by Joan Thomas
“It was here,” Mary says, gesturing towards the cliff.
There’s nothing to see, only the layers of shale and limestone put sloppily together. They scuffle around at the base of the cliff, speculating as to what sort of creature might have such an extremely long neck, and whether the size of the braincase is generally a measure of the intellect. They’re of necessity standing very close. They have to shout into each other’s ears over the roar of the surf. “There is a townswoman with a passion for measuring skulls,” Mary says, and Henry makes to measure her head with his hands. She ducks away, well out of his reach, and stands retying her bonnet.
“I want to make a map of this shore, and use it to mark down my finds,” she says evenly.
“That’s a fine idea. But let me make it for you – it would be my pleasure. I’ll chart the shore in either direction, as far as your work takes you.” He glances down. Now they’re standing in water. “Well, Mary,” and he uses her Christian name before he can stop himself, “it appears we may need to fashion ourselves an ark.”
She hitches her basket higher on her arm and splashes nimbly around the debris on the shore. He follows her and finds that a landslip has made a ramp that mounts the cliff. She presses herself into a fold in the lias and then they’re climbing a steep face where he discovers footholds so regular they must have been chopped out by an axe. He climbs after her, catching glimpses of her tattered petticoat and the long calf sticking bare from the top of her boot.
Finally they reach a narrow plateau and she stops. “I thought you said we couldn’t climb the cliff,” he says, breathing hard.
“You couldn’t, I said. And nor could you, without me.”
“No one in town believes it can be done.”
“How do folk suppose the smugglers reach their dens?” They’re flattened against the cliff face with her clumsy basket between them, and she points him to an upward trail. It’s barely discernible, but she insists he go first. He scrambles up through gorse and then steps into the cool and quiet forest and onto a surprisingly wide path worn by solitary feet, brown clay with chert embedded in it here and there.
They follow the path east and once he glimpses the sea lying silver below. He’s never walked this far into the Undercliff. Here it’s a wonderful stand of immense ash, festooned with the creepers of wild clematis, a verdant garden with nets of ivy thrown over it. And burrs – presently he discovers that burrs have caught up his trousers, to the point that he can hardly walk. They’re in a clearing then, a fern-filled clearing dotted with snowy anemone, where a falling tree has pulled its roots out of the earth, such a mass of roots that they make a den where you might shelter from the rain. The forest is filled with birdsong. Henry sinks onto the trunk of the fallen tree. He takes off his hat and drops it among the bracken.
Mary follows him into the clearing and puts her basket down. They’re alone, more alone than they ever are on the shore. He smiles and gestures for her to join him on the log. But she will not – she continues to stand. So he sets to work cleaning his trousers, careful to avoid pulling threads out of the soft wool, and (in an effort to put her at ease) begins to discourse on burrs, which, carrying each the seed of its progeny, have made him their unwitting means of propagation. Why did she lead him here? Surely it’s an invitation! But still she’s silent. He points out the anemones, blooming so late. It’s because of the tree falling, he explains when she doesn’t respond: they’ve been tricked into springtime behaviour by unaccustomed sunlight (light that shines into the clearing now, falling full on Mary’s face, brightening the white of her bonnet). She stands still, her embarrassment gone, her intent black eyes meeting his gaze unabashed. He knows the next step, he has been here before, but now he’s the one who looks away, who continues to talk. He falls back to Buckland – God knows there are stories enough on that topic. And he finds himself talking again about the tour to the Continent, confessing to these thoughtful eyes how badly he wished to accompany Buckland and Conybeare, but for the fact that his own affairs were in such disarray, the plantation in trouble, and the matter of his marriage, which was to have taken place this summer. He falters and falls silent. Then he hears himself telling her. There has been a breach in my relations with my fiancée. I have written a conciliatory letter, but she has not responded.
The light in the clearing changes – if this were a drawing room, the butler would slip in now to light the candles. She’s leaning against a tree, her basket at her feet. She is the perfect person to confide in: she listens with a grave face, she does not feel an obligation to respond.
