The Essex Serpent(19)

Talking of distinguished: you’ll never GUESS who accosted us in the High St just as we were looking for a civilised place to wait out the rain? Charles Ambrose, looking just like a parrot in a flock of pigeons, bustling about in his velvet coat! He’s adamant I need an Essex friend, to keep me from broken limbs out on the mudflats or worse (he tells me the River Blackwater is menaced by a beast, but I will tell you all about it when I see you next). He has threatened to put me in touch with some rural vicar, and though I’m half tempted to take him up on the offer purely for the pleasure of shocking whatever poor old fellow he has in mind, I really would rather be left to my own devices. WON’T YOU COME DOWN, DEAR? I miss you. I don’t like to do without you. I don’t see why I should.

Love,





CORA





Luke Garrett MD

Pentonville Rd

N1

15th February

CORA –

Hand better, thanks. The infection was useful – I tested out my new Petri dishes and made some bacterial cultures. I thought you would have liked them. They were blue and green.

Coming down with Spencer probably next week. See you then. Hold off the rain if you can.





LUKE


PS: Technically, that was a Valentine. Don’t deny it.





4


Five miles east of Colchester, Cora walked in fine rain. She’d set out with no destination in mind and no thought to how she’d come home, only wanting to get out of the cold room in the Red Lion where Francis had cut his pillow to retrieve and count the feathers. Neither she nor Martha had been able to explain why it was that he ought not to have done it (‘Yes but you can pay for it, and then it will all be mine …’), and rather than listen to her son’s patient totting up – one hundred and seventy-three as the door had closed – she’d belted up her coat and run downstairs. Martha heard her call ‘I’ll be home before it’s dark – I have money with me – I’ll find someone to bring me back,’ and sighing had returned to the boy.

Colchester had dwindled behind her in a matter of half an hour, and she’d walked east, almost persuading herself she could reach the mouth of the Blackwater before she grew tired. She skirted around a village: she wanted neither to be seen nor spoken to, and favoured overgrown paths that ran along the rim of oakwoods. Traffic was sparse and slow, and no-one spared a glance for the woman walking on the verge. When the rain set in, she delved deeper between the trees, turning her face to the featureless sky. It was a uniform grey, without shifting of clouds or sudden blue breaks, and no sign at all of the sun: it was an unwritten sheet of paper, and against it the bare branches were black. It ought to have been dreary, but Cora saw only beauty – birches unfurled their strips of bark like lengths of white cloth, and under her feet wet leaves were slick. Everywhere bright moss had taken hold, in dense wads of green fur swaddling the trees at their foot, and fine pelts on broken branches that lay across the path. She tripped twice on brambles that held scraps of white wool and little feathers grey at the tip, and swore at them without malice.

It struck her that everything under that white sky was made of the same substance – not quite animal, but not merely earth: where branches had sheared from their trunks they left bright wounds, and she would not have been surprised to see severed stumps of oak and elm pulse as she passed. Laughing, she imagined herself part of it, and leaning against a trunk in earshot of a chattering thrush held up her arm, and wondered if she might see vivid green lichen stippling the skin between her fingers.

Had it always been here – this marvellous black earth in which she sank to her ankles, this coral-coloured fungus frilling the branches at her feet? Had birds always sung? Had the rain always this light touch, as if she might inhabit it? She supposed they had, and that it had never been very far from her door. She supposed there must have been other times when she’d laughed alone into the wet bark of a tree, or exclaimed to no-one over the fineness of a fern unfolding, but she could not remember them.

The past few weeks had not always been so happy. At times she remembered her grief, and for long stretches in which it was necessary to teach herself again how to draw breath she would feel a cavity open behind her ribs. It was a kind of draining sensation, as if a vital organ had been shared with the man who’d died and was atrophying slowly from misuse. In those cold minutes she would recall not the years of unease, in which she’d never once successfully judged his mood or circumnavigated the methods of his wounding, but their first few months, which were the last of her youth. Oh, she had loved him – no-one could ever have loved more: she’d been too young to withstand it, a child intoxicated by an inch of drink. He had been imprinted on her vision, as if she’d glanced at the sun and closing her eyes found a pinprick of light persisting in the darkness. He had been so sombre that when attempts at levity made him laugh she’d felt an empress in command of an army; he was so stern, and so remote, that the first moment he embraced her had been a battle won. She’d not known then that these were the common tricks of a common trickster, to cede a skirmish and later lay her waste. In the years that followed, her fear of him was so very like her love – attended by the same fast-paced heart, the same broken nights, the same alertness to his footstep in the hall – that she was drunk on that, too. No other man had touched her, and so she could not tell how strange it was to be subject to pain as much as pleasure. No other man had loved her, and so she could not judge whether the sudden withdrawal of his approval was natural as the tide and as implacable. By the time it occurred to her that she ought to divorce him, it was too late: at that stage Francis could not tolerate so much as an altered lunch-hour, and any change would have risked his health. Besides, the boy’s presence – for all his troublesome rituals and inscrutable tempers – had given Cora the single sensation in life about which she felt no confusion at all: he was her son, and she knew her duty; she loved him, and sometimes suspected he loved her, too.