I found reasons why I couldn’t go up Silver Street. I needed to hunt curies to make up for the months when I hadn’t. Or I insisted on cleaning the house to prepare for Colonel Birch coming to see us. Or I went out to Pinhay Bay to find him a pentacrinite since he had sold all of his. Then I went to meet each coach from London, though three came and went without him stepping off.
I was on my way back from the third coach, cutting through St. Michael’s from the cliff path, when I met Miss Elizabeth coming the other way. Both of us jumped a little, startled, like we wished we’d seen the other first and had held back so we wouldn’t have to stop and greet each other.
Miss Elizabeth asked if I had been upon beach, and I had to admit I’d gone to Charmouth without hunting. She knew it were the day the coach arrived—I could see it in her face, working out why I had been there and trying to hide her displeasure. She changed the subject, and we talked a little of Lyme and its doings while she had been gone. It was awkward, though, not the way we usually were with each other, and after a time we fell silent. I felt stiff, as if I’d sat too long on a leg and it had gone to sleep. It made me stand funny. Miss Elizabeth too held her head at an angle, like her neck still had a crick in it from all that riding in the London coach.
I was about to make an excuse and set off for Cockmoile Square when Miss Elizabeth seemed to reach a decision. When she is going to say something important she sticks out her chin and tightens her jaw. “I want to tell you about what happened in London, Mary. You are not to tell anyone I told you. Not your mother or brother, nor particularly my sisters, for they do not know what I witnessed.” Then she told me all about the auction, describing in detail what was sold and who was there and what they bought, how even the Frenchman Cuvier wanted a specimen for Paris. She said how Colonel Birch made his announcement about me at the end, naming me as the hunter. All the time she was talking I felt I were listening to a lecture about someone else, a Mary Anning who lived in another town, in another country, on the other side of the world, who collected something other than fossils—butterflies or old coins.
Miss Elizabeth frowned. “Are you listening, Mary?”
“I am, ma’am, but I’m not sure I’m hearing right.”
Miss Elizabeth gazed at me, her gray eyes pinched and serious. “Colonel Birch has named you in public, Mary. He has told some of the most interested fossil collectors in the country to seek you out. They will be coming here to ask you to take them out as you have done Colonel Birch. You must prepare yourself, and take care that you don’t . . . compromise your character further.” She said the last with such a pursed mouth it were a marvel any words come out at all.
I fingered some lichen on the gravestone I stood next to. “I am not worried for my character, ma’am, nor what others think of me. I love Colonel Birch and am waiting for him to come back.”
“Oh, Mary.” A whole set of emotions crossed Miss Elizabeth’s face—it was like watching playing cards being dealt one after the other—but mostly there was anger and sadness. Those two combined make jealousy, and it come over me then that Elizabeth Philpot was jealous of the attention Colonel Birch paid me. She shouldn’t be. She never had to sell or burn her furniture to keep a roof over her head and stay warm. She had plenty of tables rather than just the one. She didn’t go out every day no matter the weather or her health and stay out for hours hunting curies till her head swam. She didn’t have chilblains on her hands and feet, and fingertips cut and torn and gray with embedded clay. She didn’t have neighbors talking about her behind her back. She should pity me, and yet she envied me.
I shut my eyes for a moment, steadying myself with the gravestone. “Why can’t you be glad for me?” I said. “Why can’t you say, ‘I hope you will be very happy’?”
“I”—Miss Elizabeth gulped as if words were choking her—“I do hope that,” she finally managed to say, though it come out all strangled. “But I don’t want you to make a fool of yourself. I want you to think sensibly about what is possible for your life.”
I ripped the lichen off the stone. “You’re jealous of me.”
“I’m not!”
“Yes, you are. You’re jealous of Colonel Birch because he courted me. You loved him and he paid no attention to you.”
Miss Elizabeth looked stricken, like I’d hit her. “Stop, please.”
