Curiosity (28 page)
Lyme Regis, Dorset. May 29th
My Dear Conybeare,
Forgive me – I am an unreliable correspondent indeed. Since my return from the North, I’ve been occupied in writing up a formal record of our travels and the science that resulted. We were just a humble trio of gentlemen scholars from Dorsetshire, amanuenses to the real gentlemen of science, but we dare to hope that our efforts will have lasting value, will even (in the case of one particular find in the north of Scotland) play a role in
dismantling the theories of the Wernerians. When you next come down to Lyme (as I hope you do soon), we will share a glass or two and you shall hear a full account.
Thank you for your recent letter and for your congratulations regarding my appointment to the Royal Society. Of course I express at every opportunity my sense of honour in being named a fellow at my age – but I will confess (for your eyes only) how chary I am of the honour since reading certain recent publications of that venerable society. You will know of which papers I speak – Sir Everard Home’s various attempts to classify the Lyme Regis reptile. How adroitly the good surgeon skipped from one order of animal to the next – a bird! a fish! an amphibian! We (the British, I mean) are rightly the laughing-stock of the French for such anatonomical nonsense. I fervently hope that your own exemplary work on the subject will go some distance towards restoring our reputation. Your paper to the Geological Society on the Ichthyosaurus has been my constant reference since returning to Lyme Regis. Being based as it is on the examination of numerous specimens, it is a model of thoroughness, precision, and scientific acumen, and my admiration grows with every reading.
Henry stops to sharpen his pen. Perhaps he’s over-egging the pudding? But Conybeare himself is most generous in his compliments. Even Mary Anning was recognized in the Ichthyosaurus paper, if obliquely. What was it Conybeare said? Something about being grateful
for the specimens that had found their way into the collection of Colonel Birch
. Henry carried the paper down to the square and read the passage aloud to Miss Anning. “It is
you
he speaks of,” he said when she did not respond. “Colonel Birch’s collection is entirely composed of specimens that you found and sold him. You are credited in this important paper!” But still she didn’t reply – she turned
to a customer in her brusque way, seemingly indifferent to the compliment.
What a funny creature she is, he thinks, burrowing a hand into his armpit to warm it. He keeps a pair of gloves on the desk with the finger ends cut off, and he puts them on and lights another candle. Conybeare’s paper sits on the shelf, a little dog-eared, for Henry lent it to Mary, surprised to learn that day in the square that she had not seen it and was indeed unaware of its having been published. Three days later, when he stopped in at her workshop, he discovered that she’d made a full copy of its thirty pages of text, the illustrations rendered in such fair duplication that it was difficult to tell them from the originals. He ruffled admiringly through her copy and his eye caught a note she’d written on the bottom of one of the pages:
When I write a paper, there shall not be but one preface
. When she saw him reading it, her colour rose and she reached out a hand to take her copy back.
He resumes:
You wonder that I returned to Lyme Regis and suggest that Bristol would be a livelier situation for a man of my age and tastes. I offer a rejoinder in the words of Mary Anning: “A cheese full of maggots is livelier than a sound cheese.” But in fact, Lyme is advancing apace in its efforts to re-create itself as a gentrified watering place. In this season, Marine Parade is crowded with victims of Hydromania, most of them maidens sporting parasols. One may discern furlong-measuring and parcel-tying in the pedigree of some of them – we have not yet the status of grand old Bath or even Weymouth – but the retired sea captains secreted behind parlour curtains, watching through spyglasses as shivering bathers are lowered from machines into the bay, are oblivious to the subtle differences of class! In summer we savour the pleasures
of the flesh and in winter the pleasures of the spirit – for then Lyme reverts to its old self and is as silent as a Tuscan monastery. When I returned in March and roamed the quiet streets where seafoam daubs the sides of the houses, I felt myself truly at home.
