Remarkable Creatures

by Tracy Chevalier

  “Well.” I was not going to argue with him about what the men thought of me. I had work to do. I begun scraping again.

  Constant Prévost got to his feet, dusted off his knees, and spoke to Mr. Lyell. “Monsieur Prévost would like to know if you have a buyer for the plesiosaurus,” he explained. “If not, he would like to purchase it for the museum in Paris.”

  I dropped my blade and sat back on my heels. “For Cuvier? Monsieur Cuvier wants one of my plesies?” I looked so astonished that both men begun to laugh.

  IT TOOK MAM NO time to bring me down from the cloud I was floating on. “What do Frenchmen pay for curies?” she wanted to know the minute the men had left to dine at the Three Cups and she could leave the table outside. “Are they looser with their purse strings or do they want it even cheaper than an Englishman?”

  “I don’t know, Mam—we didn’t talk figures,” I lied. I would find a better time to tell her I were so taken with the Frenchman that I’d agreed to sell it to him for just ten pounds. “I don’t care how much he pays,” I added. “I just know Monsieur Cuvier thinks well enough of my work to want more of it. That be pay enough for me.”

  Mam leaned in the doorway and give me a sly look. “So you’re calling the plesie yours, are you?”

  I frowned, but did not answer.

  “The Days found it, didn’t they?” she continued, relentless as always. “They found it and dug it up, and you bought it off them the way Mr. Buckland or Lord Henley or Colonel Birch bought specimens off you and called them theirs. You become a collector like them. Or a dealer, as you’re selling it on.”

  “That’s not fair, Mam. I been a hunter all my life. And I do find most of my specimens. It’s not my fault the Days found one and didn’t know what to do with it. If they had dug it out and cleaned it and sold it, it would be theirs. But they didn’t want that, and come to me. I oversaw them and paid them for their work, but the plesie’s with me now. I’m responsible for it, and so it’s mine.”

  Mam rolled her tongue over her teeth. “You been saying you ain’t had recognition by the men, who call the curies theirs once they bought ’em. Do that mean you’ll tell the Frenchman to put the Days’ names on the label along with yours when they display it in Paris?”

  “Of course I won’t. They won’t list me on the label anyway. No one else ever has.” I said this to try to distract from Mam’s argument, for I knew she was right.

  “Maybe the difference between hunter and collector ain’t so great as you been making out all these years.”

  “Mam! Why are you going on about such a thing when I’ve just had good news? Can’t you leave be?”

  Mam sighed and straightened her cap as she prepared to go back out to customers at the table. “All a mother wants is for her children to settle into their lives. I seen you worried about recognition for your work these many years. But you’d be better off worrying about the pay. That’s what really matters, isn’t it? Curies is business.”

  Though I knew she meant it kindly, her words cut. Yes, I needed to be paid for what I did. But fossils were more than money to me now—they had become a kind of life, a whole stone world that I were a part of. Sometimes I even thought about my own body after my death, and it turning to stone thousands of years later. What would someone make of me if they dug me up?

  But Mam were right: I had become part not just of the hunting and finding, but of the buying and the selling too, and it was no longer so clear what I did. Maybe that was the true price of my fame.

  What I wanted to do more than anything was to go up Silver Street to Morley Cottage and sit at the Philpots’ dining room table spread with Miss Elizabeth’s fossil fish and talk to her. Bessy would bang a cup of tea in front of me and slump off, and we would watch the light change over Golden Cap. I looked up at a watercolor Miss Elizabeth had made of that view and given me not long before our argument—trees and cottages in the foreground, the hills along the coast washed in soft light as they backed into the distance. There were no people visible in the painting, but I often felt as if I were there somewhere, just out of sight, looking for curies on the shore.

