The Essex Serpent

by Sarah Perry

  Cora, so swift to assess the shifting moods of those around her, was briefly thrown: he put his hand in hers, and it was perhaps something in the pressure of his grasp that caused her to look again at the position of the cut on his cheek, and the curls on his collar, and with a gasp – ‘Oh! You!’ – begin laughing too. Martha (watching the exchange with a sensation very like fear) saw her friend and their host each cling to the hand of the other, helpless with inexplicable merriment. Cora, mindful of her manners, tried now and then to contain herself and explain to a bewildered Stella what it was that had struck them with laughing-sickness, but she could not. It was Will, at last, who released her hand, and giving an ironic bow – one leg extended, as if in the court of the queen – said, ‘I’m so pleased to meet you, Mrs Seaborne: might I offer you a drink?’

  Composing herself, she said, ‘I’d very much like another glass of wine; and have you met my Martha? I never travel anywhere without her.’ This effort of manners proved too much: she pressed her lips together to prevent another gale of laughter, then said gently, ‘I do feel rather sheepish,’ and watched, delighted, as the man could not help another gleeful burst.

  Stella – amused, but never keen to feel outside events – said: ‘I take it you’ve met?’

  Her voice sobered Will, who drew her towards Cora and said, ‘You remember, the week before last, how I came home late, covered in mud, because I’d pulled a sheep from the lake, and how a strange woman helped me? Well: here she is.’ He turned to Cora, and said with sudden seriousness: ‘I feel I should apologise: I’m sure I was rude, and I don’t know what I would have done without you.’

  ‘You were monstrous,’ said Cora, ‘but you’ve provided so much entertainment for my friends that I forgive you completely – and here’s Martha, and she won’t believe me that I thought you a creature that had climbed out of the mud and would certainly climb back into it. Martha, meet the Reverend William Ransome; Mr Ransome: my friend.’ She put her arm round Martha’s waist, feeling a sudden need to tether herself to what was familiar, and saw her friend give the parson a swift appraising glance which almost certainly found him wanting.

  Charles, meanwhile, was applauding, as if the entire affair had been arranged for his pleasure; then urgent matters struck him, and putting a hand pitifully to the splendid curve of his stomach he said to Stella, ‘Did I hear you say there is pheasant to be had, and apple pie?’ He stood, and offered his left arm to his wife, and his right to his hostess. Joanna, leaping up from her game of cards, remembered the task she’d been set, and flung open the door to the dining room. Light picked out channels cut in crystal glasses and glossed the polished wood of the table, and Stella’s forget-me-nots bloomed on their napkins. The room was small, and it was necessary to move in single file past the high-backed dining chairs. There was nothing fashionable in the green wallpaper and the watercolours above the fireplace, but Cora thought she had never seen anything so homely. She thought of the rooms at Foulis Street, with the plasterwork on the high ceilings and the long windows which Michael had forbidden her to hang with curtains, and hoped fervently never to see them again. Joanna, rather awestruck by this magnificent laughing woman in her green dress, gestured shyly to a card on which Cora’s name had been written in John’s best calligraphy.

  ‘Thank you,’ whispered her guest, and lightly tugged the girl’s plait: ‘I saw you beat Martha at cards: you are far cleverer than me!’ (Later, when Joanna took a plate of chocolates to her brothers to recount the night’s events, she said, ‘She’s not old, though she is rich; she has an overnight bag made from crocodile skin; and I don’t know why, but she made me think of Joan of Arc. Also – John, don’t eat it all – she has an odd sort of voice, with an accent. I don’t know where she’s from but it must be far away.’)

  Stella, more intrigued than ever by her guest, watched Cora from beneath her long fair lashes. She’d pictured a lady of studied melancholy, who’d peck at her food, and sometimes fall silent to turn her wedding ring, or open a locket to gaze on the face of the departed. It was bewildering instead to be presented with a woman who ate elegantly, but in great quantities, making smiling apology for her appetite by declaring she’d walked ten miles that morning and would do the same tomorrow. In her presence the conversation veered dizzyingly from the content of Will’s sermon (‘I know it well – Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be moved, and so on? – and how apt for your congregation: how clever of you!’) to Charles Ambrose and his political scheming (‘Has Colonel Howard succumbed, Charles – Reverend, would you welcome a new MP?’), pausing to briefly take in her scouring of the coast for fossils.

