The Essex Serpent(32)
Charles, meanwhile, was applauding, as if the entire affair had been arranged for his pleasure; then urgent matters struck him, and putting a hand pitifully to the splendid curve of his stomach he said to Stella, ‘Did I hear you say there is pheasant to be had, and apple pie?’ He stood, and offered his left arm to his wife, and his right to his hostess. Joanna, leaping up from her game of cards, remembered the task she’d been set, and flung open the door to the dining room. Light picked out channels cut in crystal glasses and glossed the polished wood of the table, and Stella’s forget-me-nots bloomed on their napkins. The room was small, and it was necessary to move in single file past the high-backed dining chairs. There was nothing fashionable in the green wallpaper and the watercolours above the fireplace, but Cora thought she had never seen anything so homely. She thought of the rooms at Foulis Street, with the plasterwork on the high ceilings and the long windows which Michael had forbidden her to hang with curtains, and hoped fervently never to see them again. Joanna, rather awestruck by this magnificent laughing woman in her green dress, gestured shyly to a card on which Cora’s name had been written in John’s best calligraphy.
‘Thank you,’ whispered her guest, and lightly tugged the girl’s plait: ‘I saw you beat Martha at cards: you are far cleverer than me!’ (Later, when Joanna took a plate of chocolates to her brothers to recount the night’s events, she said, ‘She’s not old, though she is rich; she has an overnight bag made from crocodile skin; and I don’t know why, but she made me think of Joan of Arc. Also – John, don’t eat it all – she has an odd sort of voice, with an accent. I don’t know where she’s from but it must be far away.’)
Stella, more intrigued than ever by her guest, watched Cora from beneath her long fair lashes. She’d pictured a lady of studied melancholy, who’d peck at her food, and sometimes fall silent to turn her wedding ring, or open a locket to gaze on the face of the departed. It was bewildering instead to be presented with a woman who ate elegantly, but in great quantities, making smiling apology for her appetite by declaring she’d walked ten miles that morning and would do the same tomorrow. In her presence the conversation veered dizzyingly from the content of Will’s sermon (‘I know it well – Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be moved, and so on? – and how apt for your congregation: how clever of you!’) to Charles Ambrose and his political scheming (‘Has Colonel Howard succumbed, Charles – Reverend, would you welcome a new MP?’), pausing to briefly take in her scouring of the coast for fossils.
‘We told Cora all about your Essex Serpent,’ said Charles, peeling the wrapper from a chocolate. ‘Both of them, indeed.’
‘There is only one that I know of,’ said William, with perfect calm: ‘And if our guests are interested, they can of course come and see it with me in the morning.’
‘It is beautiful,’ said Stella, leaning towards Cora: ‘A serpent coiled all around the arm of a pew in the church, with wings folded on its back. Will thinks it a blasphemy, and threatens every week to take a chisel to it, but he wouldn’t dare.’
‘I would like to see it very much, thank you!’ The fire burned low, and Cora held her cup close to her breast. ‘And tell me: has there been more news of the creature they say’s in the river?’ Stella, knowing her husband’s dislike of any mention of the Trouble, glanced anxiously at him, and prepared to douse the conversation with coffee.
‘No news, since there’s no creature – though I’m afraid one of my parishioners might disagree! I’ve been to see Cracknell,’ said Will, turning to Stella, ‘and either Gog or Magog has given up the ghost.’
‘Oh!’ said Stella, pouting, resolving to go out the following morning and take the old man a meal: ‘Poor Cracknell – as if he’s not already lost enough.’ She handed her guest a cup of coffee, and said, ‘He lives out on the edge of the marsh, and has only just buried the last of his family. Gog and Magog were his goats, and his pride and joy, and keep us well supplied with butter and milk. What happened, Will?’
‘To hear him tell it you’d think some monster appeared on the doorstep and snatched one of them out of his arms – no-one believes in the serpent more than Cracknell. But of course it was only that it slipped out of its pen one night and got caught in the marsh, and the tide came in.’ He sighed, and said: ‘He says he found it frozen solid with terror, frightened – quite literally! – to death. I’m afraid this will do nothing to help put thoughts of this nonsense out of their heads. How can I make them all see how our minds are capable of clever tricks, and that without faith to sustain us we are apt to see’ – he flexed his hands, as if grasping for the phrase, and tried again: ‘I think it possible to put flesh on the bones of our terrors, most of all when we have turned our back on God.’ Conscious of Cora’s steady gaze – which was amused, though not contemptuous – he concealed his face behind the steam rising from his coffee cup.
‘And you think him insane – you think there can be nothing in what he says?’ Cora’s pity for the old man did nothing to alleviate her curiosity: here was evidence, of a kind!
The rector snorted. ‘A goat, frightened to death? Absurd. No witless beast could comprehend fear to such an extent, even if it could tell the difference between a sea-dragon, or whatever they say it is, and driftwood lying on the marsh. Frightened to death! No: it was on its last legs, and got out of its pen and into the cold. There’s no monstrous serpent here, aside from the one carved in the church, and we’d be rid of that, too, if my wife would give me (for once!) my way.’