Curiosity (29 page)

“Well, perhaps there is another species of giant reptile along this shore,” Henry mused. “Mr. Buckland will not credit it – he’ll charge me with inventing the whole story. In any case, nothing matters to Buckland but finding the old patriarch!”

“Buckland!” Mary said with a snort. She was still scanning the cliff face as they walked, her eyes never ceasing from their work. “What confounds me, sir, is this: why do we not find the stony forms of foxes and mice and seagulls in the layers, when they live in such abundance all along the shore?”

Why, indeed?

Then they were at Charmouth, and two boys were digging for oysters. The eager morning light encroached on their silhouettes, thinning them to nothing. Silver was laid down in a sparkling band on the horizon, and the black edges of the cliffs were outlined in silver light, water dripping silver from them. Piles of bracken lay washed up at the foot of the cliff: frilled sashes the rosy mauve of elderberry, and flags of glistening black, and brilliant, torn sea lettuce, all tangled like an extravagant bed of ribbons. Henry stopped walking. Mary looked inquiringly over her shoulder at him. Her bonnet had slipped down, it dangled at her back, and her black hair was twined at the nape of her neck – it picked up the light the way the cliffs did. Her face was flushed from their walk. There was a bloom to her, the bloom that work and sunshine and clear water and simple bread will produce. He could see the fine down on her cheeks and sun shining through the lobes of her ears, showing up the blood in them. He found himself returning with some confusion to their earlier conversation.

“I do wonder if there’s something … something in the human form that makes man immune to petrification. That spark of the divine that animals do not share – or perhaps it’s our capacity for spiritual corruption.”

Mary shook her head. “We be flesh and bone,” she said simply. “Animal humours will happily commingle with man’s humours. My father proved this when I were a girl. You will have heard, Mr. De la Beche, that there is a bit of the cow in me.” She touched her fingers to her arm.

“I have heard,” he said.

He throws off the covers and swings his feet to the floor, picking up his watch. Half six. The tide will be out, and so will those who work the shore.

EIGHTEEN

izzie lay on the cot in the kitchen with her eyes closed. A copy of the
Theological Review
was open and face down on her chest, as though she was trying to draw its mournful voices straight into her heart. “Mary,” she cried the instant Mary stepped in the door. “Read to me! Read the story of Martha Locke at the heavenly gates.”

“No,” Mary said. “If that’s what you want you must read it yourself. Look what I’ve got.” She opened her bag and showed Lizzie. “A dogfish. It must have come up in the herring nets. A fisherman tossed it onto the shore. It’s fresh as hay – I had to wait for it to die before I could pick it up. We’ll have it for our supper.”

Lizzie sat up and peered into the bag, and her hand flew to her mouth. “It stinks of piss,” she moaned.

Mary slid the fish onto the table, careful to avoid the dorsal fins that could wound even after death. Its eyes had turned white just in the time she walked from the shore. She bent over it and looked at its fearful, down-turned mouth.

Lizzie lay back and opened her book, holding it as a barrier
between herself and the fish. In a voice full of practised pathos, she read out:

Mary rinsed her hands quickly in the basin and dried them on the rag hanging by a nail from the wall. She took a wedge of cheese from the crock on the table. It was Mr. Gleed, the new pastor at the Independent Chapel, who’d brought Lizzie this book. “Why do these fine pastors despise the only world they know?” she asked Lizzie. “Why is that?” Lizzie puckered her mouth and made her eyes big and round in a comic sign that she did not know, she did not know what Mary meant. Mary took the knife to the cheese, trimming off the mould in thin curls. “Where is Mother?”

“At Bennetts’. I wished to go too, but when I put my foot down, the floor was rolling like the sea.” She dropped the book and turned her face to the wall. On the windowsill above her was a tray of beans drying – she’d been sorting them, sliding them into rows with her fretful fingers. Poor Lizzie, never well since her baby teeth fell out.

Mary reached for her and rolled her over, examining her white face and the mauve mottling under her eyes. “I’d be peevish too, never going out. Look, I’ve brought milk. We’ll soak the fish to take away the smell. But you can have a cup first.” Lizzie pressed her lips together. She pinched them between her thumb and forefinger and shook her head elaborately. There was energy in the shaking: Lizzie was rallying.

Mary perched on the edge of the cot and she and Lizzie shared a plate of bread and cheese, watching each other eat in silence.
It was near noon. Mary had until two o’clock, till the next low tide. Then Mr. De la Beche would cross the square and go down the steps to Marine Parade. He’d be carrying his satchel of tools. He’d call at Mr. Buckland’s lodgings near Cobb Hamlet and they’d follow the west shore to the bones on Monmouth Beach. Mary had said emphatically that she would meet them there. She did not want to walk with either of them. When she walked with Mr. Buckland, they talked of science the whole way. There was no harm in that, except that he snatched her words out of the air as though he were a frog catching mayflies, never looking at her, never asking himself about the woman who uttered the words. Whereas Mr. De la Beche – with Mr. De la Beche, the vexation was exactly the opposite: it seemed he could not get enough of watching her.

