Remarkable Creatures. Tracy Chevalier
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blew out her cheeks again as she banged her mop against the door jamb. I caught Louise’s eye and we smiled. Then Margaret began to waltz around the table again, humming.
“For pity’s sake, Margaret, do your dancing elsewhere!” I cried. “Go and dance with Bessy’s mop.”
Margaret laughed and pirouetted out of the door and down the hallway, to our young visitor’s disappointment. By then, Louise had Mary plucking stems from the flower heads, careful to shake the pollen into the pot rather than around the kitchen. Once she understood what she was to do, Mary worked steadily, pausing only when Margaret reappeared in a lime green turban. “One feather or two?” she asked, holding up one, then another ostrich feather to the band crossing her forehead.
Mary watched Margaret with wide eyes. At that time turbans had not yet arrived in Lyme – though I can report now that Margaret pushed the fashion onto Lyme’s women, and within a few years, turbans were a common sight up and down Broad Street. I am not sure they complement empire-line gowns as well as other hats, and I believe some laughed behind their hands at the sight, but isn’t fashion meant to entertain?
“Thank you for helping with the elderflowers,” Louise said when the flowers were soaking in hot water, sugar and lemon. “You may have a bottle of it when it’s ready.”
Mary Anning nodded, then turned to me. “Can I look at your curies, miss? You didn’t show me the other day.”
I hesitated, for I was a little shy now to reveal what I had found. She was remarkably self-possessed for a young girl. I suppose it was working from such an early age that did it, though it was tempting, too, to blame the lightning. However, I could not show my reluctance, and so I led Mary into the dining room. Most people when they enter the room remark on the impressive view of Golden Cap, but Mary did not even glance through the window. Instead she went straight to the sideboard, where I had laid out my finds, much to Bessy’s disgust. “What are those?” She gestured to the slips of paper beside each fossil.
“Labels. They describe when and where I found the fossil, and in which layer of rock, as well as a guess at what they might be. That is what they do at the British Museum.”
“You been there?” Mary was frowning at each label.
“Of course. We grew up near it. Do you not keep track of where you find things?”
Mary shrugged. “I don’t read nor write.”
“Will you go to school?”
She shrugged again. “Sunday school, maybe. They teach reading and writing there.”
“At St Michael’s?”
“No, we ain’t Church of England. We’re Congregationalists. Chapel’s on Coombe Street.” Mary picked up an ammonite I was especially proud of, for it was whole, not chipped or cracked, and had fine even ridges on its spiral. “You can get a shilling for this ammo, if you give it a good clean,” she said.
“Oh, I’m not going to sell it. It’s for my collection.”
Mary gave me a funny look. It occurred to me then that the Annings never collected to keep. A good specimen to them meant a good price.
Mary set down the ammonite and picked up a brown stone about the length of her finger, but thicker, with faint spiral markings on it. “That’s an odd thing,” I said. “I’m not sure what it is. It could be just a stone, but it seems – different. I felt I had to pick it up.”
“It’s a bezoar stone.”
“Bezoar?” I frowned. “What’s that?”
“A hair ball like you find in the stomachs of goats. Pa told me about them.” She put it down, then took up a bivalve shell called a gryphaea, which the locals likened to the Devil’s toenails. “You haven’t cleaned this gryphie yet, have you, miss?”
“I scrubbed the mud off.”
“But did you scrape it with a blade?”
I frowned. “What kind of blade?”
“Oh, a penknife will do, though a razor’s better. You scrape at the inside, to get the silt and such out, and give it a good shape. I could show you.”
I sniffed. The idea of a child teaching me how to do something seemed ridiculous. And yet … “All right, Mary Anning. Come along tomorrow with your blades and show me. I’ll pay you a penny per fossil to clean them.”
Mary brightened at the suggestion of payment. “Thank you, Miss Philpot.”
“Off you go, now. Ask Bessy on the way out to give you a slice of her fruitcake.”
When she was gone Louise said, “She remembers the lightning. I could see it in her eyes.”
“How could she? She was little more than a baby!”
“Lightning must be hard to forget.”
The following day Richard Anning agreed to make me a specimen cabinet for fifteen shillings. It was the first of many cabinets I have owned, though he was only to make four for me before he died. I have had cabinets of better quality and finish, where the drawers glide without sticking and the joints don’t need to be re-glued after a dry spell. But I accepted the flaws of his workmanship, for I knew that the care he neglected to put into his cabinets he put into his daughter’s knowledge of fossils.
Soon Mary had found her way into our lives, cleaning fossils for me, selling me fossil fish she and her father had found once she discovered I liked them. She sometimes accompanied me to the beach when I went out hunting for fossils, and though I didn’t tell her, I was more at ease when she was with me, for I worried about the tide cutting me off. Mary had no fear of that, for she had a natural feel for the tides that I never really learned. Perhaps to have that sense you must grow up with the sea so close you could leap into it from your window. While I consulted tide tables in our almanac before going out on the beach, Mary always knew what the tide was doing, coming in or going out, neap or spring, and how much of the beach was exposed at any given time. On my own I only went along the beach when the tide was receding, for I knew I had a few clear hours – though even then I often lost track of time, as is so easy to do while hunting, and would turn to find the sea creeping up on me. When I was with Mary she naturally kept track in her head of the movement of the sea.
I valued Mary’s company for other reasons too, as she taught me many things: how the sea sorts stones of similar sizes into bands along the shore, and which band you might find what fossils in; how to spot vertical cracks in the cliff face that warn of a possible landslip; where to access the cliff walks we could use if the tide did cut us off.
She was also handy as a companion. In some ways Lyme was a freer place than London; for example, I could walk about town on my own, without needing to be accompanied by my sisters or Bessy, as I would in London. The beach, however, was often empty save for a few fishermen checking crab pots; or scavengers of debris whom I suspected were smugglers; or travellers walking at low tide between Charmouth and Lyme. It was not considered a place for a lady to be out on her own, not even by independent Lyme standards. Later, when I was older and better known in town, and when I was less bothered about what others thought of me, I went out alone on the beach. But in those early days I preferred company. Sometimes I could convince Margaret or Louise to come with me, and occasionally they even found fossils. Though Margaret hated to get her hands dirty, she did enjoy finding chunks of iron pyrites, for she liked the glitter of fool’s gold. Louise complained of the deadness of rock compared to the plants she preferred, though she did sometimes scramble up the cliffs and study blades of sea grass with her magnifying glass.
We spent much of our time on the mile-long beach between Lyme and Charmouth. East past the Annings’ house, at the end of Gun Cliff, the shore bends sharply to the left so that the beach is out of sight of the town. The shore is flanked for several hundred yards by Church Cliffs, which are made up of what is called Blue Lias – layers of limestone and shale with a blue-grey tint forming a striped pattern. The beach then curves gently around to the right before straightening