Curiosity (21 page)

In the privacy of his own bedchamber, inside the Bedouin tent, Henry pages through the folio. Typically, the corpse is represented in three panels: a cadaver lying on a slab, its head wrenched to the left shoulder by the hangman’s rope; then the flayed corpse, apparently called the
écorché
, then the skeleton. It’s dead, he thought,
staring at the first panel. But there is still deader and deadest. He examines the
écorché
. It’s like a mummy, thickly bandaged in muscle. Its penis and testicles are gone, stripped off with its skin. None of the plates in the book represents the female form.

In the end, he arranges her at her desk in the morning room, writing a letter – a most appropriate pose, and thus he has only the head and bosom and shoulders to tackle. And the arms and hands. The hands will be difficult, but he can practise at home, using his own as a model. They work together at the desk to make a pleasing composition of her inkwell and blotting paper and a candelabra.

As he begins, she reads him her morning post, lapsing occasionally into silence, laughing softly, her colour rising. Then she takes up her own pen.

“To whom are you writing?” he asks.

“To Penrose. My cousin.”

“And what are you telling him?” He’s talking like a ventriloquist to encourage her to be still.

It’s futile. She wiggles in her chair, turns her shoulders, dips her pen. “I’m telling him about you,” she says dreamily as she writes. “My fiancé … is … painting me. He is … in a foul temper … but he is painting me.”

This is his opportunity to know her, to spend hours studying her face. She’s wearing the delicate muslin gown she wore the day he met her. There is the infamous mole, and the shadow where her breasts divide, and he returns to his recent pre occupation: how incomplete a picture of the creature does a set of bones provide! An inquiring mind unacquainted with the human form would never dream of
breasts
on a skeleton, for example. Suddenly he is that mind: suddenly he is floating in the dusty sunlight of the cluttered morning room, he is a point of view unacquainted with birds or with man, lifted beyond the ivy growing at the window
and the artist’s palette smeared with pigments, staring, fascinated and aghast, at hairless limbs and a bosom like the flesh of a fetal pig he saw once in a bottle in Piccadilly, staring at an alien creature of the forest or ocean, incongruously clothed, its eye a greenish membrane with life peeping frighteningly out of it.

FOURTEEN

ary crouched beside the creature for a long time before she set to work. It was the colour and texture of a driftwood log, only the shape of it was animal and the feel of it was rock. The limestone was a frozen sea and the creature was just surfacing in it, coming up for air. Was it a crocodile jaw? How could she know – she’d never seen a picture of a crocodile. Only dragons. The roiling dragons in James Wheaton’s bible had smaller mouths, curved fangs like cats.

God had sent this creature to save Mary and her family. Or Lucifer had sent it to destroy them. If she took it out and looked at it, she would know which. Once its beak is free, it will speak, she thought, it will tell me what it is. She would start with the beak because it was partly exposed and also for a secret reason: because there are dragons that can slay you by casting their eyes on you.

On the shore, when your head is bent, it’s easy to imagine someone coming up behind you. You have sight, but the surf blocks out sound, the shingle scraping as the sea rakes it, the sea
dumping its water on the foreshore, load after load. But she kept her head bent, and in the course of the morning, she exposed a section as big as her hand, working slowly with a quarter-inch chisel and her father’s hammer, the chisel discerning stone that was only stone from stone that was bone.

She took off her bonnet and felt the sun warm her hair, brushing shards of shale off the fossil with her fingers. She was not afraid to touch the creature now. She felt the long, hard teeth with admiration. They were not in separate sockets, as Buckland had said they must be – this was likely to reduce the value. But when she was done, she would look for the body, although how she would climb up to the cliff she could not imagine. When she found it, while she chipped it out, she would keep the head in the workshop, safe from storms and landslips. She no longer worried that someone would steal the head, for stealing it was what she was doing, and it would take many a day. All the same, when the tide was halfway in and she had to leave, she shoved marl up close to the beak to cover it.

Back home, wet-shod, Mary hung a blanket over the window of the workshop. They will get used to the workshop closed off, was her thought. Later, when my creature is here, no one will ask.

“To keep the house warm,” she explained to Mrs. Bennett, who stood in the kitchen talking to Molly.

