The Essex Serpent

by Sarah Perry

  ‘True,’ said Cora. ‘Oh well, true enough!’ and smiled; and the effect was to disarm him completely.

  ‘Well then,’ he said. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I am not sure. Liberty, I suppose. I lived so long under constraints. You wonder why I grub about in the mud – it’s what I remember from childhood. Barely ever wearing shoes – picking gorse for cordial, watching the ponds boiling with frogs. And then there was Michael, and he was – civilised. He would pave over every bit of woodland, have every sparrow mounted on a plinth. And he had me mounted on a plinth. My waist pinched, my hair burned into curls, the colour on my face painted out, then painted in again. And now I’m free to sink back into the earth if I like – to let myself grow over with moss and lichen. Perhaps you’re appalled to think we’re no higher than the animals – or at least, if we are, only one rung further up the ladder. But no, no – it has given me liberty. No other animal abides by rules – why then must we?’

  If Will was able to set aside the obligations of his office, they were never far away; as she spoke he touched his throat as if hoping to find there the comfort of his white collar. How could he begin to believe that she was content to be as much animal as woman, careless, without a soul, or the prospect of its loss or salvation? What’s more, she contradicted herself on every turn: impossible to reconcile an animal Cora with the one who seemed always to be grasping at fresh ideas just beyond her reach. The silence that fell had the effect of a full stop at the conclusion of a long confusing sentence, and it was not broken for a time. Then, with a deliberately relieved glance at the clock – and smiling, because she’d taken no offence, and hoped she’d given none – Cora said, ‘I should go. Francis doesn’t exactly need me, but he does like to know that come six o’clock there will be dinner on the table, and that I will be eating it. And I am already hungry! I always am.’

  ‘I have noticed.’ She stood; he opened the door. ‘Then I’ll walk with you – I should do my rounds, like a surgeon in a hospital – I must pay calls to Cracknell, and to Matthew Evansford, who took a vow of temperance the day the body was found on New Year’s Eve, and has taken to wearing black and getting in a state over the serpent, and the End Times. You may have seen him when you first came to All Saints – all in black, and looking as if he ought to have a coffin on his shoulder.’

  Out on the common again, with the sun lowering, and no wind; they walked with lightness of heart, conscious of having traversed uncertain terrain without serious injury. Cora spoke admiringly of Stella, perhaps by way of apology; Will in turn asked to be taught how it was that fossils were dated by the layers of sediment in which they were found. On the All Saints tower sunlight sparkled on the flint; beside the path the courteous daffodils all nodded as they passed. ‘And do you still think – seriously now, Cora – that you might find a living fossil (the ichthyosaur did you say?) in such a dull and shallow place as the Blackwater estuary?’

  ‘I think I might – I believe I might. And I am never sure of the difference between thinking and believing: you can teach me, one day. And after all I can hardly lay claim to the idea: Charles Lyell was firmly of the opinion that an ichthyosaur might turn up, although I admit no-one took him very seriously. Look – I’ve ten minutes of liberty left – let me walk with you to World’s End, and the water. I’m sure we’ll be safe: April’s too gentle a month for sea-dragons.’

  They reached the water – the tide was out – mud and shingle gleamed in the westering light, and someone had wreathed the bones of Leviathan in yellow branches of broom. Sedge grew in soft pale sheaves that shimmered when the wind took them; a little distance away they heard the deep implausible booming of a bittern. The air was sweet and clear: it went in like good wine.

