by Joan Thomas
Henry is out of Queen Square now and walking quickly, almost running, along Welsh Back towards the bridge. She is willing to overlook my disgrace at Marlow. She has an annual income of four thousand pounds. I will have nothing, nothing from the plantation. She has a dreadful mother, but one unlikely to meddle. Any man would be proud to have her on his arm. And then he is on the bridge, darting nimbly between the strolling couples. Most engagements begin in this fashion. So fine a gentleman as Mr. William Conybeare admired her.
He returns to her house the next day. He does not apologize and she does not reproach him. She asks him whether he will paint a formal portrait of her and he agrees. He decides to pose her indoors, as many sittings may be required. Inspired by her gown’s evocation of the classical period, he arranges her standing with one hand on a chair, which he will afterwards represent as a broken column. He does a charcoal sketch first to test out the composition. The arms and torso are three poorly stuffed sausages, and the face, while recognizable as a young lady’s, is not recognizable as hers; it seems he saw her more clearly a month ago, when he sketched her through the window. Captain Whyte shuffles into the morning room and looks at his easel, bemused.
When Henry is leaving, the old man follows him into the hall and slips him a shabby leather-bound book. “We’ll keep this away from the young lady’s eyes,” he says, winking. It’s an anatomy, which opens to a plate of a dark-haired young man smiling amiably, lifting a flap of skin in his abdomen to show the musculature beneath. “He may smile, poor wretch,” says Captain Whyte. “They’re all miscreants. Cut open still warm from the scaffold.”
In the privacy of his own bedchamber, inside the Bedouin tent, Henry pages through the folio. Typically, the corpse is represented in three panels: a cadaver lying on a slab, its head wrenched to the left shoulder by the hangman’s rope; then the flayed corpse, apparently called the écorché, then the skeleton. It’s dead, he thought, staring at the first panel. But there is still deader and deadest. He examines the écorché. It’s like a mummy, thickly bandaged in muscle. Its penis and testicles are gone, stripped off with its skin. None of the plates in the book represents the female form.
In the end, he arranges her at her desk in the morning room, writing a letter – a most appropriate pose, and thus he has only the head and bosom and shoulders to tackle. And the arms and hands. The hands will be difficult, but he can practise at home, using his own as a model. They work together at the desk to make a pleasing composition of her inkwell and blotting paper and a candelabra.
As he begins, she reads him her morning post, lapsing occasionally into silence, laughing softly, her colour rising. Then she takes up her own pen.
“To whom are you writing?” he asks.
“To Penrose. My cousin.”
“And what are you telling him?” He’s talking like a ventriloquist to encourage her to be still.
It’s futile. She wiggles in her chair, turns her shoulders, dips her pen. “I’m telling him about you,” she says dreamily as she writes. “My fiancé … is … painting me. He is … in a foul temper … but he is painting me.”
This is his opportunity to know her, to spend hours studying her face. She’s wearing the delicate muslin gown she wore the day he met her. There is the infamous mole, and the shadow where her breasts divide, and he returns to his recent pre occupation: how incomplete a picture of the creature does a set of bones provide! An inquiring mind unacquainted with the human form would never dream of breasts on a skeleton, for example. Suddenly he is that mind: suddenly he is floating in the dusty sunlight of the cluttered morning room, he is a point of view unacquainted with birds or with man, lifted beyond the ivy growing at the window and the artist’s palette smeared with pigments, staring, fascinated and aghast, at hairless limbs and a bosom like the flesh of a fetal pig he saw once in a bottle in Piccadilly, staring at an alien creature of the forest or ocean, incongruously clothed, its eye a greenish membrane with life peeping frighteningly out of it.
FOURTEEN
ary crouched beside the creature for a long time before she set to work. It was the colour and texture of a driftwood log, only the shape of it was animal and the feel of it was rock. The limestone was a frozen sea and the creature was just surfacing in it, coming up for air. Was it a crocodile jaw? How could she know – she’d never seen a picture of a crocodile. Only dragons. The roiling dragons in James Wheaton’s bible had smaller mouths, curved fangs like cats.
