Curiosity

by Joan Thomas

  He has callers. The next afternoon, Edmund and Mrs. Sutton are announced. Edmund Sutton, the son of his mother’s old plantation friend, and now, like Henry, an absentee planter. Sutton was in school in England when Henry was a boy in Jamaica, they hardly know each other, but Henry greets him with enthusiasm. They’re travelling from Weymouth to Bristol, and he insists they stay a day or two. It’s clear they’re taken aback by the invitation, but the weather is bad and after a moment’s hesitation, they accept. Henry has never met Sutton’s wife. Her manner is all kindness, a pantomime of kindness, tenderness and sympathy represented by tilted head and melting glances. “A finer wife than any man deserves,” Sutton says stoutly on each occasion that the lady crosses his line of vision.

  The second night, Mrs. Sutton admires a piece of needlework hanging in the drawing room and asks Henry to relay a compliment to Mrs. Aveline. “That piece was not done by my mother,” he says. “It was a gift from my fiancée, Miss Whyte.”

  “Oh, I have never known Miss Whyte to work in petit point,” says Mrs. Sutton.

  “You and Letitia are friends? I had no idea!”

  Something unspoken passes between Mrs. Sutton and her husband, and she inclines her head in assent. It is enormously puzzling, that she did not reveal this acquaintance before now. Nor does she ask why Letitia and Henry are apart over Christmas. Her expression in that moment is anything but solicitous – it is canny, and righteous, as though she is privy to the truth of the thing, knows that Letitia has thrown Henry over, and knows why.

  Henry refuses to pursue it. He turns in his chair, resumes the subject he and Sutton spent the afternoon on: the future of geology. He describes the amazement he feels riding over the English countryside, at the thought of the unknown layers beneath every roadway and meadow. Looked at in this light, England is as unstudied as America. “What is lacking,” he announces, “is a comprehensive textbook for the practitioners of this new science, and I have in mind to write one.”

  Sutton turns his moon face back to the fire. “A capital project for the gentleman who likes to ride out on an autumn day, especially for one who detests shooting.”

  “You misunderstand me,” Henry says. “I do not intend this as a leisure pursuit.” A manual will require a staggering amount of study and research, but it will establish him as an expert in the field. And there are many practical applications to geology. Once his name is known, he’ll be sought after by mining companies, by roadworks, asked to locate wells, that sort of thing. What he does not say is that, to date, his living has paid for his geologizing; very shortly, his geologizing will need to pay his living. But no doubt they grasp this.

  “You would work as a sort of engineer?” Mrs. Sutton says uncertainly, and Henry thinks of the chagrin his mother would feel overhearing this conversation.

  He sees them off in the morning and climbs straight up to the library. Their discomfort on the subject cemented his intentions. It’s a vocation that suits him splendidly – a science in its infancy, where he will not be burdened by orthodoxy, can carve out his own niche. The possibilities are endless and lucrative. He’s deferred numerous financial obligations with the expectation of his marriage settlement. If Letitia has indeed broken with him, he has no choice but to find paid employment. All to the good – he feels a rising excitement about a life prescribed by worthwhile work. What a pity he can’t talk this through with Mary! Not that she would grasp the entire import of it. He just longs to hear her response, which would be a true expression of her thoughts and feelings. How grateful he is for their conversations through the autumn. They recalled him to the days when he was a barefoot boy in osnaburg shorts, unhampered by codes of social conduct: a precious, essential past.

  On a calm day, he walks out and down to the lower town. The sea moves beyond the wall like a forgotten obligation, picking up light from the eastern sky, striations of foam gleaming white on each wave. He passes through the square, glancing once at her closed door. He will not knock, he is firm (but it’s a stingy fate that begrudges them even a chance encounter). He meets Miss Philpot near the bridge and refrains from inquiring about Miss Anning. As he climbs back up Broad Street, he stops to admire the mist lying between Stonebarrow and Golden Cap, and wonders if Mary is at that moment on the shore.

