Curiosity (8 page)

n a morning when Percival took some pips of mush and lifted his head and smiled, Mary had a letter from Mr. Buckland. It did not come directly to her, but was tucked into a letter addressed to Richard. The paper contained a drawing, a snakestone sliced open. There were no verteberries inside such as a snake would have, only a row of empty rooms. The legend was two words, and then there was text. Eventually Joseph lost patience with reading that text over and over to Mary, and began to shout the words to her one by one.
Progressively! Larger! Chambers!
There was an indignity here: Mary, who was of a stature to receive letters from scientific gentlemen, was unlettered, whereas Joseph, who had no interest in scholarship at all, had been sent to the grammar school at six. Mary pointed this out while Molly sat on the bench plaiting Lizzie’s hair. “I agree,” her mother said, and sat with her lips pressed together to indicate that nothing could be done about it, money being so much scarcer since the war began.

The day the new collecting cupboard was delivered to Morley Cottage, Mary followed the hired donkey cart up Silver Street.
It was a very steep hill; the donkey laboured hard and Richard kept an anxious hand on the cabinet. The wealthy showed a curious lack of judgment living away from the sea, so that they were always having to climb the hill or devise a means to be carried up it, while the poor had the ease of the shore. Even Morley Cottage climbed the hill, the parlour windows being higher than the dining room windows, although (Mary knew, from having been inside) the floors themselves had been built straight, not in accordance with the slant of the hill.

Miss Elizabeth Philpot came to the door in an orange gown. The cabinet was to go in the drawing room, she said, and led them down a hall to the room where pressed flowers hung in frames on the walls and curiosities from the shore and cliffs lay on every surface. Devils’ toenails were splayed out in sets of five on the mantelshelf (Miss Elizabeth’s little joke) and thunderbolts arranged in patterns on a tray.

“How grateful we will be for a bit of order in this room,” said the middle Miss Philpot while Mary’s father unwrapped the shallow drawers and slid them into the cabinet. “We can hardly reach for a book without knocking something to the floor,” said the eldest. The middle sister Mary had seen before, but not the eldest. In spite of her scars, she was the most handsome, with fine eyes and fine arching eyebrows. They had lived all three in London when they were girls, and were rich enough to pay for the pesthouse, but their father was a pious man and thought it a sin to try to thwart the will of the Almighty. “And so the Almighty had His way with the three of us,” said Miss Elizabeth Philpot, the day she told the story of her own pox to Mary.

There were fine curtains in the drawing room and a carpet on the floor, and Mary stood calmly in the midst of it. “Ye have twelve drawers but only five different curiosities,” she said to her Miss Philpot (counting on her fingers:
thunderstones, thunderbolts
,
verteberries, Devil’s toenails, snakestones
). They were partners in collecting. Miss Philpot did not go to the shore herself; she bought from the Annings or sent her groom down to the lime quarry to inquire of the quarrymen whether they had turned up anything of interest in their labours. She always asked Mary eagerly what Mr. Buckland had to say. The Ammon Knight, she called him, because of the story Mary told her about the snakestone he put over his head.

Miss Philpot stood in her puckered gown with the sleeves that swelled like pumpkins on her shoulders, frowning over the cabinet. “Twelve drawers,” she said. “Yes. How is everything to be arranged?”

“There be ammonites with ridges and ammonites without,” said Mary slowly, for she was thinking. “There be the golden ammonite curled up in stones. And the pyrite ammonite that we find clean on the shore. And the grey ammonite, made of stone like the stone it lies in, and brown ones, the ones we find past Charmouth.” And then it seemed a lamp had begun to glow in her mind. “But in each of these materials, there be ammonites with ridges or ammonites without.”

“Yes!” cried Miss Philpot. “We could sort them by substance or sort them by form. But let us begin by identifying each one as to form. In such a fashion, we will learn.” She sprang over to the bookshelf and pulled a large book down and laid it on the table. After she had leafed through it for a moment, she called Mary over and showed her, and Mary saw with a lurch that Miss Philpot was inviting her to read.

On the open page were two illustrations of ammonites. Mary bent her face over the book and stared at the print that filled the bottom half of the page. The two other Miss Philpots, sitting on either end of a divan, turned their faces towards her, and her father looked sharply up from the corner where he was giving
a last polish to the cupboard, and she put her finger to the lines, the way Joseph did when he read.
The ammonite shell
(she said in a forceful voice, as from the pulpit)
contains a series of progressively larger chambers. Only the final and largest chamber was occupied by the animal at any given time. As the animal grew, it generated newer and larger chambers, abandoning its previous home
.

When she got to the limit of the words she knew from Mr. Buckland’s letter, she halted in confusion. Her father had turned away, he stood with his head down, but the Philpot sisters watched her still, their eyes anxious. Elizabeth Philpot let out a laugh of surprise and looked down at the page and then up at Mary, her mouth caught in a nervous twist, and then she picked up the book and began to read aloud from it herself.

The next week, Miss Philpot stopped by the shop and told Molly that the grammar school was offering free places to apt scholars among the poor – four free places. One day shortly after, Richard was in Charmouth, so Molly and Mary put on their Sunday bonnets and Molly asked Mrs. Bennett to mind the little ones while they went to the school. A senior scholar came to the door of the school and went to call the master. But the master would not allow them into the hall to speak to him; he refused Mary outright as a Dissenter. Her mother heard this with bitterness (months had passed now without any of them darkening the door of the Independent Chapel) and she did not refrain from telling Richard when he came home. If he was angry that they had asked for charity, he did not say so. He said only that the Independent Chapel itself was setting up a Sunday school and if they found a teacher, Mary would go there. “On Sundays, I go to the shore,” said Mary, and he said, “Ye’ll go to the shore no more if there’s the chance of school.”

Mary ached with shame that Miss Philpot would think she had set out to trick her. The lie was in the way she put her finger to the print – children who went to school did so, they ran their fingers along the lines in exactly that fashion. But it was not entirely a lie: the meaning of letters was in her brain, just as numbers had always been. If only she were given books and the time to bear down on them, she would certainly produce the sense on her own, and much more nimbly than other children! She thought of their neighbour Annie Bennett’s pitiful attempts to read, and the botched writing she’d seen produced by scholars from the grammar school, Joseph among them.

But Mary Anning was not like other children. The whole town knew the story of the lightning bolt, with Mary herself at the centre of it, a little lass of under two years. Everyone told the story to explain Mary’s cleverness. They enjoyed dwelling on what a dull child she’d been before, a girl who hardly spoke and whose hair was the colour of mud. They told how a woman named Eliza Hastings had stopped by the workshop with talk of an amusement being held at Rack Field – a lottery, the prizes being a copper tea kettle and a leg of mutton, and horsemen making a display of their riding. Eliza Hastings offered to take Mary, and when Richard and Molly agreed, little dull Mary came happily out and took Eliza’s hand. And then, out on the field, a storm blew up. When the rain began, Eliza Hastings snatched Mary up from the ground and sought shelter under a giant oak, where two girls already huddled. And there the lightning bolt found them and the massive oak was split. Mrs. Stock was one who liked to tell it. “Dead in a trice!” she would cry. “Eliza Hastings, Fanny Fowler, Martha Drower! And
you
knocked insensible, stinking of brimstone.” Mrs. Stock would turn her eyes up into her head so that only the whites showed, to demonstrate the look of Mary.

