The Essex Serpent

by Sarah Perry

  ‘I’m not sure: two weeks an Aldwinter woman and still it’s all a mystery! I walked west, I know that. I bought some milk, which was the best I ever had; I trespassed on the grounds of a stately home, and frightened the pheasants. My nose is burned – look! – and I fell over a stile, and am bleeding from the knee.’

  ‘Conyngford Hall, I should think’ – he did not acknowledge her wounds: ‘Were there turrets, and a sad peacock in a cage? You were lucky to get away without being shot for a poacher.’

  ‘A bad squire, then? I should’ve set the peacock free.’ She surveyed him placidly. No man ever looked less a parson: his shirt was loose, and grubby at the cuffs; there was soil beneath his nails. His clean Sunday cheek had given way to a light beard, and where the sheep’s hoof had left its curled scar, no hair grew.

  ‘The worst of squires! Trap a rabbit on his acres and he’ll have you up before the beak by breakfast.’

  They fell easily into step, matching pace for pace; it occurred to him that their legs must be the same length, their height the same, perhaps the span of their open arms. Cherry blossom drifted on the idle wind. Cora felt herself brimming with things to offer, and could not keep herself from giving them: ‘Just before I saw you a hare paused right there on the path and looked at me. I’d forgotten the colour of their fur, like almonds just out of the shell – the strength in their hind legs, and how tall they are, as they pelt off over the fields, suddenly, as if they’ve remembered something they ought to be doing!’ She glanced at him – perhaps a country man would think her childish in her delight? – but no: he smiled, and inclined his head. ‘There was a chaffinch,’ she said, ‘and the flash of something yellow, which may have been a siskin – are you any good with birds? I’m not. Everywhere there’s acorns splitting open and sending out a root and a stem: a white thing burrowing into the soil where last year’s leaves are rotting, and a green leaf beginning to unfold! How did I never see that before? I wish I had one to show you.’

  He looked, bemused, into the empty palm she held out. How strange she was, to notice such things, and think of telling him; it sat curiously on a woman whose man’s coat could not conceal her shirt’s fine silk, its pearl fastenings, the diamond on her hand. ‘I’m not as good with birds as I’d like,’ he said, ‘though I can tell you the blue tit wears a highwayman’s mask, and the great tit wears the black cap of the judge that’s going to hang him!’ She laughed, and he diffidently said: ‘I wish you’d use my name. Do you mind? Mr Ransome will always be my father.’

  ‘If you like,’ she said. ‘William. Will.’

  ‘And did you hear the woodpeckers? I listen for them, always. And have you found the Essex Serpent – are you come to deliver us from bonds of fear?’

  ‘Neither hide nor hair of it!’ said Cora, ruefully: ‘Even Cracknell looks cheerful when I mention it. I believe you informed the wretched thing I was coming, and sent it to Suffolk with a flea in its ear.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Will: ‘I assure you, rumours abound! Cracknell may put a brave face on for a lady but he never leaves his window without a candle. He’s keeping poor Magog indoors, and her milk’s dried up.’ She smiled; he said: ‘What’s more, either the folk of St Osyth are careless with cattle or something’s taken two calves from their mothers and they’ve not been seen since.’ Likelier to be theft, he thought, but let her have her daydream.

  ‘Well, that’s encouraging, at least. No hope, I suppose’ – she spoke gravely – ‘that another man has drowned?’

  ‘None, Mrs Seaborne – Cora? – though it pains me to disappoint. Now then: where was it you were going?’

  They’d come, by silent consensus, to the rectory gate. Behind them on the common lengthened the shadow of Traitor’s Oak; before them the chequered path was bordered by blue hyacinths. They gave out a strong scent, and Cora reeled with it, felt it indecent – it caused a response in her so like unsought desire that her pulse quickened.

  ‘Where was I going?’ She looked down at her feet, as if they’d carried her without consent. ‘I suppose that I was going home.’

  ‘Must you? Won’t you come in? The children are out, and Stella will be glad to see you.’ And she was: the door opened without their knocking, as if they’d been awaited, and there was Stella, all her colours vivid in the dim hall – her silver hair loose, her eyes bright.

