Curiosity (53 page)

“And so the castaway perished?” she asked into the silence.

“He did, my dear,” said Mr. Aveline, straightening his leather bookmark and putting the book on the table.

“And the poet as well?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“What were the gulfs that overwhelmed him?”

“Melancholia, my dear.”

“I thought as much,” she said, and put her hand to the hair at the nape of her neck.

Down in the lower town, the dissenting pastor John Gleed was crossing Cockmoile Square on a pastoral call. His gait was the gait of a tired man. He was just back, as it happened, from a synod of Congregationalist elders and sermonizers at Bridport, where he’d found himself a person of some interest because of his knowledge of the Lyme Regis fossils. But the talk was not of Adam and Eve, nor even of Noah – no, the
end
of time was the topic. It was all Apocalypse now, brimstone falling and the Lord visiting His wrath upon the earth, the dragons in the cliffs waking to join their evil maker in a final battle. And so Pastor John Gleed, hurtled overnight from the Old Testament to the New, had ridden back from Bridport in a dogcart with his peace of mind gone, along with his means of earning extra income.

As he crossed the square, Mary Anning came up Bridge Street from her morning foraging on the shore. He turned his eyes towards her, eyes that burned with a knowledge of the true meaning of dragons, said her name, and bowed. She noted that he had a bible in the crook of his arm and that his collecting bag
was nowhere about him. Watching him walk up the street, she tried to understand his demeanour. Maybe he’d just heard the news, that the plesiosaur was genuine after all. Maybe he’d learned that in a titanic battle of scientific credibility, Mary Anning had bested the great Georges Cuvier, that Mary Anning was not a cheat. Or so the bigwigs had decided. And maybe Mr. Gleed had heard.

Mary turned towards her door, but before she could open it, a fashionable and beautifully maintained brougham, a brougham with familiar arms on the door, rolled along Bridge Street and turned up Church Street. A carriage unseen in this town for several months. Mary stopped on the doorstone. The liveried coachman – Tom – sat alone on the box, and within was just one slender figure in a bonnet. No cases or valises were strapped to the carriage – this had every appearance of a social call. Perhaps to the Murchisons’. Mrs. De la Beche liked to visit Mrs. Murchison. But when had they come back to town? It must have been last night, after dark.

Mary stepped into the house to deposit her basket. She moved a damp flannel over her face and smoothed her hair. “I’ve bought a bit of hard cheese,” she said to her mother. “We can have it for our dinner. If I’m late coming back, go ahead and eat it.” “It’s a vinny cheese I asked for,” Molly said, but Mary did not stay to debate it. She put on a clean bonnet and shut the dog in the house. Then she climbed up past the shops on Broad Street, turning left onto Pound, and walked to the Grove. She knew where he would be – he would be sat at his desk in the study with windows looking out to the ash grove, his head bent over the papers. She turned into the drive and crossed the shingle that had been carried up from the shore, walked on legs that had lain entwined with his in the bracken, walked up between the stands of ash with their bare branches, ivy cloaking their trunks, life to no purpose except as life.

When the squat girl Daisy came to the door, she did not invite Mary into the hall. “Oh, no, miss,” she said. “We’ve just got word. He is gone to Jamaica. This two, three month he were gone, and no one knew. Not even the missus – fancy that!
Jamaica
. But now they know, and they’ve given up the house. Mrs. De la Beche come in last night and she’s after leaving at the morrow, for London. I must just help with the packing up. I must just do the cleaning.” And she allowed herself a little display of temper, kicking her foot at the door frame. “I’m good enough for that, mind, the packing up and the mucking out! She’s after getting herself a fine new lady’s maid in London.”

Mary said goodbye and walked back across the shingle of the drive. There was a roaring in her ears – she strayed off the roadway more than once and stumbled, her boots catching in the weeds. At Pinhay Meadow, she stood looking across at Church Cliffs, at the graceful slopes minutely composed of the plants and animals that had lived and died there through thousands of years. In that moment, she seemed to hear the rumble of falling rock, seemed to see the layered cliffs shudder and hang in the air, then drop to the shore. Standing in sunlight at the edge of the meadow, Mary saw it all gone. Her father’s thin bones and the crumbling skeletons of dragons, the secret paths of mouse and vole and sharp-faced fox, the stands of coltsfoot and iris. All of it a raw unsightly mass of earth and broken stone clogging the shore. Oh, how much quicker it was to tear things down than to build them up!

