The Essex Serpent(33)



Cora, ever the devil’s advocate, said: ‘But you are a man of God, who surely sent signs and wonders to His people: is it so strange, after all, to think He’s choosing to do so again, to call us to repentance?’ She could not keep the wryness of the sceptic from her voice, and Will, hearing it clearly, raised an eyebrow.

‘Now: you do not believe that any more than I do. Our God is a god of reason and order, not of visitations in the night! This is nothing more than the Chinese whispers of a village which has lost sight of the constancy of their Creator. It’s my duty to guide them back to comfort and certainty: not to give in to rumour.’

‘And what if it is neither rumour nor a call to repentance, but merely a living thing, to be examined and catalogued and explained? Darwin and Lyell –’

Will pushed his cup away impatiently. ‘Ah, it is never long before those names come up. Clever men, I don’t doubt: I’ve read both, and there may be much in their theories which later generations will prove to be true. But tomorrow there will be another theory, and another; one will be discredited and the other praised; they’ll fall from fashion and be resurrected a decade later with added footnotes and a new edition. Everything is changing, Mrs Seaborne, and much of it for the better: but what use is it to try and stand on quicksand? We will stumble and fall, and in falling become prey to folly and darkness – these rumours of monsters are nothing more than evidence that we have let go of the rope that tethers us to everything that’s good and certain.’

‘But is your faith not all strangeness and mystery – all blood, and brimstone – all seeing nothing in the dark, stumbling, making out dim shapes with your hands?’

‘You speak as if we were in the Dark Ages still, as if Essex still burned its witches! No – ours is a faith of enlightenment and clarity: I am not stumbling – I am running with patience the race that is set before me – there is a lamp on my path!’

Cora smiled. ‘I can’t tell whether you are using words of your own, or of others: you have me at a disadvantage!’ She drank the last of her coffee, which left a coating of bitter grit on her tongue, and said: ‘We both speak of illuminating the world, but we have different sources of light, you and I.’

Will, unaccountably elated, feeling he ought to be piqued at this odd woman’s grey gaze challenging him at his own table, instead smiled, and went on smiling, and said: ‘Then we shall see who first blows out the other’s candle,’ and raised his cup in a toast. Stella, who could not have taken more pleasure in the exchange if she’d paid for a good seat in the theatre, put her palms together as if she were in the midst of applause; but something caught at her throat, and she began to cough. It seemed too deep a sound to come from so small and fragile a vessel: it shook her body, and she clutched at the tablecloth, and tipped over a glass of wine. Startled at once from his good humour Will crouched at her side, and with little practised taps on her narrow back murmured consolingly in her ear.

‘We should fetch hot water – she should breathe in steam,’ said Katherine Ambrose; but as soon as the fit arrived it ended.

The woman unfolded, and looked out at them all from wet blue eyes: she said, ‘I am sorry – what manners, and you’ll all now have the flu, and it takes such a long time to shake off! – will you forgive me if I go up to bed? I’ve enjoyed myself so much’ – she reached across the table and clutched Cora’s hand in both of hers – ‘but you will be here in the morning, and I know we can show you one serpent, at least.’





3


As it turned out the following morning, the All Saints serpent was an innocent-seeming thing on the arm of a Restoration pew. It had been carved in the last days of the Essex Serpent, when rumour had given way to legend, and there were no more warning signs pinned to the oaks and way-posts. Certainly the beast had held no fear for the mischievous craftsman, who’d coiled its tail three times around the spindle with sharp and lapping scales, but omitted either claws or teeth. The wings, Cora conceded, laughing, were a little sinister, looking as if a bat had mated forcibly with a sparrow, and shadows passing over the grinning face gave it the appearance of blinking, but really it was hardly a signifier of the occult. It had endured two hundred years’ fondling from affectionate congregants, and its spine was worn smooth.

Joanna, who’d accompanied Cora and her father on their morning walk, ran her finger along a fresh groove in the wood. ‘That’s where he did it,’ she said. ‘That’s where he was going to cut it off with a chisel, but we wouldn’t let him.’

‘They hid my toolbox,’ he said: ‘They won’t tell me where it is.’ William Ransome looked that morning rather sterner than Cora remembered from dinner in the small hot room, as if he’d put on his office when he put on his collar. It didn’t suit him, nor did the blackness of his suit, nor did being freshly shaved, which gave his scarred cheek a raw look. All the same, there lurked deep in his tired eyes a lightness she’d tried to coax out as he’d showed her the small village, and the low-towered church whose flint walls were wet from overnight rain and gleamed in the morning sun.

Cora put the tip of her little finger in the serpent’s mouth. Bite me then I can take it. ‘If you had any sense you’d make a feature of it, and whisper rumours yourself, and thunder from the pulpit, and charge at the door to see the monster.’

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