by Joan Thomas
“What was it the edict said, as to cause?”
“It said insubordination,” he says. “Only that. And I did tell you. Five minutes after we’d met, I’d pressed a kiss upon you. How did you understand that?” He’s had nothing to drink, only the broth. Possibly it was spiked with negus.
A solicitor sets out his papers in piles on the dining room table. A sober conversation, long overdue. The house in Bristol has been sold to pay loans drawn against Uncle Alger’s estate: nothing there. Numerous reports from the attorney regarding Halse Hall: three hundred and fifty of Jamaica’s sugar plantations now closed, over half. How is it that the French colonies can produce sugar at so little cost? A short discussion follows on this subject. It’s clear that there will be no income at all without Letitia’s. This is understood by everyone at the table, and there is no need for his mother to spell it out. He looks at her with deep resentment. Madame Trois-Mari, they call her in town. This is all her fault, he thinks, unreasonably. And yet, what else is to be done? And Letitia (who is not at the table) may be a more suitable wife than most. She’s shown remarkable independence, remarkable tolerance of his inattention to her. She is, after all, the stepdaughter of an innkeeper, although this is never mentioned. To demonstrate his good intentions on all fronts, professional and personal, Henry settles two hundred pounds on her for her private use, in addition to a dress allowance. His mother offers up Daisy, salary paid for the year, and tractable enough to serve as both lady’s maid and housemaid.
While the documents are being completed, Letitia’s gown arrives from London. His mother contrives to have a jacket with square tails made for him, swallowtails having fallen out of favour for weddings. He writes letters postponing the summer’s fieldwork indefinitely. He and Letitia will go away immediately after the wedding: society will soon exhaust the topic of the bride’s irregular behaviour. They’ll tour the Continent while Henry can still raise money against the plantation. He rides to Axminster alone on a drizzly afternoon. The agent can offer nothing for three months, such is the pent-up demand for Paris since the war ended. Finally, he books passage on the Lady Jane James packet for July.
“We will have a bit of time to catch our breath before the wedding,” he says to his mother at breakfast the next morning.
“No,” she says. All the disgust she feels at his lacklustre self is in the No. “You will marry now and stay here until your passage. Or you can tour Sussex and Kent on your way to Dover.” She has settled on a Thursday morning two weeks away, and he goes to the magistrate and arranges a special licence.
He collects Letitia from Morley Cottage in mid-morning and she spends the days at Aveline House. She’s attentive to his mother and kind to the servants, determined to be charmed by the simplicity of everything, eager to take the cure in a bathing machine. She shows an interest in Mr. Aveline’s ailments and pursuits, watching entranced when he winds up his model of the heavens and its planets turn sedately around the sun. Colonel Birch comes to call and she listens to his entire life story, taking care to keep the drawing room door propped open throughout his visit; it is her settled impression that military men cannot tolerate enclosed spaces.
He has the sense of a compelling conversation interrupted. No time for fossiling, no chance even for a private word with his mother: she’s given herself over to the cultivation of her new daughter-in-law. Whatever do they talk about? he wonders, intruding on a poignant tête-à-tête in the drawing room, the tracks of unwiped tears on Letitia’s cheeks. His mother makes a gift to Letitia of her own beloved copy of Persuasion. Letitia reads it in two days, and then she must be taken down to the Cobb to see where the fictional Louisa fell on the steps. The tide is fully out; the fishing boats stranded inside the Cobb sink into the mud. Henry and Letitia walk out on the tilting dark stones and the wind buffets them. He’s pleased by how game Letitia is, laughing and turning her face to the wind, her pretty form in a rose-coloured coat a picturesque anomaly against the threatening sky. As she comes down the steps and tumbles into his arms, he presses her against the wall, nuzzling his face in her cheek and slipping a hand into the opening of her coat. But she pushes him away. “You’ll spoil your appetite with sweets before supper,” she says, and he follows her up to Marine Parade, vexed, not at being thwarted, but at the primness and worldly knowing so casually intermingled in her expression.
In the afternoon, she sits by the window, informing her friends of the impending nuptials and grand tour. She writes on fine, lavender-tinted paper. She never blots her letters for fear of smudges, but looks them over fondly as she waits for the ink to dry. France! she reads out to Henry. How the senses crave what the heart fears! Will there truly be houses and chimneys and sheep in the fields? Are the stones of Rue de Rivoli stained yet with blood or have they been washed clean? He listens perplexed. How ironic, how perverse, that she puts on this persona for his benefit. Possibly, in a moment of rare authenticity, she frightened herself. Like the subject of a portrait stepping out of its ornate frame, standing disoriented on the hall tiles. He looks at her with a new sympathy. He’s changed as well (he sees, to his surprise and satisfaction): forebearance has grown within him without his notice. Marriage will require it, and in the season of all things, it has appeared.
But then she announces her desire to live in Bristol, and an unbearable clamour of distress starts up in him. “It’s out of the question!” he shouts. Tears, never far from the surface, rise in her eyes. He turns furiously away from them. Why has he been sitting around in the stuffy drawing room all day? It’s essential that he maintain his routine of solitude and work. He slams out into the hall, filled with resolve to allow no small change that will open the door to larger ones. Buckland is back from Europe, but not in town. Very well, he will invite Mary Anning to the shore.
He snatches up his satchel of tools and starts down Broad Street. Mary’s mother is sweeping in the square and he hurries towards her, but she opens the door of the house as he approaches, and as she steps inside, she turns her face towards him, her cheeks hollow where teeth have been lost, her eyes exhausted. A face that brings up the regrettable image of a Middle Ages sage femme. She has virtually closed the door in his face; he can’t bring himself to knock. He walks by and turns up Church Street. But as he descends the path from the cemetery, there is Mary herself on the eastern shore below, walking quickly with her basket over her arm. He calls out to her, but the wind is high and carries his voice out to sea. By the time he’s down on the shore, she is nowhere to be found. He can see a mile in either direction. He can’t imagine where she could have gone, unless she climbed back up the cliffs by one of the paths that only she seems to know.
No matter, he’ll work by himself. He’ll make Mary the chart she asked for, one that shows the vertical elevation of the cliffs. The view of a mole, she said. She can have it to work with while he is gone, to chart her finds on it. The territory of her explorations is three miles, from Pinhay Bay in the west to Charmouth in the east. He’ll start close to town to develop his method and work outwards from there. He’ll use his plumb line to measure along the lip of the cliff where they walked the last time they were out together, when the sun shone so that the shore seemed all to be blue from the tidal pools reflecting back the sky. When she was tipsy. On a single glass of sherry. Perhaps she’d never had liquor before – was it possible?
And he’ll colour it. He’ll choose pigments for each layer that match the colours in the cliffs: blue for the carboniferous limestone, vermilion for the sandstone, and so on.
Back in the drawing room after an afternoon lying on his belly and watching his plumb line snag itself on the cliff face, he crosses to warm his hands at the fire and a dark, overdressed woman sits up on the settee. His new mother-in-law, who apparently outpaced the letter announcing her arrival. “Penrose,” she cries, putting out a row of knuckles to be kissed.
Henry’s mother and Letitia hurry in. “Mamma! That’s not Penrose,” Letitia says. “You were dreaming. You rem
ember Henry.” He bends over Mrs. Auriol’s hand. And Uncle Clement, whittled down to the fundamentals of sinew and skin, is there too, so there will be gaiety and an extra course at supper.
After he’s bathed, they sit down to a game of whist in the drawing room. Letitia has apparently recovered from her distress about Bristol. She’s struck up a gleeful camaraderie with Clement, who undertakes to teach her to shuffle and deal in the Continental style. It has always been a question of some import in Henry’s mind, how Letitia endured his long absences, how she employed her talent for flirtation. He questioned her the other night about various gentlemen they knew in common. Henry Wyndham was a lieutenant colonel with the Coldstream Guards and was terribly wounded at Waterloo, she told him. Phillip Marchand, who so distinguished himself at faro the weekend near Evershot, has fallen out with his family and gone to America. She was entirely composed in the telling, seemingly uninterested. But now she’s set out to charm Clement because she so easily can, or because her mother, posing and purring in purple velvet, has the same purpose. Lucky Uncle Clement, the thin, nervous rake – the object of attention of two such energetic women!
