The Essex Serpent (15 page)

3

Since her friendship with Martha – built as patiently and carefully as one of their houses of cards – Joanna Ransome had changed her school seat to one very nearly under Mr Caffyn’s nose. Always a clever child, with a habit of raiding her father’s library with particular attention to books placed furthest out of reach, her spiritual inclinations were fed one moment by Julian of Norwich and the next by
The Golden Bough
; she could give you an account of Cranmer’s martyrdom in one breath, and of the war in Crimea with the next. But until meeting Martha it had all been directionless, and done as much in the hope of disconcerting her elders than with any other object in mind, and it had never occurred to her to be shamed by a friendship with an almost illiterate fisherman’s daughter. Able now to name the women surgeons and socialists, satirists and actors, artists, engineers and archaeologists who were apparently to be found anywhere but in Essex, she set herself the task of joining their ranks. I’ll do Latin and Greek, she thought, flinching to think of how weeks before she’d cast spells by Leviathan’s bones: I’ll learn trigonometry and mechanics and chemistry. Mr Caffyn had a hard time of it supplying work to occupy her at weekends, and Stella said, ‘Mind you don’t end up needing glasses,’ as if nothing could be worse than diluting the effect of her violet eyes.

Naomi Banks felt Joanna depart from her, and mourned. She’d heard much of Martha, seen little, and hated her, feeling strongly that an adult who was twenty-five if she was a day had no business taking away her Jo. She would’ve liked to show her friend the serpent drawings, and explain how impossible it was to sleep; to confess what had happened in the White Hare, and ask if she ought to be angry or ashamed. But it seemed impossible: her friend had begun to look on her with pity, which was worse than dislike.

On the first Friday in May Naomi came early to school. They’d been promised a morning with Mrs Cora Seaborne, who’d lived in London and been very important, and who collected fossils and, as Mr Caffyn had put it,
other specimens of note
. Joanna had already enjoyed the reflected glory of having met Mrs Seaborne before (‘We know her very well,’ she’d said: ‘She gave me this scarf – no, she’s not beautiful, but it doesn’t matter because she’s clever, and has a dress covered all over with peacocks and let me try it on …’), and looked forward to seeing her stock among her fellow pupils rise still higher. No-one could resist Cora: she’d seen them try.

Finding the seat beside Joanna empty, Naomi slipped the other girl a scrap of paper, on which she’d written out a spell they’d concocted a few weeks before. But Joanna had moved on to algebra, and couldn’t remember what the smudged symbols meant, and crumpled the paper in her hand. Then there was Mrs Seaborne herself, dressed disappointingly drably, in what was surely a man’s tweed coat, and with her hair combed too severely from her forehead. She carried over her shoulder a large leather bag, and under her left arm was a file which shed a little drawing of something like a woodlouse as she passed. The only bit of the promised glamour Naomi could see was a diamond on her left hand so large and so bright it couldn’t possibly have been real, and a fine black scarf on which small birds were stitched. Mr Caffyn, evidently over-awed, said, ‘Good morning, Mrs Seaborne: class, say good morning to Mrs Seaborne.’

Good morning, Mrs Seaborne
, they said, eyeing her with slight mistrust, and Cora eyed them back, a little nervous. She’d never known what to do with children: Francis had wrong-footed her so completely that she’d come to think of them as a delightful but volatile species no more to be trusted than cats. But there was Joanna, whom she knew well, with her mother’s eyes above her father’s mouth; and beside her a red-haired girl whose face was all freckles; and they each sat with folded hands, surveying her expectantly. She said, ‘How pleased I am to be here: I’m going to start by telling you a story, because anything that was ever worth knowing began with once upon a time.’

‘As if we’re
babies
,’ muttered Naomi, receiving a sharp kick from her friend, but found that after all it was a better schoolday than most to listen to Mrs Seaborne tell her tale of the woman who’d once found a sea-dragon cased in mud; and how all the earth was a graveyard with gods and monsters under their feet, waiting for weather or a hammer and brush to bring them up to a new kind of life. Only look hard enough and you’d find ferns unfurling in beds of rock, she said, and footprints where lizards had walked on their hind legs; there were teeth so tiny your eye could hardly pick them out, and ones so large they’d once been worn as charms to fend off the plague.

