What the Pond Returned

The following night Penelope woke him shortly after three. At first Edwin thought she had gone to the lavatory. Then he saw her standing at the bedroom window with one curtain drawn aside.

“What is it?”

“Nothing. I thought I saw a light.”

Edwin sat up. When he asked where, she pointed beyond the lawn. “Down there somewhere.”

He got out of bed and went to the window.

The moon was weak behind cloud. The pond itself could scarcely be seen, only a pale interruption between the trees. Beyond the island the old boathouse was hidden almost completely from the house.

There was no light.

“What did you see?”

Penelope climbed back into bed while he remained at the glass. She had woken and noticed something yellow between the trees, appearing and disappearing twice. It might have come from the boathouse, though at that distance she could not be certain. Nor could she tell whether someone had been carrying it. Something had moved in front of the light once, perhaps a person or a branch; she had been half asleep.

Edwin continued watching the trees. Penelope suggested one of the groundsmen, then remembered the hour and laughed at herself.

“Or moonlight on the water. Come back to bed.”

“The moon is behind us.”

“Then it wasn’t moonlight.”

She settled beneath the blankets. Edwin stayed at the window. After a while he asked how long the light had been there.

Penelope opened one eye. “Good God, Edwin. I only saw a light.”

He said nothing.

She went back to sleep.

The boathouse remained dark.

Edwin watched it until the clouds covered the moon completely.

The light did not return the following night.

Edwin said nothing to Penelope about it. She had forgotten the incident by breakfast and spent most of the morning writing letters in the drawing room. Edwin found this reassuring. Had she attached any importance to what she had seen, she would have mentioned it again.

He did not go down to the boathouse.

That would have been unnecessary.

Instead he made a point of crossing the south lawn on Friday afternoon while speaking with his agent about repairs to one of the tenant cottages. The path gave him a clear view through the trees. The boathouse looked exactly as it always had. Its door was shut. No boat was on the water.

He glanced at it once and continued talking about the roof.

There had been no further word from Hale. Alice’s father had written again, this time directly to Harcourt, asking whether anyone at the house could remember something his daughter might have said before leaving. Edwin passed the letter to Mrs Pearce. He saw no reason to answer it personally.

By the end of the week he had begun to think the matter might settle after all.

On Saturday morning Briggs found the hairbrush.

Edwin was walking back from the lower paddock when he saw the groundsman standing among the reeds with a long-handled rake. Briggs was an old man who had worked at Harcourt since before Edwin’s marriage and had an irritating habit of rescuing anything he found on the estate, however worthless. Nails, bottles, broken tools and once half a bicycle had all been carried back from hedges and ditches.

He had something in his hand now.

From twenty yards away Edwin thought he knew what it was.

Briggs called to him and came up the bank, wiping mud from his boots before stepping onto the path.

“Found this caught in the rushes, sir.”

It was a woman’s hairbrush. The wooden back had darkened with water and several strands of weed hung from the bristles. Edwin took it and turned it over. There was no question of whose it was; he had seen it inside Alice’s handbag in the boathouse.

Briggs thought it an odd thing to find in the reeds and supposed one of the maids had dropped it. Edwin suggested a boat. Briggs considered this and allowed that she might have.

“I’ll take it up to the house.”

“Very good, sir.”

Briggs returned to the reeds. Edwin walked on without hurrying. At the edge of the trees he looked back. Briggs was already working again.

Edwin carried it into the house beneath his coat.

The kitchen range was occupied, so he took it to his study instead. He shut the door, broke the wooden back across the edge of the hearth and put the pieces into the fire. The bristles burned badly. He stirred them with the poker until very little remained.

Only then did he sit down.

The handbag had opened.

The clasp must have worked loose as the bag filled with water or shifted in the mud. Once free, the wooden brush would float, and the recent rain could have carried it into the reeds.

Had Molly found it, she might have recognised it. Mrs Pearce might have done the same. A wooden hairbrush was hardly unique, but people remembered the possessions of those they lived beside. One unnecessary question would have produced another.

Briggs had found it instead.

Alice had managed to make herself troublesome again.

That evening he dined with Penelope and discussed the possibility of replacing two of the elm trees along the east drive. Penelope was sentimental about old trees and thought the elms ought to remain until they became dangerous. Edwin disagreed. They played cards afterward.

He did not sleep well.

The rain began after midnight and struck the windows hard enough to wake him several times. After each bout had passed he found himself going over the fastening again.

The handbag had been tied directly to the canvas at Alice’s hip. Edwin remembered that. What he could not remember was the exact turn of rope through the handles.

By morning the uncertainty had become intolerable.

