The Essex Serpent(97)

Taylor had found the child a month ago, curled up in what had once been the dining-room, with fallen masonry for a pillow. No amount of questioning on his part could establish where the child had come from, or where he was going: there was mention of a river, and having walked a good long way, and certainly there were sufficient blisters and bruises on foot and knee to suggest he’d had a journey, and a hard one at that. Taylor, wheeling himself this way and that on the threshold, had chivvied the lad out of the ruin with many an admonition on the dangers of trespass, then sent him over the road for two teas and as large a bacon sandwich as he thought he could manage. ‘I’ll not see that money again,’ he’d thought, watching the slight child walk away, trailing a wounded foot, but back he’d come, with a paper packet and two steaming mugs. ‘Newcomer, I take it?’ he’d said, watching the lad set about his breakfast with bites both dainty and determined, but received no reply. The meal and the tea did their work; the child accepted the cleanest of Taylor’s many blankets, and finding a scrap of carpet grudgingly conceded to be more or less safe slept for several hours. Taylor was delighted to discover that nothing plays so sweet a tune on the heart-strings as a sleeping child with a smudged cheek, and doubled his takings in an afternoon. Natural avarice vied with his own good heart: when the child woke, he tried once again to establish where he’d come from, and where his parents might be, and made faint reference to the local bobby. These lines of questioning were met respectively with silence and terror, so that Taylor felt quite justified in offering the boy a partnership in a thriving enterprise, together with full board and lodging. By way of demonstrating good faith he handed over a modest proportion of the day’s wages, which the lad surveyed in astonishment for some minutes before counting them carefully into his pocket.

‘I’ve got a daughter, mind you,’ said Taylor, reassuringly: ‘You won’t be expected to care for me, though a push of the old carriage wouldn’t go amiss, what with my hands getting arthritic around the knuckles. I daresay she’ll like to have you about, never having managed to fetch a family of her own. Fancy telling me your name? No? Well, if you don’t mind me calling you Ginger after an old tomcat of mine, we’ll get along nice enough.’ And they got along very nicely indeed, as it turned out: Taylor’s daughter had accepted worse eccentricities, and furthermore felt that given the loss of his limbs he should be permitted the occasional lapse in judgment. Ginger never quite developed what Taylor called the gift of the gab, but once provided with pencil and paper seemed content enough, if occasionally given to making troublesome sketches, frantically scribbled, that Taylor could never make out.

‘Might as well go home,’ the boy said, peering into the mist; but then there was the rattle and clamour of a group coming up the pavement from beneath the spire of St Nicholas, and Taylor readied himself: ‘It’s a bad businessman as shuts up shop on account of a bit of weather,’ he said, and rattled his cap. The group drew near, and he heard their voices – Just for a few minutes to see how he’s doing, shall we? and James, don’t dawdle, we’ve a train to catch and I’m hungry and you promised you absolutely promised …

‘If it’s not my old friends!’ said Taylor, glimpsing a scarlet frock-coat and the gleam of a brass-spiked umbrella swung high: ‘Mr Ambrose, ain’t ’t –’ but then there was the sound of a door opening and closing, and the party vanished one by one between the glowing windows of the George Hotel. ‘Damnitall, Ginger,’ he said, looking about for the boy, and not finding him: ‘A very open-handed gentleman that one – what is it, lad? Where’ve you gone?’ His apprentice had abandoned his post, silently and swiftly, and sat crouched behind the marble plinth, thrusting out his bottom lip in a failing effort to fend off tears. Children! thought Taylor, rolling his eyes heavenward, and dispensing a bar of chocolate: he’d’ve been much better off getting a dog.

‘Dear me,’ said Charles Ambrose, surveying Spencer and Luke Garrett. The former had a split severing his right eyebrow, which was held together with fine strips of plaster; the latter, besides his heavily bandaged right hand, was ashen-faced, and had grown thin, so that the heavy bones of his brow gave him more than ever a simian look. The men stood side by side, looking rather like schoolboys caught out in the aftermath of a prank. Katherine made motherly noises, and kissed each of their cheeks, whispering something sweetly to Luke, who coloured and turned away. They’d brought the children with them, who each in their way felt a certain heaviness in the air and did what they could to lighten it. ‘Got anything to eat?’ said John, scouring the room with a practised eye.

‘John, you are a pig,’ said Joanna: ‘Dr Garrett, how’s your hand? Can I look at it? I want to see the stitches. I’m going to be a doctor, you know. I’ve learned all the bones in my arm to show my dad when I get home: humerus, ulna, radius –’

‘Not an engineer, then,’ said Katherine, drawing the girl away from Luke, who’d not yet said anything, only flinched a little as if the girl had recited profanities and with a half-shamed reflex tried to put his wounded hand out of sight.

‘I’ve got a bit to make my mind up,’ said Joanna. ‘I can’t go to university for ages yet.’

‘Or at all, probably,’ said James Ransome, rather spitefully: since Jo’s sudden shift from dabbling in natural magic to dabbling (with what he felt was equal pointlessness) in the sciences, he’d felt himself deposed from his position as the family’s bright spark. ‘Look,’ he said, turning to Spencer, and taking a sheet of paper from his pocket: ‘I’ve designed a new sort of valve for a lavatory. I thought you could use them in your new houses. You can have it for free if you like,’ he added, feeling generous: he was not immune from Martha’s Marxist influence. ‘I’ll patent it once you’ve done the building work.’