by Joan Thomas
That afternoon, it rained again. Instead of working on her fossils, Mary sat sewing in the kitchen. It was her faded plaid skirt she sewed, refurbishing it, a job she’d had in mind for some time. A simple matter of picking out the stitches that held the skirt to its waistband and refolding the pleats so that the brighter strips that had never seen the sun were now to the outside. She sat and stitched the waistband back on, feeling the watch nestled between her breasts. She had told him things she had spoken of to no one else in her whole life. And he had listened with sympathy – it seemed a sort of miracle when she recalled it now. Then Miss Whyte traipsed into the square like a wicked fairy. After that, Mary had seen nothing but deception and lust – her fury had coloured everything that came before. But in truth, Mary thought as she stitched, his every gesture towards her spoke of kind regard. Kind regard? Her heart began to pound and she had to sit still until her hand steadied. Oh, not kindness – she could not let herself put a name to it.
In the evening the rain cleared, and at first light she walked out and sat on a rock at Black Ven to eat her dewbit, looking across the narrow foreshore. Tray sat alertly at her feet. The sea was the very silver of the back of a fish, and Mary felt a peace and happiness she had not felt for many months.
This was the rock where she’d sat with him once long ago, when he had come back from his many journeys a grown man and a stranger to her. They had eaten boiled eggs together, and he’d told her his notion of marriage, which had struck her as marvellous strange – but mayhap, she thought now, explained a great deal. She would have to think back over all their times together, to understand the true meaning of it. The stories of his childhood, which seemed in the nature of a confidence. It was a gift of himself: he had chosen her to talk to above all others. And in her rage, she had regarded his attentions in the sordid way the world would regard them. The world had denied her so much, and it seemed she had joined forces with it.
She finished her bread and sat still on the rock, lost in contemplation, watching with half a mind the waves steal up the sand, and after a time she realized that her eye was snagged on a shape near the water’s edge. Something was buried in the clay. It looked like a hand, the long-fingered hand of a sorcerer. She snatched up her tools and walked over to it, crouching. It was a hand, though it had an inordinate number of finger bones. The clay came away easily. The hand led to a long bone, which led to another – arm and shoulder bones, she reckoned. She followed this up – and then her trowel exposed a chain of narrow vertebrae, and she felt the back of her neck tingle.
She put the tip of her trowel under one of the vertebrae, prying it out. It broke. The fossil was in a soft marl plateau, exposed overnight by the tide. The marl was not just shrouding the bones from discovery – it was holding them together. But she could see that the vertebra was not indented like an Ichthyosaurus vertebra. It was almost flat, like a shark’s. But it was not a shark’s – it was five times thicker. She sat back on her heels, breathing hard.
The tide was rising. She pulled her watch out of her waistcoat – she had an hour before the fossil would be under water again. It would take her half of that hour to walk to town for help, and the other half to return. She fell to her knees and set frantically to work. Within twenty minutes she’d exposed a great snake – but halfway down, it sprouted a body with an undercarriage, like a turtle’s, and from that undercarriage hung amazing flippers that seemed to be made of fingers, although there were more joints than any earthly finger had. Turning back in the direction where the head should be, she followed the spine up until it petered out to nothing. There was no head.
By the time she’d uncovered the entire fossil, the tide was licking at its tail. She divided the skeleton into sections and pulled sacking out of her basket. She shovelled the sections one by one into separate sacks, running up high to the cliff line to stash each one, the dog barking at her heels in excitement. It was a sin to treat this rare find in this fashion, but by the time the tide rolled out again, it would be worried into dust by the waves.
The minute Mary was back in the workshop with the sacks, she sat down and made a sketch of the bizarre skeleton. People who had not seen this creature lying in its grave would never credit it. The next morning, she set to work rebuilding it on the workshop table, the sketch tacked to the wall. With careful handling, most of the bones held together, but some disintegrated like wet chalk or burnt-out log ends as she touched them. She would reconstruct them as she set the specimen in plaster. For now the roughly reassembled neck lay on the work table, across the blotches of cuttlefish ink. Misshapen continents on a fantastic map, those stains looked now, as if to illustrate the origins of the fossil. Such a pity Henry was not in town to see!
