The Essex Serpent (6 page)

He clasped the old man by the shoulder: ‘Nor shall you; I have my flock, and you have yours, and the same Shepherd has their care.’

‘That’s as maybe, and I thank you for it; but I’ll not be darking your church door tomorrow all the same. I made my stand, Parson: take Mrs Cracknell and the Almighty will have to make do without me, you recall were my words; and I’ll not be dissuaded come high or low water.’

He wore now the mulish expression of a stubborn child, which was so greatly preferable to the threat of tears that it took Will an effort not to laugh, and instead to say, quite gravely, and conscious of the cost of a bargain struck with God: ‘You made your stand, and I’ve no right to come between a man and his word.’

Out on the saltings water crept towards the house and the lowering sun was cold. Beyond the marsh Aldwinter’s outlook was not of some other village on the far bank of the Blackwater, but of a broad horizon where the estuary met the North Sea. Will saw the lights of a fishing vessel headed home, and thought of Stella – tired by now, her small hands busy with the children – drawing back the curtain to look past Traitor’s Oak and see him coming. Longing for her, and for the sound of children at his study door, gave him a sudden distaste for the mossy house sinking into its patch of land; then he remembered Cracknell at the graveyard throwing a clod of earth onto a small pine coffin, and stood a while longer at the gate. ‘A minute more, Reverend,’ said Cracknell, ‘I have something for you.’ He was absorbed again into the side of the house, then emerged a moment later with a brace of handsome bright-eyed rabbits, newly caught, and thrust them at Will. ‘With my compliments to Mrs Ransome, who needs her strength, on account of the child-bearing years, which as Mrs Cracknell said tends to a thinning of the blood.’

The pleasure of giving illuminated him, and Will took them graciously, feeling a restriction in his throat. Quite a pie they’d make, he said; and Johnny’s favourite, as it happened – then, as if he wanted to give something in return, he hung the rabbits from his belt, in the farmer’s fashion, and said: ‘Mr Cracknell, tell me what you’ve seen, because I cannot think whom to believe, or when. A poor man drowned: but after all drowning’s not so rare in winter. A sheep was gutted I’m told, but foxes must make their living too, and the child they said was lost overnight was found in the morning in a linen cupboard eating her mother’s sweets. Banks brings strange news on his barge from St Osyth and Maldon, but you and I know him for a liar, do we not? Then there are whisperings in doorways and outside the Inn, and they say a baby was snatched from a boat at Point Clear, but whoever took an infant to sea when the days are short and cold? Tell me you have yourself witnessed something to fear, and then perhaps I’ll believe it.’ He fixed his gaze on the old man’s eyes, which could not quite seem to meet his; they slid over his shoulder to the empty horizon behind.

Knowing the value of silence, Will refused to speak, and in a moment Cracknell – sighing, shrugging, busying himself with his knife – said, ‘The point is not what I
see
, but what I
feel
; I cannot see the ether, yet I feel it enter and depart, and depend upon it. I
feel
that something is coming; sooner or later, my words be marked. It has been before, as well you know, and it will come again, if not in my lifetime in yours, or in your children’s, or in your children’s children’s, and so I will gird my loins up, Parson, and if I might make bold a moment, I would recommend that you do similar.’ Will thought of the church with its carved remnant of the old legend, and wished (not for the first time) that he’d taken hammer and chisel to it on the morning of his arrival.

‘I have always put great store on you, Mr Cracknell, and will continue to do so; perhaps you can consider yourself the Aldwinter watchman, out here at World’s End, and set a beacon in your garden for a warning. – The Lord make his face to shine upon you, whether you want it or not!’ said Will, and on this light blessing turned and left for home.

He imagined himself walking just a little faster than the night, so that he might arrive at the door a moment before darkness. Cracknell’s scarebeasts and his visible fear had given him pause, not because he thought some aberration lay waiting in the Blackwater biding its time, but because he felt it a failing of his that his parish could have succumbed to such godless superstition. No-one could agree on its size, form or origins, but there seemed a consensus that it favoured the river and the dawn. There had been no witness to any attack, but in the weeks since the end of summer the unseen thing had been blamed for every mislaid child and every broken limb. He’d even heard it said that its urine poisoned the water-pump down at Fettlewell, and caused the sickness which had left three dead on New Year’s Eve. Resisting Stella’s gentle suggestion that he speak directly from the pulpit, he’d instead chosen a brisk refusal to acknowledge the Trouble, not even when he discovered that each Sunday morning the congregation – with unspeaking unity – would not sit in the pew with the serpent carving, as if being near it put flesh and bones on their terror.

