The Essex Serpent(46)

Nor does the fairy content herself with ships and cities: there were phantom armies in the sky at the battle of Verviers, and the Norsemen called it the Hillingar, and saw impossible cliffs appearing on the plains.

Naturally enough there’s a prosaic explanation, though as I think of it now it seems hardly less marvellous than if Morgan le Fay had followed us down to the saltings. As I understand it, the illusion is created when a particular arrangement of cold and warm air creates a refracting lens. The light which reaches the observer is bent upward in such a way that objects beneath or beyond the horizon are refracted far above their location (I am imagining you writing in one of your notebooks – are you? – I hope so!). As the pockets of cold and warm air shift, so does the lens – did you see, as I did, the ship seeming to sail upon its own reflection? Objects are not only misplaced, but repeated and distorted – something quite insignificant may be duplicated many times and form bricks from which whole cities are built!

So while we stood there baffled and bemused, I suppose that all along, somewhere out of sight, Banks was taking a shipment of wheat up to Clacton quay.

I’ve a tendency to sermonise, I know – but I cannot seem to let the matter rest. Our senses were deceived utterly – we stood for a moment clean out of our wits, as though our bodies conspired against our reason. And I have been unable to sleep, not because I am haunted by the possibility of a phantom ship, but because it occurs to me that my eyes are not to be trusted; or, at least, that my mind cannot be trusted to interpret what my eyes perceive. This morning as I walked for the train I saw a dying bird on the road – something about the way it flailed blindly on the path made me feel sick. Then I realised it was just a clump of wet leaves blowing about, but it was a while before the nausea passed – and it struck me that if my body had responded as if it had been the bird, was my perception of it really false, even if it had only been the leaves?

Round and round my thoughts have gone, turning as they often do to the Essex Serpent, until I begin to see how it might have appeared to us all in its various guises, and that far from there being one truth alone, there may be several truths, none of which it would be possible to prove or disprove. How I wish you might go down one morning and find its carcass on the beach, and that it would be photographed, and the picture annotated and handed about. Surely we could then be certain of things?

But it pleases me to think of you and me standing there together. Ungodly of me I am sure, but I would rather we were both deceived than I alone.

With regards,





WILLIAM RANSOME





By hand

I was there! I saw what you saw; I felt what you felt.

As ever

CORA





MAY





1


May, and the tender weather coaxes roses early from their beds. Naomi Banks peers at the moon and takes full credit for the soft rain, the mild mornings, but all the same she’s unhappy. She recalls the afternoon down on the saltings when they’d commanded spring to come, but what she sees of that day is not Joanna’s hand held in hers over the flames, but of something in the water biding its time. She is her father’s daughter, and knows – none better – the vagaries of the tides, and how the water might buck above a sandbank, or carry in its current the severed limbs of oaks. All the same, she’s grown wary of the Blackwater – will not set foot on the deck of the barge – skirts the quay as if convinced something down there will grasp her ankle as she passes.

Her teacher chides her for a lazy feckless thing, and sets her lines of punishment, but the words on the paper settle and shift like flies; instead, she takes to making charcoal sketches in which a sea-serpent – black-winged, blunt-beaked – snaps at her from the page. Then down she looks at the webbing between her fingers, and flinches at the memory of it having first been noted by her classmates, and how feared she’d been and reviled, until tall Joanna with her father’s authority had intervened. But there it is – she raises her hands, and watches lamplight pick out the veins in the little pouches of skin – she is distorted, unnatural; it would be entirely in keeping for the Essex Serpent to single her out; perhaps she is its kindred. For a time she refuses glasses of water, certain that there in the liquid are particles of skin sloughed from the serpent’s back.

One evening, coming home from a fruitless search for her father, she passes the open doors of the White Hare. The scent of drink is so familiar it’s as if she’s breathing her father’s breath, and she dawdles on the doorstep. Men beckon her in, and admire her red hair, the pewter locket she wears (it contains a piece of the caul she was born with, to ensure she will not drown). She grows aware of a kind of power she had no idea she possessed; she pirouettes when asked, and laughs at their admiration of her ankles, of the white bones of her knees. To be admired is so delicious, and so strange, that she allows them to tug at her ringlets, and examine the locket where it lies on her skin; yes (she says), laughing, she is covered all over with freckles. She darts away; they call her back, and when she returns, they say, ‘Pretty, pretty,’ and she thinks that after all perhaps she is. Then she’s drawn down onto a waiting lap, and is all at once aware that something is very wrong – she feels both afraid and outraged, but finds it impossible to move; somewhere behind her a man she cannot see makes a noise which is like that of an animal finding food.