The Essex Serpent

by Sarah Perry

  Will saw his daughter prone on a black couch with her arms hanging at her sides and her mouth half-open, while a creature bent over her and whispered. He’d come home from making his round of the parish to find the house empty, and calling for Stella found a note on his study directing him to Cora’s, should he care to join them. Crossing the common he’d pictured Stella’s bright head and Cora’s untidy one framed in a window, lamp-lit, impatiently waiting his arrival, and his step had quickened.

  He’d known, of course, that Dr Garrett was coming, and felt resentful at the intrusion. The village had had quite enough of that sort of thing, he felt: what with Londoners and serpents it had been a troublesome year; couldn’t they have a moment’s peace? Then he considered how fondly Cora spoke of him, and how proudly she had reported the surgery which had saved a man’s life, and concluded the surgeon must be the sort of man he could come to like. He’d be short and slight and anxious, he decided, reaching the shadow of Traitor’s Oak; he would have a long despondent moustache and finicky aversions to food and drink. Probably the poor fellow could do with a country break, given the state of his health.

  Martha had greeted him with a curious look, not quite able to meet his eye; it was so unlike her usual directness that he felt uneasy long before he opened the door and encountered a crouching black-browed thing whispering at his daughter’s side. She lay quite still, as if stunned by a blow; her head was tilted back, and her half-open eyes had a vacant gaze. He was for a moment rigid with shock and distress; when he saw Stella and Cora observing placidly from a nearby sofa, evidently complicit in the scene, he found himself tripped into a fury which not the Essex Serpent nor Cracknell nor any event of the past puzzling months had induced. Quite what he thought was unfolding in that well-furnished room with its curtains blowing out he couldn’t later say, only that he felt a kind of revulsion: it was his daughter, and she was murmuring – something Latin, was it? – and laid out like a fish on a slab! He crossed the room and fitting his fingers beneath the crouching man’s collar tried to tug him from his chair. But if the rector was strong, the surgeon was heavy: there was a tussle which Cora briefly found hilarious before growing afraid that Will in his righteous temper might actually do her friend harm. She thought of the sheep as it struggled in the mud, and how it raised cords of muscle on Will’s forearm; she stood up and said, ‘Mr Ransome – Will! It’s only Dr Garrett – he’s only trying to help!’

  Joanna, frightened and drowsy, rolled from couch to floor and struck her head on the hard seat of a chair. She stared up at the ceiling and said, ‘It’s coming,’ then knuckled at her eyes and sat up. Stella, who’d been half-dozing despite the chill coming in through the open window, looked at her husband in surprise (‘Darling, don’t drip on Cora’s carpet!’) and went over to her daughter. ‘How do you feel – are you sick? Have you hurt your head?’

  ‘It was just so easy,’ said Joanna, rubbing her forehead, on which a white lump had begun to appear. She looked from the doctor to her father, and seeing how the two men stood rigid as far from each other as the room would allow said, ‘What’s wrong? Did I do something wrong?’

  ‘You didn’t,’ said Will; and although he did not take his eyes from those of the other man it was quite clear to Cora where his anger was directed, and she felt a kind of contraction in her throat. Falling back on fine manners, she stood between the two and said, ‘Luke, this is William Ransome, my friend.’

  My friend, thought Luke: I never heard her say ‘my husband’ or ‘my son’ with so much pride.

  ‘Will, this is Dr Luke Garrett – won’t you shake hands? – we thought we’d help Joanna – she’s not been herself since what happened at the school.’

  ‘Help? How? What were you doing?’ Will ignored the offered hand, which was held out (he thought) with a sardonic grin. ‘She’s hurt – look: you’re lucky she didn’t knock herself out!’

  ‘Hypnosis!’ said Joanna, proudly. She had been an experiment! She would write about it later.

  ‘We can tell him later,’ said Stella, patting about for her jacket: all these raised voices! Her head hurt.

  ‘Nice to meet you, Reverend, I’m sure,’ said Luke, putting his hands in his pockets.

  Will turned away from his friend. ‘Put your coat on, Stella, you’re shivering – why have they let you get cold? – yes, Jo, you can tell me all about it later – good afternoon, Dr Garrett: perhaps we’ll meet again.’ As if borne on a tide of politeness Will left the room with wife and daughter in his wake, not sparing a glance at Cora, who at that moment would’ve been as grateful for a glare as for a smile.

