The Essex Serpent (21 page)

JULY

1

Over in Aldwinter Naomi Banks is missing. She went the day Cracknell was found and she left behind a note: COMING READY OR NOT, it says, and there are three kisses overleaf. Banks sails the Blackwater and won’t be consoled: ‘First wife, then boat, then this,’ he says: ‘I’m being picked clean as a fish.’ Every house is searched and nothing turns up, though the grocer says he’s down a bit on his weekly takings and might she have turned light-fingered in her state of mind?

The village is wary. No amount of Colchester coroners would have them believe Cracknell died from nothing more than his old heart running out of beats: it was the Essex Serpent, sure as eggs. They seek out signs and find them: the barley crops aren’t looking good, the hens aren’t laying, there’s a tendency in the milk to turn. Traitor’s Oak’s so heavily hung with horseshoes there’s a danger its branches will break come wind and weather. Even those who never saw the night-shining could tell you just how it had looked that night, hanging over the common, sprinkling the estuary with blue. Up at St Osyth there’s been a drowning.
Told you so
, they say:
I told you so.

A rota of nightwatchmen is set up. They sit by small fires on the marsh and make marks in a log book:
0200 hours, wind south-easterly, visibility good, tide low. No sighting but a faint grinding and groaning from 0246 to 0249
. Banks is not permitted to join the watch, on account of how Naomi is missing and he’s likelier than ever to drink.

Aldwinter’s children don’t take kindly to being kept indoors. In one of the tithed cottages a boy goes quite deranged with boredom and bites his mother’s hand. ‘There,’ she says, showing Will the wound: ‘I knew something was up the moment a robin flew in. It’s the serpent in him coming out.’ She hisses at the rector, showing him her teeth.

Stella is home and writes in her blue book daily –
I’d like to be baptised again in blue water on a clear blue night
– and closes it up when Will comes in. She has good days and bad days. Her visitors attend her – had she heard about this woman and that thing and wasn’t it funny and didn’t she still look so beautiful and wherever did she find those beads so bright – and go away shaking their heads, and dousing their hands in antiseptic. ‘She’s not herself at all,’ they say: ‘She told me she hears the serpent sometimes when she sleeps! She told me it knows her by name!’ Then – ‘You don’t think she’s seen it, do you? You don’t think there’s something to see?’

Will finds himself treading a line. The line is narrow and on either side it’s a hell of a way to fall. On the one hand he won’t hear of it, this miserable superstition: was ever a whispered rumour given such wet flesh, so many bones? It is his duty to keep it at bay. He preaches brightly: ‘God is our refuge and strength: a very present help in trouble,’ but it’s clear the villagers doubt it. The congregation does not dwindle, only grows truculent and frequently refuses to sing. No-one mentions the splintered arm of the pew where it’s still possible to make out the remnants of a tail: they’re glad, on the whole, that it’s gone.

On the other hand he lies awake at night, with Stella too far away along the corridor, and wonders if it’s a judgment. God knows he alone could be indicted on several charges (he remembers standing alone on the marsh bent double with desire); he wonders if the Essex Serpent has his name written down in a ledger.

He hears nothing from Cora. He thinks of her. Sometimes he thinks she came in the night and put her eyes in his sockets so he’d see the world on her terms: he can’t look at a clod of mud in the garden without wanting to crumble it and see if there’s something curled up in there. He wants to tell her everything and because he can’t the fabric of the world feels thin and drab. ‘There’s a dragonfly in my study trapped behind a bookcase,’ he writes, ‘and I can’t think over the sound of its wings beating.’ Then he throws the paper away.

Cora reads her letters, and does not reply. She takes Martha and Francis to London: ‘It’s at its best this time of year,’ she says, and spends irresponsibly on a good hotel, on extravagant meals, on shoes she doesn’t like and will never wear. She drinks with Luke Garrett in Gordon’s by the Embankment, where the walls drip into the candles, and when pressed on the subject of her Good Reverend dismisses him with an imperious wave. But Garrett is no fool, and would prefer her old way of merrily mentioning Will each second sentence.