  The next two days I was busy with Mr. Lyell and Monsieur Prévost, taking them upon beach to show them where the beasts had come from and teach them how to find other curies. Neither had the eye, though they found a few bits and pieces. Even then my luck were with me, for in front of them I found yet another ichthyosaurus. We were standing on the ledge near to the other ichie’s site when I spotted a length of jaw and teeth almost under the foot of the Frenchman. With my hammer I chipped off slices of rock to expose the eye, the vertebrae and ribs. It was a good specimen, apart from a crushed tail that looked like a cart wheel run over it. I confess it were a pleasure to wield my hammer and bring the creature into sight before their eyes. “Miss Anning, you are truly a conjurer!” Mr. Lyell exclaimed. Monsieur Prévost too was impressed, though he could not say so in English. I was just as happy that he could not speak, for it meant I could enjoy being in his company without having to worry about what his pretty words might mean.

  The men wanted to see more, so I had to fetch the Days to dig out that ichie while I took them to the Ammonite Graveyard at Monmouth Beach, and on along to Pinhay Bay to hunt crinoids. Only once they left to go to Weymouth and to Portland were I finally free to return to the plesie. I would have to clean it fast, for Monsieur Prévost planned to leave for France in ten days. I would be working day and night to get it ready, but it would be worth it. That was how this trade was: For months every day would be just like the last, but for the changes in weather, with me hunting upon beach. Then along come three monsters and two strangers and suddenly I would have to stay up all hours to finish preparing a specimen.

  MAYBE IT WERE BECAUSE I was in the workshop all the time till the plesie was done and the men gone that I didn’t find out until everyone else in Lyme already knew. It took Mam shouting at me from her perch at the table one morning to get me outside. “What, Mam?” I grumbled as I wiped my hair from my eyes, leaving clay on my forehead.

  “It’s Bessy,” Mam said, pointing.

  The Philpots’ maid was heading up Coombe Street. I run after her and caught up just as she was about to go into the baker’s. “Bessy!” I called.

  Bessy turned and grunted when she saw me. I had to grab her arm to keep her from ducking inside. Bessy rolled her eyes. “What you want?”

  “You’re back! You’re—Are they—Is Miss Elizabeth all right?”

  “You listen to me, Mary Anning,” Bessy said, facing me fully. “You leave ’em alone, do you hear? The last person they want to see is you. Don’t you come anywhere near Silver Street.”

  Bessy had never liked me, so it were no surprise what she was saying. I just had to work out if it were true. I tried to read her face as she spoke. She looked bothered, and nervous, and angry. Nor would she look at me direct but kept turning her head from side to side, as if hoping someone would come and save her from me.

  “I’m not going to hurt you, Bessy.”

  “Yes, you are!” she hissed. “You stay away from us. You’re not welcome at Morley Cottage. You almost killed Miss Elizabeth, you did. We thought we lost her one night at her worst, the pneumonia were that bad. She would never have got it if it hadn’t been for you. And she ain’t been the same since. So you just leave her alone!” Bessy pushed past me into the baker’s.

  I went back along Coombe Street, but when I reached Cockmoile Square I didn’t go over to Mam behind her table. Instead I turned into Bridge Street, crossed the square past the Assembly Rooms and the Three Cups, and started up Broad Street. If I were going to be kept away, I would hear it direct from the Philpots rather than from Bessy.

  It was market day, and the Shambles was busy, with stalls extending halfway up Broad Street. The place was thick with people; pushing through them was like trying to wade through the sea with the tide coming in. I kept going, though, for I knew I had to.

  With all of the crowd, it took me
a moment to spot her, marching down the hill with her quick little steps and her straight back. It was like seeing a vague shape on the horizon that when it comes closer snaps into the clear outline of a ship. At that moment I felt the bolt of lightning pass through me and stopped dead, letting the market crowd part and push round me.

  Elizabeth Philpot was surrounded by people, but she herself was alone, unaccompanied by her sisters. She looked thinner, almost skeletal, the familiar mauve dress hanging from her, her bonnet framing a bony face. Her cheekbones and especially her jaw were more prominent, long and straight and hard like an ichie’s. But she was walking smartly, as if she knew just where she was going, and when she got closer I could see that her gray eyes were very bright, like a light shone through them. I let out my breath, which I hadn’t even noticed I was holding.

  When she saw me, her face lit up like Golden Cap does when the sun touches it. Then I begun to run, shoving people out of the way and yet hardly seeming to move at all. When I reached her I threw my arms round her and begun to cry, in front of the whole town, with Fanny Miller at a veg stall staring, and Mam come to see what had happened to me, and everyone who ever talked about me behind my back now talking about me openly, and I didn’t care.

