The Essex Serpent (5 page)

Katherine laughing said: ‘Charles, don’t tease: it’s just some game of Chinese whispers that went a little too far.’

Struggling with his jacket, Ambrose ignored his wife. ‘Now here’s a mystery of science for you – put that appalling hat down and listen! Three hundred years ago or thereabouts a dragon took up residence in Henham, twenty miles north-west of here. Ask at the library and they’ll show you the leaflets they nailed up round the town: eye-witness accounts from farmers, and a picture of some kind of leviathan with wings of leather and a toothy grin. It used to lie about basking in the sunshine and snapping its beak (its
beak
, mind you!), and no-one thought much of it until a boy got his leg broken. It vanished soon after, but the rumours never did. Every time crops failed or the sun eclipsed, or there was a plague of toads, someone somewhere would see the beast down on the riverbank, or lurking on the village green. And listen:
it’s back
!’ Charles looked triumphant, as if he’d personally spawned the beast for her benefit, so that Cora regretted diminishing his delight by saying, ‘Oh Charles, I know – I heard! We’ve just been treated to a lecture on the Essex Earthquake – haven’t we, Martha? – and how it shook something loose out there in the estuary. It’s all I can do to prevent myself from heading there now with notebook and camera and seeing it for myself!’

Katherine consoled her husband with a kiss, and said placidly, ‘Stella Ransome wrote and told us all about it. On New Year’s Day a local man was washed up on the Aldwinter saltings with his neck broken. Drunk, I should think, and got caught in the tide, but the whole village is up in arms. There’ve been several sightings just off the coast, and someone swore they saw it moving up the Blackwater at midnight with murder in its eyes. There, Charles, you were right: did you ever see anyone so excited?’

Cora shifted like a child in her seat, and pulled at a lock of hair. ‘Just like Mary Anning’s sea-dragon, all those years ago! Every six months a paper’s published setting out ways and places extinct animals might still live on – imagine, just imagine, if we were to encounter one in so dull a place as Essex! And imagine what it might mean: further evidence that it’s an ancient world we live in, that our debt is to natural progression, not some divinity –’

‘Well: I don’t know about that,’ said Charles, ‘But it will interest you, no doubt. And if you visit Aldwinter you must ask the Ransomes to show you their very own Essex serpent: one of the pews in the parish church has a winged snake making its way up the arm-rest, though since the latest sightings the good rector has been threatening to take it off with a chisel.’

‘That settles it,’ said Cora. ‘Write your letters, as many as you like: we’ll suffer the attentions of a hundred parsons for the sake of one sea-dragon, won’t we, Martha?’ Leaving Charles to attend to the bill, and dispense the immense tips with which he salved his conscience, the women stepped out onto the High Street. The rain had receded and the declining sun sent the shadow of St Nicholas across their path. Katherine gestured across to the broad white façade of her hotel. ‘I’ll go upstairs right away and find some headed paper, and warn them you’ll bring trouble, with your London ideas and your disgraceful coat.’ She plucked at Cora’s sleeve, and said: ‘Martha, can’t you do anything about this?’

Since half her pleasure in adopting such a ramshackle appearance lay in her friends’ disgust, Cora turned up her collar against the wind, tilted her hat like a boy, and stuck her thumbs in her belt. ‘The wonderful thing about being a widow is that, really, you’re not obliged to be much of a woman anymore – but here comes Charles, and I can tell by that look he’s in need of his evening drink. Thank you,
dear
both.’ She kissed them, and pressed Katherine’s hand much too hard. She’d have liked to say more, and explain that her years of marriage had so degraded her expectation of happiness that to sit cradling a teacup with no thought for what waited behind the curtains on Foulis Street seemed little short of miraculous. Smiling a farewell, she stepped briskly across the road towards the Red Lion, wondering if it was Francis’s face she saw at the window, and whether he might be pleased to see her.

