by Joan Thomas
Henry went gladly across the shore to where Mary Anning stooped with her basket. She stood up and pointed to the town. “As long as you can walk out far enough to see the Cobb, sir, you will be safe,” she said. And they could see it, and the town, which at this distance looked as though its houses had been thrown together from the stony slope by a colony of alpine marmots. They stood together in silence. He wanted her to speak again but could not think what else to ask. In contrast to the white of her bonnet, her cheeks were remarkably tanned, and colour bloomed below the skin. She had the sort of colouring that would be white or brown or crimson, but never pink. She wore too-large gloves from which the fingers had been cut off. How useful, he thought, and how cold the tips of her fingers must be.
“I wish we had thought to bring refreshments,” said a voice at his elbow. It was his stepfather. “I am perishing of thirst.”
“I have water, sir,” Mary Anning said, reaching a corked bottle out of her basket. As though he had been struck deaf, Mr. Aveline walked past her and turned up the shore towards town. Mary felt the sharp sting of tears in the corners of her eyes. She had been all of a flummox in the last few days. Last night, when she came up from the workshop, her mother saw how wrought-up she was, and reached out a hand and pulled her into a bony embrace. She did not rebuke Mary with chawing high, but kissed her and said, “When your cup is full, Mary, you must walk steady.”
And so Mary blinked her eyes clear and uncorked the bottle to have a drink herself.
The tide had turned, and a storm was brewing up in the south. Walking home is always quicker but often more vexing, for the weight you might be carrying and the danger of the tide. They were hopeless at choosing a path through the rocks, these people. Without a by-your-leave, Mary wove nimbly past them all and illustrated a clear path up against the cliff edge.
Mr. Aveline was limping. His new boots, so beautifully cobbled, were, by the narrowness of their cut at the ankle, restricting the flow of pedal blood. Why did I agree to come? he thought bitterly. After a lifetime of serious pursuits, to be assigned the duty of proctor to a wayward youth! And he will be penniless. The plantation will have entirely failed by the time he reaches majority. Mr. Aveline’s old friend Miss Philpot was behind him, and he fell back then and said to her, with a nod at his stepson, “Have you noted the pantaloons?”
“Oh, it’s a fashion,” she said vaguely, and he said, “It’s a fashion that reeks of republicanism! It blew across the Channel from France.” He tried by his tone to make light of it. And then he presented as fact the prospect he and his wife had discussed that morning. “Young De la Beche will soon have others to account to. Have you heard of the geological excursion Doctor Carpenter is planning? It seems that Henry will be joining it. They will be many months in Scotland.”
“Indeed?” said Miss Philpot. “I spoke with your wife this morning, and she –”
But she could not finish. Mr. Buckland was at her side, reaching across with a gift. A devil’s toenail. Gryphaea arcuata.
“The way you can identify a species with a glance – it is marvellous!” said Miss Philpot, smiling at him.
“Long days of walking on the shore with my father. He was a wonderful naturalist, until God took from him his most precious tool, his eyes. And so, as a lad, I must needs describe every spiny protrusion in detail for his benefit.”
“God took his eyes but gave him a bright-eyed son,” said Miss Philpot, “and I dare say your father regarded it a fair exchange.”
“Indeed, it made of me a man of science.” With a wave, he was off over the rocks and she was left with the tinny aftertaste in her mouth of her last ridiculous remark, her preposterous, overreaching effort to flatter him.
The encroaching tide was forcing them to the big rocks at the foot of the cliffs. Mary Anning climbed steadily ahead, seemingly unperturbed. The genial young De la Beche paused and offered Miss Philpot a hand. The solicitude they showed Miss Philpot might impress an observer, but (she thought) it had an absence of genuine interest in it. Except in the case of Colonel Birch, who, when they stopped to catch their breath, and were all drawn by the drama in the clouds to look back at the Isle of Portland, could not resist telling her about the mermaid found on the shore at Church Ope Cove of a Sabbath morning, and carried up past the pirates’ graveyard and into the church, where, forthwith, it died. “Did you often see mermaids from the deck of your ship?” Elizabeth asked.
