Curiosity

by Joan Thomas

  “Not this morning. But they’re often here. They shuffle along the ground, a modest, nervous bird. I watched them as a boy. The male and female are identical. I found a nest close to here, with eggs. Blue, like a robin’s. Except for one larger egg, which was grey. They are often host to cuckoos, inadvertent hosts. Rather like my uncle Alger’s situation at the moment.” He stands among the bracken and watches her, letting a long moment pass. He notes the tendrils of orange hair escaping from braids coiled under her cap. Here is the subject of a grand canvas – their two forms under the trees, painted from above. The green that frames her is made of tissues of light, not material except where each tissue overlaps the other and manifests itself as leaf. “Do you watch birds?” he asks.

  Again she gives the little laugh that seems to preface every speech. “Last October, I went out with a party from Bath,” she says. “We had opera glasses and we looked at wild geese in the priory garden. There were some who took great interest, but I didn’t really see the appeal.” Her smile and her tone are pert.

  “Well, there is something very interesting about the dunnock,” he hears himself saying. “The females are polyandrous. That’s very rare in the bird kingdom. It’s a term used more for flora than fauna. It’s used for flowers that have more than one stamen.”

  “Stamen?” she says, with the little laugh.

  He moves towards her. She stands still. She does not back up, but stands and looks at him with an expression of intense interest and excitement. He understands her stillness: it is a subtle, wordless offering, as large a gesture as the female is allowed.

  “I paint birds because I lack any other model,” he says. In the moving light, he sees the notch at her collarbone, as though it were moulded by a thumb. He reaches out as though to thumb it himself, but instead pinches a bit of her gown between his fingers. It’s just the colour of her skin. “What is this fabric?” he asks.

  “Muslin,” she says. She smiles up at him.

  “But what is that? Is it cotton?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Something black clings to her bosom just above the lace of her gown. A spider, perched on the lip of the shadowed drop between her breasts.

  “Don’t move,” he whispers, leaning over her, still not touching her. He pictures a gallant young gentleman in his place on the path, pinning the gown closed with his finger and gently blowing the spider off.

  “What?” She is also whispering.

  “A spider. It’s landed on you. Careful, it will run down your gown.”

  He bends over her. To his surprise, she tilts her face up towards his and offers her lips to him. They are soft, as they must be. He presses his mouth experimentally against hers, opens it a little, and then he wants her to tip her chin higher, he wants to plant a kiss under it, on the underpart of the chin that curves so beautifully, like the merrythought of a bird. As he bends, he spies again the dark spot on her breast. It’s not a spider. It’s a bit of pigment, a mole growing darkly on her white skin. He moves his lips along the pure line of her jaw, and suddenly her breath catches and she leaps away from him.

  “Sir,” she cries. “You presume!” He reaches a hand tenderly, reassuringly, towards her, but she has turned by then and is scrambling up the path, running in her little white slippers for the garden. He laughs. The excitement in her voice is so at odds with her words that he understands this rebuke as a move in a contest they have just begun.

  It appears the maiden is not entirely the creation of Henry’s fevered imagination. She has a name and Alger knows it, although he’s never thought to mention her before. She’s Letitia Whyte, the daughter of an Irish captain from County Down. Her father is dead and the Captain Whyte next door is her uncle and guardian. She is always in Bristol when she is not somewhere else, as she must have been through the winter.

  He mentions it now because Captain Whyte requests the honour of an immediate visit from Mr. Algernon De la Beche. “Standoffish,” says Alger when the note arrives. “Doesn’t mix much. I’d suggest you accompany me, but he wishes to discuss a sensitive matter. Connected to his niece.” He clips the note into one of the three fat clothes pegs he uses for his papers. “Why ever would he wish to discuss his niece’s affairs with me?” he adds jocularly, in case Henry has failed to appreciate the compliment in this.

