The Essex Serpent Read online

  ‘Yes – but Daddy, where have you been? What have you done to your face? Do you need a stitch?’ (This said eagerly, since Joanna had a private longing to wield the surgeon’s knife.)

  ‘Never mind that: why is John crying, and he as old as the hills!’ Will tightened his hold on the boy, who swallowed the last of his sobs. ‘As for me: I have been out rescuing sheep, and frightening ladies, and I must say’ – they’d reached the chequered garden path, and the borders where snowdrops gleamed in the dark – ‘that I haven’t enjoyed myself so much in a long time. Stella! We’re home, and we need you!’

  MARCH

  Stella Ransome

  All Saints Rectory

  Aldwinter

  11th March

  My dear Mrs Seaborne –

  I write in the hope that a note from me won’t seem a note from a stranger, since Charles Ambrose assures me you’re expecting to hear from the Ransome family, of Aldwinter, Essex – and behold: here we are!

  But first, I hope you will accept the most sincere condolences from my husband and myself on your recent bereavement. We hear little of London, and yet Mr Seaborne’s name reached us via Charles, and sometimes even in The Times! We know him to have been a man greatly admired, and I’m sure greatly loved. You have been in our prayers, and most of all mine, as I think I can imagine best a wife’s grief at her husband’s loss.

  And now: to the matter at hand. Charles and Katherine Ambrose will be here next Saturday for supper, and we would be delighted beyond measure if you would join us. I understand you are accompanied by your son, and by a companion of whom Charles speaks very fondly, and we would be pleased to meet them also. There is no occasion to be marked, only the chance to see old friends and make new ones.

  Our address is as you see it, and we are easily reached from Colchester: I’m afraid there’s no train, but it’s a pleasant enough journey by cab. You must stay with us, of course: we have room, and you will not want to travel home so late. I will await your response, and in the meantime plan what dainty dishes I can set before a woman with London tastes!

  Yours very sincerely,

  STELLA RANSOME

  PS – As you see, I could not resist sending you a primrose, though I was too impatient to press it well, and it has stained the page. I never could learn to bide my time! – S.

  1

  Dr Luke Garrett surveyed his room at the George Hotel, Colchester, with grudging pleasure: it was clear that Spencer had spared no expense. His fingertip, having been swept across each surface, remained spotless. ‘I could perform an appendectomy in here,’ Luke said, with what his friend rightly took to be an air of wishing disease on passers-by. The cleanliness of the room established, Garrett flicked open the brass fastenings of his suitcase and withdrew a pair of crumpled shirts, several books with pages folded down, and a sheaf of paper. This he set on the dressing-table, reverently surmounted with a white envelope on which his name was written in a neat decisive hand.

  ‘She’s expecting us?’ Spencer nodded at the envelope: he knew Cora’s handwriting well, since his friend had lately been in the habit of passing him each of her letters, the better to examine the meaning behind each phrase.

  ‘Expecting? Expecting! I wouldn’t have come, left to my own devices – I’ve far too much to do. Not to put too fine a point on it, Spencer, the woman begged. “I miss you, dear” she said’ – he gave his wolfish grin, and above it his black eyes shone – ‘“I miss you, dear”!’

  ‘Will we see her tonight?’ Spencer said this carelessly. He had motives of his own for this display of impatience, but having successfully concealed them even from Garrett’s forensic gaze was unwilling to show them. Too absorbed in re-reading Cora’s letter (mouthing dear! to himself twice), his friend noticed nothing, only said, ‘Yes: they’re at the Red Lion; we’ll see them at eight – at eight on the dot, if I know Cora, which I do.’

  ‘Then I will go for a walk. It’s too fine a day to be cooped up, and I want to see the castle. They say you can still see ruins from the Essex earthquake – will you come?’

  ‘Certainly not. I hate walking. Besides, I have here a report of a Scottish surgeon who is convinced he can relieve paralysis by the exertion of pressure on the spinal column – I think often, you know, that I would have been better off in Edinburgh than in London: there is such courage there among medical men, and the miserable climate suits me …’ Spencer and the castle already forgotten, Garrett sat cross-legged on the bed and spread before him a dozen sheets of fine black type punctuated with drawings of vertebrae. Spencer, a little relieved to be granted an afternoon’s solitude, buttoned up his coat, and left.

