Curiosity (2 page)

“King George himself would be proud to wear such a beauty on a sash on his belly,” Mary offered. “If he had the wits to know it.”

“If he had the wits,” cried the large lady to the other, as though a dog had made a jest, and Dick Mutch in the prison stocks (as mad as the poor king himself) set to cackling, so that Mary must smile and say, “Pay the poor lummick no mind.” The lady set the snakestone back on the table and made to open the reticule on her arm, but her companion leaned in and said something Mary could not hear, and without another word or even a glance at Mary, the two of them went off across the square with their dogs running behind them. It was foolish to mind the discourtesies of the high-born, but Mary did mind. I should have spoke of blindness, she thought.

The square cleared, and it seemed she would have no luck at all that day, but then a man with a dirty blue bag tied to his saddle rode up on a horse. After he had gone, Mary was burning to go down to the cabinetry shop and tell her father what had transpired,
but first she must pack up their wares. Sliding the curiosities onto the tray, she named them all to herself, using the queer words the stranger had used for them: the ordinary snakestones he had called
ammonites
, and the beautiful snakestones worked in gold and bronze,
pyrite ammonites
. But then, before she could go downstairs, Mrs. Stock from Sherborne Lane came bustling up to the house, and Mary must stay in the kitchen with her mother.

Mrs. Stock came inquiring after Percival, who lay like a wax doll in his cot by the cold hearth, hardly bigger than the day he was born. She was a widow with an ardent, reproachful manner that implied she would one day be more than she was, and should be heeded. She sat on the rush chair in the kitchen and darted her hungry eyes around the bare cottage as though their misfortune was secretly to her taste. Percival began to make his mewling cry. Molly picked him up and sat down in the chimney corner, opening her blouse and inching her shift down on the side away from Mrs. Stock. She spread her fingers so a leathery nipple popped out in the crotch between them, and stuffed it between Percival’s lips. He gave a tiny cry of helplessness and Molly tipped her head, resting it against his.

Mary sat on the bench and willed Mrs. Stock not to see her mother’s breast, which had been full to bursting when Percival was born and hung slack now like an empty bladder. This was down to Percival, who, for all he was an infant, had a part to play in maintaining his own keep and did not seem inclined to play it. At the end, the second Henry had been ill and thin like Percival was now, although Mary remembered him as having a queer smell to him that Percival did not have, a smell of chaff or uncured hay. The doctor came and gave him a medic, and just before he died, he coughed up two worms, both of them dead. It was the medic that killed them all three, Mary’s father said.

Mrs. Stock sat talking, talking, puffed up like a rooster with news. She had learned of a lad who had the power to heal, by virtue of being a seventh son. “The seventh son of a seventh son has the power to raise from the dead,” she explained, with the air of a teacher instructing the dim-witted. “But this boy is purely a seventh son.” The lad was only twelve, not much older than Mary, and already he’d healed boils, dropsy, a child with a withered foot, and a woman vomiting black bile. He lived in Exeter, not so very far away.

Mary’s mother hated Mrs. Stock (she had privately said so more than once), but she couldn’t help but listen – she was a slave to the hope Mrs. Stock carried into the kitchen. They had no coals, so she sent Mary next door to the Bennetts’ to boil the kettle for tea. Mary measured out just two dippers of water so the kettle would boil quickly. When she came back, her mother was still nursing Percival and Mrs. Stock was working her way through a list of questions. She inquired as to the exact date Mary had turned eleven, as though she was hatching a plan for her. Then she turned to Lizzie, who was playing with oyster shells on the floor. “And you’re three now, my pretty one?”

Lizzie kept her head down and did not reply. “Four,” Mother said.

“And your big lad? Fourteen, I reckon? And he’s well? You had good success with the onion?” This last in a clever voice.

So then Mary saw why Mrs. Stock had come, and marvelled that she had waited this long to ask. A few weeks before, word of the pox had spread up the Dorsetshire coast, and Mrs. Stock had advised peeling an onion and hanging it from a string in the doorway to draw the pestilence to it. Mary’s mother
had
followed the advice, and she told Mrs. Stock so now. She had peeled the onion and hung it in the middle of the lintel. It was Richard who made her take it down – he had no use for jommetry. “He’s a
history and a mystery, my Richard,” Molly said, laughing in a shamefaced way. “He will always strike his own path.”

