Curiosity (16 page)

He touched her arm and she got up from her chair. He led her to the window, as though to study her face in the light. “Have you been recently to the shore?”

“To the shore?” said Mary, the blood thudding down her body.

“Yes, collecting.”

“I dug oysters last night,” she said faintly.

“But not the fossils?”

Mary did not answer.

“You must not!” he said urgently. “You must shun your father’s path. It was the works of Satan he gave himself to studying! He studied Satan’s handiwork on the Sabbath.”

“But Mr. Buckland studies curiosities,” said Mary, “and he be a clergyman. He be always on the shore on the Sabbath. I asked him. He said that God made all that lives in the world, that we must study it.”

“But Mary,” cried James Wheaton, “the curiosities do not
live
. The sea teems with life, but it gives us no creatures such as the stony forms we find on the shore. Serpents convulsed into flat stones. Dragons with their terrible fangs.”

Mary stared at him.

“They are the works of Satan. They are a dark creation that imperfectly mirrors our own. They are a manifestation of the
curse. Their purpose is to tempt the weak away from God’s true works.” He pulled a chair up to the table and gestured to her to sit back down. He opened his bible and from Genesis he read her the story of Cain, who killed his brother Abel, and the mark God placed on Cain, so that people who met him would not kill him.

“Who were these people?”
James Wheaton asked intently, his eyes burning in his face. “These people, strangers to Cain, who must be stopped from killing him? For we know that Adam and Eve had but two children, Cain and Abel.”

“Yes,” said Mary slowly. “I asked Father the same question when I heard this text in chapel.”

“I wish you had come to me then,” James Wheaton said. “And I trust I would have had the wisdom to answer you. Mary!” He pulled his chair closer to the corner of the table and slid the bible around so that she could see. “Look! They were a satanic tribe, made by Satan after the Fall. God sent the Flood to wipe out the whole perverse race of them. We live among their hideous ruins.” He showed her the engraving at the front of his bible, of terrible dragons with their coils all tangled in a paroxysm of fury and pain. Then he turned with trembling fingers to a passage near the end of the bible, and read out:
There was war in the heaven: Michael and the angels fought against the dragon and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not. Neither was there place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him
. “Oh, Mary,” he whispered when he was done. “You must be warned.”

She stepped out of James Wheaton’s lodgings into the sunlight, where two small boys played with a hoop and the street ran down to a sea full of ships in billowing sail. She walked through the town in the usual way, in her modest skirt and jacket and her mourning bonnet over her plaited hair. A flock of young
ladies dressed in pastel gowns chattered outside the Assembly Rooms, and at the edge of the sea, a band of seagulls splashed together in their communal bath. She lingered on the bridge for a moment, watching the ducks floating at the mouth of the river. Then she went into the house, where a note waited for her. It was from Mrs. Stock, who said she had work for a willing girl and asked Mary to report to her house in the morning. So it was clear, then, that she had not dreamed this conversation – it
had
happened, and God, working in partnership with James Wheaton and Mrs. Stock, had contrived a way to help Mary resist the seduction of the shore.

Mrs. Stock had had a sudden rise in fortune. She lived now on Marine Parade, in a house called Tower Cottage. It was a bequest from an uncle that had elevated her, and the passion of the high-born for taking the waters, and her own canny decision to purchase two bathing machines from Mr. England.

Molly sponged the collar and hems of Mary’s mourning dress, a dress Mrs. Bennett had kindly lent them because of Mary’s great size. Washed and combed and pushed out the door early the next morning, Mary took herself to Tower Cottage. It was Mrs. Stock herself who came to the door. She led Mary down the hall and let her peep into the parlour, where two ladies sat with needlework screens in front of them. Mary could see their lace morning caps and their hair, sculptures of fair coils with braids entwined. “Come all the way from Salisbury,” Mrs. Stock said. “Come to take the waters. They have each a maid come as well.”

Behind Mrs. Stock hung a silhouette of Mrs. Stock, done on convex glass. It was all new, the bell pull, the tasselled lamp, the bootjack in the hall. Mrs. Stock drew Mary back to the kitchen. “I need a clever girl to assist me,” she said. “To run errands.” Mary was the same height now as Mrs. Stock. “Occasional work,
as the lodgers come and go.” They arranged that Mary would present herself every mid-morning to see whether Mrs. Stock needed her that day.