  The George Hotel was a fine white inn that overlooked the broad High Street. The proprietors plainly fancied their position as the best establishment in town, and displayed these credentials by means of a thicket of hanging-baskets in which daffodils and primroses jostled bad-temperedly for space. The day was fine, as if the sky regretted the slow release of winter’s grip: the high clouds hurried on to pressing business in another town. Ahead, the spire of St Nicholas glittered, and there was a great deal of birdsong. Spencer, who could differentiate between a sparrow and a magpie only if pressed, found himself bewildered and delighted by it, and by the whole merry town with bright striped awnings above the pavements and cherry blossom speckling the sleeve of his coat. When he encountered a ruined house, and at its threshold a crippled man seated like a sentinel off-guard, this too seemed to him a charming sight: the house displayed an interior gone over to ivy and saplings of oak, and the cripple had taken off his coat to bask like a cat in eddies of light.

  The embarrassment of his riches made Spencer absurdly generous, and wanting to share a little of the day’s joy he emptied his pockets into the man’s upturned hat. The weight of the coins dented the shabby felt; the man raised it level with his eyes, peering as if suspecting a practical joke, then, evidently satisfied, bared a row of superb teeth in a grin. ‘Looks like I can knock off for the day then, don’t it?’ He reached behind his stone perch for a low wooden trolley on four iron wheels, and with a practised movement swung himself into it, and drawing on a pair of leather gauntlets to protect his palms propelled himself deftly towards the pavement. The trolley, Spencer saw, was extremely well-made, with designs of knot-work cut into it: a Celtic warrior felled in battle might have been content with such a vehicle, so that whatever natural pity he might have felt for the man’s infirmity seemed an affront.

  ‘Fancy a look, then?’ With a lift of his chin the man indicated the gaping ruin of the house behind, conveying the impression that he held authority over its broken walls. ‘Worst of the earthquake, this, and a danger to life and limb if you ask me, which no-one ever does; but there’s such a wrangling in the law courts they can’t settle who’s to foot the bill, and meanwhile there’s barn owls in the dining room.’ Negotiating a pair of fallen marble slabs on which the remains of Roman lettering were gathering moss, the man led Spencer to the threshold of the house. Much of the front wall had sheared away, leaving the rooms and staircases exposed. Nothing was left but what could not be reached or looted: the lower floors were empty, save for immense carpets in which violets had seeded themselves and grew dense as a mattress, concealing coy blue flowers. On the upper levels paintings and trinkets remained: something silver glinted on the windowsill and at the head of the staircase a chandelier’s crystal drops might have been polished that morning for the night’s events.

  ‘Quite a sight, isn’t it? Look on my works ye mighty and despair, and what have you.’

  ‘You ought really to sell tickets at the door,’ said Spencer, hoping to spot the barn owl: ‘Surely every passer-by wants a look.’

  ‘They do, Mr Spencer: but they are not always given it.’ This voice was not a man’s, soft with Essex vowels and coming from below, but was that of a woman, and a London one at that. Spencer would’ve known it anywhere, and when he turned away from the ruin he knew he was blushing, but could not prevent i
t.

  ‘Martha. You are here.’

  ‘And so, I see, are you; and you’ve met my old friend?’ Martha reached down, smiling, and grasped the cripple’s hand. He shook it, and shook also his well-filled hat – ‘Enough here for a leg or two, I reckon!’; then with a gesture of farewell began to wheel himself home.

  ‘There is no barn owl. He only says it to please the tourists.’

  ‘Well: it certainly pleased me.’

  ‘Everything pleases you, Spencer!’ She wore a blue jacket, and over her shoulder hung a leather bag from which protruded several peacock’s feathers. In her left hand she held a white magazine, and on it Spencer saw An Englishwoman’s Review of Social and Industrial Questions printed in elaborate black type. Trying his hand at gallantry, he said, ‘Well: seeing you pleases me, at least,’ but of all women Martha was the last to approve such a ploy. She raised an eyebrow, and rolling up the magazine struck him on the arm.

  ‘Enough of all that: come and see Cora. She’ll be so glad you came. The Imp is with you, I suppose?’

