The Essex Serpent (14 page)

MAY

1

May, and the tender weather coaxes roses early from their beds. Naomi Banks peers at the moon and takes full credit for the soft rain, the mild mornings, but all the same she’s unhappy. She recalls the afternoon down on the saltings when they’d commanded spring to come, but what she sees of that day is not Joanna’s hand held in hers over the flames, but of something in the water biding its time. She is her father’s daughter, and knows – none better – the vagaries of the tides, and how the water might buck above a sandbank, or carry in its current the severed limbs of oaks. All the same, she’s grown wary of the Blackwater – will not set foot on the deck of the barge – skirts the quay as if convinced something down there will grasp her ankle as she passes.

Her teacher chides her for a lazy feckless thing, and sets her lines of punishment, but the words on the paper settle and shift like flies; instead, she takes to making charcoal sketches in which a sea-serpent – black-winged, blunt-beaked – snaps at her from the page. Then down she looks at the webbing between her fingers, and flinches at the memory of it having first been noted by her classmates, and how feared she’d been and reviled, until tall Joanna with her father’s authority had intervened. But there it is – she raises her hands, and watches lamplight pick out the veins in the little pouches of skin – she is distorted, unnatural; it would be entirely in keeping for the Essex Serpent to single her out; perhaps she is its kindred. For a time she refuses glasses of water, certain that there in the liquid are particles of skin sloughed from the serpent’s back.

One evening, coming home from a fruitless search for her father, she passes the open doors of the White Hare. The scent of drink is so familiar it’s as if she’s breathing her father’s breath, and she dawdles on the doorstep. Men beckon her in, and admire her red hair, the pewter locket she wears (it contains a piece of the caul she was born with, to ensure she will not drown). She grows aware of a kind of power she had no idea she possessed; she pirouettes when asked, and laughs at their admiration of her ankles, of the white bones of her knees. To be admired is so delicious, and so strange, that she allows them to tug at her ringlets, and examine the locket where it lies on her skin; yes (she says), laughing, she is covered all over with freckles. She darts away; they call her back, and when she returns, they say, ‘Pretty, pretty,’ and she thinks that after all perhaps she is. Then she’s drawn down onto a waiting lap, and is all at once aware that something is very wrong – she feels both afraid and outraged, but finds it impossible to move; somewhere behind her a man she cannot see makes a noise which is like that of an animal finding food.

That night in her sleep the Essex Serpent lets just the wet tip of its tail show under her pillow and breathes coldly on the closed lids of her eyes; she wakes expecting the sheets beneath her to be briny and damp. The dream seems to have something to do with the loss of her mother years before (though that had been decently done in the bedroom with the curtains closed, and not anywhere near the Blackwater), and leaves her too anxious to eat.

The Essex Serpent does not content itself with visitations to a child. It comes to Matthew Evansford as he leafs through the book of Revelation, and sports seven heads and ten horns, and upon its heads the name of blasphemy. It rains down blows on Cracknell’s door in the buffeting of an easterly wind; it awaits Banks as he mends his sails and thinks of his lost wife, his stolen boat, the daughter who won’t meet his eye. It winks at William Ransome from the wormy arm of its pew, and leaves him in no doubt of his failings – he reads the collect with a fervency that delights the congregation:
Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils.
It comes to Stella in a light fever but it’s no match for her: she sings to it, and pities it for a cowardly creeping thing. In the dining room of the Garrick, Charles Ambrose – having eaten too richly – puts a hand to his belly and jokes to his companion that the Essex Serpent’s got its claws in him. Evidence of divine judgment in a more general sense is spotted here and there: a plague of cuckoo-spit in the gardens, a cat aborting its kittens on the hearth. Evansford hears of a death in St Osyth which the coroner cannot explain; he reserves the blood from his Sunday chicken and goes out that night to paint the lintel of every door in Aldwinter, that God’s judgment might pass over them. There’s a downpour before sunrise and noone’s any the wiser.

Martha watches her companion for signs of wanting to return to Foulis Street, but there are none, for Cora has come to feel her happiness is rooted in the Aldwinter clay. One afternoon she goes to East Mersea and walks in a daze of joy for which she fears she’ll one day be punished. The russet cliffs are wetted by a beck, and where the water runs, yellow coltsfoot grows. Down on the shore she stoops to inspect the stones and gravel sifted in the longshore drift, and finds no ammonite, no toadstone, but a smooth bit of amber that fits perfectly in the crease of her palm. At times she runs through her store of Essex memory – the dumb sheep’s struggle, Cracknell whispering in the All Saints aisle, Stella tucking a confiding arm in hers, how silently the ship had sailed across the sky – and it seems to her that she must’ve lived there years, that she can recall no other way of being. Besides, there’s the serpent to think of – she takes a boat round Mersea Island, she visits Henham-onthe-Mount, she reads the dying ode of Ragnar Lodbrok, who slew an enormous serpent and won himself a bride. She keeps before her the spirit of Mary Anning, who certainly would’ve pursued the rumour of a winged sea-serpent to the earth’s end, and her own.

