Curiosity

by Joan Thomas

  Of course, she could have told him about the satanic race spawned by the Fall, she could have snatched the bible from his hands and read him the text about the dragons being Satan’s henchmen. But why would she choose to belabour the wickedness of her own vocation? She’d failed, and was sorry that she’d tried, for now John Gleed was never shy to approach her on the shore, to ask her to identify something he’d found. He would keep on poaching off her custom and sucking on her brains, and she was powerless to stop him. Her custom was already meagre. Buckland was long gone now, having crated up the Ichthyosaurus with the bezoar stones in it and carried it off to Oxford. Not for money – he was not greedy in that way – but for science. Mary had helped him for many a day, but it did not occur to him to pay her. And Colonel Birch was suddenly not to be seen – he was poorly, so she learned from Will Darby. The pound he’d given her for the hip bone would have lasted longer, but she’d paid Doctor Huddlestone. Although that fancy doctor had had nothing to offer them – all he said was that they should not give Lizzie water, however thirsty she was, it would lead to dropsy. Molly did not understand why Mr. De la Beche should not pay the fee, as he was the one who had sent the man. “He can well afford this charity to a poor family with a sick child,” she said, and Mary would not explain, she would not put her reasons even to herself. She walked past her mother down to the workshop, her sense of that gentleman stirring, the sense she carried of him even when she was not thinking, a sense of something menacing and bright.

  It was a dangerous pastime, stealing into the forest with this man. She was inviting scandal. He seemed entirely oblivious to such a worry. There he would sit, leaning back against the log in the Undercliff with his boots crossed, and talk of things no other high-born person would dream of confessing to such as her. His rear end planted on the damp ground, heedless of his fine wool coat, this gentleman who made his living from black people he owned like mules.

  No, not like mules, exactly. When he was an infant, a blackamoor woman put him to her breast and fed him on her milk. There was a dirt floor to the house where she lived and he played there with her children. He was a planter’s son who knew about a hole in an earthen floor where a slave’s secret cutlass was buried: he took great pride in telling her this. Mary reached for her old categories of the rich and the poor and found she could not sort it out at all.

  Every day she would resolve to come home by the shore directly after collecting, and every day they would climb the cliffs. Not that whiling away the afternoons in the Undercliff with Mr. De la Beche took away from her income. Vertebrae were piled up along the wall of the workshop, belemnites and ammonites lined up on the table. No one was buying. All through the years of her growing up, people had said fervently, “When the war is over …” Now the war was over and the price of a loaf had risen to eighteen pence. The rich had taken to ships; they’d abandoned Lyme Regis and carried their guineas over to France – the sails of their ships when you stood on the Cobb were a flock of sheep in the Channel. But all to the good, thought Mary fiercely, eyeing the lovely bones on her table. It is not curios I collect now. It is scientific specimens. But how could she parlay specimens into more money?

  “Did Mr. Conybeare sell his paper on the Ichthyosaurus?” she found a chance to ask Mr. De la Beche one day.

  “He sent out a notice about it,” he said. “And everyone at the Royal Society and the Geological Society signed up for a subscription in advance.”

  The sun sank over the cliffs and the square filled with ladies and gentlemen going to dance in the Assembly Rooms. Mary stood in the shadow of the shop across the street and watched the door in the stone portico of the Assembly Rooms open to a glimpse of bright gowns. She looked through the dusk to see which of the gentlemen crossing the square she could recognize by height and stride and gesture.

  In Mary’s house, they had no fire. Beside their hearth, Molly sat wrapped in her shawl and a blanket, leaning against the stone as if to draw out a vestigial warmth. Joseph was not there. He was sitting with the stonemason’s daughter, Amelia Elliot, who had large blue eyes full of sentiment and a terrified, lying admiration for Mary’s work (her startled cries asking in their highest notes, What strange sort of girl be ye?). Their wedding was a week away. Joseph could not really love her, but no doubt he adored sitting by the stonemason’s crackling fire, drinking hot brandy and beer from a tumbler.

