Home

Books page

Fees

About the author

Contact

Blog

Links

Legal

Ralf turned to look at his sister and found her still sleeping, curled up behind him in a bed their mother had contrived from a fleece. Now that the shadows had lengthened, Imogen's hair, silver-blond like his own, was no longer catching the sun. Her thumb had returned to her mouth. In the enclosed space among all the furniture and baggage, her features had taken the inward reflections and made them into a serene and private thing, entirely her own.
     That she, and not he, the son, the firstborn, was his parents' favourite seemed to Ralf not only proper, but natural. So completely did he share their view that, aged nine, he was fashioning himself into her third guardian.
     He reached down and, being careful not to wake her, pulled her hand and thumb away from her lips.
     The cart, not very new, hired without driver, was being drawn by two oxen, one white, the other roan-brown. The motion of their broad, fly-pestered backs and horns, the containing sides of the cart, the creaking of axles and felloes, the occasional flick of his father's switch: all these, like his parents' desultory conversation, produced for Ralf, who had never yet been in one, the simulacrum of a passage by boat.
     His ponderous land-vessel, following the roads through open downs or woods full of birdsong, sometimes passing another more or less like itself, or people on foot, and making ever-deeper headway into his apprehension, left the trees for good and crossed the furzy wastes of Mape Common.
     The heavy perfume of the gorse, spreading on the cloying, pollenous air, had at last succeeded in stupefying the wayside grasshoppers, whose chorus had almost collapsed. The road began to descend and the chirping stopped altogether. The cart passed through an acre or two where the bushes had burned away, all but their charcoal skeletons. The soil, the road itself, scorched black, smelled like a hearth. As the road dipped further a view opened up below: marshland spreading as far as a long bank of shingle. Beyond that, glittering in the south-westerly light, Ralf saw the sea.
     Mape Marsh, salt and fresh, comprised vast reedbeds and, in the drier parts, rough grazing for the hardy black cattle of the village. The reeds were harvested in winter for thatching, transported to Alincester and beyond. Thousands of bundles were cut each year, but still the reeds kept enlarging their kingdom, crowding upon the coast road and colonizing the verge on the other side, the pond, the brackish banks of the river, the front gardens of the lowest-lying cottages. In those days the plumes in summer spread, purplish-brown, the whole mile from village to beach.
     As each reed ripens and grows heavier, the curve of its stem increases and, in concert with the multitude, changes most subtly the character of a marsh. With the frosts of autumn the flower-heads turn silver-bronze. The leaves fall, the stems dry out, and the ceaseless rustling becomes harsher, louder.
     A boy who has grown to manhood in Mape, an observant and introspective boy who has spent his most important years roaming there, if blindfolded and somehow transported back to the marsh sixty years later and required on pain of forfeit to tell the season: why, such a one, without any other sense to guide him, could tell you the month and perhaps the very week from the particular quality of reed-rustle that met his ears.
     This southern coast seeps into the soul. Flat, ever shifting, dazed and triturated by winter storms, it is reduced by their onslaught to a delirium of heat-shimmered shingle, lagoons, undertows. The gnarled oaks along the shore, the wind-shrivelled holly and blackthorn, the gorse, the seablite and the butcher's-broom: all cringe before the subjection of the sea. His breath, tainted with tar and rotting fish, hoars the furrows and stunts the tender shoots. Sometimes, turning gigantically in sleep, he puts out an elbow and the dike itself is breached.
     Mape is awash not just with water, but light. The sky merges with what lies below. Ripples, reflections, clods, shingle, cloud-colours: these are of the same. In the least mist, the least tremor of convected heat, the horizon dissolves away altogether as with a motion of wings. Even the marsh birds are an emblem of ambiguity. They own neither earth nor sky.
     None of Mape's birds is more ambiguous, or strange, than the bittern: a kind of heron, patterned in brown and darker brown to mimic the stems among which, standing erect with bill pointing skywards, and swaying in time with any motion of the reeds, it becomes invisible even to the practised eye. The bittern feeds on eels and water-rats. It is resident, solitary, reluctant to fly, and so elusive that even the marshmen rarely see it.
     Stranger than the bird itself is its spring call, a deep, ventriloquial, and almost disyllabic hwoomp, not loud especially, but so carrying that one may hear it at a great distance. The favoured time is evening: just such a warm, sunny, late May evening as this, in which Ralf's family and all their remaining possessions came down from the common and reached the coast road on the outskirts of the village.
     The cart turned left. Beside it, the reeds were vibrant with the song, jagged and flowing, of many warblers. Then, from somewhere in the marsh, Ralf heard a sound as of thunder suppressed by mud: infinitely mournful, wide-ranging, desperate.
     The landscape of his bleak home-to-be had spoken. With this exuded cry it had simultaneously noted his arrival and expressed the perfection of its indifference. His anxiety for the future, which had begun even before he had learned that he was to leave the city, and which had so greatly intensified on the journey south, now crystallized into fear.
