by Joan Thomas
Mary strewed the floors of the house and the workshop with rushes as in the old days to keep their feet up out of the cold, and she bought sheepskin to stuff into their boots, recalling the days when she’d had to beg straw for that purpose. If it continued so very cold, grey geese would come to the sea in a V just after Christmas, and the men would go shooting, and there would be after-Christmas geese for the whole town for a song. This had happened before – the old people talked of it. So desperate a winter was bound to bring bounty with it, she told herself.
The news of her find was spreading fast – jackdaws carried it over the entire country. Sowerby heard without her informing him. He wrote to say that he had an eager buyer for the ple-siosaur (he called it a plesiosaur, as it seemed everyone did), one Richard Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandon-Grenville, Duke of Buckingham and Duke of Chandon. Mary had never heard of such a man. What did a gentleman so over-endowed with names and titles need with her new dragon?
Then he wrote again, this time to say that Reverend Conybeare had arranged to present the plesiosaur at the Geological Society in February. William Conybeare, who had never clapped eyes on it! He was basing his talk on Mary’s drawing. He had decided on a species for the creature: Plesiosaurus conybeari. The fossil would be delivered to Bedford Street for display at the Geological Society upon its arrival in London – Conybeare had made arrangements with the Duke of Buckingham. These three men, Sowerby, Conybeare, and the Duke, had among them what Sowerby called “a gentlemen’s agreement.” All that remained was for the money to change hands, upon receipt of Miss Anning’s authorization. Impatience disguised as patient condescension underlay every sentence of Sowerby’s letter, as though he had taken up the mantle of teaching Mary how to comport herself.
Three days later came a letter from Buckland. He had taken it upon himself to inform Georges Cuvier of the staggering find. He had sent Cuvier a copy of the drawing. In a prompt reply, M. Cuvier informed Buckland that the creature was almost certainly a forgery, a snake’s head and neck clumsily stuck onto an Ichthyosaurus body. There was, indeed, a crack in the vertebrae where the neck met the body. Mary had been meticulous in documenting that crack, and he made much of it. This biological absurdity violated all laws of proportion, and M. Cuvier saw its circulation by the English as an insult to his life’s work. What was Buckland’s tone in telling her? There was no tone at all – it was most strange. But Mary knew that Buckland did not understand the concept of discretion. It was only a matter of time before the townspeople would be feasting on the story. Where was Henry De la Beche, who would have been her champion?
Another letter came from Sowerby. He had encountered Buckland at the University Club on Suffolk Street. Tactfully, Sowerby wrote, “I understand that this latest find has failed to win the approbation of the French.” Sir Richard Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandon-Grenville was tied up in assizes at the moment. The instant he stepped foot in Covent Garden, he would be besieged with the news. It was imperative that Mary authorize the sale before that happened. George Sowerby did not charge Mary with duplicity; he merely urged her to act. If I am forever discredited, Mary thought, he will have this last commission.
Beside the cauliflower cart in the market, Mary encountered Miss Philpot. “Regarding this new find,” Miss Philpot said, putting her gloved hand on Mary’s arm. “The forger showed a singular stupidity, wouldn’t you say, in drawing a line to indicate where the sham head was attached?”
“Is it Reverend Conybeare’s plesiosaur you refer to?” asked Mary.
Elizabeth Philpot laughed and invited Mary for tea. The minute they were seated in the back parlour, she began to talk freely about an unexpected visit she’d had that morning from Mrs. Aveline, who had been in a state of great distress. Henry was gone away and had informed no one as to his whereabouts. And then Mrs. Aveline confided what was at the heart of it. It seemed that Mr. and Mrs. De la Beche were contemplating separating. Henry had made outrageous accusations against his wife, and she could no longer honourably live with him. At first, Mrs. Aveline had tried to take her son’s part, but this was becoming difficult. He had always shown a shocking disregard for the proprieties, she was now prepared to admit it. “Although,” Miss Philpot added, “he’s always been a particular favourite of mine.”
