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 turned out as piddling as those curies, with no lightning jolts 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 that 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 twenty-three pounds 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 kneeled 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 fibres, that you don’t see in verteberries. And verteberries are darker in colour. 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.
I had never been in the company of educated gentlemen. Sometimes Miss Elizabeth come with us, and that made it easier for me, for she was older and of their class, and could go between as needed. When I was alone with them I was nervous at first, wondering how I was meant to act and what I could say. But they treated me as a servant, and that was a part I could play easily enough—though I was a servant who spoke her mind sometimes, and surprised them.
It was always a little awkward with the gentlemen, though, and become more so as I grew older and my chest and hips rounder. Then people begun to talk.
Maybe they would have talked less if I had been more sensible. But something took hold of me when I begun to grow up, and I become a bit silly, as girls do when they’re leaving their childhoods behind. I started to think about the gentlemen, and looked at their legs and the way they moved. I begun to cry without knowing why, and shout at Mam when there was no reason to. I begun to prefer Miss Margaret to the other Philpots, as she was more sympathetic to my moods. She told me stories from the novels she read, and helped me try to make my hair prettier, and taught me to dance in the parlour at Morley Cottage—not that I would ever get to with a man. Sometimes I stood outside the Assembly Rooms and watched them through the bay window, dancing under the glass chandeliers, and imagined it was me floating round in a silk gown. I would get so upset I’d have to run along the Walk, which is the path the Day brothers built along the beach to link the two parts of the town. It took me to the Cobb, where I could walk up and down and let the wind blow away my tears, with no one to follow and tut at my silliness.
Mam and Miss Elizabeth despaired over me, but they couldn’t fix me, for I didn’t think I was broke. I was growing up, and it was hard. It took two brushes with death, with a lady and a gentleman, before Miss Elizabeth pulled me out of the mud and I truly joined the adult world.
Both happened along the same stretch of beach, just at the end of Church Cliffs, before the shore curves towards Black Ven. It was early spring, and I was walking along the beach at low tide, scanning for curies, thinking about one of the gentleman I had helped the day before who smiled at me with teeth as white as quartz. I was so blinded by rocks and my thoughts that I didn’t see the lady till I almost stepped on her. I stopped short, feeling a jolt in my stomach like when you’re carrying a kicking child away from something they want and their foot catches you.
She were lying where the tide had left her, face down, seaweed all tangled in her dark hair. Her fine dress was sodden and dragged down with sand and mud. Even in that state I could see it cost more than all of our Anning clothes together. I stood over her a long time, watching to see if she might take a breath and spare me from seeing death in her face. It come to me that I would have to touch her, turn her over to see if she was dead and if I knew her.
I didn’t want to touch her. I spent most of the days of my life picking up dead things off the shore. If she had been stone like a croc or an ammo I would have turned her over quick as you like. But I weren’t used to touching dead flesh that had been a real person. I knew I had to do it, though, so I took a deep breath, quickly grabbed a shoulder and rolled her over.
I knew she were a lady the moment I saw her beautiful face. Others laughed at me when I said so, but I could see it in her noble brow and fine, sweet features. I called her the Lady, and I was right.
I kneeled by her head, closed my eyes, and said a prayer to God to take her into His bosom and comfort her. Then I pulled her up towards the cliff so the sea wouldn’t take her back while I went for help. I couldn’t leave her all unkempt, though: it would be disrespectful. Now I weren’t afraid to touch her, though her flesh was cold and hard like a fish. I untangled the seaweed from her hair and combed it out. I straightened her limbs and dress, and folded her hands over her breast as I’d seen others laid out. I even begun to enjoy the ritual of it—that’s how odd I were at that time in my life.
Then I saw a fine chain round her neck and pulled at it. Out from under her dress come a locket, small and round and gold, with MJ engraved in fancy lettering. There was nothing inside—any pictures or locks of hair had been scrubbed away by the sea. I didn’t dare take it with me for safe keeping. Anyone finding me with it could accuse me of being a thief. I tucked the locket away, and hoped no one found her and stole it off her while I was gone.
When I was satisfied the Lady looked presentable, I said another little prayer, blew her a kiss, and run back to Lyme to tell them I’d found a drowned lady.
They laid her out in St Michael’s and put a notice in the Western Flying Post to see if someone could identify her. I went to see her every day. I couldn’t stop myself. I brought flowers gathered from the wayside—daffs and narcissi and primroses—and set them round her, and tore up some of the petals to scatter over her dress. I liked to sit in the church, though it weren’t where we normally worshipped. It was quiet, with the Lady lying there so peaceful and beautiful. Sometimes I had a little cry for her or for myself.
It was like an illness come over me those days with the Lady, though I had no fever or chills. I’d never felt so strongly about anything before, though I wasn’t sure what it was I felt. I just knew that the Lady’s story was tragic, and maybe my story, if I had one, would be tragic too. She had died, and if I hadn’t found her, she might have become a fossil, her bones turned to stone, like all the other things I hunted upon beach.
One day I arrived and the lid on the Lady’s coffin was nailed shut. I cried because I couldn’t see her beautiful face. Everything made me cry. I lay down on a pew and cried myself to sleep. I don’t know how long I was asleep for, but when I woke Elizabeth Philpot was sitting beside me. “Mary, get up and go home, and don’t come here again,” she said quietly. “This has gone on long enough.”
“But—”
“For one thing, it’s unwholesome.” She was referring to the smell, which never bothered me, as I’d smelled worse upon beach, and in the workshop, when I brought back slabs of limestone and the piddocks in their holes died after a few days out of the water.
“That don’t matter to me.”
“It is sentimental behaviour that should remain in the gothic novels Margaret reads. It doesn’t suit you. Besides that, she has been identified and her family is coming to fetch her. There was a shipwreck off Portland of a ship arriving from India. She was on board with her children. Imagine sailing all that long way, only to be lost at the very end.”
