by Joan Thomas
Mary spent a week chipping away the shreds of limestone that still clung to it. She found a soft brush and washed the skull all over with sea water. Outside, emptying the bucket in the river, she scrutinized their own house, wondering whether it looked as it always had to passersby. Dick Mutch, back in the stocks and calm that day, tried to engage her in conversation. “It’s by cheatery I be here,” he said.
“I believe you,” she said, going back inside.
When she climbed up to Silver Street later to get a bucket of sweet water from the spring, she encountered Miss Elizabeth Philpot with one of her sisters. “You haven’t been to see us for months,” she said.
“My mother needs me,” said Mary. She could hardly look at her Miss Philpot, so sharp was her longing to tell. Hesitantly, she asked whether she could come now and Miss Philpot gladly agreed. The three of them climbed the street together. Mary kept her face down. She’ll see me changed, she thought. In my face she’ll see my conversations with the dragon.
At the cottage she set her bucket by the door and Elizabeth Philpot took her down the hall to the drawing room, where stood the twelve-drawered cabinet Mary’s father had made. On its top was a large luminous egg, held at a tilt in an ivory bracket. “What is that?” Mary asked.
“Oh, it’s an ostrich egg,” said Miss Philpot. “You haven’t seen it before? We bought it in London.”
It was the eye, the very size and the very shape. An ostrich egg! She could say this when she wrote her text about the creature. Its eye be ringed with tiny bones and be the size and shape of the egg of the mighty austrick.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth was sliding the drawers of the cabinet out one by one and showing Mary the tickets she had made for each specimen. She had filled a whole tray with bezoar stones, those oddly shaped ridged brown stones they often saw on the beach.
“Are you collecting stones now too?” asked Mary.
“Only these,” Miss Philpot said. “They’re believed to be from the gall of ancient goats. It’s said that if you put one in a glass, it will counteract any poison in your drink. I am well equipped, if cook should turn murderous!” She looked at Mary with an expression that was almost shy. “I must display what I have,” she said. “You haven’t brought anything for my cabinet in ages.”
“I have a little sea lily you will like,” said Mary. “I’ll bring it tomorrow.” And then they sat on the divan and Mary asked whether she could look at the big Sowerby book, and Elizabeth brought it. Mary turned the pages from beginning to end. But there was nothing in it of a creature such as hers. Sowerby was all small things, eggs and claws and shells. All small, harmless things.
“Are you looking for something in particular?” Mary looked at Miss Philpot’s gentle, humorous face and did not wish to lie. She put the Sowerby on the table. “Do you have a picture of a crocodile?” she asked.
Elizabeth Philpot took down another large book in a leather cover. A bestiary, she called it. The room had lost its light by then, and she lit a candelabra on a wooden stand and moved it close to Mary. With the heavy book between them, she turned pages until she found an etching labelled Cocodryllus. Mary bent over it. It was a dragon, although prettified for the picture, the scales on its back curled like waves on the sea. It was in the process of swallowing a man: two bare human legs and feet protruded from its mouth. The creature’s oblong eyes (small eyes) were guilty and distracted, like a dog caught in the act of devouring the joint from the table and unwilling to disengage its jaws. It did not appear to have a ring of bones around the eye. But unlike the dragons in the Bible, it did have a long jaw and pointed teeth. Mary studied it, taking careful note of its crooked legs and its long-clawed fingers.
When she went back to the shore two weeks later, she could see from the start of Black Ven that the landscape had changed. The cliff was a different shape: there had been another landslip. She tried to climb up and over it, but mud held her boots. She sank deep, and had to crawl back down. Ill fortune, it was – but not really: if the cliff had collapsed a fortnight earlier, the head would have been covered and crushed. She would collect, elsewhere and other things, until the cliff invited her back in. Daily it changed; soon it would open again in a different way – although she would not know the alignment, where the body was.
Back in the workshop, she interrogated the head about the rest of its remains, but it lay grinning, silent on the matter. All through the spring, rain fell. Mary had a large stock of ammonites and she spent her days cleaning and slicing and polishing them. There was a little burst in sales with this. But Lizzie was unwell, and Mary might need to sell the head to pay a doctor. Lizzie was tired and thirsty and constantly needed to go to the lavatory. It was shocking to see how loose her gown was – she was shrinking when she should have been growing.
