Curiosity

by Joan Thomas

  “Was it in this chamber that she was examined?”

  “No. It was in the Pavilion, where there is room for the illustrators to set up their easels. We paid her trainer a pretty penny for three days. They promised us her full co-operation, but she refused our every question. She merely babbled in some barbaric tongue and recited bits of verse in Dutch. She would not cease from coughing.”

  “Was she naked throughout?”

  “It was a scientific examination.”

  “Did you not seek a doctor for her?”

  Frédéric made an amused snort. “She took care of herself, that one. M. de Blainville offered her a gold napoleon if she would show her privates, but she defied him.” He planted a confiding hand on Henry’s arm and lowered his voice. “We had to wait until she died.”

  Henry was filled with loathing of himself and of this man. He removed the hand. “There is nothing of science in this – it is prurience of a most disgusting sort!”

  “Cher ami, you do not appreciate the science of it. You may wish to avail yourself of the entire display –” And he gestured to the cases at the centre of the room. Henry turned his head and saw in a glass case the fleshy petals of an elaborate tropical flower. Then understanding burned through him and he turned fiercely back on Frédéric. Frédéric met him with his guttersnipe eyes. “Eh, bien,” he shrugged, and went out through the double doors.

  Henry turned and stumbled back the way they had come. Ahead of him, two servants moved down the corridor, extinguishing the lights. He put his hand out to the wall of the dim corridor to steady himself. And then the servants had vanished and he was alone, almost running, trying to retrace their way, although in fact he had no memory of leaving the dining room. He found himself in a great hall lined with animal skeletons. They loomed on either side, facing inwards as though to charge, gleaming from the light of the Paris night sky let in through high windows. He scurried along, keeping to the centre of the aisle, as a child who was afraid of shadows might. At the end, he spied a small passage, and threw himself down it, and that was worse, it narrowed as though leading to a crypt. He leapt and shrieked as a door opened – it was a watchman with a massive key ring, letting in cold night air. At Henry’s insistence, the man let him out, and Henry stumbled into the night and wandered a long time in the maze of the garden, almost weeping with frustration, before he found an unlocked gate to the street.

  It was freezing cold and gently raining. The street was still full of carriages. The bell at Notre-Dame rang midnight as he passed. Then he was at Pont Neuf, standing before a massive statue, the new king on horseback. He leaned over the balustrade, peering down at the black water smeared with the yellow reflections of torches through the rain. Pedestrians crossed continually beside him, brushing against him. A group of English in their long cloaks, silent. A lone gentleman, his walking stick tapping on the pavement. He thought he might be sick, he longed to be sick, but not here; he wanted to get down to the water’s edge. There was a wide stone balustrade built along the bank especially to prevent him, and a sharp ridge laid along the top of the balustrade for the intimate punishment of the man who tried to go over it one leg at a time. And then, somehow, he was over it and lurching down the bank. There at the water’s edge was the prone body of Sophie, lying on her front, her face turned to the side. She had been lying there all night. Her body was fringed with land crabs, crabs like ivory tea saucers climbing clumsily over each other in an effort to get at her. His mother sat sipping punch. Poison, she said. She would have picked it in the jungle. Something only the Creoles know of. He looked for his father, but his father was gone. It was Peter, the Igbo houseboy, who took his hand and led him stumbling back up to the bridge and across to the other side.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  e was gone; that dangerous season of her life was over and done with. But the townsfolk never forgot. Walking up Broad Street on a windy April day, Mary encountered Mrs. Stock, the brim of her bonnet fouled from the blacking she smeared on her whitening curls. Mary refused to lower her gaze, and Mrs. Stock muttered something and stepped back elaborately to avoid passing too close.

