The Essex Serpent (27 page)

‘It’s not surprising to me.’ Cora prised the conker from its shell and rolled it between her palms. ‘Did you really think because you loved
here
you couldn’t love
there
? Poor Will – poor boy! – did you think you had so little of it? Look – should I boil it, bake it, or pickle it in vinegar?’ She made as if to throw it at him, but he’d turned away and moved a step or two above her.

‘It’s like talking to a child,’ he said, exasperated: ‘I know what you think of me – secretly, even secret from yourself – that I’m a God-addled half-wit fallen miles behind you, as if you’ve evolved past me!’ She surveyed him sombrely, and (he thought) with amusement very faintly at the corner of her mouth, and it made him press home his point more cruelly than he meant: ‘Look at you! Whichever Cora you are – the one in silk and diamonds or the one who wears clothes Cracknell would’ve thrown away; the one always laughing at us or the one vowing love to anyone who’ll listen – you wall yourself away because you know as well as I do you’ve almost run through your youth without ever having been loved as you should have been –’

‘Stop it,’ Cora said. All the intimacy she’d sought by letter was unbearable out there under the black forest canopy; she wanted to be back in their safe territory of ink and paper and not here, where her colour rose and she thought she could smell, above the sweetness of a distant fire, the scent of his body under his shirt. It was indecent – he was at his best sealed in an envelope – that he was so unavoidably a thing of blood and bones made it impossible to ignore the strong pulse beating in her neck – ‘Come down,’ she said: ‘Come back – don’t fight with me. Haven’t we had enough of that?’ A little ashamed, he stooped beside a chestnut tree, rooting among fallen leaves for conkers, handing them to her one by one.

‘I wish we were children!’ said Cora, closing her fingers over them, remembering how once they’d been treasures to be bartered and prized. She came closer – she sat beside him on the moss – ‘Why can we not be like children, and play together …’

‘Because you’re not innocent!’ said Will – there was a strange vertiginous feeling, as if what they were saying had flung them high up and they’d not yet fallen: ‘You are not innocent, and nor am I – you play at it – you fend me off –’ He tugged at her sleeve, a little rough – ‘d’you think because you wear a man’s coat I might forget what you are?’

‘And do you think I do it for
you
?’ she said. ‘I forget I’m a woman – I set it aside. God knows I’m no mother and was never much of a wife … d’you think I should torture myself with high-heeled shoes and paint out my freckles so you’re kept on your guard against me?’

‘No – I think you’re guarding against yourself; you told me once you’d like to be nothing but an intellect, disembodied, untroubled by your own flesh and blood –’

‘I would, I would! I despise it – my body only ever betrayed me: I don’t live in it, I live up here, in my mind and words …’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes, I know, yes: but here you are too,
here
,’ and moving aside the folds of her coat he tugged her shirt where it was tucked at the waist, in the place where once he’d touched her and been disgraced by it. But the disgrace this time kept its distance: it seemed to him that to keep apart from her now would be obscene; how could it be possible to seek out each fold and turn of her mind, and not grow familiar with the particular patina of her skin, the scent and taste of it? Not to touch her now would be to breach a natural law. Back she lay against the soft green stair in the thickening dusk and fixed her eyes on his, unsurprised, daring him: he raised her shirt and there in the split between the black cloth of her clothes he found her soft belly, very white, marked with the silver lines her son had made; he kissed it once, and could not stop, and she rolled against him in delight.

The sun slid down – the forest closed about them – the copper on the pillars of the trees turned to verdigris. The gilded temple was gone, and in its place there was the scent of leaf mould and long grass dying, and windfall apples splitting on the path. She met his gaze then, levelly as she always had, and felt herself go rushing to meet him like a river in spate; ‘Please,’ she said, pulling at her skirt: ‘Please,’ and he heard it like a command. He found her easily, and his hand slipped and moved in her, and her bright head drooped, and she was silent. He showed her his hand, and how she gleamed there; he put a forefinger to his mouth and hers, and they had an equal share.

