by Joan Thomas
He took a swallow of his tea. “The Scriptures tell us of Job, who was also sorely tried. And in the midst of his great suffering, counsellors came and tempted him to curse God and die.”
Mary sipped on her tea. She wished for a bit of sugar. And also for a bit of silence. Lizzie will stay with us for just a while longer, she thought: a sense of her, of her hot breath and her husky, petulant voice. While a sense of Lizzie lingered, she longed to be left in peace to attend to her. And then Mr. Gleed was back at the table, like a server offering her the jug of milk. “Our thoughts can be our counsellors,” he said.
“They can, indeed,” said Mary.
“Many do not grasp this. They think of counsellors as aged men in robes. But we are all counselled by our thoughts. I hope your thoughts do not tempt you as Job was tempted.”
“No,” said Mary, finally provoked to talk. “Although I ask myself, Mr. Gleed, I do ask myself why God, having performed his experiment of mortal tortures on Job, feels the need to visit it again upon the Annings.”
Mrs. Jefferd pulled her breath sharply in, but Mary did not relent. She stared Mr. Gleed into silence. She did not want to be in a temper again on this day, but she was in a temper, and would be in one until she had the quiet of her own thoughts.
The flood waters retreated the day of Lizzie’s funeral, and after the burial, Mary and her mother moved back home. In the end, only the workshop had flooded, to a depth of Mary’s waist, as you could see by a line of soil on the wall. The quantity of seaweed and clay that had washed in testified to what a loose sieve their little house was. Through the silt poked the larger fossils she had left on the floor – a hip bone from an unidentified beast, and a femur, and a large piece of jaw.
She was three days washing out the workshop and cleaning up her collection. It was like excavating these beasts a second time, and it was work she was glad of. This is what I do, she thought: I am a fossilist. She thought of Conybeare’s book and her notion that her name had been blotted from it, a notion she saw now as absurd. The names of the high-born would never be recorded in a book side by side with the low: such an association would debase them. Her impulse to think beyond her station was like a flagrant vine that needed constant pruning. Reverend Conybeare did not need to make an effort to exclude her – the order of things accomplished that task for him. Noah led the animals both clean and unclean onto the ark, but the high-born did not consider her and such like her.
When she was too tired to work, she went down to the shore. Scavengers had cleaned up, dragging home driftwood and bottles and barrels and all the other treasures a gale will steal from one shore-dweller and bestow on another, but worn pillows of foam still bobbed in inlets, and huge new excavations marked the face of the cliffs. She sat herself down on the shingle. Everything was in motion: the springy waves, and little boats bobbing, the colours throbbing against her eyes, the stirred-up sea full of its secret life. Creatures crawling in dreamlike existence along the bottom.
She’d made a choice, that her sister would die by drowning and not by parching. But she would die all the same – that part was outside Mary’s powers. How keenly Lizzie had tried, with her clever little airs, to grow into a young woman in their narrow house. The poor love life as passionately as the rich do. Perhaps more, for the effort it takes to cling to it. In spite of Mr. Gleed’s influence, Lizzie did not desire to go to the next world. Mary leaned forward then, burying her face in her old plaid skirt, and wept for relief that death had donned the guise of sleep in coming for Lizzie.
The day Mary finished scrubbing out the workshop, Miss Philpot sent to ask her round for tea. Mary could not summon up the energy to refuse. On the table was a beautiful vase of white peonies.
“This is for you, as a remembrance,” Miss Philpot said. She handed Mary a white card on which she had written a verse:
In all my troubles, Thou art nigh,
Thou sympathizing Friend!
Thou sees my pain, and from on high,
Dost consolation send.
With the card was a picture of a young girl with a mass of wisteria behind her. Weeks ago, they had looked through a folio of engravings and Mary had commented on the marvellous resemblance this one bore to Lizzie. Mary was touched by Miss Philpot’s kindness in giving her this portrait, although she did not see Lizzie so vividly in it now. This child had a narrower face and was inordinately decked out in ribbons. With time, she thought sadly, Lizzie’s aspect will vanish from my mind and the girl with the ribbons will take her place.
