Curiosity

by Joan Thomas

  “Indeed, it shows an admirable talent for dissembling,” says Henry. “You and I would not so reshape our science to suit our masters.” Buckland’s eyes are fixed on the fire; he declines to take the bait.

  “Lamarck was not present?”

  “No, and I was especially sorry not to have the opportunity to meet him. While in Paris, I read his recent paper with great interest. He begins by studying invertebrates – molluscs in the Paris basin – and finds slow changes that seem to act as an index to the age of the rocks. It would appear to be a useful method in identifying strata where there’s been a disturbance in the earth. I have been wondering whether we could work with Mary Anning to use the ammonites in the same way.”

  “Mary Anning may not condescend to work with my husband,” says Mrs. Buckland, putting up her chin. “She recently expressed scorn for his knowledge of the lias fossils. Mrs. Murchison reported this to me.”

  “She has taken to wearing a gentleman’s top hat,” says Letitia suddenly. “I saw her yesterday, climbing up from the shore. Is she deliberately ridiculing her betters?”

  “She’s simply being practical,” says Henry.

  “What is practical about a top hat?” cries Mrs. Buckland. “They were designed solely and purposefully for ostentation, to add inches to a gentleman’s height.”

  “On the contrary,” says Henry. “Such a hat will provide Miss Anning protection from falling rocks. A modicum of protection, at least.”

  “She parades her lack of femininity,” says Letitia. “What can be her motive? It must provoke disgust even in men of her own class.”

  “It is not the top hat that accounts for our discomfort with Mary Anning,” says Henry. “It is Mary Anning’s superior knowledge in all subjects related to her field. It is her refusal to pander to male vanity and pretend that the gentlemen with whom she discourses have come to this knowledge before her. That is the true challenge Mary Anning presents to men of every class.”

  In the satisfying silence that follows this little speech, he gets up and crosses to the window. He opens the casement with the thought that, when the tide is in, as it will be now, its roar might be heard as high as Pound Street. The only sound that floats in is the cooing of doves in the ash grove. He has spoken to Mary only once since his return. She was with Miss Philpot, down at the jetty taking up sea water in buckets to clean their fossils. Behind them, patient horses dragged their caravans into the waves. She was still in mourning. Her face was a bit thinner, but the black bonnet imparted a new elegance to her appearance. He offered his condolences, and she thanked him and met his eyes calmly. He stood there, bereft of words, and gems of sunlight scattered off the flailing forms of supplicants lowering themselves into the water.

  “I ran into Colonel Birch last night,” Henry says finally. “He tells me that Mary Anning has secured a London agent.”

  “And who would that be?”

  “George Sowerby.”

  Buckland recoils sharply in his chair. “Related to the botanical artist?”

  “Eldest son of. A most esteemed and well-connected fellow. It is excellent news for Miss Anning.”

  Buckland raises his eyebrows and presses his lips together in a sour approximation of gladness for Mary.

  “On another subject, Mr. Buckland,” Henry says. “A disturbing rumour concerning yourself has made its way across the Channel. The French are greatly agitated by a report that you participated in the desecration of the remains of their greatest monarch. I stoutly denied it on your behalf.”

  Buckland emits a high-pitched whinny of a laugh, and Henry sees that he is guilty. So does Mrs. Buckland: a little frown appears on her forehead.

  “I see,” Henry says. “And how ever did Lord Harcourt gain possession of the heart of Louis XIV?”

  Buckland gets up and crosses to the hearth, so that they are both standing. He reaches for the poker and begins to rearrange the coals with every appearance of nonchalance, but a sudden flush has risen in his cheek. “The royal tomb was ransacked during the revolution. I believe this particular relic changed hands several times in the intervening years. Someone approached Harcourt about it at Versailles, just sidled up to him in the garden. I suppose he’d been noticed in Paris buying all manner of nonsense. He has quite an amusing collection of esoterica.”

  “So he was displaying it at Nuneham?”

  “In a silver casket.”

  “And when he showed it to you, you snatched it up and ate it?”