“They know who she is? What’s her name?”
“Lady Jackson.”
I clapped my hands, so pleased I were right about her being a Lady. “What’s her Christian name? The M on the locket?”
Miss Elizabeth hesitated. I think she knew her answer would feed my obsession. But she does not lie easily. “It’s Mary.
I nodded, and begun to cry. Somehow I knew it.
Miss Elizabeth sighed hard, like she was trying to keep from shouting. “Don’t be silly, Mary. Of course it is a sad story, but you don’t know her, and sharing a name doesn’t mean you are anything alike.”
I covered my face with my hands and kept on crying, out of embarrassment now as much as anything else, for not being able to control myself in front of Miss Elizabeth. She sat with me for a little bit, then gave up and left me to my tears. I didn’t tell her, but I was crying because Lady Jackson and I were alike. We were both Marys and we would both die. However beautiful or plain a person was, God would take you in the end.
For a week after they took Lady Jackson away, I couldn’t touch curies on the beach for thinking of what they had been—poor creatures that had died. For that little while I allowed myself to be as timid and superstitious as my old playmate Fanny Miller. I avoided the gentlemen out hunting, and hid on Monmouth Beach, where it was quieter.
But no curies means no food on the table. Mam ordered me back upon beach and said she wouldn’t let me inside if I returned with an empty basket. Soon enough I pushed death away, till the next time when he come to stand much closer.
Later that spring I at last found a second crocodile. Perhaps all the gentlemen I was attending was what made it take so long to find one. Elizabeth Philpot must have been pleased she were right that the cliffs and ledges don’t give up their monsters so easily as I’d thought. When I found it at last, I was out at Gun Cliff one May afternoon, not even thinking of crocs, but of my empty stomach, for I’d had nothing to eat all day. The tide was coming in, and I’d almost got back home when I slipped on a ledge covered with seaweed. I come down hard on my hands and knees, and as I pushed myself up I felt a ridge of knobs under my hand. Just like that, I was touching a long line of verteberries. It was so simple I wasn’t even surprised. I was relieved to find that croc, for it proved there were more than one, and that I could make a living from them. That second croc brought money, respect, and a new gentleman.
It was a week or two after we’d removed the croc to the workshop. I was meant to be cleaning it, but there’d been a storm the night before, and a small landslip had appeared under Black Ven that I wanted to look over. There were no men about, and Miss Elizabeth had a cold, and Joe was counting tacks or blacking wood or whatever it is upholsterers are meant to do, so it was just me upon beach. I was scrabbling about in the landslip, the lias mud pushing under my nails and lining my shoes, when the sound of clacking stones made me look up. Along the beach from Charmouth a man come, riding on a black horse. He was silhouetted against the bright sunlight, so it was hard to make him out, but when he got closer I saw the horse was a mare, a plodder, and the man wore a cloak over sloped shoulders, and a top hat, and carried a sack at his side. Once I saw the sack was blue I knew it was William Buckland.
I doubted he recognised me, though I knew him: he used to buy curies from Pa when I was younger. I remembered him best for that blue sack he always carried with him to put specimens in. It was made of heavy material—just as well, since it was always bulging with rocks Mr Buckland had picked up. He would show them to Pa, who could see no use in them as they held no fossils. But Mr Buckland remained enthusiastic about his rocks, as he was about everything.
He had grown up just a few miles away in Axminster, and knew Lyme well, though now he lived in Oxford, where he taught geology. He had also taken his orders, though I doubted any church would have him. William Buckland was too unpredictable to be a vicar.
He had been along to look at the crocodile skull back when we’d showed it in the Assembly Rooms, but though he’d smiled at me, he’d spoken only to Miss Philpot. Two years later, when the croc was united, head and body, and cleaned and sold to Lord Henley, I heard Mr Buckland went to see it at Colway Manor. And since the gentlemen had come to hunt upon beach, I saw him occasionally amongst them. He had never paid much attention to me, though, so I was astonished now to hear him shout, “Mary Anning! Just the girl I wanted to see!”
No one had ever called out my name that enthusiastically. I stood up, confused, then quickly tugged at the hem of my skirt, which I’d tucked into my waist to keep it out of the mud. I often did that when the beach was empty. It wouldn’t do for Mr Buckland to see my knobby ankles and muddy calves.
“Sir?” I bobbed a sort of curtsy, though it weren’t very graceful. There weren’t many I curtsied to in Lyme—just Lord Henley, and him I didn’t want to now I understood that he’d sold on my croc and made such a lot more money than he’d ever paid us for it. Him I would scarcely bend my knee for now, even if Miss Philpot hissed at me to be polite.
Mr Buckland got down from his horse and stumbled across the pebbles. The mare must have been so used to his constant stopping that she just stood there without having to be tied up. “I heard you found another monster, and I’ve come all the way from Oxford to see it,” he declared, his eyes already scanning the landslip. “I cancelled my last lectures just to come early.” As he talked he never stopped moving about and peering at things. He picked up a clod of mud, studied it, dropped it, and picked up another. Each time he stooped I got a glimpse of the bald spot on top of his head. He had a round face like a baby’s, with big lips and sparkling eyes, and sloping shoulders and a little belly. He made me want to laugh, even when he hadn’t made a joke.
He was looking eager and expectant, gazing here and there, and I realised he thought the croc was still on the beach. “It ain’t here, sir. We got it back at the workshop. I’m cleaning it,” I added with pride.
“Are you, now? Well done, well done.” Mr Buckland looked disappointed for a moment that he wouldn’t see the croc right there, but he soon recovered. “Let us go to your workshop, then, Mary, and on the way you can show me where you dug up the creature.”
