The Essex Serpent(23)
‘Now,’ said Joanna, collecting up the pieces of paper and tearing them into fragments: ‘Come to the fire with me. Are your hands cold? Are they full of winter?’ Full of winter, she thought: what a line! Perhaps she’d be a vicar like her father when she grew up. John looked at the tips of his fingers and wondered whether he might soon see the first black flecks of frostbite. ‘I can’t feel anything.’
‘Oh, you will,’ said Naomi, grinning. Her hair was red and so was her coat, and John had never liked her. ‘You’ll feel something all right.’ She tugged him to his feet, and they joined Joanna by the flames. Someone stood on a string of bladderwrack and made it pop, and some distance away the tide was turning.
‘Now,’ said Joanna. ‘You’re going to have to be brave, John, because this is going to hurt.’ She tossed the scraps of paper into the fire, and followed them with a scattering of salt from her mother’s silver shaker. The flames burned briefly blue. Then holding out her hands to the fire, with an imperious nod that her companions should do the same, she closed her eyes and held them, palm down, above the fire. A damp log spat sparks and scorched her father’s sleeve; she flinched, and fretting for the white skin on her brother’s wrist tugged his hands upward an inch or more. ‘We don’t need to hurt ourselves badly,’ she said hastily, ‘we just have to let our hands warm up quickly and it’ll burn like it does when you come in from the snow.’
Naomi, chewing a coil of hair, said, ‘Look: you can see my veins.’ And it was true: she had a little webbing of flesh set deep between each of her fingers, and was proud of her defect, having once heard that Anne Boleyn had had something similar and caught herself a king, nonetheless. In the firelight a ruddy glow passed through the thin flesh and threw into blue relief a vein or two. Joanna – impressed, but conscious of the need to maintain the upper hand – said: ‘We have come here to mortify our flesh, Nomi, not take pride in it.’ She used the nickname of their babyhood to show that the girl was not in disgrace, and in response Naomi flexed her fingers and said, very seriously, ‘Oh, it really hurts, I can tell you that. It’s prickling like nettles.’
The girls looked at John, whose hands wavered with his courage. Something was evidently going on, since his fingers were a vivid red and even, Joanna thought, swollen at the tips. Either the low-hanging smoke the fire gave out had stung his eyes, or he was trying not to cry. Torn between her certainty that the gods would look kindly on a sacrifice from so small a celebrant, and equal certainty that her mother would be justifiably outraged, she nudged the boy and said, ‘Higher, silly boy, higher: d’you want to burn yourself to stumps?’ At this, his held-back tears overspilled, and just at that moment (or so Joanna later told it, huddled under a school table with Naomi nodding at her side and an audience awestruck at her feet), the full moon passed out of a low blue cloud. All around them the pebble-specked sand took on a sickly cast, and the sea – creeping at them over the salt-marsh as their backs were turned – glistened.
‘A sign, you see!’ said Joanna, removing her hands from above the fire then hastily replacing them at Naomi’s raised eyebrow: ‘A portent! It is the goddess’ – she cast about for the name – ‘The goddess Phoebe, come to acknowledge our petition!’
John and Naomi turned towards the moon, and looked a long while on its downcast face. Each of them saw, in the high mottled disc, the melancholy eyes and curved mouth of a woman sunk in sadness.
‘D’you think it worked?’ Naomi could not believe that her friend might have been mistaken in so serious a matter as the summoning of spring, and besides: she’d felt the pain in her hands and she had not eaten since bread-and-cheese the night before; and had she not also seen her own name on its christened piece of paper go up in a shower of sparks? She buttoned her coat a little higher, and looked out over the salt-marsh and the sea, half-expecting to see an early sunrise, and with it a flock of swifts.
‘Oh Nomi, I don’t know.’ Kicking aimlessly at the sand, Joanna found herself already a little ashamed of her display. All that waving of her arms about and chanting! Really, she was much too old for all this. ‘Don’t ask me,’ she said, forestalling further query: ‘Not done it before, have I?’ Pricked with guilt, she knelt beside her brother and said gruffly, ‘You were very brave. If it doesn’t work it won’t be your fault.’
‘I want to go home. We’ll be late and there’ll trouble and there won’t be dinner left and it was going to be my favourite.’
‘We won’t be late,’ said Joanna. ‘We said we’d be home before dark, and it’s not dark, is it? It’s not dark yet.’ But it was almost dark, and it seemed to be coming, she thought, from across the sea beyond the estuary, which had taken on the appearance of a black and solid substance across which she might walk, if she cared to try. She’d lived all her life here at the margin of the world, and never once thought to mistrust its changing territory: the seeping of salt water up through the marshes, and the changing patterns of its muddy banks and creeks, and the estuary tides which she checked almost daily against her father’s almanac, were all as untroublesome as the patterns of her family life. Before she could ever have recognised them on paper she could sit on her father’s shoulders and point, and proudly name Foulness and Point Clear, St Osyth and Mersea, and the direction of St Peter’s-on-the-Wall. It was a family trick to spin her a dozen times and say: ‘She’ll always come out facing east, to the mouth of the sea.’