The Essex Serpent

by Sarah Perry

  Dressed as the day demanded, Cora Seaborne sat before her mirror. Pearl drops on gold wires hung at each ear; the lobes were sore, since it had been necessary to pierce them again. ‘So far as tears go,’ she said, ‘these will have to do.’ Her face was powdered pale. Her black hat did not suit her, but had both a veil and a black plume of feathers, and conveyed the proper degree of mourning. The covered buttons on her black cuffs would not fasten, and between the hem of sleeve and glove a strip of white skin would be seen. The neckline of her dress was a little lower than she’d have liked, and showed on her collarbone an ornate scar as long as her thumb, and about as wide. It was the perfect replica of the silver leaves on the silver candlesticks that flanked the silver mirror, and which her husband had pressed into her flesh as though he were sinking his signet ring into a pool of wax. She considered painting it over, but had grown fond of it, and knew that in some circles she was enviously believed to have had a tattoo.

  She turned from the glass and surveyed the room. Any visitor would pause puzzled at the door, seeing on the one hand the high soft bed and damask curtains of a wealthy woman, and on the other the digs of a scholar. The furthest corner was papered with botanical prints, and maps torn from atlases, and sheets of paper on which quotations were written in her large black capitals (NEVER DREAM WITH THY HAND ON THE HELM! TURN NOT THY BACK TO THE COMPASS!). On the mantelpiece a dozen ammonites were ranked according to size; above them, captured in a gilded frame, Mary Anning and her dog observed a fallen fragment of Lyme Regis rock. Was it all hers now – that carpet, these chairs, this crystal glass that still gave off the scent of wine? She supposed so, and at the thought a kind of lightness entered her limbs, as if she might come untethered from Newton’s laws and find herself spread out upon the ceiling. The sensation was decently suppressed, but all the same she could name it: it was not happiness, precisely, nor even contentment, but relief. There was grief, too, that was certain, and she was grateful for it, since however loathed he’d been by the end, he’d formed her, at least in part – and what good ever came of self-loathing?

  ‘Oh, he made me – yes,’ she said, and memory unfurled like smoke from a blown candle. Seventeen, and she’d lived with her father in a house above the city, her mother long gone (though not before she’d seen to it that her daughter would not be damned to samplers and French). Her father – uncertain what to do with his modest wealth, whose tenants liked him contemptuously – had gone out on business and returned with Michael Seaborne at his side. He’d presented his daughter with pride – Cora, barefoot, with Latin on her tongue – and the visitor had taken her hand, and admired it, and scolded her for a broken nail. He came again, and again, until he grew expected; he brought her slim books, and small hard objects of no use. He’d mock her, putting his thumb in the palm of her hand and stroking, so that the flesh grew sore, and it seemed her whole consciousness dwelt there at the touching place. In his presence the Hampstead pools, the starlings at dusk, the cloven prints of sheep in the soft mud, all seemed drab, inconsequential. She grew ashamed of them – of her loose untidy clothes, her unbraided hair.

  One day he said: ‘In Japan they’ll mend a broken pot with drops of molten gold. What a thing it would be: to have me break you, and mend your wounds with gold.’ But she’d been seventeen, and armour-clad with youth, and never felt the blade go in: she’d laughed, and so had he. On her nineteenth birthday she exchanged birdsong for feathered fans, crickets in the long grass for a jacket dotted with beetles’ wings; she was bound by whalebone, pierced with ivory, pinned by the hair with tortoiseshell. Her speech grew languid to conceal its stumble; she walked nowhere. He gave her a gold ring which was too small – a year later another, and it was smaller still.

  The widow was roused from her reverie by footsteps overhead, which were slow, and measured out as precisely as the ticking of a clock. ‘Francis,’ she said. She sat quietly, waiting.

  A year before his father died, and perhaps six months after his disease had first appeared at the breakfast table (a lump in the throat restricting the passage of dry toast), Francis Seaborne had been moved to a room on the fourth floor of the house and at the furthest end of the passage.

