‘How did you do it?’ he asked.
‘I didn’t.’
‘Then what made her come alive again?’
She shook her head.
‘Was it me? I kissed her. To wake her, like the prince in the story.’ And he brought his lips to her hair to show Rita.
‘It doesn’t happen like that in real life.’
‘Is it a miracle?’
Rita frowned, unable to answer.
‘Don’t go thinking about it now,’ his mother said. ‘There’s a great many things hard to fathom in darkness that set themselves straight in the light of day. The little mite needs to sleep, not have you fidgeting around her. Come away, I’ve got a job for you.’
She unlocked the cupboard again and took out another bottle, set a dozen tiny glasses on a tray, poured an inch of liquor into each.
Jonathan handed one to everybody present.
‘Give one to your father.’ Joe didn’t usually drink in winter and when his lungs were bad. ‘What about you, Rita?’
‘I will, thank you.’
As one, they raised the glasses to their lips and swallowed in a single gulp.
Was it a miracle? It was as if they had dreamt of a pot of gold and woken to find it on their pillow. As if they had told a tale of a fairy princess and finished it only to find her sitting in a corner of the room listening.
For close on an hour they sat in silence and watched the sleeping child and wondered at it. Could there be any place in the country more interesting tonight than the Swan at Radcot? And they would be able to say, I was there.
In the end, it was Margot who sent them all home. ‘It’s been a long night, and nothing will do us more good now than a bit of sleep.’
The dregs in tankards were drained and slowly the drinkers reached for their coats and hats. They rose on legs unsteady with drink and magic, and shuffled over the floor towards the door. There was a round of goodnights, the door was opened and one by one, with many a backward glance, the drinkers disappeared into the night.
The Story Travels
MARGOT AND RITA lifted the sleeping child and worked her sleeveless shift over her head. They wrung out a cloth in warm water and wiped the river smell away, though it still lingered in her hair. The child made a vague sound of contentment at the touch of the water, but did not wake.
‘Funny little thing,’ Margot murmured. ‘What are you dreaming of?’
She had fetched a nightdress she kept for visiting granddaughters, and together the women fed small hands and arms through the sleeves. The girl did not wake.
Meanwhile, Jonathan washed and dried the tankards, while Joe concealed the night’s takings in the regular place and swept the floor. From a corner he dislodged the cat that had slipped in unnoticed earlier in the evening. Offended, it stalked out of the shadows and made for the hearth, where the embers were still glowing.
‘Don’t go thinking you can settle here,’ Margot told the animal, but her husband intervened.
‘It’s deathly out. Let the creature stay, the once.’
Rita settled the child on the bed in the pilgrims’ room next to the sleeping man. ‘I’ll stay here for the night to keep an eye on them,’ she said, and when Margot proposed bringing in a truckle bed, ‘The chair will be all right. I’m used to it.’
The house settled.
‘It makes you think,’ Margot murmured, her head at long last on the pillow, and Joe muttered, ‘It does, that’s for sure.’ They shared their thoughts in whispered voices. Where had they come from, these unknown people? And why here, to their own inn, the Swan? And what precisely was it that had happened tonight? Miracle was the word Jonathan had pronounced, and they tested it on their own tongues. They were used to it in the Bible, where it meant impossible things that happened an impossibly long time ago in places so far away from here that they might as well not exist. Here in the inn, it applied to the laughably improbable chance that Beszant the boat-mender would ever pay his slate in fulclass="underline" now that would be a miracle all right. But tonight, at winter solstice in the Swan at Radcot, the word had a different weight.
‘I shan’t get a wink of sleep for puzzling over it,’ Joe said. But miracle or no, they were tired and so, with the long night more than half over already, they blew out the candle. The night closed over them and almost immediately wonderment came to an end.
Downstairs, in the pilgrims’ room where her patients, man and child, were asleep side by side on the bed, Rita sat awake in the armchair. The man’s breath was slow and noisy. The air entering and leaving his lungs had to make its way past swollen membranes, through passages filled with drying blood whose paths had been altered and reset in the past hours. It was no wonder it made a sound like the teeth of a saw on wood. In the silences where his breath tipped from in to out, she could hear the insubstantial flutter of the child’s breath. Behind them both, in the background, the breath of the river, an endless exhalation.
She ought to sleep, but had been waiting to be alone to think. Methodically, dispassionately, she went over it all again. She watched herself perform the routine checks, noted all the signs she had been trained to look for. Where was her mistake? Once, twice, three times she went through it all in close detail. She found no error.
What then?
Since her learning was of no use, she looked to her experience for elucidation. Had there ever been an instance when she had been unsure whether a patient was dead or alive? It was commonplace to say that a person was at death’s door, as if there were some real line between life and death and a person might stand upon it for a time. But she had never in such circumstances had any difficulty in discerning which side of the line the patient was on. No matter how far illness had progressed, no matter how great the weakness, a patient was alive until the moment of death. There was no hovering. No in-between.
Margot had sent them all to bed with the encouraging thought that enlightenment would come naturally with the dawn, a sentiment Rita shared with regard to other kinds of trouble, but this was different. The questions in her mind related to the body, and the body was governed by laws. Everything she knew told her that what she had experienced could not happen. Dead children do not come back to life. There were two possibilities: either the child was not alive – she listened: there it was, the delicate breath – or she had not been dead. She considered again all the indications of death that she had checked. Waxy white skin. Absence of breathing. Absence of pulse. Pupil dilation. She revisited the long room in memory and knew she had checked each of these things. Every indication of death had been present. The fault was not in her. Where was it, then?
Rita closed her eyes the better to focus. She had decades of nursing experience, but her knowledge did not end there. She had spent long evenings studying books intended for the use of surgeons, had memorized anatomy, had mastered the science of the apothecary. Her practical experience had developed these pools of knowledge into a deep reservoir of understanding. She now permitted the evening’s experience to be placed alongside what she knew. She did not chase after explanations or make effortful attempts to connect thoughts. She simply waited, with a growing thrill of trepidation and exhilaration, until the conclusion that had been carefully preparing itself in the depths came to the surface.
The laws of life and death, as she had learnt them, were incomplete. There was more to life, more to death, than medical science had known.