The Essex Serpent (16 page)

Mr Caffyn, both outraged and afraid, plucked at his tie and cried, ‘Stop this! Stop this!’, looking furiously at their troublesome visitor, who’d gone very white and stood gripping Joanna’s hand in hers. Then a girl doubled over, laughing so violently her chair toppled and she fell to the floor with a yell that pierced the muddle of foolish laughter, which immediately began to recede. Naomi put a hand to her neck – ‘It hurts,’ she said: ‘Why does it hurt? What have you done?’ and looked around at her classmates, blinking and shaking her head, bemused at their tear-streaked faces. Little Harriet twisted the yellow hem of her dress and had a fit of the hiccups, and one or two of the older girls had gone to comfort the weeping child who cradled a swelling wrist beside an upturned chair.

‘Joanna?’ said Naomi, looking at her friend, ‘What’s wrong? Was it me? What have I done this time?’

4

Luke came to Aldwinter in triumph and a new grey coat. For all that his success had not proved a cure to all his own ills, it was useless to deny that this evidence of his skill and courage gave him stature. Over in Bethnal Green the heart of Edward Burton beat stronger by the hour: he’d taken to making drawings of the dome of St Paul’s, and was likely to return to work by midsummer. Luke felt Burton’s heart beat beside his own, so that he walked with the vitality of two; and though he knew how pride precedes a fall, it seemed so novel to have any distance to tumble he willingly faced the risk.

In the train from London and the cab from Colchester he’d thought of Cora, and smoothed her letter on his knee:
we
need you, she’d said, and scowling he wondered whom she meant by ‘we’: was it also this parson of hers, who peppered her correspondence, who’d drawn her away from London into the Essex mud? The envy he’d felt watching her stoop over her husband’s pillow and kiss his greasy forehead in the final days was nothing to what went through him when he saw that name in her handwriting. First she’d written of
Mr Ransome
, the title keeping him at arm’s length; then
The Good Reverend
, with a mocking fondness that had made him uneasy; then – lately, and easily, with no warning –
Will
(and not even
William
, though that would’ve been bad enough!). Luke scoured the letters for evidence of any feeling on Cora’s part that might indicate a connection beyond cheerful friendship (he grudgingly conceded she’d a right to other friends), and found none. But even so Luke looked out at the fields scudding past the window, and his own dark reflection laid over them, and thought:
Let him be old, and fat, and smelling of dust and Bibles.

In her grey house on the common Cora stood waiting at the door. Since the morning in Mr Caffyn’s classroom she’d slept uneasily, feeling it all to have been her fault. Will had warned her not to put flesh on the bones of the Blackwater terror, and he’d been right: there’s no imagination like a child’s, and she’d fattened it up ’til the Essex Serpent was solid as the cows grazing under Traitor’s Oak. Those girls laughing, and the snapping back and forth of their necks! It had been horrible, and she relied on Luke to find some consoling explanation.

In the aftermath Joanna had grown withdrawn, and though she still went early to school with her books under her arm she’d have nothing to do with Naomi Banks, and at the end of each day sat studying in the kitchen, where there was no chance she’d find herself alone. Worse, she had not laughed once since, afraid that if she started she might not stop, and no amount of teasing or capering on the part of her brothers could raise a smile. Cora had been afraid her new friends would blame her for the incident, and for Joanna’s sombre state, but neither Will nor Stella had seen it happen, and when it was explained to them could only think that girls were ridiculous creatures and always getting the giggles over nothing at all.

Worst of all, Cora’s cheerful interest in the Blackwater was soured. She didn’t (of course!) think it a judgment from God – but perhaps there were soft dark places in all of them that ought not to be probed. Then came Luke, striking out over the common, clutching a case to his chest, seeing her at the threshold and breaking out, almost, into a run.

Later that same week Joanna folded her hands in her lap and surveyed the black-haired doctor with mistrust. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. His manner was brisk, but Jo was not entirely fooled. ‘Just do as you’re told and you’ll be all right. Tell her, Cora.’ And Cora, wearing her scarf with the birds stitched on, had said, ‘It’s all right – he did it to me once, and I slept better that night than in years.’

They sat in the largest room in Cora’s grey house, with no lights lit. It was raining drearily, without the stormy conviction that makes for a comfortable afternoon, and Joanna was not warm. On a large sofa beneath the window her mother sat between Cora and Martha, and the women held hands: you’d’ve thought they were in for a séance and not a process no more mysterious (Luke said) than the removal of a tooth.

