Curiosity (25 page)

“My name is De la Beche,” he says. “I have something I wish to show you.”

“I saw you at the cliffs, sir, with Mr. Aveline,” she says. “You were collecting?”

“No,” he says. “It’s something else. I’m afraid to show you out here. It’s so windy, and what I have here is very fragile.”

She frowns, and then says, “I must needs pack up.” He waits while she transfers her wares to a tray. Then she leads him down six rough steps to what she calls the workshop. As he descends, he catches a glimpse of the one room that must serve as both kitchen and sitting room. A woman in a black widow’s cap sits motionless on a chair. A slab of bacon hangs smoking over the fire. It looks to him like a very poor kitchen enjoying an unaccustomed prosperity.

The workshop itself is a damp, cluttered cellar – not large (though it must be the size of this whole humble house), reasonably
lit by a high, shallow window at each end, and smelling of mud and the rancid-mutton stink of tallow candles. The end near the door appears to serve as a shop, with shells in shallow boxes laid along a shelf. A table runs almost the length of the room.

“You kept the head here?” he asks. She nods. “I saw it,” he says. “At the Squire’s. Professor Buckland was examining it.”

Surprise or anxiety moves over her face. “Mr. Buckland,” she says. “I were a-keeping it for Mr. Buckland. But then I learned it were rightly the Squire’s. It were buried in his cliffs. He were kind enough to pay me all the same, for my labour.”

“How long did it take you to dig that skeleton out?” Henry asks.

“Four month I worked.”

“Every day? All the winter long?”

She nods. “Anywhen the tide favoured. It were banging cold.”

Then her eyes are on the box of bird skeletons, so he opens it and begins to lay the birds in a row on the work table. “Where did ye find such clean skeletons, sir?” she asks, bending eagerly over them.

“In a hearth that had been boarded up for several years. They strayed down the chimney and perished. The dumb beast blunders into the world of man at its peril!”

She touches one with a grotesque aspect to its claws. “This en fought ’is death.”

“That’s exactly what I thought when I saw it! I’ve been making a series of paintings. It was a deal of work to identify them. You can begin to classify them by their bills, whether they eat seeds or insects. I believe those are the two principal classes of land birds.”

He can see her considering this. She slides the robin skeleton to one end, and the dunnock, and then she stops and looks up at him. “They have a powerful kinship to the crocodile head.”

“It’s true. They’re very like. If I had seen only that head, I would have thought your creature was a gigantic bird.”

She looks at him levelly, as if trying to decide what he is about. “Would ye wish to see my notations?” She picks a dogeared accounts book up off the table and shows him a page, and he moves closer to the window for the light. In pencil, in a neat script, she has written:

He looks at her with surprise. Was this an attempt at some sort of scientific description of the creature? “How did you do the measurements?” he asks.

She shows him the willow rod she cut to twelve inches and took to the shore. “I were chary of spoiling my father’s tape in the mud,” she says.

Eventually, they’re sitting on rush chairs at the corner of the long table. Behind her, the window is a perfectly halved rectangle of sea and sky. The light fades, and she gets up and fetches a tallow candle.

“Be there classes of dragons?” she asks abruptly as she sets the candle on the table.

“Of dragons!” She is a child after all. “Well, there was the Worm at Durham, that was killed by being hacked into pieces. And the dragon at Knucker Hole, with its delicate underbelly.” He’s thinking aloud of stories he heard as a boy. “And one that was killed by having a sword thrust into its tongue. So you might classify them by their vulnerability to attack. Although it often took generations of carnage to learn it. Did you ever imagine it was a dragon?”

“I confess I were sometimes afraid at first. Death be not to dragons what it be to common beasts. Especially when weather brewed up, the crims would come over me. I feared it might rise up out of the rock. Until I saw how mild its eye were.”

“Mild!” says Henry, thinking of the massive empty socket. “Miss Anning, as you excavated the skeleton, did you form an opinion as to whether the creature breathed air as mammals and reptiles breathe, or took in water through gills?” He knows as he asks that this is the salient question, and he can tell that she does too, by the way she quickens. “Did you see any indication of gills? They would need to be a grand size for so large a creature.” He estimates with his hands, an aperture of twelve or fifteen inches.

“It had a nostril, sir,” she says simply, and his face warms. “It had a nostril in its beak, the way a bird do. As big as my thumb.” How did he overlook that – he who boasted he could make a scientific illustration from memory?

Suddenly he thinks of a wonderful day in Jamaica, standing with his friends and his father on the shore and watching a phalanx of silver forms lift out of the green water. “I think what you’ve found is related to the
dolphin
,” he says. “They are lovely sea creatures, graceful and playful, and they breathe as mammals do, and have much the same form as the skeleton you found, although only one paddle on each side.”

“If it did swim, how came it to be buried five-and-twenty foot up the cliff?”

“The creature must have died in the sea, and silt covered it, and then what was the seabed became the shore.” And now red surfaces in
her
cheeks; perhaps she’s never considered this before, that the earth changes.

“The tail had a bend in it,” he says. “Like a scorpion. Why was it bent like that, do you think?”

Afterwards, he will realize that he had ceased to notice her accent. Afterwards, he will ask himself if she is comely in the range of working-class maidens, and he won’t know. He won’t be able to recall her features at all, only her self-possession, her gaze: as steady and open as a babe’s.

