by Joan Thomas
“I confess I were sometimes afraid at first. Death be not to dragons what it be to common beasts. Especially when weather brewed up, the crims would come over me. I feared it might rise up out of the rock. Until I saw how mild its eye were.”
“Mild!” says Henry, thinking of the massive empty socket. “Miss Anning, as you excavated the skeleton, did you form an opinion as to whether the creature breathed air as mammals and reptiles breathe, or took in water through gills?” He knows as he asks that this is the salient question, and he can tell that she does too, by the way she quickens. “Did you see any indication of gills? They would need to be a grand size for so large a creature.” He estimates with his hands, an aperture of twelve or fifteen inches.
“It had a nostril, sir,” she says simply, and his face warms. “It had a nostril in its beak, the way a bird do. As big as my thumb.” How did he overlook that – he who boasted he could make a scientific illustration from memory?
Suddenly he thinks of a wonderful day in Jamaica, standing with his friends and his father on the shore and watching a phalanx of silver forms lift out of the green water. “I think what you’ve found is related to the dolphin,” he says. “They are lovely sea creatures, graceful and playful, and they breathe as mammals do, and have much the same form as the skeleton you found, although only one paddle on each side.”
“If it did swim, how came it to be buried five-and-twenty foot up the cliff?”
“The creature must have died in the sea, and silt covered it, and then what was the seabed became the shore.” And now red surfaces in her cheeks; perhaps she’s never considered this before, that the earth changes.
“The tail had a bend in it,” he says. “Like a scorpion. Why was it bent like that, do you think?”
Afterwards, he will realize that he had ceased to notice her accent. Afterwards, he will ask himself if she is comely in the range of working-class maidens, and he won’t know. He won’t be able to recall her features at all, only her self-possession, her gaze: as steady and open as a babe’s.
SIXTEEN
ive gentlemen, a lady, and a girl made their way in halting conversation along the eastern shore at low tide, navigating the lower edge of a landscape that would have required, on that spring day of sun and cloud, three separate mediums to render it: smears of vegetable dye for the purple seaweed and the shocking green of maidenhair; dabs of sombre earth pigment for the near cliffs; and the pastel air – it must be done in fine chalks, as must the far cliffs that gave themselves over to the air.
The tendency of all was to let Professor Buckland lead. But then, of course, he was ignorant of the exact location of the excavation site, so Mr. Aveline and Mr. De la Beche must show him. And the Reverend William Conybeare was there, having hurried to Lyme Regis at news of the find, and a gigantically moustached half-pay lieutenant colonel named Birch, a ginger-haired fellow gone white and coral, eager as a boy and sporting a sheepskin jacket and great boots gaping on either side of his skinny flanks. And Miss Elizabeth Philpot and Mary Anning, all of them assembled at the jetty.
A bit ashamed that he had overlooked the girl (who was it who knocked on the door of the narrow house on Bridge Street and invited Mary Anning?), Professor Buckland made a great show of setting off with her, and he appeared the image of sparkling goodwill. Mary returned his blue gaze with a steady brown one and was relieved to see that he bore not a whit of resentment towards her. But their walking together was of short duration. “I encountered an antique fellow on the shore this morning,” he said as they descended at Church Cliffs. “You will never guess whom!” And when she said with a twitch to her shoulders, “I reckon it were Noah,” he made some pretext to fall back, leaving her alone, letting Mr. De la Beche and Reverend Conybeare pass him, and walked then with Miss Philpot, whose poor marred cheeks were flushed with exercise and fresh air and the excitement of walking out in company on the shore. As often as Mary had suggested such an outing, Miss Philpot had demurred. It had taken Mr. Buckland. And now she lifted her face to the breeze with something approaching rapture. Sitting in the back garden at Morley Cottage, she and her two sisters always remarked on how fortunate they were to live by the sea and to feel the sea breeze and smell the salt in the air, what a tonic it was, but (as she saw now) to sit in a garden up on the hill was no more being at the sea than reading a book about it was.
