Curiosity

by Joan Thomas

  Mrs. Stock had had a sudden rise in fortune. She lived now on Marine Parade, in a house called Tower Cottage. It was a bequest from an uncle that had elevated her, and the passion of the high-born for taking the waters, and her own canny decision to purchase two bathing machines from Mr. England.

  Molly sponged the collar and hems of Mary’s mourning dress, a dress Mrs. Bennett had kindly lent them because of Mary’s great size. Washed and combed and pushed out the door early the next morning, Mary took herself to Tower Cottage. It was Mrs. Stock herself who came to the door. She led Mary down the hall and let her peep into the parlour, where two ladies sat with needlework screens in front of them. Mary could see their lace morning caps and their hair, sculptures of fair coils with braids entwined. “Come all the way from Salisbury,” Mrs. Stock said. “Come to take the waters. They have each a maid come as well.”

  Behind Mrs. Stock hung a silhouette of Mrs. Stock, done on convex glass. It was all new, the bell pull, the tasselled lamp, the bootjack in the hall. Mrs. Stock drew Mary back to the kitchen. “I need a clever girl to assist me,” she said. “To run errands.” Mary was the same height now as Mrs. Stock. “Occasional work, as the lodgers come and go.” They arranged that Mary would present herself every mid-morning to see whether Mrs. Stock needed her that day.

  On the days Mrs. Stock wanted her, Mary went to the butter market and the baker’s and haggled with fishermen at the Cobb. When she returned with basket laden, Mrs. Stock counted out the change with glittering approval, as though Mary’s honesty was born of just this sort of close supervision. Sometimes Mary was sent on errands a small boy could have run, carrying messages from the lodgers to their friends up the hill (usually just a card with a name on it), but Mary did it willingly, for Mrs. Stock paid sixpence a half day. But often it was messages to Doctor Reeves or Doctor Coulson Carpenter that Mary carried. They slept on horsehair mattresses at night, these gentlefolk, and had calfskin boots and gloves to protect their extremities from the cold. Plates of mutton and flaking trout cooked for them daily. Cheese, eggs, sweetbreads, as much as they fancied. But they were not well for all that.

  On the Sabbath, Mary went to chapel without fail. At the pulpit, James Wheaton vibrated with the force of his message. Thinner by the week, his cuffs ragged, his fingertips fretted raw, he was a rare pastor. It tore and ripped him to utter God’s truth, but he would utter it. He had delivered the Lord’s warning to her and he trusted her now, to do what she must. He never fixed his eyes on her these mornings as he preached, but there was a shining bond between them and she felt it. Every Sabbath, she sat on the bench weighed down by her love for James Wheaton, and by his anguished love for her.

  After a busy fortnight or two, the work became scarce. When she had no lodgers, Mrs. Stock sat in the parlour and read her books. She tried to lure Mary into staying to hear her discourse on what she was reading, although she declined to pay on such days. It was the science of craniology, the study of the skull. A gentleman who had lodged at Tower Cottage had introduced her to it and left the books in lieu of rent. This gentleman, come all the way from Coventry, would run his fingers over people’s skulls and measure their heads with calipers and so predict what would become of them. It was a matter of size and shape and the bumps seldom seen under the hair. Mrs. Stock had no calipers, but she desired to measure Mary’s head with string. “It’s ill luck to be measured,” said Mary, backing away. “My mother says so,” although what her mother had said was that it was ill luck to be weighed.

  “It is a science,” said Mrs. Stock. “By science we can predict our fate, and so control it.”

  The next day, Mrs. Stock again had no errands for Mary. “But I need an upstairs maid,” she said. “I’m prepared to train, although I prefer her to live in.”

  “Ask Miss Philpot about a maid,” Mary said. “Her maid has a houseful of sisters.” Fury and shame pulsed through her. She could not find the voice to speak further. Without a goodbye, she left through the kitchen door. She walked back through the town, feeling the cool wind against her flaming cheeks.

  Instead of going home, she went straight across Cockmoile Square and walked slowly up Church Street. It was not her mother she wanted to see, who might well welcome Mrs. Stock’s offer. She went through the gate at St. Michael’s. The stained stone church sat above the shore, guarding the entrance between two worlds – the world of the town and the world of the shore, where the remains of Satan’s henchmen lay. Mary climbed the stairs cut into the side of the hill to the graveyard, with its stones leaning here and there. It looked almost empty, this graveyard, but it was not: the dead of the plague had been buried in a mass grave here long ago, under a green hill they would not open again for fear of contagion. Towards the back, a patch of brown earth was Richard’s grave. None of his children were there, except Percival. They’d been buried in the Friends’ Burying Ground, the two Henrys and the other Mary. Not Martha, who was never found.

  Mary stood by the broken ground of her father’s grave. But he was not here, she knew it. She walked to the edge of the cliff and looked down at the sea, a silver band withdrawing, leaving a bed of gleaming sand. Anyone who walked the path through the graveyard on a sunny afternoon and looked out over the sea dotted with ships in full sail must follow the path down the cliff. It rose and then fell in such a way that no one who came upon it could resist following it. Below Church Cliffs, yellow coltsfoot bloomed among the stones. On a sun-tossed afternoon, it was hard to believe that you lived in a cursed world, the mouth of hell. But Satan was a deceiver and dressed himself in light. James Wheaton, God’s tormented angel, could never look at this scene; the light would scorch his eyes.

  Along the shore, the cliffs rolled out in their order: Church Cliffs, Black Ven, Stonebarrow, Golden Cap, four more whose names she didn’t know, and beyond them, the Isle of Portland. When the wavering cliffs dipped, you could see the fields on top of them, like glimpsing the inside of a ribbon. Green, the winter corn was coming up like grass. Up there, the farmer thought he was ploughing a field he knew, and then he came up on the edge and found the sea had bitten a chunk off it. Daydreaming sheep fell to the sea. Some said the sheep had been possessed of an evil spirit and run off the cliffs, but it was the cliffs that took them by surprise; daily, the landscape changed. She was below Black Ven now, and from the shore she could see the path where she had stood while they pulled her father up. The ledge where he had lain was already gone – the rains had washed it into the sea.

  But her father was there, he was still there. On the path above her, he’d walked that wonderful bright night, the path a black seam through the gorse, the sea below shingled with moonlight. She could picture the way he’d slipped, throwing an elbow out for balance, clutching his bag and then skidding down the cliff, falling too fast for thought – until the earth caught him, a soft provisional ledge, just as wide as it needed to be. Not wide enough for him to move. Nothing to do but lie and look, his collecting bag under him.

  There he lay on the stony cliffs with the bones of dragons buried below him. Hawks hunted for mice on the field above. A smuggler rowed silently to shore. Digby, maybe, Digby may have prowled below while Richard lay and watched. The moon sank into the sea and white stars washed up in the sky. And he lay, watching from his perch where the land and the sea and the sky met, lay and knew himself alive in the night. He was who he always was, that night. He refused to be fearful. He would not be stooped and shrivelled by fate. Fate had had many victories over him; it would not have that one. It would not make him into the sort of man he had never been before.

  Walking home along the shore, Mary did not search for fossils, but she collected every loose curiosity she happened to see. A handful of thunderbolts, grey. A lovely pyrite ammonite glinting in the sun at the base of Church Cliffs. This is not witchery, she thought as she bent to pick it up and felt its weight. We have always found them here, scattered among the rocks. She fingered the tiny, perfect golden coils at its centre. She would never in h
er life see a jewel so fine.

  As Mary came back up the path through the graveyard with the ammonite in her hand, a gentleman and a lady strolled ahead of her along the cliff, looking out to sea. The gentleman was Mr. Aveline, who had a fine house on Broad Street; she recognized him by his thin, elegant shoulders. They were walking very slowly, arm in arm. Where the path widened, Mary went to hurry past them.

  “What do you have there?” called the lady in a friendly fashion. A lady Mary had never seen before, wearing a velvet coat and hat. Mary stopped and showed her. “What a beauty!” the lady said.

  “Oh, it’s an ammonite,” said Mr. Aveline, nodding at Mary. “They’re sometimes called cornemonius.” He reached out and ran a gloved finger around its coils. “They do so resemble the curled horns of a ram. It is striking, isn’t it! The Creator favoured certain patterns, as all artists do. He used the same designs over and over in very different spheres of the natural world.” The lady smiled at him – not at what he said, but as if she loved him for being the sort of man who would say it.

