Colonel Birch held his back so straight as he rode he looked like a tin soldier. With the sun low behind him and casting a long shadow before, I could not see his face until he pulled up alongside me. As I climbed to the top rung of the stile and balanced there, he took my hand so that I would not fall. “Mary, I cannot marry you,” he said.
“I know, sir. It don’t matter.”
“You are sure?”
“I am. It is my birthday today. I am twenty-one years old, and this is what I want.”
I was not a horse rider, but that day I had no fear as I reached over and swung into the space between his arms.
He took me inland. Colonel Birch knew the surrounding countryside better than I did, for I never normally went into the fields, but spent all of my time on the shore. We rode through dusk’s shadows lit here and there with panes of sunlight, up to the main road to Exeter. Once across we headed down darkening fields. Along the way we did not murmur sweet words to each other like courting couples, for we were not courting. Nor did I relax in his arms, for the horse swayed and the saddle pushed hard against me and I had to concentrate so I wouldn’t fall off. But I was where I wanted to be and did not mind.
An orchard at the bottom of the field waited for us. When I lay down with Colonel Birch it was on a sheet of apple blossom petals covering the ground like snow. There I found out that lightning can come from deep inside the body. I have no regret discovering that.
I learned something else that evening, which come to me afterwards. I was lying in his arms looking up at the sky, where I counted four stars, when he asked, “What will you do with the money I have given your family, Mary?”
“Pay off our debts and buy a new table.”
Colonel Birch chuckled. “That is very practical of you. Will you not do something for yourself?”
“I suppose I could buy a new bonnet.” Mine had just been crushed under our coupling.
“What about something more ambitious?”
I was silent.
“For example,” Colonel Birch continued, “you could move to a house with a bigger shop. Up Broad Street, for example, to where there’s a good shop front, with a big window and more light in which to display your fossils. That way you would get more trade.”
“So you’re expecting me to keep on finding and selling curies, are you, sir? That I’ll never marry, but run a shop.”
“I did not say that.”
“It’s all right, sir. I know I won’t marry. No one wants someone like me for a wife.”
“That is not what I meant, Mary. You misunderstand me.”
“Do I, sir?” I rolled off of his shoulder and lay flat on the ground. Even since we had been talking it seemed the sky had got darker, and more and more stars had joined the first scattering.
Colonel Birch sat up stiffly, for he was old, and lying on the ground must hurt him. He looked down at me. It was too dark to see his expression. “I was thinking about your future as a fossil hunter, not as a wife. There are many women—most women, in fact—who can be perfectly good wives. But there is only one of you. Do you know, when I set up the auction in London I met many people who professed to know a great deal about fossils: what they are, how they came to be here, what they mean. But none of them knows even half of what you understand.”
“Mr. Buckland does. And Henry De La Beche. And what about Cuvier? They say that Frenchman knows more than any of us.”
“That may be. But the others don’t have the instinct for it that you do, Mary. Your knowledge may be self-taught and come from experience rather than from books, but it is no less valuable for that. You have spent a great deal of time with specimens; you have studied their anatomies and seen their variations and subtleties. You recognize the uniqueness of the ichthyosaurus, for example, that it is not like anything we have ever imagined.”
But I didn’t want to talk about me or about curies. There were so many stars now that I couldn’t count them. I felt very small, pinned to the ground under the knowledge of them all. They were beginning to hollow me out. “How far away do you think those stars are?”
Colonel Birch turned his face upward. “Very far. Farther than we can even imagine.”
Perhaps it was because of what had just happened to me, of the lightning that come from inside, which made me open up to larger, stranger thoughts. Looking up at the stars so far away, I begun to feel there was a thread running between the earth and them. Another thread was strung out too, connecting the past to the future, with the ichie at one end, dying all that long time ago and waiting for me to find it. I didn’t know what was at the other end of the thread. These two threads were so long I couldn’t even begin to measure them, and where one met the other, there was me. My life led up to that moment, then led away again, like the tide making its highest mark on the beach and then retreating.