  Neither was ever certain who first shielded their eyes against the dazzle on the water, and saw what lay beyond. Neither recalled having exclaimed, or having told the other ‘Look – look!’ only that all at once both stood transfixed on the path above the saltings, gazing east. There on the horizon, between the silver line of water and the sky, there lay a strip of pale and gauzy air. Within the strip, sailing far above the water, a barge moved slowly through the lower sky. It was possible to make out the separate pieces of its oxblood sail, which appeared to move under a strong wind; there quite clearly was the deck and rigging, the dark prow. On it went, flying in full sail, high above the estuary; it flickered, and diminished, then regained its size; then for a moment it was possible to see the image of it inverted just beneath, as if a great mirror had been laid out. The air grew chill – the bittern boomed – each heard the other breathing swiftly, and it was not quite terror they felt, though something like it. Then the mirror vanished, and the boat sailed on alone; a gull flew below the black hull, above the gleaming water. Then some member of the ghostly crew tugged a rope, or dropped an anchor – the vessel ceased to move, only hung on silent, wonderful, becalmed against the sky. William Ransome and Cora Seaborne, stripped of code and convention, even of speech, stood with her strong hand in his: children of the earth and lost in wonder.

  The Reading Rooms

  The British Museum

  29th April

  Dear Mrs Seaborne –

  I write, as you see, from the Reading Rooms at the British Museum. My collar got me my pass, though when I came to the desk they looked me up and down, since I had soil beneath my nails from planting out broad beans. I’ve come to cram for something I must write on the presence of Christ in the 22nd Psalm, but instead find myself determined to get to the bottom of what we saw last night.

  You recall we agreed (once we’d regained the powers of speech) we couldn’t possibly be seeing the Flying Dutchman, or any other supernatural apparition? You wondered if it were a mirage of some kind, like those lakes that appear in the desert and deceive dying men with promises of water. Well – you were not far off the mark. Are you ready for a lesson?

  I believe we witnessed a Fata Morgana illusion, named for the fairy Morgan le Fay, who set about bewitching sailors to their death by building icy castles in the air above the sea. Cora, you’d be amazed how much of it there is about! I copy out here an extract from the published diaries of a certain Dorothy Woolfenden (forgive my handwriting!):

  1 Apr 1864, Calabria: Having risen early I stood at my window and witnessed a remarkable phenomenon – which I should certainly not believe were it related to me by any other – the weather was fine – I saw upon the horizon above the Messina Strait a gauzy haze through which I gradually perceived a shimmering city. A great cathedral was built before my eyes, with pinnacles and arches – a grove of cypress trees which all at once bowed as if buffeted by a gale – and only for a moment a vast and glittering tower in which were many high windows – then as it were a veil descended – the vision ended – the city was gone. In my astonishment I ran to tell my companions – they had slept, and seen nothing – but believe it to have been the infamous Fata Morgana, which draws men to their doom.

  Nor does the fairy content herself with ships and cities: there were phantom armies in the sky at the battle of Verviers, and the Norsemen called it the Hillingar, and saw impossible cliffs appearing on the plains.

  Naturally enough there’s a prosaic explanation, though as I think of it now it seems hardly less marvellous than if Morgan le Fay had followed us down to the saltings. As I understand it, the illusion is created when a particular arrangement of cold and warm air creates a refracting lens. The light which reaches the observer is bent upward in such a way that objects beneath or beyond the horizon are refracted far above their location (I am imagining you writing in one of your notebooks – are you? – I hope so!). As the pockets of cold and warm air shift, so does the lens – did you see, as I did, the ship seeming to sail upon its own reflection? Objects are not only misplaced, but repeated and distorted – something quite insignificant may be duplicated many times and form bricks from which whole cities are built!

  So while we stood there baffled and bemused, I supp
ose that all along, somewhere out of sight, Banks was taking a shipment of wheat up to Clacton quay.

  I’ve a tendency to sermonise, I know – but I cannot seem to let the matter rest. Our senses were deceived utterly – we stood for a moment clean out of our wits, as though our bodies conspired against our reason. And I have been unable to sleep, not because I am haunted by the possibility of a phantom ship, but because it occurs to me that my eyes are not to be trusted; or, at least, that my mind cannot be trusted to interpret what my eyes perceive. This morning as I walked for the train I saw a dying bird on the road – something about the way it flailed blindly on the path made me feel sick. Then I realised it was just a clump of wet leaves blowing about, but it was a while before the nausea passed – and it struck me that if my body had responded as if it had been the bird, was my perception of it really false, even if it had only been the leaves?

