Remarkable Creatures

by Tracy Chevalier

  I was so surprised I couldn’t say a word.

  “Upholstering?” Miss Philpot was quick to get in. “That is a useful trade, but why choose it over others?”

  “I can do it indoors rather than out.”

  I found my voice. “But Joe, don’t you want to find crocs with me? Weren’t it a thrill to dig it out?”

  “It was cold.”

  “Don’t be stupid! Cold don’t matter!”

  “It do to me.”

  “How can you care about cold when these creatures are out there just waiting for us to find ’em? It’s like treasure scattered all over the beach. We could get rich off them crocs! And you say it’s too cold?”

  Joe turned to Mam. “I do want to work for Mr. Reader, Mam. What do you think?”

  Mam and Miss Elizabeth had kept quiet while Joe and I argued. I expect they didn’t need to butt in, as Joe had clearly made up his mind the way they wanted.

  I didn’t wait to hear what they said, but jumped up and ran downstairs to the workshop. I’d rather work on the croc than listen to them, with their plan to take Joe off the beach. I had work to do.

  With head and body together again, the monster was almost eighteen feet long. Getting it out of the cliff had been an ordeal that took three days, the Days and me working flat out whenever the tide let us. The whole thing was too big to lay on the table, so we’d spread the croc out along the floor. In the dim light it was a jumble of stony bones. I’d already spent a month cleaning it, but I still had some way to go to release it from the rock. My eyes were inflamed with squinting at it so much and rubbing dust into them.

  At the time I was too young to understand Joe’s choice, but later on I come to see that he had decided he wanted an ordinary life. He didn’t want to be talked about the way I was, sneered at for wearing odd clothes and spending so much time alone upon beach with just rocks for company. He wanted what others in Lyme had—security and the chance to be respectable—and he jumped at an apprenticeship. There was nothing I could do about it. If I were offered the chance like Joe—if a girl could be apprenticed to a trade—would I have chosen the same and become a tailor or a butcher or a baker?

  No. Curies were in my bones. For all the misery that come to my life from being upon those beaches, I wouldn’t have abandoned curies for a needle or a knife or an oven.

  “Mary.” Miss Philpot was standing over me. I didn’t answer; I was still angry at her for siding with Joe. Picking up a blade, I begun to scrape at a verteberry. It were one of a long line, stacked one against the other like a row of tiny saucers.

  “Joseph has made a sensible choice,” she said. “It will be better for you and your mother. That doesn’t mean you can’t continue to look for creatures. You don’t need Joseph to help you find them, do you, now that you know what you’re looking for? You can do that yourself, and then hire the Days to extract them, just as we did with this one. I can help you with that until you are old enough to manage the men yourself. I offered to help your mother with the business side as well, but she says she will do it herself. And she was rather good with Lord Henley.” Miss Philpot knelt by the croc and ran a hand over its ribs, which were all flattened out and crisscrossed like a willow basket. “How beautiful this is,” she murmured, her tone softer and less sensible than before. “I am still amazed at its size, and its strangeness.”

  I agreed with her. The croc made me feel funny. While working on it I’d begun going to chapel more regularly, for there were times sitting alone in the workshop with it that I got that hollowed-out feeling of the world holding things I didn’t understand, and I needed comfort.

  I MAY HAVE LOST Joe, but that didn’t mean I was alone upon beach. One day as I went along the shore to Black Ven I saw two strangers hunting by the cliffs. They barely looked up, they were so excited to be swinging their hammers and grubbing about in the mud. The next day there were five men, and two days after that, ten. None was known to me. From overhearing their talk I learned they were looking for their own crocodiles. It seemed my crocodile had brought them to Lyme beaches, attracted by the promise of treasure.

  Over the next few years Lyme grew crowded with hunters. I had been used to a deserted beach and my own company, or that of Miss Elizabeth or Joe, and being with them had often felt like being by myself, they were so solitary in their hunting. Now there was the tinking of hammer against stone all along the shore between Lyme and Charmouth, as well as on Monmouth Beach, and men were measuring, peering through magnifying glasses, taking notes, and making sketches. It was comical. For all the fuss made, not one found a complete croc. A cry would go up from someone, and the others would hurry over to look, and it would be nothing, or just a tooth or a bit of jaw or a verteberry—if they were lucky.

