by Sarah Perry
Luke Garrett is alarmed to discover that he has become a celebrity. There’s a brief fad among surgical students for mimicking all the idiosyncrasies that once were roundly mocked: they rig up mirrors in the operating theatre, and take to wearing white cotton masks. He remains in disgrace with his seniors, who fear the corridors will grow clotted with victims of street brawls holding open their shirts for the needle and thread. Spencer – both generous, and attempting to keep his own possessions from being endlessly pressed into his friend’s service – commissions him a leather belt with a heavy silver buckle, and on the buckle he asks to be engraved the snake of Asclepius coiling round its staff, by way of commemorating the medical triumph.
Uncertain what he thought might change once he’d proved it possible to close a cardiac wound, Luke discovers things remain the same. He can still barely afford his rent, reliant on bank-notes he suspects Spencer secretes in his room; he’s still a crouching black-browed thing; all the accumulated humiliations of life have not evaporated with the last of the chloroform in Room 12. Besides, he didn’t quite get at the heart, not quite: both blades had stopped short of the chambers; really he can hardly say it’s been much of an achievement at all.
He admits to Spencer and to no-one else that he’d thought it might at last elevate him in Cora’s estimation: she loves him of course (or claims to), and admires him; but he feels himself out-ranked. She’s acquired new friends, and writes to tell him how the parson’s wife has a face so lovely you thought flowers would wilt in shame as she passed, and how their daughter has adopted Martha, and how even Francis can bear their company an hour or two. Her move to Aldwinter astounds him: then he imagines that she’s merely lapsed into the low spirits befitting a widow, and is greatly cheered at the prospect of raising them. But when they meet in Colchester she speaks of William Ransome and grows so animated her grey eyes gleam blue; really (she says) it’s as if God pities her absence of a brother and has fitted one up for her at the last minute. There’s nothing secretive in the way she speaks of the man, no blushes or sidelong looks; but all the same Garrett looks up and catches Martha’s eye and for the first time discovers they’re in complete accord. What’s happening? they silently say. What’s going on?
Spencer is immersed in London’s housing disgrace. What at first had been merely a means of pleasing Martha has become an obsession: he pores over Hansard and committee minutes, he puts on his worst coat and goes walking down past Drury Lane. He discovers Parliament’s habit of making policies benevolently enough, then covering its eyes and shaking hands with industry. Sometimes the greed and malice of what he sees appals him so much he thinks he must’ve misunderstood; he looks again, and it’s worse than he thought. The local authorities tear down slums, and compensate landlords according to lost rents. Since nothing makes a tenement more profitable than vice and overcrowding, landlords facilitate both as diligently as any pimp in the street, and government rewards them handsomely. The tenants then turned out find themselves considered too immoral for a smart new Peabody home, and are left to find rooms in lodging-houses: there are times when the streets are full of firelight as tenants burn furniture too poor to be sold. Spencer thinks of his family home in Suffolk, where recently his mother discovered another room they’d never known was there, and is nauseated.
Over at World’s End Cracknell turns a wary eye on the estuary. He keeps his fences thickly hung with stripped moles, and a candle burning in the window.
2
Late one afternoon, walking on the saltings with a Psalm on his tongue, William Ransome encountered Cora’s son. He sought out the features of his friend in the small inscrutable face, and found none. These then were the eyes of the man he supposed she’d loved; this the plane of his cheek and chin. But the child’s eyes were querying, not cruel, as he imagined Seaborne’s must have been, though they were not childlike, precisely – Francis was never that.
‘What are you doing, down here all alone?’ said Will.
‘I’m not alone,’ said the boy. Will looked about for someone standing on the shingle, and saw no-one.
Francis stood with his hands in his pockets, and scrutinised the man before him as though he were a sheet of problems to be worked out. Then he said – as if the question arose quite naturally out of their exchange – ‘What’s sin?’
‘Sin?’ said Will, so startled that he stumbled, and put out a hand as if expecting to encounter the pulpit door.