  We didn’t say a word, just clung to each other, both of us crying, even though Miss Elizabeth never cried. No matter all that had happened to me—finding the ichies and plesies, going with Colonel Birch to the orchard, meeting Monsieur Prévost—this was the lightning that signaled my greatest happiness, in all my life.

  “I have given my sisters the slip and was just coming to find you,” Miss Elizabeth said, when at last we let go. She wiped her eyes. “I am very glad to be home. I never thought I would miss Lyme so much.”

  “I thought the doctor said you can’t live by the sea, that your lungs are too weak.”

  In response Miss Elizabeth took a deep breath, held it, and let it out. “What do London doctors know of sea air? London air is filthy. I am much better off here. Besides, no one can keep me away from my fish. Thank you, by the way, for the crate of fish you left for me. They are a delight. Come, let us go down to the sea. I have seen so little of it, as Margaret and Louise and Bessy won’t let me out of the house. They worry over me far too much.”

  She begun walking down Broad Street again, and I reluctantly followed. “They’ll be angry at me for letting you do this,” I said. “They’re already angry that I got you sick.”

  Miss Elizabeth snorted. “Nonsense. You didn’t make me sit on a drafty landing for an evening, did you? Nor go by ship to London. Those follies I take complete responsibility for.” She said it as if she weren’t sorry for anything she done.

  Then she told me about the meeting at the Geological Society and how Mr. Buckland and Reverend Conybeare agreed to write to Cuvier, and Mr. Buckland said nice things about me to all the gentlemen gathered, even though they weren’t recorded in the minutes. And I told her about Monsieur Prévost and the plesiosaurus that was going to Monsieur Cuvier’s collection in the Paris museum. It was wonderful to talk to her again, but underneath our words I felt anxious, for I knew I had to do something difficult. I had to say sorry.

  We were strolling along the Walk when I stepped in front of her and stopped so that she could go no further. “Miss Elizabeth, I’m sorry for all the things I said,” I blurted out. “For being so proud and full of myself. For making fun of your fish and your sisters. I were awful to you and it was wrong, after all you done for me. I’ve been missing you these many years. And then you went off to London for me and almost died—”

  “Enough.” Elizabeth Philpot held up her hand. “First of all, you are to call me Elizabeth.”

  “I—All right. E—Elizabeth.” It felt very odd not saying Miss.

  Miss Elizabeth begun walking again. “And you need not apologize for my trip to London. After all, I chose to do it. And indeed, I am grateful to you. Going to London on the Unity was the finest experience of my life. It changed me for the better, and I don’t regret it in the slightest.”

  There was something different about her, though I could not say exactly what it was. It was as if she were more certain. If someone were sketching her they would use clear, strong lines, whereas before they might have used faint marks and more shading. She was like a fossil that’s been cleaned and set so everyone can see what it is.

  “As for our disagreement, I too said things I regret,” she continued. “I was jealous of you, as you said then, not just of Colonel Birch, but of your knowledge of fossils too—your ability to find them and understand what they are. I will never have such skills.”

  “Oh.” I looked away, for it was difficult to return her bright, honest gaze. All of our walking and talking had brought us to the bottom of the Cobb. The waves were bursting over it, sending out a spray that made the seagulls wheel up into the sky.

  “Do you know, I should like to see the Ammonite Graveyard,” Miss Elizabeth declared. “It has been so long.”

  “Are you sure you can go that far, Miss Elizabeth? You mustn’t tire yourself after your illness.”

  “Stop fussing. Margaret and Bessy fuss enough. Not Louise, though, thank heavens. And call me Elizabeth. I will keep insisting until you have learned.”

  So we continued, arm in arm along the beach, talking until at last we had no more to say, like a storm that blows itself out, and our eyes dropped to the ground, where the curies were waiting for us to find them.

  TEN

  Silent together

  Mary Anning and I are hunting fossils on the beach, she her creatures, I my fish. Our eyes are fastened to the sand and rocks as we make our way along the shore at different paces, first one in front, then the other. Mary stops to split open a nodule and find what may be lodged within. I dig through clay, searching for something new and miraculous. We say very little, for we do not need to. We are silent together, each in her own world, knowing the other is just at her back.

