Having come to a halt he encountered many separate pains: his feet, unused to walking much beyond an urban mile or so, were rubbed raw against his boots; his knee was swelling where he’d stumbled, swearing, over a stile. Worst, he’d let his injured hand hang loosely by his side, so that blood collecting there throbbed against the healing cut. Where knife and scalpel had scored the palm, the flesh looked rather like a thin mouth stitched shut. ‘There was a crooked man,’ he said, ‘who walked a crooked mile.’
But he could hardly resent the pains, since they distracted from the frantic misery that had dogged him since his arrival from London with a good-for-nothing hand and in his pocket Cora’s letter. ‘How could you?’ she’d said, and he’d felt her anger, and understood it: how could he? Own nothing which is not beautiful or useful, she’d once said, and he was neither. A squat, glowering creature as near to being beast as man, and now (he pushed the thumb of his left hand into the damaged palm of his right, and reeled with the shock of it) useless to boot.
Since the day the knife had gone in, he’d woken each night drenched in sweat that collected in the hollow of his collar-bones and left his pillow damp. Useless, he’d say, beating a clenched fist against his temples until his head ached, useless – useless: all that gave him purpose had been taken in a matter of hours.
Sometimes he woke forgetting, and for fleeting seconds the world was spread out before him invitingly: there were his notebooks and his models of the heart with its chambers and pipes; there the letter Edward Burton wrote in the early days as he healed, and beside it an envelope into which Cora had put a piece of stone and an explanatory note in her schoolboy hand. Then he’d remember, and see it was all false as stage props, and the black curtain would fall. It was not melancholy he felt – he might have welcomed that, imagining it possible to enjoy a fading sadness that found companionship on memorial benches. Instead he veered between bitter fury and a curious deadening that dwindled his whole range of feeling to little but a shrug.
Under the oak in the coming dawn he grew calm. If I am useless, he thought, can I not discard myself? He had no duty to go on living – no obligation to walk a yard further. There was no God to censure or console: he answered to no intelligence but his own.
Over in the east a coral light struck the low cloud while Luke laid out reasons for living and found each insufficient. Once his ambition had driven him on through poverty and disgrace; now it belonged to a lost age. His mind was now muddied and slow, and besides: what use was it, matched to a mutilated hand? Once he might have let love for Cora sustain him, but he’d lost that too: her outrage hadn’t extinguished it, not quite, only turned it into something secret and furtive, of which he was ashamed. Would she grieve him? He supposed she would, and imagined her putting on one of those black dresses that made her skin so pale, and imagined William Ransome looking up from his books to see her there on the threshold, her lips parted a little, a tear gleaming on her cheek – oh certainly she’d grieve: she did it so well, after all.
He pictured his mother’s grief: well, she’d never yet had his photo on the mantelpiece – perhaps she’d enjoy finding a silver frame going cheap in the market, and tuck behind the glass a black curl of his baby hair. There was Martha, of course – the thought of her raised something like a smile: what they’d done on midsummer night had delighted them both, but it had also been only a poor substitute. What a mess, he thought: what a mess we make. If love were an archer someone had put out its eyes, and it went stumbling about, blindly letting loose its arrows, never meeting its mark.
No, there was no reason to continue – let the curtain fall when he chose it. He looked up at the branches of the oak, and they were sturdy enough for a gallows.
Just a moment longer there on the earth with the mist rising, then – since there was neither a hell to shun nor a heaven to gain he’d go out with the Essex clay under his nails and filled with the scent of morning. He drew in a breath and all the seasons were in it: spring greenness in the grass, and somewhere a dog-rose blooming; the secretive scent of fungus clinging to the oak, and underneath it all something sharper waiting in a promise of winter.
A vixen drew near and turned her gaslight eyes upon him, then drew back and sat surveying him a while. She cocked her head – considered his position on her territory – concluded he might stay, and losing interest nosed at the white plume on her breast. Then she grew avid and merry with hunger, and went down the hill in little leaps – sometimes spying something in the grass, jack-knifing with her forepaws crooked – and vanished down the incline with her bright brush held high. Luke felt a love for her then which almost made him cry out, and knew that no man ever had a better farewell.
7
At about the time Luke was choosing his own gallows from among the Essex oaks, Banks sat beside a fire high up the shingle, near the black bones of Leviathan, making marks in the logbook: Visibility, poor; wind, north-easterly; high tide 6.23am. For all that he’d witnessed the great silver fish lying beached on the saltings with its belly splitting open, Banks knew – with a certainty which had begun to obliterate all others – that the Essex Serpent had not been found. How could it, when he woke each night with its breath on his cheek – expected to wake and see himself enfolded in its wet black wing? When all of Aldwinter had celebrated, rolling out the cider-barrels and draining them dry, he’d sat at a distance, alone, thinking of his poor lost daughter and her coral-coloured hair. ‘All alone out there with the flotsam and jetsam,’ he’d said, ‘and the mark of the Serpent on her.’ Oh, there was something out there all right – he’d seen it, he’d marked it: black it was and ridged in places and its appetite unsatisfied. He drowned his sorrows in bad gin; it fended off the worst of the images that came in the night, but out there with his face to the rising tide they came vividly at him: the serpent in the Blackwater with a livid eye, its blunt snout, how it pawed at his daughter as she rolled dumbly in the shallows.
‘Did what I could to keep her dry,’ said Banks, growing tearful, looking about for a witness and finding none: she’d been born with a caul, had Naomi, and killed her mother coming out; and he’d done as any good sailor would and put a bit of caul in a pewter locket and she’d worn it every day to fend off water-sprites. ‘I did what I could,’ he said, and the fog rolled in, and dawdled by the fire.
He took a bottle from his pocket and drained it dry; the spirit stung his throat, and he doubled over coughing, and when he raised his head he saw surveying him placidly across the fire the black-haired son of that London woman who’d taken up with the rector.
‘Bit early for you, isn’t it?’ he said. The child had always unnerved him, with his steady gaze and his habit of patting his pockets over and over. If the beast was to take any child it ought to’ve been this one, whose presence raised all the hairs on his neck’s nape – who he’d once seen steal five blue sweets from behind the counter in the village store!
‘But isn’t it the same time for me as it is for you?’ said Francis Seaborne. ‘Did you see it?’
‘What are you on about – what do you want?’ said Banks, choosing to deny the serpent. ‘Nothing out there, lad, nothing to see.’
‘I don’t think you think that,’ said Francis, coming closer. ‘Because if you did, why would you be here and what are you writing in your book? Stands to reason.’
‘Visibility poor,’ said Banks, flapping the logbook at the boy. ‘And getting worse: I can hardly see you, never mind the Blackwater.’
‘I can,’ said the boy, and took a hand from his pocket to gesture out east where the fog banked up above the salt marsh. ‘My eyes are good. Over there. Can’t you see?’
‘Where’s your mother? Doesn’t she keep you indoors – keep back, won’t you – where did you go?’