Curiosity

by Joan Thomas

  Mrs. Sutton peers down the carriage road. The house is on high ground – you can see the whole plantation from the veranda. She points out that the slaves are still down at the cabin-line and out on the road. Henry can hear the dogs baying. Sophie will not be caught, he thinks – she will go to Spanish Town to look for Tom, who was sold last week. The dogs will never find her. They’re still on the plantation, following the bush paths where the duppies wander. His father turns to look at Mother, who has tied a turban around her head to hold her hair up off her neck, and he questions how much rum punch she is drinking at this time of day. “My complexion needs replenishing,” she says, “from all this perspiration. Anyway, don’t bother about me. You should be going down. Go down and send them back to the fields.”

  “Leave it to Tomkin,” Father says. He gives his chair another hitch. This is dangerous, because granny-sugar is pouring out of holes where the termites are eating it. Any minute now, that chair will collapse into a pile of hollow sticks, as others have done. He reaches for a clean sheet of paper and writes numbers on it. They’ll leave the history and switch to pure sums, which may be of less interest to their audience. Father sets Henry the sum of 22 and 41, and then leans towards him and says softly, “Consider how many tens are in each of them.” Then the houseboy Peter is at the edge of the veranda wanting to speak, an anguished expression on his face. He says in Creole that they have found an armadillo down at the creek. He is an Igbo – his Creole is unique to him. Henry repeats what Peter said for his father and mother. He translates it exactly, although he understands from Peter’s face that it is not an armadillo, it’s something else they’ve found, that Peter can’t bring himself to say.

  “An armadillo!” says his father. “Let’s go down and have a look!” He goes eagerly down the steps of the veranda and Henry follows. They cross the sloping lawn and hurry onto the road, and by then, terrified, grieving cries are rising up from the creek, and people are running towards it from all directions. His father begins to run. Peter is running with them; he reaches down for Henry’s hand. When they come out into the creek bed, the whole plantation is there, and the slaves part so they can come through. Tomkin is splashing across the creek from the other side, the dogs on leash. Henry glimpses a figure lying at the creek edge (a duppy, the way its feet are splayed) and then his father yanks him up by the armpits and plunks him onto Peter’s back and shoves them back towards the road.

  Henry rolls over in his bed. He tries to call up Sophie’s face, but the face of the woman he saw on display in Piccadilly has overlain it. But then he thinks of being out on the veranda early on a Sunday morning and he sees Sophie coming down from the provision grounds in the hills. She’s going to the market in May Pen, walking tall and proud with a stupendous tray of pawpaw on her head, and she flashes him a smile.

  Eventually, Alger receives a letter from Henry’s mother. She has nothing to say to Henry. “I have nothing to say to Henry,” she writes in the only line Alger will show him, isolating it through assiduous folding. After two days, Alger lets fall the news that Henry and his mother are to settle in the coastal town of Lyme Regis when his mother condescends to send for him. Lyme Regis? Alger can cast no light; he endeavours to know as little as possible of his sister-in-law’s doings. On the subject of watering places, he tells Henry over tea and oatcakes of going to Brighthelmstone to take the cure. It was a nasty business. It involved drinking a gallon of sea water each morning and then surrendering to the will of the hired dippers, who, once contracted, ensured that you were fully submerged, whatever your final thoughts on the matter. “It was anti-septic,” he says, tea dribbling down his chin. “Anti-bilious. Anti-spasmodic. It did me a world of good.”

