Remarkable Creatures

by Chevalier, Tracy

  “You thought the last specimen was fine?” Mr Bullock cried, holding up another pentacrinite. “Well, then, have a look at this beauty. See? Not a crack or chip anywhere, the form in all its mysterious perfection. Who can resist its feminine charms? Not I, ladies and gentlemen, not I. Indeed, I am going to do something highly unusual and start the bidding myself, at two guineas. For what is two guineas if I can give my wife and myself such a fine example of the beauty of nature? Will anyone deprive me of my beauty? What? You will, sir? How dare you! It will have to be for two pounds ten shillings, sir. It is? And yours is three pounds, sir? So be it. I cannot compete for such beauty as these gentlemen can. I can only hope my wife forgives me. At least we know it is for a worthy cause. Let us not forget why we are here.”

  His auctioning approach was irregular—I was used to the smoother, quieter, understated tone of the auctioneers who came to sell the contents of Lyme houses. But then, they were auctioning off china plates and mahogany side tables, not the bones of ancient animals. Perhaps a different tone was necessary. And his style worked. Mr Bullock sold every pentacrinite, every shark’s tooth, every ammonite, for more than I expected. Indeed, bidders were surprisingly generous, especially when ichthyosaurus parts began to be sold—jaws, snouts, vertebrae. It was then that men I knew joined the bidding. Reverend Conybeare bought four large fused vertebrae. Charles Konig bought a jaw for the British Museum. William Buckland fulfilled his mission and bought part of an ichthyosaurus skull for Baron Cuvier’s collection at the Natural History Museum in Paris, as well as a femur. And the prices were quite high—two guineas, five guineas, ten pounds.

  Twice more Mr Bullock drew attention to the worthiness of the auction, making me shift in my seat. To call Colonel Birch’s pocket a worthy cause infuriated me, and the high regard in which he was held made me want to flee. However, standing up and pushing through the wall of men behind would have brought more attention than I could withstand, and it had taken so much effort to get here that I remained seated, and fumed.

  “Quite remarkable what Colonel Birch has done,” the man next to me whispered when there was a pause in the proceedings.

  I nodded. Though I did not share his admiration, I did not want to argue with a stranger over Colonel Birch’s character.

  “So generous of him,” the man continued.

  “What do you mean, sir?” I asked, but my words were lost as Mr Bullock bellowed like a circus ringmaster, “And now, the finest and most unusual specimen in all of Colonel Birch’s collection. A most mysterious animal has arrived at Bullock’s. Indeed, its brother graced Bullock’s Museum for several years to an enormous admiring audience. Then we called it a crocodile, but some of the finest British minds have studied it carefully and confirmed it is a different animal, not yet found in the world. You have already seen parts of it sold today—vertebrae, ribs, jaws, skulls. Now you will see how all of those parts fit together, in one complete, perfect, glorious specimen. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: the Birch ichthyosaurus!”

  The crowd rose to its feet as the mounted specimen was carried in. Even I stood and craned my neck to look, though I had already thoroughly studied it in the Anning workshop. Such was the power of Mr Bullock’s flagrant, effective showmanship. It was not just me. William Buckland craned his neck too, as did Charles Konig and Henry De La Beche and Reverend Conybeare. We were all drawn in by the spell the beast cast.

  It did look very fine. As with the other specimens sold, the artificial London setting, in a brightly painted, finely furnished room so different from Lyme’s raw sea air and natural rough tones, made the ichthyosaurus look even odder and more out of place, as if from another world altogether—older and harsher and more alien. It was difficult to imagine such a creature ever having lived in the world of people, or taking a place in Aristotle’s Great Chain of Being.

  Bidding was brisk, and resulted in the Royal College of Surgeons buying it for one hundred pounds. Mary would be pleased, I thought, if she weren’t more likely to be furious at being robbed of such a fee.

  The ichthyosaurus was the final lot of the sale. I had been missing from Montague Street for an hour and a half; if I got a cab quickly I might yet manage to get back to my bedroom without anyone noticing my absence. I stood, preparing to slip out so that the men I knew in the room wouldn’t see me. It was at that moment, however, that Colonel Birch chose also to detach himself from the front row. He moved to the lectern and called out over the hubbub, “Gentlemen! Gentlemen—and ladies,” for he had spied me. I froze.