After breakfast he went down to the boathouse and rebuilt the fastening with a length of rope, an old sack and a strip of canvas. The knot held. He pulled until the handles bit into the canvas; it still held.

Edwin put everything back where he had found it and shut the boathouse.

At luncheon Penelope asked why there was mud on his trousers.

“I walked down to the pond.”

“What for?”

Edwin looked at her. She was cutting an apple.

“No reason.”

His wife glanced up, apparently surprised by the answer, then returned to the fruit.

A little over a week later Edwin saw the arm.

He had not intended to go down to the pond. He had business concerning a boundary wall on the western side of the estate, and the shorter path from the lower paddock passed within sight of the south bank. Edwin had taken it many times before.

Something brown was caught among the reeds.

At first he supposed it was part of the old sack he had seen there on Sunday. Then the water moved and a hand appeared.

Edwin stopped.

The arm lay partly submerged, held between two clumps of rushes perhaps twenty yards from the path. The sleeve was brown and dark with water. The hand had turned palm upward. Two of the fingers were beneath the surface and moved slightly with it.

He looked along the bank.

There was nobody there.

Briggs usually worked the lower grounds in the morning, though Edwin did not know where he was now. The knowledge produced no panic. There was simply very little time.

Edwin went to the maintenance shed, found the long-handled rake and returned to the reeds.

The arm had shifted no more than a foot.

He caught the sleeve first and drew it towards him. The rake slipped. On the second attempt one of the tines passed beneath the elbow and held.

The hand came clear of the water.

Edwin had expected it to look worse.

The skin had whitened and swollen, particularly around the fingers. Weed had collected at the wrist and beneath two nails. The brown sleeve was torn raggedly at the shoulder and split along one side, as though it had caught hard on something beneath the water. Very little remained inside it that Edwin wished to examine closely.

It was Alice’s right arm.

For several seconds he stood over it.

Then he fetched a piece of sacking from the shed.

The arm was heavier than its size suggested and difficult to put into the sack without touching. Edwin eventually took hold of the sleeve above the elbow and lifted. Water ran from the cuff. The hand swung once against his trouser leg.

He put it into the sack and folded the loose end over twice.

The matter was considerably worse than the hairbrush.

The brush had established only that Alice’s handbag had opened. This established something else.

He had weighted Alice at the waist and ankles, but the right arm had remained outside the canvas. Something beneath the water had caught the exposed arm. The arm had gone and the body had not.

It made very little difference how.

Edwin tucked the sack beneath his shooting coat and started towards the trees.

He had reached the path above the kitchen garden when he saw his wife coming towards him.

Penelope carried a pair of gloves in one hand and had evidently been speaking with the head gardener. She called to Edwin before he could reasonably alter his direction.

He stopped. The sack pressed against his ribs beneath the coat. Alice’s hand lay somewhere near his hip.

“I’ve been looking for you. The gardener says he can take the dead branches off those two elms next week.”

Edwin had forgotten them. His wife said there was no need to lose both trees if the dangerous limbs were removed now.

He shifted the sack slightly beneath his arm.

“No. Have them taken down.”

“You said yesterday you were prepared to leave them.”

“I’ve changed my mind. They’ll have to come down eventually.”

“That could be ten years from now.”

“Then we pay to do the job twice.”

Penelope put on one glove and regarded him with mild irritation. “You are in an odd mood this morning.”

“I have work to do.”

“So have I.”

She pulled on the second glove. For a moment neither moved. Then she looked down at his coat.

“You’ve caught something on yourself.”

Edwin followed her gaze.

A strand of green weed projected beneath the hem.

He bent, pulled it free and dropped it onto the path.

“I was down by the water.”

“So I see.”

Penelope continued towards the house. Edwin remained where he was until she had passed through the kitchen-garden gate, then went on towards the trees.

There was an old drainage ditch beyond the lower copse which had been filled twenty years before but was still visible as a shallow depression beneath the beeches. The soil there was soft after the rain and seldom disturbed. Edwin fetched a spade from the maintenance shed and dug until he reached the heavier clay beneath the surface roots.

He placed the sack in the bottom.

It did not fit neatly. The elbow held one side of the sacking up, and he was obliged to press it down with the back of the spade before replacing the earth.

When he had finished, he covered the disturbed ground with wet leaves and stood on it twice.

Nothing showed.

Edwin returned the spade to the shed and washed the mud from his hands at the outside pump.

The arm itself was no longer a difficulty.

What remained beneath the pond was.

The brush had returned. Now the arm had followed. Edwin could no longer assume that the rest of Alice would stay where he had put her.

He looked through the trees towards the island.

There was still time to deal with it properly.