The night at his heels, he walked on, turning once to see the white moon rising with its marred face. The wind strengthened in the reeds, which gave out a single mournful note, and Will felt a quickening just behind his ribs that was very like fear, and laughed: there – how easy it was to turn your face from nothing more than a shadow. And perhaps it would be wise to make use of the Trouble, if it proved impossible to ignore – few things turned the heart to eternity more surely than fear. The Aldwinter lights appeared up ahead, and somewhere among them his family waited – their bodies solid, warm, soap-scented, each with the fine fair down on their cheeks he’d carried as a boy; wholly real, impossible to deny, never for a moment quiet or still, so that no shadow could contain them – and he felt such a rush of joy that he gave a quiet shout (and was it also one of warning or challenge, in case there was after all a wild dog loose?), and ran the half-mile home. John was waiting, standing one-footed on the gatepost in his white nightclothes. Seeing Will he roared, ‘
By the pricking of my thumbs!
’ and buried his face in his father’s coat. Feeling the rabbit fur on his neck, he said: ‘You’ve done it! You’ve brought me a pet!’

4

Five miles east of Colchester, Cora walked in fine rain. She’d set out with no destination in mind and no thought to how she’d come home, only wanting to get out of the cold room in the Red Lion where Francis had cut his pillow to retrieve and count the feathers. Neither she nor Martha had been able to explain why it was that he ought not to have done it (‘Yes but you can pay for it, and then it will all be mine …’), and rather than listen to her son’s patient totting up –
one hundred and seventy-three
as the door had closed – she’d belted up her coat and run downstairs. Martha heard her call ‘I’ll be home before it’s dark – I have money with me – I’ll find someone to bring me back,’ and sighing had returned to the boy.

Colchester had dwindled behind her in a matter of half an hour, and she’d walked east, almost persuading herself she could reach the mouth of the Blackwater before she grew tired. She skirted around a village: she wanted neither to be seen nor spoken to, and favoured overgrown paths that ran along the rim of oakwoods. Traffic was sparse and slow, and no-one spared a glance for the woman walking on the verge. When the rain set in, she delved deeper between the trees, turning her face to the featureless sky. It was a uniform grey, without shifting of clouds or sudden blue breaks, and no sign at all of the sun: it was an unwritten sheet of paper, and against it the bare branches were black. It ought to have been dreary, but Cora saw only beauty – birches unfurled their strips of bark like lengths of white cloth, and under her feet wet leaves were slick. Everywhere bright moss had taken hold, in dense wads of green fur swaddling the trees at their foot, and fine pelts on broken branches that lay across the path. She tripped twice on brambles that held scraps of white wool and little feathers grey at the tip, and swore at them without malice.

It struck her that everything under that white sky was made of the same substance – not quite animal, but not merely earth: where branches had sheared from their trunks they left bright wounds, and she would not have been surprised to see severed stumps of oak and elm pulse as she passed. Laughing, she imagined herself part of it, and leaning against a trunk in earshot of a chattering thrush held up her arm, and wondered if she might see vivid green lichen stippling the skin between her fingers.

Had it always been here – this marvellous black earth in which she sank to her ankles, this coral-coloured fungus frilling the branches at her feet? Had birds always sung? Had the rain always this light touch, as if she might inhabit it? She supposed they had, and that it had never been very far from her door. She supposed there must have been other times when she’d laughed alone into the wet bark of a tree, or exclaimed to no-one over the fineness of a fern unfolding, but she could not remember them.

The past few weeks had not always been so happy. At times she remembered her grief, and for long stretches in which it was necessary to teach herself again how to draw breath she would feel a cavity open behind her ribs. It was a kind of draining sensation, as if a vital organ had been shared with the man who’d died and was atrophying slowly from misuse. In those cold minutes she would recall not the years of unease, in which she’d never once successfully judged his mood or circumnavigated the methods of his wounding, but their first few months, which were the last of her youth. Oh, she had loved him – no-one could ever have loved more: she’d been too young to withstand it, a child intoxicated by an inch of drink. He had been imprinted on her vision, as if she’d glanced at the sun and closing her eyes found a pinprick of light persisting in the darkness. He had been so sombre that when attempts at levity made him laugh she’d felt an empress in command of an army; he was so stern, and so remote, that the first moment he embraced her had been a battle won. She’d not known then that these were the common tricks of a common trickster, to cede a skirmish and later lay her waste. In the years that followed, her fear of him was so very like her love – attended by the same fast-paced heart, the same broken nights, the same alertness to his footstep in the hall – that she was drunk on that, too. No other man had touched her, and so she could not tell how strange it was to be subject to pain as much as pleasure. No other man had loved her, and so she could not judge whether the sudden withdrawal of his approval was natural as the tide and as implacable. By the time it occurred to her that she ought to divorce him, it was too late: at that stage Francis could not tolerate so much as an altered lunch-hour, and any change would have risked his health. Besides, the boy’s presence – for all his troublesome rituals and inscrutable tempers – had given Cora the single sensation in life about which she felt no confusion at all: he was her son, and she knew her duty; she loved him, and sometimes suspected he loved her, too.

