The Essex Serpent (3 page)

Even her voice was a matter for confused admiration – that odd half-lilt, half-impediment, which would appear when she was tired, and certain consonants gave her trouble. That behind the intelligent charm (which, Martha wryly observed, could be turned on and off like the bathroom tap) there were visible wounds only made her dearer. Michael Seaborne treated Martha with the kind of indifference he might’ve reserved for the hat-stand in the hall: she was entirely inconsequential – he did not even meet her eye on the stairs. But watchful Martha let nothing pass her by – overheard each courteous insult, observed each concealed bruise – and only with a great effort prevented herself from plotting a murder for which she’d’ve cheerfully been hanged. Just less than a year after arriving at Foulis Street – in the small hours, during which no-one had slept – Cora had come to her room. Whatever had been done or said had caused her to tremble violently, though the night was warm; her thick untidy hair was wet. Without speaking Martha had raised the cloths that covered her, and taken Cora into her arms; she drew up her knees to enclose her entirely, and held her very tight, so that the other woman’s trembling entered her. Unlaced from the conventions of whalebone and cloth Cora’s body was large, strong; Martha felt the blades moving in her narrow back, the soft stomach which she cradled against her arm, the sturdy muscles of her thighs: it had been like clinging to an animal which would never again consent to lie so still. They’d woken in a loose embrace, wholly at ease, and parted on a caress.

It heartened her now to see that Cora had not taken to her bed in mourning, but with her old habit of looking over what she called ‘her Studies’, as if she were a boy cramming for college. On the bed beside her was the old leather file which had been her mother’s, and which had lost the gilt from its monogram, and which smelt (so Martha insisted) of the animal it once had been. And there also were her notebooks, written in a small clear script, the margins covered, the pages interleaved with pressed stems of weeds and grasses, and a map of a section of coastline marked with red ink. A spill of papers lay all around her and she’d fallen asleep clutching her Dorset ammonite. But in her sleep she’d held on much too hard: it had crumbled to pieces, and left her with a muddy hand.

FEBRUARY

1

‘I mean: take jasmine, for instance.’ Dr Luke Garrett swept papers from his desk as if he might find beneath them white buds popping into bloom, and discovering instead a pouch of tobacco set about rolling a cigarette. ‘The scent is so sweet that it’s both pleasant and unpleasant; people recoil and go nearer, recoil and go nearer; they’re not sure whether to be disgusted or seduced. If only we could acknowledge pain and pleasure not as opposite poles but all of a piece, we might at last understand …’ He lost the thread of his thought, and cast about for it.

Accustomed to these lectures, the man who stood beside the window sucked at his beer and mildly said, ‘Only last week you concluded that all states of pain are evil, and all states of pleasure are good. I remember your words exactly, because you said it so many times, and in fact wrote it down for me, in case I forgot. I might actually have it on me –’ He patted ironically at each pocket, then flushed, never having quite got the hang of affectionate mockery. George Spencer was all that Garrett was not: tall, wealthy, fair, shy, with feelings deeper than his thoughts were swift. Those who’d known both since their student days joked that Spencer was the Imp’s good conscience, severed from him somehow, always running to keep up.

Garrett shoved himself deeper into his armchair. ‘Of course it
seems
completely contradictory and wholly unjustifiable, but then the best minds can hold two opposing thoughts at once.’ He frowned, an expression which caused his eyes almost to vanish below his black eyebrows and blacker fringe, and drained his glass. ‘Let me explain …’

‘I’d like that: but I’m supposed to be meeting friends for dinner.’

‘You don’t
have
any friends, Spencer. Even I don’t like you. Look: it’s useless denying that causing or experiencing pain is the most repulsive of human experiences. Before we knocked the patient out cold, surgeons would vomit in horror at what they were about to do; sane men and women would shorten their lives by twenty years rather than endure the knife – so would you – so would I! But all the same – it is impossible to say what pain actually
is
, or what is truly felt, or if what pains one pains another: it is more a matter of the imagination than of the body – so you see then how valuable hypnosis ought to be?’ He narrowed his eyes at Spencer and went on: ‘If you tell me you’re burned and in pain, how can I know whether the sensations you report bear any resemblance to what I’d feel if I suffered the same injury? All I can safely say is that we each experienced some physical response to an identical stimulus. True, we might both yelp, and splash about in cold water for a bit and so on, but how can I know that you are not actually experiencing a sensation that, if I were to experience it, might have me yelping to an entirely different tune?’ Wolfish, he bared his teeth and went on: ‘Does it matter? Would it alter the treatment a physician might give? If you begin to question the truth – or I suppose the value – of pain, how could you resist withholding or dispensing care according to some measure which you admit yourself is completely arbitrary?’