  ‘He is reading up on paralysis, and what to do about it, but he’ll join us later.’

  ‘Good: I want to speak to you about something’ – she shook the magazine – ‘and it is impossible to be serious about anything with that man in the room. How was the journey?’

  ‘A child cried from Liverpool Street to Chelmsford, and only stopped when Garrett told him he’d lose all the water from his body, shrivel up, and be dead by Manningtree.’

  Martha snorted. ‘How either you or Cora can stand his company is a mystery to me. Is this your hotel?’ She surveyed the pale façade of the George, and its hanging-baskets. ‘We’re at the Red Lion, a little further on: I didn’t think we’d stay so long, only Francis has taken a liking to the landlord, and so life has been calm of late. Feathers are the latest fad: you’d think he was trying to make himself a pair of wings, though there’s not much angelic about that boy.’

  ‘And Cora – is she well?’

  ‘I’ve never known her happier, though sometimes she remembers she ought not to be, and puts on her black dress, and sits in the window looking like an artist’s idea of grief.’ They passed a flower-seller closing her stall for the night, and selling daffodils by the armful for a penny. Retrieving the last coin or two from his pockets, Spencer relieved her of her stock, and clasping a dozen bunches of the yellow blooms said: ‘Let’s take spring to Cora. We’ll fill up her rooms and she’ll forget she was ever sad about anything.’ He glanced quickly at his companion, afraid he’d spoken out of turn: perhaps it was best to keep up the pretence of a decent woman decently mourning.

  But Martha said, smiling, ‘She’ll thank you for it, too; all month she’s been going out walking looking for signs of spring, and coming home muddy and bad-tempered; then one day there it was, on the stroke of noon, as if someone had summoned it.’

  ‘And has Essex yielded any fossils? I saw in the papers some new species was unearthed up on the Norfolk coast after a winter storm: sometimes I think we must be walking on shoals of bodies without realising it and all the earth’s a graveyard.’ Spencer, who rarely voiced his flights of whimsy, flushed a little and prepared for one of Martha’s parries, but none came.

  ‘A toadstone or two, she says, but nothing more. But she has high hopes for the Essex Serpent – look: here we are.’ A little distance on, Spencer saw a timber-framed inn from which hung an iron sign emblazoned with a red lion rampant.

  ‘The Essex Serpent?’ said Spencer, glancing down as if expecting to see an adder on the pavement.

  ‘It’s all she talks about these days – didn’t she write to the Imp, and tell him? Some legend kept going by village idiots, about a winged snake seen coming out of the estuary and menacing villages on the coast. She’s got it into her head it’s one of these dinosaurs they say might’ve survived extinction – did you ever hear the like?’ They’d reached the threshold of the inn, and saw through its thick mottled panes of glass a fire in the hearth. There was a strong scent of spilled beer, and a joint roasting somewhere out of sight. ‘What can you expect, of poor country folk who can’t read or write?’ Her Londoner’s contempt was magnificent, taking in the spire of St Nicholas, and the paltriness of the earthquake, and the Red Lion, and everyone in it. ‘But Cora has a hive of bees in her bonnet: she says it’s likely a living fossil – she will tell you the names for them: I can never remember – and she’s determined to seek it out.’

  ‘Garrett always says she’ll not rest easy until her name’s on the wall in the British Museum,’ said Spencer. ‘I can believe it might happen, too.’

  At the doctor’s name Martha snorted, and pushed open the door. ‘Come up to our rooms, and see Francis: he’ll remember you, and won’t mind your coming.’

  Luke, arriving late having attempted to replicate a human vertebra in papier-mâché, found his friends seated on a thinning rug, their clothes studded all over with feathers. In a window-seat Martha turned the pages of a magazine, and watched Francis silently threading feathers from gulls and crows through the weave of Spencer’s coat until he looked like an angel dismayed by its fall. Cora had come off relatively lightly, with a peacock plume sticking up from the back of her dress and the contents of a pillow dusting her shoulders. No-one noticed the Imp arrive, so that he turned and re-entered noisily – ‘What is going on? Have I come to the insane asylum? Where are my wings then, or must I be earth-bound – Cora, I have brought you books. Spencer, get me something to drink – you have something on your coat.’

