Across the common, in the shadow of the All Saints spire, Joanna slept with her slippers on, and Stella dozed with her head on her new blue pillow. Some distance away, approaching the marsh, Will walked alone, raging. Desire had never troubled him: he’d married Stella young and happily, and their hunger was innocent and easily sated. Oh, he loved Cora – he knew that: had known it at once – but that also did not trouble him: if she’d been a boy or a dowager he’d’ve loved her no less, and prized her grey eyes just the same. He was a Bible scholar, he knew its various names for various loves: he read the words of St Paul to the churches and their sacred affection summoned Cora’s name: I thank my God on every remembrance of you …
But something had shifted there in the warm room seasoned with briny air and roses blooming in every corner – he’d put his hand on her waist and seen her throat move as she spoke – was that it, or how her scarf had slipped from her shoulder and he’d seen the scar and wondered if it had hurt, and how, and whether she’d minded? He thought of how he’d gripped her, of hearing his fingernails rasp against the fabric of her dress; of how she’d looked at him with her level long look. He thought she might have been a little afraid of him, but no: it wasn’t fear that darkened her eyes but a challenge, or satisfaction – had she smiled?
He walked on to the mouth of the estuary, not knowing what to do with his desire, only that he could not take it to Stella; he knew he’d touch her and find her for the first time slight and insubstantial – he had in mind something more like fighting, and it appalled him; he went out to the water’s edge and with quick movements spent himself on the black marsh with something like a bark and with a dog’s joy.
3
Long after midnight, as the year slipped past the half-way mark, Francis Seaborne went out. Into his left pocket he put the silver fork taken from the Colchester ruin, and into his right a grey stone perforated with a hole into which his little finger fit. Upstairs Cora lay pressing the scar on her collarbone, willing the pain back; in a room elsewhere Luke and Martha fell apart. No-one wondered where Frankie was: if they thought of him at all, it was first with unease, and then with the comfortable certainty that this inscrutable child was keeping himself safely to himself.
No-one had ever tried to fathom Frankie’s habit of night-walking; it had been chalked up as just another oddity. That he couldn’t bear to be in company, but would haunt bedroom doorways in the smallest hours, was entirely in keeping with that baffling boy. If anyone had asked, he’d have told them it was only that he tried to understand the world and its workings: why (for example) did the wheels of a cab seem to turn against the direction of travel? Why was it that he didn’t hear a falling object strike the earth until after he’d seen it land? Why did he raise his right hand but his reflection raise its left? He watched his mother with her mud and rocks, and made no connection between his own quest and hers. She looked down: he looked up. She was no help at all. Of all the men and women he’d met, he only had patience for Stella Ransome. He saw how she gathered her blue stones and flowers, and thought they understood each other. He also saw the too-bright colour of her eyes, and wondered why no-one spoke of it: but wasn’t it just like them all, to see but not observe?
Out he went under the shadows the moon made, seeing how they lay in parallel, wondering why. The evening’s muddle had unsettled him – he’d watched so carefully but found no order or reason in what he’d seen – and out alone in the night there’d be problems more readily solved. He thought he might go down to the Blackwater and see for himself what waited there in the estuary. It struck him as unjust that he alone of all the Aldwinter children had had no glimpse of the beast, not even in his dreams. Across the common, under Traitor’s Oak to High Lane, heading east, while all around low voices murmured and bonfires burned to ward off what spirits braved the modern age. Someone played the fiddle; two girls passed him dressed in white; there was a nightingale in the hedge. When he reached High Lane the common fell away, and the noise of it: there was the scent of wood smoke and a delighted yelp away to his left, and then he might have been alone in the world.
He reached the salt-marsh in sight of World’s End, thinking to find the point where the Pole Star pinned the sky in place, or see the moon give its counterfeit light, but encountered instead a black sheet on which a net of vivid blue was stitched. It was as if he looked not up into the vaulted sky, but down at the surface of a lake with sunlight on its ripples. From north to south above the pale horizon fine shreds of blue light hung, and between them showed the sky’s dark blue. Now and then, as if caught by wind, a slow movement passed across and the bright net closed and widened. The light it gave off was not borrowed, like a white cloud ringed in sunlight, but seemed entirely its own: it might have been many fine lightning bolts fixed in place, burning inexplicably blue. Francis was transfixed with joy. It rose in him so suddenly and so completely he could do nothing but laugh, frightened at the strangeness of his own delight.
As he stood watching – craning his neck too far, so that in the morning his mother wondered why he held his head so strangely – a movement on the salt-flats caught his eye. The blue lights made the world a little brighter than it ought to have been, and the estuary surface showed oily black with pricks of blue upon the surface. Between the water’s edge and the shore, not far from Leviathan’s ribs, a bundle of cloth moved. There was a sound, very faint, like the snorting of an animal; the bundle shifted and lengthened on the mud, and then was still.
Curious, Francis turned to watch, peering into the dim air. If this was the Blackwater beast, he thought, it was a pitiful thing and ought to be drowned. The snorting paused a while as the bundle edged towards Leviathan, then began again, only this time it ended in what was certainly a cough, and then a long gasp at the air.
Francis, unafraid, came nearer. The bundle convulsed, then with a groan raised itself, and Francis saw the greasy layers of a black coat and dense fur collar, and above it the wild head of an old man he’d seen once or twice over at the church where the villagers were buried. Cracknell – that was it: a stinking old thing who’d once held up his sleeve and shown the boy the earwigs scuttling there. The groan ended in a fit of coughing that doubled him over again: he clutched the coat closer and fell silent.
Cracknell, with his boots at the water’s edge and his eyesight failing, saw the thin boy with the black hair neatly combed and tried to call out. But it was as if the air had edges that caught at his throat as he breathed, and each time the name came to his mouth (Freddie, was it?) the coughing set up again. At last his breath returned; he called out ‘Boy! Boy!’ and beckoned at Francis, swaying on the path not fifteen feet away.
‘I don’t know what you’re doing,’ said Francis. What was he doing? Dying, possibly, but what a strange place to be dying in. His father had died with a clean white sheet pulled up to his chin. He turned away a moment to look up – there, the net widened and in places broke, and blue-black sky showed between fragments of light.
‘Get someone,’ said Cracknell, and after that fell to muttering at length, exasperated or amused, fixing Francis with an imploring and furious glare.