by Joan Thomas
Now she has his scarlet uniform in her hand. She holds it up to herself and looks in the mirror. “What was this about, Henry?”
He’s considered all winter what he will say. He squares his shoulders, regretting his plaid dressing gown with the ribbon around the waist. “I refuse to be subservient to inferior men,” he says.
She sighs and drops the scarlet jacket on the floor. “Oh,” she says. “You are such a baby.”
“We were locked in at night,” he cries. “There was a terrible danger of fire. The other cadets were always hiding live coals on a shovel under their beds to drop on someone’s head in the dark. Once, they stole over and ignited a boy’s bedclothes to frighten the hiccups out of him. And Woodbury! Oh, what a fool! He would squat over a candle in the night to entertain us by igniting his farts.”
To his fury, she laughs. “Well,” she says. “Courage under fire! It is a military academy.”
He listens, appalled. This was his trump card, the prospect of a hideous death for her only child. “There is something else,” he says. He’ll tell her, then, about the subaltern leaving them outside Mr. Truepenny’s chamber, and how he gave up his honour. She’ll see his need to be taken in hand, she’ll understand the dimensions of her neglect. He hadn’t planned to come at the subject like this, but it seems he will have to.
She moves towards him. She reaches up and kisses him. “Yes,” she says. “There is something else, but it’s very late. We’ll talk in the morning.” She opens the door, leaving her hat behind, and lets in a single strike of the hall clock on her way out.
Over breakfast, she tells him that she herself is engaged to be married, to a Mr. William Aveline of Lyme Regis, a man he’s never met. “I regret that you haven’t made his acquaintance before now, Henry,” she says. “I regret it with all my heart. You will be the best of companions. He is a great walker, a great lover of the natural world.” She gives Henry a curiosity that washed up on the shore at Lyme Regis, to show him the sort of pursuits that await him in his new home. It’s a heavy stone, flat and solid like a huge coin, seemingly made of a snake tightly curled up into itself.
“Is it a shell?” he asks. “How was it made?”
“It’s a curiosity,” says Alger in rebuke. “Why would they call it a curiosity if they knew?”
“In any case, my love,” his mother cries gaily, putting out a cheek to be kissed, “engagements are the order of the day! And a lifetime of joy to us both.” Then she ties on her bonnet and goes to town.
She comes back in the afternoon with a pin in a brocade box. It’s a dove, pavé-winged in turquoise, and it bears a tiny ring in its golden beak. Letitia will apparently understand this pin as an offer of marriage. Sullivan will deliver it (When? Directly) with a note written by Henry, assuring Letitia that the writer of the note and the dove are united in their sentiments. Tomorrow morning, Henry will present himself at Captain Whyte’s front door. He will request permission to ask for Miss Whyte’s hand, and Captain Whyte will give it. Then Letitia will receive him in the morning room. (What will I say? You will begin with a contrite apology.) There’s also the matter of the ring, which Alger takes from the safe and presents to Henry with great ceremony, the ring with the pebble in it – an unpolished tourmaline, as it turns out. Hopefully, all will be accomplished without delay, for it’s imperative his mother be on the road by noon. Letitia is spending the next few months in Bristol, perhaps the whole year, and so shall Henry. It will be a fine opportunity for them to become better acquainted.
She arranges all this over four o’clock Madeira in the panelled drawing room, Alger wheezing and interrupting. She is handing him over to the girl in the woods. Henry has no way of understanding tactics gone so terribly awry. Most matches are arranged this way, Alger assures him in the self-satisfied tones of one who’s escaped. They typically begin with a youthful indiscretion. His mother talks gently and warmly about his new obligations, but he can’t listen. He sees what’s at the heart of it, how well this suits her purposes. All is changed. He has crossed a river: to adulthood, to where his mother was (he thought, throughout these last months). But she’s changed too; she’s moved on ahead and vanished into her own private bower of happiness. The poise she carried in Alger’s front door under her lavender bonnet was not an affectation. It was utter indifference to Henry and what will become of him.