“If it’s freezing you be,” said Mrs. Bennett, “’tis better on your bed than on the window.” Complaints about Mary hung in the air. Mrs. Bennett, who had always been so kind, had begun to complain: that Mary took no notice of their Annie, that she chawed high, with her creeping after that maggoty professor and the Philpot sisters.

Molly looked fondly at Mary with her sad, luminous eyes. “Oh, she’s a history and a mystery,” she said, “our Mary.”

Joseph would help on the Sabbath, he said, but Mary would not go to the shore on the Sabbath. So she worked alone. She worked along the tapered beak for many days. The second week, she uncovered a nostril as big as her thumb, set into the beak the way a bird’s nostril is. In the end, the beak was the length of six hand spans. In one hand span, she counted eighteen teeth. This meant two hundred teeth in its whole jaw. Imagine it opening its maw in appeal to Noah as the rain fell! Noah must have fled in terror. But Noah kept tigers. Of course, tigers have a mighty fear of water, and would mind themselves.

On Sunday she went to chapel. They all went, and sat where they used to sit when their father took them. Did James Wheaton know? He could not know about the creature, but he certainly knew that she was selling again from the curiosity table. Yet he did not preach warnings from her father’s example in chapel, did not go from cottage to cottage to get Mrs. Stock and the other chattermags riled up. His text for the day was a mild one, from Timothy
. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; and they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and turn unto fables
. She listened with half a mind, watching a father-long-legs on the wall lift its legs one by one, as though to count them. And then, in a stroke, she saw that the text was for her. A duller pastor might think it was for
coin
she collected, might preach against the love of money. But James Wheaton saw her for the girl she was; he saw the questions and the striving, the hunger gnawing in her brain. She crossed her feet at the ankles, lifted her face to the light of the window.
Itching ears
, she said to herself, and her love for him swelled and caught at her breath.

This was what her life would be without her father. The wild squabbles of gulls on the seawall, waking up to acrimony. The cold fresh air in her lungs, her body beginning to tingle with moving, the line of crimson showing over the tops of the houses on the eastern shore. The smell from Mr. Besley’s open door, and the warm bread, for Joseph would go ahead to get a loaf and cut it into four with his pocket knife and run back to give the others a portion. Then he and Mary would stop to drink from Nancy’s ladle at Gosling Bridge. But they would not dally. Mary must be early to the shore when the tide allowed, for Joseph’s Christmas pay was long gone and they were living on the collecting she did walking out to her dragon and back at the end of the day.

It was the right eye she opened first – it took her most of a week – and she was amazed by the size of it. Its socket was oval, not round like the eye of a bird. Had that eye been compressed by the weight of the rock that lay on the dragon, or did it always have such a shape to it, like no creature she had ever seen in this world? There was a wheel of small bones inside the eye cavity. The left eye was not so easy to study: it was somewhat crushed. When both eyes were exposed, the creature looked out to sea with a comical vacant gaze. Strange to be so acquainted with its face and not to know whether you were talking to a bird or a fish or a lizard.

On the Sabbath after she’d chipped out the last bit of the skull, she walked out for a visit after chapel. Coming up the shore now, she stopped at a distance and stared, struck by this new presence at Black Ven. A long, pointed head lying on the rock like a dog’s head on the hearth. It was only a head, but it was strangely complete. For all its teeth, it looked meek. It is the eyes that betray character, thought Mary. Cruel people have small eyes (Mrs. Stock
came to mind, and the ostler from the George Inn), whereas babies and roe deer and other innocents have large eyes. James Wheaton was wrong: this creature was never one of Lucifer’s dragons.

She sat on a rock beside it and thought about her father, the Sabbath mornings when she lay sleeping and felt something strike her cheek – he would have thrown something to wake her, his comb or whatever was to hand. She would climb over the warm breathing heap that was Lizzie and crawl out of the litter of bedclothes while Mother slumbered on her back with Percival on her breast. She’d put on her heavy petticoat and plaid overskirt and slip downstairs, where her father would be munching on yesterday’s crusts, and they would set out to the shore. They’d walked this very shore so often, walked it unknowingly, while the creature slept in the cliff above them. And now her father slept in the cliff, and the creature watched the sea.