“How can you speak so?”
The slim, shaking silhouette stiffened suddenly.
“Did you hear something?” Robin asked in a low murmur.
“Nothing.”
His son listened intently for a few moments, then returned his interest to Armstrong. “If he’s not here yet, he soon will be. Give me the money and let me go.”
“What about the child from the Swan? The one you neither claimed nor relinquished. That charade at the summer fair. Tell me about that.”
“The same thing as always! Don’t you know me by now? The same thing that is hanging from your belt in the leather pouch.”
“You expected to make money out of her?”
“From the Vaughans. It was plain from the minute I walked into the Swan that night that Vaughan knew the girl wasn’t his. It couldn’t have been. I knew it and he knew it. There was money to be made if I only had the time to think it out; I fainted, or they thought I did, and worked it all out there and then, flat out on the floorboards. They wanted the girl and had money. I wanted money and could claim the girl.”
“You meant to pretend a claim and then sell it?”
“Vaughan was on the brink of paying up, but once Mother had sent the girl back, he had no need. I was in debt, thanks to her.”
“Do not speak ill of your mother. She taught you right from wrong. If you had listened better to her, you might be a better man today.”
“But she did not do right, did she? She only talked of doing so! I’d have been a better man if she’d been a better woman. I place the responsibility at her door.”
“Watch what you say, Robin.”
“Look at the three of us! She so white and you so black! And look at me! I know you are not my father. I have known from a child that I was not your son.”
Armstrong took a moment to find his words.
“I have loved you as a father loves his child.”
“She tricked you, didn’t she? She was with child by another man and desperate for someone to marry her, but who’d want a lame and boss-eyed woman for a wife? Not the baby’s father, that’s for sure. But then you came along. The black farmer. And she set her cap at you, didn’t she? What a trade that was. A white bride for a black farmer—and me, eight months later.”
“You are wrong.”
“You are not my father! I have always known it. And I know who my true father is.”
Armstrong flinched. “You know?”
“You remember when I forced the bureau drawer and stole that money?”
“I would like to forget it.”
“That is when I saw the letter.”
Armstrong was puzzled and then his confusion cleared. “The letter from Lord Embury?”
“The letter from my father. That says what is to come to his natural son. Money that you and my mother have kept from me and that I have taken from you by stealth.”
“Your father . . .”
“That’s right. I know Lord Embury is my father. I have known it since I was eight.”
Armstrong shook his head. “He is not your father.”
“I have read the letter.”
Armstrong shook his head again. “He is not your father.”
“I have got the letter!”
Armstrong shook his head a third time and opened his mouth to repeat the words. The words sounded in the wet air—“He is not your father!”—but it was not Armstrong’s voice that spoke them.
The voice struck Robert Armstrong as being distantly familiar.
Robin’s face twisted in despair.
“He’s here!” he moaned under his breath.
They turned and looked all around, but their eyes could not penetrate the darkness. Every tree trunk and every shrub might have concealed a figure, and a throng of phantoms hovered mistily in the black dampness. At last, by dint of staring, their eyes made out a shape. Half water, half night, it waded towards them, a stunted form whose wide garment trailed in the water and whose hat sat low and concealed its features.
Splash by splash it came closer to Robin.
The young man took a step back. He could not draw his fearful eyes from the approaching figure, but at the same time he shrank from it.
When the man—for man it was—came to a spot five feet from Robin, he stopped and the moonlight illuminated him.
“I am your father.”
Robin shook his head.
“Do you not know me, son?”
“I know you.” Robin’s voice shook. “I know you are a lowborn villain, a base man who lives by the knife and by crime. I know you are a charlatan and a thief and a liar and worse besides.”
The man’s mouth creased into a proud smile.
“He knows me!” he said to Armstrong. “And I see you know me too.”
“Victor Nash,” said Armstrong heavily. “I hoped never to see you again after I threw you off my farm so many years ago. Like the bad penny you are, you came back, and I wasn’t sorry to think you’d drowned off Brandy Island.”
