The Essex Serpent (11 page)

‘Let me go,’ said Cora, touching her scarred neck, recalling what she’d said to the rector as they’d sat together where she stood now:
I know punishment, I’ve learned how to stand it.
Was it punishment she sought – had Michael so mistreated her she hoped for others to do the same – was she malformed now, misshapen, having been pressed and moulded so long? Or was it really that she’d sold her soul and must honour the transaction? ‘Let me go,’ she said, and put her hand on the pew to steady herself, and found it wet. Her hand slipped; she stumbled against Cracknell and felt the oily pelt of his coat, with its reek of salt and oyster – he stumbled also, and in steadying himself raised up his arms; his long coat opened and spread and showed its leather lining, black, greasy, with the flap of wings. ‘
Let me go!
’ she said, and the door opened, and there stood Joanna at the threshold, letting in the light, and Martha with her, and they were saying ‘Who shut the door? Who let the door shut?’ – and Cracknell fell into the pew, saying that really he was ever so sorry, only it had been a troublesome few months, what with the one thing and the other. ‘I’m coming,’ called Cora, then saying it again to be certain her voice came without breaking: ‘I’m coming, and we’d better rush, if we’re going to catch our train.’

Stella stood at the rectory window, watching children cross the common and hide between the branches of Traitor’s Oak. She’d coughed for much of the night, and slept very little, dreaming when she did that someone had come to her room and painted everything blue. The walls had been blue, and so had the ceiling; in place of the carpet were blue tiles vivid with light from the window. The sky had been blue, and so were the leaves of the trees, which bore blue fruit. She had woken distressed to find the same old roses on the wallpaper, and the same old cream linen curtains, and sent James out to pick bluebells from the garden. These she ranged on the windowsill with violets she’d pressed and dried in early spring, and the stem of lavender Will had once put on her pillow. She felt a little hot, though not unpleasantly; and while the bells tolled she carried out a ritual of her own. Touching each bloom with her thumb she said, singingly, over and over, ‘Lapis, cobalt, indigo, blue,’ but later could not explain why.

II

TO USE HIS BEST ENDEAVOUR

APRIL

1

In the last week of April, when all the Essex hedgerows were white with cow parsley and blackthorn flower, Cora moved with Martha and Francis into a grey house beside Aldwinter common. They’d grown tired of Colchester and the Red Lion: Francis had exhausted the landlord’s store of Sherlock Holmes (marking inaccuracies in red ink and improbabilities in green), and Cora had grown dissatisfied with the town’s civilised little river, which could certainly conceal nothing larger than a pike.

The memory of her encounter with Cracknell – the saline scent on the collar of his coat, how he’d conjured from dark corners the waiting beast in the Blackwater – had made her restless. She felt something awaited her over in Aldwinter, though whether she sought the living or the dead she couldn’t quite say. Often she thought herself childish and credulous to be in pursuit of a living fossil in (of all places!) an Essex estuary, but if Charles Lyell countenanced the idea of a species outwitting extinction, so could she. And hadn’t the Kraken been nothing but legend, until a giant squid pitched up on a Newfoundland beach, and was photographed in a tin bath by the Reverend Moses Harvey? Besides all that, here was the Essex clay beneath her feet, concealing who-knew-what, biding its time. She’d go out walking with her coat’s hem muddy and the rain on her cheek and say, ‘I don’t see why it shouldn’t be me, and shouldn’t be here: Mary Anning knew nothing about anything until a landslide killed her dog.’

News of the grey house standing empty on the common had come from Stella Ransome. She’d gone to Colchester to buy bolts of blue cloth and said, ‘Won’t you come to Aldwinter, once you’re tired of the town? The Gainsforths have been looking for tenants for months now, but only someone very strange would go out there to live with us! It’s a good house, there’s a garden – summer’s not long off; you can hire Banks to take you out on the estuary: you’ll never find your serpent on the High Street!’ She took Cora’s hand, and said: ‘Besides, we want you near us. Joanna wants Martha, James wants Francis, and we all want you.’

‘I
have
always wanted to learn to sail,’ said Cora, smiling and taking Stella’s small hands. ‘Will you put me in touch with the Gainsforths, and vouch for my good character? Goodness, Stella, your hands are hot: take off your coat, and tell me how you are.’

