The Essex Serpent(71)
The village is wary. No amount of Colchester coroners would have them believe Cracknell died from nothing more than his old heart running out of beats: it was the Essex Serpent, sure as eggs. They seek out signs and find them: the barley crops aren’t looking good, the hens aren’t laying, there’s a tendency in the milk to turn. Traitor’s Oak’s so heavily hung with horseshoes there’s a danger its branches will break come wind and weather. Even those who never saw the night-shining could tell you just how it had looked that night, hanging over the common, sprinkling the estuary with blue. Up at St Osyth there’s been a drowning. Told you so, they say: I told you so.
A rota of nightwatchmen is set up. They sit by small fires on the marsh and make marks in a log book: 0200 hours, wind south-easterly, visibility good, tide low. No sighting but a faint grinding and groaning from 0246 to 0249. Banks is not permitted to join the watch, on account of how Naomi is missing and he’s likelier than ever to drink.
Aldwinter’s children don’t take kindly to being kept indoors. In one of the tithed cottages a boy goes quite deranged with boredom and bites his mother’s hand. ‘There,’ she says, showing Will the wound: ‘I knew something was up the moment a robin flew in. It’s the serpent in him coming out.’ She hisses at the rector, showing him her teeth.
Stella is home and writes in her blue book daily – I’d like to be baptised again in blue water on a clear blue night – and closes it up when Will comes in. She has good days and bad days. Her visitors attend her – had she heard about this woman and that thing and wasn’t it funny and didn’t she still look so beautiful and wherever did she find those beads so bright – and go away shaking their heads, and dousing their hands in antiseptic. ‘She’s not herself at all,’ they say: ‘She told me she hears the serpent sometimes when she sleeps! She told me it knows her by name!’ Then – ‘You don’t think she’s seen it, do you? You don’t think there’s something to see?’
Will finds himself treading a line. The line is narrow and on either side it’s a hell of a way to fall. On the one hand he won’t hear of it, this miserable superstition: was ever a whispered rumour given such wet flesh, so many bones? It is his duty to keep it at bay. He preaches brightly: ‘God is our refuge and strength: a very present help in trouble,’ but it’s clear the villagers doubt it. The congregation does not dwindle, only grows truculent and frequently refuses to sing. No-one mentions the splintered arm of the pew where it’s still possible to make out the remnants of a tail: they’re glad, on the whole, that it’s gone.
On the other hand he lies awake at night, with Stella too far away along the corridor, and wonders if it’s a judgment. God knows he alone could be indicted on several charges (he remembers standing alone on the marsh bent double with desire); he wonders if the Essex Serpent has his name written down in a ledger.
He hears nothing from Cora. He thinks of her. Sometimes he thinks she came in the night and put her eyes in his sockets so he’d see the world on her terms: he can’t look at a clod of mud in the garden without wanting to crumble it and see if there’s something curled up in there. He wants to tell her everything and because he can’t the fabric of the world feels thin and drab. ‘There’s a dragonfly in my study trapped behind a bookcase,’ he writes, ‘and I can’t think over the sound of its wings beating.’ Then he throws the paper away.
Cora reads her letters, and does not reply. She takes Martha and Francis to London: ‘It’s at its best this time of year,’ she says, and spends irresponsibly on a good hotel, on extravagant meals, on shoes she doesn’t like and will never wear. She drinks with Luke Garrett in Gordon’s by the Embankment, where the walls drip into the candles, and when pressed on the subject of her Good Reverend dismisses him with an imperious wave. But Garrett is no fool, and would prefer her old way of merrily mentioning Will each second sentence.
If Luke and Martha had expected either to fall in love or to despise each other in the time after midsummer they are greatly surprised. What comes instead is an ease which is like that of fellow soldiers who’ve survived a common battle. They never revisit that night, not even in memory: it was necessary, that is all. It is tacitly agreed that Spencer should be kept in the dark: Luke has such a fondness for him, and Martha such a use. He has gathered about him men of political weight and financial heft: he thinks it likely that Bethnal Green might benefit from new housing to which no moral obligations are attached, and which do more than meet the barest minimum of shelter.
Martha and Edward Burton share chips down at Limehouse and scheme while the ships from New Zealand unload frozen lamb on the docks. We’ll do this and that, they say, licking salt from their fingertips, companionable, without noticing that each has assumed the other’s presence on some future day. ‘It’s just I like looking up and seeing her there,’ he tells his mother, who has her doubts: Martha’s a good London girl but has airs and no longer drops her aitches.
What Edward does not notice, when he goes home that night holding one of Martha’s magazines, is that in the alley the man who cut him down in the shadow of St Paul’s is waiting patiently. Samuel Hall has bided his time since the day Edward came home from hospital; he wears a different coat, but in the pocket is that same short-bladed knife that slips so easily between the ribs. He can hardly remember the source of his hatred – a quarrel over a woman, was it? – it doesn’t matter anymore. It has become his sole purpose, fuelled by drink and aimlessness; he was cheated once out of revenge and passes the days impatiently until the task can be complete. That Edward Burton has become the pet of wealthy men and women who come so often and stay so long has only made him more implacable: they’ve all become the enemy. He watches Edward flick salt from his sleeve, and fit his key to the lock, calling up to his waiting mother. Not tonight then, he thinks, sheathing the knife: no, but soon enough.