The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry Page A

sensation in life about which she felt no confusion at all: he was her son, and she knew her duty; she loved him, and sometimes suspected he loved her, too.
    The scant wind paused, the oakwood held its tongue; Cora again was twenty, and her son was come bawling into the world with his fists clenched. They’d wanted to take him from her and swaddle him in white cloth; she’d roared, and wouldn’t let them. He’d crawled blindly from belly to breast and sucked so strongly the midwife marvelled, and said what a good boy he was, and a clever one. Hours it had been, surely, of their gazes meeting, his eyes fixed intently on her, the dark hazy blue of evening; I have an ally , she thought: he will never let me go . Days passed, and she felt herself split down the middle, a wound that would never heal, and which she would never regret: because of him her heart would always be exposed to wind and weather. She worshipped him with many small acts of devotion, wondering at his marvellous foot, its skin like the thin silk covering of a cushion; she passed hours in stroking it with the tip of her finger and seeing how he spread his toes in delight – that he could take pleasure! That she could give it! His curled hand was a cockleshell warmed by the sun – she held it between her lips – she was astonished by him, that those small hands, those feet, contained such multitudes. But it had been only a matter of weeks before the blinds went down, the eyes (she sometimes thought) actually clouding over. If she nursed him, it appeared to cause him pain, or at least a rage he could not contain; if she held him he struggled, flailed, cut her eyelid with the sharp little nail on his thumb. Their days of adoration seemed remote, impossible – bewildered by this second rejection of her love she began to withhold it out of shame. Her failure was a source of amusement to Michael, who said that after all it was vulgar to be entertained by one’s own children, and she’d best leave him to nurses and tutors. Years passed: she learned his ways, and he hers. If their relationship bore little resemblance to the careless warmth she witnessed between other mothers and their sons, it was serviceable enough, and it was theirs.
    On she walked, and though the cold rain and the black earth ought to have dispirited her, she could not summon up her widow’s grief. A kind of gurgling bubbled from her throat and came out in a shameless peal of laughter, which startled the silent birds into speech. She was ashamed of it, of course, but was used to feeling that she lived in a state of disgrace, and felt certain she’d concealed her growing happiness from everyone but Martha. At the thought of her friend (sitting scowling in a coffee-shop no doubt, to escape Frankie’s latest obsession, or passing the time by enchanting the proprietor of the Red Lion) the laugh subsided, and Cora lifted her arms up a little, imagining seeing her coming towards her under the dripping trees. At night they lay back to back under a thin quilt with knees drawn up against the cold, sometimes turning to murmur a fragment of remembered gossip or say goodnight , sometimes waking cradled in the crook of an arm. The simplicity of it had sustained Cora when everything else had sent her flying, and if Martha had been afraid that she’d be no longer needed now Cora stood on firmer ground, she’d been mistaken.
    Coming to her eighth mile and growing tired, Cora found herself on a slight rise where the trees began to thin. The drizzle subsided, and cleared the air, and without any sunlight breaking through the low white canopy the world flushed with colour. Everywhere reddish banks of last year’s bracken glowed, and above them gorse thickets burned with early blooms of yellow. A little aimless flock of sheep with purple ink splashed on their haunches looked up briefly from their grazing, and shrugging turned away. The path on which she stood was bright Essex clay, and a little further