Ralf thought about Jacob’s bride, the grandmother he could barely remember, whose grave her husband tended every week, keeping the grass short, laying flowers. By rights Ralf should have had three uncles and an aunt on his mother’s side, but Anna, the youngest, was the only child to have lived beyond the age of two. Ralf tried to imagine the suffering his grandparents had endured, and could not.
His parents were like that. So was Imogen, and so was Godric. In St Matthew, in the Sermon on the Mount, Christ called such people the salt of the earth. Ralf did not want to be parted from them, but he was being made to choose, and he knew what he must do. He was salt which had lost its savour; was good for nothing but to be cast out and trodden underfoot.
The wind had continued to strengthen, though for an hour or so past the downpour had eased. Now the rain began to renew itself with even greater force.
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Jacob said. “Not one bit. Wind’s backing southerly.”
Linsell said, “What about the boat? Is she secure?”
“They all are. We was down earlier, with the Reeve. He was right enough about the storm.”
Ralf had been to help his grandfather and the other fishermen at the staith. He had himself heard Mr Kenway’s pessimistic prediction, now coming true.
Mape was used to winter storms. There was at least one every year. The Reeve was responsible to the Steward for the precautions against damage: beaching, upturning and tying down the boats, clearing the staith of loose objects, getting in the animals, fixing the doors and shutters of farm buildings.
To Ralf, Linsell said, “We should have backfilled.”
“The dike, you mean?”
Except as somewhere he might meet Eloise, Ralf had almost forgotten about the mill. The project had scarcely crossed his mind all evening.
Jacob cast an apprehensive look at his son-in-law. “You know there’s a big spring tonight?”
“A sixteen footer. At least.”
“Sixteen one, Mr Kenway says. Sixteen three tomorrow night. That’s the peak.”
Ralf said to his father, “Are you worried about the screen?”
“We’re liable, that’s all.”
The excavations for the culvert and the sea-gates had left the dike effectively useless. Were it not for the screen, the sea would invade the unfinished pen, attack the earthworks, and undermine the foundations of the mill-house.
Linsell was required to supply the Baron with his mill no later than the date specified in their contract. He had considered most carefully the risks posed by fire and storms.
Like the timber framing of the mill itself, the screen had been deliberately over-engineered. The piles stood well above the height of the highest high tide. The proofing comprised a heavy canvas lining, nailed in place, and sandbags restrained by a tarred net of hempen rope. The sandbags were small, solidly packed, and made of the best hessian. They had been tarred and laid in overlapping courses with the tar still wet. The sloping profile of the proofing had been designed to deflect the waves. No more could have been done to improve the screen. Linsell had once told Ralf that it was more resistant to the sea than the dike itself, a fact of which Ralf reminded him.
“Even so, we ought to have filled in.”
Anna adjusted her lamp. “Ralf,” she said, using a tone which brooked no opposition, “I don’t want you sleeping in that workshop tonight. We’ll make you up a bed here.”
Imogen met his eye. Her fingers did not break their rhythm; her pins did not stop clicking; and her face remained, except for the subtlest lift of her eyebrows, quite neutral.
Ralf looked away, feeling worse than ever. Eloise was due at the workshop some time in the early hours, whenever she deemed it safest. If he obeyed this injunction and spent the night here, he would have to get word to her at midnight mass. It was unthinkable for her to risk coming downstairs from her chamber in the dark, to climb through the parlour window and make her way through the storm to the workshop, only for her to find him absent. But there was no chance whatever of speaking to Eloise in private at the church. That meant he had to go to the workshop himself, which meant in turn that nothing had changed.
“Tomorrow,” Imogen had said.
Yet again Ralf tried to piece together the events which had led him to this. Sometimes he hated Eloise, so violent and volatile were his passions and his feelings of bewilderment. She was an incubus who had descended on him from nowhere, from the Long Barn, from the dream which, looking back, had constituted his life. Before Eloise his days had been straightforward, his hopes and ambitions clearcut and easy to understand. Now he was hemmed in. All exits had been blocked but one. It was incomprehensible, impossible, that she had so quickly brought him low: impossible that he could be sitting here on Christmas Eve with his family, contemplating death and weighing the chances of thus circumventing the threats of his sister and his friend.
