The search went on till midnight. Most of the village took part. Every dwelling and outhouse was checked, the Hall, its offices and grounds, the church and churchyard, the bakery, the workshop, the byres and pig-sties. Bernard walked to Eyton to see if Imogen had ended up there, or sprained her ankle and fallen on the road; Ralf pinned his hopes to the idea that she had suffered a minor but immobilizing accident and was lying somewhere waiting to be found. Henry and Godric set out for Angmer.
The search proved fruitless, but as they had nothing more than lantern-light she could easily have been missed.
Ralf thought he knew why Imogen had left the house unannounced. She might have been looking for him, and for their father. She would have known where they were. And if she had been on the dike when the breach came …
But Ralf, like his father and Jacob, was so tired that even his guilt could not keep him awake. Leaving his mother in the kitchen with Father Pickard and Mrs Creech, he shut the door of the parlour and lay down on his cot.
He closed his eyes. She had to be safe. The alternative wasn’t possible. Beside that, the loss of the mill would mean nothing. She would be found. Tomorrow, she would be found.
During the rest of the night the wind eased further. The surface of the puddles became viscous, then motionless. They filmed with ice. The shallower ones froze solid. Towards morning, flakes of snow began tumbling from the dark.
Ralf had slept for no more than three hours when his dreams became so disturbing that he made himself wake up. He instantly became aware of the drop in temperature; and instantly understood what this would mean for anyone left outside.
Light was still edging the kitchen door. He found his mother and Father Pickard at the table, in the same coats and boots they had worn during the search. Mrs Creech had gone, leaving an unfamiliar trencher of bread, cold meats and cheese. The food remained untouched.
“No news,” the priest said, needlessly.
Ralf sat down. He wanted to ask Father Pickard to go with him to the confessional, or at least into the garden, away from the ears of his mother. He wanted to receive God’s verdict, his punishment, his most condign punishment. But even if a judging God existed, even if a mortal man could be authorized to act as his conduit, such a request would be an admission that Imogen was already dead. Since it was certain that she was not, Ralf remained silent. He did not even think of prayer. Nothing was to be done but sit and wait for daylight and the inevitable relief of the reunion.
Soon afterwards Linsell came downstairs, followed by Jacob.
“It’s snowing,” Jacob said, on returning from the privy. “Not much.”
Linsell took his wife’s hand. Her face was without expression. She had suspended herself, was existing in a state of self-protective torpor, the alternative to hysteria, or outright madness.
Looking away from his mother, Ralf happened to catch Father Pickard’s eye. In that compassionate, penetrative gaze he detected a new depth of insight. Ralf avoided him, suddenly afraid that Eloise had confessed, even as recently as yesterday. Was it possible that he knew what was going on in Ralf’s breast?
Examining the old deal boards of the tabletop, feeling the faint irregularities of the grain with his scratched and damaged fingers, Ralf tried to shake off the feeling of violation that his suspicion had aroused. The Church, in the form of its ministry, was everywhere, got into everything, permeated every recess of the soul. It was bad enough to be tortured by your own inner voice, to be continually goaded by that sense of right and wrong, without being chided by an external morality. Or perhaps the two were the same. Perhaps they amounted to nothing more than guilt, the chief product and stock in trade of the Church. Guilt was the means whereby the Church controlled the people. Because guilt operated on the conscience, it was a far more effective lever than fear, the most powerful weapon available to the King.
In a world uncomplicated by Church or Crown, Ralf and Eloise would have committed no crime. They had done no more than fall in love. Their impulses were those of nature. If God had created such impulses, how could they be sins?
Ralf could not think straight. Flavoured by the sunlit marshes of his childhood, a paradisal existence had presented itself to his mind. Here the birds and animals, the fishes and plants, the elements themselves, followed the sweetly natural course laid down for them by their creator. Human beings belonged to the same creation. Ralf did not see why their interactions should not be just as pure and free.
