The Essex Serpent (22 page)

‘Spencer – Martha – have we seen enough? Have we done our duty? – but look here, who’s this? Dr Garrett, he seems to want you: is this a friend of yours?’ He gestured away to his right, and at first Luke saw nothing beside the children dispersing and the soldier counting out the coppers in his cap. Then the child in the fairy wings yelped and swore: she’d been pushed aside in a sudden jostling and tumbled wailing onto the stones. ‘What’s going on?’ said Charles, drawing his coat closer – was it pick-pockets? Katherine had
warned
him to take care! – ‘Spencer? Can you see what’s going on?’ The group of children parted, a kitten broke loose and yowled from a windowsill, and Charles saw a short man in a brown coat come at them with his head held low and one hand thrust in his pocket. Thinking the man was in distress Martha stepped forward, and held out her hands: ‘What is it?’ she said: ‘What’s happened – can we help?’

Samuel Hall did not reply, only went on running, and they saw it was Luke he wanted; he reached the surgeon, who at first was a little amused, and fended the man off with a jovial shove – ‘Do I know you? Have we met?’

Hall began to mutter beneath breath sour with beer, all the while putting his hand in his pocket and drawing it out again, as if he couldn’t decide what to do next: ‘You shouldn’t’ve gone and interfered with my business – it wasn’t fair – I’ll show you what’s coming to him!’

Luke grew troubled then, but for all his strength could not push the man away: he found himself pressed against the wall, scrabbling at the brick. He cast about for help, and found it – for there was Spencer, who with his hands on the man’s shoulder wrenched him away from his friend. Then the man fell to a kind of drunken sobbing that was also a little like laughter; raising his eyes upward he said, ‘Again, would you believe it! Cheated again of all I’m due!’

‘Poor chap’s quite mad,’ said Charles, watching the man in the gutter. Then he saw him put his hand in his pocket and take out a blade. ‘Watch out,’ he said, coming forward, feeling each hair lift on the nape of his neck: ‘Watch out – he has a knife – Spencer, stay back!’

But Spencer had turned away from the fallen man, and was slow with the shock of the fight; he looked dumbly at Charles, and at his friend. ‘Luke?’ he said: ‘Are you hurt?’

‘Winded,’ said Luke, ‘that’s all.’ Then he saw Hall scrabble to his feet, and how light gleamed on the blade; saw how he raised his arm and lunged at his friend with an animal’s cry. In the long moment that followed he saw also Spencer laid out upon a mortuary table, his fine fair hair falling back against the wood, and it was unbearable: he’d never felt so appalling a surge of terror. Luke hurled himself forward with hands outstretched – he reached the man – he reached the knife – they tumbled to the pavement. Samuel Hall fell first, and fell heavily: his head struck a kerbstone with a sound like that of a nut being cracked.

The soldier had moved on to other alleys, and they heard the organ playing – something like a lullaby, so that the watching children thought perhaps the black-haired man who’d danced with them was sleeping, since he lay so still. But Luke had neither passed out nor been knocked unconscious: he lay there unmoving because he knew what had been done to him and he couldn’t bear to look.

‘Luke – can you hear us?’ said Martha, touching him with gentle hands; he roused, then sat up and turned towards them, and the colour left Martha’s cheek. From collar to belt his shirt was scarlet, and his right hand and forearm were gloved with blood. When Charles came close – having seen that the brown-coated man would certainly never get up again – he thought at first the doctor was clutching a scrap of meat. But it was the flesh of his own hand, flayed from the bone where the knife had crossed his palm as he grasped it, so that it hung down towards the wrist in a thick and glistening flap. Underneath it greyish bones were visible, and a tendon or ligament of some kind had been severed and lay in among the blood like pale ribbon snipped with scissors. Luke appeared not to be in pain, only grasped his right wrist with his left hand, peering at the visible bones of his hand and reciting over and over as if it were a liturgy: ‘
Scaphoid – unciform – carpus – metacarpus
…’ Then his black eyes rolled backward and he fell into the arms of his kneeling friends.

2

A mile or so west of that dim courtyard Cora came up towards St Paul’s with a letter in her pocket. Her time in London had been dreary: friends came and went, and found her stand-offish and
distrait
. Cora, for her part, found them all too neatly turned-out and too cautiously spoken; the women’s hands were white, their nails sharp and glossy; the men were shaved pink as children or wore absurd moustaches. They knew their politics and their scandal and which restaurants would serve you the latest fad, but Cora would’ve liked to sweep everything off the table and say, ‘Yes, yes, but have I told you how once I stood by an iron grating in Clerkenwell and heard the buried river running out to meet the Thames – did you know I laughed the day my husband died – have you ever seen me kiss my son? Do you never talk, ever, about anything that matters?’