God had sent this creature to save Mary and her family. Or Lucifer had sent it to destroy them. If she took it out and looked at it, she would know which. Once its beak is free, it will speak, she thought, it will tell me what it is. She would start with the beak because it was partly exposed and also for a secret reason: because there are dragons that can slay you by casting their eyes on you.
On the shore, when your head is bent, it’s easy to imagine someone coming up behind you. You have sight, but the surf blocks out sound, the shingle scraping as the sea rakes it, the sea dumping its water on the foreshore, load after load. But she kept her head bent, and in the course of the morning, she exposed a section as big as her hand, working slowly with a quarter-inch chisel and her father’s hammer, the chisel discerning stone that was only stone from stone that was bone.
She took off her bonnet and felt the sun warm her hair, brushing shards of shale off the fossil with her fingers. She was not afraid to touch the creature now. She felt the long, hard teeth with admiration. They were not in separate sockets, as Buckland had said they must be – this was likely to reduce the value. But when she was done, she would look for the body, although how she would climb up to the cliff she could not imagine. When she found it, while she chipped it out, she would keep the head in the workshop, safe from storms and landslips. She no longer worried that someone would steal the head, for stealing it was what she was doing, and it would take many a day. All the same, when the tide was halfway in and she had to leave, she shoved marl up close to the beak to cover it.
Back home, wet-shod, Mary hung a blanket over the window of the workshop. They will get used to the workshop closed off, was her thought. Later, when my creature is here, no one will ask.
“To keep the house warm,” she explained to Mrs. Bennett, who stood in the kitchen talking to Molly.
“If it’s freezing you be,” said Mrs. Bennett, “’tis better on your bed than on the window.” Complaints about Mary hung in the air. Mrs. Bennett, who had always been so kind, had begun to complain: that Mary took no notice of their Annie, that she chawed high, with her creeping after that maggoty professor and the Philpot sisters.
Molly looked fondly at Mary with her sad, luminous eyes. “Oh, she’s a history and a mystery,” she said, “our Mary.”
Joseph would help on the Sabbath, he said, but Mary would not go to the shore on the Sabbath. So she worked alone. She worked along the tapered beak for many days. The second week, she uncovered a nostril as big as her thumb, set into the beak the way a bird’s nostril is. In the end, the beak was the length of six hand spans. In one hand span, she counted eighteen teeth. This meant two hundred teeth in its whole jaw. Imagine it opening its maw in appeal to Noah as the rain fell! Noah must have fled in terror. But Noah kept tigers. Of course, tigers have a mighty fear of water, and would mind themselves.
On Sunday she went to chapel. They all went, and sat where they used to sit when their father took them. Did James Wheaton know? He could not know about the creature, but he certainly knew that she was selling again from the curiosity table. Yet he did not preach warnings from her father’s example in chapel, did not go from cottage to cottage to get Mrs. Stock and the other chattermags riled up. His text for the day was a mild one, from Timothy. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; and they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and turn unto fables. She listened with half a mind, watching a father-long-legs on the wall lift its leg
s one by one, as though to count them. And then, in a stroke, she saw that the text was for her. A duller pastor might think it was for coin she collected, might preach against the love of money. But James Wheaton saw her for the girl she was; he saw the questions and the striving, the hunger gnawing in her brain. She crossed her feet at the ankles, lifted her face to the light of the window. Itching ears, she said to herself, and her love for him swelled and caught at her breath.
This was what her life would be without her father. The wild squabbles of gulls on the seawall, waking up to acrimony. The cold fresh air in her lungs, her body beginning to tingle with moving, the line of crimson showing over the tops of the houses on the eastern shore. The smell from Mr. Besley’s open door, and the warm bread, for Joseph would go ahead to get a loaf and cut it into four with his pocket knife and run back to give the others a portion. Then he and Mary would stop to drink from Nancy’s ladle at Gosling Bridge. But they would not dally. Mary must be early to the shore when the tide allowed, for Joseph’s Christmas pay was long gone and they were living on the collecting she did walking out to her dragon and back at the end of the day.