He turned his eyes back to the mirage of Portland. “I was never a sailor,” he said. “I was lieutenant colonel in the First Regiment of the Life Guards,” he said. “A senior cavalry troop, as you know. I had the honour of serving under Charles Stanhope, Earl of Harrington, until my retirement. I have travelled this twelvemonth throughout the Southwest, awaiting the Lord’s direction regarding a new vocation. The day I disembarked from the coach and set eyes on that young miss’s curiosity table, I knew that my Lord had spoken.” With an apologetic smile, Miss Philpot hurried ahead to join Mary Anning, and Colonel Birch, left walking alone, knew that she despised him and returned to that story which was taking on the quality of a legend (the old soldier’s quest) but had within it the moment he could not convey – the ammonites coiled in enduring beauty on the table, a sight that went to the marrow of his aching bones. This will be my life, he’d vowed to himself (as he had been waiting to vow, about something, ever since he’d been pensioned, and even before).
“Mr. De la Beche is shortly going away,” Miss Philpot found herself saying abruptly to Mary Anning. He was engaged to be married, she went on. Such a well-favoured, well-spoken young gentleman – how could he not be engaged? The tide was closing in, the waves were splashing at their feet, but still she talked as she scrambled breathlessly over the rocks. “Mr. Aveline was telling me. And I had a conversation earlier today with Mrs. Aveline outside the bank. I understand Mr. De la Beche will be spending time with his fiancée in London, and then going to Scotland. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. Or he may go to Oxford to study with Professor Buckland.”
They were at the place where Mary’s father had lain one lonely night – Mary did not so much think this as feel a habitual squeeze to her heart. Mr. Dilabeach, she thought hopelessly. She had not even had his name right. She looked back at him and the other tall gentleman, tramping through new-fallen mud at a dangerous proximity to the cliffs, where they might provoke another landslip.
A wave broke on the rock beside her and she felt the weight of the water hitting her skirt. Out of nowhere, the text of James Wheaton’s Sunday sermon came to her, his last sermon before he was stricken and carried from the chapel. If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. The text resounded in her mind in his voice, and with such force that she knew it would lodge there until she discovered its meaning.
Then they were scant yards from the path that would take them up Church Cliffs and into town. Rain fell in a narrow sheet across the Channel and a rain-washed patch of sky opened to heavenish light before them. At the sight of it, a rainbow occurred to all among them who knew their Scripture, to all of them. In spite of their haste, each wet-shod member of the party balanced on a slippery rock for a moment to look at the sky, the breathing world colliding for a moment with its diminished image in each mind.
But it was only a trick of the light; there would not be a rainbow this time. A double closing off – the encroaching water coinciding with the dying light of day. Across the Channel, the golden light greyed. A breaker slammed on the rocks at their side, leaping at the cliff: they had less time than they thought. But there was the path, and one by one, they scrambled up it. The last to go panting up was Colonel Birch, and then the light was fully gone and the last narrow ribbon of shore was taken over by the sea.
SEVENTEEN
nder the eaves in Aveline House, Henry hangs suspended in darkness. Like the Ichthyosaurus: no eyelids to close. He’s face down on the horsehair mattress, a watcher, intact, self-nourished. Larger than the margins of his body, his
bones thinned by age: he’s a shape he’s tending towards. Then he’s awake, Henry is seeping back, recalled by grey light at the window. Kicking a foot to untangle the bedclothes pinned under his thigh, rolling over, hitching the quilt back. Too early to rise, and too cold.
He reaches down, flicks his jaunty morning erection. Oh, the joys of the morning, when the world is made new! Flicks it, cradles it. The girl he posits has Letitia’s slender waist, she has that merrythought jaw and lovely throat. He puts her in a coach, the two of them alone in a public stage while the fields reel by. When he buries his face in her bosom, she’s the girl who served him the other night at the Monmouth Inn, her breasts tumbling out of her bodice, bringing all the joy of existence gratuitously into his dim bedchamber. Then she’s Maggie, his mother’s maid, Maggie with her laughing mouth, and a passage opens swiftly in the dark to the marrow of Creation.
