Curiosity (32 page)

She would never truly be appreciated in a drawing room, Mary Anning, where reaction to her rough boots and her brown face and quaint speech would eclipse any other consideration. Buckland must recognize her worth, although in him it provokes only resentment. As for Conybeare – for all his gifts, the Reverend William Conybeare views the underclasses through a veil of undisguised contempt. One night, walking home with his friend after a visit to the Assembly Rooms, Henry commented on the darkness in the poor cottages they passed, although it was not yet eight o’clock. Conybeare laughed. “Busy seeing to their duties of procreation,” he said. “It’s the squalor they live in – they’re obliged to produce eight or ten infants in the hope of replacing themselves in the next generation. An onerous task, but one they excel at, the poor of England.”

And indeed, the Anning brood numbered ten! With only three children surviving – it is unimaginable. It’s a sad, sad story she tells him, of deaths by fire and drowning and illness and deprivation. His own childhood in Jamaica is so far outside her narrow experience that it baffles and amazes her. “Picture me, Mary,” he says. “My feet as tough as shoe leather from running barefoot. Two toes swollen where chigoe fleas had burrowed into them. My legs cobbled over with mosquito bites. And as brown as a berry from the sun – brown almost all over, I might add, for I lived in a pair of short pants Belle sewed me from the bolt of fabric intended
for her own sons. Osnaburg, that fabric was called, and it was as itchy as sin.”

“Do the blackamoors and their masters not live apart?” she asks.

“Oh, to be sure, strictly apart. But I was a child, and caring for me was part of the work of the plantation. The slaves had their own cabin-line, and the field slaves did not come to the house. But certain of them had sly ways of flouting the rules.” He tells her about the beautiful, impudent Sophie, how she infuriated his mother beyond any of the other slaves, for her boldness. “The jalousies at the latrine had so many slats missing that anyone who chose could see right in, and one day Mother was sitting in the latrine and Sophie came up the path – where she should never have been, so close to the great house – and stood there as bold as brass and called out,
How-do, missus?
” Mary stares at him, aghast, although no doubt it’s his frank talk of his mother in a latrine that accounts for her expression. “Oh, my mother was vexed! She insisted Sophie be flogged. But my father ignored her. In fact, he and the overseer made Sophie the driver of the grass gang shortly after. And then, when he was selling some slaves and could have solved the problem by selling Sophie, he sold a different slave by accident, and this enraged my mother even more.”

“He sold her by
accident
?”

Henry considers for a minute how he can explain it. “My father strove to conduct his affairs in a Christian fashion,” he says at last. “He tried to keep families together, and so when he sold a slave named Tom, he sold Beryl with him, because the overseer’s book said they were man and wife. But really, it was Sophie who lay with Tom in the night, and everyone outside the great house knew it. But my mother was rid of Sophie after all, for after that
sale, she vanished. I knew she was gone as soon as I woke up one morning – I heard the dogs out in the bush.”

“What would they do if they caught her?”

“There was a bamboo cage down by the boiling-house. Runaways were held there for a period of time.”

“Like the stocks in Cockmoile Square.”

“I suppose.”

“Was she found and put in the bamboo cage?”

“No,” Henry says. “In her own fashion, she escaped them.”

A noise starts up like a mason chipping stone with a silver spike. It’s a stonechat, somewhere in the trees above them. There is no way to make someone understand the reality of such matters. Individuals of his own class can’t grasp it, unless they have lived the planter’s life. With Mary, explanation is impossible. But her curious mind will not let it go.

“Did your brothers and sisters live in this way on the plantation, with the blackamoors?”

“I have no brothers or sisters. Well, none my father was prepared to acknowledge. Indeed, I regarded my nurse’s children as my brothers. One wonderful day, my father took me to the sea, and he kindly took Cuthbert and Ben as well. We dove for urchins and conch. They had never been in the sea before, and yet they dove like seals. They were expert at everything. You should have seen them climb the coconut palms beside the house! It’s a good trick, Mary – there are no branches to use for foothold.” He tells her about scaling the tree himself, using his bare feet to grip the trunk and reaching as high as the veranda roof before gravity hooked him and he came sliding down, rough bark nipping at his thighs, and landed in a nest of sticks and coconut husks. He doesn’t tell her about Cuthbert and Ben shrieking with laughter, and the way he ran wailing through the
house in search of his mother. She was lying in her bedroom with the shutters closed, sleeping inside her bed net. So then he started up the path to find Belle, and Cuthbert and Ben met him and drove him back to the great house.

No wonder I thought we were brothers, he thinks ruefully as they walk home. We fought like brothers.

