Curiosity (26 page)

Mary Anning’s progress down the shore taxed Colonel Birch to the end of his strength, but the blood in his eardrums roared his delight with this outing. He’d expected to spend
days
closely questioning individuals in the region before he discovered the local savants and ingratiated himself with them. And then he had got off the coach and the curiosity table was right in front of his eyes. Gasping for breath, he clambered now after the damsel, keeping his eyes on her sturdy back (and found himself judging the width of her pelvis, saw this black-eyed maiden in a cottage with a babe at her breast and another at her feet – but surely she
had three or four years before that?). His eyes went to the ground and, desperate to rest, he stooped to pick up a rock and called, “Miss! Miss!” Mary Anning turned and angled back across the foreshore towards him. He thrust it at her. “It is surely a petrified bone! Look at the grain of it.”

“It is beef rock,” she said. “It may look like bone, but it is not. Bones are dark brown or black.”

And then some of the others drifted back to her and Mary must instruct them all. Mr. Beach had picked up a rock with the rim of an ammonite peeping through its surface, and Mary opened it with a deft blow of her hammer and handed it back to him, the fossil revealed and intact. She thought of the townspeople who’d watched from the jetty as they set off, herself the only low-born girl in this party of gentlefolk, and wished the townspeople had spyglasses and could see how she was listened to. By Mr. Aveline, and Mr. Beach, and the gentleman in the beaver hat whom no one had presented to her. Daily, strangers descended the coach and addressed her as
Miss Anning
. This was what it meant to be famous. Colonel Birch was in a hunting party in Sussex when he heard about the dragon and that it was a maiden who’d found it. He’d come directly to Lyme Regis and to her table to present himself, this stout man who was both round and square in the way of the rich (round as to belly and square as to the form of his jacket above his thin legs in their great buckled boots). And Mr. Beach, examining his new ammonite, smiled at her in a friendly fashion, although it was a different friendliness from what he had shown the day before, when he called on her in the workshop. The tall gentleman with the beaver hat had cast a spell over him. They were all as changeable as the wind. However, she, Mary Anning, and her brother Joseph Anning had done something everyone in this company would be proud to have done, would have worn as a feather in their
caps. She could not adorn herself with it, putting on airs as they would have, but she could walk out with them now. And this was a great deal.

She turned and resumed walking, and Henry De la Beche pocketed his new calcite fossil and swung along behind her with his friend.

“Mr. Conybeare –”

“William, please.”

“William. The other night at dinner, Mr. Buckland talked of a pair of fossil jaws found in the Netherlands and examined by Cuvier. Are you familiar with this find?”

“I am indeed. It is several decades ago that they were first unearthed, but their significance was immediately grasped. They were enshrined in a glass case in the town square, like a relic of the Holy Cross. The European peasantry is much superior to the English, I regret to say.”

“And what did Cuvier have to say about them?”

“The find posed a great challenge to Cuvier, for it seemed to combine so many anatomical systems, as our creature does. Finally he pronounced the jaws the remains of an animal related to the monitor of the tropics. But not a monitor – different in several significant ways.”

“And not a dolphin?”

“He believes it to be a reptile.”

“And what did he say had happened to such huge creatures and their kind?”

“Ah. Well, in that regard, Cuvier is an unrepentant apostate. He argues that such creatures no longer exist, eradicated by some catastrophe, perhaps. Cuvier would have us believe that this,” and he waved his hand to take in the cliffs and the sea, “this is all a recent and transformed version of what might in another age have been a very different world.”

“I suppose it’s possible that creatures such as Squire Henley’s were wiped out in Noah’s Flood. What do you think?”

Conybeare looked at Henry kindly. “
I know that, whatsoever God doeth, it shall be forever. Nothing can be put to it, nor anything taken from it
. From the Book of Ecclesiastes, by the great King Solomon.”

“The king who built the temple in Jerusalem? And does that temple still stand?”

Conybeare simply laughed. As a clergyman, Henry saw, he would be a model of moderation. Not sanctimonious, slow to take offence, deftly balancing faith and worldly erudition.