TWELVE
quire Henley’s desire for a piece of blue silk fabric changed everything for the Annings that fall. He saw the silk in a shop in Charmouth – a bolt of it, enough for a cushioned divan, although it was only when he got home that he realized how much he fancied it, and had to arrange for someone to go back to fetch it. Mary would not have imagined Squire Henley a man to develop a passion for silk upholstery fabric, nor a man to have difficulty making up his mind. But both of these things appeared to be true.
Mary gained this access into the Squire’s character while she and Joseph sat cleaning and polishing fossils one evening. In the months since Richard’s death, Joseph had become a version of their father, tall and tense and unkempt, his eyebrows growing together over his nose. The way his upper lip rested on the bottom spoke of nervous secrets. But that night, he was congenial, and as they worked, he told her how Squire Henley had visited the upholstery shop just before closing and how Mr. Armstrong had offered to send his apprentice to Charmouth to fetch the fabric in the morning. A purse of money had changed hands. Fourteen shillings! For a piece of silk on which to park his beefy thighs!
But an hour after Joseph left in the morning for Charmouth, he was back without the fabric. He had gone by the shore and discovered a landslip under Black Ven. Not that he couldn’t pass – but in the black marl and limestone was something he wanted to show Mary. Teeth in the rock!
“A crocodile?” said Mary, standing very still in the kitchen. She’d been getting ready to go to the shore herself, although a storm was brewing.
Joseph’s face was scarlet and sweat dripped from under his cap. “Certain-sure,” he said. “Or a great boogerin’ bird. I stepped on its boogerin’ beak before I saw it.”
“You were afraid to look at it.”
“No! I’m afraid of Armstrong, if I don’t get to Charmouth and back betimes.” He shook the purse in her face to show her, its drawstring looped around his wrist. “He’ll skin me if he knows I turned back. Are you coming?”
Molly sat at the table mending Lizzie’s stocking. “Pitch a stone before you go near,” she said, not looking up. “Be sure it’s dead.”
Pelting over the sea-combed weed on the foreshore, Mary kept her eyes pinned ahead for the first sight of a dragon lying on the sands. A dragon washed out of its lair. When Black Ven loomed over them, Joseph clambered past her and ran ahead. The debris of the landslip lay at the foot of the cliff – clods of rude mud as though a giant had cleaned his boots there, and broken slate and stone. Up near the base of the cliff, Joseph stopped and stood over something like a pointer. It was a slab of limestone as big as the two of them. Above, Mary could see the broken cliff face it had fallen from. Twenty feet up.
It was not a dragon, it was only figured grey stone, sunk into grey stone. A skeleton fused with its own monument. She could have passed by without seeing it. But there was Joseph panting eagerly over it. “See!” he cried, and she bent and put her hand down and felt exposed teeth. A prickle moved down her legs and she pulled her hand back.
“Go back to town,” she said. “Ask Armstrong for a day off.”
“He’ll never give it. He thinks the collecting is a sin. We’ll write to Buckland. He’ll hire men to get it out. Twenty pound, he said.”
“No!” said Mary. “He said twenty pound for a whole skeleton. If Buckland digs it out, he’ll never pay us.” Besides, he had never answered her letter.
Grey clouds sat right down on the cliff above them. Terns dipped and spun through the clouds. Joseph stared back at her, but it was her anthracite eyes she’d turned on him, and his eyelids fluttered. He took his cap o
ff and wiped his forehead and then, on his hot face, she saw something astonishing: surrender, relief. “Mary, I must go,” he said. “Or he’ll sack me, certain-sure. I’ll come back this way. I’ll see how you’re getting on.”
“No,” said Mary. “The tide will be in, you won’t get around the point. Take the cliff path home.”
She waited while he dwindled along the foreshore, not wanting to examine the creature until she was alone. She had known they’d find the crocodile, but she’d never pictured it in the rock like this. Months, it would take, to chip it out. The thought did not numb her – it thrilled her. Months of work, and then twenty pounds. We will be depauperized. She whispered the word, a favourite expression of the Parish Overseer. We will give half to the Overseer to distribute among the names in our book and we will keep half for ourselves. And I will write a text like the texts in the Sowerby book and sell it to all the scholars.