  After the letter, Henry understands that his mother has abandoned him in Bristol until he shall make something different of himself. For his sins, he is sentenced to a season of whist with Alger, the Widow Rankin (Alger’s only constant friend), and Sullivan to make up a fourth. He writes to Clement pleading for money and for intelligence regarding his mother. Instead, a cart stops on the road and a case of books is delivered. Clement’s house has been heartlessly sold. After eight years, he’s been flung from his rooms and would have perished on the pavement but for the charity of his old friend Marshall Bentley. Henry may have the books on loan for the duration. It’s a collection of titles recently talked about in West End drawing rooms. Most of the books have an unread smell and feel; many of them are uncut. Among them, though, is a worn edition of Muller’s Artillery, the forty octavo pages of which they were assigned to copy at Marlow. He was on sea-mortars when he was hauled away to the guardhouse. That’s his biggest regret, leaving his copybook behind, and the half-finished drawing of the sea-mortars, with their shaded chambers. He asks his uncle for money to buy a folio and charcoals, and sets to work where he left off.

  The gardener comes in to pry the fireplace open. The upstairs maid is with him with a bucket of kindling. Winter is coming; it’s time he had a fire in the morning. They’ll start by burning the boards that sealed the fireplace. The nails squeak in the boards as the crowbar gains a purchase. And then the maid screams and scrambles back. Henry turns and looks with the gardener into the hearth. A pile of tiny bones, the remains of some terrible destruction. They’re intact, miniature skeletons. “Birds,” says the maid, crouching on the floor with her face turned away. “They flew down the chimney and couldn’t find their way out. This room’s been closed up since the war began. It’s birds, it’s terrible bad luck, Mr. Henry. Walter will clean them out.”

  Henry has lit a candle by then and he holds it in the hearth. He can count seven or eight skeletons lying in a soft bed of ash and down. They’re ancient, intricate, anomalous life forms. It’s a desert scene – they perished of thirst.

  “No,” he said. “Don’t. I’ll do it.”

  He picks one out carefully and lays it on his sketching paper. It’s like picking up nothing. With its guts gone to dust, this is what a bird weighs. It’s intact, its wings a close fan of quills. Its skull and beak curve downward, bent in supplication. At the end of long straight legs, claws clench in spasmodic appeal.

  “Find me a box to put them in,” he says to the maid. “I want to draw them.”

  SEVEN

  inally, the Independent Chapel found a teacher, and every Sunday Mary sat on a bench with smaller children and learned her letters and the queer way they were used. She learned why pounds are marked L (it is the Latin libra) and why pence are marked d (for denarius), but why the English should choose to use Latin words for their own coin her teacher Mr. Pippen could not explain. He was a kindly man, but he lacked curiosity – the small store of his learning lay drying in his brain like the butterflies pinned into a collecting cupboard at the Philpots’. This was just the ragged school (so it was called in the town); her mother said she should be grateful the man could read and write. But in spite of Mr. Pippen’s dullness, in spite of the other students hiding sticks up their sleeves to poke her from behind when she was called on to recite, the ragged school, which had such a feeble effect on ordinary children, was a potent tonic to Mary and within four Sundays she could read.

  And then she read every day to her father. She sat up on the stool and held the book to the window to save lighting a candle. With every passing day she improved, until her reading was as quick and accurate as Miss Philpot’s. This would never be believed in another scholar, but was believed in her because of the lightning.

  It was a bible she read from. They did not own a bible; they owned no books at all since the Rights of Man was burned. But then Mr. Buckland came to their door one day, as he had business to conduct with their father. He walked directly into the house and Molly brought the rush chair for him to sit on. He still wore his dusty gown, but he took off his top hat. No longer just a student of Undergroundology, Mr. Buckland was now a fellow at Corpus Christi College in Oxford, where he taught young men to read the Gospel in the text of the earth. For example (he told Mary, pointing
with the toe of his boot to the coals glowing in the hearth), they noted the way the Creator laid coal into the ground, with the seams tilted up to the surface at one end. “This is our Father’s beneficence writ in the earth,” he said, “the coal laid down for man’s ready access.”