Close behind them walked Mr. Aveline, his eyes on his stepson, whom he’d been sent along to supervise. It was Mrs. Doctor Carpenter who last night had made a point of telling them she’d seen Mr. De la Beche go into the carpenter’s daughter’s house sometime around noon and come out again some long time after. Henry had laughed when they took him to task about it, as though the idea was preposterous, but the laugh was a lie. “I will send him to Jamaica,” Beth vowed afterwards. But she would not, and they both knew it. Mr. Aveline watched Henry striding along beside William Conybeare, still laughing, walking straight through tidal pools, heedless of the water staining his boots and splashing the pantaloons he’d donned that morning. He’d laughed openly at the Squire’s wife while a guest at her table. He had an ungovernable energy; he did not respect the proprieties. Those absurd pantaloons! He’d have worn them to the Assembly Rooms the other night if his mother had not sent him back to change.

Behind him, Miss Philpot walked alone. How neat her gloves, how strong and shapely her hands and her long feet in their tan calfskin shoes: how well put-together for this world she persisted in being, though the world never remarked on it. She looked over
at William Conybeare, noting the neat nape of his hair below his top hat, his body formed in every aspect to house a fine intelligence. Oh, yes, Mr. Buckland’s friend satisfied all requirements as to handsomeness and civility and fortune, indeed so far exceeded requirements that you could not fault him for thinking well of himself. She turned her head and looked at the sea, and there stirred within her the moment in the night when she’d wakened and seen through the window (for she never drew her curtains across) the sinewy boughs of the sycamore tree in the garden lit up, and she’d thought to see the moon dangling from an upper branch, the full moon with its pox-marked face, but it was not there, just the tree and the counterpane lit up by the light of a moon she could not see.

At the excavation site, it was Mary Anning who led them to the spot where the path she had made herself turned upwards. They scrambled up through the mud and she could see them standing talking at the lip of the shallow pit so familiar to her from weeks of solitary work. Some learned gentleman somewhere, the great Cuvier across the ocean, perhaps, would have a name for the creature – that was what Mary had assumed as she worked. But it seemed that no one did. She’d thought it was her ignorance alone, but it was all of their ignorance. They would be months studying those bones and writing about them. Her name would be written in their books and Mr. Buckland’s students at the great university in Oxford would learn of her. Although Mr. Buckland had not once come to the workshop to ask about the discovery. She turned away from the thought, away from the path up the cliff, and set to work scavenging in the rocks recently fallen to the shore.

The group stood and gazed down into the grave. It was the most unpleasant mud, like the castings of gargantuan earthworms. Rain had erased the marks made by the shovels. Except
for the pebbles of plaster scattered around the edges of the site, you might have the sense that the dragon had shrugged massive shoulders and wrenched itself up in a hasty resurrection. Colonel Birch was struck dumb at the size of the impression it had left. The great gathering of the quick and the dead has begun here, he thought, and Buckland thought it as well, and found he could hardly breathe. He could not bring himself to ask at which end the head had lain, but someone asked, and someone answered, and Buckland stood at the foot of the grave resisting the impulse to lay himself down and use the length of his body as a measure.

That child did this and told no one, thought Miss Philpot. She looked down at Mary, picking through rocks at the base of the cliff. She came out here alone, day after day, and performed this work alone.

Professor Buckland was down in the hole attempting to secure his measuring tape with a chunk of plaster. “Let me do that for you,” Miss Philpot said, sliding down with just a fleeting thought for her shoes. He straightened and lifted his hat and wiped his forehead with his bare hand, and she saw how his forehead was creeping up already, she saw his brow lifting into a corrugated
V
below the unmoving cap of his balding skull.

“You will ruin your skirts,” he said charmingly, in spite of his evident distress. How palpably he hungered to be liked!
Let me do that for you
, she said silently to his back as he bent again over his measures.

At the edge of the excavation, Henry squatted and examined the layers of shale and limestone the dig had revealed. From the corner of his eye, he monitored Conybeare’s attention. He’d talked too much all the way out, he knew it. He’d described in every detail what he’d seen the day of the dig, and his proprietary air had begun to irritate Conybeare, but he was helpless to stop himself. “In the composition of this cliff,” he said now, “it is hard
to avoid the sense of growth through time. The strata are so like the growth rings in a tree.”

