by Sarah Perry
‘How’s Martha?’ he said, on first-name terms with the girl who, each time she came to town, contrived to disapprove of him vocally but leave him in a good temper. ‘Still got those ideas?’ He licked a crumb from his finger, and watched the sun look coyly out from a cloud.
‘If there were any justice,’ said Cora, ‘which you and I know there isn’t, she’d be in Parliament, and you’d have a house of your own.’ In fact, he had a neat flat on the lower floor of what had once been one of Colchester’s townhouses, being in receipt of a good pension and a better wage, but it would not do to disappoint his friend. ‘If wishes were horses,’ he said, sighing, and rolling his eyes towards the trolley that would later convey him home, ‘I’d make my fortune in manure. And what about the village folk, over Aldwinter way? Has the Essex Serpent come crawling up and eaten them all in their beds?’ He gnashed his teeth, and thought she might laugh; but instead she gave a frown that scored her forehead with lines.
‘Do you ever feel haunted?’ she said, gesturing up to the ruin, where rags of curtains hung wetly, and a mirror above a broken mantelpiece showed small furtive moments from somewhere inside.
‘No such business,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I’m quite religious, you know: no patience for the supernatural.’
‘Not even in the night?’
At night, he’d be in bed under a good thick quilt with his daughter snoring next door, and his stomach full of toasted cheese. ‘Not even then,’ he said: ‘There’s nothing here except house martins.’
Cora ate the last of her cake, and said, ‘I think the whole village is haunted. Only – I think they’re haunting themselves.’ She thought of Will, who’d not written since the day they’d let Luke loose on Joanna, and when he greeted her did so with such extravagant politeness it chilled each separate bone in her spine.
Not having much patience for the turn the talk had taken, Taylor poked at the newspaper Cora had brought, and said, ‘Why don’t you tell me what’s going on in the world? I like to keep my eye on things.’
She shook it out and said: ‘All the usual: three British servicemen dead outside Kabul, a test match lost. Only’ – she tapped the folded paper – ‘there’s this: a meteorological curiosity, and I don’t mean this endless rain! Shall I read it?’ Taylor nodded, then folded his hands and closed his eyes, willing as a child to be entertained. ‘“The keen meteorologist should turn a weather eye to the heavens in the weeks forthcoming in anticipation of witnessing a curious atmospheric phenomenon. First observed in 1885, and visible solely in the summer months between latitudes 50°N and 70°S, these ‘noctilucent clouds’ form a curious layer perceived only at twilight. Observers have noted the luminous blue nature of the display, which fluctuates considerably in brilliance, and in formation is best described as resembling a mackerel sky. The origin of this ‘night-shining’ remains a source of contention, and it has been suggested in some quarters that its first having been observed subsequent to the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 is no mere coincidence.” There now,’ she said: ‘What do you make of that?’
‘Night-shining,’ he said, shaking his head, a little affronted. ‘Whatever will they think of next!’
‘They say Krakatoa’s ash has changed the world – these bad winters we’ve lately had, changes in the night sky: all because years ago and thousands of miles away a volcano blew.’ She shook her head. ‘I’ve always said there are no mysteries, only things we don’t yet know; but lately I’ve thought not even knowledge takes all strangeness from the world.’ She told him what she’d seen with William Ransome at her side: the phantom barge in the Essex sky, and how she’d seen gulls fly beneath the hull.
‘It was just the light,’ she said, ‘up to its old tricks. But how was my heart to know?’
‘The Flying Essex-man, eh?’ said doubting Thomas: if ghost ships were ever to take to the seas they could surely find better waters than the Blackwater estuary. He was saved from further comment by the arrival of Charles and Katherine Ambrose, carrying a green umbrella and a pink one respectively, their presence on the street brightening up the town.
Cora stood to greet them – ‘Charles! Katherine! You can’t stay away – you know my friend Thomas Taylor, of course – we’re discussing astronomy. Have you seen the night-shining? Or are the London lights too bright?’
