The Essex Serpent(67)

Why were you sorry? You didn’t know him. You didn’t know me. I suppose they teach you these kind phrases when they give you your first white collar.

How could I tell you then what it had been like – not just the death (see how easy it is to say!) but everything before.

He died and I was glad and I was distraught. Do you believe it possible to hold in your mind two sensations which are entirely at odds and yet for both to be completely true? I imagine you don’t – I imagine your idea of absolute truth and absolute right can’t take it in.

I was distraught because I knew no other way of living. I was so young when we married, so young when we met, that I barely existed – he called me into being. He made me what I am.

And at the same time – at exactly the same time! – I felt so happy I thought I’d die of it. I’d had so little happiness – I thought it was hardly possible to live at such a pitch of it and not burn out. The day we met I was walking in the woods and could hardly breathe for gladness.

Once I met a woman who told me her husband treated her like a dog. He’d put her food in a dish on the floor. When they went walking he told her to come to heel. When she spoke out of turn he rolled up the newspaper he was reading and struck her on the nose. Her friends were there and saw it. They laughed. They said what fun he was.

Do you know what I felt, when I heard that? I felt envy, because I was never treated like a dog. We had a dog – a wretched thing: once I picked a tick from its fur and it burst like a berry – and Michael would draw its head to his knee and not mind the drool and stroke its ear, and look at me as he did it. Sometimes he’d slap its flank over and over, hard – it made a hollow noise – and the dog would roll over in ecstasy. When Michael was dying it was his shadow. It didn’t survive his death.

He never touched me so kindly. I looked at the dog and I envied it. Can you imagine being jealous of a dog?

I’m going back to London for a while. I won’t go to Foulis St: it isn’t home anymore. Charles and Katherine will look after me.

Don’t feel you should write.

With love,





CORA


PS: Re. Stella: You should receive a letter from Dr Garrett. Please consider the offer of help.





4


Joanna went to All Saints in the morning and found her father there. It had been a good night, she thought, remembering how she and Martha had pored over plans for new homes in London where the water was clean and ran in copper pipes. She’d played the piano well enough, she’d worn her good dress, she’d eaten an orange (her nails were still stained with its peel). True, it had worn her mother out, and her father that morning had been silent, but then (he said) he always had such a lot of thinking to do.

She found him stooped in the shadows with a chisel in his hand. With furious movements he worked at the serpent coiled on the arm of its pew; over the years the Essex oak had ossified and blackened, and though the creature’s folded wings had come away and lay on the stone floor, it still grinned at its adversary, baring its teeth.

‘No!’ said Joanna – imagine destroying something that had taken so much skill! – and ran to the pew, and pulling at his sleeve said, ‘You can’t do that! It isn’t even yours!’

‘I am in charge! I’ll do what I think’s right!’ he said, sounding not at all like her father, but like a boy who couldn’t get his own way; then as if he heard his own petulance he straightened his shirt and said, ‘It’s no good, Jojo, it shouldn’t be here – look: can’t you see it doesn’t belong?’

But Joanna had stroked the tip of its tail since she could barely walk, and seeing its severed wings she wept and said, ‘You shouldn’t go breaking things! You’re not allowed!’

Her tears were so rare that on any other day they might have stayed his hand, but William Ransome felt beset by enemies and this one at least he could destroy. All night, sleepless, they’d come to him: the crouching black-browed doctor, Cracknell with his moleskins hanging, a roomful of schoolgirls dismantled by laughter, the Blackwater parting, and there on the mud Cora standing sternly, and behind her with its heart beating behind its wet skin the Essex Serpent … he filed off a winking eye and said, ‘Go home, Joanna, go back to your schoolbooks, and don’t meddle.’

Joanna stood tall beside him and considered bringing her fist down on his bent head, feeling for the first time the helpless rage of a child knowing itself wiser and more just than its parent. Then behind them the church doors opened and the light came in, and there with her red hair burning was Naomi Banks. She was breathless with running, and her hands were coated with mud to the elbow. ‘It’s happened again!’ she said, and her voice rang in the vault. ‘It’s come again: I told you it would – didn’t I tell you! Didn’t I say it would!’

By the time Will reached the marsh a handful had gathered round the bundle lying there. Cracknell’s head was turned so far to his left – and upward, craning, as though looking into the face of his destroyer – that it was immediately apparent (they said) that his neck was broken. ‘Wait for the coroner,’ said Will, stooping to close the filmy eyes: ‘He’d been ill a while.’ There on the man’s coat, placed precisely on his stomach and between two torn pockets, were a silver fork and a grey stone pierced with a hole. ‘Who did this?’ he said, looking up at the faces of his flock: ‘Who put these things here, and why?’ But they all shrank away, one after the other, not admitting to anything, saying that they knew there was something there, had known it all along, and that they’d all best lock their doors whenever the tide was high. One woman crossed herself, receiving a stern look from her minister, who long ago had trained them out of superstition.