Curiosity (46 page)

ary had a new companion and she stopped in at the quarry to show him off.

“Mr. Bennett gave him to me. He belonged to their William.”

“No dogs where William’s gone, poor perisher,” someone said. The quarrymen leaned on their picks among the broken stone, their faces masks of dust.

“What be ’er name?” Simon Larch asked.

“
Tray
, Bennett called him.”

“Where’s the sense in that?”

“Do you expect sense from a Bennett?”

Mary was ready to leave, but the dog had vanished. She whistled and he came bounding out – he’d been investigating one of the tunnels. “You’ll be flattened when these cliffs collapse,” she scolded him. “And they will, you know,” she said to the men. “Why does Phelps have you digging so deep?”

“Do you expect sense from Old Phelps?” Simon said.

That was true enough. Just the morning before, Mary had been looking out the window at the rain and had seen Phelps’s
opulent new four-in-hand driven into the square. Heedless of getting wet, she’d run out and tapped on the window where the owner of the lime quarry sat, and the liveried groom had come round and opened the door. “You are destroying Church Cliffs,” Mary had cried. “They will never sustain such undermining with all this rain.”

In spite of the rain, Mr. Phelps had paid her the respect of putting his head out of the carriage door. “What do you suggest I do?” he said helplessly, charmingly. “There is a prodigious hunger for Dorsetshire lime in Paris and London – they can’t get enough of it. I had three more orders today.”

“Set gunpowder under the cliffs!” Mary shouted in rage as he drove away. “Blast them down and be done with it!”

She said goodbye to the quarrymen and walked up towards Black Ven. Tray followed at her heels as though he’d belonged to her forever. She had three skirts on her for warmth and her varnished stovepipe hat on her head. Summer was gone. Others had been lucky in collecting that summer, although not Mary. Reverend William Conybeare had been fossiling on this shore and had found a skull he was convinced belonged to the flat vertebrae that intrigued them all. It was narrow, like a turtle’s, and its big teeth were set in separate sockets. On the strength of it, he’d coined a name for the creature:
Plesiosaurus
. Mary did not see him or the skull – she heard all this from Miss Philpot – but she understood in a flash. Conybeare was trying to assert his right to a new order of animal before anyone else found a full specimen.

And one day, Mr. Gleed had approached her on Black Ven, all sweaty and agitated, and led her reverently over to something he’d found in the cliff. It looked like the headless remains of an Ichthyosaurus and she told him so, although she couldn’t identify the species without the skull. By his crafty expression, she saw that he didn’t credit it. The next Sabbath, she stepped into
the vestibule of the Independent Chapel and there were some ribs and a few broken vertebrae displayed on a table, with a notice affixed to the wall behind them:

Now Mary had the shore to herself, and she was glad of it. A week ago, a fog had rolled in, so dense that the townsfolk avoided going out, afraid of disappearing into it altogether. But fog was Mary’s ally; it focused all her senses on a little pod of shore. In that pod, she bent to scour the cliff face, cocking her ear for her invisible partners, for the gulls screaming advice and warning, and her father just a few feet ahead, his boot crunching on the shingle. Today, she said to herself. Today the cotton veil would lift its hem and she’d see bones in the rock.

And not ten minutes after starting out, she was proved right. But it was a saucer-eye she saw and a row of familiar grinning teeth set in a trench, high above the tide line. Not the new dragon they were all racing to find, but the uncanny head of a massive Ichthyosaurus.

It turned out to be an
Ichthyosaurus platyodon
, with eight perfect ammonites fused in careless adornment at its neck. Thirty-five feet long – there was much amazement in the town at the size of it. Mary hired Henry Marsden, the chemist’s son, to help her. He was a twelve-year-old with a child’s ways about him, pulling his hands up into his sleeves in idle moments and flapping them like wings or fins. But he knew how to be quiet and look, and within an hour, he’d learned to tell fossilized bone from rock. They had a month of companionable work, chipping off the overburden of slate.

Then Mary found a five-foot
Ichthyosaurus vulgaris
. This one was so perfectly preserved that between its ribs lay embossed stone that she recognized as bits of skin. A few yards away, she found another. It was an excess of riches. This is what comes when your eye is single, she told herself. Joseph came by in the evening and helped her build frames. She’d been mounting her specimens in hot wax and sand, but no more: a wagon rolled up and a tranter unloaded plaster of Paris in leaden sacks. “A waste of good money, that,” Joseph complained, and Mary laughed. She strode beside the cart that carried the frames to the Cobb, parrying jests with the tranter, and then watched the dockers sag under the weight as they carried the bones down into the ship – ancient bones taking to the sea, sailing east up the coast to Southend-on-Sea, and then up a wide river to London, where Mary had never been, but where she might one day go.

Henry De la Beche, Esquire, was back in town from his grand tour, not so prone to smiling and laughing or even to talking as he once was. He and Mary had encountered each other in the lower town when he was first back. She was with Miss Philpot. He had offered his condolences regarding Lizzie and she had replied with the civility that her pride required of her. He did not work the shore now – it seemed he was often off geologizing in other parts. Twice she’d seen him driving his barouche alone up Church Street towards the Charmouth Road, his valise in the back, but she never saw him return.

Then one day, when she was waiting in Cockmoile Square, he materialized in front of the table. She got quickly to her feet. She had no idea how he had crossed the square. He greeted her and bent to greet her dog. “I have something for you, Miss Anning,” he said, straightening up. He held a small paper package out to her, and she took it and unwrapped it to find a pocket watch
worked in gold. “I bought it in Switzerland, in a shop with clocks ticking on every wall. You should carry a timepiece when you work the shore, you know. One day, it might save your life.”

She thrust the package back at him. “Timepieces are for them that can’t read the sun and the tides. I have no interest in frippery.”

