‘The tide’ll take it,’ said Banks, sure-footed: no-one knew dead fish as well as he. ‘The tide, the gulls.’
Then – ‘Something is moving,’ said Harriet’s mother, who’d walked a little onward, and stood at the place where the creature’s belly bulged against the shingle: ‘Something inside is moving!’ Will came near, and saw a kind of shiver and writhing behind the skin; it paused, so that he rubbed his eyes, imagining that his vision had grown disordered by the early morning and the low sun; he opened them again, and all at once, as if slipping free of many small buttons, the belly opened up along the seam and spilled out a pale and writhing mass. The stench was unbearable: each staggered back as if struck by a blow, and Banks could not prevent himself from running to Leviathan’s bones and vomiting. He could not look – he could not: he imagined that there among the white fragments still moving he might see a skein of red hair. But one of the women, indifferent to the sight, stirred at the glistening mess with her foot and said: ‘Tapeworm. Look at it, yards long and still hungry. Probably did for the beast: starved it from the inside. Seen it happen before – you not going to take a look, Reverend? Found you had something to fear, after all?’ Inclining his head (he knew when he was bested) Will did take a look, reeling a little; saw the worm’s last movements, and its peculiar look of a length of white ribbon into which threads had been irregularly woven. What was the creator thinking of, to come up with so revolting a creature, which moreover lived off the life of others? He supposed it served some purpose.
‘Banks,’ said Will, suppressing the urge to deliver a short homily which emphasised his rightness in countering the villagers’ superstitious fears with godly reason: ‘Banks, what ought we to do?’
‘Leave it,’ said Banks, in whose wet eyes new veins had broken. ‘High tide’ll take it, due eleven or just after. Nature has her ways.’
‘And no harm done to the herring, the oyster beds?’
‘See the gulls? See the rooks, followed us from the common? Short work of it they’ll make, and the water: come Sunday – no sign of it.’
Nothing now moved. The lens of the creature’s eye grew milky; Will imagined, knowing himself foolish, that from the open mouth a last breath came. The shingle stirred, the tide edged nearer: on the toe of his boot a dark stain showed, and its edge was rimmed with salt.
Katherine Ambrose
c/o All Saints Rectory
Aldwinter
11th September
Our darling Cora,
Have you heard? What with your determination to no longer be interested in poor old Essex (really, I never knew a fad of yours fall from favour so fast!) I daresay you remain in the dark, so for once I get the pleasure of telling you something you don’t already know, which is this:
THEY HAVE FOUND THE ESSEX SERPENT!
Now dust yourself down, and fetch a cup of tea (Charles, who reads over my shoulder, says if the sun’s over the yard-arm you must get a glass of something strengthening), and I’ll tell all. And since I am currently in Aldwinter I have it direct from the Reverend William Ransome, whom you and I both know to be incapable of transgressing so far as to exaggerate – so you must take this report to be as sober and truthful as if it came from the pen of the man himself.
Well, it happened like this. Yesterday morning the entire village was woken by the most disgusting smell. I gather at first some thought they’d all been poisoned, since it was bad enough to make them sick in their beds: can you imagine!
At any rate, apparently they summoned up the courage to go down to the shore, and there it was – the beast itself, only dead as a doornail. Quite as big as they’d feared: Will estimates 20 feet, only not at all bulky. Rather like an eel, he said, and shining like silver, or mother-of-pearl (he grows poetical in his old age). Those that saw it knew at once how foolish they’d been – no monster after all, and certainly no wings: it looked as if it might take a chunk out of your leg, but would’ve had no end of trouble getting out of the water to snatch a sheep or a child. I gather there was an unpleasant moment with a parasite of some kind which I do not wish to dwell on, but there you have it: a beast, I suppose, but no more strange, no more dangerous, than an elephant or crocodile.
Now, I know you’ll be wondering whether it bore any resemblance to the sea-serpents which your beloved Mary Anning had a habit of digging up, and I regret to tell you that it did not. Will says it had no limbs of any kind, and that for all its size and strangeness it was quite unmistakably nothing but a fish. There was talk of notifying the authorities – Will sent a message to Charles, since we happened to be in Colchester at the time – but apparently it broke up when the tide came in and got washed back out to sea. Oh Cora! I can’t help feeling rather sorry for you. What a let-down! I had high hopes for that case in the British Museum, and inside a monstrous sea-serpent stuffed and fitted with glass eyes, and there on the wall your name on a brass plate. And what a disappointment to those looking forward to judgment day: I wonder if they repent of their repentance? I know I would!
The following day we came down to Aldwinter, half-hoping to see the wretch for ourselves, so I write to you from Will’s study. It’s warm, and mild: the window’s open, and I can see a goat cropping grass on the lawn. How curious it is to be here without the Ransome children, knowing they’re back at our own home in London! All the world is topsy-turvy. And how curious it is to be here among things I recognise as yours – your letters (I didn’t look, though I was sorely tempted!) – a glove which I know to be yours – a fossil (an ammonite, I think?) which can only have come from you. I almost think I can smell that scent of yours, which is always like the first rain of spring – as if you’d only just got up out of the chair where I am sitting! Will keeps odd books for a vicar – here’s Marx and Darwin, no doubt getting along very well.
Aldwinter is quite transformed. When we arrived this morning (to what frankly I’ve always thought a dour sort of village) a festival was taking place. The children are out to play again, since there’s no danger of encountering a beast behind the hedges, and the women had laid out blankets on the grass and sat leaning against each other, gossiping no end. We finished up the summer’s cider (delicious, and far better than any wine I’ve ever had in this county), and made short work of an entire Essex flitch of ham. Darling Stella – even more beautiful, I’d be prepared to swear, than when I saw her last (really I think it terribly unfair) – put on a blue dress and danced a little while the fiddlers played, but had to go to bed soon after. I’ve not seen her since, though I hear her pacing upstairs: mostly she lies in her bed, writing in her notebook. I brought her gifts from the children, and letters, but she hasn’t read them yet. She does not believe the strange fish on the shore to have been the Essex Serpent, but she’s had so many strange ideas in her lately I just squeezed her hand (so hot, and so small!) and said of course not, of course not, and let her put a blue ribbon in my hair. It’s a cruel disease but is treating her kindly enough.