  Buckland props the poker back at the hearth. He shrugs and slouches to his chair, never once raising his eyes to meet the three pairs of eyes fixed on him. “And a nasty morsel it was! I later learned that it was gangrene that dispatched the Sun King! Nothing I’ve eaten revolted my digestion more – except possibly the hyena. But it was worth it to see the expression on Harcourt’s face. He’d paid a fortune for that putrid lump. A king’s ransom, dare I say, ha?”

  “So I see I needlessly tarnished my reputation in defending yours.” Henry is still standing at the window. “I was also questioned as to why you’ve not announced the discovery of a massive land reptile found at Stonesfield.”

  “Everything in good time.” Buckland sprawls in his chair with legs outstretched. His lips are pulled tight across his teeth: this is rage disguised as geniality. “Tell me, Henry. How was your assault on Mont Blanc?”

  “It failed. No doubt you’ve heard.”

  “Doubtless there will be other opportunities.” He begins to kick the hob with a boot. “If I may say, Henry, about your notion of organizing the fossils by the light of the strata, or the strata by the light of the fossils – it is manifestly a fool’s enterprise. Which is to be taken as absolute index?” He continues to beat out a rhythm on the hob. “In any case, I quarrel with the direction such studies tend, the pernicious theory behind it, which is one of gradual change. I quarrel with finding man a crocodile improved.” He reaches a hand towards his wife’s chair and turns an affectionate eye towards her, as though in her upright, dumbfounded form is proof positive. “I fear there is a draft from that window. Are you warm enough, my dear?”

  THIRTY

  ary had a new companion and she stopped in at the quarry to show him off.

  “Mr. Bennett gave him to me. He belonged to their William.”

  “No dogs where William’s gone, poor perisher,” someone said. The quarrymen leaned on their picks among the broken stone, their faces masks of dust.

  “What be ’er name?” Simon Larch asked.

  “Tray, Bennett called him.”

  “Where’s the sense in that?”

  “Do you expect sense from a Bennett?”

  Mary was ready to leave, but the dog had vanished. She whistled and he came bounding out – he’d been investigating one of the tunnels. “You’ll be flattened when these cliffs collapse,” she scolded him. “And they will, you know,” she said to the men. “Why does Phelps have you digging so deep?”

  “Do you expect sense from Old Phelps?” Simon said.

  That was true enough. Just the morning before, Mary had been looking out the window at the rain and had seen Phelps’s opulent new four-in-hand driven into the square. Heedless of getting wet, she’d run out and tapped on the window where the owner of the lime quarry sat, and the liveried groom had come round and opened the door. “You are destroying Church Cliffs,” Mary had cried. “They will never sustain such undermining with all this rain.”

  In spite of the rain, Mr. Phelps had paid her the respect of putting his head out of the carriage door. “What do you suggest I do?” he said helplessly, charmingly. “There is a prodigious hunger for Dorsetshire lime in Paris and London – they can’t get enough of it. I had three more orders today.”

  “Set gunpowder under the cliffs!” Mary shouted in rage as he drove away. “Blast them down and be done with it!”

  She said goodbye to the quarrymen and walked up towards Black Ven. Tray followed at her heels as though he’d belonged to her forever. She had t
hree skirts on her for warmth and her varnished stovepipe hat on her head. Summer was gone. Others had been lucky in collecting that summer, although not Mary. Reverend William Conybeare had been fossiling on this shore and had found a skull he was convinced belonged to the flat vertebrae that intrigued them all. It was narrow, like a turtle’s, and its big teeth were set in separate sockets. On the strength of it, he’d coined a name for the creature: Plesiosaurus. Mary did not see him or the skull – she heard all this from Miss Philpot – but she understood in a flash. Conybeare was trying to assert his right to a new order of animal before anyone else found a full specimen.

  And one day, Mr. Gleed had approached her on Black Ven, all sweaty and agitated, and led her reverently over to something he’d found in the cliff. It looked like the headless remains of an Ichthyosaurus and she told him so, although she couldn’t identify the species without the skull. By his crafty expression, she saw that he didn’t credit it. The next Sabbath, she stepped into the vestibule of the Independent Chapel and there were some ribs and a few broken vertebrae displayed on a table, with a notice affixed to the wall behind them:

  ADAM — 123 FEET

  EVE — 118 FEET

  THERE WERE GIANTS IN THE EARTH IN THOSE DAYS, GENESIS 6:6.

