The Essex Serpent(47)

That night in her sleep the Essex Serpent lets just the wet tip of its tail show under her pillow and breathes coldly on the closed lids of her eyes; she wakes expecting the sheets beneath her to be briny and damp. The dream seems to have something to do with the loss of her mother years before (though that had been decently done in the bedroom with the curtains closed, and not anywhere near the Blackwater), and leaves her too anxious to eat.

The Essex Serpent does not content itself with visitations to a child. It comes to Matthew Evansford as he leafs through the book of Revelation, and sports seven heads and ten horns, and upon its heads the name of blasphemy. It rains down blows on Cracknell’s door in the buffeting of an easterly wind; it awaits Banks as he mends his sails and thinks of his lost wife, his stolen boat, the daughter who won’t meet his eye. It winks at William Ransome from the wormy arm of its pew, and leaves him in no doubt of his failings – he reads the collect with a fervency that delights the congregation: Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils. It comes to Stella in a light fever but it’s no match for her: she sings to it, and pities it for a cowardly creeping thing. In the dining room of the Garrick, Charles Ambrose – having eaten too richly – puts a hand to his belly and jokes to his companion that the Essex Serpent’s got its claws in him. Evidence of divine judgment in a more general sense is spotted here and there: a plague of cuckoo-spit in the gardens, a cat aborting its kittens on the hearth. Evansford hears of a death in St Osyth which the coroner cannot explain; he reserves the blood from his Sunday chicken and goes out that night to paint the lintel of every door in Aldwinter, that God’s judgment might pass over them. There’s a downpour before sunrise and noone’s any the wiser.

Martha watches her companion for signs of wanting to return to Foulis Street, but there are none, for Cora has come to feel her happiness is rooted in the Aldwinter clay. One afternoon she goes to East Mersea and walks in a daze of joy for which she fears she’ll one day be punished. The russet cliffs are wetted by a beck, and where the water runs, yellow coltsfoot grows. Down on the shore she stoops to inspect the stones and gravel sifted in the longshore drift, and finds no ammonite, no toadstone, but a smooth bit of amber that fits perfectly in the crease of her palm. At times she runs through her store of Essex memory – the dumb sheep’s struggle, Cracknell whispering in the All Saints aisle, Stella tucking a confiding arm in hers, how silently the ship had sailed across the sky – and it seems to her that she must’ve lived there years, that she can recall no other way of being. Besides, there’s the serpent to think of – she takes a boat round Mersea Island, she visits Henham-onthe-Mount, she reads the dying ode of Ragnar Lodbrok, who slew an enormous serpent and won himself a bride. She keeps before her the spirit of Mary Anning, who certainly would’ve pursued the rumour of a winged sea-serpent to the earth’s end, and her own.

She goes often to the rectory, bringing gifts for the Ransome children: a book for Joanna, a Jacob’s Ladder toy for James (this he dismantles at once), something sweet for John. She kisses Stella on both cheeks, and means it, too. Then on she goes to where Will waits in his study (there is the amber on his desk), and always at first sight there’s a moment of delight, of surprise: you really are here, each thinks.

Side by side they sit at his desk, books opened and discarded; has he read this or that, she says, and what does he think of it; certainly he has, he says, and thinks nothing of it at all. He attempts to sketch the refracting light that gave them the Fata Morgana; she draws the parts of a trilobite. They sharpen themselves on each other; each by turn is blade and whetstone; when talk falls to faith and reason they argue readily, startling themselves by growing swiftly bad-tempered (‘You don’t understand!’ ‘How can I understand when you do not even make attempts at speaking sense?’). One afternoon they come almost to blows over a question of the existence of absolute good, which Cora denies, with reference to the thieving magpie. Will falls back on condescension, and puts on his parson’s voice. Then she gleefully brings up the Essex Serpent – nothing but rumour and myth, he says, and she’ll have none of it: didn’t he know how in 1717 a beast fourteen feet long was washed up on the Maldon shore? And he an Essex man, too! Each considers the other to have a fatal flaw in their philosophy which ought by rights to exclude a friendship, and are a little baffled to discover it does nothing of the kind. They write more often than meet. ‘I like you better on paper,’ says Cora, and it is as if she carries around with her, in a pocket or threaded around her neck, a constant source of light.

Stella, passing the open door, smiles, pleased and indulgent: she herself is attended so warmly by so many companions it pleases her to see her husband fitted up with so suitable a friend. Questioned once by a curious Aldwinter wife hopeful of scandal she says, all mischief, half-tempted to stoke the ember: ‘Oh, I never saw firmer friends: they’ve almost begun to look alike. Last week she’d got halfway home before she realised she had his boots on.’ She stands at the mirror in the morning brushing out her hair and half-pities Cora, who to be sure has a handsome and costly look when the rare mood takes her but in general could never be mistaken for a beauty. She puts down the brush – her arm aches – the flu has left her a little weak, a little disinclined to go out: she prefers to sit by her window in the blue hour before dusk and watch cowslips come up on the lawn.