The Essex Serpent(27)



Martha snorted. ‘How either you or Cora can stand his company is a mystery to me. Is this your hotel?’ She surveyed the pale fa?ade of the George, and its hanging-baskets. ‘We’re at the Red Lion, a little further on: I didn’t think we’d stay so long, only Francis has taken a liking to the landlord, and so life has been calm of late. Feathers are the latest fad: you’d think he was trying to make himself a pair of wings, though there’s not much angelic about that boy.’

‘And Cora – is she well?’

‘I’ve never known her happier, though sometimes she remembers she ought not to be, and puts on her black dress, and sits in the window looking like an artist’s idea of grief.’ They passed a flower-seller closing her stall for the night, and selling daffodils by the armful for a penny. Retrieving the last coin or two from his pockets, Spencer relieved her of her stock, and clasping a dozen bunches of the yellow blooms said: ‘Let’s take spring to Cora. We’ll fill up her rooms and she’ll forget she was ever sad about anything.’ He glanced quickly at his companion, afraid he’d spoken out of turn: perhaps it was best to keep up the pretence of a decent woman decently mourning.

But Martha said, smiling, ‘She’ll thank you for it, too; all month she’s been going out walking looking for signs of spring, and coming home muddy and bad-tempered; then one day there it was, on the stroke of noon, as if someone had summoned it.’

‘And has Essex yielded any fossils? I saw in the papers some new species was unearthed up on the Norfolk coast after a winter storm: sometimes I think we must be walking on shoals of bodies without realising it and all the earth’s a graveyard.’ Spencer, who rarely voiced his flights of whimsy, flushed a little and prepared for one of Martha’s parries, but none came.

‘A toadstone or two, she says, but nothing more. But she has high hopes for the Essex Serpent – look: here we are.’ A little distance on, Spencer saw a timber-framed inn from which hung an iron sign emblazoned with a red lion rampant.

‘The Essex Serpent?’ said Spencer, glancing down as if expecting to see an adder on the pavement.

‘It’s all she talks about these days – didn’t she write to the Imp, and tell him? Some legend kept going by village idiots, about a winged snake seen coming out of the estuary and menacing villages on the coast. She’s got it into her head it’s one of these dinosaurs they say might’ve survived extinction – did you ever hear the like?’ They’d reached the threshold of the inn, and saw through its thick mottled panes of glass a fire in the hearth. There was a strong scent of spilled beer, and a joint roasting somewhere out of sight. ‘What can you expect, of poor country folk who can’t read or write?’ Her Londoner’s contempt was magnificent, taking in the spire of St Nicholas, and the paltriness of the earthquake, and the Red Lion, and everyone in it. ‘But Cora has a hive of bees in her bonnet: she says it’s likely a living fossil – she will tell you the names for them: I can never remember – and she’s determined to seek it out.’

‘Garrett always says she’ll not rest easy until her name’s on the wall in the British Museum,’ said Spencer. ‘I can believe it might happen, too.’

At the doctor’s name Martha snorted, and pushed open the door. ‘Come up to our rooms, and see Francis: he’ll remember you, and won’t mind your coming.’

Luke, arriving late having attempted to replicate a human vertebra in papier-maché, found his friends seated on a thinning rug, their clothes studded all over with feathers. In a window-seat Martha turned the pages of a magazine, and watched Francis silently threading feathers from gulls and crows through the weave of Spencer’s coat until he looked like an angel dismayed by its fall. Cora had come off relatively lightly, with a peacock plume sticking up from the back of her dress and the contents of a pillow dusting her shoulders. No-one noticed the Imp arrive, so that he turned and re-entered noisily – ‘What is going on? Have I come to the insane asylum? Where are my wings then, or must I be earth-bound – Cora, I have brought you books. Spencer, get me something to drink – you have something on your coat.’

Cora, giving a little yell of delight, leaped up and kissed the newcomer on each cheek, holding him at arm’s length: ‘You’ve come! Have you grown? Half an inch at – no that was cruel, I’m sorry, only you’re late, you know. Frankie, say hello (Francis has a new hobby as you see, and we’re all being very patient about it). You remember Luke?’ The boy did not look up, but sensing a change of air to which he had not agreed began silently to retrieve each fallen feather from the carpet, counting in reverse.

‘Three hundred and seventy-six – three hundred and seventy-five – three hundred and seventy-four …’

‘Now our play is ended,’ said Cora ruefully, ‘Though he’ll be quiet enough now so long as he reaches one …’

‘You look dreadful,’ said Luke, who would’ve liked to touch one by one the freckles newly arrived on her forehead. ‘Don’t you brush your hair out in the sticks? Your hands are dirty. And what are you wearing?’

‘I’ve freed myself from the obligation to try and be beautiful,’ said Cora: ‘And I was never more happy. I can’t remember when I last looked in the mirror –’

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