Curiosity

by Joan Thomas

Father and Mother were in the workshop when came the news of this heavenly lottery and the unfortunate mortals selected by it. On the heels of the news rode a horseman on a tall chestnut stallion, carrying my senseless body in the crook of one arm. No one could countenance it, so many of the Anning children having been seized already by an ill fate. Doctor Reeves was sent for and said I must be dipped in water. And so they rapidly undressed me, and before the congregation of them all, my naked infant body was immersed. At the touch of the water, I roused myself and then I spoke, although no one can recall my utterance on that occasion, the nineteenth day of August in the Year of Our Lord 1800. My salvation by immersion did not convert my parents to Baptists, as one might suppose. They remained members of the Independent Chapel, and credit my cleverness to the vitalizing effects of fork lightning.

  There were the accents of the high-born in that voice. It was the voice of Miss Elizabeth Philpot, Mary realized suddenly.

  But the school did not open. Mary grew like a heron that year; she was powerful thin. There was seldom meat on their table, and all the fish from the shore went into salt barrels for the navy or by stage to London, where it fetched a better price. Her mother began to fret about the colour of the bread they were eating, and went to the baker and accused him of putting gypsum in it. Percival still spit back his food and did not grow, and Molly still talked of Exeter. Then a lady’s maid from that very town stopped by the curiosity table, and when Mary overheard where she was from, she went to call her mother. Molly eagerly asked the woman what she had heard of the seventh son who worked as a healer, whether she knew the family’s name. “Higgins,” said the woman. “On Bobbin Lane. They be neighbours of my father. I know them well.” But she would not confide in Molly as to the extent of the boy’s powers. All she would say was that an older brother, the sixth son, had sickened and died that year.

  “What is a seventh son when his brother has died?” Molly cried in bed that night.

  They needed something, something to anchor them. As she lay on her pallet and listened to the waves beat against the seawall, Mary had the sense that they were on a narrow platform above it, just an inch away from being washed away, the lot of them. Her father knew it too – he was looking for the crocodile bones after all, tramping the shore every chance he had. Mr. Buckland had put a price on his enthusiasm: twenty pounds, he’d said, for the whole skeleton with all its parts. Twenty pounds! In his best week as a cabinetmaker, Richard made fourteen shillings. So now he walked the shore at low tide and high, clambering up to examine a promising layer, thrusting his shovel in every crumbling ledge. A lunatic, dangerous occupation – Mrs. Stock came by the cottage to impress this on Molly.

  Mr. Buckland had left Lyme Regis for a time, but now he was back. They would run into him on the shore and greet him and then drift apart, bent over the rocks with searching eyes. But often when Mary looked up, her father and Buckland had come together again, the wind whipping and snapping at their clothes, their heads bent close in conversation. The wind took up their voices and blew them back in snatches, mixing them with the cries of the gulls and curlews and the crash of the waves. Mary longed to listen, but if she picked up her tools and scrambled over the rocks, they’d have separated before she reached them.

  “How could a creature turn to stone?” Mary asked her father while they walked home one day. She was thinking of the mushy bodies of snails rotting in broken shells on the path.

  “Drop by drop, the flesh washes out and the stone washes in,” said her father. “So the fellow says. He shows me a verteberry and says it’s the backbone of a crocodile. Are ye telling me the curiosities be the remains of ordinary martel creatures? I says to him, and he says, I’d never dare tell ye that. A man said it once and they locked him in the Bastille and starved him to death.”

  “Why would they lock him up?”

  “It’s alchemy, ain’t it. Flesh rots, it don’t turn to stone.” The sun was high, it shone crimson through her father’s nostrils. His thin face was pale, the skin under his eyes was smudged. She thought of Mr. Buckland with his fleshy, high-spirited face. Beside Mr. Buckland, her father was a ragged sparrow.

  They angled up the foreshore to where the way was smoother, and Richard began to sing his walking song:

  Think’st thou that I have any need

  On slaughtered bulls and goats to feed,

  To eat their flesh and drink their blood?

  The sacrifices I require

  Are hearts which love and zeal inspire

  And vows with strictest care made good.