And in any case, I frequently have amusing and stimulating company in the form of Buckland, who is resident in lodgings on Marine Parade at the moment. In all of his work, Miss Anning is an indispensable resource. Buckland and I visit the cliffs in fair weather and as often as time allows between other pursuits, but she is there at every tide – material want draws her out in storms that would freeze the soul. She is a model of industry and upon her slender form a little family depends for its precarious survival. In spite of the celebrity she attracted six or seven years ago through her first remarkable find, she continues to make a living largely by selling curios to tourists. I credit the fashion of using large ammonites as doorstops to her entrepreneurial initiative. She carries these staggeringly heavy fossils home from Monmouth Beach on her back, employing the sort of brace a porter wears, with leather straps buckled over her shoulders. In fashioning this device, she was assisted by her brother, whom I have met on occasion at the Fossil Depot. Framed in their humble doorway, the pair of them bring to mind the window of a church, both from the innocence of their expressions and from his name (Joseph) comically paired with hers.
But as I set out to say, her daily labours on the shore, month after month, year after year, have equipped her magnificently for her work as a collector. Where Buckland and I must open five rocks to locate one meagre ammonite, she can
smell
fossils and leads us unerringly to the exact strata of the cliffs that will yield treasure. Were we at liberty to work together on a daily basis, we would make an odd but (if I may immodestly observe) formidable trio, with Miss Anning to locate the specimen, myself to render it
in charcoal, and Buckland to unravel the mystery of its place in Creation. Although in that regard, his theories are to date less than satisfactory. On the question of why these monsters have vanished, Buckland’s recent notion is that other worlds existed before the Garden of Eden (God practising, as it were, in an effort to fashion a realm fit for creatures made in His image). “How could the fish-lizard have died out,” I dare to ask, “if death came into the world through Adam?” Perhaps, my dear Conybeare, as a man of the cloth, you would like to posit an answer to that question, as Buckland has so far failed to do.
A last item of news, somewhat removed from the above: the lady habitually referred to as “Henry’s fiancée” hopes to relocate soon to Lyme Regis, with an eye to making marriage preparations. In truth, our nuptials have been long delayed. Upon my return to Lyme, Miss Whyte sent me from London the gift of a golden cravat pin in the shape of a harp. My stepfather asserts the meaning to be, “Je réponds à qui me touche,” but my dear mother, interpreting it as, “By neglect thou ruinest me,” insists that I set a date for the wedding without further delay. As I have now come into my property (such as it is with the sinking price of sugar), I am resolved to do just that. Letitia’s arrival will no doubt entail a major adjustment to my daily routine. I find I have little need of companionship beyond my scientific friends and my mother and stepfather (whose health, thank you, is somewhat improved), but, as the shore and cliffs teach us, all of life is change.
I must bring this to a close. When can I expect another pleasant day of geologizing and philosophizing with an old friend on the lias cliffs?
Your affectionate servant,
T. H. De la Beche, Esq.
He picks his pocket watch off the desk. It’s now half five. He sets the letter aside and crawls back into bed for warmth. Sometimes, looking out his window at first light, he sees Mary Anning climbing up to Morley Cottage, and then, half an hour later, sees her walk back down with the sardonic spinster of Silver Street hobbling on pattens and clinging to her arm. Off for an outing to the shore, the two of them. But four or five days ago, when he rose early and went out, he was lucky enough to catch Mary leaving for the shore on her own. She was standing on Gosling Bridge drinking from a ladle, and he walked smartly up and handed two coins to the milkmaid and then had his own dripping ladle, milk still warm from the cow. Oh, the joys of the morning!
In fact, Mary had seemed disinclined to let him join her that day – the tide was not convenient, she said, she would have to return by the Charmouth Road – but he’d charmed her into relenting. Then she set a pace up the rock-littered shore that he could not hope to match. Passing the quarry, he felt the amused eyes of the quarrymen on them, a gentleman in cape and top hat tacking clumsily along the beach after the fossil girl. She never troubled herself to glance behind. By the time they got to Black Ven, she was fifty yards ahead, sitting on a rock eating an egg. He was breathless and perspiring, formulating a mild lecture on manners, and then she offered him an egg. “I carry ’em in my hands for the heat. Once they’re cold, I eat ’em.”
“Your dewbit?” he said, and she smiled in surprise.
Dewbit, breakfast, nuncheon, cruncheon, nammit, crammit, supper
. It was Maggie who had taught him the seven meals humble folk eat in Dorsetshire. The egg was not as fresh as it ought to have been, but it was boiled to perfection and still a little warm.
