The Essex Serpent (17 page)

‘We can tell him later,’ said Stella, patting about for her jacket: all these raised voices! Her head hurt.

‘Nice to meet you, Reverend, I’m sure,’ said Luke, putting his hands in his pockets.

Will turned away from his friend. ‘Put your coat on, Stella, you’re shivering – why have they let you get cold? – yes, Jo, you can tell me all about it later – good afternoon, Dr Garrett: perhaps we’ll meet again.’ As if borne on a tide of politeness Will left the room with wife and daughter in his wake, not sparing a glance at Cora, who at that moment would’ve been as grateful for a glare as for a smile.

‘I was an experiment!’ they heard Joanna say at the door: ‘And now I’m hungry.’

‘Absolutely charming man,’ said Luke.
So much for the fat parson in gaiters
, he thought:
he’d looked like a farmer with ideas above his station and had a fine head of hair, and in his presence Cora Seaborne – of all women! – had seemed a child dismayed to find herself disgraced
. Martha rose from the sofa where she’d been silently watching and with a contemptuous look at the doctor came to stand beside her friend. ‘No good ever came of leaving London,’ she said: ‘What did I tell you?’ Cora briefly put her cheek to Martha’s shoulder and said, ‘I’m hungry too. And I want wine.’

5

Edward Burton sat on a narrow bed and opened the paper packet on his lap. In a high-backed chair beneath a print of St Paul’s, his visitor dredged her chips with vinegar, and the hot scent roused his appetite for the first time in weeks. She wore her hair in a fair braid wrapped around her crown: she looked, he thought, breaking batter from his bit of fish, like an angel, if an angel could be hungry, and didn’t mind grease on her chin and a smear of green peas on her sleeve.

Martha watched him steadily eating, and felt hardly less proud than Luke had done on closing up his wound. It was her third visit, and there was colour in his cheeks. They had been introduced by Maureen Fry, who beside a willingness to visit Burton in order to tug the stitches from his healing scar was a relation of Elizabeth Fry, and had fully inherited the family social conscience: it seemed to her the nurse’s duty lay well beyond the tying up of bandages, the mopping up of blood. She’d first encountered Martha at a meeting of women concerned with Union matters, and over strong tea discovered that Dr Luke Garrett (‘Of all people!’ Martha had said, shaking her head) was the link between them. When Martha first accompanied Sister Fry to the house where Edward and his mother lived in Bethnal Green, she’d discovered a home which was small, certainly, with sanitation troubles that left an ammoniac reek in the air, but was pleasant enough. Little light came in, only what filtered through lines of laundry running between the houses like the pennants of a coming army, but there were always flowers on the table in a rinsed-out jar of Robertson’s jam. Mrs Thomas earned her living by way of laundry, and contriving rag rugs out of scraps; these rugs decked their three small rooms and made them bright. It had never occurred to her that Edward might not recover entirely, and go back to the insurance company where he’d passed five years as a clerk, and so she faced a period of nursing him quite stoically.

That first visit had been an unsatisfactory one, with Edward Burton white and silent in the corner. Mrs Burton was battling delight at her son’s unlikely salvation with a troubling sensation that the man who’d come off the operating table was not the man who’d been laid out on it: ‘He’s so quiet,’ she’d said, wringing her hands, and borrowing Sister Fry’s handkerchief. ‘It’s like the old Ned bled out and I’ve got another one in his place and I have to get to know him before I can say he’s my son.’ Nonetheless, Martha had found herself fretting, in the following days, that Burton would not eat enough, or test the strength of his legs by walking the length of the road, and so she had returned a week later with packets of fish and chips, a net of oranges, and several of Francis’s abandoned copies of
The Strand
.

Edward steadily ate. To Martha – used to Cora’s endless conversation and her sudden fits of joy or gloom – his company was peaceful. He responded to everything she said with an inclined head, considering it slowly, often saying nothing in response. Sometimes there was a sharp pain in the place where his rib had been severed – it was like a cramping of the muscles as all the fibres tried to knit – and he’d gasp, and put a hand there in the hollow where the bone was gone, and wait for it to pass. Martha would say nothing then, only sit quietly with him, and when he raised his head say, ‘Tell me again how they built Blackfriars Bridge.’

That afternoon, as rain gathered in the gutters in the Tower Hamlets streets and poured from the eaves, Edward said, ‘He came to see me again, the Scottish man. He prayed with me and left some money.’ This was John Galt, whose tent mission in Bethnal Green brought the gospel to the city alongside temperance and improved personal hygiene. Martha knew of him – had seen his photographs recording the city at its worst – and deplored his tender Christian conscience. ‘He prayed, did he?’ She shook her head and said, ‘Never trust a do-gooder,’ disliking as always the connection between righteousness and weather-proof walls.

‘It’s not only that he
does
good,’ said Edward, thoughtfully. He surveyed a chip before putting it in his mouth. ‘I think he
is
good.’

‘Don’t you see that this is the trouble – that it’s not a question of goodness – it’s a question of
duty
! You think it’s kindness to bring you money and ask if the walls are damp and leave you in God’s hands, wherever they are, but it’s our right to live decently, it shouldn’t be a gift from our betters – oh!’ She laughed. ‘See how easily that came out!
Our betters!
What, because they never put money on the dogs or drank themselves stupid!’

‘What are you going to do about it, then?’ He said it with good humour so deeply buried that only Martha could’ve seen it there. She finished her meal, and wiping the oil from her mouth with the back of her hand said, ‘Plans are afoot, Edward Burton, mark my words. I’ve written to a man who can help – always comes down to money, doesn’t it, in the end? Money and influence, and God knows I’ve no money and not much influence but I’ll use what I’ve got.’ She thought briefly of Spencer, and his way of looking at her slightly askance, and felt a little ashamed.

‘Wish I could have a hand in it,’ said Edward, and with a gesture that took in his thin legs – thinner now than ever, since he could not run ten paces without losing his breath – he looked briefly hopeless. He’d taken his place in the city without considering it, until this woman with her hair like a rope and her brisk way of talking had stood on one of his mother’s rugs and raged at what she’d seen in the streets. Now it would be impossible to walk from one end of Bethnal Green to the other without thinking how that dark labyrinth of mean housing had a consciousness all of its own, operating on everyone who lived in it. At night, when his mother slept, he took out rolls of white paper and made drawings of high, wide buildings that let in the light, with good water running through them.

Martha withdrew her umbrella from under the chair and unfurled it, sighing at the rain running thickly down the window-pane. ‘I don’t know yet,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what I can do. But something’s going to change. Can’t you feel it?’

He was not certain he could, but then she kissed him on the cheek, and shook his hand, as if she could not decide which greeting suited them best. At the door she paused, because he called out after her: ‘It was my fault, you know.’

‘Your fault? What is – what’ve you done?’ It was so unlike him to speak unprompted that she was afraid to move and startle him out of it.

‘This,’ he said, and lightly touched his breast. ‘I know who did it, and why. I deserved it, you know. Or if not this – something.’

She returned to her chair, not speaking, turning away to pluck at a thread loose on her sleeve. He knew it was done to spare him, and there was a movement in his damaged heart.

‘I was such an ordinary person,’ he said. ‘It was such an ordinary life. I had a bit of savings. I was going to get a place of my own, though I didn’t mind living here: we’ve always got on all right. I didn’t mind my job, only sometimes got bored and made plans of buildings that’ll never be built. Now they tell me I’m a miracle, or whatever does for miracles these days.’

Martha said, ‘There are no ordinary lives.’

‘At any rate, it was my fault,’ he said, and recounted how content he’d been, there at his desk at Holborn Bars, awaiting the clock’s chime and the hour of freedom. He’d had a popularity he neither sought nor enjoyed, and suspected his peers were conned by his height, and by the biting wit he could barely remember possessing. The Edward who’d fallen in the shadow of the cathedral was not the silent man that Martha knew. That other man had been always laughing at this or that; his temper had been quick, hot, and soon extinguished. Since his own bad moods passed swiftly, he was heedless of the lasting harm his careless blows might cause. But the blows did fall – they did cause harm: ‘It was just teasing,’ he said. ‘We didn’t think anything of it. He didn’t seem to mind. You couldn’t tell, with Hall. He only ever looked miserable, so what did it matter?’

‘Hall?’ said Martha.

‘Samuel Hall. We never called him Sam. That’s telling, isn’t it?’

No: he didn’t seem to mind
, thought Burton, but telling it now to Martha he flushed with shame. Samuel Hall, unblessed with good looks or good humour; arriving in his drab coat a minute before the working day and departing a minute after its end; resentfully diligent, entirely unremarkable. But they
had
remarked on him – lightly perhaps, and in hopes of drawing out some buried wit – and it had been Edward, laughing, always at the fore.

‘I couldn’t help thinking there was something so funny about how unhappy he was. Do you understand? You couldn’t take him seriously. He could’ve dropped dead right there at his desk and we’d’ve all laughed.’

Then drab little Samuel Hall – behind whose glasses muddy eyes blinked resentfully out at the world – had fallen in love. In a dim bar near Embankment they’d seen him, and seen how he’d laughed, and exchanged his dull coat for a bright one; how he’d kissed a woman’s hand, and how she hadn’t minded. Nothing could’ve been funnier, it seemed: nothing – by the light of the lamps and the warmth of the beer – more absurd. Burton could not remember what it was that was said, or by whom, only that there’d been a moment when he’d had the woman, bewildered, in his own arms; that he’d been kissing her with a gallantry all too obviously mocking.

‘I meant nothing by it – it was done to make them laugh – I went home that night and wouldn’t even have been able to tell you where I’d been.’ But all the week that followed, Hall’s desk had been empty, though no-one thought to ask where he’d gone, or why; it did not occur to them that alone in his single room with its single chair all the accumulated resentments of Hall’s life – all the slights both real and imagined – had united in an implacable loathing of Edward Burton.

‘I’d stopped to look up at St Paul’s – I’m always wondering how the dome holds up, aren’t you? – and there were black birds on the steps and I remembered being told as a child how one rook is a crow, and many crows are rooks. Then someone stumbled against me – that’s how it was: as if they’d lost their footing. I said “Watch out!”, and there was Samuel Hall, not looking at me, just running on by, like I’d made him late.’ On he’d walked in the shadow of St Paul’s, and felt all at once very weary; he’d put a hand to wetness on his shirt, and withdrawn it gloved in blood. Then night had fallen early, and he’d lain down on the steps to sleep.

The room was dim; he reached for a lamp, and lit it; in the slow-bloomed light she saw the lean face turned from her in shame and shyness, and how he flushed across the high bones of his cheek.

‘It’s not a question of guilt and punishment,’ she said. ‘It’s not how the world turns. If we all got what we deserved –’ It felt to Martha as if he’d given her a gift that was easily broken. Something had altered between them – she owed a debt of trust. ‘We cannot help it, if we are to live,’ she said. ‘Causing harm, I mean; how could it be avoided unless we shut ourselves away – never speak, never act?’ She wanted to repay the debt, and casting about for sources of her own guilt it was Spencer’s face that first came to mind, and would not be dispelled.

‘If we all got what we deserved I’d be waiting for my punishment,’ she said. ‘It would be worse, I think; a knife in the heart would be the least of it – you did not know what you had done – but I know, and still I do it!’ And she told her quiet companion about the man who loved her (‘He thinks he conceals it, but no-one ever does …’); his shyness, and how he grasped after goodness for its own sake, and because it might please her. ‘Spencer’s wealth is obscene, it is obscene – he has so much he doesn’t know how much of it he has! If I let him love me, and pretend I might return it, and it makes him do something good – is it really so bad? Is a broken heart too high a price to pay for a better city?’

Burton smiled, and raised his hand: ‘I absolve you,’ he said.

‘Thank you, Father,’ she said, laughing. ‘You know, I always thought that was the great benefit of being religious: get the guilt over and done with, and move on to another sin. Well,’ – she gestured to the window, and beyond it to the lowering sky – ‘I must go, or miss my train.’ When she took his hand to bid him goodbye he held it, and drew her down, and kissed her once; and she saw for the first time what vitality had once been in those long fingers, in the legs outstretched beneath the blanket.

‘Come again,’ he said, ‘come soon’; and after she’d gone he sat for a long time in the chair she’d left, making plans of a garden for neighbours to share.

6

In Colchester the rain was mild and barely seemed to fall, only hang in the air as if the whole town were enveloped in pale cloud. Thomas Taylor had rigged up a tarpaulin and sat contently beneath it sharing cake with Cora Seaborne, who’d come to town for papers and books, and better food than could be had in Aldwinter (‘It’s all right for bread and fresh fish,’ she’d said, ‘but no marzipan to be had for all the tea in Yorkshire’). He suspected passers-by were pleasantly shocked to see so obviously wealthy (if untidy) a woman at his side, and hoped he might see an increased profit in the afternoon. In the meantime, they had a great deal to discuss.

‘How’s Martha?’ he said, on first-name terms with the girl who, each time she came to town, contrived to disapprove of him vocally but leave him in a good temper. ‘Still got those ideas?’ He licked a crumb from his finger, and watched the sun look coyly out from a cloud.

‘If there were any justice,’ said Cora, ‘which you and I know there isn’t, she’d be in Parliament, and you’d have a house of your own.’ In fact, he had a neat flat on the lower floor of what had once been one of Colchester’s townhouses, being in receipt of a good pension and a better wage, but it would not do to disappoint his friend. ‘If wishes were horses,’ he said, sighing, and rolling his eyes towards the trolley that would later convey him home, ‘I’d make my fortune in manure. And what about the village folk, over Aldwinter way? Has the Essex Serpent come crawling up and eaten them all in their beds?’ He gnashed his teeth, and thought she might laugh; but instead she gave a frown that scored her forehead with lines.

‘Do you ever feel haunted?’ she said, gesturing up to the ruin, where rags of curtains hung wetly, and a mirror above a broken mantelpiece showed small furtive moments from somewhere inside.

‘No such business,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I’m quite religious, you know: no patience for the supernatural.’

‘Not even in the night?’

At night, he’d be in bed under a good thick quilt with his daughter snoring next door, and his stomach full of toasted cheese. ‘Not even then,’ he said: ‘There’s nothing here except house martins.’

Cora ate the last of her cake, and said, ‘I think the whole village is haunted. Only – I think they’re haunting themselves.’ She thought of Will, who’d not written since the day they’d let Luke loose on Joanna, and when he greeted her did so with such extravagant politeness it chilled each separate bone in her spine.

Not having much patience for the turn the talk had taken, Taylor poked at the newspaper Cora had brought, and said, ‘Why don’t you tell me what’s going on in the world? I like to keep my eye on things.’

She shook it out and said: ‘All the usual: three British servicemen dead outside Kabul, a test match lost. Only’ – she tapped the folded paper – ‘there’s this: a meteorological curiosity, and I don’t mean this endless rain! Shall I read it?’ Taylor nodded, then folded his hands and closed his eyes, willing as a child to be entertained. ‘“The keen meteorologist should turn a weather eye to the heavens in the weeks forthcoming in anticipation of witnessing a curious atmospheric phenomenon. First observed in 1885, and visible solely in the summer months between latitudes 50°N and 70°S, these ‘noctilucent clouds’ form a curious layer perceived only at twilight. Observers have noted the luminous blue nature of the display, which fluctuates considerably in brilliance, and in formation is best described as resembling a mackerel sky. The origin of this ‘night-shining’ remains a source of contention, and it has been suggested in some quarters that its first having been observed subsequent to the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 is no mere coincidence.” There now,’ she said: ‘What do you make of that?’

‘Night-shining,’ he said, shaking his head, a little affronted. ‘Whatever will they think of next!’

‘They say Krakatoa’s ash has changed the world – these bad winters we’ve lately had, changes in the night sky: all because years ago and thousands of miles away a volcano blew.’ She shook her head. ‘I’ve always said there are no mysteries, only things we don’t yet know; but lately I’ve thought not even knowledge takes all strangeness from the world.’ She told him what she’d seen with William Ransome at her side: the phantom barge in the Essex sky, and how she’d seen gulls fly beneath the hull.

‘It was just the light,’ she said, ‘up to its old tricks. But how was my heart to know?’

‘The Flying Essex-man, eh?’ said doubting Thomas: if ghost ships were ever to take to the seas they could surely find better waters than the Blackwater estuary. He was saved from further comment by the arrival of Charles and Katherine Ambrose, carrying a green umbrella and a pink one respectively, their presence on the street brightening up the town.

Cora stood to greet them – ‘Charles! Katherine! You can’t stay away – you know my friend Thomas Taylor, of course – we’re discussing astronomy. Have you seen the night-shining? Or are the London lights too bright?’

‘As always, dear Cora, I don’t know what you’re on about.’ Charles shook the cripple’s hand, dispensed several coins into his hat without first checking their value, and drew Cora under the shade of his umbrella. ‘I have heard from William Ransome,’ he said. ‘You are in disgrace.’

‘Oh’ – she looked chastened, but he pressed on: ‘I know you insist that we must all face the modern age, but it might have been polite to ask permission first.’ It was very difficult to continue, since Cora looked miserable, and Katherine was giving him one of her warning looks, but he loved William, and in his latest letter he’d seemed more shaken than the incident deserved (‘I wish you hadn’t sent her,’ he’d written: ‘It’s been nothing but one thing after another.’ And then, following swiftly on a postcard, he’d said, more cheerfully: ‘Forgive my bad temper. I was tired. What news of Whitehall?’).

‘Have you apologised?’ he said, thanking God fervently – and for neither the first time nor the last – that he’d been spared parenthood.

‘Certainly not,’ said Cora, taking Katherine’s hand, feeling she deserved an ally. ‘I shan’t. Joanna gave her permission. Stella, too. Or must we all bide our time until a man provides written consent?’

‘
What
a nice coat,’ said Katherine, rather desperately, looking at the blue jacket which had replaced the old man’s tweed Cora wore all winter, and which made her grey eyes stormy.

‘Isn’t it?’ Cora said absently: she could now only think of her friend, back in his Aldwinter study, thinking badly of her. She had so much to tell him, and no means of telling it. She turned back to Taylor, who was picking the last crumbs of cake from his lap and watching all three with pleasure, as if he’d paid for a ticket. ‘I ought to be getting home,’ she said, shaking his hand: ‘Francis asked for the latest Sherlock Holmes, which he’s afraid will be the Great Detective’s last case, and if it is I really don’t know what we’ll do: write them myself, perhaps.’

‘Give him this, then,’ said Taylor, who knew the boy rather better than his mother suspected, since he’d had a habit of slipping out of the Red Lion unnoticed and clambering up into the ruins. He passed Cora a piece of broken plate on which she made out a snake coiled around an apple tree.

‘More serpents,’ said Charles. ‘There seems to be a lot of it about. Cora, I haven’t finished with you yet: we’re staying at the George and it strikes me you could do with a drink.’

Seated comfortably in the parlour of the George, it was not William they discussed, but Stella. Her letters to Katherine had taken on a spiritual cast (‘Not,’ said Charles, looking horrified, ‘what one expects of a clergyman’s wife!’). Her God had slipped into something that had little to do with the thundercrack above Mount Sinai: she seemed instead to venerate a series of sensations she associated with the colour blue. ‘She told me she meditates on it day and night – that she carries a blue stone with her into church, and kisses it – that she can only bear to wear blue, because other colours scorch her skin.’ Katherine shook her head. ‘Is she ill? She was always a little silly, I suppose, but cleverly so – it was as if she’d chosen to be silly because it’s a characteristic so often expected of women that it’s almost admired.’

‘And she’s always
hot
,’ said Cora, thinking of how she’d held her hands when last they’d met, and of how they’d been like those of a small child in fever. ‘But how can she be ill, when she grows more beautiful each time I see her?’

Charles poured another glass of wine (‘Not bad I suppose, for an Essex pub’), and holding it to the light said, ‘William says he called the doctor, and that she can’t shake off the flu. He’d like to send her away somewhere warm, but summer is icumen in, as the old song goes, and she’ll be basking soon enough.’

Cora was not so sure: Luke had said nothing to her (he’d departed Aldwinter as swiftly as he could, as if he still felt William’s hand on his collar), but she’d seen his watchful appraisal of the woman as she’d chattered amiably about the cornflowers she was raising from seed, and the turquoise drops she wore in her ears; watched him take her pulse, and frown. ‘The other day she told me that she’d not seen the Essex Serpent but heard it, only she didn’t know what it had said.’ She drained her glass, and said: ‘Was she joking, playing along, knowing I half-think there’s something there after all?’

‘She’s too thin,’ said Charles, who mistrusted anyone who did not eat. ‘But – yes – beautiful: sometimes I think she looks like a saint seeing Christ.’

‘Can’t you get her to see Luke?’ said Katherine.

‘I don’t know – he’s a surgeon, not a doctor – but I would like to – I’ve thought of writing to ask him.’ It struck Cora – just then, as the rain ceased and left everything quiet – how fond she’d grown of the woman, with whom she had so little in common, who doted on her reflection and on her family, who somehow knew everyone’s business better than her own, and only ever meant well.
Should I envy her?
she thought:
Should I wish her gone?
But she didn’t, and that was that: Will’s wife was welcome to him, as far as she had him. ‘Look,’ she said: ‘I must go – you know how Frankie counts the hours – but I will write to Luke – and yes, Charles, yes: I will write to the good Reverend – I will be good, I promise.’