“Everything is so big and old and far away,” I said, sitting up with the force of it. “God help me, for it does scare me.”
Colonel Birch put his hand on my head and stroked my hair, which was all matted from my lying on the ground. “There is no need to fear,” he said, “for you are here with me.”
“Only now,” I said. “Just for this moment, and then I will be alone again in the world. It is hard when there’s no one to hold on to.”
He had no answer to that, and I knew he never would. I lay back down and looked at the stars until I had to close my eyes.
EIGHT
An adventure in an unadventurous life
It is rare for anything reported in the Western Flying Post to surprise me. Most are predictable stories: a description of a livestock auction in Bridport, or an account of a public meeting on the widening of a Weymouth road, or warnings of pickpock ets at the Frome Fair. Even the stories of more unusual events where lives are changed—a man transported for stealing a silver watch, a fire burning down half a village—I still read with a sense of distance, for they have little effect on me. Of course if the man had stolen my watch or half of Lyme burned down, I would be more interested. Still, I read the paper dutifully, for it makes me at least aware of the wider region, rather than trapped in an inward-looking town.
Bessy brought me the paper as I rested by the fire one mid-December afternoon. I did not often fall ill, and my weakness irritated me so that I had become as grumpy as Bessy normally was. I sighed as she set it on a small table next to me along with a cup of tea. Still, it was some diversion, for my sisters were busy in the kitchen, making up a batch of Margaret’s salve to go in Christmas baskets, along with jars of rosehip jelly. I had wanted to include an ammonite in each basket, but Margaret felt they did not invoke a festive spirit and insisted on pretty shells instead. I forget sometimes that people see fossils as the bones of the dead. Indeed, they are, though I tend to view them more as works of art reminding us of what the world was once like.
I paid little attention to what I read until I came across a short notice, wedged between news of two fires, one burning down a barn, the other the premises of a pastry cook. It read:On Wednesday evening Mary Anning, the well-known fossilist, whose labors have enriched the British and Bristol Museums, as well as the private collections of many geologists, found, east of town, and immediately under the celebrated Black Ven Cliff, some remains, which were removed on that night and the succeeding morning, to undergo an examination, the result of which is, that this specimen appears to differ widely from any which have before been discovered at Lyme, either of the Ichthyosaurus or Plesiosaurus, while it approaches nearly to the structure of the Turtle. The whole osteology has not yet been satisfactorily disclosed, owing to its very recent removal.
It will be for the great geologists to determine by what term this creature is to be known. The great Cuvier will be informed when the bones are completely disclosed, but probably it will be christened at Oxford or London, after an account has been accurately furnished. No doubt the Directors of the British or Bristol Museums will be anxious to possess this relic of the “great Hercul
aneum.”
Mary had found it at last. She had found the new monster that she and William Buckland had speculated must exist, and I had to find out about her discovery in the newspaper, as if I were just anyone and had no claim on her. Even the men producing the Western Flying Post knew about it before me.
It is difficult to have a falling-out in a town the size of Lyme Regis. I had first learned that when we Philpots stopped seeing Lord Henley: We then managed to run into him everywhere, so that it became almost a game dodging him on Broad Street, along the path by the river, at St. Michael’s. We provided the town with years of gossip and amusement, for which we ought to have been thanked.
With Mary the severing was far more painful because she was so close to my heart. After our fight in the churchyard, I regretted what I’d said to her almost immediately, wishing I had let her find out from Colonel Birch himself about the widow he might marry. I shall never forget the look of betrayal and despair on her face. On the other hand, I felt the sting of her comments about my jealousy and my sisters and my fish like a whipping that lingered.
I was too proud to go and apologize, though, and I expect she was too. I longed to have Bessy come into the parlor with a tell-tale grimace and announce that I had a visitor. But it didn’t happen, and once the time for such a rapprochement had passed, it became impossible to regain our old standing.