As we started along the beach towards Lyme, I noted all the hammers and bags hanging off his poor, patient horse. There was also, tied to the bridle and flopping against the horse’s side, a dead seagull. “Sir,” I said, “what you doing with that gull?”
“Ah, I’m going to have the kitchen at the Three Cups roast it for my dinner! I am eating my way through the animal kingdom, you see, and have had such things as hedgehogs and field mice and snakes, yet in all this time I haven’t had a common gull.”
“You’ve eaten mice!”
“Oh, yes. They are rather good on toast.”
I wrinkled my nose at the thought, and at the smell of the bird. “But—the gull stinks, sir!”
Mr Buckland sniffed. “Does it?” For such a keen observer of the world, he often overlooked the obvious. “Never mind, I’ll have them boil it up, and use the skeleton for my lectures. Now, what have you found today?”
Mr Buckland got very excited by the things I showed him—some golden ammos, a fish’s scaly tail I would give to Miss Elizabeth, and a verteberry the size of a guinea. He asked so many questions, mixing in his own thoughts as he did, that I begun to feel like a pebble rolled back and forth in the tide. Then he insisted we turn round and go back to the landslip to look for more. The mare and I followed him until he stopped suddenly, just a stone’s throw from the slip, and said, “No, no, I won’t have time—I’m to meet Doctor Carpenter at the Three Cups shortly. Let’s come back this afternoon.”
“Can’t, sir—the tide’ll be in.”
Mr Buckland looked puzzled, as if a high tide were nothing to consider.
“We can’t reach the landslip along this side of the beach when the tide’s high,” I explained. “Because of the cliffs bulging out there. The beach gets cut off.”
“What about coming from the Charmouth end?”
I shrugged. “We could—but we’d have to go all the way round along the road to get to Charmouth first. Or take the cliff path—but that’s not stable now, as you can see, sir.” I nodded towards the landslip.
“We can ride my mare to Charmouth—that’s what she’s here for. She’ll take us quick as you like.”
I hesitated. Though I had accompanied gentlemen upon beach, I had never ridden on a horse with one. The townsfolk would certainly have things to say about that. Though Mr Buckland’s high spirits seemed innocent to me, they might not to others. Besides, I didn’t like being upon beach at high tide, hemmed in between cliff and sea. If there were another slip there was nowhere to escape to.
It was hard arguing with Mr Buckland, for his enthusiasm ran roughshod over everything. However, I soon discovered he changed his mind so often that by the time he reached Lyme he’d had about a dozen other ideas of how to spend the afternoon, and we didn’t return to the landslip at all that day.
Mr Buckland didn’t get to see where I’d dug up the second croc, as the tide had covered the ledge by the time we passed it. I did show him the cliff where the first one had come from, though, and he made a little sketch. He kept stopping to look at things—silly, some of them, like ammo impressions in the rock ledges that he had surely seen many times before—so I had to remind him of Doctor Carpenter waiting for him at the Three Cups, as well as the much more interesting specimen sitting in the workshop. “Did you know, sir,” I added, “that Doctor Carpenter saved my life when I were a baby?”
“Did he, now? That is what doctors often do—dose babies when they have fevers.”
“Oh, it was more than that, sir. I’d been struck by lightning, see, and Doctor Carpenter told my parents to put me in a bath of lukewarm water—”
Mr Buckland halted on the rock he was about to jump from. “You were struck by lightning?” he cried, his eyes wide and delighted.
I stopped as well, embarrassed now that I had brought it up. I did not normally talk about the lightning to anyone, but had wanted to show off to this clever Oxford gentleman. This was the only thing I could think of that would impress him. It was silly, really, for it turned out later I were more than a match for him when it come to finding and identifying fossils, and his feeble grasp of anatomy sometimes made me laugh. I didn’t know that at the time, though, and so I spent an uncomfortable time being questioned by him about what had happened to me in that field when I were a baby.
It did have its effect, though, for Mr Buckland clearly respected me for my experience. “That is truly remarkable, Mary,” he said at last. “God spared you, and gave you an experience almost unique in the world. Your body housed the lightning and clearly benefited from it.” He looked me up and down, and I blushed with the attention.
At last we got back, and I left Mr Buckland in the workshop, hopping round the crocodile and calling out questions to me even as I went up to the kitchen. Mam was at the range, boiling another family’s linens. Doing laundry brought her just enough money for coal to keep the fire going so that she could wash another set of linens. She never liked it when I pointed out this circle to her.
“Who’s that downstairs?” she demanded now, hearing Mr Buckland’s voice. “You get tuppence off him to see it?”
I shook my head. “Mr Buckland’s not the tuppence type.”
“Course he is. You don’t let anyone see that thing without paying. Penny for the poor, tuppence for the rich.”
“You ask him, then.”
Mam frowned. “I will.” Handing me the paddle she used to stir the linens, she wiped her hands on her apron and headed downstairs. I poked at the washing, happy enough for a little break from Mr Buckland’s questions—though it would have been funny to see Mam try to cope with him. She was fine with some of the other gentlemen. Henry De La Beche, for instance, she bossed about like another son. But William Buckland defeated even my mam. She come up a time later, exhausted from his constant chatter, and without tuppence. She shook her head. “Your pa used to tell me when that man come to the workshop, he’d give up getting any work done and settle back for a sleep while Mr Buckland went on. Now, he wants you back down to tell him about the cleaning and what we’re going to do with it. Tell him we want a good price, and don’t want being cheated by a gentleman again!”
When I come in Mr Buckland was leaving by the door that led onto Cockmoile Square. “Oh, Mary, I’ll just be a moment. I’m fetching Doctor Carpenter here to see this. And a few others this afternoon who I’m sure will be most interested in it.”
