The Essex Serpent (4 page)

‘I would tell you it’s a pleasure to see you, though I never saw anyone look more like a barbarian queen bent on pillage: is it necessary to emulate the Iceni just because you’re on their turf?’ Cora – who refused to wear anything that might restrict her waist, who’d raked her hands through her hair and stuffed it into a hat, who hadn’t worn jewellery since she tugged the pearls from her ears a month before – was not offended. ‘Boudicca would be ashamed to be seen like this, I’m sure. Shall we go in, and have coffee, and wait for the clouds to break? You’re pretty enough for the pair of us.’ She tucked her hand in the crook of Katherine Ambrose’s elbow, and they winked at each other, and watched Charles’s velvet back make an impressive entrance into the cafe.

‘But how, actually,
are
you, Cora?’ Katherine paused at the threshold, and taking the younger woman’s face between her palms, turned it to the light. She surveyed the high-boned face, and the eyes which were like slate. Cora didn’t answer, because she was afraid to betray her shameful happiness. Katherine, who’d suspected more of Michael Seaborne’s dealings with his wife than Cora ever guessed, found her answer, and stood on tip-toe to plant a kiss on her temple. Behind them, Martha feigned a cough; Cora turned, stooped to pick up her canvas holdall, and whispering ‘Just another half-hour, I
promise
…’ hustled her companion inside.

‘Well: what
are
you doing here? I associate you both so much with Whitehall and Kensington that I supposed I imagined you evaporating at the borders of town!’ Cora surveyed the table with satisfaction. Charles commanded an awestruck girl in a white apron to bring at least a dozen of the cakes she personally liked best, and a gallon of tea. She evidently favoured coconut: there were macaroons, and speckled shortbread, and lozenges of cake doused in raspberry jam and rolled in coconut flakes. Cora, who’d walked several miles that morning, placidly ate her way towards a centrepiece of madeleines.

‘Yes,’ said Martha, with a glint of steel she intended to be seen: ‘What
are
you doing here?’

‘Visiting friends,’ said Katherine Ambrose. She shrugged neatly out of her little coat, and gazed about the dim, fragrant interior with an air of wonder. Something in the green tasselled cloth that fell into their laps evidently amused her; she fondled it, suppressed a smile, and said: ‘Why else would anyone come? There’s no shopping to be done, not one department store. Where do the locals get their wine and cheese?’

‘The vineyard and the cowshed, I imagine.’ Charles handed his wife a plate on which he had set a small cake vivid with icing. She’d never been seen to eat cake, but he liked now and then to play the tempter. ‘We’re trying to persuade Colonel Howard to stand for Parliament next election. He’s due to retire, and …’

‘… and is
Really Good News
,’ finished Cora, serving Charles one of his own well-worn phrases. Beside her, Martha had grown a little tense, possibly preparing for one of her diatribes on public health, or the need for housing reform. (Wrapped in a blue paper bag, tucked in the canvas holdall, was an American novel that described in the most approving terms a future utopia of communal city living. Martha had waited weeks for its English publication, and was impatient to get home and make a study of it.) Cora, though appreciative of her friend’s tender conscience, was too weary to watch battle commence over the teacups. She added a madeleine to Katherine’s plate, but it was pushed away and replaced with the map Martha had placed on the tablecloth.

‘May I?’ Katherine unfolded its pages until Colchester appeared in black-and-white, with sites of interest marked approvingly and illustrated with photographs. Cora had ringed the Castle Museum, and a tea-stain blotted the spire of St Nicholas.

‘Yes,’ said Katherine. ‘We thought we’d get to the Colonel before the
others
do: he’s made no secret of his ambitions, but never lets on in which direction they lie. I think Charles convinced him there’ll be a change of government next election; says we must all lay money on it. The old boy’s got the strength of a man half his age and is stubborn to boot: we might see the oldest Prime Minister yet.’ It was not necessary for her to name Gladstone, who was to the Ambrose family a combination of eccentric saint and beloved relation. Cora had once met him – she standing rigid at her husband’s side as his sharp-tipped fingers perforated the flesh on her upper arm, Gladstone a touch stooped as he greeted a procession of guests – and been startled by the savage intelligence blazing beneath eyebrows that cried out for a pair of scissors. It had been evident, from the ice that had entered his voice as he greeted Michael Seaborne, that the statesman had loathed her husband with an implacable hatred, and though Gladstone’s greeting to her had been correspondingly chill, she had always felt, in the years that followed, as if he were an ally.

