The Essex Serpent(66)

As he stood watching – craning his neck too far, so that in the morning his mother wondered why he held his head so strangely – a movement on the salt-flats caught his eye. The blue lights made the world a little brighter than it ought to have been, and the estuary surface showed oily black with pricks of blue upon the surface. Between the water’s edge and the shore, not far from Leviathan’s ribs, a bundle of cloth moved. There was a sound, very faint, like the snorting of an animal; the bundle shifted and lengthened on the mud, and then was still.

Curious, Francis turned to watch, peering into the dim air. If this was the Blackwater beast, he thought, it was a pitiful thing and ought to be drowned. The snorting paused a while as the bundle edged towards Leviathan, then began again, only this time it ended in what was certainly a cough, and then a long gasp at the air.

Francis, unafraid, came nearer. The bundle convulsed, then with a groan raised itself, and Francis saw the greasy layers of a black coat and dense fur collar, and above it the wild head of an old man he’d seen once or twice over at the church where the villagers were buried. Cracknell – that was it: a stinking old thing who’d once held up his sleeve and shown the boy the earwigs scuttling there. The groan ended in a fit of coughing that doubled him over again: he clutched the coat closer and fell silent.

Cracknell, with his boots at the water’s edge and his eyesight failing, saw the thin boy with the black hair neatly combed and tried to call out. But it was as if the air had edges that caught at his throat as he breathed, and each time the name came to his mouth (Freddie, was it?) the coughing set up again. At last his breath returned; he called out ‘Boy! Boy!’ and beckoned at Francis, swaying on the path not fifteen feet away.

‘I don’t know what you’re doing,’ said Francis. What was he doing? Dying, possibly, but what a strange place to be dying in. His father had died with a clean white sheet pulled up to his chin. He turned away a moment to look up – there, the net widened and in places broke, and blue-black sky showed between fragments of light.

‘Get someone,’ said Cracknell, and after that fell to muttering at length, exasperated or amused, fixing Francis with an imploring and furious glare.

Francis crouched, and clasping his knees surveyed Cracknell with mild interest. A moth had settled in the fibres of the coat’s fur collar, and elsewhere the fabric showed patches of pale stains that might even have been mould (could mould take hold on clothing? He resolved to find out). ‘Ransome,’ said Cracknell, who did not quite want to make his last confession, but wouldn’t have minded a kind face being the last he looked on. He put out a hand to tug the boy’s coat – please, he meant to say – but the effort was too great.

The boy tilted his head and took in the name. ‘Ransome?’ he said. He supposed that made sense. The man with the white strip at his throat had visited three villagers in the past weeks (he had counted) of whom at least two had died. Did he bring death, or only ease them into it? He assumed the latter, but it was important to be sure. Examining the old man, Francis saw foam gather at the corners of his mouth and his chest rear inside his coat. Even in the near-dark it was possible to see the man’s flesh take on a waxy cast, and already the bones of the sockets showed blue around his sinking eyes. It was both frightening and commonplace: probably this was always the way the end came.

Cracknell discovered he could not speak: it would waste the breath he eked out of the cool air. What was the boy doing, crouching placidly behind him, turning now and then to look up and smiling every time he did it? His heart lurched in its cavity: surely he’d go running now, and fetch Ransome, who’d come with a lamp and a good thick blanket to lay over his shaking limbs? But Francis, who knew what was coming, saw no sense in wasting time. Besides, it struck him that sharing the wonder that all the while unfurled over their heads might not halve his own pleasure, but double it. He stooped over the man, and said, ‘Look,’ and taking a handful of grey hair tugged at his drooping head so that Cracknell had no choice but to turn away from the black water and up to what he’d once thought was the heavens. ‘Look,’ said the boy: ‘See?’ and he saw the old man’s filmy eyes widen and his mouth gape. The shining scraps of cloud were fading as the dawn came, but had gathered into a pale arc that split the sky, and as they watched a skylark flew up ecstatically singing.

Then Francis lay beside him on the marsh, not caring for the mud that seeped through his clothes, or for the reek that came off the old man’s body, or the morning chill. Their two heads touched now and then as Cracknell, dazed, turned his head to take in the sight, sometimes trying out a scrap of a hymn: it is well with my soul, he sang, doubting it less now than ever. When the life went out of him it was on a long untroubled breath, and Francis patted his hand and said, ‘There, there,’ feeling quite satisfied, because what he loved above anything else was for things to go as he’d thought they would.





2, The Common

Aldwinter

22nd June

Dear Will,

It’s four in the morning and summer’s begun. I’ve been watching something strange in the sky – did you see it? The night-shining, they call it. Another omen!

A long time ago you said how sorry you were I’d lost my husband so young. I remember wishing you had said that he’d died – I didn’t lose him: it wasn’t my doing.