by Joan Thomas
Meanwhile, at the top of the town, at picturesque Morley Cottage, the three Misses Philpot sat in the morning room arguing companionably about their garden. They meant to redesign the east-facing beds that spring, and three schemes had been put forward. Elizabeth had pulled out a drawer with the packets of seeds they harvested last summer. She’d opened the papers and was pouring seeds into saucers to count them in defence of her scheme. Poppy seeds (impossible to count, in any case) were stuck like sand under her fingernails. “There’s enough here to feed every sparrow in Dorset,” she said. “There’s more than enough.”
In a big square house halfway down the hill, Mrs. Aveline sat by the fire with her hands in her lap. Her husband was reading from a poem called “The Castaway.” Mrs. Aveline’s hair was pinned loosely up around her face and tumbling into curls at her neck, her morning compromise between readiness and des-habille. She tried her best to listen, but the melancholy verse had turned her mind to her mysteriously vanished son, her so terribly altered boy. What a perfect companion he’d been when he was small, willing and interested in everything, trying hard not to chaff on her nerves. But all those years of his growing up, it seemed he was occupied in transforming himself into something she did not understand, a man intent on having a difficult life. Her husband’s voice penetrated her thoughts (it was that mournful emphasis on each line end that wormed its way in) and she leaned forward with an expression of wifely interest, just in time to take in the last three lines:
We perished, each alone:
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.
“And so the castaway perished?” she asked into the silence.
“He did, my dear,” said Mr. Aveline, straightening his leather bookmark and putting the book on the table.
“And the poet as well?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“What were the gulfs that overwhelmed him?”
“Melancholia, my dear.”
“I thought as much,” she said, and put her hand to the hair at the nape of her neck.
Down in the lower town, the dissenting pastor John Gleed was crossing Cockmoile Square on a pastoral call. His gait was the gait of a tired man. He was just back, as it happened, from a synod of Congregationalist elders and sermonizers at Bridport, where he’d found himself a person of some interest because of his knowledge of the Lyme Regis fossils. But the talk was not of Adam and Eve, nor even of Noah – no, the end of time was the topic. It was all Apocalypse now, brimstone falling and the Lord visiting His wrath upon the earth, the dragons in the cliffs waking to join their evil maker in a final battle. And so Pastor John Gleed, hurtled overnight from the Old Testament to the New, had ridden back from Bridport in a dogcart with his peace of mind gone, along with his means of earning extra income.
As he crossed the square, Mary Anning came up Bridge Street from her morning foraging on the shore. He turned his eyes towards her, eyes that burned with a knowledge of the true meaning of dragons, said her name, and bowed. She noted that he had a bible in the crook of his arm and that his collecting bag was nowhere about him. Watching him walk up the street, she tried to understand his demeanour. Maybe he’d just heard the news, that the plesiosaur was genuine after all. Maybe he’d learned that in a titanic battle of scientific credibility, Mary Anning had bested the great Georges Cuvier, that Mary Anning was not a cheat. Or so the bigwigs had decided. And maybe Mr. Gleed had heard.
Mary turned towards her door, but before she could open it, a fashionable and beautifully maintained brougham, a brougham with familiar arms on the door, rolled along Bridge Street and turned up Church Street. A carriage unseen in this town for several months. Mary stopped on the doorstone. The liveried coachman – Tom – sat alone on the box, and within was just one slender figure in a bonnet. No cases or valises were strapped to the carriage – this had every appearance of a social call. Perhaps to the Murchisons’. Mrs. De la Beche liked to visit Mrs. Murchison. But when had they come back to town? It must have been last night, after dark.
Mary stepped into the house to deposit her basket. She moved a damp flannel over her face and smoothed her hair. “I’ve bought a bit of hard cheese,” she said to her mother. “We can have it for our dinner. If I’m late coming back, go ahead and eat it.” “It’s a vinny cheese I asked for,” Molly said, but Mary did not stay to debate it. She put on a clean bonnet and shut the dog in the house. Then she climbed up past the shops on Broad Street, turning left onto Pound, and walked to the Grove. She knew where he would be – he would be sat at his desk in the study with windows looking out to the ash grove, his head bent over the papers. She turned into the drive and crossed the shingle that had been carried up from the shore, walked on legs that had lain entwined with his in the bracken, walked up between the stands of ash with their bare branches, ivy cloaking their trunks, life to no purpose except as life.
