, still one thing was plain: she was their story.

  Counting

  Twenty-five miles downriver, at Oxford’s best-known boatyard, the boatbuilder himself scrawled an inky squiggle in receipt of the final invoice and with a nod slid a set of shiny brass keys over the counter. Henry Daunt’s hand closed over them.

  On his return to the city after his eventful solstice experiences, Daunt had set things in motion. He had leased the house he’d lived in before his wife’s death and moved into the attic room over his shop on Broad Street. There he enjoyed a Spartan, bachelor existence, having a bed, a chamber pot, and a table with a pitcher and basin to his name. He ate his meals at the chophouse at the corner. He invested the total of the lease money and every penny of his savings into the boat. For Daunt had a plan.

  In the period of unconsciousness between the longest day and the day after, his mind had been made new, and in the bed at the Swan a brilliant and novel idea had occurred to him—an idea that would combine in a single project his two great loves: photography and the river. He would make a book of photographs that would take the reader on a journey from the source of the Thames all the way to the estuary—or perhaps just to London—though in fact it might have to be in several volumes, and the first might go only from Trewsbury Mead to Oxford. The essence was to start. To do it, he needed two things: transport and a portable darkroom. The two things could be one. While his face was still shades of green and black and purple, with a scarlet thread running down his cheek to his lip, he’d made his first visit to the boatbuilder to explain what he needed. As it happened, there was a boat in the yard, almost finished, whose customer had been unable to make the final payment. It was just what Daunt wanted, and needed only finishing and fitting out to meet his requirements. Today, nearly three months later, his skin was its usual hale color and the scar a pink line with pairs of almost invisible dots where the stitches had been—and he had the keys to his investment in his hand.

  All the way upriver Daunt and his boat met with curiosity. Her smart navy and white paintwork and her brass and cherry fittings were reason enough, but there were originalities to this boat that had never been seen before.

  “Collodion?” asked those that could read. “What kind of a name is that?”

  He pointed to the yellow-orange of the decorative flourishes that framed his name and profession painted on the side of the boat. “This is the color of collodion. It’s lethal. I’ve known it to burst into flames—explode, even—with no warning at all. And if you inhale too much of it, woe betide you! But apply it to glass, expose it to light, and then—ah! then—you have magic! Collodion is the ingredient that unlocks all my art and all my science. Without it, there can be no such thing as a photograph.”

  “And what’s all that, then?” people called across the water, gesturing to the brackets and boxes attached so neatly to the exterior of the cabin, and he explained that this was his photographic equipment.

  “And that contraption?” they wanted to know. Secured to the cabin roof was a quadricycle, painted to match the boat.

  “For getting around inland. And this box here doubles as a trailer, so that I can get my kit to wherever I want to be by road.”

  The sharp-eyed noticed that there were internal shutters as well as curtains.

  “It’s a darkroom,” he explained, “for a single ray of light is enough to destroy a photograph in the making.”

  He stopped so often for conversations of this sort, handed out so many business cards, and took so many appointments in his diary, that by the time he got upriver as far as Buscot and Radcot, he thought Collodion was well on the way to paying for herself
already. But he had debts to repay before he could start this new phase of his business: he had come to thank the people to whom he owed his life. He had come to the Swan, and, before that, this place.

  It was a quiet spot on the river where a small, neat cottage stood. The garden was tidy, the front door was painted green, and smoke was rising from its chimney. There was suitable mooring some twenty yards on. He tied up, came back, slapping his gloved hands together to keep them warm, and knocked.

  The door opened to reveal a symmetrical brow over a strong, straight nose, flanked by distinctive angles that formed a jaw, cheeks, and temples.

  “Miss Sunday?” He hadn’t envisaged this . . . He shifted slightly to the side, curious to see how the light fell differently with the change of angle, saw shadow flood the plain of her cheek. He felt a stir of excitement.

  “Mr. Daunt!”

  Rita stepped forward and lifted her face to his with an intentness in her expression, almost as if she were going to kiss him, but she only trained an assessing squint on his scar. Next she placed a fingertip to his skin and traced the scar to check how raised it was. She nodded. “Good,” she said firmly, and stepped back.

  His mind was preoccupied with visual matters, but he finally found his tongue.

  “I’ve come to say thank you.”

  “You have already done that.”

  It was true. He had sent money in payment, thanked her in a letter for her care, and asked for information about the girl who had died and lived again. She had written in return a letter of model clarity, thanking him for the money and telling him what she knew of the child’s progress. That might have been the end of it, but his mind was unsettled by this woman who was still a visual mystery to him, for his assistant had come to collect him and take him home while his eyes were still swollen shut. It had occurred to him that the people at the Swan might appreciate a free photograph as a thank-you for their hospitality, and that it would be entirely natural to call on the nurse at the same time.

  “I thought you might like a photograph,” he said. “A thank-you gift.”

  “You’ve chosen a bad day to come,” she told him, in the calm voice he remembered. “I’m busy.”

  He noticed the pool of shade at the side of her nose, and had to repress the urge to darken it by taking her head between his hands and turning it fractionally. “The light is too good to waste.”

  “But I’ve been waiting for the right temperature,” she said. “Today’s the day. I can’t afford to miss it.”

  “What is it you need to do?”

  “An experiment.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “Sixty seconds.”

  “I need fifteen. Surely we can find seventy-five seconds in the day if we look hard?”

  “Presumably your fifteen seconds is exposure time? What about your setting up? And the developing?”

  “You help me and I’ll help you. It’ll go quicker with two.”

  She put her head on one side and gave him an appraising look.

  “You’re offering to help with my experiment?”

  “I am. In return for a photograph.” The photograph that had first been conceived as a gift to her had become something he now wanted for himself.

  “It’s possible. Even preferable. But whether you’d want to . . .”

  “I do.”

  She eyed him, and a subtle alteration in the planes of her face told him that she was suppressing a smile. “So you will be the subject of my experiment if I agree to be the subject of your photograph—is that right?”

  “It is.”

  “You’re a brave and foolish man, Mr. Daunt. It’s a deal. We’ll start with the photograph, shall we? The light will fluctuate, whereas if the temperature does, it won’t be by much.”

  Rita’s sitting room was a white painted box with many bookshelves and a blue armchair. By the window a simple wooden table held more piles of books and sheaves of paper densely covered with swift, fluent script. She helped carry boxes from Collodion and watched with interest as he set up. When all was ready, he seated Rita at this table with a featureless piece of wall behind her.

  “Lean towards me . . . Try with your chin on your fist. Yes, that’s it.”

  There were none of the dainty accouterments his paying clients would have wanted: no silver brooch to catch the light, no white collar, no lace cuff. What little you saw of her dress was dark and plain. There was no embellishment of any kind, and none was needed. There was only the symmetry of the line where her temples met her hairline, the strong arc of her brow, the shade that pooled in her orbit, and the depth of her thinking eyes.

  “Don’t move while I’m counting.”

  For fifteen seconds she sat motionless and he watched her through the lens.

  His best portraits—the most lifelike—were of people whose characters were by nature placid, slow to move from one state to the next. Lively souls were frequently reduced by the camera: their essence escaped the lens, and all that was captured was a wax dummy, all outward resemblance with none of the quicksilver.

  With Rita there was none of the goggle-eyed staring or nervous blinking that novices often displayed. Instead she opened her eyes to the camera with perfect composure. From under his cover, he saw one swell of living thought succeed another in an endless shifting movement, while all the time the muscles of her face remained unaltered. This was not one photograph, he knew by the end of the fifteen seconds. This was a thousand.

  “Come,” he said at the end of fifteen seconds, as he removed the plate enclosed in its case against the light. “I want to show you how it works.”

  They made their way swiftly to Collodion. He was holding the plate carefully, and she did not need help climbing aboard. In the cabin, the shutters already blocked out the day. He lit a candle and placed a red glass shade over it, then closed the door. A red glow illuminated the small space. They stood side by side, hemmed in before by the developing table that he had extended and behind by the bench on which he could sleep when he spent nights aboard. The planks of the ceiling were only inches above their heads, and beneath their feet was the lulling rock of the river. Daunt tried not to be aware of the size and shape of the space between their two bodies, the places where the jut of her hip narrowed it, the curve of her waist broadened it, her elbow almost closed it.

  Daunt mixed liquids from three glass bottles in a tiny vessel only an inch high, and the smell of apple vinegar and old nails filled the air.

  “Ferrous sulphate?” she wondered, sniffing the air.

  “With acetic acid and water. It actually is red; it’s not just the light that makes it look that way.”

  He slid the plate from its case. Holding it carefully in his left hand, he tipped a minute quantity of the light-red liquid onto the plate so that the acid mix flowed across the entire surface. It was a graceful motion, fluid and economical.

  “Watch. The image starts to form almost instantly—the lighter things first, but they show as dark lines . . . This line here is your cheekbone, highlighted from the window . . . Now the rest appears, blurrily at first, but then . . .”

  His voice faded as they watched her face appear on the glass. They stood close in the red light, watching the shadows and lines on the glass coalesce, and Daunt felt a falling sensation in his stomach. A great dive. It resembled the feeling he had when, as a boy, he let himself drop from the apex of a bridge into the river. He had met his wife while skating on the frozen Thames one wintertime. With her he had glided into love—if it was love, and not some lesser cousin—unknowingly. This time he plummeted—and it was unmistakable.

  Then she was fully present on the glass. Her face delineated by light and darkness, the orbits shadowed and the pupils full of enigma. He felt that it would take very little to bring him to tears. It might be the best portrait he had ever taken.

  “I must photograph you again,” he said as he rinsed the plate.

  “What’s wrong with this one?”

 
Nothing. He wanted her at every angle, in every possible lighting, in all moods and all positions. He wanted her with her hair loose around her face and pulled right back, concealed under a hat; he wanted her in a white chemise open at the neck and draped in folds of dark cloth; he wanted her in water and against tree trunks and on grass . . . There were a thousand photographs waiting to be taken. He had to have all of them.

  “Nothing’s wrong. That’s why I need more.”

  He slid the plate into a tray of potassium cyanide. “This will get rid of the blue tint. See? It turns black-and-white and will be permanent now.”

  Next to him, Rita in the red light looked with interest at the alteration, while through the clear viscosity of the liquid her eyes on glass continued to gaze thoughtfully as they would now do for the life of the plate.

  “What were you thinking about?”

  She cast a quick, assessing glance in his direction and weighed something up rapidly.

  “You were there at the beginning,” she began. “I suppose she would not be here at all if it were not for you, so . . .” And she recounted in calm detail the encounter she’d had with the man on the river path a few weeks before.

  Daunt paid close attention. He discovered that he did not like the thought of Rita being accosted by a ruffian one bit, and his instinct was to offer reassurance; but Rita’s account was so crisp, her manner so entirely unperturbed, that such chivalry would have been out of place. Yet he could not hear of it without some protective gesture.

  “Did he hurt you?”

  “There was bruising to my upper arm and grazing to my hands. Very minor.”

  “You’ve made it known locally that there is a ruffian about?”

  “I told them at the Swan and I let the Vaughans know of his interest in her. They were already considering putting locks on the windows, and that decided them.”

  Given so little opportunity to display gallantry, he allowed Rita to lead him into analysis instead.

  “Yeast and fruit . . .”

  “A baker-cum-thief? That’s not very likely. Distilling, perhaps?”