And now even the weather was involved. Not only had it trapped him at home, but, at about ten o’clock, word went round the village that the storm was becoming so terrible that, for the first time in memory, the traditional midnight Christ Mass had been cancelled.
* * *
The howling of the wind would alone have kept Ralf from sleep, but the storm outside was calmer than the one in his head. By midnight he had given up any idea of going to the workshop. Not even Eloise would venture out in such conditions.
In the past, he had always been drawn by the glamour of extreme weather. Even as a small boy he had never been afraid of thunder. One June night, alerted by a distant rumble in the stifling heat, he had revelled in the long and minatory approach from the west of an electric storm. Shawcross Street was on a slope: his window looked down towards the centre of Alincester. The abject roofscape had flinched at each blink, at each bang, each fulminating peal. Ralf had been thrilled by the noise of it all, so loud and extravagant, so careless of human rest, so magnificently indifferent, that it banished for ever the delusion that grown-ups controlled anything of importance. In each flash the city had been revealed, transformed, the Cathedral’s densely scaffolded west front lit up as if Jove himself were fain to inspect the ant-like efforts of his subjects. Even after the deluge had set in, the six-year-old had remained sitting along his window ledge, his casement thrown wide, hoping to glimpse just once more the overwhelmed gutters and gargoyles, the whole glistening length of the Cathedral roof shedding cataracts of water.
This rainstorm tonight, equally torrential, could not have been less glamorous or welcome. Instead of excitement it produced worry: dull, gnawing, becoming colder and more fretful with the passage of each hour.
Jacob’s cottage was making a poor job of withstanding it. As much as its leaking shutters, the cracks and joints in the flinty walls were letting the water in. For some time the rafters had been creaking as though a huge and impatient hand were trying to yank the roof from the house. Only the thatch was proving its worth, though Ralf feared that at any second the whole lot might be shredded away downwind.
He remembered the thatch being laid. The same four men had thatched the mill. They functioned in, carried about with them, an air of competence, like Jacob and Edwin in the boat, or Ralf’s own father. Two of the four were twins, sandy-haired, benevolent, plump, and it was one of these – Ralf could never be sure which – who was the master. The master always did the tricky bits. He had finished the ridge: its woven sedge was a work of art.
Lying in the darkness, Ralf mentally surveyed the mill from the ridge downwards. He reviewed each stage and detail of the construction, the effort and craftsmanship that had been expended on the frame and foundations. The mill had been planned with bad weather in mind. Its position could hardly have been more exposed. Linsell had anticipated rough seas and high winds. A worse tempest than this would be needed to unseat his work.
Then Ralf recalled the gap in the dike.
His father was right: they should have filled it in. By leaving it open, they had made themselves dependent
on the screen of piling, and the piling had been erected by others.
Yet those men with the sheers also knew their trade. They had helped to make docks, flood defences, bridges and jetties all along the south coast, not least for the Navy. There was no reason to be anxious on that score.
Ralf’s mind had reached the lathe-room. He recalled Eloise and her Aunt Béatrice, perfumed, stylish, grand, standing there and taking incongruous interest in the work. Imogen had been with them, the impoverished friend on a borrowed mare, whose clothes in comparison had been shabby. But she was just as much a lady as either; perhaps, compared with Béatrice, more. He remembered their riding-boots resounding on the floorboards, thought of the bloodstain he had inverted, and realized that, were it not for the storm, he and Eloise might at this moment have been together again in that room.
Just then a sound of splitting, or wrenching, was followed by a diffuse crash. The ground seemed to shake.
Ralf leapt to his feet. His first idea was that the roof had come off the Rendells’ house and been driven into Jacob’s, but he had felt no impact from the walls, and decided the cottage had not after all been hit.
