Curiosity (22 page)

The creature’s piteous, empty eye contemplated her bleakly. Mr. Buckland had not appeared in Dorsetshire since months before her father died, and he had never responded to her letter. And she felt glad of that now, for he would take the creature over, he would make it his own and have it frolicking in God’s garden. Perhaps she could find a different buyer. The waves crashed in and withdrew, and oystercatchers ran back and forth on the sand, and she buried her fingers in her soft, hot neck, shrugging a shoulder high to warm them.

That night, she and Joseph stood by the seawall. “I wish I could leave it there while I dig the body out,” she said.

“We’d best bring it in so we don’t lose it,” said Joseph.

“How will we carry it?” asked Mary.

“Put it on a door,” said Joseph, and a thread of pain connected them briefly. “If there be something solid under it, the two of us could carry it.”

“I reckon not.” Mary thought of her father when he brought the skull (the
little
skull, as she thought of it now) back from Pinhay Bay, borrowing the porter’s sling and struggling over the rocks. “We need four porters, two on each side.”

“I’ll ask Ralph Downing and George, then.” This was the wheelwright and his son, who had carried Richard home.

She said the thought that was chawing at her: “Whose property is the shore?” A question her dragon had ignored when she’d asked it. Joseph nodded gravely; she knew he understood. Private ownership rose up around them and hemmed them in. Their house, which they let from Mr. Axworthy. The market, where you had to pay a half-crown to put up a stall. The commons, all divided up now by hedges and gates. The hares and grouse and woodcocks hunted by no one but the Squire. Everything owned, everything in the town fenced and paved over, everything belonging to the gentlemen who tipped their top hats to each other outside the Assembly Rooms. One of them owned Black Ven. She had broken into his cellar and she was plotting to haul away the treasure she’d found there. Who from the town could they recruit into such thievery?

There on the western shore at the start of Monmouth Beach was Avery Cottage, brambles filling its garden and creeping over the door. Above it was the path to Ware Manor Farm, and the sycamore with the leaning limb where she’d cried “Watch!” and her father had ducked at the last minute with Lizzie on his shoulders. There was the fork that led to the Undercliff, a narrow path now with rusty rotten leaves trod into it and broken fallen trees that the vines and bracken tried to cover and scarlet stinking iris seeds spilling from their pods. And then another fork, and she knew which path to follow, she had always known, although she’d never followed it, never seen the hut sitting in smoky light
with a barrow pig rooting beside it. A hen peered with cocked head from a twig-cage and all the gear of a smuggler’s business was scattered huck-a-muck around the clearing, a porter’s sling and a stoneboat and broken crates and barrels, and a stone oven built outside, smoke rising from its chimney with heat flowing on either side of it, performing its trick of making the roiling air visible.

A big lad sat slouched on a stump beside the oven. Not Digby – this lad was too young. He was not Joseph’s age. When he saw her on the path, a smirk came over his face.
You are a wench!
the smirk seemed to say, and then it grew to a leer, as if she’d shown herself in her petticoat. Then someone else moved, a hand moved. A man sat on a bench with his head tipped back. He wore a brimmed calfskin hat from which hair straggled down to his shoulders. He was smoking tobacco, not a pipe but a brown stick like a pork sausage. The clearing stank of the pig and the stick the man was smoking. “What do ye want?” he said, breathing a curling vine of smoke out into the sunlight. His face was big and flat and mottled under the skin, but she could not see his eyes for his hat. He didn’t ask who she was.

“Two porters,” she said. “For a night job.” She had brought a sixpence and she tossed it towards Digby. It fell wide and both men laughed, and neither one bent to pick it up.

“Six shillings when it’s done,” she said hotly.

After Molly went to bed, Mary and Joseph sat polishing curiosities in the workshop. “Digby!” said Joseph.

“He works in the dark,” said Mary.

In the curse of the night
was something they said about that hour. Afterwards, it seemed something she’d done in a dream, meeting them at the base of Church Cliffs, sensing him there by the smell of tobacco and then walking single file along the sandy foreshore, a bleary quarter moon retreating ahead of them. At
Black Ven, the moon’s claw retracted behind the cliff, and when they came up on the skull, it was only a gnarled rooted trunk they were lifting onto Digby’s carrying board, although he grunted in surprise at the weight of it. A comfortable grounding weight it was as they began to walk, two on each side, grasping the leather straps he had fixed to the board. All the way up the shore they did not speak, and their footfalls were carried away by the surf. Mary began to breathe hard when they came up the path through the graveyard, and it seemed a fearsome thing to carry the skull up past her father’s grave and over the mound where lay the mouldering bodies from the plague and then between the dark, unconscious houses on Bridge Street. As they came up into Cockmoile Square, a horse galloped past, sparks leaping from the cobblestones. There Mary called a halt and they rested the board on the top of the empty wooden stocks in front of the prison while she ran ahead to open the door and light the candles she had left at the ready. It was a trick to angle the board down the workshop steps without the load shifting, and the lad put a hand on the log and then cried, “Bleedin’ Jesus,” at the sight of its grinning jaw in the candlelight. And then their burden was on the work table and Mary was asking herself how they would safely ease it off the carrying board. But both porters had turned and were pounding up the stairs. Because the creature had caught Digby with an accusing eye? Or because he saw where he was, he knew it suddenly for the house of Richard Anning? Mary (who had not a single shilling towards the six she had promised them) called after his retreating back, “I will write you in the book,” but they were past hearing. Mary and Joseph both turned then to see Molly standing on the steps with a shawl clutched over her nightdress, staring at the skull. “He’s been in our book these dozen years,” said Joseph.

