The Essex Serpent(82)
Kissing her, he said, ‘Perhaps a fishing-boat has gone aground on the saltings and spilt its cargo, and the fish is rotting – already it’s a warm enough morning …’
‘I wish the babies were here,’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t Jojo have woken before us all, and gone down with a lamp, and seen for herself, and James done a drawing for the papers?’
Out on the High Road a crowd had gathered. Mr Caffyn had wound a white cloth about his head as if he’d been wounded; others pressed a sleeve to their mouths and peered suspiciously at Will, casting about for signs of a Bible or some other weapon concealed in the crook of his arm. It did not occur to Will until that moment – until he scented on the dim air not only rottenness but fear – that perhaps there was another cause to the foul odour besides misfortune. But there was Harriet’s mother (weeping, as she so often was), crossing herself; there was Banks, not yet sober, saying he’d not go down to the water in case the beast had belched up coils of red hair. Evansford in his black shirt, looking more than ever like an undertaker bereft of a corpse, stood reciting fragments of the Book of Revelation with evident glee. Even Mr Caffyn, who each year taught his students that the 31st of October was nothing but the anniversary of Martin Luther taking hammer and pins to his 95 theses, looked (thought Will) rather green about the gills.
‘Good morning, and a fine one at that,’ he said: ‘And what’s this that’s brought us all out of our beds?’ No answer came. ‘Now as you all know I’m no seafaring man,’ he said heartily, thumping Banks on the shoulder, ‘and you can’t expect me to know anything about anything. Mr Banks, you know the Blackwater better than us all – what’s the cause of this dreadful business, d’you think?’ The wind rose, the smell strengthened: Will gagged, and said, ‘Some algae perhaps, drifted in from overseas? A shoal of herring beached on the shingle?’
‘Not anything I ever smelt before or heard tell of,’ said Banks, muffled behind the sleeve of his coat. ‘It’s not natural, I know that.’
‘Well: you say so,’ said Will, whose eyes streamed: ‘You say so, but nothing’s more natural than the smell of dead things, which I suppose this must be. You and I will both smell similar, given time.’ The small crowd observed him with distaste, and he rightly judged that humour was not fitted to the moment. All right: try scripture, then – ‘Therefore we will not fear, though the waters roar, and be troubled, and what have you!’
‘I’ll tell you what it is,’ said Harriet’s mother: ‘And I needn’t tell you, Banks, need I? – or you, or you …’ She nodded with meaning at Mr Caffyn, and at one or two women who seemed indifferent to the vileness of the air and had already begun to wander up the High Road, towards the Blackwater, where dawn had taken hold. ‘It’s come to us at last, the Essex Serpent, the river beast, and none of us ready for it! It came to my little one first – oh you bet, you bet! It came to her first and she’s sick as a dog and nothing I say’ll comfort the girl.’
Evansford remarked that after all it had been promised by the Redeemer himself there’d be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, and bolstered by this observation, the woman went on, ‘It’s the breath of the thing, the very breath of it I tell you, and on it there’s the flesh and bones of everything it ever had between its jaws – the St Osyth boy, the man washed up on our shores …’
‘A foul miasma, as our fathers were taught,’ said Mr Caffyn, ‘and bringing with it disease – look! I have a fever. La Peste! It has begun.’ And certainly his high scholar’s brow was beaded with drops of sweat, and as Will watched he began to tremble, and twist his mouth into what may have been either the beginnings of a sob or of laughter.
‘The sea gave up the dead which were in it!’ said Banks, growing excited (if hope was gone of holding Naomi alive in his arms he at least might have the pleasure of giving her a tomb): ‘And death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them!’
‘Hell! Miasma!’ said Will, growing exasperated, and discovering that either the smell had begun to recede, or that he’d grown accustomed to disgust: ‘Serpent! Plague! Mr Caffyn, you’re not ill: it’s just that you could do with a cup of tea. What! I know you all for sensible folk – Banks, it was you yourself who showed me how the sextant worked! Caffyn, I’ve seen you teach my daughter how to calculate the distance of a storm! We’re not in the Dark Ages – not children kept in line with tales of ghouls and demons – the people that walked in darkness have seen a great light! There’s nothing there, nothing to fear, there never was: we will go down and find nothing but a sheep washed up from Maldon way, not some – some abomination sent for our punishment!’
But was it so great a stretch to imagine the Intelligence that once had split the Red Sea taking the trouble to send a little admonition to the sinners of a briny Essex parish? The apostle Paul had put his hand in a nest of snakes and come away unpoisoned by way of a sign: certainly the world had turned its many thousand revolutions since, but was the season of signs and wonders really over? Why had it always seemed to him so preposterous that in the estuary something was biding its time – was it a question not of failure to believe in the serpent, but of failure to believe in his God? The fear of the crowd came then to Will, with the taste of a copper penny placed on his tongue; and it was not the fear that they were under divine judgment, but that they were not, and could never be. Cora, he thought, finding himself grasping at the empty air as if he might somehow summon up her strong hand: Cora! If she were here. If she were here – ‘Right then,’ he said, grown angry, attempting to conceal it: ‘What use is it to stand here, and choke, and imagine? I’ll go down and see for myself, and you may come or not, as you like, but I tell you by sunset there’ll be an end to all this, and there’ll be no more talk of serpents.’ He struck out east up the High Road, towards the Blackwater and the source of their disgust. Muttering and squabbling in his wake the small crowd followed; Harriet’s mother took his arm confidingly and said, ‘I bid goodbye to the child at the door as I left her, not knowing if I’d make my way home.’