The Essex Serpent (23 page)

IV

THESE LAST TIMES OF REBELLION

SEPTEMBER

1

Autumn’s kind to Aldwinter: thick sun aslant on the common forgives a multitude of sins. The dog-roses have gone over to crimson hips, and children stain their hands green breaking walnuts open. Skeins of geese unravel over the estuary, and cobwebs dress the gorse in silk.

For all that, things aren’t as they ought to be. World’s End sinks into the marsh and there’s fungus growing in the empty grate. The quay is quiet: better to risk a lean winter than set sail on polluted waters. Rumours come from Point Clear and St Osyth, from Wivenhoe and Brightlingsea: the beast in the Blackwater was seen by a fisherman at tide’s turn one night and he went clean out of his wits; a child was found half-drowned with a grey-black mark on her belly; a dog’s been cast up on the saltings with its head all awry. Now and then a half-hearted watchman sets a fire by Leviathan and makes a mark in the logbook, but never lasts the night.

No sign yet of Naomi Banks. It’s never said that she must’ve gone down one night to the marsh and there encountered the serpent, but it’s generally assumed. Banks lets his fishing-nets tangle and his red sails moulder and is banned from the White Hare for putting the wind up his fellow drinkers. ‘Coming ready or not!’ he bellows from the doorstep, and keels into the street.

Up in his rooms on the Pentoville Road, Luke’s hand knits together well enough. Spencer winds and unwinds the dressing, and admires his own needlework, and sees the crooking inward of the fingers; meanwhile Luke looks placidly out over the wet street and says nothing. He has memorised Cora’s first letter from its first word to her signature:
How could you – how could you?
Her second goes unanswered for all her contrition.

Martha writes to Spencer. Edward Burton and his mother are to lose their home, she says – the rent has become intolerable. Not all the laundry and bright rag rugs in London will keep the wolf from the door. Has anything been done? Has Charles anything to report? When can she bring good news? Spencer detects an urgency there between the lines, and puts it down to her tender heart, her good hard conscience. But he has nothing to report, and cannot think how to reply.

In the high white Ambrose house the children have grown very nearly as plump as Charles. Joanna knows the periodic table and the remarkable thing about the hypotenuse and can spot a
post hoc
logical fallacy at a hundred yards. If on a Monday she resolves to enter Parliament, by Wednesday nothing but the law will do. Charles keeps from her the unlikelihood of either: she’ll grow out of hope, as everyone eventually does. Now and then she remembers casting her childish spells with Naomi Banks, and guilt sends her reeling: where is her red-haired companion now? Do her curls wave in the estuary tides full five fathoms down? She still has a drawing Naomi made of their two hands clasped, and she asks Katherine if she can put it in a frame.

Katherine wakes one night, hears weeping, and finds the brothers in their sister’s arms. They want their mother; they miss the village; it’s agreed they’ll go down to Essex by the end of the week. Besides, says Joanna, there’s Magog to think of, still tethered in the garden, missing her master. They’re consoled with a trip to Harrods and sufficient cake to sink a sailor.

Cora remains in her London hotel, despising the carpets, the curtains. She has in her pocket a letter from Spencer advising her not to visit and it’s so polite the paper is cold in her hands. Martha sees her walk from room to room and can find nothing to say that won’t receive a harsh reply. Cora has little interest in her books and bones – she’s bored and bad-tempered and there’s a new crease between her eyebrows. Spencer’s rebuke has lodged in her and she’s sulking. Her idea of herself has never included selfishness or cruelty – she has always been done to, and never doing. It’s quite an adjustment. She has gone blundering about, wishing no harm and causing much.

Will’s letters are prized, read often, unanswered. How can she respond? She buys a postcard from a stand at the station and writes I WISH YOU WERE HERE, but what good did it ever do, to speak one’s mind? In his absence – without the possibility of walking with him on the common, of finding on the threshold an envelope (in a neat hand in which she always thinks she can spot the schoolboy) – the world grows dull and blunted; there’s no longer anything in it to delight or surprise. Then she’s struck by her own folly – to feel so dreary because she can’t talk to some Essex parson with whom she has nothing in common! – it’s absurd; her pride revolts against it. In the end, it comes more or less down to this: she does not write, because she wants to.

She tries – as she has so often tried before – to turn all her unused affection on Francis. How can it be that a mother and son should take so little pleasure from each other? She pulls every trick in the book: conversations on subjects that please him, attempts at jokes and games; she tries her hand at baking, and buys him novels she’s certain he’ll like. Sometimes she catches him out looking anxious, or thinks she does, and tries to console; they make frequent journeys on the Underground to destinations of his choosing. He submits with few words and less affection, and sometimes she thinks he is sorry for her, or (much worse!) finds her amusing.

