by Joan Thomas
“Oh, Mary, my dear,” he says. He reaches for her hand, her rough brown hand, but she snatches it away. He reaches for it again, and this time she hits out at him with it, and then she turns and begins to walk quickly back towards town. He hurries along by her side. “You have been learning the ways of the gentry, Mary,” he says, striving to keep his voice gentle. “And you have been an apt student indeed. But you may not have remarked that in sexual matters, the proprieties are universally breached. Indeed, social rank brings with it greater licence, rather than less.” The path is narrow just then and he is forced by gorse on either side to fall behind. He is making himself ridiculous, trotting after her, but he must explain. He turns to the irrefutable example of the Talbots, the prominent Devonshire family his stepfather and mother recently visited. “The children in that family are known in whispers as the Talbot Miscellany,” he says, “so many lovers has the lady taken and so different the physiognomy of each of her children. And far from shaming Lady Talbot in society, these adventures add to her attractions. My mother and Mr. Aveline had no hesitation whatsoever in being her guests. Perhaps it was not always thus, but we observed a Regency court, and we have profited from example.” He’s trying to joke, but she stops and rounds on him.
“The Prince Regent were never our teacher here in Lyme.”
He sees in a flash that this tactic was a ghastly mistake. “Very well. Very well, Mary. But may I observe that the chambermaid at the Monmouth Inn has more personal freedom than you allow yourself?”
Then her colour deepens and it seems she can hardly speak. “You compare me to the chambermaid at the Monmouth Inn?”
“No, I don’t compare you,” he cries in despair. “Oh, Mary – you so badly misconstrue my intent.” But she’s gone, a black form striding down the path in the falling light, vanishing through the high stands of gorse, and he is left alone with the preposterous preamble to what he’d wrongly assumed would be a lengthy conversation.
It’s only much later that he thinks of the argument he should have used with Mary, glimpses the vows that could be sworn to the eternal, shifting verities of rocks and tide.
For Miss Whyte From Mary Anning. Penned directly on the paper packet in a bold script. Miss White, she had written first, and then made a crude correction. Whatever could she be giving his fiancée? He cannot imagine and, standing in the hall, he cuts the string with his penknife and opens the packet. Wrapped inside is a pair of earrings. Two slices of Ichthyosaurus coprolite, polished like sections of agate and fixed to dangle from the earlobe. The hooks of the earrings are iron fish hooks. He’s breathless with amazement. He holds them close to the lamp to examine each slice of fossil excrement, fish scales running through them like a delicate inlay. The drawing room door opens. It’s Letitia, coming into the hall to see what’s keeping him. She moves smiling towards him, carrying a candle in a globe. There’s still time for him to slip the packet back into his pocket, but he holds it in his hand and she approaches.
“Forgive me,” he says. “It was with my letters and I opened it in error. It’s a wedding gift for you.” Letitia sets the candle on the hall table. She touches the stones in his hand and looks up at him in confusion. “From Miss Anning,” he says, showing her the paper.
“Miss Anning? The brown-faced girl selling seashells in the square?”
“Yes.”
Letitia fingers the polished stones. “Are they meant to be earrings?”
“I suppose they are. She must have fashioned them with her own hand.”
“They really are very beautiful stones,” she says. She picks one out of his palm and holds it up to an ear, turning her head to the hall looking glass to admire the coprolite dangling against her cheek. “I could have them fitted properly onto gold. That’s what I will do. But what a queer creature, to want to give me a wedding gift! Perhaps it’s because I spoke to her on my arrival.” She gazes at her reflection. “Does one send a formal note to such a person?” she asks. It’s not the earrings she’s admiring; it’s her own face, the pretty curve of her lips. She’s watching herself talk. “No,” he says heavily. “Don’t trouble yourself.”
