Curiosity (38 page)

he’d been ignorant of her own true self when she walked Miss Whyte up the hill to Aveline House, carrying the lady’s satchel. She understood fully only the day she saw them coming up Marine Parade from the Cobb, Miss Whyte in a rose-coloured wrap and pale orange gloves. Then she realized, not merely that he was lost to her, but that she was a feeble-brained stunpoll. She’d nurtured a hope so secret it had been secret to her own self. It was out in the open now, like debris dropped on the foreshore when the tide withdraws. How monstrous it was – it had no place in this world. And then rage seized her, and in her mind she went over all the things
he
had done – his hanging around the curiosity table and using speech laden with compliments, as though he could elevate her by his very manner of addressing her; his curious questions; his parading himself, a barefoot boy who lived with blackamoors; his talk about subjects decent common folk shut their ears to; his following her down alone to the shore, spreading her hair on the sand with tender hands. She put all these things on a scale and weighed them up against her lunatic hope. And
then it was clear to her that she was not mad, but that he certainly was.

Far, far better that he followed her no longer. It brought her the relief you feel when you finally vomit up the bit of rank fish that is tormenting your belly. It cleared her head, the way a killing frost will clear away fog. He would soon be gone away entirely, and she would be left, the person she had always been: sturdy, resolute, wholehearted, tramping down the shore, clambering over rocks with her collecting basket. Her strong legs treading a well-remembered path over the stones, her boot unerringly seizing the only passage wide enough for a foothold.
If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light
. She understood it now, James Wheaton’s text. But while she tramped her mind went slack, and then mischievously Henry came strolling in again in his charcoal jacket with tails and his fawn breeches and high black boots, Miss Whyte mimping along beside him, tipping her face up to his to whisper secrets. Wearing her rose-coloured gown and pale orange gloves, her colours all ajar, as if to say how pert she was, how wilful and daring, as if to proclaim why Henry loved her.

Ravens flock into town, they never come singly: Mary knew this from the year of her father’s death. They had been told for many months that parish support would cease, and the very week that Miss Letitia Whyte rode into town in the London coach, the Overseer of the Parish Poor carried his table out of the churchyard, never to return. He became once again plain George Davis, a sign painter. It was not his fault, people said. It was decided by the gentlemen in Whitehall, that the poor would never repent of their poverty if they were indulged with parish relief.

There are degrees of everything, thought Mary, standing at the back window watching rain fall on the sea. There were degrees of the high-born and degrees of the poor. Since
Richard’s death, they had fallen from the top of the poverty ladder to the rung next to the bottom. How easy it was to topple down, how impossible to haul yourself up! Joseph would never see them starve. But two rents were beyond Joseph – it was the rent that would be their undoing. On the table was a notice from the landlord. They had a week, and then he would be obliged to seize their furniture.

“We must sell what we can ourselves, before it comes to that,” Mary said to her mother, turning back and sitting at the table, where she was making rushlights. Molly agreed. The cupboard could go – there was not much to keep in it in any case. And the two rush chairs: they still had a bench to sit on, and the stool. But they would not sell the round table from the workshop – without the table, they could not hope for income at all.

Lizzie lay face down with her braids hanging over the edge of the cot and dreamed of picking mushrooms. At Axminster, a girl went to pick a mushroom and found a golden ring around the stem. “Our Lord put it there,” Lizzie said. “And He led the girl to find it.”

“Nature put it there,” said Mary. “A lady walked in the field and she dropped it and by hap a tiny mushroom grew up within the circle.” At the table, Mary stripped the tough skin from a reed and dreamed of her own windfall: a new intact fossil. She would not try to picture it, for it must be another such creature as no one had ever seen. Something to bring the scholars running down from Oxford with their purses at their waists. Something that had not been described, so that she herself could write a text describing it. She had been distracted, but she would focus now and find it. But day after day, she wandered the shore and returned with nothing but threepenny curios.

It was Colonel Birch who came to their rescue, hobbling into the square just as the Moffat boys carried the rush chairs down the steps. He paid the boys a half-crown for their trouble and sent them on their way. “This will never do,” he said. “You must have a few sticks to rest your bones on.”

He said he would think what was to be done. They heard nothing for days – neither from the landlord nor from Colonel Birch. Then Will Darby came to the door and with ill grace handed Mary a note. Miss Anning was invited to tea with Colonel Birch. Mary read the note at the door and said to her mother, “Colonel Birch has invited us for tea tonight.”

“I will not drag a sick child to Charmouth,” said Molly. But Mary would not go without her mother: she feared Will Darby’s tongue. So in the end, they left Lizzie and the two of them followed the cliff path to Charmouth and presented themselves at the door. Will Darby led them down the hall past the fossil room and into a drawing room, where they sat side by side on a settle. The settle was pulled up to the fire and served as a powerful barrier against the cold. Colonel Birch was in full uniform in a large armchair. At his elbow was a clay bust that Mary knew to be of John Wesley, lips painted in a thin red bow. This room was a museum in its own way – not of fossils, but of ornaments made from china and plaster and clay and marble. “Man’s handiwork,” Birch said proudly. “And down the hall, our Lord’s.” A girl served them tea, as well as bread and butter on china plates. Pure butter, without a trace of candle grease added to it.