Mary worked all day, deeply absorbed in the job and in her thoughts. It was close to suppertime before she pried herself off the stool. Stepping outside, she could hardly believe how low the sun was over the Cobb. She took a bowl of soup with her mother and then lit candles at intervals along the work table. By their light, she began to fit together the elaborate flippers, making educated guesses as to the place of each crumbling shard. There were ten flanges to the longest of them. This beast fit nowhere in the world. She’d been in a dreamlike state when she spied it – she’d never have noticed it when her eye was single.
And this combination of shoulder and arm and flipper – it was brutal and graceless, she could think of no parallel. Science would have a job wrestling with its oddities. Buckland and Conybeare would never fit it into their fairy stories. We are all wrong, she said to Henry, to the thin and sober Henry who had come back from France. I know we are, he said. Then he was vivid in her mind, his face lit up with eagerness, as it had been when they met at the cliff edge just before his wedding. Their work he had talked about, the work they might do together. And what extraordinary qualifications for this job the two of them had together!
By the middle of the night, she was working half asleep. A pain was shooting up from her hip, and her elbow hurt like the dickens. Only one candle burned. There was just the tail left to rebuild. She shifted her own bones on the stool, and jumped at the sight of a white human face watching her from the black glass of the window. She bent over the puzzle of the bones again, over the mucky remains of this fantastic creature that had lashed its tail and writhed itself down into the fearsome deep, where man could not go, where human curiosity and the light of the sun would never penetrate. The sea had made this creature for its own purposes, which are unknown. It is all blind locomotion and no direction, she thought, gazing at the long, headless neck, it is life to no purpose except as life, and then she laid her head down on the table among the ancient crumbling bones and sank into sleep.
That afternoon, she met Colonel Birch on the street. He laboured goutily down the workshop steps to see. “A snake that swallowed a turtle!” he cried. Eighteen shillings her father had been paid for a similar backbone, or so she seemed to recall. Now Birch offered her sixty pounds – that was the difference between a curiosity and a scientific specimen! They agreed that she’d build a frame and set the bones in plaster.
When he was gone, she wrote to Sowerby to ask for clearance to sell it herself, and walked up to the Three Cups to post her letter. Annie and her husband were in the public house and she sat and took a cup with them. When she stepped out of the door, there was one of those extravagant sunsets, the old sun falling into the sea behind the Cobb, everything orange, and Henry was far away in London, and she could not breathe for the dangerous beauty of it. Walking by the smithy’s, she got a powerful whiff of the pig penned there. She stood a long time by its pen, marvelling that, in this world, a pig should look so and smell so. Her dog came up to meet her, wiggling with joy, and she bent to scratch his compact, perfect head. Then she walked down to the shore and leaned on the seawall. Every bird in the harbour was wheeling in the crimson sky in celebration of the night, and Mary was near to fainting with fatigue and cider and delirious love for the world.
Wh
en at last she went into the house, Molly was down in the workshop. She was standing by the table, rubbing her arms in vexation at the sight of the fossil.
“It’s a true dragon, that one,” Mary said.
“It’s an ugly devil, I know that,” said Molly. “Do the bigwigs have a name for it?”
Oh – and Mary thought of her letter to Sowerby. She’d called the specimen a Plesiosaurus – truly, she was a stunpoll! “They may trot out whatever names they please,” she said hotly. “It’ll be Mary Anning who names this one.”
“You’d need Greek for that, my girl.”
“I’ll need Latin,” said Mary. “Mr. De la Beche has Latin.”