  ‘Mrs Seaborne – how funny: we talked about you at breakfast – didn’t we? – we hoped you’d come soon! William Ransome, don’t leave your guest on the doorstep: bring her in, make her comfortable – have you eaten? Won’t you have tea?’

  ‘I can always eat,’ said Cora, ‘always!’ She saw how Will stooped to kiss his wife; how lightly his fingers slipped through the fine fair curls above her ear, and marvelled at their tenderness (I’ll fill your wounds with gold, Michael had said, and pulled one by one the hairs from the nape of her neck, leaving a bald place there the size of a penny).

  A little later, in a sunny room, they dawdled over plates of cake, and admired the daffodils blooming on the table. ‘And tell me: how is Katherine? How is Charles?’ Stella’s appetite for the lives of others made her an easy companion, since she wanted only to be spun stories and never much minded embellishment. ‘They’re both appalled that you’re here. Charles says he’s going to send a case of French wine and that you’ll last a month at most.’

  ‘Charles is much too busy to think of wine – even French wine. You see: he has turned philanthropist!’

  Will raised an eyebrow, and drained his tea. The notion seemed unlikely: Charles was good-hearted, but in the fashion of a man devoted to his own happiness, and – always supposing it cost him no great effort – that of those he liked. That he’d exert himself for the benefit of what he was in the deplorable habit of calling ‘the great unwashed’ was surprising indeed. ‘Charles Ambrose?’ he said. ‘No-one was ever fonder of anyone than I am of him, but he troubles himself more over the cut of his shirts than the state of the nation!’

  ‘It’s true!’ said Cora, laughing. (She’d have liked to defend the man, but knew were he to overhear, slumbering in his velvet seat at the Garrick, he’d surely have nodded, and laughed, and agreed.) ‘It’s Martha’s doing.’ She turned to Stella. ‘Martha is a socialist. Well: sometimes I think we all must be, when it comes down to it, if we have a grain of sense – but for Martha it’s as much a way of life as Matins and Evensong to the good Reverend here. London housing is the loudest bee in her bonnet (which, honestly, contains entire hives): workers damned to slum conditions unless they prove themselves deserving of a roof, and meanwhile landlords fatten themselves on rent, and vice, and Parliament sits on cushions stuffed with their coins. She grew up in Whitechapel, and her father was a working man and a good one, and they all lived well enough; but she never forgot what was just beyond the doorstep. How was it the newspapers put it, a year or two ago – “Outcast London”! You remember – you saw it?’

  It was clear they had not, and Cora – who’d clean forgotten she was not in Bayswater or Knightsbridge, and that what occupies London gossip for months might not filter far from the waters of the Thames – could not help giving each a censorious look. ‘Perhaps I know it well only because of Martha, who really, I think, could recite it by now. It was printed and reprinted so often a few years back that you almost expected to find it wrapping your fish and chips.’

  ‘And what was it – what did it say?’ said Stella. Outcast London! The phrase appealed to her ready pity.

  ‘A pamphlet produced by a group of clergymen I believe – The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, and once read not soon forgotten. I thought that I’d seen everything the city had to offer from best to worst, but never anything like that. In one cellar a mother and father living with their children and their pigs – a baby dead and cut open for the coroner right there on the table, since there wasn’t any room in the mortuary! And women working seventeen hours a day stitching buttons and buttonholes … unable to pause long enough to eat, and never earning eno
ugh to keep warm, so that they might as well have been sewing their own shrouds. I remember Martha would not buy new clothes for years, saying she’d not be clothed in her sisters’ suffering!’

  Stella’s eyes brimmed. ‘How could we not have heard? Will – isn’t it your duty, to know, and to help?’

  Cora saw his discomfort, and in the absence of an observer might have sought to worsen it, out of mischief and principle. But it wouldn’t do to diminish a man in the eyes of his wife, and she said: ‘I’m sorry to distress you! The book did its work – the cry was heard – they’ve been pulling down the slums, though they tell me what goes up in their place is hardly better. Martha has it in hand. She’s enlisted the help of our friend Spencer, who is embarrassingly rich, and who in turn is calling on Charles. I hear there’s even a Committee. Well – much good may it do them.’