But it was as if a river had risen in me and broken its banks. “He never even looked at you. It was me he wanted! And why shouldn’t he? I’m young, and I’ve got the eye! All your education and your £150 a year and your elderflower champagne and your silly tonics, and your silly sisters with their turbans and roses. And your fish! Who cares about fish when there are monsters in the cliffs to be found? But you won’t find them because you haven’t got the eye. You’re a dried-up old spinster who will never get a man or a monster. And I will.” It felt so good and so horrible to say these things aloud that I thought I might be sick.
Miss Elizabeth stood very still. It were like she was waiting for a gust of wind to blow itself out. When it had and I was finished, she took a deep breath, though what come out were almost a whisper, with no force behind it. “I saved your life once. I dug you out of the clay. And this is how you repay me, with the unkindest thoughts.”
The wind come back like a gale. I cried out in such rage Miss Elizabeth stepped back. “Yes, you saved my life! And I’ll feel the burden of being grateful to you for always. I’ll never be equal to you, no matter what I do. Whatever monsters I find, however much money I earn, it will never equal your place. So why can’t you leave Colonel Birch to me? Please.” I was crying now.
Miss Elizabeth watched me with her level gray eyes until I had used up my tears. “I release you of the burden of your gratitude, Mary,” she said. “I can at least do that. I dug you out that day as I would have done for anyone, and as anyone else passing would have done for you too.” She paused, and I could see her deciding what to say next. “But I must tell you something,” she continued, “not to hurt you, but to warn you. If you are expecting anything from Colonel Birch you will be disappointed. I had occasion to meet him before the auction. We ran into each other at the British Museum.” She paused. “He was accompanying a lady. A widow. They seemed to have an understanding. I’m telling you this so that you will not have your expectations raised. You are a working girl, and you cannot expect more than you have. Mary, don’t go.”
But I had already turned and begun to run, as fast and far from her words as I could.
I WAS NOT THERE to meet the next London coach when it come to Charmouth. It was a soft afternoon, with plenty of visitors out, and I was behind the table outside our house, selling curies to passersby.
I am not a superstitious person, but I knew he would come, for though he did not know it, it was my birthday. I had never had a birthday present and was due one. Mam would say his auction money was the present, but to me he was the gift.
When the clock on the Shambles bell tower struck five I begun to follow Colonel Birch’s progress in my mind even as I was selling. I saw him alight from the coach and hire a horse from the stables, then ride along the road till he could cut across one of Lord Henley’s fields above Black Ven to Charmouth Lane. He would follow that to Church Street, then down past St. Michael’s and into Butter Market. There all he had to do was to go right round the corner and he’d come into Cockmoile Square.
When I looked up, he appeared just as I knew he would, riding up on his borrowed chestnut horse and looking down at me. “Mary,” he said.
“Colonel Birch,” I replied and curtseyed very low, as if I were a lady.
Colonel Birch dismounted, reached for my hand and kissed it in front of all the visitors rummaging through the curies and the villagers walking past. I didn’t care. When he looked up at me, still bent over my hand, I spied behind his gladness uncertainty, and I knew then that Elizabeth Philpot had not been lying about the widow lady. As much as I had wanted to disbelieve her, she was not the sort to lie. As gently as I could, I pulled my hand from Colonel Birch’s grasp. Then the shadow of uncertainty become a true flame of sorrow, and we stood looking at each other without speaking.
Over Colonel Birch’s shoulder there was a movement that distracted me from his sad eyes, and I saw a couple come arm in arm along Bridge Street, he stocky and strong, she bobbing up and down at his side like a boat in rough water. It was Fanny Miller, who had lately married Billy Day, one of the quarrymen who helped me dig out monsters. Even the quarrymen were taken, then. Fanny stared at us. When she met my eye she clutched her husband’s arm and hurried away along the street as fast as her game leg would let her.
Then I knew what I would do with Colonel Birch, widow lady or no. It would be my present to myself, for I was not likely to have another chance. I nodded at him. “Go and see Mam, sir. She’s been expecting you. I’ll find you after.”
I did not want to watch him hand over the money. Though I was grateful for it, I did not want to see it. I only wanted to see him. When he had tied up the horse and gone inside, I packed away the curies, then went quick up Butter Market and followed Colonel Birch’s path in reverse. I knew he would lodge as he always did at the Queen’s Arms in Charmouth, and so would pass this way again. When I got to Lord Henley’s field off Charmouth Lane I crossed to a stile and sat on it to wait.
