Curiosity (11 page)

And then she read every day to her father. She sat up on the stool and held the book to the window to save lighting a candle. With every passing day she improved, until her reading was as
quick and accurate as Miss Philpot’s. This would never be believed in another scholar, but was believed in her because of the lightning.

It was a bible she read from. They did not own a bible; they owned no books at all since the
Rights of Man
was burned. But then Mr. Buckland came to their door one day, as he had business to conduct with their father. He walked directly into the house and Molly brought the rush chair for him to sit on. He still wore his dusty gown, but he took off his top hat. No longer just a student of Undergroundology, Mr. Buckland was now a fellow at Corpus Christi College in Oxford, where he taught young men to read the Gospel in the text of the earth. For example (he told Mary, pointing with the toe of his boot to the coals glowing in the hearth), they noted the way the Creator laid coal into the ground, with the seams tilted up to the surface at one end. “This is our Father’s beneficence writ in the earth,” he said, “the coal laid down for man’s ready access.”

“On behalf of the citizenry of Lyme Regis, let me congratulate ye on yer advancement,” said Richard dryly. But Mr. Buckland was eager to deflect the honour from himself. It was to the credit of the dons at the University of Oxford, he said, that they chose men of faith for academic positions, aware of the danger that learning could be perverted against the interests of God’s revealed Word. In France, for example, clever men not content with throwing over the political order now insisted on studying natural history with the feeble light of their own intelligence rather than the light of Scripture.

Lizzie stared reproachfully at Buckland from where she sat under the table and Buckland stopped his lecture and made a funny face at her. “You should come to my kitchen,” he said. “I keep a monkey tethered to a pole. What do you think my monkey eats?”

“Crumbs?” said Lizzie.

“No, no, no, it’s far too clever for that. It guards the crumbs for the black beetles and when the beetles grow fat, it eats the beetles.”

Joseph had come to hover in the doorway and Richard sent him to the workshop to bring up the fossils they’d found and kept for Mr. Buckland. There was a jaw Richard had found at Pinhay Bay; Lizzie shrank further under the table at the sight of its sinister teeth. It was as big as a horse’s jaw – Richard had had to borrow a sling from the porter to carry it home. He had laid it on the workbench and chipped it out of its matrix with his chisels, and Mary had counted the teeth. There were sixty. It was not a crocodile, Mr. Buckland said to their disappointment. He showed them how the sharp pointed teeth grew in a furrow, like a fish’s, not in separate sockets, the way a crocodile’s did. But he offered Richard a guinea for it.

They had three verteberries, each as broad across as Joseph’s outstretched hand. When he saw them, Mr. Buckland stripped off his black gown and his waistcoat and turned himself around and had Joseph hold up one of the verteberries to compare it in size to his backbones. He stopped just short of pulling up his shirt to show them his bare white back, and while Mary recovered from the shock of seeing a gentleman strip off his waistcoat in their kitchen, Mr. Buckland stood by the hearth in his shirt sleeves and told them about the giants that lived somewhere on the earth, as described in the sixth chapter of Genesis. “I would like to think these vertebrae are human,” he said. “We know the cliffs here were made by the Flood, and God sent the Flood to wipe out a generation of evil men, but we have not yet found the remains of man among the fossils.”

He was holding one of the vertebrae and he ran his finger around its outside edge. “But no. There is more of the fish about
this. You see, it’s concave on two sides. I’ll make a sketch of it to send to Cuvier in France.” He sat back down in his chair and told them then about the scientist Monsieur Cuvier, who had made such a study of the animal kingdom that if you gave him one bone, he could immediately tell you what animal it came from. Georges Cuvier did not base his work on Holy Scripture and so his studies often led him to a false understanding of the world. But there was no one as informed as he about animal anatomy. Once, Cuvier’s students dressed up as devils, wearing cow horns tied to their foreheads, and crept into his chamber in the night calling, “Cuvier, Cuvier, we have come to eat you.” Monsieur Cuvier opened his eyes and said, “All creatures with hoofs and horns are herbivores,” and fell back asleep.

While Buckland slapped his hand on his knee and laughed at his own joke, Mary thought of the pig-faced lady seen from time to time in London. What would Mr. Cuvier make of her?

“I would like to have a scientific book, like Miss Philpot has,” she said boldly as Mr. Buckland got up to leave with the stone vertebrae in hand.

In all likelihood, it was a
Sowerby
the Philpots owned, he told her. He went out to where his horse was tied in the street and rooted through one of the many pouches strapped to his saddle and came back with a book. “This is all the science you will ever need,” he said, handing it to her. “You want no better teacher than Moses.” It was not the Sowerby, but a bible.

She was disappointed, but Molly was very glad. Though Molly could not read it herself, she was glad just to have it lying on her mantel, and this was something Mary understood.

“I wish I had lived in Genesis,” people always said, and Mary thought of a land where the earth was new, it was always
springtime, and the trees were supple and green. But
Genesis
was not a place; it was a book within the big book of the Bible, and it told the story of how God made all that was. The paper was thin and yellowing, and tiny type covered more pages than Mary could ever read in her life. Holding it flat on her knee, Mary sat up on the stool and read in a sermonizing voice:

When her father had had enough and set off for the Three Cups, she often slipped down into the workshop with the bible and lit a rushlight there so she could continue to read without interruption. It was the mystery of reading that thrilled her as much as the words did.
Winged fowl
. In those tiny letters and her eyes moving across them was the seagull stroking its way across the harbour on snowy feathers. In words like tiny ants lay the heaving sea and the whale lifting its massive bulk, the varnished waves torn open and all their hidden depths revealed. She sat and read until the huge tableau threatened to drown her and drove her out of the house and along the seawall. There the roaring wind and the waves beating on the rock and the cold spray falling on her face scoured out her mind and gave her relief.