Back when I was a girl, she thought, noting with satisfaction how hungry Lizzie seemed, back when he came to the workshop to talk of birds and dragons, I had no fear of him at all.

It was six feet long, this specimen: they knelt around a grave. Examining the teeth, Mr. De la Beche had pronounced it an
Ichthyosaurus communis
. There were three kinds of Ichthyosaurus, and this gentleman, who counted among his friends the Keeper of Natural History at the great museum in London, had had the honour of naming all three. The new specimen was neckless and hunched, pinned helplessly by a slab of limestone, as though it had been killed by a building collapsing on it. A difficult excavation. Mary’d told them they should hire workmen to chip it out before the tide damaged it. But Mr. De la Beche liked the work, and well he might – for him, work was play. She was proven right, though: the tide had stolen a fin. But when Mary pointed it out, Mr. Buckland shrugged. The sternum and pelvis were what he cared about; he had seen plenty of fins. “Oh, my brave, stony fish-lizard,” he crooned, “we’ll get your secrets out of you!
What do you say, Miss Anning? Was water its only element, or did it heave itself up to shore? Did it suffer the pangs of childbirth, or did it lay eggs?” The second question would answer the first, for if it laid eggs, it would need to drag itself up to shore like a turtle.

Mary, chipping away at the ribs beside Mr. De la Beche, could feel that gentleman’s glad eyes on her, could feel his eagerness to speak. The ribs Mary was excavating were splayed and there was something of great interest between them. She bent over it, wielding a small pick. There was no chance to speak – how could Buckland talk so without pausing to catch a breath? She turned her head then to look at Mr. De la Beche. Hazel, his impudent eyes were, with a band of brown like a chaffinch around their centres. He was laughing, holding her eyes, trying to make a secret fraternity with her against Buckland. “All those animals,” he murmured, while Buckland kept talking. “Taken into one ship. There are a hundred thousand animal species on earth, Miss Anning, do you realize? And two of each! And food for all of them. How was such a thing possible?” He laughed in the way he had, trying to draw her into laughing too. “Buckland,” he called then, flinging his pick down, not scrupling to interrupt. “There’s something you should know. It’s about Miss Anning. She disputes your science. Miss Mary Anning is harbouring her own private heresy. She disputes the likelihood of finding Noah on these shores.”

Mr. Buckland’s cheeks turned scarlet. “I am sick beyond endurance of being tweaked about Noah!” he cried, blinking rapidly. “You insist on an infantile representation of my ideas, purposely to provoke. We all aspire to find the remains of the race of Adam – you as well as I.”

“Not so,” said Mr. De la Beche. “I question whether man inhabited this part of the globe at the time of the Flood.”

“Well, I warrant he did.”

“What is your reasoning?”

“What is the point of all this, without man? It was man’s sin that caused the Flood. It was to caution man that God turned the drowned remains to stone. Man’s old bones are somewhere, and we shall find them, though he fled to the highest mountain peak.” He was trying to joke but he still had the stiff face and flat voice of an angry man.

The tie of Mary’s bonnet had come loose and she set her pick down and reached up both hands to retie it. “Mayhap the men all took to their ships when the waters rose,” she said. “The English be grand mariners.”

“No doubt they tried, those that had them,” said Mr. Buckland. “But no English craft could endure as Noah’s ark endured. It was a whole different order of craft. The master of the Flood Himself was the master shipbuilder.”

“Mr. Buckland,” Mary said then, seeing the chance to ask, “will you look at what I’ve found here between these ribs?”

Buckland leaned in Mary’s direction. “Oh – my lads and lassies –” he exclaimed, forgetting his anger. There beneath the ribs lay a stone. Buckland took up his brush, his lovely boar-bristle brush that Mary so envied, and delicately daubed. Lined up beside the first stone was a second. Brown and spiralled, like the stones Miss Philpot was collecting. Bezoars, they were called. “This fellow’s been swallowing stones!” said Buckland. “It’s the chap’s gizzard. He’s been swallowing stones to grind his food.”

“No, sir,” Mary said, after a pause. “No, sir. They be turds, sir. Turds turned to stone.”

Turds! Coprolites, Buckland called them, and he was as thrilled as if they were diamonds. They must open them, and Mary was the one to do it. A couple of years before his fall, Richard Anning
had lit on the idea of slicing ammonites open so that the chambers inside were visible. With the stonemason’s help, he’d set up a saw, and Mary had struggled for years to master it. And now they could use her technique in their new practice of studying coprolites. Buckland had a bezoar stone at his lodgings, and on their way back to town, Mary found two more on Monmouth Beach.

Down in the workshop, she showed them the saw. It was a fine iron band held in a wooden frame. They took off their top hats and set them on the work table. Mr. De la Beche fingered the narrow band. “You cut stone with this?” he asked. He was standing close to her. She could not move without pressing against him, and a queer sort of heat passed between them when she did.