2

Having scoured its river for kingfishers and its castle for ravens, Cora Seaborne walked through Colchester with Martha on her arm, holding an umbrella above them both. There’d been no kingfisher (‘On a Nile cruise, probably – Martha, shall we follow them?’), but the castle keep had been thick with grave-faced rooks stalking about in their ragged trousers. ‘Quite a good ruin,’ said Cora, ‘But I’d have liked to’ve seen a gibbet, or a miscreant with pecked-out eyes.’

Martha – who had little patience for the past and eyes fixed always at some brighter point several years distant – said, ‘There’s suffering, if you’re really determined to find it,’ and gestured towards a man whose legs ended above the knee and who had stationed himself opposite a cafe, the better to induce guilt in tourists with overfilled bellies. Martha had made no secret of her discomfort at being plucked from her city home: for all that her thick fair plait and strong arms gave her the appearance of a dairy-girl with a fondness for cream, she’d never before been much east of Bishopsgate, and thought the oaky Essex fields sinister and the pink-painted Essex houses the dwelling-places of half-wits. Her astonishment that coffee could be had in such a backwater had been matched only by her disgust at the astringent liquid she’d been served, and she spoke to anyone they met with the extravagant politeness reserved for a stupid child. All the same, in the fortnight since they’d departed London – Francis retrieved from school, to the unspoken but evident relief of his teachers – Martha had almost come to love the little town for its effect on her friend, who removed from London’s gaze had abandoned her dutiful mourning and receded ten years to a merrier self. Sooner or later, she thought, she’d gently ask how long Cora intended to live in their two rooms on the High Street, doing nothing but walking herself weary and poring over books, but for now she was content to witness Cora’s happiness.

Adjusting the umbrella, which had done nothing more than channel the weak rain more efficiently into the collars of their coats, Cora followed Martha’s pointing hand. The crippled man was doing a far better job than they of tricking the weather, and judging by the satisfaction with which he examined the contents of his upturned hat, had made a good day’s takings. He was sitting on what Cora first took to be a stone bench, but which on looking closer she saw was a piece of fallen masonry. It measured at least three feet broad and two deep, and the remains of a Latin phrase emerged to the left of the beggar’s limbs. Seeing the two women in their good coats observing him from across the road he immediately adopted an expression of craven misery; this he swiftly discarded as being too obvious and replaced with one of noble suffering, with the suggestion that though he found his occupation odious he could never be accused of shirking. Cora, who loved the theatre, tugged her arm from Martha’s and slipping behind a passing bus stood gravely at his feet, sheltered a little by a shallow porch.

‘Good afternoon.’ She reached for her purse. The man cast his eyes up at the sky, which at that moment split and displayed an astonishing blue interior. ‘It isn’t,’ he said. ‘But it might yet be: I’ll give you that.’ The brief brightness illuminated the building behind him, which Cora saw had been torn apart as though by an explosion. A section to her left remained more or less as its architect intended – a several-storeyed building that might have been a great house or town hall – but a portion to the right had sheared away and sunk several feet into the ground. A bulwark of poles and planks kept it from tumbling across the pavement, but it was treacherous, and she thought she could hear above the slow traffic the creak and grinding of iron on stone. Martha appeared at her side and Cora instinctively took her hand, unsure whether to step backwards or hitch up her skirt and take a closer look. The same appetite that made her break stones in search of ammonites until the air reeked of cordite propelled her forward: she could see up to a room with its fireplace intact, and a scarlet scrap of carpet lolling over the edge of the broken floor like a tongue. Further up, an oak seedling had taken hold beside the staircase, and a pale fungus that resembled many fingerless hands had colonised the plaster ceiling.

‘Now steady on, miss!’ Alarmed, the man shuffled across his stone seat and gripped the hem of Cora’s coat. ‘What d’you want to be doing that for? No, a little further back, I should think … and a little further … safe enough now, yes; and don’t do it again.’ He spoke with the authority of a gate-keeper, so that Cora felt rather ashamed of herself and said, ‘Oh, I am sorry: I didn’t mean to alarm you. It’s just I thought I saw something move.’