3

The Reverend William Ransome, Rector of Aldwinter Parish, returned the letter to its envelope and propped it thoughtfully on the windowsill. He could never think of Charles Ambrose without a smile – the man had a limitless appetite for making friends, often (though certainly not always) out of genuine affection, and it was not at all surprising that he should have taken so fondly to a widow – but despite the smile the letter unsettled him. It was not precisely that newcomers were unwelcome, but one or two phrases (
society women
…
masculine intelligence …
) were calculated to trouble any diligent minister of the church. He could picture her as precisely as if her photograph had been included in the envelope: entering the lonely final stages of life bolstered by yards of taffeta and a half-baked enthusiasm for the new sciences. Her son was doubtless down from Oxford or Cambridge, and would bring with him some secret vice which would either thrill Colchester, or make him completely unsuited to civilised company. She probably lived on a diet of boiled potatoes and vinegar, hoping Byron’s diet might improve her silhouette, and would almost certainly have Anglo-Catholic tendencies, and deplore the absence of an ornate cross on the All Saints altar. In the space of five minutes he furnished her with an obnoxious lap-dog, a toadying companion with no flesh on her bones, and a squint.

His sole consolation was that Aldwinter was so resolutely unpicturesque a destination that he couldn’t imagine a society woman – even a bored and meddlesome widow – troubling to visit. Each spring a few ardent naturalists arrived to document the handful of seabirds that passed through the salt-marshes, but even these tended to be the drabbest species imaginable, their muddy feathers so indistinguishable from their surroundings they often passed without notice. Aldwinter had only one inn and two stores, and though its village green was occasionally considered the longest, if not the largest, in Essex, there was very little to recommend it even to its own inhabitants. Aside from the church’s curiosities – which were in truth a minor embarrassment to each successive incumbent – the only item of interest within five miles was the blackened hull of a clipper which could be seen when the Blackwater estuary lay at low tide, and which the village children decorated each harvest in a kind of pagan rite of which he dutifully disapproved. The train line terminated seven miles to the west, so that the farmers still relied on barges to carry oats and barley to the mills at St Osyth, and onward to London for sale. Perhaps the best that could be said for Aldwinter was that if it was neither wealthy nor beautiful, it was at least not particularly poor. It was not in the Essex character to succumb miserably to change and decay, and when John Barleycorn came under threat from cheap imports one or two tenant farmers had tried their hand at caraway and coriander, and shared the hire cost of a threshing-engine which not only increased their output to a startling degree, but gave the entire village a festive air as the children gathered to marvel at its size, its thunderous voice, and its gusts of steam.

Will felt an ill temper settle on him, and resisting the urge to toss the envelope onto the fire hid it behind a sheet of paper presented to him that morning by John, the youngest of his boys. It was a drawing which might’ve been of an alligator which had acquired a set of wings, but might equally have been a greatly enlarged caterpillar eating a moth. His mother was convinced it was the latest demonstration of his genius, but Will was unconvinced: he remembered his own childhood spent filling notebooks with engines and devices so complex he’d clean forget their purpose from one page to the next, but what had come of that?

And it was not only the threat of a probably harmless widow that dampened his mood, but the trouble that had lately settled on the parish. He surveyed John’s drawing, and this time took it for a winged sea-dragon approaching the village. Since the discovery on New Year’s morning of a drowned man down on the Blackwater marshes – naked, his head turned almost 180 degrees, a look of dread in his wide-open eyes – the Essex Serpent had ceased to be merely a device to keep children in check, and had begun to stalk the streets. On Friday nights in the White Hare drinkers claimed to have seen it, children playing on the saltings needed no urging to come home before dark, and no amount of reasoning on Will’s part could persuade them the drowned man was a victim of nothing more than drink and the tides.

He resolved to shake himself into a better frame of mind by walking a circuit of the parish – looking up a few folk as he went, quelling rumours of a sea-dragon wherever they arose. He took up his hat and coat, and there was whispering at the study door (the children were forbidden entry, but were not above trying the handle); he bellowed threats of bread-and-water for a fortnight, and made his habitual escape through the window.