  Mary was on her way to take tea with Miss Philpot. She was not seated five minutes in the back parlour of Morley Cottage before the reason for the invitation was carried triumphantly out, in the form of a book in snowy covers: Outlines of the Geology of England and Wales by the Reverend William Conybeare. A magnificent accomplishment in geology, Elizabeth Philpot said, all tremulous with excitement. It listed every fossil ever found in England, along with the names of the gentlemen credited with the finds. So William Buckland was in the book many times over, and Henry De la Beche, Esq., and Colonel Birch, and Squire Henry Hoste Henley (for the Ichthyosaurus Joseph had found and Mary had excavated when she was twelve), and of course the good Reverend himself (for an Ichthyosaurus communis Mary had found and Henry had sold to Conybeare on her behalf).

  All this was the modest preamble to the centrepiece of the book: the name Miss Elizabeth Philpot. Elizabeth flushed as she flipped to this page and ran her finger down the line to her own lady’s name, there among all the gentlemen’s! Her citation was for a gryphaea she had found and collected herself. (But I identified it! Mary might have blurted. I showed you how to clean it.) Reverend Conybeare had sent Miss Philpot a copy of the book with his compliments. She wanted to spend a few more days studying it, but Mary was welcome to borrow it after that.

  “I have scant leisure for reading these days,” was all Mary said, stiffly.

  When she stepped out on Silver Street, she found that the wind was worse and there was a hum in the air that accorded very well with her temper. The Cobb was crowded with ships seeking shelter. While she’d been sitting in the back parlour of Morley Cottage, the clouds had built into a ledge looming over the sea, navy blue in colour. By the time she was halfway down Broad Street, wind had drawn that ledge into a gargantuan sharp-prowed schooner that was carrying a gale swiftly across the Channel towards them.

  The river was swollen from spring rains. “The workshop will flood, certain-sure,” she said to Molly. She made four or five trips from the workshop, carrying up the tools and the small and fragile specimens and stowing them in the kitchen. Lizzie was slumbering on the cot. Her face was puffy and her colour was very poor. “Sit up, lazy,” Mary said. “You need to wake up before bedtime.” She took a cup of broth from the pot and sat on the cot beside Lizzie. Lizzie half opened her eyes.

  “Flood,” she said. “I heard you.” Her breath was so short that every phrase was an accusation. Mary helped her raise her head to sip from the cup. Lizzie was parched, always, but the broth she drank did not come out as piss. It pooled in her legs, as Henry’s doctor had predicted. If they kept giving her drink, they would hasten her death, the doctor’d said, and Mary had countered, “Without drink, she will die in misery,” and he hadn’t had an answer to that.

  When the broth was mostly gone, Mary picked Lizzie up and carried her upstairs. Settling Lizzie into bed, she avoided looking at her legs, swollen like the legs of a fat old woman. “What story do you want?” she asked, and Lizzie whispered, “The Flood.”

  Mary went to the window that looked towards France. The waves were immense – a vertical boulder of water lifted as high as the window and fell back. She stood by the shelf and lit candles, a row of three, and took down Mr. Buckland’s bible. It opened naturally to Genesis, and she turned the pages and ran her eyes over the story of God falling into a temper with man, and then deciding to rescue Noah. With her free hand on Lizzie’s hand on the coverlet, she began to read, lowering her voice below the fretting of the wind.

  Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch. And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits. A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above; and the door of the ark sh
alt thou set in the side thereof; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it.

  Lizzie’s eyes had already closed and her chin had sunk down on her chest. Mary paused in her reading. When Lizzie didn’t stir, she got up and put the bible back on the shelf. Some nights, she kept reading after Lizzie drifted off – might the words not keep Lizzie company in her dreams? But tonight her feelings were too roiled up to endure it. Wind edged its way through the cracks around the window and prodded at the candles. She took up the tallest candle and lit three more from it, dripping a bit of wax on the shelf to hold each one. Molly came up the steps just then. “She’s seen enough of darkness,” Mary said, to forestall her mother chiding her with waste, and her wrath parted a little and let gratitude waft in, for the four hundred pounds the learned men had given her that bought beeswax candles and coal and marrow bones to make broth for Lizzie.