  It was his only hymn and he never sang it right through, but brought out a verse of it from time to time. Two years before, he’d been up on Church Cliffs when the land fell away under his feet. But he was not like other men – he’d ridden on top of the landslip and landed unhurt on the shore. Now he’d had a taste of death on the cliffs, the way Joseph and Mary’d had a taste of the pox, and he was safe from it.

  As Mary lay in the dark, she turned her thoughts to the seventh son in Exeter, dislodged from his place in the family by the death of another. At first, it seemed he had been chosen, as she had been. At a time when she was too young to know what she was, a lightning bolt had killed three others, but Mary Anning it had taken from one sort of child and turned to another. Even her hair was improved, becoming a rich, glistening black. The lightning bolt did not heal – it transformed. But whether its transforming powers had been exhausted in her on that August day ten years ago, she did not know.

  SIX

  n Uncle Alger’s house in Bristol, he’s given a bedchamber that was shut up for years, a perfectly square, whitewashed room with one wide window. The bed itself is a hulking affair, two hundred years old and fitted with brocade. The fireplace is still boarded over and a smell of must exudes from the curtains. Henry keeps the window open when he can. It looks onto the garden of the house next door, where a tangle of blackberry vines and the dried spikes of delphiniums rise out of the mist.

  This is the house where his father was raised. It’s not one of the great merchant houses of Bristol, but a two-storey thatched cottage. The heyday of sugar was past by the time the De la Beches came to the trade. It was as chief justice that Henry’s grandfather went to Jamaica, leaving his twin sons in Bristol with their mother. He had accepted a four-year term, but he took to island living and found the money to purchase Halse Hall and never set foot in England again. When he died, the Bristol house was left to Alger and the plantation to Henry’s father, an uneven bequest on the face of it, for the plantation comprised four and a half thousand acres, and its hundred-year-old great house was the finest in Clarendon County. But not so unfair when you consider that Henry’s father had to sell his commission to go to Jamaica, and that when he arrived, he had first to remove a Creole wife and his father’s five natural children from the great house and set them up in the nearby town of May Pen, then to arrange a mortgage to settle the generous bequests to these surprising relations, a branch of the family not acknowledged in any way in the house in Bristol. No, not so uneven after all.

  There is, in the drawing room, a grand painting of Halse Hall itself, with a grey curtain hung in front to keep the sunlight and flies off. In fact, the drawing room is crammed with paintings, and Henry spends afternoons unveiling them one by one, setting himself the exercise of seeing something new in each one. He always starts with his favourite, a painting signed Chardin. A robed monkey looks at coins with a magnifying glass and a discriminating eye. He’s an antiquarian by profession, a model of decorum. His hair is white over the temples and brushed neatly back. Curled on the rug lies his tail. For the first time, Henry notices a stove smoking into the room, warming the monkey’s naked long-toed feet, the most human part of him, somehow.

  Next to the intelligent monkey is a portrait of Uncle Alger and Henry’s father as small boys. They’re about eight, identical brown-haired boys dressed like miniature men in red jackets and riding boots. One stands with a hand buried in the ruff o
f a collie, light playing over his eager face. The other, erect with a testament in the crook of his arm, turns a sober and wary eye to the painter, as though he’s sulking from a morning scolding. Whenever Alger catches Henry studying the painting, he bustles over to assert his identity as the more appealing child, to claim possession of the dog, recall the sittings, what a trial it was to get the dog to stand still. He’ll discourse for hours on the entertaining question of how he differed from his twin brother and how he was the same.

  But what an exercise, to paint identical children – to represent, through pigment and brush stroke, two opposite natures in the same form! Henry studies the boy with the dog. How do you paint curiosity? As a glow laid onto the temples, he decides: white flake and lead-tin yellow in equal proportions. He gets the magnifying glass from the map stand and holds it up, gazing into the swirls of Kassel umber that make up the eye itself. The eye (he chooses to believe it is his father’s eye) looks warmly back through a dab of zinc white.

  At the beginning, there was just twenty minutes between them. Uncle Alger was born while Henry’s father lay wailing in a receiving blanket and the doctor was out in the latrine, thinking his day’s work done. The women were pouring tea and waiting for the afterbirth when out came a foot! How could you have a second infant in your stomach and not know it? Henry carries this question over to the next painting, a portrait of his grandmother dressed in a handsome gown in the Chinese style that accentuated her homeliness, her hair powdered and her hands folded over her stomach, hands arranged to display her wedding ring (a fretted gold band with some sort of pebble mounted in it).

  Alger comes in, wigless, his hair chopped short and unevenly powdered. Sullivan follows with two glasses of port on a tray. From the armchair by the hearth, Alger moves through his preparatory throat clearing. “A lady in London has been left a fortune of 1,800,000 gold sovereigns!” he announces finally. He’s labouring over the London Times, brought to him courtesy of the daredevils on the Bristol post. “Think of it! Reckoning sixty sovereigns to the troy pound, that’s a weight of thirteen tons, seven hundredweight, twelve pounds.”

  “Indeed, you are quick,” says Henry.

  “It’s all here, they’ve done the sums for you. The ordinary man needs assistance in comprehending this sort of wealth, and the Times has kindly provided it. This is how we must think of it: if porters were hired to carry the coin, and each of them carried 298 pounds, 107 porters would be required.”

  “Why not give each porter an even three hundred?” asks Henry, pulling the settle closer to the fire. As he sits down, his father stands momentarily on the edge of his vision, on the edge of the veranda at Halse Hall, dark-haired in the sun. He’s dressed in white, his face looking questioningly down to Henry, who’s on the lawn below. Sums – was his father talking sums? And then his father is swallowed up again, swallowed by Alger’s moving mouth.

  “Why, it’s the weight of a sack of flour, isn’t it,” the mouth says. “That’s all you can ask of a labouring man, however stout. Ten weeks, two days and four hours it would take those porters. It’s all here, they’ve worked it all out here.”

  “But where are they carrying it from and to?” Henry asks. “And why are they moving it at all?”

  “Why, I don’t know, do I?” cries the mouth, irritated. “To her marriage home, I suppose.” The tumbler is raised to mottled lips, the pleated throat pumps warm port downward. “Now there’s a match for you, supposing she could be prevented from discovering your recent history!” The corners of the mouth turn down; this is in the nature of a joke. “Although the lady in question is twenty-six. Twice your age, what?”

  “No,” says Henry, reaching for his own drink. “I’m fifteen in February.”

  For the first week in Bristol, while Henry’s scabs fall off and his bruises bloom privately brighter by the day, it is Alger who presents a wounded aspect to the world. His inaugural duty as paterfamilias hangs over them: the speech castigating Henry and all youthful folly, evoking Henry’s honourable, tragically dead father, rendering in dark strokes a life of failure and disgrace. A speech that remains undelivered, although Alger alludes to it from time to time. No doubt he worked it to a perfection of furious rhetoric in his mind and thinks he’s delivered it.

  In any case, Henry’s uniform, which he’s still wearing, is a moment-by-moment reminder of what he was and is no longer. In the famous Marlow mutiny five years back, all conspirators were stripped of every vestige of uniform by drummers – jacket, cap, boots, braid, in full public view – and driven out of town in their underwear. No one spoke of drummers in Henry’s case. Of course, there was real arson in the 1806 mutiny, not just incendiary drawings. But daily, annoyingly, needlessly, Alger forbids Henry to leave the house, banishes him at the sound of the door. Soon Henry will divest himself of the uniform and then it’s just his name that will remind people. For all time. So said the king’s envoy when signing the writ.

  A trunk of Henry’s civilian clothes finally arrives, packed up and sent on by the housekeeper at Dawlish. He can’t get into anything. Alger agrees to communicate to Henry’s mother the extent of her son’s rampant growth. A week later, a bank draft arrives and a list of what his mother deems necessities. A frock coat, a dress coat, an overcoat, four morning coats. Alger sends for his tailor. Bolts of wool are carried into the upstairs sitting room and fittings conducted. Gradually, the wardrobe in his bedroom fills. He’s being costumed for a drawing-room life. It is a hermetic life he wants.

  He could weep with relief at having his own room again. Before Marlow, he never contemplated the fact of a barracks. The bodies packed in rows like stalls, the quarrelling and crying out, the bedbugs, the rats, the foul smells. The insane laughter, the tiresome pranks, your response at every moment scrutinized to decide whether you were more truly a pillock or a ponce. Oh, they were the sultans of minute discrimination! He stands by the window and breathes the vile air of it out of him. Burn in the flames of hell, he cries to the barracks at Marlow.