‘As always, dear Cora, I don’t know what you’re on about.’ Charles shook the cripple’s hand, dispensed several coins into his hat without first checking their value, and drew Cora under the shade of his umbrella. ‘I have heard from William Ransome,’ he said. ‘You are in disgrace.’
‘Oh’ – she looked chastened, but he pressed on: ‘I know you insist that we must all face the modern age, but it might have been polite to ask permission first.’ It was very difficult to continue, since Cora looked miserable, and Katherine was giving him one of her warning looks, but he loved William, and in his latest letter he’d seemed more shaken than the incident deserved (‘I wish you hadn’t sent her,’ he’d written: ‘It’s been nothing but one thing after another.’ And then, following swiftly on a postcard, he’d said, more cheerfully: ‘Forgive my bad temper. I was tired. What news of Whitehall?’).
‘Have you apologised?’ he said, thanking God fervently – and for neither the first time nor the last – that he’d been spared parenthood.
‘Certainly not,’ said Cora, taking Katherine’s hand, feeling she deserved an ally. ‘I shan’t. Joanna gave her permission. Stella, too. Or must we all bide our time until a man provides written consent?’
‘What a nice coat,’ said Katherine, rather desperately, looking at the blue jacket which had replaced the old man’s tweed Cora wore all winter, and which made her grey eyes stormy.
‘Isn’t it?’ Cora said absently: she could now only think of her friend, back in his Aldwinter study, thinking badly of her. She had so much to tell him, and no means of telling it. She turned back to Taylor, who was picking the last crumbs of cake from his lap and watching all three with pleasure, as if he’d paid for a ticket. ‘I ought to be getting home,’ she said, shaking his hand: ‘Francis asked for the latest Sherlock Holmes, which he’s afraid will be the Great Detective’s last case, and if it is I really don’t know what we’ll do: write them myself, perhaps.’
‘Give him this, then,’ said Taylor, who knew the boy rather better than his mother suspected, since he’d had a habit of slipping out of the Red Lion unnoticed and clambering up into the ruins. He passed Cora a piece of broken plate on which she made out a snake coiled around an apple tree.
‘More serpents,’ said Charles. ‘There seems to be a lot of it about. Cora, I haven’t finished with you yet: we’re staying at the George and it strikes me you could do with a drink.’
Seated comfortably in the parlour of the George, it was not William they discussed, but Stella. Her letters to Katherine had taken on a spiritual cast (‘Not,’ said Charles, looking horrified, ‘what one expects of a clergyman’s wife!’). Her God had slipped into something that had little to do with the thundercrack above Mount Sinai: she seemed instead to venerate a series of sensations she associated with the colour blue. ‘She told me she meditates on it day and night – that she carries a blue stone with her into church, and kisses it – that she can only bear to wear blue, because other colours scorch her skin.’ Katherine shook her head. ‘Is she ill? She was always a little silly, I suppose, but cleverly so – it was as if she’d chosen to be silly because it’s a characteristic so often expected of women that it’s almost admired.’
‘And she’s always hot,’ said Cora, thinking of how she’d held her hands when last they’d met, and of how they’d been like those of a small child in fever. ‘But how can she be ill, when she grows more beautiful each time I see her?’
Charles poured another glass of wine (‘Not bad I suppose, for an Essex pub’), and holding it to the light said, ‘William says he called the doctor, and that she can’t shake off the flu. He’d like to send her away somewhere warm, but
summer is icumen in, as the old song goes, and she’ll be basking soon enough.’
Cora was not so sure: Luke had said nothing to her (he’d departed Aldwinter as swiftly as he could, as if he still felt William’s hand on his collar), but she’d seen his watchful appraisal of the woman as she’d chattered amiably about the cornflowers she was raising from seed, and the turquoise drops she wore in her ears; watched him take her pulse, and frown. ‘The other day she told me that she’d not seen the Essex Serpent but heard it, only she didn’t know what it had said.’ She drained her glass, and said: ‘Was she joking, playing along, knowing I half-think there’s something there after all?’
