by Peg Kingman
“Yes, so do we; and though limestones to Paris might seem as coals to Newcastle, we cherish hopes for un succès éclatant, for these particular specimens.”
“They are no ordinary rocks, he tells me.”
“No, quite extraordinary indeed, these particular rocks. Hugh says that when, as a boy, he first discovered fossil deposits in these grykes, he was frightened by them—by the monstrosity of them—and, putting them out of his mind as soon as he could manage it, quite succeeded in forgetting all about them. It was not until he encountered the fossil collections at the Muséum in Paris, two or three years ago, that he thought of them again; not until then did he wonder whether the curious vestiges he had seen here on Coquet Isle—though useless as building stone—might prove precious indeed, to the savants. And so, Mrs Darling, your brave and generous hospitality has been rewarded by our trespassing upon it for longer, rather longer than any of us had anticipated.”
“Not at all; nothing; a pleasure,” demurred Mrs Darling, embarrassed.
“No, you never can bear to be thanked. But these petrified remains of a vanished creature from the deepest past which he has so laboriously retrieved might be . . . it is possible—more than possible, Mrs Darling—that they will prove to be of very great significance. And perhaps quite valuable too. Or so we dearly hope.”
On another of those long winter nights abed, Constantia told Hugh the facts that had so fortuitously come to light regarding her parentage. “Not to mince words,” she concluded, “I am, almost certainly, the bastard of a bastard. There, I have bravely confessed; can you cherish me still?”
“Of course,” he said. “How could any of that make any difference at all?”
“Does it not matter? I wonder. It did seem exceedingly important to learn who made me.”
“Oh, that is important, undoubtedly. Facts do matter. Ascertaining facts—what actually happened—is important, and valuable. I mean only that this question of legitimacy, or of illegitimacy, matters not at all. Not to me.”
“To our children?”
“Nor to our children.”
They lay in silence for a time. Presently, Hugh said, “But as for that foolish housekeeper’s tale about a chimney fire started by a jackdaw’s nest . . . it strikes me as most unlikely, my dear. It is far more probable that the builders were to blame. In many of those large old houses built in the last century, such as Seaton Delaval Hall, the flues ran more nearly horizontal than is nowadays deemed prudent. It is difficult to line such flat flues properly, and the masons may well have failed to fully sequester the structural timbers from the heat of the fires. Over a period of years those dry timbers are roasted, little by little, into charcoal—until, some cold windy night, with a good fire roaring, the timber finally ignites, thoroughly and irrevocably. There is no hope of extinguishing any such fire as that; the house burns down—and jackdaws bear the blame. As no one was present when the fire started, its origin cannot be known with certainty. But even if your mother had been in the room, nothing that she or anyone else could have done would stop such a fire. Your mother and your father may have been guilty of certain small and very common failings, but I doubt that they were to blame for burning down Seaton Delaval Hall. And as to their sin in making you . . . for that, my dear, I am more inclined to gratitude than to reproach.”
Constantia kissed the palm of his hand. It was rough, yellow-
calloused.
Presently he added, “But the most fascinating aspect of all this, I think, is the unlikeliness of your discoveries. I mean the scantness of the chance, the faintness of the whisper of happenstance by which all this obscure history has been opened to you.”
“Uncanny, isn’t it.”
“It is that.”
“It is nearly enough to make one wonder . . .” she said.
“Very nearly.”
One day soon after this she showed him the verses “A Soldier’s Welcome to his First-Born, Never Seen” in her father’s handwriting. He was moved; but some time later, he said, “Yet it is striking, too, to note the resemblance which those verses bear to the well-known verses composed by Mr Robert Burns when—well, upon a similar occasion.”
“Do they? Well-known, you say? Not to me.”
“There is a strong resemblance to Burns’s verses, if my memory serves me—and yet, they are quite distinct. I suppose that your father must have known of Burns’s effort, and taken them as his model when he composed these—his own—for you.”
Constantia told Hugh about Adam’s Game, and the various names for humankind that she had heard proposed by the Chambers family and their friends. “What name did you propose?” Hugh asked her.
