by Joan Thomas
Molly had lifted her apron to her eyes at mention of the king, and at the mention of Mr. Axworthy, she had begun rocking. “Now, now, madam, none of that,” Colonel Birch said. “It’s time these bones made their way into the world. I have had my pleasure of them. We will pack them up and send them off.”
Molly used the apron to wipe her eyes. “Our Lord will bless you for this,” she said, “and Mary will help you. She will be at your door at sun-up tomorrow.”
Mary listened closely to this conversation, but she was unsure as to the thrust of it. Did he certainly intend to give them all the money from the auction sale? “Yes,” her mother said firmly on the way home. And so it seemed, for he had accepted Molly’s thanks.
“But why?” Mary asked. “He has already paid me for everything.” They were out on the cliff path, with the sea crawling below them, walking very quickly.
“It is the way the world works sometimes,” her mother said.
Preparing the collection was the very work Mary longed for. Walking the mile to Charmouth every morning, she left thoughts of Henry behind in Lyme; she climbed up and out of them. In the collecting room she was all thought, pure zeal, shut off from her worry. They chose a hundred specimens and she made up tickets for each. Miss Philpot had let her carry her Sowerby books to Charmouth, and she made careful distinctions between the Asteroceras stellare and the Asteroceras confusum.
“A pity we don’t have the whole skeleton of that one,” Mary said, admiring a grinning Ichthyosaurus skull, the centrepiece of the collection. “It was all there at first, the quarryman told me, but his mates ground the rest of it up for lime. He managed to rescue the head – he had it guarding the quarry. But he gave it to me because I was a girl and needed the money. You know, I was only twelve when I collected my first Ichthyosaurus. The first complete Ichthyosaurus ever collected.”
“Twelve,” Colonel Birch bleated. “You have nothing on Miss Isobel Cutler. A miss of nine years when she dug up a silver platter at Hadrian’s Wall. Dropped there by a Roman centurion in the year of Our Lord 400. Think of it!”
“But Colonel Birch,” Mary said, “Noah’s flood was three thousand years before our Lord was born.” She turned the centuries over in her mind like the leaves of a book, as she often did. “Think how old the Ichthyosaurus bones be!”
“Oh, they’re older, to be sure,” Colonel Birch said. “You have that over Miss Cutler.” He was such a sheep, Colonel Birch. Ovis aries. As she worked, Mary counted up all the ways he was a sheep: his nose like a steep hill, his stretched nostrils, his pale eyes that looked at you abashed with no light of cleverness in them. The white wool before and behind his ears, wool that seemed, in this proximity, to have bits of turf caught in it.
They wrapped the specimens in paper or cotton and packed them in crates. They packed the large Ichthyosaurus parts first, because the smaller specimens could nestle between. For packing the delicate tiles of sea lilies, with their segmented stems, Colonel Birch had a bale of wool brought in. They were three long days working on the Ichthyosaurus parts and the sea lilies. After the first day, Will Darby was nowhere to be seen – it was a maid who brought them their meals. Sometimes they took their dinner in the drawing room, where on the mantel lay a small white card with a name printed on it: T. H. De la Beche Esq. Below the name, the letters PPC, in ink in Henry’s hand. Those letters stood for words in French, Pour Prendre Congé. A new husband is assumed to have severed all previous ties, Colonel Birch told her, unless such a card be delivered to the door before the wedding. “He delivered it, but did not have time to take tea,” he said. “Hastening back to the fair Letitia. Taken a prisoner of love!” Also on the mantel, as though to illustrate this story, was a pair of lovers. The girl sat on the boy’s knee and stroked the boy’s temple with her white hand. Her gown was open at the top; her bosom was just at the level of his dreaming face. “From the Chelsea factory in Condon,” Colonel Birch called from his armchair. “Soft-paste porcelain.”