  ‘We told Cora all about your Essex Serpent,’ said Charles, peeling the wrapper from a chocolate. ‘Both of them, indeed.’

  ‘There is only one that I know of,’ said William, with perfect calm: ‘And if our guests are interested, they can of course come and see it with me in the morning.’

  ‘It is beautiful,’ said Stella, leaning towards Cora: ‘A serpent coiled all around the arm of a pew in the church, with wings folded on its back. Will thinks it a blasphemy, and threatens every week to take a chisel to it, but he wouldn’t dare.’

  ‘I would like to see it very much, thank you!’ The fire burned low, and Cora held her cup close to her breast. ‘And tell me: has there been more news of the creature they say’s in the river?’ Stella, knowing her husband’s dislike of any mention of the Trouble, glanced anxiously at him, and prepared to douse the conversation with coffee.

  ‘No news, since there’s no creature – though I’m afraid one of my parishioners might disagree! I’ve been to see Cracknell,’ said Will, turning to Stella, ‘and either Gog or Magog has given up the ghost.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Stella, pouting, resolving to go out the following morning and take the old man a meal: ‘Poor Cracknell – as if he’s not already lost enough.’ She handed her guest a cup of coffee, and said, ‘He lives out on the edge of the marsh, and has only just buried the last of his family. Gog and Magog were his goats, and his pride and joy, and keep us well supplied with butter and milk. What happened, Will?’

  ‘To hear him tell it you’d think some monster appeared on the doorstep and snatched one of them out of his arms – no-one believes in the serpent more than Cracknell. But of course it was only that it slipped out of its pen one night and got caught in the marsh, and the tide came in.’ He sighed, and said: ‘He says he found it frozen solid with terror, frightened – quite literally! – to death. I’m afraid this will do nothing to help put thoughts of this nonsense out of their heads. How can I make them all see how our minds are capable of clever tricks, and that without faith to sustain us we are apt to see’ – he flexed his hands, as if grasping for the phrase, and tried again: ‘I think it possible to put flesh on the bones of our terrors, most of all when we have turned our back on God.’ Conscious of Cora’s steady gaze – which was amused, though not contemptuous – he concealed his face behind the steam rising from his coffee cup.

  ‘And you think him insane – you think there can be nothing in what he says?’ Cora’s pity for the old man did nothing to alleviate her curiosity: here was evidence, of a kind!

  The rector snorted. ‘A goat, frightened to death? Absurd. No witless beast could comprehend fear to such an extent, even if it could tell the difference between a sea-dragon, or whatever they say it is, and driftwood lying on the marsh. Frightened to death! No: it was on its last legs, and got out of its pen and into the cold. There’s no monstrous serpent here, aside from the one carved in the church, and we’d be rid of that, too, if my wife would give me (for once!) my way.’

  Cora, ever the devil’s advocate, said: ‘But you are a man of God, who surely sent signs and wonders to His people: is it so strange, after all, to think He’s choosing to do so again, to call us to repentance?’ She could not keep the wryness of the sceptic from her voice, and Will, hearing it clearly, raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Now: you do not believe that any mo
re than I do. Our God is a god of reason and order, not of visitations in the night! This is nothing more than the Chinese whispers of a village which has lost sight of the constancy of their Creator. It’s my duty to guide them back to comfort and certainty: not to give in to rumour.’

  ‘And what if it is neither rumour nor a call to repentance, but merely a living thing, to be examined and catalogued and explained? Darwin and Lyell –’

  Will pushed his cup away impatiently. ‘Ah, it is never long before those names come up. Clever men, I don’t doubt: I’ve read both, and there may be much in their theories which later generations will prove to be true. But tomorrow there will be another theory, and another; one will be discredited and the other praised; they’ll fall from fashion and be resurrected a decade later with added footnotes and a new edition. Everything is changing, Mrs Seaborne, and much of it for the better: but what use is it to try and stand on quicksand? We will stumble and fall, and in falling become prey to folly and darkness – these rumours of monsters are nothing more than evidence that we have let go of the rope that tethers us to everything that’s good and certain.’

