The Essex Serpent(101)
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!’