‘I’ve been counting,’ said Francis, walking beside him. ‘Seven times you said it this Sunday. Five the last.’
‘I was not aware you’ve been in the congregation, Francis. I never see you there.’ And Cora – had she, too, sat in the shadows, listening?
‘Seven and five makes twelve. But you don’t say what it is.’
They’d reached Leviathan, and Will – grateful for the pause – stooped to pick at pebbles drifted up against its bones. In all his years of ministry nobody had ever asked, and he was appalled to find himself at a loss. It was not that he had no answer: he had many (he’d studied all the requisite books). But out of doors – with no pulpit or pew in sight and the river mouth licking at the shore – both question and answer struck him as preposterous.
‘What’s sin?’ said Francis, without the inflexion of a repeated phrase. God! Give me strength, thought Will, both devoutly and profanely, and handed the boy a pebble.
‘Stand back a bit,’ he said, ‘here, by me – a step further – there. Now throw the stone and hit Leviathan – that rib, there, where we were standing.’
Francis looked at him a while, as if assessing whether he were being mocked; evidently concluding he was not, he tossed the pebble, and it fell short.
‘Have another’ – Will put a blue stone in his palm – ‘try again.’
Again he threw; again he missed.
‘That’s all it is,’ said Will. ‘To sin is to try, but fall short. Of course we cannot get it right each time – and so we try again.’
The boy frowned. ‘But what if Leviathan had not been there – what if you had not told me to stand here? If I’d stood there, and Leviathan had been here, I might have hit it, first time.’
‘Yes,’ said Will, feeling he’d entered deeper waters than he’d bargained for: ‘We think we know where we’re aiming, and perhaps we do – but morning comes, and a change in the light, and we find out we should’ve been trying in a different direction after all.’
‘But if it changes – what I should do, and what I shouldn’t – how do I know where to aim? And how can it be my fault if I fail – and why should I be punished for it?’ A crease came faintly between the boy’s black brows, and there at last was Cora.
‘There are some things’ – Will trod carefully – ‘which I think we all must try to do, or else try not to do. But there are others we must work out for ourselves.’ The last pebble he held was smooth, and flat; he turned his back to Leviathan and tossed it spinning at the outgoing tide. It skipped once, and fell behind a shallow wave.
‘That wasn’t what you meant to do,’ said Francis.
‘No,’ said Will. ‘It wasn’t. But at my age, you’re used to failing more often than not.’
‘So you sinned,’ said Francis; Will laughed, and said he hoped to be forgiven.
Frowning, the boy studied Leviathan a while. His lips moved, and Will thought he might perhaps be calculating the correct trajectory of a stone. Then he turned away and said: ‘Thank you for answering my question.’
‘How did I do?’ said the rector, hoping he’d fallen somewhere between faith and reason, and fallen without doing himself harm.
‘I don’t know yet. I’ll think about it.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Will, and wished he could ask the boy to conceal their conversation from his mother: what might she make of her son being instructed in the doctrines of sin? He knew the stormy turn her grey eyes could take.
Each surveyed the other, both feeling that the rector had done his level best under circums
tances less than ideal. Francis held out his hand; William shook it; and they walked companionably on the High Road. When they reached the Common the boy paused, and began to pat at his pockets, so that Will wondered if he’d perhaps lost something on the saltings. Then Francis withdrew first a blue bone button, and then a black feather looped in a circle and tied with a bit of thread. He frowned, ran a forefinger down the feather’s spine, then sighing returned them to his pocket. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I can’t spare anything today,’ and with an apologetic look he waved goodbye.