  “I am overwhelmed by your interest and by your generosity. As I announced earlier,” he continued, his eyes reaching out and pinning me to my place so that I would at last listen to what he had to say, “I have auctioned off my collection to raise money for a very worthy Lyme family—the Annings.”

  I shied like a nervous horse, but managed not to gasp.

  “You have kindly responded in a most generous fashion.” Colonel Birch kept his eyes on my face, as if to calm me. “What I did not tell you before, ladies and gentlemen, is that it was the daughter of this family—Mary Anning—who discovered the majority of the specimens that make up my collection, including the fine ichthyosaurus just sold. She is—” he paused “—possibly the most remarkable young woman I have had the privilege to meet in the fossil world. She has helped me, and she may well help you in future. When you admire the specimens you have bought today, remember it was she who found them. Thank you.”

  As a wave of murmurs swept the room, Colonel Birch nodded at me, then stepped aside and was engulfed by a mob of coats and top hats. I began to push my way towards the exit. All about me men were looking me over—not as they had done on the street, but with a more cerebral curiosity. “Pardon me, are you Miss Anning?” asked one.

  “Oh no, no.” I shook my head vigorously. “I’m not.” He looked disappointed, and I felt a thread of anger tug at me. “I am Elizabeth Philpot,” I declared, “and I collect fossil fish.”

  Not everyone heard my answer, for there were murmurs of “Mary Anning” all around me. Feeling a hand on my shoulder, I did not turn, but shoved my way between the men in front of me until I reached the street. I managed to control myself until I was safe inside a cab heading up Piccadilly and no one could see me. Then I—who never cry—began to weep. Not for Mary, but for myself.

  Like the tide making its

  highest mark on the beach

  and then retreating

  Istill remember the date his letter arrived: the 12th of May, 1820. Joe wrote it in the catalogue, but I would have remembered anyway.

  By then I weren’t expecting a letter any more. It had been months since he’d left. I had begun to forget what he looked like, how his voice sounded, the way he walked, the things he said. I no longer talked to Margaret Philpot about him, nor asked Miss Elizabeth if she had heard of him from the other fossil gentlemen. I didn’t wear the locket, but put it away and didn’t take it out to look at and finger the lock of his thick hair.

  I didn’t go upon beach either. Something had happened to me. I couldn’t find curies. I went out and it was like I was blind. Nothing glittered; there were no tiny jolts of lightning, no pattern popping out from the random shapes.

  They tried to help—Mam, Miss Philpot. Even Joe left his upholstering to come out hunting with me when I knew he’d rather be inside covering chairs. And when he come to Lyme, Mr Buckland, who never noticed anything about other people, was gentle with me, guiding me to specimens he found, showing me where he thought we should look, staying at my side more than usual—in fact, doing all the things I normally done for him upon beach. He also entertained me with stories of his travels to the Continent with Reverend Conybeare, and with his antics at Oxford, how he kept a tame bear as a pet, and dressed it up and introduced it to the other Oxford dons. And how a friend brought back a crocodile in brine from a voyage, and Mr Buckland got to add a new member of the animal kingdom to his tasting list. I couldn’t help smiling at his stori
es.

  He was the only one who got through the fog even briefly. He begun talking to me about things we’d found over the years that didn’t seem to belong to the ichie: verteberries wider and chunkier, paddle bones flatter than they should be. One day he showed me a verteberry with a piece of rib that was attached lower than on an ichie’s verteberry. “Do you know, Mary, I think there may be another creature out there,” he said. “Something with a spine and ribs and paddles like the ichthyosaurus, but with anatomy rather more like a crocodile’s. Wouldn’t that be something, to find another of God’s creatures?”

  For a moment my mind went clear. I studied Mr Buckland’s kindly face, even rounder and pudgier than when I first knew him, his eyes bright and his brow bulging with ideas, and I almost said, “Yes, I think so too. I been wondering about a new monster for years.” I didn’t say it. Before I could, my mind sank down again like a leaf settling to the bottom of a pond.

