The Essex Serpent (29 page)

10

‘Bad morning for it,’ said Thomas Taylor, surveying the lamplit Colchester street. He held up the sleeve of his coat, and saw on every fibre a bead of moisture gleaming in the gaslight glow. The sea-fog was in its second day, and though the city was spared the dense and briny pall enclosing Aldwinter the streets nonetheless were queerly mute, and every now and then a passer-by stumbled on the curb or ran into the arms of a startled stranger. Behind him in the ruin, coils of mist moved across carpets and hung in empty grates, and fanciful guests at the Red Lion swore they’d seen a grey lady closing the curtains in the highest window.

Taylor was joined these days by an apprentice, who sat cross-legged on a slab of stone. He was an odd copper-headed lad, slight and silent, who soberly took instruction and, what’s more, on finer mornings turned out cheerful caricatures of passing tourists, who parted readily with their coins and often came back for more.

‘Can’t see a bloody thing,’ said the apprentice: ‘Nobody knows we’re here. We might as well go home.’

Taylor had found the child a month ago, curled up in what had once been the dining-room, with fallen masonry for a pillow. No amount of questioning on his part could establish where the child had come from, or where he was going: there was mention of a river, and having walked a good long way, and certainly there were sufficient blisters and bruises on foot and knee to suggest he’d had a journey, and a hard one at that. Taylor, wheeling himself this way and that on the threshold, had chivvied the lad out of the ruin with many an admonition on the dangers of trespass, then sent him over the road for two teas and as large a bacon sandwich as he thought he could manage. ‘I’ll not see that money again,’ he’d thought, watching the slight child walk away, trailing a wounded foot, but back he’d come, with a paper packet and two steaming mugs. ‘Newcomer, I take it?’ he’d said, watching the lad set about his breakfast with bites both dainty and determined, but received no reply. The meal and the tea did their work; the child accepted the cleanest of Taylor’s many blankets, and finding a scrap of carpet grudgingly conceded to be more or less safe slept for several hours. Taylor was delighted to discover that nothing plays so sweet a tune on the heart-strings as a sleeping child with a smudged cheek, and doubled his takings in an afternoon. Natural avarice vied with his own good heart: when the child woke, he tried once again to establish where he’d come from, and where his parents might be, and made faint reference to the local bobby. These lines of questioning were met respectively with silence and terror, so that Taylor felt quite justified in offering the boy a partnership in a thriving enterprise, together with full board and lodging. By way of demonstrating good faith he handed over a modest proportion of the day’s wages, which the lad surveyed in astonishment for some minutes before counting them carefully into his pocket.

‘I’ve got a daughter, mind you,’ said Taylor, reassuringly: ‘You won’t be expected to care for me, though a push of the old carriage wouldn’t go amiss, what with my hands getting arthritic around the knuckles. I daresay she’ll like to have you about, never having managed to fetch a family of her own. Fancy telling me your name? No? Well, if you don’t mind me calling you Ginger after an old tomcat of mine, we’ll get along nice enough.’ And they got along very nicely indeed, as it turned out: Taylor’s daughter had accepted worse eccentricities, and furthermore felt that given the loss of his limbs he should be permitted the occasional lapse in judgment. Ginger never quite developed what Taylor called the gift of the gab, but once provided with pencil and paper seemed content enough, if occasionally given to making troublesome sketches, frantically scribbled, that Taylor could never make out.

‘Might as well go home,’ the boy said, peering into the mist; but then there was the rattle and clamour of a group coming up the pavement from beneath the spire of St Nicholas, and Taylor readied himself: ‘It’s a bad businessman as shuts up shop on account of a bit of weather,’ he said, and rattled his cap. The group drew near, and he heard their voices –
Just for a few minutes to see how he’s doing, shall we?
and
James, don’t dawdle, we’ve a train to catch
and
I’m hungry and you promised you absolutely promised
…

‘If it’s not my old friends!’ said Taylor, glimpsing a scarlet frock-coat and the gleam of a brass-spiked umbrella swung high: ‘Mr Ambrose, ain’t ’t –’ but then there was the sound of a door opening and closing, and the party vanished one by one between the glowing windows of the George Hotel. ‘Damnitall, Ginger,’ he said, looking about for the boy, and not finding him: ‘A very open-handed gentleman that one – what is it, lad? Where’ve you gone?’ His apprentice had abandoned his post, silently and swiftly, and sat crouched behind the marble plinth, thrusting out his bottom lip in a failing effort to fend off tears.
Children!
thought Taylor, rolling his eyes heavenward, and dispensing a bar of chocolate: he’d’ve been much better off getting a dog.

