by Joan Thomas
In December, Mary found it. It was evening, and so cold that she had no fingers at all as far as she could tell. She had been about to turn back home when she spied the characteristic rounded surface and defining edge of a vertebra. On closer examination, six or eight smooth discs peeped out. The matrix was shale and limestone. It would be hard to excavate, but the fossil would be more enduring.
“Stay,” she said to her dog, and he crouched conscientiously, guarding the fossil. In the town she recruited Henry Marsden, her brother Joseph, and then Simon Larch and George West, whom she encountered as they left the quarry. They all ran home to fetch lanterns. At Black Ven, Tray was still guarding the fossil, although he had edged a foot or two backwards to avoid the rising water.
“About here?” said Joseph, setting his stone chisel a foot beyond the bones.
“Use your wits!” Mary cried. She forced them to cut a slab that allowed for three feet at either end. The vertebrae were three inches across; you had to assume a body length of five feet for every inch of diameter to a vertebra. All the time they dug that huge trench, they were cursing her under their breath. But they did it. They worked through a freezing night in sea spray to chip out a pedestal under the fossil, and then, in early light, they recruited a gang of helpers and broke it off and carried it up to the workshop in its matrix.
This creature was nine feet long – so her calculations had been about right. And it was intact, and solid. In the workshop, she chipped open the neck first, thirty-five vertebrae, and discovered a narrow old boot stuck to the top of the spine – the head, not much wider than the vertebrae. An almost brainless reptile, breathtakingly disproportionate. Conybeare’s name for it meant “almost a lizard” – or so Miss Philpot said. It was utterly meaningless. She would find a better.
She would let Henry know by post. She could walk up to Aveline House or to the Grove and ask his whereabouts, but something in her revolted at the thought of approaching Mrs. Aveline or Letitia. She would write to Buckland. He had not been working that fall – a fragment of rock had lodged in his eye when he was wielding his hammer, and he’d had several surgeries. To inform Buckland was to inform everyone of his acquaintance. She would send a drawing. It was a careful drawing, but a graceless one – a cry for help, to show such a drawing to Henry De la Beche. She sent it and within a week, her reply drove into the square in the form of a robed professor sporting a black patch over one eye, and Mary felt a stab of disappointment at the sight of him.
He could hardly stop to greet her, so eager was he to see the specimen. “Holy Methuselah!” he cried when he reached the bottom step and clapped his one available eye upon it. “No wonder we’ve never found a head. You need a jeweller’s loupe to see it!”
“The body is five feet across, counting the flippers, and the head is four inches wide,” said Mary proudly, as though the extremity of the creature were entirely to her credit. “But the head is perfect and complete. And note – the teeth are not in grooves, like the Ichthyosaurus. It has the teeth of a crocodile.”
“Glorious!” exclaimed Buckland, pacing around it. “It deserves to be cast in gold and circulated over the universe.”
By wonderful chance, Reverend Conybeare had been in Oxford when the news came; he was there to deliver a guest sermon. “I found him in his lodgings surrounded by his women: the wife, the daughters, the unavoidable spinster relation. His sermon was on the morrow, and he was just in the midst of writing it. The news threw him into such a frenzy that he was unable to finish. My eye fell on the spinster sister-in-law, a barnacle, dare I say it, upon the household since the day Conybeare married. There’s a task for her, says I. So he sets her to work on the sermon, chuffed that for once she’s earning her supper, and we gallop off to the printers to have plates made of the drawing. Then we settle ourselves down with a celebratory bottle of port.”
“I’m sorry you’re printing the crude drawing I sent you,” said Mary. “I intend to ask Mr. De la Beche to make a formal illustration. Have you seen him?”
“The Bristol Society is meeting tonight,” said Buckland. “Conybeare is hastening down so as to make an announcement. Difficult to discuss the find without an illustration.”
She asked him again about Henry. He shook the question off with annoyance. “How would I know where he is? Am I the fellow’s keeper?”