She reached into her bag and they passed ammonites and toad-stones from hand to hand; ‘Hundreds of thousands of years old,’ she told them: ‘Perhaps millions!’ and Mr Caffyn, whose first twenty years had been spent in a Welsh Methodist chapel, coughed, and said, ‘Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth …’ and looked a little aggrieved. ‘Any questions for Mrs Seaborne?’

How did birds end up in the rock, they said, and where were their eggs? Did they ever find humans there among the lizards and fish? How did flesh and bones become stone? Would theirs one day do the same? Was something waiting underneath the schoolyard now if they went out with spades and dug? What was her most favourite fossil and where had she found it and what was she looking for now and had she ever hurt herself and had she been abroad?

And then – voices lowered just a little – what about the Blackwater: had she heard? What about the man that drowned on New Year’s Day, and the animals found dead and the things they’d seen in the night? What about Cracknell, who’d gone mad now and sat up all night by Leviathan watching for the beast?
Was something there and was it coming?
Mr Caffyn saw the turn the morning had taken, and tried his best to turn it back. He said, ‘Now girls, don’t trouble Mrs Seaborne with that nonsense,’ and scrubbed out the ammonite sketched on the blackboard behind.

Cora had walked with William Ransome the evening before and been told, in the parson’s voice he occasionally adopted if he wanted to show the upper hand, that she was not to encourage the children to talk about the Trouble. It was bad enough dealing with Cracknell, he said, and Banks’s insistence that there was no herring to be had and he’d very likely starve: putting ideas in their heads would help nothing and no-one. At the time she’d dutifully thought:
You’re right, Will, of course you are right
; but presented now with a dozen faces turned to her enquiringly and in places openly afraid, she felt a flash of temper.
Always being told what to do by some man or other!
she thought.

‘There may still be animals alive today just like those we find in the rock,’ she said, treading carefully. ‘After all, there are places in the world no-one’s ever walked, and water so deep they’ve never found the bottom: who knows what we might’ve missed? Up in Scotland, in a lake called the Ness, there have been sightings of a creature in the water for more than a thousand years. They say once a man was killed out swimming, and St Columba sent the beast away, only it surfaces every now and then …’

Mr Caffyn coughed, and with a roll of his eyes towards the youngest members of the class (a girl in a yellow dress had turned down the corners of her mouth in a grimace of delighted fear) indicated that his guest might prefer to keep to the stones and bones she’d brought in her bag.

‘There is nothing to be afraid of,’ said Cora. ‘Except ignorance. What seems frightening is just waiting for you to shine a light on it. Think how a pile of clothes on the floor of your bedroom can seem to creep up on you until you open the curtains and see it’s just the things you took off the night before! I don’t know if there’s anything out in the Blackwater but I do know this: if it came up on the banks and let us see it, we wouldn’t see a monster, just an animal as solid and real as you and me.’ The girl in the yellow dress, plainly preferring to be afraid than to be instructed, yawned delicately into the palm of her hand. Cora looked at her watch. ‘Well: I’ve talked too long, and you’ve been so patient and listened so well. We have an hour left, I think – is that right, Mr Caffyn? – and what I’d like more than anything is to see how well you all draw and paint. I’ve seen your pictures’ – she gestured to a wall of butterflies – ‘and like them very much. Would you like to come and choose something to draw, and when you’re done, I’ll pick the one I think is best, and whoever drew it will have a prize.’

At the mention of a prize, the class clattered up – ‘In single file, please,’ said Mr Caffyn, watching Cora dole out ammonites and toadstones and soft pieces of clay in which sharp teeth were embedded – and fetched pots of water and brushes, and hard cakes of paint.

Joanna Ransome remained placidly seated. ‘Why don’t we go up?’ said Naomi, itching to get her hands on some particularly beautiful rock, and show Mrs Seaborne that she, too, was worthy of her attention.

‘Because she’s
my
friend and I can’t talk to her with you
children
all around,’ said Joanna, not meaning it nastily: but in Cora’s presence her old friend had seemed to dwindle in the chair beside her, and grow shabby and stupid, her clothes torn and smelling of rotten fish deep in the seams, her hair in ugly bunches because her father never could get the hang of plaits.
How can I be like Cora
, she thought,
if I talk like Naomi, and sit like her, and am as stupid as her, and don’t even know that the moon goes round the earth?

Behind her freckles Naomi turned pale. She felt slights keenly, and never more keenly than this. Before she had a chance to respond Joanna was at the woman’s side, and had kissed her cheek, and was saying, ‘I thought you did very well’ –
Just as if she were a grown-up too, and didn’t still wipe her nose on her sleeve when she thinks no-one’s looking!
Naomi hadn’t eaten that day, and hunger made the room begin to turn about her; she tried to stand, but Mr Caffyn appeared at her desk and set down a pot of black ink, a sheaf of paper, and something that looked like a garden snail made of grey stone.

‘Oh
do
sit up straight, Naomi Banks,’ said the teacher, who was not unkind, but who felt that Mrs Seaborne and her monsters had turned out to be less of an asset to the day than he’d hoped. ‘You’re a better artist than most of us here: see what you can do with that.’

What
will
I do with it
, thought Naomi, hefting it in her right hand and then her left: she would’ve liked to toss it at Cora Seaborne and strike her square on the forehead. Who was she anyway? They’d all been all right before she came, Jo and her with their spells and fires.
Probably she was a witch
, she thought:
wouldn’t put it past her with a coat like that; probably the Essex Serpent was a familiar she’d brought with her
. The wickedness of the idea cheered her, and when Joanna came back to her seat Naomi was circling her paintbrush in the pot of ink, laughing.
Probably sleeps with it tethered to the end of the bed
, she thought:
probably rides it.
She stirred and stirred the pot of ink, and blots appeared on the sheet of white paper in front of her.
Probably gives it her breast at night!
she thought, and laughed harder, only wasn’t sure whether the laughter really had anything to do with her own thoughts, because it was so loud and strange, and she couldn’t stop it, even though she saw Joanna look puzzled, and a little cross.
It’s probably here – on the step – outside the door
, she thought:
I bet she whistled for it like the farmer does with his dogs.
She looked down at her own hands, with the little white pockets of flesh that linked each finger, and they seemed to her to be gleaming with salt water, and scented with scraps of fish. Her laughter shook her and grew a little high-pitched, and it was the unmistakable pitch of fear: she glanced over first her left shoulder and then her right, but the classroom door was closed. The paintbrush in the inkpot went frantically round, as if someone else were guiding her hand, and the desk jolted, and a jar of water toppled and spread across the ink-stained page.
Look at it, there it is
, thought Naomi, still laughing, still jerking her head over her shoulder (when it came she’d be the first to see it!): ‘LOOK,’ she said, to Joanna, or to Mr Caffyn, who appeared again in front of her, wringing her hands, saying something she couldn’t hear above her own high peals of laughter. ‘CAN’T YOU SEE IT?’ she said, watching the water make the ink bloom, making – surely they could see it! – the coiled body of a serpent of some kind, heart pulsing through the thin skin of its belly and a pair of black wings opening. ‘Not long now,’ she said, ‘not long now –’: over her shoulder she looked, again and again, absolutely certain the serpent was on the threshold – she could smell it, certainly she could: she’d know the scent anywhere … and besides, others could see it too – there was Harriet in her yellow dress, and she was laughing, and craning her head so far over her shoulder you’d think her neck would break, and there were the twins from across the road, who barely spoke, even to each other, and now dashed their heads left and right, left and right, snapping them back and forth, and laughing as they did it.

Cora, appalled, watched as laughter spread outward from the red-haired girl’s desk, missing Joanna, moving around her like a flow of water interrupted by a rock. It was as if they’d all heard a silent joke which had passed the adults by: some girls laughed behind hands pressed to their mouths; others threw back their heads and roared, thumping the desk in front of them, as though they were older women and the joke had been a bawdy one. Naomi, who’d begun it all, had worn herself out, and sat giggling quietly, putting her hands in the water-and-ink that spilled across the paper, now and then pausing to look over her shoulder and giggle a little more loudly. The child in the yellow dress, who was nearest the door, had laughed herself into frantic tears, and instead of turning to look over her shoulder had turned her chair around and sat facing the door, her hands pressed to her cheeks, chanting
It’s coming ready or not, coming ready or not
between open-mouthed gulps at the air.