When the squat girl Daisy came to the door, she did not invite Mary into the hall. “Oh, no, miss,” she said. “We’ve just got word. He is gone to Jamaica. This two, three month he were gone, and no one knew. Not even the missus – fancy that! Jamaica. But now they know, and they’ve given up the house. Mrs. De la Beche come in last night and she’s after leaving at the morrow, for London. I must just help with the packing up. I must just do the cleaning.” And she allowed herself a little display of temper, kicking her foot at the door frame. “I’m good enough for that, mind, the packing up and the mucking out! She’s after getting herself a fine new lady’s maid in London.”
Mary said goodbye and walked back across the shingle of the drive. There was a roaring in her ears – she strayed off the roadway more than once and stumbled, her boots catching in the weeds. At Pinhay Meadow, she stood looking across at Church Cliffs, at the graceful slopes minutely composed of the plants and animals that had lived and died there through thousands of years. In that moment, she seemed to hear the rumble of falling rock, seemed to see the layered cliffs shudder and hang in the air, then drop to the shore. Standing in sunlight at the edge of the meadow, Mary saw it all gone. Her father’s thin bones and the crumbling skeletons of dragons, the secret paths of mouse and vole and sharp-faced fox, the stands of coltsfoot and iris. All of it a raw unsightly mass of earth and broken stone clogging the shore. Oh, how much quicker it was to tear things down than to build them up!
She turned back towards town with the conviction that a square of hard cheese would not suffice. On her way down, she stopped at the butcher’s and bought a half pound of bacon. She fried up all eight ounces of it and they ate it with bread, and she saved a last piece for Tray, who swallowed his whole. Then she sat in the square and waited for the coach, running her thumb over a callus on her palm that was causing her pain along its edge, thinking all the while of Conybeare’s nameless sister-in-law, who’d sprung into Mary’s imagination the morning Buckland talked about her. She saw the sister-in-law settle herself at a desk in the corner of an elegant parlour: a tall woman dressed in blue, eagerly taking up the chance to put words into the mouth of the distinguished Reverend. And then Mary followed them all to the church in the morning, and saw Conybeare standing in his robes at the pulpit, his brain soggy from the revelries of the night before, reading along with his fine, meticulous elocution (the text travelling straight from his eyes to his mouth without troubling to go through his brain), and suddenly hearing his own voice and looking up from the page in consternation, spying his sister-in-law’s impish face in the congregation below. But what was it the sister-in-law wrote in that sermon? Mary would think about this until she knew; that’s how she would occupy herself through the rainy days of spring.
Trade was reasonable that day: she sold five small curios for a total of one shilling tuppence. When she came in afterwards, the fry pan still sat on its trivet, white fat congealed. It was growing dark, so she carried the pan down to the workshop and touched a taper to it, and it flared up and filled the room with a lurid light, adding the fleshy smell of
cooked fat to the earthy air of the workshop. Jamaica. Daisy, who’d never lost a bit of her Dorsetshire speech, bore that word on her lips like a strange form of insect had landed there.
Mary sat down in her writing corner and took up the book she’d bought at the stationer’s in the fall. The fine pen-and-wash map Henry De la Beche had made for her still hung on the wall over her head, each of the new finds marked on it in her own hand. Beside her lay a wonderful ammonite sliced open to show the crystals growing within. The ammonites did not grow in the rocks, as she’d thought when she was a girl, but crystals grew within the ammonites. She’d made this observation to Buckland once, and he’d disputed it. He’d said the crystals must have been formed by God at Creation, because the filthy earth could not produce such pellucid matter. They gave all the goodness to God, these fine men, and none to the earth.
