The Essex Serpent (31 page)

The strengthening sun cast a clear light on the shingle, so that each girl saw, at the same bright moment, what had been cast up. It was a black boat, small and clinker-built, long sunk in the Blackwater and thick with barnacles which gave it the look of uneven flesh, coarse and battle-scarred. Its upturned hull had rotted and begun to sink, so that there was the impression of a blunt snout nosing at the shore; it moved in the last lap of the receding tide, causing its wood to grind against the shingle, and now and then its timber groaned in distress. It was possible to make out, beneath the draping of bladderwrack and sugar-kelp, the name GRACIE picked out in blue-white paint: Banks’s boat, long since given up for lost, all the while casting up on the marsh on the whim of the tides, sending a village clean out of its wits.

They clutched each other, not knowing whether to laugh or weep: ‘It was here all along,’ said Naomi, ‘he thought it was stolen from the quay and I said no, it’s just you never tie it up right, that’s all …’

‘Think of Mrs Seaborne down here with her notebook, wishing she’d brought her camera, thinking of a case in the British Museum –’ said Joanna, beginning to laugh, feeling disloyal, though certain Cora would see the humour in it.

‘– and all the horseshoes hanging up in Traitor’s Oak, and the watchmen, and no-one letting the children out –’

‘We ought to tell my father,’ said Joanna: ‘We should bring everyone down here, and let them see – only what if we came back and it was gone because the tide took it, and no-one believed us …’

‘I’ll stay,’ said Naomi. It was hardly possible to believe, while the low sun copper-plated the wet marsh, that they’d ever felt a moment’s fear. ‘I’ll stay. It’s practically my boat, after all.’
Gracie
, she thought.
I’d know it anywhere!
‘Go on, Jojo, fast as you can, before it gets too dark to see.’

‘It’s funny,’ said Joanna, turning away to the path above the shingle: ‘There’s something blue sticking out underneath – can you see? Cornflowers, maybe, though it’s late in the year for that.’

Some distance away, sitting between the ribs of Leviathan and pulling at dark splinters driven into the palm of his hand, Francis Seaborne watched – seen by neither, missed by no-one.

In his study Will drowsed dreamlessly. When he woke it was to so uneasy a mind and such vivid recollections that for a moment he was hard pushed to tell which had been sleep, and which waking. There on the desk was the blank sheet of paper, but what use was it now? There was no hope of conveying to Cora how all the deep-sunk foundations on which he’d built his being had shifted, cracked, been rebuilt. Each phrase that came to mind was immediately contradicted by another of equal and opposite truth: we broke the law – we obeyed it; would to God you’d kept your London distance – thank God you live when I do, thank God we share this earth! The effect was to be nullified: he had nothing to say.
A broken spirit and a contrite heart Thou wilt not despise
, he thought, wishing in that case that his own spirit could be more completely broken, his heart more wholly contrite.

A sound roused him – footsteps, a gate closed and opened: he thought of Stella, waking upstairs, wanting him, perhaps, and his heart lifted, as it always did. He pushed away Cora’s letter with a sound of distaste – it was a taint at worst, a distraction at best, when every thought should be directed up to where his loved one lay half in this world, half in the next. But after all, it was only Joanna, back from the saltings with the scent of it on her coat, her eyes gleaming, mischievous, merry: ‘You’ve got to come,’ she said, plucking at his sleeve: ‘You’ve got to come and see what we’ve found – we’ll show everyone and everything’s going to be all right.’

Going quietly, afraid they’d wake Stella, they set out across the common, where in the blue dusk Traitor’s Oak cast a long shadow and all the mist was gone. ‘You wait,’ said Joanna, making him run, refusing to answer (‘I’m tired, Jojo, can’t you tell me?’ – ‘Just you wait and see’). Then they were on High Road, which blazed wet in the last of the day; as they reached All Saints they saw Francis Seaborne running home like any ordinary boy. Then there was World’s End, which had so lost heart without Cracknell it had returned almost completely to the Essex clay. ‘Just a bit further,’ she said, dragging him on: ‘Down by Leviathan, where Naomi’s waiting.’ And there was Naomi Banks with her glinting curls, and some distance away a fire set in a circle of stones.

