Remarkable Creatures (35 page)

“Paris?” I cried. I could not contain the panic in my voice.

The Frenchman gazed at the riot of stone on the floor, and then at me. “
Enchanté, mademoiselle,
” he said, bowing. Though he looked kindly, with curly hair and long sideburns and wrinkles round his eyes, his voice was serious.

“Oh!” He was a spy. A spy for Monsieur Cuvier, come to see what I was up to. I stared at the floor, looking at it as he must see it. Laid out side by side were two specimens—an ichie without a tail and a plesie without a head. The plesie’s tail was detached from its pelvis and could easily be moved to complete the ichie. Or, I could take the ichie’s head, remove some vertebrae from the neck of the plesie, and attach the head. Those who knew the two creatures well wouldn’t be fooled, but idiots might buy them. From the evidence in front of him, it was easy enough for Monsieur Prévost to reach the conclusion I was about to join the two incomplete monsters together to create one whole, third monster.

I wanted to sit down with the suddenness of it all, but I couldn’t in front of the men.

“I bring greetings from the Reverends Buckland and Conybeare,” Charles Lyell went on, oblivious that he was adding fuel to the fire by mentioning their names. “I was Professor Buckland’s student at Oxford, and—”

“Mr. Lyell, sir, Monsieur Prévost,” I interrupted, “I can tell you now I’m an honest woman. I would never fiddle with a specimen, whatever Baron Cuvier thinks! And I will swear on a Bible to it, sirs, that I will! We don’t have a Bible here—we had one once for a bit but had to sell it. But I can take you to the chapel right now and Reverend Gleed will hear me swear on it, if that will do any good. Or we can go to St. Michael’s, if you prefer. The vicar there don’t know me well, but he’ll provide a Bible.”

Charles Lyell tried to interrupt me, but I could not stop. “I know these specimens here ain’t whole, and I swear to you I will set them as I see them, and never try to swap parts. A plesiosaurus’s tail might fit onto an ichthyosaurus, but I would never do that. And of course an ichie’s head is far too big to fit onto the end of the plesie’s neck. It wouldn’t work at all.” I was babbling, and the Frenchman in particular was looking perplexed.

Then it all started to come down on me, and I had to sit, gentlemen or no. Truly I was ruined. Right there, in front of strangers, I begun to cry.

This upset the Frenchman more than any words could have done. He begun rattling away in French, with Mr. Lyell interrupting him and speaking his own slow French, while all I could think of was that I wanted to call out to Mam to pay the Days just a pound, as I’d been too generous and we would need the extra shillings since I would no longer be able to hunt and sell monsters. I would have to go back to the piddling curies, the ammos and bellies and gryphies of my youth. Even then I wouldn’t sell so many, as there were that many more hunters selling such things themselves. We would grow poor again, and Joe would never get to set up his own business, and Mam and I would always be stuck on Cockmoile Square and not move up the hill to a better shop. I let myself cry over my future until my tears were spent and the men were silent.

When they were sure I was done crying, Monsieur Prévost pulled a handkerchief from his pocket. Leaning across the slabs so that he wouldn’t step on the specimens, he held out the han kie to me like a white flag over a battlefield of stone. When I hesitated, he gestured with it to encourage me and gave me a little smile that dug deep dimples in his cheeks. So I took it, and wiped my eyes on the softest, whitest cloth I’d ever touched. It smelled of tobacco and made me shiver and smile, for the lightning struck again, just a little. I made to hand it back, now smeared with Blue Lias clay, but he would not take it, indicating that I should keep it. It was then I begun to think maybe Monsieur Prévost were not a spy after all. I folded the handkerchief and tucked it away under my cap, for that was the only place in the room not filthy.

“Miss Anning, please let me speak,” Charles Lyell begun tentatively, perhaps fearful I would burst out crying again. I did not; I was done. I noticed then that he was calling me Miss Anning rather than Mary.

“Perhaps I should explain to you what we are doing here. Monsieur Prévost kindly hosted me last year when I visited Paris, introducing me to Baron Cuvier at the Museum of Natural History and accompanying me on geological expeditions in the area. Thus when he wrote to say he was coming to England, I offered to take him to some of the most important geological sites in the southern parts of the country. We have been to Oxford, Birmingham and Bristol, and down to Cornwall and back, via Exeter and Plymouth. Naturally we were keen to come to Lyme Regis and visit you, to go out on the beaches where you collect fossils and to see your workshop. Indeed, Monsieur Prévost has just said he is most impressed by what he sees here. He would tell you himself, but alas, he speaks no English.”