  At Aveline House, he pauses, reluctant to go back in. What made him think his parting from her had to be absolute? he wonders as he hangs his cloak behind the door. Far too cruel! He can be her gentle friend and protector. He is already her protector – he allowed her to escape him. But escape him to what? Mary Anning will never marry. She is doomed a spinster because of her work, as his mother frequently remarks. It’s a sad fact that no man of her own class will take her on. But others would, with alacrity, other men of other classes, and on terms that would leave her vulnerable to disgrace. She is chaste now, he feels no doubt, but she is manifestly a creature of flesh and blood (oh, the way she has of turning her head towards him, as though she is turning on a pillow), such a creature of nature – it is almost heartbreaking to imagine the joy she would take in it! It’s only a matter of time before someone snatches up what he has been scrupulous enough to resist. And this future, inevitable rival – will he have Henry’s regard for Mary? Henry sees them stealing into the forest together, his rival foppishly attired in blue velvet, leering like an imbecile and reaching his paddling fingers towards her bodice, and Henry swings his walking stick and clips the man in the back of his knees, watches him fall to the path, howling in anguish.

  And then, as he sits over his letters in the drawing room, he begins to muse on how an affair could be conducted so as to minimize its risks, both to Mary and to the theoretical gentleman. Resolutely he sets the subject aside, only to find himself teasing at it five minutes later. For the next few days, he is powerless to resist. Mary makes things worse, raising her black eyes to him every hour of the day and night. Then she begins to slide into his room after dark, after the house is quiet and the room lit only by the orange light of the dying coals in his hearth, she takes to pulling her hair out of its knot, her heavy dark hair, and laying the long, lovely length of her body down on him. Warm me, she says, and he cannot fail to oblige.

  The week after his mother returns to Lyme, Henry encounters Mary in the square and feels a lurch of emotion at the sight of her. She’s the one who issues an invitation to the shore, and he cannot refuse. He’s taken aback and rebuked by her composure. She is grave, distracted; she seems scarcely to take in his conversation. He’s horrified to see straw sticking out of the holes in her boots. Packed in for warmth, presumably. The tips of her fingers are terribly inflamed and when he offers her a hand on a steep bank, she winces and pulls back from his touch. It is blains, she says, from the cold. She is uncharacteristically pale. There is fatigue in the way she moves – he wonders what she has eaten that day. She was out early, she tells him, she walked to Black Ven with Miss Philpot at the first low tide, which means that she climbed the hill first to collect Miss Philpot, who could not decently walk alone.

  Spring is very early. Yellow primroses emerge, taking advantage of the light before the canopy fills in. She ventures down a different path than they normally follow, and then she stops suddenly and points out a fork in it. A smuggler lives there, she tells him, a man by name of Digby, who many years ago enticed her sister Martha onto a makeshift raft so that she drowned. “She was on a wooden door from a ship. She was playing at being a sailor. It was a sport of a group of children, and the sea took her. She was four.”

  “I warrant he was just a lad himself at the time,” Henry ventures. “No doubt he intended no harm,” and she flies into a rage.

  “Lad or no lad,” she cries. “Intended or not. It was heedless folly!” Tears glisten on her lashes. She will retreat from such a painful memory, he thinks, she’ll fall into silence. But her face continues to work. She drops her voice then and tells him about an ominous man who came to her father’s funeral, a man in a torn black coat. Not entirely a stran
ger – she recognized him as a mummer who’d come to their door the Christmas before the pox, on a night when they were starved with cold. A lone mummer, a very ill sign. Seeing him pacing behind the coffin, she felt the terror she’d felt when her father opened the door to him, she seemed to hear again the song he sang. “My father let that evil body in, though he’d heard the song – he slipped the man a coin.”

  “What was the song, Mary?”

  She breathes painfully for a minute, and then she raises her head and sings with mournful emphasis.

  Out of nine I got but five,

  Half of they be starved alive

  I want some money or else some bread

  Or all the others will soon be dead.

  At the end, she puts her face down and cries bitterly. She has her own handkerchief and will not use his. “Oh, it was not the mummer I feared – that was just a child’s fancy. It was my father.” Her words come out choked with emotion, she lapses into dialect. “My mother be full of fearful notions, death all the time clawing at her shoulder, but it were not my mother who let death in. No, it were my father. He would never bow his spine to bear the weight of trouble. He did not know proper caution.”