  As soon as he has swallowed the last of his tea, he makes ready to go next door. Henry goes up to his room to wait, trying to ignore the dread gathering in his stomach. He stands by the window a moment and then walks restlessly back down to the parlour and looks at himself in the mirror hanging over the side table. He’s back in the woods behind the garden, at the moment when courtesies began to issue from his mouth like a catechism, and he shut them off, he stood silently in the bracken, and something sinister and unschooled, some cunning overtook him and he spoke of the wantonness of the female dunnock and moved towards the girl and saw response rise in her eyes. A response to seeing something true, the one true thing. And how he stood over her, bent towards her, parted the veil of decorum hanging over her, and put his lips to her bare skin. He stares into the convex bronze mirror. It reflects back an empty, cavernous room and he sees himself in it, a dwarfed, blunt-featured bronze god, alone in an enormous cave.

  The sky outside the windows is darkening and Sullivan comes in to draw the curtains and light the lamps. Lamplight falls on the side table, on Alger’s only porcelain, a lady bearing a fan before her ugly, eager face. And a Negro holding the train of her gown, the Negro in blue pantaloons and a yellow jacket and boots. His face is a black-painted mask and his hands are black gloves. Above it hangs the painting of Halse Hall. The painting and the porcelain are the only tokens of what built this house. He’ll go to Jamaica, sooner rather than later, and he knows how he will present himself upon landing at the wharf in Kingston harbour: as Beach, Mr. Henry Beach.

  His uncle finally comes in and goes straight upstairs. Then Sullivan opens the door to the drawing room. Henry is required in his uncle’s bedchamber. He finds his uncle sitting in the opening of his own Bedouin tent wearing a dressing gown and nightcap. The window to sleep swings open at ten and closes at ten-thirty, Alger explains genially. If he fails to avail himself of this opening, he will lie sleepless till dawn. He’s flushed with society and port; there’s not a tinge of accusation in his demeanour. Mrs. Witherspoon is there. She’s come in to help him to bed. She’s at the table spreading a grey paste on a long strip of linen. The linen will be applied to his feet as a sleep aid, a remedy recommended by the Widow Rankin.

  Henry sits on a wooden chair, dazed with relief. And with admiration for the girl, who apparently kept her council after all. While Mrs. Witherspoon binds the cloth to the yellow soles of his feet, Alger is pleased to share the recipe with his nephew: camomile and vinegar boiled together and then stirred into breadcrumbs. He lies back, a lazy predator in his den. There were two Captain Whytes, he tells Henry, brothers, his neighbour being the elder by a decade, and the younger, whose name was Charles, being dead. Perished in the Dardanelles in aught-eight. A nasty engagement in a futile campaign. Vice-Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood’s little scheme. He sent in eight ships of the line. He was sure the Turks wouldn’t fight – it was October, they were fasting. But that engagement cost England a hundred men, including Captain Charles Whyte. Then Alger veers suddenly to the girl, over whom this elder Captain Whyte is legal guardian. Her mother has remarried, but by the terms of the father’s will, the uncle retained wardship. Remarkable foresight on the father’s part, for the mother’s new marriage was regrettable. However, that has nothing to do with the girl, who has an independent income of four thousand pounds! And, like Henry, no brothers or sisters.

  “I had to inform Captain Whyte that you have no hopes of this property,” Alger says. He cranks his head up on his thick neck to look at Henry. “But that of course at majority, you’ll come into Halse Hall.” He lies back down. “Her father was highly decorated. Had a better career than his brother here. Shame a
bout the Dardanelles. It was Admiral Duckworth led the engagement. He pled with Collingwood for infantry to seize the batteries onshore. But there were none spared them.”

  Mrs. Witherspoon goes out carrying her basin of paste and Alger sits up in the bed, his bound feet under the cover. “By blood a most respectable young maiden,” he says, apropos of nothing. “A pity I’ve not been more discreet about Halse Hall in years past. But who would ever have thought?” He’s speaking jovially, man to man. “How could I have foreseen such a thing? No one could have! However, with respect to yourself and your recent history, I can assure you I was the soul of discretion. The very soul.” He tugs at his nightcap, which seems to have shrunk in the laundry. With respect to Marlow, he hinted only that his nephew might not, after all, be well suited to a military career. It’s always possible Captain Whyte may make inquiries, however: haste is called for.