He heard the gulls all crying out, relieved at the clear sight of land; drew in air scented with salt and the sweetness of oysters in their beds. Turnstones busied themselves in the creeks, and there was the curlew’s underwater song. Then Naomi called, and beckoned, and he saw what it was they’d found: in the clear evening light a wrecked boat, heavily barnacled and decked with bladderwrack. Something in the way it was cast up, nudging at the shingle, gave it a half-alive look; he came closer, seeing GRACIE written clearly on the hull. ‘After all that,’ he said, turning to Naomi, ‘was it really just your father’s boat?’ She nodded, rather proud, as if it had all been her doing, and bowing, he shook each girl’s hand in turn. ‘A job well done,’ he said. ‘You should be given the freedom of this parish.’ Silently he prayed in brief full-hearted gratitude:
Let that be an end of it, then – the fear, and the whispers, and you girls half-mad at your desks!
‘Let’s fetch your father, Naomi: there’ll be no more of this. To think we had two Essex Serpents, and neither of them fit to harm a fly!’

‘Poor thing,’ said Joanna, stooping beside the boat, knocking on the wood, wincing at the barnacles sharp against her knuckles: ‘Poor thing, ending up like this, when it should be headed out to sea. And look,’ she said. ‘Blue flowers in the stones, like they were put there, and a bit of blue glass.’ She picked up the sea-blunted glass and put it in her pocket. ‘Come along home,’ said Will, drawing her away. ‘It’ll be dark before we know it, and Banks should be told.’ Arms linked, companionable, feeling they’d done a good day’s work, they turned their backs on the Blackwater.

Cora looked up from the book she’d not been reading, and there was Francis at the door. He’d been running, that much was evident: his fringe lay slick against his forehead, and his thin chest fluttered beneath his jacket. To see him at all out of sorts was so extraordinary that she began to rise from her chair: ‘Frankie?’ she said – ‘Frankie? Are you hurt?’

He stood neatly at the threshold, as if afraid he ought not to come in; he took a folded sheet of paper from his pocket, which he opened carefully and smoothed against his sleeve. Then clutching the paper to his chest he said, with eyes turned to hers in an appeal she’d never – not ever – seen before: ‘I’m afraid I’ve done something wrong.’ His voice was more like a child’s than it had ever been, but with no childish sniffling or gulping at the air he began very quietly to cry.

Cora felt something rise in her which was like the accumulation of every pain she’d ever felt; it clutched at her throat, and for a moment she could not speak. ‘I didn’t mean anything bad by it,’ he said: ‘She told me she needed my help and she was kind and I gave her my best things –’ It took a great effort not to run towards him and attempt to take him in her arms; she’d done so many times before, and been rebuffed. Better simply to let him come to her – she returned to her chair and said, ‘Frankie, if you were only trying to be kind, how could you have done something wrong?’ Then there he was on her lap, suddenly, with his dark head fitting precisely between her cheek and her shoulder; his arms clutched about her neck – she felt the warmth of his tears, and how his fast heart beat against hers. ‘Now,’ she said – she cradled his face between her palms, half-afraid she’d see him recede from her, and never come back again – ‘tell me what you think you’ve done, and I’ll tell you how we can make it right.’

‘It’s Mrs Ransome,’ he said. ‘I want to show you, but I’m not supposed to! I want to show you, but I told her I wouldn’t!’ The impossibility of reconciling what he had promised, and what he desired, bewildered him: whichever way he turned, something would be knocked out of place. His grasp on the paper loosened, and she took it from him. There in blue ink on blue paper were the words TOMORROW / SIX / MY WILL BE DONE! and beneath them a childish sketch of a woman – long-haired, smiling – laid out beneath a curling wave. Stella Ransome had signed her name, and written underneath,
Put your jacket on it might get cold
.

‘Stella, my God,’ said Cora – but she could not frighten Francis, or toss him from her lap as she ran for the door: what if he never came to her again, her son – with his arms open, and his eyes seeking hers? Nausea came, and she bit at it, and said – conversationally, as if nothing much would come of his response – ‘Frankie, did you go down with her to the water? Did you help her down?’

‘She told me she was being called home,’ he said: ‘She told me the Essex Serpent wanted her, and I told her there was nothing there, and she said God moves in mysterious ways and she’d already stayed too long.’ He put his hands over his face and began to shiver, as if he were still out there on the shingle and the sun long gone.

‘All right,’ said Cora: ‘All right, now,’ and soothed him, astonished to find that he submitted to it, that he actually turned his face towards her. She held him, as much for her own comfort as for his; she called for Martha, who came, and whose recent coolness to her friend did not last beyond the threshold.

‘Take him – please, Martha,’ said Cora – ‘my God, my God, where is my coat, my boots? – Frankie, you only did your best, and now I’ll do mine – no, no – stay: I’m coming back soon.’