Why were relations between people so tangled? Was this God’s will too? Or had it all gone wrong, as Father Pickard had preached on Lammas Day, in the Garden of Eden?
Sitting here at the tail end of this cold, solstitial night, his own lamplit countenance one of a circle of suffering faces, Ralf withdrew further and further into himself. He hardly looked up when, an hour before dawn, the priest left for his own cottage, there to change his clothes and snatch some breakfast; and there, before crossing to the Hall to help organize the renewed search for Imogen Grigg, to spend ten minutes in fervent prayer.
* * *
By daybreak there had still been no sign of her. The searchers were martialled outside the Long Barn. The largest group, led by the Baron in person, set about repeating last night’s search of barns and outhouses. Others were given particular roads and paths to check, spinneys to investigate, hedges to walk. Five men went to comb the poplar plantation. Twenty, in two groups, were appointed to test the infinitely grim, and minute-by-minute more likely, theory that she might be somewhere in the floods.
The two subsequent high tides had widened the gap in the shingle. The church dike had failed at the village end. The eastern dike had immediately followed, losing a wide section just east of the staith. A quarter of the Baron’s land had been opened to the sea.
The Reeve led one party down to the Great Marsh. Linsell was to lead the other, to the Severals. He asked Ralf to join them. There had been speculation that Imogen, headstrong Imogen, might have been making her way out to the site, intending to help with the work herself.
Ralf alone knew another reason why she might have started along the eastern dike yesterday afternoon.
“The harbour,” he said. “I’m going to look there.”
Jacob had already left with Mr Kenway’s group. To Linsell’s approval, Edwin said, “We’ll take the Meg.”
It was five years since Ralf had worked in the boat with Edwin Maw and his son, Cebert. Ralf’s dislike of Cebert no longer influenced his opinion of Edwin. Edwin was solid and amenable, if a little slow. Ralf had learned to respect him. He was not sorry to have been given Edwin’s rather than Jacob’s company on the walk down to the staith, for he meant to set sail on his own.
It was bitterly cold, under a heavy sky. The snow had stopped falling. Not much more than a dusting covered the fields and stock-rails, the windward bark of the wayside maples and oaks, the frozen reeds and rushes of the riverbank. The brackish water showed black under the bridge, whose platform had lately been scuffed by ten pairs of boots.
Linsell’s party was a few minutes ahead. It had already waded across the breach when Ralf came within sight of the dike.
The tarred walls of the mill ought to have been obvious against the snow.
They were not there.
Ralf realized, too late, that he should have gone with his father. He should have been with him now, at this moment.
Ralf’s anticipation of their loss, of the iron consequences, had been purely intellectual. He was too young to have known how to prepare himself for its emotional impact.
“What’s the matter?” Edwin said.
Ralf could do no more than gesture despairingly at the place where the mill had stood.
At the staith, they unbound and righted the shallop. From the sheds they brought the oars and fetched and fitted the mast, boom, and sail. With a grinding of keel on slimy shingle, Ralf and Edwin dragged the craft down the slope of the foreshore. Her prow broke the water.
Edwin stood by while Ralf, as the lighter man,
boarded first. Holding on to the stern, Edwin was about to complete the launch and jump in himself when Ralf said, “No, Edwin. I’m going on my own.”
Edwin protested. Ralf would not be refused. Without saying so, he knew where to look, where the complexities of wind and current, acting together, would have brought the burden he did not want to find. But if he found it, if he were right, the idea of another’s presence could not be borne.
“I’ll wait here, then,” Edwin said, at last understanding.
“You don’t have to.”
“I will.”
“As you wish.”
“Ralf —”
“Shove her off,” he said, his voice close to breaking. “Please.”
Using an oar, Ralf poled the Meg into deep water, fitted the rudder and, while Edwin walked towards the landing-stage, hoisted the sail.
Even this far up the estuary, the water remained choppy. Ralf luffed as tightly as he could, but what breeze there was, from the north-east, forced wide and frequent tacks across the harbour. In this his course was being opposed, but not by the ebb, which was carrying him further and further along the channel and towards the open sea.