THIRTY-ONE
rom the sunshine of Lyme Regis to the smoke and fog of London. Driving in slowly to spare the horses after two long days on the road, watching the towns thicken into a single metropolis, the earth vanish beneath granite and cobbles, the trees disappear. How human to contrive such a home, he thinks, how not like the beasts (for everything in his mind now is a sorting of evidence). What a contorted, misguided imitation of the creative function, this London grotesquely bloated from the Regency, grandiose empty domes and plaster statues lining the streets, this lurid artificial light, this incessant reaching up and out. And it comes to him to wonder how far it will go, and what will be the end of it.
He should stay with Clement for the economy of it, but he puts up at the White Horse Cellar Inn. When he comes out on the street, there, for his sins, is Edmund Sutton in beaver hat and trim grey coat. Sutton presses him to sup at a club, and Henry is obliged to go. It is his duty to who he is, to break bread with Edmund Sutton; it is a wilful pressing of his open palm into the burning coals of his dilemma.
Not that Sutton seems at all touched by the questions that rack Henry. He is bland and genial. He complains mildly that his cigar is stale, and presses upon the waiter his disappointment that venison is not on the menu. But over the leg of lamb, he talks of nothing but the uprising at the English colony at Demerara. A dozen planters dead, thousands of slaves from fifty plantations involved.
“How ever do they organize such a thing?” Henry asks.
“It’s our own leniency, you know,” Sutton says. “My overseer is always giving them leave to travel around the country to attend some burial or other. You heard what was behind it all, didn’t you? The revolt? Somehow they got the notion that the king had already freed them and no one was letting on. Somehow a Parliamentary motion in Whitehall made its way out onto the cane fields in the West Indies. I ask you – how was that possible?”
“The planters will talk at table,” Henry says, “and they persist in believing that the man standing behind their chair is insensate.” He lines his knife and fork up on his plate and wipes his mouth. Perhaps, he thinks, I’ll be relieved of the need to act. Perhaps the burden of action will be taken up by people more desperate than I.
The meeting at the Geological Society is set for four o’clock the next day. In the morning, Henry walks through the West End, pressing through crowds filling the streets like a cattle drive. A daylight moon, incongruous, white, floats behind the screen of smoke from a hundred thousand hearths. There on Piccadilly is the Egyptian Hall, the white marble statues of Isis and Osiris that serve as its pillars, carbon-streaked. The auction sale Mary mentioned was held there. From there, Birch’s collection (my collection, she called it) was disbursed across England and even to France. He pauses at the door but drifts on. And farther up Piccadilly, near the Circus, was the exhibition hall that he’d entered with his uncle all those years ago. The buildings are renovated in this quarter, all put to more respectable uses, and he walks straight along and does not try to puzzle out which door it was.
On Bedford Street in Covent Garden, he presents himself at the offices of the Geological Society. William Babington, the Society’s president, happens to be on the premises dealing with correspondence, and receives him warmly. A small, neat man with an expressive, mobile face, a medical man with a passion for mineralogy.
“I won’t take up your time,” says Henry. “I just want to inquire whether there’s room on today’s agenda for a further item.”
“There is indeed.” Babington opens a drawer in the desk and pulls a page out. An iron pen such as Henry has never seen before lies among the samples scattered on the desk, and he takes it up.
“I wish to report on certain ideas I encountered in Paris recently, and canvass the members for their reaction. Begin a debate, I suppose.”
“On what subject?” Babington asks, nudging the hinged lid of his inkwell up and dipping the pen.
“On the subject of transmutation, as proposed by Lamarck and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and others.” He manages to keep his voice even.
Babington’s expression changes. He puts the pen down. “Have you a written submission?” When Henry replies in the negative, Babington outlines the policy for agenda items: a written paper, with the signatures of two peers. “I’m sorry. It’s a recent policy. I should have mentioned at the outset.”