She goes often to the rectory, bringing gifts for the Ransome children: a book for Joanna, a Jacob’s Ladder toy for James (this he dismantles at once), something sweet for John. She kisses Stella on both cheeks, and means it, too. Then on she goes to where Will waits in his study (there is the amber on his desk), and always at first sight there’s a moment of delight, of surprise:
you really are here
, each thinks.

Side by side they sit at his desk, books opened and discarded; has he read this or that, she says, and what does he think of it; certainly he has, he says, and thinks nothing of it at all. He attempts to sketch the refracting light that gave them the Fata Morgana; she draws the parts of a trilobite. They sharpen themselves on each other; each by turn is blade and whetstone; when talk falls to faith and reason they argue readily, startling themselves by growing swiftly bad-tempered (‘You don’t understand!’ ‘How can I understand when you do not even make attempts at speaking sense?’). One afternoon they come almost to blows over a question of the existence of absolute good, which Cora denies, with reference to the thieving magpie. Will falls back on condescension, and puts on his parson’s voice. Then she gleefully brings up the Essex Serpent – nothing but rumour and myth, he says, and she’ll have none of it: didn’t he know how in 1717 a beast fourteen feet long was washed up on the Maldon shore? And he an Essex man, too! Each considers the other to have a fatal flaw in their philosophy which ought by rights to exclude a friendship, and are a little baffled to discover it does nothing of the kind. They write more often than meet. ‘I like you better on paper,’ says Cora, and it is as if she carries around with her, in a pocket or threaded around her neck, a constant source of light.

Stella, passing the open door, smiles, pleased and indulgent: she herself is attended so warmly by so many companions it pleases her to see her husband fitted up with so suitable a friend. Questioned once by a curious Aldwinter wife hopeful of scandal she says, all mischief, half-tempted to stoke the ember: ‘Oh, I never saw firmer friends: they’ve almost begun to look alike. Last week she’d got halfway home before she realised she had his boots on.’ She stands at the mirror in the morning brushing out her hair and half-pities Cora, who to be sure has a handsome and costly look when the rare mood takes her but in general could never be mistaken for a beauty. She puts down the brush – her arm aches – the flu has left her a little weak, a little disinclined to go out: she prefers to sit by her window in the blue hour before dusk and watch cowslips come up on the lawn.

Luke Garrett is alarmed to discover that he has become a celebrity. There’s a brief fad among surgical students for mimicking all the idiosyncrasies that once were roundly mocked: they rig up mirrors in the operating theatre, and take to wearing white cotton masks. He remains in disgrace with his seniors, who fear the corridors will grow clotted with victims of street brawls holding open their shirts for the needle and thread. Spencer – both generous, and attempting to keep his own possessions from being endlessly pressed into his friend’s service – commissions him a leather belt with a heavy silver buckle, and on the buckle he asks to be engraved the snake of Asclepius coiling round its staff, by way of commemorating the medical triumph.

Uncertain what he thought might change once he’d proved it possible to close a cardiac wound, Luke discovers things remain the same. He can still barely afford his rent, reliant on bank-notes he suspects Spencer secretes in his room; he’s still a crouching black-browed thing; all the accumulated humiliations of life have not evaporated with the last of the chloroform in Room 12. Besides, he didn’t quite get at the heart, not quite: both blades had stopped short of the chambers; really he can hardly say it’s been much of an achievement at all.

He admits to Spencer and to no-one else that he’d thought it might at last elevate him in Cora’s estimation: she loves him of course (or claims to), and admires him; but he feels himself out-ranked. She’s acquired new friends, and writes to tell him how the parson’s wife has a face so lovely you thought flowers would wilt in shame as she passed, and how their daughter has adopted Martha, and how even Francis can bear their company an hour or two. Her move to Aldwinter astounds him: then he imagines that she’s merely lapsed into the low spirits befitting a widow, and is greatly cheered at the prospect of raising them. But when they meet in Colchester she speaks of William Ransome and grows so animated her grey eyes gleam blue; really (she says) it’s as if God pities her absence of a brother and has fitted one up for her at the last minute. There’s nothing secretive in the way she speaks of the man, no blushes or sidelong looks; but all the same Garrett looks up and catches Martha’s eye and for the first time discovers they’re in complete accord.
What’s happening?
they silently say.
What’s going on?

Spencer is immersed in London’s housing disgrace. What at first had been merely a means of pleasing Martha has become an obsession: he pores over Hansard and committee minutes, he puts on his worst coat and goes walking down past Drury Lane. He discovers Parliament’s habit of making policies benevolently enough, then covering its eyes and shaking hands with industry. Sometimes the greed and malice of what he sees appals him so much he thinks he must’ve misunderstood; he looks again, and it’s worse than he thought. The local authorities tear down slums, and compensate landlords according to lost rents. Since nothing makes a tenement more profitable than vice and overcrowding, landlords facilitate both as diligently as any pimp in the street, and government rewards them handsomely. The tenants then turned out find themselves considered too immoral for a smart new Peabody home, and are left to find rooms in lodging-houses: there are times when the streets are full of firelight as tenants burn furniture too poor to be sold. Spencer thinks of his family home in Suffolk, where recently his mother discovered another room they’d never known was there, and is nauseated.

