Curiosity (31 page)

It’s a most tumultuous terrain the Charmouth Road traverses, a landscape caught in the act of moving. And yet the clifftops were cleared in centuries past, and lie cultivated in barley and corn. Some smell of fish from the mackerel worked into the soil, some of sheep shit from the beasts paddocked there. When Henry walks the road with Mary Anning after a morning’s fossiling, she tells the fields by name:
Pinch-gut. Labour in Vain. Kettle of Gruel
. Why the farmers bother to plant them at all, he can’t imagine – fields torn ragged by landslips, or sinking and being taken over by gorse. West of Lyme Regis, where Dorsetshire becomes Devonshire, there’s no coastal road at all. There the high terrain was
never cleared and a forest flourishes whose very trees may have been saplings when Shakespeare was a boy. This riotous forest is called the Undercliff, although it is really the colonized
top
and broken
side
of a cliff, where crevasses and almost-vertical upthrusts attest to the impulse of the cliffs to move, and wild clematis, ivy, bracken, holly, hazel, and brambles conspire to disguise the resulting chaos. How like the tropical bush around the plantation in Jamaica, Henry always thinks when he wanders into it from the top of the town.

In the shadow of the Undercliff, down on the western shore, Henry helps Buckland remove the
Ichthyosaurus communis
for crating. Mary Anning is there, and Buckland has hired four men for a day. They’re working to slide a carrying board under the fossil. Buckland’s irritation is like a cloud hanging over the site – he’s preparing for a trip to the Continent and he’s been in a bustling, officious mood all week. In reaction, Henry moves slower and slower, stopping often to rest and look up at the Undercliff. “Could I climb up there from here?” he asks Mary.

“No,” she says. He looks at her sharply. There may have been the hint of a dare in her tone.

With a rhythmic series of grunts, the men have the carrying board up and are off down the shore. Buckland hurries after them. No doubt, he assumes Henry and Mary will follow. But they don’t move. They stand side by side and watch his robed figure dwindle down the shore, and Henry feels his spirits lift when it falls out of sight altogether.

“Where is he off to?” Mary asks.

“He’s touring the Continent. With Reverend Conybeare. They’re conducting a study of correspondences in the rock strata.”

Still she makes no move to go. She stands and turns her sunburned face to look at the sea. He picks up his kit and looks at her questioningly.

“Would you like to see where my father found the narrow vertebrae I told you about?” she asks then, with a little smile.

He follows her out around Seven Rock Point. The lapping water has left them a scant few feet. Mr. Aveline has warned him over and over that, should he be caught by the tides at the base of the western cliffs, his only choice will pertain to the manner of his death.

“It was here,” Mary says, gesturing towards the cliff.

There’s nothing to see, only the layers of shale and limestone put sloppily together. They scuffle around at the base of the cliff, speculating as to what sort of creature might have such an extremely long neck, and whether the size of the braincase is generally a measure of the intellect. They’re of necessity standing very close. They have to shout into each other’s ears over the roar of the surf. “There is a townswoman with a passion for measuring skulls,” Mary says, and Henry makes to measure her head with his hands. She ducks away, well out of his reach, and stands retying her bonnet.

“I want to make a map of this shore, and use it to mark down my finds,” she says evenly.

“That’s a fine idea. But let me make it for you – it would be my pleasure. I’ll chart the shore in either direction, as far as your work takes you.” He glances down. Now they’re standing in water. “Well, Mary,” and he uses her Christian name before he can stop himself, “it appears we may need to fashion ourselves an ark.”

She hitches her basket higher on her arm and splashes nimbly around the debris on the shore. He follows her and finds that a landslip has made a ramp that mounts the cliff. She presses herself into a fold in the lias and then they’re climbing a steep face where he discovers footholds so regular they must have been chopped out by an axe. He climbs after her, catching glimpses
of her tattered petticoat and the long calf sticking bare from the top of her boot.

