Remarkable Creatures (14 page)

ALTHOUGH I DREADED HAVING to tell Mary about her creature, I have never been one to put off bad news—the wait only makes it worse. I went that afternoon to Cockmoile Square. Molly Anning directed me to Pinhay Bay, to the west of Monmouth Beach, where Mary had been commissioned by a visitor to extract a giant ammonite. “They want it for a garden feature,” Molly Anning added with a chuckle. “Daft.”

I flinched. In the Morley Cottage garden there was a giant ammonite with a one-foot diameter that Mary had helped me to dig out; I had given it to Louise for Christmas. Molly Anning probably didn’t know that, as she had never come up Silver Street to see us. “Why climb a hill if there’s no need to?” she often said.

Molly Anning would be glad for the money from that ammonite, however. Since selling the monster to Lord Henley, Mary had been hunting without success for another complete specimen. She had only found tantalizing pieces—jawbones, fused vertebrae, a fan of small paddle bones—which brought in a little money, but far less than if she had discovered them all together.

I found her near the Snakes’ Graveyard—I now called it the Ammonite Graveyard—which had attracted me to Lyme years before. She had managed to cut out the ammonite from a ledge and was wrapping it in a sack to drag back along the beach—hard work for a girl, even one used to it.

Mary greeted me with joy, for she often said she missed me when I was making my London visit. She told me about all that she had found while I was away, and what they had managed to sell, and who else had been out hunting. “And how was London, Miss Elizabeth?” she asked finally. “Did you buy any new gowns? I see you’ve a new bonnet.”

“Yes, I have. How observant you are, Mary. Now, I have to tell you about something I saw in London.” I took a deep breath and told her about going to Bullock’s and discovering her creature, describing in frank terms the state of it, down to its waistcoat and monocle. “Lord Henley should not have sold it to someone who would treat it so irresponsibly, no matter how many people got to see it,” I finished. “I hope you won’t be approaching him with any future finds.” I did not tell her I had just been to see Lord Henley and been laughed at.

Mary listened, her brown eyes widening only when I mentioned that the creature’s tail had been straightened. Apart from that her reaction was not what I had expected. “Was lots of people looking at it?” she asked. I thought she would be angry that Lord Henley had profited from her find, but for the moment she was more interested in the attention being given to it.

“A fair number.” I didn’t add that other exhibits were more popular.

“Lots and lots? More even than the number of people living in Lyme?”

“Far more. It has been on show for several months, so I expect thousands have seen it.”

“All them people seeing my croc.” Mary smiled, her eyes bright as she looked out to sea, as if spying a queue of spectators on the horizon, waiting to see what she would find next.

FIVE

We will become fossils, trapped upon beach forever

Finding that crocodile changed everything. Sometimes I try to imagine my life without those big bold beasts hidden in the cliffs and ledges. If all I ever found were ammos and bellies and lilies and gryphies, my life would have been as piddling as those curies, with no lightning to turn me inside out and give me joy and pain at the same time.

It weren’t just the money from selling the croc that changed things. It was knowing there was something to hunt for and I was better at finding it than most—this was what were different. I could look ahead now and see—not random rocks thrown together, but a pattern forming of what my life could be.

When Lord Henley paid us £23 for the whole crocodile, I wanted lots of things. I wanted to buy so many sacks of potatoes they’d reach the ceiling if you stacked them. I wanted to buy lengths of wool and have new dresses made for Mam and me. I wanted to eat a whole dough cake every day and burn so much coal the coalman would have to come every week to refill the coal bin. That was what I wanted. I thought my family wanted those things too.

One day Miss Elizabeth come to see Mam after the deal had been done with Lord Henley and sat with her and Joe at the kitchen table. She didn’t talk of wool or coal or dough cakes, but of jobs. “I think it will benefit the family most if Joseph is apprenticed,” she said. “Now you have the money to pay the apprentice fee, you should do so. Whatever he chooses will be a steadier income than selling fossils.”

“But Joe and me are looking for more crocs,” I interrupted. “We can make money enough off them. There’s plenty of rich folk like Lord Henley who’ll want crocs of their own now he’s got one. Think of all them London gentlemen, ready with good money for our finds!” By the end I was shouting, for I had to defend my great plan, which was for Joe and me to get rich finding crocs.

“Quiet, girl,” Mam said. “Let Miss Philpot talk sense.”

“Mary,” Miss Elizabeth begun, “you don’t know if there are more creatures—”

“Yes, I do, ma’am. Think of all them bits we found before—the verteberries and teeth and pieces of rib and jaw that we didn’t know what they were. Now we know! We got the whole body now and can see where those parts come from, how the body’s meant to be. I’ve made a drawing of it so we can match what goes where. I’m sure there’s crocs everywhere in them cliffs and ledges!”

“Why didn’t you find any other whole specimens until now, then, if there are as many as you say?”

I glared at Miss Elizabeth. She had always been good to me, giving me work cleaning curies, bringing us extra bits of food and candles and old clothes, encouraging me to go to Sunday school to learn to read and write, sharing her finds with me and showing interest in what I found too. We couldn’t have got the croc out of the cliff without her paying the Day brothers to do it, and she handled Lord Henley, her and Mam.

Why, then, was she being so contrary with me, just when my hunting had got exciting? I knew the monsters were there, whatever Elizabeth Philpot said. “We didn’t know what we was looking for till now,” I repeated. “How big it was, what it looked like. Now we know, Joe and I can find ’em easy, can’t we, Joe?”

Joe didn’t answer straightaway. He fiddled with a bit of string, twirling it between his fingers.

“Joe?”

“I don’t want to look for crocodiles,” he said in a low voice. “I want to be an upholsterer. Mr. Reader has offered to take me on.”