SIXTEEN

ive gentlemen, a lady, and a girl made their way in halting conversation along the eastern shore at low tide, navigating the lower edge of a landscape that would have required, on that spring day of sun and cloud, three separate mediums to render it: smears of vegetable dye for the purple seaweed and the shocking green of maidenhair; dabs of sombre earth pigment for the near cliffs; and the pastel air – it must be done in fine chalks, as must the far cliffs that gave themselves over to the air.

The tendency of all was to let Professor Buckland lead. But then, of course, he was ignorant of the exact location of the excavation site, so Mr. Aveline and Mr. De la Beche must show him. And the Reverend William Conybeare was there, having hurried to Lyme Regis at news of the find, and a gigantically moustached half-pay lieutenant colonel named Birch, a ginger-haired fellow gone white and coral, eager as a boy and sporting a sheepskin jacket and great boots gaping on either side of his skinny flanks. And Miss Elizabeth Philpot and Mary Anning, all of them assembled at the jetty.

A bit ashamed that he had overlooked the girl (who was it who knocked on the door of the narrow house on Bridge Street and invited Mary Anning?), Professor Buckland made a great show of setting off with her, and he appeared the image of sparkling goodwill. Mary returned his blue gaze with a steady brown one and was relieved to see that he bore not a whit of resentment towards her. But their walking together was of short duration. “I encountered an antique fellow on the shore this morning,” he said as they descended at Church Cliffs. “You will never guess whom!” And when she said with a twitch to her shoulders, “I reckon it were Noah,” he made some pretext to fall back, leaving her alone, letting Mr. De la Beche and Reverend Conybeare pass him, and walked then with Miss Philpot, whose poor marred cheeks were flushed with exercise and fresh air and the excitement of walking out in company on the shore. As often as Mary had suggested such an outing, Miss Philpot had demurred. It had taken Mr. Buckland. And now she lifted her face to the breeze with something approaching rapture. Sitting in the back garden at Morley Cottage, she and her two sisters always remarked on how fortunate they were to live by the sea and to feel the sea breeze and smell the salt in the air, what a tonic it was, but (as she saw now) to sit in a garden up on the hill was no more being at the sea than reading a book about it was.

In his blue bag, Mr. Buckland carried, along with his usual collecting tools, a measuring tape and a compass. These he had packed with the thought that the depth of burial of the creature, the angle at which it lay, and its general coordinates would yield information about the prevailing currents in the Great Deluge. But of course, it was a tedious undertaking, and he need not have involved the others, except to demonstrate how grievous a loss this was to one whose passion for science rendered even the examination of a robbed grave an urgent enterprise. And then,
who knew what else they might find? Always at the edge of his vision was the ghostly image of the ark, its timbers rotting into the lias, and the bearded patriarch lying with hands folded on his sunken belly. Why here? Why not, if it must be somewhere? And England swelled behind him like a hymn, its dappled meadows graced with solitary oak, its fields so green, so filled with light, its shores defended by the elect as Christian lands around sank into papism.
England
, his heart sang, as he turned his eyes to the dark cliffs that outlined the beauteous isle, and then to the scallops of gleaming surf that decorated the borders of the map, and the emotion rising within him seemed to presage it (what?
Something
. Some apotheosis, some divine proclamation of the sacredness of everything that fell within his gaze), seemed to declare, “It will be soon.”

Mary Anning was leading on her own now, and behind her walked Henry with his intimate friend William Conybeare. Walked in the glitter of Conybeare’s regard, under the protection of Conybeare’s decorum as under an umbrella, observing Conybeare’s fine kid gloves and the precisely calibrated attention that Conybeare turned to everything, stooping now to pick up a shell and knowing it to merit a keen three-second glance and no more. And (Henry saw with satisfaction) he understood his friend perfectly, rightly perceived Conybeare’s discomfort in following the lead of this girl in the fustian skirts and rough boots, a discomfort that was perhaps felt by the whole party and was eased only when Conybeare looked around him with his handsome eyes and called ruefully, “A little child shall lead them.”

It was a phrase that Mary knew to be from Scripture, and walking at the head of the party with her basket over her arm, she felt a tremor of disgust and pride (disgust at being called a child, and pride because the little Child was Our Lord Himself). But then, as they crossed the shingle that marked the end of Church
Cliffs and the beginning of Black Ven, both feelings were overtaken and swept away by a painful recall to James Wheaton’s plight, by an up-swelling of terror for him. After last Sabbath’s sermon, he had fallen to the ground and been carried insensible from the chapel. He lay rigid in his bed now, one corner of his mouth pulled down. Others of the congregation had been to pray at his bedside, but not Mary. She tramped along, glimpsing again, as in the corner of her eye, the evil that had seized him (glimpsed it in the light sparkling off the shoals at the creeping tide line, a malevolent vapour from the bowels of the earth, from rocky chambers broken open by a wilful girl with a hammer and chisel). But why now, weeks after the deed?
Unless it was the reassembling of the creature’s parts
– and she considered whether the head and body would have arrived in London just on the Sabbath to be put together in one piece, and pressed her trembling fingers into the palm of her codgloved hand, trying to compute the hours of its journey. But this was a going-backwards, to think of the creature in this way, and she shook her hand, shook the numbers off her fingers, resisted going backwards. By what authority did she resist it? By the authority of Richard Anning, whose path down the shore she followed, whose firm, confident gait she recalled with every step.