Will was walking on the High Road with Joanna and Naomi by his side.
How proud they are!
he thought, smiling, wondering, as he always did, how best to tell it all to Cora, what might please her most; but perhaps that was impossible now, it had all been broken, remade, he could not make out the shape of things – then ‘Cora!’ called out Joanna, and waved. And there was his friend on the path running, or almost; and for a brief moment (which caused him to make a sound he could not suppress) he thought perhaps she’d come to seek him out, could not remain another hour behind closed doors.

‘What’s wrong?’ said Naomi, stopping, touching her pewter locket for comfort. Something was wrong, that much was certain – Cora’s cheeks were wet, her mouth open in distress – she clutched a sheet of paper which she waved at them as she came, like a signal none of them could decipher. She reached them, and hardly paused, only tugged at Will’s sleeve and said, ‘I think Stella is down there, by the water – I think something is wrong.’

‘But we have come from there – it’s nothing, it’s the boat Banks lost –’ But Cora by then had gone, the scrap of paper thrust at Will and dropped on the wet path, and for a moment he could neither move nor speak. For something
was
wrong, yes – yes: he ought to’ve seen it at once – it was there, just beyond his reach – he could not quite grasp it. Joanna stooped to pick the paper up. She couldn’t at first take it in, then a picture formed in her mind so strange and terrible that she raised her hands as if she could bat it away from her. ‘Daddy,’ said Joanna, unable to keep from crying: ‘Isn’t she sleeping? Didn’t we leave her safely upstairs?’ Will, very white, reeling a little, said, ‘But I heard her, her footsteps, the door closing – she said she wanted to rest …’

They saw Cora reach the place where the road fell down to the saltings, and how she threw off her coat to run a little freer to the marsh. Will followed, cursing a body grown suddenly sluggish, unwilling, as if it were another man’s and he a possessing spirit. He was the last to reach the wreck – there was Cora, kneeling in the mud, straining against the hull, so that the muscles of her back shifted beneath the fabric of her dress. And there were the girls at her side, kneeling also, and it gave the effect of supplicants before an ugly malevolent god to whom all prayers went unanswered. He saw (how could he have missed it?) the blue-banded stones set around the ruined boat, the scrap of pale ribbon just visible, the blue glass bottle set upright in the shingle. ‘She said she was tired and it was time for her rest –’ he said, bewildered – what were they doing, there in the mud – their dresses heavy with it, their heads bowed with effort? ‘Stella, Stella,’ they called over and over, as if she were a child who’d gone walking and not come home when she was told. Their hands slipped on the wet wood, and the three women lifted up the boat, which was not so heavy after all, and disintegrated as it moved.

Lying there in the shadows, shrouded, silent, set about with all her blue tokens, lay Stella Ransome. Seeing her, Will cried out, and so also did Cora: she lost her hold on the boat, which fell away, breaking apart on the marsh. Then Stella basked in the day’s last light, her thin blue dress showing all the pretty bones of her hips and shoulders. She held a bunch of lavender that still gave off its scent, and nestled around were her blue glass bottles, her scraps of cambric and cotton, under her head a blue silk cushion and at her feet her blue notebook, curling in the damp. Her skin also was blue, her mouth dusted with it, her veins marbling close to the skin; the lids of her closed eyes were touched with purple. William Ransome, on his knees, drew his wife towards him. ‘Stella,’ he said, kissing her forehead: ‘I’m here, Stella, we’ve come to take you home.’

‘Don’t leave us, darling, not yet,’ said Cora – ‘don’t go’; she took the woman’s small white hand and rubbed it between her own. Joanna tugged at the fine hem of her mother’s dress to cover her bare blue feet: ‘Listen, her teeth are chattering, can’t you hear it?’ She took off her own coat, and tugged Will’s from his shoulders; together they cocooned her against the cool air.

‘Stella, darling, can you hear us?’ said Cora, in whose loving desperation was a painful unaccustomed twist of guilt – and oh, yes, yes – she could: the dusky eyelids fluttered and raised, and there were her bright eyes, pansy-like as ever. ‘I was faultless in the presence of his glory,’ Stella said: ‘I stood at the door of his banqueting-house and his banner over me was love.’ Her breath was shallow, and she convulsed in a cough that left a blood-fleck at the corner of her mouth. Will wiped it away with his thumb and said: ‘Not yet though: not for a while yet. I need you – dear, we promised we’d never leave each other alone – don’t you remember?’ It was joy he felt, a great indecent uplifting of it: here was redemption, out on the shingle, with no thought in his mind but for her.
It is grace, again!
he thought:
Grace abounding to the chief of sinners!