He floats gasping on the mattress. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! His rapture radiates outwards, waves of it dispersing in the dim air. Too soon it subsides, too soon he’s back in the dusty smell of cotton ticking. His roughly woven Hebrides blanket, and the bedstead with acanthus leaves ineptly carved on its low posts. He dabs at himself with the quilt and rolls to his side, the horsehair mattress hard and saggy under him. There’s a murky taste in his mouth from last night’s wine. He punches at his pillow and rolls over again. All that ecstasy surging up unprovoked within a single mortal – what a matter for scientific investigation, if you could get a man to talk about it! He sees George Holland’s amused eyes, the mobile black brows. A fine, frank fellow. On the trip to Scotland, they enjoyed several wine-fuelled conversations about the mysteries of carnal love. One night, they sat and watched a middle-aged baronet making open efforts to lure a serving maid up to his rooms. All the gentry lusted for common women, Holland insisted. “It’s the lewdness of low females. Sexual instinct is stifled in the upper classes – in highborn females, I mean. And why is that so? By nature or by moral tutelage – what do you say?” But it seemed to Henry that George Holland’s premise was wrong. Gentlemen are drawn to serving girls because they are girls, as pretty as any other, popping up in your private quarters every hour of the night and day. Regarding the sexual appetites of high-born women, he really has very little to draw on.
He rolls out of bed and walks over to the corner to pull the chamber pot out of its cabinet. On that whole trip, he drank too much and talked too much, it was a fact. He told Holland about Maggie, about the smear of blood left on his sheets and the mischief-making sow of a laundress who went to his mother in a grotesque parody of concern (“I hope Master Henry’s having his wound seen to?”). Pain rises at the thought of Maggie, the way his bed would shake with their stifled laughter, the tender little sound she made then in her throat when he entered her, clamping his head to her breast as though she were comforting a grieving boy. She was from Evershot. Likely that’s where she went when his mother dismissed her. Why did he have to make a sordid story of her? And then there was Holland asking slyly every chance he got: I hope Master Henry’s having his wound seen to?
He crawls back into bed and pulls the covers over himself. He had passed the signpost to Evershot last year, driving through the Frome Valley in a closed carriage. He was with Letitia and three or four others, on their way to a country house. The week comes to him as one protracted and acrimonious faro game, throughout which he toyed with the thought of borrowing a horse and riding to Evershot, although he never did. There was a many-fingered lake on the grounds and he slipped out one day and rowed, glided alone in a still green pool surrounded by cedars. He was in the middle of the lake when Letitia appeared on the shore. She slipped her shoes off and sank onto the landing, dangling one white-stockinged foot towards the water. He sat still in the skiff and watched a slender, inverted figure materialize in the green mirror of the lake, one raised toe just kissing the dangling toe of the girl on the landing, so that it seemed the two white forms had been cut from a single sheet of paper by an oriental prestidigitator. After a minute, he reached out and touched an oar, he sent waves undulating across the lake. They overtook the water nymph, foreshortening her, carrying her off in pieces to either side, while the forest nymph inclined unconscious in a white muslin gown.
She’s not talkative, as she once was. Her charming face invites you in and then presents an impenetrable curtain. Once when he saw her in London after a long absence, the little laugh that used to bubble out before every remark was gone, replaced by a poised smile. Her clear green eyes, the graduated hairs that make the fine arch of her eyebrows – she cannot be unintelligent. She unfailingly says the right thing, as though she has a store of graceful comments at the ready in her breastbone. If she is vapid, it’s because she wills it so, he says to himself, getting up again and striking a light. She avoids any thought that might leave traces on her face, as part of a beauty regimen, perhaps.
