The Essex Serpent(105)
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!
‘We’ll both go out on the same day like candles left by an open window,’ she said, smiling: ‘I remember! I remember! – but you see, I heard them calling me home and something was out here in the water and it whispered in the night and was hungry, and I thought: I will go down to the river and make peace with it for Aldwinter’s sake.’ At this she turned in Will’s arms to look out towards the river-mouth, where the clear sky showed the evening star brightly burning. ‘Did it come for me?’ she said, fretful: ‘Did it come?’
‘It’s gone,’ said Will. ‘Brave as a lion you sent it away – come home with us now, come home.’ How easy it was to lift her, to be helped to his feet by Joanna and Naomi – as if already she’d begun to dissipate up into the blue air!
‘Cora,’ said Stella, quietly calling, putting out her hand – ‘how warm you are and always have been – tell Francis to take my stones, my bits and pieces, leave them all behind. Give them to the river, turn the Blackwater blue.’
NOVEMBER
On turns the tilted world, and the starry hunter walks the Essex sky with his old dog at his heels. Autumn fends off the diligent winter: it’s a warm clear-eyed month, with a barbarous all-too-much beauty. On Aldwinter common the oaks shine copper in the sunblast; the hedgerows are scarlet with berries. The swallows have gone, but down on the saltings swans menace dogs and children in the creeks. Henry Banks burns his ruined boat down on the Blackwater shore. The damp wood spits, the black paint blisters. ‘Gracie,’ he says, ‘there you were, all along.’ Beside him Naomi stands very straight, warily watching the turning tide. She feels herself arrested in motion, pausing for a moment with one foot in water and one on the shore. What now? she thinks. What now? Deep in the flesh that joins thumb and forefinger there’s a black splinter from the boat’s hull: a talisman she touches, awe-struck by all her hands have done.
London capitulates too readily and hangs out her white flags: come mid-November there’s frost on the windows of the buses on the Strand. Charles Ambrose finds himself playing at fatherhood again: there’s Joanna, always at his desk, with an unerring taste for his least suitable books, and there’s James, who at breakfast found in the gutter a broken pair of glasses and had made a microscope by supper. He conceals his particular fondness for John, in whose appetite and placid good nature he recognises himself. He lies on his stomach playing cards; on Guy Fawkes’ Night he tears his coat, and doesn’t mind. In the evening he catches Katherine’s eye, and they shake their heads: the presence in their ordered tasteful house of these three is as strange as any number of river-borne beasts. Letters pass between London and Aldwinter with such frequency and speed they joke there’s a night train in the sidings waiting just for them. John believes it, and asks if he can bake a cake to keep the train driver going.