‘Cyan!’ said Stella, delighted, making a note of it: Cyan! Teal! Really there was no end to the boy’s charms. Her own children were returning to her tomorrow – would they also understand? She suspected not. ‘Put your treasures on the windowsill – there, where I’ve left a gap – and we’ll give William his letter – he’ll be pleased. He missed her while she was gone.’ She turned her eyes on Martha, who wondered what they saw, and what they did not.
‘Is he here?’ Martha said, curious: Cora had wandered home late in the cool evening, dazed as if with drink, though there’d been nothing telling on her breath; she’d said, ‘We had such a good long walk,’ and curling in a chair fallen immediately asleep.
‘In the garden feeding Magog if he can find her in the mist – Jo will be home tomorrow and will go straight out there and want to know what she had for breakfast and whether she still pines for Cracknell – go and find him, why don’t you, and take him the note?’ Stella lowered an eyelid very slightly at Francis, who understood that his new friend wished them to be alone, and felt himself grow warm with pleasure.
‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ he said when Martha had gone. He stood precisely where he’d been told to stand, and no nearer; very straight, and rigid with the importance of what he had to convey.
‘So I understand,’ said Stella. Suffer the little children to come unto me! Her own babies were coming, and here in the meantime was another, and she’d cradle him close if she could – sometimes she looked down at her arms and thought she saw love seeping out of every pore! ‘What is it? I won’t be here much longer, you see, so you have to tell me quick.’
‘I disobeyed my mother,’ said Francis, a little cautiously. He did not consider this to be a sin, but had observed that it was looked on dimly in most quarters.
‘Ah,’ said Stella. ‘I wouldn’t let it trouble you. Christ came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance, after all.’
Francis didn’t know about that, but, relieved to see he was not to be told off, edged a little closer, rolling the brass button in his pocket between finger and thumb. ‘I got up this morning at half past five and I went down to the saltmarsh and that man Banks was there and there was lots of fog. I wanted to see if I could see it. The serpent. The Trouble. What they said is in the water. They told me they’d found it but I wasn’t sure because obviously I hadn’t seen it.’
‘Ah! The Essex Serpent – my old adversary, my foe!’ Stella’s eyes glittered, and the hectic colour on her cheek spread upward; she leaned forward and said confidingly, ‘I hear it, you know. It whispers. I write it all down.’ She flicked through her blue notebook and held it out, and Francis saw, written over and over in two neat columns, COMING READY OR NOT. ‘It’s all right,’ said Stella, wondering if she’d frightened the lad: ‘You and I understand each other, as I have always said we do. They have been deceived, Francis. I know the enemy. It can be placated. It’s been done before.’ She looked down at her palms, and read them – surely there were sores coming where the head-lines crossed the lines of memory? – she held them up, but Francis saw nothing.
‘Well,’ he said, pressing on, ‘there was such a lot of fog I couldn’t see very much, but then I heard a noise and there it was.’ He flung out his arm as if the Essex Serpent might creep out from behind the dining table. ‘Just there, big and dark and moving: I could’ve thrown a stone and hit it if I wanted! Well, I looked and looked and I tried to tell Banks but he wouldn’t come. And then the fog was gone for a bit and the sun came out and I saw what it was.’ He told her what he’d seen, and how he’d laughed, and how then the fog and the tide had swallowed it up. ‘Oh …’ she said, disbelieving, as he’d feared she would be, a little let down; then ‘Oh – !’ and she too fell to laughing, and could not stop. Francis watched, recalling how his father once had reached for his throat as if it could be coaxed into being calm. His father’s illness had interested him without troubling him, but as Stella’s eyes streamed with tears his own wetted in response – should he help her? He crossed the carpet, and gave her a glass of water; the fit passed, and she sipped gratefully, then clasping her hands in her lap said, ‘Well, then. Well, Francis. What are we going to do about it?’
‘We should show them,’ he said: ‘We should go down there and show them.’
‘Show them,’ she said, ‘yes: the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen …’ She patted at the beads of sweat which settled in the cleft above her lip: ‘The people that walked in darkness will see a great light! We will deliver them out of their fear – give me my notebook, hand me my pen: I am a ready writer! Come’ – she patted the vacant seat beside her, and Francis knelt there, leaning on her arm, watching her leaf through pages blotted with blue ink – ‘I will show you what we’ll do, you and I.’ She began to sketch, her moment of weakness forgotten; her small body radiated vitality and purpose. ‘It is my time,’ she said: ‘The sands are sinking – I have heard it calling! – I am wet to my ankles in blue water …’
Francis wondered if he ought to be troubled, or should call for Martha: the woman’s white hands trembled – her words were tangled strings of bright beads – the black centres of her eyes had spread to the rims. But she put out her arm, and drew him to her, and Francis – who could not bear the shy attempts his mother made to pet him – leaned against her, and felt the heat rise from her shoulder and the incurve of her neck. ‘I can’t do it without you,’ she said, confidingly: ‘I can’t do it on my own, and who else understands, Frankie? Who else can help me?’
She told him what she had in mind. Any other child might have been frightened, or put their head on her shoulder and wept. But as she drew in her notebook, and showed him what part he should play, he was aware for the first time of being wanted, and not out of duty. A new sensation came, which he examined, and would think about later, when he was alone: he thought perhaps it was pride.
‘When shall we do it?’ he said. She tore the pages from the notebook (he admired how neatly she had set out what they were to do, and the care with which she’d planned it) and put them in his pocket.
‘Tomorrow,’ she said: ‘When I’ve seen my babies again. Will you help? Do you promise?’
‘I will,’ he said. ‘I do.’
Martha in the garden watched Will try and crown Magog with a home-coming wreath: the goat, growing stout on scraps, shook it repeatedly off, giving him a sour look they both understood to convey that Cracknell would’ve never dreamt of such an indignity. She blinked her slotted eyes and retreated to the misty garden’s end.
‘When are the children home?’ said Martha. ‘You must’ve missed them.’
‘I’ve prayed for them every day,’ he said. ‘Nothing’s been right since they’ve been gone.’ He looked very young, in a shirt with a tear on the shoulder and red berries from the discarded wreath caught in his hair. He’d left behind his pulpit voice and instead leaned on his country vowels; it had a curious effect, drawing the eye more than ever to the corded strength of his bare arms. ‘Tomorrow on the midday train.’ Martha studied him a while – dared she ask where he’d walked the night before with Cora? Had he too been a little off-kilter since then, a little restive? Perhaps it was only that his children were coming home, and meanwhile Stella burned in her blue room.
‘I’ll look forward to seeing them,’ she said: ‘Anyway, I was sent to give you this.’ She gave him the letter, which he looked at without interest; ‘Leave it there,’ he said: ‘I’d best go fetch Magog.’ He gave a curious bow – half-ironic, and half-comical – and walked into the white air.
Returning to the house to take Francis home, she stood amazed at the threshold. Frankie – who even as an infant could never bear to be held – was seated astride on Stella’s lap, his arms clasped about her neck; she’d drawn a blue cloth over them both, and under it they swayed very slightly back and forth.
What Martha later recalled most vividly of those last few fog-white days was this: William’s wife and Cora’s son, fit together like broken pieces soldered on the seam.
The blackeyed boy came and showed me the way.