He was not deterred. “Take it, Mary,” he said gently. “Let me give you that.” Across the square, puddles of water gleamed in the sun. His hand was on the table now, an inch from hers.

She pulled her hand back. “I’ll keep it against a dark day,” she said. “It will be easier to hock than the furniture.”

That afternoon, she felt queer and was disinclined to go to the shore. She climbed the stairs and lay down for a minute, and then she got up and pulled a box out from under the bed. It was the repository of useless things she could not throw out – short bits of string and the shards of a broken saucer, a comb with missing teeth. She dropped the timepiece into it and then sat on the bed for a moment more, wondering why this fine gentleman, who had everything in the world he wanted, should not leave a poor spinster in peace. Then she went down to the workshop. She would work on her study of the belemnite fossils. Buckland had no idea what the belemnite was, but Mary did, and she would prove it.

A week before, she had dissected a cuttlefish a fisherman sold her, to study its correspondences with the belemnite. She had not been able to separate out the ink bag, and ink had seeped from the flaccid mass of the cuttlefish at every touch – just here on the table were its stains. She ran her finger over them. A pity to have stained this table where her father had made his cabinets, the table where the head of the Ichthyosaurus lay all one winter when she was just a girl. A vexing current of feeling swelled in her chest at the thought of herself back then, how simple and resolute a girl she had been. And then absurd tears stung her
eyes. This was his effect on her, Sir Foppling Fossil, and she hated him for it. He had made her cry more than once in the Undercliff, turning her into herself, drawing up her sad stories. That morning at the table he’d taken her off guard – she would need to arm herself against surprises.

And so, waking up in the mornings, she set about judging whether he was in town just then, based on the light and the air. He was certainly home, she decided one morning in late September. But Miss Philpot came by towards noon and she learned that Mr. De la Beche was gone away again, he was in Cornwall, so her science of divining his whereabouts was in its infancy.

A week later, she was at the window and saw him riding up Broad Street, and longing twisted inside her at the sight of him, so
familiar
in his top hat and blue jacket. All his lively way of being in the world apparent in the way he sat his horse. And then she found herself practising jommetry, sending her will out to turn him around and bring him down to the square. Not
Mary’s
will – Mary Anning wanted none of it. It was the will of the wayward girl who (without sharing her intentions with Mary) had contrived to be alone with him on the shore, and had showed him the path to climb up to the Undercliff, and lingered with him in the forest. It was that foolish girl returned to bewitch her. So Mary gathered up her tools and took herself out to Monmouth Beach to replenish her store of ammonites. And wandering along Monmouth Beach with her wedge hammer in hand, she found herself in a waking dream where she was on a ship, making for a strange northern shore of red cliffs. A shore he had spoken of one day, a world like theirs but wondrous different, where everything was created anew before your eyes. They were standing on the deck, she and Henry, the two of them dressed in warm cloaks, his arm around her shoulder – and the inexpressible joy and
comfort of it made her lean against the cliff and bow her head and choke out tears onto the shingle. It was not Hope, her old enemy, tormenting her in this fashion – Hope was well and truly dead. It was something else, a species of insanity. So prudent, so hard-headed she had been all these many months. But she had let her
anger
go dormant, she had left a chink in her armour, and this insanity had slipped in.

But still she sent her will out, and on the third day, he walked up from Marine Parade and stopped by the table, and the demented creature who had taken possession of Mary regarded this as a potent sign.

“You’re not in Cornwall,” she said.

“I’m back just briefly. I’m leaving for London tomorrow.” Just now he was on his way to the tailor’s, where he was having his jackets made over as a means of economizing.

Two French schooners lay at anchor at the Cobb that day, and a party of French tourists strolled about the square. “We always feared being invaded by the French,” Mary said. “And now we have been.”

Henry looked at her soberly and did not reply. He was a stone thinner, she reckoned, than when he went to France. She turned on him the eyes she turned on rocks, and saw through his ribs to his heart, where sadness lay, and self-pity perhaps, but no love for his wife.

“Wait just a minute.” She ran down into the workshop and fetched up the bottle of sepia. “You’re using up old things out of thrift,” she said. “It’s eons old, this ink, and it cost nothing but a little labour.” Hours and hours of labour, in fact. This was the fruit of her study of the belemnite – proof positive that the belemnite was like a cuttlefish, made ink. She had reconstituted it from bits of black she’d chipped from the fossils.

He took the bottle, tilting it to admire the ink inside – he
seemed quite overcome by this gift. When he was gone, Mary went upstairs to the bedroom and picked the watch out of the box under the bed. It was the size and shape and weight of the best of the pyrite ammonites. It was a buttery gold, softer than the fossils. No one in the square had been watching to interpret this gift as the world would interpret it, there was only Mary to decide what it meant. The watch had a satisfying weight to it, and she found a length of ribbon and hung it around her neck, tucking it away under her waistcoat.

That afternoon, it rained again. Instead of working on her fossils, Mary sat sewing in the kitchen. It was her faded plaid skirt she sewed, refurbishing it, a job she’d had in mind for some time. A simple matter of picking out the stitches that held the skirt to its waistband and refolding the pleats so that the brighter strips that had never seen the sun were now to the outside. She sat and stitched the waistband back on, feeling the watch nestled between her breasts. She had told him things she had spoken of to no one else in her whole life. And he had listened with sympathy – it seemed a sort of miracle when she recalled it now. Then Miss Whyte traipsed into the square like a wicked fairy. After that, Mary had seen nothing but deception and lust – her fury had coloured everything that came before. But in truth, Mary thought as she stitched, his every gesture towards her spoke of kind regard. Kind regard? Her heart began to pound and she had to sit still until her hand steadied. Oh, not
kindness
– she could not let herself put a name to it.