“None, at the time,” said she. “But I have been pondering the matter ever since, and refining my ideas, and have arrived at last, I think, at a proposition which may have some merit. Shall I tell you? I should propose to call our kind Homo contumax; that is, the earthling which seeks to overthrow natural law; to overthrow the processes of all creation, of all the universe; to fight its forces; to thwart nature, to master it; and thus, to change and improve upon it.”
“Mm . . . There is a bold claim to make for our kind. But let us argue a little, to test the fitness of this idea. It seems to me that other species have changed this earth, and the conditions upon it, far more profoundly than humankind has ever yet done—and that without any design to do so; quite without intent. Consider, pray, all those earliest organic forms—the corals, crinoids, conchs, crustaceans—which first drew the dissolved calcium from the primordial waters, and concentrated it to form their own bodies; those bodies, those carapaces and shells in their countless multitudes, over countless millennia, have drawn calcium from the waters—thus changing the very chemistry of the oceans—and have compiled it, gathered it, collected it, as a solid instead. The remains of these calcareous-bodied creatures drifted down, down, layer upon layer—upon countless layers—to be compacted, during countless ages, to form stone: limestone—chalk, clunch, ordinary limestone of every kind, and marble—now so common upon and within the crust of our earth . . . Or, if you prefer, let us consider the colossal vegetal exuberance—gigantic ferns, immense palms, and other forms of which we have no memorial—which evidently once covered all the lands, wet and dry, torrid at every latitude from pole to pole; a vegetation which drew into itself during long ages vast quantities of carbonic acid gases from the atmosphere—as the atmosphere was then composed—and which, during millennia of decay and compression, have since been transmuted to coal beds—so that by now, still sequestering in their fossil remains those enormous quantities of carbonic acid gases, they have rendered the earth’s atmosphere—the air that we now breathe—fit to breathe. No, my dear, it will not be easy to convince me that humankind has, or will ever have, sufficient power to wreak any changes upon the natural world on a scale comparable to those previously wrought, entirely without purpose or intent, by shellfish—and by plants! By the lordly ranks of shellfish and plants!”
“Well,” said Constantia, when at last she had an opening, “I see that you, sir, are what Lady Janet would call a Rank Materialist. You are immune to my poesy; deaf to my lyrics; determined to examine ponderous facts, and not to be borne airily aloft by any buoyant theories. Of course you are quite right. And yet! And yet! We are the ones, you must admit, who would reverse the spinning of the galaxies. We would bring it all to a shuddering stand-still . . . and then, slowly, slowly, reverse it in its courses. We would change nature; would remould the universe and everything in it according to our own ideas of how it ought to be. We would recreate it as Just. We—our kind, Homo displiceo, the dissatisfied earthling—would create a universe in which individuals are important; where each one actually matters.”
“Oh! Yet among pigeonkind, as well as humankind, you know, individuals do matter. Even pigeons choose a particular, an individual mate, and remain more or less faithful, as long as they both do live.”
“You are exceedingly squashing,” said Constan
tia. Still, privately, she continued to ponder and cherish her idea, for she could not think of a better.
Some days later, while he was splitting a plank into battens for his packing cases, Hugh suddenly looked up and said, “Homo ruptor. We break things.”
“But that is the same thing,” said Constantia, “as what I said. It is reversing the courses of nature, don’t you see? Undoing what has been done. Unwinding what has been wound. Putting asunder what has been joined together. Homo domitor.”
What of the pigeon that did not arrive at Coquet Isle, the last pigeon Constantia had flown from Edinburgh? Was it killed by a goshawk? What of the fragile slip of paper tied to the pigeon’s leg? Was it torn, bloodied, and discarded by the hawk? Was it dropped unregarded to the ground; rain-wetted, ink-run; salvaged by a mouse for its nest; shredded; eaten; and—as mouse-dung—disintegrated to dirt?
Or was the pigeon perhaps daunted instead by the wind, and the expanse of the sea? Did it abandon its journey and form an attachment to an unmated male dwelling in a chalky cliff near Siccar Point? Did the new-mated pair build their nest and successfully raise offspring? Was the message tied around its leg soon lost in the wind? Did the ribbon which tied it eventually rot and fall away?