“Just as long as it’s not Lord Henley!” I called after him.
“Why not Lord Henley?”
I explained about the first croc, with its monocle, waistcoat and straightened tail as Miss Philpot had described it. “That idiot!” Mr Buckland cried. “He should have sold it to Oxford or the British Museum rather than to Bullock’s. I’m sure I could have convinced either to take it. I shall do so with this one.”
Without asking, Mr Buckland took over the selling of the croc from Mam and Miss Elizabeth. Before Mam could stop him he’d written enthusiastic letters to possible buyers. She were cross at first, but not once he’d found us a rich gentleman in Bristol who paid us forty pounds for it—the museums having said no. That made up for all that Mam and me had to put up with from Mr Buckland. For he was about all summer, fired with the idea of crocodiles entombed in the cliffs and ledges, waiting to be freed. While we had ours in the workshop, he was in and out all day as if the room were his, bringing with him gentlemen who poked about, measuring and sketching and discussing my croc. I noticed during all the talk, Mr Buckland never once called it a crocodile. He was like Miss Elizabeth that way. It made me begin to accept it were something else—though until we knew what that was, I would still call it a crocodile.
One day when it were just Mr Buckland and me in the workshop, he asked if he could clean a bit of the croc himself. He was always keen to try out new things. I surrendered my brushes and blade, for I couldn’t say no to him, but I feared he would do real damage. He didn’t, but that was because he kept stopping and examining and talking about the croc till I wanted to scream. We needed to eat; we needed to pay the rent. We still had debts of Pa’s to pay, and the thought of ending up in the workhouse never left us. We couldn’t spend the time talking. We needed to sell the croc.
Finally I managed to interrupt him. “Sir,” I said, “let me do the work and you do the talking, or this creature will never be ready.”
“You’re quite right, Mary, of course you are.” Mr Buckland handed me the blade, then sat back to watch me scrape along one of the ribs, freeing and brushing away the limestone that clung to it. Slowly a clear line emerged, and because I went at it carefully, the rib weren’t nicked or scored, but smooth and whole. For once he was quiet, and that made me ask the question I’d been wanting to for several days now. “Sir,” I said, “is this one of the creatures Noah brought on his ark?”
Mr Buckland looked startled. “Well, now, Mary, why do you ask that?”
He didn’t go chatting on as he normally would, and his waiting for me to speak made me shy. I concentrated on the rib. “Dunno, sir, I just thought…”
“What did you think?”
Maybe he had forgotten I weren’t one of his students, but just a girl working to live. Still, for a moment I acted the student. “Miss Philpot showed me pictures of crocodiles drawn by Cruver—Cuver—the Frenchman who does all those studies of animals.”
“Georges Cuvier?”
“Yes, him. So we compared his drawings to this and found it were different in so many ways. Its snout is long and pointed like a dolphin’s, while a croc’s is blunt. And it’s got paddles instead of claws, and they’re turned outward rather than forward the way a croc’s legs are. And of course, that big eye. No crocodile has eyes like that. So Miss Philpot and I wondered what it could be if it’s not a croc. Then I heard you and a gentleman you brought here the other day, Reverend Conybeare. You was talking about the Flood—” actually they’d used the words “deluge” and “diluvian”, and I’d had to ask Miss Elizabeth what they meant “- and it made me wonder: if this ain’t a crocodile, which Noah would’ve had on the ark, then what is it? Did God make something that was on the ark we don’t know about? So that’s why I’m asking, sir.”
Mr Buckland was silent for longer than I thought he could ever manage. I begun to worry he didn’t understand what I meant, that I was too uneducated to make sense to an Oxford scholar. So I asked again, a slightly different question. “Why would God make creatures that don’t exist any more?”
Mr Buckland looked at me with his big eyes, and I saw there a flickering worry.
“You are not the only person to ask this question, Mary,” he said. “Many learned men are discussing it. Cuvier himself believes there is such a thing as the extinction of certain animals, in which they die away completely. I am not so sure of that, however. I cannot see why God would want to kill off what He has created.” Then he brightened, and the worry left his eyes. “My friend the Reverend Conybeare says that while the Scriptures tell us that God created Heaven and Earth, they don’t describe how He did it. That is open to interpretation. And that is why I’m here—to study this remarkable creature, and find more of them to study, and through careful contemplation arrive at an answer. Geology is always to be used in the service of religion, to study the wonders of God’s creation and marvel at His genius.” He ran a hand over the croc’s spine. “God in His infinite wisdom has peppered this world with mysteries for men to solve. This is one of them, and I am hon-?floured to take on the task.”
His words sounded fine, but he had given no answer. Perhaps there was no answer. I thought for a moment. “Sir, do you think the world was created in six days, the way the Bible says?”
Mr Buckland waggled his head—not a yes or a no. “It has been suggested that ‘day’ is a word that should not be interpreted literally. If one thinks instead of each day as an epoch during which God created and perfected different parts of Heaven and Earth, then some of the tensions between geology and the Bible disappear. After five epochs, during which all of the layering of rock and the fossilisation of animals occurred, then man was created. That is why there are no human fossils, you see. And once there were people, on the sixth ‘day’, the Flood came, and when it subsided, it left the world as we see it today, in all its grandeur.”
“Where did all the water go?”
Mr Buckland paused, and I saw again that flicker of uncertainty in his eyes. “Back into the clouds from whence the rain came,” he replied.
I knew I should believe him, as he taught at Oxford, but his answers did not feel complete. It was like having a meal and not getting quite enough to eat. I went back to cleaning the croc and did not ask more questions. It seemed I was always going to feel a little hollowed out round my monsters.