6

Later that same night, hardly five miles distant, Luke Garrett walked alone beside barley fields harvested white. He’d taken it into his head to walk the River Colne, setting out in that mean time before dawn when even the lightest burden is intolerable and the prospect of sunrise laughably remote.

Though the moon had not yet set, the sky in the east was stained with light and the fields gave rise to mist. In places it thickened into scraps coming at him as he walked; they breathed wetly on his cheek then dissipated like sighs. Some time back he’d lost the Colne and neither knew nor cared where he might pitch up: if he could, he’d have walked clean out of his own skin. The Essex land to his London eye was uniform in its strangeness: all the fields were ploughed black, save here and there where barley stubble glowed pale under the setting moon, and the low hedges seethed with life. The ranks of oaks were sturdy watchmen surveying him as he passed: he was an imposter.

He came in time to an incline where grass grew thick, from which it was possible to see out across a modest rise-and-fall to a village drowsing in the hollow, and here he rested against an oak. By disease or bad luck it had shed its leaves early, and in among the branches mistletoe showed vivid green even in that murky light. He supposed another man might look up and think of mouths kissed under Christmas sprigs, but he knew it for a parasite, leaching all that was good from its host. Hanging in the bare branches the bundles looked, he thought, like nothing so much as tumours growing on a lung.

Having come to a halt he encountered many separate pains: his feet, unused to walking much beyond an urban mile or so, were rubbed raw against his boots; his knee was swelling where he’d stumbled, swearing, over a stile. Worst, he’d let his injured hand hang loosely by his side, so that blood collecting there throbbed against the healing cut. Where knife and scalpel had scored the palm, the flesh looked rather like a thin mouth stitched shut. ‘There was a crooked man,’ he said, ‘who walked a crooked mile.’

But he could hardly resent the pains, since they distracted from the frantic misery that had dogged him since his arrival from London with a good-for-nothing hand and in his pocket Cora’s letter. ‘How could you?’ she’d said, and he’d felt her anger, and understood it: how
could
he? Own nothing which is not beautiful or useful, she’d once said, and he was neither. A squat, glowering creature as near to being beast as man, and now (he pushed the thumb of his left hand into the damaged palm of his right, and reeled with the shock of it) useless to boot.

Since the day the knife had gone in, he’d woken each night drenched in sweat that collected in the hollow of his collar-bones and left his pillow damp.
Useless
, he’d say, beating a clenched fist against his temples until his head ached,
useless – useless
: all that gave him purpose had been taken in a matter of hours.

Sometimes he woke forgetting, and for fleeting seconds the world was spread out before him invitingly: there were his notebooks and his models of the heart with its chambers and pipes; there the letter Edward Burton wrote in the early days as he healed, and beside it an envelope into which Cora had put a piece of stone and an explanatory note in her schoolboy hand. Then he’d remember, and see it was all false as stage props, and the black curtain would fall. It was not melancholy he felt – he might have welcomed that, imagining it possible to enjoy a fading sadness that found companionship on memorial benches. Instead he veered between bitter fury and a curious deadening that dwindled his whole range of feeling to little but a shrug.

Under the oak in the coming dawn he grew calm.
If I am useless
, he thought,
can I not discard myself?
He had no duty to go on living – no obligation to walk a yard further. There was no God to censure or console: he answered to no intelligence but his own.

Over in the east a coral light struck the low cloud while Luke laid out reasons for living and found each insufficient. Once his ambition had driven him on through poverty and disgrace; now it belonged to a lost age. His mind was now muddied and slow, and besides: what use was it, matched to a mutilated hand? Once he might have let love for Cora sustain him, but he’d lost that too: her outrage hadn’t extinguished it, not quite, only turned it into something secret and furtive, of which he was ashamed. Would she grieve him? He supposed she would, and imagined her putting on one of those black dresses that made her skin so pale, and imagined William Ransome looking up from his books to see her there on the threshold, her lips parted a little, a tear gleaming on her cheek – oh certainly she’d grieve: she did it so well, after all.