  They took their places on either side of Lizzie, with their backs against the corner posts of the bed. For a while, Lizzie turned her face from one side to the other, as though the guttering bright candlelight was bothering her. She was panting strangely. But in a few minutes, peace came over her, and Mary passed the second pillow to her mother and put the bolster behind her own back. They did not bother with their nightdresses – there would be no sleeping for either of them. Water had begun to boom against the seawall, as loud as a cannon blast. Joseph would be anxious for them. If the Lyme flooded its banks, he would come and take them up to Church Street. Lizzie had fallen into a deep sleep. Even after the bell in the square set to wild clanging and the timbers of the house began to groan, she did not stir. Molly sat with her shawl wrapped around her and did not stir either. This was the way she always sat in the evening, motionless, like a turtle, to save her force.

  Mary leaned back and closed her eyes. She should have agreed to borrow the book. She could have counted the number of times the name Mary Anning was blotted from it. I have scant leisure for reading, she’d said. Not another soul on Bridge Street would express itself in those words. She had gentled her speech to the point that the townspeople mocked her – and to what purpose? She was like the Ichthyosaurus: she was neither fish nor fowl.

  There was a crash somewhere below. Mary tried to think what could have fallen. Oh, well. There were no treasures in this household, no useless china vases. It was a new sensation, being so vexed with Miss Philpot. I will avoid her from this day on, she thought. From now on, she would sell everything she found as curios. She would promote the use of rare vertebrae as candle-holders. She’d learn French and sell to the French, who had no concept of the value of an English coin. In any case, there would be no more sales to the learned gentlemen. The next astonishing skeleton she found, she would hide in the workshop until she could publish her own text. She had a gift for this work that could not be learned. It was a kinship with the bones you needed, a reptilian eye, to see what had never been seen or even imagined. That the scientific gentlemen would never have!

  Something wooden ripped below them. Should they try to leave? She looked at her mother, but Molly gave no sign that she had heard. Mary pictured them staggering up the hill to Joseph’s with Lizzie in her arms and all the floodgates of heaven open above them and bricks tumbling from the chimneys. They’d left it too late. If Joseph had had any thoughts of coming for them, he’d left it too late as well. She put her hand on Lizzie’s cool forehead. “Here we are, Lizzie,” she said. “Safe and dry in the ark.” She sat and watched the candles unevenly burning, and when the first guttered out, she got up and lit a new one in its place, and wondered how the Bennetts were faring next door, huddling there in their grief, for it was just last week that their William was transported to Botany Bay for snaring a pheasant on Squire Henley’s land, and they would never see him no more in their lives.

  The candles bowed and rose in the draft. I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, God said. She saw the hoarding, thieving gentlemen bobbing in the black swell, clutching desperately at their top hats as buoys. Reverend Conybeare, with his long, sneering nose and knowing eye – it was Conybeare’s sworn purpose to exclude her. He had organized Outlines of Geology by buyers, not by finders, to snatch all the glory for himself and his friends. Let him clutch his Ichthyosaurus communis to him – it would only sink him! And as for Henry De la Beche– But she could not think of Henry. She got up instead to light another candle.

  Her mother rose as well, to attend to Lizzie. Mary stood by the shelf, pressing the new candle into soft wax, and when she turned, she saw that Molly had fallen to her knees by the bed with her ear to Lizzie’s face. A black shadow dramatized her movements – it seemed she was demonstrating a procedure in the care of the gravely ill. She lifted herself heavily up, her face stricken, and said something that Mary could not hear for the gale, and then she bent and passed her hand over Lizzie’s eyes as though to close them. Do not mock us, Mother, Mary thought, before understanding moved hideously through her. She leapt to the bed and snatched Lizzie up by the shoulders. Lizzie’s head fell lifelessly back, and then Molly was there and took the child from Mary and laid her tenderly down, smoothing her hair, touching her cheek. “Let Jesus carry her now in His bosom, the poor lamb,” Molly said in Mary’s ear. She made to lay a kiss on Mary’s cheek, but Mary flung herself away with a cry.

