by Joan Thomas
And in any case, I frequently have amusing and stimulating company in the form of Buckland, who is resident in lodgings on Marine Parade at the moment. In all of his work, Miss Anning is an indispensable resource. Buckland and I visit the cliffs in fair weather and as often as time allows between other pursuits, but she is there at every tide – material want draws her out in storms that would freeze the soul. She is a model of industry and upon her slender form a little family depends for its precarious survival. In spite of the celebrity she attracted six or seven years ago through her first remarkable find, she continues to make a living largely by selling curios to tourists. I credit the fashion of using large ammonites as doorstops to her entrepreneurial initiative. She carries these staggeringly heavy fossils home from Monmouth Beach on her back, employing the sort of brace a porter wears, with leather straps buckled over her shoulders. In fashioning this device, she was assisted by her brother, whom I have met on occasion at the Fossil Depot. Framed in their humble doorway, the pair of them bring to mind the window of a church, both from the innocence of their expressions and from his name (Joseph) comically paired with hers.
But as I set out to say, her daily labours on the shore, month after month, year after year, have equipped her magnificently for her work as a collector. Where Buckland and I must open five rocks to locate one meagre ammonite, she can smell fossils and leads us unerringly to the exact strata of the cliffs that will yield treasure. Were we at liberty to work together on a daily basis, we would make an odd but (if I may immodestly observe) formidable trio, with Miss Anning to locate the specimen, myself to render it in charcoal, and Buckland to unravel the mystery of its place in Creation. Although in that regard, his theories are to date less than satisfactory. On the question of why these monsters have vanished, Buckland’s recent notion is that other worlds existed before the Garden of Eden (God practising, as it were, in an effort to fashion a realm fit for creatures made in His image). “How could the fish-lizard have died out,” I dare to ask, “if death came into the world through Adam?” Perhaps, my dear Conybeare, as a man of the cloth, you would like to posit an answer to that question, as Buckland has so far failed to do.
A last item of news, somewhat removed from the above: the lady habitually referred to as “Henry’s fiancée” hopes to relocate soon to Lyme Regis, with an eye to making marriage preparations. In truth, our nuptials have been long delayed. Upon my return to Lyme, Miss Whyte sent me from London the gift of a golden cravat pin in the shape of a harp. My stepfather asserts the meaning to be, “Je réponds à qui me touche,” but my dear mother, interpreting it as, “By neglect thou ruinest me,” insists that I set a date for the wedding without further delay. As I have now come into my property (such as it is with the sinking price of sugar), I am resolved to do just that. Letitia’s arrival will no doubt entail a major adjustment to my daily routine. I find I have little need of companionship beyond my scientific friends and my mother and stepfather (whose health, thank you, is somewhat improved), but, as the shore and cliffs teach us, all of life is change.
I must bring this to a close. When can I expect another pleasant day of geologizing and philosophizing with an old friend on the lias cliffs?
Your affectionate servant,
T. H. De la Beche, Esq.
He picks his pocket watch off the desk. It’s now half five. He sets the letter aside and crawls back into bed for warmth. Sometimes, looking out his window at first light, he sees Mary Anning climbing up to Morley Cottage, and then, half an hour later, sees her walk back down with the sardonic spinster of Silver Street hobbling on pattens and clinging to her arm. Off for an outing to the shore, the two of them. But four or five days ago, when he rose early and went out, he was lucky enough to catch Mary leaving for the shore on her own. She was standing on Gosling Bridge drinking from a ladle, and he walked smartly up and handed two coins to the milkmaid and then had his own dripping ladle, milk still warm from the cow. Oh, the joys of the morning!
In fact, Mary had seemed disinclined to let him join her that day – the tide was not convenient, she said, she would have to return by the Charmouth Road – but he’d charmed her into relenting. Then she set a pace up the rock-littered shore that he could not hope to match. Passing the quarry, he felt the amused eyes of the quarrymen on them, a gentleman in cape and top hat tacking clumsily along the beach after the fossil girl. She never troubled herself to glance behind. By the time they got to Black Ven, she was fifty yards ahead, sitting on a rock eating an egg. He was breathless and perspiring, formulating a mild lecture on manners, and then she offered him an egg. “I carry ’em in my hands for the heat. Once they’re cold, I eat ’em.”
