Curiosity

by Joan Thomas

  Mr. Buckland’s cheeks turned scarlet. “I am sick beyond endurance of being tweaked about Noah!” he cried, blinking rapidly. “You insist on an infantile representation of my ideas, purposely to provoke. We all aspire to find the remains of the race of Adam – you as well as I.”

  “Not so,” said Mr. De la Beche. “I question whether man inhabited this part of the globe at the time of the Flood.”

  “Well, I warrant he did.”

  “What is your reasoning?”

  “What is the point of all this, without man? It was man’s sin that caused the Flood. It was to caution man that God turned the drowned remains to stone. Man’s old bones are somewhere, and we shall find them, though he fled to the highest mountain peak.” He was trying to joke but he still had the stiff face and flat voice of an angry man.

  The tie of Mary’s bonnet had come loose and she set her pick down and reached up both hands to retie it. “Mayhap the men all took to their ships when the waters rose,” she said. “The English be grand mariners.”

  “No doubt they tried, those that had them,” said Mr. Buckland. “But no English craft could endure as Noah’s ark endured. It was a whole different order of craft. The master of the Flood Himself was the master shipbuilder.”

  “Mr. Buckland,” Mary said then, seeing the chance to ask, “will you look at what I’ve found here between these ribs?”

  Buckland leaned in Mary’s direction. “Oh – my lads and lassies –” he exclaimed, forgetting his anger. There beneath the ribs lay a stone. Buckland took up his brush, his lovely boar-bristle brush that Mary so envied, and delicately daubed. Lined up beside the first stone was a second. Brown and spiralled, like the stones Miss Philpot was collecting. Bezoars, they were called. “This fellow’s been swallowing stones!” said Buckland. “It’s the chap’s gizzard. He’s been swallowing stones to grind his food.”

  “No, sir,” Mary said, after a pause. “No, sir. They be turds, sir. Turds turned to stone.”

  Turds! Coprolites, Buckland called them, and he was as thrilled as if they were diamonds. They must open them, and Mary was the one to do it. A couple of years before his fall, Richard Anning had lit on the idea of slicing ammonites open so that the chambers inside were visible. With the stonemason’s help, he’d set up a saw, and Mary had struggled for years to master it. And now they could use her technique in their new practice of studying coprolites. Buckland had a bezoar stone at his lodgings, and on their way back to town, Mary found two more on Monmouth Beach.

  Down in the workshop, she showed them the saw. It was a fine iron band held in a wooden frame. They took off their top hats and set them on the work table. Mr. De la Beche fingered the narrow band. “You cut stone with this?” he asked. He was standing close to her. She could not move without pressing against him, and a queer sort of heat passed between them when she did.

  “It’s not the iron that cuts the stone. You keep sand in its path, like this.” She showed him. “It’s the sand that does the cutting. But it must stay wet. See this barrel? You must pull the peg out if the stone becomes too dry. Look, a trickle of water will fall in just the right place.”

  “Oh, my geological maiden,” Buckland cried, pushing his way in between them. “You are too clever by half.”

  They worked, taking turns, until they had cut open all the stones they had. Lizzie put on her plaid frock and pinafore and came to sit on the steps to watch. Each bezoar stone they cut into the narrowest slices possible, to see everything inside. Sectioning, Buckland called it, and their fingers hurt from holding such narrow stones under the saw. Inside, they found tiny spines and fins and scales, tiny big-eyed skulls – it seemed the Ichthyosaurus, for all its soft and gentle eye, had no qualms about eating its young. Mr. Buckland was transported with delight, thrown back six thousand years, to the moment of the creature’s gobbling its dinner. But Mr. De la Beche became more subdued, speaking in a low voice to her, as if it were just the two of them there in the workshop.

  When they had gone, Mary rested for a minute in the kitchen. Her mother was down in the workshop sweeping up the mess they’d made. Dust blossomed up from the stairs and pricked Mary’s nostrils. She was almost sweemy with hunger. She would cook the dogfish for their supper, but first she must meet the coach. Noise rose in the square and she picked up the stool to drag it outside.