Aldwinter that day was aptly named: frost lay on the hard earth, and black oaks clutched the pale sky. Will thrust his hands into his pockets, and set out. The red brick house behind had been new the day he’d first crossed the threshold, Stella coming slowly up the tiled pathway with her swollen belly cradled in her hands, and Joanna bringing up the rear trailing an invisible pet (species never established) on a length of string. Bay windows on both floors gave the impression of shallow turrets on either side of the front door, above which a fanlight in coloured glass caught an hour of light each afternoon. The largest house on the single street which passed through the village, leading south from Colchester and terminating at the small dock where a single barge now lay at anchor, it had a bright hard look entirely out of keeping with the rest of the village. He never thought there was much to recommend it save good insulation and a garden large enough to lose the children for hours at a stretch, but knew himself blessed: at least one of his peers endured a house which seemed to be sinking into the ground, and in which fungus the size of a man’s hand grew in the upper corners of the dining room.

Coming onto the street they called High Lane in deference to its slight elevation above sea level, Will bore left where it passed through common ground. A few sheep grazed listlessly under the Aldwinter oak, said to have once sheltered troops loyal to the traitor Charles, and which appeared so black it might have been burned to charcoal. Its lower branches had sunk beneath their own weight, and curving down thrust into the earth and after a while up again, so that in the spring the tree appeared surrounded by saplings. The down-curved branches formed seats where in summer lovers sat, and as Will passed a woman spread her red skirts and tossed out a few scraps for the birds. Beyond the oak, set back from the road behind a mossy wall, All Saints with its modest tower made its usual call on him: he ought, really, to sit there awhile on a bare cold pew and wait for a cooling of his temper, but someone might be waiting in the shadows for blessing or censure. In the year past, with the coming of the Essex Serpent (which he took to calling ‘the Trouble’, reluctant to christen a rumour), claims on his time had grown steadily greater. There was a feeling – mostly unspoken, at least in his presence – that they were all under judgment, doubtless well-deserved, from which only he could deliver them; but what comfort could he offer which would not also affirm their sudden fear? He could not do it, any more than he could say to John, who so often woke at night,
you and I will go together at midnight and slay the creature that lives under your bed
. What was built on deceit, however kindly done, would not withstand the first blow. And time enough for pulpit and pew tomorrow, when the sun rose on the Lord’s Day; for now he felt such an urgent desire to look out on the saltings and fill his self with the empty air that he almost ran.

On past the White Hare (‘My dear Mansfield, impossible for a man of the cloth, as I think you know!’) and past the neat small cottages with cyclamen on the windowsill (‘She’s very well thank you: the ’flu has gone, praise God …’) to the place where High Lane sloped down to the quay. Hardly that, of course, simply an inlet on the Blackwater bolstered with stonework that only ever seemed to last a season and was re-made each spring out of whatever fell to hand. Henry Banks, who racketed up and down the estuary in his barge, conveying who-knew-what to who-knew-where beneath his sacks of corn and barley, sat cross-legged on the deck mending his sails, his cold hands livid as the cloth. Seeing Will, he beckoned him over, saying ‘Still no sign of her, Reverend: still no sign,’ pulling dolefully at a hipflask. Some months had passed since Banks had lost a rowing-boat, and been refused his insurance on the grounds that he’d failed to make it fast to the quay, being probably drunk at the time. Banks felt the grievance deeply, and told anyone who’d listen that it had been stolen away in the night by oystermen from over Mersea way, and that he’d always been a truthful man, as Gracie would’ve witnessed, had she still been living, God rest her. ‘No? I’m sorry for it, Banks,’ said Will sincerely: ‘Nothing’s harder to bear than injustice. I’ll keep a lookout, mind.’ He refused a nip of rum, gesturing ruefully at his collar, and moved on – past the quay, the low water always to his right, where up ahead on a slight incline a row of bare ash trees were like so many grey feathers stuck in the ground. Beyond the ashes was the last Aldwinter house, which for as long as he could remember they’d called World’s End. Its bowed walls were bound together with moss and lichen, and over the years it had been added to so that by degrees of lean-to and annex it had doubled in size, and seemed a living thing feasting on the hard earth. The portion of land around it was fenced off on three sides; the fourth gave directly onto the grasses of the salt-marsh, and from there down to the pale stretch of mud riddled with creeks that glistened in the weak sun.