     "What is it, Ralf?" said his mother, with a hand to his shoulder.
     "That noise."
     "It's only a bittern."
     "What's a bittern?"
     "A bird," his father said. "Even I know that." And he explained, with a single mild correction from Ralf's mother, what sort of bird it was.
     As he spoke, Ralf looked up at him and felt a little better. For his father he reserved a special kind of worship. If his father could remain so calm and good humoured in the very teeth of the calamity, then perhaps, after all, there might not be so much to fear.
     He had been indentured for fourteen years to John Hampden, chief carpenter at the Cathedral. By the age of twenty his skills had far outgone those of a mere artisan. Long before his apprenticeship had ended, he had been one of those chosen by the Bishop to work not only on the choir but also on the rood screen. Ralf's mother had shown him the most beautiful carvings, some of which bore, among the intricacy of their design, the small crescent moon which formed the signature of Linsell Grigg.
     For a time, therefore, Ralf's father had found himself among men of other crafts. The masons had inadvertently taught him much about stone. He had been fascinated by the groundworks in the precincts of the Bishop's Palace, where the river had been diverted with a series of culverts. Master Hampden had been engaged on this project also, and he it was who devised the rotatory sluices, the first of their kind, which still regulate the water in the great carp pond beyond the city's western gate.
     After his apprenticeship, Ralf's father established his own workshop. It did well: he was able at last to free Ralf's mother and marry, and Ralf and his sister were conceived in a narrow house in Shawcross Street. Five years after Imogen arrived, the family moved to more spacious premises just inside the city walls. Ralf was enrolled in the cathedral school. He learned to read and write, was taught some Latin and even a little Greek. He was eager to learn. Had he stayed, his teachers said, he might have won a scholarship to Dorley.
     But then his father fell prey to bad debt and his workshop failed. He was forced to sell up.
     Ralf had made some good friends in the city. It had been hard to leave them. And once the word "Dorley" had been uttered in his presence, he had dreamt of little else: the illustrious school, the finest in England, often led to the University. He had felt himself, somehow, destined for a bigger place than Alincester.
     There was no school of any description in Mape. The nearest was seven miles along the coast in the town of Rushton, and that only had a few pupils and one master; and anyway, no money could be spared for fees. This town, which Ralf had never seen, had acquired in his imagination a hateful aspect. It was a port, mainly for fishing, but also for trade. Mutton, wool and, he supposed, live sheep, were taken there from the downs and sent to the Low Countries. He envisioned the streets as cramped, cobbled, covered in droppings where they led down to the quay, perennially wreathed in greasy fog.
     Mainly he disliked Rushton because it was there that, six days a week, his father was to be exiled. Though Linsell was no shipwright, the best work he could find anywhere near Mape was in the town's boatyard. He had to be near Mape because he could afford nowhere else to live. Mape was the village of Ralf's mother, and they were to stay, with the permission of the lord, in her father's house.
     Ralf had been there twice before, once as a baby, and again at the age of five. He could remember his grandfather only indistinctly. Ralf knew that he was not a freeman like his father. He was a serf. His life was attached to the manor. Unlike most of his kind he was not a labourer, bound to the land, but a fisherman.
     In a cathedral window Ralf had seen Simon Peter and Andrew, adrift on a luminous Galilee, flinging high their net. The beatific, interchangeable features of the two brothers, so vividly impressed on his mind, had become confused with those of his grandfather. He did recall that his grandfather's beard was white and that his face was ruddy, quite unlike those of the disciples; and he recalled also that, in his speech and broad frame, he could scarcely be less ethereal than the figures in the window.
     His grandmother he could remember no better. She had died since his last visit. He had been considered too young for a funeral, or to make a winter trip to Mape and its windswept graveyard overlooking the marsh.
     Attended by most of the village dwellings, the church stood on an eminence bounded to the east by the river. Behind it rose the Hall, the residence of the Baron, Gervase de Maepe.
     Most halls and castles elsewhere in this diocese, the richest in the kingdom, had by now been reconstructed in stone. Mape Hall was still framed of wood. As the cart drew nearer Ralf could discern, emerging from the trees, more and more of its tower. From it hung a cream and scarlet pennon which he did not then know as the flag of the de Maepes.
     "Hullo, Ralf," Imogen said, placing her chin on his shoulder and clasping her arms round his chest.
     "Have you only just woken up?"
     The cart rumbled across the boards of a white-railed bridge. Looking down, Ralf glimpsed stagnant water among the reeds.
     A moment later his eye was drawn to movement on the rising road ahead, where the first straggle of cottages began. A boy, barely older than himself and shabbily dressed, was evidently the first to have caught sight of the newcomers and was now running towards them, shouting a greeting.
     Ralf felt the heaviness returning to his heart as he half turned and, almost whispering, said to his sister, "We're here."
     

