The Essex Serpent(37)

I have recently become acquainted with proposals aiming to supplement existing provision of new accommodation for the London poor without placing moral duties on inhabitants – rewarding the ‘good’ with safe and healthy homes and leaving the remainder to their squalor – but rather to bring our fellow men out of poverty with no conditions attached.

I will be in London again in a week or two – if you can spare the time, may we talk? I’m only too aware that in this matter, as in most, I am very uninformed.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely,





GEORGE SPENCER





Cora Seaborne

c/o The Red Lion

Colchester

3rd April

My dear Stella,

Can it really have been only a week since we met? It feels a month, at least. Thank you again for your hospitality and kindness – I don’t believe I’ve ever eaten so well, or so happily.

I write in the hope I might tempt you up here to Colchester one afternoon. I’d like to visit the castle museum, and thought perhaps the children might come too: Martha has taken such a liking to Joanna that I feel quite jealous. There’s a pretty garden, too, with plenty of blue flowers to please you.

I’ve enclosed a note for the good Reverend, together with a leaflet I hope he’ll find interesting …

Write soon!

With love,





CORA





By hand

Dear Reverend Ransome – I hope you are well, and write to thank you all for your hospitality and kindness. I am so glad to have met you under more auspicious circumstances than before.

The oddest thing happened soon after we met, and I wanted to tell you at once. We took a trip to Saffron Walden, in order to look at the Guildhall, and visit the museum. Such a lovely town, it would redeem Essex in anyone’s eyes: I could almost be persuaded there was the scent of saffron blowing up the streets. And what did I find, in a bookshop on a sunny corner, but this (see enclosed) – a facsimile of that original pamphlet warning of a flying serpent. STRANGE NEWS OUT OF ESSEX, it says: a true relation, no less! One Miller Christy has taken the trouble of reproducing it, and for that we must be thankful. There’s even an illustration, though I must say nobody looks very scared.

Watch out for it, won’t you? No man bested by a sheep could expect to triumph over such a foe.

Sincerely,





CORA SEABORNE





William Ransome

All Saints Rectory

Aldwinter 6th April Dear Mrs Seaborne Thank you for the pamphlet, which I read with amused interest and return here (John thought it another colouring book, I’m afraid, while James entertains himself designing a crossbow to defend the household). I promise as faithfully as my collar allows that if ever I see a monstrous serpent with wings like umbrellas clacking its beak on the common, I’ll trap it in a fishing-net and send for you at once.

I enjoyed meeting you. I am often nervous on Sunday mornings and you were a welcome distraction.

Will you stay in Colchester long? You are always welcome in Aldwinter. Cracknell has taken a liking to you, as have we all.

In Christian love,





WILLIAM RANSOME





1


In the last week of April, when all the Essex hedgerows were white with cow parsley and blackthorn flower, Cora moved with Martha and Francis into a grey house beside Aldwinter common. They’d grown tired of Colchester and the Red Lion: Francis had exhausted the landlord’s store of Sherlock Holmes (marking inaccuracies in red ink and improbabilities in green), and Cora had grown dissatisfied with the town’s civilised little river, which could certainly conceal nothing larger than a pike.

The memory of her encounter with Cracknell – the saline scent on the collar of his coat, how he’d conjured from dark corners the waiting beast in the Blackwater – had made her restless. She felt something awaited her over in Aldwinter, though whether she sought the living or the dead she couldn’t quite say. Often she thought herself childish and credulous to be in pursuit of a living fossil in (of all places!) an Essex estuary, but if Charles Lyell countenanced the idea of a species outwitting extinction, so could she. And hadn’t the Kraken been nothing but legend, until a giant squid pitched up on a Newfoundland beach, and was photographed in a tin bath by the Reverend Moses Harvey? Besides all that, here was the Essex clay beneath her feet, concealing who-knew-what, biding its time. She’d go out walking with her coat’s hem muddy and the rain on her cheek and say, ‘I don’t see why it shouldn’t be me, and shouldn’t be here: Mary Anning knew nothing about anything until a landslide killed her dog.’

News of the grey house standing empty on the common had come from Stella Ransome. She’d gone to Colchester to buy bolts of blue cloth and said, ‘Won’t you come to Aldwinter, once you’re tired of the town? The Gainsforths have been looking for tenants for months now, but only someone very strange would go out there to live with us! It’s a good house, there’s a garden – summer’s not long off; you can hire Banks to take you out on the estuary: you’ll never find your serpent on the High Street!’ She took Cora’s hand, and said: ‘Besides, we want you near us. Joanna wants Martha, James wants Francis, and we all want you.’