The Essex Serpent (18 page)

III

TO KEEP A CONSTANT WATCH

JUNE

1

Midsummer on the Blackwater, and there are herons on the marsh. The river runs bluer than it ever did before; the surface of the estuary is still. Banks gets a good catch of mackerel early in the day, and notes with pleasure the rainbows on their flanks. Leviathan is decked with spikes of rosebay willowherb and a rosemary wreath, and a patch of samphire grows at the prow. At midday Naomi lies alone by its black ribs with her skirt up by her hips, saying her solstice spells. Joanna has stayed late at her school desk and says she’ll not move until she can recite all the bones in the human skull. (
Occiput
, she says as Naomi leaves, and the redhaired girl remembers it, to be used late one night in a curse.) The Essex Serpent recedes for a time, since how could it thrive under so benevolent a sun?

On the path above Naomi, Stella slowly walking plucks speed-well from the verge. It is blue, and so is her skirt, and so are the bands of fabric she has around her wrists. She is going home to the children. She supposes they’ll want feeding, and the thought revolts her – all that soft stuff going into their gaping mouths, into that glistening hole: it is disgusting, if you think about it. She has no appetite for anything you might eat.

In his study Will is sleeping. There’s a sheet of paper on the desk, and it reads, ‘Dear’. Just that: ‘Dear’. He writes so many letters, these days, that on the knuckle of his third finger there’s a swelling he sucks now and then to ease the ache. Waking, he’ll say to himself, ‘Dear …’, and at the first face coming to mind he’ll smile, then cease smiling.

Martha is peeling eggs. Cora has planned a midsummer party: Charles and Katherine Ambrose are coming, and Charles likes nothing more (he says) than an egg rolled in celery salt. Luke is coming. His feelings as regards eggs are of no interest to her. There will be William Ransome, stern as he is these days, and Stella in blue silk.

Cross-legged on the playing-fields with a cheese sandwich on his lap Mr Caffyn writes a note: ‘The school is quieter now than I have ever known it. The children work calmly and are expected to meet the required standards. See enclosed requisition form: order of twenty notebooks (ruled, with margin).’

At three in the afternoon Will pays Cracknell a visit. The old man’s not well, and lies on a couch with his boots on: he knows the flutter in his chest will be a rattle come Christmas. ‘A tincture of rosehip syrup in the evening is what Mrs Cracknell would’ve recommended and I’m not above taking even a dead woman’s advice, Parson – that bottle, there, and the spoon.’ It is a valiant attempt at courage, and Will smiles, but Cracknell does not. ‘It wasn’t the cough that carried her off,’ he says, touching the rector’s wrist. ‘It was the coffin they carried her off in.’

Over in Colchester on the earthquake ruins Thomas Taylor suns his phantom feet. He does a fair trade on a fair day, and his hat is heavy with coins. Wasps have been so obliging as to make their nest in the folds of a curtain, and the papery mass – with all its sinister regularity – is quite the tourist attraction. The air hums; the wasps are too drowsy to sting. Late in the afternoon the black-haired doctor crouches over him in his good grey coat. His hands are raw in places and his skin smells of lemons. He fondles (none too gently) the flesh healed over the severed bones, and says ‘A poor job: I wish I’d been here. I’d’ve done you proud.’

Fifty miles south as the swallow flies and London’s at her best. She knows it: she is irresistible. Children feed black swans in Regent’s Park and pelicans in St James’s, and the limes are incandescent in the avenues. Hampstead Heath comes over like a country fair; nobody uses the Tube. The sun is thick on the pavements while jugglers and tricksters grow rich in Leicester Square. No-one wants to go home. Why would they? Outside pubs and cafes office juniors grow impertinent, and if it’s not exactly love which brews in with the hops and the coffee it’s as near as makes no difference.

In his Whitehall rooms, dressed for the solstice in a new blue shirt, Charles Ambrose greets a visitor. ‘Spencer,’ he says, ‘I have your letter here. Are you free for lunch? There are people I think you should meet.’ Charles himself is more or less indifferent to Spencer’s sudden philanthropic bent – it’s all very much the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, as far as Charles is concerned – but he likes Spencer, and so does Katherine, and one might as well do good as do anything at all.