It was the right eye she opened first – it took her most of a week – and she was amazed by the size of it. Its socket was oval, not round like the eye of a bird. Had that eye been compressed by the weight of the rock that lay on the dragon, or did it always have such a shape to it, like no creature she had ever seen in this world? There was a wheel of small bones inside the eye cavity. The left eye was not so easy to study: it was somewhat crushed. When both eyes were exposed, the creature looked out to sea with a comical vacant gaze. Strange to be so acquainted with its face and not to know whether you were talking to a bird or a fish or a lizard.
On the Sabbath after she’d chipped out the last bit of the skull, she walked out for a visit after chapel. Coming up the shore now, she stopped at a distance and stared, struck by this new presence at Black Ven. A long, pointed head lying on the rock like a dog’s head on the hearth. It was only a head, but it was strangely complete. For all its teeth, it looked meek. It is the eyes that betray character, thought Mary. Cruel people have small eyes (Mrs. Stock came to mind, and the ostler from the George Inn), whereas babies and roe deer and other innocents have large eyes. James Wheaton was wrong: this creature was never one of Lucifer’s dragons.
She sat on a rock beside it and thought about her father, the Sabbath mornings when she lay sleeping and felt something strike her cheek – he would have thrown something to wake her, his comb or whatever was to hand. She would climb over the warm breathing heap that was Lizzie and crawl out of the litter of bedclothes while Mother slumbered on her back with Percival on her breast. She’d put on her heavy petticoat and plaid overskirt and slip downstairs, where her father would be munching on yesterday’s crusts, and they would set out to the shore. They’d walked this very shore so often, walked it unknowingly, while the creature slept in the cliff above them. And now her father slept in the cliff, and the creature watched the sea.
The creature’s piteous, empty eye contemplated her bleakly. Mr. Buckland had not appeared in Dorsetshire since months before her father died, and he had never responded to her letter. And she felt glad of that now, for he would take the creature over, he would make it his own and have it frolicking in God’s garden. Perhaps she could find a different buyer. The waves crashed in and withdrew, and oystercatchers ran back and forth on the sand, and she buried her fingers in her soft, hot neck, shrugging a shoulder high to warm them.
That night, she and Joseph stood by the seawall. “I wish I could leave it there while I dig the body out,” she said.
“We’d best bring it in so we don’t lose it,” said Joseph.
“How will we carry it?” asked Mary.
“Put it on a door,” said Joseph, and a thread of pain connected them briefly. “If there be something solid under it, the two of us could carry it.”
“I reckon not.” Mary thought of her father when he brought the skull (the little skull, as she thought of it now) back from Pinhay Bay, borrowing the porter’s sling and struggling over the rocks. “We need four porters, two on each side.”
“I’ll ask Ralph Downing and George, then.” This was the wheelwright and his son, who had carried Richard home.
She said the thought that was chawing at her: “Whose property is the shore?” A question her dragon had ignored when she’d asked it. Joseph nodded gravely; she knew he understood. Private ownership rose up around them and hemmed them in. Their house, which they let from Mr. Axworthy. The market, where you had to pay a half-crown to put up a stall. The commons, all divided up now by hedges and gates. The hares and grouse and woodcocks hunted by no one but the Squire. Everything owned, everything in the town fenced and paved over, everything belonging to the gentlemen who tipped their top hats to each other outside the Assembly Rooms. One of them owned Black Ven. She had broken into his cellar and she was plotting to haul away the treasure she’d found there. Who from the town could they recruit into such thievery?
There on the western shore at the start of Monmouth Beach was Avery Cottage, brambles filling its garden and creeping over the door. Above it was the path to Ware Manor Farm, and the sycamore with the leaning limb where she’d cried “Watch!” and her father had ducked at the last minute with Lizzie on his shoulders. There was the fork that led to the Undercliff, a narrow path now with rusty rotten leaves trod into it and broken fallen trees that the vines and bracken tried to cover and scarlet stinking iris seeds spilling from their pods. And then another fork, and she knew which path to follow, she had always known, although she’d never followed it, never seen the hut sitting in smoky light with a barrow pig rooting beside it. A hen peered with cocked head from a twig-cage and all the gear of a smuggler’s business was scattered huck-a-muck around the clearing, a porter’s sling and a stoneboat and broken crates and barrels, and a stone oven built outside, smoke rising from its chimney with heat flowing on either side of it, performing its trick of making the roiling air visible.