Then, on a cloudy spring morning, Mary went out to the shore to find that the mud had sunk and hardened and a new path opened up over the landslip; it was on its way to becoming a different cliff. She had brought a shovel, and she climbed up to her best idea of where that ledge must be. There was footing firm enough for her now, and she began to dig, using the shovel delicately, imagining a fossil just below each thrust. Almost immediately, she struck something hard, stone or bone, a shovel’s depth in. She knelt then and worked carefully, removing earth.
It was a chain of vertebrae. She could just encircle each one with her two thumbs and forefingers. She dug outwards from the vertebrae, following the ribs. Ribs like willow wands, bunched together for carrying. She sat back on her heels for a minute to rest, trying to judge how long the tail would be. Gulls circled around, expecting flesh in this grave.
The cliff was giving the creature up to her.
FIFTEEN
veline House is a stage just grand enough for his mother and her furniture. There in the modest hall are her girandole sconces and the gilt armchair; there in the drawing room is the console table with its marble top and the blue-striped settee, uneasily mingled with Mr. Aveline’s things. His folios of maps are stacked in orderly piles on a narrow table. There’s his spectacles case, his pipe and tobacco, his cribbage board, his bachelor chair with its sunken seat. A hassock covered with the stitched-together skins of roe deer. His books alphabetically arranged in forthright categories, with tickets glued to each shelf: Beasts, Birds, Fishes, The Heavens, The Earth. On a stand is the famous model of the heavens with its seven clockwork planets. Above hangs a picture of Christ kneeling to pray in Gethsemane, worked in what looks like silk thread. Henry reaches out a finger to touch it. “Hummingbird feathers,” says Mr. Aveline from behind him. He crosses to the chair, a whippet of a man, and picks up a book lying open on the table. “My morning devotional,” he says. “In the works of William Cowper. Care to join me?”
“I’m just off for a walk around the town.”
It was dark when they drove in last night. Henry had smelled the sea, but opening the front door, he feels a shock at how dramatically close it is, glistening at the foot of the street. In this town, there is only up or down. He walks slowly down, giving the right of way to carts and porters moving in both directions, stepping out of the path of four dirty sheep. The street is lined with prosperous houses and shops, and an open sluice runs along the side of it. Then he is at the lower town, where the river empties into the sea, and the stench of sewer rises. He passes under the weather vane, a fish cut in tin, and crosses a little square.
Coming out to the seawall, he has the sense that the lower town is opening its eye to the sea. Here the aqua waters of his childhood lie cast in pewter. He stands and watches the surf throw itself on the rocks and then withdraw for another attempt. Everything is in motion, the waves and the swooping gulls and the sparkling light. He looks in amazement at the cliffs to the east. They’re close, but the light renders them delicate, as though they’re at a great distance.
The tide going out has left an outcropping of wet rocks, and Henry can’t resist swinging over the wall and climbing out on them. From out on the rocks,
he looks back at the town. A row of shabby cottages lines the river and the shore. There’s a latrine built to empty directly into the river. This is the domain of the poor, this brilliant world, and they turn their backs on it, and drop their waste into it. Over the surf, he hears someone calling, and he turns his head the other way, and slips, and rights himself. A girl wrapped in a dark blue cape is standing at the seawall. “Master Henry!” It’s Maggie, the housemaid who lighted him to his room the night before. “You’re wanted at the house, Master Henry.”
He picks his way back. “What can I be wanted for?”
“I’m not one for listening at doors, Master Henry,” she says, putting up her chin. She has a pretty mouth that can’t resist smiling. “But I warrant it’s about the dragon.”
“The dragon?”
Mr. Aveline is standing by the window in the drawing room, and Henry feels fresh surprise at the sight of him, at how painfully thin the standard allotment of human clay can be stretched. Henry’s mother is lounging on the settee in a wrapper of the most miraculous aquamarine. The Squire called in, Mr. Aveline says. Not a minute after Henry went out. “A crocodile,” his mother laughs. “I thought the fellow meant he’d shot it! For a minute, I was back in the West Indies!”
