The Essex Serpent(50)
Finding the seat beside Joanna empty, Naomi slipped the other girl a scrap of paper, on which she’d written out a spell they’d concocted a few weeks before. But Joanna had moved on to algebra, and couldn’t remember what the smudged symbols meant, and crumpled the paper in her hand. Then there was Mrs Seaborne herself, dressed disappointingly drably, in what was surely a man’s tweed coat, and with her hair combed too severely from her forehead. She carried over her shoulder a large leather bag, and under her left arm was a file which shed a little drawing of something like a woodlouse as she passed. The only bit of the promised glamour Naomi could see was a diamond on her left hand so large and so bright it couldn’t possibly have been real, and a fine black scarf on which small birds were stitched. Mr Caffyn, evidently over-awed, said, ‘Good morning, Mrs Seaborne: class, say good morning to Mrs Seaborne.’
Good morning, Mrs Seaborne, they said, eyeing her with slight mistrust, and Cora eyed them back, a little nervous. She’d never known what to do with children: Francis had wrong-footed her so completely that she’d come to think of them as a delightful but volatile species no more to be trusted than cats. But there was Joanna, whom she knew well, with her mother’s eyes above her father’s mouth; and beside her a red-haired girl whose face was all freckles; and they each sat with folded hands, surveying her expectantly. She said, ‘How pleased I am to be here: I’m going to start by telling you a story, because anything that was ever worth knowing began with once upon a time.’
‘As if we’re babies,’ muttered Naomi, receiving a sharp kick from her friend, but found that after all it was a better schoolday than most to listen to Mrs Seaborne tell her tale of the woman who’d once found a sea-dragon cased in mud; and how all the earth was a graveyard with gods and monsters under their feet, waiting for weather or a hammer and brush to bring them up to a new kind of life. Only look hard enough and you’d find ferns unfurling in beds of rock, she said, and footprints where lizards had walked on their hind legs; there were teeth so tiny your eye could hardly pick them out, and ones so large they’d once been worn as charms to fend off the plague.
She reached into her bag and they passed ammonites and toadstones from hand to hand; ‘Hundreds of thousands of years old,’ she told them: ‘Perhaps millions!’ and Mr Caffyn, whose first twenty years had been spent in a Welsh Methodist chapel, coughed, and said, ‘Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth …’ and looked a little aggrieved. ‘Any questions for Mrs Seaborne?’
How did birds end up in the rock, they said, and where were their eggs? Did they ever find humans there among the lizards and fish? How did flesh and bones become stone? Would theirs one day do the same? Was something waiting underneath the schoolyard now if they went out with spades and dug? What was her most favourite fossil and where had she found it and what was she looking for now and had she ever hurt herself and had she been abroad?
And then – voices lowered just a little – what about the Blackwater: had she heard? What about the man that drowned on New Year’s Day, and the animals found dead and the things they’d seen in the night? What about Cracknell, who’d gone mad now and sat up all night by Leviathan watching for the beast? Was something there and was it coming? Mr Caffyn saw the turn the morning had taken, and tried his best to turn it back. He said, ‘Now girls, don’t trouble Mrs Seaborne with that nonsense,’ and scrubbed out the ammonite sketched on the blackboard behind.
Cora had walked with William Ransome the evening before and been told, in the parson’s voice he occasionally adopted if he wanted to show the upper hand, that she was not to encourage the children to talk about the Trouble. It was bad enough dealing with Cracknell, he said, and Banks’s insistence that there was no herring to be had and he’d very likely starve: putting ideas in their heads would help nothing and no-one. At the time she’d dutifully thought: You’re right, Will, of course you are right; but presented now with a dozen faces turned to her enquiringly and in places openly afraid, she felt a flash of temper. Always being told what to do by some man or other! she thought.
‘There may still be animals alive today just like those we find in the rock,’ she said, treading carefully. ‘After all, there are places in the world no-one’s ever walked, and water so deep they’ve never found the bottom: who knows what we might’ve missed? Up in Scotland, in a lake called the Ness, there have been sightings of a creature in the water for more than a thousand years. They say once a man was killed out swimming, and St Columba sent the beast away, only it surfaces every now and then …’
Mr Caffyn coughed, and with a roll of his eyes towards the youngest members of the class (a girl in a yellow dress had turned down the corners of her mouth in a grimace of delighted fear) indicated that his guest might prefer to keep to the stones and bones she’d brought in her bag.
‘There is nothing to be afraid of,’ said Cora. ‘Except ignorance. What seems frightening is just waiting for you to shine a light on it. Think how a pile of clothes on the floor of your bedroom can seem to creep up on you until you open the curtains and see it’s just the things you took off the night before! I don’t know if there’s anything out in the Blackwater but I do know this: if it came up on the banks and let us see it, we wouldn’t see a monster, just an animal as solid and real as you and me.’ The girl in the yellow dress, plainly preferring to be afraid than to be instructed, yawned delicately into the palm of her hand. Cora looked at her watch. ‘Well: I’ve talked too long, and you’ve been so patient and listened so well. We have an hour left, I think – is that right, Mr Caffyn? – and what I’d like more than anything is to see how well you all draw and paint. I’ve seen your pictures’ – she gestured to a wall of butterflies – ‘and like them very much. Would you like to come and choose something to draw, and when you’re done, I’ll pick the one I think is best, and whoever drew it will have a prize.’