The River Within

CHAPTER 1

Starome, North Yorkshire, August 1955

Danny Masters came home one afternoon at the beginning of August. Something stirred beneath the surface of the water, at a point where the river at last quietened and then opened out into a wide pool, bottle-green beneath the canopy of the trees. His movement was slow at first, so that a passer-by might look twice, thinking it the shadow of a bird or a swaying branch above. A billowing next, deep, growing, blurred at the edges, and then up he bobbed as jauntily as a buoy, his one remaining eye widened at the shock of release.

For a time he drifted, undisturbed, his feet nudging the river bank, arms lifted above his head as though relishing the summer warmth after the silt and gloom of the bone-cold cavern where he’d been lodged these past days, with only blind creatures for company. Insects hummed and darted across the surface of the water, feverish in their efforts, sensing a warning of autumn, even on this highest of summer days. Danny’s skin began to darken with exposure to the air. Small fish darted around him.

Three figures came along the river path, heading in the direction of the village: two young men, one blond, the other dark, while a little behind them, a girl of about seventeen, with pale hair and a light step. The two men were engaged in a debate, and it was the girl who first spotted the body, now snagged by a reed bed at the edge of the pool, just beneath the path. She stared at a bootless, sockless foot, the sole wrinkled and waxen. A softened toenail swung loose, like a door on its hinges.

Thomas Fairweather, the darker of the two men, must have sensed her pause behind him. He broke off his talk and turned, his gaze following his sister’s, beyond the wild roses that grew so dark in this spot that they appeared almost black. Something to do with the composition of soil was all anyone knew or cared to find out.

‘Oh Christ!’ he said, and then he was in front of his sister, inserting himself between her and the river bank.

‘You mustn’t look, Lennie.’ Thomas stared around him, as if seeking a culprit in the quiet woodland that lay all around. ‘You’d best go home.’

Lennie stood hand over mouth, the breeze picking at the hem of her new green dress. It fluttered around her knees. The insects seemed to have paused in their frenzy.

‘Go back to the cottage,’ Thomas repeated, firm now, taking hold of her and propelling her along the river path, in the direction from which they’d come.

‘Isn’t it . . . ?’ Words stuck in her throat. Eyes still fixed on that sodden mass. Green cloth, one boot remaining. Where did the green stop and the water start?

‘He’s been dead for days.’ Confirming what her senses already knew.

Others came. Workers from the estate helped the two young men haul the body from the edge of the pool and then up onto the river path where it rested, skin slackened from its long immersion.

‘Danny Masters!’ The word went round and the body, deflating, seemed to sigh with relief at this correct identification: a few more weeks on the riverbed would have slurred his features, rendered him no more than a template.

‘He’ll have gone in at the Stride,’ said Nathan Lacey, the head gardener, standing back and shaking his head.

Under his authority, the men cohered into a purposeful group. The estate outbuildings were to be searched for something that could function as a stretcher, to give the boy some dignity at least, while Thomas set off back along the river path to telephone Dr. Harrison, the line up at Richmond Hall being the most reliable one since the war, even after all this time.

On the river bank, Alexander Richmond made no move to follow either his friend or the estate workers.

A flash of green, bright against darker foliage, caught his eye.

‘Helena?’

Never Len or Lennie when he spoke to her. ’I thought you’d gone home.’

She stood in the shadow of an oak tree, cheek pressed against its crocodile-hide bark. From the river path, her frame seemed moulded to the base of the great trunk.

Alexander crouched down and stared into the blank socket of the corpse’s eye.

‘Come and look.’ He pointed at Danny’s forearm. ‘Covered in cuts. And the other one might be broken. See the funny angle. I wonder if he fought very hard.’

‘Don’t.’

The smell was already rising, spreading. Bloated torso, rotten gas. She could see patches of dark skin on an exposed shinbone.

Lennie’s feet moved forwards at Alexander’s command, the undergrowth damp against her bare legs.

‘How long does it take to drown, d’you think?’ A narrow shaft of sunlight broke through the canopy and made a halo of Alexander’s blond hair.

‘You know what the Stride’s like,’ said Lennie. ‘The current doesn’t let go until it’s done.’

She had seen the river’s beginnings once: a cool burble of water high up on the moors, where the wind whipped the grass to the hillside and rocks broke through the thin pelt of the land. A lonely place where the only sound was the querulous baaing of sheep. She liked it up there though. It was easier to breathe. But how changeable it was, this coppery water, muscling into the neck of the valley, which fought back at the Stride, the narrowest point of the river, where the water raged and boiled at the constraint, and then plunged on, eating its way through the softer rock and the soil that lay beyond until its fury was finally spent here, in this glassy pool.

‘You were still friends?’ Alexander glanced up at her.

‘Not since school. Hardly then really.’ She thought of Danny Masters out front at the sawmill where he’d been apprenticed, a haze of gold rising up around him and settling in soft mounds, the air dry and faintly sweet with wood dust. ‘I want to go home now.’

‘See the skin on his face. You notice how it’s loosened?’

He reached for her hand and pulled her down next to him, an audience with the dead.

Lennie held her breath as he traced the outline of Danny’s cheekbone in the air.

‘This whole lot’s going to slip off like a glove soon. Like a model in reverse really. You can see why the ancient Greeks were fascinated by anatomy. Just a series of layers.’

She jerked her hand back. ‘Stop it, Alexander! You can’t talk like that when it’s real.’

‘Another day or two and his own mother wouldn’t recognise him.’

A sudden pallor came over him and she wondered if he might be sick.

Someone was coming. She could hear the deep tones of Sam Bracegirdle, the hugely strong farmhand, and other voices too. Lennie slipped her hand from Alexander’s and retreated back to the shelter of the wood, where evening was already gathering and the undergrowth rustled with life. Her brother was sure to return with the men and it would be better for him to think her safely back home.

Alexander twisted around from his hunkered position.

‘By the way, Helena . . . ’

‘Ssssh.’

‘Did I mention that you look like a dryad in that dress?’

Laughter, sharp like a fox bark.

She had not seen him so happy in days.

CHAPTER 2

Venetia, August 1955

Venetia was on her way from the stables when the men brought the stretcher to the Hall, the procession emerging from the wood and moving flat against the tree line like a panel from a stained-glass window. She saw and smelt the corpse as it arrived at the front of the Hall. The men drew to a juddering halt before her, their purpose fulfilled.

Two pieces of knowledge fixed themselves in her: that the small green car approaching the house was driven by Dr. Harrison—even with her eyes shut she could identify his inability to shift gear at the appropriate speed—the other that Danny Masters’ mother must never see her son in this condition. Reverend Jones had been firm on that subject too, so that now, in the cottage that marked the far end of the village, Mrs. Masters could only stand over her son’s sealed coffin and worry at the surface, repeatedly pawing the fresh wood as though trying to wear a path through it. It was just as well the lid had been screwed down.

Venetia sat in the best parlour chair beside a window that allowed in a small square of light. She sipped the tea that had been brought to her, thick with milk, and observed the theatre of loss playing out around her. Timid knocks came at the door, as though the dead might yet be disturbed; little collapses were followed by rallying; hot food arrived from a neighbour who did not want to intrude but still was pressed to stay. All these things she had borne witness to before, one version of grief very like another. Her presence constrained the mourners—all female apart from old Samuel Masters, Danny’s grandfather, who sat like a wood carving to one side of the coffin—but that wasn’t the point. She must fulfil her duties as Lady Richmond, and then leave the Reverend to it.

Her husband would have been better at this sort of thing. Having no particular affinity with women, even of her own class, Venetia had managed as best she could when Angus was away during the war, when bad news was never further away than an opening gate and a few short steps up a garden path. The women of the village would see Venetia and Reverend Jones coming and the screaming would begin before they had even reached the front door. It was as if they could not quite believe the telegram already sitting on their kitchen table until that point. The worst time had been Norah Ward, whose twin sons had been blown to pieces on an Atlantic convoy on the same day. All the tears in the world couldn’t put them back together again.