In his blue bag, Mr. Buckland carried, along with his usual collecting tools, a measuring tape and a compass. These he had packed with the thought that the depth of burial of the creature, the angle at which it lay, and its general coordinates would yield information about the prevailing currents in the Great Deluge. But of course, it was a tedious undertaking, and he need not have involved the others, except to demonstrate how grievous a loss this was to one whose passion for science rendered even the examination of a robbed grave an urgent enterprise. And then, who knew what else they might find? Always at the edge of his vision was the ghostly image of the ark, its timbers rotting into the lias, and the bearded patriarch lying with hands folded on his sunken belly. Why here? Why not, if it must be somewhere? And England swelled behind him like a hymn, its dappled meadows graced with solitary oak, its fields so green, so filled with light, its shores defended by the elect as Christian lands around sank into papism. England, his heart sang, as he turned his eyes to the dark cliffs that outlined the beauteous isle, and then to the scallops of gleaming surf that decorated the borders of the map, and the emotion rising within him seemed to presage it (what? Something. Some apotheosis, some divine proclamation of the sacredness of everything that fell within his gaze), seemed to declare, “It will be soon.”
Mary Anning was leading on her own now, and behind her walked Henry with his intimate friend William Conybeare. Walked in the glitter of Conybeare’s regard, under the protection of Conybeare’s decorum as under an umbrella, observing Conybeare’s fine kid gloves and the precisely calibrated attention that Conybeare turned to everything, stooping now to pick up a shell and knowing it to merit a keen three-second glance and no more. And (Henry saw with satisfaction) he understood his friend perfectly, rightly perceived Conybeare’s discomfort in following the lead of this girl in the fustian skirts and rough boots, a discomfort that was perhaps felt by the whole party and was eased only when Conybeare looked around him with his handsome eyes and called ruefully, “A little child shall lead them.”
It was a phrase that Mary knew to be from Scripture, and walking at the head of the party with her basket over her arm, she felt a tremor of disgust and pride (disgust at being called a child, and pride because the little Child was Our Lord Himself). But then, as they crossed the shingle that marked the end of Church Cliffs and the beginning of Black Ven, both feelings were overtaken and swept away by a painful recall to James Wheaton’s plight, by an up-swelling of terror for him. After last Sabbath’s sermon, he had fallen to the ground and been carried insensible from the chapel. He lay rigid in his bed now, one corner of his mouth pulled down. Others of the congregation had been to pray at his bedside, but not Mary. She tramped along, glimpsing again, as in the corner of her eye, the evil that had seized him (glimpsed it in the light sparkling off the shoals at the creeping tide line, a malevolent vapour from the bowels of the earth, from rocky chambers broken open by a wilful girl with a hammer and chisel). But why now, weeks after the deed? Unless it was the reassembling of the creature’s parts – and she considered whether the head and body would have arrived in London just on the Sabbath to be put together in one piece, and pressed her trembling fingers into the palm of her codgloved hand, trying to compute the hours of its journey. But this was a going-backwards, to think of the creature in this way, and she shook her hand, shook the numbers off her fingers, resisted going backwards. By what authority did she resist it? By the authority of Richard Anning, whose path down the shore she followed, whose firm, confident gait she recalled with every step.
Mary Anning’s progress down the shore taxed Colonel Birch to the end of his s
trength, but the blood in his eardrums roared his delight with this outing. He’d expected to spend days closely questioning individuals in the region before he discovered the local savants and ingratiated himself with them. And then he had got off the coach and the curiosity table was right in front of his eyes. Gasping for breath, he clambered now after the damsel, keeping his eyes on her sturdy back (and found himself judging the width of her pelvis, saw this black-eyed maiden in a cottage with a babe at her breast and another at her feet – but surely she had three or four years before that?). His eyes went to the ground and, desperate to rest, he stooped to pick up a rock and called, “Miss! Miss!” Mary Anning turned and angled back across the foreshore towards him. He thrust it at her. “It is surely a petrified bone! Look at the grain of it.”
“It is beef rock,” she said. “It may look like bone, but it is not. Bones are dark brown or black.”