2

Three years later, almost to the day, Ralf set out on a certain evening for the beach. A hint of rain met his cheek as he descended the path beside the churchyard and started along the dike; the buffets of warm wind which had made the yews and lime-trees sway now hit him with exhilarating force. Thunder had been heard earlier. Perhaps there would be a storm.
     Luckily his mother had not been at home to prevent this excursion. He had been looking forward to it, and did not care whether he got wet.
     This morning there had been an exceptionally high tide. All sorts of things might have been washed up since.
     Ralf loved beachcombing. He was carrying his usual accomplice, an old shoulder-bag. He always found driftwood, often fishing-floats which he gave to his grandfather, and sometimes unexpected objects such as a crushed pewter goblet or a single boot with a tarnished buckle. Best of all he liked the mysterious treasures of the sea itself: mermaids' purses, sea-urchins, starfish, sea-cucumbers, dead men's fingers, the grey cylinders of belemnites. The little shelf above his bed bore his collection of stones and shells.
     The tide had let him study in detail the plumage and dark webbed feet of auks, terns, scoters, gannets. He had observed that the beak of the gannet, a seabird that made spectacular plunges for fish, was equipped with inward-pointing serrations to grip the prey. He had examined the nostrils, the slopes of the head, the articulation in death of the neck and wings; and at length felt he had begun to arrive at an understanding of the bird's design and the masterly way it had been fitted for its hunting life. Now, whether from shore or sea, whenever he saw gannets -- huge, majestic, the adults pure white with the outer wings black, the juveniles scaly and dark -- he felt the secret kinship that his knowledge had brought.
     He could not pass a dead bird or animal without at least turning it with a stick. Many times he had come across seals or pups, more or less decomposed and crawling with maggots. Once, alerted by the stench far upwind, he had discovered a rotting porpoise and marvelled at its skull and the many teeth of its jaws.
     Such carcases smelled not just of putrefaction but of the sea itself. Ralf had heard that there was in the sea an equivalent for every creature of the land. Just as a human body in the graveyard crumbled to earth, so did that of the porpoise dissolve to brine. Brine was the essence of the sea. In its most rarefied form it merely flavoured the air. At his whim, God condensed it into the porpoise, the seal, the gannet, and all the curious forms which Ralf and his grandfather, together with the other fishermen and boys, daily brought ashore.
     Ralf could not rid himself of a feeling that people had no business on the sea. The catch seemed like plunder. Yet, after nearly three years of fishing, he no longer felt he belonged to the land. That was why he liked the tideline. Wandering close to the surge, his ears full of its noise, he could believe himself invisible. He was happiest between the sea and land, indebted to neither.
     The marshes formed part of this magic kingdom. Here the boundary was less obvious, but existed nonetheless. At one spot by the base of the dike the mud would take your weight, and was, at a given moment, land; six inches further out it wouldn't. The mud there, malevolent, inscrutable, gannet-billed, was of the sea.
     The gurgling runnels and gullies of the saltmarsh were like nothing on land. Even its plants, its samphire, sea-lavender and sea-purslane, even they disdained the loam and rain that ordinary plants held dear and throve on salt and submersion.
     Now the tide was flooding again, nearing its height. Ralf paused to inspect the sky. When he looked north, back towards the village, it appeared darker than over the sea. The wind was from the south-east. He decided it would not rain heavily after all.