The scant wind paused, the oakwood held its tongue; Cora again was twenty, and her son was come bawling into the world with his fists clenched. They’d wanted to take him from her and swaddle him in white cloth; she’d roared, and wouldn’t let them. He’d crawled blindly from belly to breast and sucked so strongly the midwife marvelled, and said what a good boy he was, and a clever one. Hours it had been, surely, of their gazes meeting, his eyes fixed intently on her, the dark hazy blue of evening;
I have an ally
, she thought:
he will never let me go
. Days passed, and she felt herself split down the middle, a wound that would never heal, and which she would never regret: because of him her heart would always be exposed to wind and weather. She worshipped him with many small acts of devotion, wondering at his marvellous foot, its skin like the thin silk covering of a cushion; she passed hours in stroking it with the tip of her finger and seeing how he spread his toes in delight – that he could take pleasure! That she could give it! His curled hand was a cockleshell warmed by the sun – she held it between her lips – she was astonished by him, that those small hands, those feet, contained such multitudes. But it had been only a matter of weeks before the blinds went down, the eyes (she sometimes thought) actually clouding over. If she nursed him, it appeared to cause him pain, or at least a rage he could not contain; if she held him he struggled, flailed, cut her eyelid with the sharp little nail on his thumb. Their days of adoration seemed remote, impossible – bewildered by this second rejection of her love she began to withhold it out of shame. Her failure was a source of amusement to Michael, who said that after all it was vulgar to be entertained by one’s own children, and she’d best leave him to nurses and tutors. Years passed: she learned his ways, and he hers. If their relationship bore little resemblance to the careless warmth she witnessed between other mothers and their sons, it was serviceable enough, and it was theirs.

On she walked, and though the cold rain and the black earth ought to have dispirited her, she could not summon up her widow’s grief. A kind of gurgling bubbled from her throat and came out in a shameless peal of laughter, which startled the silent birds into speech. She was ashamed of it, of course, but was used to feeling that she lived in a state of disgrace, and felt certain she’d concealed her growing happiness from everyone but Martha. At the thought of her friend (sitting scowling in a coffee-shop no doubt, to escape Frankie’s latest obsession, or passing the time by enchanting the proprietor of the Red Lion) the laugh subsided, and Cora lifted her arms up a little, imagining seeing her coming towards her under the dripping trees. At night they lay back to back under a thin quilt with knees drawn up against the cold, sometimes turning to murmur a fragment of remembered gossip or say
goodnight
, sometimes waking cradled in the crook of an arm. The simplicity of it had sustained Cora when everything else had sent her flying, and if Martha had been afraid that she’d be no longer needed now Cora stood on firmer ground, she’d been mistaken.

Coming to her eighth mile and growing tired, Cora found herself on a slight rise where the trees began to thin. The drizzle subsided, and cleared the air, and without any sunlight breaking through the low white canopy the world flushed with colour. Everywhere reddish banks of last year’s bracken glowed, and above them gorse thickets burned with early blooms of yellow. A little aimless flock of sheep with purple ink splashed on their haunches looked up briefly from their grazing, and shrugging turned away. The path on which she stood was bright Essex clay, and a little further down the incline a fallen tree had been overtaken by a thick covering of vivid moss. The change of scene was like a change in altitude: it took her breath, and she paused for a moment to adjust herself to it. In the silence a curious sound reached her: it was a little like a child crying, but a child old enough to know better. She could not make out any words, only an odd choking, whinnying noise, which fell silent for moments at a time then started up again. Then another voice joined it, and it was the voice of a man – crooning, patient, deep – wordless also, though (she listened harder) not quite:
now … now … now
… After a pause – during which her heartbeat thrummed, although she later claimed she’d never been afraid – the man’s voice set up again, only this time at a higher, rougher pitch; she could not quite divine the words, but thought in among the frantic urging was
Oh, damn you! Damn you!
Then there was the sound of something heavy striking something soft, and another choked little bray.