And then some of the others drifted back to her and Mary must instruct them all. Mr. Beach had picked up a rock with the rim of an ammonite peeping through its surface, and Mary opened it with a deft blow of her hammer and handed it back to him, the fossil revealed and intact. She thought of the townspeople who’d watched from the jetty as they set off, herself the only low-born girl in this party of gentlefolk, and wished the townspeople had spyglasses and could see how she was listened to. By Mr. Aveline, and Mr. Beach, and the gentleman in the beaver hat whom no one had presented to her. Daily, strangers descended the coach and addressed her as Miss Anning. This was what it meant to be famous. Colonel Birch was in a hunting party in Sussex when he heard about the dragon and that it was a maiden who’d found it. He’d come directly to Lyme Regis and to her table to present himself, this stout man who was both round and square in the way of the rich (round as to belly and square as to the form of his jacket above his thin legs in their great buckled boots). And Mr. Beach, examining his new ammonite, smiled at her in a friendly fashion, although it was a different friendliness from what he had shown the day before, when he called on her in the workshop. The tall gentleman with the beaver hat had cast a spell over him. They were all as changeable as the wind. However, she, Mary Anning, and her brother Joseph Anning had done something everyone in this company would be proud to have done, would have worn as a feather in their caps. She could not adorn herself with it, putting on airs as they would have, but she could walk out with them now. And this was a great deal.
She turned and resumed walking, and Henry De la Beche pocketed his new calcite fossil and swung along behind her with his friend.
“Mr. Conybeare –”
“William, please.”
“William. The other night at dinner, Mr. Buckland talked of a pair of fossil jaws found in the Netherlands and examined by Cuvier. Are you familiar with this find?”
“I am indeed. It is several decades ago that they were first unearthed, but their significance was immediately grasped. They were enshrined in a glass case in the town square, like a relic of the Holy Cross. The European peasantry is much superior to the English, I regret to say.”
“And what did Cuvier have to say about them?”
“The find posed a great challenge to Cuvier, for it seemed to combine so many anatomical systems, as our creature does. Finally he pronounced the jaws the remains of an animal related to the monitor of the tropics. But not a monitor – different in several significant ways.”
“And not a dolphin?”
“He believes it to be a reptile.”
“And what did he say had happened to such huge creatures and their kind?”
“Ah. Well, in that regard, Cuvier is an unrepentant apostate. He argues that such creatures no longer exist, eradicated by some catastrophe, perhaps. Cuvier would have us believe that this,” and he waved his hand to take in the cliffs and the sea, “this is all a recent and transformed version of what might in another age have been a very different world.”
“I suppose it’s possible that creatures such as Squire Henley’s were wiped out in Noah’s Flood. What do you think?”
Conybeare looked at Henry kindly. “I know that, whatsoever God doeth, it shall be forever. Nothing can be put to it, nor anything taken from it. From the Book of Ecclesiastes, by the great King Solomon.”
“The king who built the temple in Jerusalem? And does that temple still stand?”
Conybeare simply laughed. As a clergyman, Henry saw, he would be a model of moderation. Not sanctimonious, slow to take offence, deftly balancing faith and worldly erudition.
Close behind them walked Mr. Aveline, his eyes on his stepson, whom he’d been sent along to supervise. It was Mrs. Doctor Carpenter who last night had made a point of telling them she’d seen Mr. De la Beche go into the carpenter’s daughter’s house sometime around noon and come out again some long time after. Henry had laughed when they took him to task about it, as though the idea was preposterous, but the laugh was a lie. “I will send him to Jamaica,” Beth vowed afterwards. But she would not, and they both knew it. Mr. Aveline watched Henry striding along beside William Conybeare, still laughing, walking straight through tidal pools, heedless of the water staining his boots and splashing the pantaloons he’d donned that morning. He’d laughed openly at the Squire’s wife while a guest at her table. He had an ungovernable energy; he did not respect the proprieties. Those absurd pantaloons! He’d have worn them to the Assembly Rooms the other night if his mother had not sent him back to change.