TWENTY-SIX
ary stood on Black Ven with her basket on her arm. She frowned at the rock-strewn foreshore. Just here was where she’d found the body of Lady Jackson. And here she’d walked out with Sir Foppling Fossil, and dropped herself down to the sands. She’d been seized by madness, and she’d given him such a story. She’d given him Lady Jackson as everyone imagined a gentlewoman should be – Oh, lovely appearance of death, no sight upon earth is so fair! As Mary herself imagined the lady would be, when she first crept across the sand and saw the white hand flung out, palm up, the lady’s fair hair laid out by the water, and her slender foot. A fine lady and taken by death all the same.
And now Mary saw her as clear as she had that day. She’d been undressed by the sea, there was no ivory silk gown on her at all, but bladderwort and black marl mashed under her. She was lying on her back, not as Mary had fallen to show Henry. Her eyes half open, unseeing, as though Mary creeping up to her did not exist. The lady was marble on the sand and Mary was the ghost, squatting beside her on the shore, scarcely breathing. Staring at the white of her flesh mottled with pooled blood, and her nipples pointing darkly up at the sky. Her vacant face with the thick, unlovely mouth. The fine lines at her eyes and the pouches beneath, the faint expression of disgust. Mary was the ghost reaching a hand out, touching the cold skin of her thigh. And noting everything: her woman’s legs splayed open (fat legs with blue veins wandering over them), the hair on her woman’s mound left to curl like bracken in the sea water, the lips between mauve as an oyster.
The De la Beche carriage rolled out of town laden with cases. Was Mrs. De la Beche wearing her reptile turds? Mary wondered. Then Colonel Birch rode into town on his mare and presented himself at the curiosity table with a chastened face. “Not this week,” Mary said, lifting her chin, looking coldly across the square. “Our Lizzie is poorly.”
Then they did not hear from him, and it looked as though it would all come to naught on account of her pride. The work is finished, was all she told her mother, but in bed at night, she raged still against Colonel Birch, saw him reaching his hand for the heavy-veined udder of the cow, winking at her with his pale-fringed eye. Recalled the syllabub, the taste of childhood with a potent, seductive aftertaste, and thought of how cheese was made, how a calf was allowed to suck its fill before it was killed and the curdled milk from its stomach used to curdle cheese. Her fury grew: she felled the old ram with the flat side of an axe, she saw him falling heavily to the floor. Her rage was like sticky mud; she was sucked down into it. These gentlemen and their lusts – there was Henry, grabbing at her when they clambered over a rock, the heat burning in his hand, his thirst for her shining in his eyes. And there was she, just as bad – Do not look at me so, she’d think, and when he turned obediently away, she’d stir beside him or make some little sound in her throat so he’d look again.
She rolled over in her bed. Oh, Catherine, Saint Catherine, please come to my aid, she breathed. The money – better to think of the money. All of those wonderful treasures from the shore offered up for sale. Two hundred and twenty pounds – that’s what was at stake here. She’d kept her own tally of fair market values all the time she was fitting the collection into crates. Two hundred and twenty pounds! But an auction sale was different from transactions conducted in the sober light of day. It was buyers vying with each other. Sometimes in the heat of the moment, prices went sky-high – a man might pay a fortune to keep a rival from getting what he desired. She told herself stories of such feuds, she peopled the hall with petulant rich men who loathed each other, and in her mind, the total grew and grew. It would be enough to pay off the last of their creditors and keep them for a year. She would be independent, above the insults of sordid men. She turned over again and slid one icy foot up into the hot angle of the other knee. These imaginings were Hope come to taunt her, her new enemy, Hope –
for really, in giving her anything at all, Colonel Birch would be paying twice. And what must she expect to part with in the end for such a windfall?
Finally, a note came to say that he was back in Charmouth with the proceeds of the sale and awaited her attendance. It was not Will Darby who brought the note but a new and friendlier Charles, a boy from Cobb Hamlet wearing a tremendous pair of hobnailed boots. “You must go,” Mary said to her mother. Her mother, who was scrubbing out the kitchen, set to humming and did not reply. Mary began to suspect that what she dreaded was what her mother desired. But she could not mount an argument – she could not further jeopardize this windfall. And so she put it to herself that she was a woman who could outwit a sheep, and she fetched her bonnet. Her mother walked a ways with her. At the edge of town, she stopped and put her hand on Mary’s arm. “Better a little fire to warm thee than a great fire to burn thee,” she said.
