Authors: Sarah Perry
The Essex Serpent (33 page)
Cora Seaborne
11 Foulis St
London W1
Dear Will,
Here I am again in Foulis Street, and I am left alone.
Martha’s gone to Edward now – half-wife, and half-conspirator – but she’s still here, in the scent of lemon on my pillow and the way the plates are stacked. Frankie’s away at school, and he writes, which he never did before. His letters are short and his handwriting’s neat as newsprint, and he signs himself YOUR SON, FRANCIS, as if he thinks I might forget. Luke heals, though more for Spencer’s sake than mine. I hope I’ll see them all soon.
I go from room to room pulling dust-sheets from the furniture and put my hand on every chair and table. I live mostly in the kitchen, where the stove is always lit: I paint and write, and catalogue my Essex treasures. They’re poor things – an ammonite, bits of teeth, an oyster-shell perfectly white – but finders keepers: they’re mine.
I eat an egg for my supper and drink Guinness with it and read Brontë and Hardy, Dante and Keats, Henry James and Conan Doyle. I mark up the pages and look back and see I’ve underlined where I think you also might have got your pencil out; then in the margins I draw the Essex Serpent and give it good strong wings to fly by.
Solitude suits me. Sometimes I wear my old boots and my man’s coat and sometimes I put on silk, and no-one’s any the wiser, and certainly not me.
Yesterday I walked to Clerkenwell in the morning and stood by the iron grate where the Fleet flows, and listened, and imagined I heard the waters of all the rivers I have known – the head of the Fleet at Hampstead where I played when I was young, and the wide Thames, and the Blackwater, with its secrets that were hardly worth keeping.
Then it carried me in spate to the Essex shore, to all the marsh and shingle, and I tasted on my lips the salt air which is also like the flesh of oysters, and I felt my heart cleaving, as I felt it there in the dark wood on the green stair and as I feel it now: something severed, and something joined.
The sun on my back through the window is warm and I hear a chaffinch singing. I am torn and I am mended – I want everything and need nothing – I love you and I am content without you.
Even so, come quickly!
CORA SEABORNE
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I am indebted to a number of books for having opened the door to a Victorian age so like our own I am almost persuaded I remember it.
Matthew Sweet’s
Inventing the Victorians
(2002) challenges notions of a prudish era enslaved by religion and incomprehensible manners; rather, he shows us a nineteenth century of department stores, big brands, sexual appetites and a fascination for the strange.
An obscure book by an anonymous Essex rector,
Man’s Age in the World According to Holy Scripture and Science
(1865), suggests a clergy that did not see faith and reason as mutually exclusive. It amuses me to think of it on William Ransome’s shelves.
In
Victorian Homes
(1974) David Rubinstein collates contemporary accounts of housing crises, venal landlords, intolerable rents and political chicanery; they would not look out of place in tomorrow’s newspapers.
The Bitter Cry of Outcast London
(1883) was compiled by Rev. Andrew Mearns, and is readily available online. It draws spurious parallels between poverty and lack of moral virtue that may strike the reader as familiar from modern political rhetoric.
Those in the habit of picturing the Victorian woman as forever succumbing to fits of the vapours under the gaze of a bewhiskered husband can do no better than to read Rachel Holmes’s biography of Eleanor Marx (2013). In its preface the author says: ‘Feminism began in the 1870s, not the 1970s.’
In researching the treatment of tuberculosis – and in particular its effects on the mind – I am grateful to Helen Bynum, both in correspondence and in her book
Spitting Blood
(2012). Meanwhile Richard Barnett’s
The Sick Rose
(2014) shows the troubling beauty that can be found in sickness and suffering.
Roy Porter’s majestic work
The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present
(1999), his overview of surgical history
Blood and Guts
(2003), and Peter Jones’s
A Surgical Revolution
(2007), have all been invaluable in framing the mind and work of Dr Luke Garrett. Inaccuracies and elisions in the medical aspects of this novel – as in all others – are of course mine alone.
The nature of Stella Ransome’s
spes pthisica
was profoundly influenced by Maggie Nelson’s
Bluets
, an exquisite meditation on desire and suffering, filtered through a lens of blue.
Strange News Out of Essex
, the pamphlet alerting villagers at Henham-on-the-Mount to the presence of the Essex Serpent, is real. You may see both the 1669 original and Miller Christy’s 1885 facsimile at the British Library; a copy of the facsimile is also held in the library at Saffron Walden, Essex, where it was first printed. The titles of each of this book’s four parts are taken from the text of the pamphlet.
Mary Anning’s ‘sea-dragons’ are displayed in London’s Natural History Museum.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First and most loving thanks to my dear Rob, whose company is an inexhaustible supply of interest and charm, and who first told me about the legend of the Essex Serpent.
I’m profoundly grateful, as ever, to Hannah Westland and Jenny Hewson for their wisdom and support, and for their uncanny habit of knowing my mind better than I do: to work with them is a privilege and joy. My thanks also to Anna-Marie Fitzgerald, Flora Willis, Ruth Petrie, Emily Berry, Zoe Waldie and Lexie Hamblin, all of whom have done so much for me, and for this book.
Thank you to my family, who’ve been so kind to me, particularly to Ethan and Amelie, dauntless travellers through time and space. Thanks also to my three smallest muses: Dotty, Mary and Alice.
Thank you to Louisa Yates, my first reader and my tutor; to Helen Bynum, who was kind enough to advise me on aspects of TB; and to Helen Macdonald, for her guidance on matters floral and avian. Much of this book was drafted at Gladstone’s Library, where I think a piece of my shadow lives always at the same desk: thank you to all my friends there, particularly Peter Francis.
For their patience, friendship and wisdom, my love and thanks to Michelle Woolfenden, Tom Woolfenden, Sally Roe, Sally Craythorne, Holly O’Neill, Anna Mouser, Jon Windeatt, Ben Johncock, Ellie Eaton, Kate Jones and Stephen Crowe. I am endlessly grateful for the kindness and support shown to me by writers, many of whom I have admired for years: thank you especially to Sarah Waters, John Burnside, Sophie Hannah, Melissa Harrison, Katherine Angel and Vanessa Gebbie. To the women of the FOC, who were the first ever to hear me read from this book: my love.
I could not have written this book without the support of the Arts Council, and am profoundly grateful for their assistance, and for that of Sam Ruddock and Chris Gribble at the Norwich Writers’ Centre.
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