FIFTEEN

veline House is a stage just grand enough for his mother and her furniture. There in the modest hall are her girandole sconces and the gilt armchair; there in the drawing room is the console table with its marble top and the blue-striped settee, uneasily mingled with Mr. Aveline’s things. His folios of maps are stacked in orderly piles on a narrow table. There’s his spectacles case, his pipe and tobacco, his cribbage board, his bachelor chair with its sunken seat. A hassock covered with the stitched-together skins of roe deer. His books alphabetically arranged in forthright categories, with tickets glued to each shelf: Beasts, Birds, Fishes, The Heavens, The Earth. On a stand is the famous model of the heavens with its seven clockwork planets. Above hangs a picture of Christ kneeling to pray in Gethsemane, worked in what looks like silk thread. Henry reaches out a finger to touch it. “Hummingbird feathers,” says Mr. Aveline from behind him. He crosses to the chair, a whippet of a man, and picks up a book lying open on the table. “My morning devotional,” he says. “In the works of William Cowper. Care to join me?”

“I’m just off for a walk around the town.”

It was dark when they drove in last night. Henry had smelled the sea, but opening the front door, he feels a shock at how dramatically close it is, glistening at the foot of the street. In this town, there is only up or down. He walks slowly down, giving the right of way to carts and porters moving in both directions, stepping out of the path of four dirty sheep. The street is lined with prosperous houses and shops, and an open sluice runs along the side of it. Then he is at the lower town, where the river empties into the sea, and the stench of sewer rises. He passes under the weather vane, a fish cut in tin, and crosses a little square.

Coming out to the seawall, he has the sense that the lower town is opening its eye to the sea. Here the aqua waters of his childhood lie cast in pewter. He stands and watches the surf throw itself on the rocks and then withdraw for another attempt. Everything is in motion, the waves and the swooping gulls and the sparkling light. He looks in amazement at the cliffs to the east. They’re close, but the light renders them delicate, as though they’re at a great distance.

The tide going out has left an outcropping of wet rocks, and Henry can’t resist swinging over the wall and climbing out on them. From out on the rocks, he looks back at the town. A row of shabby cottages lines the river and the shore. There’s a latrine built to empty directly into the river. This is the domain of the poor, this brilliant world, and they turn their backs on it, and drop their waste into it. Over the surf, he hears someone calling, and he turns his head the other way, and slips, and rights himself. A girl wrapped in a dark blue cape is standing at the seawall. “Master Henry!” It’s Maggie, the housemaid who lighted him to his room the night before. “You’re wanted at the house, Master Henry.”

He picks his way back. “What can I be wanted for?”

“I’m not one for listening at doors, Master Henry,” she says, putting up her chin. She has a pretty mouth that can’t resist smiling. “But I warrant it’s about the dragon.”

“The dragon?”

Mr. Aveline is standing by the window in the drawing room, and Henry feels fresh surprise at the sight of him, at how painfully thin the standard allotment of human clay can be stretched. Henry’s mother is lounging on the settee in a wrapper of the most miraculous aquamarine. The Squire called in, Mr. Aveline says. Not a minute after Henry went out. “A crocodile,” his mother laughs. “I thought the fellow meant he’d shot it! For a minute, I was back in the West Indies!”

“Indeed, he shoots at everything that breathes, does Squire Henley,” says her new husband. But it’s a curiosity the Squire was talking about, one of the strange stony creatures they’ve told Henry about, found not far from town. “He stayed only a moment. He’s on his way out to the cliffs. His men are crating it this morning. How would you like to walk out and see?”

Mr. Aveline fears rocks, dreads twisting an ankle. Rightly so, Henry thinks, eyeing the lathy legs scissoring along the shore beside him, a shore littered with rocks in umber and rust and grey, and with beautifully uniform slabs of limestone with limpet shells cemented to them. The going is smoother on the foreshore, so they angle towards the sea. In places, the waves have scoured away all pebble down to the bare Channel bottom, a wide tilted road of uncracked limestone, sand washed into its shallows in streaks of gold and black. Not a bed of shifting sand, as he’d always thought, but bedrock, like bone scraped bare. Mr. Aveline’s thin shoulders convulse. He lets out a sneeze like a door slamming. “I shall die in the pursuit of science,” he says. Henry can hardly contain his excitement. A new curiosity! I will write to Conybeare, he thinks. I will be the one who tells him about it first.