  His father would’ve had no interest in domestic arrangements even if he’d not at that time been assisting Parliament with the passage of a housing act. The decision had been made wholly by his mother and by Martha, who’d been hired as nurse when he was a baby, and never, as she herself put it, quite got round to leaving. It was felt that Francis was best kept at arm’s length, since he was restless at night and made frequent appearances at the door and even, once or twice, at the window. He’d never ask for water, or for comfort, as any other child might; only stand at the threshold holding one of his many talismans until unease raised a head from the pillow.

  Soon after his removal to what Cora called the Upper Room, he lost interest in his nightly travels, becoming content with accumulating (no-one ever said ‘stealing’) whatever took his fancy. These he laid out in a series of complex and baffling patterns that changed each time Cora made a maternal visit; they had a beauty and strangeness she’d have admired if they’d been the work of somebody else’s son.

  This being Friday, and the day of his father’s funeral, he’d dressed himself. At eleven years old he knew both one end of a shirt from the other, and its usefulness in spelling (‘It is NECESSARY that the shirt has one Collar, but two Sleeves’). That his father had died struck him as a calamity, but one no worse than the loss of one of his treasures the day before (a pigeon’s feather, quite ordinary, but which could be coiled into a perfect circle without snapping its spine). When told the news – noting that his mother was not crying but was rigid and also somehow blazing, as if in the midst of a lightning strike – his first thought was this: I cannot understand why these things happen to me. But the feather was gone; his father was dead; and it seemed he was to attend church. The idea pleased him. He said, conscious of being quite affable given the circumstances: ‘A change is as good as a rest.’

  In the days following the discovery of Michael Seaborne’s body it was the dog who’d suffered most. It had whined at the sickroom door and could not be consoled; a caress might’ve done it, but since no-one would sink their hands into its greasy pelt, the laying-out of the body (‘Put a penny on his eye for the ferry-man,’ Martha said: ‘I don’t think St Peter will trouble himself …’) had been accompanied by that same high keening. The dog was dead now, of course, thought Francis, patting with satisfaction a little wad of fur collected from his father’s sleeve, and so the only mourner was now itself to be mourned.

  He was uncertain what rituals attended the disposal of the dead, but thought it best to come prepared. His jacket had a number of pockets, each of which contained an object not sacred, precisely, but well suited, he thought, to the task. An eyeglass which had cracked, offering a broken view of things; the wad of fur (he hoped it might still contain a flea or tick, and within that, if he was ever so lucky, a bead of blood); a raven-feather, which was his best, being bluish at the tip; a scrap of fabric he’d torn from Martha’s hem, having observed on it a persistent stain in the shape of the Isle of Wight; and a stone with a perfect perforation in the centre. Pockets packed, and tapped, and counted out, he went down to find his mother, and at each of the thirty-six steps to her room incanted ‘Here – today – gone – tomorrow; here – today – gone.’

  ‘Frankie –’ How small he was, she thought. His face, which curiously bore scant resemblance to either parent, save for his father’s rather flat-seeming black eyes, was impassive. He’d combed his hair, and it lay in ridges flat against his scalp: that he had troubled to make himself neat moved her, and she put out her hand, but let it fall empty to her lap. He stood patting each of pockets in turn, and said: ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘He will be waiting for us at the church.’ Ought she to take him into her arms? He did not look, it must be said, much in need of comfort.

  ‘Frankie, if you
want to cry, there is no shame in it.’

  ‘If I wanted to cry, I would. If I wanted to do anything, I would.’ She didn’t chastise him for that, since really it was little more than a statement of fact. He once again patted each of his pockets, and she said, gently, ‘You are bringing your treasures.’

  ‘I am bringing my treasures. I have a treasure for you (pat), a treasure for Martha (pat), a treasure for Father (pat), a treasure for me (pat, pat).’

  ‘Thank you, Frankie …’ – all at a loss: but there at last was Martha, brightening the room as she always did, dissipating by nothing more than her presence the slight tension which had taken the air. She lightly touched Francis on the head, just as though he had been any other child; her strong arm circled Cora’s waist; she smelt of lemons.

  ‘Come on then,’ she said. ‘He never did like us to be late.’