Only Martha had disapproved of the plan to put the girl under hypnosis to see what light might be shed on what she called The Laughing Incident. ‘The Imp thinks of us all as nothing but cuts of meat, and you’d trust him with a child’s mind and memory?’ She’d bitten her apple down to the pips and said, ‘Hypnosis! He makes it up. It’s not even a word.’

The question of hypnosis had not been raised until certain other matters had been settled. Mr Caffyn, fearing for his career, had produced a report made in the days following, listing the names of the girls involved, their ages and addresses, their fathers’ occupations and their average grades and appending a chart showing the position of each girl at each desk. He deplored Cora’s presence in the village, but didn’t dream of saying so. Little Harriet consented to be questioned from her mother’s lap, and gave such an elaborate description of a coiled snake unfolding wings like umbrellas that she was put down as a nice child but a dreadful liar (Francis, listening at the door, thought: ‘Is a dreadful liar bad at lying, or good at it?’). Naomi Banks, who began it all, refused to say anything other than that she had no idea what she’d been thinking, and could they leave her alone. Parents were delighted to have their daughters examined by a London physician, and declared one after the other in perfect health (save for six instances of ring-worm, which were treated on the spot, and could not account for their hysteria).

Luke, who’d been introduced to Stella Ransome over lunch (and noted the rosy bloom on each cheek), had said, ‘There’ll be something at the heart of the matter – a shared memory or fear; the question is how to allay the fears when the girls cannot or will not share them?’

Stella had pulled at the blue beads looped around her wrist, and taken a liking to the scowling London doctor;
only wouldn’t it be awful to be ugly
, she thought. ‘Cora tells me you practise hypnosis – am I saying it right? – and that somehow it might help Joanna? She’d like it – she likes everything new. She’d write it all up in her schoolbook.’

It had been tempting for Luke to take Stella’s small hand and say that yes, yes: certainly it would help; that her daughter would restfully recount what it was that had been seen and heard that day, if anything at all, and in coming to would regain her good cheer. But his ambition faltered before the blue eyes turned on him in trust, and he said: ‘It might, but it might not, though I don’t suppose it would do any harm.’ His insistent conscience pricked him: he said, ‘I have never tried it on anyone so young. She might resist it, and laugh at me.’

‘Laugh!’ said Stella: ‘I wish she would!’

‘When I was hypnotised,’ said Cora, pouring tea, ‘I felt swept clean as a chimney, as they say. It was restful, and I said very little. There is nothing to be afraid of: there is nothing strange; it is all just the working of the mind.’ The tea had spilled in the saucer; the light had faded on the wall. ‘I can almost imagine that by the time she’s your age and mine it’ll be so commonplace there’ll be hypnotists on the High Street beside every chemist’s and shoe-shop.’ (At her shoulder the absent Will was gravely watching, and was ignored.)

‘With pot plants in the window,’ said Stella, taking to the idea: ‘And receptionists in white blouses. No-one will ever have any secrets again – aren’t you hot? Could we open the window? – and I’d like to see her happy again.’ It occurred to her to wonder what Will might think: he’d not yet met the doctor, or shown any inclination to, and she supposed he might baulk at the thought of Jo submitting to a procedure her own mother couldn’t pronounce. But then, Cora wouldn’t do anything Will might dislike. It was comforting, she thought – never in her life having felt envy, unable to imagine what it was like – to think of her husband so steadfastly and loyally liked. ‘Open the window wider,’ she said: ‘I am only ever hot, these days.’

Cora turned to Luke, who’d taken Stella’s wrist in a chivalrous gesture, hoping she’d not notice he was taking her pulse (and yes – yes, as he’d suspected: it was skittish below the skin). ‘Well: why don’t we call Jo, and ask her, and see if she is willing?’

And since she had been willing (‘Am I going to be an
experiment
?’), she lay now on the most comfortable couch, gazing up at the ceiling where the plaster had begun to peel. It was difficult to take the thing seriously, since she’d overhead Cora call the doctor an imp and could not help thinking how apt that was (he ought to’ve carried a pitchfork, not a Gladstone bag!).

Drawing up a chair beside her, and leaning in so that she could smell something like lemons rising from his shirt, Dr Garrett said: ‘This is what will happen. You will not sleep, and I’ll have no power over you, but you’ll be more comfortable – more at ease – than you ever were before. And I’ll ask you questions – about how you have been, and about that day – and we’ll see what we can learn: how it began, and what it is you felt.’