  Mam and Joe went hunting while I stayed back and minded the shop. It was a surprise the first time Mam went out with Joe to Black Ven. She give me a funny look as they left, but she said nothing. She had been out with me now and then, but always as company, not to hunt herself. She was good at the business side—writing letters to collectors, chasing up what we was owed and describing specimens for sale, convincing visitors to buy more than they’d meant to at the shop. She never went looking for curies. She didn’t have the eye, or the patience. Or so I’d thought. I was amazed when they come back hours later and Mam, all smug, handed me a basket heavy with finds. It was mostly ammos and bellies—the easiest curies for a beginner to see since their even lines stand out from the rocks. But she’d also managed to find some pentacrinites, a damaged sea urchin, and, most surprising of all, part of the shoulder bone of an ichie. We could get three shillings for that bone alone, and eat for a week.

  When she was in the privy I accused Joe of putting what he found in her basket and saying it were hers. He shook his head. “She did it herself. I don’t know how she manages it, she’s so haphazard in her hunting. But she finds things.”

  Mam later told me she’d made a bargain with God: if He showed her where the curies were, she would never again question His judgment, which she had done many times over the years with all the death and debt she had to suffer. “He must have listened,” Mam said, “for I didn’t have to look hard to find ’em. They were just there upon beach, waiting for me to pick up. I don’t know why you fussed so much when you went out looking, needing all that time day after day. It ain’t so hard to find curies.”

  I wanted to argue with her but was in no position to since I weren’t going hunting any more. And it was true that when Mam went out she always filled her basket. She had the eye all right, she just didn’t want to admit it.

  All of that changed on the 12th of May, 1820. I was behind our table in Cockmoile Square, showing sea lilies to a Bristol couple, when a boy come by with a packet for Joe. He wanted a shilling to pay for it, as it was bigger than your average letter. I didn’t have a shilling, and was about to send the boy away again when I saw the handwriting I had been waiting for these months. I knew his hand because, just as Miss Elizabeth had taught me, I’d shown him how to write labels of each specimen he found—a description of it, the Linnaean name if known, where and when found, in which layer of rock, and any other information that might be useful.

  I snatched the packet from the boy and stared at it. Why were it addressed to Joe? They weren’t ever over friendly together. Why wouldn’t he write to me?

  “You can’t have that unless you pay, Mary.” The boy pulled at the packet.

  “I haven’t the shilling yet, but I’ll get it somehow. Can’t you let me have it and I’ll owe you?”

  In answer he pulled at the packet again. I hugged it to my chest. “I’m not giving it up. I been waiting for this letter for months.”

  The boy sneered. “That be from your sweetheart, eh? The old man you went round with who left you, didn’t he?”

  “You shut your gob, boy!” I turned to the gentleman, knowing such a fuss in front of customers would sell no curies. “Sorry, sir. Have you decided what you want?”

  “Indeed,” the lady answered for her husband. “We shall take a shilling’s worth of crinoids.” She smiled as she held out a coin.

  “Oh, thank you, ma’am, thank you!” I handed the shilling to the boy. “You get out now, you!”

  He made a rude gesture as he left, and I apologised again to the couple. Though the lady had been so understanding about the letter, she took her time about choosing her crinoids, and I had to swallow my impatience. Then I had to wrap them up in paper, and the man wanted extra string, and I got it all in knots, and thought I would go mad with fixing it. At last it was done and they left, the lady whispering, “I hope there is good news in your letter.”

  I went inside then and sat in the dusty workshop, the packet in my lap. I read the address again: “Joseph Anning, Esq., The Fossil Shop, Cockmoile Square, Lyme Regis, Dorsetshire.” Why had he written to my brother? And why was it a packet wrapped in brown paper rather than a letter? What could Colonel Birch want to send to my brother?

  Why hadn’t he sent it to me?

  I knew from the incoming tide that Joe and Mam would be back in half an hour. I didn’t know how I could sit there with the letter and wait even that little while for them to return. I couldn’t bear it.