  “It’s an ammonite stellaris,” said Mary. They looked at her in surprise, for the science coming off a Dorsetshire tongue. Then the lady offered to buy it. She said it was something her son would fancy.

  “They call them snakestones in the town,” Mary said. “People carry them for luck.” What a soft face the lady had, like a flower blooming under her velvet hat! The word luck felt like a black charm on Mary’s lips. But she went on, she said, “I can make a head on it if you wish.”

  “Oh, no, I prefer it in its natural state,” said the lady.

  “Just let me clean that bit of iron off it.”

  And so Mr. Aveline and the lady walked down to Bridge Street with Mary, and they waited in the square while Mary washed the ammonite and chipped the iron off. Then the lady gave Mary a half-crown, and when she had gone up Broad Street, Mary held it out to Molly, who was sitting in the kitchen with her head down as if to shut out the sight of what Mary was doing. Mary pressed the half-crown into her hand and she threw it to the floor with an angry gesture, but this was just for show. Finally she raised her face and gave Mary the look she used to give Richard when he came in from the Three Cups or from a Sabbath at the shore: a look that said, This is the way it will be, then.

  Alone in the workshop, Mary pulled a blank page from the accounts book and sat a long time thinking. Finally, she took up her quill and wrote a letter to Mr. William Buckland at Oxford University, informing him that Richard Anning had gone to his rest and requesting that, if there was any money owing Richard for goods provided, it be paid now. Oxford, England, she put by way of address, because it was all she knew. But surely Mr. Buckland would be known by the citizenry of any town he frequented? She melted a bit of the beeswax left from a candle and used it for a seal. On her way home from posting the letter, she stopped at the Bennetts’ and asked their boy to carry a message to Mrs. Stock, saying that she would come no more.

  ELEVEN

  enry’s manoeuvre in the woods secures another unanticipated object: it brings his mother to Bristol. She arrives in a velvet hat and coat in a fetching shade of lavender; she wears her nothing can touch me face. She stands in the hall while Sullivan helps her with her coat and crinkles her eyes at Henry. The smile is her I will solve this smile. He trembles with happiness at the sight of it. She was right, right to have left him here for so long to expiate his sins. Marlow is gone now, and the eager, silly youth he was then. It’s all over, they need not waste time on it.

  Alger has promised Mother to Captain Whyte for tea that very day, so there is very little time to talk. Again Henry’s presence is not required. He clatters up to his room and brings down the sketch he made of Letitia, offering to send it along. It’s both a true and a flattering portrait, as he knows, having had the benefit of a close view. The vines on the wall behind her make a playful motif with her curls. And (he thinks, pleased with this insight) it will make his sally in the woods seem premeditated and thus less rash.

  His mother hands it back. “I rather doubt she’ll appreciate having been spied on,” she says.

  His mother spends the entire evening at Captain Whyte’s. He works for an hour on a bird study, based on one of the tiny skeletons. Since the encounter in the woods, birds have been his resolute focus. He did the India ink detail the morning before, and now, carrying a large candelabra to his desk, he does a sepia wash, admiring the professional look the ink imparts to the study. Sepia. It is his favourite medium, pigment offered up by the living cuttlefish. But the instant the wash is applied and dry, his patience evaporates. He stomps back down to the parlour and tries to read. By nine o’clock, he’s choked with fury and humiliation. It’s incomprehensible that he was not included in these discussions. Perhaps he should go and present himself at the door.

  At ten o’clock, he climbs the stairs to his room. Shortly after, she knocks lightly on his door. Happiness still glows on her cheeks. She takes off her hat and sets it on his bureau. “What an endless evening! What a long-winded man! We must examine all his sordid mementoes from Singapore and hear the story connected to each, and all this on the meanest little glass of sherry.” She arranges herself in the chair by his desk. “Well, Henry,” she says, tilting her head at him. “She seems a nice enough girl, and very pretty. Why did you not find a way to be properly introduced? There may have been an opportunity to ask her for a kiss.”

  He stood up when she came in and he is still standing, wearing his dressing gown. “I can steal, but I cannot beg,” he says. “That’s something I learned on the road between Marlow and London.” What an awful popinjay he’s turned into! – the sort of person she loves to mock. If only he could tell her about his solitary journey on foot by the Thames, about this last long winter. But she doesn’t ask.

  “Well, it appears she’s sensitive about the mole on her bosom. She’s never been on the Continent, poor child, or she’d be decorating it with kohl.”

  “What was it she was painting?” he asks.

  “Herself. It’s a head-and-shoulders self-portrait, made with the use of a looking glass. I saw it drying in the hall. The mole does not figure in it.”

  “Did you think it skilful?”

  “I thought it rather … Oh, never mind. It’s not the sort of thing that matters, is it? In the flesh, she has an air of mischief that’s quite appealing. As you know – you’ve spoken to her. I think she may be an interesting woman one day, Henry. I refrained from asking why a maiden of her station would creep into the woods with an unknown man. But it does speak of a lack of supervision, and her uncle’s very eager to have this settled.” She’s up now, she has the wardrobe door open, she begins to go through his new clothes. She takes the three waistcoats out and spreads them side by side on the bed. “Oh, this one’s very nice. You see so much canary satin on Regent Street this year, and I was afraid they’d still be using ivory in Bristol.” She looks for the coat that goes with it and lays it on the bed, comparing the embroidery on the lapels. “The girl’s mother is not well connected, it’s true.” Her voice drops. “It’s worse than Alger let on,” she says. “The stepfather is an innkeeper. The publican of a coaching inn – you will have seen it. The Moonlight Inn or some such thing. It seems to have been a moment of folly on the mother’s part. They have done everything in their power to keep Letitia away from all that, to the point that she seldom sees her mother. Captain Whyte is fully empowered with respect to his niece.”

  She takes out his frock coat and examines the lining. “I suppose we have to be realistic. You could argue detriments on each side. It was rather a delicate conversation, as you can imagine. I gather your uncle Alger was less cautious the other night than he should have been, but he didn’t grasp the situation immediately. Captain Whyte is not what I would call direct. And Alger can’t resist dwelling on the sinking fortunes of Halse Hall. It’s a way of gloating, isn’t it, for having got this place, while your father was stuck with the plantation. So there was the old captai
n bringing up the Wilberforce Bill, whether the cane-cutters will be fully emancipated, all that business! It required a deal of deft footwork on my part, I can tell you. Perhaps there’s a post for me in Whitehall!” She laughs merrily and turns back to the jacket, turning a sleeve inside out, running her fingers over the seams. “I dwelt on your scholastic prowess. I portrayed you as a solitary boy, unaccustomed to female society. Overcome by her closeness and her beauty. In other words, Henry, I was entirely frank!”

  Henry picks the candelabra up from the side table and sets it on the desk so he can see her face. She smiles at him fondly. “Short-sighted as well, I said to Captain Whyte. My son is in desperate need of spectacles. I said this to explain the business with the spider!”

  He steps between her and the wardrobe. He stares until she stops talking and looks at him. “Is marriage always consequent upon one kiss?” he asks. He folds his arms; his hands have begun to shake. Then, in the candlelight, her colour rises. He has done it – he has managed to call them up. Without stooping to speak of them, he has called up Mr. Ridd on the path in Hammersmith. And the ridiculous painting master caught in the upstairs hall. And Captain Outhwaite, always at their house in Dawlish, always there day and night with his stinking hounds, although there was no hunting.

  Her throat has bloomed scarlet, but she does not avert her eyes. “When the maiden is innocent,” she says steadily, “as this one appears to be, then it is.” They stand with eyes locked until finally he moves aside and goes to the window. “On every occasion that your name is spoken in society, Henry, a story of Great Marlow will follow. This would be a second scandal, to abandon this maiden after such a liberty. It would be fatal to all your hopes. And all in all, you could do far worse. Four thousand is a wonderful settlement. Given the situation at Halse Hall, it’s a godsend. It’s a pity, I agree, that young people are not allowed some few years of indiscretion. But no one is talking about your marrying for ages, not until you come into your own.”