The Essex Serpent (24 page)

3

Little Harriet, yellow-dressed youngest of the laughing girls, woke before dawn and vomited into her pillow. In the corner her mother stirred, and rising to comfort her child breathed in the morning air, choked, and vomited also. Coming from the Blackwater on a warm west wind a vile smell had entered the room through a broken windowpane. Creeping past World’s End and finding nothing there, it had passed over and come to the borders of Aldwinter, where few lights shone. Leaving the child in her mother’s arms, it came to the Banks cottage, and borne on the breeze stirred the red sails of the barges in the quay. Weighted by drink Banks slept too deeply to be roused, but something troubled him in the dark, and three times he said his lost daughter’s name. On it went, past the White Hare, and on the doorstep a stray dog whined for a master long gone; past the school, where Mr Caffyn – already up, marking grammar notebooks, deploring abuse of the comma – gave a cry of disgust, and ran to fetch a glass of water. Rooks had begun to gather in Traitor’s Oak on the common, sensing in the reeking air a feast. At Cora’s grey house it crept above the door, beneath the lintel; it seeped into the fabric of the sheets on her bed and could not find her. It skirted the All Saints tower, and reached the window of the rectory: William Ransome, sleepless in his study, thought perhaps a mouse lay rotting beneath the boards. Pressing his shirt’s cuff to his mouth he went on his knees below the desk, beside the empty chair he kept beside his own, and found nothing. Stella, in a blue satin garment through which the bones of her shoulder-blades flared like hard little wings, appeared at the threshold. ‘What on earth?’ she said, caught between laughing and choking: ‘What on
earth
?’ She held a bunch of lavender to her nose.

‘A dead thing somewhere,’ said Will, putting his own jacket around her, afraid she’d begin one of the coughing fits which shook her small body as if it were held in the jaws of a predator: ‘Something on the common? A sheep?’

‘Not Magog, I hope,’ said Stella: ‘We’d never be forgiven’; but no – the last of Cracknell’s family could be seen at the garden’s end, untroubled, chewing an early breakfast. ‘Will, should we light a fire – oh! Oh, it’s foul, foul – you’ll go out on the common and see the earth split open and sinners looking up with all their bones broken and their lips cracked with thirst!’ Her eyes glittered as if the prospect pleased her, and it troubled Will more than the vile air, which he almost thought he could taste, there on the tip of his tongue: something foetid, with a horrid sweetness behind it. Ought he to go out there – perhaps he should – certainly he must: who else was there to seek out the cause of all that had lately befallen the village? He lit a fire, and shortly the reek was displaced by wood-smoke; Stella tossed in her lavender, and there was a brief and piercing scent of recent summer. ‘Go on,’ she said, straightening the papers on his desk (so many letters! Did he never put them away?), giving him his coat. ‘Ten minutes more and we’ll hear the bell and you’ll be wanted somewhere by someone.’

Kissing her, he said, ‘Perhaps a fishing-boat has gone aground on the saltings and spilt its cargo, and the fish is rotting – already it’s a warm enough morning …’

‘I wish the babies were here,’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t Jojo have woken before us all, and gone down with a lamp, and seen for herself, and James done a drawing for the papers?’

Out on the High Road a crowd had gathered. Mr Caffyn had wound a white cloth about his head as if he’d been wounded; others pressed a sleeve to their mouths and peered suspiciously at Will, casting about for signs of a Bible or some other weapon concealed in the crook of his arm. It did not occur to Will until that moment – until he scented on the dim air not only rottenness but fear – that perhaps there was another cause to the foul odour besides misfortune. But there was Harriet’s mother (weeping, as she so often was), crossing herself; there was Banks, not yet sober, saying he’d not go down to the water in case the beast had belched up coils of red hair. Evansford in his black shirt, looking more than ever like an undertaker bereft of a corpse, stood reciting fragments of the Book of Revelation with evident glee. Even Mr Caffyn, who each year taught his students that the 31st of October was nothing but the anniversary of Martin Luther taking hammer and pins to his 95 theses, looked (thought Will) rather green about the gills.