3
Since her friendship with Martha – built as patiently and carefully as one of their houses of cards – Joanna Ransome had changed her school seat to one very nearly under Mr Caffyn’s nose. Always a clever child, with a habit of raiding her father’s library with particular attention to books placed furthest out of reach, her spiritual inclinations were fed one moment by Julian of Norwich and the next by The Golden Bough; she could give you an account of Cranmer’s martyrdom in one breath, and of the war in Crimea with the next. But until meeting Martha it had all been directionless, and done as much in the hope of disconcerting her elders than with any other object in mind, and it had never occurred to her to be shamed by a friendship with an almost illiterate fisherman’s daughter. Able now to name the women surgeons and socialists, satirists and actors, artists, engineers and archaeologists who were apparently to be found anywhere but in Essex, she set herself the task of joining their ranks. I’ll do Latin and Greek, she thought, flinching to think of how weeks before she’d cast spells by Leviathan’s bones: I’ll learn trigonometry and mechanics and chemistry. Mr Caffyn had a hard time of it supplying work to occupy her at weekends, and Stella said, ‘Mind you don’t end up needing glasses,’ as if nothing could be worse than diluting the effect of her violet eyes.
Naomi Banks felt Joanna depart from her, and mourned. She’d heard much of Martha, seen little, and hated her, feeling strongly that an adult who was twenty-five if she was a day had no business taking away her Jo. She would’ve liked to show her friend the serpent drawings, and explain how impossible it was to sleep; to confess what had happened in the White Hare, and ask if she ought to be angry or ashamed. But it seemed impossible: her friend had begun to look on her with pity, which was worse than dislike.
On the first Friday in May Naomi came early to school. They’d been promised a morning with Mrs Cora Seaborne, who’d lived in London and been very important, and who collected fossils and, as Mr Caffyn had put it, other specimens of note. Joanna had already enjoyed the reflected glory of having met Mrs Seaborne before (‘We know her very well,’ she’d said: ‘She gave me this scarf – no, she’s not beautiful, but it doesn’t matter because she’s clever, and has a dress covered all over with peacocks and let me try it on …’), and looked forward to seeing her stock among her fellow pupils rise still higher. No-one could resist Cora: she’d seen them try.
Finding the seat beside Joanna empty, Naomi slipped the other girl a scrap of paper, on which she’d written out a spell they’d concocted a few weeks before. But Joanna had moved on to algebra, and couldn’t remember what the smudged symbols meant, and crumpled the paper in her hand. Then there was Mrs Seaborne herself, dressed disappointingly drably, in what was surely a man’s tweed coat, and with her hair combed too severely from her forehead. She carried over her shoulder a large leather bag, and under her left arm was a file which shed a little drawing of something like a woodlouse as she passed. The only bit of the promised glamour Naomi could see was a diamond on her left hand so large and so bright it couldn’t possibly have been real, and a fine black scarf on which small birds were stitched. Mr Caffyn, evidently over-awed, said, ‘Good morning, Mrs Seaborne: class, say good morning to Mrs Seaborne.’
Good morning, Mrs Seaborne, they said, eyeing her with slight mistrust, and Cora eyed them back, a little nervous. She’d never known what to do with children: Francis had wrong-footed her so completely that she’d come to think of them as a delightful but volatile species no more to be trusted than cats. But there was Joanna, whom she knew well, with her mother’s eyes above her father’s mouth; and beside her a red-haired girl whose face was all freckles; and they each sat with folded hands, surveying her expectantly. She said, ‘How pleased I am to be here: I’m going to start by telling you a story, because anything that was ever worth knowing began with once upon a time.’
‘As if we’re babies,’ muttered Naomi, receiving a sharp kick from her friend, but found that after all it was a better schoolday than most to listen to Mrs Seaborne tell her tale of the woman who’d once found a sea-dragon cased in mud; and how all the earth was a graveyard with gods and monsters under their feet, waiting for weather or a hammer and brush to bring them up to a new kind of life. Only look hard enough and you’d find ferns unfurling in beds of rock, she said, and footprints where lizards had walked on their hind legs; there were teeth so tiny your eye could hardly pick them out, and ones so large they’d once been worn as charms to fend off the plague.
She reached into her bag and they passed ammonites and toad-stones from hand to hand; ‘Hundreds of thousands of years old,’ she told them: ‘Perhaps millions!’ and Mr Caffyn, whose first twenty years had been spent in a Welsh Methodist chapel, coughed, and said, ‘Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth …’ and looked a little aggrieved. ‘Any questions for Mrs Seaborne?’
