man to gather himself after a shock. So please forgive me if I have been improperly frank, and remember I have been driven to it by the need to give you a reasonable explanation for my reaction here today.
‘It is true that on seeing your daughter I felt as if I was face to face with my own beloved Alice. But it is plain that she does not know me. And though she resembles Alice – to a very striking degree – I must remind myself that I have not seen her in nearly twelve months and children are apt to change, are they not?’
He turned to Margot.
‘No doubt you have children of your own, Madam, and will be able to confirm that I am right in this?’
Margot jumped at being addressed. She wiped away the tear that Robin’s story had put in her eye, and some confusion prevented her from giving an immediate answer.
‘I am right, am I not?’ he repeated. ‘Little children are apt to change in a twelvemonth?’
‘Well … Yes, I suppose they do change …’ Margot sounded uncertain.
Robin Armstrong rose from his chair and spoke to the Vaughans.
‘It was my grief that jumped ahead of my reason to recognize your child as my own. I apologize if I have alarmed you. I did not intend any harm.’
He brought his fingers to his lips, stretched out a hand and, obtaining permission from Helena with a glance, touched a gentle kiss upon the child’s cheek. His eyes filled with tears, but before they could fall he had bowed his head to the ladies, bid them farewell and was gone.
In the silence that followed Robin Armstrong’s exit, Vaughan turned his back to stare out of the window. The elms’ branches were black against the charcoal sky and his thoughts seemed tangled in the mazy treetops.
Margot opened her mouth to speak and closed it half a dozen times, blinking in perplexity.
Helena Vaughan drew the child close and rocked her.
‘Poor, poor man,’ she said in a low voice. ‘We must pray that he finds his Alice again – as we have found our Amelia.’
Rita did not stare and nor did she blink or speak. All the while Robin had been giving his account of himself, she had sat on the stool in the corner of the room, observing and listening. Now that he was gone she continued to sit, with the air of someone doing a mildly challenging long-division calculation in her head. What kind of a man is it, she was thinking, who appears to faint, and then comes round, though all the while his pulse does not falter?
After a time she evidently arrived at the end of her reflections, for she put her thinking face away and rose to her feet.
‘I must go and see how Mr Daunt is doing,’ she said, and she let herself quietly out of the room.
The Tale of the Ferryman
HENRY DAUNT SLEPT and woke and slept again. He emerged each time a bit less bewildered, a bit more himself. It was not like the worst hangover he had ever had, but it was more akin to that than anything else he had ever experienced. He was still blinded by his own eyelids, which pressed firmly to each other and against his eyeballs.
Till he was five years old Henry Daunt had cried persistently at night. Roused by her son’s inconsolable wailing in the dark, it had taken a long time for his mother to realize it wasn’t that he was afraid of the dark, but another reason. ‘There’s nothing to see,’ he sobbed at last, heartbroken, which put an end to her misunderstanding. ‘Of course there’s nothing to see,’ she told him. ‘It’s night. Night is for sleeping.’ He would not be persuaded. His father had sighed. ‘That boy was born with his eyes open and hasn’t shut them since.’ But it was he who had found the solution. ‘Look at the patterns on the inside of your eyelids. Pretty floating shapes, you’ll see, all different colours.’ Warily, fearing a trick, Henry had closed his eyes and been entranced.
Later he’d taught himself to conjure up visions from memory with his eyes shut, and enjoy them as freely as when they were present before his daytime gaze. More freely, even. He reached an age where it was the Maidens of Destiny he conjured to entertain his night-time hours. The underground mermaids rose out of churning water, their torsos half concealed by rounded lines that might have