as her feet trotted hastily across the floor to the door. ‘Who can it be this time?’
There came the sound of the door opening. And then—
‘Oh!’ exclaimed Margot. ‘Oh!’
Daddy!
MR VAUGHAN WAS on Brandy Island, at the vitriol works, where he was making an inventory of every item that appertained to the factory in preparation for the auction. It was painstaking work and he could have delegated the job, but he liked the repetitive nature of the task. In any other circumstances the abandonment of his brandy business might have been a painful thing. He had invested so much in it: the purchase of Buscot House with its fields and its island, the planning, the research, the construction of the reservoir, the planting of acres of beet, the building of the railway and the bridge to bring the beet over on to the island, all that plus the work on the island itself: the distillery and the vitriol works … An ambitious experiment that he’d had energy for when he was single and later a newly married man and after that a new father. To tell the truth, it wasn’t really that the enterprise hadn’t worked; it was simply that he couldn’t be bothered with it any more. Amelia had disappeared and so had his zest for the work. There was profit enough in his other enterprises – the farms were doing well and his shares in his father’s mining operation made him wealthy. Why rack his brains solving one problem after another, to make a success of this, when it was so much easier to let it go? There was a peculiar satisfaction in the dismantling, auctioning off, melting down and dispersal of the world he had spent so much time and money building up. Making his meticulous lists was an opportunity to forget. He counted, measured, listed, and felt soothed in his boredom. It helped him forget Amelia.
Today he had woken grasping after the tail end of a dream, and though he could not remember it, he suspected it was the dream – too terrible to speak of – that he had suffered frequently in the first days of their loss. It left him feeling hollowed out. Later, as he crossed the yard, the wind had delivered to his ears a snatch of a child’s high-pitched voice picked up some distance away. Of course, all little children’s voices sound the same from afar. They just do. But the two things had unsettled him and put him in need of this dulling occupation.
Now, in the store room, his eye alighted on something that opened a chasm into the past and made him flinch. It was a jar of barley-sugar canes in a dusty corner. Suddenly she was there – fingers reaching into the mouth of the jar, delighted when two canes came out so tightly welded together that they could not be separated and she was allowed to eat them both. His heart beat painfully and the jar slipped through his fingers and smashed on the concrete floor. That had done it. He would not regain his peace of mind today, not now she had materialized here in the store room.
He called for a broom to sweep it all and when he heard running supposed it was his assistant, but to Vaughan’s surprise, it was a member of his domestic staff that appeared: Newman, his gardener. Though out of breath, the man began to speak; his words were so shaken about by the great gasps of breath he was obliged to take that his meaning was not easy to make out. Vaughan caught the word drowned.
‘Slow down, Newman, take your time.’
The gardener began again and this time something approximating the story of the girl who died and lived again emerged. ‘At the Swan at Radcot,’ he finished. And in a hushed voice, as though he hardly dared to say it, ‘They say she is about four.’
‘Christ in heaven!’ Vaughan’s hands rose halfway to his head, then he gathered himself. ‘Try not to let my wife hear about it, will you?’ he asked. But even before the gardener spoke again, he could see it was too late.
‘Mrs Vaughan has gone up there already, by herself. Mrs Jellicoe who does the laundry brought the news – she heard it from one of the Swan’s regulars last night. We couldn’t know what she was going to say – if we had we wouldn’t have let her near, but we thought she was going