When they had finished eating, Colonel Birch stood by the mantel and made a speech. He talked of his own straitened circumstances, the fact that he was on half pay and had not
succeeded in selling his commission. He dwelt a few minutes on the God-fearing and temperate king, whose gout had flown to his brain, not yet dead, but for these many years dead to himself and his world. He told them of his father, who for all of the years of his adult life had generously fed and clothed a neighbour woman and her six children as they came one by one fatherless into the world. He told them the story of coming up the street in Lyme Regis to observe a brace of stout youths carrying away a widow woman’s furniture, her two gentle daughters weeping at her bosom, and then he paused and lifted his moustache in the customary display of his dentures. Behind his long and rambling speech lay the question, Who had made them his responsibility? He did not address it and they (sitting by a warm fire licking butter from their fingers) were not inclined to ask. “And so I put it to myself,” he resumed, “
What do I possess of value?
and my brain lit on my collection of bones and shells, assembled through the industry of this young maiden we see before us. And so I sat myself down at this writing desk and composed a letter to a person of my acquaintance in London, one Mr. Bullock of the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, and he has done me the courtesy of an immediate reply. He agrees to reserve his hall on May fifteenth for an auction, and to send notices to all interested persons. With no expectation of gain for himself. It will be an alms for you and your family, Mrs. Anning, on the part of both Mr. Bullock and myself, although the auctioneer is a hard-headed fellow who insists on his commission. In the meantime, I have sent Mr. Axworthy a quarter’s rent in anticipation of these proceeds. I may never again have what I am about to part with, but I am resolved.”

Molly had lifted her apron to her eyes at mention of the king, and at the mention of Mr. Axworthy, she had begun rocking. “Now, now, madam, none of that,” Colonel Birch said. “It’s time
these bones made their way into the world. I have had my pleasure of them. We will pack them up and send them off.”

Molly used the apron to wipe her eyes. “Our Lord will bless you for this,” she said, “and Mary will help you. She will be at your door at sun-up tomorrow.”

Mary listened closely to this conversation, but she was unsure as to the thrust of it. Did he certainly intend to give them all the money from the auction sale? “Yes,” her mother said firmly on the way home. And so it seemed, for he had accepted Molly’s thanks.

“But why?” Mary asked. “He has already paid me for everything.” They were out on the cliff path, with the sea crawling below them, walking very quickly.

“It is the way the world works sometimes,” her mother said.

Preparing the collection was the very work Mary longed for. Walking the mile to Charmouth every morning, she left thoughts of Henry behind in Lyme; she climbed up and out of them. In the collecting room she was all thought, pure zeal, shut off from her worry. They chose a hundred specimens and she made up tickets for each. Miss Philpot had let her carry her Sowerby books to Charmouth, and she made careful distinctions between the
Asteroceras stellare
and the
Asteroceras confusum
.

“A pity we don’t have the whole skeleton of that one,” Mary said, admiring a grinning Ichthyosaurus skull, the centrepiece of the collection. “It was all there at first, the quarryman told me, but his mates ground the rest of it up for lime. He managed to rescue the head – he had it guarding the quarry. But he gave it to me because I was a girl and needed the money. You know, I was only twelve when I collected my first Ichthyosaurus. The first complete Ichthyosaurus ever collected.”

“Twelve,” Colonel Birch bleated. “You have nothing on Miss Isobel Cutler. A miss of
nine years
when she dug up a silver platter at Hadrian’s Wall. Dropped there by a Roman centurion in the year of Our Lord 400. Think of it!”

“But Colonel Birch,” Mary said, “Noah’s flood was three thousand years before our Lord was born.” She turned the centuries over in her mind like the leaves of a book, as she often did. “Think how old the Ichthyosaurus bones be!”

“Oh, they’re older, to be sure,” Colonel Birch said. “You have that over Miss Cutler.” He was such a sheep, Colonel Birch.
Ovis aries
. As she worked, Mary counted up all the ways he was a sheep: his nose like a steep hill, his stretched nostrils, his pale eyes that looked at you abashed with no light of cleverness in them. The white wool before and behind his ears, wool that seemed, in this proximity, to have bits of turf caught in it.

They wrapped the specimens in paper or cotton and packed them in crates. They packed the large Ichthyosaurus parts first, because the smaller specimens could nestle between. For packing the delicate tiles of sea lilies, with their segmented stems, Colonel Birch had a bale of wool brought in. They were three long days working on the Ichthyosaurus parts and the sea lilies. After the first day, Will Darby was nowhere to be seen – it was a maid who brought them their meals. Sometimes they took their dinner in the drawing room, where on the mantel lay a small white card with a name printed on it:
T. H. De la Beche Esq
. Below the name, the letters
PPC
, in ink in Henry’s hand. Those letters stood for words in French,
Pour Prendre Congé
. A new husband is assumed to have severed all previous ties, Colonel Birch told her, unless such a card be delivered to the door before the wedding. “He delivered it, but did not have time to take tea,” he said. “Hastening back to the fair Letitia. Taken a prisoner of love!” Also on the mantel, as though to illustrate this
story, was a pair of lovers. The girl sat on the boy’s knee and stroked the boy’s temple with her white hand. Her gown was open at the top; her bosom was just at the level of his dreaming face. “From the Chelsea factory in Condon,” Colonel Birch called from his armchair. “Soft-paste porcelain.”