She had been standing on Church Cliffs the morning Henry left, and she had noted the number of valises and cases in the barouche. She could have watched him all the way up the road, but she’d turned away. It was ill luck: you would never see someone again if you watched them out of sight. “Whist,” she’d called to her dog, to move him down the path and prevent him looking as well. She’d been surprised that Henry had not come by the table to say goodbye. He communicates through silence now, she’d told herself. Well, silence I have in abundance.
She cleaned the creature with the greatest care, and set it in a frame for transport. It was a massive frame, six feet wide and ten feet long. Whether or not she wanted to sell this specimen, she would have to. Prices were depressed at that moment, but it would still bring a hundred pounds. It might be a decade before she earned more than shillings again. But she could delay the sale until they classified the creature and made a formal announcement. She imagined Henry, trimming his side-whiskers and donning one of his wonderful coats and carrying the paper in to the Geological Society, a paper with both their names on the front.
Except that Henry remained stubbornly away. At night, when it was so dark you could not tell the sea from the sky, she climbed the hill and stood looking out over the town, flittermice swooping and darting around her. The moon rose while she stood there shivering, the slate roofs of the houses across the valley showing up as separate patches of pale grey. She counted out the houses until she’d picked out the roof of the Grove, and then she went again over every detail of the day she’d gone into the library of that house, a story that seemed, these days, to have a different meaning every time she told it to herself.
On that October day of summer haze, she had knocked boldly on the front door of the Grove. “Your card, miss?” said Tom, Henry’s lanky young groom. Then he laughed and held out a hand for Mary’s top hat. He went up the hall and Mary waited beside the huge ammonite coroniceras that she herself, with Joseph’s help, had hauled up from the western point on a carrying board. The timepiece was turned on its side and digging into her breast, and she nudged it flat inside her waistcoat. In a minute, Tom was back, inviting Mary into the library. Henry was standing by the desk. He crossed the room to greet her, a look on his face that suggested he had brought her up the hill by his own practice of jommetry. He did not contrive a pause that would ask her to explain her purpose, but led her to a chair and began with the courtesies the high-born employ in a social call. He asked if she would mind sitting where they were, as he found the drawing room unpleasant, and then he called a maid to bring sherry in. He was pale and his sidewhiskers stood in the shadow of unshaved beard. He said that his wife was in London and had taken two of the servants, and that he himself was busy with plantation affairs. He’d had to let his overseer go but had managed to hire a new one in Kingston. Not an experienced man, but one who seemed in his correspondence to have a progressive attitude. “I was relieved,” he said, “to find a fellow who will try by whatever means to ameliorate the conditions of the poor creatures we employ.”
But the new overseer spent his days writing plaintive letters to England, seeking advice regarding the most routine of matters. “What am I to do with this?” Henry said humorously, waving a letter before her. “It was posted in June and arrived yesterday. It will be the new year before my reply reaches Jamaica. By then, he will have found his own method of dealing with the thieving of the bookkeeper’s boots.” This was his usual jocular way of talking, but his eyes had smudges of sleeplessness under them. It was a wonderful room, rock samples scattered on the shelves, and row upon row of books, a room filled with the cooing of doves and with ai
r from all its windows open, and he sat alone in it, misery and sadness exuding from him. Creatures we employ, he said. Slaves he did not say. She pitied him terribly. How could your eye be single in such a world as his? The sherry itself had a cloying, too-smooth taste, the taste of artifice.
But for all that, a glass of sherry in the hand cries out to be drunk, and she drank it down at once and told him about her headless, crumbling find, recently sold to Colonel Birch. He looked up in quick interest and said they must go out and look for the head. “There is no point,” Mary said. “The whole muddy ledge was taken away by the tide. But you must visit Colonel Birch one day to see the rest of it. I was astonished by the neck. Longer than a swan’s, proportionately.”
Both of them turned to look at a framed picture hanging on the wall, a study of a bird and its skeleton. She got up and went over to it, and so did he. They stood and counted the neck vertebrae of the little sparrow he had painted. Nine.
“Do you still have the skeletons?” she asked.
“No. They were thrown out during one of my absences. This is the only picture I have. The dunnock. A canny bird, or at least the female is. She will court a second male and mate with him. It’s a clever strategy to get both males to feed the chicks.”
What a bitter edge there was to his voice. “Do you still paint?” Mary asked, feeling regret that no pictures done in ancient sepia adorned his walls.
“No. I must needs earn my keep now,” he said, turning towards her a look such as she had never seen from him. They were standing very close together. And then he put his hand lightly on her waist. A downdacious gesture, except that the air between them was already holding them as close as an embrace.
There was no sound from the servants. A man can do as he likes in his own house, thought Mary. But then a child squealed above them and something fell in a series of thumps down the stairs, and there was muffled laughter and more squeals.
“Mary, have you time to go to the shore?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, her heart beginning to bang in her ears.
They took up their hats and walked out onto the drive. When any two souls walk together, there is one who signals the way they will walk, and it was Mary who turned ever so subtly at the corner, Mary’s foot that fell in an angle that implied west, towards the Undercliff. A private word, that’s all I want, she was saying to herself. When the road branched down, they took it and walked out on Monmouth Beach under the hazy sky. She went swiftly ahead, as she always did, to show the best way across the Devil’s treacherous stones. Finally they were on the smooth ammonite pavement at the end of Monmouth Beach, and then they were around the point and could see Pinhay Bay, the white surf and the fog that veiled the wandering shore beyond it, one tier laid on another, and gulls soaring and dipping, vanishing into it on their snowy wings. She stopped and waited for Henry. He stumbled just as he came up to her. She put out a hand and he clung to her.
“I don’t know how to look at it,” he said, as though she had commented on the beauty of the scene. “I see God withdrawn from it all.”
“Well,” said Mary, looking closely into his eyes, with their irises of brown and green. “Well, it is no less the miracle for that.”
They moved up the foreshore towards the cliff face and she let his arm go and began to climb. It had been two years and the path at the top was entirely laced over with vines: it opened like a throat. They scrambled into it, and then the ground levelled off and Mary looked back and saw the sea below them through the trees, and then the torn thatch of Digby’s hut where a bird had made an untidy nest.
When they came to the clearing, she did not sit down – she turned to face him. He took off his hat and held it in his hands. “I always thought of this as Eden,” he said. “The question was – who was I? Adam or the serpent?” There was the old cleverness in his words and on his face, and she could not bear it.
“You have changed,” she said. “What changed you?”
“Oh, Mary,” he said. He dropped his hat and turned slightly away from her. “Oh, Mary, my dear –”
She would not let him turn away. She reached out and drew him to her, pressing her body against his, and gave him such a kiss as she had wanted to give him for many a month. She stepped back then and began to undo his cravat, unwinding it from around his neck, and with his white cravat dangling from one hand, she turned and waded through the bracken to the roots standing up at the end of the fallen tree in a frazzled mass. For a minute she thought he was not following, but then he stepped around the roots and she drew him into the den, this den that, all the months they’d come to the clearing and all the months since, had been furnishing itself with a carpet of moss and bracken. He made to ease her down to the moss, but she stumbled back a step and began to unbutton his waistcoat. When it was off, he reached up himself and pulled his shirt over his head, and she ran her hands around him and felt the separate vertebrae that stitched his backbone. She felt his sadness leave him then, she felt life surge back into him, and she gladly met it. Then they were on the moss, he was helping her with her skirt, he was pushing her stocking down, stroking the soft skin at the top of it. This was a hunger, she saw, that grew by being fed. “Mary, I will hurt you,” he said, trying to slow her, but she would not wait. There was a knife pain to it, but a pain so silvered by desire that she tilted her hips into the plush of the moss for more of it, until the pain was all suffused with something else and finally with white light trembling in a sheet.