  When Mary had wiped the table and swept the floor, she carried the second blanket down from the upstairs bed and settled on the cot beside Lizzie. She lay staring at the charcoal streaked on the ceiling like the trails of flittermice.

  “Mary,” Lizzie asked. “Who be your friends and who be your enemies?” Excitement crackled off Lizzie like heat – her joy at having Mary lie down with her.

  “My friends be three,” Mary said, rolling over to her side to face Lizzie. “They start with B.”

  “Mr. Buckland,” Lizzie said. Saliva had dried like lime in the corners of her mouth. “B for Buckland. And B for Birch. I don’t know who the third could be, unless it be Mr. De la Beche. But that is D.” It was a puckish, knowing face Lizzie was turning towards her.

  “Of course it’s him,” Mary said. “The De la is just for show. They are gentle friends to the poor, all three.” Mary, he had taken to calling her, this Henry De la Beche. Henry, she said to herself. She folded the scratchy edge of the blanket away from her chin.

  Lizzie eyed Mary craftily. “And who be your enemies?”

  “My enemies be two. They start with C.” Lizzie’s face was absorbed in thought, her lips moved silently. “I’ll give it to you,” Mary said, “because you are so dull. Conybeare. De la Beche and Buckland’s friend from Bristol. He comes to the shore with Mr. De la Beche but he’s too fine to speak to me. He wrote about my Ichthyosaurus as if it was his own, with nary a thought for my labours. I could show you, Lizzie. It’s down in the workshop. Nary a mention of Mary Anning in the whole entire paper.”

  “And the other C?”

  “Cuvier, crouched like a toad across the water.”

  “How can he be your enemy?”

  “He has the disease of all men who are never wrong. That makes him my enemy.” Mary eased herself up and arranged the bolster behind her head. She turned her face away from the rotting-fruit smell of Lizzie’s breath. “Listen,” she said. “I’ll tell you a story.”

  “The wreck of the Alexander,” said Lizzie.

  “No. This is about London. It’s a dream, about a meeting at the Geological Society, where the high folk go to talk about science. Only certain men are allowed – they have chosen each other. Every month, as though a bell has rung that only they can hear, they put their stovepipe hats on their heads and ride in from all directions. To one of those grand buildings with columns in front holding up the roof. They walk in through the wide doors and take their place in a great hall.” Mary was momentarily distracted by Lizzie’s intent face, almost luminous in the dim light. Lizzie nudged her on.

  “Well, it’s a very particular night that this story takes place. A monster’s been found on the shore at Lyme Regis. They are to decide its name. Just before they begin, a lad appears – someone they’ve never seen before. He’s dressed in a black wool coat. Everyone falls silent as he walks down the aisle and takes his place among them. Who let him in? The gentlemen tried to catch each other’s eyes.”

  “Why don’t they drive him out?”

  “They’re curious. He knows things they don’t know – they can see it on his face. They want to suck his brains.”

  Lizzie was watching her knowingly. “What manner of hair does the young man have?”

  “His hair is black and plaited into a queue down his back.”

  “Was it a coat like that he was wearing?” They both looked towards the door where Joseph’s coat hung when he was in the house.

  “Yes,” said Mary. “It’s a mite long for this lad. But no matter. The meeting begins. The gentlemen fall to debating and arguing. Not the stranger. If h
e speaks, he will betray more than he wants to betray. So he sits in silence. He takes in everything they have to say, and then he stands up and walks out.” She turned on her side away from Lizzie. Rogue tears stung behind her eyes. “That’s all I know,” she said. “You tell the rest.”

  Lizzie wove her fingers into Mary’s hair. “It were you, Mary,” she said sweetly.

  There was a long quiet, while Lizzie lay plucking at Mary’s hair, methodically picking up one strand after another. In the Assembly Rooms across the square, the scrape of fiddles started up. Mary sighed. “Yes, it’s me. It’s me sitting there among my friends and enemies. Sitting with my mouth shut. Dressed like a man.”

  “But your bosom would pout out.”