Spencer, who’s come prepared to plead Martha’s cause, hopes he can remember this statistic and that, and how to mimic her habit of being both matter-of-fact and impassioned. He pictures Martha’s face when he gives her good news (‘And will you come when we instruct the architects, Martha, since you understand it so well …’).
There’ll be one of her rare smiles
, he thinks:
she will see me.

He takes a drink from Charles, and says, ‘Thank you, I’d like that. I thought: maybe you might come with Martha and me, next week? We’re going to visit Edward Burton over in Bethnal Green – the man Luke operated on, you know. Martha has become a friend of his, and says he makes the perfect case study …’

Case study!
thinks Charles. He looks at Spencer fondly. The boy’s too thin by half. Would there be lamb at lunch? Might there be wild salmon? ‘Will you be coming to Cora’s party, to see the merry widow play Persephone with flowers in her hair?’ But Spencer cannot: he’ll be in his white coat at the Royal Borough, setting limbs perhaps, a little relieved to be spared the ordeal of finding social graces under Martha’s gaze.

Essex has her bride’s gown on: there’s cow parsley frothing by the road and daisies on the common, and the hawthorn’s dressed in white; wheat and barley fatten in the fields, and bindweed decks the hedges. Cora has walked four miles and is not yet tired. At the fifth mile she passes a farmer stripped to the waist and unbuttons her shirt: why should her skin be disgraceful, when his is not? But there’s someone on the path, and she puts the buttons back through their slots: no sense courting disaster.

She comes to a place where roses are grown for bowls and vases in dining rooms elsewhere; an acre or two of blooms laid out in coloured stripes, as if bolts of silk had been dyed and left to dry. It scents the air; she licks her lips, and there’s Turkish Delight on her tongue.

As so often these days, she’s thinking of Will. She cannot concede that she’s done wrong, or that she deserves to be in disgrace: she faintly despises him for being so readily thrown into a bad temper.
Male pride
, she thinks:
the most tender, contemptible thing!
But all the same her conscience is pricked – has she really ridden roughshod over him? She considers prostrating herself half-ironically in apology for the pleasure of watching him try not to laugh, but no: she has her own pride to consider.

What’s more, she misses the whole Ransome household – James had promised to show her the periscope he’s made out of a broken piece of mirror, and Stella’s gift for gossip is a fine substitute for London life. The thought of Stella casts a shadow on the path: has Will failed to see his wife’s new strangeness, how she wears only blue, and puts blue flowers in her hair? How she roots around the marshes for blue sea-glass and bluish stones, and sends to Colchester for roses with their stems dipped in ink so the petals come out cornflower coloured? How she’s grown thinner but more vital-seeming, her cheeks flushed, her motions hectic, her pansy eyes brighter than ever?
I’ll speak to Luke
, thinks Cora:
Luke will know.

She arrives home with her arms full of dog-roses in creamy bloom and three new freckles on her cheek. She puts her arms round Martha’s waist, thinking how well they fit there in the groove above her broad hips, and says, ‘They’re on their way – everyone who’s ever loved me and everyone I’ve ever loved.’

2

Late in the gentle evening Stella Ransome walked over Aldwinter common with her husband on her right hand and her daughter on her left. Back at the rectory, in the care of Naomi Banks, her boys were eating toast and playing Snakes and Ladders. Cora had called that morning on her way home from walking, carrying armfuls of roses that left little scratches in the crook of her elbow, saying, ‘Come early, won’t you? I never could have a party and not be afraid no-one would show up, and that I’d be left to sit up all night with bottles around me, drowning all my sorrows.’

Earlier Stella had stood at her mirror smoothing her skirt’s white silk across her hip, and Will had said, ‘What, no blue today?’ and she’d looked down and laughed, because everything she saw was blue. The skirt’s folds shimmered with it; her own skin had a bluish cast; even Will’s eyes – which surely had once been the colour of the acorns the boys collected every autumn and lined along the windowsill – were blue. Sometimes she thought her eyes had filmed over with ink-stained tears.