It was all so quickly done, but afterwards they lay in its glow. A wonder to see him, a beast among the autumn green. With his skinny flanks, and the slight beginning of a belly (he was not so thin with his clothes off), and the line that ran from his muscled chest to his navel. She kissed that line and ran a hand along the cage of his ribs. In the forest light, their skin had a greenish tinge, the skin of things that grow in secret. They lay and talked in low voices, and she told him everything – Lizzie’s sad dying and the Outlines of Geology and her intention to take charge of a new find – and all the while, her body lay warmly the length of his, and his arms were around her as if it was a treasure he held. He picked up one of her hands then and kissed it. “Oh, my geological maiden,” he said.
“Even old Cuvier will marvel,” Mary said stoutly.
“I went to his salon in Paris, you know.”
“I thought you must have. What did you see there?”
“I saw a pseudo-science that issues from the foul imagination of man. I saw the end of all our theories. I saw myself.” Mary raised herself up on her elbows in shock, but his face was bland, as though he had said nothing of significance. He laid her back down and smiled, leaning over her, folding her heavy braid in his hand to admire it. Tenderly, he traced the red mark on her neck made by the ribbon that carried her timepiece. “Your watch is too heavy to be worn this way,” he said.
“I need to sew a pocket into my skirt.”
“They sell ladies’ watches to be pinned to a dress by a brooch. That’s what you should have had.”
It was in that moment that melancholy rose up between them. He bent and kissed her, and it may have been that he felt the gooseflesh that had come out on her, for he sat up and reached for his shirt and pulled it on. It was chilly after all. When he drew his trousers towards him, his talisman fell out of the pocket. She picked it up. “I was a child when I sold this to your mother. All these years, it’s protected you. We used to sell them as a charm against blindness.”
“You shouldn’t have advertised blindness, Mary,” he said. “It’s never helped me with that.” Then he was kneeling beside her with his face in her hair, and he said something she did not care to hear, words she let fall into the bracken.
“Go back first,” she whispered. She lay still with her eyes open. All she could see was his legs and feet as he moved about dressing himself. She was overcome with languor. She did not lift her head to take in the rest of him, and then he moved out of her line of vision and she knew he was gone
down the path. Still she lay, with her skirt pulled loosely over her. She had seldom lain on the ground. In spite of the damp, she felt like a child held by a firm, kind bed, and thought that it would be fine, after she died, to be buried so, with the weight of the earth piled upon her.
THIRTY-THREE
n that overwrought winter, while the dragon with the shrunken head slept in the workshop and Mary waited for Henry to drive back into town, another terrible gale blew up. It was spring tide, and it rose three hours before it was due; no one had ever seen the water so high. Joseph stopped to ask them up to his house on Church Street, and they slept the night in the attic there, although the Lyme was low and the houses on Bridge Street were unlikely to flood. But it was a disastrous gale – beyond any in the memory of the townspeople, for the Cobb was breached in the night, and all the ships sheltering in it were washed away, and two men in the revenue tender drowned. And then the sea was unfettered and the towering waves were free to smash the town. Two houses at Cobb Hamlet were destroyed, and part of the Folly Public House. In the morning, Mary stood up on the edge of the western cliff and looked down at a marvel: the Cobb that had lain for hundreds of years holding its brood of boats in its long arm, saying to the sea Thus far and no farther, broken open now to a width of thirty feet, and huge breakers smashing against Marine Parade. No ships would enter the harbour that winter; indeed, there was no longer a harbour to enter. It would be a winter without coal.
The Annings had money and had thought that for once they were well provisioned. There was a brown hen underfoot and two hams hanging in the inglenook, a basket each of russets and swedes in the corner, and, in the dark space under the bed, sacks of dried beans and peas, sorted this year by Molly. But apparently there was a decree that they should continue to suffer. Not that the Annings, or even the town of Lyme, had been singled out for hardship and privation. All of England was seized with a shocking cold. One frosty morning when the Carlisle coach rolled into London, two poor women sitting outside were frozen into blocks. So people said. Later versions of the story reported that one of the women was with child. People relished such extremes, the thought of a perfect frozen bud curled inside its lifeless mother.