‘Good morning, and a fine one at that,’ he said: ‘And what’s this that’s brought us all out of our beds?’ No answer came. ‘Now as you all know I’m no seafaring man,’ he said heartily, thumping Banks on the shoulder, ‘and you can’t expect me to know anything about anything. Mr Banks, you know the Blackwater better than us all – what’s the cause of this dreadful business, d’you think?’ The wind rose, the smell strengthened: Will gagged, and said, ‘Some algae perhaps, drifted in from overseas? A shoal of herring beached on the shingle?’

‘Not anything I ever smelt before or heard tell of,’ said Banks, muffled behind the sleeve of his coat. ‘It’s not natural, I know that.’

‘Well: you say so,’ said Will, whose eyes streamed: ‘You say so, but nothing’s more natural than the smell of dead things, which I suppose this must be. You and I will both smell similar, given time.’ The small crowd observed him with distaste, and he rightly judged that humour was not fitted to the moment. All right: try scripture, then – ‘Therefore we will not fear, though the waters roar, and be troubled, and what have you!’

‘
I’ll
tell you what it is,’ said Harriet’s mother: ‘And I needn’t tell you, Banks, need I? – or you, or
you
…’ She nodded with meaning at Mr Caffyn, and at one or two women who seemed indifferent to the vileness of the air and had already begun to wander up the High Road, towards the Blackwater, where dawn had taken hold. ‘It’s come to us at last, the Essex Serpent, the river beast, and none of us ready for it! It came to my little one first – oh you bet, you bet! It came to her first and she’s sick as a dog and nothing I say’ll comfort the girl.’

Evansford remarked that after all it had been promised by the Redeemer himself there’d be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, and bolstered by this observation, the woman went on, ‘It’s the
breath
of the thing, the very
breath
of it I tell you, and on it there’s the flesh and bones of everything it ever had between its jaws – the St Osyth boy, the man washed up on our shores …’

‘A foul miasma, as our fathers were taught,’ said Mr Caffyn, ‘and bringing with it disease – look! I have a fever.
La Peste!
It has begun.’ And certainly his high scholar’s brow was beaded with drops of sweat, and as Will watched he began to tremble, and twist his mouth into what may have been either the beginnings of a sob or of laughter.

‘The sea gave up the dead which were in it!’ said Banks, growing excited (if hope was gone of holding Naomi alive in his arms he at least might have the pleasure of giving her a tomb): ‘And death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them!’

‘Hell! Miasma!’ said Will, growing exasperated, and discovering that either the smell had begun to recede, or that he’d grown accustomed to disgust: ‘Serpent! Plague! Mr Caffyn, you’re not ill: it’s just that you could do with a cup of tea. What! I know you all for sensible folk – Banks, it was you yourself who showed me how the sextant worked! Caffyn, I’ve seen you teach my daughter how to calculate the distance of a storm! We’re not in the Dark Ages – not children kept in line with tales of ghouls and demons – the people that walked in darkness have seen a great light! There’s nothing there, nothing to fear, there never was: we will go down and find nothing but a sheep washed up from Maldon way, not some – some abomination sent for our punishment!’

But was it so great a stretch to imagine the Intelligence that once had split the Red Sea taking the trouble to send a little admonition to the sinners of a briny Essex parish? The apostle Paul had put his hand in a nest of snakes and come away unpoisoned by way of a sign: certainly the world had turned its many thousand revolutions since, but was the season of signs and wonders really over? Why had it always seemed to him so preposterous that in the estuary something was biding its time – was it a question not of failure to believe in the serpent, but of failure to believe in his God? The fear of the crowd came then to Will, with the taste of a copper penny placed on his tongue; and it was not the fear that they were under divine judgment, but that they were not, and could never be.
Cora
, he thought, finding himself grasping at the empty air as if he might somehow summon up her strong hand:
Cora! If she were here. If she were here
– ‘Right then,’ he said, grown angry, attempting to conceal it: ‘What use is it to stand here, and choke, and imagine? I’ll go down and see for myself, and you may come or not, as you like, but I tell you by sunset there’ll be an end to all this, and there’ll be no more talk of serpents.’ He struck out east up the High Road, towards the Blackwater and the source of their disgust. Muttering and squabbling in his wake the small crowd followed; Harriet’s mother took his arm confidingly and said, ‘I bid goodbye to the child at the door as I left her, not knowing if I’d make my way home.’

