The Essex Serpent Read online

  They stood between the ribs of a clipper which had pitched up there a decade ago and never shifted from the shore. In the harshness of the weather it had worn down to little more than a dozen black curved posts that looked so much like the opened chest cavity of a drowned beast that visitors took to calling it Leviathan. It was near enough to the village for the children to reach it without censure, and far enough out of sight for no-one to notice what they did there. In summer they hung their clothes from its bones, and in winter they lit small fires in its shelter, always afraid the hulk would burn, and dismayed when it didn’t. Love notes and curses were cut in the wood with penknives; pennies were stacked on the posts and were never spent. Joanna’s little fire was set some distance away from the wreck in a circle of stones, and had taken hold nicely. She’d looped it with lengths of bladderwrack, which gave off a clean scent, and pressed into the coarse sand seven of her best shells.

  ‘I’m hungry.’ John looked up at his sister and immediately regretted his lack of resolve. He’d turn seven before summer, and felt firmly that it was high time he matched his increasing years with increasing courage. ‘I don’t mind though,’ he said, and capered twice around the fire.

  ‘We have to be hungry because tonight’s the night of the Hunger Moon, isn’t that right, Jo?’ Red-haired Naomi Banks crouched with her back to Leviathan and looked beseechingly at her friend. As far as she was concerned, Reverend Ransome’s daughter had the Queen’s authority and God’s wisdom, and she’d cheerfully have stepped barefoot in the flames if the other girl had commanded it.

  ‘That’s right: the Hunger Moon, and the last full moon before spring.’ Conscious of the need to be both stern and benevolent, Joanna imagined her father in his pulpit, and mimicked his stance. In the absence of a lectern, she raised both her arms and said in a chanting voice which had taken some weeks to perfect: ‘We are gathered here on the day of the Hunger Moon to beseech Persephone to break the chains of Hades and bring spring to our beloved land.’ Wondering if she’d struck quite the right note, and a little concerned that she was playing fast and loose with the education her father insisted upon, she glanced quickly at Naomi. Her friend’s cheek was flushed, and her eyes were bright: she pressed a hand to her throat and Joanna, bolstered, went on: ‘Too long have we suffered winter winds! Too long have the dark nights concealed the river’s terrors!’ John, whose determination to be brave was unequal to his dread of the beast probably lurking not a hundred yards away in the water, squealed. His sister frowned, and raised her voice a little. ‘Goddess Persephone, hear us!’ She nodded briskly at her companions, who chorused: ‘Goddess Persephone, hear us!’ They made their supplications to numerous gods, genuflecting deeply at each name; Naomi, whose mother had been of the old religion, crossed herself fervently. ‘And now,’ said Joanna, ‘we have to make a sacrifice,’ and John – who’d never forgotten the story of how Abraham had tethered his son to an altar and got out his carving knife – squealed again, and bolted twice round the fire.

  ‘Come back, stupid boy,’ said Joanna. ‘Nobody’s going to hurt you.’

  ‘The Essex Serpent might,’ said Naomi, coming at the child with claws, and receiving a look of such censure in return that she flushed, and took John’s hand in hers.

  ‘We give you the sacrifice of our hunger,’ said Joanna, whose stomach burbled shamefully (she’d concealed breakfast in a napkin and fed it later to the dog, and pleading a headache avoided lunch). ‘We give you the sacrifice of our cold.’ Theatrical, Naomi shivered. ‘We give you the sacrifice of our burning. We give you the sacrifice of our names.’ Joanna paused, forgetting for a moment the ritual she’d prepared, then putting her hand in her pocket took out three pieces of paper. Earlier that day she’d dipped the corner of each sheet in the font of her father’s church, alert to the possibility he’d find her there, and with several lies prepared in her defence. The damp corners had dried in ripples, and as she handed them to her fellow celebrants they crackled audibly. ‘It is necessary for us to commit to the spells,’ she said, sombrely, ‘to give a part of our own nature. We must write our names, and in writing them vow to whichever gods hear us that we give of our own being, in the hope that winter will be gone from the village.’ She examined her words as she said them, and pleased with her phrasing, was struck by a new thought. Stooping to pick up a broken twig, she put it in the fire and let it burn a while, then blowing out the flame scrawled her name on the paper with the charcoal. It was not quite extinguished, and the paper scorched and tore, and the goddesses would need celestial vision to make out more than her initials from so great a distance, but the effect was gratifying. She handed the stick to Naomi, who scored her paper with a capital N, and helped James make his mark. The boy was proud of his handwriting, and scuffled and elbowed at the girl, determined to manage on his own.