‘She’s too thin,’ said Charles, who mistrusted anyone who did not eat. ‘But – yes – beautiful: sometimes I think she looks like a saint seeing Christ.’
‘Can’t you get her to see Luke?’ said Katherine.
‘I don’t know – he’s a surgeon, not a doctor – but I would like to – I’ve thought of writing to ask him.’ It struck Cora – just then, as the rain ceased and left everything quiet – how fond she’d grown of the woman, with whom she had so little in common, who doted on her reflection and on her family, who somehow knew everyone’s business better than her own, and only ever meant well. Should I envy her? she thought: Should I wish her gone? But she didn’t, and that was that: Will’s wife was welcome to him, as far as she had him. ‘Look,’ she said: ‘I must go – you know how Frankie counts the hours – but I will write to Luke – and yes, Charles, yes: I will write to the good Reverend – I will be good, I promise.’
Cora Seaborne
2, The Common
Aldwinter
29th May
Dear Will –
Charles tells me I must apologise. Well: I shan’t. I cannot apologise when I don’t concede I’ve done wrong.
I have been studying the scriptures, as you once urged me to do, and observe (cf. Matthew 18 15–22) that you must allow me a further 489 transgressions before you cast me out.
Besides – I know how you spoke to my son about sin – and I had no quarrel with you over that! Must we make battlegrounds out of our children?
And why should my mind cede to yours – why should yours to mine?
Yours,
CORA
Rev. William Ransome
The Lodge
Aldwinter
31st May
Dear Mrs Seaborne
Thank you for your letter. Naturally you are forgiven. In fact I’d forgotten the incident I suppose you allude to and am surprised you mention it.
I hope you are well.
Kind regards,
WILLIAM RANSOME
III
TO KEEP A CONSTANT WATCH
JUNE
1
Midsummer on the Blackwater, and there are herons on the marsh. The river runs bluer than it ever did before; the surface of the estuary is still. Banks gets a good catch of mackerel early in the day, and notes with pleasure the rainbows on their flanks. Leviathan is decked with spikes of rosebay willowherb and a rosemary wreath, and a patch of samphire grows at the prow. At midday Naomi lies alone by its black ribs with her skirt up by her hips, saying her solstice spells. Joanna has stayed late at her school desk and says she’ll not move until she can recite all the bones in the human skull. (Occiput, she says as Naomi leaves, and the redhaired girl remembers it, to be used late one night in a curse.) The Essex Serpent recedes for a time, since how could it thrive under so benevolent a sun?
On the path above Naomi, Stella slowly walking plucks speed-well from the verge. It is blue, and so is her skirt, and so are the bands of fabric she has around her wrists. She is going home to the children. She supposes they’ll want feeding, and the thought revolts her – all that soft stuff going into their gaping mouths, into that glistening hole: it is disgusting, if you think about it. She has no appetite for anything you might eat.
In his study Will is sleeping. There’s a sheet of paper on the desk, and it reads, ‘Dear’. Just that: ‘Dear’. He writes so many letters, these days, that on the knuckle of his third finger there’s a swelling he sucks now and then to ease the ache. Waking, he’ll say to himself, ‘Dear …’, and at the first face coming to mind he’ll smile, then cease smiling.
Martha is peeling eggs. Cora has planned a midsummer party: Charles and Katherine Ambrose are coming, and Charles likes nothing more (he says) than an egg rolled in celery salt. Luke is coming. His feelings as regards eggs are of no interest to her. There will be William Ransome, stern as he is these days, and Stella in blue silk.
Cross-legged on the playing-fields with a cheese sandwich on his lap Mr Caffyn writes a note: ‘The school is quieter now than I have ever known it. The children work calmly and are expected to meet the required standards. See enclosed requisition form: order of twenty notebooks (ruled, with margin).’