If Luke and Martha had expected either to fall in love or to despise each other in the time after midsummer they are greatly surprised. What comes instead is an ease which is like that of fellow soldiers who’ve survived a common battle. They never revisit that night, not even in memory: it was necessary, that is all. It is tacitly agreed that Spencer should be kept in the dark: Luke has such a fondness for him, and Martha such a use. He has gathered about him men of political weight and financial heft: he thinks it likely that Bethnal Green might benefit from new housing to which no moral obligations are attached, and which do more than meet the barest minimum of shelter.

Martha and Edward Burton share chips down at Limehouse and scheme while the ships from New Zealand unload frozen lamb on the docks. We’ll do this and that, they say, licking salt from their fingertips, companionable, without noticing that each has assumed the other’s presence on some future day. ‘It’s just I like looking up and seeing her there,’ he tells his mother, who has her doubts: Martha’s a good London girl but has airs and no longer drops her aitches.

What Edward does not notice, when he goes home that night holding one of Martha’s magazines, is that in the alley the man who cut him down in the shadow of St Paul’s is waiting patiently. Samuel Hall has bided his time since the day Edward came home from hospital; he wears a different coat, but in the pocket is that same short-bladed knife that slips so easily between the ribs. He can hardly remember the source of his hatred – a quarrel over a woman, was it? – it doesn’t matter anymore. It has become his sole purpose, fuelled by drink and aimlessness; he was cheated once out of revenge and passes the days impatiently until the task can be complete. That Edward Burton has become the pet of wealthy men and women who come so often and stay so long has only made him more implacable: they’ve all become the enemy. He watches Edward flick salt from his sleeve, and fit his key to the lock, calling up to his waiting mother.
Not tonight then
, he thinks, sheathing the knife:
no, but soon enough
.

Cracknell’s funeral is well-attended, since no-one’s as loved as the dead. Joanna sings ‘Amazing Grace’ and there’s not a dry eye in God’s house. Cora Seaborne sends a wreath judged rightly to’ve cost the earth.

Will has taken to walking and finds himself thinking that if only by the laws of statistics his feet might fit where Cora’s have been. While he walks he unspools his thoughts behind him, and they are divided. He cannot settle his mind where Cora is concerned: he’d been so content in his love for her – he’d thought it of a kind the apostles might admire, as if in that muddy patch of earth they’d made a heaven – and then something had altered. He can still feel how her flesh had given beneath his hand, and what came after, and he is ashamed, though not (he thinks) as ashamed as he ought to be.

And then there’s Stella, serene in her blue cotton dressing-gown: with the light behind her she’d shame a stained-glass saint. Sometimes she talks of sacrifice and lies quite still as if already on the altar, then she grows animated and writes at night in her blue book. What is he going to do with her? He thinks of the needle and scalpel in the surgeon’s hand and all his being shrinks from it. He rejoices in the reason conferred on mankind, but mistrusts the shifting sands of man’s ingenuity. This is what he is getting at: that we have always been in the habit of making mistakes. Think of the set-to when Galileo sent the earth spinning round the sun – think of the idea that a man deposited a crouching homunculus in his wife. It was all very well for science to puff out its chest and say, ‘This time we have it right,’ but must he gamble Stella on it?

Will bargains with God, as Gideon once did. ‘If it is not your will that she endures the treatment, prevent it by some very definite means, and let that be the sign,’ he prays. The logical absurdity does not escape him, but there it is: God might as well use logic as anything else. On Sunday he climbs into the pulpit and reminds the congregation of how Moses in the desert had raised up a wooden pole around which a great brass serpent coiled, and how it had given them hope.

Late in July the nightwatchmen abandon their post.

AUGUST

1

Nothing inclined Charles Ambrose to Darwinism more than walking the narrow streets of Bethnal Green. He saw there not equals separated from him only by luck and circumstance, but creatures born ill-equipped to survive the evolutionary race. He looked on their pale thin faces – which often had a sour mistrustful cast, as if expecting at any moment to encounter a boot – and felt they inhabited their proper place. The notion that if only they’d had access to grammar and citrus fruit at an early age they might have one day sat beside him at the Garrick was preposterous: their predicament was nothing more than evidence of failure to adapt and survive. Why were so many of them so short? Why did they screech and bellow from windows and balconies? And why, at noon, were so many so drunk? Turning down an alley, twitching his fine linen coat closer, he felt much as he might if viewing them through iron bars. This is not to say that he felt no compassion: even animals in zoos should have their cages cleaned.

Four had gathered in Edward Burton’s rooms that August afternoon: Spencer, Martha, Charles and Luke. Their intention was to walk further into Bethnal Green, whose slums and rookeries were candidates for demolition and replacement with the good clean housing Parliament had promised. ‘It’s all very well passing Acts,’ Spencer had said, not knowing how precisely he mimicked Martha, ‘but how much higher will the infant death toll rise before policies are put in place? It’s actions we need, not Acts!’

Edward’s mother served lemon biscuits on a plate from which the Queen’s head looked grimly out, and fretted that her son was tired. He’d been silent in such company and responded only to Martha’s quiet asides – was the old wound hurting? Could he show Spencer the plans he’d been making for a new estate? ‘Very feasible,’ Spencer had said, though really he knew nothing about it. He smoothed his hands across the length of white paper on which Edward had drafted, with all his painstaking untutored skill, the blueprint of a tenement block set around a square of garden. ‘Can I take this – can I show my colleagues? Would you mind?’

Luke meanwhile had eaten his fifth biscuit, having admired Mrs Burton’s evident attention to cleanliness, and said, ‘Martha won’t be happy until she’s seen Thomas More’s Utopia encamped on Tower Hill.’ He’d licked sugar from his thumb, and looked merrily out at the ranks of peaked roofs past the window. Writing to Cora had been like lancing a boil: in due course there might be further discomfort, but for now he felt only relief. What he’d written had been the truth, at least while he still held the pen: he expected nothing back, had offered no bargain, thought himself owed nothing. Probably the euphoria would last no more than another day, but it was a heady thing while it lasted, and made him benevolent. Sometimes, imagining a sealed envelope making its way to his door on the back of a postman’s bike, he grew anxious: would she be amused – would she be moved – might she ignore it and go on blithely as before? Knowing her, he thought the last most likely: it was difficult to penetrate her good temper, or move her beyond a general display of affection to everyone she knew.

‘Off we go then, slumming it,’ said Charles rather gleefully, putting on his coat, remembering how years before he and a companion had one night been tourists of poverty, dressing in drag and loitering under streetlights, drumming up not a solitary client between them.

‘You might be sold a bad oyster,’ said Edward Burton, not yet well enough to take up his post over at Holborn Bars, ‘but keep your wits about you and you’ll all come home again.’

As they’d left it was not yet closing time in the factories and offices, and so the alleys were rather quiet, and it was possible to make out the sound of trains shunting on the tracks a few hundred yards distant. All around, high tenements blotted out the light, and laundry hanging low above them could never have been got clean. Though the summer was mild the few scraps of sunlight coming through seemed hotter there, so that before long Martha felt her clothes grow damp between her shoulder-blades, and the pavements, slicked with fallen scraps of food, gave off the sweetish scent of decay. What had once been grand houses were divided meanly into many small apartments, let at prices out of all proportion to what wages it was possible to earn. Rooms were sublet, and sub-let again, so that what constituted a family had long been forgotten, and strangers bickered over cups and plates and their few square feet of space. Less than a mile away, just beyond the City griffins, the landlords and their lawyers, their tailors and their bankers and their chefs, knew only what was totted in the columns of their ledgers.