  The St Martin’s bells tolled for the dead at two, rolling out across Trafalgar Square. Francis, whose hearing was pitilessly acute, pressed gloved hands to each ear and refused to cross the threshold until the last peal died, so that the congregation, turning to see the late-coming widow and her son, sighed, gratified: how pale they were! How very fitting! And would you take a look at that hat!

  Cora watched the evening’s performance with an interested detachment. There in the nave, obscuring the altar – in a coffin resting on what resembled a butcher’s trestle – was her husband’s body, which she did not recall having ever seen in its entirety, only in small and sometimes panicked glimpses of very white flesh laid thinly over beautiful bones.

  It struck her that really she’d known nothing of him in his public life, which was carried out in (she imagined) identical rooms in the Commons, and in his Whitehall set, and in the club which she could not attend, having the misfortune to be female. Perhaps he dealt elsewhere with kindness – yes: perhaps that was it – perhaps she’d been a kind of clearing-house for cruelties deserved elsewhere. There was a kind of nobility in that, if you thought about it: she looked down at her hands as if expecting the notion to have raised stigmata.

  Above her, on the high black balcony which seemed in the dim air to float several feet above the columns which bore it up, was Luke Garrett. Imp, she thought: look at him! and her heart seemed almost to move towards her friend, pressing against the bars of her ribs. His coat was no more fitting to the occasion than his surgeon’s apron might have been, and she was certain he’d been drinking long before he came, and that the girl by his side was a recent acquaintance whose affection was out of his budget; but despite the darkness and distance there came down to her, in one black glance, an incitement to laugh. Martha felt it too, and administered a pinch to her thigh, so that later, when glasses of wine were poured in Hampstead and Paddington and Westminster it was said: ‘Seaborne’s widow gasped with grief just as the priest declared though he were dead, yet shall he live; it was beautiful, you know, in a way.’

  Beside her, Francis went on whispering, his mouth pressed to his thumb, his eyes tightly closed; it made him babyish again, and she put her hand over his. It fit within hers perfectly still, and very hot, and after a while she lifted her own and laid it again in her lap.

  Afterwards, as black cassocks flapped like rooks between the pews, Cora stood on the steps and greeted the departing congregation, who were all kindness, all solicitude – she must consider herself to have friends in Town; she was welcome, with her handsome boy, at any supper she chose; she’d be remembered in their prayers. She passed to Martha so many visiting-cards, and so many small posies, and so much in the way of little books of remembrance and black-hemmed samplers, that a passer-by might have mistaken the day for a wedding, albeit a sombre one.

  It was not yet evening, but frost thickened on the steps with a hard glitter in the lamplight, and fog enclosed the city in a pale tent. Cora shivered, and Martha came a little nearer, so that she could feel warmth rising from that compact body in its second-best coat. Francis stood some distance away, his left hand foraging in the pocket of his jacket, his right smoothing fitfully at his hair. He did not look distressed, precisely, or either woman would have drawn him between them, with the murmurs of comfort which would have come so easily if they’d been sought. Rather, he looked politely resigned to disruption in a cherished routine.

  ‘Christ have mercy on us!’ said Dr Garrett, as the last of the mourners departed, black-hatted, relieved it was over, turning to the night’s entertainment and the morning’s business. Then, with the swift transition to the serious which was so irresistible in him, he grasped Cora’s gloved hand. ‘Well done, Cora: you did well. Can I take you home? Let me take you. I’m hungry. Are you? I could eat a horse and its foal.’

  ‘You can’t afford a horse.’ Martha only ever spoke to the doctor with a show of annoyance; Imp had been her name for him, though no-one remembered it now. His presence in the house at Foulis Street – first a matter of duty, then one of devotion – was an annoyance to Martha, who felt her own devotion to be more than adequate. He’d dispensed with his companion, and had put into his breast pocket a handkerchief edged in black.

  ‘I’d like more than anything to go for a long walk,’ said Cora. Francis, as if detecting her sudden weariness and seeing in it an opportunity for gain, came quickly to stand at her feet and demand they travel home by Underground. As ever, it came not as a childish request that if granted, would give him pleasure, but as a bald statement of fact. Garrett, who’d not yet learned to negotiate the boy’s implacable will, said, ‘I’ve already had enough of Hades for one day,’ and gestured towards a passing cab.