At least Danny Masters could be boxed up properly. The candles at the head and foot of the coffin drooped and stretched on unseen currents. It occurred to Venetia that Danny might have worked on the long, straight planks of the coffin himself—a simple enough project for an apprentice, one supposed.

A thin-faced woman was speaking, a different version of Mrs. Masters, younger by a few years and uncrumpled by a mother’s grief. The sister from Malton or somewhere that way.

‘ . . . what he was doing there in the first place,’ she was saying, outrage in her voice. ‘That river’s always been dangerous . . . ’

One or two sets of eyes slid daringly towards Venetia, as if responsibility for all of nature lay in her direction. Mrs. Masters, a midwife who had delivered so many of the village children into the world, stroked the coffin, a stream of silent tears running down her face. But what was the point of crying? Tears came and came and then went away and nothing changed because of them. They served no purpose, thought Venetia, but Mamie Masters would never be pretty again, that was certain. Widowed some years ago and now her only son was gone, loss leaching all the moisture out of her.

Venetia had known Danny better as a small boy, and even then only a little. She pictured him and Alexander on the riverbank, arms slung round one another as they leapt and waved to a Hurricane passing overhead, bare chests puny in the sunlight. She recalled a freckled, open face, smeared scarlet, as he, Thomas and Lennie ate bread and strawberry jam in the kitchens of Richmond Hall; whoops and shrieks coming from the woods on summer evenings; an alliance made possible by that unspoken democracy that exists among children, broken only when Alexander and Thomas had gone off to Prep School.

‘It was an accident!’

Venetia jumped at Mrs. Masters’ voice. She had missed some exchange, it seemed. ‘He would never . . . Don’t you dare say that in this house. Everyone one ends up in that bloody river. It should have been bloody concreted over years ago, I’ve always said it . . . !’ Mamie Masters stared them all down through watery eyes, and then the strength went out of her again and she fell forwards, stretching herself over the coffin. ‘Oh God!’ Her hands trying to gain a purchase on the smooth wood. ‘Christ, not my lovely lad.’

Venetia took the long route home, avoiding the Stride and the river path by cutting around the back of the village on a bridleway. She had no fear of the river—dead men’s fingers grasping beneath its surface were childish fancies—but she had no great affection for it either. The horses tended to shy away from the roar of the Stride whenever she rode that way and she did not trouble to insist, allowing them to find their own way through the woods. The water was black and angry and ugly, and she would not seek it out by choice but you could not get rid of it. Energy like that would only find its way to the surface again. You had to find a way to live alongside it.

She crossed the water where the bridle path emerged from the woods, by a humped stone bridge that lay directly below the Hall. Stopping for a moment, her eye ran over the building and its grounds before her, a kind of mental housekeeping she undertook every time she approached this place that had been home to her since she was a young bride.

The sweep of sycamores lining the driveway promised grandeur, yet Richmond Hall was an unremarkable piece of architecture, designed by Vanbrugh but so lacking in baroque audacity that it was clear his patron must have imposed catastrophic restrictions on his plans. The dark-sand walls of the main house were plainly built, with modest borders at their base and only a blue clock face and a cupola to add interest to the garden wing. Money to build the Hall had come from an ancestor who’d profited from the slave trade, and Angus once remarked that the house looked a little ashamed of itself, hidden away at the far end of the valley, creeper pulled up over its walls and sills. But the land swelled here, opening out into a plateau, and Venetia, who never felt quite comfortable in the confines of the village, locked in its internecine troubles, always felt a sense of release on returning home.

Glass flashed as one of the French doors opened and Alexander stepped out onto the Great Lawn. Her son home at last, though he’d taken his time about it. Time. Time was what Mrs. Masters needed, the Reverend had said, a soothing recitation Venetia had heard many times over the years. He’d motioned to where Venetia sat, calmly drinking her tea, as if to demonstrate what time had done for her, Lady Richmond, widow, in just a few short months. Time would lessen the agony. Time and God’s comfort. Well, Reverend Jones could gesture all he wanted but Venetia did not care for the Reverend’s God, nor his comfort.