  “No, look,” said Mary, rolling back towards Lizzie. “I wrap a towel tight around like this and Mother sews it closed. It could be done.”

  He told her long stories about the blackamoor boys he played with, and how he learned to see that he was not like them and fixed his heart on becoming so. About the slimy green soup he drank, because his nurse Belle said it would turn him black. A great wonder, thought Mary, this gentleman’s passion to be something he is not.

  And then he was to have been a soldier. He was in officer’s training in a great college on the River Thames, but he was sent down. “Just a bit of mischief, and my whole life turned on it,” he said with a little laugh, leading her up the path in the Undercliff, talking all the while. There was a master that everyone loathed, and the cadets found a means to take revenge upon him. Mr. De la Beche drew a series of pictures of this master in a lewd embrace with a chambermaid – the redhaired chambermaid who worked in the masters’ quarters. Everyone recognized them immediately when they saw the caricatures. “She was – how shall I put it? – rather spectacularly endowed,” he said, “both as to bosom and as to buttocks. And the clever thing was that each drawing was franker and bolder than the one that came before – fewer clothes, you know, and the embrace, er, more compromising. I released the pictures one at a time, over several weeks. It was a beauty of a scheme, because the price went up each time, unless you had paid a subscription for the whole series, as many did. Oh, it was boyhood folly – but you have to admire the genius behind it.”

  Mary stopped walking. “And in truth they consorted together, this master and this chambermaid?” she asked.

  “Oh, no, I doubt it. I never saw a more prudish man. No doubt he was entirely oblivious to the wench – and incapable, I’d wager, even if he had been tempted. So you see, for boys, we were fiendishly clever – we pounced on his very weakness!”

  Mary’s anger was a dark cap pressing down over her head. “What of the chambermaid? What became of her? Did she know of the lewd and lying pictures being passed around?”

  “Well, I suppose that’s something we should have considered at the time,” he said genially. “Lads of a certain age are beasts, aren’t they? I don’t know what became of her, because I left, you see, before they could drum me out.” He moved up the path again, and after a minute, so did Mary. He walked along, swinging his leather satchel, and told her with great relish about running away, walking across the Home Counties like a vagabond, limping into London, and the restless sea of people one sees there, the gaslights and coal smoke, and the fairs that draw spectators of every rank. He himself entered an exhibition hall with his uncle, and there on display was a naked woman, naked except for a small apron, almost the brown of her skin. “They chose that fabric, I warrant you, to give the impression of complete nakedness. She was a Hottentot, from the south of Africa. She had on a collar of shells and claws. They were treating the poor creature in a beastly fashion. A leash was tied around her neck, and the keeper was leading her like a dog.”

  Mary let out a bark of horror, but he paid it no heed. He lowered his voice, it was himself he wanted to discuss. “You know, I had the strangest experience when I saw this exhibition. I was right at the front, not three feet from the woman, and she raised her head and looked at me, and I was filled with the most vivid conviction that she knew me! It was uncanny – such was my confusion that I could not abide being part of that crowd, and I left the exhibition hall before my uncle. It was all a delusion, of course. She had come directly to London from Africa, I believe, and she was only about twenty – I could not have encountered her in the West Indies so many years ago.”

  Mary could not make sense of any part of this story. “These gawkers – they came to see how black she were?”

  “No, I would say not.” They’d come up to the open chalk boulders and he put his kit down and leaned against one. “There are many Negroes in London. Perhaps it was scientific curiosity that drew some of the spectators. There is a deal of interest at the moment in the development of the various races. I have read several papers on it. But of course, the spectators were not all learned, and even among those who were, I reckon it was rather a curiosity of a baser sort. People paid thruppence to buy sticks from a boy, and used them to prod her backside. To satisfy themselves that her rather large haunches were real. A man reached out his stick to try to lift her apron and see what was beneath, but she stepped out of the way. So I suppose it was the novelty of the Hottentot woman’s body.” He scuffled his feet in the mat of leaves rotting on the forest floor. “An enlarged property … of the female parts.” She would not look at him. “It suggests to scientists a … a heightened sexual proclivity. An appetite untrammelled in the savage of the species.”