‘That’ll be the house martins and they needn’t trouble you a bit.’ Forgetting for a moment the demeanour of his profession, he tugged at his scarf and said, ‘Thomas Taylor, at your service. Not been here before, I take it?’

‘A few days. My friend and I’ – Cora gestured towards Martha, who stood a little distance away in the shadow of her umbrella, stiff with disapproval – ‘Are staying on awhile, so I thought maybe I’d better say hello.’ Cora and the cripple both examined this statement for logic, and finding none let it pass.

‘You’ve probably come about the earthquake,’ said Taylor, gesturing behind him to the ruins. He gave the appearance of a lecturer taking a last look at his notes, and Cora – always ready to be educated – indicated that she had. ‘Could you enlighten us?’ she said: ‘If you have the time.’

It had come (he said) eight years back, by his reckoning, at eighteen minutes past nine precisely. It had been as fair an April morning as any could remember, which later was counted a blessing, since most were out-of-doors. The Essex earth had bucked as if trying to shake off all its towns and villages; for twenty seconds, no more, a series of convulsions that paused once as if a breath were being drawn and then began again. Out in the estuaries of the Colne and the Blackwater, the sea had gathered into foaming waves which ransacked the shore and reduced every vessel on the water to splinters. Langenhoe Church, known to be haunted, was shaken almost to bits, and the villages of Wivenhoe and Abberton were hardly more than rubble. They felt it over in Belgium, where teacups were knocked from the table; here in Essex a boy left sleeping in a cot beneath the table was crushed by falling mortar, and a man cleaning the face of the town hall clock was knocked from a ladder and his arm broke clean off. Over in Maldon they thought someone had set dynamite to terrorise the town and ran screaming in the streets, and Virley Church was beyond repair and had no congregants but foxes, no pews but beds of nettle. In the orchards the apple trees lost their blossom and grew no fruit that year.

Come to think of it, thought Cora, she did recall the headlines, which had been a touch amused (to think that modest little Essex, with barely a pleat in its landscape, should have shuddered and broken!). ‘Extraordinary!’ she said, delighted: ‘It’s all Paleozoic rock under our feet, this part of the world: to think of it, laid down five hundred million years before, shrugging its shoulders and bringing down the steeples on the churches!’

‘I don’t know about that,’ said Taylor, exchanging a glance with Martha which had in it a degree of understanding. ‘At any rate, Colchester did badly, as you see, though no lives lost.’ He gestured again with his thumb to the gaping ruin, and said ‘If you’re minded to go in step careful, and keep your eyes skinned for my legs, on account of them being not fifteen yards away.’ He tugged at the fabric of his trousers, and tucked the empty cloth closer; Cora, whose pity was very near the surface, bent and with a hand on his shoulder said: ‘I’m so sorry to have been the cause of your remembering – though probably you never forget it, and I’m sorry for that, too.’ She reached for her purse, wondering how to convey that it was not done in the spirit of alms, but of payment.

‘Well now,’ said Taylor, taking a coin, and managing to do so with the air of having done her a favour, ‘There’s more!’ The lecturer’s manner departed, and he took on the appearance of a showman. ‘I daresay you’ve heard tell of the Essex Serpent, which once was the terror of Henham and Wormingford, and has been seen again?’ Delighted, Cora said that she had not. ‘Ah,’ said Taylor, growing mournful, ‘I wonder if I ought not to trouble you, what with ladies being of a fragile disposition.’ He eyed his visitor, and evidently concluded that no woman in such a coat could be frightened by mere monsters. ‘So then: in 1669 it was, with the son of the traitor king on the throne, a man could scarcely walk a mile before coming up against a warning pinned to an oak or a gatepost. STRANGE NEWS, they’d say, of a monstrous serpent with eyes like a sheep, come out of the Essex waters and up to the birch woods and commons!’ He buffed the coin to brightness on his sleeve. ‘Those were the years of the Essex Serpent, be it scale and sinew, or wood and canvas, or little but the ravings of madmen; children were kept from the banks of the river and fishermen wished for a better trade! Then it was gone as soon as it came, and for nigh on two hundred years we had neither hide nor hair of it ’til the quake came and something was shook loose down there under the water – something was set free! A great creeping thing, as they tell it, more dragon than serpent, as content on land as in water, that suns its wings on a fair day. The first man as saw it up by Point Clear lost his reason and never found it again and died in the asylum not six months back, leaving behind a dozen drawings he made with bits of charcoal from the grate …’

