The Essex Serpent(95)

We are cleaved together – we are cleaved apart – everything that draws me to you is everything that drives me away.

I’ll send this note with Francis: he says there’s something he must tell Stella. He has gifts for her: a blue bus ticket from Colchester, a white stone with a blue band. Martha says she’ll walk him over the common, and she’s bringing a jar of plum jam.





CORA





9


‘You look well,’ said Martha, truthful but also a little afraid: Stella Ransome burned with too much life. ‘We’re not disturbing you? Frankie wanted to come and says he has gifts. And Cora sends jam, though I’m afraid it hasn’t set. Hers never does.’

Stella sat on her blue couch, wrapped in many blankets. She’d watched them come across the common: first the bobbing of torchlight through fog, then two figures circled by a glow: for a moment she’d thought she was being called home, but concluded that her summoning angels were unlikely to knock at the door. Besides, hadn’t that black-haired boy said he was coming with something to tell her? ‘I feel well,’ she said: ‘I feel my heart beating fast and strong and my mind opening out like a blue flower – I tarry only a short while here on the earth and want very much to live it vividly! Frankie’ – she was pleased to see the boy: ‘Sit there, by the window, where I can see you. Not too close: I’ve had a bit of a cough lately, though nothing too bad.’

‘I’ve got things for you,’ said Francis, and kneeling a discreet distance away laid out the bus ticket, the blue-banded stone, and a foil sweet-wrapper the colour of a robin’s egg.

‘Navy, cyan, teal,’ he said, touching each in turn. Then he put his hand in the other pocket and took out a white envelope. ‘And I’ve got to give you this, which is a letter for your husband from my mother.’

‘Cyan!’ said Stella, delighted, making a note of it: Cyan! Teal! Really there was no end to the boy’s charms. Her own children were returning to her tomorrow – would they also understand? She suspected not. ‘Put your treasures on the windowsill – there, where I’ve left a gap – and we’ll give William his letter – he’ll be pleased. He missed her while she was gone.’ She turned her eyes on Martha, who wondered what they saw, and what they did not.

‘Is he here?’ Martha said, curious: Cora had wandered home late in the cool evening, dazed as if with drink, though there’d been nothing telling on her breath; she’d said, ‘We had such a good long walk,’ and curling in a chair fallen immediately asleep.

‘In the garden feeding Magog if he can find her in the mist – Jo will be home tomorrow and will go straight out there and want to know what she had for breakfast and whether she still pines for Cracknell – go and find him, why don’t you, and take him the note?’ Stella lowered an eyelid very slightly at Francis, who understood that his new friend wished them to be alone, and felt himself grow warm with pleasure.

‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ he said when Martha had gone. He stood precisely where he’d been told to stand, and no nearer; very straight, and rigid with the importance of what he had to convey.

‘So I understand,’ said Stella. Suffer the little children to come unto me! Her own babies were coming, and here in the meantime was another, and she’d cradle him close if she could – sometimes she looked down at her arms and thought she saw love seeping out of every pore! ‘What is it? I won’t be here much longer, you see, so you have to tell me quick.’

‘I disobeyed my mother,’ said Francis, a little cautiously. He did not consider this to be a sin, but had observed that it was looked on dimly in most quarters.

‘Ah,’ said Stella. ‘I wouldn’t let it trouble you. Christ came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance, after all.’

Francis didn’t know about that, but, relieved to see he was not to be told off, edged a little closer, rolling the brass button in his pocket between finger and thumb. ‘I got up this morning at half past five and I went down to the saltmarsh and that man Banks was there and there was lots of fog. I wanted to see if I could see it. The serpent. The Trouble. What they said is in the water. They told me they’d found it but I wasn’t sure because obviously I hadn’t seen it.’

‘Ah! The Essex Serpent – my old adversary, my foe!’ Stella’s eyes glittered, and the hectic colour on her cheek spread upward; she leaned forward and said confidingly, ‘I hear it, you know. It whispers. I write it all down.’ She flicked through her blue notebook and held it out, and Francis saw, written over and over in two neat columns, COMING READY OR NOT. ‘It’s all right,’ said Stella, wondering if she’d frightened the lad: ‘You and I understand each other, as I have always said we do. They have been deceived, Francis. I know the enemy. It can be placated. It’s been done before.’ She looked down at her palms, and read them – surely there were sores coming where the head-lines crossed the lines of memory? – she held them up, but Francis saw nothing.

‘Well,’ he said, pressing on, ‘there was such a lot of fog I couldn’t see very much, but then I heard a noise and there it was.’ He flung out his arm as if the Essex Serpent might creep out from behind the dining table. ‘Just there, big and dark and moving: I could’ve thrown a stone and hit it if I wanted! Well, I looked and looked and I tried to tell Banks but he wouldn’t come. And then the fog was gone for a bit and the sun came out and I saw what it was.’ He told her what he’d seen, and how he’d laughed, and how then the fog and the tide had swallowed it up. ‘Oh …’ she said, disbelieving, as he’d feared she would be, a little let down; then ‘Oh – !’ and she too fell to laughing, and could not stop. Francis watched, recalling how his father once had reached for his throat as if it could be coaxed into being calm. His father’s illness had interested him without troubling him, but as Stella’s eyes streamed with tears his own wetted in response – should he help her? He crossed the carpet, and gave her a glass of water; the fit passed, and she sipped gratefully, then clasping her hands in her lap said, ‘Well, then. Well, Francis. What are we going to do about it?’