The Great Unknown

by Peg Kingman

  “They don’t, of course,” said Miss Grant. “They swallow sharp bits of gravel, which remains in their crops to break up their food before it passes into their stomachs.”

  “Aha! . . . and hence, these pebbles,” said Miss Buckley.

  “I daresay you may be right, Harriet,” said Miss Grant seriously. “These pebbles may be gastroliths, though I have never heard it proposed before this. And there, resting within the pelvis, a—well, what is that, then?” Removing her tinted spectacles, Miss Grant bent to look more closely.

  “Another creature, a small huddled-up skeleton, quite complete, long-necked—”

  “Very long of neck. And so tidily curled up, as though for a nap.”

  “Is it undigested prey?” suggested Miss Buckley. “Might the plesiosaur have swallowed this smaller creature entire—and then met its own end, while its last meal remained undigested?”

  “But here, up here, are the stomach contents: all hashed up, mere fragments, those pterodactyl bones, and mixed in with these rounded pebbles. They are higher in the pelvis, not lower. The intact creature is lower in the pelvis.”

  “Why is it intact? How could it have been swallowed whole?”

  “Perhaps the intact creature lies under the plesiosaur—not within its pelvis, but beneath it?”

  “No, look. It huddles within the bones of the pelvis—within the pelvic cradle. That is undoubtedly the case.”

  To Constantia, the curled intact creature resembled those embryonic ducklings—unhatched, but fully formed, even faintly feathered—which in China are cooked in the shell and eaten, savoured as delicacies.

  “What will you think when I tell you that the small creature, too, has forty cervical vertebrae?” said Hugh.

  “Has it indeed?”

  “It is an unborn plesiosaur, to be sure,” said Miss Buckley.

  “There is no sign of a shell in development,” said Miss Grant.

  “Nothing like a shell,” agreed Miss Buckley.

  “Did they not lay eggs, then, these plesiosaurs?” said Miss Grant.

  “Unknown—until now,” said Hugh. “This fossil is proof that they brought forth their young alive.”

  “Proof!”

  “Evidence, at the very least,” he said. “Convincing evidence.”

  Said Miss Buckley, “There is only the one embryo—not a clutch of them, not a litter of them. But only the one—and rather larger than might have been expected. To be brought forth shell-less; alive. I confess I feel differently about the creature now—now that it more nearly resembles a mammifer—resembles our own kind!—in this respect. Oh; Livia has succeeded in shedding a mitten after all—but only one of them. Here it is.”

  “How utterly remarkable this is, Mr Stevenson.”

  “Stunning.”

  “I should think it ought to prove of inestimable value to the Muséum.”

  Mme Mouchy appeared at the door, carrying the tea-tray. Constantia, holding Livia on her hip, hastened to clear a space for it on a tool-shelf at the front of the shed. The landlady did not turn around until she had safely deposited the tray; and then she started, or pretended to, at the sight of the fossil bones disposed across the worktable. “Oh! Mais c’est laide, ça!” she exclaimed, laying dimpled hand to fat bosom. “Frightening! Who wishes to carve such a monster as that? What a pity, to lavish skill and patience upon making so ugly, so monstrous a carving as this! A great waste of time and effort, Mme Stevenson, when something beautiful might have been made, just as easily.” And, grimacing her disapproval, out she went.

  What was the value of this discovery? Having undertaken to investigate this question, Miss Grant and Miss Buckley invited the Stevensons one evening, a week later, to their private sitting room to hear their findings.

  “Feckless stuff,” said Miss Buckley as she poured out a cup of Mme Mouchy’s pale after-dinner tea for Constantia, and another for Hugh. “She imagines that we do not know.”

  “It is provoking,” agreed Constantia, moving her cup out of Livia’s eager reach, “but then, French coffee is only too feckful.”

  “Shall we commence?” said Miss Grant, consulting her notes. “Yes. We have directed our attention to the past twenty-five years, and although a great many transactions must have been concluded between individuals in private, we did succeed in finding several public reports of the sales of certain important fossils, beginning with the year 1820, when an ichthyosaur, one of the very earliest to be found, fetched a hundred pounds at an auction organised by Colonel Birch at Bullock’s Museum.”