Losing interest, Garrett stooped to collect the fallen papers from the floor, and set about sorting them into neat files. ‘Doesn’t matter in the least, to all practical purposes. The thought just occurred to me, that’s all. Things occur to me, and I like to talk about them, and I haven’t anyone else. I ought to get a dog.’ Spencer, noting his friend’s plunge into gloom, took out his cigarette, and ignoring the ticking of his watch sat in a bare-seated chair and surveyed the room. It was fanatically clean, and the parsimonious winter sun could not pick out a speck of dust, no matter how it tried. It contained two chairs and a table, with two upended packing cases making do elsewhere. A length of fabric nailed over the window was washed thin and pale, and the white stone fireplace gleamed. There was a strong scent of lemons and antiseptic, and over the fire were black-framed photographs of Ignaz Semmelweis and John Snow. Pinned above the little desk there was a drawing (signed LUKE GARRETT AGE THIRTEEN) of a serpent coiled about a staff and testing the air with its split tongue: the symbol of Asclepius, who was cut from the womb of his mother on her funeral pyre and grew up to be the god of healing. The only food and drink Spencer had ever seen up those three flights of whitewashed stairs were cheap beer and Jacob’s crackers. He looked down at his friend, conscious of the familiar battle between frustration and affection which he always roused.

Spencer could recall with perfect clarity their first meeting in the lecture rooms of the Royal Borough, the teaching hospital where Garrett proved himself to have leaped ahead of his tutors in theory and understanding, bearing their tutelage with ill grace save when studying cardiac anatomy and the circulatory system, when he’d become so boyish and enthused he was suspected of mockery and often tossed out of class. Spencer, who knew the only way to conceal and overcome the limits of his own intelligence was to study, and study hard, avoided Garrett. He suspected no good could come of being seen with him, and besides was a little afraid of the black glitter set behind his eyes. Encountering him one evening, long after the laboratory was emptied and its doors ought to have been locked, he thought at first he must be in deep distress. He was seated with a drooping head at one of the scored and Bunsen-burned benches, staring intently at something between his outspread hands.

‘Garrett?’ he’d said: ‘Is that you? Are you all right? What are you doing here so late?’

Garrett hadn’t answered, but turned his head, and the sardonic grin with which his face was usually masked was gone. Instead he gave the other man a frank smile of such happy sweetness that Spencer thought he must have been mistaken for a friend; but Garrett gestured and said, ‘Look! Come and see what I made!’

Spencer’s first thought was that Garrett had taken up embroidery. This would not have been so strange: each year there was a contest among the graduate surgeons to see who could sew the finest stitches on a white silk square, and some claimed to have practised with cobweb. What had been holding Garrett’s attention was a beautiful object that resembled a Japanese fan in miniature with an intricately woven tassel at the handle. It measured no broader than his thumb, and was worked in such fine patterns of blue and scarlet on dense yellowish cream that he could barely see where the threads looped through the silk. Stooping to look closer, his vision sharpened and shifted, and he realised what it was; an exquisitely cut portion of the lining of a human stomach, sliced thin as paper, injected with ink to show the tracing of the blood vessels and set between glass slides. No artist could have matched the fine loop and twist of vein and artery, which had no pattern at all, but in which Spencer thought he saw the image of bare-branched trees in spring.

‘
Oh!
’ He caught Garrett’s eye, and they shared a look of delight that was a stitch neither ever severed.

‘You made this?’

‘I did! Once when I was young I saw a picture of something like this, made by Edward Jenner, I think – I told my father I’d make one of my own, though I doubt he believed me – and here we are and here it is. I broke into the morgue. You won’t tell?’

‘No – never!’ said Spencer, entranced.