Half a mile or so on, they spy a clutch of men twenty feet up, working on a black ledge where the cliff has slumped. The cliffs that looked like delicate aquatints from the town are heaps of marl when seen close up, water oozing out of them here and there. There is a path of sorts and they climb it. Henry slips and puts a hand down, and brings it up black. “Bid farewell to my new boots,” Mr. Aveline says gamely. In the mud sit three crates like rude coffins, their lids propped beside them. The whole cliff is an open grave. A dozen men hover over the excavation. Under the direction of a large gentleman in a top hat, a workman is mixing in a bucket with a great iron spoon. When they crest the top, Henry almost slides back down in his astonishment.

Splayed before them is the skeleton of an enormous finned animal. Twenty feet long, at the least. It lies in a debris of chipped shale, headless and defeated and somewhat flattened. The ribs on the left side are intact, those on the right are crushed – from the weight of the creature’s own body, it would seem: it was not lying entirely flat when it expired. The fine ribs are all agley, crowded and interwoven, as though the Maker had thought initially to make a basket of it. The spine is the spine of a huge fish – it must have sixty vertebrae. “It is a crocodile!” breathes Mr. Aveline beside him. “It’s enormous!”

“But it doesn’t have a crocodile’s feet,” says Henry. In the place of feet, it has paddles, made of tiny bones pressed together like miniature paving stones, like the Roman mosaics in the British Museum. Bones in rows that could almost have been fingers. The front paddle is much larger than the back one. It did not walk on land, this creature, not easily. He surveys it eagerly, committing details to memory for his letter to Conybeare.

Beside Henry, a shepherd boy stands leaning on his crook, his blue smock the only patch of colour in the crowd. “Where is the creature’s head?” Henry asks him.

“She’s a-taken en hwome, zir,” he says. “Buried under ’er bed, it were.”

He does not know the Dorsetshire tongue and struggles to understand. “She?”

“The maid that found en.” He gestures over the open grave. There a girl stands. Henry has not noticed her, for her dress is dark, like the men’s coats, although she wears a white bonnet. The shepherd thrusts his crook in her direction with a rude sticking out of his lips, as though to hook her over and present her to Henry. “She were all the winter long a-choppin en out, Meary Hanning.”

This girl dug it out! She stands among the men, looking across the excavation, a brown face in a white bonnet. He tips his head in greeting. Her expression doesn’t change – it’s the creature, not him, that is the object of her severe scrutiny. He glances around to see whether anyone has caught his gesture, and then looks back at her. She’s almost as tall as he is. Her face has the bones of a grown woman, but this is the unconscious absorption of a child. Twelve or thirteen, she would be. Mud cakes her rough skirts. She’s gloveless, and he can see mud on her hands.

“What an undertaking!” says Mr. Aveline.

The man in the top hat has made his way around the excavation to be introduced to Henry. “It took a good deal of arranging, I confess,” says the Squire. He’s a stout man with a small, mild face surprised to find itself at the top of such an imposing body. “Nothing is easy in science! We were out here for over an hour yesterday, taking measurements, rain leaking under our collars. It was Sir Everard Home who showed us how we must collect it. He’s a surgeon – he knows everything there is to know about handling bones. Unfortunately, he’s been called back to his post.”

“Did he say what the creature is?” Henry asks.

The workmen are calling. The Squire clamps his hand over Henry’s sleeve by way of excuse. “You must sup with us at Colway Manor tonight!” he says to Mr. Aveline as he hurries away. “We shall have a scientific dinner.”

Under the Squire’s direction, the contents of the bucket are poured onto the skeleton. It’s plaster; they’re encasing the skeleton in a matrix again. The stream of plaster falls from the lip of the bucket in slow motion, breaking into globs. Across the excavation, the girl leans forward anxiously. It’s the tail they’re covering first. The tail – he’s not taken sufficient note of it. It’s long and thin, and bent at the end like a scorpion’s. It must have been folded to fit it into the grave. By whom? Not folded – it must have kinked in the paroxysm of death. If only they’d arrived sooner. If only he could have drawn it! He watches the bones disappear under lumps of grey plaster with the excruciating sense that the shape of the tail would explain everything.