“Your dewbit?” he said, and she smiled in surprise. Dewbit, breakfast, nuncheon, cruncheon, nammit, crammit, supper. It was Maggie who had taught him the seven meals humble folk eat in Dorsetshire. The egg was not as fresh as it ought to have been, but it was boiled to perfection and still a little warm.
Mary was waiting for the light to be full on the cliff face, she said. So then he had a chance to talk to her – never possible when Buckland was around. He asked her whether she had ever travelled from Lyme Regis, and she answered in her forthright way, “I have walked as far as Seatown to the east and Seaton to the west – which names befuddle many visitors, but there is some ten miles between them. And I’ve ridden to Axminster in the Bennetts’ dogcart.”
She did not hesitate then to question him about his own comings and goings. It was the sort of boldness that enraged his friends, especially Conybeare, but really, how else was she to learn? He gave her a quick account of his journeys to the North. “The world is abuzz with the notion that the strata of the earth were formed gradually over vast periods of time,” he explained, “and we were seeking to refute this theory.” She was especially curious as to whether he had ever been to Oxford University, so he told her about his decision not to enrol, in spite of the cajolery of his mother and stepfather. “The entire institution is consumed with the Articles of Faith. How can a university be a place of inquiry when dogma is its chief concern? There is, furthermore, an unbecoming preoccupation with rank. In all the dining halls, you find separate tables and even separate entrances for noblemen, gentlemen commoners, and commoners. Such distinctions are made in the very chapels! I have been several times to visit Mr. Buckland, and I tell you, Miss Anning, each visit deepened my resolve to eschew the academy and make the fields and the shores my University. Although it would be a relief to be resident somewhere else at the moment. I find myself dwelling like a ghost in Aveline House, so as not to remind my mother and Mr. Aveline that I’m still here.”
A vertical frown formed between her brows.
“They wish me in London. My fiancée is there, Miss Letitia Whyte.” She stared at him sternly, surprised no doubt by such a personal disclosure, but he went on. “We’ve been betrothed for some years, but I’ve been busy making a geologist of myself and have not seen a great deal of Miss Whyte in that time. How capriciously a lifelong union can be arranged! But perhaps it makes no difference. The institution of marriage was conceived to answer to all manner of material and social and physical needs, and must inevitably answer poorly to some, no matter who your mate or how she was chosen.” It was proof of your reasoning, he decided in that moment, if you could explain yourself to this girl and know your logic to be sound, if you could endure the scrutiny of her black eyes without flinching. Henry observed himself failing the test, and so he asked the question that would surely turn her eyes away. “How will you choose a husband, Miss Anning, when the time comes?”
“When the time comes?” she asked intently, and she did not look away. “I am past twenty.” She kept staring with an expression he couldn’t interpret, and finally he was the one who looked back to the sea. Neither of them spoke. A woman of breeding would have found a way to remedy such a silence, but Mary did not. Eventually, he broke it by inquiring about her family, and she said that her sister was ill. So then he offered to s
end Mr. Aveline’s surgeon over to see whether he could be of help. She accepted the offer, but she did not seem well pleased. Possibly she held to goose grease and dried moss and such as cures, like most of Lyme.
The sun had lifted itself over the edge of Stonebarrow by then, and they had an hour or two of collecting before the tide forced them off the shore. He watched her move methodically along the dark layers, using any convenient rock as a stepping stool, pressing her fingers to the cliff face as though to read it by touch. With a twinge of envy, he observed her absolute focus; this mist-veiled shore was her entire world! He found nothing but a couple of belemnites, but low in the cliff, she found a lovely crinoid on a waving stem. He watched while she deftly separated the layers with a chisel and touched her fingertips to its delicate calyx. “When I was a girl,” she said, still crouching, “I thought the sea lilies were flowers, and I could not see how they could have turned to stone. It takes an animal to be petrified. But then I learned they were animals, and could feel fear like any other.”