I was so surprised I couldn’t say a word.

“Upholstering?” Miss Philpot was quick to get in. “That is a useful trade, but why choose it over others?”

“I can do it indoors rather than out.”

I found my voice. “But Joe, don’t you want to find crocs with me? Weren’t it a thrill to dig it out?”

“It was cold.”

“Don’t be stupid! Cold don’t matter!”

“It do to me.”

“How can you care about cold when these creatures are out there just waiting for us to find ’em? It’s like treasure scattered all over the beach. We could get rich off them crocs! And you say it’s too cold?”

Joe turned to Mam. “I do want to work for Mr. Reader, Mam. What do you think?”

Mam and Miss Elizabeth had kept quiet while Joe and I argued. I expect they didn’t need to butt in, as Joe had clearly made up his mind the way they wanted.

I didn’t wait to hear what they said, but jumped up and ran downstairs to the workshop. I’d rather work on the croc than listen to them, with their plan to take Joe off the beach. I had work to do.

With head and body together again, the monster was almost eighteen feet long. Getting it out of the cliff had been an ordeal that took three days, the Days and me working flat out whenever the tide let us. The whole thing was too big to lay on the table, so we’d spread the croc out along the floor. In the dim light it was a jumble of stony bones. I’d already spent a month cleaning it, but I still had some way to go to release it from the rock. My eyes were inflamed with squinting at it so much and rubbing dust into them.

At the time I was too young to understand Joe’s choice, but later on I come to see that he had decided he wanted an ordinary life. He didn’t want to be talked about the way I was, sneered at for wearing odd clothes and spending so much time alone upon beach with just rocks for company. He wanted what others in Lyme had—security and the chance to be respectable—and he jumped at an apprenticeship. There was nothing I could do about it. If I were offered the chance like Joe—if a girl could be apprenticed to a trade—would I have chosen the same and become a tailor or a butcher or a baker?

No. Curies were in my bones. For all the misery that come to my life from being upon those beaches, I wouldn’t have abandoned curies for a needle or a knife or an oven.

“Mary.” Miss Philpot was standing over me. I didn’t answer; I was still angry at her for siding with Joe. Picking up a blade, I begun to scrape at a verteberry. It were one of a long line, stacked one against the other like a row of tiny saucers.

“Joseph has made a sensible choice,” she said. “It will be better for you and your mother. That doesn’t mean you can’t continue to look for creatures. You don’t need Joseph to help you find them, do you, now that you know what you’re looking for? You can do that yourself, and then hire the Days to extract them, just as we did with this one. I can help you with that until you are old enough to manage the men yourself. I offered to help your mother with the business side as well, but she says she will do it herself. And she was rather good with Lord Henley.” Miss Philpot knelt by the croc and ran a hand over its ribs, which were all flattened out and crisscrossed like a willow basket. “How beautiful this is,” she murmured, her tone softer and less sensible than before. “I am still amazed at its size, and its strangeness.”

I agreed with her. The croc made me feel funny. While working on it I’d begun going to chapel more regularly, for there were times sitting alone in the workshop with it that I got that hollowed-out feeling of the world holding things I didn’t understand, and I needed comfort.

 

 

 

I MAY HAVE LOST Joe, but that didn’t mean I was alone upon beach. One day as I went along the shore to Black Ven I saw two strangers hunting by the cliffs. They barely looked up, they were so excited to be swinging their hammers and grubbing about in the mud. The next day there were five men, and two days after that, ten. None was known to me. From overhearing their talk I learned they were looking for their own crocodiles. It seemed my crocodile had brought them to Lyme beaches, attracted by the promise of treasure.

Over the next few years Lyme grew crowded with hunters. I had been used to a deserted beach and my own company, or that of Miss Elizabeth or Joe, and being with them had often felt like being by myself, they were so solitary in their hunting. Now there was the tinking of hammer against stone all along the shore between Lyme and Charmouth, as well as on Monmouth Beach, and men were measuring, peering through magnifying glasses, taking notes, and making sketches. It was comical. For all the fuss made, not one found a complete croc. A cry would go up from someone, and the others would hurry over to look, and it would be nothing, or just a tooth or a bit of jaw or a verteberry—if they were lucky.

I was passing a man searching amongst the stones one day when he picked up a bit of round, dark rock. “A vertebra, I think,” he called to his companion.

I couldn’t help it—I had to correct his mistake, even though he hadn’t asked me. “That’ll be beef, sir,” I said.

“Beef?” The man frowned. “What is ‘beef’?”

“It’s what we call shale that’s been calcified. Bits of it often look like verteberries, but it’s got vertical lines in the layers, a bit like rope fibers, that you don’t see in verteberries. And verteberries are darker in color. All the bits of the croc are. See?” I dug out a verteberry from my basket that I’d found earlier and showed him. “Look, sir, verteberries have six sides, like this, though they’re not always clear till you clean them. And they’re concave, like someone’s pinched them in the middle.”

The man and his companion handled the verteberry as if it were a precious coin—which, in a way, it was. “Where did you find this?” one asked.

“Over there. I got others too.” I showed them what I’d found and they were astonished. When they showed me theirs, most of it was beef we had to throw out. All day they come up with would-be curies for me to judge. Soon others caught on, and I was called here and there to tell the men what they had or hadn’t found. Then they would ask me where they should look, and before long I was leading them on fossil hunts along the beach.

That was how I come to be in the company of the geologists and other interested gentlemen, looking over their mistakes and finding curies for them. A few were from Lyme or Charmouth: Henry De La Beche, for instance, who had just moved to Broad Street with his mother and was but a few years older than me. But most were from farther away, Bristol or Oxford or London.