The Reverend William Ransome, Rector of Aldwinter Parish, returned the letter to its envelope and propped it thoughtfully on the windowsill. He could never think of Charles Ambrose without a smile – the man had a limitless appetite for making friends, often (though certainly not always) out of genuine affection, and it was not at all surprising that he should have taken so fondly to a widow – but despite the smile the letter unsettled him. It was not precisely that newcomers were unwelcome, but one or two phrases (society women … masculine intelligence …) were calculated to trouble any diligent minister of the church. He could picture her as precisely as if her photograph had been included in the envelope: entering the lonely final stages of life bolstered by yards of taffeta and a half-baked enthusiasm for the new sciences. Her son was doubtless down from Oxford or Cambridge, and would bring with him some secret vice which would either thrill Colchester, or make him completely unsuited to civilised company. She probably lived on a diet of boiled potatoes and vinegar, hoping Byron’s diet might improve her silhouette, and would almost certainly have Anglo-Catholic tendencies, and deplore the absence of an ornate cross on the All Saints altar. In the space of five minutes he furnished her with an obnoxious lap-dog, a toadying companion with no flesh on her bones, and a squint.
His sole consolation was that Aldwinter was so resolutely unpicturesque a destination that he couldn’t imagine a society woman – even a bored and meddlesome widow – troubling to visit. Each spring a few ardent naturalists arrived to document the handful of seabirds that passed through the salt-marshes, but even these tended to be the drabbest species imaginable, their muddy feathers so indistinguishable from their surroundings they often passed without notice. Aldwinter had only one inn and two stores, and though its village green was occasionally considered the longest, if not the largest, in Essex, there was very little to recommend it even to its own inhabitants. Aside from the church’s curiosities – which were in truth a minor embarrassment to each successive incumbent – the only item of interest within five miles was the blackened hull of a clipper which could be seen when the Blackwater estuary lay at low tide, and which the village children decorated each harvest in a kind of pagan rite of which he dutifully disapproved. The train line terminated seven miles to the west, so that the farmers still relied on barges to carry oats and barley to the mills at St Osyth, and onward to London for sale. Perhaps the best that could be said for Aldwinter was that if it was neither wealthy nor beautiful, it was at least not particularly poor. It was not in the Essex character to succumb miserably to change and decay, and when John Barleycorn came under threat from cheap imports one or two tenant farmers had tried their hand at caraway and coriander, and shared the hire cost of a threshing-engine which not only increased their output to a startling degree, but gave the entire village a festive air as the children gathered to marvel at its size, its thunderous voice, and its gusts of steam.
Will felt an ill temper settle on him, and resisting the urge to toss the envelope onto the fire hid it behind a sheet of paper presented to him that morning by John, the youngest of his boys. It was a drawing which might’ve been of an alligator which had acquired a set of wings, but might equally have been a greatly enlarged caterpillar eating a moth. His mother was convinced it was the latest demonstration of his genius, but Will was unconvinced: he remembered his own childhood spent filling notebooks with engines and devices so complex he’d clean forget their purpose from one page to the next, but what had come of that?
And it was not only the threat of a probably harmless widow that dampened his mood, but the trouble that had lately settled on the parish. He surveyed John’s drawing, and this time took it for a winged sea-dragon approaching the village. Since the discovery on New Year’s morning of a drowned man down on the Blackwater marshes – naked, his head turned almost 180 degrees, a look of dread in his wide-open eyes – the Essex Serpent had ceased to be merely a device to keep children in check, and had begun to stalk the streets. On Friday nights in the White Hare drinkers claimed to have seen it, children playing on the saltings needed no urging to come home before dark, and no amount of reasoning on Will’s part could persuade them the drowned man was a victim of nothing more than drink and the tides.
He resolved to shake himself into a better frame of mind by walking a circuit of the parish – looking up a few folk as he went, quelling rumours of a sea-dragon wherever they arose. He took up his hat and coat, and there was whispering at the study door (the children were forbidden entry, but were not above trying the handle); he bellowed threats of bread-and-water for a fortnight, and made his habitual escape through the window.
Aldwinter that day was aptly named: frost lay on the hard earth, and black oaks clutched the pale sky. Will thrust his hands into his pockets, and set out. The red brick house behind had been new the day he’d first crossed the threshold, Stella coming slowly up the tiled pathway with her swollen belly cradled in her hands, and Joanna bringing up the rear trailing an invisible pet (species never established) on a length of string. Bay windows on both floors gave the impression of shallow turrets on either side of the front door, above which a fanlight in coloured glass caught an hour of light each afternoon. The largest house on the single street which passed through the village, leading south from Colchester and terminating at the small dock where a single barge now lay at anchor, it had a bright hard look entirely out of keeping with the rest of the village. He never thought there was much to recommend it save good insulation and a garden large enough to lose the children for hours at a stretch, but knew himself blessed: at least one of his peers endured a house which seemed to be sinking into the ground, and in which fungus the size of a man’s hand grew in the upper corners of the dining room.