Miss Philpot was soft in her manner and solicitous about the condition of the workshop and Molly’s health and spirits. Mary found she could not hold on to her resentment. They were two solitary women together, whatever others might see. But she sensed a new sadness in Elizabeth Philpot, sadness and nervousness. While they chatted, Elizabeth broke a peony from its stem and methodically ripped it apart with her bony fingers, laying the frail bits of bruised petal along the tablecloth in order of size. The maid came in and set a tea of biscuits and fresh cream on the table, ignoring the disassembled peony. When she was gone, the startling news finally came out.
Mr. Buckland was to be married! He had written to announce his engagement, but had been uncharacteristically vague about the manner of his meeting the young lady. It was Charlotte Murchison who told Miss Philpot the real circumstances.
Two months ago, Mr. Buckland had boarded a public coach in Oxford in which a single other passenger, an unchaperoned lady, sat reading. Mr. Buckland intended to profit from the journey by reading himself, and he withdrew from his portmanteau the volume he was carrying – Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles, the newest study by Georges Cuvier – hoping, no doubt, to impress the lady by his erudition in reading such a volume en français. And then he heard the lady laugh and looked up to discover that she was holding the identical volume! Not only that – this lady had been sent a complimentary copy, for she was a skilled artist and had supplied some of the illustrations in the book. And so, without a proper introduction, they fell into conversation. The upshot of it was that they were to be married in July! She was a Mary as well, Mary Moreland.
It seemed the fiancée was much younger than Mr. Buckland. “About your age, Mary,” Miss Philpot said in a voice that was quite bitter. Her face twisted into a sardonic smile. “What do you think is behind it?” she asked, with a visible effort to lighten her tone. “Love for the lady or the prospect of a new illustrator, now that Mr. De la Beche has gone to France?”
Mary had heard others mock Mr. Buckland, but never Miss Philpot. “It’s the satisfaction of stealing her from Cuvier,” she said, noting the vain little touches in Miss Philpot’s dress, the puff sleeves so ill-suited to her frame. She drank her last swallow of tea and thought, How very much I do not see. It had never once occurred to her that Elizabeth Philpot might have any desires at all. She looked thoughtfully at her friend’s face, made all of straight lines and flat planes. The pockmarks had faded in the years of their acquaintance, but there was nothing lovely in the face save its humour and intelligence. And today the humour was soured and Miss Philpot’s shoulders were held rigid with the knowledge that she had betrayed herself. So Mary turned the talk to her work, and they sat in the parlour and talked about sea creatures until the light began to dim.
“We will ask Mr. De la Beche,” Miss Philpot said about some point or other. “Mr. and Mrs. De la Beche will be returning over the summer, I expect. I always thought his manners rather French, and they will be more so now.”
“Do you hear from him?”
The maid came in just then to light the lamps, and Miss Philpot sprang up to draw the curtains. “Oh,” she cried. “Mary, I am a donkey! There is wonderful news from Mr. De la Beche. I heard days ago from Mrs. Aveline, but we were so occupied with the Outlines of Geology that it slipped my mind. Henry is a father! They have a little girl. She came earlier than expected, while they were in Grenoble. It was the infant’s act of mercy to her mother, arriving early, for poo
r young Mrs. De la Beche found her confinement very difficult. They have named her Elizabeth, after Mr. De la Beche’s mother, but Mrs. Aveline says I may take it also as a compliment to myself.” To make up for her oversight in not immediately sharing this news, Miss Philpot got her book out of a drawer, a commonplace book, she called it, where she wrote her thoughts and such thoughts of others as merited recording, and she looked through the pages to find the exact date of the baby’s birth.
Of the months that followed Lizzie’s death, certain moments lay complete within Mary like fossils in the lias: Annie Bennett and her two black-eyed children strolling along the path to Pinney Meadow, Annie lifting the little girl to tickle her face against the fleabane growing on the wall. Will Darby and his bride walking up to the church and the rain starting to fall, and the groom taking off his hat and solemnly holding it out over his bride’s veiled head. And Molly – she would always remember Molly coming across Lizzie’s comb behind the cupboard, sitting down on the bench, holding the comb in her two knobby hands. “Nay, I say, as stern as can be, I’m not a-plaiting it again, and then I come in and she has it all undone, the imp, so I have to set about a-plaiting if I wish to or no.”
