The Dragon in the Cliff

by Sheila Cole

  “A Dissenter? No, you will not do,” she said. “I cannot vouch for the morals of a girl who has been allowed to run free like you. We are respectable people here.” And with that she dismissed me.

  I ran all the way down Broad Street, past the proud, tall-windowed houses, through the throngs crowding the marketplace and shambles, and onto to the safety of Bridge Street in a confusion of feeling. I had escaped from Mrs. Wiggins, but her rejection still left me in need of work. I did not tell Mama why Mrs. Wiggins did not hire me. Mrs. Wiggins’s disapproval of my fossil hunting would have caused her great anguish. Instead, I muttered something about there being a mistake. And Mama, who was vague about everything those days, did not inquire further. “Something will turn up soon,” she said, and turned back to the window.

  Not knowing what else to do, I continued to go to the beach in search of curiosities. One day, not long afterward, as I was returning from the beach, I saw Dr. Carpenter leaving our house. Fearing the worst, I ran into the shop, and up the stairs, calling, “Mama! Mama!” I pulled the door open and stopped. Mama was not in her customary place by the window. She was kneeling by the sideboard. On the long table were dishes, salvers, mugs—the contents of the sideboard.

  “I’ve sold the sideboard to Dr. Carpenter,” Mama explained. “He is giving me a good sum for it. Now you needn’t go into service, and I needn’t give up our house and go to live with Mr. Hunnicutt. We can stay here together … for a little while longer.”

  I ran to her and threw my arms around her neck. “Oh, Mama,” I said over and over, unable to say anything else.

  “It is just a thing, a piece of furniture,” Mama said, wiping her tears with the back of her hand.

  But I knew that the sideboard was not just another thing. It had always meant a great deal to her. Papa made it to become a master cabinetmaker. It was the one fine thing in our house, the one thing that showed Papa’s true craftsmanship. It had a bowed front with inlaid rosewood panels.

  “We should not set much stock in the things of this world. I would have had to sell it anyway when Joseph finishes his term. It is just as well that Dr. Carpenter offered me the money for it now. Truth be known, he paid me more than it was worth. I do not want to take charity from him, but he insists it is not charity. He tells me that he has admired it ever since he first set eyes on it.”

  I did not ask her how we would pay Hale the thirty pounds due him when Joseph’s apprenticeship was over. I was too relieved that I did not have to be parted from Mama and go into service to worry much about what would happen in five years. I would earn the money somehow.

  SOMETHING STARES AT ME FROM THE CLIFF

  Days and weeks passed without incident. I can remember little of that hard summer, except that somehow we endured. It was November again, a year since Papa was taken from us. I was walking along Church Cliff Walk intending to make my way down to the beach. It was quite a different scene from summer when the town was filled with visitors. In June, the deep blue sea stretched out against a paler blue sky, the air was warm, and there were groups of holidaymakers strolling along Church Cliff Walk in their light summer clothes. Now it was cold. Slate-colored clouds rolled across a lead sky. Except for me, the Walk was deserted. Down on the beach waves rushed headlong crashing against the base of the cliffs, threw spray high in the air, withdrew, and crashed again. The beach was impassable. But still I stayed on the cliffs, drawn by the wild force of the sea.

  The clouds grew blacker, gulls cried as they circled overhead, a raindrop splattered on my nose and then another. I turned for home. I just reached the door as a clap of thunder announced the storm. The sky opened, letting loose a torrent. It rained steadily without letup for four days and for all that time the wind blew with gale force. “A real southwester,” Mama called it. I remained indoors wrapped up against the cold in Mama’s wool shawl, listening to the wind driving the rain against the panes, rattling the shutters, and whistling through the eaves.

  As soon as the rain let up I put on my clogs and dressed to go out collecting. “The wind is still high, and it is dangerous near the cliffs now,” Mama warned.

  Remembering that Papa always said that the best finds were made just after a storm, I was impatient to get down to the beach. But I soon found that Mama was right. Though the tide was out, the waves, pushed by the wind, made the beach impassable.