  I was passing a man searching amongst the stones one day when he picked up a bit of round, dark rock. “A vertebra, I think,” he called to his companion.

  I couldn’t help it—I had to correct his mistake, even though he hadn’t asked me. “That’ll be beef, sir,” I said.

  “Beef?” The man frowned. “What is ‘beef’?”

  “It’s what we call shale that’s been calcified. Bits of it often look like verteberries, but it’s got vertical lines in the layers, a bit like rope fibers, that you don’t see in verteberries. And verteberries are darker in color. All the bits of the croc are. See?” I dug out a verteberry from my basket that I’d found earlier and showed him. “Look, sir, verteberries have six sides, like this, though they’re not always clear till you clean them. And they’re concave, like someone’s pinched them in the middle.”

  The man and his companion handled the verteberry as if it were a precious coin—which, in a way, it was. “Where did you find this?” one asked.

  “Over there. I got others too.” I showed them what I’d found and they were astonished. When they showed me theirs, most of it was beef we had to throw out. All day they come up with would-be curies for me to judge. Soon others caught on, and I was called here and there to tell the men what they had or hadn’t found. Then they would ask me where they should look, and before long I was leading them on fossil hunts along the beach.

  That was how I come to be in the company of the geologists and other interested gentlemen, looking over their mistakes and finding curies for them. A few were from Lyme or Charmouth: Henry De La Beche, for instance, who had just moved to Broad Street with his mother and was but a few years older than me. But most were from farther away, Bristol or Oxford or London.

  I had never been in the company of educated gentlemen. Sometimes Miss Elizabeth come with us, and that made it easier for me, for she was older and of their class, and could go between as needed. When I was alone with them I was nervous at first, wondering how I was meant to act and what I could say. But they treated me as a servant, and that was a part I could play easily enough—though I was a servant who spoke her mind sometimes, and surprised them.

  It was always a little awkward with the gentlemen, though, and become more so as I grew older and my chest and hips rounder. Then people begun to talk.

  Maybe they would have talked less if I had been more sensible. But something took hold of me when I begun to grow up, and I become a bit silly, as girls do when they’re leaving behind their childhoods. I started to think about the gentlemen and looked at their legs and the way they moved. I begun to cry without knowing why, and shout at Mam when there was no reason to. I begun to prefer Miss Margaret to the other Philpots, as she was more sympathetic to my moods. She told me stories from the novels she read, and helped me try to make my hair prettier, and taught me to dance in the sitting room at Morley Cottage—not that I would ever get to with a man. Sometimes I stood outside the Assembly Rooms and watched them through the bay window, dancing under the glass chandeliers, and imagined it was me floating round in a silk gown. I would get so upset I’d have to run along the Walk, which is the path the Day brothers built along the beach to link the two parts of the town. It took me to the Cobb, where I could
walk up and down and let the wind blow away my tears, with no one to follow and tut at my silliness.

  Mam and Miss Elizabeth despaired over me, but they couldn’t fix me, for I didn’t think I was broke. I was growing up, and it was hard. It took two brushes with death, with a lady and a gentleman, before Miss Elizabeth pulled me out of the mud and I truly joined the adult world.

  Both happened along the same stretch of beach, just at the end of Church Cliffs, before the shore curves towards Black Ven. It was early spring, and I was walking along the beach at low tide, scanning for curies, thinking about one of the gentleman I had helped the day before who smiled at me with teeth as white as quartz. I was so blinded by rocks and my thoughts that I didn’t see the lady till I almost stepped on her. I stopped short, feeling a jolt in my stomach like when you’re carrying a kicking child away from something they want and their foot catches you.

  She were lying where the tide had left her, facedown, seaweed all tangled in her dark hair. Her fine dress was sodden and dragged down with sand and mud. Even in that state I could see it cost more than all of our Anning clothes together. I stood over her a long time, watching to see if she might take a breath and spare me from seeing death in her face. It come to me that I would have to touch her, turn her over to see if she was dead and if I knew her.

  I didn’t want to touch her. I spent most of the days of my life picking up dead things off the shore. If she had been stone like a croc or an ammo I would have turned her over quick as you like. But I weren’t used to touching dead flesh that had been a real person. I knew I had to do it, though, so I took a deep breath and in one quick motion grabbed a shoulder and rolled her over.

  I knew she were a lady the moment I saw her beautiful face. Others laughed at me when I said so, but I could see it in her noble brow and fine, sweet features. I called her the Lady, and I was right.

  I knelt by her head, closed my eyes, and said a prayer to God to take her into His bosom and comfort her. Then I pulled her up towards the cliff so the sea wouldn’t take her back while I went for help. I couldn’t leave her all unkempt, though: It would be disrespectful. Now I weren’t afraid to touch her, though her flesh was cold and hard like a fish. I untangled the seaweed from her hair and combed it out. I straightened her limbs and dress, and folded her hands over her breast as I’d seen others laid out. I even begun to enjoy the ritual of it, that’s how odd I were at that time in my life.

  Then I saw a fine chain round her neck and pulled at it. Out from under her dress come a locket, small and round and gold, with MJ picked out in fancy lettering. There was nothing inside—any pictures or locks of hair had been scrubbed away by the sea. I didn’t dare take it with me for safekeeping. Anyone finding me with it could accuse me of being a thief. I tucked the locket away and hoped no one found her and stole it off her while I was gone

  When I was satisfied the Lady looked presentable, I said another little prayer, blew her a kiss, and run back to Lyme to tell them I’d found a drowned lady.

  They laid her out in St. Michael’s and put a notice in the Western Flying Post to see if someone could identify her. I went to see her every day. I couldn’t stop myself. I brought flowers gathered from the wayside—daffs and narcissi and primroses—and set them round her, and tore up some of the petals to scatter over her dress. I liked to sit in the church, though it weren’t where we normally worshipped. It was quiet, with the Lady lying there so peaceful and beautiful. Sometimes I had a little cry, for her or for myself.

  It was like an illness come over me those days with the Lady, though I had no fever or chills. I’d never felt so strongly about anything before, though I wasn’t sure what it was I felt. I just knew that the Lady’s story was tragic, and maybe my story, if I had one, would be tragic too. She had died, and if I hadn’t found her, she might have become a fossil, her bones turned to stone, like all the other things I hunted upon beach.

  One day I arrived and the lid on the Lady’s coffin was nailed shut. I cried because I couldn’t see her beautiful face. Everything made me cry. I lay down on a pew and cried myself to sleep. I don’t know how long I was asleep for, but when I woke Elizabeth Philpot was sitting beside me. “Mary, get up and go home, and don’t come here again,” she said quietly. “This has gone on long enough.”

  “But—”

  “For one thing, it’s unwholesome.” She was referring to the smell, which never bothered me, as I’d smelled worse upon beach, and in the workshop, when I brought back slabs of limestone from the ledges and the piddocks in their holes died after a few days out of the water.

  “That don’t matter to me.”

  “It is sentimental behavior that should remain in the gothic novels Margaret reads. It doesn’t suit you. Besides that, she has been identified and her family is coming to fetch her. There was a shipwreck off Portland of a ship arriving from India. She was on board with her children. Imagine sailing all that long way, only to be lost at the very end.”

  “They know who she is? What’s her name?”

  “Lady Jackson.”

  I clapped my hands, so pleased I were right about her being a Lady. “What’s her Christian name? The M on the locket?”

  Miss Elizabeth hesitated. I think she knew her answer would feed my obsession. But she does not lie easily. “It’s Mary.”

  I nodded and begun to cry. Somehow I knew it.

  Miss Elizabeth sighed hard, like she was trying to keep from shouting. “Don’t be silly, Mary. Of course it is a sad story, but you don’t know her and sharing a name doesn’t mean you are anything alike.”

