Curiosity (34 page)

The hand
, the satyr whispers
, again
, and in his mind, he pulls Mary towards him, easing her down in the bracken, feels his way through those rough skirts to the long, strong, bare leg within. But still he refrains. Instead, he talks, slides to subjects where the forbidden glitters, his voice coming from some seat deep inside him. Someone, his better self perhaps, is listening behind the trees, cautioning him, but still he goes on, drops his voice and carries on, telling her of boyhood follies, allowing himself a boyhood frankness, and feels a heady sense of liberty in the telling. Mary looks sternly beyond him, her strong dark brows
drawn together. It’s perverse, this talk, he’d be thrown out of decent company for it, but it’s only talk, and as he follows her out of the clearing and through the stands of bracken lining the path, he congratulates himself for resisting when no other man of vigour would have done.

Then it’s so cold and stormy that no sane person would venture onto the shore. The bathing machines are carried to high ground, the very fishing boats are beached. Henley’s pond freezes over. His mother and Mr. Aveline wait for a fair day for driving – they’ve accepted an invitation to the Devonshire home of their friends the Talbots. Henry has declined, raising his mother’s hopes that he’ll be going to London. The morning they leave, he finally mentions the letter from Letitia. “And you have not gone to her in spite of this?” his mother cries. Then she’s speechless with fury. She climbs into the coach without a goodbye.

Aveline House is drafty and dark, and he misses the outings to the shore. Free of Mrs. Aveline’s influence, the cook serves stewed salt fish every night. Henry commits to a Christmas meal with the Henleys. He toys with excuses to invite Mary to call; they could sit by the fire and talk in a civilized fashion. But he busies himself sorting through his papers, and as one day goes by and then another, his perspective on the past few months alters. Finally, he finds himself outside the thing altogether – he’s an onlooker, watching with a frown as a gentleman creeps into the forest with a comely girl of a station far beneath him. There is a name for this, and any onlooker would be quick to provide it. Although (Henry asserts in his own defence) those who would condemn him have no notion of the
inside
of the thing – his respect for the girl, the restraint he’s shown, and his kindness to her.

But it will not do, he is forced to admit that night as he takes his solitary supper by candlelight. As to the intentions of the
gentleman, the disapproving onlooker would be entirely correct. A pulse beats in the gentleman’s veins, a pulse in the nature of an imperative, and in its fulfillment lie infamy and heartache. He must distance himself from her. He will, he vows. He breaks off a piece of bread, dips it into the fish stew, eats it. He takes a swallow of wine. Gazing into the candle, noting the lazulite blue where the flame springs from the wick, he tests out the weight of the resolution. I will avoid the square when the coach is due, he’s able to say. He empties his glass. I will end our outings to the shore, unless we are in company. He pushes back his chair. Will she feel this as a loss? It’s hard to know what she feels. But an absence in his chest, the absence of a certain goading restlessness, tells him he’s made the right decision. In the peaceful company of his better self, he goes to the library after supper and reads until the early hours.

He has callers. The next afternoon, Edmund and Mrs. Sutton are announced. Edmund Sutton, the son of his mother’s old plantation friend, and now, like Henry, an absentee planter. Sutton was in school in England when Henry was a boy in Jamaica, they hardly know each other, but Henry greets him with enthusiasm. They’re travelling from Weymouth to Bristol, and he insists they stay a day or two. It’s clear they’re taken aback by the invitation, but the weather is bad and after a moment’s hesitation, they accept. Henry has never met Sutton’s wife. Her manner is all kindness, a pantomime of kindness, tenderness and sympathy represented by tilted head and melting glances. “A finer wife than any man deserves,” Sutton says stoutly on each occasion that the lady crosses his line of vision.

The second night, Mrs. Sutton admires a piece of needlework hanging in the drawing room and asks Henry to relay a compliment to Mrs. Aveline. “That piece was not done by my mother,” he says. “It was a gift from my fiancée, Miss Whyte.”

“Oh, I have never known Miss Whyte to work in petit point,” says Mrs. Sutton.

“You and Letitia are friends? I had no idea!”

Something unspoken passes between Mrs. Sutton and her husband, and she inclines her head in assent. It is enormously puzzling, that she did not reveal this acquaintance before now. Nor does she ask why Letitia and Henry are apart over Christmas. Her expression in that moment is anything but solicitous – it is canny, and
righteous
, as though she is privy to the truth of the thing, knows that Letitia has thrown Henry over, and knows why.

Henry refuses to pursue it. He turns in his chair, resumes the subject he and Sutton spent the afternoon on: the future of geology. He describes the amazement he feels riding over the English countryside, at the thought of the unknown layers beneath every roadway and meadow. Looked at in this light, England is as unstudied as America. “What is lacking,” he announces, “is a comprehensive textbook for the practitioners of this new science, and I have in mind to write one.”

Sutton turns his moon face back to the fire. “A capital project for the gentleman who likes to ride out on an autumn day, especially for one who detests shooting.”

“You misunderstand me,” Henry says. “I do not intend this as a leisure pursuit.” A manual will require a staggering amount of study and research, but it will establish him as an expert in the field. And there are many practical applications to geology. Once his name is known, he’ll be sought after by mining companies, by roadworks, asked to locate wells, that sort of thing. What he does not say is that, to date, his living has paid for his geologizing; very shortly, his geologizing will need to pay his living. But no doubt they grasp this.

“You would work as a sort of engineer?” Mrs. Sutton says
uncertainly, and Henry thinks of the chagrin his mother would feel overhearing this conversation.

He sees them off in the morning and climbs straight up to the library. Their discomfort on the subject cemented his intentions. It’s a vocation that suits him splendidly – a science in its infancy, where he will not be burdened by orthodoxy, can carve out his own niche. The possibilities are endless and lucrative. He’s deferred numerous financial obligations with the expectation of his marriage settlement. If Letitia has indeed broken with him, he has no choice but to find paid employment. All to the good – he feels a rising excitement about a life prescribed by worthwhile work. What a pity he can’t talk this through with Mary! Not that she would grasp the entire import of it. He just longs to hear her response, which would be a true expression of her thoughts and feelings. How grateful he is for their conversations through the autumn. They recalled him to the days when he was a barefoot boy in osnaburg shorts, unhampered by codes of social conduct: a precious, essential past.

On a calm day, he walks out and down to the lower town. The sea moves beyond the wall like a forgotten obligation, picking up light from the eastern sky, striations of foam gleaming white on each wave. He passes through the square, glancing once at her closed door. He will not knock, he is firm (but it’s a stingy fate that begrudges them even a chance encounter). He meets Miss Philpot near the bridge and refrains from inquiring about Miss Anning. As he climbs back up Broad Street, he stops to admire the mist lying between Stonebarrow and Golden Cap, and wonders if Mary is at that moment on the shore.

At Aveline House, he pauses, reluctant to go back in. What made him think his parting from her had to be absolute? he wonders as he hangs his cloak behind the door. Far too cruel! He can be her gentle friend and protector. He is already her
protector – he allowed her to escape him. But escape him to what? Mary Anning will never marry. She is doomed a spinster because of her work, as his mother frequently remarks. It’s a sad fact that no man of her own class will take her on. But others would, with alacrity, other men of other classes, and on terms that would leave her vulnerable to disgrace. She is chaste now, he feels no doubt, but she is manifestly a creature of flesh and blood (oh, the way she has of turning her head towards him, as though she is turning on a pillow), such a creature of nature – it is almost heartbreaking to imagine the joy she would take in it! It’s only a matter of time before someone snatches up what he has been scrupulous enough to resist. And this future, inevitable rival – will he have Henry’s regard for Mary? Henry sees them stealing into the forest together, his rival foppishly attired in blue velvet, leering like an imbecile and reaching his paddling fingers towards her bodice, and Henry swings his walking stick and clips the man in the back of his knees, watches him fall to the path, howling in anguish.

And then, as he sits over his letters in the drawing room, he begins to muse on how an affair could be conducted so as to minimize its risks, both to Mary and to the theoretical gentleman. Resolutely he sets the subject aside, only to find himself teasing at it five minutes later. For the next few days, he is powerless to resist. Mary makes things worse, raising her black eyes to him every hour of the day and night. Then she begins to slide into his room after dark, after the house is quiet and the room lit only by the orange light of the dying coals in his hearth, she takes to pulling her hair out of its knot, her heavy dark hair, and laying the long, lovely length of her body down on him.
Warm me
, she says, and he cannot fail to oblige.

The week after his mother returns to Lyme, Henry encounters Mary in the square and feels a lurch of emotion at the sight of
her. She’s the one who issues an invitation to the shore, and he cannot refuse. He’s taken aback and rebuked by her composure. She is grave, distracted; she seems scarcely to take in his conversation. He’s horrified to see
straw
sticking out of the holes in her boots. Packed in for warmth, presumably. The tips of her fingers are terribly inflamed and when he offers her a hand on a steep bank, she winces and pulls back from his touch. It is
blains
, she says, from the cold. She is uncharacteristically pale. There is fatigue in the way she moves – he wonders what she has eaten that day. She was out early, she tells him, she walked to Black Ven with Miss Philpot at the first low tide, which means that she climbed the hill first to collect Miss Philpot, who could not decently walk alone.

Spring is very early. Yellow primroses emerge, taking advantage of the light before the canopy fills in. She ventures down a different path than they normally follow, and then she stops suddenly and points out a fork in it. A smuggler lives there, she tells him, a man by name of Digby, who many years ago enticed her sister Martha onto a makeshift raft so that she drowned. “She was on a wooden door from a ship. She was playing at being a sailor. It was a sport of a group of children, and the sea took her. She was four.”

“I warrant he was just a lad himself at the time,” Henry ventures. “No doubt he intended no harm,” and she flies into a rage.

“Lad or no lad,” she cries. “Intended or not. It was heedless folly!” Tears glisten on her lashes. She will retreat from such a painful memory, he thinks, she’ll fall into silence. But her face continues to work. She drops her voice then and tells him about an ominous man who came to her father’s funeral, a man in a torn black coat. Not entirely a stranger – she recognized him as a mummer who’d come to their door the Christmas before the pox, on a night when they were starved with cold. A lone
mummer, a very ill sign. Seeing him pacing behind the coffin, she felt the terror she’d felt when her father opened the door to him, she seemed to hear again the song he sang. “My father let that evil body in, though he’d heard the song – he slipped the man a coin.”

“What was the song, Mary?”

She breathes painfully for a minute, and then she raises her head and sings with mournful emphasis.

At the end, she puts her face down and cries bitterly. She has her own handkerchief and will not use his. “Oh, it was not the mummer I feared – that was just a child’s fancy. It was my father.” Her words come out choked with emotion, she lapses into dialect. “My mother be full of fearful notions, death all the time clawing at her shoulder, but it were not my mother who let death in. No, it were my father. He would never bow his spine to bear the weight of trouble. He did not know proper caution.”

It’s an image that pierces his heart – the vulnerable child, seeing accident and illness and starvation threaten to carry off the last of them, her yearning love for her foolhardy father. One must look for fecklessness and superstition at the root of it, he tells himself. It is ignorance and low breeding that compound the problems of such families. But he cannot hold back the truth that she feels as deeply as any woman of his own class would feel, that she has marshalled every ounce of will and intelligence to
ameliorate her fate. Then, at the sight of her sobbing figure, a different feeling rises – anger, that he should have let this knowing in, because it will not be so easy to force it back out. She is a dangerous companion, Mary Anning, with her mud-edged petticoat and her sore fingers. There is a contagion here – this comes all from improper fraternization, from closing a gap where a gap must be maintained!

He strides up the path ahead of her. When he comes to the clearing, he has the impulse to keep walking, but then he thinks of her weeping alone in the forest and his anger collapses. He sits on the log. He’s losing his footing; everything seems to unmoor him these days. He’s
sweemy
, as Mary would say, in danger of floating away. The very globe, untethered from the ropes that moored it, is floating away with him on it. It could be that he’s hungry himself – he has neglected lunch. Mary comes into the clearing and sits down on the ground by the log, leaning back against it. She does not seem piqued that he walked away from her. She asks so little of him! He reaches over and briefly clasps her shoulder. “Alas, the young are at the mercy of the old,” he says.