He pictured his mother’s grief: well, she’d never yet had his photo on the mantelpiece – perhaps she’d enjoy finding a silver frame going cheap in the market, and tuck behind the glass a black curl of his baby hair. There was Martha, of course – the thought of her raised something like a smile: what they’d done on midsummer night had delighted them both, but it had also been only a poor substitute.
What a mess
, he thought:
what a mess we make
. If love were an archer someone had put out its eyes, and it went stumbling about, blindly letting loose its arrows, never meeting its mark.

No, there was no reason to continue – let the curtain fall when he chose it. He looked up at the branches of the oak, and they were sturdy enough for a gallows.

Just a moment longer there on the earth with the mist rising, then – since there was neither a hell to shun nor a heaven to gain he’d go out with the Essex clay under his nails and filled with the scent of morning. He drew in a breath and all the seasons were in it: spring greenness in the grass, and somewhere a dog-rose blooming; the secretive scent of fungus clinging to the oak, and underneath it all something sharper waiting in a promise of winter.

A vixen drew near and turned her gaslight eyes upon him, then drew back and sat surveying him a while. She cocked her head – considered his position on her territory – concluded he might stay, and losing interest nosed at the white plume on her breast. Then she grew avid and merry with hunger, and went down the hill in little leaps – sometimes spying something in the grass, jack-knifing with her forepaws crooked – and vanished down the incline with her bright brush held high. Luke felt a love for her then which almost made him cry out, and knew that no man ever had a better farewell.

7

At about the time Luke was choosing his own gallows from among the Essex oaks, Banks sat beside a fire high up the shingle, near the black bones of Leviathan, making marks in the logbook:
Visibility, poor; wind, north-easterly; high tide 6.23am
. For all that he’d witnessed the great silver fish lying beached on the saltings with its belly splitting open, Banks knew – with a certainty which had begun to obliterate all others – that the Essex Serpent had not been found. How could it, when he woke each night with its breath on his cheek – expected to wake and see himself enfolded in its wet black wing? When all of Aldwinter had celebrated, rolling out the cider-barrels and draining them dry, he’d sat at a distance, alone, thinking of his poor lost daughter and her coral-coloured hair. ‘All alone out there with the flotsam and jetsam,’ he’d said, ‘and the mark of the Serpent on her.’ Oh, there was something out there all right – he’d seen it, he’d marked it: black it was and ridged in places and its appetite unsatisfied. He drowned his sorrows in bad gin; it fended off the worst of the images that came in the night, but out there with his face to the rising tide they came vividly at him: the serpent in the Blackwater with a livid eye, its blunt snout, how it pawed at his daughter as she rolled dumbly in the shallows.

‘Did what I could to keep her dry,’ said Banks, growing tearful, looking about for a witness and finding none: she’d been born with a caul, had Naomi, and killed her mother coming out; and he’d done as any good sailor would and put a bit of caul in a pewter locket and she’d worn it every day to fend off water-sprites. ‘I did what I could,’ he said, and the fog rolled in, and dawdled by the fire.

He took a bottle from his pocket and drained it dry; the spirit stung his throat, and he doubled over coughing, and when he raised his head he saw surveying him placidly across the fire the black-haired son of that London woman who’d taken up with the rector.

‘Bit early for you, isn’t it?’ he said. The child had always unnerved him, with his steady gaze and his habit of patting his pockets over and over. If the beast was to take any child it ought to’ve been this one, whose presence raised all the hairs on his neck’s nape – who he’d once seen steal five blue sweets from behind the counter in the village store!

‘But isn’t it the same time for me as it is for you?’ said Francis Seaborne. ‘Did you see it?’

‘What are you on about – what do you want?’ said Banks, choosing to deny the serpent. ‘Nothing out there, lad, nothing to see.’

‘I don’t think you think that,’ said Francis, coming closer. ‘Because if you did, why would you be here and what are you writing in your book? Stands to reason.’

