The Essex Serpent

by Sarah Perry

  Colchester had dwindled behind her in a matter of half an hour, and she’d walked east, almost persuading herself she could reach the mouth of the Blackwater before she grew tired. She skirted around a village: she wanted neither to be seen nor spoken to, and favoured overgrown paths that ran along the rim of oakwoods. Traffic was sparse and slow, and no-one spared a glance for the woman walking on the verge. When the rain set in, she delved deeper between the trees, turning her face to the featureless sky. It was a uniform grey, without shifting of clouds or sudden blue breaks, and no sign at all of the sun: it was an unwritten sheet of paper, and against it the bare branches were black. It ought to have been dreary, but Cora saw only beauty – birches unfurled their strips of bark like lengths of white cloth, and under her feet wet leaves were slick. Everywhere bright moss had taken hold, in dense wads of green fur swaddling the trees at their foot, and fine pelts on broken branches that lay across the path. She tripped twice on brambles that held scraps of white wool and little feathers grey at the tip, and swore at them without malice.

  It struck her that everything under that white sky was made of the same substance – not quite animal, but not merely earth: where branches had sheared from their trunks they left bright wounds, and she would not have been surprised to see severed stumps of oak and elm pulse as she passed. Laughing, she imagined herself part of it, and leaning against a trunk in earshot of a chattering thrush held up her arm, and wondered if she might see vivid green lichen stippling the skin between her fingers.

  Had it always been here – this marvellous black earth in which she sank to her ankles, this coral-coloured fungus frilling the branches at her feet? Had birds always sung? Had the rain always this light touch, as if she might inhabit it? She supposed they had, and that it had never been very far from her door. She supposed there must have been other times when she’d laughed alone into the wet bark of a tree, or exclaimed to no-one over the fineness of a fern unfolding, but she could not remember them.

  The past few weeks had not always been so happy. At times she remembered her grief, and for long stretches in which it was necessary to teach herself again how to draw breath she would feel a cavity open behind her ribs. It was a kind of draining sensation, as if a vital organ had been shared with the man who’d died and was atrophying slowly from misuse. In those cold minutes she would recall not the years of unease, in which she’d never once successfully judged his mood or circumnavigated the methods of his wounding, but their first few months, which were the last of her youth. Oh, she had loved him – no-one could ever have loved more: she’d been too young to withstand it, a child intoxicated by an inch of drink. He had been imprinted on her vision, as if she’d glanced at the sun and closing her eyes found a pinprick of light persisting in the darkness. He had been so sombre that when attempts at levity made him laugh she’d felt an empress in command of an army; he was so stern, and so remote, that the first moment he embraced her had been a battle won. She’d not known then that these were the common tricks of a common trickster, to cede a skirmish and later lay her waste. In the years that followed, her fear of him was so very like her love – attended by the same fast-paced heart, the same broken nights, the same alertness to his footstep in the hall – that she was drunk on that, too. No other man had touched her, and so she could not tell how strange it was to be subject to pain as much as pleasure. No other man had loved her, and so she could not judge whether the sudden withdrawal of his approval was natural as the tide and as implacable. By the time it occurred to her that she ought to divorce him, it was too late: at that stage Francis could not tolerate so much as an altered lunch-hour, and any change would have risked his health. Besides, the boy’s presence – for all his troublesome rituals and inscrutable tempers – had given Cora the single sensation in life about which she felt no confusion at all: he was her son, and she knew her duty; she loved him, and sometimes suspected he loved her, too.