  Oh – that she could snatch back the last hour! In one of its moments, while she boiled and ranted, Lizzie’s spirit had slipped from the room. But she had sensed nothing – those vicious gentle men had stolen from her the sacred hour of her sister’s passing. Or she had thrown it away. She had let Lizzie fall. She had been caught up in drowning her enemies, and it was Lizzie who had slipped beneath the waves. Mary let the candles gutter out, and when the last was gone, she saw that her mother had fallen asleep, but she could not bring herself to take her place on the bed. Finally, she slid to the floor and laid her head against the bed, reaching a hand towards where Lizzie’s lay. She did not sleep but wept, pressing her face into the coverlet. She wept and wept, and when her tears were gone, she stayed on the floor in the posture of exhausted prayer, listening to the water thrashing like a beast below, and thought that it was right that the sea should convulse so for the loss of this child.

  It was full light of a grey day when Mary woke in a strange, soft bed with a curtain around it. At her waking, a new weight in her chest reminded her that Lizzie was gone. This day has come, she said to herself, as we knew it must, and we can take up the burden of our grieving. The timbers of the house she was in groaned, but they were up on the high street and the roaring of the sea was low and distant.

  Her mother slept beside her under a white coverlet. “It is a great charity she shows us,” she’d said in the early morning hours, as Mary held her by the elbows and helped her lower herself onto the night bucket. “A great charity, and her with that goitre.” It was Mrs. Jefferd she meant.

  “It is not a charity,” said Mary. “They will send us a bill and we will pay it.”

  Henry Jefferd did not have her father’s skill with a dovetail join, but he was the only undertaker now in Lyme, and a kindly man. When Mary had pounded on his door at first light, he’d said they must bring Lizzie to be laid out there, for the Lyme would surely flood. His wife saw Mary drenched in the kitchen and knew without having to be told, and she said they must all come, there was a bed to spare.

  Mary’s heart had pounded with an unreasoned hope when she led Henry Jefferd into the bedchamber of their house, but in the grey light leaking around the shutter, she saw that Lizzie’s face had transformed through the last hour into something no longer human. Mr. Jefferd had brought a canvas with him. Inside was a wool blanket proofed with lanolin. He laid the blanket on the bed and lifted the body onto it, tucking the blanket tightly up over the face, and then wrapped the whole thing into the canvas. He lifted this bundle into his arms with the gentleness of a father, and Mary closed up the house and she and her mother followed Jefferd up the rain-dashed street, with
the wind pushing at their backs like a giant hand. At his house, he went straight through to the laying-out room and Harriet Jefferd showed them to their bed. “Hand your skirts out to me, my dears, and I will dry them by the fire,” she said. “And we will think nothing amiss if you lie abed late after all your troubles.”

  The Jefferds’ kitchen window afforded a view of the eastern shore. The veil of rain had thinned and Mary glimpsed the sea piled in untidy heaps below. The wind seemed shriller this morning, and now it raked on Mary’s nerves.

  Harriet Jefferd turned from the fire and greeted Mary and offered her a cup of tea, and for the first time, Mary saw the goitre poking from the side of her neck. And there by the mantel was another visitor, Mr. Gleed, steam rising from his coat in the warmth of the coal fire. Mary sat down and he inclined his head towards her. “Miss Anning,” he said. “My sympathies at this dark hour.” When Mary thanked him, he reached out and touched her on the shoulder. “Hoping to serve you in some small way, I have carried the sad news to your brother.” He cupped his hands as if to show Mary how this was accomplished. “He will come the instant the storm allows. Your sister-in-law is in a very delicate state.”

  “Indeed,” Mary said, and after a long pause, she thought to thank him again. It was not a small thing Mr. Gleed had done, braving Church Street hill in this gale.

  Mrs. Jefferd sat herself down in the inglenook and gave Mary a soft look.

  “Your family has been sorely tried,” Mr. Gleed said, intruding his face into Mary’s thoughts. She noticed that he had a plate of bread and a cup of tea on the mantelpiece.

  “I must agree,” Mary said. “Mr. Gleed, do sit down,” she added, although it was not her place.

  “Can’t sit, poor chap,” murmured Mrs. Jefferd in Mary’s direction. “It’s his ulsters.” She gestured towards her own hindquarters.