Mary drank her tea. Nothing had changed in this room since she came with her father to deliver the collecting cupboard. All its homey, comfortable objects spoke of kindness and discernment: the beast-footed side table and the striped tan and blue paper on the wall, the curtains held back with a braided gold sash, the books with their worn leather covers, the collecting cupboards and specimens still on every surface. Tears burned behind her eyes, from the love she felt for this room. “I used to come to your kitchen for salve,” she said after a minute. “Do you remember?”
“I do,” said Miss Philpot. “You could make your own, you know. It is tobacco juice and lanolin and myrrh in equal parts, and my sisters would have my hide for telling you.”
In her conversation with Henry as they lay in the Undercliff, there had been a similar ease, a sense almost of domestic comfort. She had felt no shame. Some few hours Mary Anning and Henry De la Beche were on this earth – was it not fitting that they should spend one of them thus? But in the quiet of Miss Philpot’s parlour, Mary found the courage to think about the moment when she had told him of her plan to write a paper about the new reptile, when she had asked him if he would do the illustration and present the paper to the Geological Society on her behalf. She could not recall him putting his agreement into words, only the way he had picked up her hand and kissed it, which had seemed a seal on their contract. “My geological maiden,” he had murmured, words Buckland had used when she was a girl.
Miss Philpot set her cup down. “Mary, it occurs to me that you may know where Mr. De la Beche might be.”
“No,” Mary said, looking steadily at Miss Philpot. “I have no idea at all.”
After Mary left, she walked up Church Cliffs, across the path over the graveyard and down to the sea, where she found herself studying the horizon as though he had left by ship and would return the same way. It was a habit to think of him in France. She began to walk east. The tide was low. Ahead of her, oystercatchers sank crimson bills into the soft sand. The littoral zone, Henry called the foreshore, where twice daily the sea and land passed the same bit of shore back and forth between them. Mary bent and picked up a bit of bladderwrack, popping one of its leather bladders between her fingers, feeling warmed sea water run out. Here the sea bottom lay exposed and shining in the sun, sea anemones and dulse and maidenhair weed dried and lifted by the wind. Sea water was their element and their sustenance, and daily they felt it withdraw, felt themselves abandoned to an alien environment. But perhaps she was wrong in her understanding – how could you tell which world they considered their true element? Perhaps they were dual in nature, and counted on the rhythms of the tide to take them from one world of need to the other, and twice daily the tide obliged.
But that night, something began to clutch at her guts, a realization so cruel that she must hold herself above it, she could not allow herself tears. She paced back and forth in the workshop and finally sat down and wrote to George Sowerby. She wrote in a bold hand, in letters almost an inch high. The Cobb has been breached. I must needs ship the specimen from Weymouth. I will look for payment by return post. I will not let this fossil go for less than £125 – whatever your gentlemen’s agreement.
The meeting at the Geological Society was held on February 23. Mary wrote a detailed account of it in her mind. One day soon, she would take up pen and ink. When she did, she would preface her account with a disclaimer:
The Author, being prohibited from attendance at the Society, here confesses the uncertain source of her intelligence: Roderick Impey Murchison, Esq., who carried an account of the evening to his wife Mrs. Charlotte Murchison, who took the story round to Miss Elizabeth Philpot, who recounted such as she recalled of it to Miss Mary Anning, who
recorded it here as she saw fit. Which Record is therefore subject to the Deformities of all Accounts set down independent of the principal Actors.
In fact, the fateful meeting had been intended for February 9 but was two weeks delayed, because the ship that bore the plesiosaur from Weymouth had to be dry-docked at the Thames estuary for a repair to its hull. Reverend Conybeare went down to the London docks daily to await its arrival, out of fear that Sir Everard Home might intercept it before he did. When the ship finally arrived, the specimen in question was transported to the Geological Society rooms in Covent Garden, where eight stout youths attempted to carry it to the meeting chambers on the first floor. But it was a very wide frame that the finder had built and the exhibit got firmly stuck in the entry, so that the scientific gentlemen arriving for the meeting had to jockey for position on the stairs, where they examined it by candlelight. Reverend Conybeare hovered above it in an ecstasy of ambivalence, desperate to seize whatever glory attended the find, anxious to avoid disgrace should the creature turn out to be fraudulent. Finally he settled on pointing out a mistake in the presentation (the radius and ulna had been carelessly transposed, he said), forced to acknowledge at last another hand in the fossil’s preparation. But the consensus was clear, and there were no less experts than Charles Lyell and William Buckland and George Sowerby in attendance: every part of Plesiosaurus conybeari conformed to the scattered pieces they had been finding for years.
After they had looked their fill, the scientific gentlemen were summoned to the meeting proper in the room above, which they had to access by the foul and treacherous servants’ entry at the back of the building. In the upper room, Reverend William Conybeare entertained further questions. Then the attention of the company was seized by the Society’s new president, the illustrious undergroundologist William Buckland, who rose to make a sensational announcement: the discovery of the first ancient land reptile. Old bones long considered to be those of elephants brought over by the Romans were in fact, when seen in connection with recent finds, the remains of a massive meat-eating land reptile that he had named Megalosaurus buckland. This identification had been validated by Georges Cuvier himself, and indeed was confirmation of recent Biblical scholarship, which indicated the creation of earlier worlds before the present one, worlds alluded to in the phrase “without form and void” in Genesis 1:2.
Buckland’s presentation was followed by the eager leaping up of one Doctor Gideon Mantell, who had waited four years to announce indisputable evidence of a massive land reptile found in the Cuckfield quarry, but whose findings, alas, were not recorded in the formal Proceedings of the Society on a point of order, as he had not arranged to be on the agenda.
THIRTY-FOUR
seasonable day in late winter, near noon. A heavily laden carriage was stalled on a steep road in Oxfordshire. Shotover Hill had thwarted the horses, two poorly matched pairs of blacks. They tottered with swaying heads, helpless against the whip, their heaving sides brindled with lather. The gentleman inside the carriage tapped sharply on the window. “Oy!” the coachman shouted to a lad standing by the road, and the lad looked up eagerly and deftly caught the coin the coachman tossed him. He yanked open a gate and a black and white blur exploded from the yard, a baying pack of furious Dalmatians. The blinkered horses rose in terror in their traces, and in the terrible din that ensued, the carriage crowned the hill.
Sacks of rocks and crates of books crammed the carriage, gear the gentleman within insisted he needed and never looked at or unloaded from one trip to the next. His wife sat with her maid on the back-facing seat. A jewelled watch was pinned to the front of her coat and she tipped it up to check the time. They’d been on the road before dawn both today and yesterday. William couldn’t sleep, so why not? Mrs. Buckland turned her intent face to her husband. They’d met in a coach, hadn’t they (the figs, the clasp knife), and they’d recently been much feted in London for the Megalosaurus buckland. But her expression was not tender. That last afternoon in London, they’d toured St. Paul’s and watched amused when an old woman bent to kiss a stain on a limestone set. “Papist,” someone in their distinguished company murmured. “She believes it to be the blood of a saint, poor thing,” and then Mrs. Buckland heard her husband’s knees creak and he was prostrate in the aisle, putting out his tongue. “Bat’s urine!” he declared as he scrambled to his feet. She sat very still, the former Mary Moreland, sat and watched her husband with her clever eyes.
What remained of William Buckland’s hair was grey, and a bit of a belly was forming under his waistcoat: he’d be forty in three weeks’ time. The eye patch was gone. The excellent surgeon had pronounced him fully healed, not a hint of scarring on his pupil. His eyes were turned to the window – he was intent on the peerless landscape jostling past, feeling his customary vexation with God regarding the Land in faraway parts designated Holy (that barren, salty, prickly, stony flood plain, a realm that attracted infidels and was suitable only for infidels!). But as he gazed at the meadows of Oxfordshire with both eyes, he observed a flatness, as when he’d worn the eye patch: a loss of colour or dimension or vitality. If he covered his bad eye and looked through his good, the absence was just as pronounced. He gazed on the green and pleasant meadow, a landscape familiar and diminished, and grief pressed on him, a wordless grief. “Will cook have dinner when we arrive?” he said to his wife, but she pressed her lips together and looked away.