  ‘Now,’ said Joanna, collecting up the pieces of paper and tearing them into fragments: ‘Come to the fire with me. Are your hands cold? Are they full of winter?’ Full of winter, she thought: what a line! Perhaps she’d be a vicar like her father when she grew up. John looked at the tips of his fingers and wondered whether he might soon see the first black flecks of frostbite. ‘I can’t feel anything.’

  ‘Oh, you will,’ said Naomi, grinning. Her hair was red and so was her coat, and John had never liked her. ‘You’ll feel something all right.’ She tugged him to his feet, and they joined Joanna by the flames. Someone stood on a string of bladderwrack and made it pop, and some distance away the tide was turning.

  ‘Now,’ said Joanna. ‘You’re going to have to be brave, John, because this is going to hurt.’ She tossed the scraps of paper into the fire, and followed them with a scattering of salt from her mother’s silver shaker. The flames burned briefly blue. Then holding out her hands to the fire, with an imperious nod that her companions should do the same, she closed her eyes and held them, palm down, above the fire. A damp log spat sparks and scorched her father’s sleeve; she flinched, and fretting for the white skin on her brother’s wrist tugged his hands upward an inch or more. ‘We don’t need to hurt ourselves badly,’ she said hastily, ‘we just have to let our hands warm up quickly and it’ll burn like it does when you come in from the snow.’

  Naomi, chewing a coil of hair, said, ‘Look: you can see my veins.’ And it was true: she had a little webbing of flesh set deep between each of her fingers, and was proud of her defect, having once heard that Anne Boleyn had had something similar and caught herself a king, nonetheless. In the firelight a ruddy glow passed through the thin flesh and threw into blue relief a vein or two. Joanna – impressed, but conscious of the need to maintain the upper hand – said: ‘We have come here to mortify our flesh, Nomi, not take pride in it.’ She used the nickname of their babyhood to show that the girl was not in disgrace, and in response Naomi flexed her fingers and said, very seriously, ‘Oh, it really hurts, I can tell you that. It’s prickling like nettles.’

  The girls looked at John, whose hands wavered with his courage. Something was evidently going on, since his fingers were a vivid red and even, Joanna thought, swollen at the tips. Either the low-hanging smoke the fire gave out had stung his eyes, or he was trying not to cry. Torn between her certainty that the gods would look kindly on a sacrifice from so small a celebrant, and equal certainty that her mother would be justifiably outraged, she nudged the boy and said, ‘Higher, silly boy, higher: d’you want to burn yourself to stumps?’ At this, his held-back tears overspilled, and just at that moment (or so Joanna later told it, huddled under a school table with Naomi nodding at her side and an audience awestruck at her feet), the full moon passed out of a low blue cloud. All around them the pebble-specked sand took on a sickly cast, and the sea – creeping at them over the salt-marsh as their backs were turned – glistened.

  ‘A sign, you see!’ said Joanna, removing her hands from above the fire then hastily replacing them at Naomi’s raised eyebrow: ‘A portent! It is the goddess’ – she cast about for the name – ‘The
goddess Phoebe, come to acknowledge our petition!’

  John and Naomi turned towards the moon, and looked a long while on its downcast face. Each of them saw, in the high mottled disc, the melancholy eyes and curved mouth of a woman sunk in sadness.