     The path along the top of the dike was well worn but narrow, hemmed in by stems of milfoil and sea-aster which hindered his legs as he passed. To his right, beyond the course of the borrowdike at the base of the slope, the grazing had given way to reed-scrub. To his left lay the broad saltmarsh which edged the harbour; ahead rose the shingle of the beach.
     A heron hoisted itself from the borrowdike, laboured into the wind and out towards the water.
     Had his gaze not idly followed it, Ralf might never have noticed that someone was in the saltings. All that could be seen was a head and a pair of slight shoulders, facing away, just visible above the expanse of grey-green purslane, so far off that he could make out little but the dark, collar-length hair. The owner of the head had descended into a channel.
     Ralf himself, like most people in the village, had often been out there to dig bait or gather samphire. At low tide, if you had companions, it was safe enough. But if you were alone and the tide was swelling, the saltings were forbidden. It was so easy to lose your way in the maze of channels, to get cut off, to drown, that even the most confident marshmen never risked it.
     Ralf cupped his hands to his mouth.
     "Hullo there! Hullo!"
     Had he been heard? The shoulders were agitated, moving as the unseen body struggled to get free.
     "Hullo! Hullo!"
     A mere boy's voice could not compete with the wind. Ralf clenched his fists in frustration, looking back once more towards the distant village. There was no time to fetch help.
     From here, the victim was in line with the top of Boling Down, ten miles away to the east. Ralf hurriedly surveyed the pattern and course of the larger channels, trying to fix them in his mind. He pulled the leather strap of his bag over his head so that it no longer hung from one shoulder but crossed his breast. Next he stamped down the vegetation on the top of the dike, making a gap three or four feet across. And then, without hesitation, his heart pounding, he scrambled down the slope.
     At the bottom, as he was pushing through the waist-high thickets of seablite, he knew that what he was doing was foolish, dangerous, even mad. He knew that he should be afraid. Perhaps he was. Perhaps he knew very well that he too would get stuck and that, trapped by the ferocious suction of the mud, he too would be overwhelmed by the sea; he knew all this, yet still he kept on, forcing his pace, driven further and further from safety by a rising excitement he had never known before.
     The seablite dwindled and was left behind. The firmest ground now was covered by a luxuriant growth of samphire. He made several detours to keep to it, pausing only to confirm his position using the line he had established between the dike and Boling Down. From this elevation the victim was no longer visible.
     Ralf arrived at the first sizeable gully, jumped across, leapt another, and a third. The next was too wide. He turned left, realized he was being driven back on himself and went the other way. The mud underfoot was becoming softer, vibrating more and more readily with his weight. The sea-lavender had begun.
     By now he was two hundred yards into the saltings. His shoes were already caked, his leggings already spattered: it was not always possible to keep to the crowns of the tummocks. Coming at speed to another gully, he misjudged its width and fell, making himself filthy as he scrambled upright.
     Without thinking, he dragged a hand across his face.
     He came to a halt, making a deliberate attempt at calm. Only if he kept a clear head would all be well. He did not know how much higher the sea had to come, but there was still time, time enough, surely, to do what was needed.
     A little further on he encountered a line of deep footprints, leading out. Beside them, crossing them and there obliterated, wavered the prints of a small dog. At once he guessed the identity of his quarry and of the tan and white terrier, and knew what must have happened. Guided towards the right by the direction of the tracks, he now saw, almost hidden by sea-purslane, the top of the head of a boy of about his own age and size, a boy with whom, throughout his three years in the village, Ralf had not exchanged so much as a single word: the Honourable Godric, youngest son of Lord de Maepe.