It’s only half four, but he won’t drift off again. This comes from napping on the drawing room settee through rainy afternoons. He pulls his dressing gown on and goes to his desk, where a letter from the attorney in Kingston lies open. The birth rate on the plantation is up – that is the good news – but the attorney is sorry to report that the overseer has found a hidden cache of cutlasses. To the extent the Negro thrives, muses the attorney, he becomes a threat to his masters. Henry buries this sheet in a pile of letters, pulls out fresh paper, and settles himself to write.
Lyme Regis, Dorset. May 29th
My Dear Conybeare,
Forgive me – I am an unreliable correspondent indeed. Since my return from the North, I’ve been occupied in writing up a formal record of our travels and the science that resulted. We were just a humble trio of gentlemen scholars from Dorsetshire, amanuenses to the real gentlemen of science, but we dare to hope that our efforts will have lasting value, will even (in the case of one particular find in the north of Scotland) play a role in dismantling the theories of the Wernerians. When you next come down to Lyme (as I hope you do soon), we will share a glass or two and you shall hear a full account.
Thank you for your recent letter and for your congratulations regarding my appointment to the Royal Society. Of course I express at every opportunity my sense of honour in being named a fellow at my age – but I will confess (for your eyes only) how chary I am of the honour since reading certain recent publications of that venerable society. You will know of which papers I speak – Sir Everard Home’s various attempts to classify the Lyme Regis reptile. How adroitly the good surgeon skipped from one order of animal to the next – a bird! a fish! an amphibian! We (the British, I mean) are rightly the laughing-stock of the French for such anatonomical nonsense. I fervently hope that your own exemplary work on the subject will go some distance towards restoring our reputation. Your paper to the Geological Society on the Ichthyosaurus has been my constant reference since returning to Lyme Regis. Being based as it is on the examination of numerous specimens, it is a model of thoroughness, precision, and scientific acumen, and my admiration grows with every reading.
Henry stops to sharpen his pen. Perhaps he’s over-egging the pudding? But Conybeare himself is most generous in his compliments. Even Mary Anning was recognized in the Ichthyosaurus paper, if obliquely. What was it Conybeare said? Something about being grateful for the specimens that had found their way into the collection of Colonel Birch. Henry carried the paper down to the square and read the passage aloud to Miss Anning. “It is you he speaks of,” he said when she did not respond. “Colonel Birch’s collection is entirely composed of specimens that you found and sold him. You are credited in this important paper!” But still she didn’t reply – she turned to a customer in her brusque way, seemingly indifferent to the compliment.
What a funny creature she is, he thinks, burrowing a hand into his armpit to warm it. He keeps a pair of gloves on the desk with the finger ends cut off, and he puts them on and lights another candle. Conybeare’s paper sits on the shelf, a little dog-eared, for Henry lent it to Mary, su
rprised to learn that day in the square that she had not seen it and was indeed unaware of its having been published. Three days later, when he stopped in at her workshop, he discovered that she’d made a full copy of its thirty pages of text, the illustrations rendered in such fair duplication that it was difficult to tell them from the originals. He ruffled admiringly through her copy and his eye caught a note she’d written on the bottom of one of the pages: When I write a paper, there shall not be but one preface. When she saw him reading it, her colour rose and she reached out a hand to take her copy back.
He resumes:
You wonder that I returned to Lyme Regis and suggest that Bristol would be a livelier situation for a man of my age and tastes. I offer a rejoinder in the words of Mary Anning: “A cheese full of maggots is livelier than a sound cheese.” But in fact, Lyme is advancing apace in its efforts to re-create itself as a gentrified watering place. In this season, Marine Parade is crowded with victims of Hydromania, most of them maidens sporting parasols. One may discern furlong-measuring and parcel-tying in the pedigree of some of them – we have not yet the status of grand old Bath or even Weymouth – but the retired sea captains secreted behind parlour curtains, watching through spyglasses as shivering bathers are lowered from machines into the bay, are oblivious to the subtle differences of class! In summer we savour the pleasures of the flesh and in winter the pleasures of the spirit – for then Lyme reverts to its old self and is as silent as a Tuscan monastery. When I returned in March and roamed the quiet streets where seafoam daubs the sides of the houses, I felt myself truly at home.
