Curiosity (18 page)

She arranges all this over four o’clock Madeira in the panelled drawing room, Alger wheezing and interrupting. She is handing him over to the girl in the woods. Henry has no way of understanding tactics gone so terribly awry. Most matches are arranged this way, Alger assures him in the self-satisfied tones of one who’s escaped. They typically begin with a youthful indiscretion. His mother talks gently and warmly about his new obligations, but he can’t listen. He sees what’s at the heart of it, how well this suits her purposes. All is changed. He has crossed a river: to adulthood, to where his mother was (he thought, throughout these last months). But she’s changed too; she’s moved on ahead and vanished into her own private bower of happiness. The poise she carried in Alger’s front door under her lavender bonnet was not an affectation. It was utter indifference to Henry and what will become of him.

TWELVE

quire Henley’s desire for a piece of blue silk fabric changed everything for the Annings that fall. He saw the silk in a shop in Charmouth – a bolt of it, enough for a cushioned divan, although it was only when he got home that he realized how much he fancied it, and had to arrange for someone to go back to fetch it. Mary would not have imagined Squire Henley a man to develop a passion for silk upholstery fabric, nor a man to have difficulty making up his mind. But both of these things appeared to be true.

Mary gained this access into the Squire’s character while she and Joseph sat cleaning and polishing fossils one evening. In the months since Richard’s death, Joseph had become a version of their father, tall and tense and unkempt, his eyebrows growing together over his nose. The way his upper lip rested on the bottom spoke of nervous secrets. But that night, he was congenial, and as they worked, he told her how Squire Henley had visited the upholstery shop just before closing and how Mr. Armstrong had offered to send his apprentice to Charmouth to fetch the fabric in the morning. A purse of money had changed hands. Fourteen
shillings! For a piece of silk on which to park his beefy thighs!

But an hour after Joseph left in the morning for Charmouth, he was back without the fabric. He had gone by the shore and discovered a landslip under Black Ven. Not that he couldn’t pass – but in the black marl and limestone was something he wanted to show Mary. Teeth in the rock!

“A crocodile?” said Mary, standing very still in the kitchen. She’d been getting ready to go to the shore herself, although a storm was brewing.

Joseph’s face was scarlet and sweat dripped from under his cap. “Certain-sure,” he said. “Or a great boogerin’ bird. I stepped on its boogerin’ beak before I saw it.”

“You were afraid to look at it.”

“No! I’m afraid of Armstrong, if I don’t get to Charmouth and back betimes.” He shook the purse in her face to show her, its drawstring looped around his wrist. “He’ll
skin
me if he knows I turned back. Are you coming?”

Molly sat at the table mending Lizzie’s stocking. “Pitch a stone before you go near,” she said, not looking up. “Be sure it’s dead.”

Pelting over the sea-combed weed on the foreshore, Mary kept her eyes pinned ahead for the first sight of a dragon lying on the sands. A dragon washed out of its lair. When Black Ven loomed over them, Joseph clambered past her and ran ahead. The debris of the landslip lay at the foot of the cliff – clods of rude mud as though a giant had cleaned his boots there, and broken slate and stone. Up near the base of the cliff, Joseph stopped and stood over something like a pointer. It was a slab of limestone as big as the two of them. Above, Mary could see the broken cliff face it had fallen from. Twenty feet up.

It was not a dragon, it was only figured grey stone, sunk into grey stone. A skeleton fused with its own monument. She could have passed by without seeing it. But there was Joseph panting eagerly over it. “See!” he cried, and she bent and put her hand down and felt exposed teeth. A prickle moved down her legs and she pulled her hand back.

“Go back to town,” she said. “Ask Armstrong for a day off.”

“He’ll never give it. He thinks the collecting is a sin. We’ll write to Buckland. He’ll hire men to get it out. Twenty pound, he said.”

“No!” said Mary. “He said twenty pound for a whole skeleton. If Buckland digs it out, he’ll never pay us.” Besides, he had never answered her letter.

Grey clouds sat right down on the cliff above them. Terns dipped and spun through the clouds. Joseph stared back at her, but it was her anthracite eyes she’d turned on him, and his eyelids fluttered. He took his cap off and wiped his forehead and then, on his hot face, she saw something astonishing: surrender, relief. “Mary, I must go,” he said. “Or he’ll sack me, certain-sure. I’ll come back this way. I’ll see how you’re getting on.”

“No,” said Mary. “The tide will be in, you won’t get around the point. Take the cliff path home.”

She waited while he dwindled along the foreshore, not wanting to examine the creature until she was alone. She had known they’d find the crocodile, but she’d never pictured it in the rock like this. Months, it would take, to chip it out. The thought did not numb her – it thrilled her. Months of work, and then twenty pounds. We will be
depauperized
. She whispered the word, a favourite expression of the Parish Overseer. We will give half to the Overseer to distribute among the names in our book and we will keep half for ourselves. And I
will write a text like the texts in the Sowerby book and sell it to all the scholars.

Joseph had come to a halt. He was standing like a stunpoll on the satiny foreshore to the east. What was he waiting for? “Go on!” she screamed, and threw her fist at him. But it was a distant rock she was scolding – he had turned up the path to Charmouth and she was alone on the shore.