As Mr. Lyell was speaking, the Frenchman squatted by the ichthyosaurus and run a finger up and down its ribs, which were almost complete and beautifully spaced like iron railings. I could no longer just sit while he was crouching with his thighs so near to me. I picked up a blade, knelt by the ichie’s jaw and begun to scrape at the shale clinging to it.

“We should like to examine the specimens you have found more closely, if we might, Miss Anning,” Mr. Lyell said. “We would like also to see where they have come from on the beach—they, and the plesiosaurus you found last December. A most remarkable specimen, with its extraordinary neck and head.”

I froze. His bringing up the most worrying part of the plesie sounded suspicious. “You seen it?”

“Of course. I was there when it arrived at the Geological Society offices. Did you not hear of the drama of it?”

“I heard nothing. Sometimes I feel I could be the man in the moon, for the little I hear of what’s happening in the scientific world. I had someone who was going to keep me informed, but—Mr. Lyell, do you know of Elizabeth Philpot?”

“Philpot? No, I have not heard that name, I’m sorry. Should I know her?”

“No, no.” Yes, I thought. Yes, you should. “What was it you was saying—about the drama?”

“The plesiosaurus was delayed in its arrival,” Mr. Lyell explained, “and did not reach London until almost two weeks after the Society meeting at which Reverend Conybeare was speaking of it. You know, Miss Anning, at the meeting Reverend Buckland was very complimentary of your collecting skills.”

“He was?”

“Yes, indeed. Now, when the plesiosaurus arrived at last, the men could not get it up the stairs, for it was too wide.”

“Six feet wide, the frame round it was. I know, for I built it. We had to turn it sideways to get it out this door.”

“Of course. They tried the better part of a day to get it up to the meeting rooms. Finally, though, it had to be left in the entranceway, where many Society members came to look at it.”

I watched the Frenchman crawl between the ichie and plesie to get round to the plesie’s front paddle. I gestured with my head. “Did
he
see it?”

“Not in London, but when we went to Birmingham from Oxford, we stopped en route at Stowe House, where the Duke of Buckingham has taken it.” Mr. Lyell, though polite as a gentleman ought to be, made a little face. “It is a splendid specimen, but rather swamped by the duke’s extensive collection of glittering objects.”

I paused, my hand on the ichie’s jaw. So this poor specimen would go to a rich man’s house, to be ignored amongst all the silver and gold. I could have wept. “So is he”—I nodded at Monsieur Prévost—“going to tell Monsieur Cuvier that the plesiosaurus isn’t a fake? That it really does have a small head and a long neck and I weren’t just putting two animals together?”

Monsieur Prévost glanced up from his study of the plesie with a keen look that made me think he understood more English than he spoke.

Mr. Lyell smiled at me. “There is no need, Miss Anning. Baron Cuvier is fully convinced of the specimen, even without Monsieur Prévost having seen it. He has had a great deal of correspondence about the plesiosaurus with various of your champions: Reverend Buckland, Conybeare, Mr. Johnson, Mr. Cumberland—”

“I wouldn’t call them my champions exactly,” I muttered. “They like me when they need something.”

“They have a great deal of respect for you, Miss Anning,” Charles Lyell countered.

“Well.” I was not going to argue with him about what the men thought of me. I had work to do. I begun scraping again.

Constant Prévost got to his feet, dusted off his knees, and spoke to Mr. Lyell. “Monsieur Prévost would like to know if you have a buyer for the plesiosaurus,” he explained. “If not, he would like to purchase it for the museum in Paris.”

I dropped my blade and sat back on my heels. “For Cuvier? Monsieur Cuvier wants one of my plesies?” I looked so astonished that both men begun to laugh.

 

 

 

IT TOOK MAM NO time to bring me down from the cloud I was floating on. “What do Frenchmen pay for curies?” she wanted to know the minute the men had left to dine at the Three Cups and she could leave the table outside. “Are they looser with their purse strings or do they want it even cheaper than an Englishman?”

“I don’t know, Mam—we didn’t talk figures,” I lied. I would find a better time to tell her I were so taken with the Frenchman that I’d agreed to sell it to him for just ten pounds. “I don’t care how much he pays,” I added. “I just know Monsieur Cuvier thinks well enough of my work to want more of it. That be pay enough for me.”

Mam leaned in the doorway and give me a sly look. “So you’re calling the plesie yours, are you?”

I frowned, but did not answer.

“The Days found it, didn’t they?” she continued, relentless as always. “They found it and dug it up, and you bought it off them the way Mr. Buckland or Lord Henley or Colonel Birch bought specimens off you and called them theirs. You become a collector like them. Or a dealer, as you’re selling it on.”

“That’s not fair, Mam. I been a hunter all my life. And I do find most of my specimens. It’s not my fault the Days found one and didn’t know what to do with it. If they had dug it out and cleaned it and sold it, it would be theirs. But they didn’t want that, and come to me. I oversaw them and paid them for their work, but the plesie’s with me now. I’m responsible for it, and so it’s mine.”

Mam rolled her tongue over her teeth. “You been saying you ain’t had recognition by the men, who call the curies theirs once they bought ’em. Do that mean you’ll tell the Frenchman to put the Days’ names on the label along with yours when they display it in Paris?”

“Of course I won’t. They won’t list me on the label anyway. No one else ever has.” I said this to try to distract from Mam’s argument, for I knew she was right.

“Maybe the difference between hunter and collector ain’t so great as you been making out all these years.”

“Mam! Why are you going on about such a thing when I’ve just had good news? Can’t you leave be?”

Mam sighed and straightened her cap as she prepared to go back out to customers at the table. “All a mother wants is for her children to settle into their lives. I seen you worried about recognition for your work these many years. But you’d be better off worrying about the pay. That’s what really matters, isn’t it? Curies is business.”

Though I knew she meant it kindly, her words cut. Yes, I needed to be paid for what I did. But fossils were more than money to me now—they had become a kind of life, a whole stone world that I were a part of. Sometimes I even thought about my own body after my death, and it turning to stone thousands of years later. What would someone make of me if they dug me up?

But Mam were right: I had become part not just of the hunting and finding, but of the buying and the selling too, and it was no longer so clear what I did. Maybe that was the true price of my fame.

What I wanted to do more than anything was to go up Silver Street to Morley Cottage and sit at the Philpots’ dining room table spread with Miss Elizabeth’s fossil fish and talk to her. Bessy would bang a cup of tea in front of me and slump off, and we would watch the light change over Golden Cap. I looked up at a watercolor Miss Elizabeth had made of that view and given me not long before our argument—trees and cottages in the foreground, the hills along the coast washed in soft light as they backed into the distance. There were no people visible in the painting, but I often felt as if I were there somewhere, just out of sight, looking for curies on the shore.

The next two days I was busy with Mr. Lyell and Monsieur Prévost, taking them upon beach to show them where the beasts had come from and teach them how to find other curies. Neither had the eye, though they found a few bits and pieces. Even then my luck were with me, for in front of them I found yet another ichthyosaurus. We were standing on the ledge near to the other ichie’s site when I spotted a length of jaw and teeth almost under the foot of the Frenchman. With my hammer I chipped off slices of rock to expose the eye, the vertebrae and ribs. It was a good specimen, apart from a crushed tail that looked like a cart wheel run over it. I confess it were a pleasure to wield my hammer and bring the creature into sight before their eyes. “Miss Anning, you are truly a conjurer!” Mr. Lyell exclaimed. Monsieur Prévost too was impressed, though he could not say so in English. I was just as happy that he could not speak, for it meant I could enjoy being in his company without having to worry about what his pretty words might mean.

The men wanted to see more, so I had to fetch the Days to dig out that ichie while I took them to the Ammonite Graveyard at Monmouth Beach, and on along to Pinhay Bay to hunt crinoids. Only once they left to go to Weymouth and to Portland were I finally free to return to the plesie. I would have to clean it fast, for Monsieur Prévost planned to leave for France in ten days. I would be working day and night to get it ready, but it would be worth it. That was how this trade was: For months every day would be just like the last, but for the changes in weather, with me hunting upon beach. Then along come three monsters and two strangers and suddenly I would have to stay up all hours to finish preparing a specimen.