  I covered my face with my hands and kept on crying, out of embarrassment now as much as anything else, for not being able to control myself in front of Miss Elizabeth. She sat with me for a little bit, then gave up and left me to my tears. I didn’t tell her, but I was crying because Lady Jackson and I were alike. We were both Marys and we would both die. However beautiful or plain a person was, God would take you in the end.

  For a week after they took Lady Jackson away, I couldn’t touch curies on the beach for thinking of what they had been—poor creatures that had died. For that little while I allowed myself to be as timid and superstitious as my old playmate Fanny Miller. I avoided the gentlemen out hunting, and hid on Monmouth Beach, where it was quieter.

  But no curies means no food on the table. Mam ordered me back upon beach and said she wouldn’t let me inside if I returned with an empty basket. Soon enough I pushed death away, till the next time when he come to stand much closer.

  LATER THAT SPRING I at last found a second crocodile. Perhaps all the gentlemen I was attending was what made it take so long to find one. Elizabeth Philpot must have been pleased she were right that the cliffs and ledges don’t give up their monsters so easily as I’d thought. When I found it at last, I was out at Gun Cliff one May afternoon, not even thinking of crocs, but of my empty stomach for I’d had nothing to eat all day. The tide was coming in, and I’d almost got back home when I slipped on a ledge covered with seaweed. I come down hard on my hands and knees, and as I pushed myself up I felt a ridge of knobs under my hand. Just like that, I was touching a long line of verteberries. It was so simple I wasn’t even surprised. I was relieved to find that croc, for it proved there were more than one, and that I could make a living from them. That second croc brought money, respect, and a new gentleman.

  It was a week or two after we’d removed the croc to the workshop. I was meant to be cleaning it, but there’d been a storm the night before, and a small landslip had appeared under Black Ven that I wanted to look over. There were no men about, and Miss Elizabeth had a cold, and Joe was counting tacks or blacking wood or whatever it is upholsterers are meant to do, so it was just me upon beach. I was scrabbling about in the landslip, the Lias mud pushing under my nails and lining my shoes, when the sound of clacking stones made me look up. Along the beach from Charmouth a man come, riding on a black horse. He was silhouetted against the bright sunlight, so it was hard to make him o
ut, but when he got closer I saw the horse was a mare, a plodder, and the man wore a cloak over sloped shoulders, and a top hat, and carried a sack at his side. Once I saw the sack was blue I knew it was William Buckland.

  I doubted he recognized me, though I knew him: He used to buy curies from Pa when I was younger. I remembered him best for that blue sack he always carried with him to put specimens in. It was made of heavy material—just as well, since it was always bulging with rocks Mr. Buckland had picked up. He would show them to Pa, who could see no use in them as they held no fossils. But Mr. Buckland remained enthusiastic about his rocks, as he was about everything.

  He had grown up just a few miles away in Axminster, and knew Lyme well, though now he lived in Oxford, where he taught geology. He had also taken his orders, though I doubted any church would have him. William Buckland was too unpredictable to be a vicar.

  He had been along to look at the crocodile skull back when we’d showed it in the Assembly Rooms, but though he’d smiled at me, he’d spoken only to Miss Philpot. Two years later, when the croc was united, head and body, and cleaned and sold to Lord Henley, I heard Mr. Buckland went to see it at Colway Manor. And since the gentlemen had come to hunt upon beach, I saw him occasionally amongst them. He had never paid much attention to me, though, so I was astonished now to hear him shout, “Mary Anning! Just the girl I wanted to see!”

  No one had ever called out my name that enthusiastically. I stood up, confused, then quickly tugged at the hem of my skirt, which I’d tucked into my waist to keep it out of the mud. I often did that when the beach was empty. It wouldn’t do for Mr. Buckland to see my knobby ankles and muddy calves.

  “Sir?” I bobbed a sort of curtsy, though it weren’t very graceful. There weren’t many I curtsied to in Lyme—just Lord Henley, and him I didn’t want to now I understood that he’d sold on my croc and made such a lot more money than he’d ever paid us for it. Him I would scarcely bend my knee for now, even if Miss Philpot hissed at me to be polite.