On the days Mrs. Stock wanted her, Mary went to the butter market and the baker’s and haggled with fishermen at the Cobb. When she returned with basket laden, Mrs. Stock counted out the change with glittering approval, as though Mary’s honesty was born of just this sort of close supervision. Sometimes Mary was sent on errands a small boy could have run, carrying messages from the lodgers to their friends up the hill (usually just a card with a name on it), but Mary did it willingly, for Mrs. Stock paid sixpence a half day. But often it was messages to Doctor Reeves or Doctor Coulson Carpenter that Mary carried. They slept on horsehair mattresses at night, these gentlefolk, and had calfskin boots and gloves to protect their extremities from the cold. Plates of mutton and flaking trout cooked for them daily. Cheese, eggs, sweetbreads, as much as they fancied. But they were not well for all that.

On the Sabbath, Mary went to chapel without fail. At the pulpit, James Wheaton vibrated with the force of his message. Thinner by the week, his cuffs ragged, his fingertips fretted raw, he was a rare pastor. It tore and ripped him to utter God’s truth, but he would utter it. He had delivered the Lord’s warning to her and he trusted her now, to do what she must. He never fixed his eyes on her these mornings as he preached, but there was a shining bond between them and she felt it. Every Sabbath, she sat on the bench weighed down by her love for James Wheaton, and by his anguished love for her.

After a busy fortnight or two, the work became scarce. When she had no lodgers, Mrs. Stock sat in the parlour and read her books. She tried to lure Mary into staying to hear her discourse on what
she was reading, although she declined to pay on such days. It was the science of craniology, the study of the skull. A gentleman who had lodged at Tower Cottage had introduced her to it and left the books in lieu of rent. This gentleman, come all the way from Coventry, would run his fingers over people’s skulls and measure their heads with calipers and so predict what would become of them. It was a matter of size and shape and the bumps seldom seen under the hair. Mrs. Stock had no calipers, but she desired to measure Mary’s head with string. “It’s ill luck to be measured,” said Mary, backing away. “My mother says so,” although what her mother had said was that it was ill luck to be
weighed
.

“It is a science,” said Mrs. Stock. “By science we can predict our fate, and so control it.”

The next day, Mrs. Stock again had no errands for Mary. “But I need an upstairs maid,” she said. “I’m prepared to train, although I prefer her to live in.”

“Ask Miss Philpot about a maid,” Mary said. “Her maid has a houseful of sisters.” Fury and shame pulsed through her. She could not find the voice to speak further. Without a goodbye, she left through the kitchen door. She walked back through the town, feeling the cool wind against her flaming cheeks.

Instead of going home, she went straight across Cockmoile Square and walked slowly up Church Street. It was not her mother she wanted to see, who might well welcome Mrs. Stock’s offer. She went through the gate at St. Michael’s. The stained stone church sat above the shore, guarding the entrance between two worlds – the world of the town and the world of the shore, where the remains of Satan’s henchmen lay. Mary climbed the stairs cut into the side of the hill to the graveyard, with its stones leaning here and there. It looked almost empty, this graveyard, but it was not: the dead of the plague had been buried in a mass grave here long ago, under a green hill they would not open
again for fear of contagion. Towards the back, a patch of brown earth was Richard’s grave. None of his children were there, except Percival. They’d been buried in the Friends’ Burying Ground, the two Henrys and the other Mary. Not Martha, who was never found.

Mary stood by the broken ground of her father’s grave. But he was not here, she knew it. She walked to the edge of the cliff and looked down at the sea, a silver band withdrawing, leaving a bed of gleaming sand. Anyone who walked the path through the graveyard on a sunny afternoon and looked out over the sea dotted with ships in full sail must follow the path down the cliff. It rose and then fell in such a way that no one who came upon it could resist following it. Below Church Cliffs, yellow coltsfoot bloomed among the stones. On a sun-tossed afternoon, it was hard to believe that you lived in a cursed world, the mouth of hell. But Satan was a deceiver and dressed himself in light. James Wheaton, God’s tormented angel, could never look at this scene; the light would scorch his eyes.