  ‘D’you think it worked?’ Naomi could not believe that her friend might have been mistaken in so serious a matter as the summoning of spring, and besides: she’d felt the pain in her hands and she had not eaten since bread-and-cheese the night before; and had she not also seen her own name on its christened piece of paper go up in a shower of sparks? She buttoned her coat a little higher, and looked out over the salt-marsh and the sea, half-expecting to see an early sunrise, and with it a flock of swifts.

  ‘Oh Nomi, I don’t know.’ Kicking aimlessly at the sand, Joanna found herself already a little ashamed of her display. All that waving of her arms about and chanting! Really, she was much too old for all this. ‘Don’t ask me,’ she said, forestalling further query: ‘Not done it before, have I?’ Pricked with guilt, she knelt beside her brother and said gruffly, ‘You were very brave. If it doesn’t work it won’t be your fault.’

  ‘I want to go home. We’ll be late and there’ll trouble and there won’t be dinner left and it was going to be my favourite.’

  ‘We won’t be late,’ said Joanna. ‘We said we’d be home before dark, and it’s not dark, is it? It’s not dark yet.’ But it was almost dark, and it seemed to be coming, she thought, from across the sea beyond the estuary, which had taken on the appearance of a black and solid substance across which she might walk, if she cared to try. She’d lived all her life here at the margin of the world, and never once thought to mistrust its changing territory: the seeping of salt water up through the marshes, and the changing patterns of its muddy banks and creeks, and the estuary tides which she checked almost daily against her father’s almanac, were all as untroublesome as the patterns of her family life. Before she could ever have recognised them on paper she could sit on her father’s shoulders and point, and proudly name Foulness and Point Clear, St Osyth and Mersea, and the direction of St Peter’s-on-the-Wall. It was a family trick to spin her a dozen times and say: ‘She’ll always come out facing east, to the mouth of the sea.’

  But something had changed in the course of their ritual: she had a curious impulse to glance backward over her shoulder as if she might catch out the tide in reversing its direction, or see the waters split open as once they had for Moses. She’d heard, of course, the rumours that something lived now in the estuary depths, and was responsible for the taking of a lamb and the breaking of a limb, but thought little of it: childhood was so rife with terrors that it was useless giving more credence to one thing than to another. Wanting to see again the sad pale face of the lady in the moon, she looked up, and there was only the gathering of dense clouds stacking up above the marsh. The wind had dropped, as it often did at dusk, and up on the road above them the earth would be hardening with frost. John, evidently feeling his own unease, forgot his increasing years and put his hand in hers; and even Naomi, who’d never once been seen to look afraid, sucked fretfully at her coil of hair and drew closer to her friend. As they made their silent way past the dying embers of their fire, and past Leviathan as it shored itself deeper for the night, they glanced repeatedly over their shoulders at the black water creeping closer across the mud. ‘Girls and boys come out to play,’ sang Naomi, not quite managing to keep a tremor from her voice: ‘The moon does shine as bright as day …’

  Much later – and only when pressed, since it had all seemed to be a part of a ritual of which the children felt strangely ashamed – each claimed to have seen a curious thickening and rising of the water in a particular place, just where the salt-marsh ended and the riverbed shelved steeply down. There’d been no sound, and nothing as comfortingly frightening as a long limb or rolling eye; only a movement that was too swift and directionless to be the casting of a wave. John claimed that it had had about it a whitish look, but Joanna thought that was only the moon peering out and brightening the surface with her gaze. Naomi, the first to speak up, embellished the event with such a flourish of wing and snout that it was generally accepted she’d seen nothing at all, and her testimony was discarded.

  ‘How long until we’re home, Jojo?’ John, tense with a longing to run home to his mother and the dinner he imagined going cold on the table, tugged at his sister’s hand.

  ‘Nearly there: look, see the smoke from the chimneys and the sails on the boats?’

  They had reached the path – their teeth chattering, with the sudden chill and with unease – and up ahead the oil lamps set in the windows of World’s End had the charm of a Christmas tree. They could see Cracknell making his rounds for the night, cuffing Gog and Magog into their pen, and pausing at the gate to bid them goodnight.