“Indeed, he shoots at everything that breathes, does Squire Henley,” says her new husband. But it’s a curiosity the Squire was talking about, one of the strange stony creatures they’ve told Henry about, found not far from town. “He stayed only a moment. He’s on his way out to the cliffs. His men are crating it this morning. How would you like to walk out and see?”
Mr. Aveline fears rocks, dreads twisting an ankle. Rightly so, Henry thinks, eyeing the lathy legs scissoring along the shore beside him, a shore littered with rocks in umber and rust and grey, and with beautifully uniform slabs of limestone with limpet shells cemented to them. The going is smoother on the foreshore, so they angle towards the sea. In places, the waves have scoured away all pebble down to the bare Channel bottom, a wide tilted road of uncracked limestone, sand washed into its shallows in streaks of gold and black. Not a bed of shifting sand, as he’d always thought, but bedrock, like bone scraped bare. Mr. Aveline’s thin shoulders convulse. He lets out a sneeze like a door slamming. “I shall die in the pursuit of science,” he says. Henry can hardly contain his excitement. A new curiosity! I will write to Conybeare, he thinks. I will be the one who tells him about it first.
Half a mile or so on, they spy a clutch of men twenty feet up, working on a black ledge where the cliff has slumped. The cliffs that looked like delicate aquatints from the town are heaps of marl when seen close up, water oozing out of them here and there. There is a path of sorts and they climb it. Henry slips and puts a hand down, and brings it up black. “Bid farewell to my new boots,” Mr. Aveline says gamely. In the mud sit three crates like rude coffins, their lids propped beside them. The whole cliff is an open grave. A dozen men hover over the excavation. Under the direction of a large gentleman in a top hat, a workman is mixing in a bucket with a great iron spoon. When they crest the top, Henry almost slides back down in his astonishment.
Splayed before them is the skeleton of an enormous finned animal. Twenty feet long, at the least. It lies in a debris of chipped shale, headless and defeated and somewhat flattened. The ribs on the left side are intact, those on the right are crushed – from the weight of the creature’s own body, it would seem: it was not lying entirely flat when it expired. The fine ribs are all agley, crowded and interwoven, as though the Maker had thought initially to make a basket of it. The spine is the spine of a huge fish – it must have sixty vertebrae. “It is a crocodile!” breathes Mr. Aveline beside him. “It’s enormous!”
“But it doesn’t have a crocodile’s feet,” says Henry. In the place of feet, it has paddles, made of tiny bones pressed together like miniature paving stones, like the Roman mosaics in the British Museum. Bones in rows that could almost have been fingers. The front paddle is much larger than the back one. It did not walk on land, this creature, not easily. He surveys it eagerly, committing details to memory for his letter to Conybeare.
Beside Henry, a shepherd boy stands leaning on his crook, his blue smock the only patch of colour in the crowd. “Where is the creature’s head?” Henry asks him.
“She’s a-taken en hwome, zir,” he says. “Buried under ’er bed, it were.”
He does not know the Dorsetshire tongue and struggles to understand. “She?”
“The maid that found en.” He gestures over the open grave. There a girl stands. Henry has not noticed her, for her dress is dark, like the men’s coats, although she wears a white bonnet. The shepherd thrusts his crook in her direction with a rude sticking out of his lips, as though to hook her over and present her to Henry. “She were all the winter long a-choppin en out, Meary Hanning.”
This girl dug it out! She stands among the men, looking across the excavation, a brown face in a white bonnet. He tips his head in greeting. Her expression doesn’t change – it’s the creature, not him, that is the object of her severe scrutiny. He glances around to see whether anyone has caught his gesture, and then looks back at her. She’s almost as tall as he is. Her face has the bones of a grown woman, but this is the unconscious absorption of a child. Twelve or thirteen, she would be. Mud cakes her rough skirts. She’s gloveless, and he can see mud on her hands.
“What an undertaking!” says Mr. Aveline.
The man in the top hat has made his way around the excavation to be introduced to Henry. “It took a good deal of arranging, I confess,” says the Squire. He’s a stout man with a small, mild face surprised to find itself at the top of such an imposing body. “Nothing is easy in science! We were out here for over an hour yesterday, taking measurements, rain leaking under our collars. It was Sir Everard Home who showed us how we must collect it. He’s a surgeon – he knows everything there is to know about handling bones. Unfortunately, he’s been called back to his post.”