She turned back towards town with the conviction that a square of hard cheese would not suffice. On her way down, she stopped at the butcher’s and bought a half pound of bacon. She fried up all eight ounces of it and they ate it with bread, and she saved a last piece for Tray, who swallowed his whole. Then she sat in the square and waited for the coach, running her thumb over a callus
on her palm that was causing her pain along its edge, thinking all the while of Conybeare’s nameless sister-in-law, who’d sprung into Mary’s imagination the morning Buckland talked about her. She saw the sister-in-law settle herself at a desk in the corner of an elegant parlour: a tall woman dressed in blue, eagerly taking up the chance to put words into the mouth of the distinguished Reverend. And then Mary followed them all to the church in the morning, and saw Conybeare standing in his robes at the pulpit, his brain soggy from the revelries of the night before, reading along with his fine, meticulous elocution (the text travelling straight from his eyes to his mouth without troubling to go through his brain), and suddenly hearing his own voice and looking up from the page in consternation, spying his sister-in-law’s impish face in the congregation below. But what was it the sister-in-law wrote in that sermon? Mary would think about this until she knew; that’s how she would occupy herself through the rainy days of spring.

Trade was reasonable that day: she sold five small curios for a total of one shilling tuppence. When she came in afterwards, the fry pan still sat on its trivet, white fat congealed. It was growing dark, so she carried the pan down to the workshop and touched a taper to it, and it flared up and filled the room with a lurid light, adding the fleshy smell of cooked fat to the earthy air of the workshop.
Jamaica
. Daisy, who’d never lost a bit of her Dorsetshire speech, bore that word on her lips like a strange form of insect had landed there.

Mary sat down in her writing corner and took up the book she’d bought at the stationer’s in the fall. The fine pen-and-wash map Henry De la Beche had made for her still hung on the wall over her head, each of the new finds marked on it in her own hand. Beside her lay a wonderful ammonite sliced open to show the crystals growing within. The ammonites did not grow in the
rocks, as she’d thought when she was a girl, but crystals grew within the ammonites. She’d made this observation to Buckland once, and he’d disputed it. He’d said the crystals must have been formed by God at Creation, because the filthy earth could not produce such pellucid matter. They gave all the goodness to God, these fine men, and none to the earth.

Mary ran her hand over the leather cover of the unmarked book. She took out a bottle of sepia bought at the stationers, the only sepia she had at the moment, and she picked up the crow’s quill she’d found on the road to the mill. She spent a long time preparing her pen to perfection, and then she opened the book to its first snowy page.

She would never publish a scientific text and sell subscriptions to it. It was an alien language the high-born spoke, in which there were different terms, even, for something as simple as
goodbye
.
Forgive me
was one of those terms, when whispered after the act of love. They’d had no common ground to stand on to learn each other’s language, she and Henry De la Beche. She had thought science was a common ground, but it was not. Even if she managed to write a scientific text in words that did not offend, her mere name on the frontispiece would. She had been drawn into believing that a massive new continent was about to heave into sight on the horizon, that this last autumn was the beginning of something. It seemed a kind of madness had seized her, a reptilian logic.

COMMONPLACE BOOK
, she wrote. She turned the page and paused in the dying orange light, wondering what to put next. Then she fetched down the text about the fossils that she’d written as a girl and began to copy it in, adding such new thoughts as came to her.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

In 1831, a frank and lively young woman named Anna Maria Pinney came to stay in Lyme Regis. She was seventeen, the daughter of prominent Bristol planters, and a keen observer and writer. Her journal is one of our richest sources of information about Mary Anning. “She glories in being afraid of no one and in saying everything she pleases,” wrote a fascinated Anna Maria soon after she met Mary.

In January 1832, Mary apparently confided in Anna Maria that she had been in love with a person of a higher social class and that, eight years before (i.e., in 1824), she had seen her hopes cruelly dashed. I say “apparently,” because Pinney, although astonished and even titillated by this confidence, was moved by its details to an uncharacteristic discretion.

Having suffered “as much as mortal can endure for years,” Mary Anning claimed to be thankful that the affair (if an affair it was) had ended: “Had it not been so,” Pinney quotes her as saying, “I would have lost what little religion I now have.”