Conybeare smiled, and Henry saw that he was about to fully articulate Henry’s striking and novel idea, and to wedge it back into its narrow niche in the orderly cupboard of Christ Church College scholarship. “Ah, you’ve been reading Mr. Smith,” Conybeare said. “Strata Smith, the blacksmith’s son from Oxfordshire? I heard him speak in Bath. It is an intriguing idea, that geological formations could be attributed to natural agents. The quandary it poses, of course, is with respect to time. Consider the abandoned Roman road that runs through Lyme. Almost two millennia since that road was laid down, and its marks on the earth are scarcely effaced.” He touched Henry’s arm in a friendly gesture. “I confess the notion appeals to me – that the strata could be read as a narrative of past conditions on the earth. But the time is the problem. The six thousand years that Scripture allows since Creation.” They picked their way down to the foreshore. “Speaking of time,” Conybeare said, “has the tide turned? I wonder if we’re in any danger of being cut off.”

Henry went gladly across the shore to where Mary Anning stooped with her basket. She stood up and pointed to the town. “As long as you can walk out far enough to see the Cobb, sir, you will be safe,” she said. And they
could
see it, and the town, which at this distance looked as though its houses had been thrown together from the stony slope by a colony of alpine marmots. They stood together in silence. He wanted her to speak again but could not think what else to ask. In contrast to the white of her bonnet, her cheeks were remarkably tanned, and colour bloomed below the skin. She had the sort of colouring that would be white or brown or crimson, but never pink. She wore too-large gloves from which the fingers had been cut off.
How useful, he thought, and how cold the tips of her fingers must be.

“I wish we had thought to bring refreshments,” said a voice at his elbow. It was his stepfather. “I am perishing of thirst.”

“I have water, sir,” Mary Anning said, reaching a corked bottle out of her basket. As though he had been struck deaf, Mr. Aveline walked past her and turned up the shore towards town. Mary felt the sharp sting of tears in the corners of her eyes. She had been all of a flummox in the last few days. Last night, when she came up from the workshop, her mother saw how wrought-up she was, and reached out a hand and pulled her into a bony embrace. She did not rebuke Mary with chawing high, but kissed her and said, “When your cup is full, Mary, you must walk steady.”

And so Mary blinked her eyes clear and uncorked the bottle to have a drink herself.

The tide had turned, and a storm was brewing up in the south. Walking home is always quicker but often more vexing, for the weight you might be carrying and the danger of the tide. They were hopeless at choosing a path through the rocks, these people. Without a by-your-leave, Mary wove nimbly past them all and illustrated a clear path up against the cliff edge.

Mr. Aveline was limping. His new boots, so beautifully cobbled, were, by the narrowness of their cut at the ankle, restricting the flow of pedal blood. Why did I agree to come? he thought bitterly. After a lifetime of serious pursuits, to be assigned the duty of proctor to a wayward youth!
And he will be penniless
. The plantation will have entirely failed by the time he reaches majority. Mr. Aveline’s old friend Miss Philpot was behind him, and he fell back then and said to her, with a nod at his stepson, “Have you noted the pantaloons?”

“Oh, it’s a fashion,” she said vaguely, and he said, “It’s a
fashion that reeks of republicanism! It blew across the Channel from France.” He tried by his tone to make light of it. And then he presented as fact the prospect he and his wife had discussed that morning. “Young De la Beche will soon have others to account to. Have you heard of the geological excursion Doctor Carpenter is planning? It seems that Henry will be joining it. They will be many months in Scotland.”

“Indeed?” said Miss Philpot. “I spoke with your wife this morning, and she –”

But she could not finish. Mr. Buckland was at her side, reaching across with a gift. A devil’s toenail.
Gryphaea arcuata
.

“The way you can identify a species with a glance – it is marvellous!” said Miss Philpot, smiling at him.

“Long days of walking on the shore with my father. He was a wonderful naturalist, until God took from him his most precious tool, his eyes. And so, as a lad, I must needs describe every spiny protrusion in detail for his benefit.”