The Essex Serpent (19 page)

I don’t understand any of this
, thought Francis, seeing Martha withdraw, and stand beside Luke, and seeing how perfectly her face mirrored his: they looked almost a little afraid.

‘I can’t keep playing it over and over,’ said Joanna at the piano, rolling her eyes at Francis.

‘I don’t know the tune!’ said Will, ‘I never heard it before –’

‘Shall I try one like this?’ said Jo, and the piano slowed, grew rather languorous; Martha said, ‘No! No – not like that.’

‘Should I stop?’ said Joanna, raising her hands from the keys, watching her father. How odd they looked, simply standing there! They might have been John and James, uncertain if they’d committed some little household sin.

‘No: play on, play on!’ said Luke, turning the sharp points of his mischief on himself and wincing as he did it: he would’ve liked to slam the piano shut.

Then the rector said, ‘No: I can’t – I’ve forgotten the steps.’ Joanna played on – the clock ticked – still he did not move.

‘I don’t think,’ said Cora, ‘that I ever knew them.’ Her hand fell from his shoulder – she stepped back, and said, ‘Stella, I have disappointed you.’

‘Poor show altogether,’ said Charles Ambrose, looking with regret into his empty glass.

‘Best stop playing now, I think,’ said Will, turning to his daughter, giving her a look which was almost an apology. He made a deep bow before his dancing-partner, and said: ‘You’d’ve been better with anyone but me – I was never trained for this.’

‘Oh – please,’ said Cora, ‘the fault’s all mine. I’m good for nothing but books and walking. But Stella, you are shivering – are you cold?’ She turned away from Will, and stooped to take Stella’s small hands in hers.

‘I don’t feel it,’ said Stella, glittering, ‘but I suppose Jo ought not to stay so late.’

‘Yes!’ said Will, rather swiftly, as if grateful: ‘She certainly ought not, and we should see what havoc the boys have wrought while we were gone … Cora, will you forgive us if we go?’

‘Nearly midnight after all,’ said Charles, peering at his watch. ‘The clock will strike and make white mice and pumpkins out of us all – Katherine? Where is my Kate! Where is my wife?’

‘Here I am, as always,’ said Katherine Ambrose. She held out his coat, and watched as Cora grew brisk, polite, her manners beyond reproach. She pressed the blue silk cushion on Stella (‘Darling, you must: plainly they had you in mind when they made it …’), and kissed Joanna on the cheek (‘I could never play a note, you know – how clever you are!’). Still, Katherine was not quite fooled. There ought to have been nothing in a brief waltz on the bare boards – nothing in those polite familiar steps to take anyone by surprise. What then had caused that curious moment, with so sudden a change in the air she’d hardly have been surprised to hear a thunderclap? Well – she shrugged, and drew down her husband for a kiss – it was late, and after all Will Ransome was a clergyman and not a courtier.

Cora opened the door and the scent of the Blackwater came in. There was a curious bluish light in the sky, and she shivered, though the air was warm. From beneath the table Francis saw how his mother held out her hands to each guest as they crossed the threshold – ‘Thank you so much – thank you: promise you’ll come again!’ – and how vivid she seemed, how bright, as if however late the hour she’d never need her sleep.

William Ransome left with his wife on one arm and his daughter on the other, almost (Francis began to peel another orange) as though he’d buckled on a coat of armour. Cora – even brighter, more vivid – seemed somehow to sweep them all out onto the common. She closed the door, and clapped her hands together in satisfaction, but it seemed to her watchful son that a false note rang out as clearly as if Jo still sat at the ill-tuned piano. Why had William Ransome said nothing as he went out – why had his mother not offered him her hand – what caused Martha and the Imp to survey her silently now, as if she’d disappointed them? Well – he crawled out from beneath the table – what use was it to observe the human species and try to understand it? Their rules were fathomless and no more fixed than the wind.

After Francis had been put to bed, reciting the Fibonacci series as another child might a fairy tale, Martha and Luke set about clearing the tables and unfurling the carpet, crushing buds of lavender strewn across the floor. Cora had briefly been very animated – hadn’t it been a good night, she’d said, wasn’t Jo a clever girl, although music probably was not her vocation – then said that she was tired, and needed her bed. Her friends had watched her run barefoot upstairs and grown companionable in their fear. ‘I don’t even think she
knows
,’ said Luke, drinking the last of Charles’s good red wine: ‘She’s like a child, I don’t think she can see it, what they’ve done – and all the while Stella there watching –’

‘Every day his name comes up, every day – what would he think of
this
, how he would laugh at
that
– but really what
have
they done, it was nothing, no-one else saw –’

‘And in her letters too – on every page! What can
he
give her? A country vicar afraid the world’s changing. And besides, he already has a silly wife, isn’t that enough, must he have Cora too –’

‘She’s collecting him’ – Martha plucked grapes from their stem and rolled them across the table – ‘that’s what it is. She’d put him in a glass jar if she could, and label his parts in Latin, and keep him on a shelf.’

‘I’d kill him if I could,’ said Luke, appalled at the truth of it, flexing finger and thumb as if he felt a scalpel there – ‘She’s going away from me …’

They surveyed each other, feeling all their antipathy ebb, and how the air was thick with the uselessness of their longing, and no way for it to be spent. In the dim room the surgeon’s eyes blackened; he watched Martha put her hands up to her hair – saw how her green dress pulled at the seam beneath her arm; he moved towards her, and she turned away to the foot of the stairs. ‘Come with me,’ she said, reaching for him: ‘Come up with me.’

The windows in her room were open and light was fading on the wall. She said, ‘There may be blood,’ and he said, ‘Better that way – better’; and it was Cora’s mouth he kissed, and Cora’s hand she placed where she wanted it most. Each was only second best: they wore each other like hand-me-down coats.

Across the common, in the shadow of the All Saints spire, Joanna slept with her slippers on, and Stella dozed with her head on her new blue pillow. Some distance away, approaching the marsh, Will walked alone, raging. Desire had never troubled him: he’d married Stella young and happily, and their hunger was innocent and easily sated. Oh, he loved Cora – he knew that: had known it at once – but that also did not trouble him: if she’d been a boy or a dowager he’d’ve loved her no less, and prized her grey eyes just the same. He was a Bible scholar, he knew its various names for various loves: he read the words of St Paul to the churches and their sacred affection summoned Cora’s name:
I thank my God on every remembrance of you
…

But something had shifted there in the warm room seasoned with briny air and roses blooming in every corner – he’d put his hand on her waist and seen her throat move as she spoke – was that it, or how her scarf had slipped from her shoulder and he’d seen the scar and wondered if it had hurt, and how, and whether she’d minded? He thought of how he’d gripped her, of hearing his fingernails rasp against the fabric of her dress; of how she’d looked at him with her level long look. He thought she might have been a little afraid of him, but no: it wasn’t fear that darkened her eyes but a challenge, or satisfaction – had she
smiled
?

He walked on to the mouth of the estuary, not knowing what to do with his desire, only that he could not take it to Stella; he knew he’d touch her and find her for the first time slight and insubstantial – he had in mind something more like fighting, and it appalled him; he went out to the water’s edge and with quick movements spent himself on the black marsh with something like a bark and with a dog’s joy.

3

Long after midnight, as the year slipped past the half-way mark, Francis Seaborne went out. Into his left pocket he put the silver fork taken from the Colchester ruin, and into his right a grey stone perforated with a hole into which his little finger fit. Upstairs Cora lay pressing the scar on her collarbone, willing the pain back; in a room elsewhere Luke and Martha fell apart. No-one wondered where Frankie was: if they thought of him at all, it was first with unease, and then with the comfortable certainty that this inscrutable child was keeping himself safely to himself.

No-one had ever tried to fathom Frankie’s habit of night-walking; it had been chalked up as just another oddity. That he couldn’t bear to be in company, but would haunt bedroom doorways in the smallest hours, was entirely in keeping with that baffling boy. If anyone had asked, he’d have told them it was only that he tried to understand the world and its workings: why (for example) did the wheels of a cab seem to turn against the direction of travel? Why was it that he didn’t hear a falling object strike the earth until after he’d seen it land? Why did he raise his right hand but his reflection raise its left? He watched his mother with her mud and rocks, and made no connection between his own quest and hers. She looked down: he looked up. She was no help at all. Of all the men and women he’d met, he only had patience for Stella Ransome. He saw how she gathered her blue stones and flowers, and thought they understood each other. He also saw the too-bright colour of her eyes, and wondered why no-one spoke of it: but wasn’t it just like them all, to see but not observe?

Out he went under the shadows the moon made, seeing how they lay in parallel, wondering why. The evening’s muddle had unsettled him – he’d watched so carefully but found no order or reason in what he’d seen – and out alone in the night there’d be problems more readily solved. He thought he might go down to the Blackwater and see for himself what waited there in the estuary. It struck him as unjust that he alone of all the Aldwinter children had had no glimpse of the beast, not even in his dreams. Across the common, under Traitor’s Oak to High Lane, heading east, while all around low voices murmured and bonfires burned to ward off what spirits braved the modern age. Someone played the fiddle; two girls passed him dressed in white; there was a nightingale in the hedge. When he reached High Lane the common fell away, and the noise of it: there was the scent of wood smoke and a delighted yelp away to his left, and then he might have been alone in the world.

He reached the salt-marsh in sight of World’s End, thinking to find the point where the Pole Star pinned the sky in place, or see the moon give its counterfeit light, but encountered instead a black sheet on which a net of vivid blue was stitched. It was as if he looked not up into the vaulted sky, but down at the surface of a lake with sunlight on its ripples. From north to south above the pale horizon fine shreds of blue light hung, and between them showed the sky’s dark blue. Now and then, as if caught by wind, a slow movement passed across and the bright net closed and widened. The light it gave off was not borrowed, like a white cloud ringed in sunlight, but seemed entirely its own: it might have been many fine lightning bolts fixed in place, burning inexplicably blue. Francis was transfixed with joy. It rose in him so suddenly and so completely he could do nothing but laugh, frightened at the strangeness of his own delight.

As he stood watching – craning his neck too far, so that in the morning his mother wondered why he held his head so strangely – a movement on the salt-flats caught his eye. The blue lights made the world a little brighter than it ought to have been, and the estuary surface showed oily black with pricks of blue upon the surface. Between the water’s edge and the shore, not far from Leviathan’s ribs, a bundle of cloth moved. There was a sound, very faint, like the snorting of an animal; the bundle shifted and lengthened on the mud, and then was still.

Curious, Francis turned to watch, peering into the dim air. If this was the Blackwater beast, he thought, it was a pitiful thing and ought to be drowned. The snorting paused a while as the bundle edged towards Leviathan, then began again, only this time it ended in what was certainly a cough, and then a long gasp at the air.

Francis, unafraid, came nearer. The bundle convulsed, then with a groan raised itself, and Francis saw the greasy layers of a black coat and dense fur collar, and above it the wild head of an old man he’d seen once or twice over at the church where the villagers were buried. Cracknell – that was it: a stinking old thing who’d once held up his sleeve and shown the boy the earwigs scuttling there. The groan ended in a fit of coughing that doubled him over again: he clutched the coat closer and fell silent.

Cracknell, with his boots at the water’s edge and his eyesight failing, saw the thin boy with the black hair neatly combed and tried to call out. But it was as if the air had edges that caught at his throat as he breathed, and each time the name came to his mouth (Freddie, was it?) the coughing set up again. At last his breath returned; he called out ‘Boy! Boy!’ and beckoned at Francis, swaying on the path not fifteen feet away.

‘I don’t know what you’re doing,’ said Francis. What
was
he doing? Dying, possibly, but what a strange place to be dying in. His father had died with a clean white sheet pulled up to his chin. He turned away a moment to look up – there, the net widened and in places broke, and blue-black sky showed between fragments of light.

‘Get someone,’ said Cracknell, and after that fell to muttering at length, exasperated or amused, fixing Francis with an imploring and furious glare.

Francis crouched, and clasping his knees surveyed Cracknell with mild interest. A moth had settled in the fibres of the coat’s fur collar, and elsewhere the fabric showed patches of pale stains that might even have been mould (could mould take hold on clothing? He resolved to find out). ‘
Ransome
,’ said Cracknell, who did not quite want to make his last confession, but wouldn’t have minded a kind face being the last he looked on. He put out a hand to tug the boy’s coat –
please
, he meant to say – but the effort was too great.

The boy tilted his head and took in the name. ‘Ransome?’ he said. He supposed that made sense. The man with the white strip at his throat had visited three villagers in the past weeks (he had counted) of whom at least two had died. Did he bring death, or only ease them into it? He assumed the latter, but it was important to be sure. Examining the old man, Francis saw foam gather at the corners of his mouth and his chest rear inside his coat. Even in the near-dark it was possible to see the man’s flesh take on a waxy cast, and already the bones of the sockets showed blue around his sinking eyes. It was both frightening and commonplace: probably this was always the way the end came.

Cracknell discovered he could not speak: it would waste the breath he eked out of the cool air. What was the boy doing, crouching placidly behind him, turning now and then to look up and smiling every time he did it? His heart lurched in its cavity: surely he’d go running now, and fetch Ransome, who’d come with a lamp and a good thick blanket to lay over his shaking limbs? But Francis, who knew what was coming, saw no sense in wasting time. Besides, it struck him that sharing the wonder that all the while unfurled over their heads might not halve his own pleasure, but double it. He stooped over the man, and said, ‘Look,’ and taking a handful of grey hair tugged at his drooping head so that Cracknell had no choice but to turn away from the black water and up to what he’d once thought was the heavens. ‘Look,’ said the boy: ‘See?’ and he saw the old man’s filmy eyes widen and his mouth gape. The shining scraps of cloud were fading as the dawn came, but had gathered into a pale arc that split the sky, and as they watched a skylark flew up ecstatically singing.

Then Francis lay beside him on the marsh, not caring for the mud that seeped through his clothes, or for the reek that came off the old man’s body, or the morning chill. Their two heads touched now and then as Cracknell, dazed, turned his head to take in the sight, sometimes trying out a scrap of a hymn:
it is well with my soul
, he sang, doubting it less now than ever. When the life went out of him it was on a long untroubled breath, and Francis patted his hand and said, ‘There, there,’ feeling quite satisfied, because what he loved above anything else was for things to go as he’d thought they would.