  Henry sits motionless on the wooden chair. Inside the tent, his uncle abandons the nightcap and struggles with his pillows. Engagement, his uncle has said repeatedly. Referring to Captain Charles Whyte’s campaign in the Dardanelles, of course, but with a panicky squeeze of his heart Henry sees that he has misunderstood the terms of this manouevre from the beginning.

  TEN

  rom up on Pinhay Meadow, Mary could see the whole gently curving harbour. A row of bathing machines stood in deep water on the ladies’ side of the tidal ledge. Two heads emerged from one, like hermit crabs crawling out of a whelk shell – the lady and her dipper. Mary watched fascinated as their two bonnets lowered into the icy water and then rose again. A second machine was being drawn through the waves by a single horse. The driver was trying to turn it, he was broadside to the surf, and then the horse caught a wave in its belly and rose in its limbers, almost capsizing the machine. Mary thought of the lady inside, lurching fearfully like a lobster in a trap. Any sensible man or beast would shun the sea in February, but the high-born streamed to the black water for the greater misery winter bathing offered them. In pursuit of wellness, they sought tonics the poor took for granted: sea air, the only air the poor of Lyme Regis had ever breathed, chills, terror, hardship, suffering.

  So many visitors in Lyme Regis that year! Marine Parade was crowded with their parasols. From up on Pound Street, Mary could see their own little cottage, perched in the heart of the town, the first thing visitors clapped eyes on when they alighted from the coach. A useless, taunting advantage: the curiosity table sat in the cellar with driftwood stacked on it. Mary turned her eyes to the eastern shore where a band of morning mist rose like a collar of swan’s down from the edge of the sea. Sunlight would be shining through the tip of each wave as it broke on the shore, sunlight would be glinting off the rocks where treasure lay. She folded her arms tightly over her empty stomach and turned her eyes resolutely away.

  There was still the bounty of the Lord’s creation: oysters in the sea, cresses plucked where mist hung over the mouth of the river, blackthorn leaves that could be brewed for tea. Mushrooms pushed up between the roots of trees, rushes grew in the shallow trout ponds at the Squire’s estate. Mary walked out on a quiet morning and collected rushes. Leaving her shoes on the bank to save them and hitching up her skirts, she stood in icy pond water and cut the rushes green. She could see Colway Manor, a stout, featureless house of the sort favoured by the rich, sitting squarely on its own reflection in the pond. Then she spied Squire Henry Henley, stout and featureless himself, standing up to his leather-wrapped thighs in the water, stolidly tossing flies onto the surface of the pond, and she snatched up her shoes and melted into the trees, lest he put his dog after her for picking his rushes.

  At home, Mary transformed the rushes into primitive candles, peeling away the hard outer skin until her fingers were raw with small cuts, and then laying the pith along the bottom of a long pan and covering it with warm mutton fat that the cook at the Philpots’ kindly gave her. When the pith was well soaked and hardened, she laid the rushlights out on the curiosity table, a row of drowned grey fingers. They smelled foul and poured greasy smoke when they burned, but she asked only a penny for three. No one bought. Only the poor would burn rushlights, and they made their own.

  In another month, there would be wortleberries, but for now, there were just nettles coming up along the turnpike. She collected them and made soup, but after they’d drunk it, Lizzie crawled back into her bed, and lay whimpering with hunger. “Hush,” Mary said, her fingers still prickling from the nettles. “Hush your moaning.” God made all the fruit of the earth? Surely not nettles! In the kitchen, Molly sat motionless. Her weird composure in the weeks after Richard’s death was gone: she was all grief now. “I’m going collecting,” Mary said, coming down the steps, and her mother shook her head, but in truth, it was the dread weighing down Mary’s own heart that stopped her.

  James Wheaton lodged across from the Independent Chapel with Mrs. Buffet, in a cottage with chickens penned in front. Mary stood on the doorstone for a minute and then she sucked in her breath and knocked. It was Mrs. Buffet who answered. She asked Mary to follow her in and wait in the sitting room. Mary heard Mrs. Buffet climb the stairs and heard her say, “Mary Anning wishes to see you,” and then there was a long quiet. Mary looked around the room. It was all as it should be, bare and clean.

