The Essex Serpent (30 page)

Charles interposed himself between the two, receiving a light slap on his arm: ‘Joanna,’ he said, ‘I’m the first to admire your forthrightness but on this occasion fear you may’ve over-stepped the mark – sir, I am sorry for my … really, Jo,
what
am I to call you? … I am sorry you have been attacked in this disgraceful fashion! Perhaps I can make amends?’ Coins rained into Taylor’s upturned hat; the men shook hands. ‘Now then,’ said Charles, fervently wishing himself elsewhere: ‘What possessed you, child?’ Joanna was not listening, only stood looking back and forth between Taylor and a thin lad in a dirty jacket. She’d gone very white, and her face seemed to flicker between a woman’s fury and a child’s distress, and all the while the boy stood staring at the ground. Charles, baffled, put out his hand to Joanna; then she said – gulping a little at a threatened sob – ‘They all said you’d been stealing from the shop, but I told them you’d never do that, and then when you didn’t come we thought the Trouble’d got you and you were here all along – Naomi Banks, I should give you a black eye!’ The girl looked for a moment as if she might do exactly that, then instead threw herself at what Charles by now realised was no boy, but a thin girl whose hair had been lopped short and stood out in grubby ringlets, glinting copper. She stood aloof from Joanna – now almost hysterical with weeping – crossing her arms with an expression of hauteur.

‘Trouble?’ said Taylor, thinking once again of dogs he might’ve had: ‘Stealing? My Ginger? I confess,’ he said, stirring at the coins in his hat, ‘to be at a loss.’

‘I think we can infer,’ said Charles, ‘that your employee here has been having you on, and is a girl called Naomi, and a friend of Joanna’s.’ Here ended his understanding, since no-one had thought to tell him of the boatman’s missing child. The red-haired girl ran out of her store of pride, and with a choking cry returned Joanna’s embrace. ‘I wanted to go home, honest I did, but I was too scared to be by water and no-one wanted me anyway!’ She drew back, and looked severely at Joanna, and her eyelashes were spiked with tears. ‘You didn’t want to be my friend anymore and everyone was scared of me because of what I did at school and that thing in the water and I didn’t mean it: I don’t even know what happened, just that I was so afraid I couldn’t stop laughing …’

‘Ginger?’ said Taylor, summing up the situation as best he could: ‘Didn’t I look after you all right?’ Slyly he looked at Charles, who added another coin or two to the insatiable hat.

‘It’s all my fault, isn’t it – all my fault – I’ve been a bad friend …’

‘It was that woman,’ said Naomi, whose freckles showed brightly in the runnels of her tears: ‘That woman came and after that nothing was all right. She put it there! She put the monster in the river!’

‘Haven’t you heard?’ said Joanna, finding she’d grown tall enough to draw the girl’s head to her shoulder: ‘It’s gone, the Essex Serpent – it’s gone, there’s nothing there, there never was – just a poor old fish, a big one, and it died in the water – come back, Nomi’ – she kissed the girl’s hand, feeling on her mouth the ruin’s dust and the town’s grime – ‘don’t you want to see your dad?’ At this the last of Naomi’s pride departed, and she fell to crying, not violently like a child, but with the steady hopelessness of a woman. When Katherine Ambrose arrived, John on one hand and James on the other, she saw Joanna seated on a marble plinth in a
pietà
, a thin girl cradled in her lap, crooning what sounded very like a child’s idea of a spell.

‘I’m afraid,’ said Charles, looking at his watch, ‘we seem to’ve acquired another one.’

11

Stella in her blue bower heard her children coming and held out her arms: she knew the rap of John’s shoe on the doorstep, and James’s considered tread; she knew how Joanna would throw down her coat and come running long-legged, full-tilt. Then there was Will at her door, his smile that of a man bringing gifts, triumphant: ‘Darling, here they are – they’ve come back and tall as telegraph poles’ – then, quietly, to Joanna: ‘Go carefully: she’s weaker than she seems.’

Joanna had dreaded seeing her mother lolling on a sickbed, gaunt and grey, listlessly thumbing at a blanket, but here was Stella starlike, with eyes gleaming and a touch of rouge; she’d dressed for their arrival with turquoise beads looped three times round her neck and a shawl on which blue-winged butterflies flew. ‘
Jojo
,’ said Stella, straining towards them – she could not reach them soon enough. ‘My Joanna,’ she said, holding their names on her tongue: ‘James. John.’ How well she knew their particular scent – of John’s hair, which had always been a little like warm oats, and of James, who had something sharper about him, keen as his wits. Joanna felt beneath the shawl to brittle bones, and shuddered; her mother felt it, and a complicit look passed between them.