Joseph had come to a halt. He was standing like a stunpoll on the satiny foreshore to the east. What was he waiting for? “Go on!” she screamed, and threw her fist at him. But it was a distant rock she was scolding – he had turned up the path to Charmouth and she was alone on the shore.
Only one side of the jaw was visible, as long as her arm. It was like a weathered log cemented in the limestone. Top and bottom jaw both there, the teeth clenched. The teeth were pointed, meant for killing, each tooth as big as her thumb. She’d wanted Joseph gone, but now that he was she could hardly force herself to touch it. But she did, and it was cold to her fingers. There would be claws to match the teeth, a lashing tail. Not in this rock, though. The whole head might be here, but the body would lie in the cliff above. She scrambled back, frightened suddenly to be standing between the creature’s head and its body.
The storm was brewing up. It was very close, black over the Channel. She watched the breakers slam against the rocks and then the water sink in a low, moaning retreat to meet the next wave. Lightning flickered and there was a smell in the air. Brimstone, she thought. Very near here, in a cottage just outside Charmouth, a woman noted for cursing had been killed by lightning. It had burst open the door of her house and torn off her hair and clothing. Please, Mary prayed in a panic, bring Mr. Buckland back! Let him float over the stones in his top hat and gown. Let him raise his face to the sky and cry, Here is all the bounty of the Lord made manifest! She braced herself to look again at the dreadful teeth in the rock, and it came over her with a shock how real they were, ridged and graduated, the remains of a real creature. She’d had the notion that God had carved such fossils in stone, just for sport. But this dragon had crawled or swum along this very shore. Frightened fishes had darted before it and it had snatched them up with these teeth. Just here, under this black sky, a dragon had lived its awful life, thoughtless of God. And something in its life or death had turned it to stone.
Black clouds collided over the Channel with a terrible thud. Raindrops fell hard on her face and shoulders and pocked the grey water. If I die here, the angels will be afraid to come for me, Mary thought. She turned to leave, and then scurried back and kicked soft mud over the teeth to hide them, and then she pelted with all her might towards town.
By evening, the storm was over. The sky was clear, although you could hear the sea still fretting over the disturbance. Mary lay down for the night as the sun sank below Ware Cliffs. Molly had asked her to move up to the bed now that Richard was gone, but Mary would not. Every morning now, Molly’s sorrow woke with the light, and Mary did not wish to share it. So Mary was on her pallet and Molly sat above, undoing Lizzie’s plaits, running her fingers down the kinky strands. “In the morning, we will wash it,” she said. Then she laid Lizzie down and said a bed-charm over her: Four corners to my bed, four angels all a-spread. One at head and one at feet and two to keep my soul asleep.
When Molly was gone, Lizzie dangled a hand off the bed. “Mary?” she whispered. “Will I have an egg at market today?”
“Tomorrow, you mean,” Mary said. “Maybe. Now go to sleep.” When Lizzie was quiet, she cautiously approached the idea of the creature, lying outside this very moment as the sun sank redly below the cliffs. Methodically, she outlined the situation: The fossil is above the high-tide line, right up against the base of the cliff. Unless a huge tempest blows up, the sea will not touch it. I will have time to chip it out. I will chip it out and sell it. We will pay down our debt, and we will have ten pounds for ourselves, if I be not a cowheart. God has sent it to save us. But why has he sealed it in rock, and what will I waken if I free it?
She slid away from the thought, she slid towards sleep. Then James Wheaton was at the pallet in the dark attic, leaning over her, saying her name. Mary. Mary. Mary Anning – do you not hear my voice? Do you not see? It is the Great Dragon Himself, cast into the world. He is a deceiver! He will suck you all down. We are starving, she murmured, putting her hands over her eyes. Better to starve. James Wheaton said. Better to die in the love of the Lord.
