Joanna stood tall beside him and considered bringing her fist down on his bent head, feeling for the first time the helpless rage of a child knowing itself wiser and more just than its parent. Then behind them the church doors opened and the light came in, and there with her red hair burning was Naomi Banks. She was breathless with running, and her hands were coated with mud to the elbow. ‘It’s happened again!’ she said, and her voice rang in the vault. ‘It’s come again: I told you it would – didn’t I tell you! Didn’t I say it would!’
By the time Will reached the marsh a handful had gathered round the bundle lying there. Cracknell’s head was turned so far to his left – and upward, craning, as though looking into the face of his destroyer – that it was immediately apparent (they said) that his neck was broken. ‘Wait for the coroner,’ said Will, stooping to close the filmy eyes: ‘He’d been ill a while.’ There on the man’s coat, placed precisely on his stomach and between two torn pockets, were a silver fork and a grey stone pierced with a hole. ‘Who did this?’ he said, looking up at the faces of his flock: ‘Who put these things here, and why?’ But they all shrank away, one after the other, not admitting to anything, saying that they knew there was something there, had known it all along, and that they’d all best lock their doors whenever the tide was high. One woman crossed herself, receiving a stern look from her minister, who long ago had trained them out of superstition.
‘It’s torn off one of his brass buttons,’ said Banks, tousling his daughter’s head, but no-one paid much attention: it was a miracle Cracknell had any buttons at all.
‘Our friend has passed away only because he was ill, and now he’s gone to glory,’ said Will, hoping this last was true: ‘He would have wandered out at night for air, or got lost and confused. It’s not the time to talk of snakes and monsters – has someone sent for the doctor? – thank you, yes: cover his face – let him rest in peace – isn’t it what we all hope for in the end?’
On the outskirts of the small crowd Francis Seaborne stood, now and then patting the pocket of his jacket where he’d put a shiny button on which an anchor was embossed. Someone had begun to cry, but Frankie had lost interest: he was looking out to the horizon, where blue clouds banked up all around. They were so like mountain ranges receding into mist he thought perhaps the village had been plucked up out of Essex and dropped, wholesale, into a foreign country.
Dear Cora – I saw this postcard and it called you to mind – do you like it?
I have your letter. Thank you. I will write again soon. Stella sends love.
As ever,
WILLIAM RANSOME
Philippians 1:3–11
Luke Garrett MD
c/o Royal Borough Teaching Hospital 23rd June Dear Rev Ransome,
I hope you are well. I write with regard to Mrs Ransome, whom
I have met twice. On both occasions I observed the following: a significantly raised temperature; heightened colour in the cheek; dilated pupils; a fast irregular heartbeat; and a rash on her forearms.
I believe her also to be suffering a small degree of delirium.
I would strongly advise you to bring Mrs Ransome to the Royal Borough hospital, where as you know I am employed. My colleague Dr David Butler has offered to examine her. He has considerable expertise in respiratory disease. With your permission I will attend. There are certain surgical procedures you may wish to consider.
An appointment is not necessary. You will be expected as soon as possible.
Yours sincerely,
LUKE GARRETT MD
Rev. William Ransome
The Lodge, Aldwinter
Essex
24th June
Dear Cora –
I hope you are well. I couldn’t write sooner, though I wanted to – something has happened: Cracknell has been taken.
Why do I put it like that? I knew he was ill: I sat with him the day before he died. He wanted me to read to him, but we couldn’t find a single book in the house, except my Bible, which of course he didn’t want. In the end I recited ‘Jabberwocky’. It made him laugh. ‘Snicker-snack!’ he said, and thought it very funny.
We found him on the marsh. The tide was coming in and had got as far as his boots. He seemed to have been looking up at something over him, though the coroner says there’s no foul play. He must have been there all night. Already it looks as if World’s End is sinking without him into the mud. Joanna has decided we have to keep Magog (or possibly Gog); she put a rope round its neck and walked it all the way home. It’s in the back garden eating Stella’s flowers. It’s looking at me now. I don’t like its slotted eyes.
Of course the villagers are in uproar: they’re keeping their children in. The night it happened they say there was a strange blue light in the sky – one woman (little Harriet’s mother, do you remember her?) kept saying the veil had been pierced, and I can’t get her out of the church. She’d get up in the pulpit, given half a chance. Imagine if she’d seen the Fata Morgana, as we did! Bedlam would have been the most we could hope for.
Someone’s been hanging horseshoes in Traitor’s Oak (probably Evansford, who is taking a lot of pleasure out of being afraid) and one of the farmers has burned his crops. I don’t know what to do. Are we under judgment? And if we are, what have we done and how can we atone for it? I accepted this flock, and tried to be a good shepherd, but something’s driving them over a cliff.
Your imp of a doctor wrote. By letter he’s a fine firm man: I could hardly refuse. We travel to London next week, though Stella looks better now than lately and sleeps the whole night through.
But all the same, I’m troubled. Dr Garrett showed me what he would do to infants and women if they let him, and it sickened me. Not the cuts and stitches, but how careless he is. He told me that if I believed in the immortal soul I’d have no more reverence for my own carcass than for that of a rabbit; we are all only passengers, he said. He told me that since he reverences science, since he worships the vessels and corpuscles and cells that make us up, it is I who am the barbarian!
Since you’ve been gone I’ve been reading like a student. I hope you don’t think I’m too proud to sift over my thoughts, to order them. What does Locke say? We are all short-sighted. I think more than ever I need glasses with lenses three inches thick.
I won’t accept that my faith is the faith of superstition. I suspect you despise me for it just a bit – and I know your doctor does! – and I almost wish I could deny it to please you. But it’s a faith of reason, not darkness: the Enlightenment did away with all that. If a reasoned creator set the stars in their place then we must be capable of understanding them – we must also be creatures of reason, of order!
Cora, there is more – there is more besides the counting of atoms, the calculating of the planet’s orbit, counting down the years until Halley’s Comet makes its return – something beats in us beside the pulse. Do you remember the Frenchman who tied a pigeon to a photographic plate and cut its throat, and thought he caught a wisp of soul escaping through the wound? Absurd of course, and yet – can’t you see him there with his knife and imagine how he thought it might be so?
How else to account for so much? How else to explain how attentive, how loving my whole being becomes when I turn towards Christ?
And how else to account for the longing I have for you? Cora, I was content. I had come to the end of everything new – I had no more surprises in store, and I never sought any. I was serving my purpose. And there you were – and from your hair which is never tidy to your man’s clothes, I’ve never liked the look of you (do you mind?). But I seem to have learned you by heart, seemed at once to know you, had immediate liberty to say everything to you I could never have said elsewhere – and all this is to me the ‘substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen’! Ought I to be ashamed, or troubled? I am not. I refuse to be.
How do you like that, you rank atheist, you apostate? You have driven me to God.
With love – and with prayer, whether you like it or not,
WILL
Rev. William Ransome
The Lodge, Aldwinter