  “On behalf of the citizenry of Lyme Regis, let me congratulate ye on yer advancement,” said Richard dryly. But Mr. Buckland was eager to deflect the honour from himself. It was to the credit of the dons at the University of Oxford, he said, that they chose men of faith for academic positions, aware of the danger that learning could be perverted against the interests of God’s revealed Word. In France, for example, clever men not content with throwing over the political order now insisted on studying natural history with the feeble light of their own intelligence rather than the light of Scripture.

  Lizzie stared reproachfully at Buckland from where she sat under the table and Buckland stopped his lecture and made a funny face at her. “You should come to my kitchen,” he said. “I keep a monkey tethered to a pole. What do you think my monkey eats?”

  “Crumbs?” said Lizzie.

  “No, no, no, it’s far too clever for that. It guards the crumbs for the black beetles and when the beetles grow fat, it eats the beetles.”

  Joseph had come to hover in the doorway and Richard sent him to the workshop to bring up the fossils they’d found and kept for Mr. Buckland. There was a jaw Richard had found at Pinhay Bay; Lizzie shrank further under the table at the sight of its sinister teeth. It was as big as a horse’s jaw – Richard had had to borrow a sling from the porter to carry it home. He had laid it on the workbench and chipped it out of its matrix with his chisels, and Mary had counted the teeth. There were sixty. It was not a crocodile, Mr. Buckland said to their disappointment. He showed them how the sharp pointed teeth grew in a furrow, like a fish’s, not in separate sockets, the way a crocodile’s did. But he offered Richard a guinea for it.

  They had three verteberries, each as broad across as Joseph’s outstretched hand. When he saw them, Mr. Buckland stripped off his black gown and his waistcoat and turned himself around and had Joseph hold up one of the verteberries to compare it in size to his backbones. He stopped just short of pulling up his shirt to show them his bare white back, and while Mary recovered from the shock of seeing a gentleman strip off his waistcoat in their kitchen, Mr. Buckland stood by the hearth in his shirt sleeves and told them about the giants that lived somewhere on the earth, as described in the sixth chapter of Genesis. “I would like to think these vertebrae are human,” he said. “We know the cliffs here were made by the Flood, and God sent the Flood to wipe out a generation of evil men, but we have not yet found the remains of man among the fossils.”

  He was holding one of the vertebrae and he ran his finger around its outside edge. “But no. There is more of the fish about this. You see, it’s concave on two sides. I’ll make a sketch of it to send to Cuvier in France.” He sat back down in his chair and told them then about the scientist Monsieur Cuvier, who had made such a study of the animal kingdom that if you gave him one bone, he could immediately tell you what animal it came from. Georges Cuvier did not base his work on Holy Scripture and so his studies often led him to a false understanding of the world. But there was no one as informed as he about animal anatomy. Once, Cuvier’s students dressed up as devils, wearing cow horns tied to their foreheads, and crept into his chamber in the night calling, “Cuvier, Cuvier, we have come to eat you.” Monsieur Cuvier opened his eyes and said, “All creatures with hoofs and horns are herbivores,” and fell back asleep.

  While Buckland slapped his hand on his knee and laughed at his own joke, Mary thought of the pig-faced lady seen from time to time in London. What would Mr. Cuvier make of her?

  “I would like to have a scientific book, like Miss Philpot has,” she said boldly as Mr. Buckland got up to leave with the stone vertebrae in hand.

  In all likelihood, it was a Sowerby the Philpots owned, he told her. He went out to where his horse was tied in the street and rooted through one of the many pouches strapped to his saddle and came back with a book. “This is all the science you will ever need,” he said, handing it to her. “You want no better teacher than Moses.” It was not the Sowerby, but a bible.

  She was disappointed, but Molly was very glad. Though Molly could not read it herself, she was glad just to have it lying on her mantel, and this was something Mary understood.