  “That will have been the benefit auction, however,” said Miss Buckley.

  “Yes, it was,” said Miss Grant, and explained: “Colonel Birch organised that auction to sell his own collection—much of which he had bought originally from the Annings, frère et soeur—as a benefit for them when they had fallen on very hard times.”

  “And one ought to consider,” said Miss Buckley, “that prices realised at charity auctions do not always indicate the true state of the market. Prices may be somewhat—inflamed, let us say—by a rare uncontrolled spasm of generosity on the part of bidders—in the public view!—for a good cause.”

  “So cynical, my dear Harriet!” said Miss Grant. “But never mind; let us go on. The next figure I have to report is from 1830, when Miss Anning sold her famous plesiosaur to Lord Cole, the Irish MP, for, let me see . . . two hundred guineas.”

  “Two hundred ten pounds,” said Hugh. “That was a very important plesiosaur, as I believe. The first Plesiosaurus macrocephalus.”

  “So it was,” said Miss Grant. “Does anything remain in that teapot, Harriet?”

  “The merest drop,” said Miss Buckley, demonstrating over Miss Grant’s cup. “But I have already rung for more.”

  “Then, in 1834,” continued Miss Grant, “we know of the British Museum’s acquisition of Mr Thomas Hawkins’s entire collection—twenty tons, or so, of saurian fossils—for the sum of twelve hundred fifty pounds.”

  “Now, there is a figure to chime sweetly in one’s ears!” said Hugh.

  “I daresay it did not chime quite so sweetly in Mr Hawkins’s, however; for he had at first asked four thousand pounds for them; but agreed that they should be valued by two experts. And the experts—Dr Buckland and Dr Mantell—independently of one another, both arrived at a figure of twelve hundred fifty pounds.”

  “Independently! Give me leave to doubt that,” said Hugh.

  “Even so, when the museum’s curator finally got a look at the fossils, he cried foul, upon discovering how much of the collection was made up of imaginative plaster ‘restorations,’ not actual fossil bones,” said Miss Buckley.

  “Oh, but that came to nothing,” said Miss Grant. “Mr Hawkins had never made any secret about it, and Dr Buckland assured the trustees that his valuation had accounted for the plaster reconstructions. No, it was money well spent, that twelve hundred fifty pounds.”

  The maid entered, bearing a kettle of steaming water. “That will never do,” said Miss Buckley to her. “These leaves have given their utmost; it would be injustice to ask any further effort—or effect—from them. We don’t want hot water; you may tell Mme Mouchy that we want tea itself, a fresh pot of it. I beg your pardon, Julia; do go on.”

  “But by 1835, it seems, the general depression was weighing upon the market for fossils, too. In that year, Miss Anning parted with a perfect ichthyosaur, four feet and a half in length, to Dr Adam Sedgwick for a mere fifty pounds.”

  “Oh, Dr Sedgwick!” exclaimed Constantia. “I cannot help but dislike even the arrogant and sarcastic sound of his name; and I daresay that poor Miss Anning’s fossil must have been worth considerably more.”

  “I had no idea that you had so little opinion of Dr Sedgwick! Do you know him?” asked Miss Buckley.

  “Oh—no; but I have reason to believe that he has treated a friend of mine—an acquaintance—ungenerously, and unjustly,” explained Constantia, in some confusion.

  “And, most rec
ently of all,” continued Miss Grant, “we have seen a price list of Miss Anning’s from just two years ago—1844—when she was offering an excellent ichthyosaur, six feet in length, in a matrix of black clay, for fifteen pounds. For all I know, it may still be on her hands.”

  “Unsold, at fifteen pounds!” said Hugh. “That is discouraging.”

  It was Mme Mouchy herself who brought in another pot of tea. Miss Buckley promptly poured an inch of this fresh tea into her cup. The tea was nearly colourless; a pale watery tan. “Regardez, madame, s’il vous plaît,” said Miss Buckley, indicating the sorry stuff to the landlady.