He was standing over her, noting how tanned the back of her neck was, noting the fine hairs escaping from her bonnet. “Petra,” he said. “Miss Anning – the root betrays the meaning. It’s just Latin for rock.” She lifted her head and looked at him with amusement.
Oh, only a fool would underestimate Mary Anning! At one point in the walk, he told her about the narrow vertebrae he and Conybeare had found the year before in a tidal outcropping. A serpent perhaps, from the length of that chain. The waves had had sport with the bones all night and they fell into nothing before they could be collected. But Mary knew immediately. “Were they almost flat, sir? Like a shark’s spine, but thicker? My father found some in Pinhay Bay years ago. He sold them to the curi-man at Charmouth.” But they were not from a serpent, she said – flat vertebrae like that would not allow the mobility a serpent needed. This was the spine or neck of a creature with fins.
“Well, perhaps there is another species of giant reptile along this shore,” Henry mused. “Mr. Buckland will not credit it – he’ll charge me with inventing the whole story. In any case, nothing matters to Buckland but finding the old patriarch!”
“Buckland!” Mary said with a snort. She was still scanning the cliff face as they walked, her eyes never ceasing from their work. “What confounds me, sir, is this: why do we not find the stony forms of foxes and mice and seagulls in the layers, when they live in such abundance all along the shore?”
Why, indeed?
Then they were at Charmouth, and two boys were digging for oysters. The eager morning light encroached on their silhouettes, thinning them to nothing. Silver was laid down in a sparkling band on the horizon, and the black edges of the cliffs were outlined in silver light, water dripping silver from them. Piles of bracken lay washed up at the foot of the cliff: frilled sashes the rosy mauve of elderberry, and flags of glistening black, and brilliant, torn sea lettuce, all tangled like an extravagant bed of ribbons. Henry stopped walking. Mary looked inquiringly over her shoulder at him. Her bonnet had slipped down, it dangled at her back, and her black hair was twined at the nape of her neck – it picked up the light the way the cliffs did. Her face was flushed from their walk. There was a bloom to her, the bloom that work and sunshine and clear water and simple bread will produce. He could see the fine down on her cheeks and sun shining through the lobes of her ears, showing up the blood in them. He found himself returning with some confusion to their earlier conversation.
“I do wonder if there’s something … something in the human form that makes man immune to petrification. That spark of the divine that animals do not share – or perhaps it’s our capacity for spiritual corruption.”
Mary shook her head. “We be flesh and bone,” she said simply. “Animal humours will happily commingle with man’s humours. My father proved this when I were a girl. You will have heard, Mr. De la Beche, that there is a bit of the cow in me.” She touched her fingers to her arm.
“I have heard,” he said.
He throws off the covers and swings his feet to the floor, picking up his watch. Half six. The tide will be out, and so will those who work the shore.
EIGHTEEN
izzie lay on the cot in the kitchen with her eyes closed. A copy of the Theological Review was open and face down on her chest, as though she was trying to draw its mournful voices straight into her heart. “Mary,” she cried the instant Mary stepped in the door. “Read to me! Read the story of Martha Locke at the heavenly gates.”
“No,” Mary said. “If that’s what you want you must read it yourself. Look what I’ve got.” She opened her bag and showed Lizzie. “A dogfish. It must have come up in the herring nets. A fisherman tossed it onto the shore. It’s fresh as hay – I had to wait for it to die before I could pick it up. We’ll have it for our supper.”
Lizzie sat up and peered into the bag, and her hand flew to her mouth. “It stinks of piss,” she moaned.
Mary slid the fish onto the table, careful to avoid the dorsal fins that could wound even after death. Its eyes had turned white just in the time she walked from the shore. She bent over it and looked at its fearful, down-turned mouth.
Lizzie lay back and opened her book, holding it as a barrier between herself and the fish. In a voice full of practised pathos, she read out:
Ah, lovely appearance of death!
No sight upon earth is so fair.
Not all the gay pageants that breathe
Can with a dead body compare.
