Curiosity

by Joan Thomas

  Squire Henley and his wife bring an awkward exactitude to their hospitality, avid hosts unaccustomed to entertaining. The table would nicely seat twelve and they’re confronted with a party of six. Mr. Aveline and his wife sit opposite each other towards the Squire’s end of the table, and Henry and Mr. Buckland are stranded at the dimmer end of the dining room with Mrs. Henley, who has come to the table armed with a list of suitable conversational topics, resolute in her effort to calm Mr. Buckland. “And what is your opinion of Lyme Regis?” she inquires of Henry. “There are many who remark that it has the air of a Turkish town!”

  “I’ve never been to Turkey,” Henry says, beginning to shake with laughter. His mother darts a cautioning hand across the gulf between them.

  “But I am not surprised at this opinion,” Mr. Aveline calls down to the Squire’s wife. “I have always thought the Lyme Regis climate more like Italy than like England.”

  “We have had great success with hibiscus from the Bahamas. You may demur at Turkey, Mr. De la Beche, but there are those enthusiastic visitors who compare our climate to the tropics. Mrs. Aveline may wish to comment on that.”

  Mrs. Aveline touches her hair and gives her hostess an elaborate smile. “It’s a decade since we were in the West Indies. But no, I don’t find Lyme Regis quite tropical.”

  The Squire frowns uncertainly and turns his efforts to the suckling pig lying on a board before them. As he carves, he offers the news that a certain Mr. England is building warm-water baths near the Assembly Rooms. Lyme Regis is destined to be the next Brighton, he tells them, deftly running the point of his knife around the piglet’s neck. The carving proceeds, a wicket of ghostly ribs is laid bare. The skeleton of the suckling pig lies exposed for their examination. The tourism prospects of Lyme Regis falter; they are recalled by bones to the irresistible topic of the day.

  Buckland is the one who finds a graceful segue. “To Lyme Regis!” he cries, lifting his wine. “To the blue lias of Lyme Regis, where lie treasures richer than the pyramids of Egypt.” They raise their goblets to the blue lias and then, prompted by Mr. Aveline, jump to their feet to toast the creature listening from the library.

  “What a shame the creature’s body was carried away before you had the opportunity to view it.” Henry’s mother says charmingly to Buckland, lowering herself back to her chair. “But from reports, I can tell you that its mother was certainly a fish and its father a crocodile.”

  “Perhaps fishes took a different form in ages past,” Henry ventures. “Perhaps fishes have changed.”

  Buckland leans forward in his chair, galvanized into professorial mode, and the Squire’s wife lunges towards him to snatch goblets and pitchers out of the way. A scientific gentleman in France has proposed just such a notion, that species have changed over time. Consider the camelopard, a long-necked creature reaching to eat leaves from high trees. As the lower leaves are consumed, it must needs stretch its neck. Perhaps its offspring were obligingly born with a longer neck. “So goes the theory of the Continental gentleman,” Mr. Buckland intones.

  “The great Georges Cuvier,” explains the Squire helpfully.

  No, no, nothing of the sort! Mr. Buckland is seized with hysteria at the notion, he’s in danger of choking. Mrs. Henley passes him the goblet she’s taken under her protection. It is the theory of one Jean Baptiste Lamarck, Buckland says when he’s able to speak, a professor of insects and worms at the great Paris Museum. A mischievous fellow – he endeavoured to interest Napoleon in his ideas, but Cuvier advised Napoleon to refuse a copy of his scientific paper. And rightly so, for Cuvier had explicitly refuted the suggestion that species can change; he refuted it absolutely and forever. Monsieur Cuvier had the opportunity to study animals found by Napoleon in the Egyptian tombs and carried back to Paris. Cats. Dogs. Crocodiles. He made his usual immaculate measurements. He compared them to creatures living today. These animals had not changed one iota. Not in four thousand years! The notion of transmutation is discredited, fully discredited! Mr. Buckland takes another drink of wine. He digresses into a story about Georges Cuvier, the clever master foiling a student prank. It is not, Henry thinks, quite to the point, but Mr. Buckland has lost his point, he is struggling to batter back a hurricane of emotions. Finally the rising water floods the banks and spills from his eyes. It’s the mention of Monsieur Cuvier that has done it. In a broken voice, he confesses his distress that he will not be able to present a scientific description of today’s discovery to the great anatomist.

  “I summoned Sir Everard Home,” says the Squire into the silence that Mr. Buckland’s tears provoke. “He’s a surgeon from the naval hospital at Plymouth. He was on the cliffs with me last week and spent an hour looking at the specimen and noting down his observations. He can be trusted absolutely to write a faithful description.”

  “Sir Everard Home,” groans Buckland into his handkerchief.

  “But my dear Buckland, we had no idea where you were. In any case, you are free now to study the skeleton in London. I shall provide you with a letter of introduction to the proprietor.”

  “Tell me again the name of the carnival where it is to be displayed.”

  Even from this distance, Henry can see that the Squire is regretting he so kindly accommodated Professor Buckland today. “It is the London Museum, popularly known as the Egyptian Hall. The proprietor is a Mr. Bullock. Not a carnival at all, a very scientific endeavour.”

  “Mr. Bullock,” Henry says eagerly. “He is a friend of my uncle’s. I was in London last year when he was opening his hall. He had acquired artifacts from the voyages of Captain Cook – they were to be the first exhibit.” Henry’s mother’s smile encompasses the whole long table. My clever son!

  “There, you see,” says the Squire gratefully.

  “My son will accompany you,” Mrs. Aveline offers brightly. “Henry is a highly skilled artist.”

  Buckland inclines his flushed face towards her. “I would be much obliged,” he says mournfully.

  “But we are neglecting your gift, sir,” trills their hostess. It has been roasted and lies on a platter beside the principal dish, like the suckling pig’s unnatural offspring. A guinea pig, it is called. It is found in South America. Big-headed like a pig, but with the bleared face of a baked cat. “It is not quite a pig, I believe?” asks the Squire’s wife delicately.

  “Cavia porcellus,” says the professor. “Porcellus you will know, having been Latin scholars. But cavia?” He shoves his hand kerchief away and rallies himself to the parody of a schoolmaster. “Come, come. You there, with the spectacles!” Mr. Aveline, he means. They gaze at the professor, dull students all. The word is Portuguese, he tells them finally. For rat. The creature is in fact a rodent, and very high in protein. It’s a scientific experiment! Mr. Buckland is eating his way through the animal kingdom. He has tasted shark. Rat. Ostrich! Hyena! A nasty flavour, as you might imagine. Why would he choose to eat his way through the animal kingdom, will no one pose the question?

  Mr. Aveline declines to pose the question. He likewise declines a slice of guinea pig. “I have had rather more of the Porcellus domesticus than is good for me,” he says. He leans in Henry’s direction. “Henry, do you realize that the ammonite your mother gave you was found by the very maiden who came across the specimen we saw today? You remember, darling, when we met her in the churchyard.”

  Indeed she remembers. She raises a hand to her bosom. In honour of the occasion, she wears a brooch purchased in the maiden’s shop. An impression of a sea lily, polished in its matrix. The Squire is telling how the maiden came to his door, to his front door, all drabble-tailed in the rain and her boots caked in black marl. They sent her around back to the kitchen, but still she insisted on speaking to the Squire himself. He was away for the morning and she refused to leave. I wish to sell a dragon were her words when he finally came down.

  “You can thank me for that,” says Mr. Aveline through their laughter. Earlier, Mary Anning had approached him in the butter market. �
��Please, sir, can you tell me who owns Black Ven?” she’d asked.

  But having lost possession of the dragon, Professor Buckland will not be denied possession of Mary Anning. In full command of his emotions now, he outlines their intimate acquaintance. The morning excursions under his tutelage, her fearless and perspicacious questions. The letters he wrote to her, the visits to their humble kitchen, his charge to her and her father to contact him with just such a find. He has been away, on a geological tour in Scotland; that explains everything. He would have called at her workshop this very afternoon, but he chanced to call on the Squire first, just as they carried the saurian head up the drive. The girl on the cliffs comes into Henry’s mind: black hair and eyes and ruddy, healthy cheeks – a Celtic face, the face of the region (it would seem from the people he’s encountered on the streets), a very distinct physiognomy.

  “She dresses so plainly,” he says to his mother.

  “Why, she’s a Dissenter. They see colour as vanity, poor thing. Remember Susan St. Ives, when she married that dreadful Congregationalist, all those grey gowns done up at the neck.” Standing by the coach in the afternoon sun, he’d remarked his mother’s own gown, the rich purple of a plum. Now, in the candlelight, it’s the crimson-purple of the plum’s flesh when you bite into it. “Or the girl may be in mourning,” she says. “Perhaps she’s both: a Dissenter in mourning.” Her cheeks and bosom are flushed from the wine. She laughs, the stones in her earrings catching the candlelight.

  “Come, tell us,” Buckland is calling up the table to his host. “How much did you pay the maiden?”

  “Twenty-three pounds,” says the Squire after a pause, and his wife’s head flies up.

  “Twenty pounds I promised the father!” cries Mr. Buckland. “That explains it, the shrewd little dealer. That explains why she didn’t wait for me. And what did you manage to extract from this Bullock fellow?” The Squire declines to say. “You turned a tidy profit, I have no doubt,” says Buckland.

  “Twenty-three pounds!” says the Squire’s wife, dabbing at her chin with her napkin. “It’s more than they’ll know what to do with.”

  It is beeswax the Henleys are burning in three small iron chandeliers hanging over the table, wooden dripping-dishes overflowing under each candle. The smell floats over the long table, the incense of a country home. An amber drop falls beside Henry’s fork and he picks it from the table and presses it between his thumb and finger, feeling its warmth, fingering the hardening impression of his thumbprint in the wax. In his reverie, he slides a chair into the gap between Mr. Aveline and Professor Buckland. It’s for Mary Anning, who materializes sitting up very straight in a plain black dress with a white collar. Her dark hair is caught loosely up at the nape of her neck. She turns her head from one party to the other, listening gravely to both conversations. Then she catches sight of the mutilated carcass of the guinea pig and leans forward, touching it with her fingertips, seeming to count its frail ribs.

  The next afternoon, Henry finds the girl in the flesh standing behind a round table in front of one of the cottages clinging to the seawall. The weekly coach from Bath has just arrived and the square is full of hawkers and travellers and townspeople idling about. Eight or ten customers crowd around her table, most of them men. A boy tries to crawl between his legs and Henry delivers a sharp kick. He waits till everyone’s gone but him. He’s clutching the casket of bird bones, having brought it with him on impulse.

  On the table are stones in the shape of vertebrae, long pointed grey rods, curled mollusc shells. But her best trade seems to be in ammonites. He looks with interest at the range of matter in which they are formed: some made of ochre sandstone, others of grey limestone, some like gooseberry jelly embedded in grey rock. The finest, like his, are iron infused with fool’s gold. He’s carrying his in his pocket, a better specimen than anything she has just now on the table.

  “What is your shop called?” he asks her bent head.

  “The Fossil Depot, sir,” she says without looking up. The last customer paid her with a handful of brass and she’s counting coins.

  “You need to hang a sign out,” he says. “I came by this morning, and it was not apparent to me which house was yours, and so I went away again.”

  Then she does look at him with her black eyes. “This were my father’s shop, sir,” she says. She has the vowels of the shepherd he spoke with at the excavation. “He scorned a sign. His trade came from his good name in the district.”

  “My name is De la Beche,” he says. “I have something I wish to show you.”

  “I saw you at the cliffs, sir, with Mr. Aveline,” she says. “You were collecting?”

  “No,” he says. “It’s something else. I’m afraid to show you out here. It’s so windy, and what I have here is very fragile.”

  She frowns, and then says, “I must needs pack up.” He waits while she transfers her wares to a tray. Then she leads him down six rough steps to what she calls the workshop. As he descends, he catches a glimpse of the one room that must serve as both kitchen and sitting room. A woman in a black widow’s cap sits motionless on a chair. A slab of bacon hangs smoking over the fire. It looks to him like a very poor kitchen enjoying an unaccustomed prosperity.

  The workshop itself is a damp, cluttered cellar – not large (though it must be the size of this whole humble house), reasonably lit by a high, shallow window at each end, and smelling of mud and the rancid-mutton stink of tallow candles. The end near the door appears to serve as a shop, with shells in shallow boxes laid along a shelf. A table runs almost the length of the room.

  “You kept the head here?” he asks. She nods. “I saw it,” he says. “At the Squire’s. Professor Buckland was examining it.”

  Surprise or anxiety moves over her face. “Mr. Buckland,” she says. “I were a-keeping it for Mr. Buckland. But then I learned it were rightly the Squire’s. It were buried in his cliffs. He were kind enough to pay me all the same, for my labour.”

  “How long did it take you to dig that skeleton out?” Henry asks.

  “Four month I worked.”

  “Every day? All the winter long?”

  She nods. “Anywhen the tide favoured. It were banging cold.”

  Then her eyes are on the box of bird skeletons, so he opens it and begins to lay the birds in a row on the work table. “Where did ye find such clean skeletons, sir?” she asks, bending eagerly over them.

  “In a hearth that had been boarded up for several years. They strayed down the chimney and perished. The dumb beast blunders into the world of man at its peril!”

  She touches one with a grotesque aspect to its claws. “This en fought ’is death.”

  “That’s exactly what I thought when I saw it! I’ve been making a series of paintings. It was a deal of work to identify them. You can begin to classify them by their bills, whether they eat seeds or insects. I believe those are the two principal classes of land birds.”

  He can see her considering this. She slides the robin skeleton to one end, and the dunnock, and then she stops and looks up at him. “They have a powerful kinship to the crocodile head.”

  “It’s true. They’re very like. If I had seen only that head, I would have thought your creature was a gigantic bird.”

  She looks at him levelly, as if trying to decide what he is about. “Would ye wish to see my notations?” She picks a dogeared accounts book up off the table and shows him a page, and he moves closer to the window for the light. In pencil, in a neat script, she has written:

  Cocodrille

  Number of teeth — 184

  Length of skull — 9 foot

  Length of body — 17 foot

  Number of verteberrys — 60

  Bredth of verteberry — 3 inch

  Number of ribs — 47–60 (some be mashed)

  Shape of eye — austrick egg

  Found by Joseph and Mary Anning at Black Ven Cliff,

  Lyme Regis, Dorsetshire

  In the year of our Lord 1812.

/>   He looks at her with surprise. Was this an attempt at some sort of scientific description of the creature? “How did you do the measurements?” he asks.

  She shows him the willow rod she cut to twelve inches and took to the shore. “I were chary of spoiling my father’s tape in the mud,” she says.

  Eventually, they’re sitting on rush chairs at the corner of the long table. Behind her, the window is a perfectly halved rectangle of sea and sky. The light fades, and she gets up and fetches a tallow candle.

  “Be there classes of dragons?” she asks abruptly as she sets the candle on the table.

  “Of dragons!” She is a child after all. “Well, there was the Worm at Durham, that was killed by being hacked into pieces. And the dragon at Knucker Hole, with its delicate underbelly.” He’s thinking aloud of stories he heard as a boy. “And one that was killed by having a sword thrust into its tongue. So you might classify them by their vulnerability to attack. Although it often took generations of carnage to learn it. Did you ever imagine it was a dragon?”