“Did he say what the creature is?” Henry asks.
The workmen are calling. The Squire clamps his hand over Henry’s sleeve by way of excuse. “You must sup with us at Colway Manor tonight!” he says to Mr. Aveline as he hurries away. “We shall have a scientific dinner.”
Under the Squire’s direction, the contents of the bucket are poured onto the skeleton. It’s plaster; they’re encasing the skeleton in a matrix again. The stream of plaster falls from the lip of the bucket in slow motion, breaking into globs. Across the excavation, the girl leans forward anxiously. It’s the tail they’re covering first. The tail – he’s not taken sufficient note of it. It’s long and thin, and bent at the end like a scorpion’s. It must have been folded to fit it into the grave. By whom? Not folded – it must have kinked in the paroxysm of death. If only they’d arrived sooner. If only he could have drawn it! He watches the bones disappear under lumps of grey plaster with the excruciating sense that the shape of the tail would explain everything.
“What a pity Letitia must be in London,” says his mother on the way to Colway Manor. “There will be no young people at the table, I’m afraid.” Henry gives a little grunt.
Colway Manor is the dull revelation at the end of a long lane of ash. There are the panes of crown glass on either side of the door, there are the greyhounds panting and pushing at their legs as they climb from the coach. There in the hall is the Squire, his periwig gleaming in the light from a high window. But in the library, a surprise awaits them. They are to see the head, the Squire says, taking Henry’s hand in his meaty palm. His men carried it up from the maiden’s house and they have postponed crating it to please a family friend who dropped in unexpectedly.
The head lies on a table in the library, on a wide board with leather straps fixed to the sides. At the sight of it, a current runs up Henry’s spine. It is a bird! It’s one of the bird skulls he’s carried from Bristol in a tea box, grown to monster size and (he discovers when he touches it) turned to stone. It is all eye, the skull created as a case
for a huge oval orb. It won’t be fused to the fish he saw lying in the cliff – his mind refuses to do it. But then, at second look, it is all jaw, a long ledge of teeth, and he decides it is a crocodile.
A man crouches at the jaw end, the recently arrived family friend. He gets to his feet with obvious reluctance as Squire Henley introduces him. Mr. Buckland, a professor of natural history at Oxford University, with a lively face and popping blue eyes and his hairline creeping back from his forehead. He’s dressed in a dusty academic gown. The smudges on his cheeks can only have been made by wiping tears off with dusty hands. “Imagine my astonishment,” he cries, “coming by chance to call on the good Squire, bearing in my saddlebag a gift – which, incidentally, you shall all sample at supper – and seeing carried before me up the lane, as on a gigantic platter, the splendid specimen I had sought for a decade! Imagine my grief upon learning that the creature is sold. That the cart I’d encountered an hour before, bouncing along the turnpike towards London, contained the key to the entire geology of the lias cliffs.”
“I had a close look at the spine and fins this morning,” Henry says. “If you would like me to, sir, I dare say I could make a reasonably accurate sketch from memory.”
“Oh, you are most kind,” says Buckland, distracted. “Most generous indeed. I do have a fair idea of the creature’s anatomy. I’m able to extrapolate from the head.”
It appears that when the French revolutionary army occupied Maastricht in 1794, they found a similar gigantic skeleton enshrined there, and shipped it off home as a trophy of war. It ended up at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, where the great Georges Cuvier examined it. Cuvier knew it for a saurian. Not, contrary to appearances, a fish. The professor paces and points. He will salvage what he can from this occasion, Henry thinks, by knowing more about the creature than the people who actually saw it. He talks at length about the bones around the eye, a structure found only in certain turtles and lizards and in birds. These bones are used to increase or diminish the curvature of the cornea, he explains, thus increasing or diminishing its magnifying power, performing the office of a telescope. Henry’s mother listens for a while and then sinks down on a blue upholstered divan, lifting a serene, vacant face towards the professor. “Thus could it pursue its prey into the blackness of the sea,” cries the professor. “Thus was it marvellously equipped by its Maker to bear, on an eye so large, the vast weight of the deep.” On the table, the great eye stares blankly and the great beak grins.