‘All right,’ she said.
But there’s nothing to learn about that day, and the laughing
, she thought,
or I’d have told them all I knew
. She looked for her mother, and Stella blew her a kiss.

‘Do you see that mark on the wall – there above the fire where the paint is chipped? I want you to keep looking at it, however heavy your eyelids, however sore your eyes …’

There were other instructions, delivered murmuringly and as if from a great distance: she was to let her hands fall, her head droop, her breath slow, her thoughts wander into other rooms … it was impossible to keep her open eyes fixed on the mark, and when permission was given to close them she did so with a sigh and almost fell in her relief from the couch. She never knew until later what it was she said as she hovered midway between waking and dreaming (later they told her it was something about Naomi Banks, and a leviathan, but that she hadn’t seemed at all afraid). What she remembered was a polite rap on the door, then the drag of it against the carpet; and then her father’s voice raised in a rage she’d never heard before.

Will saw his daughter prone on a black couch with her arms hanging at her sides and her mouth half-open, while a creature bent over her and whispered. He’d come home from making his round of the parish to find the house empty, and calling for Stella found a note on his study directing him to Cora’s, should he care to join them. Crossing the common he’d pictured Stella’s bright head and Cora’s untidy one framed in a window, lamp-lit, impatiently waiting his arrival, and his step had quickened.

He’d known, of course, that Dr Garrett was coming, and felt resentful at the intrusion. The village had had quite enough of that sort of thing, he felt: what with Londoners and serpents it had been a troublesome year; couldn’t they have a moment’s peace? Then he considered how fondly Cora spoke of him, and how proudly she had reported the surgery which had saved a man’s life, and concluded the surgeon must be the sort of man he could come to like. He’d be short and slight and anxious, he decided, reaching the shadow of Traitor’s Oak; he would have a long despondent moustache and finicky aversions to food and drink. Probably the poor fellow could do with a country break, given the state of his health.

Martha had greeted him with a curious look, not quite able to meet his eye; it was so unlike her usual directness that he felt uneasy long before he opened the door and encountered a crouching black-browed thing whispering at his daughter’s side. She lay quite still, as if stunned by a blow; her head was tilted back, and her half-open eyes had a vacant gaze. He was for a moment rigid with shock and distress; when he saw Stella and Cora observing placidly from a nearby sofa, evidently complicit in the scene, he found himself tripped into a fury which not the Essex Serpent nor Cracknell nor any event of the past puzzling months had induced. Quite what he thought was unfolding in that well-furnished room with its curtains blowing out he couldn’t later say, only that he felt a kind of revulsion: it was his daughter, and she was murmuring – something Latin, was it? – and laid out like a fish on a slab! He crossed the room and fitting his fingers beneath the crouching man’s collar tried to tug him from his chair. But if the rector was strong, the surgeon was heavy: there was a tussle which Cora briefly found hilarious before growing afraid that Will in his righteous temper might actually do her friend harm. She thought of the sheep as it struggled in the mud, and how it raised cords of muscle on Will’s forearm; she stood up and said, ‘Mr Ransome – Will! It’s only Dr Garrett – he’s only trying to help!’

Joanna, frightened and drowsy, rolled from couch to floor and struck her head on the hard seat of a chair. She stared up at the ceiling and said, ‘It’s coming,’ then knuckled at her eyes and sat up. Stella, who’d been half-dozing despite the chill coming in through the open window, looked at her husband in surprise (‘Darling, don’t drip on Cora’s carpet!’) and went over to her daughter. ‘How do you feel – are you sick? Have you hurt your head?’

‘It was just so
easy
,’ said Joanna, rubbing her forehead, on which a white lump had begun to appear. She looked from the doctor to her father, and seeing how the two men stood rigid as far from each other as the room would allow said, ‘What’s wrong? Did I do something wrong?’

‘
You
didn’t,’ said Will; and although he did not take his eyes from those of the other man it was quite clear to Cora where his anger was directed, and she felt a kind of contraction in her throat. Falling back on fine manners, she stood between the two and said, ‘Luke, this is William Ransome, my friend.’

My friend
, thought Luke:
I never heard her say ‘my husband’ or ‘my son’ with so much pride.

‘Will, this is Dr Luke Garrett – won’t you shake hands? – we thought we’d help Joanna – she’s not been herself since what happened at the school.’

‘Help? How? What were you doing?’ Will ignored the offered hand, which was held out (he thought) with a sardonic grin. ‘She’s hurt – look: you’re lucky she didn’t knock herself out!’

‘Hypnosis!’ said Joanna, proudly. She had been an experiment! She would write about it later.