Curiosity (6 page)

Mary glanced back and saw that Walter Jones was finally turning up to town. He had cast his head over his shoulder for one last look at Richard. In that look, she felt the pull of the chapel, as though James Wheaton or God himself had sent Walter Jones to summon them. Richard saw where Mary’s eyes had gone. “An hour in the chapel, the week with the Devil,” he said.

Mary looked closely at her father’s thin face. We try to explain him, she thought, but he does not hold to reasons as other men do. His causes were wordless, sealed shiny and hard inside him. No one would ever hold him. He’d been a rebel and he rebelled against the rebels. He’d been a Dissenter and now he was a dissenter of the Dissenters and went to chapel no more. Walter Jones and all of them watched him in wonder – Richard Anning, misfortune’s favourite, walking boldly down to the shore on a Sabbath morning.

It was a relief to encounter the plump spectre of Mr. Buckland on the shore, floating a foot or two above the shingle with his popping eyes fixed on the stones – Mr. Buckland, the man
with the blue bag who had come to the curiosity table, who disputed the Devil’s hand on any living creature and said that what they called dragons were really just crocodiles, made by God and migrated now to warmer climes. He was lodging in town; they would often spy his big hairy-hocked horse munching weeds along the cliff. Mary was always startled at first by the sight of him drifting over the shingle in his gown and top hat. When you worked your way closer, you could see that he
was
attached to the earth; it was just that the bottom of his gown up to his knees was white with dust.

He was a clergyman, she knew that now, and as soon as they were close enough, she called a greeting and asked him, “Be ye not in church this Sabbath morning?”

“Of course I am,” he said. “And so are you. We’re worshipping in the
Lord’s
chapel.” And he gestured to the east, where mist veiled Black Ven and Golden Cap shone high above as though it dangled from the sun. He seemed to be addressing her, but really he was directing his cleverness to her father, darting eager smiles in Richard’s direction. “Here on this shore is all the bounty of the Lord made manifest,” he cried.

“This shore?” Mary said. “But there were grand wickedness done on this shore.”

“There’s been wickedness done on every shore of the seven seas,” said Mr. Buckland. “Man will use the earth for his purposes, for God gave him dominion.” Light sparkled silver off the edges of the black cliffs, and the sky was a high dome of blue over them, and it seemed that what Mr. Buckland said was true – Mary could hardly look at the shore for the beauty of it.

The first time Mary and her father talked to Mr. Buckland at the shore, he’d tried to trick them. Richard asked him what he’d found that morning and he reached into his blue bag and showed them a Devil’s toenail sticking out of a bit of red shale.

“What do ye take me for?” said Richard, passing it back. “You never found that on this shore.” The limestone and shale cliffs rose behind them, all blue-grey. The
blue lias
, people called it.

Buckland laughed and confessed he’d bought it from the curi-man who stopped the coach on the Exeter Road. Mr. Buckland asked their names and he told them his, and explained that he was a clergyman and a scholar at Oxford University. “What age is the lass?” he asked.

Mary told him she was eleven and asked with all courtesy, “And you, sir?” and Mr. Buckland and her father both laughed, but he did tell her. He was six-and-twenty. “Sharp as a blade!” he said, and now Mary, who was coming to know his tendency to reuse his words, did not put so much stock in it.

“Ye’d not have said so, mind,” said Richard, “if ye’d seen her as a babe.” But Mary did not want to hear him tell the story of the lightning again, dwelling on her wondrous dullness, and she rushed in with a question: Could Mr. Buckland explain why the snakes had all curled up in the same attitude to die, so neatly, like the curled horns of a ram? For she’d seen more than one snake dead on the turnpike road and they were not curled tightly up but were laid out like whips.

“Were the ammonites snakes at all?” Mr. Buckland asked. “By their form, you might conclude they were molluscs. You’ve seen a garden snail with its shell on its back?”

“If they were like garden snails, how did they come to be stone?” she asked.

“Ha!” said Mr. Buckland. “I could ask you the same question, if they were snakes.”

“Saint Hilda turned them to stone,” Mary said. “When she started the convent at Whitby. She rolled them down a hill and their heads broke off.” But even as she said it, she saw the amused
look on Mr. Buckland’s face and realized how very foolish this story was.

Mr. Buckland asked her father then about the stony jaws often found on the shore. Crocodile jaws, he called them. He wanted a complete example that he could carry away to study.

“You’d best ask at the quarry at Church Cliffs,” Richard said. “They’re grinding them up for lime morning and night.” Her father must have taken hard against Mr. Buckland to refuse such a chance.

“I’d be prepared to pay handsomely,” Mr. Buckland said, and Mary studied his face, trying to gauge how many shillings
handsomely
might mean.

“The lass with the anthracite eyes,” he called her. She asked him what anthracite was, and he said a kind of coal. Mr. Buckland was from another world; he’d been born in Axminster, six miles away. He did not know the Annings, the ill fortune they were marked out for, although the news of the first Mary’s death in a fire had been written up in the paper – not in Lyme (where they thought the tidings too dismal for Christmas) but in Bath. Molly had the newspaper, so old and dry and yellow that it was splitting at the folds. She kept it in the cupboard and, when she was in the mood to look at it, showed Mary, though neither of them could read it. Mary studied it, marvelling that the whole sad story was hidden in those tiny lines of print. Strangers in Bath had moved their eyes over it while their Christmas goose spit and dripped on the fire, and knew about the Annings. But that was long ago.