Here and there Martha saw reasons to hope that passed the others by, and sometimes nodded, and smiled, because all those strangers’ faces were familiar. A woman in a scarlet jacket appeared from behind a lace curtain to water the geraniums on her windowsill, and tossed away a couple of spent blooms that landed in the gutter beside a broken Guinness bottle. Polish labourers had come to seek work, discovering that if Dick Whittington had been misled about London’s pavements, the weather was at least more temperate in the winter and the docks never slept. They were cheerful and noisy; they leaned in doorways in pairs with their caps tipped, passing a Polish newspaper back and forth; they smoked black-papered cigarettes that gave off a fragrant pall. A Jewish family went volubly by on their way to catch a bus, and the girls wore red shoes; a moment later an Indian woman passed on the other side and in each ear was a bit of gold.

But even Martha had to concede it was frequently a miserable scene: a young mother sat on a doorstep enviously watching two children eat cheap white bread and margarine, and a group of men watched a bulldog in training for a fight hang by its jaws from a high rope. Someone had thrown aside a copy of
Vanity Fair
, and from the cover an actress in a yellow dress smiled placidly out; beside it in the gutter a clever-eyed rat flexed its little hands. Passing the men with their dog Martha couldn’t suppress her distaste: she glowered at them openly; a man with sleeves rolled high to show a blurred tattoo lunged at her, and laughed as she scuttled on. Luke, more familiar with the seamy city than he’d let on, a little amused by Spencer’s display of social conscience, allowed himself to grow chivalrous and walked more closely at her side.

‘Will it work? – it
must
work,’ she said, gesturing ahead to where Charles walked with Spencer, picking his distasteful way through a litter of rotten fruit from which a cloud of small flies puffed. ‘He must see this is unsustainable, if only out of common humanity!’

‘How can it not? Bit of a stupid man I’ve always thought, but not an unkind one – evening, love,’ he said, grinning at a woman in a curled wig who leaned invitingly out of her door and blew him a kiss as he passed.

‘It’s no use – Spencer has tried – I’m long past redemption.’ There ahead of them on the path his friend was gesticulating towards an especially narrow alley from which a sour smell came. ‘He’s doing all this mostly for your sake, you know. He’d give a fortune to a beggar if you asked him but otherwise would never notice they’re there –’

She considered denying this, but felt that what with one thing and another the Imp had earned her honesty. ‘It’s not so bad of me, is it? I’ve never promised him anything – and besides, I’m not what his family would’ve had in mind! – but I can’t do this alone. I’m a woman and a poor one – they might as well’ve cut out my tongue.’

They’d come to a kind of courtyard overlooked on all sides by tenement blocks. Luke watched his friend stand with arms folded surveying the insoluble problem of London, speaking in his quiet steady way to Ambrose, who only half-listened, distracted by a child in a fairy costume sitting on a doorstep and smoking a cigarette. ‘He has joined the Socialist League, and talks of commissioning a little something from William Morris. Martha – let him down easy, won’t you?’ The fairy child stubbed out her cigarette and began another; her wings shed a feather and shivered.

Martha, stirred with guilt, said crossly, ‘Can’t I just be friendly, and that be that? He’s not a puppet: he thinks well enough for himself, listen –’

‘All the new housing on the Thames Embankment,’ Spencer was saying, ‘that they were so proud of, and use as proof of progress: have you seen it? Little better than cages. They’re packed in there tighter than they ever were – some rooms have no windows and those that do are hardly bigger than a stamp – they wouldn’t house their hounds so badly.’ He couldn’t resist a glance at Martha, who came near and let her temper get the better of her.

‘Charles – look at you – you can’t wait to go home, to Katherine and your velvet slippers and your wine that costs more each sip than
they
must live on for week. You think them a different species – that they brought this on themselves because they’re immoral or stupid and that if you gave them something better they’d trash it in a week – well: perhaps they are a different animal from you, because while your kind grudge each penny of your tax, here if they had nothing they’d give you half of it – no, Luke: I won’t stop – d’you think because Cora taught me which fork to use for fish I’ve forgotten where I was born?’

‘Martha, my dear’ – Charles Ambrose had maintained fine manners against far worse, and besides, he knew well enough when he’d been found out – ‘we all know your point, and admire it. I’ve seen enough, and if you let me return to my natural habitat I’ll do what I can to carry out your every command.’ Seeing that his ironic bow would do nothing for her temper, he said, as if confiding state secrets: ‘The Bill has been passed, you know. The policies are in place. It’s only a question of next steps.’