  It was several more days before I had another chance to go down to the shore. Thrown this way and that by the waves, huge timbers, barrel staves, bricks, driftwood, seaweed, pieces of broken pottery, and even rags littered the beach. It was slow work to pick my way over them toward a new slide that looked promising.

  The first thing I pulled out of the mound of clay, rock, and dirt was flat bottomed and domed on top. It might have been a fossil urchin, but I could not be sure because it was covered with sticky, wet clay. I took it over to a pool left behind by the tide and started to wash it off. As I was watching the clay cloud the water of the pool, I heard a roar and turned, in fright, only to see a mass of dirt and pieces of rock falling from the top of the cliff to the beach below. Scanning the cliff trying to decide whether it was safe for me to remain, I found myself staring at a grayish white circle with two slightly curved parallel lines beneath it. Looking at it, I had the strange feeling that it was staring back at me.

  I stood there for what must have been several minutes waiting to see if more of the cliff was going to fall before I approached it to see what the circle was. Close up it was easier to see that it was a curiosity, but I did not recognize it as anything I had seen before. I took my hammer and chisel out of my pocket and gently worked the wet Lias near the circle. Set inside the large, thin circle was a smaller circle made of several bony plates, like flower petals. At the center was a hole. Could it be an eye? I wasn’t sure.

  I slowly worked around the lines that protruded underneath. I bared more of the fossil, but I could not make out what it was. I worked in between the two lines with a nail. There was something there. It was perpendicular to the two parallel lines. I scraped off the wet clay with mounting excitement. There was no mistaking what I saw. It was a tooth, and there was another one next to it. I had collected teeth like these near the large vertebrae. I laughed. Could it possibly be? I whirled about madly until I fell down on the sand with giddiness. When I calmed down, I looked at it again just to make certain. There was no mistake. I had found the dragon!

  I put the tools back in my pocket and ran all the way back to town, jumping over all the obstacles in my way, sliding, falling, picking myself up, and running until I reached the house. I threw the door to the shop open and tore up the stairs yelling, “Mama! Mama! I found it,” not realizing until I was in the house that Mama was not there.

  Without stopping to catch my breath, I ran to Hale’s to tell Joseph. I burst into the shop, startling poor Mr. Hale, who was on a stepladder. “Where’s Joseph?” I demanded. I didn’t wait for an answer, seeing him bent over an armchair. I shouted, “Joseph, I’ve found it! I found the dragon at the end of the Church Cliffs near the ledges.”

  Joseph looked at me as if I had just gone mad. “What dragon?” he asked.

  “I don’t know if it is a dragon or a crocodile,” I said, stopping for the first time since I found it. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s a fossil in the cliffs, and it’s big.” I told him and Mr. Hale the story of my discovery from the beginning.

  “You’ve only seen a tooth and you come bursting in here like that. I have no time for such foolishness,” Mr. Hale said, turning away to fetch a bolt of cloth that he had stored in the rafters.

  My certainty crumbled like dried marl. Papa and I had found other teeth like it, but we had never found an eye socket or a jaw before.

  I had to make certain that it was actually there and that I had not made it all up. Quickening my pace, I passed our house, made my way back down to the beach, and over to the east end of Church Cliff. There it was, the large eye staring at me. I took out my chisel and s
et to work again. The fossil was in a narrow band of limestone that lay between beds of shale. Shale splits easily. That meant that getting the fossil out of the cliff might be possible. But how big was it? I worked at it and worked at, but with only my small hammer, chisel, and a nail, I could not tell.

  The tide was coming in and I had no time to explore further. Reluctantly, I started for home.

  “Did you find anything?” Mama asked without looking up from her lace when I came in.

  “I think I’ve found the dragon!”

  Mama, looked up from her work, staring at me uncomprehendingly.

  “The what?” she asked.

  “The dragon, the one people talk about. It’s in the cliffs. It’s really there. It’s not just a story. It’s a big, big curiosity, Mama. The biggest we have ever seen. Papa said I might find such a creature, and I have.”

  “Tell me what it is again?” Mama asked, still not understanding.

  “A dragon, or maybe a crocodile,” I repeated, describing the long line of teeth and the bony eye that stared at me. But it was not until the next morning, when she came with me to see the curiosity for herself, that she believed that I had found anything unusual.

  “My heavens, what a thing!” she exclaimed, standing before the head.

  “It’s a petrified dragon or crocodile, that’s what Papa said. He said that collectors talk about it. They’re the ones who want the verteberries. Squire Henley made me promise that if I ever found it I would save it for him. He will pay me handsomely for it.”

  Mama furrowed her brow. “Are you certain that this is the creature he was talking about?”

  “No, but he said the crocodile, or whatever creature it was that the verteberries belong to. I think this must be it.”

  She shook her head. “Well, if you say Henley told you he wanted it, I guess he does, though whatever for, I will never understand.”

  She stood in front of the cliff staring at the fossil for some time. Then she sighed, turned away, and started back for town. I caught up with her. “Well, what do you think?” I asked eagerly.

  “You may as well not have found it for all the good it will do us. We’ll never get it out of the cliff. It is too big for us, Mary. We would have to hire some workmen to help us break it out, and we do not have the money to hire them.”

  “I can do it, Mama. I know I can.”

  She shook her head. “I do not mean to be discouraging, child, but it would be a waste of your time even trying. Besides, we do not have the tools for such a job.”

  “But Mama,” I pleaded, “it will fetch a lot of money. We cannot just let it remain in the cliff.”

  Mama nodded wearily at my arguments, but did not reply.

  I was not to be discouraged. I believed with all my being that if I tried hard enough and did not give up, I would have that fossil. Looking back now, I can see that it was unreasonable for a twelve-year-old girl with only a hammer and one not very heavy chisel to expect to cut a fossil almost as big as she was out of the cliff. But then I am not only Papa’s child, I am also Mama’s. When one cannot accept what is reasonable, one must have faith and hope to fly in face of what reason denies.

  However, I do admit that faith and hope are only a beginning. Despite hours and hours of work chipping away at the rock, I made little progress until spring when Mr. Hale was ill and Joseph had the free time to help me. It was he who thought of borrowing a pick, crowbars, proper square-headed hammers, a mallet, heavier chisels, and wedges from the stonemason.

  At first Mr. Littlejohn was reluctant to let us use his tools for such a “foolish project.” Finally he relented, saying that it was only because we were Richard Anning’s children that he was letting us use them. But he still could not understand what we wanted with a stone monster. He became more enthusiastic when he came down to the beach to see for himself. Standing before it, he shook his head and laughed, saying that he was glad it was stone and not wandering around Lyme today.

  Once we had the proper tools, extracting the fossil began in earnest. The rhythmic clink of our hammers hitting our chisels filled the air as we chipped away at the cliff. The creature was embedded in limestone surrounded by shale beds that splintered under our blows and fell to the ground at our feet where it lay in mounds. But still the fossil remained in place. The more rock we broke, the more there seemed to be to break. My back ached and my arms hurt from pounding at the rock so much that I cried with fatigue, but still I continued and so did Joseph. Then, at last, after hours and days of slow difficult work, we had a deep enough channel around the skull so that we could start to break it out using metal wedges.

  When we had gotten this far Joseph’s friends, Robert Whitesides and John Whittle, came to help. They had never collected curiosities and knew nothing about getting them out of the cliff. “Don’t get too close to the curiosity,” I cautioned them, remembering Papa’s advice to me. “Angle your tools well away from it. Be certain to get all of it.”

  All of it, as it turned out after we had pried the fossil out of the rock with crowbars, was only the head of the dragon. But what a head it turned out to be! It was four feet long, as big as an eight-year-old child, with a snout filled with sharp teeth that ran almost its entire length.

  If that was the head, how much bigger must the body have been, I thought. But to my bitter disappointment the body was not where I expected it to be.