It is not easy to let someone go, even when they have said unforgivable things to you. For at least a year it cut me deeply to see her, out on the beach, or on Broad Street, or by the Cobb. I began to avoid Cockmoile Square, taking back-lanes to St. Michael’s, and the path by the church to the beach. I no longer went to Black Ven, where Mary usually hunted, instead heading in the opposite direction, past the Cobb and onto Monmouth Beach. There were not so many fossil fish there, and so I collected less, but at least I was not so likely to run into her.
It was lonely, though. Over the years Mary and I had spent a great deal of time together out hunting. Some days we wouldn’t speak for hours, but her presence nearby, bent over the ground, scrabbling in the mud or splitting open rocks, was a familiar comfort. Now I would glance around and still be surprised to find there was only me on the deserted beach. Such solitude brought on a self-indulgent melancholy that I detested, and I would make cutting remarks to jolt myself out of it. Margaret began to complain that I had grown more prickly, and Bessy threatened to give notice when I was sharp with her.
It wasn’t only on the beach that I missed Mary. I also longed for the company of her sitting at my dining table while I unpacked my basket and showed off what I had found. I could only do so the rare times when Henry De La Beche or William Buckland or Dr. Carpenter was about, or when someone occasionally came to see my collection and showed more than simply a fashionable interest in fossils. Without Mary’s knowledge and encouragement, I felt my own studies slacken.
At the same time I had to watch her become more popular with outsiders. They actively sought her out, and she began taking visitors on fossil walks to Black Ven. With Colonel Birch’s auction money and Mary’s growing fame, the Annings were at last freeing themselves from the debt Richard Anning had put them into many years before. Mary and Molly Anning had new dresses, and they bought proper furniture again, and coal to warm themselves. Molly Anning stopped taking in laundry and began running the fossil shop properly, and it became a busy place. I should have been glad for them. Instead I was envious.
For a short time I even considered leaving Lyme and going to live with my sister Frances and her family, who had recently moved to Brighton. When I casually mentioned the possibility to Louise and Margaret, they both reacted with horror. “How can you think of leaving us?” Margaret cried, and Louise was pale and silent. I even found Bessy sniffling into her pastry dough and had to reassure them all that Morley Cottage would always remain my home.
It took a long time, but eventually I did grow used to not having Mary’s company or her friendship. It became as if she lived in Charmouth or Seatown or Eype. It was surprising that in such a small town she and I were able to avoid each other so well. But then, she was so busy with new collectors that I would have seen less of her even if I hadn’t been trying to. While I accommodated her absence, a dull ache in my heart remained, like a fracture that, though healed, ever after flares up during damp weather.
I did run into her once where I couldn’t get away. I was with my sisters, heading along the Walk, when Mary came from the opposite direction, a small black-and-white dog at her heels. It happened too quickly for me to duck aside. Mary started when she saw us, but continued along her path, as if determined not to be deterred. Margaret and Louise said hello to her, and she to them. She and I carefully avoided meeting each other’s eyes.
“What a lovely little dog!” Margaret cried, kneeling to pet it. “What is his name?”
“Tray.”
“Where did you get him?”
“A friend give him to me, to keep me company upon beach.” Mary turned red, which told us who the friend was. “If he likes you, he lets you pet him. If he don’t, he growls.”
Tray sniffed at Louise’s dress, then mine. I stiffened, expecting him to growl, but he looked up at me and panted. I had always assumed pets did not like those their owners did not like.
Other than that meeting, I was able to avoid her, though I sometimes saw her in the distance, Tray following, on the beach or in town.
There was one moment when I was briefly tempted to try to restore our friendship. A few months after our fight, I heard that Mary had discovered a loose jumble of bones, which she pieced together in a speculative fashion, though the specimen was without a skull. I wanted to see it, but the Annings sold it to Colonel Birch and shipped it to him before I got up the courage to visit Cockmoile Square. I was only able to read about it in papers Henry De La Beche and Reverend Conybeare published, in which they named this notional creature a plesiosaurus—a “near lizard.” It had a very long neck and huge paddles, and William Buckland likened it to a serpent threaded through the shell of a turtle.