  The scant wind paused, the oakwood held its tongue; Cora again was twenty, and her son was come bawling into the world with his fists clenched. They’d wanted to take him from her and swaddle him in white cloth; she’d roared, and wouldn’t let them. He’d crawled blindly from belly to breast and sucked so strongly the midwife marvelled, and said what a good boy he was, and a clever one. Hours it had been, surely, of their gazes meeting, his eyes fixed intently on her, the dark hazy blue of evening; I have an ally, she thought: he will never let me go. Days passed, and she felt herself split down the middle, a wound that would never heal, and which she would never regret: because of him her heart would always be exposed to wind and weather. She worshipped him with many small acts of devotion, wondering at his marvellous foot, its skin like the thin silk covering of a cushion; she passed hours in stroking it with the tip of her finger and seeing how he spread his toes in delight – that he could take pleasure! That she could give it! His curled hand was a cockleshell warmed by the sun – she held it between her lips – she was astonished by him, that those small hands, those feet, contained such multitudes. But it had been only a matter of weeks before the blinds went down, the eyes (she sometimes thought) actually clouding over. If she nursed him, it appeared to cause him pain, or at least a rage he could not contain; if she held him he struggled, flailed, cut her eyelid with the sharp little nail on his thumb. Their days of adoration seemed remote, impossible – bewildered by this second rejection of her love she began to withhold it out of shame. Her failure was a source of amusement to Michael, who said that after all it was vulgar to be entertained by one’s own children, and she’d best leave him to nurses and tutors. Years passed: she learned his ways, and he hers. If their relationship bore little resemblance to the careless warmth she witnessed between other mothers and their sons, it was serviceable enough, and it was theirs.

  On she walked, and though the cold rain and the black earth ought to have dispirited her, she could not summon up her widow’s grief. A kind of gurgling bubbled from her throat and came out in a shameless peal of laughter, which startled the silent birds into speech. She was ashamed of it, of course, but was used to feeling that she lived in a state of disgrace, and felt certain she’d concealed her growing happiness from everyone but Martha. At the thought of her friend (sitting scowling in a coffee-shop no doubt, to escape Frankie’s latest obsession, or passing the time by enchanting the proprietor of the Red Lion) the laugh subsided, and Cora lifted her arms up a little, imagining seeing her coming towards her under the dripping trees. At night they lay back to back under a thin quilt with knees drawn up against the cold, sometimes turning to murmur a fragment of remembered gossip or say goodnight, sometimes waking cradled in the crook of an arm. The simplicity of it had sustained Cora when everything else had sent her flying, and if Martha had been afraid that she’d be no longer needed now Cora stood on firmer ground, she’d been mistaken.

  Coming to her eighth mile and growing tired, Cora found herself on a slight rise where the trees began to thin. The drizzle subsided, and cleared the air, and without any sunlight breaking through the low white canopy the world flushed with colour. Everywhere reddish banks of last year’s bracken glowed, and above them gorse thickets burned with early blooms of yellow. A little aimless flock of sheep with purple ink splashed on their haunches looked up briefly from their grazing, and shrugging turned away. The path on which she stood was bright Essex clay, and a little further down the incline a fallen tree had been overtaken by a thick covering of vivid moss. The change of scene was like a change in altitude: it took her breath, and she paused for a moment to adjust herself to it. In the silence a curious sound reached her: it was a little like a child crying, but a child old enough to know better. She could not make out any words, only an odd choking, whinnying noise, which fell silent for moments at a time then started up again. Then another voice joined it, and it was the voice of a man – crooning, patient, deep – wordless also, though (she listened harder) not quite: now … now … now … After a pause – during which her heartbeat thrummed, a
lthough she later claimed she’d never been afraid – the man’s voice set up again, only this time at a higher, rougher pitch; she could not quite divine the words, but thought in among the frantic urging was Oh, damn you! Damn you! Then there was the sound of something heavy striking something soft, and another choked little bray.

  At this, she hitched up her coat, which was too long and had grown heavy with mud at the hem, and followed the sound. The clay path led over the slight rise and down again, between high pale green hedges on which twisted black seed-pods rattled as she passed. A little further down and she saw an acre of that russet bracken opening before her, with a few sheep nosing at the earth. To her left, overlooked by a bare oak, there was a shallow lake. Its water was thick with mud, and speckled with rain; no reeds grew, and there were no birds busy on the bank. It was entirely featureless, except that on the nearer bank a man stooped struggling over something pale, which made frantic movements and gave out another weak cry. The sound of it struck and sickened her, and there was something familiar in the wretched imploring movements it made, so that when she gathered pace and began to run what she had hoped would be an imperious ‘Stop that! Stop!’ came out as a shriek.