‘Strange news!’ said Cora. ‘And stranger things in heaven and earth … tell me: was any picture ever taken of it – did anyone think to make a report?’

‘None that I know of.’ He shrugged. ‘Can’t say as I put much store on it myself. Essex folk are over-keen on this sort of thing, what with the Chelmsford witches, and Black Shuck doing the rounds when he’s tired of Suffolk flesh.’ He surveyed them a while, and appeared to grow suddenly weary of their company. He put the coin in his pocket, and patted it twice. ‘Well then, I’ve made my living today, and more besides, and I’ll be fetched home soon to a good meal. Besides’ – he looked wryly at Martha, whose impatience shivered in the spokes of her umbrella – ‘I think you’d best be off wherever you’re going, though mind the cracks in the pavements, as my daughter’d tell you, since you never know what’s between.’ He waved them away with a grand gesture that would have sat well on a statesman dismissing a secretary, and hearing a young couple laughing through the wet air turned away and assembled his expression of pleading.

‘Somewhere in there,’ said Cora, returning to Martha’s side, ‘All in the rubble and dust, there’s a pair of his shoes and probably the bones of the legs he’s lost …’

‘I don’t believe a word of it: look, the lights are coming on, and it’s past five. We should get back and see to Frankie.’ This was true: they’d left Francis in bed, wrapped tight and rigid as a mummy, tended to by a landlord who’d raised three sons of his own and thought Cora’s a docile thing whose cold could be drowned by soup. Francis, wrong-footed to encounter a man who viewed him not only without suspicion but barely with any interest, had consented to a brusque kindliness his mother could never have provided. He’d been seen to give the landlord one of his treasures (a piece of iron pyrite which he half-hoped would be mistaken for gold), and had taken to reading Sherlock Holmes stories. Cora wondered how it was possible to feel anxious for her son (when ill his face grew luminous and girlish and broke her heart) yet relieved at their enforced separation. Living in those two small rooms had brought all his little rituals to her door, and his indifference to her anger or warmth could not be ignored; her day of freedom by the castle keep and the bare willows down by the River Colne had been a delight, and she was loath to end it. Martha, who had a trick of voicing Cora’s thoughts even before they’d formed, said: ‘But look, your coat’s dragging in puddles and your hair’s wet through: let’s find a cafe and wait for the rain to pass.’ She nodded towards a dripping awning beneath which a pair of windows bulged with cakes.

Cora said, tentatively: ‘Besides, he’ll be sleeping by now, don’t you think? And he’s so cross when he’s woken …’ Complicit, they headed across wet pavements made bright by a low sun, and had reached the awning’s shade when Cora heard a familiar voice.

‘Mrs Seaborne, I declare!’ She peered into the dim street and said, ‘Has someone seen us?’

Martha, resentful of further intruders on their time, tugged at the strap of her bag. ‘Who can know you here? We’ve been here less than a week: can’t you ever just be overlooked?’