TWENTY

hen Mary was worn down by hunger, it was John Gleed her mind seized on, a nasty bit of prey, to be sure. Two years he’d been preaching hard work and industry to his weary flock at the Independent Chapel, urging them to be fruitful and multiply, to subdue the earth, to have dominion over every living thing. Two years he’d been collecting on the shore and stealing her trade. Mary listened every Sabbath to Adam and Eve digging and delving in the Garden and she waited in vain for the Serpent to slither in. But it had vanished, taking with it the dragons roaring and roiling at Black Ven. All that dark world gone, all fear of it drained away the bleak day James Wheaton was carried off in a wagon to be buried with his ancestors in Plymouth.

I shall have to open this hedge-parson’s eyes to the true meaning of dragons, Mary thought, and one day after the service, she waited until everyone had gone and slipped back into the chapel. She’d never said more than “Good morning” to Mr. Gleed – around single women, he was properly reserved. She found him hunched over a shelf behind the pulpit. He had
a small looking glass and was worrying his back teeth with a wooden pick. He jumped when she came up behind him, and dropped the pick. “Mr. Gleed,” she said. “I have a question. About the days when the earth was young. In Genesis, we are told of Cain who slew his brother Abel –”

“Oh, Miss Anning!” he said eagerly, wiping his mouth surreptitiously with his sleeve and snatching his bible up off the pulpit. “The perennial question of the seeking heart: Where did Cain get his wife?” He smiled as though she were a fish he had caught in his net. His black coat was crimped at the elbows into the stiff folds of a bellows, from neglect of sponging and pressing. People said his pig ate from a baptism font seized by his own hand from a papist church.

“Scholars of Scripture explain that Cain married one of his sisters,” she said, stepping closer to him. They were the same height, and Mary straightened her backbone and made herself taller by an inch. “My question is something other. It is this: God marked Cain’s brow to warn strangers not to kill him. If Cain were the son of Adam and Eve, and Adam and Eve were the first parents, then who were these strangers?”

“Ah, Miss Anning,” Mr. Gleed said again. He flipped to the front of his bible and read out: “
And the days of Adam …
let me see … oh, here we are, it is here:
And he begat sons and daughters. And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died
.” Mr. Gleed peered at Mary. “Well?” he cried. “Mrs. Brody on the Axminster Road? Seventeen children, and still in her prime. Consider if she lived to be nine hundred. Would she still know all her kin by name – eh? Eh? Of course not. Ye can be strangers to your own kin.”

Of course, she could have told him about the satanic race spawned by the Fall, she could have snatched the bible from his
hands and read him the text about the dragons being Satan’s henchmen. But why would she choose to belabour the wickedness of her own vocation? She’d failed, and was sorry that she’d tried, for now John Gleed was never shy to approach her on the shore, to ask her to identify something he’d found. He would keep on poaching off her custom and sucking on her brains, and she was powerless to stop him. Her custom was already meagre. Buckland was long gone now, having crated up the Ichthyosaurus with the bezoar stones in it and carried it off to Oxford. Not for money – he was not greedy in that way – but for science. Mary had helped him for many a day, but it did not occur to him to pay her. And Colonel Birch was suddenly not to be seen – he was poorly, so she learned from Will Darby. The pound he’d given her for the hip bone would have lasted longer, but she’d paid Doctor Huddlestone. Although that fancy doctor had had nothing to offer them – all he said was that they should not give Lizzie water, however thirsty she was, it would lead to dropsy. Molly did not understand why Mr. De la Beche should not pay the fee, as he was the one who had sent the man. “He can well afford this charity to a poor family with a sick child,” she said, and Mary would not explain, she would not put her reasons even to herself. She walked past her mother down to the workshop, her sense of that gentleman stirring, the sense she carried of him even when she was not thinking, a sense of something menacing and bright.

It was a dangerous pastime, stealing into the forest with this man. She was inviting scandal. He seemed entirely oblivious to such a worry. There he would sit, leaning back against the log in the Undercliff with his boots crossed, and talk of things no other high-born person would dream of confessing to such as her. His rear end planted on the damp ground, heedless of his fine wool coat, this gentleman who made his living from black people he owned like mules.

No, not like mules, exactly. When he was an infant, a blackamoor woman put him to her breast and fed him on her milk. There was a dirt floor to the house where she lived and he played there with her children. He was a planter’s son who knew about a hole in an earthen floor where a slave’s secret cutlass was buried: he took great pride in telling her this. Mary reached for her old categories of the rich and the poor and found she could not sort it out at all.

Every day she would resolve to come home by the shore directly after collecting, and every day they would climb the cliffs. Not that whiling away the afternoons in the Undercliff with Mr. De la Beche took away from her income. Vertebrae were piled up along the wall of the workshop, belemnites and ammonites lined up on the table. No one was buying. All through the years of her growing up, people had said fervently, “When the war is over …” Now the war was over and the price of a loaf had risen to eighteen pence. The rich had taken to ships; they’d abandoned Lyme Regis and carried their guineas over to France – the sails of their ships when you stood on the Cobb were a flock of sheep in the Channel. But all to the good, thought Mary fiercely, eyeing the lovely bones on her table. It is not curios I collect now. It is scientific specimens. But how could she parlay specimens into more money?