Victor bowed. “Drowned? It was not my time. I live to claim what’s mine. I owe you thanks, Armstrong, for raising my son and educating him. Don’t he speak fine, after all his teaching? Listen to what comes out of his mouth—why, sometimes I can hardly understand him, when he gets going with his Latin and his Greek and his long words nobody knows. And he can write so nice. See him with a pen and watch how quick he takes the notions from your tongue and sets them down in ink, and never a blot! All curls and twiddles and it looks a picture, it does. And his manners! Nobody can say a word against his manners: he is like the finest lord of the land. I am proud of my son, truly I am. For in him the best of me—all my cunning and all my guile—is mixed with the best of your missus: ain’t he fair, with his soft hair and his white skin? And you have played your part, Armstrong. You have polished him over with the best of you.”
Robin shuddered.
“It’s not true!” he told the man and, turning to Armstrong, “It’s not true, is it? Tell him! Tell him who my father is!”
The man sniggered.
“It is true,” Armstrong told Robin. “This man is your father.”
Robin stared. “But Lord Embury . . . !”
“Lord Embury!” echoed the man, with a snigger. “Lord Embury! He be somebody’s father all right, eh, Armstrong? Why don’t you tell him?”
“Lord Embury is my father, Robin. He fell in love with my mother when he was a very young man and she a servant girl. That is what the letter in the bureau referred to. It is the agreement he made to assure my financial future. I am the Rob Armstrong mentioned in the letter.”
Robin looked stricken into Armstrong’s face.
“Then my mother . . .”
“Her innocence was taken advantage of in the vilest manner by this scoundrel, and I did my utmost to make things right for her. And to make things right for you.”
“Yes, well, enough of that. I have come to claim him. It is time to give him up to me. You have had him for twenty-five years and now he must come to his true father. Mustn’t you, Rob?”
“Come to you? You think I will come to you?” Robin laughed. “You’re mad.”
“Ah, but you must, boy. Family is family. We are kin, you and me. With my base plotting and your fine looks, with my low knowledge and your high manners, think what we can do! We have only just begun! What we have started we must continue! Together, my boy, we can work wonders! After all the waiting our time has come!”
“I’ll have nothing to do with you!” Robin snarled. “I tell you now, leave me! I’ll not acknowledge you if you come to me and I’ll not have it said that I’m your son. If you tell a soul of this, I’ll . . . I’ll . . .”
“What will you, Robin my boy? What, eh?”
Robin panted.
“What is it I know, Robin? Tell me that. What is it I know about you that nobody else knows?”
Robin froze. “Whatever you say brings you down with me!”
The man nodded slowly. “S
o it is.”
“You would not incriminate yourself.”
The man looked at the water. “Who’s to say what a man would and wouldn’t do when his own son denies him? It’s about family, my boy. I lost my mother in the days before I can remember. My father taught me everything I know—how to steal and fight and get away with murder—but he was hanged before I was grown to manhood. I had a sister once—at least, I called her sister—but even she betrayed me. To you, Armstrong, of all people, for nothing but a stolen pig. She’s nothing to me now. You are all I have, my Robin with the soft hair and the silky words and the lordly ways . . . You are all the world to me, Robin, and if I cannot have you, then what is the purpose of my life? No, our future is one, Robin, and it is up to you which way you will have it. We can go into business together, as we have before, or else you deny me and I denounce you, and we will be chained together in the cells and we will go to the gallows, father and son together, as is the natural way of things.”
Robin wept.
“What is the hold this man has over you?” Armstrong asked. “What conspiracy is it that binds you to him?”
“Shall I tell him?” the man asked.
“No!”