The voice came again – ‘Cora Seaborne, as I live and breathe and have my being!’ – and with a cry of delight she plunged onto the pavement and raised her arm. ‘Charles! Come over! Come over and see me!’ Coming towards her beneath a pair of umbrellas so large they commandeered the street, Charles and Katherine Ambrose were an unlikely sight. Once a colleague of Michael Seaborne – undertaking one of the many Whitehall roles Cora was never able to fathom, and which seemed to entail twice the politician’s power with none of the responsibility – Charles had become a regular feature of Foulis Street life. The brightness of his waistcoats, and his insatiable appetite for all things, shielded a shrewdness which went undetected by most; that Cora had picked it out on first meeting had made him more or less her slave. Perhaps surprisingly, he was entirely devoted to his wife, who was diminutive where he was large, and who found him ceaselessly amusing. The pair of them were generous, benevolent, and interested in the lives of others; when they’d insisted that no doctor but Garrett would do for the ailing Seaborne, it had seemed impossible to refuse.

Cora gave her companion’s waist a mollifying squeeze. ‘You know I’d rather it was just you and me and our books. But it’s Charles and Katherine Ambrose: you met them, and liked them – no: really, you did! – Charles!’ Cora made a deep ironic curtsey, which might have been elegant if the toe she extended hadn’t been concealed in a man’s boot mottled with mud. ‘You know Martha, of course?’ Beside her, Martha unfurled to her full height and gave an unwelcoming nod. ‘And Katherine, too – I’d no idea you knew England extended past Palmer’s Green: are you lost? Can I lend you my map?’ Charles Ambrose looked with disgust at the muddy boot, and the Harris tweed coat which was cut too broad across the shoulders, and the strong hands with their bitten nails.

‘I would tell you it’s a pleasure to see you, though I never saw anyone look more like a barbarian queen bent on pillage: is it necessary to emulate the Iceni just because you’re on their turf?’ Cora – who refused to wear anything that might restrict her waist, who’d raked her hands through her hair and stuffed it into a hat, who hadn’t worn jewellery since she tugged the pearls from her ears a month before – was not offended. ‘Boudicca would be ashamed to be seen like this, I’m sure. Shall we go in, and have coffee, and wait for the clouds to break? You’re pretty enough for the pair of us.’ She tucked her hand in the crook of Katherine Ambrose’s elbow, and they winked at each other, and watched Charles’s velvet back make an impressive entrance into the cafe.

‘But how, actually, are you, Cora?’ Katherine paused at the threshold, and taking the younger woman’s face between her palms, turned it to the light. She surveyed the high-boned face, and the eyes which were like slate. Cora didn’t answer, because she was afraid to betray her shameful happiness. Katherine, who’d suspected more of Michael Seaborne’s dealings with his wife than Cora ever guessed, found her answer, and stood on tip-toe to plant a kiss on her temple. Behind them, Martha feigned a cough; Cora turned, stooped to pick up her canvas holdall, and whispering ‘Just another half-hour, I promise …’ hustled her companion inside.

‘Well: what are you doing here? I associate you both so much with Whitehall and Kensington that I supposed I imagined you evaporating at the borders of town!’ Cora surveyed the table with satisfaction. Charles commanded an awestruck girl in a white apron to bring at least a dozen of the cakes she personally liked best, and a gallon of tea. She evidently favoured coconut: there were macaroons, and speckled shortbread, and lozenges of cake doused in raspberry jam and rolled in coconut flakes. Cora, who’d walked several miles that morning, placidly ate her way towards a centrepiece of madeleines.

‘Yes,’ said Martha, with a glint of steel she intended to be seen: ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Visiting friends,’ said Katherine Ambrose. She shrugged neatly out of her little coat, and gazed about the dim, fragrant interior with an air of wonder. Something in the green tasselled cloth that fell into their laps evidently amused her; she fondled it, suppressed a smile, and said: ‘Why else would anyone come? There’s no shopping to be done, not one department store. Where do the locals get their wine and cheese?’

