‘It’s Mrs Ransome,’ he said. ‘I want to show you, but I’m not supposed to! I want to show you, but I told her I wouldn’t!’ The impossibility of reconciling what he had promised, and what he desired, bewildered him: whichever way he turned, something would be knocked out of place. His grasp on the paper loosened, and she took it from him. There in blue ink on blue paper were the words TOMORROW SIX MY WILL BE DONE! and beneath them a childish sketch of a woman – long-haired, smiling – laid out beneath a curling wave. Stella Ransome had signed her name, and written underneath, Put your jacket on it might get cold.
‘Stella, my God,’ said Cora – but she could not frighten Francis, or toss him from her lap as she ran for the door: what if he never came to her again, her son – with his arms open, and his eyes seeking hers? Nausea came, and she bit at it, and said – conversationally, as if nothing much would come of his response – ‘Frankie, did you go down with her to the water? Did you help her down?’
‘She told me she was being called home,’ he said: ‘She told me the Essex Serpent wanted her, and I told her there was nothing there, and she said God moves in mysterious ways and she’d already stayed too long.’ He put his hands over his face and began to shiver, as if he were still out there on the shingle and the sun long gone.
‘All right,’ said Cora: ‘All right, now,’ and soothed him, astonished to find that he submitted to it, that he actually turned his face towards her. She held him, as much for her own comfort as for his; she called for Martha, who came, and whose recent coolness to her friend did not last beyond the threshold.
‘Take him – please, Martha,’ said Cora – ‘my God, my God, where is my coat, my boots? – Frankie, you only did your best, and now I’ll do mine – no, no – stay: I’m coming back soon.’
Will was walking on the High Road with Joanna and Naomi by his side. How proud they are! he thought, smiling, wondering, as he always did, how best to tell it all to Cora, what might please her most; but perhaps that was impossible now, it had all been broken, remade, he could not make out the shape of things – then ‘Cora!’ called out Joanna, and waved. And there was his friend on the path running, or almost; and for a brief moment (which caused him to make a sound he could not suppress) he thought perhaps she’d come to seek him out, could not remain another hour behind closed doors.
‘What’s wrong?’ said Naomi, stopping, touching her pewter locket for comfort. Something was wrong, that much was certain – Cora’s cheeks were wet, her mouth open in distress – she clutched a sheet of paper which she waved at them as she came, like a signal none of them could decipher. She reached them, and hardly paused, only tugged at Will’s sleeve and said, ‘I think Stella is down there, by the water – I think something is wrong.’
‘But we have come from there – it’s nothing, it’s the boat Banks lost –’ But Cora by then had gone, the scrap of paper thrust at Will and dropped on the wet path, and for a moment he could neither move nor speak. For something was wrong, yes – yes: he ought to’ve seen it at once – it was there, just beyond his reach – he could not quite grasp it. Joanna stooped to pick the paper up. She couldn’t at first take it in, then a picture formed in her mind so strange and terrible that she raised her hands as if she could bat it away from her. ‘Daddy,’ said Joanna, unable to keep from crying: ‘Isn’t she sleeping? Didn’t we leave her safely upstairs?’ Will, very white, reeling a little, said, ‘But I heard her, her footsteps, the door closing – she said she wanted to rest …’
They saw Cora reach the place where the road fell down to the saltings, and how she threw off her coat to run a little freer to the marsh. Will followed, cursing a body grown suddenly sluggish, unwilling, as if it were another man’s and he a possessing spirit. He was the last to reach the wreck – there was Cora, kneeling in the mud, straining against the hull, so that the muscles of her back shifted beneath the fabric of her dress. And there were the girls at her side, kneeling also, and it gave the effect of supplicants before an ugly malevolent god to whom all prayers went unanswered. He saw (how could he have missed it?) the blue-banded stones set around the ruined boat, the scrap of pale ribbon just visible, the blue glass bottle set upright in the shingle. ‘She said she was tired and it was time for her rest –’ he said, bewildered – what were they doing, there in the mud – their dresses heavy with it, their heads bowed with effort? ‘Stella, Stella,’ they called over and over, as if she were a child who’d gone walking and not come home when she was told. Their hands slipped on the wet wood, and the three women lifted up the boat, which was not so heavy after all, and disintegrated as it moved.
Lying there in the shadows, shrouded, silent, set about with all her blue tokens, lay Stella Ransome. Seeing her, Will cried out, and so also did Cora: she lost her hold on the boat, which fell away, breaking apart on the marsh. Then Stella basked in the day’s last light, her thin blue dress showing all the pretty bones of her hips and shoulders. She held a bunch of lavender that still gave off its scent, and nestled around were her blue glass bottles, her scraps of cambric and cotton, under her head a blue silk cushion and at her feet her blue notebook, curling in the damp. Her skin also was blue, her mouth dusted with it, her veins marbling close to the skin; the lids of her closed eyes were touched with purple. William Ransome, on his knees, drew his wife towards him. ‘Stella,’ he said, kissing her forehead: ‘I’m here, Stella, we’ve come to take you home.’
‘Don’t leave us, darling, not yet,’ said Cora – ‘don’t go’; she took the woman’s small white hand and rubbed it between her own. Joanna tugged at the fine hem of her mother’s dress to cover her bare blue feet: ‘Listen, her teeth are chattering, can’t you hear it?’ She took off her own coat, and tugged Will’s from his shoulders; together they cocooned her against the cool air.
‘Stella, darling, can you hear us?’ said Cora, in whose loving desperation was a painful unaccustomed twist of guilt – and oh, yes, yes – she could: the dusky eyelids fluttered and raised, and there were her bright eyes, pansy-like as ever. ‘I was faultless in the presence of his glory,’ Stella said: ‘I stood at the door of his banqueting-house and his banner over me was love.’ Her breath was shallow, and she convulsed in a cough that left a blood-fleck at the corner of her mouth. Will wiped it away with his thumb and said: ‘Not yet though: not for a while yet. I need you – dear, we promised we’d never leave each other alone – don’t you remember?’ It was joy he felt, a great indecent uplifting of it: here was redemption, out on the shingle, with no thought in his mind but for her. It is grace, again! he thought: Grace abounding to the chief of sinners!
‘We’ll both go out on the same day like candles left by an open window,’ she said, smiling: ‘I remember! I remember! – but you see, I heard them calling me home and something was out here in the water and it whispered in the night and was hungry, and I thought: I will go down to the river and make peace with it for Aldwinter’s sake.’ At this she turned in Will’s arms to look out towards the river-mouth, where the clear sky showed the evening star brightly burning. ‘Did it come for me?’ she said, fretful: ‘Did it come?’
‘It’s gone,’ said Will. ‘Brave as a lion you sent it away – come home with us now, come home.’ How easy it was to lift her, to be helped to his feet by Joanna and Naomi – as if already she’d begun to dissipate up into the blue air!
‘Cora,’ said Stella, quietly calling, putting out her hand – ‘how warm you are and always have been – tell Francis to take my stones, my bits and pieces, leave them all behind. Give them to the river, turn the Blackwater blue.’
NOVEMBER