  ‘I hope it will! I hope it will!’ said Stella. To Cora’s dismay she dabbed at her eyes, and said, ‘All of a sudden I’m tired – Cora, would you forgive me if I went up to bed? I can’t shake the flu, and you’ll think I’m very feeble, when really until this winter just gone I hardly had a day in bed, not even when I had my babies.’ She rose, and so did her guest; Cora kissed her, and felt how hot her wet cheek was.

  ‘But you’ve not finished your tea, and I know there was something Will had to show you, if you can stay a little longer? Will, play the host! Perhaps’ – she showed them her dimples – ‘you can talk over your sermon preparation, and Cora can give you her verdict?’ Cora laughed, and said that she was in no position to comment; Will laughed, and said that in any case he would not dream of subjecting her to it.

  The door closed behind Stella – they heard her footstep on the stair – and it seemed to them both that there came a slight alteration in the air. It was not precisely that the room seemed at once smaller, and more warmly lit – though certainly it did, as the sun fell, and on the table the yellow blooms took on the look of flames burning in their bowl. It was a sensation of freedom, as though the curious liberty both felt as they’d crossed the common had returned. Will also was conscious of feeling mildly aggrieved: he did not for a moment think his guest had set out to make him look foolish, but that had been the effect. With little more than a look she’d made him feel chastised, and rightly so – when had his conscience dwindled down to the scope of the parish boundary? ‘Grace,’ he said, suddenly. ‘On Sunday I’ll talk about the quality of grace, which I suppose is a gift of a kind – of goodness and mercy undeserved, and unexpected.’

  ‘That’ll do, for your sermon,’ she said. ‘That’s quite enough. Let them go home early and walk in the forest, and find God there.’ This was so nearly his own preferred method of worship that his annoyance evaporated; he threw himself into an armchair, and gestured that she should do the same.

  ‘What was it you were going to show me?’ In Stella’s presence Cora had sat ladylike, neat, her ankles crossed beneath her skirts; now, she curled in the corner of a couch, leaning against the arm and resting her chin in a cupped hand.

  ‘Really,’ he said, ‘I wish she hadn’t mentioned it – it’s nothing – only a bit of stuff I found on the saltings last week, and put in my pocket, thinking you might like to see it. Come with me!’

  It did not occur to him then that no-one but Stella ever entered his study – that it was neither clean nor tidy, and that anyone caring to look at the litter of books and notes on the desk and floor might’ve made a guess at the full character of his mind. Not even the children were allowed to enter, unless expressly invited, and then only in order to be chastised or taught; it would seem to him less exposing to relieve himself against Traitor’s Oak at noon than to allow anyone across the threshold. But none of this struck him as he opened the door, and stood back to let her pass, nor was he troubled by how immediately her attention turned to his desk, or that her letter was set beside his papers, thin at the folds from being opened and reopened. ‘Do sit,’ he said, gesturing to the leather armchair which had been his father’s; and she did, spreading out her skirts. He reached up to a bookshelf and withdrew a white paper packet, which he placed on the desk and opened very carefully, taking out a pale lump a little larger than a child’s fist. Embedded within were several black and pitted fragments, as if a rough plate had been smashed, and concealed for some reason inside a piece of clay. Will picked it up, and showed her, stooping beside her chair; looking down she saw where his hair grew whorled at the crown, and the few white threads which grew thick and gleaming as wire. ‘It’s nothing, I’m sure,’ he said, ‘but there it was, broken away from one of the banks down in the creeks; I go down so often, and never saw anything like it before, but then until you came I wouldn’t have thought to look! What do you think – ought we to contact the museum in Colchester, and offer to make a donation?’

  Cora was not entirely sure: ammonites and toadstones she knew well enough, and the shocking white curl of a shark’s tooth biting through its lump of clay; she knew the puffed and spiny echinoid when she saw it, and the flared ribs of a trilobite, and was convinced that once at Lyme Regis she’d struck a seam in which was concealed the bone of a small vertebrate. But she’d learned the humility of scholars: that the more she knew, the more she did not know. Will flexed his hand – the lump rolled in his palm – a piece of clay broke off, and fell between his outspread fingers to the floor. ‘Well then,’ he said: ‘What is the expert’s verdict?’ He looked both eager and shy, as if certain there was nothing he could show her that might please her, but hoping all the same that he might. She drew her thumbnail across the black surface; it had grown warm from his hand, and was smooth. ‘I wonder,’ she said, grateful that the thought had occurred, ‘if it’s a kind of lobster – I’ll never remember the name! – hoploparia, that’s it. I can’t tell you the age of it, though several millions of years, I imagine.’ (And would he counter this with talk of an earth barely cool from creation?)