A big lad sat slouched on a stump beside the oven. Not Digby – this lad was too young. He was not Joseph’s age. When he saw her on the path, a smirk came over his face. You are a wench! the smirk seemed to say, and then it grew to a leer, as if she’d shown herself in her petticoat. Then someone else moved, a hand moved. A man sat on a bench with his head tipped back. He wore a brimmed calfskin hat from which hair straggled down to his shoulders. He was smoking tobacco, not a pipe but a brown stick like a pork sausage. The clearing stank of the pig and the stick the man was smoking. “What do ye want?” he said, breathing a curling vine of smoke out into the sunlight. His face was big and flat and mottled under the skin, but she could not see his eyes for his hat. He didn’t ask who she was.
“Two porters,” she said. “For a night job.” She had brought a sixpence and she tossed it towards Digby. It fell wide and both men laughed, and neither one bent to pick it up.
“Six shillings when it’s done,” she said hotly.
After Molly went to bed, Mary and Joseph sat polishing curiosities in the workshop. “Digby!” said Joseph.
“He works in the dark,” said Mary.
In the curse of the night was something they said about that hour. Afterwards, it seemed something she’d done in a dream, meeting them at the base of Church Cliffs, sensing him there by the smell of tobacco and then walking single file along the sandy foreshore, a bleary quarter moon retreating ahead of them. At Black Ven, the moon’s claw retracted behind the cliff, and when they came up on the skull, it was only a gnarled rooted trunk they were lifting onto Digby’s carrying board, although he grunted in surprise at the weight of it. A comfortable grounding weight it was as they began to walk, two on each side, grasping the leather straps he had fixed to the board. All the way up the shore they did not speak, and their footfalls were carried away by the surf. Mary began to breathe hard when they came up the path through the graveyard, and it seemed a fearsome thing to carry the sk
ull up past her father’s grave and over the mound where lay the mouldering bodies from the plague and then between the dark, unconscious houses on Bridge Street. As they came up into Cockmoile Square, a horse galloped past, sparks leaping from the cobblestones. There Mary called a halt and they rested the board on the top of the empty wooden stocks in front of the prison while she ran ahead to open the door and light the candles she had left at the ready. It was a trick to angle the board down the workshop steps without the load shifting, and the lad put a hand on the log and then cried, “Bleedin’ Jesus,” at the sight of its grinning jaw in the candlelight. And then their burden was on the work table and Mary was asking herself how they would safely ease it off the carrying board. But both porters had turned and were pounding up the stairs. Because the creature had caught Digby with an accusing eye? Or because he saw where he was, he knew it suddenly for the house of Richard Anning? Mary (who had not a single shilling towards the six she had promised them) called after his retreating back, “I will write you in the book,” but they were past hearing. Mary and Joseph both turned then to see Molly standing on the steps with a shawl clutched over her nightdress, staring at the skull. “He’s been in our book these dozen years,” said Joseph.
The strange thing was that Molly was pleased down to the ground with the monster in the workshop. She said it resembled the figurehead on the prow of a ship, a particular ship she remembered from girlhood, the Pisces. Mary grabbed Lizzie by the arms and dragged her in to show her, enjoying her terror. “It’s the fish that swallowed Jonah,” she said. “Look at its smile!”
Privately, Mary was shocked every time she approached it. At its size – her heart thudded at the size of it indoors. At how indifferent it was to being moved into the house. The house was just two hundred years old, while thousands of years had passed since this creature had swum in the surf or rowed on vast wings over the waves. Six thousand years, Mr. Buckland said. She propped her broom against the fossil and stared. She looked at it from each end, and clambered up on the stool to survey it from above. It was a text she could not read, like the lines of print that had once taunted her.