“What a pity Letitia must be in London,” says his mother on the way to Colway Manor. “There will be no young people at the table, I’m afraid.” Henry gives a little grunt.

Colway Manor is the dull revelation at the end of a long lane of ash. There are the panes of crown glass on either side of the door, there are the greyhounds panting and pushing at their legs as they climb from the coach. There in the hall is the Squire, his periwig gleaming in the light from a high window. But in the library, a surprise awaits them. They are to see the head, the Squire says, taking Henry’s hand in his meaty palm. His men carried it up from the maiden’s house and they have postponed crating it to please a family friend who dropped in unexpectedly.

The head lies on a table in the library, on a wide board with leather straps fixed to the sides. At the sight of it, a current runs up Henry’s spine. It is a bird! It’s one of the bird skulls he’s carried from Bristol in a tea box, grown to monster size and (he discovers when he touches it) turned to stone. It is all eye, the skull created as a case for a huge oval orb. It won’t be fused to the fish he saw lying in the cliff – his mind refuses to do it. But then, at second look, it is all jaw, a long ledge of teeth, and he decides it is a crocodile.

A man crouches at the jaw end, the recently arrived family friend. He gets to his feet with obvious reluctance as Squire Henley introduces him. Mr. Buckland, a professor of natural history at Oxford University, with a lively face and popping blue eyes and his hairline creeping back from his forehead. He’s dressed in a dusty academic gown. The smudges on his cheeks can only have been made by wiping tears off with dusty hands. “Imagine my astonishment,” he cries, “coming by chance to call on the good Squire, bearing in my saddlebag a gift – which, incidentally, you shall all sample at supper – and seeing carried before me up the lane, as on a gigantic platter, the splendid specimen I had sought for a decade! Imagine my grief upon learning that the creature is sold. That the cart I’d encountered an hour before, bouncing along the turnpike towards London, contained the key to the entire geology of the lias cliffs.”

“I had a close look at the spine and fins this morning,” Henry says. “If you would like me to, sir, I dare say I could make a reasonably accurate sketch from memory.”

“Oh, you are most kind,” says Buckland, distracted. “Most generous indeed. I do have a fair idea of the creature’s anatomy. I’m able to extrapolate from the head.”

It appears that when the French revolutionary army occupied Maastricht in 1794, they found a similar gigantic skeleton enshrined there, and shipped it off home as a trophy of war. It ended up at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, where the great Georges Cuvier examined it. Cuvier knew it for a saurian. Not, contrary to appearances, a fish. The professor paces and points. He will salvage what he can from this occasion, Henry thinks, by knowing more about the creature than the people who actually saw it. He talks at length about the bones around the eye, a structure found only in certain turtles and lizards and in birds. These bones are used to increase or diminish the curvature of the cornea, he explains, thus increasing or diminishing its magnifying power, performing the office of a telescope. Henry’s mother listens for a while and then sinks down on a blue upholstered divan, lifting a serene, vacant face towards the professor. “Thus could it pursue its prey into the blackness of the sea,” cries the professor. “Thus was it marvellously equipped by its Maker to bear, on an eye so large, the vast weight of the deep.” On the table, the great eye stares blankly and the great beak grins.

Squire Henley and his wife bring an awkward exactitude to their hospitality, avid hosts unaccustomed to entertaining. The table would nicely seat twelve and they’re confronted with a party of six. Mr. Aveline and his wife sit opposite each other towards the Squire’s end of the table, and Henry and Mr. Buckland are stranded at the dimmer end of the dining room with Mrs. Henley, who has come to the table armed with a list of suitable conversational topics, resolute in her effort to calm Mr. Buckland. “And what is your opinion of Lyme Regis?” she inquires of Henry. “There are many who remark that it has the air of a Turkish town!”

“I’ve never been to Turkey,” Henry says, beginning to shake with laughter. His mother darts a cautioning hand across the gulf between them.