Colonel Birch held his back so straight as he rode he looked like a tin soldier. With the sun low behind him and casting a long shadow before, I could not see his face until he pulled up alongside me. As I climbed to the top rung of the stile and balanced there, he took my hand so that I would not fall. “Mary, I cannot marry you,” he said.
“I know, sir. It don’t matter.”
“You are sure?”
“I am. It is my birthday today. I am twenty-one years old, and this is what I want.”
I was not a horse rider, but that day I had no fear as I reached over and swung into the space between his arms.
He took me inland. Colonel Birch knew the surrounding countryside better than I did, for I never normally went into the fields, but spent all of my time on the shore. We rode through dusk’s shadows lit here and there with panes of sunlight, up to the main road to Exeter. Once across we headed down darkening fields. Along the way we did not murmur sweet words to each other like courting couples, for we were not courting. Nor did I relax in his arms, for the horse swayed and the saddle pushed hard against me and I had to concentrate so I wouldn’t fall off. But I was where I wanted to be and did not mind.
An orchard at the bottom of the field waited for us. When I lay down with Colonel Birch it was on a sheet of apple blossom petals covering the ground like snow. There I found out that lightning can come from deep inside the body. I have no regret discovering that.
I learned something else that evening, which come to me afterwards. I was lying in his arms looking up at the sky, where I counted four stars, when he asked, “What will you do with the money I have given your family, Mary?”
“Pay off our debts and buy a new table.”
Colonel Birch chuckled. “That is very practical of you. Will you not do something for yourself?”
“I suppose I could buy a new bonnet.” Mine had just been crushed under our coupling.
“What about something more ambitious?”
I was silent.
“For example,” Colonel Birch continued, “you could move to a house with a bigger shop. Up Broad Street, for example, to where there’s a good shop front, with a big window and more light in which to display your fossils. That way you would get more trade.”
“So you’re expecting me to keep on finding and selling curies, are you, sir? That I’ll never marry, but run a shop.”
“I did not say that.”
“It’s all right, sir. I know I won’t marry. No one wants someone like me for a wife.”
“That is not what I meant, Mary. You misunderstand me.”
“Do I, sir?” I rolled off of his shoulder and lay flat on the ground. Even since we had been talking it seemed the sky had got darker, and more and more stars had joined the first scattering.
Colonel Birch sat up stiffly, for he was old, and lying on the ground must hurt him. He looked down at me. It was too dark to see his expression. “I was thinking about your future as a fossil hunter, not as a wife. There are many women—most women, in fact—who can be perfectly good wives. But there is only one of you. Do you know, when I set up the auction in London I met many people who professed to know a great deal about fossils: what they are, how they came to be here, what they mean. But none of them knows even half of what you understand.”
“Mr. Buckland does. And Henry De La Beche. And what about Cuvier? They say that Frenchman knows more than any of us.”
“That may be. But the others don’t have the instinct for it that you do, Mary. Your knowledge may be self-taught and come from experience rather than from books, but it is no less valuable for that. You have spent a great deal of time with specimens; you have studied their anatomies and seen their variations and subtleties. You recognize the uniqueness of the ichthyosaurus, for example, that it is not like anything we have ever imagined.”
But I didn’t want to talk about me or about curies. There were so many stars now that I couldn’t count them. I felt very small, pinned to the ground under the knowledge of them all. They were beginning to hollow me out. “How far away do you think those stars are?”
Colonel Birch turned his face upward. “Very far. Farther than we can even imagine.”
Perhaps it was because of what had just happened to me, of the lightning that come from inside, which made me open up to larger, stranger thoughts. Looking up at the stars so far away, I begun to feel there was a thread running between the earth and them. Another thread was strung out too, connecting the past to the future, with the ichie at one end, dying all that long time ago and waiting for me to find it. I didn’t know what was at the other end of the thread. These two threads were so long I couldn’t even begin to measure them, and where one met the other, there was me. My life led up to that moment, then led away again, like the tide making its highest mark on the beach and then retreating.