‘The vineyard and the cowshed, I imagine.’ Charles handed his wife a plate on which he had set a small cake vivid with icing. She’d never been seen to eat cake, but he liked now and then to play the tempter. ‘We’re trying to persuade Colonel Howard to stand for Parliament next election. He’s due to retire, and …’

‘… and is Really Good News,’ finished Cora, serving Charles one of his own well-worn phrases. Beside her, Martha had grown a little tense, possibly preparing for one of her diatribes on public health, or the need for housing reform. (Wrapped in a blue paper bag, tucked in the canvas holdall, was an American novel that described in the most approving terms a future utopia of communal city living. Martha had waited weeks for its English publication, and was impatient to get home and make a study of it.) Cora, though appreciative of her friend’s tender conscience, was too weary to watch battle commence over the teacups. She added a madeleine to Katherine’s plate, but it was pushed away and replaced with the map Martha had placed on the tablecloth.

‘May I?’ Katherine unfolded its pages until Colchester appeared in black-and-white, with sites of interest marked approvingly and illustrated with photographs. Cora had ringed the Castle Museum, and a tea-stain blotted the spire of St Nicholas.

‘Yes,’ said Katherine. ‘We thought we’d get to the Colonel before the others do: he’s made no secret of his ambitions, but never lets on in which direction they lie. I think Charles convinced him there’ll be a change of government next election; says we must all lay money on it. The old boy’s got the strength of a man half his age and is stubborn to boot: we might see the oldest Prime Minister yet.’ It was not necessary for her to name Gladstone, who was to the Ambrose family a combination of eccentric saint and beloved relation. Cora had once met him – she standing rigid at her husband’s side as his sharp-tipped fingers perforated the flesh on her upper arm, Gladstone a touch stooped as he greeted a procession of guests – and been startled by the savage intelligence blazing beneath eyebrows that cried out for a pair of scissors. It had been evident, from the ice that had entered his voice as he greeted Michael Seaborne, that the statesman had loathed her husband with an implacable hatred, and though Gladstone’s greeting to her had been correspondingly chill, she had always felt, in the years that followed, as if he were an ally.

Martha said, ‘Still gadding about with hookers, is he?’ doing her best to disgrace herself; but Charles was beneath being shocked and grinned over the rim of his teacup.

Hastily Katherine said: ‘So much for us – but what are you doing in Colchester, Cora? If you wanted the sea you could have used our house in Kent: here it’s little but mud and marsh for miles and the sight of it would depress a clown. Unless you’ve got it in your head to search the garrison for a new husband, I can’t see the appeal.’

‘Let me show you.’ Cora drew the map towards her, and with a forefinger which Katherine observed was none too clean, traced a line south from Colchester towards the mouth of the River Blackwater. ‘Last month two men were walking at the foot of the Mersea cliffs and were almost knocked out by a landslip. They had the wit to take a look at the rubble and found fossil remains – a few teeth here and there, the usual coprolites, of course – but also a small mammal of some kind. It’s been taken up to the British Museum for classification: who knows what new species they might have discovered!’

Charles looked warily at the map. For all his liberality and his determined attempts at worldliness, he was at heart profoundly conservative and would not keep the works of Darwin or Lyell in his study for fear they carried a contagion that might spread throughout his healthier books. He was not an especially devout man, but felt that a common faith overlooked by a benevolent God was what kept the fabric of society from tearing like a worn sheet. The idea that after all there was no essential nobility in mankind, and that his own species was not a chosen people touched by the divine, troubled him in the hours before dawn; and as with most troubling matters he elected to ignore it, until it went away. What’s more, he blamed himself for Cora’s adoration for the geologist Mary Anning: she’d never shown the least interest in grubbing about among rocks and mud until finding herself at an Ambrose dinner party seated beside an elderly man who’d spoken with Anning once and been in love with her memory ever since. By the time Cora had heard his tales of the carpenter’s daughter who grew strong after a lightning strike, and of her first fossil find at twelve, and her poverty, and her martyrdom to cancer, she too was in love and for months afterwards talked of nothing but blue lias and bezoar stones. If anyone had hoped her passion would dwindle they did not, Charles thought wearily, know Cora.