“But I am not surprised at this opinion,” Mr. Aveline calls down to the Squire’s wife. “I have always thought the Lyme Regis climate more like Italy than like England.”

“We have had great success with hibiscus from the Bahamas. You may demur at Turkey, Mr. De la Beche, but there are those enthusiastic visitors who compare our climate to the tropics. Mrs. Aveline may wish to comment on that.”

Mrs. Aveline touches her hair and gives her hostess an elaborate smile. “It’s a decade since we were in the West Indies. But no, I don’t find Lyme Regis quite tropical.”

The Squire frowns uncertainly and turns his efforts to the suckling pig lying on a board before them. As he carves, he offers the news that a certain Mr. England is building warm-water baths near the Assembly Rooms. Lyme Regis is destined to be the next Brighton, he tells them, deftly running the point of his knife around the piglet’s neck. The carving proceeds, a wicket of ghostly ribs is laid bare. The skeleton of the suckling pig lies exposed for their examination. The tourism prospects of Lyme Regis falter; they are recalled by bones to the irresistible topic of the day.

Buckland is the one who finds a graceful segue. “To Lyme Regis!” he cries, lifting his wine. “To the blue lias of Lyme Regis, where lie treasures richer than the pyramids of Egypt.” They raise their goblets to the blue lias and then, prompted by Mr. Aveline, jump to their feet to toast the creature listening from the library.

“What a shame the creature’s body was carried away before you had the opportunity to view it.” Henry’s mother says charmingly to Buckland, lowering herself back to her chair. “But from reports, I can tell you that its mother was certainly a fish and its father a crocodile.”

“Perhaps fishes took a different form in ages past,” Henry ventures. “Perhaps fishes have changed.”

Buckland leans forward in his chair, galvanized into professorial mode, and the Squire’s wife lunges towards him to snatch goblets and pitchers out of the way. A scientific gentleman in France has proposed just such a notion, that species have changed over time. Consider the camelopard, a long-necked creature reaching to eat leaves from high trees. As the lower leaves are consumed, it must needs stretch its neck. Perhaps its offspring were obligingly born with a longer neck. “So goes the theory of the Continental gentleman,” Mr. Buckland intones.

“The great Georges Cuvier,” explains the Squire helpfully.

No, no, nothing of the sort! Mr. Buckland is seized with hysteria at the notion, he’s in danger of choking. Mrs. Henley passes him the goblet she’s taken under her protection. It is the theory of one Jean Baptiste Lamarck, Buckland says when he’s able to speak, a professor of insects and worms at the great Paris Museum. A mischievous fellow – he endeavoured to interest Napoleon in his ideas, but Cuvier advised Napoleon to refuse a copy of his scientific paper. And rightly so, for Cuvier had explicitly refuted the suggestion that species can change; he refuted it absolutely and forever. Monsieur Cuvier had the opportunity to study animals found by Napoleon in the Egyptian tombs and carried back to Paris. Cats. Dogs. Crocodiles. He made his usual immaculate measurements. He compared them to creatures living today. These animals had not changed one iota. Not in four thousand years! The notion of transmutation is discredited, fully discredited! Mr. Buckland takes another drink of wine. He digresses into a story about Georges Cuvier, the clever master foiling a student prank. It is not, Henry thinks, quite to the point, but Mr. Buckland has lost his point, he is struggling to batter back a hurricane of emotions. Finally the rising water floods the banks and spills from his eyes. It’s the mention of Monsieur Cuvier that has done it. In a broken voice, he confesses his distress that he will not be able to present a scientific description of today’s discovery to the great anatomist.

“I summoned Sir Everard Home,” says the Squire into the silence that Mr. Buckland’s tears provoke. “He’s a surgeon from the naval hospital at Plymouth. He was on the cliffs with me last week and spent an hour looking at the specimen and noting down his observations. He can be trusted absolutely to write a faithful description.”

“Sir Everard Home,” groans Buckland into his handkerchief.

“But my dear Buckland, we had no idea where you were. In any case, you are free now to study the skeleton in London. I shall provide you with a letter of introduction to the proprietor.”

“Tell me again the name of the carnival where it is to be displayed.”

