is their time, he sees them safely to that other place, the one he went to in search of his child, and there they must remain.’
They gave the story the silent pause it deserved, and when it was over, Daunt spoke again.
‘So it was not my time, and Quietly towed me to Radcot.’
‘If the story is to be believed.’
‘Do you believe it?’
‘Of course not.’
‘It’s a good story, nonetheless. The devoted father rescuing his child at the price of his own life.’
‘It cost him more than that,’ Rita said. ‘It cost him his death too. There is no eternal rest for Quietly, he must exist for ever between the two states, policing its border.’
‘You don’t believe that either,’ he said. ‘Do they believe it here?’
‘Beszant the boat-mender does. He reckons he saw him, when he was a youth and slipped on the jetty. The cressmen think Quietly keeps them safe when the river rises up the fields and turns them marshy. One of the gravel-diggers was a sceptic till the day he got his ankle trapped underwater. He swears blind it was Quietly that reached down and freed him.’
The conversation put Daunt in mind of the child. ‘I thought she was dead,’ he told her. ‘She came drifting into my arms, white and cold and with her eyes closed … I would have sworn she was dead.’
‘They all thought so too.’
‘But not you.’
‘I too. I was certain of it.’ There was a thoughtful silence in the room. He thought of questions he might ask, but stilled his tongue. Something told him there might be more to come if he waited, and he was right.
‘You are a photographer, Mr Daunt, which makes you a scientist. I am a nurse, which makes me a scientist too, but I cannot explain what I witnessed last night.’ She spoke slowly and with great calm, choosing her words carefully. ‘The girl was not breathing. She had no pulse. Her pupils were dilated. The body was cold. The skin was white. According to every rule in the textbook, she was dead. I had no doubt about it. After I had checked for signs of life and found none, I might easily have come away. I don’t know why I stayed, except that I felt uneasy for reasons I could not explain to myself. For a short time – between two minutes and three in my estimation – I continued to stand by the body. Her hand was between my hands; my fingertips were touching her wrist. In that position I felt something flicker between her skin and mine. It felt like a pulse. But I knew it couldn’t be – she was dead.
‘Now, it is actually just possible to mistake your own pulse for the pulse of a patient, because there is a pulse in the fingertips. Let me show you.’ He heard the rustle of her skirts behind her footsteps as she approached the bed. She took his hand, laid it palm up on her own open palm and placed her other palm over it, so that his hand was enclosed in hers and her fingertips rested lightly at the inside of his wrist. ‘There. I can feel your pulse’ (his blood lurched at her touch) ‘and I can also feel mine. It’s a very delicate pulse, but it’s mine.’
He murmured a note of understanding in his throat and his senses jumped to attention to catch a flicker of her blood. It was too faint.
‘So to avoid all uncertainty I did this …’ Her hands slipped briskly away, his own was left abandoned on the counterpane; his swell of disappointment ebbed when her fingertips alighted on the tender spot beneath his ear.
‘This is a good pulse point. I pressed firmly, waited for another minute. There was nothing. Nothing, and nothing, and more nothing. I told myself I was mad to be standing in the dark and the bitter cold, waiting for a pulse to beat in a dead child. Then it came again.’
‘How slow can a heart beat?’
‘Children’s hearts are faster than adult hearts. A hundred beats a minute is quite ordinary. Sixty is dangerous. Forty is perilous. At forty, you expect the worst.’
On the inside of his eyelids he saw his own thoughts rise in blue, cloud-like shapes. Above them he saw her thoughts, deep maroon and green stripes, moving horizontally from left to right across his field of vision, like slow and intent lightning flashes.
‘One beat per minute … I have never known the