Little Harriet, yellow-dressed youngest of the laughing girls, woke before dawn and vomited into her pillow. In the corner her mother stirred, and rising to comfort her child breathed in the morning air, choked, and vomited also. Coming from the Blackwater on a warm west wind a vile smell had entered the room through a broken windowpane. Creeping past World’s End and finding nothing there, it had passed over and come to the borders of Aldwinter, where few lights shone. Leaving the child in her mother’s arms, it came to the Banks cottage, and borne on the breeze stirred the red sails of the barges in the quay. Weighted by drink Banks slept too deeply to be roused, but something troubled him in the dark, and three times he said his lost daughter’s name. On it went, past the White Hare, and on the doorstep a stray dog whined for a master long gone; past the school, where Mr Caffyn – already up, marking grammar notebooks, deploring abuse of the comma – gave a cry of disgust, and ran to fetch a glass of water. Rooks had begun to gather in Traitor’s Oak on the common, sensing in the reeking air a feast. At Cora’s grey house it crept above the door, beneath the lintel; it seeped into the fabric of the sheets on her bed and could not find her. It skirted the All Saints tower, and reached the window of the rectory: William Ransome, sleepless in his study, thought perhaps a mouse lay rotting beneath the boards. Pressing his shirt’s cuff to his mouth he went on his knees below the desk, beside the empty chair he kept beside his own, and found nothing. Stella, in a blue satin garment through which the bones of her shoulder-blades flared like hard little wings, appeared at the threshold. ‘What on earth?’ she said, caught between laughing and choking: ‘What on earth?’ She held a bunch of lavender to her nose.
‘A dead thing somewhere,’ said Will, putting his own jacket around her, afraid she’d begin one of the coughing fits which shook her small body as if it were held in the jaws of a predator: ‘Something on the common? A sheep?’
‘Not Magog, I hope,’ said Stella: ‘We’d never be forgiven’; but no – the last of Cracknell’s family could be seen at the garden’s end, untroubled, chewing an early breakfast. ‘Will, should we light a fire – oh! Oh, it’s foul, foul – you’ll go out on the common and see the earth split open and sinners looking up with all their bones broken and their lips cracked with thirst!’ Her eyes glittered as if the prospect pleased her, and it troubled Will more than the vile air, which he almost thought he could taste, there on the tip of his tongue: something foetid, with a horrid sweetness behind it. Ought he to go out there – perhaps he should – certainly he must: who else was there to seek out the cause of all that had lately befallen the village? He lit a fire, and shortly the reek was displaced by wood-smoke; Stella tossed in her lavender, and there was a brief and piercing scent of recent summer. ‘Go on,’ she said, straightening the papers on his desk (so many letters! Did he never put them away?), giving him his coat. ‘Ten minutes more and we’ll hear the bell and you’ll be wanted somewhere by someone.’
Kissing her, he said, ‘Perhaps a fishing-boat has gone aground on the saltings and spilt its cargo, and the fish is rotting – already it’s a warm enough morning …’
‘I wish the babies were here,’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t Jojo have woken before us all, and gone down with a lamp, and seen for herself, and James done a drawing for the papers?’
Out on the High Road a crowd had gathered. Mr Caffyn had wound a white cloth about his head as if he’d been wounded; others pressed a sleeve to their mouths and peered suspiciously at Will, casting about for signs of a Bible or some other weapon concealed in the crook of his arm. It did not occur to Will until that moment – until he scented on the dim air not only rottenness but fear – that perhaps there was another cause to the foul odour besides misfortune. But there was Harriet’s mother (weeping, as she so often was), crossing herself; there was Banks, not yet sober, saying he’d not go down to the water in case the beast had belched up coils of red hair. Evansford in his black shirt, looking more than ever like an undertaker bereft of a corpse, stood reciting fragments of the Book of Revelation with evident glee. Even Mr Caffyn, who each year taught his students that the 31st of October was nothing but the anniversary of Martin Luther taking hammer and pins to his 95 theses, looked (thought Will) rather green about the gills.
‘Good morning, and a fine one at that,’ he said: ‘And what’s this that’s brought us all out of our beds?’ No answer came. ‘Now as you all know I’m no seafaring man,’ he said heartily, thumping Banks on the shoulder, ‘and you can’t expect me to know anything about anything. Mr Banks, you know the Blackwater better than us all – what’s the cause of this dreadful business, d’you think?’ The wind rose, the smell strengthened: Will gagged, and said, ‘Some algae perhaps, drifted in from overseas? A shoal of herring beached on the shingle?’
‘Not anything I ever smelt before or heard tell of,’ said Banks, muffled behind the sleeve of his coat. ‘It’s not natural, I know that.’
‘Well: you say so,’ said Will, whose eyes streamed: ‘You say so, but nothing’s more natural than the smell of dead things, which I suppose this must be. You and I will both smell similar, given time.’ The small crowd observed him with distaste, and he rightly judged that humour was not fitted to the moment. All right: try scripture, then – ‘Therefore we will not fear, though the waters roar, and be troubled, and what have you!’
‘I’ll tell you what it is,’ said Harriet’s mother: ‘And I needn’t tell you, Banks, need I? – or you, or you …’ She nodded with meaning at Mr Caffyn, and at one or two women who seemed indifferent to the vileness of the air and had already begun to wander up the High Road, towards the Blackwater, where dawn had taken hold. ‘It’s come to us at last, the Essex Serpent, the river beast, and none of us ready for it! It came to my little one first – oh you bet, you bet! It came to her first and she’s sick as a dog and nothing I say’ll comfort the girl.’
Evansford remarked that after all it had been promised by the Redeemer himself there’d be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, and bolstered by this observation, the woman went on, ‘It’s the breath of the thing, the very breath of it I tell you, and on it there’s the flesh and bones of everything it ever had between its jaws – the St Osyth boy, the man washed up on our shores …’
‘A foul miasma, as our fathers were taught,’ said Mr Caffyn, ‘and bringing with it disease – look! I have a fever. La Peste! It has begun.’ And certainly his high scholar’s brow was beaded with drops of sweat, and as Will watched he began to tremble, and twist his mouth into what may have been either the beginnings of a sob or of laughter.
‘The sea gave up the dead which were in it!’ said Banks, growing excited (if hope was gone of holding Naomi alive in his arms he at least might have the pleasure of giving her a tomb): ‘And death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them!’