Even from this distance, Henry can see that the Squire is regretting he so kindly accommodated Professor Buckland today. “It is the London Museum, popularly known as the Egyptian Hall. The proprietor is a Mr. Bullock. Not a carnival at all, a very scientific endeavour.”

“Mr. Bullock,” Henry says eagerly. “He is a friend of my uncle’s. I was in London last year when he was opening his hall. He had acquired artifacts from the voyages of Captain Cook – they were to be the first exhibit.” Henry’s mother’s smile encompasses the whole long table. My clever son!

“There, you see,” says the Squire gratefully.

“My son will accompany you,” Mrs. Aveline offers brightly. “Henry is a highly skilled artist.”

Buckland inclines his flushed face towards her. “I would be much obliged,” he says mournfully.

“But we are neglecting your gift, sir,” trills their hostess. It has been roasted and lies on a platter beside the principal dish, like the suckling pig’s unnatural offspring. A guinea pig, it is called. It is found in South America. Big-headed like a pig, but with the bleared face of a baked cat. “It is not quite a pig, I believe?” asks the Squire’s wife delicately.

“Cavia porcellus,” says the professor. “Porcellus you will know, having been Latin scholars. But cavia?” He shoves his hand kerchief away and rallies himself to the parody of a schoolmaster. “Come, come. You there, with the spectacles!” Mr. Aveline, he means. They gaze at the professor, dull students all. The word is Portuguese, he tells them finally. For rat. The creature is in fact a rodent, and very high in protein. It’s a scientific experiment! Mr. Buckland is eating his way through the animal kingdom. He has tasted shark. Rat. Ostrich! Hyena! A nasty flavour, as you might imagine. Why would he choose to eat his way through the animal kingdom, will no one pose the question?

Mr. Aveline declines to pose the question. He likewise declines a slice of guinea pig. “I have had rather more of the Porcellus domesticus than is good for me,” he says. He leans in Henry’s direction. “Henry, do you realize that the ammonite your mother gave you was found by the very maiden who came across the specimen we saw today? You remember, darling, when we met her in the churchyard.”

Indeed she remembers. She raises a hand to her bosom. In honour of the occasion, she wears a brooch purchased in the maiden’s shop. An impression of a sea lily, polished in its matrix. The Squire is telling how the maiden came to his door, to his front door, all drabble-tailed in the rain and her boots caked in black marl. They sent her around back to the kitchen, but still she insisted on speaking to the Squire himself. He was away for the morning and she refused to leave. I wish to sell a dragon were her words when he finally came down.

“You can thank me for that,” says Mr. Aveline through their laughter. Earlier, Mary Anning had approached him in the butter market. “Please, sir, can you tell me who owns Black Ven?” she’d asked.

But having lost possession of the dragon, Professor Buckland will not be denied possession of Mary Anning. In full command of his emotions now, he outlines their intimate acquaintance. The morning excursions under his tutelage, her fearless and perspicacious questions. The letters he wrote to her, the visits to their humble kitchen, his charge to her and her father to contact him with just such a find. He has been away, on a geological tour in Scotland; that explains everything. He would have called at her workshop this very afternoon, but he chanced to call on the Squire first, just as they carried the saurian head up the drive. The girl on the cliffs comes into Henry’s mind: black hair and eyes and ruddy, healthy cheeks – a Celtic face, the face of the region (it would seem from the people he’s encountered on the streets), a very distinct physiognomy.

“She dresses so plainly,” he says to his mother.

“Why, she’s a Dissenter. They see colour as vanity, poor thing. Remember Susan St. Ives, when she married that dreadful Congregationalist, all those grey gowns done up at the neck.” Standing by the coach in the afternoon sun, he’d remarked his mother’s own gown, the rich purple of a plum. Now, in the candlelight, it’s the crimson-purple of the plum’s flesh when you bite into it. “Or the girl may be in mourning,” she says. “Perhaps she’s both: a Dissenter in mourning.” Her cheeks and bosom are flushed from the wine. She laughs, the stones in her earrings catching the candlelight.

“Come, tell us,” Buckland is calling up the table to his host. “How much did you pay the maiden?”