  When James Wheaton appeared in the doorway of the sitting room, he had a bible under his arm. His forehead was picked at and terribly inflamed, but his strange spasmodic movements were stilled as they sometimes were when he was filled with purpose. He crossed the room swiftly and fixed his avid eyes on her. Mary looked steadily back and held to her courage. “I wish to know why my family has been marked out for so much misfortune,” she said.

  “Oh, my child,” said James Wheaton, as though her words had knocked the breath out of him. When he was finally able to speak, he said, “After we buried your father, I approached Our Lord with this very question.” In the quiet, the sound of the chickens floated in from the window. “He answered me,” said James Wheaton in a heavy voice. “Oh, he answered me.” He pressed the heel of a hand to his eyes. “Our Lord has been wrestling with me since, that I must go to you. And now He has sent you to me.” A sob broke his voice and Mary thought he was about to fall to his knees in front of her. “Oh, my sister, you heard His voice, you obeyed, you came to me. When I, a weak, unruly minister, struggled against Him.”

  He touched her arm and she got up from her chair. He led her to the window, as though to study her face in the light. “Have you been recently to the shore?”

  “To the shore?” said Mary, the blood thudding down her body.

  “Yes, collecting.”

  “I dug oysters last night,” she said faintly.

  “But not the fossils?”

  Mary did not answer.

  “You must not!” he said urgently. “You must shun your father’s path. It was the works of Satan he gave himself to studying! He studied Satan’s handiwork on the Sabbath.”

  “But Mr. Buckland studies curiosities,” said Mary, “and he be a clergyman. He be always on the shore on the Sabbath. I asked him. He said that God made all that lives in the world, that we must study it.”

  “But Mary,” cried James Wheaton, “the curiosities do not live. The sea teems with life, but it gives us no creatures such as the stony forms we find on the shore. Serpents convulsed into flat stones. Dragons with their terrible fangs.”

  Mary stared at him.

  “They are the works of Satan. They are a dark creation that imperfectly mirrors our own. They are a manifestation of the curse. Their purpose is to tempt the weak away from God’s true works.” He pulled a chair up to the table and gestured to her to sit back down. He opened his bible and from Genesis he read her the story of Cain, who killed his brother Abel, and the mark God placed on Cain, so that people who met him would not kill him.

  “Who were these people?” James Wheaton asked intently, his eyes burning in his face. “These people, strangers to Cain, who must be stopped from killing him? Fo
r we know that Adam and Eve had but two children, Cain and Abel.”

  “Yes,” said Mary slowly. “I asked Father the same question when I heard this text in chapel.”

  “I wish you had come to me then,” James Wheaton said. “And I trust I would have had the wisdom to answer you. Mary!” He pulled his chair closer to the corner of the table and slid the bible around so that she could see. “Look! They were a satanic tribe, made by Satan after the Fall. God sent the Flood to wipe out the whole perverse race of them. We live among their hideous ruins.” He showed her the engraving at the front of his bible, of terrible dragons with their coils all tangled in a paroxysm of fury and pain. Then he turned with trembling fingers to a passage near the end of the bible, and read out: There was war in the heaven: Michael and the angels fought against the dragon and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not. Neither was there place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him. “Oh, Mary,” he whispered when he was done. “You must be warned.”

  She stepped out of James Wheaton’s lodgings into the sunlight, where two small boys played with a hoop and the street ran down to a sea full of ships in billowing sail. She walked through the town in the usual way, in her modest skirt and jacket and her mourning bonnet over her plaited hair. A flock of young ladies dressed in pastel gowns chattered outside the Assembly Rooms, and at the edge of the sea, a band of seagulls splashed together in their communal bath. She lingered on the bridge for a moment, watching the ducks floating at the mouth of the river. Then she went into the house, where a note waited for her. It was from Mrs. Stock, who said she had work for a willing girl and asked Mary to report to her house in the morning. So it was clear, then, that she had not dreamed this conversation – it had happened, and God, working in partnership with James Wheaton and Mrs. Stock, had contrived a way to help Mary resist the seduction of the shore.