The sight of blood roused her from a reverie: she said, ‘Let me help,’ and he gave a breathless grunt of assent. Man’s a halfwit! she thought, already wondering how to tell the tale to best please her friends. Again the sheep went limp, exhaling a long kind of sigh that plumed in the air, and allowed the man to clasp both arms behind its back. In their embrace the two sank together into the mud, and looking furiously over his shoulder the man said, ‘Well: come on!’ Not quite a halfwit, then, though with slow Essex vowels. Cora reached for her belt, which was broad and meant for a man. Her fingers were stiff and slow, and she fumbled with the buckle, as the sighing sheep slipped further down. Then she tugged it free, and dashing forward looped the belt across the animal’s back where it would catch in the crook beneath its forelegs, forming a kind of bridle. The man released his grip and tugged the strap from her hand, and the animal felt the loss of his grasp and panicked; it gave a convulsive movement that threw Cora into the mud. The man showed her no concern, only grunted ‘Up! Get up!’ and, gesturing that she should take the belt, again resumed his grip on the sheep’s flank. There was a long moment in which their matched strength slowly worked against the sucking mud, and Cora felt the bones of her shoulders straining in their sockets, then all at once the sheep’s rear legs appeared above the water’s surface, and it propelled itself forward onto the bank. Cora and the man fell back, and she turned away to conceal her breathlessness: she would not have minded the mud, and the pain in her wrists, had the man not been an oaf, and the sheep not such a witless beast. Some distance away the sheep’s companions looked warily up, showing no pleasure, awaiting the lost one’s return. It ought to have felt, she thought, like a triumph, but instead the pleasure of the day had gone, and even the banks of bracken had lost their colour.
When she turned back the man was regarding her above his sleeve, which he had pressed to the cut on his cheek. He had put on a knitted hat, which was so poorly made he might well have put it together himself from scarlet scraps, and pulled it to his eyebrows, which were thick with mud and almost obscured his eyes. He said, ‘Thanks,’ a little curtly, again with that flattening of the vowels that marked him out as a country man. A farmer then, she thought, and without accepting the gratitude so grudgingly given she said, gesturing to the exhausted sheep: ‘Is it going to be all right?’ It mouthed at the air, and rolled its eyes again.
He shrugged. ‘Should think so.’
‘One of yours?’
‘Ha! No. Not my flock.’ The idea evidently struck some chord of slow humour in him, and he began to chuckle.
A vagrant, then, poor soul! It was in her nature to think well of folk until they gave her cause to do otherwise, and besides: she’d shortly be home to Martha and their clean white sheets, and who knew but that he might be making his bed in the bracken with nothing but a half-drowned beast for company. Smiling, she decided to bring good London manners to their conversation. ‘Well: I must be home. It was very nice to meet you.’ She gestured towards the dripping oaks, and the pond where little eddies from their struggle still moved, and wishing to be generous said: ‘Essex. Nice part of the world.’
‘Is it?’ His voice was dampened by the sleeve still pressed against his cheek, on which she could see blood mixed in with dirty water. She wanted to ask if he would be all right, if he’d make it safely home, if there was anything she could do; but it was his territory, not hers. It occurred to her, as she saw the first thickening of the shadows at dusk, that of the pair of them she was most at a loss, miles from her bed and with only a vague sense of where she stood. With a fair attempt at maintaining what she felt was the upper hand, she said: ‘Tell me: am I far from Colchester? Where can I fetch a cab home?’
The man lacked the wit to be surprised. He nodded towards the further bank, where she could make out a breach in the line of oaks, and behind it an open stretch of land. ‘Out onto the road – bear left, five hundred yards. There’s a pub: they’ll fetch it for you.’ Then, with a motion extraordinarily like that of a man dismissing an inferior, he turned and trudged away through the mud. His shoulders were so stooped against the cold that the weight of his filthy coat made him seem very like a hunchback. Always more easily moved to mirth than rage, Cora could not prevent herself from laughing: perhaps he heard, because he paused on the path, half-turned towards her, then thought better of it and went on his way.
Cora tugged her coat closer, and heard all around her the gathering of birds for evensong. The sheep had dragged itself a yard or two further onto the bank; it had raised itself into a kneeling position and was nudging the earth in search of a blade of grass. The light was fading, and a fine white mist rose up from the cold earth and spilled over the rim of her boots. Beyond the last of the oaks a grass verge dropped a little to the roadside, and in the near distance a half-timbered pub with bright-lit windows beckoned to passing travellers. The sight of the gleaming panes, and the thought that she was still so far from home, and that she did not know the way, brought on a weariness so sudden it struck her like a blow. When she reached the threshold and saw a woman leaning on the bar and smiling a welcome beneath a high coil of bright hair, Cora paused to adjust her clothes. Smoothing her coat, she found in the buckle of her belt a little scrap of white wool, and on it – gleaming in the lamplight as though it were fresh – a smear of blood.
5
Joanna Ransome, not quite thirteen, tall as her father and wrapped in his newest coat, held her hand over flames. She brought her palm as near the flicker as she could, then withdrew it slow enough to preserve her pride. Her brother John watched solemnly, and would’ve liked to have thrust his own hands into his pockets, but had been instructed to leave them to grow as cold as he could bear. ‘We are making a sacrifice,’ she’d said, leading him to the stretch of land just beyond World’s End, where the marshes gave way to the Blackwater estuary, and beyond that, the sea: ‘And for there to be a sacrifice, we must suffer.’
Earlier that day she’d explained to him, whispering in cold corners, that something was rotten in the village of Aldwinter. There was the drowned man, for one thing (naked, they said, and with five deep scratches on his thigh!), and the sickness at Fettlewell, and the way they all woke from dreams of wet black wings. And there was more: the nights should’ve grown lighter by now – there should be snowdrops in the garden – their mother should not still have a cough that woke her at night. There should be birdsong in the mornings. They should not still shiver in their beds. It was all because of something they’d done and forgotten and never repented, or was because the Essex earthquake had let something loose in the Blackwater, or perhaps it was because their father had lied (‘He said he’s not afraid, and there’s nothing there – but why won’t he go down to the sea after dark anymore? Why won’t he let us play out on the boats? Why does he look tired?’). Whatever the cause and wherever the blame, they were going to do something about it. Long ago in other lands they’d cut out hearts to bring the sun up: surely it wasn’t too much to ask that they try out a little spell for the sake of the village? ‘I have it all worked out,’ she’d said: ‘You trust me, don’t you?’
They stood between the ribs of a clipper which had pitched up there a decade ago and never shifted from the shore. In the harshness of the weather it had worn down to little more than a dozen black curved posts that looked so much like the opened chest cavity of a drowned beast that visitors took to calling it Leviathan. It was near enough to the village for the children to reach it without censure, and far enough out of sight for no-one to notice what they did there. In summer they hung their clothes from its bones, and in winter they lit small fires in its shelter, always afraid the hulk would burn, and dismayed when it didn’t. Love notes and curses were cut in the wood with penknives; pennies were stacked on the posts and were never spent. Joanna’s little fire was set some distance away from the wreck in a circle of stones, and had taken hold nicely. She’d looped it with lengths of bladderwrack, which gave off a clean scent, and pressed into the coarse sand seven of her best shells.
‘I’m hungry.’ John looked up at his sister and immediately regretted his lack of resolve. He’d turn seven before summer, and felt firmly that it was high time he matched his increasing years with increasing courage. ‘I don’t mind though,’ he said, and capered twice around the fire.