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.