A door opened, beckoning her towards new knowledge.
Again she missed God. She had shared everything with Him. From childhood she had gone to Him with every question, doubt, delight and triumph. He had accompanied every advance in her thinking, in action He had been her daily collaborator. But God was gone. This was something she was going to have to work out by herself.
What to do about it?
She listened. The breathing of the girl. The breathing of the man. The breath of the river.
The river … She would start there.
Rita laced up her boots and buttoned herself into her coat. In her bag she groped for something – it was a slim tin box – and dropped it into her pocket before creeping quietly outside. Around her lantern flame the chill darkness expanded vastly, but she could make out the edges of the path. She stepped off it and on to the grass. As much by feel as by sight, she made her way to the riverbank. The cold air sidled through her buttonholes and the stitches of her muffler. She walked through the warm steam of her own exhalation, felt it lay itself as wetness on her face.
Here was the boat, upturned on the grass. She pulled off a glove, and her cautious fingers found jagged edges of wood, but then a solid part; she placed her lantern there.
She took the box from her pocket and held it for a moment between her teeth while – ignoring the cold – she gathered the folds of her skirt and tucked a bunch of hem into the same pocket so that she could crouch without getting her dress wet. Before her was the dark shimmer of the river. She reached forward and down till she felt it nip viciously at the flesh of her fingers. Good. Opening the tin, she removed from it a glass-and-metal vial with complications impossible to see in the dark. By feel, she immersed the tube in the freezing water and counted. Then she rose and, with all the care her numb fingers could muster, closed the tube in its case for protection, and without bothering to straighten her dress made her way as swiftly as she could back to the inn.
In the pilgrims’ room she held the tube as close to the lantern as was necessary to read the gauge, then took a notebook and a pencil out of her bag. She wrote down the temperature of the water.
It wasn’t much. But it was a start.
She eased the child off the bed and settled her gently on her lap, in the chair. The little head nodded to rest against her chest. I won’t sleep now, she thought as she arranged the blankets to cover herself and the child. Not after all this. Not in this chair.
As she prepared herself to sit out the night, with scratchy eyes and an aching back, her namesake came to mind. Saint Margaret who consecrated her virginity to God and was so determined not to marry that she bore the pain of torture sooner than become a wife. She was the patron saint of pregnant women and childbirth. In her early days at the convent, washing the filthy, bloodied sheets, laying out the bodies of the women who had died in childbirth, Rita had been rather relieved that her own future was as God’s bride. She would never be sundered by a child emerging from her belly. God had left her, but her commitment to virginity had never wavered.
Rita closed her eyes. Her arms folded around the child, whose sleeping weight rested heavily against her. She felt the rise and fall of the girl’s breathing, and measured her own inhalations so that as her chest fell, the child’s expanded; as the child’s fell, her own filled the space. An obscure pleasure took hold of her; she sought drowsily to identify it, name it, and couldn’t.
An idea came floating towards her in the dark.
If she doesn’t belong to this man. If nobody wants her. She could be mine …
But before she had time to register her own thinking, the sound of the river, endless and low, filled her mind. It nudged her from the solidity of wakefulness, carried her on to the current of the night where, without awareness of what was happening, she drifted … drifted … into the dark sea of sleep.
All were not sleeping, though. The drinkers and the storytellers had some way to walk before they found their beds for the night. One of them turned away from the river on leaving the Swan and skirted the fields to find his way to the barn two miles off where he slept with the horses. He regretted that he had nobody waiting for him, nobody he could shake awake and say, ‘You won’t believe what’s just happened!’ He pictured himself telling the horses what he had witnessed that night, saw their large unbelieving eyes. Nay, they will say, he thought, and That’s a good joke, I’ll remember that. But it wasn’t horses he wanted to tell; the story was too fine to be squandered on animal ears. He turned off the direct path and made a detour to the cottages by Gartin’s fields where his cousin lived.
He knocked.
No one answered, so the story made him knock again, a full-fisted hammering.
In the adjoining cottage, a window was flung up and a woman put her head out in her nightcap to remonstrate with him.
‘Wait!’ he said. ‘Hold your scolding till you know what I have come to tell you!’
‘Is that you, Fred Heavins?’ She peered in the direction the voice was coming from. ‘Drunken stories, I shouldn’t wonder!’ she grumbled. ‘As if I haven’t heard enough of those to last me a lifetime!’
‘I’m not drunk,’ he said, offended. ‘Look! I can walk in a straight line, see?’ He placed foot in front of foot with elaborate ease.
‘As if that proves anything!’ she laughed into the night. ‘When there is no light to see by, any drunk can walk in a straight line!’
The argument was interrupted by the opening of his cousin’s door. ‘Frederick? What on earth is it?’
Simply, with no embellishments, Fred told what had happened at the Swan.
Leaning out of the window, the neighbour was drawn in, at first unwillingly, to the story, then she called to someone behind her.
‘Come, Wilfred. Listen to this!’
Before long, Fred’s cousin’s children were shaken out of their beds in their nightgowns, and the neighbours on all sides were roused too.
‘What is she like, then, this girl?’
He described her skin, as white as the glazed jug on his grandmother’s kitchen windowsill; he told of her hair, that hung in a dead straight curtain and was the same colour dry as wet.
‘What colour are her eyes?’
‘Blue … Blueish, at any rate. Or grey.’
‘How old is she?’
He shrugged. How was he to know? ‘If she was by my side she’d come up to … about here.’ He indicated with his hand.
‘About four, then? What do you reckon?’
The women discussed it and agreed. About four.
‘And what’s ’er name, this girl?’
Again he was stumped. Who would have thought a story needed all this detail, things he had never considered while it was happening?
‘I dunno. Nobody asked her.’
‘Nobody asked her name!’ The women were scandalized.
‘She was drowsy, like. Margot and Rita said to let her sleep. But her father’s name is Daunt. Henry Daunt. We found it in his pocket. He’s a photographer.’
‘So he’s her father, is he?’
‘I’d’ve thought so … Wouldn’t you? It was him brought her in. They arrived together.’
‘Perhaps he was only taking her photograph?’
‘And they both half drowned, taking a photograph? How do you make that out?’
There was a general hubbub of conversation between the windows, as the story was discussed, its missing pieces identified, attempts made to fill them in … Fred began to feel left out of his own tale, sensed it slipping from his grasp and altering in ways he hadn’t anticipated. It was like a living thing that he had caught but not trained; now it had slipped the leash and was anybody’s.