On the common Traitor’s Oak was so thick with rooks it might’ve been a crop of feathered fruit – Will walked in its shadow – the avid flock fell silent. The stench grew intolerable, and Mr Caffyn, seeing the lit windows of the school, peeled away to find refuge, saying that he ought not to’ve taken up a post in so remote and muddy a location, but that at any rate he couldn’t say he hadn’t been warned. Then the pitying wind relented, and changed its course; rooks lifted from the oak with a look of black ashes blown up from burning sheets of paper. With the changed air the odour began to recede, blown back out towards the estuary, where others would wake to foulness in the morning; Banks, taking courage, sang a scrap of sea shanty and took a nip of rum.

Then there was World’s End, and each averted their eyes: though they’d seen the mossy tump where Cracknell lay waiting for his headstone it was nonetheless impossible to think that he could not be there behind the mottled glass, picking at earwigs on the sleeve of his coat. A handful now, that was all: William Ransome, with a mother on his left hand and a riverman on his right, and behind them Evansford, mercifully silent.

The two women gone on ahead talked cheerily enough, gesturing at scraps of cloud stained red by the sun’s rising, turning to bat at the air as if they might fend off the odour which strengthened again as they drew near the saltings. Will’s stomach turned in revulsion and fear: he did not believe they were shortly to encounter the Essex Serpent sunning its thin wings on the shingle, snapping its beak, regurgitating a fragment of bone – but oh, he was uneasy. ‘
Cora
,’ he said, aloud, appalled at his own voice, which had the inflexion of a man blaspheming: Banks at his side cast up a glance of confusion, and may himself have spoken had one of the women ahead not paused on the path, flung an arm down towards the shore, and begun to shriek. Her companion reeled with the shock of it, and stepping on the hem of her dress tripped, and unable to right herself staggered down the incline, her mouth gaping in fear.

There was a moment which Will later recalled as having been fixed, as if on the photographer’s plate: the falling woman – Banks arrested in motion as he moved towards her – himself, useless, in his mouth a sweet foulness that lifted up from the rising estuary tide. Then the image broke, and by some means he could never adequately explain they were all down on the salt shingle, standing by the black bones of Leviathan, looking in terror and pity at what the sea had given up.

In parallel to the lapping water’s edge the carcass of a creature lay in putrefaction. It measured perhaps twenty feet in length, so that its further end seemed to taper almost to a point; it was wingless, limbless, its body taut as a drum’s skin and gleaming silver. All along the spine the remnants of a single fin remained: protrusions rather like the spokes of an umbrella between which fragments of membrane, drying out in the easterly breeze, broke and scattered. The falling woman had stumbled upon its head: eyes large in diameter as a clenched fist looked blindly out, and behind them a pair of gills split away from the silvery flesh and showed, deep within, a crimson, meaty frilling that resembled the underside of a mushroom. Either it had suffered an attack, or caught against the hull of a Thames barge making its way to the capital: in places the taut hide – which gleamed where the low sun struck it with the colours of oil on water – had opened up to show bloodless wounds. Wherever it had touched the mud and shingle it had left a greasy residue, as if fat had begun to render out of its skin. Within its open mouth – which had about it something like the blunt beak of a finch – very fine teeth could be seen. As they watched, a portion of flesh fell away from the bone as cleanly as if tugged with a diner’s knife.

‘Look,’ said Banks, ‘that’s all it was, that’s all it was.’ He plucked off his hat, and held it to his breast, looking absurdly as if he’d encountered there in the Essex dawn the Queen on her way to Parliament: ‘Poor old thing, that’s all it was, out there in the dark, lost, I daresay, damaged, cast up on the marsh and sucked back out on the tides.’

And it did seem a poor old thing
, thought Will. For all its look of having detached itself from the illuminated margins of a manuscript, not the most superstitious of men could’ve believed this decaying fish to be a monster of myth: it was simply an animal, as they all were; and was dead, as they all would be. There they stood, reaching by silent agreement the conclusion that the mystery had not been solved so much as denied: it was impossible to imagine that this blind decaying thing – cast out of its element, where its silver flank must’ve been lithe, beautiful – could have caused their terror. Where, besides, were the promised wings, the muscular limbs from which claws protruded? Perhaps it might’ve coiled Cracknell in a wet embrace, out there in the Blackwater estuary, but Cracknell had died on the dry shore and with his boots on.