‘I believe for most of us – for me, certainly – what’s below the skin is more worth looking at than what’s outside it. Turn me inside-out and I’d be quite a handsome man!’ Garrett placed the slide in a cardboard box, secured it with string, and placed it in his breast pocket, reverent as a priest. ‘I’m going to take it to a framer and have it set in ebony. Is ebony expensive? Pine, or oak – I live in hope of one day knowing someone who’ll think it as beautiful as I do. Shall we have a drink?’

Spencer had looked at the exercise books he’d carried from his rooms, then down at Luke’s face. It occurred to Spencer for the first time that he was certainly shy, and probably lonely. ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘If I’m going to fail the exam, I might as well not care about it.’

The other man had grinned. ‘I hope you’ve got some money, then, because I’ve not eaten since yesterday.’ Then he’d loped ahead down the corridor, laughing at himself, or at Spencer, or at an old joke he’d only just remembered.

It was apparent Garrett had not yet found a fit recipient for his handiwork, for there – years later – was the slide in its box, placed reverently upon the mantelpiece, the white cardboard darkened at the edge. Spencer rolled the cigarette between his fingers, and said: ‘Has she gone?’

Looking up, Garrett considered pretending he misunderstood, but knew himself bettered. ‘Cora? She went last week. The blinds are down at Foulis Street and the furniture’s covered in dust-sheets. I know, because I looked.’ He scowled. ‘She’d gone by the time I came by. That old witch Martha was there and wouldn’t pass on the address: said she needed rest and quiet and I’d hear from her in her own good time.’

‘Martha is one year older than you,’ said Spencer mildly. ‘And admit it, Garrett: peace and quiet are two qualities which are not often linked with you.’

‘I am her
friend
!’

‘Yes, but not a peaceful or a quiet one. Where has she gone?’

‘Colchester. Colchester! What is there at Colchester? A ruin and a river, and web-footed peasants, and
mud
.’

‘They’re finding fossils on the coast: I read about it. Smart women are wearing necklaces of sharks’ teeth set in silver. Cora will be happy as a schoolboy there, up to her knees in mud. You’ll see her soon.’

‘What good is
soon
? What good is
Colchester
? What good are
fossils
? It’s been hardly a month. She should still be mourning.’ (At this, neither met the other man’s eye.) ‘She should be with people who love her.’

‘She is with Martha, and no-one ever loved her more.’ Spencer did not mention Francis, who’d several times beaten him at chess: it did not somehow seem feasible to suggest the boy loved his mother. His watch ticked louder, and he saw in Garrett the slow burning of a furious temper. Thinking of the dinner that awaited him, and the wine, and the warm deep-carpeted house, he said – as if the thought had just occurred – ‘I meant to ask: how’s your paper coming along?’ Dangling the prospect of academic approval in front of Garrett generally had much the same effect as showing a dog a raw bone, and lately little else could turn his mind from Cora Seaborne.

‘Paper?’ The word came out like something unpleasant eaten. Then, a little mollified: ‘On the possibility of replacing an aortic valve? Yes, all right’ – almost without looking, he deftly retrieved half-a-dozen sheets of dense black script from midway through a stack of notebooks – ‘Deadline’s Sunday. Might as well crack on with it. Get out, would you?’ He turned away, folded himself over the desk, and began sharpening a pencil with a razorblade. He unfolded a large sheet of paper which showed a vastly enlarged transverse section of a human heart, with cryptic markings in black ink, and sections of script crossed out and reinstated with a series of exclamation marks. Something in the margins caught his eye; it excited or irritated him: he swore, and began scribbling.

Spencer withdrew a banknote from his pocket, set it silently on the floor, where his friend might mistake it for one he himself had dropped and forgotten, and closed the door behind him.

2

Having scoured its river for kingfishers and its castle for ravens, Cora Seaborne walked through Colchester with Martha on her arm, holding an umbrella above them both. There’d been no kingfisher (‘On a Nile cruise, probably – Martha, shall we follow them?’), but the castle keep had been thick with grave-faced rooks stalking about in their ragged trousers. ‘Quite a good ruin,’ said Cora, ‘But I’d have liked to’ve seen a gibbet, or a miscreant with pecked-out eyes.’