‘I like your necklace,’ said John, admiringly, then presenting half a bar of chocolate said, ‘I brought you a present.’ Stella knew this for a sacrifice, and kissed him, and turned to James, who had not ceased talking since he crossed the threshold, about the
Cutty Sark
and the Tube, and how he’d been down to see Bazalgette’s sewers. ‘One at a time,’ she said, ‘one at a time: I don’t want to miss anything.’

‘Don’t tire her,’ said Will, watching from the threshold, throat aching with pleasure and sadness: he could’ve stood there an hour seeing Stella hold them to her breast – he wanted to feel them in his own arms, warm and compact and wriggling; and all the while he wondered how he’d frame it for Cora, by letter or word: how it would please her, how her grey eyes would blur.
God help me: I am severed
, he thought, but no – it was not that he was there in part, and in part in the grey house across the common; he was wholly present in both. ‘Don’t tire her,’ he said, coming forward, finding himself drawn in by small hands: ‘A bit longer, then let her sleep.’

‘I have you all now,’ said Stella. ‘I have you all here now, sweethearts: be with me now before I go.’

12

Down at the quay Banks sat beside his struck sails dully counting out his losses – wife, boat, child, all slipped through his hands like so much salt water. Behind the sea-fog the estuary swelled in the coming tide, and he recalled the black-haired boy by the fire in the morning, and how he’d dragged him towards the shore. ‘Didn’t see a thing,’ he said into the dim air: ‘Didn’t see a damn thing’; but in his mind’s eye there it was – the strange news, the Essex Serpent: bloated, arrow-tailed, pawing at the shingle. Now and then the pale mist parted and there were the lights of smacks and barges winking in the dusk; then the curtain fell, and he was alone again. He whispered the boatsman’s plainsong for comfort –
The starboard light is green at night – The starboard light is on your right …
– but what use were flames behind coloured glass when down in the deep something was waiting, biding its time?

When he felt a small hand on his shoulder it came so gently he didn’t flinch or shirk it. The touch was not only familiar but possessive – no-one else could’ve touched him like that – it struck off memories that rose through the fuddle of drink and the thickening mist. ‘Come home then, littl’un?’ he said, tentatively, putting up his own hand in a searching pat: ‘Come back to your old man?’

Wrapped in Joanna’s cast-off coat Naomi looked down at her father’s head where hair grew thinner than she remembered, and felt a new and unexpected tenderness. For a moment he was no longer her father, so nearly an extension of her own self that he hardly crossed her mind. She understood for the first time that he too felt fear and disappointment – that there were things he hoped for, and suffered, and enjoyed. It moved her, and propelled her forward through the years: she took up her old position cross-legged beside him on the quayside and drew a fishing-net towards her. Expertly, she pulled it through her fingers, finding a tear, saying, ‘I’ll get on with this one if you like.’ It had always been a hated task – it left welts in the webbing between her fingers that grew sore with salt – but her hands found their old rhythm, and there was comfort in it. ‘Sorry I went away,’ she said, drawing together the torn threads, turning away to let him shed tears privately. ‘I was scared of things but it’s all right now. And besides’ – she reached over and did up the buttons on his coat – ‘I earned some money all on my own! We’ll go home and you can help me count it.’

Midway through the afternoon the sea-fog rallied and approached Aldwinter from the east. It crept across windowsills and pooled in ditches and hollows, and dampened the ringing of the All Saints bell. Cora, restlessly walking on the common, looked the sun dead in the eye and saw, specked on its surface, the dark sunspots of storms raging.
Who will I tell now, if not him?
she thought
: Who else would believe me when I speak of impossible things?

‘I’m tired,’ Stella said in her blue room, ‘and now I lay me down to sleep.’ Curled in the corner, James and John looked up from a game of cards, and looked down again, incurious and content as animals returned to their hide. Joanna, who’d read several times a paragraph of Newton and felt none the wiser, saw how moisture gleamed on her mother’s forehead, and how her hair clung there, and was afraid. Stella, no less acute now than she’d ever been, beckoned her child over, and said: ‘I know you see it, Jojo: I know you see what they don’t. But I’m happy – sometimes even when you were all away and the house was silent I’d think: I am happier now than I’ve ever been. Do you believe me? I wouldn’t do without an hour of my suffering, because it has lifted me – it has shown me the path of life!’ She held out her skirt, and began to pick up all her treasures, one by one – the blue mussel shells, the fragments of glass, the bus tickets and the sprigs of lavender – and drop them into the fold of cloth. ‘I ought to tidy up,’ she said, looking about the room. ‘Bring it all to me, Jo – the bottles, there; all the stones and ribbons – I want to take them with me.’