Mr Buckland stayed at the Three Cups in Lyme for much of the summer, long after the second crocodile had been cleaned, packed and sent to Bristol. He often called for me at Cockmoile Square, or asked me to meet him upon beach. He assumed I would accompany him and attend him, showing him where fossils could be found, sometimes finding them for him. He was particularly keen to find another monster, which he would take back to Oxford for his collection. While I wanted to find one too, I were never sure what would happen if we did discover one while out together. I had the eye and was more likely to spot it first. Would that mean Mr Buckland should pay me for it? It were never clear, as we didn’t talk about money, though he was quick to thank me when I found curies for him. Even Mam didn’t mention it. Mr Buckland seemed to be above money, as a scholar ought to be, living in a world where it didn’t matter.
By then Joe was well into his apprenticeship and never come out with me unless there was heavy lifting or hammering to do. Sometimes Mam come with us, and sat knitting while we ranged round her. But Mr Buckland wanted to go farther than she did, and she had laundry to do and the house to look after, and the shop—for we still set out a table of curies in front of the workshop, the way Pa used to, and Mam sold ’em to visitors.
Other times Miss Elizabeth went hunting with us. It weren’t as it had been with the other gentlemen, though, where she and I had laughed at the men behind their backs when they kept making beginner’s mistakes, picking up beef or thinking a bit of fossilised wood was a bone. Mr Buckland was smarter, and kinder too, and I could see Miss Elizabeth liked him. I felt sometimes that she and I were two women competing for his attention, for I weren’t a child any more. I would look up from my hunting and see her eyes lingering on him, and want to tease her about it, but knew it would hurt her. Miss Elizabeth was clever, which Mr Buckland appreciated. She could talk to him about fossils and geology, and read some of the scientific papers he lent her. But she was five years older than him, too old to start a family, and without the money or the looks to tempt him anyway. Besides, he was in love with rocks, and would fondle a pretty bit of quartz more likely than flirt with a lady. Miss Elizabeth hadn’t a chance. Not that I did, either.
When we were together she become quieter, and sharper when she did speak. Then she made excuses, leaving us to walk farther down the beach, and I would see her in the distance, her back very straight, even when she stooped to examine something. Or she would say she preferred to hunt at Pinhay Bay or Monmouth Beach rather than by Black Ven, and disappear altogether.
Mostly, then, Mr Buckland and me were alone. Though we were fixed only on finding curies, our being together so often was too much even for Lyme folk. Eventually town gossip caught up with us—fuelled, I was sure, by Captain Cury. In the years since the landslip that almost killed him and me and buried the first crocodile, he had let me be. But he had never managed to find himself a complete croc, and still liked to spy on what I was doing. Once I begun hunting with Mr Buckland, Captain Cury got jealous. He would make sly comments as he passed us upon beach, clanging his spade against the rock ledge. “Having fun here on your own, you two?” he’d say. “Enjoy being alone?”
Mr Buckland mistook Captain Cury’s attention as interest, and hurried over to show him the fossils we’d found, and baffle him with scientific terms and theories. Captain Cury stood there uncomfortable, then made an excuse to get away. He loped down the beach, sneering at me over his shoulder, ready to tell everyone that he’d seen us together.
I ignored the talk, but one day Mam overheard someone in the Shambles calling me a gentleman’s whore. She marched straight down to Church Cliffs where Mr Buckland and I were prising out the jaw of a crocodile. “Get your things and come back with me,” she ordered, ignoring Mr Buckland’s greeting.
“But, Mam, we’ve only an hour left to dig till the tide’s in. Look, you can see all the teeth here.”
“Come away, you. Do as I say.” Mam made me feel guilty when I hadn’t even done anything. I stood up quick and brushed the mud off my skirt. Mam glared at Mr Buckland. “I don’t want you out here alone with my daughter.” I had never heard her be so rude to a gentleman.
Luckily Mr Buckland was not easily offended. Perhaps it was because he misunderstood her, for he was not the sort of man to think as the town did. “Mrs Anning, we have found a most splendid jaw!” he cried. “Here, feel the teeth, they are as even as a comb’s. I promise you, I’m not wasting Mary’s time. She and I are engaged in tremendous scientific discovery.”
“I don’t care nothing for your scientific so-and-so,” Mam muttered. “I’ve my daughter’s reputation to think of. This family’s been through enough already—we don’t need Mary’s prospects ruined by a gentleman with no concern other than what he can get out of her.”
Mr Buckland turned to look at me as if he’d never thought of me in that way before. I flushed and hunched my shoulders to hide my breasts. Then he looked down at his own chest, as if suddenly reconsidering himself. It would be comical, if it weren’t already tragical.
Mam begun picking her way back across the beach, skirting pools of water. “Come along, Mary,” she said over her shoulder.
“Wait, ma’am,” Mr Buckland called. “Please. I have the greatest respect for your daughter. I would never want to compromise her reputation. Is it our being alone that is the problem? For that is easily solved. I shall find us a chaperone. If I ask at the Three Cups I’m sure they can spare us someone.”
Mam stopped but didn’t look round. She was thinking. So was I. Mam’s words had given me an idea about myself I had never really considered. I had prospects. A gentleman could be interested in me. I might not always be so poor and needy.
“All right,” Mam said at last. “If Miss Elizabeth or me ain’t with you, you take someone else. Come, Mary.”
I picked up my basket and hammer.
“But what about this jaw? Mary?” Mr Buckland looked a little frantic.
I walked backwards so I could look at him. “You have a go at it, sir. You been collecting fossils all these years, you don’t need me.”
“But I do, Mary, I do!”
I smiled. Swinging my basket, I turned and followed Mam.
That was how Fanny Miller come back into my life. When Mr Buckland collected me from home the next morning, Fanny was hovering behind him, looking about as miserable as a coachman in the rain. She kept her eyes on her boots, scuffing them on the cobblestones of Cockmoile Square to get the mud off. Like me, she were growing into a young woman, her curves a little softer than mine, her face the shape of an egg, framed by a battered bonnet trimmed with a blue ribbon to match her eyes. Though poor, she was so pretty I wanted to slap her.