  I looked at the packet. Then I turned it over, counted to three, and broke the seal. Joe would be angry, but I could-n’t help it. I was sure it was really meant for me.

  Along with a folded letter there was a pamphlet the size of the exercise books I used to practise my letters in at Sunday school. On the front page it read:

  A Catalogue of

  a small but very fine Collection of

  Organised Fossils,

  from the Blue Lias Formation

  at Lyme and Charmouth, in Dorsetshire

  consisting principally of Bones,

  illustrating the

  Osteology of the Ichthio-Saurus, or Proteo-Saurus,

  and of Specimens of

  the Zoophyte, called Pentacrinite,

  the Genuine Property of Colonel Birch,

  collected at a considerable Expense,

  which will be sold at Auction,

  by Mr Bullock,

  at his Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly

  on Monday, the 15th Day of May, 1820

  Punctually at one o’clock

  I studied this page without really taking it in. Only when I turned the pages of the catalogue and read the list of specimens, each of which I could picture and name where it had been found, did I begin to understand. He was selling it, every last cury I had worked so hard to add to his collection just for the satisfaction of knowing he would be handling it. All the pentacrinites he loved so, the ammos and parts of lobsters, the fish I should really have given to Elizabeth Philpot, the strange crustaceous insect I had never seen before and would have studied more carefully with the Philpots’ magnifying glass, but that he wanted it. All the fragments of ichies, jaws and teeth and eye sockets and verteberries, all about to be scattered.

  And of course the ichie, the most perfect specimen I’d ever seen, that I’d stayed up night after night to finish cleaning and mounting the very best I could. I did it all for him, and now he was going to sell it, just like Lord Henley sold my first ichie. And Mr Bullock was in the middle of it again. My head buzzed so that I thought it would explode. I held the catalogue tight in my hands, wanting to rip it apart. I would have done so if it had been sent to me rather than Joe. I would have torn it all apart and thrown it in the fire, catalogue and letter alike.

  The letter. I had not read it yet. I had such an ache behind my eyes I weren’t sure I could read anything now. But I unfolded it, smoothed it out, rubbed my eyes, and let them rest on his words. Then I begun to read.

  When I finished, my throat was that tight I couldn’t swallow, and I’d gone hot in the face like I’d r
un all the way up Broad Street. By the time Mam and Joe come in, I was sobbing so hard my heart was sure to come out of my mouth.

  There were three coaches a week from London, and each one brought me another piece of the puzzle of what had gone on there.

  The newspaper account arrived first. Normally there was no money for newspapers, but Mam come home with one. “We has to find out if we can afford this newspaper,” was her logic. I could hardly turn the pages, my hands were trembling so. On page three I found the following notice and read it out to Mam and Joe:

  An auction yesterday by Mr. Bullock at his Egyptian Hall on Piccadilly of the fossil collection of Lt.-Col. Thomas Birch, late of the Life Guards, has raised in excess of £400. The collection included a fine and rare specimen of the ichthyosaurus, which was sold to the Royal College of Surgeons for £100. Lt.-Col. Birch announced that the funds raised would be given to the Anning family of Lyme Regis, who helped him to assemble the collection.

  It was brief, but it was enough. To see it in print like that made my hands go cold.

  Mam was usually cautious with money, making no plans for it until she held it in her hands. Seeing word of it in the newspaper, though, was as good as proof to her that it was coming, and she begun discussing with Joe what to do with it. “We’ll pay off our debts,” Joe said. “Then we’ll think about buying a house further uphill, away from the floods.” Cockmoile Square was regularly flooded, by the river or the sea.

  “I’m in no hurry to move,” Mam replied, “but we do need new furniture. And then you’ll need money to set up a proper upholstery business.” They talked on and on, with plans they’d never dared to dream of a week ago, relaxing in the luxury of being able to fart in the face of the workhouse, as Mam put it. It was comical how quick they went from being poor to thinking rich. I didn’t say anything as they talked, nor did they expect me to. We all knew we were getting the money because of me. I had done my part, and it were like I was a queen and could sit back and let my courtiers arrange things.