The Essex Serpent(99)

Out on the High Street where the mist thinned under the low sun, Joanna thought of her mother, and felt her stomach turn. She’d missed her at first with the constant dull ache of an old injury; everything had been all awry. Katherine Ambrose had been kind, but not in the way Stella was kind; her room was comfortable, but not in the way Stella would’ve made it so. Dinner was served too early, on the wrong kind of plates; there were no African violets on the windowsill; Katherine laughed at the wrong things and did not laugh at the right ones; they had hot milk for supper, and not camomile tea. In those early days she had written to her mother daily, and blotted the ink more than once, and could not sleep at night without summoning into the kitchen downstairs a slight white-fair figure in a blue-bordered dress. But the pictures had faded fast: the letters that came back were fervently loving and oddly phrased and rarely touched on anything Joanna had said. Then they grew rare, and when they came were like little devotional leaflets handed out by women in thick brown stockings outside Oxford Street station, and they embarrassed her. Within weeks she became a Londoner, at ease on Tube and bus, able to look Harrods girls square in the eye, with strong opinions on where to buy notebooks and pencils. Aldwinter dwindled, became mud-bound and dull, the Essex Serpent a bumpkin beast too dim-witted to make its presence felt. She missed her father, but pleasantly, and felt it would do them both good: she’d read Little Women and felt that if Jo March could manage without for a while, certainly so could she. She had the hardness of youth, and it stood her in good stead, save when she caught sight of a fallen crow’s feather or a spider putting a fly in a winding-sheet; then she remembered her days of magic, and her red-haired companion, and would for a moment be floored with guilt and grief.

So it was that when she looked across to the ruin and saw the cripple there, and the ragged child cross-legged on a marble plinth bending over sheets of paper, she gasped, and shrugging out of her brother’s grasp dashed blindly across the road. She was bright-lit for a moment by the lights of a bus, then was gone behind a group of elderly tourists headed for the castle museum. ‘Joanna!’ called Katherine, feeling instantly sick, frantic on the kerb, trying both to reach the girl and prevent the boys from tumbling into the road. Charles, with an unshakeable belief that no Essex vehicle would contemplate muddying his scarlet coat, walked with measured calm to the ruin, and was astonished to find Joanna bellowing at the crippled man, and raining down blows on his shoulder. ‘What’ve you done to Naomi!’ she said: ‘Look what you’ve done to her beautiful hair!’

Charles interposed himself between the two, receiving a light slap on his arm: ‘Joanna,’ he said, ‘I’m the first to admire your forthrightness but on this occasion fear you may’ve over-stepped the mark – sir, I am sorry for my … really, Jo, what am I to call you? … I am sorry you have been attacked in this disgraceful fashion! Perhaps I can make amends?’ Coins rained into Taylor’s upturned hat; the men shook hands. ‘Now then,’ said Charles, fervently wishing himself elsewhere: ‘What possessed you, child?’ Joanna was not listening, only stood looking back and forth between Taylor and a thin lad in a dirty jacket. She’d gone very white, and her face seemed to flicker between a woman’s fury and a child’s distress, and all the while the boy stood staring at the ground. Charles, baffled, put out his hand to Joanna; then she said – gulping a little at a threatened sob – ‘They all said you’d been stealing from the shop, but I told them you’d never do that, and then when you didn’t come we thought the Trouble’d got you and you were here all along – Naomi Banks, I should give you a black eye!’ The girl looked for a moment as if she might do exactly that, then instead threw herself at what Charles by now realised was no boy, but a thin girl whose hair had been lopped short and stood out in grubby ringlets, glinting copper. She stood aloof from Joanna – now almost hysterical with weeping – crossing her arms with an expression of hauteur.

‘Trouble?’ said Taylor, thinking once again of dogs he might’ve had: ‘Stealing? My Ginger? I confess,’ he said, stirring at the coins in his hat, ‘to be at a loss.’

‘I think we can infer,’ said Charles, ‘that your employee here has been having you on, and is a girl called Naomi, and a friend of Joanna’s.’ Here ended his understanding, since no-one had thought to tell him of the boatman’s missing child. The red-haired girl ran out of her store of pride, and with a choking cry returned Joanna’s embrace. ‘I wanted to go home, honest I did, but I was too scared to be by water and no-one wanted me anyway!’ She drew back, and looked severely at Joanna, and her eyelashes were spiked with tears. ‘You didn’t want to be my friend anymore and everyone was scared of me because of what I did at school and that thing in the water and I didn’t mean it: I don’t even know what happened, just that I was so afraid I couldn’t stop laughing …’

‘Ginger?’ said Taylor, summing up the situation as best he could: ‘Didn’t I look after you all right?’ Slyly he looked at Charles, who added another coin or two to the insatiable hat.

‘It’s all my fault, isn’t it – all my fault – I’ve been a bad friend …’

‘It was that woman,’ said Naomi, whose freckles showed brightly in the runnels of her tears: ‘That woman came and after that nothing was all right. She put it there! She put the monster in the river!’