The Smoke and the Silver Water
763 words
The morning they were to sail on the paddle-steamer, Constance woke before the sparrows had so much as ruffled a feather. She lay quite still beneath her quilt and listened to the house breathe around her — the creak of a floorboard, the distant clatter of Mrs Hobbs setting the breakfast things. Today was different. Today there was the river.
She dressed herself in her good blue serge frock without being told, plaited her own hair tolerably well, and was seated at the table before her younger brother Edmund had even opened his eyes. Their father, Mr Ashworth, appeared in the doorway with his coat already buttoned and his pocket watch in his hand. 'Half past seven,' he announced, as though it were an accusation. 'We leave at eight. The steamer will not wait, however prettily one might ask it.'
The walk to the embankment took the better part of twenty minutes, and Edmund dawdled at every puddle and iron gate along the way, so that by the time the family arrived the quayside was already pleasantly alive with noise. Vendors called from behind towers of oranges and wrapped parcels; a man with a concertina played something merry but indistinct; and above it all rose the great black funnel of the Celestine, breathing slow white puffs into the August sky as though she were a contented old dragon resting between adventures.
Constance had expected something magnificent and had not been disappointed. The Celestine was wider than she had imagined, her painted hull the colour of fresh cream trimmed with a band of deep scarlet, and her two paddle-wheels, still and dripping on either side, looked to Constance like the folded wings of some enormous mechanical bird waiting for the signal to take flight. She pressed close to the rail and peered down at the dark water below, which shifted and glittered like the skin of a living thing.
'Do not lean over,' said Father, placing a firm hand on her shoulder.
Once aboard, the children were given a penny each to spend at the little refreshment counter amidships. Edmund chose a bag of sherbet drops immediately and without deliberation, as was his habit in all things. Constance considered the matter for considerably longer — turning the coin in her fingers, measuring the ginger biscuits against the barley sugar sticks with a solemn expression that the attendant appeared to find quietly amusing.
The great bell rang, the crew cast off the mooring ropes, and with a tremendous shuddering groan the paddle-wheels began to turn. The vessel moved away from the quayside slowly at first, then with gathering confidence, pushing a curling white moustache of foam before her as she nosed out into the broad current. Constance forgot all about her penny. She stood at the bow and watched the familiar rooftops of the town recede until they were no larger than the models she kept on her bedroom windowsill. Then she turned her face into the breeze and felt, for one giddy and unnameable moment, entirely free.
Edmund, who had already finished his sherbet drops and was regretting nothing, came to stand beside her. 'I can see a fish,' he announced.
'You cannot,' said Constance, without looking at him.
'I can. It was silver.'
She glanced down despite herself. The river slid past in shades of grey-green and deep amber, impenetrable and silent. Of course there was no fish visible. But she did not say so, because just then the opposite bank appeared from behind a curtain of willows — a sweep of low meadow, gold-green in the summer light, with a heron standing motionless at the water's edge as though it had been carved from the same grey stone as the bridge upstream. Constance thought that she had never in her life seen anything so perfectly still and so perfectly alive at the same moment.
The return journey came all too quickly, the sun lower now and painting long amber stripes across the deck. Father gathered the children at the stern to watch the town draw near again, the familiar church spire rising above the rooftops like an old friend lifting a hand in greeting. Edmund fell asleep against Father's arm before they reached the quayside, the empty paper bag still tucked in his fist.
Constance did not sleep. She watched everything she could until the gangplank was lowered and the adventure was over, storing each last detail carefully, the way one presses a flower between the pages of a book — so that something of the day might be kept long after the colours had faded.