As Will approached World’s End, its sole resident was so nearly camouflaged against the walls of the house that when he emerged it was as if by a charm. Mr Cracknell seemed made of the same stuff as his home: his coat green as moss and quite as damp, and his beard reddish as the clay tiles that fell from the roof. He held in his right hand the small grey body of a mole, and in his left a folded knife. ‘Stand back a little, Reverend, for the good of your coat,’ he said, and Will obeyed, seeing that strung all along the fence were a dozen moles or more; but these were skinned, and their hides hung from their hindquarters like a shadow. Their pale paws, so like the hands of children, reached blindly for the earth. Will inspected the body nearest. ‘Quite a haul; and a penny apiece?’ Man’s dominion over animals notwithstanding, he’d never been able to shake a fondness for the little gentlemen in their velvet jackets, and wished the farmers’ war of attrition could be ended by kinder means.

‘A penny apiece, that’s right, and warm work besides.’ He laid the creature out, and deftly cut a loop at wrist and ankle.

‘Twenty years an Aldwinter man, and still your customs surprise me. Is there no better way of keeping moles from the crops than by scaring them off with their slaughtered brethren?’

Cracknell frowned. ‘Oh, I’ve a purpose in mind, Parson; you know that: you see I have a purpose in mind!’ Delighted, the man slipped a forefinger between flesh and skin and tested the ease with which he could part them. ‘I am aware that in
some quarters
I am considered not as they say the full shilling, not that I’ve lately seen a shilling, being content with such pence as might now and then come my way’ – and here a pause, and a direct glance at Will’s pockets, then down again to the task at hand – ‘And yet there you stand, God’s own man, and ask if I have a purpose!’

‘I felt it,’ said Will, gravely, ‘as if by instinct.’ The tearing of skin from flesh was like that of paper. Cracknell lifted his handiwork, inspecting it, well pleased with his skill; a ribbon of steam unfurled from the hot bare body in the cold air.

‘Scaring them off,
oh
yes –’ his jovial mood fractured, he busied himself with a length of wire, which he ran through the animal’s pink nose, nostril to nostril, and looped three times around the fencepost. ‘Scaring them off, says he! Though of what I might be scaring off there mightn’t be knowing now nor later I daresay, when a voice is heard of weeping and lamentation for our children, because they are not, and we will not be comforted …’ His hand on the wire trembled a little, and Will was appalled to see that so also did his lower lip. His first impulse, which came as much from training as from instinct, was to offer a word of comfort – but hard on its heels came a flash of irritation. So the old man too had succumbed to whatever trick of the light had the whole village taken in! He thought of his daughter running home weeping in terror at what might be creeping upriver towards them, and of notes slipped in the collection box urging he preach repentance of whatever sins had brought judgment to their door.

‘Mr Cracknell’ – briskly, with a little humour perhaps; let him see that there was nothing to fear but a long winter and a tardy spring – ‘Mr Cracknell, I may not quite be episcopal material, but I know misquoted scripture when I hear it. Our children are in no more danger now than they have ever been! Where are your wits? What have you done with them?’ Reaching out, he made a show of patting the other man’s pockets. ‘You don’t mean to tell me you’ve strung up these poor beasts to fend off some – some rumoured sea-serpent in the Blackwater!’

Cracknell was coaxed into a smile. ‘Gentlemanly of you to allude to my wits at all, Parson, on account of the general disbelief that I ever was in possession of such a thing as wits.’ He patted the mole on its stripped back with a fond gesture. ‘For all that, though, I do say and always have said that caution is the side best erred on; and if man or creature were minded to make their approaches here at World’s End my little scarebeasts here would give them pause.’ He jerked his thumb towards the rear of his dwelling, where a pair of tethered goats industriously cropped a circle of grass. ‘I’ve Gog and Magog here for companionship, you understand, in addition to providing the milks and the cheeses which Mrs Ransome is so kind as to enjoy, and I’ll not risk their loss! Not I! I’ll not be left alone!’ There was the trembling again, but here Will felt on firmer ground: three times in three years he’d stood with Cracknell at the graveside: first wife, then sister, then son.