  Cora, giving a little yell of delight, leaped up and kissed the newcomer on each cheek, holding him at arm’s length: ‘You’ve come! Have you grown? Half an inch at – no that was cruel, I’m sorry, only you’re late, you know. Frankie, say hello (Francis has a new hobby as you see, and we’re all being very patient about it). You remember Luke?’ The boy did not look up, but sensing a change of air to which he had not agreed began silently to retrieve each fallen feather from the carpet, counting in reverse.

  ‘Three hundred and seventy-six – three hundred and seventy-five – three hundred and seventy-four …’

  ‘Now our play is ended,’ said Cora ruefully, ‘Though he’ll be quiet enough now so long as he reaches one …’

  ‘You look dreadful,’ said Luke, who would’ve liked to touch one by one the freckles newly arrived on her forehead. ‘Don’t you brush your hair out in the sticks? Your hands are dirty. And what are you wearing?’

  ‘I’ve freed myself from the obligation to try and be beautiful,’ said Cora: ‘And I was never more happy. I can’t remember when I last looked in the mirror –’

  ‘Yesterday,’ said Martha. ‘You were admiring your nose. Good evening, Dr Garrett.’

  This was said with so penetrating a chill Luke shivered, and might’ve attempted a wounding response if the landlord had not arrived, and with an admirable refusal to acknowledge the feather-strewn room and the chanting boy left a tray of beer upon the sideboard. This was followed by a platter of cheese and cold beef marbled with yellow fat, and a plaited white loaf, and a dish of pale butter sprinkled with salt, and lastly a cake studded with cherries and giving off the scent of brandy; and such was the impossibility of maintaining a bad temper in the presence of the feast that Luke gave Martha the sweetest smile he could manage, and tossed her a green apple.

  Spencer, sitting beside Martha on the window-seat to watch the passers-by on the wet black pavements below, took up her magazine and said, ‘You were going to tell me about this – may I see – what’ve you been reading?’ He leafed through the booklet, which contained bewildering statistics on London’s over-population, and the catastrophic consequences of urban clearance.

  Martha surveyed him with the temporary warmth of wine. Truth be told, he roused in her a kind of reflexive loathing which took an effort to suppress. Certainly he seemed kindly enough, and gentle; she’d seen him make attempts with Francis no other visitor had ever done (all those swift games of chess endin
g in Spencer’s defeat!), and she admired his efforts to keep the Imp in check. More – and most importantly – he treated Cora with a courteous friendship which never once transgressed into attempts to know her any better than he ought. But she saw his wealth and privilege coat him like furs. What little she knew of his circumstances (the possession of more property than he could find use for – the liberty to train in medicine as a kind of hobby while women contented themselves with bedpans and broth) ranked him among those she had all her life counted as the enemy.

  Martha’s socialism was no less ingrained than any inherited faith still clung to past childhood fervour. Community halls and picket lines were her temples, and Annie Besant and Eleanor Marx stood at the altar; she had no hymn book but the fury of folk songs setting English suffering to English melody. In the kitchen of their Whitechapel rooms her father – hands reddened with brick dust, the whorls of his fingertips worn smooth – counted out his wages and set aside his Union fees, and in his careful handwriting joined the petitioning of Parliament for a ten-hour limit on the working day. Her mother – who’d once stitched stoles and copes with golden crosses, and pelicans pecking out their hearts – cut cloth for banners held high above the picket line, and eked out the household budget to take beef soup to the striking match-girls at Bryant and May. ‘All that is solid melts into air,’ her father had said, reverently reciting his apostle’s creed: ‘And all that is holy is profaned! Martha, don’t bow your head to the way things are and always were – whole empires are brought down by nothing but ivy and time.’ He washed his shirts in the small tin bath – the water came out red – he sang as he wrung the linen dry: ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the Englishman?’ When Martha walked from Limehouse to Covent Garden she saw not high windows and Doric columns, but the labourers toiling behind them. It seemed to her that the city’s bricks were red with the blood of its citizens, its mortar pale with the dust of their bones; that deep in its foundations women and children lay head-to-toe in buried ranks, bearing up the city on their backs.