A light was hurriedly descending the stairs. The door opened.
“What was that?” Ralf’s father said. “Something down here?”
“It could have been a tree,” Ralf said. “On the green. One of the oaks.”
Linsell looked over his shoulder, at Imogen, who had just appeared. Like himself and Ralf, she was still fully dressed. “Fetch the others, please, Im,” he said. “It’s getting too risky up there.”
* * *
They passed the rest of the night in the parlour. Linsell thought the roof vulnerable. Beams and rubble might fall into the bedchambers. Staying indoors was dangerous, but the alternative, in the dark, would be far worse.
Towards dawn the wind abated somewhat, though rain continued falling. In the first glimmers of daylight Ralf and his father donned their waterproofs and left the cottage by the back door.
The main structure seemed to be unscathed, though the privy door now hung by a single hinge and was on the point of coming off. The narrow garden was full of debris – twigs, mostly. While his father continued to scrutinize the house from the rear, Ralf went round to the front.
On the green, one of the Three Sisters had been blown over. The entire root-ball had come up, so much had the last weeks’ rain softened the soil. Like Jacob’s rear and front gardens, the village green and street were littered with broken branches, twigs and thatch. Several houses on either side of the green had sustained damage, mostly to their roofs. The front elevation of Jacob’s appeared to have come through intact, as had the Hall, its tower, and the church.
“Let’s do it, then, Ralf,” Linsell said, as he joined him by the road. “Let’s look. Bit late for praying, I suppose.”
Ralf wanted to reassure him, but could not.
More people were emerging from their houses. Ralf walked with his father to the path beside the church. Father Pickard, Mr Caffyn and the Sexton were already in the graveyard. One of the bigger lime-trees had fallen diagonally, crushing several of the yews, smashing headstones. The furthest tips of its branches were broken and bent against the wall of the church itself. Several other limes had lost large limbs. Looking towards the Hall, a gap had appeared in the stand of trees there.
Linsell shouted a question to Mr Caffyn. “Has anyone been hurt?”
“Not that I know! I’ve only just come out!”
“Me too!”
Ralf opened the gate to the footpath. As they passed the yew tree he was unable to prevent himself from looking at the roots, though he knew no pebble would be there. For all its destructive power, the storm felt unreal, like his sleepless night, like the sluggish dawn and the uniquely unfamiliar beginning to this day. It was as though he were already dead; as though hell were a twilit place where the rain never stopped.
Following his father’s lead, he clambered over and through the branches of a lime-bough and approached the stock-gate.
Ralf had never known his father to utter an oath, even under his breath, even when he had hurt himself. As for profanity, Linsell forbade it in his presence. But now, above the wind, Ralf distinctly heard him say, “Great God above!”
From here, away to the left, the mill would just be visible. That was why they had come, to see if it was still there. But neither of them had yet thought to turn in that direction.
The grazing, the reeds, the whole marsh west of the church dike, hundreds and hundreds of acres, had disappeared. The lapping, wind-blown edge of the floodwater, interrupted here and there along its length by clumps and stalks of grass, was no more than eighty yards from this spot. Ralf thought the land itself had been washed away. Then his eye, hampered by rain and the half-light, perceived the line, a mile distant, of the beach. Beyond it he saw waves so gigantic and surf so wild that he wondered that any of the shingle-bank remained at all. A long section of it had vanished, been brushed aside, and through this gap, at high tide in the early hours, the sea had poured unimpeded.
Shielding his eyes from the rain, Linsell was already peering to the left. Far away along the line of the eastern dike Ralf too now made out the solid, familiar form of the black walls and thatched roof of the mill.
“Do you think the Steward knows yet?” Linsell said. “About the marsh?”
Before he could answer, Ralf turned to see Mr Caffyn approaching.
At first he was too shocked to speak.
“The beach can be re-made,” Linsell told him, as though embarrassed that the mill had not also been swept away.
