Late one afternoon, walking on the saltings with a Psalm on his tongue, William Ransome encountered Cora’s son. He sought out the features of his friend in the small inscrutable face, and found none. These then were the eyes of the man he supposed she’d loved; this the plane of his cheek and chin. But the child’s eyes were querying, not cruel, as he imagined Seaborne’s must have been, though they were not childlike, precisely – Francis was never that.
‘What are you doing, down here all alone?’ said Will.
‘I’m not alone,’ said the boy. Will looked about for someone standing on the shingle, and saw no-one.
Francis stood with his hands in his pockets, and scrutinised the man before him as though he were a sheet of problems to be worked out. Then he said – as if the question arose quite naturally out of their exchange – ‘What’s sin?’
‘Sin?’ said Will, so startled that he stumbled, and put out a hand as if expecting to encounter the pulpit door.
‘I’ve been counting,’ said Francis, walking beside him. ‘Seven times you said it this Sunday. Five the last.’
‘I was not aware you’ve been in the congregation, Francis. I never see you there.’ And Cora – had she, too, sat in the shadows, listening?
‘Seven and five makes twelve. But you don’t say what it is.’
They’d reached Leviathan, and Will – grateful for the pause – stooped to pick at pebbles drifted up against its bones. In all his years of ministry nobody had ever asked, and he was appalled to find himself at a loss. It was not that he had no answer: he had many (he’d studied all the requisite books). But out of doors – with no pulpit or pew in sight and the river mouth licking at the shore – both question and answer struck him as preposterous.
‘What’s sin?’ said Francis, without the inflexion of a repeated phrase. God! Give me strength, thought Will, both devoutly and profanely, and handed the boy a pebble.
‘Stand back a bit,’ he said, ‘here, by me – a step further – there. Now throw the stone and hit Leviathan – that rib, there, where we were standing.’
Francis looked at him a while, as if assessing whether he were being mocked; evidently concluding he was not, he tossed the pebble, and it fell short.
‘Have another’ – Will put a blue stone in his palm – ‘try again.’
Again he threw; again he missed.
‘That’s all it is,’ said Will. ‘To sin is to try, but fall short. Of course we cannot get it right each time – and so we try again.’
The boy frowned. ‘But what if Leviathan had not been there – what if you had not told me to stand here? If I’d stood there, and Leviathan had been here, I might have hit it, first time.’
‘Yes,’ said Will, feeling he’d entered deeper waters than he’d bargained for: ‘We think we know where we’re aiming, and perhaps we do – but morning comes, and a change in the light, and we find out we should’ve been trying in a different direction after all.’
‘But if it changes – what I should do, and what I shouldn’t – how do I know where to aim? And how can it be my fault if I fail – and why should I be punished for it?’ A crease came faintly between the boy’s black brows, and there at last was Cora.
‘There are some things’ – Will trod carefully – ‘which I think we all must try to do, or else try not to do. But there are others we must work out for ourselves.’ The last pebble he held was smooth, and flat; he turned his back to Leviathan and tossed it spinning at the outgoing tide. It skipped once, and fell behind a shallow wave.
‘That wasn’t what you meant to do,’ said Francis.
‘No,’ said Will. ‘It wasn’t. But at my age, you’re used to failing more often than not.’
‘So you sinned,’ said Francis; Will laughed, and said he hoped to be forgiven.
Frowning, the boy studied Leviathan a while. His lips moved, and Will thought he might perhaps be calculating the correct trajectory of a stone. Then he turned away and said: ‘Thank you for answering my question.’
‘How did I do?’ said the rector, hoping he’d fallen somewhere between faith and reason, and fallen without doing himself harm.
‘I don’t know yet. I’ll think about it.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Will, and wished he could ask the boy to conceal their conversation from his mother: what might she make of her son being instructed in the doctrines of sin? He knew the stormy turn her grey eyes could take.
Each surveyed the other, both feeling that the rector had done his level best under circumstances less than ideal. Francis held out his hand; William shook it; and they walked companionably on the High Road. When they reached the Common the boy paused, and began to pat at his pockets, so that Will wondered if he’d perhaps lost something on the saltings. Then Francis withdrew first a blue bone button, and then a black feather looped in a circle and tied with a bit of thread. He frowned, ran a forefinger down the feather’s spine, then sighing returned them to his pocket. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I can’t spare anything today,’ and with an apologetic look he waved goodbye.
3
Since her friendship with Martha – built as patiently and carefully as one of their houses of cards – Joanna Ransome had changed her school seat to one very nearly under Mr Caffyn’s nose. Always a clever child, with a habit of raiding her father’s library with particular attention to books placed furthest out of reach, her spiritual inclinations were fed one moment by Julian of Norwich and the next by The Golden Bough; she could give you an account of Cranmer’s martyrdom in one breath, and of the war in Crimea with the next. But until meeting Martha it had all been directionless, and done as much in the hope of disconcerting her elders than with any other object in mind, and it had never occurred to her to be shamed by a friendship with an almost illiterate fisherman’s daughter. Able now to name the women surgeons and socialists, satirists and actors, artists, engineers and archaeologists who were apparently to be found anywhere but in Essex, she set herself the task of joining their ranks. I’ll do Latin and Greek, she thought, flinching to think of how weeks before she’d cast spells by Leviathan’s bones: I’ll learn trigonometry and mechanics and chemistry. Mr Caffyn had a hard time of it supplying work to occupy her at weekends, and Stella said, ‘Mind you don’t end up needing glasses,’ as if nothing could be worse than diluting the effect of her violet eyes.
Naomi Banks felt Joanna depart from her, and mourned. She’d heard much of Martha, seen little, and hated her, feeling strongly that an adult who was twenty-five if she was a day had no business taking away her Jo. She would’ve liked to show her friend the serpent drawings, and explain how impossible it was to sleep; to confess what had happened in the White Hare, and ask if she ought to be angry or ashamed. But it seemed impossible: her friend had begun to look on her with pity, which was worse than dislike.