Francis crouched, and clasping his knees surveyed Cracknell with mild interest. A moth had settled in the fibres of the coat’s fur collar, and elsewhere the fabric showed patches of pale stains that might even have been mould (could mould take hold on clothing? He resolved to find out). ‘Ransome,’ said Cracknell, who did not quite want to make his last confession, but wouldn’t have minded a kind face being the last he looked on. He put out a hand to tug the boy’s coat – please, he meant to say – but the effort was too great.
The boy tilted his head and took in the name. ‘Ransome?’ he said. He supposed that made sense. The man with the white strip at his throat had visited three villagers in the past weeks (he had counted) of whom at least two had died. Did he bring death, or only ease them into it? He assumed the latter, but it was important to be sure. Examining the old man, Francis saw foam gather at the corners of his mouth and his chest rear inside his coat. Even in the near-dark it was possible to see the man’s flesh take on a waxy cast, and already the bones of the sockets showed blue around his sinking eyes. It was both frightening and commonplace: probably this was always the way the end came.
Cracknell discovered he could not speak: it would waste the breath he eked out of the cool air. What was the boy doing, crouching placidly behind him, turning now and then to look up and smiling every time he did it? His heart lurched in its cavity: surely he’d go running now, and fetch Ransome, who’d come with a lamp and a good thick blanket to lay over his shaking limbs? But Francis, who knew what was coming, saw no sense in wasting time. Besides, it struck him that sharing the wonder that all the while unfurled over their heads might not halve his own pleasure, but double it. He stooped over the man, and said, ‘Look,’ and taking a handful of grey hair tugged at his drooping head so that Cracknell had no choice but to turn away from the black water and up to what he’d once thought was the heavens. ‘Look,’ said the boy: ‘See?’ and he saw the old man’s filmy eyes widen and his mouth gape. The shining scraps of cloud were fading as the dawn came, but had gathered into a pale arc that split the sky, and as they watched a skylark flew up ecstatically singing.
Then Francis lay beside him on the marsh, not caring for the mud that seeped through his clothes, or for the reek that came off the old man’s body, or the morning chill. Their two heads touched now and then as Cracknell, dazed, turned his head to take in the sight, sometimes trying out a scrap of a hymn: it is well with my soul, he sang, doubting it less now than ever. When the life went out of him it was on a long untroubled breath, and Francis patted his hand and said, ‘There, there,’ feeling quite satisfied, because what he loved above anything else was for things to go as he’d thought they would.
2, The Common
Aldwinter
22nd June
Dear Will,
It’s four in the morning and summer’s begun. I’ve been watching something strange in the sky – did you see it? The night-shining, they call it. Another omen!
A long time ago you said how sorry you were I’d lost my husband so young. I remember wishing you had said that he’d died – I didn’t lose him: it wasn’t my doing.
Why were you sorry? You didn’t know him. You didn’t know me. I suppose they teach you these kind phrases when they give you your first white collar.
How could I tell you then what it had been like – not just the death (see how easy it is to say!) but everything before.
He died and I was glad and I was distraught. Do you believe it possible to hold in your mind two sensations which are entirely at odds and yet for both to be completely true? I imagine you don’t – I imagine your idea of absolute truth and absolute right can’t take it in.
I was distraught because I knew no other way of living. I was so young when we married, so young when we met, that I barely existed – he called me into being. He made me what I am.
And at the same time – at exactly the same time! – I felt so happy I thought I’d die of it. I’d had so little happiness – I thought it was hardly possible to live at such a pitch of it and not burn out. The day we met I was walking in the woods and could hardly breathe for gladness.
Once I met a woman who told me her husband treated her like a dog. He’d put her food in a dish on the floor. When they went walking he told her to come to heel. When she spoke out of turn he rolled up the newspaper he was reading and struck her on the nose. Her friends were there and saw it. They laughed. They said what fun he was.
Do you know what I felt, when I heard that? I felt envy, because I was never treated like a dog. We had a dog – a wretched thing: once I picked a tick from its fur and it burst like a berry – and Michael would draw its head to his knee and not mind the drool and stroke its ear, and look at me as he did it. Sometimes he’d slap its flank over and over, hard – it made a hollow noise – and the dog would roll over in ecstasy. When Michael was dying it was his shadow. It didn’t survive his death.
He never touched me so kindly. I looked at the dog and I envied it. Can you imagine being jealous of a dog?
I’m going back to London for a while. I won’t go to Foulis St: it isn’t home anymore. Charles and Katherine will look after me.
Don’t feel you should write.
With love,
CORA
PS: Re. Stella: You should receive a letter from Dr Garrett. Please consider the offer of help.
4
Joanna went to All Saints in the morning and found her father there. It had been a good night, she thought, remembering how she and Martha had pored over plans for new homes in London where the water was clean and ran in copper pipes. She’d played the piano well enough, she’d worn her good dress, she’d eaten an orange (her nails were still stained with its peel). True, it had worn her mother out, and her father that morning had been silent, but then (he said) he always had such a lot of thinking to do.
She found him stooped in the shadows with a chisel in his hand. With furious movements he worked at the serpent coiled on the arm of its pew; over the years the Essex oak had ossified and blackened, and though the creature’s folded wings had come away and lay on the stone floor, it still grinned at its adversary, baring its teeth.
‘No!’ said Joanna – imagine destroying something that had taken so much skill! – and ran to the pew, and pulling at his sleeve said, ‘You can’t do that! It isn’t even yours!’
‘I am in charge! I’ll do what I think’s right!’ he said, sounding not at all like her father, but like a boy who couldn’t get his own way; then as if he heard his own petulance he straightened his shirt and said, ‘It’s no good, Jojo, it shouldn’t be here – look: can’t you see it doesn’t belong?’
But Joanna had stroked the tip of its tail since she could barely walk, and seeing its severed wings she wept and said, ‘You shouldn’t go breaking things! You’re not allowed!’
Her tears were so rare that on any other day they might have stayed his hand, but William Ransome felt beset by enemies and this one at least he could destroy. All night, sleepless, they’d come to him: the crouching black-browed doctor, Cracknell with his moleskins hanging, a roomful of schoolgirls dismantled by laughter, the Blackwater parting, and there on the mud Cora standing sternly, and behind her with its heart beating behind its wet skin the Essex Serpent … he filed off a winking eye and said, ‘Go home, Joanna, go back to your schoolbooks, and don’t meddle.’