60 pages • 2 hours read
Once Upon a River
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Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 27 Summary: “The Longest Day”
Summer begins with a lot of rain. Owen Albright marries his housekeeper on the summer solstice and hires Daunt to take the photographs. The wedding party arrives at the Swan to celebrate, where talk eventually returns to The Child. Albright ties himself into her story. After the wedding, everyone travels to the fair, where there is entertainment and goods for sale. The Vaughans take The Child to the fair as well, though both are in poor moods because The Child hasn’t spoken yet. Vaughan is also at odds because he still doesn’t believe The Child is Amelia, a secret he keeps from his wife.
They reach the fair and people pay a lot of attention to The Child, thinking her capable of miracles. Helena and The Child go to watch the boat races, but Vaughan is waylaid by a farmer. He is then pulled into a fortune teller’s tent. When the woman reads his palm, he is angry because he thinks she is reciting rumors, but she claims that The Child “is not [his] child” (289). Vaughan realizes that the fortune teller is a man in disguise. The man makes it clear he intends to blackmail Vaughan and he leaves the tent. He hears Helena screaming and runs to her.
The Armstrong family walks the fairgrounds with a written apology from Robin. Armstrong looks for him in the crowd as they enjoy the festivities. He finds Rita helping organize Daunt’s photography stand. The two start to plan a photography session for his farm when he spots a picture from three years ago that makes him freeze. He buys it and tells Rita he wishes to speak to Daunt later. He tries to find his family but spots Mrs. Eavis leaving a tent. She avoids him and he chases her but is distracted when he hears Helena yelling.
Vaughan reaches Helena to find her crying on the ground as a woman stand between her and The Child, calling the girl “Alice.” Robin arrives and the woman points him out as the father, thrusting The Child into his arms before vanishing. Helena becomes inconsolable and is carried back to the house as The Child falls asleep in Robin’s arms. Rain begins to fall as many people go to the Swan
Chapter 28 Summary: “Philosophy at the Swan”
The drinkers at the Swan discuss the story of the day, then debate The Child’s true identity and what happened on the night of Amelia Vaughan’s kidnapping. A cressman confidently tells Daunt “it was that nursemaid” before Jonathan approaches (299). He asks to tell Daunt a story, but makes a mistake and leaves, annoyed with himself (300). Beszant, the boat mender, asserts that The Child cannot be Alice because, if her mother really threw her into the river, she would have had to float upstream to reach the Swan. Another regular argues that if she can come back to life after being dead, anything is possible. As the debate grows more heated, Daunt goes to his boat.
Chapter 29 Summary: “The Shortest Night”
Rita and the housekeeper take care of Helena as she falls apart in grief. Rita gives her a draught to help her sleep. When she wakes, Rita asks Helena if she knows she’s pregnant; Helena initially denies it, shocked and confused, but then “[a] small smile [pulls] feebly at her lips, and the tear she [sheds is] not the same kind of tear that had wetted her pillow before” (304). Rita walks into the rain and is overwhelmed by her own mourning for The Child. She cries as she walks past the Swan, trying to avoid the crowds. Daunt saves her from interacting with others by pulling her up onto his boat and pouring her a drink. They talk about Mrs. Eavis and Daunt is surprised by her frankness regarding brothels. Rita drinks several glasses of wine and describes the violence of childbirth. Daunt tries to comfort her, and she changes the topic. The two suspect that Robin and Mrs. Eavis conspired together to get The Child back into his care. As Daunt pours the last of the wine, one of Margot’s daughters comes aboard for Rita. The women go to the Swan, where Joe is ill. Rita informs him he has half a year left to live. She overhears an argument about evolution while she eats dinner.
Chapter 30 Summary: “Great Lakes Underground”
Lily goes to the parson and tells him what happened to The Child. She is too distressed to be comforted as she worries about The Child’s wellbeing. She reflects on her own childhood, which changed when her mother remarried and her stepbrother, Victor Nash, entered her life. Even as a child, Lily blamed herself for her mother’s abusive relationship. At the cottage, Victor beats her and mocks her for being afraid of water. He then rapes her.
Chapter 31 Summary: “Two Strange Things”
At the Armstrong farm, Armstrong’s other children are besotted with The Child. As soon as they left the fair, Robin had given The Child to Bess and returned home to Oxford. Bess sends her children to bed and tucks The Child in while trying to recognize some of her features. Bess and Armstrong wonder if the scene was orchestrated but struggle to understand Robin’s motivations. When they fail to come to a conclusion, Armstrong finally shows Bess the picture he found at the fair—a picture of Maud, his missing pig.
Part 3 Analysis
The narrator continues to frame the story’s events using astrological events, skipping ahead to summer. This framework is exploited to showcase the similarities and differences between the two solstices, reinforcing the cyclical heartbreak that occurs. The Child is removed from one family and given to another that is totally different. This deepens the mystery around her: Both the Armstrongs and the Vaughans struggle to be familiar with her as much as they struggle with losing her.
Although six months have passed since The Child’s appearance, she continues to be the center of many dialogues that perpetuate the mystique of her survival. This reinforces the Importance of Stories. At the Swan, Owen Albright ties The Child’s story to his own. He makes himself part of the mythology and makes her seem much larger and more powerful than she is. Similarly, when The Vaughans take The Child to the fair, they are thronged by people who believe she is a miracle and capable of giving blessings. Helena is dismissive, but only because she refuses to believe The Child is anyone but Amelia.
Helena is so insistent that the girl is Amelia that she remains intentionally ignorant of the facts surrounding the girl’s drowning. She instead focuses on any similarities between the two-year-old she knew and the four-year-old in front of her, using those similarities to dismiss any alternative lore. Vaughan is also guilty of this mythos erasure, but he engages with it intentionally. While he internally believes that The Child is not his daughter, he externally supports Helena’s façade. He makes sacrifices to support the story they’ve created despite knowing for a fact that The Child is not Amelia. Vaughan is driven by his love for his wife and his growing care for The Child, regardless of her true identity.
Robin Armstrong further complicates The Child’s story when he arranges a scene that names The Child as his missing daughter Alice. The Vaughans’ worst fears come to life: Robin claims The Child and robs them of a daughter all over again, an act that erases the story the Vaughans have created and replaces it with a new tale.
Grief resurfaces in this section. The Vaughans experience a regression in The Child’s absence, as Vaughan becomes numb and Helena reenters a depressive state. Even Rita, the voice of reason, suffers her own breakdown at the loss of The Child, an emotional response that surprises her with its intensity. This mourning from all involved parties reinforce that they are mourning more than just The Child: They are grieving the future she represents.
Even as Bess Armstrong welcomes The Child, she internally doubts the girl’s identity, just like Vaughan did. As she tucks the girl into bed, she remembers “the letter that had started it all, the torn fragments in Robin’s pocket that she and Armstrong had pieced so unsuccessfully together. ‘Alice, Alice, Alice,’ she had repeated then. The name was available to her tongue tonight, but she hesitated to pronounce it” (321). This is a direct continuation of Vaughan’s struggle to call The Child “Amelia,” hinting that the girl may not be Alice. These continued doubts add to the ongoing intrigue, making it clear that the reader is far from a resolution.
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