‘Visibility poor,’ said Banks, flapping the logbook at the boy. ‘And getting worse: I can hardly see you, never mind the Blackwater.’

‘I can,’ said the boy, and took a hand from his pocket to gesture out east where the fog banked up above the salt marsh. ‘My eyes are good. Over there. Can’t you see?’

‘Where’s your mother? Doesn’t she keep you indoors – keep back, won’t you – where did you go?’

Francis stepped away from the fire into the white air, and for a time Banks was alone again; then a slender figure appeared from a little away to his left, saying again, ‘Didn’t you see it then? Can’t you hear?’

‘No – no, there’s nothing there,’ said Banks, coming to his feet, kicking salt shingle over the fire: ‘There’s nothing there and I’m going home – let go of my hand! Only one child ever held it and she’s gone and won’t be coming back!’

The cold hand in his had a strength out of all proportion to its fingers; the boy tugged at him, trying to draw him near the incoming tide, saying, ‘Look harder, look better, don’t you see it?’

Banks shook him off, growing afraid, not of what lay out there on the wet mud but of the child, who stared so implacably back at him. ‘I’m going home now,’ said Banks, and turned away – then there came from close by the sound of something moving. It was a curious, low, muffled sound, deadened by the thickening fog; it was like the slow grinding of a jawbone, or of something scrabbling for purchase on the shore. Then there was a groan – rather high-pitched, and ending on something like a squeal – and the thick pale air lifted in the wind, and Banks saw the long low curve of something dark, hunched, in places glistening smooth and in others uneven and rough. It shifted against the shingle, and there was the groaning again; Banks called out to the boy, but the fog enclosed him in a pale shroud and he saw nothing. The glowing embers of the fire beckoned him, and he ran towards it, stumbling in the mud and the high tussocks of marsh-grass; once he fell, and felt his kneecap shift under his skin; then he half-hobbled home. As he went, his heart lifted, despite the terror:
I was right – oh, but I was right!

Francis, meanwhile, held his ground. He assumed he was afraid, since his palms were wet and his breath was coming fast, but as far as he was concerned that was no reason to turn tail. He rarely thought of Cora – not out of contempt, but because she was a constant, and so seemed hardly worth troubling over. But he thought of her then – of how often she bent over a fragment of rock, and sketched it; of how she’d beckon him over and tell him the names of what she’d found. Perhaps he could do the same, here, or something like it: observe a phenomenon at the closest of quarters, and make a report, and show her. The idea satisfied him; he walked on, and beyond the pale curtain the sun rallied, and the fog began to thin. The wet mud glistened gold, and water began to run in rivulets towards the shingle; there again was the sound of grinding, and a dark shape shifting a few yards distant appeared as slowly as if it were just that moment being formed out of the air. Francis stepped forward. A low gust came from the east and whipped at the fog, and there was a bright clear moment in which he saw plainly what it was that had been cast up on the shore.

He numbered his feelings as accurately as any of his treasures: first it was relief he felt, as his breath slowed and his heart’s beating subsided; then disappointment; then hard on its heels came mirth. Laughter bubbled up in him and could not be suppressed; he had to ride it out like a coughing fit, or as if he were being sick. After a while the laughter died back, and he was himself again, drying his eyes with his sleeve, considering how best to proceed. What he’d seen was gone now – hidden behind a fresh bank of fog, or borne out again on the lapping tides – and it was important to settle on what he should do next. Certainly he ought to tell somebody, and it was Cora he thought of first. But no – he ought not to have been out-of-doors so early in the morning – he imagined her discarding his account in favour of explaining that he had done something wrong, and the idea was intolerable. Then he remembered Stella Ransome, and how he’d visited her in her blue bower, and how she’d let him touch her treasures, and how readily she’d understood that in his own pockets there’d been a bent coin, a fragment of gull’s egg, and the empty cup of an acorn. He’d grown so used to being greeted with bemusement and suspicion that her immediate affection earned her his absolute loyalty. He’d tell her what he’d seen, and she’d tell him what to do.