Once Upon a River

by Diane Setterfield

  “Yes, I wondered about that.”

  “Who does distilling round here?”

  She smiled. “That’s a question you won’t easily get an answer to. Everybody and nobody, I should think.”

  “Is there a lot of illicit liquor?”

  She nodded. “More than there used to be, according to Margot. But nobody knows where it comes from. Or nobody is willing to let on.”

  “And you caught no glimpse of him.” Daunt, for whom vision was everything, frowned.

  “He has unusually small hands and is a head shorter than I am.”

  He eyed her quizzically.

  “The bruises where his fingertips dug into my arms were smaller than expected, his voice came from a spot lower than my ear, and I felt the brim of his hat dig into me here.” She indicated where.

  “That is small for a man.”

  “And he’s strong.”

  “What do you make of his questions?”

  Rita peered at the photograph of her thoughtful self. “That is what I was considering here. If he wants to know whether the child will speak, that suggests he is concerned at what she might say. He might be frightened by what she could tell, which would imply that he has something to hide regarding the child. Perhaps he is responsible for her being in the river.”

  There was a sense of something unfinished in her voice. Daunt waited. She went on, speaking slowly and carefully, as if she was still weighing it up in her own mind. “But he was also particularly interested in knowing when she will speak again. Which might suggest his interest is less in something that has already happened and more in something to come. Perhaps he has some plan—some notion that depends on her continuing silence.”

  He waited while she organized her train of thought.

  “Which is it? Past or future? It may be the first, but I incline towards the latter. We must wait till the summer solstice and perhaps we will know more then.”

  “Why the summer solstice?”

  “Because that is when he believes it will be plain whether the child will speak or not. According to the Oxford doctor, that is when her muteness will either be gone or permanent. It’s nonsense, of course, but my assailant didn’t ask for my opinion, and I didn’t give him the benefit of it. I only told him what the doctor had said. Six months from the drowning—if we can call it that—takes us to the summer solstice. Whether or not she speaks by then might be the factor which will determine his actions.”

  His eyes met hers in the flickering red light.

  “I would not want anything bad to happen to her,” he said. “When I first saw her, I thought—I wanted—”

  “You wanted to keep her.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “It’s the same for everybody. The Vaughans want her, the Armstrongs want her, Lily White wants her. Jonathan wept when she left the Swan, and Margot was more than ready to have her. Why, even the cressmen would have taken her home and raised her if there’d been nobody else. Even I—” Something flickered in her eyes, there and gone again. I particularly want that, he thought. “So of course you wanted her,” she continued smoothly. “Everyone did.”

  “Let me photograph you again. There will be light enough for another one.”

  He lifted the red shade and snuffed out the candle and Rita leant to open the shutters. The day outside was dank and cold and grey, and the river was iron-cold.

  “You agreed to help me with my experiment.”

  “What is it you want me to do?”

  “You might change your mind once you know.”

  She told him her intentions and he stared.

  “Why on earth would you want me to do that?”

  “Can’t you guess?”

  Of course he could. “It’s her, isn’t it? Her heart slowed. You want to know how it happened.”

  “Will you help?”

  The first part was easy. At her kitchen table, while water was heating over the fire, she took his wrist in one hand and held her pocket watch in the other. For sixty seconds they sat in silence and she counted his pulse. At the end of a minute she made a note with a pencil that she wore on a string around her neck.

  “Seventy beats a minute. A little high. It might be the anticipation.”

  She tipped the water into a tin bath by the fire.

  “It’s not all that hot,” he said, testing it with his finger.

  “Tepid is better. Now—are you ready? I’ll turn my back.”

  He undressed to his shirt and long johns while she looked out of the window, then put his coat on. “Ready.”

  Outside, the ground was unyielding and the cold penetrated Henry’s bare feet. The river ahead appeared smooth but occasional shivers gave away the presence of deeper turbulences. Rita got into her little rowing boat and pushed off a couple of yards into the water. When she had lodged the nose of the craft in the reeds to secure it, she held her thermometer in the water for a few moments to test the temperature and noted it.

  “Perfect!” she called. “Ready when you are.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “Only a minute, I should think.”

  On the bank Daunt took off his coat, then his shirt. He stood in his long johns and reflected that when in the early days of his widowhood he had contemplated the possibility of finding himself almost naked in the company of a woman, this was not what he had imagined.

  “All set,” she said, with her unaltered calm voice, her gaze fixed firmly away from him and on the pocket watch.

  He entered the river.

  The first touch of the river made his bones contract. He set his jaw, went three steps deeper. The freezing line rose up his limbs. He could not bear it to creep up to his genitals; instead he bent his knees and took the shock of immersion in a single motion. He lowered himself to the neck and gasped, surprised that his chest could expand in the water’s grip. A few strokes took him to the side of the boat.

  “Wrist,” she instructed.

  He raised his wrist. She took it in her right hand, held the watch in her left, and said nothing.

  He endured it for what must have been a minute. She was still watching the watch, her eyes blinking calmly every so often. He endured it for what felt like another minute.

  “God! How much longer?”