Mary listened to this story skeptically. If only she could have been a watcher in the field that day, to see what had really happened to her other, duller self. Thunder must have echoed from the cliffs, although no one ever mentioned thunder. She could see the lightning swing from the sky like a great hairy rope, electric fluid pouring down it. The crowd in the meadow must have taken a breath and thanked Providence that they could still do so. And then someone would have cried out, “Look!” and all eyes would have gone to the oak tree, where the child Mary Anning lay as dead in a dead woman’s arms. When Mary turned her mind to the scene that followed, the story grew in fullness, words coming out on its branches the way blossoms come out on an apple tree. Mary would never be able to tell it properly – her tongue was enslaved to Dorsetshire speech. But no matter: the moment its branches were filled in, the story assumed a voice, bypassing Mary’s tongue and flowing out of Mary’s mind:

Father and Mother were in the workshop when came the news of this heavenly lottery and the unfortunate mortals selected by it. On the heels of the news rode a horseman on a tall chestnut stallion, carrying my senseless body in the crook of one arm. No one could countenance it, so many of the Anning children having been seized already by an ill fate. Doctor Reeves was sent for and said I must be dipped in water. And so they rapidly undressed me, and before the congregation of them all, my naked infant body was immersed. At the touch of the water, I roused myself and then I spoke, although no one can recall my utterance on that occasion, the nineteenth day of August in the Year of Our Lord 1800. My salvation by immersion did not convert my parents to Baptists, as one might suppose. They remained members of the Independent Chapel, and credit my cleverness to the vitalizing effects of fork lightning
.

There were the accents of the high-born in that voice. It was the voice of Miss Elizabeth Philpot, Mary realized suddenly.

But the school did not open. Mary grew like a heron that year; she was powerful thin. There was seldom meat on their table, and all the fish from the shore went into salt barrels for the navy or by stage to London, where it fetched a better price. Her mother began to fret about the colour of the bread they were eating, and went to the baker and accused him of putting gypsum in it. Percival still spit back his food and did not grow, and Molly still talked of Exeter. Then a lady’s maid from that very town stopped by the curiosity table, and when Mary overheard where she was from, she went to call her mother. Molly eagerly asked the woman what she had heard of the seventh son who worked as a healer, whether she knew the family’s name. “Higgins,” said the woman. “On Bobbin Lane. They be neighbours of my father. I know them well.” But she would not confide in Molly as to the extent of the boy’s powers. All she would say was that an older brother, the sixth son, had sickened and died that year.

“What is a seventh son when his brother has died?” Molly cried in bed that night.

They needed something, something to anchor them. As she lay on her pallet and listened to the waves beat against the seawall, Mary had the sense that they were on a narrow platform above it, just an inch away from being washed away, the lot of them. Her father knew it too – he was looking for the crocodile bones after all, tramping the shore every chance he had. Mr. Buckland had put a price on his enthusiasm: twenty pounds, he’d said, for the whole skeleton with all its parts. Twenty pounds! In his best week as a cabinetmaker, Richard made fourteen shillings. So now he walked the shore at low tide and high,
clambering up to examine a promising layer, thrusting his shovel in every crumbling ledge. A lunatic, dangerous occupation – Mrs. Stock came by the cottage to impress this on Molly.

Mr. Buckland had left Lyme Regis for a time, but now he was back. They would run into him on the shore and greet him and then drift apart, bent over the rocks with searching eyes. But often when Mary looked up, her father and Buckland had come together again, the wind whipping and snapping at their clothes, their heads bent close in conversation. The wind took up their voices and blew them back in snatches, mixing them with the cries of the gulls and curlews and the crash of the waves. Mary longed to listen, but if she picked up her tools and scrambled over the rocks, they’d have separated before she reached them.

“How could a creature turn to stone?” Mary asked her father while they walked home one day. She was thinking of the mushy bodies of snails rotting in broken shells on the path.

“Drop by drop, the flesh washes out and the stone washes in,” said her father. “So the fellow says. He shows me a verteberry and says it’s the backbone of a crocodile. Are ye telling me the curiosities be the remains of ordinary martel creatures? I says to him, and he says, I’d never dare tell ye that. A man said it once and they locked him in the Bastille and starved him to death.”