  It was not the coach; it was boys scuffling on the street. Mr. Gleed came down Broad Street towards the boys, and they fell apart with a last defiant shove to each other’s shoulders. Mr. Gleed had his collecting bag full of curiosities on his arm. Miles away in Plymouth, Mary thought, James Wheaton’s body is turning in its grave. Mr. Gleed stood for a minute at the end of the square, a small figure in shabby black. Would he dare to sell right under her nose? She could see him trying to decide whether he had sufficient gall. She stared unblinkingly at him. Finally, he walked nimbly away from the square and turned up Church Street. He was on his way up to the Monmouth Inn. He’d sell in the public house, something she had never done. He will see us starve, she thought. I shall start selling at the chapel door while he preaches.

  A knot of young ladies waited for the coach, tossing merry cries into the air. Delicate tendrils framed their faces – the sort of curls you must have a lady’s maid to produce. Their gowns and slippers were white, the snowy white you must have a lady’s maid to maintain. Miss Whyte, in fact, was the name of Mr. De la Beche’s betrothed. Mary looked at the three young ladies across the square until they began to cast glances in her direction. I am a woman of science, Mary thought. I may stare. In her mind’s eye, she saw Miss Whyte with hair so fair as to be white, and a high, serene brow. She saw her sitting by a casement with a book in her hand, her chin aloof, wearing a gown of palest yellow, her two white breasts lying open to appraisal like goose eggs in a bowl in the market. Wearing tiny slippers and a lacy shawl, and diamonds dangling where wires were made to go through her ears.

  Colonel Birch came hobbling across the square, a fat, amiable ram, and Mary stood up off her stool. “Miss Anning!” he bleated. “What relic does Miss Anning have for me today?”

  “Nothing new, I’m afraid,” Mary said. He owned scores of the small invertebrates spread out on the table, the ammonites and devil’s toenails and belemnites. “Nothing new – oh! – except this.” It was leaning against the house – another large hip bone she’d found near Charmouth.

  “Capital, capital!” he cried, scarcely glancing at it. “I shall send Charles to carry it home. What do you say to a pound?”

  “Colonel Birch,” she said, “last month I sold you the very piece.” She was always counselling him against buying, afraid he would turn against collecting entirely when he came to his senses.

  “Oh, spare no thought for that, miss,” he said. “I shall not rest until I have another. If one is good, then two are better. Two by two into the ark!” He lifted his moustache to her, displaying his teeth. They were white and straight and set into a wooden plate. They came from a thief hanged at Bridport – so Will Darby from Sherborne Lane said. He bent over to examine the hip bone, leaning heavily on his stick in deference to his own hip. His rented rooms in Lyme had been full to the rafters and the landlord had complained. Recently he’d moved to a house in Charmouth. If Mary were rich and could keep a collection, she would keep only the best example of each type. It would be the science she thought of, not just a greedy piling into cabinets.

  And then Colonel Birch was gone, hobbling back to the Assembly Rooms where his mount waited, and Annie Bennett wandered into the square with her basket of lavender. She came from Cobb Hamlet, not from her mother’s house, for she was Mrs. George Downing now. Mary looked narrowly at her stomach. Molly swore Annie was childing, but it was hard to tell for the basket. Annie leaned against the prison wall and turned her head in Mary’s direction. Some days they spoke to each other and some days they said the same thing with a look: I am tired and you must be too. The coach was late. Everyone was hungry and tired, leaning on the priso
n wall or slouching outside the Assembly Rooms, propping their weary gaze on her. They would stare: she had been written up in the papers, she was a poor woman visited by gentlemen. It was a truth in life that others could look at you and see what you could not see.

  Now Mr. De la Beche was crossing Bridge Street towards her. While she’d been waiting there hungry and tired, he had bathed and dressed. He wore now his knee breeches and boots and a beautiful jacket of dark blue wool. “Yes, it’s me back,” he said. “Try not to look so stricken! I won’t keep you. I’m taking tea with Mr. Buckland. It shall be rock cakes at table, I warrant you. But why are you still here, Miss Anning? Is the coach late?” She nodded. “Just as well for me,” he said. “You never know what the coach will bring me, by way of passenger or post. And in any case, I hate to miss the excitement. In other towns with a steep decline, footmen will throw a drag out. But not in Lyme. In Lyme, they thrive on danger to life and limb.” He eyed her table. “And how is trade?”

