We followed the coast road. There was no other path, and Henry’s little talisman could only have been lost, or even deliberately dropped to attract our attention, if they had come this way. It would take us to Happisburgh, a wild, wind-beaten stretch of shingled shore and crumbling sandstone looking out to the North Sea. From there, the birds flew straight and true to Denmark, with hundreds of miles between. Beyond, bigger and more unknowable than anything I could imagine, were regions of mountains and fire, lands I could not put a name to, guarded by the whale-seas, the ice fields, and, I had been told, thousands of jagged islands of bare rock and unnavigable rivers. It was a world I had never been given cause to think of, until now. Did the prospect of its freedoms draw the creature? After all our guesswork about what it would do, who it would target next, was it really so simple? That it would seek only its own return to the sea?
The wind was uncomfortable enough as we picked our way along the road to the coast. It swept in across the flat fields to shake the tops of the trees like dandelion heads, but until we reached the Happisburgh road and turned away from the land, it did not reveal its true malice. Now, unfettered by forests or hillsides, it howled around us, unsettling the horses and blowing Milton’s hat into a battered coppice. He let it go, hunkering low over his mare’s ears and urging her on. I, too, spurred Ben on quicker, knowing I pushed the horse harder than was fair, with two riders on his back. Mary had donned the sundial pendant, and held its wooden plate to her lips, whispering prayers I could not hear.
In the last half mile, just as the dunes rose and barricaded the water from our view, Mary leant back in the saddle, so her head touched my shoulder, and her mouth brushed my overgrowing hair. I experienced a moment of acute embarrassment – misplaced, I knew – that I was not more well groomed. I doubted she had ever had a more unkempt suitor. ‘I have never seen the ocean,’ she said.
This was unexpected – not that she had not seen the sea, but that she wanted to talk of it. Thrown, I said, ‘What, never?’
‘I’m a London girl.’
I realised she wanted a distraction. I said, ‘So, you have seen the Thames river? That can’t be too unlike the sea.’
‘I hope they are not like,’ she said, emphatically. ‘The Thames stinks to Heaven. And the docks. Though I think I swam in the estuary once. But no, not the real sea.’
‘In happier times…’ I began, intending to say I would take her swimming one day. But I stopped, feeling it was too presumptuous.
She did not move her head, so her face sat just below my jaw and ear, tickling the skin. ‘What?’ she said, her voice lower than the wind, just discernible.
‘Perhaps you will see it in happier times,’ I concluded, lamely, cursing my own cowardice.
‘Perhaps I will,’ she said, leaning forward again.
As we moved down a long, thin track with high hedges on either side, the mud took on a sandy texture. It was harder to hold up our heads, now, as the wind whipped the sand into our faces and made our eyes water. Ben hated it, so I rubbed his withers and encouraged him to walk on, his head carried low like ours against its blast. I lifted my sight again in search of Esther’s frail form, perhaps lying in a hedgerow or tumbled down on the top of the dunes. I doubted she could stand easily in this, and her clothes had been fit for bed, only. She had not eaten a full meal in weeks. I began to seriously consider that she could collapse and freeze, or else die of exposure. But I did not know – perhaps the creature did not share the limitations of our bodies. Who could say?
In front, Mary called for Henry again, but her voice was lost on the gale as clouds continued to roll ashore, black enough to cast us back into twilight. Just before we mounted the sheer, crumbly path to the peak of the dunes, Mary seized my arm. ‘There!’ She pointed west, and I thought something moved over the top of the hill, but it might have been a cloud, or the shadow of a cloud, and, before I could focus my eyes against the wind and the sand, it was gone. ‘No,’ she said, wretchedly. ‘Nothing.’
The path was even steeper than it had looked from its base. Ben was labouring, so we dismounted and set him to roam the rough slope. Milton led his mare by her halter as we crested the hill.
At the first sight of the sea, Mary gasped. Usually flat and smooth, today the pebbled beach was battered by waist-high waves, and as we turned our sight eastwards down the coast, countless small, drenched coves bit into the rising sandstone cliffs. Northwards, as the water stretched away from us, the clouds hunkered on the horizon, swept this way and that by a wind that could not seem to decide on its direction.
We considered what to do. A path, wet with spray, curved down to the sand and shale ribbon that separated us from the water. The beach extended half a mile. Towards the end a fisherman or crab-catcher had abandoned a small boat. I wondered whether the man had been intending to drag it up to safer ground, but had surrendered to the ferocity of the weather. If we went down there, the three of us agreed, the reach of our sight would be poorer, and we might have less chance of spotting her.
But what if she wasn’t here at all? Could we have been wrong? Mary’s eyes were on me and I felt pressure to act. We would have to search. We could split up, and Mary and I could cover the dunes to the west while Milton searched the coves to the east. If we were wrong…
It was as though she read my mind. ‘They’re here,’ she said, raising her voice to carry over the wind. ‘You can feel it, can’t you?’
Yes. There was a disquiet beneath my thoughts, a vibration at the foundation of my awareness that I associated with Not-Esther, now. And Mary felt it, too. I raked my eyes across the sand, searching for twin heads: one dark and one golden. Nothing.
‘Perhaps you could stay here and watch, sir,’ I suggested to Milton. ‘We’ll go down to the water and seek her there.’
‘I don’t think there will be any need for that,’ said Milton, calmly. He pointed straight down the path, down the beach, towards the boat, which I now saw was moving. While my inner voice had debated what to do, a tiny white figure had emerged from the shadow of the cliff and now, before our aghast eyes, began to push the little vessel across the sand. Esther was so slight, and in her weakened condition, I was certain she did not have the strength to drag the boat even a foot, let alone all the way to the water. But, impossibly, the vessel started to move, and it and its companion began their slow progress towards the sea.
