The Essex Serpent(62)

But she could not go away – not yet, not when Joanna was still so sombre, not while Will so often slammed his study door, not while the village still shrank from the river and the villagers still came silently to church and left without being comforted. Star of the sea, Will had said – and wasn’t that also the name of the Virgin, who also only ever wore blue? She laughed, thinking: Pray for me, Mary Mother of God, and lend me one of your robes.

Then they were on the doorstep, and there was Cora in black silk, looking so stern and so serene that for a moment Will forgot his righteous indignation. Wrong-footed once again he took her hand and said, ‘Cora, you look tired – have you been walking too far?’

Tall in her costly black, a little nervous perhaps, it seemed to him that he’d never met her before – that she’d taken on a kind of remoteness that made him want to run after her, wherever it was she had gone. He watched her greet her guests with the grace he imagined cultivated in high-ceilinged establishments in Chelsea and Westminster: she seemed to know precisely what to say, and how to say it; who to greet with kisses and who preferred her handshake, which was so like a man’s. She conveyed Stella at once to a broad low seat on which a blue silk cushion was placed – ‘I saw this in Colchester just last week,’ she said, ‘and thought you should have it; take it with you when you go.’ She’d brushed her hair, and wore it loose like a girl, only pinned above the ears with silver combs; she wore pearl drops in her ears, and the lobes were red, as if they were sore from the weight of them.

When Charles Ambrose came in, blazing brightly in his new silk shirt, he held his hostess at arm’s length – ‘I thought you’d be decked in flowers, Cora: what a sad sight you are,’ but his gaze had been an admiring one.

‘You’re gorgeous enough for us all,’ she’d said, and kissed his plump cheek, and fingered Katherine’s long-fringed shawl (‘I am going to steal this later: see if I don’t’).

‘She’s getting fat,’ said Charles, not disapprovingly, watching her make her way past low tables set with silverware. Then Luke was brought over, and proudly presented (‘You know the Imp, of course!’), a yellow cowslip dying in his buttonhole and his black hair oiled.

‘Cora,’ he said, ‘I have something for you: I’ve had it for years, and you might as well have it as anyone.’ He handed her a packet wrapped in white, rather carelessly as if it hardly mattered whether it pleased her. When she opened it, Katherine Ambrose saw a small frame in which a miniature embroidered fan was set behind glass, and wondered what on earth the man was doing working with linen and coloured silk threads.

Martha, wearing green, looked a country girl born and bred, and more so when she produced a loaf shaped like a corn-sheaf and two gleaming capons dressed with sprigs of thyme. There were ducks’ eggs and a clove-studded ham; platters of tomatoes sliced and dotted with mint, and potatoes small as pearls. Joanna followed her to the kitchen and back, begging to be useful, permitted to cut curls of lemon to dress the salmon. All along the table early buds of lavender were crushed by heavy dishes and made the air sweet. Charles Ambrose had brought good red wine from London, and as he opened the third bottle he lined up the crystal glasses and with a wet finger on their rims played a melody. On a wool rug Martha and Joanna lay on their stomachs poring over papers, making plans, looking very serious and sucking cubes of ice, and coiled on a window-seat Francis drew his knees to his chin and recited the numbers of the Fibonacci sequence.

What Will wanted most of all was to take his friend aside, and pull up two chairs, and tell her everything he had stored up those past weeks – how he’d found in his papers a poem he’d written when he was a boy and how he’d burned it, and wished he hadn’t; how Jo had borrowed her mother’s diamond ring and tested its strength by scoring her name on the window; what Cracknell had said as he licked rosehip syrup from a spoon. But he could do none of those things: she was busy elsewhere, dredging strawberries with sugar and persuading Stella to eat, and saying rather shyly to Francis that if it was numbers that bothered him most these days she had several books he could read. Besides (Will tried to rouse himself to anger again) they were in the midst of a battle, with no quarter asked, none given.

Still, the anger wouldn’t come however hard he summoned: he pictured the crouching man stooping over his daughter, whispering, but after all it was only this Dr Garrett, this imp, who ought to be pitied, really, for his meagre height and the way one shoulder was surely more hunched than the other. Where were his good graces? What had Cora done with them?

He went over to the doctor, who’d taken the yellow flower from his buttonhole and was pulling at the petals, and heard himself say, ‘I was rude, that day when we met: I shouldn’t have flown off the handle like that – will you forgive me?’, and looked astonished at the glass of wine he held, as if it was the liquid there that had spoken, and not him. The doctor flushed, and stammered, and said, ‘Don’t mention it,’ with something like hauteur, then the flush receded and he said, ‘it was just something I like to try out sometimes – we did it to Cora once – we didn’t see any harm.’

‘I can’t imagine anyone making Cora say anything she didn’t want to say,’ said Will, and for a moment the air chilled, with each thinking the other had no right at all to an opinion on what Cora was likely to do.