The strange thing was that Molly was pleased down to the ground with the monster in the workshop. She said it resembled the figurehead on the prow of a ship, a particular ship she remembered from girlhood, the
Pisces
. Mary grabbed Lizzie by the arms and dragged her in to show her, enjoying her terror. “It’s the fish that swallowed Jonah,” she said. “Look at its smile!”

Privately, Mary was shocked every time she approached it. At its size – her heart thudded at the size of it indoors. At how indifferent it was to being moved into the house. The house was just two hundred years old, while thousands of years had passed since this creature had swum in the surf or rowed on vast wings over the waves.
Six thousand years
, Mr. Buckland said. She propped her broom against the fossil and stared. She looked at it from each end, and clambered up on the stool to survey it from above. It was a text she could not read, like the lines of print that had once taunted her.

Mary spent a week chipping away the shreds of limestone that still clung to it. She found a soft brush and washed the skull all over with sea water. Outside, emptying the bucket in the river, she scrutinized their own house, wondering whether it looked as it always had to passersby. Dick Mutch, back in the stocks and calm that day, tried to engage her in conversation. “It’s by cheatery I be here,” he said.

“I believe you,” she said, going back inside.

When she climbed up to Silver Street later to get a bucket of sweet water from the spring, she encountered Miss Elizabeth Philpot with one of her sisters. “You haven’t been to see us for months,” she said.

“My mother needs me,” said Mary. She could hardly look at her Miss Philpot, so sharp was her longing to tell. Hesitantly, she
asked whether she could come now and Miss Philpot gladly agreed. The three of them climbed the street together. Mary kept her face down. She’ll see me changed, she thought. In my face she’ll see my conversations with the dragon.

At the cottage she set her bucket by the door and Elizabeth Philpot took her down the hall to the drawing room, where stood the twelve-drawered cabinet Mary’s father had made. On its top was a large luminous egg, held at a tilt in an ivory bracket. “What is that?” Mary asked.

“Oh, it’s an ostrich egg,” said Miss Philpot. “You haven’t seen it before? We bought it in London.”

It was the eye, the very size and the very shape. An ostrich egg! She could say this when she wrote her text about the creature.
Its eye be ringed with tiny bones and be the size and shape of the egg of the mighty austrick
.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth was sliding the drawers of the cabinet out one by one and showing Mary the tickets she had made for each specimen. She had filled a whole tray with bezoar stones, those oddly shaped ridged brown stones they often saw on the beach.

“Are you collecting stones now too?” asked Mary.

“Only these,” Miss Philpot said. “They’re believed to be from the gall of ancient goats. It’s said that if you put one in a glass, it will counteract any poison in your drink. I am well equipped, if cook should turn murderous!” She looked at Mary with an expression that was almost shy. “I must display what I have,” she said. “You haven’t brought anything for my cabinet in ages.”

“I have a little sea lily you will like,” said Mary. “I’ll bring it tomorrow.” And then they sat on the divan and Mary asked whether she could look at the big Sowerby book, and Elizabeth brought it. Mary turned the pages from beginning to end. But there was nothing in it of a creature such as hers. Sowerby
was all small things, eggs and claws and shells. All small, harmless things.

“Are you looking for something in particular?” Mary looked at Miss Philpot’s gentle, humorous face and did not wish to lie. She put the Sowerby on the table. “Do you have a picture of a crocodile?” she asked.

Elizabeth Philpot took down another large book in a leather cover. A bestiary, she called it. The room had lost its light by then, and she lit a candelabra on a wooden stand and moved it close to Mary. With the heavy book between them, she turned pages until she found an etching labelled
Cocodryllus
. Mary bent over it. It was a dragon, although prettified for the picture, the scales on its back curled like waves on the sea. It was in the process of swallowing a man: two bare human legs and feet protruded from its mouth. The creature’s oblong eyes (small eyes) were guilty and distracted, like a dog caught in the act of devouring the joint from the table and unwilling to disengage its jaws. It did not appear to have a ring of bones around the eye. But unlike the dragons in the Bible, it did have a long jaw and pointed teeth. Mary studied it, taking careful note of its crooked legs and its long-clawed fingers.

When she went back to the shore two weeks later, she could see from the start of Black Ven that the landscape had changed. The cliff was a different shape: there had been another landslip. She tried to climb up and over it, but mud held her boots. She sank deep, and had to crawl back down. Ill fortune, it was – but not really: if the cliff had collapsed a fortnight earlier, the head would have been covered and crushed. She would collect, elsewhere and other things, until the cliff invited her back in. Daily it changed; soon it would open again in a different way – although she would not know the alignment, where the body was.

Back in the workshop, she interrogated the head about the rest of its remains, but it lay grinning, silent on the matter. All through the spring, rain fell. Mary had a large stock of ammonites and she spent her days cleaning and slicing and polishing them. There was a little burst in sales with this. But Lizzie was unwell, and Mary might need to sell the head to pay a doctor. Lizzie was tired and thirsty and constantly needed to go to the lavatory. It was shocking to see how loose her gown was – she was shrinking when she should have been growing.

Then, on a cloudy spring morning, Mary went out to the shore to find that the mud had sunk and hardened and a new path opened up over the landslip; it was on its way to becoming a different cliff. She had brought a shovel, and she climbed up to her best idea of where that ledge must be. There was footing firm enough for her now, and she began to dig, using the shovel delicately, imagining a fossil just below each thrust. Almost immediately, she struck something hard, stone or bone, a shovel’s depth in. She knelt then and worked carefully, removing earth.

It was a chain of vertebrae. She could just encircle each one with her two thumbs and forefingers. She dug outwards from the vertebrae, following the ribs. Ribs like willow wands, bunched together for carrying. She sat back on her heels for a minute to rest, trying to judge how long the tail would be. Gulls circled around, expecting flesh in this grave.