Curiosity (51 page)

“You shouldn’t have advertised blindness, Mary,” he said. “It’s never helped me with that.” Then he was kneeling beside
her with his face in her hair, and he said something she did not care to hear, words she let fall into the bracken.

“Go back first,” she whispered. She lay still with her eyes open. All she could see was his legs and feet as he moved about dressing himself. She was overcome with languor. She did not lift her head to take in the rest of him, and then he moved out of her line of vision and she knew he was gone down the path. Still she lay, with her skirt pulled loosely over her. She had seldom lain on the ground. In spite of the damp, she felt like a child held by a firm, kind bed, and thought that it would be fine, after she died, to be buried so, with the weight of the earth piled upon her.

THIRTY-THREE

n that overwrought winter, while the dragon with the shrunken head slept in the workshop and Mary waited for Henry to drive back into town, another terrible gale blew up. It was spring tide, and it rose three hours before it was due; no one had ever seen the water so high. Joseph stopped to ask them up to his house on Church Street, and they slept the night in the attic there, although the Lyme was low and the houses on Bridge Street were unlikely to flood. But it was a disastrous gale – beyond any in the memory of the townspeople, for the Cobb was breached in the night, and all the ships sheltering in it were washed away, and two men in the revenue tender drowned. And then the sea was unfettered and the towering waves were free to smash the town. Two houses at Cobb Hamlet were destroyed, and part of the Folly Public House. In the morning, Mary stood up on the edge of the western cliff and looked down at a marvel: the Cobb that had lain for hundreds of years holding its brood of boats in its long arm, saying to the sea
Thus far and no farther
, broken open now to a width of thirty feet, and huge breakers smashing against Marine Parade. No
ships would enter the harbour that winter; indeed, there was no longer a harbour to enter. It would be a winter without coal.

The Annings had money and had thought that for once they were well provisioned. There was a brown hen underfoot and two hams hanging in the inglenook, a basket each of russets and swedes in the corner, and, in the dark space under the bed, sacks of dried beans and peas, sorted this year by Molly. But apparently there was a decree that they should continue to suffer. Not that the Annings, or even the town of Lyme, had been singled out for hardship and privation. All of England was seized with a shocking cold. One frosty morning when the Carlisle coach rolled into London, two poor women sitting outside were frozen into blocks. So people said. Later versions of the story reported that one of the women was with child. People relished such extremes, the thought of a perfect frozen bud curled inside its lifeless mother.

Mary strewed the floors of the house and the workshop with rushes as in the old days to keep their feet up out of the cold, and she bought sheepskin to stuff into their boots, recalling the days when she’d had to beg straw for that purpose. If it continued so very cold, grey geese would come to the sea in a V just after Christmas, and the men would go shooting, and there would be after-Christmas geese for the whole town for a song. This had happened before – the old people talked of it. So desperate a winter was bound to bring bounty with it, she told herself.

The news of her find was spreading fast – jackdaws carried it over the entire country. Sowerby heard without her informing him. He wrote to say that he had an eager buyer for the ple-siosaur (he called it a plesiosaur, as it seemed everyone did), one Richard Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandon-Grenville, Duke of Buckingham and Duke of Chandon. Mary had never heard of
such a man. What did a gentleman so over-endowed with names and titles need with her new dragon?

Then he wrote again, this time to say that Reverend Conybeare had arranged to present the plesiosaur at the Geological Society in February. William Conybeare, who had never clapped eyes on it! He was basing his talk on Mary’s drawing. He had decided on a species for the creature:
Plesiosaurus conybeari
. The fossil would be delivered to Bedford Street for display at the Geological Society upon its arrival in London – Conybeare had made arrangements with the Duke of Buckingham. These three men, Sowerby, Conybeare, and the Duke, had among them what Sowerby called “a gentlemen’s agreement.” All that remained was for the money to change hands, upon receipt of Miss Anning’s authorization. Impatience disguised as patient condescension underlay every sentence of Sowerby’s letter, as though he had taken up the mantle of teaching Mary how to comport herself.

Three days later came a letter from Buckland. He had taken it upon himself to inform Georges Cuvier of the staggering find. He had sent Cuvier a copy of the drawing. In a prompt reply, M. Cuvier informed Buckland that the creature was almost certainly a forgery, a snake’s head and neck clumsily stuck onto an Ichthyosaurus body. There was, indeed, a crack in the vertebrae where the neck met the body. Mary had been meticulous in documenting that crack, and he made much of it. This biological absurdity violated all laws of proportion, and M. Cuvier saw its circulation by the English as an insult to his life’s work. What was Buckland’s tone in telling her? There was no tone at all – it was most strange. But Mary knew that Buckland did not understand the concept of discretion. It was only a matter of time before the townspeople would be feasting on the story. Where was Henry De la Beche, who would have been her champion?