And so she preferred the collecting room, where there was nothing to intrude upon the clear domain of science. In the end, they had just the molluscs left, the belemnites like long metallic rods, as smooth as though they’d been poured and polished by a silversmith. Colonel Birch told her that when Napoleon’s emissaries went into the ancient pyramids where the Egyptians wrapped and stored their dead, they found huge belemnites strapped to the groins of male mummies. He was flushed and stammering in the telling. A good thing the work was almost done, for he grew more distracted by the hour.
After their noon meal, he invited her to the barn, where he kept his milk cow and mare. He wanted to show her syllabub, for she said she’d never tasted it. In the house, he made up two tankards of wine, sugar, and spices, and he had her carry them to the barn. There, he sat himself down on a stool with his belly on his thighs and his little stockinged legs tucked alertly under him. It was a joke, that such as he could milk a cow! He shared the joke with her, putting his hand on the teat and turning his head to wink at her. She had to lean close, holding the tankard under the cow so he could direct the stream of milk into it. Then they sat on a bench in the sun behind the house and drank the lovely syllabub, warm and sweet like mother’s milk. All the time, he blinked and leaned towards her, as though he was on the point of confiding a secret. But he never quite managed to say what he had in mind, and then they were back in the collecting room, packing up the belemnite specimens. Truly, he was a sheep, with his knack of being heavily in doorways and corridors, obstructing the way with his bulk, blind to her need to pass. And (while they bent together over the belemnites on the table) in the shy and trusting way he pulled his member, proud and purple, out of his breeches – to show how superior it was, was her first thought, how superior in vivid colour to these stony rods. She let out a scream and then vexation raked her, to be so rudely distracted from her work by this stout ram panting and pushing up against her. “Pray put that away,” she cried furiously, dodging out of his reach. She ran across the room and snatched up her shawl and bonnet. “I’ll have none of such stuff! I am finished with this work!”
TWENTY-FIVE
hen the sky is green with dawn, Henry packs bread, cheese, and two boiled eggs into his kit: dewbit and nuncheon. He can’t bring himself to return to Church Cliffs. He’ll make a fresh start at the west end of Mary’s territory, a rock face untouched by man and one that reveals a higher elevation of blue lias.
He walks all the way to Seven Rock Point at the far end of Monmouth Beach, admiring the calcite circles that giant ammonites made in the limestone shore. Before he sets to work, he peels the eggs, sitting facing the cliff and dropping the frail brown shells to lie on the shore among pebbles and whelk shells. Before him is a slice of the earth’s crust torn open by the ocean for his study. Layers of shale and limestone alternate regularly. But even within the shale, there are different strata. Subtly different – as though a painting master set his students an exercise in moving by degrees from one earth tone to the next. Shading his eyes with his hand, he endeavours to count the layers. It is a feat of concentration: there are fifty-three. He’ll never make the sort of detailed chart of the whole area that would allow Mary to record the vertical elevation of each find. Has he ever, seriously, thought it was possible? No – it was a project contrived to ingratiate himself with her.
Terns wheel over the cliffs. The limestone layers are dotted with small fossils. These layers will have been made by clear, shallow water, teeming with life. But the slate layers are mud, compressed into stone. Water must have risen and withdrawn, over and over, during periods of radically different conditions. His mind reels at the eons this would take. But he has always known, deep down, that this is not the sediment of a single flood. When he was first in Lyme Regis, when he was only sixteen, he noted that the pattern of layers here matched the pattern on the other side of the River Lyme. And Buckland and Conybeare are travelling on the Continent expressly to look for a similar sequence there. Yet Buckland is prepared to
argue that God created the trees in the Garden of Eden fully grown, with growth rings in place. If the rock strata are merely trompe l’oeil, why does Buckland spend so much time studying them?