Conybeare is not in attendance and Henry keeps his distance from Buckland. He spies an empty seat by Gideon Mantell, another physician and a most passionate collector. Mantell is somewhat shunned in this company – his over-brushed suit and cadaverous eyes and his general air of reproach and defeat always call up the confinement bed and beakers of leeches, an association Babington somehow manages to escape. In the last year especially, Mantell has become something of a joke for his obsession with certain huge bones and teeth he’s been finding at a quarry in Cuckfield. Having subjected them to Cuvier’s principles of proportion, he insists they are the remains of an unknown land creature sixty feet long. He nods gravely as Henry sits down. Together they watch Professor Buckland glad-hand his way around the room, his prominent eyes red-rimmed, his gestures comedic. Henry feels the tug of an old affection. Buckland will be occupied in turning his new notion about time into a theory. Apparently, the laws of nature pertain when convenient to our theories, but not otherwise. He will certainly be attacked for it, from both sides, poor fellow – when all he wants is to be admired. But he never bragged about eating the heart of Louis XIV. Maybe he’s starting to be frightened by his own compulsions.
Henry leans towards Mantell. “Have you thought of announcing your recent finds? Have you ever discussed this with Buckland?”
“Indeed I have. But Buckland advised me to wait.” He makes a little moue. “How can one ignore a caution from such a quarter?”
“Perhaps he’s collecting his own evidence to publish in advance of you?” Henry says. He can see Mantell turning this over in his mind as the meeting is called to order.
The meeting is brief and concerned mainly with the orientation of new shafts for a tin mine in Cornwall. In the election of officers, Buckland is duly named president. Afterwards, there’s a general movement to a club. Henry slips out and walks back through the West End and into Green Park, where the noise of the city fades. A nurse with a little boy hanging on to each hand walks a path towards him and he looks eagerly at her face. He’s in one of those moods where everyone he encounters looks uncannily familiar. He finds a bench to sit on and is overtaken by the anxiety he’s been avoiding since he drove away from Lyme. Letitia’s keenness when he first mentioned this trip: it was not a desire to go to London herself, but a desire for her husband’s absence. And he is so often absent. A suspicion he thought he had mastered flared up at the sight of her face in that moment, and has since grown. He has no material proof. But it is a fact, daily he is faced with it, that she is fed by an emotional current that has nothing to do with him. He gets up and begins to walk quickly towards Pall Mall, trying to shake off his panic. When she told him she was pregnant, back in Paris, he fixed in his mind the occasion of conception. Just after they left Lyme – he could recall the inn, the disagreeable, distracting smell of the bed linens. But during the whole Mediterranean leg of their tour, he was consumed with anxiety. It began in the southeast corner of France a
nd deepened as they passed into Italy. It became an insane preoccupation. He was not well, he was never well after that night in the Muséum, and his suspicion seemed of a one with the filth and the garlic-reeking food, the gabbling, rude press in the streets, the black-clad quarrelling widows (so resembling his arachnoid mother-in-law), the winking, leering gigolos, the yellow sun, and the smell of sex hanging in everything. Letitia was miserably pregnant by then, and one day, helping her step heavily down from the carriage, it struck him that her pregnancy was the material proof he lacked. She had come straight to him from London because she needed to be married. His mother (it was suddenly clear to him) was complicit in the deception. He can compute a gestation period, and their baby’s appears to have been seven months. It’s a law of nature, the human gestation period, but somehow his first glimpse of Bessie’s puckered red face in the folded opening of a white shawl swept suspicion from his mind. And now it’s back.
He’s previously set up a two-day meeting regarding a geological survey of Devon. A lucrative contract – he can’t afford to jeopardize it. He reads through most of the night to keep Letitia from his thoughts, but by morning, his anxiety is so consuming that he writes to say that a family emergency recalls him to Dorsetshire. Tom had set his heart on two days at Barnaby Fair and he snaps the reins sulkily all the way out the Clapham Road. Indeed, the whole trip was an utter waste of time and energy, typical, Henry thinks, of how he’s managing his affairs.