  ‘Surely not!’ he said, evidently delighted, though attempting to conceal it. ‘Surely not! Well – if you say so, Mrs Seaborne: I bow to your knowledge.’ And indeed he did bow, standing, and holding the crumbling bit of mud out as he did so, and placing it on the mantelpiece with a reverence that was only partly mocking.

  ‘Will,’ said Cora: ‘How did you come to be here?’ She spoke with a kindly hauteur very like that of a minor royal greeting dignitaries at the opening of a library; they both heard it, and smiled.

  ‘Here, you mean?’ he said, taking in the uncurtained window which overlooked the lawn, the pot of leaking pens, the several drawings of mechanical devices which served no purpose other than to turn and turn.

  ‘Here, I mean! Here, in Aldwinter – you ought to be elsewhere – Manchester, London, Birmingham – not always fifty paces from a rural church with no equal near to hand! If I met you elsewhere I would think you a – a lawyer, or an engineer, or a government minister – what, did you vow to take holy orders at fifteen, when you were a child, and were afraid to break your promise in case you were struck by lightning for your betrayal!’

  Leaning against the windowsill Will surveyed his guest, and frowned. ‘Am I really so interesting – did you never meet a clergyman before?’

  ‘Oh – I am sorry – do you mind?’ said Cora. ‘I have met more clergymen than I care to remember, but you surprise me: that’s all.’

  He shrugged, elaborately. ‘You are a solipsist, Mrs Seaborne – can you really not imagine that I might take a path which differs from yours and be happy walking there?’

  No, she thought: no, I cannot.

  ‘I’m not an unusual or interesting man. You’re mistaken if you think so. For a time I wanted be an engineer, and revered Pritchard and Brunel, and once skipped school and travelled by train all the way to Ironbridge, and made drawings of the rivets and struts; I’d sit bored in class and make plans for box-girder bridges. But in the end it was purpose I wanted, not achievement – you see the difference? I have a good enough mind – if I’d played my cards right I c
ould even now be sitting on the back benches debating some minor point of law – wondering whether it’s turbot for dinner and has Ambrose found another parliamentary candidate and ought I to go to Drury Lane or the Mall for dinner. But it chills me. Give me an afternoon guiding Cracknell back to the God who never left him over a thousand Drury Lane dinners. Give me an evening with the Psalms on the saltings and the sky breaking open over a thousand walks in Regency Park.’ He could not remember having ever spoken so long on the subject of himself, and wondered how she’d contrived to make him do so. ‘Besides,’ he said, a little irritated: ‘I have an equal in Stella.’

  ‘I think it a shame, that’s all.’

  ‘A shame!’

  ‘Yes – a shame. That in the modern age a man could impoverish his intellect enough to satisfy himself with myth and legend – could be content to turn his back to the world and bury himself in ideas which even your father must have thought outdated! Nothing is more important than to use your mind to its last degree!’

  ‘I’ve turned my back on nothing – I have done the reverse. Do you think everything can be accounted for by equations and soil deposits? I am looking up, not down.’ There again was another of those little alterations in the air, as if the pressure had dropped, and a storm was coming: each was aware of having grown angry with the other, uncertain why.

  ‘You certainly don’t seem to be looking outward – I know that at least!’ Cora found herself braced against the arms of her chair, wanting to be a little unkind: ‘What do you know of England now, of how the roads are laid, and where they’re going – of places in the city where children have never seen the Thames – never seen a patch of grass. How content you must be, reciting your Psalms to the air, and coming home to a pretty wife and books that left the press three hundred years ago!’ It was unjust, she knew; she faltered a little, wanting neither to retreat nor press on. And if she’d intended to infuriate her host she succeeded; he said, with a sharpness to his voice on which she could have cut herself, ‘How perceptive of you, to have my character and motives sketched out on our third meeting.’ Their gazes met. ‘It is not I who goes grubbing about in the mud for scraps of dead things – it’s not I who has run away from London and lost myself in a science I barely understand.’