Colonel Birch was in his big chair in the drawing room. Mary was struck by the streaks of colour running down his massive moustaches, as though the iron hull of his cheeks were rusting. She could tell at a glance that he was in a fine, dignified humour, and her fear drained out of her – it would be like the day when she came with her mother. He reached forward and gravely handed her the catalogue from the sale. It was a twelve-page booklet printed on cream-coloured paper. On the flyleaf was the engraving of the strange shrimp-like creature she had once found on the tide flats below town. There was a list of every item, with flattering descriptions. Colonel Birch told her she might keep this catalogue, that he had brought this copy for her. He directed her to read the text at the front of it and she sat on the settle and read out:
A small but very fine collection of organised fossils, from the Blue Lias Formation, At Lyme and Charmouth, in Dorsetshire, consisting principally of Bones, Illustrating the Osteology of the Ichthio-saurus, or Proteo-saurus, and of specimens of the Zoophyte, called Pentacrinite, the genuine property of Colonel Birch, Collected at considerable expense.
She read the rules for the sale and the list of items right through while Colonel Birch dozed. Then tea was brought in and, while they drank it, he told her the story of the auction from beginning to end. Buyers had come from as far away as Paris and Vienna. The sale had been dominated by a man in a velvet jacket, who bought the Ichthyosaurus head and numerous other pieces, who bid by touching his index finger to his left nostril, a finger with a long nail sharpened like a file. A stranger to the others in the room – but he had money behind him. He was certainly the agent for someone of consequence. For the Ichthyosaurus skull alone, he paid one hundred guineas! Colonel Birch conspired to be in his path in the foyer afterwards and boldly inquired whom the man represented. Léopold Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert, the man said in the outlandish way that Frenchmen speak. Colonel Birch looked at Mary triumphantly and she stared back. “Cu-vi-er,” he bleated, and she felt a thrill go through her to think that the great Monsieur Cuvier would be studying her collection. And a sadness that her collection was all disbursed, sent out across many lands, those creatures that had all died here at Lyme Regis.
Then Colonel Birch made a ceremony of handing her the pouch. He seemed to be searching for words that would make an event of it, but finally settled for the prosaic. “With best wishes for the health and prosperity of the Annings,” he said. “From their humble friend and servant Colonel Thomas Birch, S.S.” He held her eye. “A sinner saved.”
Some of the money was paper, and then there was a sack of gold sovereigns. “They must pay in guineas at such a sale,” Colonel Birch explained, “and the auctioneer changes the coin to sovereigns or pound notes, whatever he has to hand, and keeps the extra shilling for his fee.” The sovereigns had a head of the king on one side, dead now in the material sense of the word, and on the other, Saint George slaying the dragon – a dragon with pleated wings that folded like a parasol, and a muzzle and paws like a dog.
“Go ahead, my dear, reckon it up,” he said. “It is all there, every pence, less your last quarter’s rent.” And though it seemed rude to do so, she did, for she was dying to know the sum and he seemed to want the pleasure of watching her look through the money. She sorted the coins and bills by kind and added them up, her heart pounding. Even without the last quarter’s rent, it came to almost four hundred pounds.
They took their supper in the dining room, served by a silent, flat-faced girl. They ate a whole pike with a pudding in its belly, and venison pasties. It was a supper fit for a king. The sweetmeats were served in a porcelain dish with three sections like three seashells and a fish tail in the centre for a handle. How Lizzie would adore it! Back in the drawing room, they drank Madeira from the vessel with the duck swimming in the stream. With her glass in her hand, Mary roamed the drawing room. She stood by the fire, and it warmed her stomach and thighs and cast an orange light on her apron. She had not been warm that winter. It was such a fire as they would never have at home, even now, with hundreds of pounds. In Colonel Birch’s house, it was possible to believe that the sea did not exist, and Black Ven. She saw herself in a house such as this, with a lace cap on her head. Everything in the room was beautified by the firelight. She knew her own beauty, just at that moment. She saw it without a looking glass, without Henry’s glowing eyes on her, the firelight gleaming off her dark hair, her eyes that gathered up all the light in the room.