Over at World’s End Cracknell turns a wary eye on the estuary. He keeps his fences thickly hung with stripped moles, and a candle burning in the window.

2

Late one afternoon, walking on the saltings with a Psalm on his tongue, William Ransome encountered Cora’s son. He sought out the features of his friend in the small inscrutable face, and found none. These then were the eyes of the man he supposed she’d loved; this the plane of his cheek and chin. But the child’s eyes were querying, not cruel, as he imagined Seaborne’s must have been, though they were not childlike, precisely – Francis was never that.

‘What are you doing, down here all alone?’ said Will.

‘I’m not alone,’ said the boy. Will looked about for someone standing on the shingle, and saw no-one.

Francis stood with his hands in his pockets, and scrutinised the man before him as though he were a sheet of problems to be worked out. Then he said – as if the question arose quite naturally out of their exchange – ‘What’s sin?’

‘Sin?’ said Will, so startled that he stumbled, and put out a hand as if expecting to encounter the pulpit door.

‘I’ve been counting,’ said Francis, walking beside him. ‘Seven times you said it this Sunday. Five the last.’

‘I was not aware you’ve been in the congregation, Francis. I never see you there.’ And Cora – had she, too, sat in the shadows, listening?

‘Seven and five makes twelve. But you don’t say what it is.’

They’d reached Leviathan, and Will – grateful for the pause – stooped to pick at pebbles drifted up against its bones. In all his years of ministry nobody had ever asked, and he was appalled to find himself at a loss. It was not that he had no answer: he had many (he’d studied all the requisite books). But out of doors – with no pulpit or pew in sight and the river mouth licking at the shore – both question and answer struck him as preposterous.

‘What’s sin?’ said Francis, without the inflexion of a repeated phrase.
God! Give me strength
, thought Will, both devoutly and profanely, and handed the boy a pebble.

‘Stand back a bit,’ he said, ‘here, by me – a step further – there. Now throw the stone and hit Leviathan – that rib, there, where we were standing.’

Francis looked at him a while, as if assessing whether he were being mocked; evidently concluding he was not, he tossed the pebble, and it fell short.

‘Have another’ – Will put a blue stone in his palm – ‘try again.’

Again he threw; again he missed.

‘That’s all it is,’ said Will. ‘To sin is to try, but fall short. Of course we cannot get it right each time – and so we try again.’

The boy frowned. ‘But what if Leviathan had not been there – what if you had not told me to stand here? If I’d stood
there
, and Leviathan had been
here
, I might have hit it, first time.’

‘Yes,’ said Will, feeling he’d entered deeper waters than he’d bargained for: ‘We think we know where we’re aiming, and perhaps we do – but morning comes, and a change in the light, and we find out we should’ve been trying in a different direction after all.’

‘But if it changes – what I should do, and what I shouldn’t – how do I know where to aim? And how can it be my fault if I fail – and why should I be punished for it?’ A crease came faintly between the boy’s black brows, and there at last was Cora.

‘There are some things’ – Will trod carefully – ‘which I think we all must try to do, or else try not to do. But there are others we must work out for ourselves.’ The last pebble he held was smooth, and flat; he turned his back to Leviathan and tossed it spinning at the outgoing tide. It skipped once, and fell behind a shallow wave.

‘That wasn’t what you meant to do,’ said Francis.

‘No,’ said Will. ‘It wasn’t. But at my age, you’re used to failing more often than not.’

‘So you sinned,’ said Francis; Will laughed, and said he hoped to be forgiven.

Frowning, the boy studied Leviathan a while. His lips moved, and Will thought he might perhaps be calculating the correct trajectory of a stone. Then he turned away and said: ‘Thank you for answering my question.’

‘How did I do?’ said the rector, hoping he’d fallen somewhere between faith and reason, and fallen without doing himself harm.

‘I don’t know yet. I’ll think about it.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Will, and wished he could ask the boy to conceal their conversation from his mother: what might she make of her son being instructed in the doctrines of sin? He knew the stormy turn her grey eyes could take.

Each surveyed the other, both feeling that the rector had done his level best under circumstances less than ideal. Francis held out his hand; William shook it; and they walked companionably on the High Road. When they reached the Common the boy paused, and began to pat at his pockets, so that Will wondered if he’d perhaps lost something on the saltings. Then Francis withdrew first a blue bone button, and then a black feather looped in a circle and tied with a bit of thread. He frowned, ran a forefinger down the feather’s spine, then sighing returned them to his pocket. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I can’t spare anything today,’ and with an apologetic look he waved goodbye.