Martha – who had little patience for the past and eyes fixed always at some brighter point several years distant – said, ‘There’s suffering, if you’re really determined to find it,’ and gestured towards a man whose legs ended above the knee and who had stationed himself opposite a cafe, the better to induce guilt in tourists with overfilled bellies. Martha had made no secret of her discomfort at being plucked from her city home: for all that her thick fair plait and strong arms gave her the appearance of a dairy-girl with a fondness for cream, she’d never before been much east of Bishopsgate, and thought the oaky Essex fields sinister and the pink-painted Essex houses the dwelling-places of half-wits. Her astonishment that coffee could be had in such a backwater had been matched only by her disgust at the astringent liquid she’d been served, and she spoke to anyone they met with the extravagant politeness reserved for a stupid child. All the same, in the fortnight since they’d departed London – Francis retrieved from school, to the unspoken but evident relief of his teachers – Martha had almost come to love the little town for its effect on her friend, who removed from London’s gaze had abandoned her dutiful mourning and receded ten years to a merrier self. Sooner or later, she thought, she’d gently ask how long Cora intended to live in their two rooms on the High Street, doing nothing but walking herself weary and poring over books, but for now she was content to witness Cora’s happiness.

Adjusting the umbrella, which had done nothing more than channel the weak rain more efficiently into the collars of their coats, Cora followed Martha’s pointing hand. The crippled man was doing a far better job than they of tricking the weather, and judging by the satisfaction with which he examined the contents of his upturned hat, had made a good day’s takings. He was sitting on what Cora first took to be a stone bench, but which on looking closer she saw was a piece of fallen masonry. It measured at least three feet broad and two deep, and the remains of a Latin phrase emerged to the left of the beggar’s limbs. Seeing the two women in their good coats observing him from across the road he immediately adopted an expression of craven misery; this he swiftly discarded as being too obvious and replaced with one of noble suffering, with the suggestion that though he found his occupation odious he could never be accused of shirking. Cora, who loved the theatre, tugged her arm from Martha’s and slipping behind a passing bus stood gravely at his feet, sheltered a little by a shallow porch.

‘Good afternoon.’ She reached for her purse. The man cast his eyes up at the sky, which at that moment split and displayed an astonishing blue interior. ‘It isn’t,’ he said. ‘But it might yet be: I’ll give you that.’ The brief brightness illuminated the building behind him, which Cora saw had been torn apart as though by an explosion. A section to her left remained more or less as its architect intended – a several-storeyed building that might have been a great house or town hall – but a portion to the right had sheared away and sunk several feet into the ground. A bulwark of poles and planks kept it from tumbling across the pavement, but it was treacherous, and she thought she could hear above the slow traffic the creak and grinding of iron on stone. Martha appeared at her side and Cora instinctively took her hand, unsure whether to step backwards or hitch up her skirt and take a closer look. The same appetite that made her break stones in search of ammonites until the air reeked of cordite propelled her forward: she could see up to a room with its fireplace intact, and a scarlet scrap of carpet lolling over the edge of the broken floor like a tongue. Further up, an oak seedling had taken hold beside the staircase, and a pale fungus that resembled many fingerless hands had colonised the plaster ceiling.

‘Now steady on, miss!’ Alarmed, the man shuffled across his stone seat and gripped the hem of Cora’s coat. ‘What d’you want to be doing that for? No, a little further back, I should think … and a little further … safe enough now, yes; and don’t do it again.’ He spoke with the authority of a gate-keeper, so that Cora felt rather ashamed of herself and said, ‘Oh, I am sorry: I didn’t mean to alarm you. It’s just I thought I saw something move.’

‘That’ll be the house martins and they needn’t trouble you a bit.’ Forgetting for a moment the demeanour of his profession, he tugged at his scarf and said, ‘Thomas Taylor, at your service. Not been here before, I take it?’

‘A few days. My friend and I’ – Cora gestured towards Martha, who stood a little distance away in the shadow of her umbrella, stiff with disapproval – ‘Are staying on awhile, so I thought maybe I’d better say hello.’ Cora and the cripple both examined this statement for logic, and finding none let it pass.

‘You’ve probably come about the earthquake,’ said Taylor, gesturing behind him to the ruins. He gave the appearance of a lecturer taking a last look at his notes, and Cora – always ready to be educated – indicated that she had. ‘Could you enlighten us?’ she said: ‘If you have the time.’