  “I wish I had lived in Genesis,” people always said, and Mary thought of a land where the earth was new, it was always springtime, and the trees were supple and green. But Genesis was not a place; it was a book within the big book of the Bible, and it told the story of how God made all that was. The paper was thin and yellowing, and tiny type covered more pages than Mary could ever read in her life. Holding it flat on her knee, Mary sat up on the stool and read in a sermonizing voice:

  And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

  When her father had had enough and set off for the Three Cups, she often slipped down into the workshop with the bible and lit a rushlight there so she could continue to read without interruption. It was the mystery of reading that thrilled her as much as the words did. Winged fowl. In those tiny letters and her eyes moving across them was the seagull stroking its way across the harbour on snowy feathers. In words like tiny ants lay the heaving sea and the whale lifting its massive bulk, the varnished waves torn open and all their hidden depths revealed. She sat and read until the huge tableau threatened to drown her and drove her out of the house and along the seawall. There the roaring wind and the waves beating on the rock and the cold spray falling on her face scoured out her mind and gave her relief.

  In cold climates, hairy elephants were found in the earth, their flesh frozen. Buckland had told her. Mammoths, they were called, a word for the earth mole, for they were always found buried and it was thought they lived underground and died when they came into contact with the light. Elephants living in tunnels under the earth! Georges Cuvier had looked closely at their jawbones and said they were not the same species as the elephants that now lived. He said the mammoths had all died and were no more. He said that the earth and the creatures on it in ages past were very different from today, that over and over again terrible catastrophes had wiped out the life on earth and God had replaced it with a new and different world.

  Mr. Buckland told them this – it was an example of Monsieur Cuvier’s apostasy. “Everything God makes endures,” said Mr. Buckland, quoting Scripture. Richard asked where the hairy mole-elephants were to be found now, and Mr. Buckland said, “America.”

  They did ciphers at the ragged school, but she had lost her love of numbers. It was words that pressed on her now. The store of numbers was set at nine. There were no new numbers. But there were new words. Mr. Buckland’s word fossil. It was a word they used in France: things dug out of the ground. There was a need for new texts – the Bible explained many things, but not all. If I can read with such ease, I can certainly write, thought Mary. She would broach the question that so interested her father and Mr. Buckland, the nature of the stony curiosities found on the shore and in the cliffs, which question Genesis did not appear to touch. She resolved to ask her father for some pages from his accounts book. If Mr. Buckland will not give me a book about curiosities, Mary said to herself, I will give him one. I will post my text to him. She saw Mr. Buckland standing in a grand doorway, turning the letter over in his hand to see what was written on the front: To Mr. Buckland at Oxford University from Miss Mary Anning. She saw him breaking the seal to open it and her brain sketched it out.

  Unless it be frozen (she would begin), a body will rot in the grave. It will not turn to stone. The stone eagles carve
d in front of the Great House on Broad Street were always stone and never alive. It were not within the powers of the stonemason to breathe life into them. God worked as the stonemason works. The curiosities were the stony matter of all creatures before God breathed life into them. Some were sports of the Creator: for respite on the Sabbath, He fashioned certain forms with never a thought of breathing life into them, and left them scattered in the cliffs. They were not dead. They were less than the creatures that walked the earth and now lay rotting in their graves. They had never lived. And yet they endured.

  She put the bible on the workbench and pinched out the light and went up the steps to the kitchen. Molly sat on the bench rocking Percival. “Put the bread to soak,” she said, and Mary realized with astonishment that her mother had no idea of the thoughts that roiled in her mind. All her mother cared about was coals collected on the foreshore and washing hung on the bushes by Church Cliffs. Mary’s mind was an invisible world that no one else entered.

  Mary wrote her first text at home, sitting for many hours in Richard’s empty workshop, where the smell of shavings hung. She left the Undergroundology alone for the moment; her ideas sat within her like a mass of the lias cliff, awaiting excavation, and one day, when she knew which thread to follow into the mass, she would do it. But for now, she wrote another of the stories that came to her when she lay on her pallet in the night. She did not show it to her mother, but stayed back at the school and showed it to Mr. Pippen: