But time passed. Weeks turned into months and, as the attention lessened, I did what had to be done with little or no expectation placed on me by others, beyond the pressure from Mother to make money. I found nothing worth more than a few pennies, but some people still made a point of visiting and we sold enough to keep the wolf from the door. Elizabeth and I must have found a thousand ammonites between us. They always sold well.
Elizabeth was my saviour, for together we passed our days searching and our evenings reading and talking about science and our discoveries. Henry’s letters were few and far between and his mother was more often in London than Lyme, so the bonds of that friendship of which he claimed to be so fond seemed to be fraying to nothing. It was to be expected, I supposed. Hadn’t Father warned me that people change and loyalties are forgotten or betrayed?
Elizabeth and I worked well together, for her passion was more for fish preserved for ever in their slate graves, like silvery ghosts, so she was happy to yield other finds to me. Her own collection grew apace. The one cabinet in her library on Silver Street became three, then five, and then the whole house was quite taken up with her collection. Visitors ogled and marvelled at her specimens and then she sent them down to my table on the beach and they spent their money on shells and snakestones and the like. Oh, I knew what those things were, the ancient oysters and cuttlefish with their fancy Latin names, but I was resigned to the fact that Devil’s toenails and ladies’ fingers and thunderbolts made a better story for fancy folk and Mother and I could spin a spine-chilling yarn when it suited.
Sometimes I would find myself questioned by gentlemen who, like Buckland, had a scientific interest in my finds. Elizabeth told me they admired me greatly, but it seemed to me they were like the seagulls, happy to steal a meal that someone else had caught, for they asked their questions and gleaned my knowledge with no genuine regard for my ideas or labours or any thought to reward these in the only way that made any real difference to me – coin. ‘Fine words butter no parsnips,’ as Mother often said. ‘Talk is cheap,’ she might have added, for talk was all they offered me, unlike Elizabeth who gained her reward from her pleasure in sharing her knowledge with me.
On fine, dry days, I would get up before the break of dawn and walk along the beach, while all was quiet and still and free from visitors and fancy folk and all the Marys in my head would be at peace, particularly if there had been a storm the night before. A storm throws everything about so, yet when it has passed, there is a stillness like no other, a freshness as if all has been washed clean and laid out anew.
It was not long after my sixteenth birthday that I came across a poor drowned woman, delivered up by the tide, lying in the shallows. She was quite the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. I crouched by her side and gazed on her for many minutes. Her skin glowed white as the moon. The sea had dressed her in sea lettuce and bound her hair with bladderwrack so that she seemed half-sea creature, half-human. I felt a great wave of sadness wash over me that such a beauty, such a treasure, should now be doomed to decay. No slate bed for her. No transformation into rock. No volcano to lift her up and entomb her in the pages of the Earth’s history book.
How little time we have.
I gently pulled the seaweed from her hair and closed her blue unseeing eyes and laid her out as best I could.
I paid men to come and place her body in the church, in hope that someone might claim her but no one did. For four days, I took lavender and sweet peas from Mrs Stock’s garden to strew around her corpse. I did not know then why I felt compelled to do so and I do not now, but she occupied my thoughts to the exclusion of all else until they laid her in the ground.
Then her true identity was discovered. Her name was Lady Jackson. She was a mother and a wife. She perished with all her children when their ship was lost off Portland. All that way from India, to be drowned a mile from home. Wiped from the Earth as if she had never existed. How utterly without purpose.
I thought of her beautiful face, frozen like marble, wrapped in seaweed. I thought of Henry and his stories of sharks and hungry sailors and of his mother in her black gown and of Mother with that bundle, the scrap that was barely there, and I looked down at the ammonite on its leather necklace, hanging near my heart, and I cried and cried for Father and all that was lost for evermore and then I dried my eyes and went back to work.
‘We were worried about you,’ Elizabeth said, as we set off towards Monmouth beach one morning, shortly after the funeral.
‘Nothing ever came of worrying,’ I replied.
‘That poor woman and her poor children. You showed her great kindness, Mary, but I worry at what cost?’
‘Cost me next to nothing,’ I said, not wishing to be drawn on the subject.
Elizabeth knew better than to speak to me of such things but she continued, nonetheless. ‘I did not mean money, Mary. There are costs to our person in pain and suffering, as well you know. I wondered if you felt as I did, that our lives could end at any moment? You have already had so much to bear, and now this! Our time here is precious and you are young, Mary. You have your whole life ahead of you.’
‘I do indeed, as do you,’ I replied, feeling a tightness in my chest as I spoke. ‘We all have our lives ahead of us ’til we be dead and, as you say, we could be dead tomorrow, so being young is neither here nor there.’
I started digging with great vigour, hoping she would stop with this talk which made me want to stop up my ears and scream.
‘But you do have your whole life ahead of you, Mary. Do you consider what might be done with it? What contribution you might make? Do you not consider that?’
‘I do not. The days dawn. I fill them with searching or selling. They are either good days or bad days. Nothing I think, say or do will make them any different. Such is my lot. The life before me is the same as the life behind me, save I am older, another step nearer my Maker.’
I hoped this would end her prying, but something of what she said had got into my head like grit in an oyster shell. Was this really my lot? Was this why I had been spared death by the lightning’s strike? Was I part of God’s plan and if so, why did He torment me so by showing me things which made me question everything and doubt everything?
Sometimes it felt to me as if God were like the sea: cruel, changeable, heartless, creating and destroying; and yet these thoughts could only be the Devil’s work, surely?
Faith and science. Science and faith. They seemed at war in the world and in my head.
For the next few days I worked alone and I was glad of it, for my mind was in a turmoil. Elizabeth had gone to Oxford to take William Buckland a very fine ammonite specimen (that I had found and cleaned) and to attend a talk he was giving at his college. For all I valued my solitude, I envied her this time spent with people of high intellect, people who knew things and took pleasure in knowledge for its own sake, with no need to turn it into money, people who were, seemingly, untroubled by the torment of doubt. Maybe the company of such people would have taught me to better express myself, for I had ideas aplenty in my head, all the time. As it was, I lacked the skill or the practice to give voice to them out loud and something brusque or cross-sounding usually came out, unless I was speaking with Elizabeth. My letters to Henry, infrequent as they were, could not help me untangle all the thoughts that buzzed about in my head.
I returned to The Spittles, the scene of my so-called triumph four years before, in search not of a monster but some quiet in which to organise my mind. The sky was a mass of deep blue grey clouds above me, heavy with rain; but away over towards Golden Cap the sun shone and the grass was as bright green as a new beech leaf.
Was that my lot? To work under a cloud with the sun and the green fields for ever at a distance, out of reach? To be an object of curiosity? The child-woman who found what... one of God’s mistakes? What if that discovery were never to be repeated? What if that Fish Lizard was the only monster to be buried in the cliffs?
All my instincts told me that it was not so. All my studies, my discussions with Elizabeth, told me it was not so and yet to prove it so would take all my strength, all my youth and for what? So others might claim the glory?
There was a break in the cloud and all of a sudden I had that feeling in my bones again, a feeling that there might be something about to happen, something that might bring change. I felt my father’s eye upon me and looked around as if to find him there.
Nothing.
Then I heard footsteps in the distance and the quick, shallow panting of a dog. I stood up to see who was coming to disturb my work and my thoughts.
A tallish man, not old, fair-haired and with a spaniel at his side on a leash – a puppy by the looks of it, as it pulled and wandered and wiggled along in an unruly fashion.
I felt irritation rising up inside me. This was my beach. My escape. It was not to be invaded by careless walkers of even more careless dogs.
‘Mary! Do you not know your old friend and collaborator?’ the figure called out.
The voice was deeper but unmistakably his. Henry!
He reached me, a broad grin spread across his face which was browned by the sun. He made as if to embrace me, but I stepped backwards just in time. I felt myself in danger of being overwhelmed by unwanted feelings of joy, elation, fury and disbelief.
I took a deep breath. ‘So. You’re back then,’ I said, while the puppy sniffed my skirts and wagged its feather tail so hard it was like to knock us all over.
‘I am. All too briefly, I am afraid.’
He tried to hold my gaze but I refused to return it and looked out to sea.
‘On leave, I suppose.’
‘No! Lord, no! Thrown out!’ He changed his tone and began to speak in a loud, deep pompous voice such as I have heard many a time amongst the bigwigs. ‘ “Young man! You are an ill-disciplined fellow and this regiment has no use for you. We can do no more with you. Your career is at an end forthwith!” Music to my ears, Mary! Music to my ears! So no more falling off Troy for me! No more parades and drills and all that nonsense! Besides, the war with Boney is over and they have no need of me! Bonaparte is defeated and I am free! Like you! And like you, I am going to follow my dream!’
I could not help my bitter laugh. My dream! What did he know of my dream? Dreaming is for fools and for those who are asleep, but I bit my tongue and said nothing.
‘I have a plan to join the Geological Society of London at the first opportunity!’ he continued. ‘And I am going to propose that you join it too! It is quite new and forward-thinking. We can achieve so much, Mary, and you deserve to be a part of it. You are already famous. Buckland – you have met him, I know – speaks of you often and has the greatest respect for you and I bask in your reflected glory, for I can say that I was not only taught by Mistress Anning herself, but I am also one of her very oldest friends!’
Reflected glory indeed! Henry was as he ever was, a puppy eager to be petted as was the puppy at my feet, squeaking and wriggling and beating its tail fit to burst. Yet, deep down, I was pleased to see him, even though he had such foolish notions of my fame.
I responded part in jest, but part in bitter regret. ‘Join your society? Piffle! I am as like to inherit a fortune and be dubbed a lady. And as for glory, it’s a fantasy of your own making!’
Henry looked disquieted for a moment. ‘But you are consulted, I know! And your ichthyosaur is still quite the talk of London—’
‘Only Joseph found it,’ I interrupted.
‘The skull, yes, but you and I and Buckland know who must take the credit for the entire find.’
‘That’s as may be, but I have no foolish notions,’ I continued, for the unfairness of it all was once again foremost in my mind. ‘These bigwig know-it-alls come down from London and Oxford and Cambridge and pick my brains clean as a fish bone all right, but do not deceive yourself that they will admit me to their company for I know they will not. You are older than me, Henry De la Beche, and have more learning than I shall ever have, but for all that you are ignorant of the world and a dreamer of dreams which, for such as I, will never come true. Now, are you going to help or take that puppy home to your mother?’
‘Same old plain-speaking Mary!’ Henry replied, his face serious and earnest. ‘Well, I acknowledge your superior wisdom. It has always been my belief that you are wise beyond your years and mine; but you must trust your old friend to fight your corner, for I will see justice done, mark my words! You are truly a scientist for what you do, not for what people may call you. You must believe that and believe in yourself as I believe in you. And as for this puppy... why, he is yours. A companion for you!’
He stared at me intently, as if willing me to be as excited as he. I felt vexation starting up in my veins. What use did I have for a dog, especially a fancy, curly-coated spaniel better suited to a hunting man with a servant to keep its feathery legs snowy white? Another mouth to feed. A creature needing my care. The puppy looked at me with its huge brown eyes. It wanted something from me. I had to look away.
Henry persisted. ‘I like to think he might watch out for you in case of a landslip. He’ll guard your life, be your faithful companion in my stead. He is young, yes, but very willing to learn. And he is, as yet, nameless. You can name him, Mary.’
The puppy let out another long squeak and jumped up, its paws against my knees.
‘See how he likes you! You must not worry about his keep. Cook is under orders to save scraps so that he may be fed at no expense to you,’ Henry said, putting the leash in my hand. ‘Keep him by you for my sake, Mary. Please.’
The puppy was sitting now, its soft limbs splayed out, its tail beating the sand.
‘He is a little wilful, but that shows character. You can train him, Mary. Remember how you trained me? I became useful to you, didn’t I, even though you were not inclined to like me at first!’
I said nothing. I just thought, And what if I should become fond of the creature, what then? For everything I have become fond of is taken from me eventually.
‘Well? Will you train him or must I return him in disgrace because he does not please you?’
He stretched out his hand to take back the leash, but I held onto it. Maybe I could train the spaniel. As if responding to a command, the puppy suddenly leaped up and started digging in the sand, creating a deep hole in an instant and then sitting back down again in a heap, looking to me as if asking for praise.
Henry laughed. ‘You see! He will make a fine apprentice! Now, come, shake my hand, Mary, and trust your old friend to deliver on his promise.’
He was staring at me intently again and once more I had to look away.
I suddenly remembered a question that had burned in my mind so long ago, when Father died. ‘You once did a drawing of me and called me Lightning Mary. Why did you call me that? It was only my father ever called me by that name. I suppose you believe that tale, that I was a dull creature before the lightning struck me.’
‘Nothing could be further from the truth. I called you... call you Lightning Mary because you think as fast as lightning, you split rock just as lightning does, and although you had a face like thunder most of the time, you illuminated my life like the brightest of lightning in the darkest days of my life. Lightning Mary seemed then, and still seems now, to be the right name for you. You are a rare creature, Mary. One of a kind. Extraordinary. One day everyone will know it. Of that I am sure.’
He held my hand for a few seconds more, bowed and turned to begin the long walk back to Lyme.
For a while, after he had gone, I lay on my back next to the exhausted puppy and felt its warmth as it nestled close to me. I spread my fingers out against the sand and stones, as if I were feeling for the beating of the heart of the Earth itself or the breathing of the beasts buried deep in the stone, creatures never before seen by man, creatures so old that my sixteen years were but a day to them.
They were all around me, waiting, waiting
to be found, thousands upon thousands upon thousands. Monsters and marvels and mysteries, all waiting deep in the Earth. Waiting for release. Waiting to be marvelled at by men and women and children. Waiting for their mysteries to be revealed and their stories told by the men of science.
And by me.
I thought back to Father’s words to me in the workshop. Maybe happiness was not for the likes of us, but maybe there could be contentment in our labours and in the fulfilment of our purpose on this Earth. Why else was I on God’s Earth, if not to uncover its wonders? And who else could find these treasures and set them free from their prison of rock but me, Lightning Mary?
AFTERWORD
MARY ANNING: SOME FACTS AND AUTHOR’S COMMENTS
Mary was born on 21 May 1799 and at fifteen months survived a lightning strike which killed the woman holding her and two others. Some said it transformed her from a dull child into a bright spark.
Mary grew up in a period of great change in politics, religion and society, much of it against a backdrop of war with the Emperor Napoleon as he attempted to conquer Europe before being defeated in June 1815 at the Battle of Waterloo. Her childhood also coincided with the beginning of the end of slavery. In 1807, the British Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act which banned the transportation and trade in slaves in the British Empire, but slavery itself was only fully abolished in 1833.
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