Curiosity (33 page)

“Did Mr. Conybeare sell his paper on the Ichthyosaurus?” she found a chance to ask Mr. De la Beche one day.

“He sent out a notice about it,” he said. “And everyone at the Royal Society and the Geological Society signed up for a subscription in advance.”

The sun sank over the cliffs and the square filled with ladies and gentlemen going to dance in the Assembly Rooms. Mary stood in the shadow of the shop across the street and watched the door in the stone portico of the Assembly Rooms open to a glimpse of
bright gowns. She looked through the dusk to see which of the gentlemen crossing the square she could recognize by height and stride and gesture.

In Mary’s house, they had no fire. Beside their hearth, Molly sat wrapped in her shawl and a blanket, leaning against the stone as if to draw out a vestigial warmth. Joseph was not there. He was sitting with the stonemason’s daughter, Amelia Elliot, who had large blue eyes full of sentiment and a terrified, lying admiration for Mary’s work (her startled cries asking in their highest notes,
What strange sort of girl be ye?
). Their wedding was a week away. Joseph could not really love her, but no doubt he adored sitting by the stonemason’s crackling fire, drinking hot brandy and beer from a tumbler.

When Mary had wiped the table and swept the floor, she carried the second blanket down from the upstairs bed and settled on the cot beside Lizzie. She lay staring at the charcoal streaked on the ceiling like the trails of flittermice.

“Mary,” Lizzie asked. “Who be your friends and who be your enemies?” Excitement crackled off Lizzie like heat – her joy at having Mary lie down with her.

“My friends be three,” Mary said, rolling over to her side to face Lizzie. “They start with
B
.”

“Mr. Buckland,” Lizzie said. Saliva had dried like lime in the corners of her mouth. “
B
for Buckland. And
B
for Birch. I don’t know who the third could be, unless it be Mr. De la Beche. But that is
D
.” It was a puckish, knowing face Lizzie was turning towards her.

“Of course it’s him,” Mary said. “The
De la
is just for show. They are gentle friends to the poor, all three.”
Mary
, he had taken to calling her, this Henry De la Beche.
Henry
, she said to herself. She folded the scratchy edge of the blanket away from her chin.

Lizzie eyed Mary craftily. “And who be your enemies?”

“My enemies be two. They start with
C
.” Lizzie’s face was absorbed in thought, her lips moved silently. “I’ll give it to you,” Mary said, “because you are so dull.
Conybeare
. De la Beche and Buckland’s friend from Bristol. He comes to the shore with Mr. De la Beche but he’s too fine to speak to me. He wrote about my Ichthyosaurus as if it was his own, with nary a thought for my labours. I could show you, Lizzie. It’s down in the workshop. Nary a mention of Mary Anning in the whole entire paper.”

“And the other
C
?”

“Cuvier, crouched like a toad across the water.”

“How can he be your enemy?”

“He has the disease of all men who are never wrong. That makes him my enemy.” Mary eased herself up and arranged the bolster behind her head. She turned her face away from the rotting-fruit smell of Lizzie’s breath. “Listen,” she said. “I’ll tell you a story.”

“The wreck of the
Alexander
,” said Lizzie.

“No. This is about London. It’s a dream, about a meeting at the Geological Society, where the high folk go to talk about science. Only certain men are allowed – they have chosen each other. Every month, as though a bell has rung that only they can hear, they put their stovepipe hats on their heads and ride in from all directions. To one of those grand buildings with columns in front holding up the roof. They walk in through the wide doors and take their place in a great hall.” Mary was momentarily distracted by Lizzie’s intent face, almost luminous in the dim light. Lizzie nudged her on.

“Well, it’s a very particular night that this story takes place. A
monster’s
been found on the shore at Lyme Regis. They are to decide its name. Just before they begin, a lad appears – someone they’ve never seen before. He’s dressed in a black wool coat. Everyone falls silent as he walks down the aisle and takes his
place among them. Who let him in? The gentlemen tried to catch each other’s eyes.”

“Why don’t they drive him out?”

“They’re curious. He knows things they don’t know – they can see it on his face. They want to suck his brains.”

Lizzie was watching her knowingly. “What manner of hair does the young man have?”

“His hair is black and plaited into a queue down his back.”

“Was it a coat like that he was wearing?” They both looked towards the door where Joseph’s coat hung when he was in the house.

“Yes,” said Mary. “It’s a mite long for this lad. But no matter. The meeting begins. The gentlemen fall to debating and arguing. Not the stranger. If he speaks, he will betray more than he wants to betray. So he sits in silence. He takes in everything they have to say, and then he stands up and walks out.” She turned on her side away from Lizzie. Rogue tears stung behind her eyes. “That’s all I know,” she said. “You tell the rest.”

Lizzie wove her fingers into Mary’s hair. “It were you, Mary,” she said sweetly.

There was a long quiet, while Lizzie lay plucking at Mary’s hair, methodically picking up one strand after another. In the Assembly Rooms across the square, the scrape of fiddles started up. Mary sighed. “Yes, it’s me. It’s me sitting there among my friends and enemies. Sitting with my mouth shut. Dressed like a man.”

“But your bosom would pout out.”

“No, look,” said Mary, rolling back towards Lizzie. “I wrap a towel tight around like this and Mother sews it closed. It could be done.”

He told her long stories about the blackamoor boys he played with, and how he learned to see that he was not like them and
fixed his heart on becoming so. About the slimy green soup he drank, because his nurse Belle said it would turn him black. A great wonder, thought Mary, this gentleman’s passion to be something he is not.

And then he was to have been a soldier. He was in officer’s training in a great college on the River Thames, but he was sent down. “Just a bit of mischief, and my whole life turned on it,” he said with a little laugh, leading her up the path in the Undercliff, talking all the while. There was a master that everyone loathed, and the cadets found a means to take revenge upon him. Mr. De la Beche drew a series of pictures of this master in a lewd embrace with a chambermaid – the redhaired chambermaid who worked in the masters’ quarters. Everyone recognized them immediately when they saw the caricatures. “She was – how shall I put it? – rather spectacularly endowed,” he said, “both as to bosom and as to buttocks. And the clever thing was that each drawing was franker and bolder than the one that came before – fewer clothes, you know, and the embrace, er, more compromising. I released the pictures one at a time, over several weeks. It was a beauty of a scheme, because the price went up each time, unless you had paid a subscription for the whole series, as many did. Oh, it was boyhood folly – but you have to admire the genius behind it.”

Mary stopped walking. “And in truth they consorted together, this master and this chambermaid?” she asked.

“Oh, no, I doubt it. I never saw a more prudish man. No doubt he was entirely oblivious to the wench – and
incapable
, I’d wager, even if he had been tempted. So you see, for boys, we were fiendishly clever – we pounced on his very weakness!”

Mary’s anger was a dark cap pressing down over her head. “What of the chambermaid? What became of her? Did she know of the lewd and lying pictures being passed around?”

“Well, I suppose that’s something we should have considered
at the time,” he said genially. “Lads of a certain age are beasts, aren’t they? I don’t know what became of her, because I left, you see, before they could drum me out.” He moved up the path again, and after a minute, so did Mary. He walked along, swinging his leather satchel, and told her with great relish about running away, walking across the Home Counties like a vagabond, limping into London, and the restless sea of people one sees there, the gaslights and coal smoke, and the fairs that draw spectators of every rank. He himself entered an exhibition hall with his uncle, and there on display was a naked woman, naked except for a small apron, almost the brown of her skin. “They chose that fabric, I warrant you, to give the impression of complete nakedness. She was a Hottentot, from the south of Africa. She had on a collar of shells and claws. They were treating the poor creature in a beastly fashion. A leash was tied around her neck, and the keeper was leading her like a dog.”

Mary let out a bark of horror, but he paid it no heed. He lowered his voice, it was himself he wanted to discuss. “You know, I had the strangest experience when I saw this exhibition. I was right at the front, not three feet from the woman, and she raised her head and looked at me, and I was filled with the most vivid conviction that she knew me! It was uncanny – such was my confusion that I could not abide being part of that crowd, and I left the exhibition hall before my uncle. It was all a delusion, of course. She had come directly to London from Africa, I believe, and she was only about twenty – I could not have encountered her in the West Indies so many years ago.”

Mary could not make sense of any part of this story. “These gawkers – they came to see how black she were?”

“No, I would say not.” They’d come up to the open chalk boulders and he put his kit down and leaned against one. “There are many Negroes in London. Perhaps it was scientific curiosity
that drew some of the spectators. There is a deal of interest at the moment in the development of the various races. I have read several papers on it. But of course, the spectators were not all learned, and even among those who were, I reckon it was rather a curiosity of a baser sort. People paid thruppence to buy sticks from a boy, and used them to prod her backside. To satisfy themselves that her rather large haunches were real. A man reached out his stick to try to lift her apron and see what was beneath, but she stepped out of the way. So I suppose it was the novelty of the Hottentot woman’s body.” He scuffled his feet in the mat of leaves rotting on the forest floor. “An enlarged property … of the female parts.” She would not look at him. “It suggests to scientists a … a heightened sexual proclivity. An appetite untrammelled in the savage of the species.”

And then she did look, and she saw the gleam in his eye, a falseness to his manner that she loathed. What did he see when he looked at her – what did he think she was? It was a down-dacious act, walking into the woods with a gentleman. She’d always known she was courting danger. But better he should grab at her like a drunken tranter on the Gosling Bridge, better he should know his own heart.

“Did you tell Miss Whyte about this display?” she asked.

“Of course not,” he said in surprise. “Oh, Mary! I tell you, Mary, because of its scientific interest.” He was laughing, but there was shame in his laugh.

TWENTY-ONE

atyrs inhabit a forest, and he becomes one. A sly satyr, who cloaks his intentions in sanctimony, reaching for her hand to say, “When they talk in church about man being in the image of God, it’s always the hands I think of. In Rome, there’s a wonderful image painted on a ceiling by an artist named Michelangelo – I have an etching of it – God animating Adam through a touch of their fingers.” He demonstrates with their two hands. Then he turns her hand over and, before she withdraws it, feels the calluses from her wedge hammer on her palm.