Mr Buckland didn’t seem to notice that, though, nor the frosty look that passed between her and me. “There, you see,” he said, “I’ve brought us a chaperone. She works in the Three Cups’ kitchen, but they said they could spare her for a few hours while the tide is out.” He beamed, clearly pleased with himself. “What is your name, my girl?”
“Fanny,” she said, so soft I weren’t sure Mr Buckland even heard.
I sighed, but there was nothing I could do. After all the fuss Mam made about him getting someone to come out with us, I couldn’t complain about his choice. I would just have to put up with her—and she with me. Fanny were sure to be just as unhappy as I was that she had to come upon beach with us, but she needed the work, and would do as she was told.
We went back to the jaw in Church Cliffs, Fanny trailing behind us. As we worked she sat some way away, sifting through the stones at her feet. Maybe she still liked shiny pebbles. She looked so bored and frightened I almost pitied her.
So did Mr Buckland. Perhaps he felt idleness was an evil anyone would want to avoid. When he saw her playing with the stones he went over to talk “undergroundology”, as he liked to call geology. “Here—Fanny, is it?” he said. “Would you like me to tell you what those stones are you’re arranging? Most of what you’ve got there is limestone and flint, but that pretty white bit is quartz, and the brown with the stripe is sandstone. There are several different layers of rock along this beach, you see, like this.” He took up a stick and drew in the sand the different layers of granite, limestone, slate, sandstone and chalk. “All over Great Britain, and indeed on the Continent as well, we are discovering these layers of rock, always in the same order. Isn’t that surprising?”
When Fanny did not respond, he said, “Perhaps you would like to come and see what we’re digging out.”
Fanny approached reluctantly, glancing up at the cliff face. She seemed not to have overcome her fear of falling rocks.
“Do you see this jaw?” Mr Buckland ran his finger along it. “Beautiful, isn’t it? The snout is broken off, but the rest is intact. It will make an excellent model to use during my lectures on fossil discoveries.” He peered at Fanny as if to savour her response, and looked puzzled when she screwed up her face with disgust. Mr Buckland found it hard to understand that others didn’t feel as he did about fossils and rocks.
“You saw the creatures Mary discovered when they were on display in town, did you not?” he persisted.
Fanny shook her head.
He tried once more to draw her in. “Perhaps you would like to help? You may hold the hammers. Or Mary can show you how to look for other fossils.”
“No, thank you, sir. I’ve my own work.” As she turned to go back to her safe seat away from the cliff, Fanny’s face was full of spite. If I were younger I would have pinched her. But she had punishment enough, being out upon beach with us, her presence allowing for the discovery of the very things she despised most. She must have hated that, and would have preferred to scrub any number of pots in the kitchen of the Three Cups.
Later Miss Elizabeth come along, hunting on her own. She frowned at Fanny, who now had out some lace she was making—though how she could keep it clean with so much mud about I didn’t know. “What is she doing here?” Miss Elizabeth demanded.
“Chaperone,” I said.
“Oh!” Miss Elizabeth watched her for a moment, then shook her head. “Poor girl,” she murmured, before passing on.
It’s your fault she’s here, I thought. If you weren’t so funny about Mr Buckland you could stay with us and release Fanny from her torment. And my torment too that she’s sitting there reminding me of the sort of woman I’ll never be.
Fanny was with us all summer. Usually she sat on rocks away from us, or followed at a distance when we were wandering. Though she didn’t complain, I knew she hated it when we went farther, to Charmouth or beyond. She preferred remaining close to Lyme, by Gun Cliff or Church Cliffs. Then a friend might come out to see her, and Fanny cheered up and become more confident. The two would sit and peek round their bonnets at us and whisper and giggle.
Mr Buckland tried to interest Fanny in what we found, or to show her what to look for, but she always said she had other things to do, and brought out lace or sewing or knitting. “She thinks they’re the Devil’s works,” I finally explained in a low voice, when Fanny had once again rebuffed him and gone to sit with her lace. “They scare her.”
“But that’s absurd!” Mr Buckland said. “They are God’s creatures from the past, and there is nothing to be frightened of.”
He got up from his knees as if he would go to her, but I caught his arm. “Please, sir, leave her be. It’s better that way.”
When I looked over at Fanny she was staring at my hand on Mr Buckland’s sleeve. She always seemed to notice when his hand touched mine as he passed me a fossil, or when I grabbed his elbow when he stumbled. She gasped outright when Mr Buckland hugged me the afternoon we managed to get the croc jaw out of the cliff. In that way her accompanying us made things worse, for I suspect Fanny spread plenty of gossip. We might have been better off alone, without a witness to report back everything she saw that she didn’t understand. I still had funny looks from townspeople, and laughter behind my back.
Poor Fanny. I should be kinder to her, for she paid a price, going out with us.
My trade is best done in bad weather. Rain flushes fossils out of the cliffs, and storms scrub the ledges clean of seaweed and sand so more can be seen. Joe may have left fossils for upholstery because of the weather, but I was like Pa—I never minded the cold or the wet, as long as I was finding curies.
Mr Buckland also wanted to go out even when it was raining. Fanny had to come with us, and would huddle wretched in her shawl, curling up amongst the boulders to shelter against the wind. We were often the only folk upon beach then, for in poor weather visitors preferred to go to the bath houses, which had heated water, or to play cards and read the papers at the Assembly Rooms, or to drink at the Three Cups. Only serious hunters went out in the rain.