  Now Mary had the shore to herself, and she was glad of it. A week ago, a fog had rolled in, so dense that the townsfolk avoided going out, afraid of disappearing into it altogether. But fog was Mary’s ally; it focused all her senses on a little pod of shore. In that pod, she bent to scour the cliff face, cocking her ear for her invisible partners, for the gulls screaming advice and warning, and her father just a few feet ahead, his boot crunching on the shingle. Today, she said to herself. Today the cotton veil would lift its hem and she’d see bones in the rock.

  And not ten minutes after starting out, she was proved right. But it was a saucer-eye she saw and a row of familiar grinning teeth set in a trench, high above the tide line. Not the new dragon they were all racing to find, but the uncanny head of a massive Ichthyosaurus.

  It turned out to be an Ichthyosaurus platyodon, with eight perfect ammonites fused in careless adornment at its neck. Thirty-five feet long – there was much amazement in the town at the size of it. Mary hired Henry Marsden, the chemist’s son, to help her. He was a twelve-year-old with a child’s ways about him, pulling his hands up into his sleeves in idle moments and flapping them like wings or fins. But he knew how to be quiet and look, and within an hour, he’d learned to tell fossilized bone from rock. They had a month of companionable work, chipping off the overburden of slate.

  Then Mary found a five-foot Ichthyosaurus vulgaris. This one was so perfectly preserved that between its ribs lay embossed stone that she recognized as bits of skin. A few yards away, she found another. It was an excess of riches. This is what comes when your eye is single, she told herself. Joseph came by in the evening and helped her build frames. She’d been mounting her specimens in hot wax and sand, but no more: a wagon rolled up and a tranter unloaded plaster of Paris in leaden sacks. “A waste of good money, that,” Joseph complained, and Mary laughed. She strode beside the cart that carried the frames to the Cobb, parrying jests with the tranter, and then watched the dockers sag under the weight as they carried the bones down into the ship – ancient bones taking to the sea, sailing east up the coast to Southend-on-Sea, and then up a wide river to London, where Mary had never been, but where she might one day go.

  Henry De la Beche, Esquire, was back in town from his grand tour, not so prone to smiling and laughing or even to talking as he once was. He and Mary had encountered each other in the lower town when he was first back. She was with Miss Philpot. He had offered his condolences regarding Lizzie and she had replied with the civility that her pride required of her. He did not work the shore now – it seemed he was often off geologizing in other parts. Twice she’d seen him driving his barouche alone up Church Street towards the Charmouth Road, his valise in the back, but she never saw him return.

  Then one day, when she was waiting in Cockmoile Square, he materialized in front of the table. She got quickly to her feet. She had no idea how he had crossed the square. He greeted her and bent to greet her dog. “I have something for you, Miss Anning,” he said, straightening up. He held a small paper package out to her, and she took it and unwrapped it to find a pocket watch worked in gold. “I bought it in Switzerland, in a shop with clocks ticking on every wall. You should carry a timepiece when you work the shore, you know. One day, it might save your life.”

  She thrust the package back at him. “Timepieces are for them that can’t read the sun and the tides. I have no interest in frippery.”

  He was not deterred. “Take it, Mary,” he said gently. “Let me give you that.” Across the square, puddles of water gleamed in the sun. His hand was on the table now, an inch from hers.

  She pulled her hand back. “I’ll keep it against a dark day,” she said. “It will be easier to hock than the furniture.”

  That afternoon, she felt queer and was disinclined to go to the shore. She climbed the stairs and lay down for a minute, and then she got up and pulled a box out from under the bed. It was the repository of useless things she could not throw out – short bits of string and the shards of a broken saucer, a comb with missing teeth. She dropped the timepiece into it and then sat on the bed for a moment more, wondering why this fine gentleman, who had everything in the world he wanted, should not leave a poor spinster in peace. Then she went down to the workshop. She would work on her study of the belemnite fossils. Buckland had no idea what the belemnite was, but Mary did, and she would prove it.