Mary was awake then. She rolled over onto her stomach and turned her face to the side, against the smell of moulding straw in her pallet. Molly came in and lay down in the bed, and soon after Joseph, dropping heavily down on his pallet on the other side. Molly’s breathing turned to a thin snore and Mary lifted herself to her knees and laid her face against the bed. She pressed her face into the blanket and rocked for a minute to comfort herself. She tried Lizzie’s prayer: Four corners to my bed, four angels all a-spread. But when she got to two to keep my soul asleep, she could not say it. She sank back onto her pallet. She did not want her soul asleep.
Sometime in the night, her father came in. Not in a dream; she did not speak to him nor he to her. But in the morning, when Mary was wakened by her mother’s low keening, she saw the long shape of him lying in the bed. His form faded away as the light came in around the shutter, but when Mary scrambled out of her bedclothes and sat for a minute on the edge of her mother’s bed, she could sense him still in the room. He was there in the way she pulled in her breath, dark and heedless, unafraid.
Downstairs, Mary built a fire and boiled the kettle. She made her mother sit up before she would bring her tea. Then she combed out Molly’s hair and wiped her soft white face with a wet flannel. Molly smiled as though Mary’s solicitude carried her back to a time before sorrow had chosen her as its favourite. She smelled of her sad bed and her unwashed nightdress, but Mary’s kindness would carry her no further – she was desperate to get to the shore. Joseph was up by then, filling the kitchen with Richard’s shape. Mary pulled her father’s codgloves over her hands and got her tools from the workshop. As they left, they carried the table between them out to the street so Molly could sell later in the day.
“Did you start to open it?” Joseph asked in Cockmoile Square. He meant the fossil.
“I’ll start today,” said Mary. Molly called to Mary to check the weather vane on the market tower but Mary turned and ran up towards Church Street as though she had not heard.
It was a day of fog and rain. The cliffs had vanished. The town was the whole world, a brave, wet circle of thatch and stone in a sea of dove grey. She left the circle of the world and started down the beach.
THIRTEEN
enry walks the ten paces to the house next door as if he’s facing his execution. But Captain Whyte, who receives him alone in his study, merely puts his newspaper aside with a let’s be quick about it expression, and Henry is obliged to launch directly into his proposal. Neither does Letitia seem to expect anything more than the mandatory question when he bows over her hand. “Yes,” she says with a giggle, and he slips the rustic ring on her finger. She holds her hand up to show how much too big it is. Captain Whyte, standing at the door, says, “There’s a goldsmith on the bridge who will size it for you,” and Henry promises to see to it.
Then they sit all three in the morning room and the coals in the grate turn silently, flamelessly to ash, sending out the stuffy heat that induces sleep. Captain Whyte does indeed love to talk, and holds strong o
pinions about what he calls “the Guinea business” – he seems to relish the fact that the young scion of a plantation has fallen under his influence. The mismanagement of the trade disgusts him, how fearfully gutted Bristol commerce was by its collapse. Why was the Royal African Company’s monopoly allowed to go on for so long? Why did the Bristol ships insist on trading in beads and textiles from the East Indies when the Liverpool traders were clever enough to stock themselves in domestic goods? Henry raises his eyebrows and smiles on cue. “Black ivory,” the Captain calls the slaves, as though to establish himself as an insider. But there is something about the man Henry likes, the hint of Ireland in his speech, and the young adventurer he was still peeping from his narrow eyes. Across the room, Letitia inclines gracefully in a pale blue gown, pleating the skirt between her fingers, looking up from time to time to catch Henry’s eyes, her own greenly glittering. At the first chance, she jumps to her feet and asks whether Henry may take her walking. And so they go out, Letitia holding her white parasol in one hand and clinging to his arm with the other. They walk out to Redcliff Way and gaze at the signets reflected on the water, and he feels grateful to these birds for their calm beauty, for providing the adornment the day seems to require.
After that, they walk together every morning, and the signets are always there. Mute swans, they are: he points out the distinguishing lump at the base of the beak, and the curve of the neck. “People assume all swans are white,” he tells his fiancée. “But the swans of the southern hemisphere are black and white, and the swans of Australia are black. In the Americas, there are swans with pink legs and feet. So I have read.”