‘I think I’m blue-blooded,’ she said, and lifted her arms, and thought how slender they were, and how pretty; and Will had said, ‘I never doubted it, my star of the sea,’ and kissed her twice.

On they walked, while house martins darted at insects over the grass, passing villagers off to set solstice fires in their gardens and on the margins of fields. Greetings chimed out across the village with the tolling of the All Saints bells:
What a night for it! What a glorious night!

William slipped a finger inside his collar and loosened it: he did not want to see Cora – he wanted very much to see her; he’d thought all day of her roaming the marshes, her fingernails crusted with Essex clay – he never thought of her at all; she was the worst of women – she was his friend. Gratefully he looked down at Stella’s silvery head, ringed with sunlight, gleaming, and thought: not once in all these years has she caused me unease – not once! Her little hand turned in his, and it was hot, and at the nape of her neck where her white dress was cut low he saw a sheen of sweat. The flu, the Colchester doctor had said, putting away his stethoscope: it had left her weak. She should rest and eat and sleep. The summer had come. They were not to worry.

Stella saw the grey house with all its bright lamps lit and in each window a jug of dog roses. Behind them someone was moving back and forth, and there was the sound of a piano being played. Nothing pleased her more than a party on a warm night; to be the still centre of an eddying crowd, knowing she was admired, lighting on this person and that with her endless interest in grandsons, and ailments, and fortunes won and lost. But she felt desperately weary, as if she’d burned up her store of energy in the hundred yards they’d walked. She wanted to be home in the blue bower she’d made, counting over her treasures, lifting to the light the blue waxed paper that had wrapped a bar of gentian soap, taking in the scent, or running her finger in the curve of the robin’s egg her sons had brought her in May.

Flu, the doctor had said, speaking to Will; but Stella Ransome was no fool, and knew consumption when she saw it speckle the white folds of a handkerchief. Once in her youth she’d seen a girl die the White Death (as they’d called it then, as if to name the disease was to bring it into the room): she too had burned away, grown slender and
distrait
, greeting the end when it came contentedly, all her pains inside and out blunted by opium. A week before dying the girl had brought up gouts of blood that splashed her white bed-sheets.

Stella knew that she herself had not yet slipped so far into disease: when she did, she’d take Will aside, and ask to be sent to some high ward where she’d sit looking out on mountain ranges and all of their peaks would be blue. There’d been a reddish mist on the mirror once when she’d been caught by coughing one morning as she brushed out her hair – on the hundredth stroke it had come; but only once, and it had wiped away easily enough. (And why was it that blood when it came out was red, when clearly through the thin skin of her wrist every vein showed blue? It didn’t seem fair.)

But she could not go away – not yet, not when Joanna was still so sombre, not while Will so often slammed his study door, not while the village still shrank from the river and the villagers still came silently to church and left without being comforted. Star of the sea, Will had said – and wasn’t that also the name of the Virgin, who also only ever wore blue? She laughed, thinking:
Pray for me, Mary Mother of God, and lend me one of your robes.

Then they were on the doorstep, and there was Cora in black silk, looking so stern and so serene that for a moment Will forgot his righteous indignation. Wrong-footed once again he took her hand and said, ‘Cora, you look tired – have you been walking too far?’

Tall in her costly black, a little nervous perhaps, it seemed to him that he’d never met her before – that she’d taken on a kind of remoteness that made him want to run after her, wherever it was she had gone. He watched her greet her guests with the grace he imagined cultivated in high-ceilinged establishments in Chelsea and Westminster: she seemed to know precisely what to say, and how to say it; who to greet with kisses and who preferred her handshake, which was so like a man’s. She conveyed Stella at once to a broad low seat on which a blue silk cushion was placed – ‘I saw this in Colchester just last week,’ she said, ‘and thought you should have it; take it with you when you go.’ She’d brushed her hair, and wore it loose like a girl, only pinned above the ears with silver combs; she wore pearl drops in her ears, and the lobes were red, as if they were sore from the weight of them.