  Round and round my thoughts have gone, turning as they often do to the Essex Serpent, until I begin to see how it might have appeared to us all in its various guises, and that far from there being one truth alone, there may be several truths, none of which it would be possible to prove or disprove. How I wish you might go down one morning and find its carcass on the beach, and that it would be photographed, and the picture annotated and handed about. Surely we could then be certain of things?

  But it pleases me to think of you and me standing there together. Ungodly of me I am sure, but I would rather we were both deceived than I alone.

  With regards,

  WILLIAM RANSOME

  By hand

  I was there! I saw what you saw; I felt what you felt.

  As ever

  CORA

  MAY

  1

  May, and the tender weather coaxes roses early from their beds. Naomi Banks peers at the moon and takes full credit for the soft rain, the mild mornings, but all the same she’s unhappy. She recalls the afternoon down on the saltings when they’d commanded spring to come, but what she sees of that day is not Joanna’s hand held in hers over the flames, but of something in the water biding its time. She is her father’s daughter, and knows – none better – the vagaries of the tides, and how the water might buck above a sandbank, or carry in its current the severed limbs of oaks. All the same, she’s grown wary of the Blackwater – will not set foot on the deck of the barge – skirts the quay as if convinced something down there will grasp her ankle as she passes.

  Her teacher chides her for a lazy feckless thing, and sets her lines of punishment, but the words on the paper settle and shift like flies; instead, she takes to making charcoal sketches in which a sea-serpent – black-winged, blunt-beaked – snaps at her from the page. Then down she looks at the webbing between her fingers, and flinches at the memory of it having first been noted by her classmates, and how feared she’d been and reviled, until tall Joanna with her father’s authority had intervened. But there it is – she raises her hands, and watches lamplight pick out the veins in the little pouches of skin – she is distorted, unnatural; it would be entirely in keeping for the Essex Serpent to single her out; perhaps she is its kindred. For a time she refuses glasses of water, certain that there in the liquid are particles of skin sloughed from the serpent’s back.

  One evening, coming home from a fruitless search for her father, she passes the open doors of the White Hare. The scent of drink is so familiar it’s as if she’s breathing her father’s breath, and she dawdles on the doorstep. Men beckon her in, and admire her red hair, the pewter locket she wears (it contains a piece of the caul she was born with, to ensure she will not drown). She grows aware of a kind of power she had no idea she possessed; she pirouettes when asked, and laughs at their admiration of her ankles, of the white bones of her knees. To be admired is so delicious, and so strange, that she allows them to tug at her ringlets, and examine the locket where it lies on her skin; yes (she says), laughing, she is covered all over with freckles. She darts away; they call her back, and when she returns, they say, ‘Pretty, pretty,’ and she thinks that after all perhaps she is. Then she’s drawn down onto a waiting lap, and is all at once aware that something is very wrong – she feels both afraid and outraged, but finds it impossible to move; somewhere behind her a man she cannot see makes a noise which is like that of an animal finding food.

  That night in her sleep the Essex Serpent lets just the wet tip of its tail show under her pillow and breathes coldly on the closed lids of her eyes; she wakes expecting the sheets beneath her to be briny and damp. The dream seems to have something to do with the loss of her mother years before (though that had been decently done in the bedroom with the curtains closed, and not anywhere near the Blackwater), and leaves her too anxious to eat.

  The Essex Serpent does not content itself with visitations to a child. It comes to Matthew Evansford as he leafs through the book of Revelation, and sports seven heads and ten horns, and upon its heads the name of blasphemy. It rains down blows on Cracknell’s door in the buffeting of an easterly wind; it awaits Banks as he mends his sails and thinks of his lost wife, his stolen boat, the daughter who won’t meet his eye. It winks at William Ransome from the wormy arm of its pew, and leaves him in no doubt of his failings – he reads the collect with a fervency that delights the congregation: Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils. It comes to Stella in a light fever but it’s no match for her: she sings to it, and pities it for a cowardly creeping thing. In the dining room of the Garrick, Charles Ambrose – having eaten too richly – puts a hand to his belly and jokes to his companion that the Essex Serpent’s got its claws in him. Evidence of divine judgment in a more general sense is spotted here and there: a plague of cuckoo-spit in the gardens, a cat aborting its kittens on the hearth. Evansford hears of a death in St Osyth which the coroner cannot explain; he reserves the blood from his Sunday chicken and goes out that night to paint the lintel of every door in Aldwinter, that God’s judgment might pass over them. There’s a downpour before sunrise and noone’s any the wiser.