  She had never seen him wear this splendid coat before, scarlet flowers stitched on its cuffs and down both sides of the front. Everything Mr. De la Beche owned was bought with money earned by blackamoors, who worked for him in the heat of the West Indies. If I were rich, she thought, it would not be lacy frippery I would buy, it would be this blue embroidered jacket. I would have his calfskin boots, and the red waistcoat, and the wonderful cape. If I were rich, I would have his leather kit.

  He smiled at Mary now and examined the ammonites, sliding four or five very similar asteroceras into two rows to show the difference between them, winking at her to show he meant no offence, and that something passed between them again, although their hands were inches apart.

  “Poor to middling,” Mary said. “I must pack up now. I have supper to cook.”

  “But the coach has yet to come,” he said.

  Oh, this day was all a jumble, all the recent days were a jumble! It was her hunger hanging like a fog between her and the square, her hunger that gave her the sense that she’d been on a long journey and had come back bewildered, somehow she’d lost her bearings in front of her own house. She couldn’t take her eyes off Mr. De la Beche’s jacket. On each button was stitched a single blossom, the work of many hours by the hands of an unknown woman.

  “The flowers on your coat,” she asked. “What species be they?”

  He turned up a button and peered at it. “I don’t know, actually,” he said.

  Watchers in the square moved imperceptibly, angled their ears towards the questions she was putting to this gentleman. Took in the shine on his boots and the delicate neckerchief tied at his neck, and the clean, healthy glow on his cheek. Took her in as well, saw Mary Anning standing by the table in her rough-woven skirt talking to a gentleman. And then suddenly, so did she: she saw what they saw, a thin woman with unruly dark hair pulled back under a cotton bonnet, a white bonnet gone grey, her hands callused and bare and brown, and the cotton lining of her jacket sticking from her cuffs like crude lace. And then the bugle sounded and everyone turned to watch the headlong plunge of the coach down the hill.

  NINETEEN

  Lyme Regis, Dorset. July 30th

  My dearest Letitia,

  I am in receipt of your letter this very hour. The question it poses demands a swift reply. With respect to the embarrassment you endured in your conversation with Colonel Henry Wyndham at Ascot, I thank you for your loyal attempts to defend my name, but must, with full awareness of the pain this confession will cause you, inform you that in this situation the truth lay with my accuser. My removal from Great Marlow was not, in fact, voluntary. I was expelled on the grounds of insubordination. I deeply regret that you were obliged to learn this from another (and in such public circumstances) and I beg your pardon for the humiliation this scene caused you. It was always my intention to reveal the whole truth to you prior to our marriage, but we have not had a great deal of leisure together in recent years due to my scientific travels. In the early days of our acquaintance in Bristol, the episode was too raw to be broached (or I too raw a youth to find a way to broach it), and in recent years, it has rather shrunk in significance in my mind. Perhaps my hesitation to set a date for our nuptials sprang in part from a sense that many fundamental things remain unsaid between us.

  The incident in its entirety is this: I was the instigator of a scheme to produce and circulate a chapbook of satiric cartoons. They featured one Mr. Truepenny, a risible Marlow tyrant, a pathetic pettifogger whose self-importance superseded all other traits, whose partiality to certain favoured boys was unconcealed, and who was the cause of a great deal of suffering to the poor wretches who met his disfavour. It was from my imagination and pen that the drawings issued (the salacious details forbid their description to a lady), and Henry Wyndham and one Richard Chorley acted as copiers and purveyors, having collected a lengthy subscription list. I was expelled and my two lieutenants were not. My final vacating of the officers’ hall was, as Colonel Wyndham has recounted to you, in defiance of the trust placed upon me and of my own publicly sworn vow.

