Curiosity

by Joan Thomas

  He feels a pleasant heat when she takes his arm. Her physical perfection amazes him – her poreless skin, the curls springing out between her bonnet and cheek, glittering like copper wire, her perfectly oval little face, the pretty curve of her lips, the white teeth revealed when she smiles. I could kiss her with impunity, he thinks (the liberties to which an engaged man is entitled having been the subject of a deal of private speculation). But it seems a preposterous notion – as though by entering into this pledge, he’s taken on the role of protector, a proxy for her uncle. In any case, the libidinous tide that had swept him up has somewhat withdrawn. His foray into the woods seems mad to him now. They were all mad. That their guardians should, for so slight a thing, allow the fates of two young strangers to become forever entwined is deeply perplexing. There must be some hidden logic in it, a social precept so profound as to be unknowable, and he will have a lifetime to uncover it.

  Her family is originally from Ireland. She was born in Lough-brickland, County Down. She’s only fourteen, but she’s been out for a year. She came out at the time of her mother’s new marriage. In the past season, she stayed with families in London, Shrewsbury, and Bath, and has collected many friends in her travels, with whom she corresponds avidly: Miss Francine Mortimer, Miss Mathilda Sheffield, Miss Ann Wakefield, Miss Sarah Morland (the latter two have recently acquired fiancés), and her dear cousin Penrose. The adventures of her correspondents, their flirtations in assembly rooms and country houses all over the kingdom, she breathlessly recounts in confiding tones, as though Henry is intimately acquainted with the individuals in question.

  “I spent the early years of my childhood in Jamaica,” Henry says. He has volunteered several pieces of information about himself, including the fact that he was briefly at Great Marlow, but she seems incurious. Or perhaps she is extraordinarily tactful.

  “Jamaica! Did you go to St. Kitts? Miss Fogg grew up in St. Kitts. She is seventeen, do you realize, and not betrothed. She had hopes of a captain with the Staffordshire Regiment, but all the time he was pursuing her own sister!” They’ve reached the junction with Baldwin Street, and she stops short and looks at him with an expression of high animation. “Baldwin Street,” she cries. “When we promenade on Baldwin Street, we must converse in French all the way up and all the way back. It’s one of my rules!” She resumes walking, playfully spinning her parasol. “Et qui connaissez-vous à Bristol?” she asks. On the evidence, it would appear her French tutor was educated in Belfast.

  “La veuve Rankin,” he replies. “Personne d’autre.” She looks at him with disbelief and wrinkles her nose.

  She comes to tea at Alger’s and is given a tour of the paintings in the study. Then Henry displays his bird drawings. She falls into silence at the sight of them and he is encouraged to go on, to draw the tea box of tiny bones onto the table. “I never imagined birds to have such a large pelvic bone,” he says, using a quill tip as pointer to trace the bone in question. “Actually, there are many features to these skeletons that surprised me. Imagine if you’d stumbled across one and had never seen a bird! Look at the little chain of vertebrae at the base of this spine. If you were unacquainted with feathers, wouldn’t you assume this creature to have had a short tail, like a terrier?”

  But in response, she flings herself away from the table. “Who is there on God’s earth that has not seen a bird?” she cries shrilly. “Certainly not Mr. Henry De la Beche, who knows all there is to know about swans and hedge sparrows and their precious feathers and the colour of their legs!”

  It is Alger who rescues him, opening up the pianoforte and inviting Miss Whyte to play, which she is happy to do. Henry closes the tea box and takes his place on the settee, where he sits smarting through a surprisingly expert rendition of a Haydn sonata.

  She makes a point of telling him that she’s never once been to the Hotwell spa, or to the Pump Room, or the Clifton Assembly Rooms: her uncle refuses to take her. Having established himself as a pedant, having failed to proffer a collection of distinguished friends, Henry can at least escort her to the Assembly Rooms, although whom they will converse with there without an introduction is a mystery to him. Uncle Alger offers the closed carriage, and on the agreed-upon Wednesday afternoon, pleased with the prospect of a drive up the Avon gorge to Clifton, Henry goes to collect Letitia and brings her to the house first for a word with his uncle. She is standing in the drawing room in high spirits, handsomely dressed in a new ensemble of rose and tan, when Sullivan announces a caller, a Mr. William Conybeare. “The bishop!” Alger cries. “I thought he had died.”

  He’s still puzzling over the marvellous honour inexplicably bestowed upon him when Sullivan opens the door again to reveal a tall young man with a strikingly handsome and engaging face. The grandson of the famous and long-dead bishop, as it turns out, a fellow of Christ Church College, Oxford, and about to take holy orders himself. Mr. Conybeare hastens to explain the call: he’s a frequent sojourner in Lyme Regis, where he recently dined at Aveline House, and it is Henry’s mother who has sent him. After introductions are performed, Henry confesses that he has not yet met Mr. Aveline and their caller goes on to describe him as a fine fellow, an expert on many subjects in the natural world. “He owns a clockwork model of the heavens. When I was there, he set the spheres revolving for my amusement. He has been a bachelor all his days, and there was much amazement when his engagement was announced. Apparently your mother accomplished in an hour what maiden ladies of the region had spent years attempting! And you will both be in Dorsetshire before long, I understand?” With Alger chiming in on the third syllable of every word, trying to finish his guest’s sentences, Conybeare tells them what unrivalled scenery they will find there, what delights await them in the spectacular walks along the cliffs and the shore.

  “Henry is going to Dorsetshire, but I am not,” says Letitia, perching on the edge of a chair and taking off her gloves. “I am going to London for the season. I am to be the guest of Mrs. Billings of Mayfair. Mrs. Anthony Billings?” And to Henry’s chagrin, she arches her fine brows knowingly at their guest. But it appears that Mr. Conybeare is acquainted with Mrs. Anthony Billings, and can attest to her amiable manner and the amusing pug that sits by her chair. The very model of a gentleman, Mr. William Conybeare, with his slender aquiline nose and quick, candid eyes, and a flourish to the tying of his cravat to which Henry can only aspire (and also the tiniest pause before each of his graceful utterances, as though his new acquaintances are the subject of some amusement to him. But perhaps not). Deftly setting aside Alger’s detailed inquiries into his health and the health of various members of his family (individuals entirely unknown to Uncle Alger), Conybeare turns back to Henry. “Well, sir, if you are to be on your own in Lyme Regis, you must join the ranks of the gentlemen collectors! You will be amazed at the variety of fossils one is able to procure on those shores.”

  So (at the risk of appearing a child) Henry draws the curiosity his mother brought him out of his waistcoat pocket, where he’s taken to carrying it for the pleasure of its weight and the feel of its coils.

  “Indeed, that is a beauty!” Conybeare declares.

  “I have no idea what it is,” says Henry. “I confess to ignorance regarding the very nature of fossils.”

  “They are an age-old mystery, indeed,” says Conybeare, and then he will not unravel it – he makes them guess.

  “It was left by fairies!” says Letitia immediately. “They stole a child and left this stone in its place!” Conybeare laughs heartily. Uncle Alger pronounces it to be a stone carved by the Druids. As for Henry, he hesitates, palming the curiosity. There is something so marvellously delicate about its descending coils, each of them minutely ridged in gold, as to make him believe it must be organic. This is the sort of detail that an artisan can only allude to.

  Finally he asks, “Can it possibly be the shell of a sea creature?” and Conybeare says, “Well done,” and goes on to tell them that science agrees that curiosities of this type are t
he remains of molluscs unknown now in Britain, presumably migrated to other waters. This one is an ammonite, although Conybeare cannot classify it as to type. As to its strange composition, why, perhaps it turned to stone as a consequence of the unique atmospheric conditions at the time of the Great Flood.

  “Where at Lyme Regis does one find them?”

  “Oh, there are curiosity-mongers in the lower town who sell them for a pittance.”

  They’re seated on either side of the fire, and somehow Alger’s sitting room has transformed itself into an inviting salon, and Henry has begun to anticipate the pleasure of discussing his bird skeletons with Mr. Conybeare. But Letitia moves restlessly to stand by the hearth and it is difficult to avoid her eyes. How can he suggest postponing the outing to the Assembly Rooms without driving their guest away? Then, with an agile leap into the conversation, Letitia pre-empts him.

  “And will we find Lyme Regis a lively centre for dancing and card playing and such?” she asks. From there, it’s just a few neat steps to the Clifton Assembly Rooms, and to the happy discovery that Mr. Conybeare had considered attending that very afternoon and would be pleased to accompany them now. And then Henry is settling himself into the carriage, he is waving goodbye to a disconsolate uncle, thinking all the while, Never must I underestimate Letitia Whyte, where social arrangements are concerned.

  Here at last is Letitia’s entry to Bristol society, for if William Conybeare is not acquainted with every person in the room, he is certainly acquainted with the most prominent. Cards are abandoned in favour of dancing, and then Henry is abandoned in favour of a partner who knows the steps, and so he finds himself happily standing by the punch bowl with Conybeare. The fiddles strike up and the dancers rise unevenly from honouring their partners, and Conybeare tells Henry that this particular dance sprang up in Devonshire, inspired by a military exercise performed on horseback. Walk. Trot. Canter. Gallop, he says softly at intervals as the linked couples swing past. He confesses to a fiancée of his own, who also loves to dance. He confesses as well to the hope of a lectureship at Bristol; it was the need to cultivate old ties that prompted his current visit. And he frankly tells his age: he’s ten years older than Henry, yet in his telling, Henry is encouraged to believe that they may become friends.

  “How did you begin to collect at Lyme Regis?” Henry asks.

  “My friend and colleague William Buckland was born near there. He teaches now at Oxford. The little curiosities found at Lyme Regis are fascinating, but it seems also that many large creatures perished there in the Flood, and these are the focus of his study. There’s a great deal of pressure on Buckland to find evidence for his theories, if he wishes to retain a chair in Undergroundology. He’s been on an extended research tour for that purpose, although the Lyme Regis area remains the most significant site. Buckland has spent years trying to dissuade the ignorant townsfolk from grinding valuable fossils up for lime, for the stucco trade.”

  While he talks, his eyes are on Letitia’s curls, the brightest patch of colour in the long line of muslin and ribbons. She executes a graceful turn a few feet away from them and Conybeare looks back at Henry, flashing him an approving smile.

  She has very little family left in Ireland, just a few cousins. In England, there is only her cousin Penrose and her mother, to whom Henry is soon to be presented. The occasion is several times postponed, although the inn in question, a prosperous establishment called the Full Moon, is not a mile away. Its proprietor is a Mr. Auriol. “On the evidence of his name, your stepfather would appear to be of French extraction,” Henry observes.

  “I really have no idea,” Letitia says coolly.

  Finally, on a Sunday afternoon, Mrs. Auriol appears at Captain Whyte’s, alone and in ill humour. She’s a dark-eyed, unhappy-looking woman – Letitia bears very little resemblance to her – who resided in Bath before her remarriage and makes much of the absence of sedan chairs in Bristol. “It was a moment of folly,” Henry’s mother said of her marriage, and Henry studies Mrs. Auriol’s face and bearing for evidence of a passionate nature. She asks Henry three questions: where his mother lives, what his annual income is likely to be at his majority, and whether the cane-cutters on the plantation live in trees, as she has heard. She receives his answers gloomily. “It would be more commendable to provide employment for the destitute Christian of England,” she observes.

  “Alas, the English constitution cannot withstand the tropical heat – to work in it, I mean. Indentured servants from Ireland and Scotland were used in the early days of the West Indies colonies, and a year or two of cutting cane generally killed them. When you consider it fully, slavery is in some ways more humane than indentureship. Ownership provides an incentive not to drive your workers to death – when indeed, with indentured servants, the impulse was to do so, to avoid paying them out at the end of their term.” He has no idea where this argument is coming from, but he finds himself propounding it with some heat. “When the workers are your greatest capital investment, you must maintain them. Especially now, with the Wilberforce Bill, now that the trade has been abolished and the workforce can no longer be replenished at the next docking of a ship from Guinea, we must subsist the slaves properly so that they will breed.”

  She looks at him, confounded. The old uncle seems to be biting his tongue. Perhaps he’s developing a new respect for Henry.

  After Mrs. Auriol leaves, Henry invites Letitia out to the garden. “I sense your mother may have been angry about something.”

  “She loathes my uncle because he will not receive her husband.”

  “Your stepfather.”

  She gives her little laugh. “Hardly that. I was in Bath when they married and I did not trouble myself to come down. I don’t speak of him. It is one of my rules.” And then, to his surprise, tears well in her eyes. She looks up at him with a transparent expression he’s never seen in her before, and goes to speak again, and then puts her hands over her face.

  He reaches for a hand, draws it down, and leans forward to plant a kiss on her damp cheek. “When I come into my own,” he says, “we shall marry and never trouble with such things. We shall take a Grand Tour. To Paris and Venice and Mont Blanc. The war will be over by then.”

  “Do you think the war is going to end?”

  “Well, of course it will end, one day.”

  She shakes him off and trips back across the garden, swinging her skirts like a child. “I hope the war is never over!” she cries in a falsely exuberant voice. “Never! I adore the uniforms. Oh, Henry, do enlist!”

  “How can I enlist?” he shouts, exasperated, as she disappears through the door.

  All their courtship was squeezed into five unconscious minutes in the copse behind her uncle’s house. He feels the loss of it, of courtship itself; the very word has about it a sense of ritual and leisurely pursuit. It also seems a pity to him that she came out at such a young age, in that her lessons were stopped. Her life looks unbearably tedious to him – worse than his. But she is never bored for long. In the vicissitudes of dressmaking and hair curling and calling card and post, she manages to find drama. She comes down the stairs on his arrival, breathless with eagerness, and Henry listens closely to discover the pending event that accounts for her excitement. But it all seems to spring from a source within herself, her own talent for endowing the day with intrigue.

  On a sunny morning, he suggests they take their easels to the back garden to paint together, but she professes to detest painting, she adamantly refuses. “But you were painting in the garden the day I made your acquaintance,” he says, “and for several days before.”

  “How ever would we have met, else?” she asks saucily. “My uncle would not be troubled to arrange an introduction.”

  There is a terrible clatter – the butler is tipping coals into the hearth – and she sits smiling up at him, picturesquely arranged in the divan cushions, and then gives the little laugh that has so begun to annoy him. Henry turns and walks out, snatching up his hat from the h
all table. He does not trouble to see that the door is closed properly but turns sharply away from his uncle’s house and angles across the road, fury clutching at his stomach.

  Pretending to paint – pretending to an interest that was never hers – how much of what she seems to be is pretence? The ridiculous little laugh – it is the laugh of a coquette! He sees himself floundering in the woods, a helpless dupe caught in her snare. A snare laid with absolute indifference to the real qualities of the man she’d chosen as her prey. And he fell into it. He allowed himself to become fodder for prattling letters to her silly friends. He is at Queen Square by then, walking kitty-corner across a park lined with mansions built by the Guinea trade. As would be evident to anyone walking through the square, by the number of Negro servants one sees – here a groom leading a pair of geldings towards a stable, here a gardener bent over the hedge (and he thinks briefly of the fierce and piteous woman he saw in Piccadilly, and wonders what became of her). He feels himself outside it all – Henry Beach, who will live life on his own terms. The day he walked to the neighbouring house to propose marriage to this girl, the thought he held to was this: I shall get the foundation of my gentleman’s life in place and then I need not trouble myself. I shall give them this because it’s meaningless, and I shall be as I was. And it’s true, he will need to have a home, and that home will need to have a wife in it. Or I shall become Uncle Alger, he thinks.

  He’s a little calmer now, and he asks himself whether he loves her to any degree, and whether it matters. He considers how similar they are, their childhoods both spent on green islands far away, the lost fathers they hardly recall. She’s not sensible, but from all reports, young ladies are not. She is pleasing to look at and thrilling to touch. She seems to know how to conduct herself in society, if you make allowances for how very young she is. Already she has a facility with dress and charming gesture that surpasses that of other, older girls. His mother felt she would grow into something.