  “If I lose count, we have to start again,” she murmured, the concentration on her face unchanging.

  He endured an eternity.

  He endured another.

  He endured a thousand eternities—and then she let go of his wrist, took up the pencil, and noted something neatly on the pad of paper while he gasped and rose, scattering water from the river. He made for the bank, ran to the cottage, for the tin bath of tepid water they had prepared in advance, and when he was in it, she was right: the heat bloomed all over him.

  When she entered the kitchen, he was entirely submerged.

  “Feel all right?” she asked.

  He nodded, teeth chattering, and then his body took over from his mind for a time as it put all its vigor into recovering from the shock of the cold. When he was himself again he looked over to the table. Rita was frowning out of the window as the light faded. The pencil was no longer round her neck but stuck over her ear, the cord dangling onto her shoulder. I want that, he thought.

  “Well?”

  “Seventy-four.” She lifted the paper on which she had noted the figures. “Your heartbeat rose in response to submersion in cold water.”

  “Rose?”

  “Yes.”

  “But the girl’s pulse fell . . . We found the opposite of what was meant to happen.”

  “Yes.”

  “It was for nothing, then.”

  She shook her head slowly. “Not nothing. I’ve ruled out a hypothesis. That’s progress.”

  “What’s hypothesis two?”

  She bent her head back to look at the ceiling, arm raised, elbow crooked around her head, and puffed out a sigh of frustration. “I don’t know.”

  Lily�
��s Visitor

  Lily White was not asleep and she was not awake. She was in that border territory where shadows move like waves, and illumination—faint and perplexing—comes and goes, like feeble sunshine through deep water. Then she emerged abruptly into wakefulness in her bed in Basketman’s Cottage.

  What was it?

  He was stealthy as a cat, opening the door without making a sound, stepping noiselessly on the flags. But she knew him by the odor of woodsmoke, sweetness, and yeast that he always brought with him, and that alarmed her senses so. It held its own even against the dank riverine smell of the cottage. Then she heard him too: the grating sound of stone on stone. He was retrieving the money from the hiding place.

  The sudden burst of a match strike. From her bed on the high ledge she saw the flare of light and the hand, with its bruises and scars, that tilted the candle wick into it. The wick caught and the circle of light grew steady.

  “What you got for me?” he said.

  “There’s cheese there and a bit of that ham you like. There’s bread in the basket.”

  “Today’s?”

  “Yesterday’s.”

  The light moved over to the side, and there was the sound of rummaging.

  “Going moldy, isn’t it. Should’ve got me some today.”

  “I didn’t know you was coming.”

  The circle of light floated back to the table where it was set down, and for a little while the only sound was of ravenous eating, mouthfuls barely chewed, famished gulps. Lily lay in the dark, silent and unmoving, her heart trembling.

  “What else is there?”

  “Apples, if you want.”

  “Apples! What do I want with apples?”

  The glow of light rose again and hovered along one bare shelf and then the other. It crossed to the cupboard, examined the emptiness within; it reached into the back corners of a drawer and still found nothing.

  “What do he pay you, that parson of yours?”

  “Not enough. You told me that before.”

  She tried not to think of her savings safe in the parson’s desk drawer for fear the hovering light would reveal it to him.

  A click of exasperation came out of the darkness.

  “Why haven’t you got me a bit of something sweet? What do you do for him, up at that parsonage? Apple pie? Bread pudding with damson jam? All sorts, I bet.”

  “I will, next time.”

  “Don’t you forget.”

  “I won’t.”

  Now that her eyes had adjusted, she could make out his shape in the dark. He sat at the table, his back to her, the shoulders of his coat sticking out wider than the frame beneath them; he was still in his wide-brimmed hat. By the sound of it, he was counting the money. She held her breath.

  When the money wasn’t right, it was she who got the blame for it. What had she taken? Where had she hidden it? What selfish plan was she brewing with it? What kind of loyalty did she call that? There were no answers to these questions that satisfied him. Whatever she said, her answers were always met with his fists. The truth was she had never once taken his money—she might be stupid, but she wasn’t that stupid. The money did puzzle her, though. She had questions of her own she’d have liked to ask, but didn’t dare. She had pieced together where it came from well enough. Overnight and coinciding with his visits, those bottles and barrels full of a potent and illegal brew appeared in her woodshed. There they remained through daylight hours, and with the next darkness they disappeared, taken by his distributors and replaced by money for the next delivery. But what happened to the money after he’d got it? In a single night he took more money from the hiding place here than she earned in a month at the parsonage, and she was sure he had other places that worked the same way too. He was hiding out in some place where there was no rent to pay, didn’t gamble, and never paid for a woman. He didn’t touch drink either—never had; only encouraged others to ruin and emptied their purses in exchange. She’d tried to add it up, the money he had from here in a year, doubled or trebled, or multiplied sevenfold, but the numbers set her head spinning. Even without coming to the end of her sums, she knew it was enough to make him rich, yet he turned up here, once a week or twice, in his ancient coat smelling of the distillery, all skin and bone, and famished. He ate her food and helped himself to her candles. She didn’t dare keep a single nice thing in the cottage, because whatever it was, he would take it, sell it, and the money would disappear. Even a pair of green woolen gloves with holes in the fingers would disappear into his pockets. There was a mystery in Victor’s life that sucked all his money into it, and all hers too. Except what she had the parson keep back for her. It didn’t make sense.