  POSTSCRIPT

  The reader’spatience

  Mary Anning’s name was first published in a scientific context in France in 1825, when Georges Cuvier added it to a caption for an illustration of a plesiosaur specimen, in the third edition of his book Discours sur les révolutions du globe (“Discourse on the revolutionary upheavals on the surface of the earth”). She was first mentioned by name in Great Britain in a paper by William Buckland on coprolites in 1829; by then she and Buckland had worked out that bezoar stones were the feces of ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs. She also discovered the first complete pterodactyl (now called a pterosaur) in Great Britain, and the squaloraja, a transition animal between sharks and rays, which became a type specimen.

  Mary Anning never married, living with her mother until Molly’s death in 1842. They moved from Cockmoile Square to a house with a shop front on Broad Street in 1826. Mary’s dog Tray was killed in a landslip in 1833; it missed Mary by a few feet. Mary died of breast cancer in 1847 at the age of forty-seven. She is buried in the churchyard of St. Michael’s, which she joined later in life. Her ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs are on display at the Natural History Museum in London, and the headless plesiosaur Cuvier bought from her is on display in the Palaeontology Gallery of the Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris.

  In 1834 the Swiss scientist Louis Agassiz came to Lyme and studied Elizabeth Philpot’s fossil fish collection. He thanked both Elizabeth and Mary Anning in his book Recherches sur les poissons fossiles (“Research on Fossil Fish”) and named fish species after both of them. Elizabeth outlived both Mary Anning and her sisters, dying in 1857 at the age of seventy-eight. Her nephew John inherited her estate, and in 1880 his wife donated the Philpot fossil collection to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, where there are still drawers full of her superb specimens. Elizabeth’s great-nephew Thomas later established the Philpot Museum in Lyme Regis. Rather fittingly, the museum is now housed in a handsome building on the site of the Annings’ house in Cockmoile Square, where amongst many treasures
concerning the town’s history you can see on display the fossil hammer Mary’s father made for her.

  Joseph Anning became a full-time upholsterer in 1825, married in 1829, and had three children. Apparently Mary Anning did not get on with his wife. Joseph managed to achieve the respectable life he craved, overseeing parish relief and becoming a church warden.

  Lieutenant Colonel Thomas James Birch became Thomas James Bosvile in 1824, when he inherited the title and the family estate in Yorkshire. He died in 1829.

  William Buckland did find a woman to marry him, in 1825—she was sitting opposite him in a coach and reading a volume of Cuvier. He continued to eat his way through the animal world, and to try to reconcile geology with his religious beliefs. He later became Dean of Westminster School, but towards the end of his life he suffered from mental illness and had to be placed in an asylum.

  Between 1830 and 1833 Charles Lyell published Principles of Geology, which became the seminal text on modern geology; Charles Darwin took it with him on his voyage on the Beagle.

  Jane Austen visited Lyme in September 1804, and there is no reason why she and Margaret Philpot could not have been in the Assembly Rooms at the same time. Indeed, she did meet Richard Anning, for she went to his shop to have him give her a quote on fixing the broken lid of a chest. According to a letter she wrote to her sister, he charged far too much, and she took her business elsewhere.

  Remarkable Creatures is a work of fiction, but many of the people existed, and events such as Colonel Birch’s auction and the Geological Society meeting where Conybeare talked about the plesiosaur did take place. And Mary did indeed write at the bottom of a scientific paper she had copied out: “When I write a paper there shall not be but one preface.” Sadly she never did write her own scientific paper.

  Twenty-first-century attitudes towards time and our expectations of story are very different from the shape of Mary Anning’s life. She spent day after day, year after year, doing the same thing on the beach. I have taken the events of her life and condensed them to fit into a narrative that is not stretched beyond the reader’s patience. Hence events, while in order, do not always coincide exactly with actual dates and time spans. Plus, of course, I made up plenty. For instance, while there was gossip about Mary and Buckland and Mary and Birch, there was no proof. That is where only a novelist can step in.