Behind him, Miss Philpot walked alone. How neat her gloves, how strong and shapely her hands and her long feet in their tan calfskin shoes: how well put-together for this world she persisted in being, though the world never remarked on it. She looked over at William Conybeare, noting the neat nape of his hair below his top hat, his body formed in every aspect to house a fine intelligence. Oh, yes, Mr. Buckland’s friend satisfied all requirements as to handsomeness and civility and fortune, indeed so far exceeded requirements that you could not fault him for thinking well of himself. She turned her head and looked at the sea, and there stirred within her the moment in the night when she’d wakened and seen through the window (for she never drew her curtains across) the sinewy boughs of the sycamore tree in the garden lit up, and she’d thought to see the moon dangling from an upper branch, the full moon with its pox-marked face, but it was not there, just the tree and the counterpane lit up by the light of a moon she could not see.
At the excavation site, it was Mary Anning who led them to the spot where the path she had made herself turned upwards. They scrambled up through the mud and she could see them standing talking at the lip of the shallow pit so familiar to her from weeks of solitary work. Some learned gentleman somewhere, the great Cuvier across the ocean, perhaps, would have a name for the creature – that was what Mary had assumed as she worked. But it seemed that no one did. She’d thought it was her ignorance alone, but it was all of their ignorance. They would be months studying those bones and writing about them. Her name would be written in their books and Mr. Buckland’s students at the great university in Oxford would learn of her. Although Mr. Buckland had not once come to the workshop to ask about the discovery. She turned away from the thought, away from the path up the cliff, and set to work scavenging in the rocks recently fallen to the shore.
The group stood and gazed down into the grave. It was the most unpleasant mud, like the castings of gargantuan earthworms. Rain had erased the marks made by the shovels. Except for the pebbles of plaster scattered around the edges of the site, you might have the sense that the dragon had shrugged massive shoulders and wrenched itself up in a hasty resurrection. Colonel Birch was struck dumb at the size of the impression it had left. The great gathering of the quick and the dead has begun here, he thought, and Buckland thought it as well, and found he could hardly breathe. He could not bring himself to ask at which end the head had lain, but someone asked, and someone answered, and Buckland stood at the foot of the grave resisting the impulse to lay himself down and use the length of his body as a measure.
&n
bsp; That child did this and told no one, thought Miss Philpot. She looked down at Mary, picking through rocks at the base of the cliff. She came out here alone, day after day, and performed this work alone.
Professor Buckland was down in the hole attempting to secure his measuring tape with a chunk of plaster. “Let me do that for you,” Miss Philpot said, sliding down with just a fleeting thought for her shoes. He straightened and lifted his hat and wiped his forehead with his bare hand, and she saw how his forehead was creeping up already, she saw his brow lifting into a corrugated V below the unmoving cap of his balding skull.
“You will ruin your skirts,” he said charmingly, in spite of his evident distress. How palpably he hungered to be liked! Let me do that for you, she said silently to his back as he bent again over his measures.
At the edge of the excavation, Henry squatted and examined the layers of shale and limestone the dig had revealed. From the corner of his eye, he monitored Conybeare’s attention. He’d talked too much all the way out, he knew it. He’d described in every detail what he’d seen the day of the dig, and his proprietary air had begun to irritate Conybeare, but he was helpless to stop himself. “In the composition of this cliff,” he said now, “it is hard to avoid the sense of growth through time. The strata are so like the growth rings in a tree.”
Conybeare smiled, and Henry saw that he was about to fully articulate Henry’s striking and novel idea, and to wedge it back into its narrow niche in the orderly cupboard of Christ Church College scholarship. “Ah, you’ve been reading Mr. Smith,” Conybeare said. “Strata Smith, the blacksmith’s son from Oxfordshire? I heard him speak in Bath. It is an intriguing idea, that geological formations could be attributed to natural agents. The quandary it poses, of course, is with respect to time. Consider the abandoned Roman road that runs through Lyme. Almost two millennia since that road was laid down, and its marks on the earth are scarcely effaced.” He touched Henry’s arm in a friendly gesture. “I confess the notion appeals to me – that the strata could be read as a narrative of past conditions on the earth. But the time is the problem. The six thousand years that Scripture allows since Creation.” They picked their way down to the foreshore. “Speaking of time,” Conybeare said, “has the tide turned? I wonder if we’re in any danger of being cut off.”