At night, he’d be in bed under a good thick quilt with his daughter snoring next door, and his stomach full of toasted cheese. ‘Not even then,’ he said: ‘There’s nothing here except house martins.’
Cora ate the last of her cake, and said, ‘I think the whole village is haunted. Only – I think they’re haunting themselves.’ She thought of Will, who’d not written since the day they’d let Luke loose on Joanna, and when he greeted her did so with such extravagant politeness it chilled each separate bone in her spine.
Not having much patience for the turn the talk had taken, Taylor poked at the newspaper Cora had brought, and said, ‘Why don’t you tell me what’s going on in the world? I like to keep my eye on things.’
She shook it out and said: ‘All the usual: three British servicemen dead outside Kabul, a test match lost. Only’ – she tapped the folded paper – ‘there’s this: a meteorological curiosity, and I don’t mean this endless rain! Shall I read it?’ Taylor nodded, then folded his hands and closed his eyes, willing as a child to be entertained. ‘“The keen meteorologist should turn a weather eye to the heavens in the weeks forthcoming in anticipation of witnessing a curious atmospheric phenomenon. First observed in 1885, and visible solely in the summer months between latitudes 50°N and 70°S, these ‘noctilucent clouds’ form a curious layer perceived only at twilight. Observers have noted the luminous blue nature of the display, which fluctuates considerably in brilliance, and in formation is best described as resembling a mackerel sky. The origin of this ‘night-shining’ remains a source of contention, and it has been suggested in some quarters that its first having been observed subsequent to the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 is no mere coincidence.” There now,’ she said: ‘What do you make of that?’
‘Night-shining,’ he said, shaking his head, a little affronted. ‘Whatever will they think of next!’
‘They say Krakatoa’s ash has changed the world – these bad winters we’ve lately had, changes in the night sky: all because years ago and thousands of miles away a volcano blew.’ She shook her head. ‘I’ve always said there are no mysteries, only things we don’t yet know; but lately I’ve thought not even knowledge takes all strangeness from the world.’ She told him what she’d seen with William Ransome at her side: the phantom barge in the Essex sky, and how she’d seen gulls fly beneath the hull.
‘It was just the light,’ she said, ‘up to its old tricks. But how was my heart to know?’
‘The Flying Essex-man, eh?’ said doubting Thomas: if ghost ships were ever to take to the seas they could surely find better waters than the Blackwater estuary. He was saved from further comment by the arrival of Charles and Katherine Ambrose, carrying a green umbrella and a pink one respectively, their presence on the street brightening up the town.
Cora stood to greet them – ‘Charles! Katherine! You can’t stay away – you know my friend Thomas Taylor, of course – we’re discussing astronomy. Have you seen the night-shining? Or are the London lights too bright?’
‘As always, dear Cora, I don’t know what you’re on about.’ Charles shook the cripple’s hand, dispensed several coins into his hat without first checking their value, and drew Cora under the shade of his umbrella. ‘I have heard from William Ransome,’ he said. ‘You are in disgrace.’
‘Oh’ – she looked chastened, but he pressed on: ‘I know you insist that we must all face the modern age, but it might have been polite to ask permission first.’ It was very difficult to continue, since Cora looked miserable, and Katherine was giving him one of her warning looks, but he loved William, and in his latest letter he’d seemed more shaken than the incident deserved (‘I wish you hadn’t sent her,’ he’d written: ‘It’s been nothing but one thing after another.’ And then, following swiftly on a postcard, he’d said, more cheerfully: ‘Forgive my bad temper. I was tired. What news of Whitehall?’).
‘Have you apologised?’ he said, thanking God fervently – and for neither the first time nor the last – that he’d been spared parenthood.
‘Certainly not,’ said Cora, taking Katherine’s hand, feeling she deserved an ally. ‘I shan’t. Joanna gave her permission. Stella, too. Or must we all bide our time until a man provides written consent?’
‘What a nice coat,’ said Katherine, rather desperately, looking at the blue jacket which had replaced the old man’s tweed Cora wore all winter, and which made her grey eyes stormy.
‘Isn’t it?’ Cora said absently: she could now only think of her friend, back in his Aldwinter study, thinking badly of her. She had so much to tell him, and no means of telling it. She turned back to Taylor, who was picking the last crumbs of cake from his lap and watching all three with pleasure, as if he’d paid for a ticket. ‘I ought to be getting home,’ she said, shaking his hand: ‘Francis asked for the latest Sherlock Holmes, which he’s afraid will be the Great Detective’s last case, and if it is I really don’t know what we’ll do: write them myself, perhaps.’
‘Give him this, then,’ said Taylor, who knew the boy rather better than his mother suspected, since he’d had a habit of slipping out of the Red Lion unnoticed and clambering up into the ruins. He passed Cora a piece of broken plate on which she made out a snake coiled around an apple tree.
‘More serpents,’ said Charles. ‘There seems to be a lot of it about. Cora, I haven’t finished with you yet: we’re staying at the George and it strikes me you could do with a drink.’
Seated comfortably in the parlour of the George, it was not William they discussed, but Stella. Her letters to Katherine had taken on a spiritual cast (‘Not,’ said Charles, looking horrified, ‘what one expects of a clergyman’s wife!’). Her God had slipped into something that had little to do with the thundercrack above Mount Sinai: she seemed instead to venerate a series of sensations she associated with the colour blue. ‘She told me she meditates on it day and night – that she carries a blue stone with her into church, and kisses it – that she can only bear to wear blue, because other colours scorch her skin.’ Katherine shook her head. ‘Is she ill? She was always a little silly, I suppose, but cleverly so – it was as if she’d chosen to be silly because it’s a characteristic so often expected of women that it’s almost admired.’
‘And she’s always hot,’ said Cora, thinking of how she’d held her hands when last they’d met, and of how they’d been like those of a small child in fever. ‘But how can she be ill, when she grows more beautiful each time I see her?’
Charles poured another glass of wine (‘Not bad I suppose, for an Essex pub’), and holding it to the light said, ‘William says he called the doctor, and that she can’t shake off the flu. He’d like to send her away somewhere warm, but summer is icumen in, as the old song goes, and she’ll be basking soon enough.’
Cora was not so sure: Luke had said nothing to her (he’d departed Aldwinter as swiftly as he could, as if he still felt William’s hand on his collar), but she’d seen his watchful appraisal of the woman as she’d chattered amiably about the cornflowers she was raising from seed, and the turquoise drops she wore in her ears; watched him take her pulse, and frown. ‘The other day she told me that she’d not seen the Essex Serpent but heard it, only she didn’t know what it had said.’ She drained her glass, and said: ‘Was she joking, playing along, knowing I half-think there’s something there after all?’
‘She’s too thin,’ said Charles, who mistrusted anyone who did not eat. ‘But – yes – beautiful: sometimes I think she looks like a saint seeing Christ.’