The Essex Serpent(48)
Luke Garrett is alarmed to discover that he has become a celebrity. There’s a brief fad among surgical students for mimicking all the idiosyncrasies that once were roundly mocked: they rig up mirrors in the operating theatre, and take to wearing white cotton masks. He remains in disgrace with his seniors, who fear the corridors will grow clotted with victims of street brawls holding open their shirts for the needle and thread. Spencer – both generous, and attempting to keep his own possessions from being endlessly pressed into his friend’s service – commissions him a leather belt with a heavy silver buckle, and on the buckle he asks to be engraved the snake of Asclepius coiling round its staff, by way of commemorating the medical triumph.
Uncertain what he thought might change once he’d proved it possible to close a cardiac wound, Luke discovers things remain the same. He can still barely afford his rent, reliant on bank-notes he suspects Spencer secretes in his room; he’s still a crouching black-browed thing; all the accumulated humiliations of life have not evaporated with the last of the chloroform in Room 12. Besides, he didn’t quite get at the heart, not quite: both blades had stopped short of the chambers; really he can hardly say it’s been much of an achievement at all.
He admits to Spencer and to no-one else that he’d thought it might at last elevate him in Cora’s estimation: she loves him of course (or claims to), and admires him; but he feels himself out-ranked. She’s acquired new friends, and writes to tell him how the parson’s wife has a face so lovely you thought flowers would wilt in shame as she passed, and how their daughter has adopted Martha, and how even Francis can bear their company an hour or two. Her move to Aldwinter astounds him: then he imagines that she’s merely lapsed into the low spirits befitting a widow, and is greatly cheered at the prospect of raising them. But when they meet in Colchester she speaks of William Ransome and grows so animated her grey eyes gleam blue; really (she says) it’s as if God pities her absence of a brother and has fitted one up for her at the last minute. There’s nothing secretive in the way she speaks of the man, no blushes or sidelong looks; but all the same Garrett looks up and catches Martha’s eye and for the first time discovers they’re in complete accord. What’s happening? they silently say. What’s going on?
Spencer is immersed in London’s housing disgrace. What at first had been merely a means of pleasing Martha has become an obsession: he pores over Hansard and committee minutes, he puts on his worst coat and goes walking down past Drury Lane. He discovers Parliament’s habit of making policies benevolently enough, then covering its eyes and shaking hands with industry. Sometimes the greed and malice of what he sees appals him so much he thinks he must’ve misunderstood; he looks again, and it’s worse than he thought. The local authorities tear down slums, and compensate landlords according to lost rents. Since nothing makes a tenement more profitable than vice and overcrowding, landlords facilitate both as diligently as any pimp in the street, and government rewards them handsomely. The tenants then turned out find themselves considered too immoral for a smart new Peabody home, and are left to find rooms in lodging-houses: there are times when the streets are full of firelight as tenants burn furniture too poor to be sold. Spencer thinks of his family home in Suffolk, where recently his mother discovered another room they’d never known was there, and is nauseated.
Over at World’s End Cracknell turns a wary eye on the estuary. He keeps his fences thickly hung with stripped moles, and a candle burning in the window.
2
Late one afternoon, walking on the saltings with a Psalm on his tongue, William Ransome encountered Cora’s son. He sought out the features of his friend in the small inscrutable face, and found none. These then were the eyes of the man he supposed she’d loved; this the plane of his cheek and chin. But the child’s eyes were querying, not cruel, as he imagined Seaborne’s must have been, though they were not childlike, precisely – Francis was never that.
‘What are you doing, down here all alone?’ said Will.
‘I’m not alone,’ said the boy. Will looked about for someone standing on the shingle, and saw no-one.
Francis stood with his hands in his pockets, and scrutinised the man before him as though he were a sheet of problems to be worked out. Then he said – as if the question arose quite naturally out of their exchange – ‘What’s sin?’
‘Sin?’ said Will, so startled that he stumbled, and put out a hand as if expecting to encounter the pulpit door.
‘I’ve been counting,’ said Francis, walking beside him. ‘Seven times you said it this Sunday. Five the last.’
‘I was not aware you’ve been in the congregation, Francis. I never see you there.’ And Cora – had she, too, sat in the shadows, listening?
‘Seven and five makes twelve. But you don’t say what it is.’
They’d reached Leviathan, and Will – grateful for the pause – stooped to pick at pebbles drifted up against its bones. In all his years of ministry nobody had ever asked, and he was appalled to find himself at a loss. It was not that he had no answer: he had many (he’d studied all the requisite books). But out of doors – with no pulpit or pew in sight and the river mouth licking at the shore – both question and answer struck him as preposterous.
‘What’s sin?’ said Francis, without the inflexion of a repeated phrase. God! Give me strength, thought Will, both devoutly and profanely, and handed the boy a pebble.