On a table at Mary’s end of the settle was an ornament of the languid body of Jesus, laid out dead, his mother leaning weeping over him and two plump angels floating at her shoulders, one of them holding up its hand as though to say, Do not come near. And she had to think of Lizzie, who would never see this room filled with tender light. Sadness for Lizzie welled up, tears stung her eyes – tears for herself too. She tried to breathe steadily, in through her nostrils. She was like the flowers in the tidal pools that moved their fringes at unseen currents, curling up at the slightest touch.
Colonel Birch sat with one foot on a stool, his head tipped back against the cushions. There would be no more lewd demonstrations, he would do nothing to hold her. The fine gentlemen had overpaid for the fossils – fair market value did not always rule. She had the money bag tied to her waist and she was free to go. But the drink that had been travelling a journey from her throat to her stomach rose and warmed her mind at just that moment, and so she went and sat on the hassock beside his chair, holding her glass of Madeira.
“Why did you collect the old bones, sir?” she asked.
He smiled, showing his sturdy young teeth. His moustache did not move when he smiled. It betrayed his inner expression, which was sadness, like hers. “It’s the mystery, I reckon,” he said. “Something lost, turned to stone.”
“What happened to all these creatures, that we never see their type no more?”
“Mayhap they all died,” he said. “Mayhap they became something else.”
“That is what I wish to know,” she said. “Can a creature be changed into something else?”
She waited a long time for his answer, then she saw that he was asleep, his head tipped to the side and his mouth loosely open. His chest rose and fell with his breath. The firelight glowed on his cheeks, on his flesh, the something on his skull that was other than bone and would not endure. A shutter banged and Colonel Birch started. “The latch wants fixing,” she said. His eyelids slid down again. She reached a hand over and touched her fingers lightly to his temple. “The latch,” she said again. “It is the sort of thing that I would take in hand.” He peered at her, awake now. She saw in his pale eyes that he understood – he did not assume she was offering to join his employ as a housemaid.
His hand, dangling off the arm of the chair, reached blindly for her leg and found it, pressed the calf of her leg through her skirt. “It could never be, my dear,” he said. His voice was kind. “For all my fondness – and I am very fond of you – there are proprieties.” He sat and looked at the fire and then his hand dropped and he fell back into his doze.
She turned away from him
and got up. She went back to the fireplace and leaned her head against the mantel. There were proprieties to her heart, her heart had proprieties, and she would have flouted them. For the fire, just for that, to be warm every night.
TWENTY-SEVEN
July 9, Paris
We are installed on rue de la Paix in lodgings that are anything but peaceful, but were recommended by Professor Buckland. While this is not the hotel preferred by my mother-in-law, it is very near the Opera, which pleases just as much. All signs of the revolution, all Napoleonic insignia, have been removed. It is Royale-this and Royale-that, everywhere. Yesterday, eager for exercise and missing the shores and lanes of Dorsetshire, I walked as far as the Jardin du Roi, the vast grounds of which are open to the public. I wandered at length through the gardens, foreign trees and bushes sheltering foreign beasts, and listened to the peacocks screaming. Before leaving, I delivered my letter of introduction from Doctor Leach to a Monsieur Royer, who seemed suitably impressed by the seal of the curator of the British Museum, and indicated to me that an invitation from M. Cuvier would be forthcoming. He encouraged me to visit the exhibition halls of the museum as an ordinary sightseer, but I believe I will rest on my privilege and wait for a tour by the great man himself.
As for the city, which I explore daily (most often alone, as L. continues unwell), I have never seen a patch of ground where the impulses of nature have been so utterly stifled – whether by the outright razing of trees, or by tortured topiary which allows to no humble shrub the exercise of its own will, or by gardens laid out as an operation in geometry, grass replaced entirely by shingle. One cannot but think of the verdant tumble of foliage in the Undercliff. Here nature asserts itself only in the unpaved streets, when rain transforms the thoroughfare into a muddy channel.
July 11