  The man may have heard her, or he may not: he neither lifted his head, nor stopped whatever he was doing. His voice had lowered again to the curious deep crooning noise she first had heard, only now it seemed to her appalling that he should be so tender when he was causing so much harm. As she drew nearer, she saw his feet planted firmly in muddy water, and his back in a dark winter coat splashed with mud. Even from that distance she saw that he was shabby and rough-looking: everything about him was dirty, from the thick wet fabric of his clothes to the damp curls falling over his collar. If the old stories were right, she thought, and man had been first made from a handful of dust, here was Adam himself: all mud, ill-formed, without the full powers of speech. ‘What are you doing? Stop!’ At this he half-turned, and she saw that he was not much above medium height, and bulky. Smears of mud on his face gave the impression of a beard, and from the filth a pair of eyes blazed at her. He might have been sixty, or he might have been twenty. He had rolled his sleeves to his elbows, and his forearms were thickly corded with muscle, and as if deciding she’d neither help nor hinder he shrugged, and turned back to his task. Nothing infuriated Cora more than being ignored: she gave an exasperated cry and ran the few remaining yards. Reaching the water’s rim she saw that the pale thing struggling beneath the man was a sheep dumbly struggling in the shallows, and she was rinsed with relief: whatever horror she’d imagined, it was not this.

  The sheep rolled its stupid eyes at the newcomer, and bleated. Its hindquarters were blackened to the waist with mud, and with frantic workings of its rear legs it contrived to sink a little deeper. The man had his right arm hooked beneath its left foreleg and around its back, and with his left he was attempting to grasp its flank, the better to haul it to safety, but his feet could not find a purchase on the slick earth. The movement frightened the animal, which had closed its eyes for a moment, as if resigned to its own end; it bleated and struggled again, and with its left foreleg flailed out and struck the man across his cheek. He yelped, and Cora saw a wound open beneath the mask of mud.

  The sight of blood roused her from a reverie: she said, ‘Let me help,’ and he gave a breathless grunt of assent. Man’s a halfwit! she thought, already wondering how to tell the tale to best please her friends. Again the sheep went limp, exhaling a long kind of sigh that plumed in the air, and allowed the man to clasp both arms behind its back. In their embrace the two sank together into the mud, and looking furiously over his shoulder the man said, ‘Well: come on!’ Not quite a halfwit, then, though with slow Essex vowels. Cora reached for her belt, which was broad and meant for a man. Her fingers were stiff and slow, and she fumbled with the buckle, as the sighing sheep slipped further down. Then she tugged it free, and dashing forward looped the belt across the animal’s back where it would catch in the crook beneath its forelegs, forming a kind of bridle. The man released his grip and tugged the strap from her hand, and the animal felt the loss of his grasp and panicked; it gave a convulsive movement that threw Cora into the mud. The man showed her no concern, only grunted ‘Up! Get up!’ and, gesturing that she should take the belt, again resumed his grip on the sheep’s flank. There was a long moment in which their matched strength slowly worked against the sucking mud, and Cora felt the bones of her shoulders straining in their sockets, then all at once the sheep’s rear legs appeared above the water’s surface, and it propelled itself forward onto the bank. Cora and the man fell back, and she turned away to conceal her breathlessness: she would not have minded the mud, and the pain in her wrists, had the man not been an oaf, and the sheep not such a witless beast. Some distance away the sheep’s companions looked warily up, showing no pleasure, awaiting the lost one’s return. It ought to have felt, she thought, like a triumph, but instead the pleasure of the day had gone, and even the banks of bracken had lost their colour.

  When she turned back the man was regarding her above his sleeve, which he had pressed to the cut on his cheek. He had put on a knitted hat, which was so poorly made he might well have put it together himself from scarlet scraps, and pulled it to his eyebrows, which were thick with mud and almost obscured his eyes. He said, ‘Thanks,’ a little curtly, again with that flattening of the vowels that marked him out as a country man. A farmer then, she thought, and without accepting the gratitude so grudgingly given she said, gesturing to the exhausted sheep: ‘Is it going to be all right?’ It mouthed at the air, and rolled its eyes again.

  He shrugged. ‘Should think so.’

  ‘One of yours?’

  ‘Ha! No. Not my flock.’ The idea evidently struck some chord of slow humour in him, and he began to chuckle.