When Charles Ambrose came in, blazing brightly in his new silk shirt, he held his hostess at arm’s length – ‘I thought you’d be decked in flowers, Cora: what a sad sight you are,’ but his gaze had been an admiring one.

‘You’re gorgeous enough for us all,’ she’d said, and kissed his plump cheek, and fingered Katherine’s long-fringed shawl (‘I am going to steal this later: see if I don’t’).

‘She’s getting fat,’ said Charles, not disapprovingly, watching her make her way past low tables set with silverware. Then Luke was brought over, and proudly presented (‘You know the Imp, of course!’), a yellow cowslip dying in his buttonhole and his black hair oiled.

‘Cora,’ he said, ‘I have something for you: I’ve had it for years, and you might as well have it as anyone.’ He handed her a packet wrapped in white, rather carelessly as if it hardly mattered whether it pleased her. When she opened it, Katherine Ambrose saw a small frame in which a miniature embroidered fan was set behind glass, and wondered what on earth the man was doing working with linen and coloured silk threads.

Martha, wearing green, looked a country girl born and bred, and more so when she produced a loaf shaped like a corn-sheaf and two gleaming capons dressed with sprigs of thyme. There were ducks’ eggs and a clove-studded ham; platters of tomatoes sliced and dotted with mint, and potatoes small as pearls. Joanna followed her to the kitchen and back, begging to be useful, permitted to cut curls of lemon to dress the salmon. All along the table early buds of lavender were crushed by heavy dishes and made the air sweet. Charles Ambrose had brought good red wine from London, and as he opened the third bottle he lined up the crystal glasses and with a wet finger on their rims played a melody. On a wool rug Martha and Joanna lay on their stomachs poring over papers, making plans, looking very serious and sucking cubes of ice, and coiled on a window-seat Francis drew his knees to his chin and recited the numbers of the Fibonacci sequence.

What Will wanted most of all was to take his friend aside, and pull up two chairs, and tell her everything he had stored up those past weeks – how he’d found in his papers a poem he’d written when he was a boy and how he’d burned it, and wished he hadn’t; how Jo had borrowed her mother’s diamond ring and tested its strength by scoring her name on the window; what Cracknell had said as he licked rosehip syrup from a spoon. But he could do none of those things: she was busy elsewhere, dredging strawberries with sugar and persuading Stella to eat, and saying rather shyly to Francis that if it was numbers that bothered him most these days she had several books he could read. Besides (Will tried to rouse himself to anger again) they were in the midst of a battle, with no quarter asked, none given.

Still, the anger wouldn’t come however hard he summoned: he pictured the crouching man stooping over his daughter, whispering, but after all it was only this Dr Garrett, this imp, who ought to be pitied, really, for his meagre height and the way one shoulder was surely more hunched than the other. Where were his good graces? What had Cora done with them?

He went over to the doctor, who’d taken the yellow flower from his buttonhole and was pulling at the petals, and heard himself say, ‘I was rude, that day when we met: I shouldn’t have flown off the handle like that – will you forgive me?’, and looked astonished at the glass of wine he held, as if it was the liquid there that had spoken, and not him. The doctor flushed, and stammered, and said, ‘Don’t mention it,’ with something like hauteur, then the flush receded and he said, ‘it was just something I like to try out sometimes – we did it to Cora once – we didn’t see any harm.’

‘I can’t imagine anyone making Cora say anything she didn’t want to say,’ said Will, and for a moment the air chilled, with each thinking the other had no right at all to an opinion on what Cora was likely to do.

‘She says you are a genius,’ said Will: ‘Are you?’

‘I expect so,’ said Luke, and bared his teeth in a grin. ‘Your glass is empty – let me help – tell me: do you have any interest in medical science, or does your collar preclude it?’ And in the minutes that followed Will could do nothing but admire a man whose ambition burned so vividly: ‘Impossible to operate on the heart itself, of course: even if we could work out how to suspend the blood’s flow – to isolate it, if you like – the brain would be starved of oxygen and the patient would die on the table – Martha, get us some wine, would you? – there: are you squeamish? – let me show you …’ The Imp took out the notebook he always carried, and Will saw a drawing of a baby with the skin of its breast flayed from the bone while a cord linked the infant to its sleeping mother. ‘You look appalled – don’t be: it is the future! – if the mother’s circulation is connected to her child’s, so that her heart pumps for them both, and her breath supplies the oxygen, I could close up the hole in the heart so many babies are born with, but they won’t let me attempt it, you know. You look faint.’ And Will did look faint, but it was not the pipes and fluids of the body that troubled him, but the matter-of-factness of the surgeon, who spoke as if all God’s creatures were to be plucked and gutted like hens. ‘I forget you are a man of the cloth,’ said Luke, with a delivery that made the words an insult.

Under the table Francis peeled an orange brought down from Harrods in a paper bag. He saw Charles Ambrose sit beside Stella and give her a glass of cold water; he heard them speak of Cora, and how well she looked, and how lovely she’d made the room, as if she’d summoned the garden inside. Then Stella wiped her forehead with the back of her hand and said, ‘We should dance the summer in – can’t someone play?’

‘I can do a waltz,’ said Joanna. ‘Nothing else.’

‘
One
two three
one
two three,’ said Charles Ambrose, treading on his wife’s toes: ‘Shall we roll back the carpet?’

‘Come out of there,’ said Martha, seeing Francis in his hiding-place, tugging the carpet from under him, revealing the black boards beneath. At the piano Joanna, straight-backed, played a run that took in every key, wincing and saying, ‘It’s horrible! It’ll sound horrible – it’s been left to get old and damp!’ Then she played a melody that was too fast, and then too slow; every several note rang so dull as to not be heard, but no-one was troubled. Outside the moon was full and low (‘The Corn-Planting Moon,’ said Francis to himself), and the estuary lapped at its banks, and for all they knew something was even now crawling up onto the marsh, but they cared nothing for any of it.
I think it could knock three times on the door and no-one would hear
, he thought, and found himself listening for it on the threshold, and imagining the blaze of its hooded eye.

Luke Garrett, leafing through handwritten pages in a dim corner of the room, set his notebook down and went to stand beside Cora’s chair. He bowed like a courtier and said: ‘Come on – you are almost as bad as me – a fine pair we’d make.’ But Stella by the open window had other ideas: ‘Since I’m too tired to dance with my husband, will my friend take my place? Will!’ – imperious, laughing, she summoned him: ‘Show Cora you’re no ordinary parson, only ever at home with his books!’

Reluctantly, Will came forward (‘Stella! You give them false hope …’) and stood alone in the centre of the room. Without pulpit or Bible he looked all at a loss, and held out his hands a little shyly. ‘Cora,’ he said, ‘it’s not use denying her. I’ve tried.’

‘The Imp is right,’ said Cora, going to meet him, fastening a button at her cuff. ‘If I dance, it will be badly. I’ve got no music in me.’ She stood before Will, seeming somehow diminished, as if she’d gone some distance away: not since they’d left Foulis Street had she looked so unsure of her footing.

‘She’s right, you know,’ said Martha, sighing and shaking out her green dress. ‘She’ll break your foot – she’s heavy – won’t you have me instead?’

But Stella stood, and came forward: like a dancing-master she placed Cora’s hand upon her husband’s shoulder. ‘See how well-matched you are!’ She surveyed them a while, then returned, satisfied, to sit below the open window. ‘There, now,’ – she stroked the blue silk cushion in her lap – ‘eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow it rains.’

Then William Ransome put his hand on Cora’s waist where her blouse was tucked, and Francis heard his mother sigh. She looked up – they stood quite still together – there was a quiet moment, and no-one spoke. Francis, watching, burst a piece of orange on his tongue: he saw how his mother smiled at Will, and how the smile was met with a steady, stern look – how then her head moved as though drawn back by the weight of her hair, and how his hand flexed at her waist, tugging at the fabric of her skirt.