this child in the inn tonight?’ When he had ascertained that the event – extraordinary and impossible, as Jonathan described it – had some basis in something that had actually happened, and was not the boy’s dream or a tall tale told by some drinker, he nodded. ‘So, in fact, the little girl was not dead at all. But everyone thought she was.’
Jonathan shook his head vehemently. ‘I caught her. I held her. I touched her eye.’ He mimed the catching of a heavy bundle, the holding of it, then the gentle fingertip.
‘A person might seem dead after something terrible has happened. That is possible. To appear to be dead, but in fact only be in a – a kind of sleep.’
‘Like Snow White? I kissed her. Was it that that woke her up?’
‘That is just a story, Jonathan.’
Jonathan considered. ‘Like Jesus, then.’
The parson frowned and was lost for words.
‘She was dead,’ Jonathan added. ‘Rita thought so.’
That was a surprise. Rita was the most reliable person the parson knew.
Jonathan gathered up the breadcrumbs and chewed them.
The parson rose. It was more than he could take in.
‘It’s cold and it’s late. Sleep here for what remains of the night, eh? Here’s a blanket, look, on this chair. You’re worn out.’
Jonathan wanted something else. ‘I’m right, aren’t I, Parson? It’s like Jesus, all over again?’
The parson thought if he was lucky his bed would still have a parson-shaped bit of warmth in it. He nodded. ‘The way you have put it before me, yes, Jonathan. The parallels are inescapable. But let’s not cudgel our brains tonight.’
Jonathan grinned. ‘I’m the one that brought you the story.’
‘I won’t forget that. I heard it from you first.’
Jonathan settled down happily in the kitchen chair and his eyes began to close.
The parson climbed the stairs wearily back to his room. In summer he was a different man, sprightly and alert, and people took him for a man a decade younger than his years, but in winter he sank as the skies darkened, and by December he was always tired. When he went to bed he drowned in sleep; when he was wakened from it, dragged from the bleak depths, he was somehow always unrefreshed.
He didn’t know what it was, but something strange had happened tonight at the Swan at Radcot. He would go over there tomorrow. He climbed into his bed, aware that in June it would be getting light already at this time. Yet there were hours of this winter darkness ahead.
‘Let the child – if there is a child – be all right,’ he prayed. ‘And let it soon be spring.’
And then he was asleep.
Clutching his ragged coat to him as if he believed it might afford some protection against the weather, the tramp followed the path to the river. The story he had heard had the smell of money to him – and he knew who might want to buy it. It was not a good path: rocks jutted out of the soil to trick the boots of even a sober man, and where the going was flat it was slippery. When he stumbled, as he did now and again, he flung his arms out for balance and by a miracle found it. Perhaps there were spirits in the darkness that gripped his frozen hands and held him safe. It was a ticklish thought and it made him chuckle. He stumbled on for a bit, and the going was thirsty work. His tongue was furred and stinking like a three-day-dead mouse, so he stopped for a drink from the bottle in his pocket, and then stumbled on a bit more.
When he came to the river, he turned upstream. There were no landmarks in the dark, but at about the time he thought he must surely be level with Brandy Island, he came to a spot he knew.
The name Brandy Island was a new one. In the old days it was just The Island and nobody needed another name for it because nobody ever went there and there was nothing to see. But when the new people came to Radcot Lodge – Mr Vaughan at first and later his young wife – one of the changes they made was the construction on this river-bound sliver of land of the big distillery and vitriol works, and that was what gave the island its name. Acres of fields belonging to Mr Vaughan were turned over to sugar beet, and a light railway was installed to transport