Mary was waiting for the light to be full on the cliff face, she said. So then he had a chance to talk to her – never possible when Buckland was around. He asked her whether she had ever travelled from Lyme Regis, and she answered in her forthright way, “I have walked as far as Seatown to the east and Seaton to the west – which names befuddle many visitors, but there is some ten miles between them. And I’ve ridden to Axminster in the Bennetts’ dogcart.”
She did not hesitate then to question him about his own comings and goings. It was the sort of boldness that enraged his friends, especially Conybeare, but really, how else was she to learn? He gave her a quick account of his journeys to the North. “The world is abuzz with the notion that the strata of the earth were formed gradually over vast periods of time,” he explained, “and we were seeking to refute this theory.” She was especially curious as to whether he had ever been to Oxford University, so he told her about his decision not to enrol, in spite of the cajolery of his mother and stepfather. “The entire institution is
consumed
with the Articles of Faith. How can a university be a place of inquiry when dogma is its chief concern? There is, furthermore, an unbecoming preoccupation with rank. In all the dining halls, you find separate tables and even separate entrances for noblemen, gentlemen commoners, and commoners. Such distinctions are made in the very chapels! I have been several times to visit Mr. Buckland, and I tell you, Miss Anning, each visit deepened my resolve to eschew the academy and make the fields and the shores my University. Although it would be a relief to be resident somewhere else at the moment. I find myself dwelling like a ghost in Aveline House, so as not to remind my mother and Mr. Aveline that I’m still here.”
A vertical frown formed between her brows.
“They wish me in London. My fiancée is there, Miss Letitia
Whyte.” She stared at him sternly, surprised no doubt by such a personal disclosure, but he went on. “We’ve been betrothed for some years, but I’ve been busy making a geologist of myself and have not seen a great deal of Miss Whyte in that time. How capriciously a lifelong union can be arranged! But perhaps it makes no difference. The institution of marriage was conceived to answer to all manner of material and social and physical needs, and must inevitably answer poorly to some, no matter who your mate or how she was chosen.” It was proof of your reasoning, he decided in that moment, if you could explain yourself to this girl and know your logic to be sound, if you could endure the scrutiny of her black eyes without flinching. Henry observed himself failing the test, and so he asked the question that would surely turn her eyes away. “How will
you
choose a husband, Miss Anning, when the time comes?”
“When the time comes?” she asked intently, and she did not look away. “I am past twenty.” She kept staring with an expression he couldn’t interpret, and finally he was the one who looked back to the sea. Neither of them spoke. A woman of breeding would have found a way to remedy such a silence, but Mary did not. Eventually, he broke it by inquiring about her family, and she said that her sister was ill. So then he offered to send Mr. Aveline’s surgeon over to see whether he could be of help. She accepted the offer, but she did not seem well pleased. Possibly she held to goose grease and dried moss and such as cures, like most of Lyme.
The sun had lifted itself over the edge of Stonebarrow by then, and they had an hour or two of collecting before the tide forced them off the shore. He watched her move methodically along the dark layers, using any convenient rock as a stepping stool, pressing her fingers to the cliff face as though to read it by touch. With a twinge of envy, he observed her absolute focus; this mist-veiled shore was her entire world! He found nothing
but a couple of belemnites, but low in the cliff, she found a lovely crinoid on a waving stem. He watched while she deftly separated the layers with a chisel and touched her fingertips to its delicate calyx. “When I was a girl,” she said, still crouching, “I thought the sea lilies
were
flowers, and I could not see how they could have turned to stone. It takes an animal to be petrified. But then I learned they were animals, and could feel fear like any other.”
He was standing over her, noting how tanned the back of her neck was, noting the fine hairs escaping from her bonnet. “
Petra
,” he said. “Miss Anning – the root betrays the meaning. It’s just Latin for
rock
.” She lifted her head and looked at him with amusement.
Oh, only a fool would underestimate Mary Anning! At one point in the walk, he told her about the narrow vertebrae he and Conybeare had found the year before in a tidal outcropping. A serpent perhaps, from the length of that chain. The waves had had sport with the bones all night and they fell into nothing before they could be collected. But Mary knew immediately. “Were they almost flat, sir? Like a shark’s spine, but thicker? My father found some in Pinhay Bay years ago. He sold them to the curi-man at Charmouth.” But they were not from a serpent, she said – flat vertebrae like that would not allow the mobility a serpent needed. This was the spine or neck of a creature with fins.