One rainy day towards the end of the summer, I was upon beach with Mr Buckland and Fanny. There was no one else on that stretch of shore, though Captain Cury passed by at one point, nosing about to see what we were doing. Mr Buckland had discovered a ridge of bumps not far from where we’d dug out the jaw in Church Cliffs, and thought they might be a row of verteberries from the same animal.
I was chiselling away at it to try and uncover the bones when Mr Buckland left my side. After a minute Fanny come to stand close by, and I knew Mr Buckland must be pissing in the water. He was always careful not to embarrass me, and slipped off to do his business far enough away that I didn’t have to see. I was used to him doing that, but it always bothered Fanny, and it were the one time she come up to the cliff by me. Even after several weeks in his company, she was still a little scared of Mr Buckland. His friendliness and constant questions were too demanding for someone like Fanny.
I felt sorry for her. The rain was coming down hard, and dripping on her face from her bonnet rim. It was too wet for her to sew or knit, and there’s nothing worse than having nothing to do in the rain. “Why don’t you just turn away when he’s down there?” I said, trying to be helpful. “He’s not going to wave it in your face. He’s too much of a gentleman for that.”
Fanny shrugged. “You ever seen one?” she said after a moment. I think it was the first question she’d asked me in ten years. Maybe the rain had wore her down.
I thought of the belemnite Miss Elizabeth showed James Foot on this beach years before and smiled. “No. Just Joe’s, when he were little. You?”
I didn’t think she would answer, but then she said, “Once, at the Three Cups, a man got so drunk he dropped his trousers in the kitchen, thinking it were the privy!”
We both laughed. For a second I wondered if we might be starting to get on better.
We’d no chance for that. There were no warning, no pebbles raining down or the groan of stone splitting from stone. It were that sudden that one moment Fanny and I were laughing about men’s parts by the cliff, and the next the cliff just dropped, and I was knocked down and buried in the thick, rocky clay.
Though I don’t remember doing it, I’d thrown my hand up to my mouth as the cliff come down on me, and that made a little space for me to breathe in. I couldn’t see anything, and though I struggled I couldn’t move at all, for the clay was cold and wet and heavy, and it held me fast. I couldn’t even call out. All I could do was think that I was going to die and wonder what God would say to me when He met me.
There was a long, long time when nothing happened. Then I heard a scrabbling and felt hands clawing at me and wiping my eyes, and I opened them and saw Mr Buckland’s terrified face, and I thought maybe I would not meet God yet.
“Oh, Mary!” he cried.
“I—I—” Mr Buckland pulled at the rocks and mud but could not move them. “It’s too heavy, Mary. I can’t get you with no tools.” He was in a kind of daze, as if he couldn’t think straight.
We heard a cry then. We had forgot about Fanny. She was just a few feet from us, and weren’t so heavily buried as me, but there was blood on her face. She begun to scream, and Mr Buckland jumped up and went to her. The clay was looser round her and he managed to shift it enough that he could pull her out. He wiped the blood from her face, and in doing so knocked the bonnet from her head, for he was scared and clumsy. It got caught up in a gust of wind and rolled away down the beach. Losing her bonnet seemed to upset Fanny more than anything else. “My bonnet!” she cried. “I need my bonnet. Mam will kill me if I lose it!” Then she screamed again as Mr Buckland tried to move her.
“Her leg is broken,” Mr Buckland panted. “I’m going to have to leave you to get help.”
At that moment part of the cliff further along crumbled and crashed to the ground. Fanny screamed again. “Don’t leave me, sir, please don’t leave me in this godforsaken place!”
I did not want to be left either, but I did not cry out. “Best to carry her, sir, if you can. At least you can save one of us.”
Mr Buckland looked horrified. “Oh, I don’t think I should do that. It wouldn’t be proper.” It seemed even he, who ate field mice and carried a bright blue sack and pissed in the sea, was uneasy about holding a girl in his arms. But now was not the time for worrying about what was proper.
“Put an arm round her shoulders and one under her knees and lift, sir,” I coached. “She’s a little thing—you should be able to carry her, even a scholar like you.”
Mr Buckland did what I said and heaved Fanny into his arms. She screamed again, in pain and shame. Letting her arms flop wide, she turned her head away from him.
“For God’s sake, Fanny, put your arms round him!” I cried. “Help the man or he’ll never get you back.”
Fanny obeyed me, throwing her arms round his neck and burying her head against his chest.
“Take her to the bath house—that’s the closest place—and send people straight back with spades.” I wouldn’t normally direct a gentleman so, but Mr Buckland seemed to have lost his wits. “Hurry, please, sir. I can’t bear being alone like this.”
As he nodded, another section of cliff fell away with a crash. Mr Buckland flinched, terror written all over his face. I fastened my eyes on his. “Sir, pray for me. And if I die, tell Mam and Joe—”
“D- d- don’t say such a thing, Mary. I’ll be back shortly.” Mr Buckland would not listen, but staggered away, Fanny gazing at me with glazed eyes over his shoulder. Now that she had surrendered to his arms she was beyond care. Later Doctor Carpenter would set her leg, but the break was awkward and never healed properly, and left her with one leg shorter than the other. She could never walk far or stand for long, and could never again come out upon beach—not that she would want to. Whenever I saw her hobbling down Broad Street to the Three Cups, I ducked my head to avoid that fearful blue gaze.
Course I didn’t know any of that then, held fast in the landslip. I watched Mr Buckland weaving down the beach with his burden, not going fast enough for me, and wondered why it was that the pretty ones were always rescued before the plain. That was how the world worked: with her big eyes and dainty features, Fanny did not get stuck, whereas I was caught in the mud, the cliff threatening to crumble on top of me.