Francis, listening from his newly favoured position under the dining table, approved thoroughly: the move to Colchester had given him new kingdoms to conquer, and he was ready for more. He’d exhausted the town’s small store of treasure (the gull’s egg he’d blown and preserved, the silver fork which Taylor had let him take from the High Street ruin), and shared his mother’s certainty that something was waiting on the Blackwater marsh. In the months since his father’s death he had become (he felt) more or less an adult himself: neither Cora nor Martha attempted any more to cosset or coddle him, and certainly he never asked for it. His tendency to arrive unbidden in the night or early morning, watchful at the door or window, was long gone – he didn’t know why he’d done it, only that it was no longer necessary. Instead he grew self-contained and contentedly silent, and bore their Aldwinter visits with good grace. The rector’s sons treated him with an amiable contempt that suited him perfectly: on the two occasions they’d met the boys had ranged across the common and exchanged perhaps a dozen words in several hours. ‘Aldwinter,’ he said, trying it out for size: ‘Aldwinter.’ He liked the three syllables; he liked the declining cadence. His mother glanced down at him and said, with relief, ‘Would you like that, Frankie? There, then: it’s settled.’

2

In his rooms on the Pentonville Road, sleeping off bad wine, Dr Luke Garret was woken by a tumult beneath his window. A running boy had brought a message, and stood obstinate on the doorstep awaiting a response. Opening the folded sheet of paper, Garrett read:

He gave such a bellow of joy that the waiting boy, startled, abandoned all hope for a tip and slipped back into the crowd. Alone among the hospital staff (saving always Spencer), Sister Maureen Fry was Garrett’s champion and confidante. Thwarted in her own desire to take up knife and needle, she saw in Garrett’s disruptive fierce ambition a proxy for her own. Her long service and formidable intellect, combined with an implacable serenity wielded as a weapon against the arrogance of men, caused her to seem as essential to the hospital’s structure as any of its supporting walls. Garrett had grown used to her near-silent attendance in the operating rooms, and suspected (though was never so certain as to be able to thank her) that to have her as ally had permitted him to attempt several operations which might otherwise have been considered too grave a risk. And none came so burdened with risk as this: no surgeon had ever made a successful attempt to close a wound to the heart. The impossibility of doing so had become attended by romance and legend, as if it were a task set by a goddess no-one could ever hope to placate. Less than a year before, one of the most promising surgeons in an Edinburgh hospital, believing he could remove a bullet from a wounded soldier’s heart, had lost his patient on the table, and in his shame and grief gone quietly home and shot himself. (He’d aimed, of course, for the heart; but with a shaking hand misjudged the aim and died of an infection.)

None of this occurred to Luke Garrett, there on the sunlit doorstep with the sheet of paper held to his chest. ‘God bless you!’ he roared at the baffled passers-by, meaning both patient and nurse, and whoever had so conveniently wielded the knife. He put on his coat – he patted his pockets – his money was gone on drink, and there was none remaining for a cab. Laughing, he ran full-tilt the mile to the hospital gate, shedding with each step the last of the night’s dreariness, and on arrival found himself expected. His entrance to the ward was blocked by a senior surgeon with a beard the colour and shape of a garden spade, who more or less braced himself in the doorframe. Beside him, looking anxious as he so often did, Spencer stood with his hands raised in a placating gesture, now and then gesturing to the note he held, which Luke saw clearly to have also come from Sister Fry. Behind them both a door was opened and pulled quickly shut, though not before Luke glimpsed a pair of long, narrow feet extended beneath a white sheet.

‘Dr Garrett,’ said the older surgeon, tugging at his beard: ‘I know what you are thinking, and you cannot do this – you cannot.’

‘Can’t I?’ This was said so mildly that Spencer drew back in alarm. There was, he knew, no mildness anywhere in Luke. ‘What’s his name?’

‘I mean that you both cannot, and you must not. His family is with him: let him reach the end in peace. I knew someone would send for you!’ He wrung his hands. ‘I will not let you bring disgrace on this hospital – his mother is with him, has not stopped talking since she came in.’

Garrett took a step further, and smelt a kind of onion ripeness coming from the surgeon, and above it the consoling reek of iodine.

‘Tell me his name, Rollings.’

‘You’ve no use for his name whatever. When I discover who sent for you … you’re not going in. I will not let you. No-one ever treated a wound of the heart and had the patient live, not all the better men than you. And he is a man – he is not one of your dead toys – and think of the reputation of the hospital!’