Time did not stop, it kept going forward, and Mary stood still and watched it on its way. There was the rhythm of the seasons and of the tide, momentary change with the promise of sameness in it. Everyone around her was part of it; they flowed by her in a stream. But Mary Anning was not – she had been formed of lightning, she was neither fish nor fowl. When the high-born got off the coach, she met their eyes with such boldness that they turned away alarmed. “A cat may look at the queen,” she called once, and laughed when the lady’s husband came back to the table and threatened to get the magistrate.
Pride and fury drove her every moment of the day. She walked with Richard Anning’s quick step and the insolent set of his jaw. Time was not standing still, it was speeding up, and it had her in its clutches as well, and was carrying her towards a fate she did not choose to meet. If I am to be an old maid, Mary said fiercely to herself, I will be an old maid such as Lyme Regis has never seen. Mary Anning: an unknown species, her tendencies unpredictable. None of the doctrines of the high-born explained her – she did not exist in their taxonomy. Why had she so hungered to be one of them? Thwarted, that hunger would turn her into a certain kind of monstrosity; fulfilled, it would turn her into another. One day, she was sifting through a tray of shells for a child in the shop, and she saw herself as if caught in a shaft of light, sturdy, plainly dressed, efficient, sharp-tongued, smelling of starch and sea salt and the salt of her own sweat, and she knew that that particular ambition had withered. Other hungers would take its place, for people are always hungry. She straightened up and brushed her hand over her skirt, and felt one of those hungers, a fierce curiosity to see what she would make of herself.
TWENTY-NINE
he Grove on Pound Street was to let. They were in Strasbourg when his mother wrote to tell him. “It will serve for a start,” she wrote, but the day he returns to Lyme Regis and walks through one finely proportioned room after another, he decides he must live in this house for the rest of his life. Open beams frankly show its structure. The upstairs windows offer a view of the sea over rooftops, although not of the shore. He chooses a back room on the ground floor for his study, for the broad windows that open to an ash grove on the west and to an artless garden of fern and periwinkle on the north. The drawing room is painted a blue unknown to the sky (a derivative of copper, it must be), but that is easily changed.
The property is to let furnished, by a Mr. Linnison. Letitia is appalled by the serviceable mahogany dining room table and he agrees to replace it when he is able. An Axminster rug they select together is laid in the drawing room. Milkmaid Letitia gazes pensively from a Chippendale frame in the hall. In the entry leans a massive polished ammonite, abandoned by the previous tenant. “Couldn’t lift it to take it away,” explains Mr. Linnison, demonstrating. “And nor more can I.” Though, somehow, it was transported all the way from the west end of Monmouth Beach.
The Bucklands are invited to dinner and arrive while Letitia is still dressing. “Here’s a beauty,” says Buckland. It’s the ammonite he means; he crouches to examine it, abandoning his wife. Henry looks at her curiously – a small, awkward collection of parts (both bony and curvaceous) dressed in pale green chambray. From upstairs floats the chiding voice of Sally, the nursery maid, and an indignant response from the baby. Buckland gets to his feet and surrenders his hat, revealing a pate newly hairless, except for its victorious forelock. “Paracoroniceras lyra,” he says to his wife.
In the drawing room, Henry raises a glass to his guests. “I wish you the joy of each other,” he says, thinking it a wish likely to be fulfilled. Fate has granted the professor a rare gift, it seems, a clever woman equipped by her own peculiarities to tolerate his. She moves like the geckos of Henry’s childhood, standing frozen by the window one minute, and the next, materializing with chin held high on the edge of a chair across the room. Buckland himself has strolled over to the cuckoo clock they carried home from Switzerland, and is manipulating its chains so that the tiny bird within pops in and out in a frenzy.