Unsure of his inward predictions, he scrutinized the mud and saltings on either hand. Snow had given the saltmarshes an unusual aspect. They had become a variegation of white, melted in odd shapes wherever tongued by the darkness of the water. There was no green, no colour, only grey and white and black. Even the distant shingle of the Point beach, running beside the seablite and here and there clumped with wood-sage, campion, or horned poppy, had been cloaked overnight in whitish grey.
A cormorant flew low across the water. Far to port, Ralf saw the widely separated figures of his father’s party, picking their way along the dike. It seemed that they had as yet found nothing.
The site of the mill drew nearer, came abeam, passed within two hundred yards. The screen of piling yet remained, standing proud of the mud. It had lost most of its netting and sandbags. Beyond it and to the left, a few broken timbers jutting skywards were all that was left of the house. The thatch, the weatherboards, the beams and rafters and floors, had been converted into a worthless tangle of flotsam, tons of it, strewn along the tideline. There would be more on the other side, in the pen.
Somewhere among it all the sea had claimed a certain floorboard. The stain on its underside would have been repeatedly bleached and scoured, abraded among the wreckage, washed again and again until no trace of virginal blood remained.
Ralf put the helm over once more, almost as if he were in possession of himself, but his actions were automatic. He was being dragged both with and against his will, towards an area of muddy gutters and inlets near the end of Mape Point, at the indented southern shore where, curving inwards, it received much of the superficial tidestream.
Since boyhood he had been intimate with these currents. Just as he had been able to say where Godric’s dog would end up, so this morning he had guessed where his sister might be.
As the water on the weather bow thumped at her strakes, the elderly Meg heeled her stoical way through the swell. Her work-worn frame rose and sended, taking and absorbing each knock, shrugging off each shower of spray, leaving the staith and the village behind; and all the time Ralf’s eyes raked the starboard shore for a sign they feared to see.
His hopes began to rise. He was approaching the end of the Point, and still there had been nothing but sand and mud, snow-clotted samphire and purslane. The bustling flocks of small waders ignored him, even when close in. They continued feeding, careless of the hated human form. They saw only a broad-sailed floating shape, large, silent, familiar and benign.
But two crows, further in, did take wing. They were followed by a third. Mated pairs often had a hanger-on, Ralf knew, a solitary bird whose perennial presence was tolerated. Carrion crows were intelligent and wary. One of the pair uttered a croak of warning or annoyance. At a safe distance all three pitched on the sand to wait for him to pass.
Where they had risen, a yard or two along an inlet, there was something out of place, something like a flattened bundle of stained and soggy clothing.
“Please God, no.”
The bundle was foreshortened, lying lengthwise. Ralf’s unwilling retina now registered the pale sole of a feminine boot and, beside it, the pale, awkwardly bent sole of a naked feminine foot.
He dropped the sail, beached the boat, and threw down the steel claws of the anchor. Step followed step, breaking through the crust of ice and sinking into the mud. Ralf was most afraid of crabs. If the water were warm enough for them to be active, if her face were exposed, they would already have eaten her eyes. As it was he did not know what the crows had been doing, whether they had had time to make a start.
He came to the place.
She was sprawled face down, wearing her tallowed rainproof, her hair drowned and dishevelled and, like the wreckage of the mill, strewn about by the ebbing tide.
Ralf fell to his knees beside her. He was not sure how long he remained like that, or whether he had only imagined giving vent to a raw howl of grief, or how soon he had been able to reach out and touch the cold, livid flesh of her cheek. The morning had stopped. Even the act of carrying her to the water’s edge, of going down on one knee and cradling her so that with one hand he could wash the precious face clean, even that was conducted in the space between two discrete heart-beats. Before the first, there had been hope. After the second, there was none.
Her eyes were untouched. He put down the lids.