They walk back out on the Pound Street path, and as they cross the meadow at the edge of town, Mary begins to sing in the forceful, natural fashion of chapel singing that he often hears from the street on his way to church:
The Lord hath spoke, the mighty God
Hath sent his summons all abroad
From dawning light till day declines
The listening earth his voice has heard
And he from Sion hath appeared
Where beauty in perfection shines.
Her bonnet has slipped off again, and her black braid has fallen by its own weight out of the knot she had it tied in. On the slope below is the thatched roof of a cowshed, and then they can see the Cobb, miniature ships being unloaded, donkeys labouring along the stones, and side by side they walk towards their separate suppers.
He spends a week making the map he promised Mary and takes a great deal of pleasure in the work. For the eastern portion, he saddles up his mare and rides the cliff road as far as Charmouth, stopping every fifty yards to peer over the cliff and sketch. He was aiming for a scale of two inches to a quarter mile – but finally it’s a topological map he makes, rendering the most fruitful fossil areas (Black Ven, for one) in high detail and compressing the others. Monmouth Beach and Pinhay Bay he cannot sketch from above on account of the Undercliff, so he paces them at low tide, savouring the beauty of the shore, exhilarated at being freed from the future, and employed, and outdoors, out of Aveline House, where he aggravates his mother and Mr. Aveline merely by walking into the room.
In the end, he has a simple (and, to his eye, elegant) ink drawing from Charmouth to Pinhay Bay, with a wash to indicate the littoral zone and a few landmarks labelled. He marks in the quarry beds (Gumption, Specketty, Lower Skulls, Mongrel) because Mary taught him those names, but he leaves the major excavation sites to her to fill in. His first impulse is to take the map to the workshop so Mary can examine it with him, but he’s chary, suddenly, of entering her cottage without Buckland. Instead, he stops by the curiosity table and suggests an outing to the western shore. Then out at Pinhay Bay, he suggests climbing into the Undercliff to examine the map out of the wind. She assents, and they follow the path to the same clearing, where this time she sits beside him on the log as he unscrolls the map.
She seems pleased. They work out where the Ichthyosaurus finds will be marked, and she pinpoints the site of a huge shipwreck from her childhood, the Alexander. It foundered in a terrible tempest, and the body of a lady washed to shore afterwards. “She’d sailed all the way from Bombay,” Mary says, “and then she died on the English coast. She’d been three month at sea.”
“Well, Mary,” he says, “I don’t believe I’ve ever told you about my own shipwreck.” He makes a dramatic story of the typhoon that caught them on their journey home from Jamaica, after his father’s death, and she listens, entranced. “Oh, we had a merry time. We were being toyed with. That wave did not finish you? Well, this one shall! It was a betrayal, a grievous betrayal, the sea so warm and green, turned into a roaring monster. But the Fates were with us. There are small islands everywhere in that sea – they were made by volcanoes – and the waves dashed us onto one. I shall never forget the solid sensation of those black rocks under my cheek! I can still hear my mother’s terrified cries. It was a dreadful time for her.”
He breaks off a leaf of hart’s tongue fern, folding it carefully down the middle, and
finds himself wanting to go on. “My father had just died. That’s why we’d taken to the sea, to return to England. He was gone from the plantation. He was at Bath St. Thomas on business, many miles away, when he contracted an infection – not the sort of illness you see in England that a soul will linger with for weeks, but a tropical fever that felled him in a day. A messenger came on a donkey to tell us he’d been taken ill.”
Mary moves closer, as though she’s having trouble hearing him.
“When the messenger rode into the yard,” he says, “the field slaves left their work and gathered round the house. How did they know what was in that message? – we never understood it. They sat all around the yard and waited. The overseer couldn’t budge them and after a while he stopped trying. As the afternoon went on they began to wail. My mother made me stay in the house. She was frantic with distress to hear them. She didn’t know the tropics, she still believed he could recover. And then as the darkness fell – and it falls very quickly in the islands – a second messenger came up the road on a donkey.”
Understanding moves across Mary’s open face. Across the clearing, sunlight salutes the fronds of fern standing green among last year’s black.
They collect together regularly, always on the western shore, and even as the days grow colder and golden leaves fall to the paths, they always come home through the Undercliff; that way, they can steal an hour’s collecting time from the tide. They tend to linger in the Garden (how could one not think of Eden, walking the paths of that voluptuous forest?), pausing in the clearing for quiet conversation away from the roar of the surf and the spying eyes of fishers and oyster diggers and coal collectors crouching on the shore. The clearing is nature’s drawing room, he sometimes thinks, and we have the chance to get better acquainted here, as people do in drawing rooms. Although the modestly costumed damsel at his side is a most curious companion – almost unlettered, absent an aptitude for flirtation, shockingly bereft of ordinary conversation, completely untravelled (having never once stepped foot on a ship, nor indeed in a coach), and prone to wiping her nose on her sleeve as the need arises. Also (he notes every time he follows her down a path) possessing a grace of motion that comes entirely from a lack of self-consciousness, from the very framework of her bones. Not that she is angular – but he is always aware of her bones, her strong shoulders and the long, striding legs. And he wonders at the candour and intelligence that light up her face, and the breasts that lie unrestrained under her blouse (lifting just perceptibly as she bends to put down her basket).
She would never truly be appreciated in a drawing room, Mary Anning, where reaction to her rough boots and her brown face and quaint speech would eclipse any other consideration. Buckland must recognize her worth, although in him it provokes only resentment. As for Conybeare – for all his gifts, the Reverend William Conybeare views the underclasses through a veil of undisguised contempt. One night, walking home with his friend after a visit to the Assembly Rooms, Henry commented on the darkness in the poor cottages they passed, although it was not yet eight o’clock. Conybeare laughed. “Busy seeing to their duties of procreation,” he said. “It’s the squalor they live in – they’re obliged to produce eight or ten infants in the hope of replacing themselves in the next generation. An onerous task, but one they excel at, the poor of England.”
And indeed, the Anning brood numbered ten! With only three children surviving – it is unimaginable. It’s a sad, sad story she tells him, of deaths by fire and drowning and illness and deprivation. His own childhood in Jamaica is so far outside her narrow experience that it baffles and amazes her. “Picture me, Mary,” he says. “My feet as tough as shoe leather from running barefoot. Two toes swollen where chigoe fleas had burrowed into them. My legs cobbled over with mosquito bites. And as brown as a berry from the sun – brown almost all over, I might add, for I lived in a pair of short pants Belle sewed me from the bolt of fabric intended for her own sons. Osnaburg, that fabric was called, and it was as itchy as sin.”
“Do the blackamoors and their masters not live apart?” she asks.
“Oh, to be sure, strictly apart. But I was a child, and caring for me was part of the work of the plantation. The slaves had their own cabin-line, and the field slaves did not come to the house. But certain of them had sly ways of flouting the rules.” He tells her about the beautiful, impudent Sophie, how she infuriated his mother beyond any of the other slaves, for her boldness. “The jalousies at the latrine had so many slats missing that anyone who chose could see right in, and one day Mother was sitting in the latrine and Sophie came up the path – where she should never have been, so close to the great house – and stood there as bold as brass and called out, How-do, missus?” Mary stares at him, aghast, although no doubt it’s his frank talk of his mother in a latrine that accounts for her expression. “Oh, my mother was vexed! She insisted Sophie be flogged. But my father ignored her. In fact, he and the overseer made Sophie the driver of the grass gang shortly after. And then, when he was selling some slaves and could have solved the problem by selling Sophie, he sold a different slave by accident, and this enraged my mother even more.”
“He sold her by accident?”
Henry considers for a minute how he can explain it. “My father strove to conduct his affairs in a Christian fashion,” he says at last. “He tried to keep families together, and so when he sold a slave named Tom, he sold Beryl with him, because the overseer’s book said they were man and wife. But really, it was Sophie who lay with Tom in the night, and everyone outside the great house knew it. But my mother was rid of Sophie after all, for after that sale, she vanished. I knew she was gone as soon as I woke up one morning – I heard the dogs out in the bush.”
“What would they do if they caught her?”