‘My dear Rollings’ – this was said with such exquisite politeness that Spencer fairly recoiled – ‘you could not stop me if you tried. I will waive my fee, if they give me permission; and they will, because they will be desperate. Besides: the Royal Borough has no reputation at all save the one I’ve given it!’

Rollings shuffled in the doorway as if he wanted to swell to fit each corner and turn to steel, flushing such a deep and meaty red Spencer came near in fear that he might faint. ‘I am not speaking of
rules
,’ he said: ‘I’m speaking of a man’s life – it is not
possible
– you will ruin your reputation – it is his heart! It is his heart!’

Garrett had not moved, only seemed in the dim corridor to have grown not larger but more massy, more dense: he had not lost his temper, but seemed almost to thrum with a great store of energy barely suppressed. Rollings sagged against the wall: he knew himself bested. Passing him with a look that was almost kindly, Garrett crossed swiftly into a small room, scrupulously clean. The bright antiseptic air smelt of carbolic acid, and of lavender scent rising from the handkerchief drawn through the hands of a woman seated by the patient’s bedside. She leaned forward at intervals, confidingly, whispering to the man beneath the white sheet: ‘Shouldn’t think you’ll be long off work – we won’t bother them yet.’

Maureen Fry, in a dress starched stiff as card and thin rubber gloves, stood at the window adjusting a cotton blind to let the late sun in. She turned to greet the men with a placid nod: if she’d heard the intemperate wrangling just beyond the closed door it was clear she’d never acknowledge it. ‘Dr Garrett,’ she said; ‘Dr Spencer. Good afternoon. You of course will prepare before examining the patient, who is doing nicely.’ She handed Spencer a small file on which was recorded the declining pulse, the peaking temperature. Neither Garrett nor Spencer were fooled by a form of words calculated to convey nothing at all to the mother: he was not doing nicely, and likely never would again. ‘His name is Edward Burton,’ she said: ‘Twenty-nine, and in good health: a clerk in the Prudential Insurance Company. He was attacked by a stranger as he walked home to Bethnal Green; they found him on the steps of St Paul’s.’

‘Edward Burton,’ said Luke, and turned to the man beneath the sheet.

He was so slight that he hardly lifted the white cloth covering him, but tall, so that his feet and shoulders were visible. His collarbones were sharp, and between them the declivity of his throat fluttered visibly. Spencer thought:
He’s swallowed a moth
, and felt sick. A high colour spread across the patient’s cheeks, which were broad and high, and marked with moles in black clusters. His hair had begun to recede early, leaving a white stretch of forehead on which beads of sweat stood out. He might have been twenty; he might have been fifty; he was probably more beautiful at that moment than he had ever been before. He was conscious, and had about him an air of great concentration, as if the expelling of breath were a skill that had taken years to perfect. Listening carefully to his mother, he interjected where she paused, but only to say something about crows and rooks.

‘He was all right a few hours ago,’ said his mother, apologetically, as if they’d missed seeing him at his best and would go away disappointed. ‘They put a plaster on. Can you show them?’ The nurse lifted first the thin arm, and then the sheet. Spencer saw a large square plaster fastened over the left nipple and extending a few inches down. There was no blood or suppuration: it looked as if a cloth had been draped over him as he slept. His mother said, ‘He was all right when they brought him in. He was talking. They patched him up a bit. There wasn’t much bleeding, there wasn’t much of anything. They put him away in here out of sight and I think they forgot about us. He’s just getting tired, that’s all. Why didn’t anyone come? Why can’t I take him home?’

Gently, Luke said: ‘He is dying.’ He left the word in the air a while to see if she’d take it up, but she only smiled uncertainly, as if it had been a joke in poor taste. Luke crouched by her chair, and touched her lightly on the hand, and said, ‘Mrs Burton, he’s going to die. By morning, he’ll be dead.’

Spencer, who knew how eagerly Luke had awaited a wound like this – had seen dogs and corpses cut and probed in preparation, and once let Luke stitch and restitch a long cut of his own to perfect his needlework – saw his friend’s patience with astonishment and love.

‘Nonsense!’ the woman said, and they heard the fabric of her handkerchief tear between her fingers. ‘Nonsense! Look at him! He’ll sleep it off!’

‘His heart is cut. The bleeding is all in there, all in here’ – Garrett thumped his own breast – ‘his heart is getting weak.’ Reaching for words she might understand he said, ‘It will get weaker and weaker like an animal bleeding in the forest, and then it will stop and there’ll be no more blood anywhere in him, and everything – his lungs and his brain – will starve.’

