فصل 10

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THE DROWNING POOL (UNPUBLISHED)

DANIELLE ABBOTT

PROLOGUE

When I was seventeen, I saved my sister from drowning.

But that, believe it or not, is not where all this started.

There are people who are drawn to water, who retain some vestigial primal sense of where it flows. I believe that I am one of them. I am most alive when I am near the water, when I am near this water. This is the place where I learned to swim, the place where I learned to inhabit nature and my body in the most joyous and pleasurable way.

Since I moved to Beckford in 2008, I have swum in the river almost every day, in winter and in summer, sometimes with my daughter and sometimes alone, and I have become fascinated by the idea that this place, my place of ecstasy, could be for others a place of dread and terror.

When I was seventeen, I saved my sister from drowning, but I had become obsessed with the Beckford pool long before that. My parents were storytellers, my mother especially; it was from her mouth that I first heard Libby’s tragic story, of the shocking slaughter at the Wards’ cottage, the terrible tale of the boy who watched his mother jump. I made her tell me again and again. I remember my father’s dismay (“These stories aren’t really for children”) and my mother’s resistance (“Of course they are! They’re history”).

She sowed a seed in me, and long before my sister went into the water, long before I picked up a camera or set pen to paper, I spent hours daydreaming and imagining what it must have been like, what it must have felt like, how cold the water must have been for Libby that day.

The mystery that has consumed me as an adult is, of course, that of my own family. It shouldn’t be a mystery, but it is, because despite my efforts to build bridges, my sister has not spoken to me for many years. In the well of her silence, I have tried to imagine what drew her to the river in the dead of night, and even I, with my singular imagination, have failed. Because my sister was never the dramatic one, never the one for a bold gesture. She could be sly, cunning, as vengeful as the water itself, but I am still at a loss. I wonder if I always will be.

I decided, while in the process of trying to understand myself and my family and the stories we tell each other, that I would try to make sense of all the Beckford stories, that I would write down all the last moments, as I imagined them, in the lives of the women who went to the Beckford Drowning Pool.

Its name carries weight; and yet, what is it? A bend in the river, that’s all. A meander. You’ll find it if you follow the river in all its twists and turns, swelling and flooding, giving life and taking it, too. The river is by turns cold and clean, stagnant and polluted; it snakes through forest and cuts like steel through the soft Cheviot Hills, and then, just north of Beckford, it slows. It rests, just for a while, at the Drowning Pool.

This is an idyllic spot: oaks shade the path, beech and plane trees dot the hillsides, and there’s a sloping sandy bank on the south side. A place to paddle, to take the kids; the perfect picnic spot for a sunny day.

But appearances are deceptive, for this is a deathly place. The water, dark and glassy, hides what lies beneath: weeds to entangle you, to drag you down; jagged rocks to slice through flesh. Above looms the grey slate cliff: a dare, a provocation.

This is the place that, over centuries, has claimed the lives of Libby Seeton, Mary Marsh, Anne Ward, Ginny Thomas, Lauren Slater, Katie Whittaker, and more—countless others, nameless and faceless. I wanted to ask why, and how, and what their lives and deaths tell us about ourselves. There are those who would rather not ask those questions, who would rather hush, suppress, silence. But I have never been one for quiet.

In this work, this memoir of my life and the Beckford pool, I wanted to start not with drowning, but with swimming. Because that is where it begins: with the swimming of witches—the ordeal by water. There, at my pool, that peaceful beauty spot not a mile from where I sit right now, was where they brought them and bound them and threw them into the river, to sink or to swim.

Some say the women left something of themselves in the water; some say it retains some of their power, for ever since then it has drawn to its shores the unlucky, the desperate, the unhappy, the lost. They come here to swim with their sisters.