Eyeing the last of the macaroons, he said: ‘Surely it’s best left to the experts, by now: we’re not in the dark ages, reliant on crackpots in petticoats crawling about with a tack-hammer and paint-brush. There are colleges and societies and grants, and so on.’

‘Well? What d’you expect me to do? Sit at home planning supper and waiting for a new pair of shoes to arrive?’ Cora’s temper, which burned slow, made itself seen first in a hardening of her grey eyes to flint.

‘Of course not!’ Thinking he detected an edge to her look, Charles said: ‘No-one who knows you would expect that. But there are things that matter now that could use your time and your mind, not scraps of animals that meant nothing while living and less when dead!’ As evidence of his desperation he gestured towards Martha. ‘Could you not join Martha’s society – whatever it’s called – and sort out the plumbing in Whitechapel, or the orphans in Peckham, or whatever it is she goes in for these days?’

‘Yes, Cora. Couldn’t you?’ Grinning at Charles, knowing that he disapproved as much of her political conscience as of Cora’s muddy boots, Martha made her blue eyes into pools of appeal.

‘Meant nothing!’ Cora drew a breath to deliver a well-rehearsed speech on the significance of her beloved scraps of animals, but Katherine placed a cool white hand on hers and said, as if oblivious to the past few minutes: ‘And you intend to make your way there and find a beast of your own?’

‘I do! And I will: you’ll see! Michael never’ – at the name she faltered, and unconsciously touched the scar at her neck – ‘He thought it a waste of time, and that I’d be better off reading The Lady to see what shape skirt I ought to wear to the Savoy.’ She thrust her plate away in disgust. ‘Well: I can do what I like now, can’t I?’ She eyed each of them in turn, and Katherine said: ‘Darling child, of course you can: and we are very proud of you. Aren’t we, Charles?’ There came a humble nod. ‘And what’s more, we can help: I know just the family for you!’

‘Do we?’ Charles looked dubious. His only friend in Colchester was the choleric Colonel Howard, and he felt certain that the sight of Cora might deliver the final blow to his battle-battered health.

‘Charles! The Ransomes! Those gorgeous children and that awful house, and Stella with her dahlias!’

The Ransomes! Charles brightened at the thought. William Ransome was the disappointing brother of a Liberal MP of whom the Ambroses were fond. Disappointing, because at an early age he’d decided to hitch his considerable intellect not to the law or to Parliament, or even to the service of medicine, but to the church. What was worse, the natural ambition that generally accompanies a good mind was so lacking he’d consented to spend the past fifteen years shepherding his small flock in a bleak village down by the Blackwater estuary, marrying a fair-haired sprite and doting on his children. Charles and Katherine had stayed there once after a journey to Harwich had gone awry and come away devoted to the Ransome brood, Katherine clutching a paper packet of dahlia seeds which promised to produce black blooms. She turned to Cora.

‘I tell you, you never saw a more perfect family. The good Reverend Ransome and little Stella, no bigger than a fairy and twice as pretty. They live down at Aldwinter, which is almost as bad as it sounds – but on a bright night you can see right across to Point Clear, and in the mornings watch the Thames Barges off with their cargo of oysters and wheat. If anyone could show you your way round the coast there, it’s them – don’t look at me like that, dear, you know perfectly well you can’t go trudging off with nothing but a map.’

‘It is a foreign shore, mind: you may require a phrasebook. There are kissing-gates and croats, and acres of tidal land they call the saltings.’ Charles licked sugar from his forefinger, and contemplated another pastry. ‘Will once walked me through Aldwinter churchyard and showed me the graves they call broken-backed: the villagers reckon if you die of TB the earth sinks down into the coffin.’

