Chapter 2
— The Lock-Keeper's Hands
Hands closed around my arm. That is the first thing I remember clearly after the dark, after the cold, after the long silence of the water. Hands, strong and certain, pulling me upward, and then air, sharp and wonderful, and coughing that shook my whole body, and a voice saying, easy, easy, I have you, do not fight me. I did fight, for a moment, because fear does not leave the body just because rescue has arrived. Then I felt solid stone beneath my back, and a coat thrown over me, and the voice again, low and steady, telling me to breathe, telling me I was out of the river now, telling me I was safe.
I opened my eyes. Above me was a sky full of stars, and the shape of a man kneeling beside me, his hair wet, his sleeves rolled to the elbow, his face lined and weathered by years of outdoor work. He was breathing hard, as if he had run a long way or swum one. Water dripped from his chin onto the stone. Behind him, the lock gates stood dark and massive, and the river moved past them, black and silver, unconcerned. He asked if I could hear him, and I nodded, and he asked if anything was broken, and I shook my head, and then I began to shiver so violently that my teeth struck together and I could not speak at all.
He did not waste time on questions. He lifted me as if I weighed nothing, though I am not a small woman, and carried me up the stone steps away from the water. I remember the warmth of his arms through my wet dress, and the smell of river water and woodsmoke on his coat, and the way he kept talking as he walked, telling me where we were going, telling me his cottage was just above the lock, telling me there was a fire there and dry blankets and hot tea. He said his name was Kieran. He said it twice, as if he wanted me to hold on to it. I tried to say my name in return, and all that came out was a cough, and he said, later, there is time for that later.
The cottage was small and warm, and the fire was already burning low in the grate. He set me down in a chair beside it, wrapped me in blankets, and knelt to build the fire higher, feeding it with dry wood until the flames rose and the room filled with light. My hands were blue at the fingertips, and I held them out to the heat, and watched the colour come back into them slowly, as if I were watching someone else's hands. He brought tea, strong and sweet, in a chipped mug, and held it to my lips until I could hold it myself. He asked no questions while I drank. He only watched me, the way a man watches a boat he has pulled from a storm, checking for damage, waiting to see if she will hold.
When the shaking eased, I looked at him properly for the first time. He was perhaps sixty, with grey in his hair and lines at the corners of his eyes, and hands that looked as if they had worked with rope and iron all his life. There was nothing soft about him, and nothing unkind. He wore a worn sweater and heavy boots, and he moved around the cottage with the economy of a man who lives alone and knows where everything is. He put a kettle back on the stove. He hung my wet dress near the fire, with a discretion that told me he had done this before for someone, or that he simply understood what dignity required. He gave me a dry shirt and a blanket, and turned his back while I changed, and I was grateful in a way I could not yet put into words.
I told him I had fallen from a boat, and he nodded, as if falls from boats were a thing he had seen before. I did not tell him I had been pushed. Not yet. I needed to know who he was first, and whether I could trust him, and whether the man who had pushed me might come looking. I asked how he had found me, and he said the current had brought me to the lock, and he had seen something pale in the water, and he had gone in after it without stopping to think. He said it plainly, without pride, as if going into a cold river at night for a stranger were simply part of keeping a lock. Perhaps, for him, it was.
The tea warmed me from the inside, and the fire warmed me from the outside, and slowly my thoughts began to gather themselves into order. I was alive. I was cold, and wet, and exhausted, but I was alive, and the man who had tried to end my life believed I was dead in the Danube. That belief was the only advantage I had, and I knew, even then, in that small warm room with the fire crackling, that I must not waste it. I looked at Kieran across the firelight, and I saw a man who had pulled a stranger from the river and asked for nothing in return, and I made a decision. I would tell him the truth. Not all of it, not yet, but enough. My name was Theodora Haversham. I was the founder-chairwoman of the Haversham Danube Line. And someone had pushed me from my own boat.