CHAPTER 3

Lennie, August 1955

How she loved him! Lennie broke off from weeding the vegetable patch at the front of Gatekeeper’s Cottage to watch Alexander step out from the shadow of the Richmond Hall and cross the driveway, head bent. Was he thinking about her? Or was his mind fixed on Danny Masters, still caught up by the subject when everyone else had run out of answers? Coming across a body just like that, Alexander had said, cheeks flushing as if he had survived some threat to his person, as if death could rub off on the living. Lennie pushed the hoe beneath a dandelion, slicing through its fibrous roots. Well it couldn’t. It mustn’t. It had been another accident. A young man with everything to live for. Nearly everyone said so and yet the gossip. It would be better after tomorrow, once the funeral was out of the way.

She would know the shape of him, the particularity of his stride and the set of his shoulders from any distance. She was in love with the straight-limbed golden beauty of him. Like a poet she thought, though he cared more about old ruins than poetry. His name on her tongue: Alexander. Possessing him with her voice.

Something troubled the edge of her perfect picture: Lady Richmond crossing the stone bridge below the Hall, her spare frame elegant even now, as she moved with such purpose, one hand raised to greet her son. Lennie glanced down at herself, brushed her hands against her apron. The clayey soil had wedged beneath her fingernails and drawn the moisture from the backs of her hands, drying them to ploughed ridges. She should content herself with cutting flowers for the parlour, her father said, or tending the herb garden set out by her mother all those years ago. Woman’s work. But she liked the heft of the spade or the hoe in her hand, the turn of the soil, loamy and pink with worms. There was something straightforward about the lines of vegetables, each plant knowing its purpose, earning its space and time in the earth. Not like her father’s marigolds and petunias, buttoning up the earth in garish, useless splodges. They were a child’s drawing, a bad attempt at nature, and she liked them only a little more when the wind, which blew constantly across the face of Gatekeeper’s Cottage, gave them a straggly, desperate look. Lennie loved only woodland things—ferns unrolling exuberantly in springtime, bluebells, violent on the forest floor—and those plants must be left untouched.

She watched now as Alexander turned back across the driveway, hands deep in his pockets. Would he come to see her today? If only he had come home at the end of his college year when she expected him, as her brother, Thomas, had done. Not sent that tight little note to say he was travelling to Greece. It was still too painful for him here, she had told herself, with the churchyard so close, the spire of its squat tower just visible through the copper beech. Only Easter since his father had been lowered into the hard earth. A few short months to grieve. She waited for him, yes, but unhappiness of her own came bubbling up in that vacuum of time when there had been little to do but hang out the laundry or prepare supper for her father and Thomas.

Lennie pushed the hoe deep into the ground, so that it stood of its own accord, and then felt inside the collar of her dress for the ring: a silver band etched with an acanthus design.

‘It’s a traditional Greek pattern,’ Alexander said, a few days after he’d arrived home. From the continent, her father said, speaking carefully as though such a word—such a place and all its inhabitants—was not to be trusted. ‘Remarkably cheap,’ Alexander teased. ‘I bartered, of course.’ She had strung it on a chain that once belonged to her mother, her fingers seeking its cold surface whenever she was alone, feeling the way it had been worked, trying to read it. Like a picture she’d once seen of a girl, upright at a desk and dressed in Victorian clothing, all ringlets and unseeing eyes, and fingers moving across a Braille pattern. She liked the way the design turned back in upon itself, like a secret or a lie.

Alexander must not have noticed his mother approaching. Just as Lady Richmond drew close, he turned towards the house and a moment later there was the glint of glass as a door closed behind him.

Home. He was home at last and the ring around her neck proved that she was his again. Such a good girl, everyone said. Kind, loyal, gentle Lennie. She was a good girl and his, and tomorrow Danny Masters would be lying in the quiet earth.

CHAPTER 4

Danny

He loved her alright though he couldn’t say when it’d begun. They’d been kids together once, running wild in the woods and making up stories about the wounded soldiers who were taken up to Richmond Hall in ambulances, and he’d not paid her any attention, except to think Thomas Fairweather short-tempered with his little sister. He’d not cared much for Thomas back then, you never knew where you were with him, but Alexander had been a fine friend with his plays and his plans and