“So I’ve heard said,” said Mrs. Stock grimly. “Well, give us a look, then.” Molly told Mary to roll up her sleeve and show Mrs. Stock the three little circles at the top of her arm. They were healed now, as dry as fairy rings in grass. “God forgive and protect us all,” Mrs. Stock cried, closing her eyes and crossing herself. “There were many who told me, but I swore it could not be true.”

It had been early morning when they first learned about the pox – Mary’s father was going out to the latrine on the bridge when a man came up from the Cobb and told him. Six dead in Bridport, he said. At first, there was excitement in the town, people standing in the square going over who had told them, and what exactly was said. But at noon Mrs. Bennett came running up Marine Parade and announced in a shrill voice that the isolation hut on the Cobb was being turned into a pesthouse, where you could pay to have a bit of pox put into your arm and lie between life and death while the contagion was sweated out of you. Mary saw her mother’s face and then she grasped the terror the pox brought with it, although it seemed her mother dreaded the cure more than the disease. “It’s one thing to wait till the pox comes to you,” Molly said. She was standing in the workshop in the cellar of their house with Percival slung over her shoulder. “It’s another thing altogether to go to the pox, and die in a hut with strangers for your trouble.” In the light from the high window, her own pox-marks showed on her white cheeks like discs drilled lightly into chalk.

“The beast in the field waits,” said Mary’s father.

It was an empty argument, thought Mary, sitting on the workshop steps. Where would the Annings find the coin to take themselves off to the pesthouse?

That night, Richard went out to the Three Cups. He was red-cheeked and singing when he came home, lit up by cider and by his bright new idea. He had taken a pint with Farmer Ware and they’d fallen to talking about the pox visited on cows at Ware Manor Farm. He was at the bottom of his third pint, he said, when the idea came to him: he would try his own version of the pesthouse cure, a barnyard version inspired by the fresh cheeks of milkmaids everywhere. Molly kept them awake with her crying, but the next day he took them anyway, just Mary and Joseph, took them out to Ware Manor Farm with its mossy yard the colour of the limes you saw loaded into ships in nets. The farmer led them into the cowshed, where a boy mucking out the stalls was made to put his fork down and pull up his smock. Red sores bloomed across his belly. They used the point of a clasp knife to scrape the boy’s cowpox into Mary’s and Joseph’s arms, three cuts each for good measure. In payment, Richard Anning gave Farmer Ware a thunderstone for the dairy, to keep the milk from souring.

“We be all one in nature,” Molly said vaguely. Mary rolled her sleeve back down. She kept her dark eyes fixed on Mrs. Stock. Mary was a healthy, God-fearing girl with a drop of animal humours in her, and if asked, she would assure Mrs. Stock that she felt better for it, although in truth she would have favoured a livelier animal than a cow – a fox with its dashing ways, or maybe a magpie.

Mrs. Stock finally fastened her crimson shawl with a clasp pin and took her leave, and Mary, almost choking by then with impatience, tried to slip down to the workshop. But her mother called her back. She had put Percival on his side in the cradle and she was at the chimney corner, prying the loose brick out to get at her leather pouch. She spilled the coins on the table – it was all half-groats and farthings. “Count it, Mary,” she said.

Mary slid the coins into rows by kind. The shillings the strange man had given her were pressed into her waistcoat pocket. “One shilling thruppence,” she said, keeping her voice flat.

“What is the fare to Exeter?”

It was sixpence to Axminster and Exeter was ten times as far. “Five shillings, if you ride outside,” Mary said.

Molly picked up the baby again and cupped his little head, straightening his cap. Then she carried him down into the workshop and Mary followed. Mary’s father was standing at the workbench fitting a dovetail join in a drawer. Molly went over all boris-noris and said, “Pray let me see the cash box.” Mary’s father laid the two parts of the join side by side on the workbench with a thunk. He reached the cash box from the cupboard shelf and handed it to her. He would suffer her to count the money, but that did not mean he would suffer her to spend it.

With her free hand, Mary’s mother slid the top off the cash box and moved her fingers over the coins inside, not really counting. “There be more than enough,” she said. Richard did not say what she wanted him to say, he did not ask,
For what?
“That were the Widow Stock upstairs,” she said in a heated-up voice. “There be talk of a healer in Exeter. A seventh son.” Richard turned back to his drawer and pressed his lips as he wedged the join together. He reached for his felted hammer and tapped at the join, and its two sides squeaked into the perfect little dovetail cells they made for each other. Her mother waited in silence another minute and then she turned and climbed back up to the kitchen.

Mary sat down on the workshop steps, her excitement about the gentleman on the horse suddenly falling away. She took off her bonnet and set it on the step. By what arithmetic did you compute which child was a seventh son? she wondered. They were four just then – Joseph, Mary, Lizzie, and Percival. Mary
herself was either the first daughter or the third, depending whether you counted the dead in with the living. Or possibly she was the fourth: between her and the second Henry, there had been a babe that opened its eyes once on the world and shut them again, too early to say whether it was a boy or a girl. The parts were not made yet, Mary’s mother said (although, Mary noted, it had eyelids to close). Mary could hear the cradle rocking on the floor above, and her mother’s tread. Molly would be making a soft mush to try to get into Percival. Two shillings sixpence weighed still in Mary’s pocket. She had not offered the money from the curiosity table and her father had not offered the money from the cash box. There would be no help for Percival in Exeter; it would have to come from another quarter.

Mary sat and watched her father as he took up the second drawer and began to fit it together. He was working from the light of the window, which showed the sky in three rows of its panes, and then the sea. In the soft sawdust on the floorboards, she could see his footprints like the tracks of animals on the shore. This was a collecting cupboard he was making, with shallow drawers for the curiosities. For the rich, who could afford to horde what the Annings must sell. It was a strange passion with the high-born, filling their drawing rooms with thunderbolts and snakestones, although they could buy all the china figurines they chose. Richard was lining up the dovetails, bracing the drawer on the workbench. He needed a helper. But he’d apprenticed Joseph to Armstrong the upholsterer on Dorcas Lane.
I’ve enough aggravation in my day
, he said when Molly argued about it.
Armstrong can have the thin-faced nessel-tripe and welcome to him
.

Mary stood up. “I’ll brace it,” she said.

“No,” he said. “Ye’ve not the meat on your bones to hold it steady.”

So then Mary’s anger swelled up and sealed her mouth shut, then she could not tell him. About the strangeness of the man, the way he’d sorted the curiosities according to the names he gave them, shoving the carved snakestones to the side as worthless. The way he’d tried to speak to her as though she were a child, and how she’d shown him. “Last time I was at Lyme,” he said, “I ran into an antique fellow wandering the shore with a staff in one hand. On the search for the creatures he’d refused onto the ark.”

Mary had stood up to her full height and declined to smile. “Noah,” she’d said.

“It was, lass,” said the man, regarding her with surprise. “I’ve been burning to know if these cliffs were here before the Flood. But he wouldn’t put his mind to the question.
Shun the sea
, he cried. He shook his staff at me.
Water, water, everywhere and not a drop to drink!
He had only two teeth left in his head, the sorry old codger.”

“But it were rain that made the Flood,” Mary said. “He could have drunk rainwater.”

The man had laughed, high colour rising in his cheeks. “Sharp as a blade,” he’d cried.

Richard was fixing a handle to the second drawer of the collecting cupboard. He moved to the shelf for his screwdriver. His back was turned fully to the window and his face was erased by its glare. Something stirred in Mary at the sight of his bony form looming large and black against the glass. Then he stepped away from the light and she could see his face again (intent and inward, with no thought of her upon it at all). “Any trade off the coach?” he asked.

“Not off the coach.” She paused, and then she finally said it. “A man came on a horse and bought seven curios.” She reached into her waistcoat pocket and took out the coins.

Her father’s black eyebrows lifted and she caught the gleam of his approval as she opened the lid of the box and dropped the coins in. Then he turned back to the cupboard. “The Philpot dames have spoke for this cabinet,” he said. “Pick out a beauty snakestone. We’ll put it in the top drawer to start them off.”

The Philpot dames! Miss Elizabeth Philpot always smiled kindly at Mary and was a healer in her own way, with a salve she offered anyone who came with a wound to her door. There were three sisters, but it was Miss Elizabeth Philpot who loved the curiosities, although she would not go down to the shore to collect. Mary ran upstairs to the tray she had left in the kitchen and picked out the best pyrite ammonite, one Joseph hadn’t yet got his hands on, and slipped it into her pocket.