Only one side of the jaw was visible, as long as her arm. It was like a weathered log cemented in the limestone. Top and bottom jaw both there, the teeth clenched. The teeth were pointed, meant for killing, each tooth as big as her thumb. She’d wanted Joseph gone, but now that he was she could hardly force herself to touch it. But she did, and it was cold to her fingers. There would be claws to match the teeth, a lashing tail. Not in this rock, though. The whole head might be here, but the body would lie in the cliff above. She scrambled back, frightened suddenly to be standing between the creature’s head and its body.

The storm was brewing up. It was very close, black over the Channel. She watched the breakers slam against the rocks and then the water sink in a low, moaning retreat to meet the next wave. Lightning flickered and there was a smell in the air.
Brimstone
, she thought. Very near here, in a cottage just outside Charmouth, a woman noted for cursing had been killed by lightning. It had burst open the door of her house and torn off her hair and clothing. Please, Mary prayed in a panic, bring Mr. Buckland back! Let him float over the stones in his top hat and gown. Let him raise his face to the sky and cry,
Here is all the bounty of the Lord made manifest!
She braced herself to look again at the dreadful teeth in the rock, and it came over her with a shock how real they were, ridged and graduated, the remains of a real creature. She’d had the notion that God had carved such
fossils in stone, just for sport. But this dragon had crawled or swum along this very shore. Frightened fishes had darted before it and it had snatched them up with these teeth. Just here, under this black sky, a dragon had lived its awful life, thoughtless of God. And something in its life or death had turned it to stone.

Black clouds collided over the Channel with a terrible thud. Raindrops fell hard on her face and shoulders and pocked the grey water. If I die here, the angels will be afraid to come for me, Mary thought. She turned to leave, and then scurried back and kicked soft mud over the teeth to hide them, and then she pelted with all her might towards town.

By evening, the storm was over. The sky was clear, although you could hear the sea still fretting over the disturbance. Mary lay down for the night as the sun sank below Ware Cliffs. Molly had asked her to move up to the bed now that Richard was gone, but Mary would not. Every morning now, Molly’s sorrow woke with the light, and Mary did not wish to share it. So Mary was on her pallet and Molly sat above, undoing Lizzie’s plaits, running her fingers down the kinky strands. “In the morning, we will wash it,” she said. Then she laid Lizzie down and said a bed-charm over her:
Four corners to my bed, four angels all a-spread. One at head and one at feet and two to keep my soul asleep
.

When Molly was gone, Lizzie dangled a hand off the bed. “Mary?” she whispered. “Will I have an egg at market today?”

“Tomorrow, you mean,” Mary said. “Maybe. Now go to sleep.” When Lizzie was quiet, she cautiously approached the idea of the creature, lying outside this very moment as the sun sank redly below the cliffs. Methodically, she outlined the situation: The fossil is above the high-tide line, right up against the base of the cliff. Unless a huge tempest blows up, the sea will not touch it. I will have time to chip it out. I will chip it out and sell
it. We will pay down our debt, and we will have ten pounds for ourselves, if I be not a cowheart. God has sent it to save us. But why has he sealed it in rock, and what will I waken if I free it?

She slid away from the thought, she slid towards sleep. Then James Wheaton was at the pallet in the dark attic, leaning over her, saying her name.
Mary. Mary. Mary Anning – do you not hear my voice? Do you not see? It is the Great Dragon Himself, cast into the world. He is a deceiver! He will suck you all down
. We are starving, she murmured, putting her hands over her eyes.
Better to starve
. James Wheaton said.
Better to die in the love of the Lord
.

Mary was awake then. She rolled over onto her stomach and turned her face to the side, against the smell of moulding straw in her pallet. Molly came in and lay down in the bed, and soon after Joseph, dropping heavily down on his pallet on the other side. Molly’s breathing turned to a thin snore and Mary lifted herself to her knees and laid her face against the bed. She pressed her face into the blanket and rocked for a minute to comfort herself. She tried Lizzie’s prayer:
Four corners to my bed, four angels all a-spread
. But when she got to
two to keep my soul asleep
, she could not say it. She sank back onto her pallet. She did not want her soul asleep.

Sometime in the night, her father came in. Not in a dream; she did not speak to him nor he to her. But in the morning, when Mary was wakened by her mother’s low keening, she saw the long shape of him lying in the bed. His form faded away as the light came in around the shutter, but when Mary scrambled out of her bedclothes and sat for a minute on the edge of her mother’s bed, she could sense him still in the room. He was there in the way she pulled in her breath, dark and heedless, unafraid.

Downstairs, Mary built a fire and boiled the kettle. She made her mother sit up before she would bring her tea. Then she combed out Molly’s hair and wiped her soft white face with a
wet flannel. Molly smiled as though Mary’s solicitude carried her back to a time before sorrow had chosen her as its favourite. She smelled of her sad bed and her unwashed nightdress, but Mary’s kindness would carry her no further – she was desperate to get to the shore. Joseph was up by then, filling the kitchen with Richard’s shape. Mary pulled her father’s codgloves over her hands and got her tools from the workshop. As they left, they carried the table between them out to the street so Molly could sell later in the day.