It had come (he said) eight years back, by his reckoning, at eighteen minutes past nine precisely. It had been as fair an April morning as any could remember, which later was counted a blessing, since most were out-of-doors. The Essex earth had bucked as if trying to shake off all its towns and villages; for twenty seconds, no more, a series of convulsions that paused once as if a breath were being drawn and then began again. Out in the estuaries of the Colne and the Blackwater, the sea had gathered into foaming waves which ransacked the shore and reduced every vessel on the water to splinters. Langenhoe Church, known to be haunted, was shaken almost to bits, and the villages of Wivenhoe and Abberton were hardly more than rubble. They felt it over in Belgium, where teacups were knocked from the table; here in Essex a boy left sleeping in a cot beneath the table was crushed by falling mortar, and a man cleaning the face of the town hall clock was knocked from a ladder and his arm broke clean off. Over in Maldon they thought someone had set dynamite to terrorise the town and ran screaming in the streets, and Virley Church was beyond repair and had no congregants but foxes, no pews but beds of nettle. In the orchards the apple trees lost their blossom and grew no fruit that year.

Come to think of it, thought Cora, she did recall the headlines, which had been a touch amused (to think that modest little Essex, with barely a pleat in its landscape, should have shuddered and broken!). ‘Extraordinary!’ she said, delighted: ‘It’s all Paleozoic rock under our feet, this part of the world: to think of it, laid down five hundred million years before, shrugging its shoulders and bringing down the steeples on the churches!’

‘I don’t know about that,’ said Taylor, exchanging a glance with Martha which had in it a degree of understanding. ‘At any rate, Colchester did badly, as you see, though no lives lost.’ He gestured again with his thumb to the gaping ruin, and said ‘If you’re minded to go in step careful, and keep your eyes skinned for my legs, on account of them being not fifteen yards away.’ He tugged at the fabric of his trousers, and tucked the empty cloth closer; Cora, whose pity was very near the surface, bent and with a hand on his shoulder said: ‘I’m so sorry to have been the cause of your remembering – though probably you never forget it, and I’m sorry for that, too.’ She reached for her purse, wondering how to convey that it was not done in the spirit of alms, but of payment.

‘Well now,’ said Taylor, taking a coin, and managing to do so with the air of having done her a favour, ‘There’s more!’ The lecturer’s manner departed, and he took on the appearance of a showman. ‘I daresay you’ve heard tell of the Essex Serpent, which once was the terror of Henham and Wormingford, and has been seen again?’ Delighted, Cora said that she had not. ‘Ah,’ said Taylor, growing mournful, ‘I wonder if I ought not to trouble you, what with ladies being of a fragile disposition.’ He eyed his visitor, and evidently concluded that no woman in such a coat could be frightened by mere monsters. ‘So then: in 1669 it was, with the son of the traitor king on the throne, a man could scarcely walk a mile before coming up against a warning pinned to an oak or a gatepost. STRANGE NEWS, they’d say, of a monstrous serpent with eyes like a sheep, come out of the Essex waters and up to the birch woods and commons!’ He buffed the coin to brightness on his sleeve. ‘Those were the years of the Essex Serpent, be it scale and sinew, or wood and canvas, or little but the ravings of madmen; children were kept from the banks of the river and fishermen wished for a better trade! Then it was gone as soon as it came, and for nigh on two hundred years we had neither hide nor hair of it ’til the quake came and something was shook loose down there under the water – something was set free! A great creeping thing, as they tell it, more dragon than serpent, as content on land as in water, that suns its wings on a fair day. The first man as saw it up by Point Clear lost his reason and never found it again and died in the asylum not six months back, leaving behind a dozen drawings he made with bits of charcoal from the grate …’

‘Strange news!’ said Cora. ‘And stranger things in heaven and earth … tell me: was any picture ever taken of it – did anyone think to make a report?’