Letitia trips through the door and across the carpet, dressed in a delicate gown that recalls the muslin of her girlhood. She curtsies to both guests. “The bow is bent, the arrow flies, the winged shaft of fate,” she murmurs mischievously as Buckland kisses her hand: it’s the start of a charming performance she can sustain for about ten minutes. But the sight of Mrs. Buckland in her lettuce-coloured ensemble breaks Letitia’s rhythm. She allows a fatal pause, and then Buckland is in, snatching them away from romance and into his recent escapades in the ochre caves of Wales. Only the maid announcing dinner can pry them all from the ochre caves of Wales.
Over the soup, Letitia finds an opportunity to turn the lovers back to the circumstances of their first meeting. Indeed, they are eager to tell: the damaged wheel at Oxfordshire (what he said, what she said, what the coachman said), the bread and cheese and figs she carried, the clasp knife he was able to provide. Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles serving as a table. It’s the sort of joint entertainment Henry has often seen newly paired couples attempt. That impromptu picnic in the coach was a scant four months ago. Now Mrs. Buckland is occupied in furnishing their new home. Buckland has made a tabletop for the hall table, a mosaic of sectioned coprolites that his wife calls fossil rejectamenta.
Henry looks across at Letitia, but mercifully, she’s wearing the mother-of-pearl earrings she bought in Paris. “We may soon relocate to Jamaica,” he says by way of accounting for their status as renters. “The situation there has worsened in a way that no one anticipated. As an absentee planter, I consider the blame for this to be mine, at least in part.” Letitia sits with her eyes fixed to the tablecloth. Mrs. Buckland has straightened her spine. On her face dances the desire for a debate on the morality of her host’s sources of income. “In any case,” Henry says, deciding not to provoke everyone further for the moment, “the last year has been full of event for all of us.” The baby emits a corroborating cry from the room above.
The fish is brought in, a mackerel dressed with parsley. As Daisy serves it, Henry’s eyes are caught by the iridescent green jewel at Mrs. Buckland’s throat: it’s a hummingbird’s tiny head. He feels misery rising like a gas from his diaphragm, his buoyancy draining away. He resolutely turns towards Mrs. Buckland and offers her a smile.
“I have been thinking a great deal about time in these weeks since our return,” he says. “Not just about the profound effect on our destinies of certain single moments, but how elastic time is. Some days you are to bed before you properly know that you have risen. Other days seem an eternity as they transpire.”
“Indeed,” says Buckland intently. “And if I may be excused for turning to natural philosophy over dinner, in this very phenomenon may lie the solution to the scientific problem that has vexed us for years. Perhaps our interpr
etation of the day and the week in the Genesis account has been all too literal from the beginning. Scripture itself tells us that a day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.”
Mrs. Buckland makes a sly movement with her fingers. “You assert that the sun rose and set over two million times during the week of Creation?” she said.
“Not necessarily, my dear,” says Buckland. “It’s always possible the earth rotated more slowly that week. A prudent measure, from a mechanical point of view, for so new and complex a system. And given the molten nature of the primary rock, a cooling period would have been necessary. Newton himself allows the possibility.”
Everyone is momentarily silent, contemplating the notion of the sun taking a millennium to crawl across the heavens. Henry peels back the black skin on his piece of mackerel. And then Mrs. Buckland abandons Newton and the sun. She moves back to Oxford, to a story of her husband’s folly, eagerly describing the bear Buckland has procured for himself. A tame bear, it wears an academic gown and cap. It is introduced to the Oxford dons at garden parties as Tiglath Pileser. She named it herself – William told her she might. The mutton is carried in and Henry must carve, a task he sets about silently. Letitia is trying hard to catch Henry’s eye, but he resists her.
With the last spoonful of pudding, Letitia turns to Mrs. Buckland and suggests that they imitate ladies on the Continent and join the gentlemen after dinner. Henry recalls no such custom, but he makes his way around the table and offers Letitia his arm, almost withdrawing it at the savage look she gives him.
“Will you be attending at the annual meeting of the Geological Society?” Buckland asks when they’re settled in the drawing room.
“I intend so.”
“You’re going to London?” says Letitia with sudden interest, but Buckland is speaking over her, asking Henry about the Jardin. Which of Cuvier’s savants did Henry meet? Henry goes through the list. Buckland remarks on how they managed to keep their posts through so many political transformations.