Martha loses her temper. ‘Did you really think you could carry on like that – you never wanted friends or lovers – you wanted courtiers! What you have on your hands is a peasants’ revolt. Frankie,’ she says, ‘we’re going for a walk.’

Will stands in the All Saints pulpit and looks out at his flock and finds himself lost for words. They are by turns mistrustful and eager: at times it seems they’re ready to run pell-mell into the everlasting arms, at others they eye him askance as if the Trouble has all been his doing. Someone somewhere has transgressed, that is the general consensus; and if the parson can’t be trusted to root out the wrongdoer things have come to a pretty pass.

All the while he finds himself wavering like a compass needle between the South Pole and the North: his wife whom he loves and is the sanctioned source of all his joys; and Cora Seaborne, who is not, and what’s more brought him nothing but trouble. News of Luke’s catastrophe has reached him via Charles. Other clergy might’ve imagined this swift end to the surgeon’s career to have been as divinely intended as if it had been the almighty hand wielding the knife, since it delivers Stella from the threat of the scalpel. Will, of course, is not so backward in his thinking, but all the same it’s difficult not to feel they’ve been extended a period of grace: the brutal treatment once offered by Garrett – the diseased lung collapsed in its cavity – is now impossible, since no other surgeon in England would consent to it.

Without Cora, he finds his thoughts lack direction. What, after all, is the point of observing this, of encountering that, if he cannot tell her, and watch her laugh or frown in response? He finds himself restless, uneasy; often he grows exasperated with them both, for having permitted only a lapse in good manners (this is how he frames it to himself) to cut the knot between them. Perhaps she finds herself too enraptured by her wounded friend to recall the country parson with his ailing wife – brings him rich food he ought not to eat, learns to dress the cut, to tug silk stitches from the skin. He clothes her in white and seats her at the doctor’s feet, her head bent over his ruined hand, and is appalled to find himself envious. All the same (he thinks): soon enough a letter will pass either this way or that between town and country – it only remains to be seen who’ll be first to unfold a sheet of paper, to lick the nib of their pen.

Behind Stella Ransome’s ribs, tubercles are forming. If Cora could’ve seen them, they’d have put her in mind of the toadstones she collects on her mantelpiece. They send out scavenger cells; infection’s setting in. The blood vessels of her lungs are beginning to disintegrate and show themselves in scarlet flecks on her blue handkerchiefs.

Of them all, only Stella is happy. It is the
spes phthisica
, which confers on the tubercular patient a light heart, a hopeful spirit. She brims with joy unspeakable and full of glory, beatified by suffering, devoutly occupied in her taxonomy of blue. Like a magpie decking its nest she gathers talismans around her, of gentian seed packets and sea-glass and spools of navy thread, and all throughout her eyes are fixed on heaven. She feels her feet have left the mud they once were mired in – she wakes in the night sweat-drenched in a light euphoric fever and has seen the face of blue-eyed Christ. Sometimes she hears the whisper of the serpent summoning and is not afraid. There was once another like it: she knows that enemy of old.

Her love for her husband and her children does not diminish, but grows distant: it is as if a fine blue veil has been drawn between them. Will is attentive in his loving – he hardly leaves her side – he sees the skin of her hands is dry and brings back from Colchester a bottle of Yardley’s lotion.

Sometimes she draws his head down to her shoulder and cradles it as though the disease were his. No more a fool now than she ever was, she’s seen his attachment to Cora grow knotted, and pities him.
My beloved’s hers, and she is his
, she writes in her blue book without rancour. ‘When is Cora coming back?’ she says that night, playing cat’s cradle with blue ribbon: ‘When does she leave London? I’ve missed hearing you talk together.’

2

A woman walked onstage alone at the Mile End Assembly Hall. Slight, dark-browed, darkly dressed, she surveyed her scant audience good-humouredly. Perhaps a hundred men and women waited whispering under the white vault: here then was Eleanor Marx Aveling, and more than her father’s daughter.

Among them – breathless from his walk – sat Edward Burton, feeling dwindled down to nothing inside his winter coat. Martha fidgeted beside him: ‘I met her once, you know,’ she said, glinting. ‘She said to call her Tussy, like her friends.’