‘Dear me,’ said Charles Ambrose, surveying Spencer and Luke Garrett. The former had a split severing his right eyebrow, which was held together with fine strips of plaster; the latter, besides his heavily bandaged right hand, was ashen-faced, and had grown thin, so that the heavy bones of his brow gave him more than ever a simian look. The men stood side by side, looking rather like schoolboys caught out in the aftermath of a prank. Katherine made motherly noises, and kissed each of their cheeks, whispering something sweetly to Luke, who coloured and turned away. They’d brought the children with them, who each in their way felt a certain heaviness in the air and did what they could to lighten it. ‘Got anything to eat?’ said John, scouring the room with a practised eye.

‘John, you are a pig,’ said Joanna: ‘Dr Garrett, how’s your hand? Can I look at it? I want to see the stitches. I’m going to be a doctor, you know. I’ve learned all the bones in my arm to show my dad when I get home:
humerus, ulna, radius
–’

‘Not an engineer, then,’ said Katherine, drawing the girl away from Luke, who’d not yet said anything, only flinched a little as if the girl had recited profanities and with a half-shamed reflex tried to put his wounded hand out of sight.

‘I’ve got a bit to make my mind up,’ said Joanna. ‘I can’t go to university for ages yet.’

‘Or at all, probably,’ said James Ransome, rather spitefully: since Jo’s sudden shift from dabbling in natural magic to dabbling (with what he felt was equal pointlessness) in the sciences, he’d felt himself deposed from his position as the family’s bright spark. ‘Look,’ he said, turning to Spencer, and taking a sheet of paper from his pocket: ‘I’ve designed a new sort of valve for a lavatory. I thought you could use them in your new houses. You can have it for free if you like,’ he added, feeling generous: he was not immune from Martha’s Marxist influence. ‘I’ll patent it once you’ve done the building work.’

‘That’s really very kind,’ said Spencer, scrutinising the plans, which were certainly sufficiently detailed to resemble every other blueprint he’d seen. Charles Ambrose caught his eye, with what was a look of almost paternal gratitude.

‘Heard from Martha, have you?’ said Charles, seating himself beside the fire while Katherine took Luke Garrett to one side and with gentle, inconsequential conversation tried to coax him out. Spencer coloured a little, as he always did at Martha’s name. ‘She’s written twice – she tells me Edward Burton and his mother stand to lose their home! The landlord has almost doubled the rent at a stroke – their neighbours are already turned out. And meanwhile we move so slowly! How good she is – to care so much about a man she barely knows.’

‘I’ve done what I could,’ said Charles, truthfully: where conscience and argument could not move him to push wholeheartedly for the Housing Bill to become bricks and mortar, the sight of Luke Garrett wounded in the gutter had. Nothing, he knew, could remedy the sudden curtailment of a life’s ambition, but at least they could see that it was not wholly a waste. ‘There’s enthusiasm in Parliament, but what counts for enthusiasm in the Commons would look very like laziness elsewhere.’

‘I wish I could give her good news,’ said Spencer, wringing his hands, and failing as ever to conceal the personal motive behind his philanthropy. His long, shy face coloured, and he cuffed at a thread of fine fair hair. Charles, who’d taken a keen liking to the young man for his good nature and his lack of guile, and who’d had his own correspondence with Martha, felt his heart contract with pity. Ought he to tell the lad which way the wind blew, and snuff out the candle he held? Probably he ought, though he was scarcely certain himself what that exasperating woman had in mind, and suspected she had further shocks in store. Glancing at the children to see they were occupied elsewhere he said, gently, ‘It’s not only goodness that makes Martha bother herself about Burton’s rent – she’s throwing her lot in with his, I’m told.’ The blow landed – Spencer stepped back as though to fend off another – he said, ‘Burton? But –’ He shook his head like a dazed dog, and Charles in his kindness tried his hand at levity. ‘We’re all as shocked as you are! Ten years Cora’s companion and she’d throw it all in for three rooms and a fish supper! No date set for a wedding, mind you, and one can hardly picture her in a veil –’

Spencer mouthed silently once or twice, as if trying and failing to form Martha’s name; he seemed diminished, and he looked perplexedly down at his own hands as if he couldn’t think where he should put them. Charles looked away, knowing the man would assemble himself in moments – there in the corner John had found a packet of crackers and ate them with contemplative dedication, while Joanna and James bickered pleasantly over who’d first found a drawing of a hip-joint corroded by disease. Turning back, he saw Spencer fastening his jacket, as if packing away whatever it was that had threatened to come out. ‘I’ll write to congratulate her,’ he said: ‘Nice, for once, to have good news.’ His eyes brightened with withheld tears, and flicked towards Luke, dully staring at the floor beside Katherine, who’d grown hopeless, and felt she could do nothing but insist that he eat.

