Once Upon a River Page 3

  “I should like to see the child before I go,” she said.

  “You will want to say a prayer over the poor mite. Of course.” In the minds of the locals, not only was Rita as good as a doctor, but—given her time in the convent—she could stand in for the parson at a push. “Here’s the key. Take a lantern.”

  Back in her hat and coat and with a muffler wrapped around her face, Rita stepped outside.

  Rita Sunday was not afraid of corpses. She was used to them from childhood—had even been born from one. This is how it had happened: thirty-three years ago, heavily pregnant and in despair, a woman had thrown herself into the river. By the time a bargeman spotted her and pulled her out, she was three-quarters drowned. He took her to the nuns at Godstow, who nursed the poor and needy at the convent hospital. She survived long enough for labor to commence. The shock of almost drowning having weakened her, she had no strength left to give birth, and died when her belly rippled with the strong contractions. Sister Grace had rolled up her sleeves, taken a scalpel, sliced a shallow red curve into the dead woman’s abdomen, and removed from it a living baby. Nobody knew her mother’s name, and they would not have given it to the child anyway: the deceased had been triply sinful, by fornication, by the act of self-murder, and by the attempt at killing her baby; and it would have been ungodly to encourage the child to remember her. They named the infant Margareta, after Saint Margaret, and she came to be called Rita for short. As for her surname, in the absence of a flesh-and-blood begetter, she was called Sunday, for the day of the heavenly Father, just like all the other orphans at the nunnery.

  The young Rita did well at her lessons, showed an interest in the hospital, and was encouraged to help. There were tasks even a child could do: at eight she was making beds and cleaning the bloodied sheets and cloths; at twelve she carried buckets of hot water and helped lay out the dead. By the time Rita was fifteen, she was cleaning wounds, splinting fractures, and stitching skin, and by seventeen there was little in the way of nursing that she could not do, including delivering a baby all by herself. She might easily have stayed in the convent, becoming a nun and devoting her life to God and the sick, were it not for the fact that one day, collecting herbs on the riverbank, it occurred to her that there was no life beyond this one. It was a wicked thought according to everything she had been taught, but instead of making her feel guilty she was overwhelmed with relief. If there was no heaven, there was no hell, and if there was no hell, then her unknown mother was not enduring the agonies of eternal torment but simply gone, absent, untouched by suffering. She told the nuns of her change of heart, and before they had recovered from their consternation, rolled a nightdress and a pair of bloomers together and left without even a hairbrush.

  “But your duty!” Sister Grace had called after her. “To God and the sick!”

  “The sick are everywhere,” she cried back, and Sister Grace had said, “So is God,” but she spoke it quietly, and Rita did not hear.

  The young nurse had worked first at an Oxford hospital; then, when her talent was noticed, as general nurse and assistant to an enlightened medical man in London. “You’ll be a great loss to me and the profession when you marry,” he told her more than once, when it was plain a patient had taken a shine to her.

  “Marry? Not me,” she replied every time.

  “Whyever not?” he pressed, when he had heard the same answer half a dozen times.

  “I’m more use to the world as a nurse than as a wife and mother.”

  It was only half an answer, and the other half came a few days later.

  They attended a young mother the same age as Rita. It was her third pregnancy. Everything had gone smoothly before, and there was no particular reason to fear the worst. The baby was not awkwardly positioned, the labor was not unduly prolonged, the forceps were not necessary, the placenta followed cleanly. It was just that they could not stop the bleeding. The woman bled and she bled and she bled until she died.

  The doctor spoke to the husband while Rita gathered up the bloodstained sheets with efficient expertise. She had lost count of the dead mothers long ago.

  When the doctor came in, she had everything ready for their departure. They left the house in silence. After a few steps she said, “I don’t want to die like that.”

  “I don’t blame you,” he said.

  The doctor had a friend, a certain gentleman, who called frequently at dinnertime and did not leave till the next morning. Rita never spoke of it, yet he realized she was aware of the love he felt for this man. She appeared to be unperturbed by it, and was entirely discreet. After thinking it over for a few months, he made a surprising suggestion.

  “Why don’t you marry me?” he asked her one day between patients. “There would be no . . . You know. But it would be convenient for me, and it might be advantageous for you. Financial security. Your own rooms in this house. The patients would like it.”

  She thought about it and agreed. They became engaged, but before they could marry, he fell ill with pneumonia and died, too young. In the last days of his life, he had called his lawyer to alter his will. In it he left his house and furniture to the gentleman, and to Rita a significant sum of money, enough to give her a modest independence, and a letter of recommendation that praised her in the highest terms. He also left her his library. She sold the volumes that were not medical or scientific, and had the rest packed and taken upriver. When the boat came to Godstow, she looked at the convent as she passed and felt a surprising pang that called to mind her lost God.

  “Here?” the boatman asked, mistaking the nature of the intensity on her face.

  “Keep going,” she told him.

  On they went, another day, another night, till they came to Radcot. She liked the look of the place.

  “Here,” she told the bargeman. “This will do.”

