The Essex Serpent(69)

Cora, there is more – there is more besides the counting of atoms, the calculating of the planet’s orbit, counting down the years until Halley’s Comet makes its return – something beats in us beside the pulse. Do you remember the Frenchman who tied a pigeon to a photographic plate and cut its throat, and thought he caught a wisp of soul escaping through the wound? Absurd of course, and yet – can’t you see him there with his knife and imagine how he thought it might be so?

How else to account for so much? How else to explain how attentive, how loving my whole being becomes when I turn towards Christ?

And how else to account for the longing I have for you? Cora, I was content. I had come to the end of everything new – I had no more surprises in store, and I never sought any. I was serving my purpose. And there you were – and from your hair which is never tidy to your man’s clothes, I’ve never liked the look of you (do you mind?). But I seem to have learned you by heart, seemed at once to know you, had immediate liberty to say everything to you I could never have said elsewhere – and all this is to me the ‘substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen’! Ought I to be ashamed, or troubled? I am not. I refuse to be.

How do you like that, you rank atheist, you apostate? You have driven me to God.

With love – and with prayer, whether you like it or not,





WILL





Rev. William Ransome

The Lodge, Aldwinter

Essex 30th June Cora, I’ve had no letter from you – did I speak too freely? Or did I not speak freely enough?

I’m afraid for Stella. Sometimes I think her mind wanders, then she’s her old self and she tells me how St Osyth has a new vicar and he doesn’t yet have a wife, or how up in Colchester there’s a new shop opened and the pastries come direct from Paris.

She writes all day in a blue book. She won’t let me see.

Tomorrow we go to London. Think of us both.

Yours in Christ,





WILLIAM RANSOME





5


Stella flinched under the stethoscope and breathed under instruction: as deeply as she could, and never mind the coughing. The fit, when it came, was not one of her worst, but bad enough: it threw her forward in the chair, it let loose a little urine; she called out for a fresh handkerchief.

‘It’s not always so bad,’ she said, dabbing at her mouth, feeling sorry for the three men surveying her sombrely: how alarmed they were! Had they themselves never been sick? There was Will, who out of distress or discomfort could barely meet her eye. And there was the Imp, who stood far back in the corner, his black gaze even from that distance missing nothing. There, too – the elder of the men and the most gracious, having had longer to cultivate a soothing manner at bedsides both tawdry and grand – was Dr Butler, who withdrew the stethoscope, and with a gentle hand tugged his patient’s blouse into place. ‘No doubt in my mind of tuberculosis,’ he said, seeing – as Luke had promised – the pretty flush on the woman’s cheek: ‘Though naturally we’ll take a sputum sample, in order to be certain.’ His full white beard compensated for a high domed head which was completely bald (it was said by his students that his thoughts moved at such a speed that over the years their friction made any hair growth impossible).

‘Captain among these men of death,’ said Stella into her handkerchief, whispering to the forget-me-nots embroidered there. There was no need for all this: she’d have told them months ago, if anyone had asked. The high open window showed the white sky splitting open to show a fragment of blue. ‘I did that myself,’ she said confidingly (not that anyone heard).

‘Certain? How?’ said Will, wondering if the room really did darken at that moment, or if it was only his own dread. There, beneath the couch where she lay still smiling, he imagined something in the shadows moving, and with it the scent of the river. ‘How can you be sure? There has been none of it in her family – none – Stella, you must tell them.’ But how could he have missed it – had he really been so blinded by what had come to Aldwinter? ‘Flu, the doctor said: it had gone round the village, and everyone after was weak …’

‘Family’s got nothing to do with it,’ said Luke. ‘It doesn’t pass from father to son. It’s just the tuberculosis bacteria, nothing more than that.’ His dislike for Will came to the fore, and he said with nasty precision: ‘Bacteria, Reverend, are microorganisms that can carry infectious disease.’

‘I’d like to be certain,’ said Dr Butler again, casting a troubled glance at his colleague, who to be sure was not known for his manners but was rarely so rude: ‘Mrs Ransome, can you bear to cough again – just a little – and spit into a dish?’

‘I’ve birthed five children,’ said Stella, with a little flash of temper: ‘Two of them dead. Spitting is nothing to me.’ It was a steel dish they brought, and in it the fragment of sky showed clearly. She obliterated it with a brownish substance drawn painfully up from her lungs, and handed it to Dr Butler with a gracious tip of her head.

‘What are you going to do with it?’ said Will: ‘How will it help?’ And how oblivious she was to it all: how calm! It was not natural – it was a kind of hysteria: shouldn’t she weep, and ask him to sit by her, and hold her hand?