Jane Hardstaff - River Daughter

Could a ghost hear your thoughts?

She bobbed her head above the water to take another gulp of air and when she sank back down, there it was.

The face.

Green eyes, hair coiling, arms reaching. A gentle face, smooth as milk. A mirror of herself. And Moss could not help but stretch her own arms towards the ghostly figure.

She felt her hands clasped by ice-cold fingers.

Who are you?

The gentle ghost tried to smile, as though she had understood Moss’s unspoken question.

But something was wrong.

The face was changing. The milk-smooth skin was flaking away. Peeling, tearing, paper-thin flakes hanging from her cheeks. The ghostly mouth parted as if to say something, then began dissolving before Moss’s eyes. Now it gaped at Moss, half torn, teeth rooted in bare bone. A dead face. A skull face, lit by strange candle eyes. A face Moss knew too well.

The Riverwitch.

Moss wrenched her hands from the bone-cold grasp and burst to the surface. She scrabbled backwards, splashing and stumbling, trying to reach the bank. But winding its way round her ankles was the twisting waterweed, holding her fast to the river bed.

Up through the clear water rose the Riverwitch. Her tattered dress rippled outwards, her skull face breaking the surface of the river.

‘River Daughter . . . now the Blacksmith’s Daughter, are you not?’

‘I . . . I thought you had gone,’ said Moss.

The Riverwitch said nothing.

‘Why?’ asked Moss. ‘Why have you come back?’

‘You know why.’ The Witch’s eyes flared. ‘I saved your life when you were born. But in return a promise was made. You were to come to me on your twelfth birthday.’

‘And I did come. That day on the river. I jumped. I gave myself to you.’

Above the trickle of the river the Witch’s voice hissed, ‘Tell me, what do you remember of that day?’

Moss opened her mouth to speak. Some of it was so clear – stepping from the raft into the murky water where the Riverwitch lay waiting, Salter’s cry as she was dragged down. But after that the pictures in her head ran thin as a poor man’s broth. There was the darkness of the deep river. The bone-arms of the Riverwitch circling her. Moss’s own arms embracing that cold body. And as she’d drifted into blackness, the grasp of the Witch had slackened. Then she remembered no more.

‘Why?’ said Moss. ‘Why did you let me go?’

The Riverwitch inclined her head slowly. ‘The embrace of a child.’ She spread her arms. ‘The embrace of a child has the power to thaw a Witch’s frozen heart.’

‘So . . .’

‘So that day I let you go. But do not forget. You were promised to me. A child born in water, you shall return to water. You belong to me.’

‘No!’ Moss kicked out at the coils of weed that bound her feet, but they held fast.

‘Do not struggle. You cannot fight me, River Daughter. I am the swirl and suck of the river. Its currents and its mysteries pass through me. They have made me strong. And I have watched you swimming the river. I’ve seen your eyes open to its treasures and its terrors.’

Something clicked inside Moss’s head.

‘The mud yesterday, in the river . . . It was sucking me down,’ she said, ‘but something pulled me free. Was it you ?’

The Witch’s face stretched into a painful smile.

‘But why?’ said Moss. ‘Why save me again, if you are going to take me now?’

The water began to churn and the Witch grew suddenly agitated, her body twisting, the fronds of her dress whisking this way and that.

‘There is something you can do for me,’ said the Witch slowly, ‘A way for you to earn your freedom.’

‘My freedom?’ echoed Moss.

‘What I ask will not be easy. But if you succeed, I will release you.’

The churning river quietened and for a few moments there was just silence between them, the Witch’s body swaying in the current.

‘Isn’t that what you want, River Daughter? Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted?’

Moss hesitated. ‘What is it?’ she asked. ‘This thing you want me to do?’

‘All in good time, River Daughter. First you must leave this village.’

‘Leave? Leave Pa and Salter?’

‘Leave this place. Go back. To London.’

‘But London is miles and miles. Three days walk at least.’

‘You shall travel by river.’

‘But I can’t just disappear. Pa needs me.’

The Witch’s lantern eyes held her. How could I have mistaken this face for my mother’s ? thought Moss. She’d wanted to believe it so badly. But all the time it was the Riverwitch.

The Witch held up two ghostly hands. The tips of her fingers were black. She gestured to the dead fish on the bank.

‘It has begun,’ she said.

‘What has begun?’

But the Witch’s torn body was sinking back into the river. As the weed closed over her head, her words mixed with the trickle of water.

‘The river rots . . .’

Then Moss felt the tendrils loosen around her feet.

The Riverwitch had gone.

It was unthinkable.

Wasn’t it?

Moss lay back on her pallet staring at the ceiling.

Even if she took Salter’s boat, she’d never been further than a few miles down river. Salter had told her, though, that if you went far enough the gentle chalk river gathered speed until it met the wide path of the Thames. Flowing past fields and towns to London. There it became the murky torrent she knew, raging through the arches of London Bridge and all the way out to the sea.

But why did the Witch want her to go there? What did she want from Moss?

She rolled over and kicked off her blanket. She couldn’t breathe in here.

What if she didn’t go? What if she stayed here? If she never went near a river again, the Witch couldn’t touch her.

Freedom . . . isn’t that what you’ve always wanted?

This past year and a half here in the village, with Pa and Salter, Moss had experienced more freedom than she’d ever dreamt was possible. And now she thought about it, the river was a huge part of her new life. Salter fished it, she swam in it. To run from the Riverwitch now would mean giving all that up.

Softly she slipped from her pallet and tweaked the curtain. The forge was heavy with Pa’s deep sleep. No noise from Salter. In those early days, when Salter had let her stay in his cosy shack, Moss had discovered he was a light sleeper, always half an eye open in case of trouble. But since coming to live in the forge he’d slept like a boy who’d been turned to stone.