Left to his own devices Burton may not have chosen to attend a public meeting of the Socialist League, but Martha had been impossible to resist. ‘No sense just listening to me,’ she’d said, pouring tea from the cooling pot. ‘No sense taking things secondhand. I’ll go with you – we’ll walk together – you can’t be forever cooped up in here with your plans.’

In the weeks of his convalescence the earth had leaned a little further from the sun; the air now was bright, gleaming, as though he viewed the world through a polished pane of glass. It had struck him lately that if his body these days was weary his mind – at last! – was not: Samuel Hall had roused him from a long slumber. It seemed impossible that there’d been years when he’d taken his allotted place without complaint, fitting neatly into the whole great grinding enterprise of London. What he saw about him now was a sick body convulsing as it shook off its fever – disease coursing in the arteries of its roads and canals, poison silting in the chambers of its halls and factories. He was awake – painfully, restlessly so: he ate his bread wondering what long hours the dying men worked in the flour-mills; he watched his mother stitching scraps and knew her worth to be less than that of the bricks in the street. The landlord raised their rent, and he saw it not as an act of personal greed, simply another symptom of the sickness. He thought of Samuel Hall’s cracked skull and his own guilt was overlaid with pity: Hall had been degraded by enslavement, as they all were.

This new fervour was indistinguishable from what he felt for Martha, and he made no attempt to set one aside from the other. He’d never been much in the company of women: they’d been prized objects to be bickered over, and rarely more than that. Now he sought no other company but hers, and could scarcely name the boys and men who’d once clustered round his Holborn desk. She seemed to him neither man nor woman, but some other sex entirely. How she stood in the window with a hand pressed to the scooped hollow of her back, how once between her shoulder-blades he’d seen sweat blot her dress: these gave him a thirst he was afraid he could never drink deep enough to sate. But she was also brisk, combative, indifferent to praise – would not give ground, moved him to laughter, never tried to please, played no tricks. Edward knew himself outwitted and outgunned. That she spoke so often of Cora Seaborne in a manner by turns fond and furious seemed wholly in keeping. She was a being like none he’d ever known and he accepted her completely. His mother was wary. ‘I’ve never known it!’ she’d said (put out that Martha always left their rooms a fraction neater than she found them). ‘A woman needs her own home and a man in it. A waste, I call it – and should she be here on her own?’

No theatrics from the stage in the Assembly Hall, still less the ardour of a Bible Rally preacher: the speaker’s tone was matter-of-fact, perhaps a little wearied.
She has suffered
, thought Burton, certain of it. ‘It’s a sad and hideous story,’ said Eleanor Marx, and it seemed to those watching that she grew in stature as she spoke, her masses of hair unwinding. ‘This unholy alliance of masters, lawyers and magistrates against the wage-slaves …’ Beside him Martha nodded once – twice – made marks in her notebook; in the front row a woman holding a sleeping infant sat quite still but weeping. Now and then a dissenting voice broke through and was silenced by a look: the stage seemed thronged with girls broken by machinery and boys flayed by the blast-furnace, while standing by, stout men fondled their watch-chains and watched their capital accumulate. ‘These are hard times – and even harder times will come until this bad order is replaced. This is not the end of our struggle – it is the beginning!’ There were cheers, and a hat thrown onstage – no bow, but a raised hand, which was a gesture both of farewell and encouragement.
Yes
, thought Edward Burton, standing, putting a hand to his aching breast.
Yes, I see: but how?

On a bench in a small square park he ate chips with vinegar. Children dressed in party clothes stood waiting on the kerb, and behind them,
Standard
sellers bawled the evening news. ‘But how?’ he said. ‘It makes me stupid sometimes – all I read and hear. I have anger in me and I don’t know what to do with it.’

‘It is how they’d have us,’ said Martha. ‘It’s not the function of the wage-slave to think. The girls at Bryant and May, the boys down in the quarries: d’you think they’ve time to think, to plot, to revolutionise? That’s the great crime: that no-one need be put in chains when their own minds are shackles enough. Once I thought we were no better than horses tied to the plough, but it’s so much worse – we’re only moving parts in their machinery – just the bolts on the wheel, the axle turning round and round!’

‘What then? I must work. I cannot escape the machine.’

‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘Not yet: but change is slow. Even the world turns by inches.’

Weary Edward leaned against the bench. Croesus touched the chestnut trees, the oaks and London limes; his friend was by his side. ‘Martha,’ he said: just that, and it was enough for now.

‘You’re pale,’ she said. ‘Ned. Let me take you home.’ She kissed him, and on her mouth there was a grain of salt.