How did birds end up in the rock, they said, and where were their eggs? Did they ever find humans there among the lizards and fish? How did flesh and bones become stone? Would theirs one day do the same? Was something waiting underneath the schoolyard now if they went out with spades and dug? What was her most favourite fossil and where had she found it and what was she looking for now and had she ever hurt herself and had she been abroad?
And then – voices lowered just a little – what about the Blackwater: had she heard? What about the man that drowned on New Year’s Day, and the animals found dead and the things they’d seen in the night? What about Cracknell, who’d gone mad now and sat up all night by Leviathan watching for the beast? Was something there and was it coming? Mr Caffyn saw the turn the morning had taken, and tried his best to turn it back. He said, ‘Now girls, don’t trouble Mrs Seaborne with that nonsense,’ and scrubbed out the ammonite sketched on the blackboard behind.
Cora had walked with William Ransome the evening before and been told, in the parson’s voice he occasionally adopted if he wanted to show the upper hand, that she was not to encourage the children to talk about the Trouble. It was bad enough dealing with Cracknell, he said, and Banks’s insistence that there was no herring to be had and he’d very likely starve: putting ideas in their heads would help nothing and no-one. At the time she’d dutifully thought: You’re right, Will, of course you are right; but presented now with a dozen faces turned to her enquiringly and in places openly afraid, she felt a flash of temper. Always being told what to do by some man or other! she thought.
‘There may still be animals alive today just like those we find in the rock,’ she said, treading carefully. ‘After all, there are places in the world no-one’s ever walked, and water so deep they’ve never found the bottom: who knows what we might’ve missed? Up in Scotland, in a lake called the Ness, there have been sightings of a creature in the water for more than a thousand years. They say once a man was killed out swimming, and St Columba sent the beast away, only it surfaces every now and then …’
Mr Caffyn coughed, and with a roll of his eyes towards the youngest members of the class (a girl in a yellow dress had turned down the corners of her mouth in a grimace of delighted fear) indicated that his guest might prefer to keep to the stones and bones she’d brought in her bag.
‘There is nothing to be afraid of,’ said Cora. ‘Except ignorance. What seems frightening is just waiting for you to shine a light on it. Think how a pile of clothes on the floor of your bedroom can seem to creep up on you until you open the curtains and see it’s just the things y
ou took off the night before! I don’t know if there’s anything out in the Blackwater but I do know this: if it came up on the banks and let us see it, we wouldn’t see a monster, just an animal as solid and real as you and me.’ The girl in the yellow dress, plainly preferring to be afraid than to be instructed, yawned delicately into the palm of her hand. Cora looked at her watch. ‘Well: I’ve talked too long, and you’ve been so patient and listened so well. We have an hour left, I think – is that right, Mr Caffyn? – and what I’d like more than anything is to see how well you all draw and paint. I’ve seen your pictures’ – she gestured to a wall of butterflies – ‘and like them very much. Would you like to come and choose something to draw, and when you’re done, I’ll pick the one I think is best, and whoever drew it will have a prize.’
At the mention of a prize, the class clattered up – ‘In single file, please,’ said Mr Caffyn, watching Cora dole out ammonites and toadstones and soft pieces of clay in which sharp teeth were embedded – and fetched pots of water and brushes, and hard cakes of paint.
Joanna Ransome remained placidly seated. ‘Why don’t we go up?’ said Naomi, itching to get her hands on some particularly beautiful rock, and show Mrs Seaborne that she, too, was worthy of her attention.
‘Because she’s my friend and I can’t talk to her with you children all around,’ said Joanna, not meaning it nastily: but in Cora’s presence her old friend had seemed to dwindle in the chair beside her, and grow shabby and stupid, her clothes torn and smelling of rotten fish deep in the seams, her hair in ugly bunches because her father never could get the hang of plaits. How can I be like Cora, she thought, if I talk like Naomi, and sit like her, and am as stupid as her, and don’t even know that the moon goes round the earth?