  A vagrant, then, poor soul! It was in her nature to think well of folk until they gave her cause to do otherwise, and besides: she’d shortly be home to Martha and their clean white sheets, and who knew but that he might be making his bed in the bracken with nothing but a half-drowned beast for company. Smiling, she decided to bring good London manners to their conversation. ‘Well: I must be home. It was very nice to meet you.’ She gestured towards the dripping oaks, and the pond where little eddies from their struggle still moved, and wishing to be generous said: ‘Essex. Nice part of the world.’

  ‘Is it?’ His voice was dampened by the sleeve still pressed against his cheek, on which she could see blood mixed in with dirty water. She wanted to ask if he would be all right, if he’d make it safely home, if there was anything she could do; but it was his territory, not hers. It occurred to her, as she saw the first thickening of the shadows at dusk, that of the pair of them she was most at a loss, miles from her bed and with only a vague sense of where she stood. With a fair attempt at maintaining what she felt was the upper hand, she said: ‘Tell me: am I far from Colchester? Where can I fetch a cab home?’

  The man lacked the wit to be surprised. He nodded towards the further bank, where she could make out a breach in the line of oaks, and behind it an open stretch of land. ‘Out onto the road – bear left, five hundred yards. There’s a pub: they’ll fetch it for you.’ Then, with a motion extraordinarily like that of a man dismissing an inferior, he turned and trudged away through the mud. His shoulders were so stooped against the cold that the weight of his filthy coat made him seem very like a hunchback. Always more easily moved to mirth than rage, Cora could not prevent herself from laughing: perhaps he heard, because he paused on the path, half-turned towards her, then thought better of it and went on his way.

  Cora tugged her coat closer, and heard all around her the gathering of birds for evensong. The sheep had dragged itself a yard or two further onto the bank; it had raised itself into a kneeling position and was nudging the earth in search of a blade of grass. The light was fading, and a fine white mist rose up from the cold earth and spilled over the rim of her boots. Beyond the last of the oaks a grass verge dropped a l
ittle to the roadside, and in the near distance a half-timbered pub with bright-lit windows beckoned to passing travellers. The sight of the gleaming panes, and the thought that she was still so far from home, and that she did not know the way, brought on a weariness so sudden it struck her like a blow. When she reached the threshold and saw a woman leaning on the bar and smiling a welcome beneath a high coil of bright hair, Cora paused to adjust her clothes. Smoothing her coat, she found in the buckle of her belt a little scrap of white wool, and on it – gleaming in the lamplight as though it were fresh – a smear of blood.

  5

  Joanna Ransome, not quite thirteen, tall as her father and wrapped in his newest coat, held her hand over flames. She brought her palm as near the flicker as she could, then withdrew it slow enough to preserve her pride. Her brother John watched solemnly, and would’ve liked to have thrust his own hands into his pockets, but had been instructed to leave them to grow as cold as he could bear. ‘We are making a sacrifice,’ she’d said, leading him to the stretch of land just beyond World’s End, where the marshes gave way to the Blackwater estuary, and beyond that, the sea: ‘And for there to be a sacrifice, we must suffer.’

  Earlier that day she’d explained to him, whispering in cold corners, that something was rotten in the village of Aldwinter. There was the drowned man, for one thing (naked, they said, and with five deep scratches on his thigh!), and the sickness at Fettlewell, and the way they all woke from dreams of wet black wings. And there was more: the nights should’ve grown lighter by now – there should be snowdrops in the garden – their mother should not still have a cough that woke her at night. There should be birdsong in the mornings. They should not still shiver in their beds. It was all because of something they’d done and forgotten and never repented, or was because the Essex earthquake had let something loose in the Blackwater, or perhaps it was because their father had lied (‘He said he’s not afraid, and there’s nothing there – but why won’t he go down to the sea after dark anymore? Why won’t he let us play out on the boats? Why does he look tired?’). Whatever the cause and wherever the blame, they were going to do something about it. Long ago in other lands they’d cut out hearts to bring the sun up: surely it wasn’t too much to ask that they try out a little spell for the sake of the village? ‘I have it all worked out,’ she’d said: ‘You trust me, don’t you?’