“I think I will. This is one refuge I will close, and when it is gone, the only succor left will be at my side.” He turned to Armstrong. “I knew this fine young man liked to drink in a place on the edge of Oxford, and I got to know him there, slow and gradual. I sowed a plot in his mind and let him think it was his own invention. He thought I was following behind his every step, when in fact the route was all mine. We stole your pig together, Armstrong—that was the first thing! How I laughed in my sleeve that night, thinking that you had told me twenty years before to stay away and not come within twelve miles of you and your Bess, and there I was, being let into your yard to steal your favorite pig, and it was my own son unlatching the gate and tempting her with raspberries to help me do it! He ran off with me and we had a good little business for a while. I knew how to set it up, the trickery of a fortune-telling pig. The fairs brought us in some good money: we was well off, for low-down types, only your son wasn’t satisfied. He wanted more. So we used what we had—the pig and the fair—and we leapt to greater things. Didn’t we, Rob, my son?”
Robin shuddered.
“The Vaughan child . . . ,” Armstrong murmured, aghast. “The kidnap . . .”
“Well done! Rob used all his inveigling words to draw that foolish girl Ruby into parting with a shilling. Your ginger pig looked with soft eyes into that girl’s silly round ones, and from behind a curtain Robin here in his sweetest piggy voice told her where to go to see the face of her one true love in the night river. Didn’t you, my son?”
Robin put his face in his hands and turned to Armstrong, but Armstrong took him by the wrists and forced him to look him in the eye.
“Is this true?”
Robin cringed and his face crumpled.
“And there is more, isn’t there, Robin, my lad?”
“Don’t listen to him!”
“Yes, for that was only the beginning. Whose idea was it, Robin, at the start? Whose idea to take the little girl from the Vaughans and how to do it?”
“That was your idea!”
“Aye, it was too, but whose idea did you think it was, at the outset?”
Robin turned his face away.
“Who was it who crowed at his own cleverness? Who was it who gave orders to the men in the boat, who wrote out the ransom note, who set each man his hiding place? Who was it who strutted about on the night itself, checking each man had his instructions clear? I was proud of you then! When I saw you, only a stripling, yet sure of yourself and your villainy, ‘He’s my boy,’ I thought. ‘He’s got my blood in his veins and my wickedness in his heart, and there’s nothing Armstrong can do to clean it out. He’s mine, body and soul.’ ”
“Give him the money,” Robin whispered into Armstrong’s ear, but not quietly enough, for the words carried over the rising water and the man laughed. “The money? Yes, we’ll take the money all right, won’t we, son? Share and share alike. I’ll share it with you, Robin my boy, fifty-fifty!”
The water had risen to reach the knees of the three, and the rain fell and soaked into their hats and ran down their necks and into their shirts, and before long their top halves were as wet as their bottom halves and it made no difference whether they were in or out of the water.
“And the rest, Robin,” the man went on. “The rest!”
“Don’t . . . ,” Robin moaned, but his voice scarcely sounded above the rain that fell torrentially on the water.
“Yes, the rest . . . We had the little lass, didn’t we, Robin? We had her in our grip. Out the window and down the ladder and sprinting down the garden to the river where our boat was waiting.”
He turned to Armstrong. “Canny, he was! Did he trespass in the garden? Did he climb the ladder? Did he break an entry? Not he! Others did all that dangerous work. He waited in the boat. Too great an organizational mind to be placed at risk, you see. Got a head on his shoulders, eh?” He turned back to Robin. “So down the garden we came and the child with us, chloroformed, in a sack. I had her, for though I am slight, my strength is formidable, and I tossed her like a bag of cress into the arms of Rob here.”
Robin sobbed.
“I chucked her over the water to my son, waiting in the boat. And what happened, Rob?”
Robin shook his head while his shoulders shook.
“No!” exclaimed Armstrong.
“Yes!” said the man. “Yes! The boat tilted and he half dropped her. There was a crack against the side of the boat and in his grasping to clutch her back he lost his grip again, and in she went. Down like a sack of stones she sunk. He set the men to prodding with their oars and how we did it, I don’t know, but we found her at last. How long was it Robin? Five minutes? Ten?”