Finally they reach a narrow plateau and she stops. “I thought you said we couldn’t climb the cliff,” he says, breathing hard.

“
You
couldn’t, I said. And nor could you, without me.”

“No one in town believes it can be done.”

“How do folk suppose the smugglers reach their dens?” They’re flattened against the cliff face with her clumsy basket between them, and she points him to an upward trail. It’s barely discernible, but she insists he go first. He scrambles up through gorse and then steps into the cool and quiet forest and onto a surprisingly wide path worn by solitary feet, brown clay with chert embedded in it here and there.

They follow the path east and once he glimpses the sea lying silver below. He’s never walked this far into the Undercliff. Here it’s a wonderful stand of immense ash, festooned with the creepers of wild clematis, a verdant garden with nets of ivy thrown over it. And burrs – presently he discovers that burrs have caught up his trousers, to the point that he can hardly walk. They’re in a clearing then, a fern-filled clearing dotted with snowy anemone, where a falling tree has pulled its roots out of the earth, such a mass of roots that they make a den where you might shelter from the rain. The forest is filled with birdsong. Henry sinks onto the trunk of the fallen tree. He takes off his hat and drops it among the bracken.

Mary follows him into the clearing and puts her basket down. They’re alone, more alone than they ever are on the shore. He smiles and gestures for her to join him on the log. But she will not – she continues to stand. So he sets to work cleaning his trousers, careful to avoid pulling threads out of the soft wool, and (in an effort to put her at ease) begins to discourse on
burrs
, which, carrying each the seed of its progeny,
have made him their unwitting means of propagation. Why did she lead him here? Surely it’s an invitation! But still she’s silent. He points out the anemones, blooming so late. It’s because of the tree falling, he explains when she doesn’t respond: they’ve been tricked into springtime behaviour by unaccustomed sunlight (light that shines into the clearing now, falling full on Mary’s face, brightening the white of her bonnet). She stands still, her embarrassment gone, her intent black eyes meeting his gaze unabashed. He knows the next step, he has been here before, but now he’s the one who looks away, who continues to talk. He falls back to Buckland – God knows there are stories enough on that topic. And he finds himself talking again about the tour to the Continent, confessing to these thoughtful eyes how badly he wished to accompany Buckland and Conybeare, but for the fact that his own affairs were in such disarray, the plantation in trouble, and the matter of his marriage, which was to have taken place this summer. He falters and falls silent. Then he hears himself telling her.
There has been a breach in my relations with my fiancée
.
I have written a conciliatory letter, but she has not responded
.

The light in the clearing changes – if this were a drawing room, the butler would slip in now to light the candles. She’s leaning against a tree, her basket at her feet. She is the perfect person to confide in: she listens with a grave face, she does not feel an obligation to respond.

They walk back out on the Pound Street path, and as they cross the meadow at the edge of town, Mary begins to sing in the forceful, natural fashion of chapel singing that he often hears from the street on his way to church:

Her bonnet has slipped off again, and her black braid has fallen by its own weight out of the knot she had it tied in. On the slope below is the thatched roof of a cowshed, and then they can see the Cobb, miniature ships being unloaded, donkeys labouring along the stones, and side by side they walk towards their separate suppers.

He spends a week making the map he promised Mary and takes a great deal of pleasure in the work. For the eastern portion, he saddles up his mare and rides the cliff road as far as Charmouth, stopping every fifty yards to peer over the cliff and sketch. He was aiming for a scale of two inches to a quarter mile – but finally it’s a topological map he makes, rendering the most fruitful fossil areas (Black Ven, for one) in high detail and compressing the others. Monmouth Beach and Pinhay Bay he cannot sketch from above on account of the Undercliff, so he paces them at low tide, savouring the beauty of the shore, exhilarated at being freed from the future, and employed, and outdoors, out of Aveline House, where he aggravates his mother and Mr. Aveline merely by walking into the room.

