Curiosity (35 page)

Mary wraps her arms around her knees and lays her cheek to rest on her skirt, and they sit in silence. Above them, the stonechat makes its distinctive sound. The ash trees are coming out in bud, dressing themselves in the softest green. It’s a very great gift, her opening her heart to him in this way. He longs to be worthy of it. And so he does not speak. He and Mary sit by the fallen trunk and gradually, in their silence, all his chattering words that hung in the clearing these many weeks dissolve, gradually they are scattered and taken away by the forest air. They sit on the damp, mossy ground where fronds of fern slowly uncurl their bent heads – not in a drawing room, as he
pretended, not even a cathedral, as many might say. This is a work of nature, husbanded only by its dyings and rottings and seedings, misted by the Channel breezes even when there is no rain. This is a forest, and perhaps, after all, they are just two of its creatures.

TWENTY-TWO

n a cloudy day, when Molly pulled her shawl over her head and went to the churchyard to see the Overseer of the Parish Poor, Will Darby with his rick of red hair came to the table with a note from Colonel Birch.

Mary looked over the note at Will Darby.
Charles
, Colonel Birch called him. Because it saved learning a new name – he’d always had a Charles. Will Darby had picked a sea lily up from the table. She’d cut the shale into a tile around it, and it swayed gracefully across its matrix on a long stalk. Will Darby tilted it to the light, eyeing it with the air of a man intent on exercising
some meagre authority. “It is a
crinoid
,” she said to him. “They are animals, but they grow on stems like flowers.” He scowled, offended at being instructed by such as her. She did not know for certain what
itinerant
meant, but she saw what she must do. “Tell Colonel Birch I refuse to deal with a thin-faced nesseltripe,” she cried in a sudden temper. “Tell him I’ll be in Charmouth myself in the morning.”

The next morning, she picked out as many pieces as she could carry and wrapped each one in a paper. As she opened the door, she saw Mr. De la Beche ride into the square and swing down from his horse in a fluid motion, standing with one hand on the bridle, cupping the soft muzzle of the horse. Henry, she thought. She pulled the door almost closed and waited until he was gone, leading the horse up Broad Street, before she set out on the walk to Charmouth with her heavy load.

At Charmouth, she walked up the single street to the house she knew to be Colonel Birch’s, ignoring the townspeople who always stared when she walked through the town with one gentle man or another. Will Darby answered the door, wearing a string tied around his head to keep the hair out of his eyes. With a terse nod, he left her standing in the hall. The light from a high window fell on a carving on the hall table, the bust of a man with a garland of leaves around his head. It was carved in white marble, so amazingly like flesh that she longed to touch it. Then Will Darby was back and led her sullenly down the corridor, to a room filled with tables and shelves of fossils (it was just as she had pictured it), and she breathed in the familiar smell of dust and the shore. Two chairs were arranged at a grand window, with a small table between them. Colonel Birch sat in one with his sore foot wrapped in sheepskin and propped on a stool. “Sit yourself down, maid,” he said, gesturing to the second chair. “If ye dare.” It was indeed a most curious chair:
a lion, with its head snarling over her head, and its legs become chair legs. On each side a muscular tail curved up to form an armrest. “What do you think of that workmanship, eh?” Colonel Birch said.

Mary peered down at the tassels of the tails, where the carver in his exuberance had carved lions’ heads. “There be more heads and tails than nature would allow to one beast,” she said.

“I bought it from an Arab in Bath,” Colonel Birch said, “when the Egyptomania was upon me. Very well, then! Help the maiden with her bundle, Charles, and we’ll see what she has found.”

Mary sat on the edge of the chair in this room where all her industry lay around her and watched him go through the fossils. In the end, he bought everything she had carried in – as she’d known he would. For a strange little shrimp-like creature alone, he paid eighteen shillings. And then he sat back and lit his clay pipe, pulling the whole candle flame into the bowl of the pipe by his sucking. With her money pouch like a stone at her waist, Mary sat while Will Darby served wine and oatcakes, she sat back in the lion’s lap and looked at her collection laid out on shelves on three sides of the room, narrow, unvarnished shelves that reached from the floor to the height of her head. If they were mine, she thought, I would arrange them in the order they were found, from lowest in the cliffs to highest, and she remembered asking Buckland one of the questions that had troubled her since a girl: if the earth was formed on the third day and the creatures on the fifth, how came the creatures to be buried so deep within the earth? And he said again what he always said, that the rock was all the sediment of the Flood, and so contained the bodies of creatures who had died in it, turned to stone as a caution to man. And she asked him then why the Ichthyosaurus for all its size did not sink to the bottom of the rock as the sediment settled, and he turned away from her without answering.