This is not known. No record has been found. No fossil has been found. Many facts are lost beyond finding—but they remain facts nonetheless; facts known to no one.
Oh, that stout oak bed! The nights now, at midwinter, were long, very long, and, while Livia slept, this bed was Hugh and Constantia’s haven, their paradise, their refuge; the private theatre of their ardent joy.
To her own surprise, Constantia savored—far more now than when she had first been married—an increasing carnal appetite. The long nights were not long enough; and sometimes, as she worked at Hugh’s side during the day, a sudden flush of desire for him would be sparked by the sight, perhaps, of the play of muscle in his forearms below his rolled-up shirtsleeves. And this imperative appetite, Constantia now knew, was just what had always—always!—moved her mother, that beautiful amorous mother (who, unlike Constantia and Hugh, had never been properly married at all, though she hadn’t known it). Indeed, it was just this abandon which had finally proven fatal to her mother. Now that Constantia herself enjoyed the same peremptory hunger, she knew she would eventually have to forgive her mother everything; forgive even her dying, that final abandonment.
Who claws at the earth as the quarryman does? Defaces and mauls its pages as the quarryman does? What tremendous fossils have quarrymen not cut to pieces—smashed to shards—used as ballast or roadbed—or thrown away as useless rubble, all these centuries? As the puppy chews the book?
What is revealed? What remains concealed? What is destroyed, irrevocably? All depends upon how the matrix is sliced; how it is teased apart.
Constantia helped to crate up the stones—the Useless Rubble—that Hugh had so painstakingly extracted from the gryke at the north end of the island. Embedded still in its ancient limestone matrix, broken but complete, was a petrified creature some five or six feet across. In the belly of this beast were the most astonishing things of all.
On a moonless night just after the New Year, 1846, a French lugger drew in by prearranged signal to the Coquet Isle landing, where Hugh’s derrick and crated cargo waited, ready. It took all night to load and secure this heavy cargo. The lugger—with three Stevensons aboard—did not get under sail again until shortly before daybreak. For some time Hugh and Constantia, looking aft, could make out Mr and Mrs Darling still waving their last farewells, smaller and smaller upon their diminishing white isle astern. Then, just as a brilliant scarlet crust of sun pushed upward, emerging from the pewter sea ahead, Constantia looked back in time to see the Coquet light extinguished. Extinct.
The heavily-laden lugger sailed rather deep and sluggish, a cause of some consternation to her captain, a M. St Clair of Le Havre, particularly as the barometer was falling rapidly. Across a fresh northeast wind they sailed southward, into a cliff of dark cloud.
15
RAIN SOON ENVELOPED the French lugger, and for four days and three nights she beat doggedly into it. On the evening of the fourth day, by providential design, or good luck, or superior seamanship—or all three—her captain got her into Le Havre on the last possible moment of slack tide before the ebb. By that time, Constantia’s fingertips were wrinkled with the constant wet; and so, she saw, were Livia’s. And still the rain lashed down, so that Constantia was immensely grateful when Hugh proposed an overnight halt at Havre. Captain St Clair readily agreed, for his house and family were here, and he invited the Stevensons—mère, père, et enfant—to come eat, sleep, and dry themselves at his house. But when Constantia learned that his wife had been unwell for some while, she insisted upon going instead to the principal inn of the port.
They arrived just too late for the table d’hôte dinner, but in good time for the ceremonial cutting of the galette des rois, for the date was the 6th of January: La Fête des Rois, the feast of the three kings. Constantia nibbled dutifully at her slice of galette until another guest—a pretty young bride—let out a whoop of triumph, having bitten down upon the fève, and was duly crowned queen. Thus relieved of obligation, Constantia relished the remainder of the almond cake; then, leaving Hugh to disparage the disgusting weather with the other men, she carried Livia upstairs. Their bedchamber at the back of the inn overlooked only a small yard, and was quiet. A fire burned in the grate, and a basin and jug of fresh water stood on a washstand. She undressed Livia and sponged away the salt of the past three days; then rinsed her own hair, too. Then, dragging the washstand near the fire, she draped all their clothing over it. Steam rose; and she and Livia fell asleep to the homely smell of drying wool; and to the rattle of rain still pelting the window panes. Hugh slid into bed beside her sometime during the night.
