‘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.