“I know.” The Steward was still trying to assimilate the new sea that had been made of one of the most productive parts of his domain. “The bank went in ’32, further east. So the record says. But the expense. And we’ve lost the reed-harvest altogether. Just look at it.”
“Any cattle out there?”
“Kenway got them in.”
“That’s something.”
With this, Mr Caffyn seemed to awake. He turned to Linsell. “What about the mill?”
“It looks all right. We’re going out now to check.”
“Be careful,” said the Steward, but his attention had already returned to the flood, to the cost of repairing the damage and the implications for the manor. He turned away. “I must tell His Lordship.”
3
From a distance, the aligned humps of the upturned fishing-boats resembled outsized crustaceans clinging to the highest part of the foreshore. They had resisted the storm completely. As Ralf drew near he could make out the ropes and pegs with which he himself had helped to fix them down. The bulbous, clinker-built hulls, like the precincts of the staith, the glossy boards of the landing-stage, and the windward parts of the sheds, were strewn with fragments of bright-green weed and glaucous saltmarsh plants.
The brown stream flowing down the track had widened at the bottom, around the staith, into a flood. Puckered by raindrops and shivering before the wind, it seemed to be waiting for a yet greater flood to subsume it. Ralf saw that if the church dike gave way, the water presently trapped in the Great Marsh would be released with a rush into the harbour and might well hole the eastern dike at the village end. If that happened, much of the area behind the eastern dike – including the unfinished earthworks for the pen – would be threatened by this afternoon’s high tide.
Beside his father he waded across, knee-deep. Though their boots and leggings were already soaked, the water struck him as spitefully cold. He cast a glance skywards.
Linsell said, “There’s more to come, by the look of it.”
With squelching steps they negotiated the path along the top of the dike. The way was not easy. A few hundred yards on, Linsell slipped and fell. Helping him up, Ralf was aware of their frailty and transience, their smallness in the landscape. He thought again of his failure to meet Eloise last night; and he thought again of Imogen’s threat. “Tomorrow” was here. At what time today would h
er patience run out? How long would she give him?
To their left lay the big arable field, which was now so waterlogged that large pools occupied the lower-lying parts. To their right stretched the estuary, being increasingly exposed by the ebbing tide. The salty wind across it smelled not just of mud and weed: it bore a faintly gangrenous tang, as though the sea in its storm-throes had dredged from the abyss and left beached some colossal corpse, a rotting monster, a leviathan or kraken, the fabled xiphias or rosmarine. Ralf had been told about these creatures by Godric, who had learned of them at Leckbourne. Godric’s account had been so descriptive that Ralf felt almost as if he himself had been privileged to turn the vellum pages of the Abbey’s bestiaries; as if he himself had been stirred by the words of the ancient authors or seen the bizarre and frightening drawings so faithfully reproduced by the monks.
The sea, inconceivably vast, constrained for landlubbers by a curved horizon, had opened itself up and fallen on Mape. Struggling towards the mill, delirious with exhaustion and worry, it seemed to Ralf that sea and Church were of the same. Under a deceptive surface, both concealed teeming complexities, unknown terrors, inky and sinister depths. Both were capable of wreck as well as creation: for both were manifestations of the Almighty, and unless he destroyed he could not also create. Ralf had glimpsed the beginnings of the answer to his conundrum, but the idea was so tenuous that he had trouble in pursuing it, and when, a moment later, his father turned and spoke again, he lost the thread altogether.
“Can you see it?” Linsell said, pointing.
“What?”
“Up in the corner there.”
They had left the field behind and drawn level with the first of the lagoons. The new chalk-track was largely under water. They had been forced to keep to the top of the dike. Ahead, the harbour entrance was rougher than Ralf had ever known it. Waves extended far up the channel towards the staith. It was obvious that the shore here had been punished almost as severely as the open beach. On the far side of the channel, at least a quarter of the dunes and saltings at the end of the Point had gone. Ralf could hardly recognize the view.
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