In the end, he has a simple (and, to his eye, elegant) ink drawing from Charmouth to Pinhay Bay, with a wash to indicate the littoral zone and a few landmarks labelled. He marks in the quarry beds
(Gumption, Specketty, Lower Skulls, Mongrel)
because Mary taught him those names, but he leaves the major excavation sites to her to fill in. His first impulse is to take the map to the workshop so Mary can examine it with him, but he’s chary, suddenly, of entering her cottage without Buckland.
Instead, he stops by the curiosity table and suggests an outing to the western shore. Then out at Pinhay Bay, he suggests climbing into the Undercliff to examine the map out of the wind. She assents, and they follow the path to the same clearing, where this time she sits beside him on the log as he unscrolls the map.

She seems pleased. They work out where the Ichthyosaurus finds will be marked, and she pinpoints the site of a huge shipwreck from her childhood, the
Alexander
. It foundered in a terrible tempest, and the body of a lady washed to shore afterwards. “She’d sailed all the way from Bombay,” Mary says, “and then she died on the English coast. She’d been three month at sea.”

“Well, Mary,” he says, “I don’t believe I’ve ever told you about my own shipwreck.” He makes a dramatic story of the typhoon that caught them on their journey home from Jamaica, after his father’s death, and she listens, entranced. “Oh, we had a merry time. We were being
toyed
with. That wave did not finish you? Well, this one shall! It was a betrayal, a grievous betrayal, the sea so warm and green, turned into a roaring monster. But the Fates were with us. There are small islands everywhere in that sea – they were made by volcanoes – and the waves dashed us onto one. I shall never forget the solid sensation of those black rocks under my cheek! I can still hear my mother’s terrified cries. It was a dreadful time for her.”

He breaks off a leaf of hart’s tongue fern, folding it carefully down the middle, and finds himself wanting to go on. “My father had just died. That’s why we’d taken to the sea, to return to England. He was gone from the plantation. He was at Bath St. Thomas on business, many miles away, when he contracted an infection – not the sort of illness you see in England that a soul will linger with for weeks, but a tropical fever that felled him in a day. A messenger came on a donkey to tell us he’d been taken ill.”

Mary moves closer, as though she’s having trouble hearing him.

“When the messenger rode into the yard,” he says, “the field slaves left their work and gathered round the house. How did they know what was in that message? – we never understood it. They sat all around the yard and waited. The overseer couldn’t budge them and after a while he stopped trying. As the afternoon went on they began to wail. My mother made me stay in the house. She was frantic with distress to hear them. She didn’t know the tropics, she still believed he could recover. And then as the darkness fell – and it falls very quickly in the islands – a second messenger came up the road on a donkey.”

Understanding moves across Mary’s open face. Across the clearing, sunlight salutes the fronds of fern standing green among last year’s black.

They collect together regularly, always on the western shore, and even as the days grow colder and golden leaves fall to the paths, they always come home through the Undercliff; that way, they can steal an hour’s collecting time from the tide. They tend to linger in the Garden (how could one not think of Eden, walking the paths of that voluptuous forest?), pausing in the clearing for quiet conversation away from the roar of the surf and the spying eyes of fishers and oyster diggers and coal collectors crouching on the shore. The clearing is nature’s drawing room, he sometimes thinks, and we have the chance to get better acquainted here, as people do in drawing rooms. Although the modestly costumed damsel at his side is a most curious companion – almost unlettered, absent an aptitude for flirtation, shockingly bereft of ordinary conversation, completely untravelled (having never once stepped foot on a ship, nor indeed in a coach), and prone to wiping her nose on her sleeve as the need
arises. Also (he notes every time he follows her down a path) possessing a grace of motion that comes entirely from a lack of self-consciousness, from the very framework of her bones. Not that she is angular – but he is always aware of her bones, her strong shoulders and the long, striding legs. And he wonders at the candour and intelligence that light up her face, and the breasts that lie unrestrained under her blouse (lifting just perceptibly as she bends to put down her basket).