  She bought a cottage, placed her books on the shelves, and let it be known among the better households of the area that she had a letter of recommendation from one of the best medical men in London. Once she had treated a few patients and delivered half a dozen babies, she was established. The wealthier families in the area wanted only Rita for their arrivals in the world and departures from it, and for all the medical crises in between. This was well-paid work and provided an adequate income to round out her inheritance. Among these patients were a number who could afford to be hypochondriacs; she tolerated their self-indulgence, for financially it enabled her to work at very low rates—or nothing at all—for those who could not otherwise afford it. When she was not working, she lived frugally, read her way methodically through the doctor’s library (she neither thought of him nor referred to him as her fiancé), and made medicines.

  Rita had been at Radcot for nearly ten years now. Death did not frighten her. In those decades and since, she had tended the dying, witnessed their demise, and laid them out. Death by sickness, death in childbirth, death by accident. Death by malice, once or twice. Death as the welcome visitor to great age. Godstow’s hospital was on the river, so naturally she was familiar with the bodies of the drowned.

  It was death by drowning that was on Rita’s mind as she made her way briskly through the cold night air to the outbuilding. Drowning is easy. Every year the river helps herself to a few lives. One drink too many, one hasty step, one second’s lapse of attention, is all it takes. Rita’s first drowning was a boy of twelve, only a year younger than herself at the time, who slipped as he sang and larked about on the lock. Later was the summer reveler who mistook his step from a boat and received a blow to the temple on the way down; his friends were too drunk to come effectively to his aid. A student showing off jumped from the apex of Wolvercote bridge on a golden autumnal day, only to be surprised by the depth and the current. A river is a river, whatever the season. There were young women, like her own mother, poor souls unable to face a future of shame and poverty, abandoned by lover and family, who turned to the river to put an end to it all. And then the babies, unwanted morsels of flesh, little
beginnings of life, drowned before they had a chance to live. She’d seen it all.

  At the door to the long room, Rita turned the key in the lock. The air inside seemed even colder than out. It outlined a vivid map of passages and cavities behind her nostrils and up into her forehead. The chill carried the tang of earth, stone, and, overwhelmingly, the river. Her mind sprang instantly to attention.

  The feeble light from the lantern faltered long before it reached the corners of the stone room, yet the little corpse was illuminated, shimmering with a glaucous gleam. It was a peculiar effect, caused by the extreme paleness of the body, but a fanciful person might have thought it emanated from the small limbs themselves.

  Aware of the unusual alertness that stirred in her, Rita approached. She judged the child to be about four years of age. Her skin was white. She was dressed in the simplest of shifts that left her arms and ankles bare, and the fabric, still damp, lay in ripples around her.

  Rita automatically initiated the convent hospital routine. She checked for breathing. She placed two fingers against the child’s wrist to feel for a pulse. She peeled back the petal of an eyelid to examine the pupils. As she did all this, she heard in her mind the echo of the prayer that would have accompanied the examination in a chorus of calm, female voices: Our Father, which art in heaven . . . She heard it but her lips did not move in time.

  No breathing. No pulse. Full dilation of the pupils.

  The uncommon vigilance was alive in her still. She stood over the little body and wondered what it was that had set her mind on edge. Perhaps it was nothing but the cold air.

  You can read a dead body if you have seen enough of them. The when and the how and the why of it were all there if, like Rita, you knew how to look. She began an examination of the corpse so complete and so thorough that she entirely forgot about the cold. In the flickering light of the lantern, she peered and squinted at every inch of the child’s skin. She lifted arms and legs, and felt the smooth movement of joints. She looked into ear and nostril. She explored the cavity of the mouth. She studied every finger- and toenail. At the end of it all she stood back and frowned.

  Something wasn’t right.

  Head on one side, mouth twisted in perplexity, Rita went through everything she knew. She knew how the drowned wrinkle, swell, and bloat. She knew how their skin, hair, and nails loosen. None of this was present here, but that meant only that this child had not been in the water very long. Then there was the matter of mucus. Drowning leaves foam at the edges of the mouth and nostrils, but there was none on the face of this corpse. That too had its explanation. The girl was already dead when she went into the water. So far, so good. It was the rest that disturbed her. If she had not drowned, what had happened to her? The skull was intact. The limbs unbeaten. There was no bruising to the neck. No bones were broken. There was no evidence of injury to the internal organs. Rita was aware how far human wickedness could go: she had checked the girl’s genitals and knew she had not been the victim of unnatural interference.

  Was it possible that the child had died naturally? Yet there were no visible signs of illness. In fact, to judge from her weight, skin, and hair, she had been exceptionally healthy.

  All this was disconcerting enough, but there was more. Even supposing the child had died of natural causes and—for reasons impossible to imagine—been disposed of in the river, there should be injuries to the flesh made after death. Sand and grit abrade skin, stones graze, the detritus on the river’s bed will cut flesh. Water can break a man’s bones, a bridge will smash his skull. Wherever you looked at her, this child was unmarked, unbruised, ungrazed, uncut. The little body was immaculate. “Like a doll,” Jonathan had told her when he described the girl falling into his arms, and she understood why he had thought so. Rita had run her fingertips over the soles of the girl’s feet, around the outer edge of her big toe, and they were so perfect, you would think she had never put foot to earth. Her nails were as fine and as pearlized as a newborn’s. That death had made no mark on her was strange enough, but nor had life, and that, in Rita’s experience, was unique.