  ‘I was an experiment!’ they heard Joanna say at the door: ‘And now I’m hungry.’

  ‘Absolutely charming man,’ said Luke. So much for the fat parson in gaiters, he thought: he’d looked like a farmer with ideas above his station and had a fine head of hair, and in his presence Cora Seaborne – of all women! – had seemed a child dismayed to find herself disgraced. Martha rose from the sofa where she’d been silently watching and with a contemptuous look at the doctor came to stand beside her friend. ‘No good ever came of leaving London,’ she said: ‘What did I tell you?’ Cora briefly put her cheek to Martha’s shoulder and said, ‘I’m hungry too. And I want wine.’

  5

  Edward Burton sat on a narrow bed and opened the paper packet on his lap. In a high-backed chair beneath a print of St Paul’s, his visitor dredged her chips with vinegar, and the hot scent roused his appetite for the first time in weeks. She wore her hair in a fair braid wrapped around her crown: she looked, he thought, breaking batter from his bit of fish, like an angel, if an angel could be hungry, and didn’t mind grease on her chin and a smear of green peas on her sleeve.

  Martha watched him steadily eating, and felt hardly less proud than Luke had done on closing up his wound. It was her third visit, and there was colour in his cheeks. They had been introduced by Maureen Fry, who beside a willingness to visit Burton in order to tug the stitches from his healing scar was a relation of Elizabeth Fry, and had fully inherited the family social conscience: it seemed to her the nurse’s duty lay well beyond the tying up of bandages, the mopping up of blood. She’d first encountered Martha at a meeting of women concerned with Union matters, and over strong tea discovered that Dr Luke Garrett (‘Of all people!’ Martha had said, shaking her head) was the link between them. When Martha first accompanied Sister Fry to the house where Edward and his mother lived in Bethnal Green, she’d discovered a home which was small, certainly, with sanitation troubles that left an ammoniac reek in the air, but was pleasant enough. Little light came in, only what filtered through lines of laundry running between the houses like the pennants of a coming army, but there were always flowers on the table in a rinsed-out jar of Robertson’s jam. Mrs Thomas earned her living by way of laundry, and contriving rag rugs out of scraps; these rugs decked their three small rooms and made them bright. It had never occurred to her that Edward might not recover entirely, and go back to the insurance company where he’d passed five years as a clerk, and so she faced a period of nursing him quite stoically.

  That first visit had been an unsatisfactory one, with Edward Burton white and silent in the corner. Mrs Burton was battling delight at her son’s unlikely salvation with a troubling sensation that the man who’d come off the operating table was not the man who’d been laid out on it: ‘He’s so quiet,’ she’d said, wringing her hands, and borrowing Sister Fry’s handkerchief. ‘It’s like the old Ned bled out and I’ve got another one in his place and I have to get to know him before I can say he’s my son.’ Nonetheless, Martha had found herself fretting, in the following days, that Burton would not eat enough, or test the strength of his legs by walking the length of the road, and so she had returned a week later with packets of fish and chips, a net of oranges, and several of Francis’s abandoned copies of The Strand.

  Edward steadily ate. To Martha – used to Cora’s endless conversation and her sudden fits of joy or gloom – hi
s company was peaceful. He responded to everything she said with an inclined head, considering it slowly, often saying nothing in response. Sometimes there was a sharp pain in the place where his rib had been severed – it was like a cramping of the muscles as all the fibres tried to knit – and he’d gasp, and put a hand there in the hollow where the bone was gone, and wait for it to pass. Martha would say nothing then, only sit quietly with him, and when he raised his head say, ‘Tell me again how they built Blackfriars Bridge.’

  That afternoon, as rain gathered in the gutters in the Tower Hamlets streets and poured from the eaves, Edward said, ‘He came to see me again, the Scottish man. He prayed with me and left some money.’ This was John Galt, whose tent mission in Bethnal Green brought the gospel to the city alongside temperance and improved personal hygiene. Martha knew of him – had seen his photographs recording the city at its worst – and deplored his tender Christian conscience. ‘He prayed, did he?’ She shook her head and said, ‘Never trust a do-gooder,’ disliking as always the connection between righteousness and weather-proof walls.