  Mme Mouchy retorted, “Tiens, mademoiselle must exercise patience a little, and allow the pot to steep some moments longer. Voyons, there is an abundance of tea leaves in the pot, leaves of excellent quality.” She lifted the lid of the pot to show that it was indeed swimming in leaves; choked by leaves. “It is the most choice of teas, un thé du soir, a tea most raffiné, a tea which can be appreciated only by those of the most advanced taste, not a coarse brackish tea such as satisfies the low tastes of the English shopkeepers, no indeed! But a tea for cultivated persons. However, if mademoiselle is unable to appreciate . . .”

  Here Mme Mouchy swooped, as if to remove the teapot—but Miss Grant intervened, saying, “You may leave it with us, madame. Yes, thank you. Good evening!” she added, and closed the door firmly behind the landlady. “You know very well it is no use arguing with her, Harriet,” she added, returning.

  English guests were not particularly welcome in some boarding-houses, because they drank tea, expensive tea, in such ruinous quantities. But thrifty Mme Mouchy had overcome this difficulty with a little stratagem of her own. Each morning after breakfast, she removed from the sideboard her large square gilded white porcelain teapot—drained now of tea—and carried it downstairs in her own hands to the kitchen. There she would shake out the spent leaves carefully onto a pan, spread them, and place them into the oven to dry. She had learned even to toast them judiciously, for better colour. These toasted leaves then performed again that same evening, in the silver-plated after-dinner teapot. Her cook was in on the secret, but Mme Mouchy imagined that her guests had no inkling; supposed that they, being English, were devoid of palate. In fact, they knew very well; it was notorious that tea taken after dinner chez Mme Mouchy had no power to revive. Those who looked forward to a good night’s sleep partook safely of Madame’s thé du soir; but those who wanted stimulation—for study, for conviviality, for amour—knew to take their after-dinner tea elsewhere, or ask for coffee instead.

  “It amuses me, though, to provoke her,” said Miss Buckley.

  “The fact is, you are insulted by her supposition that we are too stupid to detect her fraud. And, worse still, you don’t like to be referred to as ‘mademoiselle’ in that particular way of hers,” said Miss Grant. “Do you imagine that she will change?”

  “Certainly not; no one ever does. Humankind may change, may indeed progress! But individuals cannot,” said Miss Buckley. “That is why we all must die: to make way for the new and improved individuals who are coming along behind us—such as our splendid Livia; such promise! Now, Julia, you may quarrel with me later if you like, in private; but let us not quarrel before friends. I shall now change the subject. Mr Stevenson, you must insist, as a condition of the sale to Professor de Blainville, upon its being called ‘the Stevenson plesiosaur,’ not ‘the de Blainville plesiosaur’! It is inexpressibly provoking to hear those exquisite marbles removed from the Parthenon referred to as ‘the Elgin marbles’—as though that plunderer Lord Elgin had brought them into existence!”

  “But despite what Mme Mouchy may suppose, we did not make this plesiosaur, Miss Buckley; we only found it. We can take no more credit for its existence than Lord Elgin can take for the existence of ‘his’ marbles.”

  “No, but it was you who found it, and unearthed it, where no one else had; and it is high time that the humble finders of fossils—miners, quarrymen, ditchdiggers, farmers—received due credit for what they unearth. It can only be a careless, presumptuous, contemptuous disregard for an undistinguished female which prevents the savants from openly and publicly naming Miss Anning as the finder of so many of the most astonishing fossils of the last thirty years.”

  “May it not be a respectful reticence? A tender regard for the delicate sensibilities of the fair sex?” suggested Constantia. “What respectable woman likes for her name to be bandied about in public?”

  “Let us dismiss such misplaced modesty as that! I am not so foolishly modest!” said Miss Buckley.

  “No, indeed, Harriet; no one would accuse you of modesty. But others may differ,” said Miss Grant. “It is conceivable, at least, that the savants respectfully assume—”

  “Or pretend to assume—” interrupted Miss Buckley.

  “ . . . that Miss Anning is sufficiently modest to shun notoriety!” finished Miss Grant loudly.

  “Or they wish to imply that she ought to be!” declared Miss Buckley, more loudly still. “But you, Mr Stevenson, need not conceal your name.”

  “Not while I remain in France, at any rate.”