In cold climates, hairy elephants were found in the earth, their flesh frozen. Buckland had told her.
Mammoths
, they were called, a word for the earth mole, for they were always found buried and it was thought they lived underground and died when they
came into contact with the light. Elephants living in tunnels under the earth! Georges Cuvier had looked closely at their jawbones and said they were not the same species as the elephants that now lived. He said the mammoths had all died and were no more. He said that the earth and the creatures on it in ages past were very different from today, that over and over again terrible catastrophes had wiped out the life on earth and God had replaced it with a new and different world.

Mr. Buckland told them this – it was an example of Monsieur Cuvier’s apostasy. “Everything God makes endures,” said Mr. Buckland, quoting Scripture. Richard asked where the hairy mole-elephants were to be found now, and Mr. Buckland said, “America.”

They did ciphers at the ragged school, but she had lost her love of numbers. It was words that pressed on her now. The store of numbers was set at nine. There were no new numbers. But there were new words. Mr. Buckland’s word
fossil
. It was a word they used in France: things dug out of the ground. There was a need for new texts – the Bible explained many things, but not all. If I can read with such ease, I can certainly write, thought Mary. She would broach the question that so interested her father and Mr. Buckland, the nature of the stony curiosities found on the shore and in the cliffs, which question Genesis did not appear to touch. She resolved to ask her father for some pages from his accounts book. If Mr. Buckland will not give me a book about curiosities, Mary said to herself, I will give him one. I will post my text to him. She saw Mr. Buckland standing in a grand doorway, turning the letter over in his hand to see what was written on the front:
To Mr. Buckland at Oxford University from Miss Mary Anning
. She saw him breaking the seal to open it and her brain sketched it out.

Unless it be frozen
(she would begin)
, a body will rot in the grave. It will not turn to stone. The stone eagles carved in front of the Great House on Broad Street were always stone and never alive. It were not within the powers of the stonemason to breathe life into them. God worked as the stonemason works. The curiosities were the stony matter of all creatures before God breathed life into them. Some were sports of the Creator: for respite on the Sabbath, He fashioned certain forms with never a thought of breathing life into them, and left them scattered in the cliffs. They were not dead. They were less than the creatures that walked the earth and now lay rotting in their graves. They had never lived. And yet they endured
.

She put the bible on the workbench and pinched out the light and went up the steps to the kitchen. Molly sat on the bench rocking Percival. “Put the bread to soak,” she said, and Mary realized with astonishment that her mother had no idea of the thoughts that roiled in her mind. All her mother cared about was coals collected on the foreshore and washing hung on the bushes by Church Cliffs. Mary’s mind was an invisible world that no one else entered.

Mary wrote her first text at home, sitting for many hours in Richard’s empty workshop, where the smell of shavings hung. She left the Undergroundology alone for the moment; her ideas sat within her like a mass of the lias cliff, awaiting excavation, and one day, when she knew which thread to follow into the mass, she would do it. But for now, she wrote another of the stories that came to her when she lay on her pallet in the night. She did not show it to her mother, but stayed back at the school and showed it to Mr. Pippen:

Two Sisters of Mary Anning, Both Departed

The first of my sisters were a girl named Martha my mother tells that as a babe she had a way of crawling up the kwilt of a morning to peel Mother’s Eye open and see if Mother be flown away in the night. She lived until a lippen May day when two lads at the shore entise some children to take up a woden Door that washed in from a Shiprek and float on it though the Tide be risin and they were sucked around the point crying when a wave spils them off and they all drown their Bodies never found. The Luptons on our road lost their Jane off that Door as well. It be well known in Lyme the two youts that did this and they be rightly shunned. The one joined Bony’s navy and lies in the Sea but the other by name of Digby dwells in the Underclif and sells counterban and folk slip up the Path and buy their Tea from him today though not we
.

Then the first Mary were born who they say were like me in every regard the thick black Hair and the way of starring I be scolded for. Then the year after her my brother Joseph who be now fourteen. For three years they held this Mary as their Mary. Until the day before our Saviour’s birth in the year of our Lord 1798 when this Mary and my brother Joseph play by the herth and my mother goes down the street to take the rent to Mr. Axworthy because it be Saturday. A pile of shavins lay by the fire. For sport the children do pick up the shavins in their fingers and throw them on the fire and the fire flare and catch Mary’s peticoat. Joseph but a little lad of two there be no one to smother the flames and Mary run into the street crying for our mother because the shop be closed up and Father down at the shore and the air fan the flames and she be terrible burned and die as night falls
.

My mother had no Respit for she bore me some four month later and they give me the name of Mary and keep shavins in the house no more and warn me of the tides. In the year of our Lord 1799 I was born Mary Anning
.

Mr. Pippen read it and water filmed his eyes. “The ending needs a homily,” he said at last. “You must think what the homily will be.” When she was silent, he suggested in a gentle tone, “Is it the suffering of this life that teaches our hearts to long for the next world?”

But she could not, she could not put a pen again to that paper. There was a homily of a sort in the last sentence, so it felt to her, and she took the story back home as it was.

EIGHT