Essex Serpent, The by Perry Sarah

Author:Perry, Sarah [Perry, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Novel, Fantasy, Horror, Fiction
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2016-05-26T23:00:00+00:00

5

Edward Burton sat on a narrow bed and opened the paper packet on his lap. In a high-backed chair beneath a print of St Paul’s, his visitor dredged her chips with vinegar, and the hot scent roused his appetite for the first time in weeks. She wore her hair in a fair braid wrapped around her crown: she looked, he thought, breaking batter from his bit of fish, like an angel, if an angel could be hungry, and didn’t mind grease on her chin and a smear of green peas on her sleeve.

Martha watched him steadily eating, and felt hardly less proud than Luke had done on closing up his wound. It was her third visit, and there was colour in his cheeks. They had been introduced by Maureen Fry, who beside a willingness to visit Burton in order to tug the stitches from his healing scar was a relation of Elizabeth Fry, and had fully inherited the family social conscience: it seemed to her the nurse’s duty lay well beyond the tying up of bandages, the mopping up of blood. She’d first encountered Martha at a meeting of women concerned with Union matters, and over strong tea discovered that Dr Luke Garrett (‘Of all people!’ Martha had said, shaking her head) was the link between them. When Martha first accompanied Sister Fry to the house where Edward and his mother lived in Bethnal Green, she’d discovered a home which was small, certainly, with sanitation troubles that left an ammoniac reek in the air, but was pleasant enough. Little light came in, only what filtered through lines of laundry running between the houses like the pennants of a coming army, but there were always flowers on the table in a rinsed-out jar of Robertson’s jam. Mrs Thomas earned her living by way of laundry, and contriving rag rugs out of scraps; these rugs decked their three small rooms and made them bright. It had never occurred to her that Edward might not recover entirely, and go back to the insurance company where he’d passed five years as a clerk, and so she faced a period of nursing him quite stoically.

That first visit had been an unsatisfactory one, with Edward Burton white and silent in the corner. Mrs Burton was battling delight at her son’s unlikely salvation with a troubling sensation that the man who’d come off the operating table was not the man who’d been laid out on it: ‘He’s so quiet,’ she’d said, wringing her hands, and borrowing Sister Fry’s handkerchief. ‘It’s like the old Ned bled out and I’ve got another one in his place and I have to get to know him before I can say he’s my son.’ Nonetheless, Martha had found herself fretting, in the following days, that Burton would not eat enough, or test the strength of his legs by walking the length of the road, and so she had returned a week later with packets of fish and chips, a net of oranges, and several of Francis’s abandoned copies of The Strand.

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