  He gave a grunt of satisfaction and she breathed again. The money was right. With that done, he now leaned back in the chair and took a breath. He always relaxed once he’d counted the money. She didn’t.

  “I always done all right by you, didn’t I, Lil?”

  “Always,” she responded, and she made a silent apology to God for lying before she answered. God understood that there were times a person just couldn’t tell the truth.

  “Looked after you better than your old ma ever did, eh?”

  “You did, yes.”

  He made a sound of contentment in the back of his throat.

  “So what do you want to go calling yourself Lily White for?”

  Lily’s throat tightened. “You said not to use your name when I come here. Nothing to connect us, you said, so . . .”

  “Didn’t have to be White, though, did it? Could’ve chose any name under the sun. That Whitey, he was no husband to you anyway. Not in the eyes of the Lord. Do he know that, your parson?”

  “No.”

  “No,” he repeated with satisfaction. “I didn’t think so.” He let the implied threat hang in the air before going on. “I’m no fool, Lil. I knows why you chose that name. Shall I tell you?”

  “Tell me.”

  “You cling to that name like you never clung to the man himself. Lily White. Innocent and blameless, like the lilies of the field. That’s what you like, isn’t it?”

  She swallowed.

  “Speak up, Lil! Can’t hardly hear you. But naming a thing don’t make it so. You cling to that name like it’ll wash you clean, same way as you scour this table, same way as you clean for that parson. Like it’ll redeem you . . . Aren’t I right, Lil?”

  He took her agreement for granted.

  “See, I know you, Lily. But what’s done is done. There’s no getting round it; some things can’t never be scrubbed away.”

  It was all she could do to keep her tears silent, but then even that was too much: her throat quivered and the next spasm of tears sounded loud in the room.

  “Don’t go upsetting yourself,” he said, calmly. “Things could be worse. You got me, haven’t you?”

  She nodded.

  “Eh?”

  “Yes, Vic.”

  “I wonder whether you deserve me, sometimes. You’ve let me down at times, Lil.”

  “I’m sorry, Vic.”

  “So you say. More than once I’ve been disappointed in you. Running off with Whitey. Years it took me to find you then. Any other man would’ve given up on you, but I didn’t.”

  “Thank you, Vic.”

  “But are you grateful, Lil?”

  “Course I am!”

  “Really?”

  “Truly!”

  “So why’d you go letting me down again? That girl at the Swan . . .”

  “They wouldn’t let me take her, Vic, I tried, I tried my best, but there were two of them and —”

  He wasn’t listening. “Could’ve made a fortune round the fairs with that. The Dead Girl That Lived Again. Imagine the queues. You could’ve given up skivvying for the parson, and with your honest face the queue to see her would’ve been a mile long. ’Stead of that, she’s gone up to the Vaughans’ place, I hear.”

  She nodded. He brooded, and she thought perhaps that would be it. Perhaps he’d gon
e to that dreaming place he went to when he had something to eat and got some money in his pocket, the place where he made his secret plans. But then he spoke again.

  “We stick together, you and me, don’t we?”

  “Yes, Vic.”

  “It’s like there’s a thread that joins us together. No matter how far you go or how long you’re gone, that thread is always there. You know it is, ’cause sometimes there’s a tug on it . . . You know that feeling, don’t you, Lil? Except it’s more than a tug; it’s more like a boxer’s fist in your chest that gives your heart a great wallop.”

  She knew the feeling. She’d felt it many a time. “Yes, Vic.”

  “And we know what it is, don’t we?”

  “Yes, Vic.”

  “Family!” He let out a profound sigh of satisfaction.

  Now he stood and brought the circle of light across the floor and up the steps to her bed. The candle came close to her face. She squinted. Behind the glow was Victor, but, dazzled, she could not make out his expression. She felt the blanket tugged away and the light played for a little while on the folds of her nightgown over her breasts.

  “I gets it in mind you’re still that girl you used to be. You’ve let yourself go. All skin and bone. Used to be a pretty thing, you did. Back then. Before you run off.” He stretched out on the mattress; she inched away; he inched into the space and put an arm around her. The arm was slim in the coat sleeve, but she knew the strength in it.

  His breathing deepened and he began to snore. She was reprieved—for now, at least—but still she could not stop the racing in her chest.

  Lily did not move. She lay awake in the dark, breathing as gently as she could for fear of waking him.

  After a scant hour the candle had burned out and a faint light seeped into the room. He didn’t shift and stretch like most people did when they woke up. He didn’t move an inch, just opened his eyes and asked, “What money you got from that parson?”

  “Not a lot.” She made her voice as meek as she could.

  He reached for the purse she kept under her pillow and, standing, tipped the contents into his palm.

  “I had to get the cheese for you. And the ham,” she explained. “Leave me something, will you? Just a bit?”