‘No news, since there’s no creature – though I’m afraid one of my parishioners might disagree! I’ve been to see Cracknell,’ said Will, turning to Stella, ‘and either Gog or Magog has given up the ghost.’
‘Oh!’ said Stella, pouting, resolving to go out the following morning and take the old man a meal: ‘Poor Cracknell – as if he’s not already lost enough.’ She handed her guest a cup of coffee, and said, ‘He lives out on the edge of the marsh, and has only just buried the last of his family. Gog and Magog were his goats, and his pride and joy, and keep us well supplied with butter and milk. What happened, Will?’
‘To hear him tell it you’d think some monster appeared on the doorstep and snatched one of them out of his arms – no-one believes in the serpent more than Cracknell. But of course it was only that it slipped out of its pen one night and got caught in the marsh, and the tide came in.’ He sighed, and said: ‘He says he found it frozen solid with terror, frightened – quite literally! – to death. I’m afraid this will do nothing to help put thoughts of this nonsense out of their heads. How can I make them all see how our minds are capable of clever tricks, and that without faith to sustain us we are apt to see’ – he flexed his hands, as if grasping for the phrase, and tried again: ‘I think it possible to put flesh on the bones of our terrors, most of all when we have turned our back on God.’ Conscious of Cora’s steady gaze – which was amused, though not contemptuous – he concealed his face behind the steam rising from his coffee cup.
‘And you think him insane – you think there can be nothing in what he says?’ Cora’s pity for the old man did nothing to alleviate her curiosity: here was evidence, of a kind!
The rector snorted. ‘A goat, frightened to death? Absurd. No witless beast could comprehend fear to such an extent, even if it could tell the difference between a sea-dragon, or whatever they say it is, and driftwood lying on the marsh. Frightened to death! No: it was on its last legs, and got out of its pen and into the cold. There’s no monstrous serpent here, aside from the one carved in the church, and we’d be rid of that, too, if my wife would give me (for once!) my way.’
Cora, ever the devil’s advocate, said: ‘But you are a man of God, who surely sent signs and wonders to His people: is it so strange, after all, to think He’s choosing to do so again, to call us to repentance?’ She could not keep the wryness of the sceptic from her voice, and Will, hearing it clearly, raised an eyebrow.
‘Now: you do not believe that any more than I do. Our God is a god of reason and order, not of visitations in the night! This is nothing more than the Chinese whispers of a village which has lost sight of the constancy of their Creator. It’s my duty to guide them back to comfort and certainty: not to give in to rumour.’
‘And what if it is neither rumour nor a call to repentance, but merely a living thing, to be examined and catalogued and explained? Darwin and Lyell –’
Will pushed his cup away impatiently. ‘Ah, it is never long before those names come up. Clever men, I don’t doubt: I’ve read both, and there may be much in their theories which later generations will prove to be true. But tomorrow there will be another theory, and another; one will be discredited and the other praised; they’ll fall from fashion and be resurrected a decade later with added footnotes and a new edition. Everything is changing, Mrs Seaborne, and much of it for the better: but what use is it to try and stand on quicksand? We will stumble and fall, and in falling become prey to folly and darkness – these rumours of monsters are nothing more than evidence that we have let go of the rope that tethers us to everything that’s good and certain.’
‘But is your faith not all strangeness and mystery – all blood, and brimstone – all seeing nothing in the dark, stumbling, making out dim shapes with your hands?’
‘You speak as if we were in the Dark Ages still, as if Essex still burned its witches! No – ours is a faith of enlightenment and clarity: I am not stumbling – I am running with patience the race that is set before me – there is a lamp on my path!’
Cora smiled. ‘I can’t tell whether you are using words of your own, or of others: you have me at a disadvantage!’ She drank the last of her coffee, which left a coating of bitter grit on her tongue, and said: ‘We both speak of illuminating the world, but we have different sources of light, you and I.’
Will, unaccountably elated, feeling he ought to be piqued at this odd woman’s grey gaze challenging him at his own table, instead smiled, and went on smiling, and said: ‘Then we shall see who first blows out the other’s candle,’ and raised his cup in a toast. Stella, who could not have taken more pleasure in the exchange if she’d paid for a good seat in the theatre, put her palms together as if she were in the midst of applause; but something caught at her throat, and she began to cough. It seemed too deep a sound to come from so small and fragile a vessel: it shook her body, and she clutched at the tablecloth, and tipped over a glass of wine. Startled at once from his good humour Will crouched at her side, and with little practised taps on her narrow back murmured consolingly in her ear.
‘We should fetch hot water – she should breathe in steam,’ said Katherine Ambrose; but as soon as the fit arrived it ended.
The woman unfolded, and looked out at them all from wet blue eyes: she said, ‘I am sorry – what manners, and you’ll all now have the flu, and it takes such a long time to shake off! – will you forgive me if I go up to bed? I’ve enjoyed myself so much’ – she reached across the table and clutched Cora’s hand in both of hers – ‘but you will be here in the morning, and I know we can show you one serpent, at least.’
3
As it turned out the following morning, the All Saints serpent was an innocent-seeming thing on the arm of a Restoration pew. It had been carved in the last days of the Essex Serpent, when rumour had given way to legend, and there were no more warning signs pinned to the oaks and way-posts. Certainly the beast had held no fear for the mischievous craftsman, who’d coiled its tail three times around the spindle with sharp and lapping scales, but omitted either claws or teeth. The wings, Cora conceded, laughing, were a little sinister, looking as if a bat had mated forcibly with a sparrow, and shadows passing over the grinning face gave it the appearance of blinking, but really it was hardly a signifier of the occult. It had endured two hundred years’ fondling from affectionate congregants, and its spine was worn smooth.
Joanna, who’d accompanied Cora and her father on their morning walk, ran her finger along a fresh groove in the wood. ‘That’s where he did it,’ she said. ‘That’s where he was going to cut it off with a chisel, but we wouldn’t let him.’
‘They hid my toolbox,’ he said: ‘They won’t tell me where it is.’ William Ransome looked that morning rather sterner than Cora remembered from dinner in the small hot room, as if he’d put on his office when he put on his collar. It didn’t suit him, nor did the blackness of his suit, nor did being freshly shaved, which gave his scarred cheek a raw look. All the same, there lurked deep in his tired eyes a lightness she’d tried to coax out as he’d showed her the small village, and the low-towered church whose flint walls were wet from overnight rain and gleamed in the morning sun.