‘Yes,’ said Charles, discomfited by his own pity, and urging on the hands of the clock: Aldwinter beckoned, and after that a return to a peaceful home. ‘Yes: it’s been a bad year all round, it’s true – but we’re only three-quarters through.’

Spencer – who thought thoroughly, if not fast – said, slowly, wringing his hands: ‘I had wondered why she was so troubled by the rise in Edward Burton’s rents – it seemed such a small thing, in the greater scheme … Luke, did you know? Have you heard?’ He turned towards his friend, with the old impulse of looking there first to be guided or mocked, but he was gone. ‘Well,’ said Spencer, turning back to Charles, forcibly bright: ‘Will you keep me posted?’ There was a shaking of hands, which conveyed a mingling of sympathy, resolve and embarrassment, and children were fetched from their various corners. They asked where Luke was, and asked again after his hand; John said he was sorry for eating him out of house and home and pointed out that if he’d been given the promised cake it wouldn’t’ve come to that, and he’d replace the packet of biscuits when his pocket money came through.

‘I am worried for our beloved Imp,’ said Katherine, taking Spencer’s hands, noting his pallor, putting it down to anxiety over his friend. ‘Where has he gone? It’s like the lights blew out.’ All her maternal instinct – sleepily roused by the Ransome children – fixed now on the surgeon, who’d sat beside her concealing his right hand beneath his left as if he’d once caught it out in a shameful act. ‘Does he eat? Is he drinking? Has he seen Cora?’

‘Early days yet,’ said Charles, helping his wife into her coat, buttoning it to the chin: he’d had more than his fair share of melancholy this past half-hour and was anxious to take the children home. ‘He’ll be himself again come Christmas – Spencer, come to lunch soon: we’ll go over the plans – Joanna, James, thank Mr Spencer for his time; you’ll see Dr Garrett again soon – goodbye, then!’ John stopped on the threshold and said, suddenly remembering, ‘We’re going to see Mummy!’ and flung his arms around his sister. ‘Do you think she’s better now? Will she still be pretty?’

Out on the High Street where the mist thinned under the low sun, Joanna thought of her mother, and felt her stomach turn. She’d missed her at first with the constant dull ache of an old injury; everything had been all awry. Katherine Ambrose had been kind, but not in the way Stella was kind; her room was comfortable, but not in the way Stella would’ve made it so. Dinner was served too early, on the wrong kind of plates; there were no African violets on the windowsill; Katherine laughed at the wrong things and did not laugh at the right ones; they had hot milk for supper, and not camomile tea. In those early days she had written to her mother daily, and blotted the ink more than once, and could not sleep at night without summoning into the kitchen downstairs a slight white-fair figure in a blue-bordered dress. But the pictures had faded fast: the letters that came back were fervently loving and oddly phrased and rarely touched on anything Joanna had said. Then they grew rare, and when they came were like little devotional leaflets handed out by women in thick brown stockings outside Oxford Street station, and they embarrassed her. Within weeks she became a Londoner, at ease on Tube and bus, able to look Harrods girls square in the eye, with strong opinions on where to buy notebooks and pencils. Aldwinter dwindled, became mud-bound and dull, the Essex Serpent a bumpkin beast too dim-witted to make its presence felt. She missed her father, but pleasantly, and felt it would do them both good: she’d read
Little Women
and felt that if Jo March could manage without for a while, certainly so could she. She had the hardness of youth, and it stood her in good stead, save when she caught sight of a fallen crow’s feather or a spider putting a fly in a winding-sheet; then she remembered her days of magic, and her red-haired companion, and would for a moment be floored with guilt and grief.

So it was that when she looked across to the ruin and saw the cripple there, and the ragged child cross-legged on a marble plinth bending over sheets of paper, she gasped, and shrugging out of her brother’s grasp dashed blindly across the road. She was bright-lit for a moment by the lights of a bus, then was gone behind a group of elderly tourists headed for the castle museum. ‘
Joanna!
’ called Katherine, feeling instantly sick, frantic on the kerb, trying both to reach the girl and prevent the boys from tumbling into the road. Charles, with an unshakeable belief that no Essex vehicle would contemplate muddying his scarlet coat, walked with measured calm to the ruin, and was astonished to find Joanna bellowing at the crippled man, and raining down blows on his shoulder. ‘What’ve you done to Naomi!’ she said: ‘Look what you’ve done to her beautiful hair!’