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 full: 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