Letitia watches Clement’s demonstration with her chin cupped in her hand. With idle fingers, she pulls at the sausage curls bunched at each cheek, admiring their spring. Perhaps it’s this gesture that prompts Clement to a story about a lady of his acquaintance who sadly endured the ending of a love affair not long ago. “She wrote to the gentleman in question,” says Clement, organizing the cards in his hand with a flourish, “demanding the return of the lock of hair she had given him as a token. Shortly after, the gentleman’s servant appeared at her door with an enamel casket. The lady opened it eagerly, only to find within a tangled mass of hair, locks of blond, raven, and auburn, each tied with its own ribbon. My lord requests that you kindly retrieve your property, the servant said.”
Letitia’s laugh is a tinkle, her mother’s a bleat. Outside the triangle of their mutual charm, the smell of the shore clings to Henry.
Letitia recounts to Clement how, when they were scarcely out of childhood, Henry lured her into the woods to see a dunning on its nest.
“Dunnock,” Henry says.
“In any case, Mr. Mollot, there was none,” Letitia says, dropping a trump on Henry’s knave.
TWENTY-FOUR
he’d been ignorant of her own true self when she walked Miss Whyte up the hill to Aveline House, carrying the lady’s satchel. She understood fully only the day she saw them coming up Marine Parade from the Cobb, Miss Whyte in a rose-coloured wrap and pale orange gloves. Then she realized, not merely that he was lost to her, but that she was a feeble-brained stunpoll. She’d nurtured a hope so secret it had been secret to her own self. It was out in the open now, like debris dropped on the foreshore when the tide withdraws. How monstrous it was – it had no place in this world. And then rage seized her, and in her mind she went over all the things he had done – his hanging around the curiosity table and using speech laden with compliments, as though he could elevate her by his very manner of addressing her; his curious questions; his parading himself, a barefoot boy who lived with blackamoors; his talk about subjects decent common folk shut their ears to; his following her down alone to the shore, spreading her hair on the sand with tender hands. She put all these things on a scale and weighed them up against her lunatic hope. And then it was clear to her that she was not mad, but that he certainly was.
Far, far better that he followed her no longer. It brought her the relief you feel when you finally vomit up the bit of rank fish that is tormenting your belly. It cleared her head, the way a killing frost will clear away fog. He would soon be gone away entirely, and she would be left, the person she had always been: sturdy, resolute, wholehearted, tramping down the shore, clambering over rocks with her collecting basket. Her strong legs treading a well-remembered path over the stones, her boot unerringly seizing the only passage wide enough for a foothold. If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. She understood it now, James Wheaton’s text. But while she tramped her mind went slack, and then mischievously Henry came strolling in again in his charcoal jacket with tails and his fawn breeches and high black boots, Miss Whyte mimping along beside him, tipping her face up to his to whisper secrets. Wearing her rose-coloured gown and pale orange gloves, her colours all ajar, as if to say how pert she was, how wilful and daring, as if to proclaim why Henry loved her.
Ravens flock into town, they never come singly: Mary knew this from the year of her father’s death. They had been told for many months that parish support would cease, and the very week that Miss Letitia Whyte rode into town in the London coach, the Overseer of the Parish Poor carried his table out of the churchyard, never to return. He became once again plain George Davis, a sign painter. It was not his fault, people said. It was decided by the gentlemen in Whitehall, that the poor would never repent of their poverty if they were indulged with parish relief.
There are degrees of everything, thought Mary, standing at the back window watching rain fall on the sea. There were degrees of the high-born and degrees of the poor. Since Richard’s death, they had fallen from the top of the poverty ladder to the rung next to the bottom. How easy it was to topple down, how impossible to haul yourself up! Joseph would never see them starve. But two rents were beyond Joseph – it was the rent that would be their undoing. On the table was a notice from the landlord. They had a week, and then he would be obliged to seize their furniture.