There was a lot of time to think. I thought of Mr Buckland, and how odd it were that for an ordained man so interested in what God had been up to in the past, he hadn’t been much comfort with prayers, but run away from them. I closed my eyes and said a long prayer myself, for God to spare me, to let me live on to help Mam and Joe, to find more crocs, to have enough to eat and coal to burn, even to have a husband and children one day. “And please, God, make Mr Buckland a runner rather than a walker today. Make him find someone quick, and come back.” Although Mr Buckland was happy wandering miles along the cliff, and regularly walked to Axminster and back while in Lyme, he did not hurry. He had a scholar’s belly on him, and I worried that with Fanny in his arms he would not get back quick enough to save me.
It was quiet now. The wind had died down, and a fine misty rain sprayed my face. Now and then I heard the faint skitter of more debris tumbling down the cliff to the ground. I couldn’t see it because it were behind me and I couldn’t turn my head all the way round. That was the worst, hearing it and not knowing how close it was, or if it would bury me.
The mud that held me was cold and heavy and pressing on my chest, making it hard to breathe. I closed my eyes for a bit, thinking that sleep might make the time go faster. But I couldn’t sleep, so instead I followed Mr Buckland in my mind as he went back to Lyme. Now he’s passing where we found the first croc, I thought. Now he’s passing the ledge with the ammo impressions. Now he’s reached the bend where the path starts. Now he’s in sight of Jefferd’s Baths. Maybe Mr Jefferd is there and will come running, faster than Mr Buckland. I traced the path there and back again—and it was not so far back to Lyme—but no one come.
I opened my eyes. Mr Buckland was a dot along Church Cliffs. I couldn’t believe he hadn’t got farther. But then, it was hard to say how much time had passed—it could have been ten minutes or hours. I looked the other way, down the beach towards Charmouth. There were no boats out, or fishermen checking crab pots, for it was too rough. There was no one at all. And the tide had turned, and was slowly creeping up.
I gave up looking for help, and begun to notice things closer to me. The landslip had caused a churning up of rocks caught in an ooze of blue-grey clay. My eyes flicked over the stones near to me and come to rest on a familiar shape about four feet from me: a ring of overlapping bony scales the size of my fist. A croc’s eye. It were like it was staring straight at me. I cried out with the surprise of seeing it. Then, several feet past the eye, there was a movement. It was only tiny, but I cried out again, and it moved again. It was just a little pink spot sticking out of the clay, and with the rain in my eyes it was hard to see what it was. I wondered if it were a crab, scrabbling about in the mud.
“Hey!” I called, and it moved. It was not a crab, but a finger. I felt so relieved and sick at the same time that I think I fainted. When I come to I looked at the spot again, and it wasn’t moving. I cleared my throat.
“Who’s that?” I said, but not loud enough. “Who’s that?” I repeated, as loud as I could. The finger moved. I was so happy not to be alone that I laughed aloud.
“Joe? Is it Joe?” The finger didn’t move.
“Mam? Miss Philpot?”
No movement. I knew it couldn’t have been any of them, for I would have known they were upon beach. But who else would be out in such weather? I supposed it could have been one of the children from Lyme, come to spy on Mary Anning and the man she attended, hoping to see something scandalous that they could report back on. But it seemed unlikely. We would have spotted them if they were upon beach. Unless they’d been up on the cliff—which meant they’d come down with the slip. It was a miracle they was alive.
It was thinking of the cliff and landslips that made me realise who it must be. “Captain Cury?” I remembered now that I had seen him earlier.
Even as the finger wriggled, I saw the handle of his spade, poking out of the clay that had buried him. I was so glad he was there that any spite I felt towards him vanished. “Captain Cury! Mr Buckland’s gone to get help. They’ll be back to dig us out.”
The finger moved, but less than before.
“Was you up on the cliff and come down with the slip?”
The finger didn’t move.
“Captain Cury, can you hear me? Are your bones broke? Fanny’s leg is broke, I think. Mr Buckland’s taken her with him. He’ll come back soon.” I was chattering on to mask my terror.
The finger stayed stiff, pointing up at the sky. I knew what that meant, and begun to cry. “Don’t go! Stay with me! Please stay, Captain Cury!”
Between me and Captain Cury the croc eye watched us both. Captain Cury and I are going to be like the croc, I thought. We will become fossils, trapped upon beach forever.
After a while I stopped looking at Captain Cury’s finger, now as still as any rock caught in the clay. I couldn’t bear to watch the tide steadily rising. Instead I gazed up into the flat white sky, a few pewter clouds swimming about in it. After spending so much of my life looking down at stones, it was strange to look up into emptiness. I spotted a gull circling high above. It seemed it would never get closer, but would always be a dot hovering far away. I kept my eyes fixed on it, and did not look at the finger or the croc again.
It was so quiet I wanted to make a noise to break the spell. I wanted the lightning to pass through me and jolt me into life, for I was feeling the opposite of that sensation—a slow darkness was creeping through my body.
There had been plenty of deaths in our family—Pa and all the children. I spent most of my time collecting what were dead bodies of animals. But I had not thought much of my own death before. Even when I had been visiting Lady Jackson I’d really thought more of her passing than mine, and treating death as a drama to revel in. But dying was no drama. Dying was cold and hard and painful, and dull. It went on too long. I was exhausted and growing bored with it. Now I had too much time to think about whether I was going to die from the tide coming in and drowning me like Lady Jackson, or the mud pressing the air out of me as it had Captain Cury, or a falling rock striking me. I couldn’t think for long or it hurt too much, like touching a piece of ice. I tried to think of God instead, and how He would help me through it.
I never told anyone this, but thinking of Him then didn’t make me less scared.
It was hard to breathe now with the mud so heavy. My breathing got slower, and so did the beat of my heart, and I closed my eyes.
When I come to, someone was digging at the clay round me. I opened my eyes and smiled. “Thank you. I knew you would come. Oh, thank you for coming to me.”