Cora attempted to conquer her scowl. Some bull-necked country curate all Calvin and correction, and his parsimonious wife! She could not, off-hand, think of anything worse, and inferred from Martha’s rigidity at her side that her feelings were shared. But still – it would be useful to have some local knowledge of Essex geography. What’s more, it was not necessarily the case that a man of the cloth would be ignorant of modern science: among her favourite books was a thesis from an anonymous Essex rector on the high antiquity of the earth, which crisply dispensed with notions of calculating the date of creation from Old Testament genealogies.

She said, tentatively, ‘Perhaps it would be good for Francis. I spoke to Luke Garrett about him, you know. Not that I think there is anything wrong with him!’ She flushed, because nothing shamed her as much as her son. Acutely aware that her unease in the presence of Francis was shared by most who met him, it was impossible to exculpate herself; his remoteness, his obsessions, must be her fault, for where else could she lay the blame? Garrett had been uncharacteristically quiet, soft-spoken; he’d said, ‘You cannot pathologise him – you cannot attempt to make a diagnosis. There is no blood test for eccentricity, no objective measure for your love or his!’ Perhaps, he conceded, he might benefit from analysis, though it was hardly recommended for children, whose consciousness was barely formed. There was little she could do but continue to watch over him, as best she could; to love him, as far as he would let her.

The Ambroses shared a glance, and Katherine said hastily: ‘Fresh air would be the best thing for him, I should think. Won’t you let Charles write to the Reverend, and make an introduction? Aldwinter’s barely fifteen miles from here – I’ve known you walk further! – and you could at least spend an afternoon there, and let Stella give you tea.’

‘I’ll write to William, and give him your address – you’re staying at the George, I assume? You’ll all make fast friends, I’m sure, and find piles of your wretched fossils.’

‘We’re staying at the Red Lion,’ said Martha. ‘Cora thought it looked authentic, and was disappointed not to find straw on the floor and a goat tethered to the bar.’ Reverend Ransome, she thought, scornfully: as if some slow-witted parson and his fatcheeked children could interest her Cora! But kindness shown to her friend always earned her loyalty, and so she tipped the last of the cakes onto Charles’s plate and said quite sincerely: ‘I’ve so enjoyed seeing you again: d’you think you might come back to Essex soon, before we go?’

‘Probably.’ He took on an air of noble suffering. ‘And by then we expect a whole new species to be discovered and anatomised, and ready for the Seaborne Wing at Castle Museum.’ With a little gesture to his wife that signalled they should depart, he reached for his coat, and then with an arm arrested mid-sleeve said ‘Oh!’ and turned grinning to Cora. ‘How could we forget! Have you heard of this strange beast that’s been putting the fear of all the gods into the local populace?’

Katherine laughing said: ‘Charles, don’t tease: it’s just some game of Chinese whispers that went a little too far.’

Struggling with his jacket, Ambrose ignored his wife. ‘Now here’s a mystery of science for you – put that appalling hat down and listen! Three hundred years ago or thereabouts a dragon took up residence in Henham, twenty miles north-west of here. Ask at the library and they’ll show you the leaflets they nailed up round the town: eye-witness accounts from farmers, and a picture of some kind of leviathan with wings of leather and a toothy grin. It used to lie about basking in the sunshine and snapping its beak (its beak, mind you!), and no-one thought much of it until a boy got his leg broken. It vanished soon after, but the rumours never did. Every time crops failed or the sun eclipsed, or there was a plague of toads, someone somewhere would see the beast down on the riverbank, or lurking on the village green. And listen: it’s back!’ Charles looked triumphant, as if he’d personally spawned the beast for her benefit, so that Cora regretted diminishing his delight by saying, ‘Oh Charles, I know – I heard! We’ve just been treated to a lecture on the Essex Earthquake – haven’t we, Martha? – and how it shook something loose out there in the estuary. It’s all I can do to prevent myself from heading there now with notebook and camera and seeing it for myself!’

Katherine consoled her husband with a kiss, and said placidly, ‘Stella Ransome wrote and told us all about it. On New Year’s Day a local man was washed up on the Aldwinter saltings with his neck broken. Drunk, I should think, and got caught in the tide, but the whole village is up in arms. There’ve been several sightings just off the coast, and someone swore they saw it moving up the Blackwater at midnight with murder in its eyes. There, Charles, you were right: did you ever see anyone so excited?’

Cora shifted like a child in her seat, and pulled at a lock of hair. ‘Just like Mary Anning’s sea-dragon, all those years ago! Every six months a paper’s published setting out ways and places extinct animals might still live on – imagine, just imagine, if we were to encounter one in so dull a place as Essex! And imagine what it might mean: further evidence that it’s an ancient world we live in, that our debt is to natural progression, not some divinity –’

‘Well: I don’t know about that,’ said Charles, ‘But it will interest you, no doubt. And if you visit Aldwinter you must ask the Ransomes to show you their very own Essex serpent: one of the pews in the parish church has a winged snake making its way up the arm-rest, though since the latest sightings the good rector has been threatening to take it off with a chisel.’

‘That settles it,’ said Cora. ‘Write your letters, as many as you like: we’ll suffer the attentions of a hundred parsons for the sake of one sea-dragon, won’t we, Martha?’ Leaving Charles to attend to the bill, and dispense the immense tips with which he salved his conscience, the women stepped out onto the High Street. The rain had receded and the declining sun sent the shadow of St Nicholas across their path. Katherine gestured across to the broad white façade of her hotel. ‘I’ll go upstairs right away and find some headed paper, and warn them you’ll bring trouble, with your London ideas and your disgraceful coat.’ She plucked at Cora’s sleeve, and said: ‘Martha, can’t you do anything about this?’

Since half her pleasure in adopting such a ramshackle appearance lay in her friends’ disgust, Cora turned up her collar against the wind, tilted her hat like a boy, and stuck her thumbs in her belt. ‘The wonderful thing about being a widow is that, really, you’re not obliged to be much of a woman anymore – but here comes Charles, and I can tell by that look he’s in need of his evening drink. Thank you, dear both.’ She kissed them, and pressed Katherine’s hand much too hard. She’d have liked to say more, and explain that her years of marriage had so degraded her expectation of happiness that to sit cradling a teacup with no thought for what waited behind the curtains on Foulis Street seemed little short of miraculous. Smiling a farewell, she stepped briskly across the road towards the Red Lion, wondering if it was Francis’s face she saw at the window, and whether he might be pleased to see her.

 

Charles Ambrose
THE GARRICK CLUB
WC

20^th February

My Dear Will,

I trust you are all in good health, and hope it won’t be long before we see you again. Katherine asks me to tell Stella that her dahlias did very well, but turned out blue rather than black – perhaps it was the soil?

I am writing in order to introduce to you a very great friend of ours, who I think would benefit from meeting you both. She is the widow of Michael Seaborne, who died early this year (you might recall having kindly prayed for his return to good health, but the Almighty’s will evidently lay elsewhere).

We’ve known Mrs Seaborne for many years. She is an unusual woman. I think of her as having an exceptional – really I might even say a masculine! – intelligence: she is something of a naturalist, which Katherine tells me is the latest fashion among society women. It seems harmless enough, and seems to bring her pleasure after a time of great sadness.

She has recently come to Essex together with her son and companion in order to study the coastline there (something about fossil bird remains at Walton-on-the-Naze, I believe), and has been staying in Colchester. Of course I told her about the legend of the Essex Serpent and the rumours of its return, and about the curious carving in All Saints church, and she was most intrigued, and plans to visit.

If she comes to Aldwinter (and knowing Cora, she will be already planning her journey!) perhaps you and Stella could make her welcome? She has given me permission to supply details of her current address, which I enclose here together with our good wishes, as ever –

Yours faithfully,

CHARLES HENRY AMBROSE