The jovial nights in country inns hundreds of miles from home, the meetings and pontificating! How earnest they were, how complacent, how certain that they’d defeated the heresies of secular scholars. He thinks of a particular night in Scotland years before, of walking the shore at sunset – at Arbroath, a village on the east coast. Carpenter and Holland were enraptured by the sun deepening the red of the cliffs, God painting His creation with glorious light for their benefit. Henry once told Mary about that night, and she was amused by his description of that red shore where the very sheep were stained vermilion, and the smocks of the shepherds red. He told her how he’d stayed back on the shore when the others went to the inn, and watched the light fade and the cliffs loom up before him, how he’d seen the rocks broken and worn by the sea, basins filling up with sand to be turned to sandstone, and the sandstone being worn down again to sand. “It was not God I saw,” he said, “but the earth itself, terribly old, constantly changing by its own processes. It seemed the deeper truth.”
She listened to him with utter absorption and then sat in silence for a moment. “When I was a girl,” she said finally, “the first time you came to the workshop, I asked you how the creature came to be buried in the cliff. You told me that what is now the shore was once the seabed. So you knew this once, and you have forgotten. All your science has driven it out.” She was sitting on the ground by the log and she crossed her legs and smoothed her skirt. Then she turned her calm eyes back on him. “The world is every day creating itself,” she said, and all around them the buds of early spring bore witness to her words, to a truth indifferent to all his philosophy.
A gull floats motionless above the cliff. There is a moment of stasis – the noise of the surf suspended, the wind still. He has been carrying an unwieldy weight on his head, the weight of a primitive theology, and he will put it down. He will not indulge in the contortions Buckland indulges in; he will say what he sees. This is not a leap into uncertainty and darkness. The earth will be his scripture.
Back at Aveline House, he manages to mount to his room undetected. He drops his cloak and gloves on the floor and sits down at his desk to write.
My dear Miss Anning,
I write to express my fervent wish that we remain colleagues in spite of my marriage. They say that the sailors with Christopher Columbus, first coming up on America, could sense the weight of a massive new continent before land hove into sight on the horizon. I have had exactly this sensation these past weeks. You and I are on a journey to the unknown and we are very close to our destination. If we find the courage to continue, it will be a rare and brave adventure. Please, Mary, do not abandon me.
T. H. De la Beche, Esq.
He blots the letter and carries it over to the window to read it in a different light. “In spite of my marriage.” He should have said, “After my marriage.” How can a preposition hold such illicit energy? He should re-copy it, but he will not: he would lose his resolve. He goes back to his desk and reaches into the drawer for a stick of sealing wax.
Brownley is in the upstairs passage. Henry asks him to see that Miss Anning receives the note without delay. When he descends to the drawing room, Letitia is waiting for him. She lures him outside and plays a little geologizing joke on him – pretending to find one of her mother’s whalebone stays in the garden, pretending to think it’s a fossil. Then Mr. Aveline appears. He invites Henry to the drawing room to present a special gift: a beautiful leather-bound journal. He wants to talk about Montpellier and Mont Blanc, the highlights of his own grand tour; he wants to express his regret that Henry cannot afford to engage a tutor. At that point, George Holland is received (with a winking allusion to Henry’s wound). He too has a wedding gift, a handsome kit with a barometric pressure device and a thermometer. Then Mrs. Auriol ambushes Henry. She wants to suggest a lovely little hotel in Paris where she stayed before the war. When he engages the rooms, could he be certain to ask for chambre vingt-sept for her? Vingt-sept has such a charming balcony overlooking the courtyard! Letitia is standing frozen in the hall, watching this exchange with round eyes. She runs after him into the breakfast room. She has indeed invited her mother, but she’s contrite and full of pleading apology. “There has never been such sympathy between us as this last week,” she says. He stands looking down on the street and thinks, I must see her. Letitia touches his hand. “You will share a maid, at least?” he asks. But the thought of being attended by her mother’s dreadful Tilly dislodges the tears she’s holding at the ready. “Very well. I’ll see whether I can book two more passages,” he says. She takes a step back, evidently unsure how to interpret his tractability.
He finds a moment to steal away to his room and writes again: Would you do me the great kindness of meeting me at the fallen tree in the Undercliff? An hour before sunset tonight? If you are delayed, I shall wait until you come.