I made to step forward and Milton grabbed me. ‘Wait. What if the creature abandons her when it reaches the water?’
‘Do you think it will?’ Longing was burgeoning in my breast. Longing that this ordeal might – at last – be ending.
Milton said, ‘Who can say? But we have to allow for the chance. And we could bring that chance to ruin, if we move too soon.’
Despite the incoming tide, the stretch of sand between the dunes and the water had never seemed wider. Mary framed her eyes with her hands, hunting her brother. Milton and I watched in rigid silence as the boat inched towards the waves and then into the surf. The water foamed and swelled about the hull. It was nearly afloat.
The divide inside me raged. Even if Esther’s body had the strength to row against the tide into the bay, and even if the creature wanted only to be free, and left her once it found the safety of the water, it still might not save her. Who was to say she would not capsize and be drowned, or that the tide would not drag her back towards the shore, dashing the boat against the rocks further down the beach? I was caught between a desperate desire to intervene and save her body, and to let the creature leave her, and possibly save her soul.
It was only as the boat began to bob with the choppy water that I saw the obstacle, the missing piece of the puzzle that rendered my struggle meaningless.
Henry.
He was in the boat. His dark head lay unmoving, his skinny frame wedged, somehow, between the bow and the mast. Was he still alive?
As the craft took to the waves, Esther, with her white dress billowing about her waist, clambered in. She wrestled with the oars as she lowered herself to the seat, her back braced against the wind.
Mary had seen Henry a moment after I had, and now sprinted like an attacking soldier down the beach, shouting for her brother. I glanced at Milton, and we followed. I was surprised to find it so easy – my battle injury seemed like a distant memory as I passed Milton and gained ground on Mary. I caught her, then outstripped her. I was closing the distance between me and the boat, and, even knowing that I ran towards danger, it was hard not to rejoice in the return of my strength. My feet sank into the sand, but it barely slowed me. For a few moments, I might have been a boy again, exulting in the simple joy of movement.
But when level with the boat and with the water foaming cold about my feet, I saw how far away Esther was already. The keel had to be four or five feet clear of the bottom. The oars moved easily, as if the hands that wielded them could command the waves. I knew it was pointless, but I still shouted to her. My voice was drowned out by a parliament of winds, a noise going up to Heaven like a thousand voices raised in dissent.
Mary reached me and ran straight into the surf, then Milton caught up. I turned in the knee-high water, to see the older man removing his boots and cloak, preparing to come in after us.
The boat was already more than a hundred yards from shore when we waded together into the water, with the baleful shock of the cold against my thighs making me gasp. Swirling flakes of snow were just beginning to blow in from the sea as we forged deeper, pushing through the swell. When I was in up to my shoulders, I struck out with a firm stroke. The others followed, but I quickly realised that, of the three of us, I was by far the strongest swimmer. Mary was off her feet, but her face kept sinking beneath the waves. Milton was a little better, battling on, but still he was beaten back by each incoming wave.
I trod water, allowing a wave to crash over my head. In the valley between it and the next, I raised my voice. ‘Go back!’ I shouted to them. ‘I’ll get him.’ Another wave crashed into my face, filling my mouth and nose with freezing salt water. I did not wait to see whether they turned back, but plunged ahead, dipping below the surface. When I breathed air again, I was alone.
Between the waves, just visible, was the stern of the little boat. I was far from sure I could do what I had promised. I kicked harder and gained on them, foot by painful foot. With a last desperate spend of energy, I came alongside; then, as the bow of the boat crested the next wave and it teetered, I grabbed the frame, gritting my teeth. Animal sounds escaped me as I clung to the slippery rib of the hull.
I fell back, nearly releasing the side as an oar struck my temple. I tasted blood. Suspended above me, outlined against the black clouds and swirling flakes, Esther’s face was alien, so discoloured with the cold, it was almost purple. As she raised the oar for another strike, I hauled my weight up out of the water and into the boat. It cost me every ounce of my remaining strength, and I fell gasping against the bottom boards, my chest burning, reaching for Henry in the bow. My hand grasped a limb, a foot, but I could not tell whether or not the boy lived. I sat up, coughing water.
My assailant seemed to have given up hope of putting me off by force. She sat back, regarding me with wary hostility as I scrambled over the bench, reaching past her, and coming to my knees at Henry’s side. He was glacially cold and clammy, but – thank Christ! – alive, breathing shallowly. His eyes were wide and he stared through me. I choked back a sob of sheer relief. ‘It’s Thomas,’ I said, with no idea of whether he could hear me.
I could waste no time engaging with Esther. If I could recover her, I would, but Henry had to be taken to safety. I stood, swaying as the boat fell into the valley of another wave and the wind redoubled against my back. She stared. I waited, then feinted towards the right-hand oar but at the last moment grabbed the left from her hands; as she lost her grip on it, I snatched the other, and she fell backward into the boat. I took the helm, squatted on the bench and hauled, trying to bring us about, but the wide circle, as I fought the current, seemed to take forever to complete. All the while, Esther crouched low, wearing a strange, expectant expression.
Then, just as the nose turned towards the shore and the rowing became easier, and as the boat surged forward, we were knocked off course. It was not the current or the wind; this force was blunt and physical, and seemed to come from below, throwing the boat and all of us sideways.
When I recovered my balance, clinging to the gunwale with Esther’s writhing body thrown against me, I froze at my first sight of what now disturbed the surface of the sea.