  ‘It’s not only that he does good,’ said Edward, thoughtfully. He surveyed a chip before putting it in his mouth. ‘I think he is good.’

  ‘Don’t you see that this is the trouble – that it’s not a question of goodness – it’s a question of duty! You think it’s kindness to bring you money and ask if the walls are damp and leave you in God’s hands, wherever they are, but it’s our right to live decently, it shouldn’t be a gift from our betters – oh!’ She laughed. ‘See how easily that came out! Our betters! What, because they never put money on the dogs or drank themselves stupid!’

  ‘What are you going to do about it, then?’ He said it with good humour so deeply buried that only Martha could’ve seen it there. She finished her meal, and wiping the oil from her mouth with the back of her hand said, ‘Plans are afoot, Edward Burton, mark my words. I’ve written to a man who can help – always comes down to money, doesn’t it, in the end? Money and influence, and God knows I’ve no money and not much influence but I’ll use what I’ve got.’ She thought briefly of Spencer, and his way of looking at her slightly askance, and felt a little ashamed.

  ‘Wish I could have a hand in it,’ said Edward, and with a gesture that took in his thin legs – thinner now than ever, since he could not run ten paces without losing his breath – he looked briefly hopeless. He’d taken his place in the city without considering it, until this woman with her hair like a rope and her brisk way of talking had stood on one of his mother’s rugs and raged at what she’d seen in the streets. Now it would be impossible to walk from one end of Bethnal Green to the other without thinking how that dark labyrinth of mean housing had a consciousness all of its own, operating on everyone who lived in it. At night, when his mother slept, he took out rolls of white paper and made drawings of high, wide buildings that let in the light, with good water running through them.

  Martha withdrew her umbrella from under the chair and unfurled it, sighing at the rain running thickly down the window-pane. ‘I don’t know yet,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what I can do. But something’s going to change. Can’t you feel it?’

  He was not certain he could, but then she kissed him on the cheek, and shook his hand, as if she could not decide which greeting suited them best. At the door she paused, because he called out after her: ‘It was my fault, you know.’

  ‘Your fault? What is – what’ve you done?’ It was so unlike him to speak unprompted that she was afraid to move and startle him out of it.

  ‘This,’ he said, and lightly touched his breast. ‘I know who did it, and why. I deserved it, you know. Or if not this – something.’

  She returned to her chair, not speaking, turning away to pluck at a thread loose on her sleeve. He knew it was done to spare him, and there was a movement in his damaged heart.

  ‘I was such an ordinary person,’ he said. ‘It was such an ordinary life. I had a bit of savings. I was going to get a place of my own, though I didn’t mind living here: we’ve always got on all right. I didn’t mind my job, only sometimes got bored and made plans of buildings that’ll never be built. Now they tell me I’m a miracle, or whatever does for miracles these days.’

  Martha said, ‘There are no ordinary lives.’

  ‘At any rate, it was my fault,’ he said, and recounted how content he’d been, there at his desk at Holborn Bars, awaiting the clock’s chime and the hour of freedom. He’d had a popularity he neither sought nor enjoyed, and suspected his peers were conned by his height, and by the biting wit he could barely remember possessing. The Edward who’d fallen in the shadow of the cathedral was not the silent man that Martha knew. That other man had been always laughing at this or that; his temper had been quick, hot, and soon extinguished. Since his own bad moods passed swiftly, he was heedless of the lasting harm his careless blows might cause. But the blows did fall – they did cause harm: ‘It was just teasing,’ he said. ‘We didn’t think anything of it. He didn’t seem to mind. You couldn’t tell, with Hall. He only ever looked miserable, so what did it matter?’

  ‘Hall?’ said Martha.

  ‘Samuel Hall. We never called him Sam. That’s telling, isn’t it?’

  No: he didn’t seem to mind, thought Burton, but telling it now to Martha he flushed with shame. Samuel Hall, unblessed with good looks or good humour; arriving in his drab coat a minute before the working day and departing a minute after its end; resentfully diligent, entirely unremarkable. But they had remarked on him – lightly perhaps, and in hopes of drawing out some buried wit – and it had been Edward, laughing, always at the fore.

  ‘I couldn’t help thinking there was something so funny about how unhappy he was. Do you understand? You couldn’t take him seriously. He could’ve dropped dead right there at his desk and we’d’ve all laughed.’

  Then drab little Samuel Hall – behind whose glasses muddy eyes blinked resentfully out at the world – had fallen in love. In a dim bar near Embankment they’d seen him, and seen how he’d laughed, and exchanged his dull coat for a bright one; how he’d kissed a woman’s hand, and how she hadn’t minded. Nothing could’ve been funnier, it seemed: nothing – by the light of the lamps and the warmth of the beer – more absurd. Burton could not remember what it was that was said, or by whom, only that there’d been a moment when he’d had the woman, bewildered, in his own arms; that he’d been kissing her with a gallantry all too obviously mocking.

  ‘I meant nothing by it – it was done to make them laugh – I went home that night and wouldn’t even have been able to tell you where I’d been.’ But all the week that followed, Hall’s desk had been empty, though no-one thought to ask where he’d gone, or why; it did not occur to them that alone in his single room with its single chair all the accumulated resentments of Hall’s life – all the slights both real and imagined – had united in an implacable loathing of Edward Burton.

  ‘I’d stopped to look up at St Paul’s – I’m always wondering how the dome holds up, aren’t you? – and there were black birds on the steps and I remembered being told as a child how one rook is a crow, and many crows are rooks. Then someone stumbled against me – that’s how it was: as if they’d lost their footing. I said “Watch out!”, and there was Samuel Hall, not looking at me, just running on by, like I’d made him late.’ On he’d walked in the shadow of St Paul’s, and felt all at once very weary; he’d put a hand to wetness on his shirt, and withdrawn it gloved in blood. Then night had fallen early, and he’d lain down on the steps to sleep.

  The room was dim; he reached for a lamp, and lit it; in the slow-bloomed light she saw the lean face turned from her in shame and shyness, and how he flushed across the high bones of his cheek.

  ‘It’s not a question of guilt and punishment,’ she said. ‘It’s not how the world turns. If we all got what we deserved –’ It felt to Martha as if he’d given her a gift that was easily broken. Something had altered between them – she owed a debt of trust. ‘We cann
ot help it, if we are to live,’ she said. ‘Causing harm, I mean; how could it be avoided unless we shut ourselves away – never speak, never act?’ She wanted to repay the debt, and casting about for sources of her own guilt it was Spencer’s face that first came to mind, and would not be dispelled.

  ‘If we all got what we deserved I’d be waiting for my punishment,’ she said. ‘It would be worse, I think; a knife in the heart would be the least of it – you did not know what you had done – but I know, and still I do it!’ And she told her quiet companion about the man who loved her (‘He thinks he conceals it, but no-one ever does …’); his shyness, and how he grasped after goodness for its own sake, and because it might please her. ‘Spencer’s wealth is obscene, it is obscene – he has so much he doesn’t know how much of it he has! If I let him love me, and pretend I might return it, and it makes him do something good – is it really so bad? Is a broken heart too high a price to pay for a better city?’

  Burton smiled, and raised his hand: ‘I absolve you,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you, Father,’ she said, laughing. ‘You know, I always thought that was the great benefit of being religious: get the guilt over and done with, and move on to another sin. Well,’ – she gestured to the window, and beyond it to the lowering sky – ‘I must go, or miss my train.’ When she took his hand to bid him goodbye he held it, and drew her down, and kissed her once; and she saw for the first time what vitality had once been in those long fingers, in the legs outstretched beneath the blanket.

  ‘Come again,’ he said, ‘come soon’; and after she’d gone he sat for a long time in the chair she’d left, making plans of a garden for neighbours to share.

  6

  In Colchester the rain was mild and barely seemed to fall, only hang in the air as if the whole town were enveloped in pale cloud. Thomas Taylor had rigged up a tarpaulin and sat contently beneath it sharing cake with Cora Seaborne, who’d come to town for papers and books, and better food than could be had in Aldwinter (‘It’s all right for bread and fresh fish,’ she’d said, ‘but no marzipan to be had for all the tea in Yorkshire’). He suspected passers-by were pleasantly shocked to see so obviously wealthy (if untidy) a woman at his side, and hoped he might see an increased profit in the afternoon. In the meantime, they had a great deal to discuss.