“Twenty-three pounds,” says the Squire after a pause, and his wife’s head flies up.

“Twenty pounds I promised the father!” cries Mr. Buckland. “That explains it, the shrewd little dealer. That explains why she didn’t wait for me. And what did you manage to extract from this Bullock fellow?” The Squire declines to say. “You turned a tidy profit, I have no doubt,” says Buckland.

“Twenty-three pounds!” says the Squire’s wife, dabbing at her chin with her napkin. “It’s more than they’ll know what to do with.”

It is beeswax the Henleys are burning in three small iron chandeliers hanging over the table, wooden dripping-dishes overflowing under each candle. The smell floats over the long table, the incense of a country home. An amber drop falls beside Henry’s fork and he picks it from the table and presses it between his thumb and finger, feeling its warmth, fingering the hardening impression of his thumbprint in the wax. In his reverie, he slides a chair into the gap between Mr. Aveline and Professor Buckland. It’s for Mary Anning, who materializes sitting up very straight in a plain black dress with a white collar. Her dark hair is caught loosely up at the nape of her neck. She turns her head from one party to the other, listening gravely to both conversations. Then she catches sight of the mutilated carcass of the guinea pig and leans forward, touching it with her fingertips, seeming to count its frail ribs.

The next afternoon, Henry finds the girl in the flesh standing behind a round table in front of one of the cottages clinging to the seawall. The weekly coach from Bath has just arrived and the square is full of hawkers and travellers and townspeople idling about. Eight or ten customers crowd around her table, most of them men. A boy tries to crawl between his legs and Henry delivers a sharp kick. He waits till everyone’s gone but him. He’s clutching the casket of bird bones, having brought it with him on impulse.

On the table are stones in the shape of vertebrae, long pointed grey rods, curled mollusc shells. But her best trade seems to be in ammonites. He looks with interest at the range of matter in which they are formed: some made of ochre sandstone, others of grey limestone, some like gooseberry jelly embedded in grey rock. The finest, like his, are iron infused with fool’s gold. He’s carrying his in his pocket, a better specimen than anything she has just now on the table.

“What is your shop called?” he asks her bent head.

“The Fossil Depot, sir,” she says without looking up. The last customer paid her with a handful of brass and she’s counting coins.

“You need to hang a sign out,” he says. “I came by this morning, and it was not apparent to me which house was yours, and so I went away again.”

Then she does look at him with her black eyes. “This were my father’s shop, sir,” she says. She has the vowels of the shepherd he spoke with at the excavation. “He scorned a sign. His trade came from his good name in the district.”

“My name is De la Beche,” he says. “I have something I wish to show you.”

“I saw you at the cliffs, sir, with Mr. Aveline,” she says. “You were collecting?”

“No,” he says. “It’s something else. I’m afraid to show you out here. It’s so windy, and what I have here is very fragile.”

She frowns, and then says, “I must needs pack up.” He waits while she transfers her wares to a tray. Then she leads him down six rough steps to what she calls the workshop. As he descends, he catches a glimpse of the one room that must serve as both kitchen and sitting room. A woman in a black widow’s cap sits motionless on a chair. A slab of bacon hangs smoking over the fire. It looks to him like a very poor kitchen enjoying an unaccustomed prosperity.

The workshop itself is a damp, cluttered cellar – not large (though it must be the size of this whole humble house), reasonably lit by a high, shallow window at each end, and smelling of mud and the rancid-mutton stink of tallow candles. The end near the door appears to serve as a shop, with shells in shallow boxes laid along a shelf. A table runs almost the length of the room.

“You kept the head here?” he asks. She nods. “I saw it,” he says. “At the Squire’s. Professor Buckland was examining it.”

Surprise or anxiety moves over her face. “Mr. Buckland,” she says. “I were a-keeping it for Mr. Buckland. But then I learned it were rightly the Squire’s. It were buried in his cliffs. He were kind enough to pay me all the same, for my labour.”

“How long did it take you to dig that skeleton out?” Henry asks.

“Four month I worked.”

“Every day? All the winter long?”

She nods. “Anywhen the tide favoured. It were banging cold.”