  Constantia let herself spend a day in pleasant dreams of riches, successes, good fortune. She dreamt not a castle in the air, but quite the opposite: a pit in the earth. Oh, that quarry in the Cévennes! If ever a capital sum were to fall into their hands, she and Hugh would not hesitate for an instant; they would buy that quarry. Hugh often lay awake nights, thinking, calculating, planning how best to work it, if it were his. And why? Because (he had explained to Constantia) every printer and publisher in Europe and America was laying out substantial sums for lithographic stone: those slabs of exquisitely fine-grained limestone on which illustrations were drawn and inked, for printing. It was true that the slabs could be re-used many times (by grinding and sanding, to erase previous images, thus preparing the stone to receive new ones)—but still the world’s appetite for printed images, and for the stone from which to print them, continued to grow, insatiable.

  At present, every block of this prodigiously fine limestone originated from the quarries of Solnhofen, in Bavaria. The supply was small; the demand was vast and still increasing; the owners of those Bavarian quarries had become very rich indeed. French self-regard demanded a similar resource within its own borders. Hugh, after quitting the employ of Brassey & Mackenzie, had gone out to investigate quarries throughout France. He had identified one particular pit in the southern mountains—now little-worked, because the two elderly brothers who owned it were in failing health—as holding extraordinary promise. He was certain that this particular Cévennes quarry could, under careful working, produce satiny, lithographic-quality limestone. The two elderly brothers were willing to part with their holdings for a sum which did not seem impossible; and had executed an agreement to sell the quarry to no one but him, if he could raise sufficient capital to exercise his option by the end of the year. This year: 1846.

  The Useless Rubble—now the Precious Trove—was moved once more: packed, laden onto a carrier’s wagon, and hauled to the Muséum—to Miss Grant and Miss Buckley’s well-lit workroom; there to be laid out to best advantage, and offered for sale to the holder of the Muséum’s chair of comparative anatomy, Professor Henri-Marie Ducrotay de Blainville.

  But from Hugh’s manner of coming in, on the evening after his meeting with Professor de Blainville, Constantia perceived immediately that their hopes were to be dashed.

  “He is not eager to buy,” said Hugh, throwing himself into the only chair.

  “He hopes to induce you to part with it for less than it is worth,” said Constantia.

  “He says it is of very little value.”

  “What preposterous nonsense!”

  “He declares that the market has been sinking for several years now—but the truth is that the funds for acquisitions have been sadly depleted by his recent frenzied purchases of mastodons and mammoths from the Americas. Mastodons, I tell you! And mammoths!”
/>
  “Does he make any offer at all? Does he name a sum?”

  “He . . . suggests that I might like to donate our trove to the Muséum, for the benefit of science.”

  “Donate! How dare he? You to donate these hard-won fruits of your own labour, your own enterprise? A year of your own labour, and the expenses you have incurred—not to mention the risks you have run! Does he forget that some unfortunates among us must work for our bread? Were we all of us born with silver spoons to our mouths? What can he imagine, this Henri-Marie Ducrotay de Blainville? He mistakes you, perhaps, for Sir Hugh DuStevenson de Coquet?”

  By morning, Constantia’s indignation had spawned a practical suggestion. “Supposing we were to publish its description ourselves?” she said, as soon as Hugh stirred beside her in their bed. “In time for the conference? Meticulously described, exquisitely illustrated—and offered for sale. There it is already, in Miss Grant and Miss Buckley’s workroom, under their very camera. No one could engrave more exquisite plates of it than Miss Buckley. And you must write its description.”

  “Me? I am no one. No one at all. A stone-mason.”

  “And William Smith—‘Strata’ Smith, I mean—was only a surveyor; but his geological maps of England have won the highest esteem. Deservedly.”

  “Oh, esteem, aye! So highly esteemed was his map that a pack of unscrupulous printers instantly copied it, and republished it, without paying him a penny! Esteem for his map did not save him from debtor’s prison. What use is posthumous acclaim?”

  Presently, Constantia said, “Supposing it were published anonymously?”

  “Oh, well . . . Anonymously.”

  “A newly-unearthed fossil of surpassing interest—text and plates of the highest caliber—the seller anonymous—all inquiries to be directed to you. I daresay the savants, when they gather here next month, would find it irresistible.”

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