  Given that you were ignorant of this episode at the time of our engagement, honour compels me to ask whether you wish to be released from the promise you made to me while still a girl. Perhaps “honour” is something to which I can no longer lay claim. Having been prompted by your letter to reflect on this ancient incident, let me be frank in telling you how I regard its “stain” on my character: I do not minimize my past behaviour, I do not dismiss this as the rash act of a callow and unformed youth. I see in it, rather, a spontaneous and individualistic gesture, the import of which I have not fully sounded – a fidelity to an inner light (as it were). I have taken from it a guiding truth, that the conventions of society do not form an entire and unfailing code for our behaviour. Integrity may, on occasion, lie in deeds that are perceived by others as offensive and even immoral.

  We must be grateful to Colonel Wyndham that he has afforded us this opportunity to know each other better. I ask you to consider whether this confession renders your fiancé repugnant in your eyes or rather endears him to you further. Your decision to persevere in this engagement will be tantamount to a fresh vow. As compelling as our families’ desire is for us to honour our longstanding promise to each other, it would be folly to enter into a lifelong union you have come to regret. Consider soberly, knowing there is more of your fiancé in this letter than in any other you have received from his hand. I eagerly await your reply, upon which rests the happiness of others beyond yourself.

  Your humble servant,

  T. H. De la Beche, Esq.

  Postscript: If you have occasion to speak further with my old companion, please remind him that through this incident he was spared having me as comrade-at-arms; I should have made a wretched soldier.

  It’s a most tumultuous terrain the Charmouth Road traverses, a landscape caught in the act of moving. And yet the clifftops were cleared in centuries past, and lie cultivated in barley and corn. Some smell of fish from the mackerel worked into the soil, some of sheep shit from the beasts paddocked there. When Henry walks the road with Mary Anning after a morning’s fossiling, she tells the fields by name: Pinch-gut. Labour in Vain. Kettle of Gruel. Why the farmers bother to plant them at all, he can’t imagine – fields torn ragged by landslips, or sinking and being taken over by gorse. West of Lyme Regis, where Dorsetshire becomes Devonshire, there’s no coastal road at all. There the high terrain was never cleared and a forest flourishes whose very trees may have been saplings when Shakespeare was a boy. This riotous forest is called the Undercliff, although it is really the colonized top and broken side of a cliff, where crevasses and almost-vertical upthrusts attest to the impulse of the cliffs to move, and wild clematis, ivy, bracken, holly, hazel, and brambles conspire to disguise the resulting chaos. How like the tropical bush around the plantation in Jamaica, Henry always thinks when he wanders into it from the top of the town.

  In the shadow of the Undercliff, down on the western shore, Henry helps Buckla
nd remove the Ichthyosaurus communis for crating. Mary Anning is there, and Buckland has hired four men for a day. They’re working to slide a carrying board under the fossil. Buckland’s irritation is like a cloud hanging over the site – he’s preparing for a trip to the Continent and he’s been in a bustling, officious mood all week. In reaction, Henry moves slower and slower, stopping often to rest and look up at the Undercliff. “Could I climb up there from here?” he asks Mary.

  “No,” she says. He looks at her sharply. There may have been the hint of a dare in her tone.

  With a rhythmic series of grunts, the men have the carrying board up and are off down the shore. Buckland hurries after them. No doubt, he assumes Henry and Mary will follow. But they don’t move. They stand side by side and watch his robed figure dwindle down the shore, and Henry feels his spirits lift when it falls out of sight altogether.

  “Where is he off to?” Mary asks.

  “He’s touring the Continent. With Reverend Conybeare. They’re conducting a study of correspondences in the rock strata.”

  Still she makes no move to go. She stands and turns her sunburned face to look at the sea. He picks up his kit and looks at her questioningly.

  “Would you like to see where my father found the narrow vertebrae I told you about?” she asks then, with a little smile.

  He follows her out around Seven Rock Point. The lapping water has left them a scant few feet. Mr. Aveline has warned him over and over that, should he be caught by the tides at the base of the western cliffs, his only choice will pertain to the manner of his death.