  ‘But is your faith not all strangeness and mystery – all blood, and brimstone – all seeing nothing in the dark, stumbling, making out dim shapes with your hands?’

  ‘You speak as if we were in the Dark Ages still, as if Essex still burned its witches! No – ours is a faith of enlightenment and clarity: I am not stumbling – I am running with patience the race that is set before me – there is a lamp on my path!’

  Cora smiled. ‘I can’t tell whether you are using words of your own, or of others: you have me at a disadvantage!’ She drank the last of her coffee, which left a coating of bitter grit on her tongue, and said: ‘We both speak of illuminating the world, but we have different sources of light, you and I.’

  Will, unaccountably elated, feeling he ought to be piqued at this odd woman’s grey gaze challenging him at his own table, instead smiled, and went on smiling, and said: ‘Then we shall see who first blows out the other’s candle,’ and raised his cup in a toast. Stella, who could not have taken more pleasure in the exchange if she’d paid for a good seat in the theatre, put her palms together as if she were in the midst of applause; but something caught at her throat, and she began to cough. It seemed too deep a sound to come from so small and fragile a vessel: it shook her body, and she clutched at the tablecloth, and tipped over a glass of wine. Startled at once from his good humour Will crouched at her side, and with little practised taps on her narrow back murmured consolingly in her ear.

  ‘We should fetch hot water – she should breathe in steam,’ said Katherine Ambrose; but as soon as the fit arrived it ended.

  The woman unfolded, and looked out at them all from wet blue eyes: she said, ‘I am sorry – what manners, and you’ll all now have the flu, and it takes such a long time to shake off! – will you forgive me if I go up to bed? I’ve enjoyed myself so much’ – she reached across the table and clutched Cora’s hand in both of hers – ‘but you will be here in the morning, and I know we can show you one serpent, at least.’

  3

  As it turned out the following morning, the All Saints serpent was an innocent-seeming thing on the arm of a Restoration pew. It had been carved in the last days of the Essex Serpent, when rumour had given way to legend, and there were no more warning signs pinned to the oaks and way-posts. Certainly the beast had held no fear for the mischievous craftsman, who’d coiled its tail three times around the spindle with sharp and lapping scales, but omitted either claws or teeth. The wings, Cora conceded, laughing, were a little sinister, looking as if a bat had mated forcibly with a sparrow, and shadows passing over the grinning face gave it the appearance of blinking, but really it was hardly a signifier of the occult. It had endured two hundred years’ fondling from affectionate congregants, and its spine was worn smooth.

  Joanna, who’d accompanied Cora and her father on their morning walk, ran her finger along a fresh groove in the wood. ‘That’s where he did it,’ she said. ‘That’s where he was going to cut it off with a chisel, but we wouldn’t let him.’

  ‘They hid my toolbox,’ he said: ‘They won’t tell me where it is.’ William Ransome looked that morning rather sterner than Cora remembered from dinner in the small hot room, as if he’d put on his office when he put on his collar. It didn’t suit him, nor did the blackness of his suit, nor did being freshly shaved, which gave his scarred cheek a raw look. All the same, there lurked deep in his tired eyes a lightness she’d tried to coax out as he’d showed her the small village, and the low-towered church whose flint walls were wet from overnight rain and gleamed in the morning sun.

  Cora put the tip of her little finger in the serpent’s mouth. Bite me then I can take it. ‘If you had any sense you’d make a feature of it, and whisper rumours yourself, and thunder from the pulpit, and charge at the door to see the monster.’

  ‘I suppose it might pay for a new window, but Essex is full of horrors, and we can’t compete with Hadstock and the Dane-skin door.’ Seeing her frown, he said: ‘The church door there is studded all over with iron bolts, and under the bolts are scraps of skin. They say an apostate Dane was caught and flayed, and his pelt used to keep the rain out.’ She shuddered, delighted, and wanting to give her more he discarded the last of his sternness and said, ‘Perhaps they gave him the Viking blood eagle punishment, and cleaved his ribs from his spine and spread them out like wings, and lifted out each lung – oh, you’re pale, and I’ve made Jojo sick!’