Remembering the boat, Ralf stood up with her and the scene rushed in: the estuary, the saltings, the weather, the cries of the birds.
He kept to the sand on the way to the Meg, fearful that he might stumble or that his feet might sink too far in the mud. Placing his load in the bows, he set about unshackling the sail. His frozen fingers struggled intermittently with the task. He found himself staring blankly, pausing for unknown periods while he tried to understand.
Imogen was dead.
He was the cause. Were it not for him, she would never have ventured along the dike. She would never have stumbled, or been caught by the flood and washed off the path. Weighed down by her skirts, perhaps flung again and again by the waves against the facing, she would have had no chance of survival. No one could have heard her screams. No one, in the dusk, could even have seen her fall.
Leaving only her face exposed, he wrapped her in the sail and laid her once again, very gently, as though she were sleeping, in the bows. He dismantled the boom, retrieved the anchor, and went to the transom to pull the boat into the water, not caring how deeply he had to wade or how wet he became. When the hull was floating freely, he hoisted himself over the side, sat on the forward thwart, and took up the oars. More time must have elapsed than he knew, because the ebb had weakened to little more than the flow of the river. The tide was on the turn.
As the doleful oarlocks creaked, as the Meg made her ponderous passage towards the village, Ralf’s unravelling mind traced the chain of events leading to Imogen’s death. It stretched back to his earliest days. He rued having enthused over the mill, and meeting Eloise, and saving Godric. He rued Acklin and the Beadle, he rued the Bishop, but most keenly he rued the sunny May evening in which his father, driving that ox-cart, had brought the family here.
Once, and once only, with dripping oars, he again turned to look at his sister. Head first, she was now preceding him to Mape.
“O Jesus, Ralf,” Edwin said, when the boat finally bumped against the landing-stage. “Dear Jesus.”
* * *
Edwin carried her back to the village while Ralf went on ahead to find his mother. Hubert tolled the bell and the search was called off. Imogen was taken to her room. Mrs Creech helped Anna with the laying-out.
The frost hardened. That night, during the vigil, there was a heavy fall of snow. When, the following morning, the Sexton set about digging a new grave next to her grandmother’s, he had to break the soil with a pickaxe.
At the insistence of the Baron, the funeral reception was held in the great hall. Everyone in the village attended. Even Ralf had not known how well regarded his sister had been.
“She was an angel,” Bernard told him, when he came to make his condolences, “too good for this world,” and, for once, the stale form of words was true.
Ralf had risen that morning with a painful sore throat. During the service, and especially in the churchyard, he had felt feverish and chilled. All he wanted now was to go somewhere else – not home, for he had no home. To the city, any city. He looked across at his parents and wondered how they were able to keep functioning.
He drew closer to the fire, which the Baron had ordered to be fuelled with charcoal and beech-logs.
“Ralf.”
Eloise was at his shoulder. She looked terrible, as if she had slept no more than he.
“It’s over between us,” she said, quietly.
“Yes.”
He should not have regretted knowing her. They belonged together, were two halves of a whole. Ever since that November morning when he had showed the women over the mill, he had yearned to make her his wife, but there was a supernal will far greater than his. Whatever it opposed could never come to pass. He wanted her yet, but she was, as always, right. It was over.
He said, “What will you do?”
“Marry him.”
He gave a resigned, a bitter little nod.
She said, “I loved her. We fell out on Christmas Eve. I wish we hadn’t. With all my soul I wish we hadn’t.”
The brief opportunity for private conversation passed. While Ralf accepted more condolences, he watched her moving away. The last time Eloise had seen Imogen, she had lied to her. The lie could never be undone.
Their whole affair had been conducted in lies. Now, because of those lies, Imogen had been killed, and it was over.
Ralf had not wanted to talk to Father Pickard again today, not after the nauseating nonsense he had spouted during the service, but the priest deliberately sought him out.
“Remember your beatitudes, Ralf,” he said. “‘Blessed are those who mourn.’”
The Tide Mill Page 32