Martha said, ‘Still gadding about with hookers, is he?’ doing her best to disgrace herself; but Charles was beneath being shocked and grinned over the rim of his teacup.

Hastily Katherine said: ‘So much for us – but what are you doing in Colchester, Cora? If you wanted the sea you could have used our house in Kent: here it’s little but mud and marsh for miles and the sight of it would depress a clown. Unless you’ve got it in your head to search the garrison for a new husband, I can’t see the appeal.’

‘Let me show you.’ Cora drew the map towards her, and with a forefinger which Katherine observed was none too clean, traced a line south from Colchester towards the mouth of the River Blackwater. ‘Last month two men were walking at the foot of the Mersea cliffs and were almost knocked out by a landslip. They had the wit to take a look at the rubble and found fossil remains – a few teeth here and there, the usual coprolites, of course – but also a small mammal of some kind. It’s been taken up to the British Museum for classification: who knows what new species they might have discovered!’

Charles looked warily at the map. For all his liberality and his determined attempts at worldliness, he was at heart profoundly conservative and would not keep the works of Darwin or Lyell in his study for fear they carried a contagion that might spread throughout his healthier books. He was not an especially devout man, but felt that a common faith overlooked by a benevolent God was what kept the fabric of society from tearing like a worn sheet. The idea that after all there was no essential nobility in mankind, and that his own species was not a chosen people touched by the divine, troubled him in the hours before dawn; and as with most troubling matters he elected to ignore it, until it went away. What’s more, he blamed himself for Cora’s adoration for the geologist Mary Anning: she’d never shown the least interest in grubbing about among rocks and mud until finding herself at an Ambrose dinner party seated beside an elderly man who’d spoken with Anning once and been in love with her memory ever since. By the time Cora had heard his tales of the carpenter’s daughter who grew strong after a lightning strike, and of her first fossil find at twelve, and her poverty, and her martyrdom to cancer, she too was in love and for months afterwards talked of nothing but blue lias and bezoar stones. If anyone had hoped her passion would dwindle they did not, Charles thought wearily, know Cora.

Eyeing the last of the macaroons, he said: ‘Surely it’s best left to the experts, by now: we’re not in the dark ages, reliant on crackpots in petticoats crawling about with a tack-hammer and paint-brush. There are colleges and societies and grants, and so on.’

‘Well? What d’you expect me to do? Sit at home planning supper and waiting for a new pair of shoes to arrive?’ Cora’s temper, which burned slow, made itself seen first in a hardening of her grey eyes to flint.

‘Of course not!’ Thinking he detected an edge to her look, Charles said: ‘No-one who knows you would expect that. But there are things that matter
now
that could use your time and your mind, not scraps of animals that meant nothing while living and less when dead!’ As evidence of his desperation he gestured towards Martha. ‘Could you not join Martha’s society – whatever it’s called – and sort out the plumbing in Whitechapel, or the orphans in Peckham, or whatever it is she goes in for these days?’

‘Yes, Cora. Couldn’t you?’ Grinning at Charles, knowing that he disapproved as much of her political conscience as of Cora’s muddy boots, Martha made her blue eyes into pools of appeal.

‘Meant
nothing
!’ Cora drew a breath to deliver a well-rehearsed speech on the significance of her beloved scraps of animals, but Katherine placed a cool white hand on hers and said, as if oblivious to the past few minutes: ‘And you intend to make your way there and find a beast of your own?’

‘I do! And I will: you’ll see! Michael never’ – at the name she faltered, and unconsciously touched the scar at her neck – ‘He thought it a waste of time, and that I’d be better off reading
The Lady
to see what shape skirt I ought to wear to the Savoy.’ She thrust her plate away in disgust. ‘Well: I can do what I like now, can’t I?’ She eyed each of them in turn, and Katherine said: ‘Darling child, of course you can: and we are very proud of you. Aren’t we, Charles?’ There came a humble nod. ‘And what’s more, we can help: I know just the family for you!’

‘Do we?’ Charles looked dubious. His only friend in Colchester was the choleric Colonel Howard, and he felt certain that the sight of Cora might deliver the final blow to his battle-battered health.