  And then she did look, and she saw the gleam in his eye, a falseness to his manner that she loathed. What did he see when he looked at her – what did he think she was? It was a down-dacious act, walking into the woods with a gentleman. She’d always known she was courting danger. But better he should grab at her like a drunken tranter on the Gosling Bridge, better he should know his own heart.

  “Did you tell Miss Whyte about this display?” she asked.

  “Of course not,” he said in surprise. “Oh, Mary! I tell you, Mary, because of its scientific interest.” He was laughing, but there was shame in his laugh.

  TWENTY-ONE

  atyrs inhabit a forest, and he becomes one. A sly satyr, who cloaks his intentions in sanctimony, reaching for her hand to say, “When they talk in church about man being in the image of God, it’s always the hands I think of. In Rome, there’s a wonderful image painted on a ceiling by an artist named Michelangelo – I have an etching of it – God animating Adam through a touch of their fingers.” He demonstrates with their two hands. Then he turns her hand over and, before she withdraws it, feels the calluses from her wedge hammer on her palm.

  The hand, the satyr whispers, again, and in his mind, he pulls Mary towards him, easing her down in the bracken, feels his way through those rough skirts to the long, strong, bare leg within. But still he refrains. Instead, he talks, slides to subjects where the forbidden glitters, his voice coming from some seat deep inside him. Someone, his better self perhaps, is listening behind the trees, cautioning him, but still he goes on, drops his voice and carries on, telling her of boyhood follies, allowing himself a boyhood frankness, and feels a heady sense of liberty in the telling. Mary looks sternly beyond him, her strong dark brows drawn together. It’s perverse, this talk, he’d be thrown out of decent company for it, but it’s only talk, and as he follows her out of the clearing and through the stands of bracken lining the path, he congratulates himself for resisting when no other man of vigour would have done.

  Then it’s so cold and stormy that no sane person would venture onto the shore. The bathing machines are carried to high ground, the very fishing boats are beached. Henley’s pond freezes over. His mother and Mr. Aveline wait for a fair day for driving – they’ve accepted an invitation to the Devonshire home of their friends the Talbots. Henry has declined, raising his mother’s hopes that he’ll be going to London. The morning they leave, he finally mentions the letter from Letitia. “And you have not gone to her in spite of this?” his mother cries. Then she’s speechless with fury. S
he climbs into the coach without a goodbye.

  Aveline House is drafty and dark, and he misses the outings to the shore. Free of Mrs. Aveline’s influence, the cook serves stewed salt fish every night. Henry commits to a Christmas meal with the Henleys. He toys with excuses to invite Mary to call; they could sit by the fire and talk in a civilized fashion. But he busies himself sorting through his papers, and as one day goes by and then another, his perspective on the past few months alters. Finally, he finds himself outside the thing altogether – he’s an onlooker, watching with a frown as a gentleman creeps into the forest with a comely girl of a station far beneath him. There is a name for this, and any onlooker would be quick to provide it. Although (Henry asserts in his own defence) those who would condemn him have no notion of the inside of the thing – his respect for the girl, the restraint he’s shown, and his kindness to her.

  But it will not do, he is forced to admit that night as he takes his solitary supper by candlelight. As to the intentions of the gentleman, the disapproving onlooker would be entirely correct. A pulse beats in the gentleman’s veins, a pulse in the nature of an imperative, and in its fulfillment lie infamy and heartache. He must distance himself from her. He will, he vows. He breaks off a piece of bread, dips it into the fish stew, eats it. He takes a swallow of wine. Gazing into the candle, noting the lazulite blue where the flame springs from the wick, he tests out the weight of the resolution. I will avoid the square when the coach is due, he’s able to say. He empties his glass. I will end our outings to the shore, unless we are in company. He pushes back his chair. Will she feel this as a loss? It’s hard to know what she feels. But an absence in his chest, the absence of a certain goading restlessness, tells him he’s made the right decision. In the peaceful company of his better self, he goes to the library after supper and reads until the early hours.