Then her eyes are on the box of bird skeletons, so he opens it and begins to lay the birds in a row on the work table. “Where did ye find such clean skeletons, sir?” she asks, bending eagerly over them.

“In a hearth that had been boarded up for several years. They strayed down the chimney and perished. The dumb beast blunders into the world of man at its peril!”

She touches one with a grotesque aspect to its claws. “This en fought ’is death.”

“That’s exactly what I thought when I saw it! I’ve been making a series of paintings. It was a deal of work to identify them. You can begin to classify them by their bills, whether they eat seeds or insects. I believe those are the two principal classes of land birds.”

He can see her considering this. She slides the robin skeleton to one end, and the dunnock, and then she stops and looks up at him. “They have a powerful kinship to the crocodile head.”

“It’s true. They’re very like. If I had seen only that head, I would have thought your creature was a gigantic bird.”

She looks at him levelly, as if trying to decide what he is about. “Would ye wish to see my notations?” She picks a dogeared accounts book up off the table and shows him a page, and he moves closer to the window for the light. In pencil, in a neat script, she has written:

Cocodrille
Number of teeth — 184
Length of skull — 9 foot
Length of body — 17 foot
Number of verteberrys — 60
Bredth of verteberry — 3 inch
Number of ribs — 47–60 (some be mashed)
Shape of eye — austrick egg
Found by Joseph and Mary Anning at Black Ven Cliff,
Lyme Regis, Dorsetshire
In the year of our Lord 1812.

He looks at her with surprise. Was this an attempt at some sort of scientific description of the creature? “How did you do the measurements?” he asks.

She shows him the willow rod she cut to twelve inches and took to the shore. “I were chary of spoiling my father’s tape in the mud,” she says.

Eventually, they’re sitting on rush chairs at the corner of the long table. Behind her, the window is a perfectly halved rectangle of sea and sky. The light fades, and she gets up and fetches a tallow candle.

“Be there classes of dragons?” she asks abruptly as she sets the candle on the table.

“Of dragons!” She is a child after all. “Well, there was the Worm at Durham, that was killed by being hacked into pieces. And the dragon at Knucker Hole, with its delicate underbelly.” He’s thinking aloud of stories he heard as a boy. “And one that was killed by having a sword thrust into its tongue. So you might classify them by their vulnerability to attack. Although it often took generations of carnage to learn it. Did you ever imagine it was a dragon?”

“I confess I were sometimes afraid at first. Death be not to dragons what it be to common beasts. Especially when weather brewed up, the crims would come over me. I feared it might rise up out of the rock. Until I saw how mild its eye were.”

“Mild!” says Henry, thinking of the massive empty socket. “Miss Anning, as you excavated the skeleton, did you form an opinion as to whether the creature breathed air as mammals and reptiles breathe, or took in water through gills?” He knows as he asks that this is the salient question, and he can tell that she does too, by the way she quickens. “Did you see any indication of gills? They would need to be a grand size for so large a creature.” He estimates with his hands, an aperture of twelve or fifteen inches.

“It had a nostril, sir,” she says simply, and his face warms. “It had a nostril in its beak, the way a bird do. As big as my thumb.” How did he overlook that – he who boasted he could make a scientific illustration from memory?

Suddenly he thinks of a wonderful day in Jamaica, standing with his friends and his father on the shore and watching a phalanx of silver forms lift out of the green water. “I think what you’ve found is related to the dolphin,” he says. “They are lovely sea creatures, graceful and playful, and they breathe as mammals do, and have much the same form as the skeleton you found, although only one paddle on each side.”

“If it did swim, how came it to be buried five-and-twenty foot up the cliff?”

“The creature must have died in the sea, and silt covered it, and then what was the seabed became the shore.” And now red surfaces in her cheeks; perhaps she’s never considered this before, that the earth changes.

“The tail had a bend in it,” he says. “Like a scorpion. Why was it bent like that, do you think?”

Afterwards, he will realize that he had ceased to notice her accent. Afterwards, he will ask himself if she is comely in the range of working-class maidens, and he won’t know. He won’t be able to recall her features at all, only her self-possession, her gaze: as steady and open as a babe’s.