Almost noon, but down in London, Reverend William Cony-beare was just then being shaved in his rooms at the Salopian Coffee House. Conybeare’s face had been pressed into hot towels, and now he was perched beside a dirty east window for what light it afforded, being deftly scraped with a perfectly whetted blade wielded by his man Anthony, a consummate craftsman of the gentleman’s whisker. Conybeare had full confidence in Anthony. He closed his eyes and his thoughts slid swiftly back to the Geological Society meeting the week before, to the splendid moment when Charles Lyell approached him and warmly congratulated him. “It heralds a new age in science,” Lyell said, “when one can predict a species never seen before, and have his predictions borne out.” While Anthony carved delicately around the sidewhiskers, Conybeare squeezed his folded arms and wished he’d asserted the authenticity of Plesiosaurus conybeari with more authority from the outset. But it was hard to know what that grotesque female might have been up to. When he’d first heard Cuvier’s accusation, he’d felt a frisson of horrified conviction: he had been right about Mary Anning all along! And what a fiendish plot it would have been, too, what a clever scheme to undo them all – although, in the event, it was clear he’d overestimated her.
It would be Friday night now before he rolled into the rectory – he’d be hard pressed to cobble together a sermon for Sunday. He should have been working on it that morning. Maybe he could use a text connected to his monster, something from Genesis. When he and De la Beche found the first chain of narrow vertebrae a few years back, Buckland had insisted it was the serpent that tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden. Then, of course, it was discovered to have flippers. But when you thought about it, the tempter in Genesis had some sort of limbs the week of Creation; it was only after the Fall that God cursed it, and put it to crawling on its belly. Which would mean this fossil was from before the Fall, not from the Flood – a possibility that suddenly taxed and tired Conybeare’s brain. He couldn’t summon the will to pursue it.
“Basin, sir,” Anthony said, and Conybeare lowered his face into warm water and endeavoured not to breathe. It was hard to grasp God’s intention in creating the grotesque, to understand how such creatures served His purposes (but consider the octopus, as hideous as the underside of a tongue, endlessly shape-changing and writhing its numberless legs with their repulsive suckers; consider the brood of children born in his village with no colour in either their skin or their eyes or their hair, so that they looked like grubs or disembodied souls), and he raised his face and buried it in the towel his man was holding, and regret stirred: that such an unlovely crea
ture should forever bear the name Conybeare.
In the counties of the Southwest, it was one of those days when breezes chased clouds across the sun, laying bands of light and shadow over the land and the sea. A Wednesday, and proceeding in the small coastal town of Lyme Regis as many Wednesdays do. Squire Henley was supervising the dredging of his trout pond. Joseph Anning was down at the knacker’s, trying to negotiate a better price on the bundles of horsehair he needed for stuffing. Mr. Phelps was at the edge of the quarry with a set of rolled drawings under his arm. They illustrated his plan for laying iron tracks under the cliffs, so the lime could be hauled out more efficiently in donkey carts. Not a small investment! And his foreman (an infuriating hireling, stuck in the last century, devoid of business sense) had balked at the notion, and dragged Phelps out to see for himself the fragility of Church Cliffs. And so there he was at the quarry, his Wellington hat massive against the sky, glaring at his foreman, and then the bold curi-woman with the top hat came walking up from the eastern shore, and she did not scruple to stick her nose into his business. He could stomach no more of it, and he turned back to his horse and swung up into the saddle (for his girth, he was still a man of vigour, and if the cliffs collapsed, he had already made his fortune). He wheeled the horse around and called over his shoulder in a hearty voice, “God bless us! What a world is here, It ne’re can last another year!” and set his mare to trotting heavily up the foreshore, leaving them to stand and stare.