Luke came to Aldwinter in triumph and a new grey coat. For all that his success had not proved a cure to all his own ills, it was useless to deny that this evidence of his skill and courage gave him stature. Over in Bethnal Green the heart of Edward Burton beat stronger by the hour: he’d taken to making drawings of the dome of St Paul’s, and was likely to return to work by midsummer. Luke felt Burton’s heart beat beside his own, so that he walked with the vitality of two; and though he knew how pride precedes a fall, it seemed so novel to have any distance to tumble he willingly faced the risk.
In the train from London and the cab from Colchester he’d thought of Cora, and smoothed her letter on his knee: we need you, she’d said, and scowling he wondered whom she meant by ‘we’: was it also this parson of hers, who peppered her correspondence, who’d drawn her away from London into the Essex mud? The envy he’d felt watching her stoop over her husband’s pillow and kiss his greasy forehead in the final days was nothing to what went through him when he saw that name in her handwriting. First she’d written of Mr Ransome, the title keeping him at arm’s length; then The Good Reverend, with a mocking fondness that had made him uneasy; then – lately, and easily, with no warning – Will (and not even William, though that would’ve been bad enough!). Luke scoured the letters for evidence of any feeling on Cora’s part that might indicate a connection beyond cheerful friendship (he grudgingly conceded she’d a right to other friends), and found none. But even so Luke looked out at the fields scudding past the window, and his own dark reflection laid over them, and thought: Let him be old, and fat, and smelling of dust and Bibles.
In her grey house on the common Cora stood waiting at the door. Since the morning in Mr Caffyn’s classroom she’d slept uneasily, feeling it all to have been her fault. Will had warned her not to put flesh on the bones of the Blackwater terror, and he’d been right: there’s no imagination like a child’s, and she’d fattened it up ’til the Essex Serpent was solid as the cows grazing under Traitor’s Oak. Those girls laughing, and the snapping back and forth of their necks! It had been horrible, and she relied on Luke to find some consoling explanation.
In the aftermath Joanna had grown withdrawn, and though she still went early to school with her books under her arm she’d have nothing to do with Naomi Banks, and at the end of each day sat studying in the kitchen, where there was no chance she’d find herself alone. Worse, she had not laughed once since, afraid that if she started she might not stop, and no amount of teasing or capering on the part of her brothers could raise a smile. Cora had been afraid her new friends would blame her for the incident, and for Joanna’s sombre state, but neither Will nor Stella had seen it happen, and when it was explained to them could only think that girls were ridiculous creatures and always getting the giggles over nothing at all.
Worst of all, Cora’s cheerful interest in the Blackwater was soured. She didn’t (of course!) think it a judgment from God – but perhaps there were soft dark places in all of them that ought not to be probed. Then came Luke, striking out over the common, clutching a case to his chest, seeing her at the threshold and breaking out, almost, into a run.
Later that same week Joanna folded her hands in her lap and surveyed the black-haired doctor with mistrust. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. His manner was brisk, but Jo was not entirely fooled. ‘Just do as you’re told and you’ll be all right. Tell her, Cora.’ And Cora, wearing her scarf with the birds stitched on, had said, ‘It’s all right – he did it to me once, and I slept better that night than in years.’
They sat in the largest room in Cora’s grey house, with no lights lit. It was raining drearily, without the stormy conviction that makes for a comfortable afternoon, and Joanna was not warm. On a large sofa beneath the window her mother sat between Cora and Martha, and the women held hands: you’d’ve thought they were in for a séance and not a process no more mysterious (Luke said) than the removal of a tooth.
Only Martha had disapproved of the plan to put the girl under hypnosis to see what light might be shed on what she called The Laughing Incident. ‘The Imp thinks of us all as nothing but cuts of meat, and you’d trust him with a child’s mind and memory?’ She’d bitten her apple down to the pips and said, ‘Hypnosis! He makes it up. It’s not even a word.’
The question of hypnosis had not been raised until certain other matters had been settled. Mr Caffyn, fearing for his career, had produced a report made in the days following, listing the names of the girls involved, their ages and addresses, their fathers’ occupations and their average grades and appending a chart showing the position of each girl at each desk. He deplored Cora’s presence in the village, but didn’t dream of saying so. Little Harriet consented to be questioned from her mother’s lap, and gave such an elaborate description of a coiled snake unfolding wings like umbrellas that she was put down as a nice child but a dreadful liar (Francis, listening at the door, thought: ‘Is a dreadful liar bad at lying, or good at it?’). Naomi Banks, who began it all, refused to say anything other than that she had no idea what she’d been thinking, and could they leave her alone. Parents were delighted to have their daughters examined by a London physician, and declared one after the other in perfect health (save for six instances of ring-worm, which were treated on the spot, and could not account for their hysteria).
Luke, who’d been introduced to Stella Ransome over lunch (and noted the rosy bloom on each cheek), had said, ‘There’ll be something at the heart of the matter – a shared memory or fear; the question is how to allay the fears when the girls cannot or will not share them?’
Stella had pulled at the blue beads looped around her wrist, and taken a liking to the scowling London doctor; only wouldn’t it be awful to be ugly, she thought. ‘Cora tells me you practise hypnosis – am I saying it right? – and that somehow it might help Joanna? She’d like it – she likes everything new. She’d write it all up in her schoolbook.’
It had been tempting for Luke to take Stella’s small hand and say that yes, yes: certainly it would help; that her daughter would restfully recount what it was that had been seen and heard that day, if anything at all, and in coming to would regain her good cheer. But his ambition faltered before the blue eyes turned on him in trust, and he said: ‘It might, but it might not, though I don’t suppose it would do any harm.’ His insistent conscience pricked him: he said, ‘I have never tried it on anyone so young. She might resist it, and laugh at me.’
‘Laugh!’ said Stella: ‘I wish she would!’