Curiosity (52 page)

In fact, the fateful meeting had been intended for February 9 but was two weeks delayed, because the ship that bore the plesiosaur from Weymouth had to be dry-docked at the Thames estuary for a repair to its hull. Reverend Conybeare went down to the London docks daily to await its arrival, out of fear that Sir Everard Home might intercept it before he did. When the ship finally arrived, the specimen in question was transported to the Geological Society rooms in Covent Garden, where eight stout youths attempted to carry it to the meeting chambers on the first floor. But it was a very wide frame that the finder had built and the exhibit got firmly stuck in the entry, so that the scientific gentlemen arriving for the meeting had to jockey for position on the stairs, where they examined it by candlelight. Reverend Conybeare hovered above it in an ecstasy of ambivalence, desperate to seize whatever glory attended the find, anxious to avoid disgrace should the creature turn out to be fraudulent. Finally he settled on pointing out a mistake in the presentation (the radius and ulna had been carelessly transposed, he said), forced to acknowledge at last another hand in the fossil’s preparation. But the consensus was clear, and there were no less experts than Charles Lyell and William Buckland and George Sowerby in attendance: every part of
Plesiosaurus conybeari
conformed to the scattered pieces they had been finding for years.

After they had looked their fill, the scientific gentlemen were summoned to the meeting proper in the room above, which they had to access by the foul and treacherous servants’ entry at the back of the building. In the upper room, Reverend William
Conybeare entertained further questions. Then the attention of the company was seized by the Society’s new president, the illustrious undergroundologist William Buckland, who rose to make a sensational announcement: the discovery of the first ancient land reptile. Old bones long considered to be those of elephants brought over by the Romans were in fact, when seen in connection with recent finds, the remains of a massive meat-eating land reptile that he had named
Megalosaurus buckland
. This identification had been validated by Georges Cuvier himself, and indeed was confirmation of recent Biblical scholarship, which indicated the creation of earlier worlds before the present one, worlds alluded to in the phrase “without form and void” in Genesis 1:2.

Buckland’s presentation was followed by the eager leaping up of one Doctor Gideon Mantell, who had waited four years to announce indisputable evidence of a massive land reptile found in the Cuckfield quarry, but whose findings, alas, were not recorded in the formal Proceedings of the Society on a point of order, as he had not arranged to be on the agenda.

THIRTY-FOUR

seasonable day in late winter, near noon. A heavily laden carriage was stalled on a steep road in Oxfordshire. Shotover Hill had thwarted the horses, two poorly matched pairs of blacks. They tottered with swaying heads, helpless against the whip, their heaving sides brindled with lather. The gentleman inside the carriage tapped sharply on the window. “Oy!” the coachman shouted to a lad standing by the road, and the lad looked up eagerly and deftly caught the coin the coachman tossed him. He yanked open a gate and a black and white blur exploded from the yard, a baying pack of furious Dalmatians. The blinkered horses rose in terror in their traces, and in the terrible din that ensued, the carriage crowned the hill.

Sacks of rocks and crates of books crammed the carriage, gear the gentleman within insisted he needed and never looked at or unloaded from one trip to the next. His wife sat with her maid on the back-facing seat. A jewelled watch was pinned to the front of her coat and she tipped it up to check the time. They’d been on the road before dawn both today and yesterday. William couldn’t sleep, so why not? Mrs. Buckland turned her intent face to her
husband. They’d met in a coach, hadn’t they (the figs, the clasp knife), and they’d recently been much feted in London for the
Megalosaurus buckland
. But her expression was not tender. That last afternoon in London, they’d toured St. Paul’s and watched amused when an old woman bent to kiss a stain on a limestone set. “Papist,” someone in their distinguished company murmured. “She believes it to be the blood of a saint, poor thing,” and then Mrs. Buckland heard her husband’s knees creak and
he
was prostrate in the aisle, putting out his tongue. “Bat’s urine!” he declared as he scrambled to his feet. She sat very still, the former Mary Moreland, sat and watched her husband with her clever eyes.

What remained of William Buckland’s hair was grey, and a bit of a belly was forming under his waistcoat: he’d be forty in three weeks’ time. The eye patch was gone. The excellent surgeon had pronounced him fully healed, not a hint of scarring on his pupil. His eyes were turned to the window – he was intent on the peerless landscape jostling past, feeling his customary vexation with God regarding the Land in faraway parts designated Holy (that barren, salty, prickly, stony flood plain, a realm that attracted infidels and was suitable only for infidels!). But as he gazed at the meadows of Oxfordshire with both eyes, he observed a flatness, as when he’d worn the eye patch: a loss of colour or dimension or vitality. If he covered his bad eye and looked through his good, the absence was just as pronounced. He gazed on the green and pleasant meadow, a landscape familiar and diminished, and grief pressed on him, a wordless grief. “Will cook have dinner when we arrive?” he said to his wife, but she pressed her lips together and looked away.

Almost noon, but down in London, Reverend William Cony-beare was just then being shaved in his rooms at the Salopian Coffee House. Conybeare’s face had been pressed into hot towels, and now he was perched beside a dirty east window for
what light it afforded, being deftly scraped with a perfectly whetted blade wielded by his man Anthony, a consummate craftsman of the gentleman’s whisker. Conybeare had full confidence in Anthony. He closed his eyes and his thoughts slid swiftly back to the Geological Society meeting the week before, to the splendid moment when Charles Lyell approached him and warmly congratulated him. “It heralds a new age in science,” Lyell said, “when one can predict a species never seen before, and have his predictions borne out.” While Anthony carved delicately around the sidewhiskers, Conybeare squeezed his folded arms and wished he’d asserted the authenticity of
Plesiosaurus conybeari
with more authority from the outset. But it was hard to know what that grotesque female might have been up to. When he’d first heard Cuvier’s accusation, he’d felt a frisson of horrified conviction: he had been right about Mary Anning all along! And what a fiendish plot it would have been, too, what a clever scheme to undo them all – although, in the event, it was clear he’d overestimated her.

It would be Friday night now before he rolled into the rectory – he’d be hard pressed to cobble together a sermon for Sunday. He should have been working on it that morning. Maybe he could use a text connected to his monster, something from Genesis. When he and De la Beche found the first chain of narrow vertebrae a few years back, Buckland had insisted it was the serpent that tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden. Then, of course, it was discovered to have
flippers
. But when you thought about it, the tempter in Genesis had some sort of limbs the week of Creation; it was only after the Fall that God cursed it, and put it to crawling on its belly. Which would mean this fossil was from
before
the Fall, not from the Flood – a possibility that suddenly taxed and tired Conybeare’s brain. He couldn’t summon the will to pursue it.

“Basin, sir,” Anthony said, and Conybeare lowered his face into warm water and endeavoured not to breathe. It was hard to grasp God’s intention in creating the grotesque, to understand how such creatures served His purposes (but consider the
octopus
, as hideous as the underside of a tongue, endlessly shape-changing and writhing its numberless legs with their repulsive suckers; consider the brood of children born in his village with no colour in either their skin or their eyes or their hair, so that they looked like grubs or disembodied souls), and he raised his face and buried it in the towel his man was holding, and regret stirred: that such an unlovely creature should forever bear the name
Conybeare
.

In the counties of the Southwest, it was one of those days when breezes chased clouds across the sun, laying bands of light and shadow over the land and the sea. A Wednesday, and proceeding in the small coastal town of Lyme Regis as many Wednesdays do. Squire Henley was supervising the dredging of his trout pond. Joseph Anning was down at the knacker’s, trying to negotiate a better price on the bundles of horsehair he needed for stuffing. Mr. Phelps was at the edge of the quarry with a set of rolled drawings under his arm. They illustrated his plan for laying iron tracks under the cliffs, so the lime could be hauled out more efficiently in donkey carts. Not a small investment! And his foreman (an infuriating hireling, stuck in the last century, devoid of business sense) had balked at the notion, and dragged Phelps out to see for himself the fragility of Church Cliffs. And so there he was at the quarry, his Wellington hat massive against the sky, glaring at his foreman, and then the bold curi-woman with the top hat came walking up from the eastern shore, and she did not scruple to stick her nose into his business. He could stomach no more of it, and he turned back to his horse and swung up into the
saddle (for his girth, he was still a man of vigour, and if the cliffs collapsed, he had already made his fortune). He wheeled the horse around and called over his shoulder in a hearty voice, “God bless us! What a world is here, It ne’re can last another year!” and set his mare to trotting heavily up the foreshore, leaving them to stand and stare.

Meanwhile, at the top of the town, at picturesque Morley Cottage, the three Misses Philpot sat in the morning room arguing companionably about their garden. They meant to redesign the east-facing beds that spring, and three schemes had been put forward. Elizabeth had pulled out a drawer with the packets of seeds they harvested last summer. She’d opened the papers and was pouring seeds into saucers to count them in defence of her scheme. Poppy seeds (impossible to count, in any case) were stuck like sand under her fingernails. “There’s enough here to feed every sparrow in Dorset,” she said. “There’s more than enough.”

In a big square house halfway down the hill, Mrs. Aveline sat by the fire with her hands in her lap. Her husband was reading from a poem called “The Castaway.” Mrs. Aveline’s hair was pinned loosely up around her face and tumbling into curls at her neck, her morning compromise between readiness and des-habille. She tried her best to listen, but the melancholy verse had turned her mind to her mysteriously vanished son, her so terribly altered boy. What a perfect companion he’d been when he was small, willing and interested in everything, trying hard not to chaff on her nerves. But all those years of his growing up, it seemed he was occupied in transforming himself into something she did not understand, a man intent on having a difficult life. Her husband’s voice penetrated her thoughts (it was that mournful emphasis on each line end that wormed its way in) and she leaned forward with an expression of wifely interest, just in time to take in the last three lines: