The Essex Serpent(20)

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.