“There was a bamboo cage down by the boiling-house. Runaways were held there for a period of time.”
“Like the stocks in Cockmoile Square.”
“I suppose.”
“Was she found and put in the bamboo cage?”
“No,” Henry says. “In her own fashion, she escaped them.”
A noise starts up like a mason chipping stone with a silver spike. It’s a stonechat, somewhere in the trees above them. There is no way to make someone understand the reality of such matters. Individuals of his own class can’t grasp it, unless they have lived the planter’s life. With Mary, explanation is impossible. But her curious mind will not let it go.
“Did your brothers and sisters live in this way on the plantation, with the blackamoors?”
“I have no brothers or sisters. Well, none my father was prepared to acknowledge. Indeed, I regarded my nurse’s children as my brothers. One wonderful day, my father took me to the sea, and he kindly took Cuthbert and Ben as well. We dove for urchins and conch. They had never been in the sea before, and yet they dove like seals. They were expert at everything. You should have seen them climb the coconut palms beside the house! It’s a good trick, Mary – there are no branches to use for foothold.” He tells her about scaling the tree himself, using his bare feet to grip the trunk and reaching as high as the veranda roof before gravity hooked him and he came sliding down, rough bark nipping at his thighs, and landed in a nest of sticks and coconut husks. He doesn’t tell her about Cuthbert and Ben shrieking with laughter, and the way he ran wailing through the house in search of his mother. She was lying in her bedroom with the shutters closed, sleeping inside her bed net. So then he started up the path to find Belle, and Cuthbert and Ben met him and drove him back to the great house.
No wonder I thought we were brothers, he thinks ruefully as they walk home. We fought like brothers.
TWENTY
hen Mary was worn down by hunger, it was John Gleed her mind seized on, a nasty bit of prey, to be sure. Two years he’d been preaching hard work and industry to his weary flock at the Independent Chapel, urging them to be fruitful and multiply, to subdue the earth, to have dominion over every living thing. Two years he’d been collecting on t
he shore and stealing her trade. Mary listened every Sabbath to Adam and Eve digging and delving in the Garden and she waited in vain for the Serpent to slither in. But it had vanished, taking with it the dragons roaring and roiling at Black Ven. All that dark world gone, all fear of it drained away the bleak day James Wheaton was carried off in a wagon to be buried with his ancestors in Plymouth.
I shall have to open this hedge-parson’s eyes to the true meaning of dragons, Mary thought, and one day after the service, she waited until everyone had gone and slipped back into the chapel. She’d never said more than “Good morning” to Mr. Gleed – around single women, he was properly reserved. She found him hunched over a shelf behind the pulpit. He had a small looking glass and was worrying his back teeth with a wooden pick. He jumped when she came up behind him, and dropped the pick. “Mr. Gleed,” she said. “I have a question. About the days when the earth was young. In Genesis, we are told of Cain who slew his brother Abel –”
“Oh, Miss Anning!” he said eagerly, wiping his mouth surreptitiously with his sleeve and snatching his bible up off the pulpit. “The perennial question of the seeking heart: Where did Cain get his wife?” He smiled as though she were a fish he had caught in his net. His black coat was crimped at the elbows into the stiff folds of a bellows, from neglect of sponging and pressing. People said his pig ate from a baptism font seized by his own hand from a papist church.
“Scholars of Scripture explain that Cain married one of his sisters,” she said, stepping closer to him. They were the same height, and Mary straightened her backbone and made herself taller by an inch. “My question is something other. It is this: God marked Cain’s brow to warn strangers not to kill him. If Cain were the son of Adam and Eve, and Adam and Eve were the first parents, then who were these strangers?”
“Ah, Miss Anning,” Mr. Gleed said again. He flipped to the front of his bible and read out: “And the days of Adam … let me see … oh, here we are, it is here: And he begat sons and daughters. And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died.” Mr. Gleed peered at Mary. “Well?” he cried. “Mrs. Brody on the Axminster Road? Seventeen children, and still in her prime. Consider if she lived to be nine hundred. Would she still know all her kin by name – eh? Eh? Of course not. Ye can be strangers to your own kin.”