Mary rinsed her hands quickly in the basin and dried them on the rag hanging by a nail from the wall. She took a wedge of cheese from the crock on the table. It was Mr. Gleed, the new pastor at the Independent Chapel, who’d brought Lizzie this book. “Why do these fine pastors despise the only world they know?” she asked Lizzie. “Why is that?” Lizzie puckered her mouth and made her eyes big and round in a comic sign that she did not know, she did not know what Mary meant. Mary took the knife to the cheese, trimming off the mould in thin curls. “Where is Mother?”
“At Bennetts’. I wished to go too, but when I put my foot down, the floor was rolling like the sea.” She dropped the book and turned her face to the wall. On the windowsill above her was a tray of beans drying – she’d been sorting them, sliding them into rows with her fretful fingers. Poor Lizzie, never well since her baby teeth fell out.
Mary reached for her and rolled her over, examining her white face and the mauve mottling under her eyes. “I’d be peevish too, never going out. Look, I’ve brought milk. We’ll soak the fish to take away the smell. But you can have a cup first.” Lizzie pressed her lips together. She pinched them between her thumb and forefinger and shook her head elaborately. There was energy in the shaking: Lizzie was rallying.
Mary perched on the edge of the cot and she and Lizzie shared a plate of bread and cheese, watching each other eat in silence. It was near noon. Mary had until two o’clock, till the next low tide. Then Mr. De la Beche would cross the square and go down the steps to Marine Parade. He’d be carrying his satchel of tools. He’d call at Mr. Buckland’s lodgings near Cobb Hamlet and they’d follow the west shore to the bones on Monmouth Beach. Mary had said emphatically that she would meet them there. She did not want to walk with either of them. When she walked with Mr. Buckland, they talked of science the whole way. There was no harm in that, except that he snatched her words out of the air as though he were a frog catching mayflies, never looking at her, never asking himself about the woman who uttered the words. Whereas Mr. De la Beche – with Mr. De la Beche, the vexation was exactly the opposite: it seemed he could not get enough of watching her.
Back when I was a girl, she thought, noting with satisfaction how hungry Lizzie seemed, back when he came to the workshop to talk of birds and dragons, I had no fear of him at all.
It was six feet long, this specimen: they knelt around a grave. Examining the teeth, Mr. De la Beche had pronounced it an Ichthyosaurus communis. There were three kinds of Ichthyosaurus, and this gentleman, who
counted among his friends the Keeper of Natural History at the great museum in London, had had the honour of naming all three. The new specimen was neckless and hunched, pinned helplessly by a slab of limestone, as though it had been killed by a building collapsing on it. A difficult excavation. Mary’d told them they should hire workmen to chip it out before the tide damaged it. But Mr. De la Beche liked the work, and well he might – for him, work was play. She was proven right, though: the tide had stolen a fin. But when Mary pointed it out, Mr. Buckland shrugged. The sternum and pelvis were what he cared about; he had seen plenty of fins. “Oh, my brave, stony fish-lizard,” he crooned, “we’ll get your secrets out of you! What do you say, Miss Anning? Was water its only element, or did it heave itself up to shore? Did it suffer the pangs of childbirth, or did it lay eggs?” The second question would answer the first, for if it laid eggs, it would need to drag itself up to shore like a turtle.
Mary, chipping away at the ribs beside Mr. De la Beche, could feel that gentleman’s glad eyes on her, could feel his eagerness to speak. The ribs Mary was excavating were splayed and there was something of great interest between them. She bent over it, wielding a small pick. There was no chance to speak – how could Buckland talk so without pausing to catch a breath? She turned her head then to look at Mr. De la Beche. Hazel, his impudent eyes were, with a band of brown like a chaffinch around their centres. He was laughing, holding her eyes, trying to make a secret fraternity with her against Buckland. “All those animals,” he murmured, while Buckland kept talking. “Taken into one ship. There are a hundred thousand animal species on earth, Miss Anning, do you realize? And two of each! And food for all of them. How was such a thing possible?” He laughed in the way he had, trying to draw her into laughing too. “Buckland,” he called then, flinging his pick down, not scrupling to interrupt. “There’s something you should know. It’s about Miss Anning. She disputes your science. Miss Mary Anning is harbouring her own private heresy. She disputes the likelihood of finding Noah on these shores.”