In his study Will laid a sheet of clean paper beside Cora’s letter and could not pick up his pen.
Keep guilt at bay
, she’d said, as if it could be fended off, as if she had any idea! She’d untied herself from all that: she had no idea it was not simply a general sense of wrongdoing, but of personal and particular wounding; that he’d hammered in a little further the nails in foot and hand, that he might as well have taken a length of bramble and wound it tight round Stella’s brow.
I am the chief of sinners
, he thought; but wasn’t there pride in that, another sin heaped on the first? He thought of Cora, and summoned her easily up – the freckles high on her cheek, her steady grey gaze, her way of standing bolt upright, queenly in her tattered coat – and was blinded for a moment with fury (there – another sin: put it on the charge sheet, stick it on the slate!). From the moment of opening Ambrose’s letter when the year was young he’d known the wind was changing – he ought to’ve buttoned up his coat and pulled the windows shut, not turned to face the draught. But all the same it was Cora (he said her name aloud),
Cora
, who’d grown intimate in the first clasp of their hands – no, before then, while they grappled in the mud – who delighted and enraged, who was generous and selfish, who mocked him as no-one else ever did; Cora, who in his presence alone could weep! The fury receded, and he remembered the press of his mouth on her belly, and how warm she’d been, how soft, how like an animal at ease: it had not felt like sinning then, and hardly did now – it was grace, he thought, grace: a gift he’d never sought and did not deserve!

How long did you stay alone out there?
she wrote, and it had been a long while: he’d gone down to the river-mouth, to Leviathan’s black bones, and looked out at the estuary, willing the serpent up from the deep to swallow him down like Jonah.
By the rivers of Essex I sat down and wept
, he thought, and upstairs the door to Stella’s room was gently closed, and footsteps moved across the landing. His heart made a painful circuit: there was Stella, his bright particular star, going out in a blaze; he was afraid she’d leave behind a black cavity into which he’d hopelessly fall. He wanted to go up to her, and lie beside her on their bed, and sleep as he always used to with her fitted to his back, but it was not possible: she wanted now always to be alone, writing in her blue book, her eyes fixed avidly elsewhere. On he sat in that dark room, unable to write – unable to pray – watching the red-rimmed sun, and wondering if somewhere Cora also watched.

Across the common Francis Seaborne sat cross-legged, watching the clock. He had in his pockets so many bluish stones that try as he might he could not get comfortable. Elsewhere his mother roamed about the house, distracted and restless, sometimes coming in to see him and put kisses on his forehead without speaking. He held the note from Stella Ransome, on which were clear instructions written in blue ink, and a picture that frightened him, though it was lovely to look at. He folded and refolded the paper – the minute hand moved slowly, and he half-wished it would move more slowly still: it was not that he doubted the wisdom of his orders, only that he wondered if he had the courage to see it through. At five o’clock precisely Francis went out to the hall where boots and jacket neatly waited, and set off into the fog. He looked up, trying to find the rising Hunter’s moon, but it was hidden, and wouldn’t be back for a year.

Leaving her mother sleeping, Joanna had gone to find her friend: she wanted to reclaim the old territory of their gossiping and spells, and show her how the saltings were free from the serpent’s shadow. It had soon become clear that their days of magic had become a distant childish memory and one not to be recalled without a blush. Still, it was good to walk their old paths, matching step for step. ‘Cracknell was there when I found him,’ said Naomi, pointing to a clear stretch of shingle beside a narrow creek. ‘Stretched out with his head on one side. I went over thinking maybe he’d fallen – he was so old, wasn’t he? And old people do fall over – but his eyes were open. I saw something dark in them and thought maybe it was the last thing he’d seen, maybe it was the monster, but then it moved and it was only me, like they were mirrors I was looking in. They say it was because he was old and ill – funny to think we all thought the serpent did it!’

They walked on past Leviathan, feeling the air damp against their cheeks; the fog on the banks of the Blackwater was thick, particulate, full of pearly grains. A little distance away a watchman must’ve set a fire burning and later left his post: its embers gave off a yellowish haze that shifted as the wind moved the mist.

‘It’s gone,’ said Joanna, ‘and there was nothing to be afraid of after all, but all the same my heart is beating – I can hear it! Are you afraid? Shall we go on?’

‘Yes,’ said Naomi, ‘and yes.’ It was necessary to be afraid in order to have courage: this is what her father taught her out on the desk of his barge. ‘Let’s go on – mind there, it gets deep.’ She knew the saltings well, and all its creeks and high tufts of marsh-grass: ‘Hold onto my arm and trust me,’ she said, ‘the tide turned an hour ago. We’re safe.’ It pleased her to be there again with her friend, only with everything altered: she was not poor Naomi, slow to read, biddable, in awe of the rector’s daughter – these were her elements, and she felt in command. All the same, it was a dim, uneasy evening. The sea-fog disclosed the marsh in small portions (it parted and there was an egret waiting out the mist) then closed and they were all alone. Once there was a moment where the sun beat through the fog, and they discovered they were surrounded on all sides by dabchicks whinnying and diving. ‘As lost as we are,’ said Joanna, laughing, and wishing she were at home. ‘Let’s go back now,’ she said. ‘What if we can’t find the way?’ She clung to Naomi, despising her just a little for taking charge, stumbling against the rotting posts of an oyster bed and crying out.

‘What if it’s still here,’ said Naomi, only half-teasing: ‘What if it’s still here after all and has come back for us?’ Out of a shameful desire for revenge she withdrew her arm and stepped backward into the mist, and cupping her hands to her mouth gave a kind of beckoning call. ‘I’ll summon it, shall I?’ she said, frightening herself, but not wanting to stop. ‘Watch out! Here it comes!’

‘Stop,’ said Joanna, fighting unwomanly tears: ‘
Stop it!
Come back – I can’t find the path …’ When Naomi appeared again, a little ashamed of herself, she struck her on the shoulders: ‘You’re horrible,
horrible
, I could’ve walked out into the estuary and drowned and it would have been your fault … What? What is it? Nomi – stop playing games, when you know full well it was just a great big fish …’ Beside her, Naomi had gone very still, and put out a restraining hand. It was not towards the estuary she looked, where the Blackwater rolled out to join the waters of the Colne, but back towards the shore, where the fire still glowed coral-coloured through the fog. ‘What?’ said Joanna, on her tongue the copper-penny taste of fear: ‘What have you seen, what is it?’

Naomi’s hand on her sleeve flexed and tightened – she drew her friend nearer and put her mouth close to her ear: ‘
Shh
…’ she said, ‘shh now … look, up by Leviathan, can’t you see? Can’t you hear?’ Joanna heard, or thought she did: a kind of groaning or grinding, coming in fits and starts, without reason or pattern. It fell silent, then struck up again, seeming nearer; from scalp to fingertips she felt a dreadful chill that left her fixed in place. It was there – it had been there all along, waiting, waiting – it was almost a relief, to think they’d not been duped after all.

Then the pale pall lifted, and there it was – fifty yards distant, no more: black, snub-nosed, bulkier than either had imagined; wingless or sleeping, blunt-tailed, with an ugly lumpish surface, not the sleek lapping scales of fish or serpent. Naomi half-screamed, half-laughed, turning to bury her face in Joanna’s shoulder: ‘
I told you!
’ she whispered, hissing: ‘
Didn’t I tell everyone?
’ Joanna took a step towards it, curiously unafraid – then it shifted, and there was that grinding again, almost of great teeth moving against each other in hunger, and she shrieked, and leapt back. The fog closed about it, and they saw nothing but a shadow biding its time.

‘We have to go,’ said Joanna, forcing down a yell of fear: ‘Can you get us back – look, the fire’s burning there on the bank – go towards it, Nomi, keep your eyes on it and don’t make a sound …’ But the fire’s embers dampened, and the light faded, and for a while they stumbled helpless and blind on the shingle, each keeping back tears only for the sake of pride. ‘
Ready or not – ready or not
–’ muttered Naomi for consolation; then the low sun pierced the fog-bank and they found they’d come hard up against it, had almost stumbled on its wet black flank. Joanna yelped, and pressed her hand to her mouth: there it was,
there
, after all this time only an arm’s length away – blind, slumbering perhaps, impossibly ungainly on the bank – was it sleek in water, in its native element? Did it go beneath the waves and grow slick and gleaming? What of the wings, outspread like umbrellas, someone had said: had they been clipped and who had clipped them? And there was something else – some bluish marking on its belly: something she half-recognised, could almost make out in the thinning mist.

Beside her, Naomi stood bolt upright, hands flung up, on the verge of the laughter that drove the schoolgirls mad. She was pointing at the markings, mouthing at the air; there was the grinding again, and she flinched, but all the same drew closer. ‘Mummy,’ she said: ‘
Mummy …
’ and for a moment Joanna thought she was calling for her mother, who lay in the churchyard under the cheapest headstone to be had. ‘Look,’ said Naomi, whispering, ‘Look there: I know those letters, even upside down – Gracie it says – Gracie, my mum’s name, the first one I ever wrote down and I never forgot it, not for ten years –’ Forward she ran on the shingle, in the lifting mist, and Joanna tried to call her back. But all the fear had left her friend, and took with it her own terror, so that she too moved towards the dark shape shifting on the marsh.