  A body always tells a story—but this child’s was a blank page.

  Rita reached for the lantern on its hook. She trained its light on the child’s face but found it as inexpressive as the rest of her. It was impossible to tell whether, in life, these blunt and unfinished features had borne the imprint of prettiness, timid watchfulness, or sly mischief. If there had once been curiosity or placidity or impatience here, life had not had time to etch it into permanence.

  Only a very short time ago, the body and soul of this little girl had still been securely united. At this thought, and despite all her training, all her experience, Rita found herself suddenly in the grip of a storm of feeling. Not for the first time since they had parted company she wished for God. God, who, in her childhood years had seen all, known all, understood all. How simple it had been when, ignorant and confused, she could nonetheless put her faith in a Father who enjoyed perfect understanding of all things. She had been able to bear not knowing a thing when she could be sure that God knew, but now . . .

  She took the child’s hand—the perfect hand with its five perfect fingers and their perfect fingernails—laid it in her open palm, and closed her other hand over it.

  This is wrong! All wrong! It should not be so!

  And that is when it happened.

  The Miracle

  Before Margot plunged the injured man’s clothes into the bucket of fresh water, Jonathan went through his pockets. They gave up:

  One purse swollen with water, containing a sum of money that would cover all kinds of expenses and still stand them all a drink when he was feeling better.

  One handkerchief, sodden.

  One pipe, unbroken, and a tin of tobacco. They prized open the lid and found the contents to be dry. “He’ll be glad of that, at least,” they noted.

  One ring to which were linked a number of dainty tools and implements over which they puzzled—was he a clock mender? they wondered; a locksmith? a burglar?—until the next item was drawn out.

  One photograph. And then they remembered the dark stains on the man’s fingers and Rita’s idea that he might be a photographer, and this seemed to lend weight to it. The tools must be something to do with the man’s profession.

  Joe took the photograph from his son and dabbed it gently with his woolen cuff to dry it.

  It showed a corner of a field, an ash tree, and not a lot else.

  “I’ve seen prettier pictures,” someone said.

  “It wants a church spire or a thatched cottage,” said another.

  “It don’t seem to be a photograph of anything exactly,” a third said, scratching his head in perplexity.

  “Trewsbury Mead,” said Joe, the only one to recognize it.

  They didn’t know what to say, so they shrugged and put the photograph on the mantel to dry and went on to the next and last item to come out of the man’s pockets which was:

  One tin box, in which was a wad of small cards. They peeled off the top one and handed it to Owen, the best reader of them all, who raised a candle and read aloud:

  Henry Daunt of Oxford

  Portraits’ landscapes’ city and country scenes

  Also: postcards’ guide books’ picture frames

  Thames scenes a speciality

  “She was right,” they exclaimed. “She said he were a photographer, and there’s the proof of it.”

  Then Owen read out an address on Oxford’s High Street.

  “Who will be going to Oxford tomorrow?” Margot asked. “Anybody know?”

  “My sister’s husband runs the cheese barge,” a gravel digger suggested. “I don’t mind going to her house tonight and ask him.”

  “Barge’ll take two days, won’t it?”

  “Can’t leave his family worrying about him for two days.”

  “Surely he won’t be going tomorrow, your sister’s husband? If he did, he wouldn’t be back in time for Christ
mas.”

  “The railway, then.”

  It was decided that Martins would go. He was not wanted at the farm tomorrow, and he had a sister living five minutes from the station at Lechlade. He would go to her house now, to be on hand for the early train. Margot gave him the fare; he repeated the address till he knew it and set off, with a shilling in his pocket and a brand-new story on his tongue. He had six miles of riverbank along which to rehearse his tale, and by the time he got to his sister’s house, he would have it to perfection.

  The other drinkers lingered. Storytelling of the usual kind was over for the night—who would stop to tell a story when one was actually happening?—and so they refilled their tankards and glasses, relit their pipes, and settled on their stools. Joe put his shaving things away and returned to his chair, where from time to time he discreetly coughed. From his stool by the window, Jonathan kept an eye on the logs in the fire and surveyed the level of the candles. Margot prodded the river-wet clothes into a bucket with an old paddle and gave them a good swirl, then she put the pan of spiced beer back over the stove. The fragrance of nutmeg and allspice mingled with tobacco and burning logs, and the smell of the river receded.

  The drinkers began to talk, finding words to turn the night’s events into a story.

  “When I saw him in the doorway there, I was astonished. No, astounded. That’s what I was. Astounded!”

  “I was stunned, I was.”

  “And me. I was stunned and astounded. What about you?”

  They were collectors of words the same way so many of the gravel diggers were collectors of fossils. They kept an ear constantly alert for them, the rare, the unusual, the unique.