If she is something to you, Mr … Mr whoever-you-are, that’s where you should address your questions. Go to the one who ruined her and abandoned her. That’s where you’ll find the responsibility lies for what happened next! Not that I know what happened. I’m nothing but a man who must make a living, and that’s what I do.’
‘Selling poison so that girls with no one in the world to help them can kill the greenfly on their December roses?’
The apothecary had the grace to look discomfited, but whether it was guilt or just the fear that Armstrong was out to make trouble for him was hard to tell.
‘There is no law requiring me to know the seasons of horticultural pests.’
‘Where next, Sir?’ Ben asked hopefully, when they were outside again.
‘I think I’m done here. For today, anyway. Let’s go up to the river.’
As they went, Ben’s stride grew slow and he began to waver on his feet. Coming to the river, Armstrong glanced to see where the boy had got to and saw him leaning against a tree trunk, his face green.
‘What is it, Ben?’
Ben wept. ‘Sir, I’m sorry, Sir, I ate some of the green apple you gave me for Fleet, Sir, and now my belly’s aching and churning …’
‘They’re sour, those apples. No wonder. What have you eaten today?’
‘Nothing, Sir.’
‘No breakfast?’
The boy shook his head. Armstrong felt a surge of anger towards the butcher who failed to feed his children.
‘It’s the acid on an empty stomach.’ Armstrong unscrewed his hip flask. ‘Drink this.’
The boy drank and pulled a face. ‘That is truly horrible, Sir, it’s making me feel worse.’
‘That’s the idea. It’s nothing more sinister than cold tea. Finish it up.’
Ben tipped the flask and with a grimace swallowed the last of the tea. Then he was violently sick in the grass.
‘Good. Any more? Yes? Good. Keep it coming.’
While Ben gasped and groaned on the riverbank, watched by Fleet, Armstrong doubled back to the high street, where he bought three buns at the bakery. He returned and gave two to Ben – ‘Go on, fill your stomach’ – and ate the third himself.
The pair sat on the bank, and while Ben ate, Armstrong watched the river flow powerfully by. The river was quieter like this than when it dawdled. There was no idle splashing on the way, only the purposeful surge forwards, and behind the high-pitched ringing of water on shingle at the river edge was a kind of hum, of the kind you would expect to hear inside your ears after a bell has been struck by a hammer and the audible ringing has died away. It had the shape of noise but lacked the sound, a sketch without colour. Armstrong listened to it, and his mind flowed with the river.
There was a bridge, a simple one, constructed in wood. Beneath it the river was high and fast – it would sweep away anything that might fall into it. He saw the young woman here with her child, in the evening, in the dark and the cold. He spared himself the picture of her dropping her child into the water, but he imagined her distress, felt his own heart leap in horror and grief. Armstrong looked up- and downriver distractedly. He didn’t know what he was expecting to see. Not a small child, he knew that – not now.
When he returned to himself, he noticed how harsh the winter felt compared to only a few hours before. His body had less resistance to the chill and inside his woollen overcoat and the layers beneath he felt the coldness of his skin. There was dankness in the undergrowth. The browns and dark golds of autumn were long gone and the softening of spring was months ahead. The branches were at their blackest. It seemed that only by some miracle could life ever return to dress the stark treetops with the haze of new foliage. Seeing it today, one would think that life was gone for good.
He tried to distract himself from his sad thoughts. Turning to Ben, he found the boy was looking more like his old self.
‘Will you join your father in the butcher’s shop when you are older?’
Ben shook his head. ‘I shall run away.’
‘Is that a good plan?’
‘It is the family tradition, done first by my second-eldest brother and then by my third-eldest brother, and it will be my turn next, for Father only has need of one of us, so being as how