Asking for salve was just a pretext to knock on the door of Morley Cottage that afternoon, for Mary’s arm was healed. All the same, Miss Elizabeth Philpot helped her hang her jacket on the back of a chair and roll up the sleeve of her grey dress.
While Miss Philpot applied the salve, Mary told her a story about Mr. Buckland. Grey snakestones as big as cartwheels were bedded on the western shore, and Mr. Buckland had found a broken one with the centre whorls washed out of it. He hoisted it up and fitted it over his head like a ruff, and then he called to Mary, “How does my lady for this many a day?” The tide was coming in and he walked straight out onto the foreshore and disappeared around a point, wading ankle deep in water with the snakestone round his neck. Mary was worried he’d be caught by the tide, but all her father said was, “He’ll swim to France, the thin-faced martel.”

Miss Philpot was daubing the salve delicately and without fear on Mary’s pox-marks. Her own cheeks were marred with scars (for the pox is not a respecter of persons). She had never asked where the marks had come from; it was not in the way of the highborn to ask. Or perhaps she had heard in the town. At chapel, the pastor had delivered a thundering sermon especially for the Annings, on the practice of mingling animal humours into human blood. A
devilish
cure, he called it. Why the Devil would choose to cure people was something no one explained.

Miss Philpot listened to the story of Mr. Buckland with amusement. “A professor!” she said. “If he has survived, you must ask him what he thinks of the pig-faced lady.” And then, with great relish, she told Mary a story about the Philpot brother Charles, riding down a wide highway in the great city of London and seeing, in a carriage beside, a lady famously known in London as the pig-faced lady. There were many who had seen her, but no one knew her name or where she lived. She was thought to possess a fortune, but this was scant comfort to her. The day Charles saw her, she wore a veil, but it had got caught up on her snout. Charles Philpot saw her lift a graceful hand to fix it. A lady’s hand in a fine glove, not a pig’s trotter.

“Gentlemen have been posting notices in the
Times
,” Miss Philpot said, her mouth turned down in the wry twist that passed for a smile, “offering themselves to the lady with the heavy facial affliction, as they delicately put it. For five thousand pounds per annum, they reckon they can stomach a bit of squealing at supper.”

If the pig-faced lady did find a husband, Mary wondered, how would he bear to kiss her? If she’d had any thought of saying this aloud, Miss Philpot’s poor pox-fretted face stopped her before the words came out.

“Oh, Catherine, Saint Catherine, please come to my aid, and grant that I niver may be a wold maid,” Mary said secretly to herself as she went out through the back garden, feeling a bit ashamed as she said it, because of the liking she had for Miss Philpot.

The Philpot sisters had paid Richard a deposit for the cabinet and now, for the moment, there was money to spare and her mother knew it, but Richard took Joseph to the Three Cups for his supper that night and left her no chance to importune him about the seventh son. Long after Mary and Lizzie and their mother had retired, Richard and Joseph came clattering up to the bedchamber and laid themselves down in the dark, Joseph on a pallet on the far side of the bed. Murmuring voices started up from the bed.

Lizzie, who was on a floor pallet beside Mary, was wakened by all the noise. “Mary,” she said, putting a hot hand on Mary’s cheek, “where did they cut you to put the pox in?” It was the question she asked almost every night.

Mary wanted to hear her parents’ conversation. She pulled the cover over both her head and Lizzie’s. “Not in one place but in five,” she said fiercely. “Like our Lord Jesus Christ. Here –”
She scratched at Lizzie’s palm, then she poked at Lizzie’s side and grabbed for Lizzie’s feet. “– and here, and here.” Lizzie began to cry and Mary clamped her hand over her mouth, but pips of sob escaped into the room.

“Hush,” their father said, rising up in the bed. “You two hush yer moaning.”

Finally it was quiet again, and then Molly asked Richard about taking Percival to Exeter.

“It’s a big town, Exeter,” Richard said. “Where the devil does the lad dwell? Do ye have any notion?”

Molly was silent.

“Does Mrs. Stock have the name?”

“I hate to ask her.” Mary could hear her mother turn over in bed. “She has a gloating way about her, does Mrs. Stock.”

“A pullet with its legs tied together could gloat, if it cast for cause as wide as the Widow Stock does,” Richard said, turning over also.

They would be lying close, with their legs bent to fit together. Mary heard them both sigh. There was a comfort in their sighs and their silence, and she wished she was small enough to climb into their bed and worm her way into the warm channel between them. She rolled over and tucked an arm under her head as a pillow. The day of the cowpox cure came vividly to her – she had begun to think of that day with a kind of joy. Walking out with her father and Joseph, and crossing a field where black-faced sheep with tattered coats stood to watch them. Seeing Ware Manor Farm, with geese running in a pack in the green yard, and the dead tree that stood with buckets hung upside down to dry on its limbs. It all came to her – Farmer Ware in his smock, walking between the barn and the dairy with stately step because of the yoke over his shoulders, the smell of manure in the cowshed, so
strong it made her eyes burn, and her father lifting her up to a railing heedless of the muck that coated it. “Did ye ever see a poxy milkmaid?” he said, and he brought the tip of the sharp clasp knife to her forearm, and she kept her eyes on his and did not let out so much as a whimper.

FOUR

n hour out on the Great West Road, Henry is frantic with pain from his lacerated buttocks. He braces his boots against the floor of the bouncing coach and shifts his weight from one hip to the other, while Alger, sitting in the opposite corner, watches him suspiciously. His uncle insists on having the curtains pulled across; the light bothers his eyes. So there is not even the distraction of the road. They’re locked together in this dim box for three days of torment.