Mary ran her hand over the leather cover of the unmarked book. She took out a bottle of sepia bought at the stationers, the only sepia she had at the moment, and she picked up the crow’s quill she’d found on the road to the mill. She spent a long time preparing her pen to perfection, and then she opened the book to its first snowy page.
She would never publish a scientific text and sell subscriptions to it. It was an alien language the high-born spoke, in which there were different terms, even, for something as simple as goodbye. Forgive me was one of those terms, when whispered after the act of love. They’d had no common ground to stand on to learn each other’s language, she and Henry De la Beche. She had thought science was a common ground, but it was not. Even if she managed to write a scientific text in words that did not offend, her mere name on the frontispiece would. She had been drawn into believing that a massive new continent was about to heave into sight on the horizon, that this last autumn was the beginning of something. It seemed a kind of madness had seized her, a reptilian logic.
COMMONPLACE BOOK, she wrote. She turned the page and paused in the dying orange light, wondering what to put next. Then she fetched down the text about the fossils that she’d written as a girl and began to copy it in, adding such new thoughts as came to her.
Mayhap the Bones were never living Creatures at all, but Monuments carved by the Hand of God as two Eagles be carved in Stone on the steps of the Great House by a Sculptor come from Bristol. Or adornment laid into the rock as a tree trunk has circles in it, for the rock was formed by the same Hand that formed all Living Things and with the same Fancies of adornment.
Or Patterns drawn by Lightning. Or Ornaments formed by Crystals, as Frost is formed, or Salt. Or borne of Eggs washed into Rock, a coupling between Fish and Rock. Or Fossils that grew within the Earth due to the fertile powers of the Earth itself.
Mayhap they were Dragons made by the Devil to tempt the weak away from Religion and to mar the Creator’s Handiwork – Which Dragons lived on the Earth until overcome with Shame they burrowed into Rock and turned to Rock. Or swam in the Sea until the Waves turned to Shale and held them.
Mayhap they were Beasts too immense for Noah to house on the Ark, which therefore perished in the Great Flood. Or Beasts which he judged could swim, and could not, and so drowned – Whose bodies Our Lord turned afterward to Stone as a testimony to the Great Flood and a Warning to us all.
Mayhap they were Beasts that roamed the land and sea, nor God nor Man yet thought of – And, the Earth changing, perished.
These things have I not shewed unto all men, but unto thee and a few like thee. (2 Esdras 8:62)
Mary Anning, Lyme Regis
In the year of Our Lord 1824
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In 1831, a frank and lively young woman named Anna Maria Pinney came to stay in Lyme Regis. She was seventeen, the daughter of prominent Bristol planters, and a keen observer and writer. Her journal is one of our richest sources of information about Mary Anning. “She glories in being afraid of no one and in saying everything she pleases,” wrote a fascinated Anna Maria soon after she met Mary.
In January 1832, Mary apparently confided in Anna Maria that she had been in love with a person of a higher social class and that, eight years before (i.e., in 1824), she had seen her hopes cruelly dashed. I say “apparently,” because Pinney, although astonished and even titillated by this confidence, was moved by its details to an uncharacteristic discretion.
Her wonderful history (which I cannot consider myself at liberty even to write) interested me, because I understood, I felt the power of the [e]motions by which she was actuated … during that time, the bodily anguish was small compared with what must have been suffered by a proud mind, who had hoped from childhood to see herself removed from her low station in life, and suddenly saw these hopes blasted by Satanic treachery.
Having suffered “as much as mortal can endure for years,” Mary Anning claimed to be thankful that the affair (if an affair it was) had ended: “Had it not been so,” Pinney quotes her as saying, “I would have lost what little religion I now have.”
She is not quarrelling with what she cannot obtain, the season of worldly happiness once would have returned again, and I believe would even do so now, but she is wise. Her wildness of manner and late horror of everything in the world is taken for madness by those who do not understand the agony of blasted hopes.