The wine, called Madeira, was in a china flagon with a duck on the spout so that when you tipped the flagon to pour, the duck seemed to be swimming on a river of Madeira. “What a piece of workmanship, eh?” Colonel Birch cried, and Mary thought how Lizzie would like it. “More Madeira, my dear?” the Colonel asked, leaning over to refill her cup. She drank the lovely Madeira and looked around her in the dusty, light-filled room. This was her collection. She could put a name to every specimen; she could tell where each was found and how it was dug out. If she were not poor, this would be her collection. Colonel Birch sank into a doze and when her cup was empty, she poured herself another to watch the duck swim.

Walking back into Lyme Regis, she felt sweemy being so high above the town. The town, she saw, was a hive: it had been built up in layers and was penetrated by the street, and she was descending down into it. At the top of the hive were the rich, snoring in their castles full of booty from the shore. What a treasure it was to have everything together! Colonel Birch was right, after all, not to be choosy but to save everything. And he did not ticket them, he did not tell the fossils their names, but waited for them to tell him. Better he should have them. He was not clever, but he had the heart of a collector. Whereas she was out under the sky where she belonged, out on the muddy street, going down into the town empty-handed, walking past the house where the pig-faced lady lived with her sisters, down onto Broad Street, where Aveline House sat squarely against the street, where the comely Henry De la Beche in his trousers lived, who knew all the names of the layers in the town and on the shore, and dared to think beyond his teachers. Her own understanding was imperfect – for a practitioner of Undergroundology, she
lacked instruction, and so she knocked on the door. “Is Henry in?” she asked when a maid came to the door.

“Mind your tongue, Miss,” said the maid sharply, but asked her to wait in the hall all the same, and then Henry himself came out in his shirt sleeves, wearing a waistcoat in dove grey, this fair young gentleman whose betrothed was gone, gone, wiped out in the stroke of a pen.

“The map you made me is wrong,” she said to his smiling face.

“Possibly it is,” he said. “Well, then we should correct it.” He said he would go to the shore with her, but they were just eating their noon meal. He took her into a small room and said he would have something brought in for her. “I shall ask the maid to bring you a refreshment while you wait,” was what he said, and left alone Mary repeated this sentence to herself in the tongue of the high-born. Then the maid came back with a large tumbler of drink and a soft bread roll on a tray. “It’s
sherry
,” she said when Mary asked. It was sweeter than the Madeira, and softer.

When he came back into the little room, he had his coat on. He asked her what was wrong with the map and she told him. “It offers the view of a kestrel hawk,” she explained. “I need the view of a mole.”

As they walked along Bridge Street and passed the square, she gave a small wave in case Lizzie was watching from the window. They did not turn towards the western shore and the Undercliff. No, they went up through the graveyard and down towards Black Ven. It was Mary who set their course, walking in a demure way she had never walked before. She had changed in the course of the morning, she’d become soft through and through, without a centre. Like an invertebrate – with the same sort of thin shell between herself and the world. They were on the
shore then. They stood shoulder to shoulder by the cliff and watched the waves fold over themselves, watched the fingers of water that chased up the shore after each wave retreated. The foreshore was a brilliant blue, the blue of the sky reflected in its pools. She turned and watched him watching the sea, looked at his straight nose and his hazel eyes, and thought with wonder that he did not see the happenings that lingered here on the shore, that left their smudge in the sand and their colour in the air. He came innocent to the shore, a visitor. Although deep in the Undercliff she’d told him about the sinking of the
Alexander
, the way the whole town stood on the Cobb in the howling wind and clutched each other while its great mast tipped. She’d told him about going out early the next morning, among all the other scavengers combing the shore for booty, and how she’d found the body. Why did she tell him? There was never such a gentleman for drawing things out of her, he was unique to his species. And then she had the sudden sensation that he could read her thoughts, and she said in confusion, “It were just here. The body of Lady Jackson. I came walking up and I saw something white on the foreshore, and I knew in a wink what it were.”

“What did you do, Mary?” he asked.

She felt heat gather round her eyes. “I went back to the cliffs,” she whispered. “I picked the coltsfoot blooming there, armfuls of it, and scattered the blossoms over her body.” And that was the truth.

“Did you not tell them in the town?”

“No. I left her to the sea.” Mary frowned and looked beyond him. If he carried on watching her in this fashion, he would see through her. “But later that morning, some folk found her. They took her up and laid her in St. Michael’s church. And then I carried flowers to the church to keep the body sweet. After a week, we
learned who she was. Then her two brothers came from London and carried her away.”

She ran across the sand now and stood still on the very spot.

“It was just here I found her. She wore a white gown with lace at the bosom and trailing skirts. Her hair was spread out behind her. It was so fair it was almost silver. It lay on the sand like the wings of an angel. Even in death she was graceful, she had the grace of a lady.” And suddenly she had dropped on her side to the sand and she was showing him the way the arms lay.