Curiosity (40 page)

From her expression he thinks she’s listening, but suddenly she thrusts something at him. A small paper packet tied with string. “A handsel,” she says. “For Miss Whyte.”

Confused, he takes the token and drops it into his pocket. “How very kind,” he says. They stand in silence. He wants to take her by the shoulders and make her look at him. “Mary,” he says finally. “We will not see each other again for months. And I must tell you – I have had such a vision! You know, as in Scripture, when an apostle sees an angel, or a bush that burns and is not consumed – something not of this world? Except what I saw
was
the world. I was out on the shore this morning. I went out to work on the chart I promised you. And I saw the cliffs for the first time. The layers, all those separate layers! It was as though scales had fallen from my eyes. The scales of orthodoxy.” He senses she wants to say something, but his words are tumbling out. “
You
know this, Mary! You
saw all this before I did. Oh, Mary, no one thinks as you do. I see your mind at work as you speak. There is no cant, no effort to please. And so I must ask whether you will work with me … upon my return.” He’s momentarily distracted by the fierceness of her expression. “Think how valuable we can be to each other! You have an
instinctual
understanding of the fossils. And all my acquaintances in the Geological Society – I can cultivate them for your benefit. And the Royal Society, for all it is –”

Then she is looking at him. “Science!” she cries. “You talk of
science
. You have no idea what you think. You are a child.”

He can’t speak – the breath is knocked out of him.

“Your letter,” she says. She has a paper crumpled in her hand, and she thrusts it towards him, and then in a fury raises her fist and tries to throw it out into the sea. But the wind blows it back and drops it into the gorse. She scrambles down and plucks it out and pitches it again with such a passion that this time it flutters down the cliff. Henry tries to follow it with his eyes, fearing it will lie on the beach where someone may find it. “I have never read such tripe.” Mary shouts after it. She turns on him. “A new adventure. It is
not
new, sir. It is a foul tale that has been often told.”

He feels his own anger flare up at the injustice of this. “Have I ever been less than respectful of your person? Have I ever laid a hand on you?”

But of course there’s the kiss, and it seems a fresh provocation to have brought it back. She looks at him in quick surprise and takes a step backwards. Her nostrils flare. “You have sneaking ways, sir. You used your sneaking ways on me!”

“Oh, Mary, my dear,” he says. He reaches for her hand, her rough brown hand, but she snatches it away. He reaches for it again, and this time she hits out at him with it, and then she turns and begins to walk quickly back towards town. He hurries along
by her side. “You have been learning the ways of the gentry, Mary,” he says, striving to keep his voice gentle. “And you have been an apt student indeed. But you may not have remarked that in sexual matters, the proprieties are universally breached. Indeed, social rank brings with it greater licence, rather than less.” The path is narrow just then and he is forced by gorse on either side to fall behind. He is making himself ridiculous, trotting after her, but he must explain. He turns to the irrefutable example of the Talbots, the prominent Devonshire family his stepfather and mother recently visited. “The children in that family are known in whispers as the Talbot Miscellany,” he says, “so many lovers has the lady taken and so different the physiognomy of each of her children. And far from
shaming
Lady Talbot in society, these adventures add to her attractions. My mother and Mr. Aveline had no hesitation whatsoever in being her guests. Perhaps it was not always thus, but we observed a Regency court, and we have profited from example.” He’s trying to joke, but she stops and rounds on him.

“The Prince Regent were
never
our teacher here in Lyme.”

He sees in a flash that this tactic was a ghastly mistake. “Very well. Very well, Mary. But may I observe that the chambermaid at the Monmouth Inn has more personal freedom than you allow yourself?”

Then her colour deepens and it seems she can hardly speak. “You compare me to the chambermaid at the Monmouth Inn?”

“No, I don’t compare you,” he cries in despair. “Oh, Mary – you so badly misconstrue my intent.” But she’s gone, a black form striding down the path in the falling light, vanishing through the high stands of gorse, and he is left alone with the preposterous preamble to what he’d wrongly assumed would be a lengthy conversation.

It’s only much later that he thinks of the argument he should
have used with Mary, glimpses the vows that could be sworn to the eternal, shifting verities of rocks and tide.

For Miss Whyte From Mary Anning
. Penned directly on the paper packet in a bold script.
Miss White
, she had written first, and then made a crude correction. Whatever could she be giving his fiancée? He cannot imagine and, standing in the hall, he cuts the string with his penknife and opens the packet. Wrapped inside is a pair of earrings. Two slices of Ichthyosaurus coprolite, polished like sections of agate and fixed to dangle from the earlobe. The hooks of the earrings are iron fish hooks. He’s breathless with amazement. He holds them close to the lamp to examine each slice of fossil excrement, fish scales running through them like a delicate inlay. The drawing room door opens. It’s Letitia, coming into the hall to see what’s keeping him. She moves smiling towards him, carrying a candle in a globe. There’s still time for him to slip the packet back into his pocket, but he holds it in his hand and she approaches.

“Forgive me,” he says. “It was with my letters and I opened it in error. It’s a wedding gift for you.” Letitia sets the candle on the hall table. She touches the stones in his hand and looks up at him in confusion. “From Miss Anning,” he says, showing her the paper.