At three in the afternoon Will pays Cracknell a visit. The old man’s not well, and lies on a couch with his boots on: he knows the flutter in his chest will be a rattle come Christmas. ‘A tincture of rosehip syrup in the evening is what Mrs Cracknell would’ve recommended and I’m not above taking even a dead woman’s advice, Parson – that bottle, there, and the spoon.’ It is a valiant attempt at courage, and Will smiles, but Cracknell does not. ‘It wasn’t the cough that carried her off,’ he says, touching the rector’s wrist. ‘It was the coffin they carried her off in.’
Over in Colchester on the earthquake ruins Thomas Taylor suns his phantom feet. He does a fair trade on a fair day, and his hat is heavy with coins. Wasps have been so obliging as to make their nest in the folds of a curtain, and the papery mass – with all its sinister regularity – is quite the tourist attraction. The air hums; the wasps are too drowsy to sting. Late in the afternoon the black-haired doctor crouches over him in his good grey coat. His hands are raw in places and his skin smells of lemons. He fondles (none too gently) the flesh healed over the severed bones, and says ‘A poor job: I wish I’d been here. I’d’ve done you proud.’
Fifty miles south as the swallow flies and London’s at her best. She knows it: she is irresistible. Children feed black swans in Regent’s Park and pelicans in St James’s, and the limes are incandescent in the avenues. Hampstead Heath comes over like a country fair; nobody uses the Tube. The sun is thick on the pavements while jugglers and tricksters grow rich in Leicester Square. No-one wants to go home. Why would they? Outside pubs and cafes office juniors grow impertinent, and if it’s not exactly love which brews in with the hops and the coffee it’s as near as makes no difference.
In his Whitehall rooms, dressed for the solstice in a new blue shirt, Charles Ambrose greets a visitor. ‘Spencer,’ he says, ‘I have your letter here. Are you free for lunch? There are people I think you should meet.’ Charles himself is more or less indifferent to Spencer’s sudden philanthropic bent – it’s all very much the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, as far as Charles is concerned – but he likes Spencer, and so does Katherine, and one might as well do good as do anything at all.
Spencer, who’s come prepared to plead Martha’s cause, hopes he can remember this statistic and that, and how to mimic her habit of being both matter-of-fact and impassioned. He pictures Martha’s face when he gives her good news (‘And will you come when we instruct the architects, Martha, since you understand it so well …’). There’ll be one of her rare smiles, he thinks: she will see me.
He takes a drink from Charles, and says, ‘Thank you, I’d like that. I thought: maybe you might come with Martha and me, next week? We’re going to visit Edward Burton over in Bethnal Green – the man Luke operated on, you know. Martha has become a friend of his, and says he makes the perfect case study …’
Case study! thinks Charles. He looks at Spencer fondly. The boy’s too thin by half. Would there be lamb at lunch? Might there be wild salmon? ‘Will you be coming to Cora’s party, to see the merry widow play Persephone with flowers in her hair?’ But Spencer cannot: he’ll be in his w
hite coat at the Royal Borough, setting limbs perhaps, a little relieved to be spared the ordeal of finding social graces under Martha’s gaze.
Essex has her bride’s gown on: there’s cow parsley frothing by the road and daisies on the common, and the hawthorn’s dressed in white; wheat and barley fatten in the fields, and bindweed decks the hedges. Cora has walked four miles and is not yet tired. At the fifth mile she passes a farmer stripped to the waist and unbuttons her shirt: why should her skin be disgraceful, when his is not? But there’s someone on the path, and she puts the buttons back through their slots: no sense courting disaster.
She comes to a place where roses are grown for bowls and vases in dining rooms elsewhere; an acre or two of blooms laid out in coloured stripes, as if bolts of silk had been dyed and left to dry. It scents the air; she licks her lips, and there’s Turkish Delight on her tongue.
As so often these days, she’s thinking of Will. She cannot concede that she’s done wrong, or that she deserves to be in disgrace: she faintly despises him for being so readily thrown into a bad temper. Male pride, she thinks: the most tender, contemptible thing! But all the same her conscience is pricked – has she really ridden roughshod over him? She considers prostrating herself half-ironically in apology for the pleasure of watching him try not to laugh, but no: she has her own pride to consider.
