The Essex Serpent(15)

Charles Ambrose

THE GARRICK CLUB

WC

20th February

My Dear Will,

I trust you are all in good health, and hope it won’t be long before we see you again. Katherine asks me to tell Stella that her dahlias did very well, but turned out blue rather than black – perhaps it was the soil?

I am writing in order to introduce to you a very great friend of ours, who I think would benefit from meeting you both. She is the widow of Michael Seaborne, who died early this year (you might recall having kindly prayed for his return to good health, but the Almighty’s will evidently lay elsewhere).

We’ve known Mrs Seaborne for many years. She is an unusual woman. I think of her as having an exceptional – really I might even say a masculine! – intelligence: she is something of a naturalist, which Katherine tells me is the latest fashion among society women. It seems harmless enough, and seems to bring her pleasure after a time of great sadness.

She has recently come to Essex together with her son and companion in order to study the coastline there (something about fossil bird remains at Walton-on-the-Naze, I believe), and has been staying in Colchester. Of course I told her about the legend of the Essex Serpent and the rumours of its return, and about the curious carving in All Saints church, and she was most intrigued, and plans to visit.

If she comes to Aldwinter (and knowing Cora, she will be already planning her journey!) perhaps you and Stella could make her welcome? She has given me permission to supply details of her current address, which I enclose here together with our good wishes, as ever –

Yours faithfully,





CHARLES HENRY AMBROSE





3


The Reverend William Ransome, Rector of Aldwinter Parish, returned the letter to its envelope and propped it thoughtfully on the windowsill. He could never think of Charles Ambrose without a smile – the man had a limitless appetite for making friends, often (though certainly not always) out of genuine affection, and it was not at all surprising that he should have taken so fondly to a widow – but despite the smile the letter unsettled him. It was not precisely that newcomers were unwelcome, but one or two phrases (society women … masculine intelligence …) were calculated to trouble any diligent minister of the church. He could picture her as precisely as if her photograph had been included in the envelope: entering the lonely final stages of life bolstered by yards of taffeta and a half-baked enthusiasm for the new sciences. Her son was doubtless down from Oxford or Cambridge, and would bring with him some secret vice which would either thrill Colchester, or make him completely unsuited to civilised company. She probably lived on a diet of boiled potatoes and vinegar, hoping Byron’s diet might improve her silhouette, and would almost certainly have Anglo-Catholic tendencies, and deplore the absence of an ornate cross on the All Saints altar. In the space of five minutes he furnished her with an obnoxious lap-dog, a toadying companion with no flesh on her bones, and a squint.

His sole consolation was that Aldwinter was so resolutely unpicturesque a destination that he couldn’t imagine a society woman – even a bored and meddlesome widow – troubling to visit. Each spring a few ardent naturalists arrived to document the handful of seabirds that passed through the salt-marshes, but even these tended to be the drabbest species imaginable, their muddy feathers so indistinguishable from their surroundings they often passed without notice. Aldwinter had only one inn and two stores, and though its village green was occasionally considered the longest, if not the largest, in Essex, there was very little to recommend it even to its own inhabitants. Aside from the church’s curiosities – which were in truth a minor embarrassment to each successive incumbent – the only item of interest within five miles was the blackened hull of a clipper which could be seen when the Blackwater estuary lay at low tide, and which the village children decorated each harvest in a kind of pagan rite of which he dutifully disapproved. The train line terminated seven miles to the west, so that the farmers still relied on barges to carry oats and barley to the mills at St Osyth, and onward to London for sale. Perhaps the best that could be said for Aldwinter was that if it was neither wealthy nor beautiful, it was at least not particularly poor. It was not in the Essex character to succumb miserably to change and decay, and when John Barleycorn came under threat from cheap imports one or two tenant farmers had tried their hand at caraway and coriander, and shared the hire cost of a threshing-engine which not only increased their output to a startling degree, but gave the entire village a festive air as the children gathered to marvel at its size, its thunderous voice, and its gusts of steam.

Will felt an ill temper settle on him, and resisting the urge to toss the envelope onto the fire hid it behind a sheet of paper presented to him that morning by John, the youngest of his boys. It was a drawing which might’ve been of an alligator which had acquired a set of wings, but might equally have been a greatly enlarged caterpillar eating a moth. His mother was convinced it was the latest demonstration of his genius, but Will was unconvinced: he remembered his own childhood spent filling notebooks with engines and devices so complex he’d clean forget their purpose from one page to the next, but what had come of that?

And it was not only the threat of a probably harmless widow that dampened his mood, but the trouble that had lately settled on the parish. He surveyed John’s drawing, and this time took it for a winged sea-dragon approaching the village. Since the discovery on New Year’s morning of a drowned man down on the Blackwater marshes – naked, his head turned almost 180 degrees, a look of dread in his wide-open eyes – the Essex Serpent had ceased to be merely a device to keep children in check, and had begun to stalk the streets. On Friday nights in the White Hare drinkers claimed to have seen it, children playing on the saltings needed no urging to come home before dark, and no amount of reasoning on Will’s part could persuade them the drowned man was a victim of nothing more than drink and the tides.