  It’s an image that pierces his heart – the vulnerable child, seeing accident and illness and starvation threaten to carry off the last of them, her yearning love for her foolhardy father. One must look for fecklessness and superstition at the root of it, he tells himself. It is ignorance and low breeding that compound the problems of such families. But he cannot hold back the truth that she feels as deeply as any woman of his own class would feel, that she has marshalled every ounce of will and intelligence to ameliorate her fate. Then, at the sight of her sobbing figure, a different feeling rises – anger, that he should have let this knowing in, because it will not be so easy to force it back out. She is a dangerous companion, Mary Anning, with her mud-edged petticoat and her sore fingers. There is a contagion here – this comes all from improper fraternization, from closing a gap where a gap must be maintained!

  He strides up the path ahead of her. When he comes to the clearing, he has the impulse to keep walking, but then he thinks of her weeping alone in the forest and his anger collapses. He sits on the log. He’s losing his footing; everything seems to unmoor him these days. He’s sweemy, as Mary would say, in danger of floating away. The very globe, untethered from the ropes that moored it, is floating away with him on it. It could be that he’s hungry himself – he has neglected lunch. Mary comes into the clearing and sits down on the ground by the log, leaning back against it. She does not seem piqued that he walked away from her. She asks so little of him! He reaches over and briefly clasps her shoulder. “Alas, the young are at the mercy of the old,” he says.

  Mary wraps her arms around her knees and lays her cheek to rest on her skirt, and they sit in silence. Above them, the stonechat makes its distinctive sound. The ash trees are coming out in bud, dressing themselves in the softest green. It’s a very great gift, her opening her heart to him in this way. He longs to be worthy of it. And so he does not speak. He and Mary sit by the fallen trunk and gradually, in their silence, all his chattering words that hung in the clearing these many weeks dissolve, gradually they are scattered and taken away by the forest air. They sit on the damp, mossy ground where fronds of fern slowly uncurl their bent heads – not in a drawing room, as he pretended, not even a cathedral, as many might say. This is a work of nature, husbanded only by its dyings and rottings and seedings, misted by the Channel breezes even when there is no rain. This is a forest, and perhaps, after all, they are just two of its creatures.

  TWENTY-TWO

  n a cloudy day, when Molly pulled her shawl over her head and went to the churchyard to see the Overseer of the Parish Poor, Will Darby with his rick of red hair came to the table with a note from Colonel Birch.

  My Dear Miss Anning,

  It is the Gout that felled me, I am Lame as a Hen-haggler’s Horse. What news on the shore? Would Miss Anning were itinerant like the good Pastor Gleed! In the meantime I have given Charles a Purse, I have charged the Youth as my Agent.

  Colonel T. Birch, S. S.

  Mary looked over the note at Will Darby. Charles, Colonel Birch called him. Because it saved learning a new name – he’d always had a Charles. Will Darby had picked a sea lily up from the table. She’d cut the shale into a tile around it, and it swayed gracefully across its matrix on a long stalk. Will Darby tilted it to the light, eyeing it with the air of a man intent on exercising some meagre authority. “It is a crinoid,” she said to him. “They are animals, but they grow on stems like flowers.” He scowled, offended at being instructed by such as her. She did not know for certain what itinerant meant, but she saw what she must do. “Tell Colonel Birch I refuse to deal with a thin-faced nesseltripe,” she cried in a sudden temper. “Tell him I’ll be in Charmouth myself in the morning.”

  The next morning, she picked out as many pieces as she could carry and wrapped each one in a paper. As she opened the door, she saw Mr. De la Beche ride into the square and swing down from his horse in a fluid motion, standing with one hand on the bridle, cupping the soft muzzle of the horse. Henry, she thought. She pulled the door almost closed and waited until he was gone, leading the horse up Broad Street, before she set out on the walk to Charmouth with her heavy load.

  At Charmouth, she walked up the single street to the house she knew to be Colonel Birch’s, ignoring the townspeople who always stared when she walked through the town with one gentle man or another. Will Darby answered the door, wearing a string tied around his head to keep the hair out of his eyes. With a terse nod, he left her standing in the hall. The light from a high window fell on a carving on the hall table, the bust of a man with a garland of leaves around his head. It was carved in white marble, so amazingly like flesh that she longed to touch it. Then Will Darby was back and led her sullenly down the corridor, to a room filled with tables and shelves of fossils (it was just as she had pictured it), and she breathed in the familiar smell of dust and the shore. Two chairs were arranged at a grand window, with a small table between them. Colonel Birch sat in one with his sore foot wrapped in sheepskin and propped on a stool. “Sit yourself down, maid,” he said, gesturing to the second chair. “If ye dare.” It was indeed a most curious chair: a lion, with its head snarling over her head, and its legs become chair legs. On each side a muscular tail curved up to form an armrest. “What do you think of that workmanship, eh?” Colonel Birch said.

  Mary peered down at the tassels of the tails, where the carver in his exuberance had carved lions’ heads. “There be more heads and tails than nature would allow to one beast,” she said.

  “I bought it from an Arab in Bath,” Colonel Birch said, “when the Egyptomania was upon me. Very well, then! Help the maiden with her bundle, Charles, and we’ll see what she has found.”

  Mary sat on the edge of the chair in this room where all her industry lay around her and watched him go through the fossils. In the end, he bought everything she had carried in – as she’d known he would. For a strange little shrimp-like creature alone, he paid eighteen shillings. And then he sat back and lit his clay pipe, pulling the whole candle flame into the bowl of the pipe by his sucking. With her money pouch like a stone at her waist, Mary sat while Will Darby served wine and oatcakes, she sat back in the lion’s lap and looked at her collection laid out on shelves on three sides of the room, narrow, unvarnished shelves that reached from the floor to the height of her head. If they were mine, she thought, I would arrange them in the order they were found, from lowest in the cliffs to highest, and she remembered asking Buckland one of the questions that had troubled her since a girl: if the earth was formed on the third day and the creatures on the fifth, how came the creatures to be buried so deep within the earth? And he said again what he always said, that the rock was all the sediment of the Flood, and so contained the bodies of creatures who had died in it, turned to stone as a caution to man. And she asked him then why the
Ichthyosaurus for all its size did not sink to the bottom of the rock as the sediment settled, and he turned away from her without answering.

  The wine, called Madeira, was in a china flagon with a duck on the spout so that when you tipped the flagon to pour, the duck seemed to be swimming on a river of Madeira. “What a piece of workmanship, eh?” Colonel Birch cried, and Mary thought how Lizzie would like it. “More Madeira, my dear?” the Colonel asked, leaning over to refill her cup. She drank the lovely Madeira and looked around her in the dusty, light-filled room. This was her collection. She could put a name to every specimen; she could tell where each was found and how it was dug out. If she were not poor, this would be her collection. Colonel Birch sank into a doze and when her cup was empty, she poured herself another to watch the duck swim.

  Walking back into Lyme Regis, she felt sweemy being so high above the town. The town, she saw, was a hive: it had been built up in layers and was penetrated by the street, and she was descending down into it. At the top of the hive were the rich, snoring in their castles full of booty from the shore. What a treasure it was to have everything together! Colonel Birch was right, after all, not to be choosy but to save everything. And he did not ticket them, he did not tell the fossils their names, but waited for them to tell him. Better he should have them. He was not clever, but he had the heart of a collector. Whereas she was out under the sky where she belonged, out on the muddy street, going down into the town empty-handed, walking past the house where the pig-faced lady lived with her sisters, down onto Broad Street, where Aveline House sat squarely against the street, where the comely Henry De la Beche in his trousers lived, who knew all the names of the layers in the town and on the shore, and dared to think beyond his teachers. Her own understanding was imperfect – for a practitioner of Undergroundology, she lacked instruction, and so she knocked on the door. “Is Henry in?” she asked when a maid came to the door.