Rain was still falling steadily next morning when they re-embarked for Rouen, just behind the rising tide. The mascaret between Havre and Rouen, like the tidal bore at Calcutta, was not to be trifled with. It could and often did capsize small craft, and tore larger ones from their moorings; and in ascending the river, its effects were more pronounced—as the channel became narrower and shallower—all the way up to Rouen. Captain St Clair timed their departure so as to ride along just behind this rising tide, borne easily upstream upon its surge. At first the river resembled a broad estuary, its banks some three miles apart—until suddenly at Quillebeuf it narrowed to less than a mile.
As the morning wore on, the rain became intermittent, sometimes relenting for entire quarters of an hour at a time. When visible, the river banks here were delightfully picturesque. But alas, the castles, hills, trees, villages, and miles of chalk cliffs under which they passed had mostly to be taken upon faith, for they were so heavily shrouded in clouds, rain, fogs, and mists that Constantia felt herself transported back to the Meghalaya of her childhood: the Abode of Clouds and Mists.
Was there ever so leisurely and meandering a river as the lower Seine? On a bulkhead in the cabin was tacked a chart showing its course—which resembled nothing so much as cranial sutures, the seams where the plates of a skull knit themselves together. Dozing the afternoon away, Livia at her breast, Constantia relinquished first her sense of direction, losing track of the points of the compass—for on so winding a river, the sun and the wind might come from any direction, at any time; only the current held steady; and not so very steady at that. Then she relinquished her convulsive grip on place, and time. What river do we ascend? Is this the Hooghly? Brahmaputra? Ganges? Perhaps this is the Goomtee, at Lucknow?
She awakened unmoored, adrift—but Livia slept within the parenthesis of her arm. A porthole opposite her berth showed sky, clear and blue; showed white cliffs and the hanging woods of the river banks, fresh-washed. Is this still Tuesday? or perhaps it may be Wednesday? Is it early morning, or late afternoon?
Hugh appeared suddenly, filling the hatchway, eager, red-nosed. It was still the afternoon of the 7th of Janua
ry; and the place was Duclair, a village of no importance a few miles below Rouen. “Have I awakened you?” he said. “I am sorry. I have just been ashore to make some inquiries, and I have a proposal to lay before you. My dear, I should not like you to feel deserted in the least, and you’ve only to say a word and I shall gladly relinquish my plan. But if you are willing to dispense with me for a few hours—well, perhaps even overnight—I should like very much to make a quick jaunt up to Barentin to see the works going forward there. Barentin? Just five or six miles up the Austreberthe, the stream which empties itself here into the Seine, you see. And then I shall rejoin you at Rouen, if not tonight, then before breakfast tomorrow morning, at latest. The road is not too bad, and I’ve arranged for a post-chaise.”
“A post-chaise . . . Has it a hood? We could go with you then, Livia and I,” said Constantia—though, as she spoke, she feared to see his face fall at her proposal.
Instead, he brightened, saying, “I should like it above anything!—unless it may be too cold for our wee lass?”
“This, cold? No, my dear; I assure you this is quite nearly warm, compared to our journey to join you on Coquet Isle. Look, even the rain has stopped—for now.” So they all three set off by post-chaise, Hugh having arranged with Captain St Clair to rejoin the vessel and its cargo up at Rouen.
“Here, as anyone may see, is the turning to the quarry—my quarry,” said Hugh, where the road—pretty fair thus far despite the wet weather—suddenly became a morass of muddy ruts and mire. “And still in heavy use, it would seem. Do you mind, my dear, if we turn in here for just a few moments? It is not far to the work-face.”
Constantia had no objection; indeed, she was interested in seeing this quarry where Hugh had formerly been the master—until that hot disagreement with Mackenzie, his one-time employer.