Now, according to the newspaper, she had found another specimen, and I was once again being tempted to visit Cockmoile Square. After reading the brief notice, questions popped into my head that I wanted to ask Mary. What did she find first? How big was the specimen, and in what sort of condition? How complete? Did this one have a skull? Why did she stay out all night to work on it? Whom did they expect to sell it to: the British or Bristol Museum, or to Colonel Birch once more?
My desire to see it was so strong that I went so far as to get up to fetch my cloak. At that moment, however, Bessy appeared with another cup of tea for me. “What are you doing, Miss Elizabeth? Surely you’re not going out in the cold?”
“I—” As I looked into Bessy’s broad face, her cheeks red and accusing, I knew I couldn’t tell her where I wanted to go. Bessy had been pleased that Mary and I were no longer friends, and would now have plenty of opinions about my desire to visit Cockmoile Square which I didn’t have the energy to fight. Nor could I explain to Margaret and Louise, who had both encouraged me to make amends with Mary and then, when I wouldn’t, let the matter drop and never mentioned her.
“I was just going to the door to see if I could see the post coming,” I said. “But do you know, I’m feeling a little dizzy. I think I’ll go to bed.”
“You do that, Miss Elizabeth. You don’t want to go anywhere.”
It is rare that I feel Bessy’s caution is sound.
WILLIAM BUCKLAND ARRIVED TWO days later. Margaret and Louise had gone to deliver the Christmas baskets to various deserving persons, but I was still ill enough to stay behind. Louise had looked envious as they left; such visits were tedious for her—as they were for me. Only Margaret enjoyed social calls.
It seemed I had only just allowed my eyes to close when Bessy came in to announce that a gentleman had arrived to see me. I sat up, rubbed my face, and smoothed my hair.
William Buckland bounded in. “Miss Philpot!
” he cried. “Don’t get up—you look so comfortable there by the fire. I didn’t mean to disturb you. I can come back.” He looked about him with every intention of remaining, however, and I got to my feet and gave him my hand. “Mr. Buckland, what a pleasure to see you. It has been such a long time.” I waved at the chair opposite. “Please sit and tell me all of your news. Bessy, some tea for Mr. Buckland, please. Have you just come from Oxford?”
“I arrived a few hours ago.” William Buckland sat. “Thankfully the term has just ended, and I was able to set out almost as soon as I received Mary’s letter.” He jumped up again—he was never good at sitting for long—and paced up and down. His forehead was growing larger as his hairline receded, and it gleamed in the firelight. “It really is remarkable, isn’t it? Bless Mary, she has found the most spectacular specimen! We have now incontrovertible evidence of another new creature without having to guess at its anatomy as we did before. How many more ancient animals might we find?” Mr. Buckland picked up a sea urchin from the mantelpiece. “You are very quiet, Miss Philpot,” he said as he examined it. “What do you think? Is it not magnificent?”
“I have not seen the specimen,”I confessed.“I’ve only read about it—though there is little enough in the newspaper account.”
Mr. Buckland stared at me. “What? You’ve not been to see it? Why ever not? I’ve just come like lightning all the way from Oxford, and yet you can simply stroll down the hill. Would you like to go now? I am going back again and can accompany you.” He set down the sea urchin and held out his elbow for me to take.
I sighed. It had been impossible to get Mr. Buckland to understand that Mary and I no longer had anything to do with each other. Though I counted him as a friend, he was not the sort of man who was sensitive to others’ feelings. To Mr. Buckland life was about the pursuit of knowledge rather than the expression of emotions. Almost forty years old, he showed no sign of marrying, to no one’s surprise, for what lady could put up with his erratic behavior and profound interest in the dead rather than the living?
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