‘Charles! The Ransomes! Those gorgeous children and that awful house, and Stella with her dahlias!’

The Ransomes! Charles brightened at the thought. William Ransome was the disappointing brother of a Liberal MP of whom the Ambroses were fond. Disappointing, because at an early age he’d decided to hitch his considerable intellect not to the law or to Parliament, or even to the service of medicine, but to the church. What was worse, the natural ambition that generally accompanies a good mind was so lacking he’d consented to spend the past fifteen years shepherding his small flock in a bleak village down by the Blackwater estuary, marrying a fair-haired sprite and doting on his children. Charles and Katherine had stayed there once after a journey to Harwich had gone awry and come away devoted to the Ransome brood, Katherine clutching a paper packet of dahlia seeds which promised to produce black blooms. She turned to Cora.

‘I tell you, you never saw a more perfect family. The good Reverend Ransome and little Stella, no bigger than a fairy and twice as pretty. They live down at Aldwinter, which is almost as bad as it sounds – but on a bright night you can see right across to Point Clear, and in the mornings watch the Thames Barges off with their cargo of oysters and wheat. If anyone could show you your way round the coast there, it’s them – don’t look at me like that, dear, you know perfectly well you can’t go trudging off with nothing but a map.’

‘It is a foreign shore, mind: you may require a phrasebook. There are kissing-gates and croats, and acres of tidal land they call the saltings.’ Charles licked sugar from his forefinger, and contemplated another pastry. ‘Will once walked me through Aldwinter churchyard and showed me the graves they call broken-backed: the villagers reckon if you die of TB the earth sinks down into the coffin.’

Cora attempted to conquer her scowl. Some bull-necked country curate all Calvin and correction, and his parsimonious wife! She could not, off-hand, think of anything worse, and inferred from Martha’s rigidity at her side that her feelings were shared. But still – it would be useful to have some local knowledge of Essex geography. What’s more, it was not necessarily the case that a man of the cloth would be ignorant of modern science: among her favourite books was a thesis from an anonymous Essex rector on the high antiquity of the earth, which crisply dispensed with notions of calculating the date of creation from Old Testament genealogies.

She said, tentatively, ‘Perhaps it would be good for Francis. I spoke to Luke Garrett about him, you know. Not that I think there is anything wrong with him!’ She flushed, because nothing shamed her as much as her son. Acutely aware that her unease in the presence of Francis was shared by most who met him, it was impossible to exculpate herself; his remoteness, his obsessions, must be her fault, for where else could she lay the blame? Garrett had been uncharacteristically quiet, soft-spoken; he’d said, ‘You cannot pathologise him – you cannot attempt to make a diagnosis. There is no blood test for eccentricity, no objective measure for your love or his!’ Perhaps, he conceded, he might benefit from analysis, though it was hardly recommended for children, whose consciousness was barely formed. There was little she could do but continue to watch over him, as best she could; to love him, as far as he would let her.

The Ambroses shared a glance, and Katherine said hastily: ‘Fresh air would be the best thing for him, I should think. Won’t you let Charles write to the Reverend, and make an introduction? Aldwinter’s barely fifteen miles from here – I’ve known you walk further! – and you could at least spend an afternoon there, and let Stella give you tea.’

‘I’ll write to William, and give him your address – you’re staying at the George, I assume? You’ll all make fast friends, I’m sure, and find piles of your wretched fossils.’

‘We’re staying at the Red Lion,’ said Martha. ‘Cora thought it looked authentic, and was disappointed not to find straw on the floor and a goat tethered to the bar.’
Reverend Ransome
, she thought, scornfully: as if some slow-witted parson and his fatcheeked children could interest her Cora! But kindness shown to her friend always earned her loyalty, and so she tipped the last of the cakes onto Charles’s plate and said quite sincerely: ‘I’ve so enjoyed seeing you again: d’you think you might come back to Essex soon, before we go?’

‘Probably.’ He took on an air of noble suffering. ‘And by then we expect a whole new species to be discovered and anatomised, and ready for the Seaborne Wing at Castle Museum.’ With a little gesture to his wife that signalled they should depart, he reached for his coat, and then with an arm arrested mid-sleeve said ‘Oh!’ and turned grinning to Cora. ‘How could we forget! Have you heard of this strange beast that’s been putting the fear of all the gods into the local populace?’