Robin, a white face in the dark, did not answer.
“We found her, anyway. And off we went. Back to Brandy Island. There we set her down and opened up the sack, didn’t we Rob, son? All might have been lost,” he said with gravity and a somber shaking of the head. “It could have been the end of everything. But Rob here, with his clear head, saved the day. “It matters not whether she be alive or dead,” said he, “for the Vaughans won’t know it till the money is passed over!” And he wrote out the note—a prettier note I never did see—and though we had not the goods—not in a fit state anyhow—we sent the invoice all the same. And why not, he said, for we had had the labor and the risk of it, eh, Rob? I knew he was my son then too.”
Armstrong all the while had edged up the slope and away from the swirling water, but Robin stood still. The water eddied around him, and he seemed not to feel it.
“So we had the ransom from Vaughan. We had it, and we gave him back his girl too, didn’t we, though he made out we hadn’t. Lasted a good long while, that money. Lovely house Rob got. I’ve seen it. Didn’t my heart swell with pride, a son of mine in a fine white house in the city of Oxford. Mind you, he has never invited me there. Not once. After everything we had gone through together. Pig rustling and fairground trickery and kidnap and murder—you might think as they was pastimes would bind one man to another in comradeship, mightn’t you? That pained me, that did, Rob. And when the money ran out—he is a gambler, Armstrong, this child of ours, Armstrong, did you know that? I’ve warned him but he won’t listen—yes, after that money ran out, I’ve been the one to keep him afloat. Every penny I’ve got has gone into his pocket. I’ve worked myself to the bone to keep him in his finery, my boy, so that now you might say as he belongs to me.
“Now that you know I’m your father, you wouldn’t be so unkind again, would you? With all those IOUs that fine white house is my house now, but there is nothing of mine I will not share with you, my son.”
Rob looked at the man. His eyes were dark and quiet and his shivering was at an end.
“Look at him,” Victor sighed. “See how fine a fig
ure he cuts: that’s my lad. Come, we’ll take the money, Armstrong, and be on our way. Are you ready to go, Rob?”
He stepped towards Robin, hand outstretched. Robin sliced the air with his hand, and the man took an awkward step back, stumbling. He held his hand up to stare at it in surprise and saw that it was running with dark liquid.
“Son?” he said uncertainly.
Robin took a step towards him. He raised his hand again and this time the light caught on the blade of Armstrong’s slaughter knife.
“No!” came Armstrong’s roar, but Robin’s hand came down once more, a swift line in the air, and the man stepped back again. This time the ground was not where he expected it to be. He teetered on the brink, clasped the coat of his son who slashed at him—one, two, three—with the knife. They were on the very edge of the riverbank and it was into the running river that they fell—together.
“Father!” Robin cried as he fell, and in the moment before the river swept him away, he reached a desperate arm towards Armstrong and cried out once again: “Save me, Father!”
“Robin!”Armstrong waded to the point where he had seen his son enter the water. He felt the current tug at his legs. He saw Robin go under, scanned the water to see him reemerge, and, when he saw the flailing limbs, was shocked at how far the current had already carried his boy downstream. To launch himself into the water was unthinkable—he must get back to the bank, run downstream, find a boat, get help—but before he could do any of these things, he stopped and stared.
A punt appeared from out of the rain. A tall figure thrust a pole into the sky, and when it descended and found the riverbed, the long narrow vessel moved with remarkable force through the water, slicing through it with effortless grace. The ferryman reached into the water and with thin, bare arms and easy strength drew out the body of a man in a long sodden coat. He laid the body in the bottom of the punt.
“My son!” cried Armstrong. “For God’s sake, where is my son?”
The man reached in again, and with the same ease he pulled a second body from the water. As he hauled it in, Armstrong caught a glimpse of Robin’s face, still and lifeless and like—so very like—the other man’s.
Once Upon a River Page 39