Katherine Ambrose had visited with Joanna by her side. Soon after Stella’s diagnosis, Katherine and Charles Ambrose had taken charge of the Ransome children (Dr Butler, awaiting Will’s decision on how his wife should be treated, urged peace, and good clean air, and the children sent elsewhere). Appalled to find his quiet home full and noisy, Charles nonetheless found himself coming home earlier than necessary and with his pockets stuffed full of Cadbury’s and games of cards, which he played with them until rather too late in the evening. They all longed for Stella, but bore it bravely: Joanna was at once let loose on the Ambrose library, but also learned to curl her hair with rags; James drew devices of impossible complexity and sent them to his mother in envelopes sealed with wax.

‘I’m glad to see you,’ said Cora, truthfully: Joanna had grown almost into womanhood in the space of a month and wore her mother’s eyes above her father’s mouth. She was studying hard at Charles’s books and intended (she said) to be a doctor or a nurse or an engineer, something like that, she hadn’t decided; then she’d remember her mother, and how much she missed her, and her violet eyes would grow cloudy.

‘What are you doing here in London, Cora?’ said Katherine, nibbling at a square of bread and butter. ‘What made you leave, when you were so happy, and saw so much? If ever anyone could unravel the mystery of the Blackwater beast it surely should be you! At midsummer we all said you looked a country girl born and bred, and doubted we’d ever see you get on a train again.’

‘Oh, all that mud and muddle,’ said Cora brightly, not fooling her friend for an instant: ‘I’m a city mouse and always was – all those mad girls, that whispering about the serpent, the horseshoes in the oak tree – I thought if I stayed any longer I’d go mad. Besides’ – she listlessly crumbled a piece of bread – ‘I didn’t really know what I was doing.’

‘But you’re going back to Essex soon though, aren’t you?’ said Joanna: ‘You shouldn’t leave your friends when they’re ill because that’s when they need you!’ Her tears came, and could not be stopped.

‘Oh – yes,’ said Cora, ashamed of herself: ‘Jojo, of course I’m going back.’

Later, Katherine said, ‘What
did
happen, Cora? Will Ransome – you talked about him so much – I was almost afraid of what was coming! But then I saw him with you and you barely spoke, and I thought you hardly liked each other … it seems a strange friendship but then you never did do anything the way the rest of us might – and now, with Stella as she is …’ But Cora – who since her widowhood could never conceal a thought that passed behind her eyes – drew down the blinds and tersely said: ‘There was nothing strange about it: we enjoyed each other’s company for a time, that is all.’

If Cora could’ve explained what had gone awry she might have done, but for all the thought that she gave it – late into the night, and immediately on waking – she could not unravel things. She’d prized Will’s affection because it was impossible that he might want her as Michael once had; his affection was bounded off on all sides by Stella, and his faith, and by what she’d gratefully thought was his complete failure to notice she was a woman. ‘I might as well be a head in a jar of formaldehyde, for all he cares,’ she’d once said to Martha: ‘It’s why he prefers to write to me than see me – I’m only a mind, not a body: I’m safe as a child – don’t you see how I might prefer it?’

And she believed it, too. Even now, when she thought of that moment when everything had shifted, she saw the fault as hers, not his – she ought not to have looked at him the way she did, and she had no idea why she’d done it. Something in the hard flexing of his fingers against her flesh had struck something off in her, and he had seen it, and it had thrown him off-balance. Certainly his letters now were kind enough – but it seemed to her a kind of innocence was lost.

Then Luke’s letter had come, and it was she who was thrown off-balance. It was not that she’d been oblivious to his love, since he cheerfully declared it so often, but that it was no longer possible to laugh, and declare that she too loved her Imp: a kind of innocence was lost. Worse, it seemed an attempt to force her hand – all the years of what ought to have been her youth she’d been in someone’s possession, and now, with hardly a few months’ freedom to her name, someone wanted to put their mark on her again.
I know you cannot return my love
, he’d said, but no-one ever wrote such a letter without hope.

Crossing the Strand up by St Paul’s she found a letterbox and tossed in a letter addressed to Dr Garrett with a kind of contempt. From somewhere behind her there came the sound of music, and she saw on the cathedral steps a man in a torn soldier’s tunic turning the handle of a barrel organ. His left sleeve was empty, and the sun picked out the medal on his breast. The melody was a merry one, and it lifted her mood: she crossed to where he sat and dropped a few coins in his cap.