‘How long is it, now?’ He totted up the months in his head. ‘Two years and three months. A long time. Who took her, eh? You were there, Martha. Why didn’t you squeal when they came and stole your mother?’
Martha gave him a long and intent look. He studied her expression, tried to decipher it, and for once failed.
He was giving Martha a final scratch when she lifted her chin from the fence and turned in the direction of the river.
‘What is it?’
He looked that way himself. There was nothing to see, and he had heard nothing either. Still, there must be something … He and the pig exchanged a look. He had never seen that look in her eyes before, yet he had only to compare it with his own sensations to know what it meant.
‘I think you’re right, Martha. Something is going to happen.’
Mrs Vaughan and the River Goblins
A PEARL OF water formed in the corner of an eye. The eye belonged to a young woman who was lying in the bottom of a boat. The bead of liquid rested in the place where the pink inner of the eyelid swells into the dainty complication of a tear duct. It shivered with the rocking motion of the boat but, supported by the lashes that sprouted beneath and above it, did not break or fall.
‘Mrs Vaughan?’
The young woman had rowed across the river, then drawn the blades in and allowed the little boat to drift into the reed bed which now held it. By the time the words from the bank reached her, the thick white river mist had rinsed the urgency out of them. The words drifted into her ear, washed out and waterlogged, and sounded scarcely louder than the thoughts in her own head.
Mrs Vaughan … that’s me, Helena thought. It sounded like the name of another person altogether. She could imagine a Mrs Vaughan and it would be nothing like herself. Someone old. About thirty, probably, with a face like the portraits that hung in the hallway of her husband’s house. It was odd to think that only a few years ago she had been Helena Greville. It seemed a lot longer. When she thought about that girl now, it was as if she were thinking about someone she used to know, and know quite well, but would never see again. Helena Greville was gone for good.
‘It’s too cold to be out, Mrs Vaughan.’
Cold, yes. Helena Vaughan counted the coldnesses. There was the cold of being coatless, hatless, gloveless. The cold of the air that dampened her dress to her skin and raised goosebumps on her chest and arms and legs. There was the cold of the air as it entered her, stinging her nostrils and making her lungs quiver. After all those came the coldness of the river. It was the slowest, taking its time to reach her through the thick planks of the boat, but when it did it burnt the points of her shoulder blades, the back of her skull, her ribcage, the base of her spine, all the places where her body lay hard against the curve of the wood. The river came nudging at the boat, draining her of warmth with its lulling, rocking motion. She closed her eyes.
‘Are you there? Oh, answer me, for heaven’s sake!’
Answer … The word dredged up a memory from a few years ago. Aunt Eliza had talked about an answer. ‘Think before you answer,’ she had said, ‘because opportunities like this don’t come every day.’
Aunt Eliza was the little sister of Helena’s father. Widowed in her forties and childless, she had come to live with her brother and the child of his late marriage, to disrupt and upset them, as Helena saw it. Helena’s mother had died when the child was an infant, and it was Eliza’s view that her niece needed a maternal figure to take her in hand. Eliza’s brother was an eccentric who had neglected to instil proper discipline and the girl was barely educated. Eliza had tried, but she had failed to have much influence. Helena had complained in the early days to her father about Aunt Eliza, and he had told her with a wink, ‘She has nowhere else to go, Pirate. Just nod and say yes to whatever she says, and afterwards do just as you like. That’s what I always do.’ The strategy had worked.