Well, what are we to make of this? Anning scholars, perhaps reluctant to see romantic speculation overshadow Anning’s long-delayed scientific reputation, have tended to dismiss these entries as the fantasy of an over-excitable teenager. Mary’s distress was caused by her brother Joseph’s marriage, they suggest. Or by the thwarted hope that Miss Philpot would elevate her socially – a more plausible theory, although it does not quite account for Anna Maria Pinney’s excitement. In fact, I find it impossible to read these journal entries as anything other than a veiled account of a romantic attachment; one that, after the initial crushing disappointment, continued to tempt Mary with the prospect of illicit love. And so I think we must put our minds to the question of who, among Mary’s acquaintances through those years, might have raised her hopes and caused her so much pain and confusion.
I think we can dismiss William Conybeare. He was adamantly blind to Mary’s work, and in a rare mention of Anning in a letter, he gets her name wrong. What about Thomas Birch? He was more than twice Mary’s age, but he was amazingly generous to the Annings, and a letter of the period mentions salacious rumours linking Colonel Birch and Mary. Then there is William Buckland, with whom Mary worked closely for decades. If Mary Anning had set her hopes on Buckland, his 1824 marriage to Mary Moreland might indeed have been felt as a “Satanic betrayal.” So I think that both Birch and Buckland must be considered candidates, although Buckland’s piety makes him less likely to have embarked on a “season of worldly happiness” with Mary.
As for Henry De la Beche, he seems a man inclined by temperament to chafe against social constraints. He was indeed expelled from Marlow for insubordination, and his drawings and journals are satiric and irreverent. And he was a true friend to Mary Anning for many decades. When Cuvier questioned Mary Anning’s integrity regarding the plesiosaur, De la Beche wrote from Jamaica in her defence. In 1830, his drawing Duria antiquior (a detail of which forms the cover of Curiosity) was printed and sold as a benefit for the Annings. At Mary’s death in 1847, it was Henry De la Beche who delivered a eulogy at the Geological Society, the only time Mary Anning’s name finds its way into the Society’s proceedings. De la Beche’s separation from his wife and his departure for Jamaica occurred the same year as the Buckland marriage, 1824.
Aside from the appeal of these facts, I was irresistibly drawn to Henry De la Beche as a fictional subject, and I wrote Curiosity not as a historical argument regarding his relationship with Mary Anning, but as an attempt to imagine what such a romance, so impossible and so full of possibility, would have meant to both of them. The progressive attitudes De la Beche expresses in his journals were terribly at odds with the reality of his life: he was a slave owner at a time when the conscience of England had aw
akened to the atrocity of slavery. All the individuals working with the fossils at Lyme Regis were confronted with the need to profoundly revise their view of the world and their place within it, but the challenges for Henry De la Beche were more personal and profound.
Curiosity is broadly (and usually factually) consistent with the historic record, although I have invented freely where no record exists. Almost all the characters, including such minor figures as Mrs. Stock and James Wheaton, are based on real individuals. As for chronology, time in Curiosity has had to conform occasionally to the higher purposes of the story, as it did for William Buckland’s God.
What happened to these people? Henry De la Beche’s 1824 journey to Jamaica did not make an emancipationist of him; instead, he used the occasion to write a book urging the humane treatment of slaves. When he returned to England, he resumed work as a geologist, and in 1842, he was knighted for his contribution to the science. Henry and Letitia divorced in 1826. Sir Henry De la Beche did not remarry and died in London in 1855.
The Megalosaurus announced by William Buckland at the famous meeting of February 1824 was the first primeval creature to be given the name dinosaur. William Buckland outlived both Mary and Henry. He died of dementia in 1856; an autopsy revealed a long-time tubercular inflammation of the brain.
The Khoisan woman known as Saartjie Baartman was exhibited in London from 1810 to 1814. Henry De la Beche’s visit to this exhibit is fiction, but his Paris journal reports a tour of the Cuvier salon where her body was displayed. Her remains circulated amongst Paris museums until 1974. After negotiations by the Griqua National Council and the South African government, they were returned to Africa in 2002. She was buried in her hometown in the Eastern Cape.