“We must sell what we can ourselves, before it comes to that,” Mary said to her mother, turning back and sitting at the table, where she was making rushlights. Molly agreed. The cupboard could go – there was not much to keep in it in any case. And the two rush chairs: they still had a bench to sit on, and the stool. But they would not sell the round table from the workshop – without the table, they could not hope for income at all.
Lizzie lay face down with her braids hanging over the edge of the cot and dreamed of picking mushrooms. At Axminster, a girl went to pick a mushroom and found a golden ring around the stem. “Our Lord put it there,” Lizzie said. “And He led the girl to find it.”
“Nature put it there,” said Mary. “A lady walked in the field and she dropped it and by hap a tiny mushroom grew up within the circle.” At the table, Mary stripped the tough skin from a reed and dreamed of her own windfall: a new intact fossil. She would not try to picture it, for it must be another such creature as no one had ever seen. Something to bring the scholars running down from Oxford with their purses at their waists. Something that had not been described, so that she herself could write a text describing it. She had been distracted, but she would focus now and find it. But day after day, she wandered the shore and returned with nothing but threepenny curios.
It was Colonel Birch who came to their rescue, hobbling into the square just as the Moffat boys carried the rush chairs down the steps. He paid the boys a half-crown for their trouble and sent them on their way. “This will never do,” he said. “You must have a few sticks to rest your bones on.”
He said he would think what was to be done. They heard nothing for days – neither from the landlord nor from Colonel Birch. Then Will Darby came to the door and with ill grace handed Mary a note. Miss Anning was invited to tea with Colonel Birch. Mary read the note at the door and said to her mother, “Colonel Birch has invited us for tea tonight.”
“I will not drag a sick child to Charmouth,” said Molly. But Mary would not go without her mother: she feared Will Darby’s tongue. So in the end, they left Lizzie and the two of them followed the cliff path to Charmouth and presented themselves at the door. Will Darby led them down the hall past the fossil room and into a drawing room, where they sat side by side on a settle. The settle was pulled up to the fire and served as a powerful barrier against the cold. Colonel Birch was in full uniform in a large armchair. At his elbow was a clay bust that Mary knew to be of John Wesley, lips painted in a thin red bow. This room was a museum in its own w
ay – not of fossils, but of ornaments made from china and plaster and clay and marble. “Man’s handiwork,” Birch said proudly. “And down the hall, our Lord’s.” A girl served them tea, as well as bread and butter on china plates. Pure butter, without a trace of candle grease added to it.
When they had finished eating, Colonel Birch stood by the mantel and made a speech. He talked of his own straitened circumstances, the fact that he was on half pay and had not succeeded in selling his commission. He dwelt a few minutes on the God-fearing and temperate king, whose gout had flown to his brain, not yet dead, but for these many years dead to himself and his world. He told them of his father, who for all of the years of his adult life had generously fed and clothed a neighbour woman and her six children as they came one by one fatherless into the world. He told them the story of coming up the street in Lyme Regis to observe a brace of stout youths carrying away a widow woman’s furniture, her two gentle daughters weeping at her bosom, and then he paused and lifted his moustache in the customary display of his dentures. Behind his long and rambling speech lay the question, Who had made them his responsibility? He did not address it and they (sitting by a warm fire licking butter from their fingers) were not inclined to ask. “And so I put it to myself,” he resumed, “What do I possess of value? and my brain lit on my collection of bones and shells, assembled through the industry of this young maiden we see before us. And so I sat myself down at this writing desk and composed a letter to a person of my acquaintance in London, one Mr. Bullock of the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, and he has done me the courtesy of an immediate reply. He agrees to reserve his hall on May fifteenth for an auction, and to send notices to all interested persons. With no expectation of gain for himself. It will be an alms for you and your family, Mrs. Anning, on the part of both Mr. Bullock and myself, although the auctioneer is a hard-headed fellow who insists on his commission. In the meantime, I have sent Mr. Axworthy a quarter’s rent in anticipation of these proceeds. I may never again have what I am about to part with, but I am resolved.”