  With its heavy brocade curtains, his bed is a Bedouin tent. Henry opens the tent and sits cross-legged inside it. The tent takes him back to the bed nets of his childhood, hung against mosquitoes. He has no memory of anything before Jamaica. When he woke up to himself, he was running on the road with Belle’s sons Cuthbert and Ben (it’s the road to the boiling-house, they’re rolling an iron hoop, passing it back and forth between them with sticks). And then they’re in Belle’s cabin, and Tallo is there, it’s the dinner break, and he’s whittling a green coconut open for them with the cutlass he keeps hidden in the floor, and they’re drinking thin, sweet milk and scooping the jellied flesh out with their fingers. Then they’re stealing through the bush, on wickered paths that wind through dense foliage, Henry and Cuthbert and Ben, tormenting themselves with the terror of duppies, who look human but have their feet put on backwards.

  One day, the three of them were brothers, creeping around in the bush, and the next, the grass gang was walking up the road and Cuthbert and Ben were part of it, loads of wet grass for the livestock on their heads, loads like haystacks – they were swaying under the weight of them and Henry knew them only by their skinny black legs. Sophie, a great beautiful girl they all admired, was driving them with a switch. Henry ran towards Cuthbert and Ben on the road, thinking to tease them when they couldn’t see him for their loads, and Sophie laughed at him and said, “You go back now, massa Henry, these boys be mine.” Peter, the houseboy, was sweeping the veranda when Henry went back. “Henry vex,” he said sympathetically.

  Darkness has fallen on the neighbour’s garden and in Henry’s room. The butler knocks; he’s come to light the lamps. Henry kicks a chair against the door by way of response. He pulls the bed curtains closed and curls into the cave of his bed. He’s at Halse Hall, he’s sitting at a table for his lessons and his father sits beside him. It seems that Father discovered Henry when Cuthbert and Ben were taken into the grass gang.

  Mrs. Sutton from Sutton Estates is
there (she is always there, she comes on horseback and stays for days) and she and his mother are in rocking chairs drinking glasses of rum punch, although they have only just finished their dinner. The dogs are out – everyone is worked up because a slave is missing. Sophie. Henry’s father requests that Mother and Mrs. Sutton sit somewhere else so as not to further distract the boy, but they will not. They sit on the veranda to admire the view of the Mocho Mountains and because the house is too hot – they are likely to suffocate, says his mother, if required to sit inside.

  Father went to May Pen that morning to post a notice of the missing slave, but he is back now for Henry’s lesson. Father is teaching Henry because it has dawned on him that Henry speaks fluent Creole and precious little English. “You said he should not be one of those mollycoddled plantation sons,” his mother says. “And now you find reason to reproach me for what he is.” And so Henry must sit on the veranda and listen to the far-off baying of the dogs, and his father teaches him the history of Jamaica under the English. It begins with General Venables, from whose mistakes many lessons can be drawn. General Venables was sent by Oliver Cromwell to take the great Spanish island of Hispaniola. He anchored his ships at a beach he believed to be 10 miles from the Spanish stronghold of Santa Domingo. In reality, Santa Domingo was 35 miles away. (How many extra miles was that? Father asks, and Henry says, 15. Mrs. Sutton laughs and his father says, No, 25.) The men tramped through the jungle for days. They got dysentery and yellow fever and finally were forced to retreat. So Venables took to the sea again and conquered Jamaica instead, as a sop for Cromwell. But Cromwell was not impressed and had Venables thrown into the Tower.

  The mournful sound of the conch rings out and Henry stirs. The two-hour midday break is over; the slaves will be returning to the fields. Mrs. Sutton gets up and comes to the edge of the veranda. Her hair is wet to her head with perspiration. She has an over-wide smile. “He was thrown into the Tower for cowardice,” she cries. “He pulled up anchor and sailed away in the dead of night, abandoning hundreds of men who had not yet gained the ships. And tell the boy why, Colonel De la Beche!” She does not give him a chance to speak. “Henry, precious, the silly man fled in the night because, in his addled brain, he thought he heard the Spanish army approaching. And the Spanish army was nowhere near. It was fiddler crabs migrating – that was the sound he heard in the jungle!” Henry’s father gives his chair a hitch in irritation.