Another letter came from Sowerby. He had encountered Buckland at the University Club on Suffolk Street. Tactfully, Sowerby wrote, “I understand that this latest find has failed to win the approbation of the French.” Sir Richard Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandon-Grenville was tied up in assizes at the moment. The instant he stepped foot in Covent Garden, he would be besieged with the news. It was imperative that Mary authorize the sale before that happened. George Sowerby did not charge Mary with duplicity; he merely urged her to act. If I am forever discredited, Mary thought, he will have this last commission.

Beside the cauliflower cart in the market, Mary encountered Miss Philpot. “Regarding this new find,” Miss Philpot said, putting her gloved hand on Mary’s arm. “The forger showed a singular stupidity, wouldn’t you say, in drawing a line to indicate where the sham head was attached?”

“Is it Reverend Conybeare’s plesiosaur you refer to?” asked Mary.

Elizabeth Philpot laughed and invited Mary for tea. The minute they were seated in the back parlour, she began to talk freely about an unexpected visit she’d had that morning from Mrs. Aveline, who had been in a state of great distress. Henry was gone away and had informed no one as to his whereabouts. And then Mrs. Aveline confided what was at the heart of it. It seemed that Mr. and Mrs. De la Beche were contemplating separating. Henry had made outrageous accusations against his wife, and she could no longer honourably live with him. At first, Mrs. Aveline had tried to take her son’s part, but this was becoming difficult. He had always shown a shocking disregard for the proprieties, she was now prepared to admit it. “Although,” Miss Philpot added, “he’s always been a particular favourite of mine.”

Mary drank her tea. Nothing had changed in this room since she came with her father to deliver the collecting cupboard. All
its homey, comfortable objects spoke of kindness and discernment: the beast-footed side table and the striped tan and blue paper on the wall, the curtains held back with a braided gold sash, the books with their worn leather covers, the collecting cupboards and specimens still on every surface. Tears burned behind her eyes, from the love she felt for this room. “I used to come to your kitchen for salve,” she said after a minute. “Do you remember?”

“I do,” said Miss Philpot. “You could make your own, you know. It is tobacco juice and lanolin and myrrh in equal parts, and my sisters would have my hide for telling you.”

In her conversation with Henry as they lay in the Undercliff, there had been a similar ease, a sense almost of domestic comfort. She had felt no shame. Some few hours Mary Anning and Henry De la Beche were on this earth – was it not fitting that they should spend one of them thus? But in the quiet of Miss Philpot’s parlour, Mary found the courage to think about the moment when she had told him of her plan to write a paper about the new reptile, when she had asked him if he would do the illustration and present the paper to the Geological Society on her behalf. She could not recall him putting his agreement into words, only the way he had picked up her hand and kissed it, which had seemed a seal on their contract. “My geological maiden,” he had murmured, words Buckland had used when she was a girl.

Miss Philpot set her cup down. “Mary, it occurs to me that you may know where Mr. De la Beche might be.”

“No,” Mary said, looking steadily at Miss Philpot. “I have no idea at all.”

After Mary left, she walked up Church Cliffs, across the path over the graveyard and down to the sea, where she found herself studying the horizon as though he had left by ship and would return the same way. It was a habit to think of him in France. She began to walk east. The tide was low. Ahead of her,
oystercatchers sank crimson bills into the soft sand. The littoral zone, Henry called the foreshore, where twice daily the sea and land passed the same bit of shore back and forth between them. Mary bent and picked up a bit of bladderwrack, popping one of its leather bladders between her fingers, feeling warmed sea water run out. Here the sea bottom lay exposed and shining in the sun, sea anemones and dulse and maidenhair weed dried and lifted by the wind. Sea water was their element and their sustenance, and daily they felt it withdraw, felt themselves abandoned to an alien environment. But perhaps she was wrong in her understanding – how could you tell which world they considered their true element? Perhaps they were dual in nature, and counted on the rhythms of the tide to take them from one world of need to the other, and twice daily the tide obliged.

But that night, something began to clutch at her guts, a realization so cruel that she must hold herself above it, she could not allow herself tears. She paced back and forth in the workshop and finally sat down and wrote to George Sowerby. She wrote in a bold hand, in letters almost an inch high.
The Cobb has been breached. I must needs ship the specimen from Weymouth. I will look for payment by return post. I will not let this fossil go for less than £125 – whatever your gentlemen’s agreement
.

The meeting at the Geological Society was held on February 23. Mary wrote a detailed account of it in her mind. One day soon, she would take up pen and ink. When she did, she would preface her account with a disclaimer: