The Essex Serpent(12)
‘Yes,’ said Martha, with a glint of steel she intended to be seen: ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Visiting friends,’ said Katherine Ambrose. She shrugged neatly out of her little coat, and gazed about the dim, fragrant interior with an air of wonder. Something in the green tasselled cloth that fell into their laps evidently amused her; she fondled it, suppressed a smile, and said: ‘Why else would anyone come? There’s no shopping to be done, not one department store. Where do the locals get their wine and cheese?’
‘The vineyard and the cowshed, I imagine.’ Charles handed his wife a plate on which he had set a small cake vivid with icing. She’d never been seen to eat cake, but he liked now and then to play the tempter. ‘We’re trying to persuade Colonel Howard to stand for Parliament next election. He’s due to retire, and …’
‘… and is Really Good News,’ finished Cora, serving Charles one of his own well-worn phrases. Beside her, Martha had grown a little tense, possibly preparing for one of her diatribes on public health, or the need for housing reform. (Wrapped in a blue paper bag, tucked in the canvas holdall, was an American novel that described in the most approving terms a future utopia of communal city living. Martha had waited weeks for its English publication, and was impatient to get home and make a study of it.) Cora, though appreciative of her friend’s tender conscience, was too weary to watch battle commence over the teacups. She added a madeleine to Katherine’s plate, but it was pushed away and replaced with the map Martha had placed on the tablecloth.
‘May I?’ Katherine unfolded its pages until Colchester appeared in black-and-white, with sites of interest marked approvingly and illustrated with photographs. Cora had ringed the Castle Museum, and a tea-stain blotted the spire of St Nicholas.
‘Yes,’ said Katherine. ‘We thought we’d get to the Colonel before the others do: he’s made no secret of his ambitions, but never lets on in which direction they lie. I think Charles convinced him there’ll be a change of government next election; says we must all lay money on it. The old boy’s got the strength of a man half his age and is stubborn to boot: we might see the oldest Prime Minister yet.’ It was not necessary for her to name Gladstone, who was to the Ambrose family a combination of eccentric saint and beloved relation. Cora had once met him – she standing rigid at her husband’s side as his sharp-tipped fingers perforated the flesh on her upper arm, Gladstone a touch stooped as he greeted a procession of guests – and been startled by the savage intelligence blazing beneath eyebrows that cried out for a pair of scissors. It had been evident, from the ice that had entered his voice as he greeted Michael Seaborne, that the statesman had loathed her husband with an implacable hatred, and though Gladstone’s greeting to her had been correspondingly chill, she had always felt, in the years that followed, as if he were an ally.
Martha said, ‘Still gadding about with hookers, is he?’ doing her best to disgrace herself; but Charles was beneath being shocked and grinned over the rim of his teacup.
Hastily Katherine said: ‘So much for us – but what are you doing in Colchester, Cora? If you wanted the sea you could have used our house in Kent: here it’s little but mud and marsh for miles and the sight of it would depress a clown. Unless you’ve got it in your head to search the garrison for a new husband, I can’t see the appeal.’
‘Let me show you.’ Cora drew the map towards her, and with a forefinger which Katherine observed was none too clean, traced a line south from Colchester towards the mouth of the River Blackwater. ‘Last month two men were walking at the foot of the Mersea cliffs and were almost knocked out by a landslip. They had the wit to take a look at the rubble and found fossil remains – a few teeth here and there, the usual coprolites, of course – but also a small mammal of some kind. It’s been taken up to the British Museum for classification: who knows what new species they might have discovered!’
Charles looked warily at the map. For all his liberality and his determined attempts at worldliness, he was at heart profoundly conservative and would not keep the works of Darwin or Lyell in his study for fear they carried a contagion that might spread throughout his healthier books. He was not an especially devout man, but felt that a common faith overlooked by a benevolent God was what kept the fabric of society from tearing like a worn sheet. The idea that after all there was no essential nobility in mankind, and that his own species was not a chosen people touched by the divine, troubled him in the hours before dawn; and as with most troubling matters he elected to ignore it, until it went away. What’s more, he blamed himself for Cora’s adoration for the geologist Mary Anning: she’d never shown the least interest in grubbing about among rocks and mud until finding herself at an Ambrose dinner party seated beside an elderly man who’d spoken with Anning once and been in love with her memory ever since. By the time Cora had heard his tales of the carpenter’s daughter who grew strong after a lightning strike, and of her first fossil find at twelve, and her poverty, and her martyrdom to cancer, she too was in love and for months afterwards talked of nothing but blue lias and bezoar stones. If anyone had hoped her passion would dwindle they did not, Charles thought wearily, know Cora.
Eyeing the last of the macaroons, he said: ‘Surely it’s best left to the experts, by now: we’re not in the dark ages, reliant on crackpots in petticoats crawling about with a tack-hammer and paint-brush. There are colleges and societies and grants, and so on.’