  AN ACCIDENT LEADS TO A DISCOVERY

  No sooner did we have the head laid out in the workshop than all the neighbors and friends from our quarter of Lyme came to see for themselves “the monster’s head” that the Anning children brought back from the beach. They crowded into the tiny shop, joking and jostling one another. It was an amazing scene, one which I don’t think I’ll ever forget.

  “I wouldn’t have such a thing in my house,” Mr. Cruikshanks said, poking it with his pipe. “Wouldn’t be able to sleep knowing there was a dragon there.”

  “’Fraid it might come to life, John?” asked Mr. Adams, with a guffaw.

  “You never know,” Mr. Cruikshanks replied. “Now that it’s not buried in the cliff, it might come back to life. I heard such stories, things people thought were gone, come back.…”

  Mrs. Cruikshanks gave Mr. Cruikshanks a withering look. “Told over a glass of brandy, no doubt,” she commented.

  Mr. Halowell the jailer, who came in from the jail next door with his round little wife, poked his finger in the monster’s mouth and exclaimed, “Did you ever see such a mouthful of teeth?”

  “You could borrow some for your own mouth, Rob. I don’t think the beast would miss them,” his wife told him, much to everyone’s amusement.

  I was flushed with happiness at all of this attention. I told them that in cleaning away the stone from around the fossil’s teeth, I had found that it had teeth in different stages of growth, which made me think that it grew new teeth to replace the old.

  “Wish I could do the same,” Mr. Halowell replied, laughing at himself.

  Of course Lizzie, who was my closest friend, came. She had been to the beach when we were working on extracting the fossil. Now she came to see the fossil laid out in the shop, bringing Caroline Gleed and Jane Lovett along. Despite their contempt for me and for my fossil hunting, Caroline and Jane were eager to see “the monster’s head” that everyone else in our quarter of town was talking about.

  “My brother says that it is so ugly it must belong to the devil,” Caroline said, pushing past me and going directly to the fossil. Seeing it, she gasped, and stepped back. “He’s right. It is ugly. A monster!” Then turning to me, she said, “You must be the only girl in all of England who could find such a thing, Mary.”

  “The only girl who is queer enough to want to,” commented Jane, loud enough so that I could hear.

  Struggling to keep my temper, I answered, “No one has ever found such a fossil before. We don’t really know what it is.”

  “Fossil?” Lizzie asked. She, like almost everyone in Lyme then, c
alled them curiosities.

  “A fossil is a curiosity,” I explained.

  “Any fool can see that it is a petrified monster,” Jane said.

  Trying to salvage the situation, Lizzie said, “Some people say that it is the head of a crocodile.”

  “It does look something like the pictures of crocodiles,” I admitted. “That’s what Squire Henley called it.”

  “Whatever it is, be glad it does not live in England now,” Jane said. And with that she and Caroline turned away and left the shop.

  This upset Lizzie, who, despite all of her efforts to smooth things over, was caught once again between me and others. “I should have known better than to bring them here. But everyone was talking about your find, and they wanted to see it. They said they wouldn’t come unless I came with them. They think you hate them, Mary. I told them that you didn’t hate them at all, it is just that you are interested in other things. I hoped that by bringing them here I would be able to convince them.”

  “Hate them, Lizzie? It is they who hate me. I know you meant no harm in bringing them. You have always tried to smooth my way with them. But they have made up their minds that I am strange and contemptible, and it doesn’t matter what I do.”

  “They are just jealous”—Lizzie dismissed them—“and rude. I don’t care what Caroline and Jane say about your crocodile. It is wonderful that you have been able to get it out of the cliffs. It should give an enormous boost to your trade, Mary. Everyone will want to see it, and when they do, they will want curiosities of their own. You wait and see. I’ll even warrant that when curiosities are all the rage, Caroline and Jane will change their opinion of you. But you must promise, Mary, that you will be friendly and kind.”

  “Haven’t I just been friendly?” I asked her indignantly.

  “Yes, you have,” she admitted, “but still, Mary …” She did not finish, but I knew she thought I was being proud even if she would not say it. Instead, she repeated her prediction that fossils were sure to be the rage when people heard the news.