“Miss Anning? The brown-faced girl selling seashells in the square?”

“Yes.”

Letitia fingers the polished stones. “Are they meant to be earrings?”

“I suppose they are. She must have fashioned them with her own hand.”

“They really are very beautiful stones,” she says. She picks one out of his palm and holds it up to an ear, turning her head to
the hall looking glass to admire the coprolite dangling against her cheek. “I could have them fitted properly onto gold. That’s what I will do. But what a queer creature, to want to give me a wedding gift! Perhaps it’s because I spoke to her on my arrival.” She gazes at her reflection. “Does one send a formal note to such a person?” she asks. It’s not the earrings she’s admiring; it’s her own face, the pretty curve of her lips. She’s watching herself talk. “No,” he says heavily. “Don’t trouble yourself.”

TWENTY-SIX

ary stood on Black Ven with her basket on her arm. She frowned at the rock-strewn foreshore. Just here was where she’d found the body of Lady Jackson. And here she’d walked out with Sir Foppling Fossil, and dropped herself down to the sands. She’d been seized by madness, and she’d given him such a story. She’d given him Lady Jackson as everyone imagined a gentlewoman should be –
Oh, lovely appearance of death, no sight upon earth is so fair!
As Mary herself imagined the lady would be, when she first crept across the sand and saw the white hand flung out, palm up, the lady’s fair hair laid out by the water, and her slender foot. A fine lady and taken by death all the same.

And now Mary saw her as clear as she had that day. She’d been undressed by the sea, there was no ivory silk gown on her at all, but bladderwort and black marl mashed under her. She was lying on her back, not as Mary had fallen to show Henry. Her eyes half open, unseeing, as though Mary creeping up to her did not exist. The lady was marble on the sand and Mary was the ghost, squatting beside her on the shore, scarcely breathing.
Staring at the white of her flesh mottled with pooled blood, and her nipples pointing darkly up at the sky. Her vacant face with the thick, unlovely mouth. The fine lines at her eyes and the pouches beneath, the faint expression of disgust. Mary was the ghost reaching a hand out, touching the cold skin of her thigh. And noting everything: her woman’s legs splayed open (fat legs with blue veins wandering over them), the hair on her woman’s mound left to curl like bracken in the sea water, the lips between mauve as an oyster.

The De la Beche carriage rolled out of town laden with cases. Was Mrs. De la Beche wearing her reptile turds? Mary wondered. Then Colonel Birch rode into town on his mare and presented himself at the curiosity table with a chastened face. “Not this week,” Mary said, lifting her chin, looking coldly across the square. “Our Lizzie is poorly.”

Then they did not hear from him, and it looked as though it would all come to naught on account of her pride.
The work is finished
, was all she told her mother, but in bed at night, she raged still against Colonel Birch, saw him reaching his hand for the heavy-veined udder of the cow, winking at her with his pale-fringed eye. Recalled the syllabub, the taste of childhood with a potent, seductive aftertaste, and thought of how cheese was made, how a calf was allowed to suck its fill before it was killed and the curdled milk from its stomach used to curdle cheese. Her fury grew: she felled the old ram with the flat side of an axe, she saw him falling heavily to the floor. Her rage was like sticky mud; she was sucked down into it. These gentlemen and their lusts – there was Henry, grabbing at her when they clambered over a rock, the heat burning in his hand, his thirst for her shining in his eyes. And there was she, just as bad –
Do not look at me so
, she’d think, and when he turned obediently away,
she’d stir beside him or make some little sound in her throat so he’d look again.

She rolled over in her bed. Oh, Catherine, Saint Catherine, please come to my aid, she breathed. The
money
– better to think of the money. All of those wonderful treasures from the shore offered up for sale. Two hundred and twenty pounds – that’s what was at stake here. She’d kept her own tally of fair market values all the time she was fitting the collection into crates. Two hundred and twenty pounds! But an auction sale was different from transactions conducted in the sober light of day. It was buyers vying with each other. Sometimes in the heat of the moment, prices went sky-high – a man might pay a fortune to keep a rival from getting what he desired. She told herself stories of such feuds, she peopled the hall with petulant rich men who loathed each other, and in her mind, the total grew and grew. It would be enough to pay off the last of their creditors and keep them for a year. She would be independent, above the insults of sordid men. She turned over again and slid one icy foot up into the hot angle of the other knee. These imaginings were Hope come to taunt her, her new enemy, Hope – for really, in giving her anything at all, Colonel Birch would be paying twice. And what must she expect to part with in the end for such a windfall?

Finally, a note came to say that he was back in Charmouth with the proceeds of the sale and awaited her attendance. It was not Will Darby who brought the note but a new and friendlier Charles, a boy from Cobb Hamlet wearing a tremendous pair of hobnailed boots. “
You
must go,” Mary said to her mother. Her mother, who was scrubbing out the kitchen, set to humming and did not reply. Mary began to suspect that what she dreaded was what her mother desired. But she could not mount an argument – she could not further jeopardize this windfall. And so she put it to herself that she was a woman who could outwit a sheep, and
she fetched her bonnet. Her mother walked a ways with her. At the edge of town, she stopped and put her hand on Mary’s arm. “Better a little fire to warm thee than a great fire to burn thee,” she said.