They encounter each other before they reach the Undercliff. There is a path across the meadow at the edge of town, and as he walks out the Pound Street path, he sees her on it, walking parallel to him but a little behind. He walks up to the cliff edge and waits, trying to contain his gladness, looking down at the questioning line the Cobb makes in the surf below and the birds wheeling in a frenzied evening feed.
She bows her head when he greets her. It occurs to him to thank her for assisting Letitia when she first arrived, but he does not want to evoke his fiancée. And so he simply says, “I’m going away, Mary. I wanted to tell you. I will be gone for at least a year.”
“You are getting married,” she says.
“Yes,” he says. “I am indeed.” She turns and looks at the sea. He laughs, and hears how nervous he sounds. “I am as surprised as anybody. As I believe I told you, there had been a rupture in our relations. I had reason to assume that the engagement was dissolved.” He’s struck by how changed her demeanour is. She’d seemed so worn down all winter, but she’s standing straight now, exuding vigour. “There’s a great deal I need to tell you,” he says eagerly. “I’ve been waiting for an occasion to talk at length. Let’s walk out of the wind.”
But she will not go, she stands still with an adamant set to her shoulders. Always a woman of the direct gaze, she will not face him now, she’s looking out to sea. So they must stand on the cliff edge with the wind buffeting them while he tells her of his resolve to make a serious professional of himself. Still she won’t look at him, and it occurs to him for the first time that she might esteem him less as a workingman. Very well, he thinks. In for a penny, in for a pound. He moves to the heart of it. “Be assured, I shall not work in the way we have been working to date. By we, I mean Buckland and the rest. All their so-called science is grounded in doctrine. It paralyzes the intellect. We are purblind, if you will. Our efforts are more and more contorted, to make the evidence of nature fit with a few cryptic lines of Scripture. I can’t countenance it. I am committed to a purer science.”
From her expression he thinks she’s listening, but suddenly she thrusts something at him. A small paper packet tied with string. “A handsel,” she says. “For Miss Whyte.”
Confused, he takes the token and drops it into his pocket. “How very kind,” he says. They stand in silence. He wants to take her by the shoulders and make her look at him. “Mary,” he says finally. “We will not see each other again for months. And I must tell you – I have had such a vision! You know, as in Scripture, when an apostle sees an angel, or a bush that burns and is not consumed – something not of this world? Except what I saw was the world. I was out on the shore this morning. I went out to work on the chart I promised you. And I saw the cliffs for the first time. The layers, all those separate layers! It was as though scales had fallen from my eyes. The scales of orthodoxy.” He senses she wants to say something, but his words are tumbling out. “You know this, Mary! You saw all t
his before I did. Oh, Mary, no one thinks as you do. I see your mind at work as you speak. There is no cant, no effort to please. And so I must ask whether you will work with me … upon my return.” He’s momentarily distracted by the fierceness of her expression. “Think how valuable we can be to each other! You have an instinctual understanding of the fossils. And all my acquaintances in the Geological Society – I can cultivate them for your benefit. And the Royal Society, for all it is –”
Then she is looking at him. “Science!” she cries. “You talk of science. You have no idea what you think. You are a child.”
He can’t speak – the breath is knocked out of him.
“Your letter,” she says. She has a paper crumpled in her hand, and she thrusts it towards him, and then in a fury raises her fist and tries to throw it out into the sea. But the wind blows it back and drops it into the gorse. She scrambles down and plucks it out and pitches it again with such a passion that this time it flutters down the cliff. Henry tries to follow it with his eyes, fearing it will lie on the beach where someone may find it. “I have never read such tripe.” Mary shouts after it. She turns on him. “A new adventure. It is not new, sir. It is a foul tale that has been often told.”
He feels his own anger flare up at the injustice of this. “Have I ever been less than respectful of your person? Have I ever laid a hand on you?”
But of course there’s the kiss, and it seems a fresh provocation to have brought it back. She looks at him in quick surprise and takes a step backwards. Her nostrils flare. “You have sneaking ways, sir. You used your sneaking ways on me!”