     When Ralf reached him, he was horrified to see that he was already chest-deep in fast-flowing water, his arms held level before him, his face, viewed from the side, a mask of disbelief. He did not even see Ralf approaching.
     "It's all right!" Ralf cried, getting as close as he dared and unhitching his bag. "It's all right!" he repeated, although he knew it most certainly was not.
     The boy turned his head.
     "How deep is the mud? Where does it come to? Your knees?"
     "Higher."
     "Your waist?"
     "Nearly."
     "Take this!" Gripping the centre of the strap, Ralf flung the bag towards him. It splashed just out of reach. Ralf tried again, and a third time, before Godric, leaning to the side, was able to grab it.
     As soon as Ralf began to pull, two things happened. He felt his feet being driven into the mud; and, almost immediately, the strap broke. Unable to help himself, he fell backwards in a heap.
     The stitching had parted where one end of the strap had been fixed to the bag. Ralf saw the advantage. They could use the full length of the strap, so that he could stand further up where the mud was firmer. They could wrap the ends round their wrists, to get a better grip. As Ralf imparted this information, the boy nodded blankly.
     "Ready?"
     "Yes."
     "Hold tight."
     "I will."
     "Point your feet if you can."
     "I will."
     "Now put your head under."
     "What?"
     "You've got to let the water take your weight. I can't manage otherwise."
     To Ralf's amazement, Godric understood him at once. Ralf saw him take a deep breath, lean sideways, and his head duly went below the swirling surface of the tide.
     Ralf pulled with every ounce of his strength, pulled ten times harder than ever he had pulled on the heaviest, most bulging net, and was rewarded with nothing but his feet once again sinking and the knowledge that Godric had absolutely and terminally been claimed by the marsh.
     It was no good. Godric spluttered for air.
     "Again!" Ralf shouted.
     Again Ralf failed. The churned mud at his feet showed how desperately he had tried.
     The water was rising towards Godric's throat. Part of Ralf's mind was aware that he also was at the mercy of the tide: the gullies he had leapt, like this very channel, were now filling, widening, becoming impassable; but mainly he was seized by an appalled determination that no one should have to die in such a stupid and horrible way. For a dog, a little yapping dog!
     "Again!"
     As he pulled, as his feet slithered and floundered, as he realized he could never do it, Ralf remembered God. He remembered he was supposed to pray for strength. But the remote, all-knowing god of the village church or Alincester Cathedral, the father on high, who had sent his only son to be reviled and crucified, this god was just someone in a story. The god Ralf knew, knew intimately, lived down here. His ruthlessness and beneficence were of another kind. He made the weather and the sky, the downs, the forests, the porpoise and the gannet. His message, expressed everywhere, was clear. Self reliance.
     These thoughts had consumed no more than a moment. They produced a single idea that changed everything. It was no longer a matter of trying, but deciding. Ralf decided. Not only would Godric come free, but they would both get back to the dike alive.
     As he hauled anew, he could not be sure whether he had become endowed with miraculous strength or whether his previous strivings had served to loosen the mud's grip. At first so slight as to be no more credible than wishful thinking, a sensation of yielding, of success, grew to the stage where he accepted it was happening. His eyes, tight shut in the extreme grimace of his effort, opened to see that he was dragging Godric out.

* * *