  Martha watches her companion for signs of wanting to return to Foulis Street, but there are none, for Cora has come to feel her happiness is rooted in the Aldwinter clay. One afternoon she goes to East Mersea and walks in a daze of joy for which she fears she’ll one day be punished. The russet cliffs are wetted by a beck, and where the water runs, yellow coltsfoot grows. Down on the shore she stoops to inspect the stones and gravel sifted in the longshore drift, and finds no ammonite, no toadstone, but a smooth bit of amber that fits perfectly in the crease of her palm. At times she runs through her store of Essex memory – the dumb sheep’s struggle, Cracknell whispering in the All Saints aisle, Stella tucking a confiding arm in hers, how silently the ship had sailed across the sky – and it seems to her that she must’ve lived there years, that she can recall no other way of being. Besides, there’s the serpent to think of – she takes a boat round Mersea Island, she visits Henham-onthe-Mount, she reads the dying ode of Ragnar Lodbrok, who slew an enormous serpent and won himself a bride. She keeps before her the spirit of Mary Anning, who certainly would’ve pursued the rumour of a winged sea-serpent to the earth’s end, and her own.

  She goes often to the rectory, bringing gifts for the Ransome children: a book for Joanna, a Jacob’s Ladder toy for James (this he dismantles at once), something sweet for John. She kisses Stella on both cheeks, and means it, too. Then on she goes to where Will waits in his study (there is the amber on his desk), and always at first sight there’s a moment of delight, of surprise: you really are here, each thinks.

  Side by side they sit at his desk, books opened and discarded; has he read this or that, she says, and what does he think of it; certainly he has, he says, and thinks nothing of it at all. He attempts to sketch the refracting light that gave them the Fata Morgana; she draws the parts of a trilobite. They sharpen themselves on each other; each by turn is blade and whetstone; when talk falls to faith and reason they argue readily, startling themselves by gr
owing swiftly bad-tempered (‘You don’t understand!’ ‘How can I understand when you do not even make attempts at speaking sense?’). One afternoon they come almost to blows over a question of the existence of absolute good, which Cora denies, with reference to the thieving magpie. Will falls back on condescension, and puts on his parson’s voice. Then she gleefully brings up the Essex Serpent – nothing but rumour and myth, he says, and she’ll have none of it: didn’t he know how in 1717 a beast fourteen feet long was washed up on the Maldon shore? And he an Essex man, too! Each considers the other to have a fatal flaw in their philosophy which ought by rights to exclude a friendship, and are a little baffled to discover it does nothing of the kind. They write more often than meet. ‘I like you better on paper,’ says Cora, and it is as if she carries around with her, in a pocket or threaded around her neck, a constant source of light.

  Stella, passing the open door, smiles, pleased and indulgent: she herself is attended so warmly by so many companions it pleases her to see her husband fitted up with so suitable a friend. Questioned once by a curious Aldwinter wife hopeful of scandal she says, all mischief, half-tempted to stoke the ember: ‘Oh, I never saw firmer friends: they’ve almost begun to look alike. Last week she’d got halfway home before she realised she had his boots on.’ She stands at the mirror in the morning brushing out her hair and half-pities Cora, who to be sure has a handsome and costly look when the rare mood takes her but in general could never be mistaken for a beauty. She puts down the brush – her arm aches – the flu has left her a little weak, a little disinclined to go out: she prefers to sit by her window in the blue hour before dusk and watch cowslips come up on the lawn.