  ‘Girls and boys come out to play,’ he sang, having heard them coming, thudding the gatepost for emphasis: ‘And though I note it’s a full-face moon you’ll have no daybright shining what with the light being borrowed only, and that paid back at interest, and losing its value month by month, which accounts for the dimness of the thing. Eh?’ Pleased with this line of thought he grinned, then beckoned them closer, and closer still, so that they smelt the earthy dampness rising from the pockets of his coat, and saw the stripped bodies of the moles hanging by their heels.

  ‘Keen to get home, ain’t he?’ Cracknell nodded at John, who was an old friend of his, and would not usually pass up the chance to sit astride Gog or Magog and circuit the shack, and after eat honey straight from the comb. John, who by now imagined his supper being passed to the dog, scowled, and it was perhaps this that made the old man scowl in return, and grasp the boy’s ear. ‘Listen up then, the three of you – it’s not just girls and boys come out to play in these times which I do wonder but might well be the last and you’ll hear no regrets from me on that score, even so come quickly Lord Jesus as I might have said when I had truck with such talk … join your playfellows in the street, as the song says but it’s a strange playfellow you made down there in the Blackwater black water, don’t think I don’t know and haven’t seen it myself twice or thrice when the moon’s bright …’ He gripped John’s ear a little too tight, and the boy yelped. Cracknell looked at his own hand in surprise, as if it had operated without his permission, and released John, who rubbed his face and began to cry. ‘Well, then. Well, then: what’s this noise for?’ Cracknell patted his several pockets, but found nothing that might placate a child in need of his mother’s lap, and a hot meal. ‘I only speak kindly, only kindly, as always I hope I do, and wouldn’t wish the snapping and the creeping and the watching on any of you or any of yours.’ John had not yet stopped crying, and Joanna feared for a moment that the old man might cry also, out of shame and something she suspected was fear. She reached over the mole-strung fence and patted the greasy sleeve of his coat twice, and had begun to cast about for something soothing to say when Cracknell stiffened, thrust up his arm, and roared: ‘Halt, now! What goes there?’

  The children flinched: John buried his face in his sister’s waist; Naomi spun on her heel, and gasped. A dark misshapen creature was coming at them along the path, moving slowly, making a low sound in the depths of its throat. It did not creep, but stood on hind legs; it almost had the shape of a man – it held out its arms – it might have been a threat, but the noise it made seemed almost laughter. It was a man, surely; indeed, there was something in the unhurried gait that was almost familiar – nearer it came to the light cast by Cracknell’s lamps; it paused, and she saw its long coat shedding thick flakes of mud, and its heavy boots. The face was obscured by a hat pulled low to the brows, and by a heavy scarf – everything about the creature was coated in mud that showed black with damp in places and dried pale in others; only there were parts of the filthy hat which showed the original scarlet of the wool.

  ‘Don’t you know me? Am I such a sight?’ Again the man held out his arms, then tugged off the knitted cap, and a th
icket of untidy curls the same russet shade as her own long plait gleamed in the lamplight.

  ‘Daddy! Where have you been? What have you done – how have you cut your cheek?’

  ‘John, lad: and don’t you know your own father?’ With a child in the crook of each arm, the Reverend William Ransome reached out to cuff Naomi kindly on the shoulder, and nodded at Cracknell, who said, ‘And a sight for sore eyes you represent as ever, Parson; and if I could suggest the littl’uns be taken home and kept there, I’ll bid each a goodnight.’ Bowing to them all – and most deeply to John – the old man retreated into World’s End and slammed shut the door.

  ‘And why are you all out so late, might I ask? We shall all of us answer to your mother for this; and as for you, Miss Banks, what will I tell your father?’ He tweaked Naomi’s cheek, and propelled her home towards a grey stone cottage that overlooked the quay. The girl looked once over her shoulder at her friends, then hurried inside, and they heard the door bolted.