  The girl gave her father a contemptuous look – you’ve let me down: really you have – and buttoning up her jacket went out to greet the bell-ringers on their morning duty.

  ‘How lucky you are – how blessed, you’d probably say!’ said Cora, impulsively, watching the girl dart between tombstones and stand beneath the lychgate waving. ‘You all seem to have the knack of happiness …’

  ‘Don’t you?’ He sat beside her on the pew, and touched the serpent there. ‘You’re always laughing; it’s contagious, like a yawn!’ We dreaded you, he thought: and look at you! ‘You’re not what we expected.’

  ‘Oh, lately, yes. Lately – I laugh when I shouldn’t. I know I don’t give what’s expected of me … these last few weeks I’ve thought over and over that there was never a greater difference between what I ought to be, and what I am.’ Absurd to talk so freely to almost a stranger, but after all they’d seen each other at their worst, and no conversation could mire them as deeply as that little lake by the Colchester road. ‘I am in a state of disgrace, I know it: I always have been, but it was never as visible.’ She made such a sudden transition to sadness that he saw, appalled, her grey eyes glaze and brighten, and touching his collar he said (in the grave voice that did so well for these occasions), ‘We’re taught – and I believe – that it’s when we’re most lost and feeling most lacking in grace that the source of comfort is nearest … forgive me, it’s not that I mean to impose, only not to say these things would be not to give you a glass of water if I saw you thirsty.’ This last phrase was so far out of his usual stock in trade that he looked down at his hands in astonishment, as if to check that it was his own body the words inhabited.

  She smiled, and said, ‘I’m thirsty, I’m always thirsty – for everything, everything! But I gave all this up a long time ago.’ She gestured to the high roof with its white stones and the beams that crossed it, and the altar with its blue cloth. ‘Sometimes I think I sold my soul, so that I could live as I must. Oh, I don’t mean without morals or conscience – I only mean with freedom to think the thoughts that come, to send them where I want them to go, not to let them run along tracks someone else set, leading only this way or that …’ Frowning, she ran her thumb along the serpent’s spine and said, ‘I’ve never said this before, not to anyone, though I’ve meant to: but yes, I’ve sold my soul, though I’m afraid it didn’t fetch too high a price. I had faith, the sort I think you might be born with, but I’ve seen what it does an
d I traded it in. It’s a sort of blindness, or a choice to be mad – to turn your back on everything new and wonderful – not to see that there’s no fewer miracles in the microscope than in the gospels!’

  ‘You think – you really think – that it is one or the other: your faith or your reason?’

  ‘Not only my reason – there’s not enough of that to set against my soul! – but my liberty. And sometimes I’m afraid I’ll be punished for it, but I know punishment, I’ve learned how to stand it …’ He didn’t understand, and was afraid to ask – but then Joanna came in and stood in the nave while behind her the bell-ringers tugged at their ropes and the bells sounded faintly indoors.

  ‘You are not what we expected,’ he said again.

  ‘Nor are you,’ said Cora, looking at him as directly as she could in a curious bout of shyness. She thought his collar conferred no more authority than a blacksmith’s apron, but even a blacksmith is lord in his forge. ‘No, nor are you: I thought you’d be very fat and pompous, and Stella very thin and frail, and your children all horribly devout.’

  He grinned – ‘Devout!’ he said: ‘What, traipsing into church in the mornings dripping piety and jostling to get at the bibles!’ At that moment Joanna genuflected enormously in front of the altar (a school-friend was a Catholic girl, and Joanna envied her rituals and rosary), and crossed herself three times. Her hair was bound like a halo above her ears; she wore white, and adopted such a prim expression her mouth had all but disappeared. She was so exactly the image of a parson’s horrid daughter that Cora and Will looked at each other in delight and could not help falling into another of their fits of laughter.