‘None that I know of.’ He shrugged. ‘Can’t say as I put much store on it myself. Essex folk are over-keen on this sort of thing, what with the Chelmsford witches, and Black Shuck doing the rounds when he’s tired of Suffolk flesh.’ He surveyed them a while, and appeared to grow suddenly weary of their company. He put the coin in his pocket, and patted it twice. ‘Well then, I’ve made my living today, and more besides, and I’ll be fetched home soon to a good meal. Besides’ – he looked wryly at Martha, whose impatience shivered in the spokes of her umbrella – ‘I think you’d best be off wherever you’re going, though mind the cracks in the pavements, as my daughter’d tell you, since you never know what’s between.’ He waved them away with a grand gesture that would have sat well on a statesman dismissing a secretary, and hearing a young couple laughing through the wet air turned away and assembled his expression of pleading.

‘Somewhere in there,’ said Cora, returning to Martha’s side, ‘All in the rubble and dust, there’s a pair of his shoes and probably the bones of the legs he’s lost …’

‘I don’t believe a word of it: look, the lights are coming on, and it’s past five. We should get back and see to Frankie.’ This was true: they’d left Francis in bed, wrapped tight and rigid as a mummy, tended to by a landlord who’d raised three sons of his own and thought Cora’s a docile thing whose cold could be drowned by soup. Francis, wrong-footed to encounter a man who viewed him not only without suspicion but barely with any interest, had consented to a brusque kindliness his mother could never have provided. He’d been seen to give the landlord one of his treasures (a piece of iron pyrite which he half-hoped would be mistaken for gold), and had taken to reading Sherlock Holmes stories. Cora wondered how it was possible to feel anxious for her son (when ill his face grew luminous and girlish and broke her heart) yet relieved at their enforced separation. Living in those two small rooms had brought all his little rituals to her door, and his indifference to her anger or warmth could not be ignored; her day of freedom by the castle keep and the bare willows down by the River Colne had been a delight, and she was loath to end it. Martha, who had a trick of voicing Cora’s thoughts even before they’d formed, said: ‘But look, your coat’s dragging in puddles and your hair’s wet through: let’s find a cafe and wait for the rain to pass.’ She nodded towards a dripping awning beneath which a pair of windows bulged with cakes.

Cora said, tentatively: ‘Besides, he’ll be sleeping by now, don’t you think? And he’s so cross when he’s woken …’ Complicit, they headed across wet pavements made bright by a low sun, and had reached the awning’s shade when Cora heard a familiar voice.

‘Mrs Seaborne, I declare!’ She peered into the dim street and said, ‘Has someone seen us?’

Martha, resentful of further intruders on their time, tugged at the strap of her bag. ‘Who can know you here? We’ve been here less than a week: can’t you ever just be overlooked?’

The voice came again – ‘Cora Seaborne, as I live and breathe and have my being!’ – and with a cry of delight she plunged onto the pavement and raised her arm. ‘Charles! Come over! Come over and see me!’ Coming towards her beneath a pair of umbrellas so large they commandeered the street, Charles and Katherine Ambrose were an unlikely sight. Once a colleague of Michael Seaborne – undertaking one of the many Whitehall roles Cora was never able to fathom, and which seemed to entail twice the politician’s power with none of the responsibility – Charles had become a regular feature of Foulis Street life. The brightness of his waistcoats, and his insatiable appetite for all things, shielded a shrewdness which went undetected by most; that Cora had picked it out on first meeting had made him more or less her slave. Perhaps surprisingly, he was entirely devoted to his wife, who was diminutive where he was large, and who found him ceaselessly amusing. The pair of them were generous, benevolent, and interested in the lives of others; when they’d insisted that no doctor but Garrett would do for the ailing Seaborne, it had seemed impossible to refuse.

Cora gave her companion’s waist a mollifying squeeze. ‘You know I’d rather it was just you and me and our books. But it’s Charles and Katherine Ambrose: you met them, and liked them – no: really, you did! –
Charles!
’ Cora made a deep ironic curtsey, which might have been elegant if the toe she extended hadn’t been concealed in a man’s boot mottled with mud. ‘You know Martha, of course?’ Beside her, Martha unfurled to her full height and gave an unwelcoming nod. ‘And Katherine, too – I’d no idea you knew England extended past Palmer’s Green: are you lost? Can I lend you my map?’ Charles Ambrose looked with disgust at the muddy boot, and the Harris tweed coat which was cut too broad across the shoulders, and the strong hands with their bitten nails.