Along the shore, the cliffs rolled out in their order: Church Cliffs, Black Ven, Stonebarrow, Golden Cap, four more whose names she didn’t know, and beyond them, the Isle of Portland. When the wavering cliffs dipped, you could see the fields on top of them, like glimpsing the inside of a ribbon. Green, the winter corn was coming up like grass. Up there, the farmer thought he was ploughing a field he knew, and then he came up on the edge and found the sea had bitten a chunk off it. Daydreaming sheep fell to the sea. Some said the sheep had been possessed of an evil spirit and run off the cliffs, but it was the cliffs that took them by surprise; daily, the landscape changed. She was below Black Ven now, and from the shore she could see the path where she had stood while they pulled her father up. The ledge where he had lain was already gone – the rains had washed it into the sea.

But her father was there, he was still there. On the path above her, he’d walked that wonderful bright night, the path a black seam through the gorse, the sea below shingled with moonlight. She could picture the way he’d slipped, throwing an elbow out for balance, clutching his bag and then skidding down the cliff, falling too fast for thought – until the earth caught him, a soft provisional ledge, just as wide as it needed to be. Not wide enough for him to move. Nothing to do but lie and look, his collecting bag under him.

There he lay on the stony cliffs with the bones of dragons buried below him. Hawks hunted for mice on the field above. A smuggler rowed silently to shore. Digby, maybe, Digby may have prowled below while Richard lay and watched. The moon sank into the sea and white stars washed up in the sky. And he lay, watching from his perch where the land and the sea and the sky met, lay and knew himself alive in the night. He was who he always was, that night. He refused to be fearful. He would not be stooped and shrivelled by fate. Fate had had many victories over him; it would not have that one. It would not make him into the sort of man he had never been before.

Walking home along the shore, Mary did not search for fossils, but she collected every loose curiosity she happened to see. A handful of thunderbolts, grey. A lovely pyrite ammonite glinting in the sun at the base of Church Cliffs. This is not witchery, she thought as she bent to pick it up and felt its weight. We have always found them here, scattered among the rocks. She fingered the tiny, perfect golden coils at its centre. She would never in her life see a jewel so fine.

As Mary came back up the path through the graveyard with the ammonite in her hand, a gentleman and a lady strolled ahead of her along the cliff, looking out to sea. The gentleman was
Mr. Aveline, who had a fine house on Broad Street; she recognized him by his thin, elegant shoulders. They were walking very slowly, arm in arm. Where the path widened, Mary went to hurry past them.

“What do you have there?” called the lady in a friendly fashion. A lady Mary had never seen before, wearing a velvet coat and hat. Mary stopped and showed her. “What a beauty!” the lady said.

“Oh, it’s an ammonite,” said Mr. Aveline, nodding at Mary. “They’re sometimes called cornemonius.” He reached out and ran a gloved finger around its coils. “They do so resemble the curled horns of a ram. It is striking, isn’t it! The Creator favoured certain patterns, as all artists do. He used the same designs over and over in very different spheres of the natural world.” The lady smiled at him – not at what he said, but as if she loved him for being the sort of man who would say it.

“It’s an ammonite stellaris,” said Mary. They looked at her in surprise, for the science coming off a Dorsetshire tongue. Then the lady offered to buy it. She said it was something her son would fancy.

“They call them snakestones in the town,” Mary said. “People carry them for luck.” What a soft face the lady had, like a flower blooming under her velvet hat! The word
luck
felt like a black charm on Mary’s lips. But she went on, she said, “I can make a head on it if you wish.”

“Oh, no, I prefer it in its natural state,” said the lady.

“Just let me clean that bit of iron off it.”

And so Mr. Aveline and the lady walked down to Bridge Street with Mary, and they waited in the square while Mary washed the ammonite and chipped the iron off. Then the lady gave Mary a half-crown, and when she had gone up Broad Street, Mary held it out to Molly, who was sitting in the kitchen with her head down
as if to shut out the sight of what Mary was doing. Mary pressed the half-crown into her hand and she threw it to the floor with an angry gesture, but this was just for show. Finally she raised her face and gave Mary the look she used to give Richard when he came in from the Three Cups or from a Sabbath at the shore: a look that said,
This is the way it will be, then
.