At this, she hitched up her coat, which was too long and had grown heavy with mud at the hem, and followed the sound. The clay path led over the slight rise and down again, between high pale green hedges on which twisted black seed-pods rattled as she passed. A little further down and she saw an acre of that russet bracken opening before her, with a few sheep nosing at the earth. To her left, overlooked by a bare oak, there was a shallow lake. Its water was thick with mud, and speckled with rain; no reeds grew, and there were no birds busy on the bank. It was entirely featureless, except that on the nearer bank a man stooped struggling over something pale, which made frantic movements and gave out another weak cry. The sound of it struck and sickened her, and there was something familiar in the wretched imploring movements it made, so that when she gathered pace and began to run what she had hoped would be an imperious ‘Stop that! Stop!’ came out as a shriek.

The man may have heard her, or he may not: he neither lifted his head, nor stopped whatever he was doing. His voice had lowered again to the curious deep crooning noise she first had heard, only now it seemed to her appalling that he should be so tender when he was causing so much harm. As she drew nearer, she saw his feet planted firmly in muddy water, and his back in a dark winter coat splashed with mud. Even from that distance she saw that he was shabby and rough-looking: everything about him was dirty, from the thick wet fabric of his clothes to the damp curls falling over his collar. If the old stories were right, she thought, and man had been first made from a handful of dust, here was Adam himself: all mud, ill-formed, without the full powers of speech. ‘What are you
doing
? Stop!’ At this he half-turned, and she saw that he was not much above medium height, and bulky. Smears of mud on his face gave the impression of a beard, and from the filth a pair of eyes blazed at her. He might have been sixty, or he might have been twenty. He had rolled his sleeves to his elbows, and his forearms were thickly corded with muscle, and as if deciding she’d neither help nor hinder he shrugged, and turned back to his task. Nothing infuriated Cora more than being ignored: she gave an exasperated cry and ran the few remaining yards. Reaching the water’s rim she saw that the pale thing struggling beneath the man was a sheep dumbly struggling in the shallows, and she was rinsed with relief: whatever horror she’d imagined, it was not this.

The sheep rolled its stupid eyes at the newcomer, and bleated. Its hindquarters were blackened to the waist with mud, and with frantic workings of its rear legs it contrived to sink a little deeper. The man had his right arm hooked beneath its left foreleg and around its back, and with his left he was attempting to grasp its flank, the better to haul it to safety, but his feet could not find a purchase on the slick earth. The movement frightened the animal, which had closed its eyes for a moment, as if resigned to its own end; it bleated and struggled again, and with its left foreleg flailed out and struck the man across his cheek. He yelped, and Cora saw a wound open beneath the mask of mud.

The sight of blood roused her from a reverie: she said, ‘Let me help,’ and he gave a breathless grunt of assent.
Man’s a halfwit!
she thought, already wondering how to tell the tale to best please her friends. Again the sheep went limp, exhaling a long kind of sigh that plumed in the air, and allowed the man to clasp both arms behind its back. In their embrace the two sank together into the mud, and looking furiously over his shoulder the man said, ‘Well: come on!’ Not quite a halfwit, then, though with slow Essex vowels. Cora reached for her belt, which was broad and meant for a man. Her fingers were stiff and slow, and she fumbled with the buckle, as the sighing sheep slipped further down. Then she tugged it free, and dashing forward looped the belt across the animal’s back where it would catch in the crook beneath its forelegs, forming a kind of bridle. The man released his grip and tugged the strap from her hand, and the animal felt the loss of his grasp and panicked; it gave a convulsive movement that threw Cora into the mud. The man showed her no concern, only grunted ‘Up! Get up!’ and, gesturing that she should take the belt, again resumed his grip on the sheep’s flank. There was a long moment in which their matched strength slowly worked against the sucking mud, and Cora felt the bones of her shoulders straining in their sockets, then all at once the sheep’s rear legs appeared above the water’s surface, and it propelled itself forward onto the bank. Cora and the man fell back, and she turned away to conceal her breathlessness: she would not have minded the mud, and the pain in her wrists, had the man not been an oaf, and the sheep not such a witless beast. Some distance away the sheep’s companions looked warily up, showing no pleasure, awaiting the lost one’s return. It ought to have felt, she thought, like a triumph, but instead the pleasure of the day had gone, and even the banks of bracken had lost their colour.