  A week before, she had dissected a cuttlefish a fisherman sold her, to study its correspondences with the belemnite. She had not been able to separate out the ink bag, and ink had seeped from the flaccid mass of the cuttlefish at every touch – just here on the table were its stains. She ran her finger over them. A pity to have stained this table where her father had made his cabinets, the table where the head of the Ichthyosaurus lay all one winter when she was just a girl. A vexing current of feeling swelled in her chest at the thought of herself back then, how simple and resolute a girl she had been. And then absurd tears stung her eyes. This was his effect on her, Sir Foppling Fossil, and she hated him for it. He had made her cry more than once in the Undercliff, turning her into herself, drawing up her sad stories. That morning at the table he’d taken her off guard – she would need to arm herself against surprises.

  And so, waking up in the mornings, she set about judging whether he was in town just then, based on the light and the air. He was certainly home, she decided one morning in late September. But Miss Philpot came by towards noon and she learned that Mr. De la Beche was gone away again, he was in Cornwall, so her science of divining his whereabouts was in its infancy.

  A week later, she was at the window and saw him riding up Broad Street, and longing twisted inside her at the sight of him, so familiar in his top hat and blue jacket. All his lively way of being in the world apparent in the way he sat his horse. And then she found herself practising jommetry, sending her will out to turn him around and bring him down to the square. Not Mary’s will – Mary Anning wanted none of it. It was the will of the wayward girl who (without sharing her intentions with Mary) had contrived to be alone with him on the shore, and had showed him the path to climb up to the Undercliff, and lingered with him in the forest. It was that foolish girl returned to bewitch her. So Mary gathered up her tools and took herself out to Monmouth Beach to replenish her store of ammonites. And wandering along Monmouth Beach with her wedge hammer in hand, she found herself in a waking dream where she was on a ship, making for a strange northern shore of red cliffs. A shore he had spoken of one day, a world like theirs but wondrous different, where everything was created anew before your eyes. They were standing on the deck, she and Henry, the two of them dressed in warm cloaks, his arm around her shoulder – and the inexpressible joy and comfort of it made her lean against the cliff and bo
w her head and choke out tears onto the shingle. It was not Hope, her old enemy, tormenting her in this fashion – Hope was well and truly dead. It was something else, a species of insanity. So prudent, so hard-headed she had been all these many months. But she had let her anger go dormant, she had left a chink in her armour, and this insanity had slipped in.

  But still she sent her will out, and on the third day, he walked up from Marine Parade and stopped by the table, and the demented creature who had taken possession of Mary regarded this as a potent sign.

  “You’re not in Cornwall,” she said.

  “I’m back just briefly. I’m leaving for London tomorrow.” Just now he was on his way to the tailor’s, where he was having his jackets made over as a means of economizing.

  Two French schooners lay at anchor at the Cobb that day, and a party of French tourists strolled about the square. “We always feared being invaded by the French,” Mary said. “And now we have been.”

  Henry looked at her soberly and did not reply. He was a stone thinner, she reckoned, than when he went to France. She turned on him the eyes she turned on rocks, and saw through his ribs to his heart, where sadness lay, and self-pity perhaps, but no love for his wife.

  “Wait just a minute.” She ran down into the workshop and fetched up the bottle of sepia. “You’re using up old things out of thrift,” she said. “It’s eons old, this ink, and it cost nothing but a little labour.” Hours and hours of labour, in fact. This was the fruit of her study of the belemnite – proof positive that the belemnite was like a cuttlefish, made ink. She had reconstituted it from bits of black she’d chipped from the fossils.

  He took the bottle, tilting it to admire the ink inside – he seemed quite overcome by this gift. When he was gone, Mary went upstairs to the bedroom and picked the watch out of the box under the bed. It was the size and shape and weight of the best of the pyrite ammonites. It was a buttery gold, softer than the fossils. No one in the square had been watching to interpret this gift as the world would interpret it, there was only Mary to decide what it meant. The watch had a satisfying weight to it, and she found a length of ribbon and hung it around her neck, tucking it away under her waistcoat.