‘
Edward
–’ she said.

Luke saw the blows land, and that his prey was weak; laying a hand on her shoulder he said: ‘What I mean is – he will die, unless you let me help.’

There was a moment of struggling against the truth, then she began to cry. In a quiet voice that carried through the weeping with more authority than Spencer had ever seen him muster, Luke said, ‘You are his mother: you brought him into the world, and you can keep him in it. Will you let me operate? I …’ – his belief in the possibility of success did battle with his honesty, and reached an uneasy truce – ‘I am very good – I’m the best, and I’ll do it without payment. It’s not been done before and they’ll tell you it can’t be done, but for everything there’s a first time and it’s the time that matters most. You want me to promise, I know, and I can’t, but can you trust me, at least?’

Outside the door there was a brief commotion. Spencer suspected that Rollings had alerted various administrative authorities, and leaned against the door with his arms folded. He caught the nurse’s eye, and each conveyed silently
Oh we are sailing very close to the wind
. The commotion subsided.

The woman said, between gasps, ‘What will you do to him?’

‘Really, it’s not so bad,’ said Luke. ‘His heart is protected by a kind of bag, like an infant in the womb. The cut is there – I have seen it – I could show you? – yes, perhaps you’d rather not. The cut is there, no longer than your little finger. I’ll stitch it up, and the bleeding will stop, and he will – he might – recover. If we do nothing …’ He spread out his hands in a gesture of dismay.

‘Will it hurt?’

‘He will know nothing about it at all.’

She began to gather herself piece by piece, beginning at her feet, which she set a little further apart on the floor, and ending with her hair, which she brushed away from her face as if to show off her newly acquired resolve. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Do what you like. I’m going to go home now.’ She did not look at her son, only grasped his foot as she passed the bed. Spencer went out with her, to do as he always did: soothe, and placate, and with the authority conferred by wealth and status protect his friend from the consequences of his actions.

Garrett meanwhile stooped over the bed and said briskly, ‘In a little while you’ll have a good deep sleep – are you tired? I think you are.’ Then he took the man’s hand, feeling foolish, and saying, ‘I am Luke Garrett; I hope you’ll remember my name when you wake.’

‘One rook is a crow,’ said Edward Burton, ‘but two crows are rooks.’

‘Confusion’s only to be expected,’ said Garrett, and replaced the man’s wrist on the white sheet. He turned to Sister Fry, and said, ‘Are you able to attend?’ though it was merely politeness, since it was inconceivable that she would not. She nodded, and in that silent response conveyed such quiet confidence in Garrett’s skill that his pulse – not yet settled since running there – began to slow.

When he and Spencer entered the operating theatre, hands raw from scrubbing, the porters had departed. Edward Burton lay high on the bed, eyes fixed on Sister Fry, who’d changed into a fresh uniform and was withdrawing with practised monotony a series of bottles and instruments which she laid out on steel trays.

Spencer would’ve liked to explain to the patient what was to come next – that the chloroform worked slowly and sickly, and that he should not fight the mask, but would wake (would he wake?) in due course, throat aching from the tube through which the ether passed. But Garrett required silence, and both Spencer and the nurse had come to anticipate what he required next by little more than nods and nudges, and how directed were the black looks he gave above the white mask.

The patient immobile, the rubber tube tugging at his lip to give the impression of a sneer, Garrett removed the plaster and surveyed the wound. The tension of the skin had caused it to open in the shape of a blind eye. Burton had so little fat on him that the grey-white bone of the rib was visible beneath the severed skin and muscle. The opening was insufficient, and having first washed the flesh in iodine Garret took his knife and made it larger by an inch in each direction. With Spencer and Fry attending, to suck and swab and keep clear his view, Garrett saw it would be necessary first to remove a section of the rib that covered the wounded heart. With a fine bone-saw (he’d used it once to amputate a girl’s crushed toe, despite her protestations that she couldn’t possibly dance in sandals if she was down to just the four) he cut the rib to four inches shorter than creation intended, and put it in a pan held nearby. Then with steel retractors that would not have looked out of place in the hands of a railway engineer he opened up a cavity and peered within.
We’re so tightly packed
, thought Spencer, marvelling as always at how bright and beautiful it was. The marbling of red and purplish-blue, and the scant deposits of yellow fat: they were not the colours of nature. Once or twice the muscles all around the opening flexed slowly, like a mouth arrested in a yawn.