  Martha took the boy’s hand, and out of sheer surprise at her audacity he let it lie there in her glove. ‘I’ll take you, Frank: it’ll be warm, and I can’t feel my toes – but Cora, you surely cannot walk all the way – it is three miles at least?’

  ‘Three and a half,’ said the doctor, as if he himself had laid the paving stones. ‘Cora, let me walk with you.’ The cab driver made an impatient gesture, and received an obscene response. ‘You shouldn’t do it. You can’t go alone …’

  ‘Shouldn’t? Can’t?’ Cora took off her gloves, which were no more proof against the cold than a cobweb. She thrust them at Garrett. ‘Give me yours – I can’t think why they make these, or why women buy them – I can walk, and I will. I’m dressed for walking, see?’ She lifted her hem and displayed boots better suited to a schoolboy.

  Francis had turned away from his mother, no longer interested in the turn the evening might take; he had a great deal to do, back in his Upper Room, and a few new items (pat, pat) which required his attention. He pulled his hand from Martha’s and set off towards the city. Martha, throwing a mistrustful look at Garrett and a rueful one at her friend, called out a farewell and slipped into the mist.

  ‘Let me go alone,’ said Cora, pulling on the borrowed gloves, so threadbare they were scarcely warmer than her own. ‘My thoughts are so tangled they’ll take a mile or more to unravel.’ She touched the black-edged handkerchief in Garrett’s pocket. ‘Come tomorrow, if you like, to the grave. I said I’d go alone, but perhaps that’s the point; perhaps we are always alone, no matter the company we keep.’

  ‘You ought to be followed about by a clerk making a record of your wisdom,’ said the Imp, satirically, letting her hand fall. He bowed extravagantly, and retreated into the cab, slamming the door against her laughter.

  Marvelling at his ability to bring about such total reversions in her mood, Cora turned first not west towards home, but towards the Strand. She liked to find the place where the River Fleet had been diverted underground, east from Holborn; there was a particular grating where on a quiet day you could hear it running out towards the sea.

  Reaching Fleet Street, she thought that if she strained hard enough into the grey air she might hear the river running through its long tomb, but there was only the noise of a city which no frost or fog could dissuade from work or pleasure. And besides, she’d once been told that it was scarcely more than a sewer
by now, swollen not by rainwater leaching down from Hampstead Heath but by humanity massing on its banks. She stood a while longer, until her hands ached with the chill, and the punctured lobes of her ears began to throb. She sighed, and set out for home, discovering that the unease that once accompanied the image of the high white house on Foulis Street had been left behind, dropped somewhere beneath the black pews of the church.

  Martha, who’d anxiously awaited Cora’s return (little more than an hour later, with freckles blazing through white powder and her black hat slipped), put a great store on appetite as evidence of a sound mind, and watched with pleasure as her friend ate fried eggs and toast. ‘I’ll be glad when it’s all over,’ she’d said. ‘All these cards, these handshakes. I am so bored of the etiquette of death!’

  In his mother’s absence the child, mollified by the Underground, had gone wordlessly upstairs with a glass of water and slept with an apple core in his hand. Martha had stood at his door and seen how black his lashes were against his white cheek, and felt her heart soften towards him. A scrap of the wretched dog’s fur had found its way to his pillow; she imagined it seething with lice and fleas, and stooped over the boy to take it and leave him safely sleeping. But her wrist must’ve touched the pillowcase; he came fully alert in the time it took a breath to leave her; seeing the fur in her hand he gave a kind of wordless scream of rage, so that she dropped the greasy wad and ran from the room. Coming downstairs, she thought, How can I be afraid of him: he’s nothing but a fatherless boy! and was half-inclined to return and insist that he hand over the unsavoury little keepsake, and perhaps even submit to a kiss. Then a key was fitted noisily to the lock, and there had been Cora, demanding a fire, throwing down her gloves, holding out her arms for an embrace.