Martha smiled as well as she could, because Spencer had withdrawn a little, as if suddenly uncertain of his attachment to a woman who’d bellow at her betters in the street, and because Luke had gone impish again, and had never looked more delighted. ‘Next steps! Oh – Charles: I am sorry. They tell me I should count to ten – wait, but can you hear that? What is it – what can I hear?’

They all turned, and heard from deep within a narrow alley the sound of an organ playing. An uneven melody gained speed as someone turned the handle, then became a rousing martial tune. The child ran to meet the music with her wings shivering behind her, and as the organ-player emerged others joined her as if seeping out of the bricks and mortar around them; some were barefoot, and others wore hobnailed boots that struck sparks as they ran; two fair-haired boys carried a kitten each; a girl in a white dress trailed behind, feigning indifference. Charles, keeping to the corners, saw a man of about his own age dressed in the remnants of a soldier’s tunic. Stitched on the breast was the green and crimson ribbon of the Afghan War Medal and his empty left sleeve was pinned at the elbow. With his right hand he turned the organ’s handle faster and faster, and began a jig of his own. The girl in the white dress spun, and laughed, and reached for Garrett’s hand; one boy held his kitten high and sang to it words of his own. Martha looked at Spencer, and saw he was appalled, and despised him for it: perhaps he imagined they ought to be decently miserable in their lot, and not snatch pleasure wherever they saw it. ‘Take partners,’ bellowed the soldier: ‘Try this one for size,’ and it wasn’t a military melody he played then, but with something in it of sailors on deck sighting land. Martha held out her hands to a passing lad who’d discarded his kitten on a doorstep and with great strength in his thin forearms flung her round, so that Spencer saw all her hair fan out, wheat-coloured against the grimy brickwork. ‘
Heave me away, my bully bully boys
,’ sang the girl in white, ‘
I’m bound for South Australia
,’ and as she passed Charles she dipped her head, as though accepting a compliment he hadn’t thought to give.

A little distance away, unseen in an alley, Edward Burton’s enemy was watching. Addled with beer and loathing Samuel Hall woke each morning with hatred sharpening in his belly as keenly as any knife. Daily vigils outside Burton’s home had given glimpses of the enemy himself, and of frequent visitors so obviously wealthy it was as if Burton had entered the wards of the Royal Borough a pauper and left them a king. What could they know of his cruelty – of how he’d soured Hall’s sole hope of happiness? Worse, there’d been mention in the
Standard
of the operation that had cheated Hall of justice: two columns and a photograph in praise of a surgeon who looked like nothing so much as a glowering demon. His hatred for Burton doubled, and spent itself on this other man – what right did he have, to meddle in the ways of God? The knife went in – it had struck the heart – that ought to have been the end of it, and he might have had peace!

And here he was, that same man – black-browed, a little hunched, and with him three companions: a woman he recognised for her thick hair braided at the crown, and two men he did not. Hall had watched them greeted at Burton’s door, and seen them framed in Burton’s window; they’d passed plates of food between them, while Hall himself could not bear to eat – they’d laughed, when he’d forgotten anything but misery! He’d followed them all the way, and seen them dancing, when he himself had lost all joy – Hall put his hand in his pocket, and pricked his thumb on the blade hidden there. If Edward Burton were to remain always just beyond his reach, here at least might be a chance at retribution.

The soldier paused – his arm was tired – in the silence the dancers grew suddenly ashamed. The tenements and gutters seemed all at once more sordid and more bleak; Luke took his arm from the girl’s waist and bowed as if with apology. ‘
They brush their hair with codfish bones
,’ she sang to the soldier invitingly, but he was tired and wouldn’t play more.

Charles glanced at his watch. It had been a charming display in its way, though perhaps a detail to be omitted from his report to the department; but he wanted his dinner, and before he could reach that happy conclusion to the day he’d need to bathe for an hour at least.
And possibly
, he thought, only a little ashamed of himself,
burn my clothes.